Last of the Mohicans (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read online

  Unlike Conrad, Cooper does not require his readers to acknowledge this insight. In fact, as in his treatment of the theme of “Indian removal,” his dramatization of desire is framed in a way that allows white readers to keep their distance no matter how deeply it takes them into its jungle. When Cora’s veil opens, it reveals that “her complexion was not brown,” but “charged with the color of the rich blood, that seemed ready to burst its bounds.” Her blush we can immediately attribute to her gaze at Magua, but readers don’t learn why the narrator uses the strange locution “not brown” to describe her until the middle of the novel, when her father tells Duncan that not only do Cora and Alice come from different mothers, but also that Cora’s mother had progenitors who came from Africa, that she was “descended, remotely, from that unfortunate class who are enslaved.” Thus “not brown” means “partly black,” so that Cooper’s fantasy includes all three of the races that inhabited his America. Cora is one of Cooper’s greatest female characters: brave, resourceful, generous, high-minded, and passionate. Alice is a much more typical Cooper “female”: so white, so chaste, so helpless that she is not much more than an icon of innocence. But while it is impossible not to admire Cora, her father’s revelation of her heritage has two major implications. Like Cora’s “indescribable look” at Magua’s body, his marriage to Cora’s unnamed mother reminds us that desire can transgress all the lines, burst all the bounds, that Cooper’s culture believed should confine it. But at the same time it allows white readers to identify Cora’s sexuality with her “blackness” rather than their own humanity. Seen this way, she is not only a dark heroine, but that stereotypi cal figure American fiction kept coming back to throughout the nineteenth century: the tragic mulatta, as much an “Other” as the dark savages, and like them doomed, despite all her strengths, by her race.

  The novel’s wilderness, like the greenwood in Shakespeare or folklore, is a place of transformation. In the last section, particularly, the narrative recounts a dizzying number of metamorphoses: People turn into beavers and vice versa, Hawkeye and Uncas turn into bears, an Indian turns into David Gamut who later turns into Uncas, even Duncan paints his face like a Mingo. But the novel refuses to endorse the possibility of racial change through intermarriage, and at the end the racial boundaries are enforced with a vengeance. Duncan carefully removes his paint before being reunited with Alice, who has never given anyone’s body a look with the least hint of ambiguity in it, and this untainted white couple is allowed to survive and marry and through their racially unmixed offspring inherit the future. All the characters who have gazed across racial lines—Cora at Magua, Magua at Cora, Uncas at Cora—come together at the novel’s climax, but only to die.

  That scene has the feel of both a ritual sacrifice and a perversely intimate dance of death. One of Magua’s Mingo henchmen “sheathe[s] his knife in the bosom of Cora.” “Magua burie[s] his weapon in the back of the prostrate” Uncas. The final task of killing Magua is left to Hawkeye. The theological overtones in the passage describing Magua’s fall from the rocks are obvious: “his dark person was seen cutting the air with its head downwards.” But the sexual undertones in the description of the action with which Hawkeye kills him also need to be acknowledged. Like those knives sinking into Cora and Uncas’s bodies, Hawkeye’s rifle resembles and replaces the phallus at the moment of sexual climax: As he starts to take aim on Magua, Hawkeye’s “frame trembled so violently with eagerness, that the muzzle of the half-raised rifle played like a leaf fluttering in the wind,” but after he draws “the agitated weapon” to his body, “the piece [becomes as steady as the rocks] for the single instant that it poured out its contents” (p. 351). “Sex and violence,” according to the Hollywood cliché, is the most dependable recipe for feeding the appetite of the popular audience. The Last of the Mohicans not only follows this formula, but it helps us to appreciate why we never hear the order of those terms reversed—it’s not “violence and sex,” but always “sex and [then] violence.” At the start, the novel arouses readers with “indescribable looks,” “unbridled passions,” and “nearly naked” Indian bodies, but the only consummations the narrative provides are its repeated acts of violence, which culminate at that moment in which Hawkeye’s rifle ejaculates death. It’s not easy to see why this substitute satisfaction is so perennially attractive to so many people, what psychic need is fulfilled by this apparent cause-and-effect relationship between eros and violence. But as many other popular works besides Mohicans can testify, this dynamic works a powerful spell on audiences, and in this novel Cooper exploits it repeatedly, and always to great effect.

