In its final chapter, the novel relieves white American readers from the burden of imagining a political and social future for the nation that includes Native Americans by linking Uncas’s death to the doom of his entire race. There are two massacres in the book. Neither involves whites killing Indians. The first half climaxes with the account of the slaughter of defenseless white men, women, and children at Fort William Henry by the Indians allied with the French. At the end of the second half we hear “the shrieks and cries of hundreds of women and children” when Delaware Indians loyal to Uncas destroy “the whole community” of a neighboring Iroquois tribe in a failed attempt to rescue Cora. But perhaps the most chilling scene in the novel is the one that follows this battle: the depiction of these Delawares at the funeral ceremony they hold for Uncas and Cora. In a series of descriptions the narrator suggests that these Indians are already dead, more a cemetery than a living tribe: Their grief “seemed to have turned each dark and motionless figure to stone,” and “even the inanimate Uncas appeared a being of life, compared with the humbled and submissive throng by whom he was surrounded.” In the novel’s final paragraph, Tamenund, the aged patriarch of this people, explains what they are submitting to: the will of God, or as he puts it, “the anger of the Manitto.” “The pale-faces are masters of the earth,” he adds, and it is time for the Indians to “go.” The story Cooper tells about Uncas, then, opens with the epitaph that Chingachgook prematurely hangs on his son and ends with Tamenund’s valedictory consent to the disappearance of his race, putting a frame around the erasure of the Indians that keeps it entirely in the past, where the only responsibility white readers have is to shed a tear for a tragedy they had nothing to do with. Of course, in 1826 most of the worst crimes against the Native American population—President Jackson’s “Indian Removal” policy and the Trails of Tears, for example, or the western “Indian Wars” of the last third of the nineteenth century—were still to come. A “narrative of 1829,” as John McWilliams reminds us in his book-length study of Cooper’s novel, would include Jackson’s use of the myth Cooper created to justify the removal legislation that, in 1838, allowed his successor, Martin Van Buren, to use 7,000 federal soldiers to force 15,000 nonconsenting Cherokee to “go,” to leave the land guaranteed them by treaty and undertake the thousand-mile march across the Mississippi on which more than 4,000 of them died. Reading the novel and mourning the noble but providentially doomed “last Mohi can” allowed contemporary Americans to affirm their compassion while ignoring the real victims of their national policies. That is the self-serving fiction we must not read uncritically.
Having said that, however, it is equally crucial to note that the novel itself is not simply an endorsement of white American history. Mohicans is the second of Cooper’s so-called Leatherstocking Tales, the five novels that he published between 1823 and 1841 featuring Natty Bumppo (called Hawkeye most of the time in this novel, and also referred to as Leather stocking throughout the five novels). The novels were not written in chronological order: Natty is an old man in the first of them, The Pioneers, and is youngest in the fifth, The Deerslayer, which is set a dozen years before the events of Mohicans. And Natty’s role is not the same in all the novels: In the last two, Cooper tries to involve him more directly in the romance plot by depicting him as in love and beloved. But Natty remains profoundly single, a liminal figure whose relationship to both white and Indian cultures is saturated with ambivalence. For example, at the end of this novel every other surviving white character retreats “far into the settlements of the ‘pale-faces,‘ ” goes back from the wilderness to civilization and the rules of the society that the colonists are building in the new world. But Natty, who has lived most of his life among the Delaware, chooses to remain in the woods with Chingachgook. Yet as readers of the novel have many opportunities to note, Natty does not identify himself with the Indians either: His insistent (and, for many readers, annoying) refrain about being “a man without a cross” does not mean he isn’t a Christian, but rather that, as he puts it in his first scene in the novel, “I am genuine white”; that is, both of his parents were white. In his actions as a “warrior,” Natty most commonly serves the interests of the other white characters in the Tales, and reviewers and readers from the start have perceived him as the American equivalent of an epic hero. But in fact he repeatedly rejects the values and aspirations of white society. As a series focused on this alienated hero, the Leatherstocking Tales are written from a perspective both inside and outside official history, and simultaneously affirm and challenge the American quest to settle and civilize the continent.
Hawkeye and Chingachgook are already deep in a discussion about the morality of that project when we first meet them in chapter III. As Natty says there, “every story has its two sides,” and he listens open-mindedly while Chingachgook protests the destruction of his people at the hands of superior force. Two chapters later, Natty himself rebukes Duncan as a representative of the race that has “driven [the] tribes from the sea-shore.” Cooper inherited the theme of civilizing the wilderness not just from his American society but also from his father, Judge William Cooper, the founder of Cooperstown, who claimed to have been responsible for settling more acres of American forest than any other man of his time. Given this relationship, it is not surprising that Cooper’s feelings and ideas about this theme are so conflicted. The unresolved tensions inside the Tales about the moral costs and individual consequences of building an imitation of European civilization on the ruins of both the Native American culture and the natural environment give the series much of its power. Set in the world of Cooper’s own childhood in Cooperstown, The Pioneers probably takes the most subversive stance toward the nation’s (and his father’s) official faith in progress. In that novel Chingachgook, though old and enfeebled by drink, is angrier about the extermination of his culture, and Leatherstocking is often prophetically eloquent in the judgments he pronounces against the “wicked and wasty ways” of white society. The Last of the Mohicans, on the other hand, puts considerably less pressure on America’s ideological status quo. While most of The Pioneers is set inside the raw forms of a new settlement, from which point of view the natural life embodied by the Indians and by Natty can be romanticized, nearly all of Mohicans takes place in the depths of a wilderness where terror seems to lurk behind almost every tree and bush; the worlds of nature and the Indians are aligned with the dangerous forces of Gothic fiction rather than the restorative virtues of Wordsworthian Romanticism.
Cooper’s decision in this second Leatherstocking Tale to pair Chingachgook and the Delaware/Mohicans with another group of Indians, Magua and the Mingoes/Iroquois, similarly tilts the novel’s ideological balance toward society. If the Mohicans can be aligned with the Romantic trope of the Noble Savage, Magua derives from a combination of the archetypal Gothic villain, Milton’s Satan, and the New England Puritans’ association of Indians with the powers of evil in the howling wilderness. But here, too, the novel is complex: Even Magua’s story has its other side. In the scene in chapter XI in which Magua informs Cora that he will spare her sister, Alice, if she will put herself at his mercy by becoming his wife, he makes a case for being seen as the real victim. Like the Indian nation Chingachgook describes for Natty in chapter III, Magua says he was once a good and happy man, until the coming of the whites, with their “fire-water” and other evils and injustices, turned him into a scarred exile with a righteous grievance. “Who made [Magua] a villain?” he asks. That is a question with enormous subversive potential, but Cooper’s narrative doesn’t give it much chance to resonate. Magua is so single-mindedly and ruthlessly determined to destroy the happiness of these two young women who have never harmed him, his eyes burn so steadily with his thirst for vengeance, that as the narrator says near the end, “it would not have been difficult to have fancied the dusky savage the Prince of Darkness, brooding on his own fancied wrongs, and plotting evil.”
It is significant that Cooper labels Magua a “
dusky savage” and sees this term as a synonym for satanic. The white characters, including Hawk eye, and the narrator himself repeatedly describe the Mingoes in terms like these that deny them their humanity: “beasts of prey,” “hellhounds,” “devils,” “fiend,” “monster.” For much of the novel the Mingoes whoop far more often than they speak, and when they scream it sounds, the narrator says, “as if the demons of hell had possessed themselves of the air.” Most of their actions trace out a pattern of racially incendiary moments: They gorge themselves on raw food and even drink human blood “freely, exultingly, hellishly” ; more than once we witness the dark hand of a Mingo stroking the blond hair of a white woman as a prelude to scalping her, while during the first atrocity at William Henry a “savage” wantonly kills a white “infant,” then tomahawks the mother. The rescue mission in the novel’s second half actually takes the narrative into a Mingo village, which allows Cooper to give his white readers a chance to look closely at Native American culture on its own ground. But although Cooper read primary sources to research his Indian novels, especially the accounts of John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary who had both a Christian and a proto-anthropological respect for the customs of the tribes he lived among, the novel’s Mingo village is built out of white prejudice and exists only in the imagination of Cooper and his culture. Even Mingo women and children are “hags” and “dark spectres,” and the first time we are shown the whole village gathered together, the scene looks like this:
The place ... resembled some unhallowed and supernatural arena, in which malicious demons had assembled to act their bloody and lawless rites. The forms in the background looked like unearthly beings, gliding before the eye and cleaving the air with frantic and unmeaning gestures; while the savage passions of such as passed the flames were rendered fearfully distinct by the gleams that shot athwart their inflamed visages (p. 245).
If it’s “not difficult” to see Magua as Satan, it’s impossible not to recognize this Indian village as hell on earth.
The five chapters that the novel spends inside the Mingo encampment (chapters XXIII-XXVII) are paired with two (chapters XXVIII and XXIX) that take us into the neighboring Delaware village. In a sense, this is even where the narrative leaves us in its last chapter, with Natty and Chingachgook at the Delaware funeral for Uncas and Cora. In his account of the Delawares and their social behavior, Cooper relies much more on Heckewelder, on both his facts and his spirit of cross-cultural respect. But while the Delaware community is shown to be dignified, just, ordered, devout, and willing to revere and serve white womanhood (which the novel consistently defines as the epitome of civilized grace), the members cannot transcend their historical fate. In the novel’s opening paragraphs the narrator talks about the futility of the French and Indian War, in which two European powers fought for “the possession of a country that neither was destined to retain.” At the end the fighting is between Mingoes and Delawares. The Mingo village is entirely destroyed, but in the first paragraph of the last chapter it is the Delawares who are described as “a nation of mourners,” and it is their own inevitable extinction as well as Uncas that they mourn for. England and France, Delawares and Mingoes all lose—but, of course, out of these losses Cooper’s United States of (white) America is being born. While some citizens of that new country protested loudly against Cooper’s sympathetic portrait of the Delawares, his decision in this novel to provide two antithetical types of “Indians” proved very popular with the mass of his readers. Because the tribe that adopts Hawkeye is so noble, white readers can grieve over their passing. Because the rest of the Indians, however, are so monstrous, they must be destroyed to make the continent safe for civilization, and while (in the novel at least) the work of their destruction is not done by white hands, white readers need have no compunctions about rejoicing at their extermination. History is made up of losses as well as gains, the novel says; the end of the Indians is an occasion for sorrow and celebration but not at all for guilt.