  Eros and violence also define one context in which Hawkeye’s heroism can be understood. This man of action, alienated from conventional society but profoundly at home in the woods and among the people of another race, is Cooper’s greatest contribution to American, indeed world literature. As a mythic figure, the Leatherstocking can be identified with a variety of referents, from a legendary old world antecedent like Robin Hood to such quasi-legendary new world contemporaries as Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett. He has had many descendants in American literature and popular culture, from the late-nineteenth century’s “cowboy” hero through such twentieth-century film and TV avatars as the Lone Ranger (with Tonto in Chingachgook’s role). Looking at Natty Bumppo from a European point of view, the British novelist D. H. Lawrence, in Studies in Classic American Literature, concluded that Hawkeye is the quintessential American, and that “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer”: “What sort of a white man is [Natty] ? Why, he is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer.” The novel does repeatedly associate Hawkeye with killing. Half a dozen pages after we first meet him, he calls Uncas’s act of killing a deer “a pretty sight to behold!” Two chapters later he insists on killing a young colt. After leading the first rescue mission to victory, he doesn’t imitate Chingachgook’s example and scalp the fallen enemies (scalping, Natty says often, is an “Indian gift,” permissible for them but not lawful for a white man without a cross), but neither does he follow the examples of Uncas and Duncan and hasten to Cora and Alice’s side; instead, he makes sure his enemies are dead, “thrust[ing] his long knife [into their bodies], with as much coolness, as though they had been so many brute carcasses.” He also seems here at least as pleased to have recovered his rifle as to have rescued the females: “ ‘I have got back my old companion,’ ” he says, “striking his hand on the breech of his rifle”; as much as Cora and Alice’s father will worry later about their purity after they’ve been in the hands of the savages, Hawkeye worries about his gun here, “examining into the state of his rifle with a species of parental assiduity.” Tellingly, when at the Delaware camp there is a moment of doubt about which of two white men really is “La Longue Carabine,” Hawkeye’s Mingo name, the question is settled with that same “long rifle”: His identity is inseparably bound up with his ability to shoot and kill.

  There can be no doubt, then, that Hawkeye is a killer, but that is only half of the story that Cooper is telling about him in the novel. At least as central to his character, and even more important in terms of the place he occupies in the larger fantasy, is the fact that Hawkeye is not a lover. Michael Mann’s 1992 movie adaptation of the novel drastically revises this aspect of his character, but Cooper’s text leaves no room for doubt on this score. The narrator, for example, tells us that, while Duncan carries Alice to safety in the Mingo camp, Hawkeye “had certainly been an entire stranger to the delicious emotions of the lover, while his arms encircled his mistress.” And Hawkeye himself confirms the “entire strange[ness]” of sex for him in an extraordinary speech to Duncan and Alice that begins: “I have heard that there is a feeling in youth, which binds man to woman.... It may be so. I have seldom been where women of my color dwell; but such may be the gifts of nature in the settlements” (p. 274). The urgings of desire, that fact of life that everyone else beyond the age of pubert
y knows viscerally, Hawkeye has only heard of, and he seems to have his doubts about it. From the start, when the veil is removed from Cora’s aroused face and the bushes part to reveal the apparently lustful gaze of the savage, the novel associates the wilderness with those desires, except in Hawkeye’s case. For him, life in the woods is a different and more invulnerable form of virginity than that of the novel’s two maidens; in the wilderness he lives outside the “feelings,” the passions that can be seen in the other characters’ eyes and are the cause of their abductions, captivities, and rescues, the large movements that carry them back and forth across the novel’s fantasy landscape. Natty stands apart from the bonds of desire that pull the others toward each other. As a rescuer, he is as selfless as any of the book’s lovers. He proves how much more there is to him than the “killer” when he risks his life to go back into the Mingo village to save Uncas, or when he offers Magua his own life in exchange for Cora’s. But note that he is equally willing to save Uncas or Cora, or, for that matter, probably anyone else. His sense of duty to other people, in other words, is absolutely uncompromised by any erotic longing. His sense of self, therefore, is inviolable.

  Natty Bumppo’s autonomy is perhaps the most compelling reason Cooper and his readers kept coming back to him. Late in his career Cooper said he always intended to come back one more time and write a sixth Leatherstocking Tale depicting him amidst the events of the Revolutionary War. Given Natty’s status as an American archetype, the absence of a tale set in the 177Os leaves a conspicuous gap. Filling it, however, would have created problems for Natty’s biographer. In Mohicans, set in the 1750s, Natty as Hawkeye serves under Major Effingham of the British Army. In The Pioneers, set in the 1790s, Natty as Leatherstocking still serves Effingham. So if Natty fought in the 1770s it seems clear that, unlike the Muhheakunnuk, he would have been fighting against the American colonies. This ambiguity serves as a good reminder of just how estranged Hawkeye is as a hero from American society, or from any form of community. At the end of Mohicans, as Hawkeye and Chingachgook stand shaking hands “across the fresh earth” of Uncas’s grave, the narrator calls them “the two most renowned warriors of that region.” The note this strikes is an image of alienation that seems amazingly modern: Cut off from any future, unconnected to any tribe or society, divided even from each other by the racial line that Hawkeye keeps insisting cannot be “crossed,” these warriors are heroes without a cause. While Hawkeye stands there, Duncan and Alice are returning to civilization, where, like Cooper and his readers, they will define their life in terms of their relationships to others, including each other as husband and wife. The power of Hawkeye’s solitary character is to make that kind of “happily ever after” look like the inferior choice, the wrong way to escape the perils of the wilderness. As a myth, the story of Leatherstocking cannot tell us where we came from, nor help us with where, as a nation or as individuals, we must find ways to go. But it does give us an imaginative place of respite, from our past and our future. The novel’s wilderness setting is a realm of terror and bloodshed, because it is a screen onto which the facts of history and desire can be projected. But among the swirl of those horrors, Hawkeye stands strongly centered on what he doesn’t need—not land, not money, not social prestige, not even love.

  Stephen Railton teaches American literature at the University of Virginia. His books include Fenimore Cooper: A Study of His Life and Imagination, Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the American Renaissance, and Mark Twain: A Short Introduction. Since 1996 he has spent much of his time in virtual reality, as the creator of two major electronic archives: Mark Twain in His Times (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (http: //jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc) .

  COOPER’S INTRODUCTION1

  It is believed that the scene of this tale, and most of the information necessary to understand its allusions, are rendered sufficiently obvious to the reader in the text itself, or in the accompanying notes. Still there is so much obscurity in the Indian traditions, and so much confusion in the Indian names, as to render some explanation useful.

  Few men exhibit greater diversity, or, if we may so express it, greater antithesis of character, than the native warrior of North America. In war, he is daring, boastful, cunning, ruthless, self-denying, and self-devoted; in peace, just, generous, hospitable, revengeful, superstitious, modest, and commonly chaste. These are qualities, it is true, which do not distinguish all alike; but they are so far the predominating traits of these remarkable people,2 as to be characteristic.

  It is generally believed that the aborigines of the American continent have an Asiatic origin. There are many physical as well as moral facts which corroborate this opinion, and some few that would seem to weigh against it.