Thus, even as a fantasy, Cooper’s fiction arises from the brute facts of American history, although the colonial setting disguises the way the novel is a response to America’s own empire-building: the imperialist subjugation of the native population that became known, within a generation after the novel was published, as “Manifest Destiny.” Almost half of Cooper’s thirty-two novels are, in one way or another, about the process of civilizing the wilderness. Most of these are still well worth reading, for in their troubled dramatizations of one of our culture’s constitutive acts they hold up a mirror to our own deeply mixed feelings about the stories we tell about that process as well as the ones we continue to repress. As the “wildest” of Cooper’s dramas of the wilderness, however, The Last of the Mohicans projects a psychological as well as sociohistorical fantasy onto its dark woods and its “dusky savages.” In this respect it has a lot in common with The Heart of Darkness (1902), the novel about European powers in the African jungle that Joseph Conrad published at the start of the twentieth century. Conrad wrote very admiringly about Cooper’s sea fictions but may not even have recognized the relationship between his novel and this one. Heart of Darkness is often cited as one of the originating texts of Modernism, while Mohicans seems, to many readers at least, most “historical” in its own aesthetic: its prose style, its fussy and intrusive omniscient narrator, its reliance on literary conventions like “villain” or “light” and “dark” heroines. Thematically, however, Cooper’s novel verges on the same question that suggests “the horror” at the center of Conrad’s: whether “civilized” and “savage” are really not racial or ethnic or historical antonyms, but instead two interchangeable labels for all human beings. The darkness at the heart of Conrad’s “Africa” symbolically represents the deepest truth about human nature. Similarly, the “savage wilderness” into which Cooper’s novel plunges us can be interpreted as the realm of our dark passions.
The plot of Mohicans looks compulsively straightforward. Like most American novels in the 1820s, it was published in two volumes. In each volume the heroines are kidnapped, leading to a pair of rescue missions and ending with a pair of massacres. At the center the novel intersects history in its three-chapter account of the 1757 siege and surrender of Fort William Henry, but most of the story occurs in the archetypal, timeless world of villains who abduct heroines and heroes who rescue them. By casting Indians as the abductors, the novel aligns itself with the country’s first best-selling books: the “captivity narratives” written in the seventeenth century by Puritans like Mary Rowlandson and John Williams. The emphasis of these stories, however, is on captivity as a trial of faith in the wilderness. Through both its volumes and across hundreds of miles of woods, Cooper’s story keeps the focus on the threat to Cora and Alice’s virginity : Will they be restored to their father “spotless and angel like, as I lost them,” as he anxiously asks at one point, or will they suffer “a fate worse than death,” the euphemism by which rape is referred to by more than one character? This plot is launched at the very end of chapter II, when from behind the bushes appears an Indian’s face, “as fiercely wild as unbridled passions could make it,” watching “the light and graceful forms of the females” riding through the forest with a “gleam of exultation” in his eyes. Cooper keeps this apparent threat hanging over the heroines’ maidenheads so compellingly that the only major complaint reviewers made was that the novel was unbearably suspenseful, too painfully exciting to read. In their anxiety about the fate of the women, however, Cooper’s readers seem to have missed the moment when Hawkeye turns this story back on them. As the heroes begin their second rescue mission near the start of the second volume, Hawkeye tells Duncan that the threat of rape is all in his white imagination: “I know your thoughts, and shame be it to our color, that you have reason for them; but he who thinks that even a Mingo would ill-treat a woman, unless it be to tomahawk her, knows nothing of Indian natur” (p. 221).
In this amazing revelation, the novel exposes the ideological act of
projection that projects “unbridled passions” onto dark savages and suggests that if, like Duncan, readers have been thinking about sex, they should probably revise their reading of both the story and themselves. From this vantage point we can see that the story really begins at the very end of chapter I, and not with the lustful gaze of a savage looking at white women, but with the “indescribable look” Cora bestows on a savage. This event is staged very suggestively, at the very moment the white characters leave Fort Edward’s protecting walls to enter the wilderness. Until this moment, a veil has covered Cora’s face, but just as the nearly naked Magua runs past her to take the lead of the party, “her veil was allowed to open its folds, and betrayed an indescribable look of pity, admiration and horror, as her dark eye followed the easy motions of the savage.” The Last of the Mohicans dramatizes what the conventional decorum of Cooper’s culture repressed as “indescribable.” Out of Cora’s ambiguous gaze across racial lines, her attraction to and repulsion from the movements of Magua’s body, erupts the novel’s fantasy of angelic virginity and demonic desire. And as Hawkeye tells Duncan, as a fantasy it betrays more about our thoughts, who we are outside the walls or behind the veil of civilization, than about Indian nature.
Last of the Mohicans (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 2