  The color of the Indian, the writer believes, is peculiar to himself; and while his cheekbones have a very striking indication of a Tartar origin, his eyes have not. Climate may have had great influence on the former, but it is difficult to see how it can have produced the substantial difference which exists in the latter. The imagery of the Indian, both in his poetry and his oratory, is Oriental—chastened, and perhaps improved, by the limited range of his practical knowledge. He draws his metaphors from the clouds, the seasons, the birds, the beasts, and the vegetable world. In this, perhaps, he does no more than any other energetic and imaginative race would do, being compelled to set bounds to fancy by experience; but the North American Indian clothes his ideas in a dress which is different from that of the African, and is Oriental in itself. His language has the richness and sententious fullness of the Chinese. He will express a phrase in a word, and he will qualify the meaning of an entire sentence by a syllable; he will even convey different significations by the simplest inflections of the voice.

  Philologists have said that there are but two or three languages, properly speaking, among all the numerous tribes which formerly occupied the country that now composes the United States. They ascribe the known difficulty one people have in understanding another to corruptions and dialects. The writer remembers to have been present at an interview between two chiefs of the Great Prairies west of the Mississippi, and when an interpreter was in attendance who spoke both their languages. The warriors appeared to be on the most friendly terms, and seemingly conversed much together; yet, according to the account of the interpreter, each was absolutely ignorant of what the other said. They were of hostile tribes, brought together by the influence of the American government; and it is worthy of remark that a common policy led them both to adopt the same subject. They mutually exhorted each other to be of use in the event of the chances of war throwing either of the parties into the hands of his enemies. Whatever may be the truth, as respects the root and the genius of the Indian tongues, it is quite certain they are now so distinct in their words as to possess most of the disadvantages of strange languages; hence much of the embarrassment that has arisen in learning their histories, and most of the uncertainty which exists in their traditions.

  Like nations of high pretensions, the American Indian gives a very different account of his own tribe or race from that which is given by other people. He is much addicted to overestimating his own perfections, and to undervaluing those of his rival or his enemy; a trait which may possibly be thought corroborative of the Mosaic account of the creation.

  The whites have assisted greatly in rendering the traditions of the aborigines more obscure by their own manner of corrupting names. Thus, the term used in the title of this book has undergone the changes of Mahi canni, Mohicans, and Mohegans; the latter being the word commonly used by the whites. When it is remembered that the Dutch (who first settled New York), the English, and the French, all gave appellations to the tribes that dwelt within the country which is the scene of this story, and that the Indians not only gave different names to their enemies but frequently to themselves, the cause of the confusion will be understood.

  In these pages, Lenni-Lenape, Lenope, De
lawares, Wapanachki, and Mohicans, all mean the same people, or tribes of the same stock. The Mengwe, the Maquas, the Mingoes, and the Iroquois, though not all strictly the same, are identified frequently by the speakers, being politically confederated and opposed to those just named. Mingo was a term of peculiar reproach as were Mengwe and Maqua in a less degree.

  The Mohicans were the possessors of the country first occupied by the Europeans in this portion of the continent. They were, consequently, the first dispossessed; and the seemingly inevitable fate of all these people, who disappear before the advances, or it might be termed the inroads of civilization, as the verdure of their native forests falls before the nipping frost, is represented as having already befallen them. There is sufficient historical truth in the picture to justify the use that has been made of it.

  In point of fact, the country which is the scene of the following tale has undergone as little change, since the historical events alluded to had place, as almost any other district of equal extent within the whole limits of the United States. There are fashionable and well-attended watering places at and near the spring where Hawk-eye halted to drink, and roads traverse the forests where he and his friends were compelled to journey without even a path. Glenn’s has a large village; and while William Henry, and even a fortress of later date, are only to be traced as ruins, there is another village on the shores of the Horican. But, beyond this, the enterprise and energy of a people who have done so much in other places have done little here. The whole of that wilderness, in which the latter incidents of the legend occurred, is nearly a wilderness still, though the Red Man has entirely deserted this part of the state. Of all the tribes named in these pages, there exist only a few half-civilized beings of the Oneidas, on the reservations of their people in New York. The rest have disappeared,3 either from the regions in which their fathers dwelt, or altogether from the earth.