Cooper s Frontier: From Mohicans to Americans

Transcription

1 Cooper s Frontier: From Mohicans to Americans A) Regeneration of Americans Through Violence: To understand how this works, you need to understand the structure of the novel. The novel itself is framed in two parts: Part one ends with the fall of Fort William Henry. It is the realm of civilization, and it is based on history. Cooper himself was steeped in the history of the French and Indian war; he visited the scene and his novel is based on historical fact. Colonel Monro (slight name change) actually did command Fort William Henry; Montcalm did successfully attack Fort Henry in August The bare outlines of the novel s first half-the historical and civilized half -- coincide with historical fact. Montcalm did besiege the fort for several days before it surrendered. He did offer generous terms. His Indian allies did treacherously attack the helpless British and provincial soldiers as they marched back defenselessly to Fort Edward a few miles away. And so Cooper reinterpreted fact as fiction. In the second part of the novel we are in the world of savagery and of myth. The historical framework of the second part of the novel is Indian history, not white history. Cooper links his Mohicans with the ancient Uncas, who historically befriended the English and fought with them in the Pequot and King Phillips Wars. Cooper attributes the warlike prowess of the Uncas to a moral superiority that enabled them to appreciate and stay faithful to the English. But war, white man s disease, and treachery have diminished the Mohicans until only Uncas and Chingachgook remain -- living, like Natty, as adopted Delawares. Cooper s Indian history is a deliberate and elaborate fabrication for fictional purposes. Its effect is to unite the fragmentary history of the Indians into a single myth of origin, rise to grandeur, intermarriage, and thus decline and fall. And this cycle echoes the cycle of civilizations rise and fall that was a major theme in contemporary historiography at the time Cooper was writing. Historically the Mohicans never died out. But Cooper needed them to die out in order to make way for the white American nation, which he embraced in 1826: And this despite the diversity of people in America, which he reveals in his characters. By structuring the novel as he does, and creating the characters he does, Cooper creates what would become a central trope of the American literary experience: the regenerative means of violence. White men coming to the new world seek to regenerate themselves and their new identity. They do so by entering the wilderness, become like savages in order to

2 vanquish the dark-skinned savages (and their own savage impulses), and emerge from the warfare with their whiteness clarified and purified. Indian is the hunter/warrior par excellence. White man in this new savage world needs to learn the ways of the Indian to survive and prosper. He needs to become like the savages to conquer them and their own savage impulses. There is a bifurcation of characters much like there is in the structure of the novel: Characters are white, or Indian, or mixed blood. And their blood determines their actions and fate. In the second half-the savage half of the novel-the laws are the laws of the Indians, and that is where the "true" white American regenerate themselves and purify and clarify their essential white characters. Magua is in control in second half. He wants to revenge his whipping at the hands of Munro for being drunk, and he partly responsible for the massacre of the whites when Fort William Henry falls. It is in the wilderness that Magua s power flourishes. David Gamut and Duncan Heyward must become like Indians to survive in this savage wilderness. David Gamut, a pathetic person when we first meet him, gains strength in the wilderness; he wears moccasins, dresses like an Indian, even dresses in Hawkeye's outfit when Hawkeye saves Uncas. David abandons his "tooting instrument," as Hawkeye calls it, in the forest. And at the end of the novel,david even abandons his pacifism and is willing to strike a blow on behalf of Cora: At the climactic last fight, he is willing to take up arms, not only dress and act like an Indian, but kill like one, in order to save Cora and preserve his white manhood. In contrast to the whites, who will stake their honor and lives on behalf of their women, Indians will not descend to their women: Even Uncas, at the end, will not descend to Cora in the company of his Indian peers: When Magua says: "Cora is mine," Uncas is silent; he does not deny it. He is silent because he accepts Indian morality and ways. And those are the ways of violence. Had he been white he would have come to Cora's behalf. Because he is an Indian he can defend her in the only way he knows how: through violence. In the second half, Duncan Heyward wears war paint and defers to the Indians, whereas in the first half, the historical half, he is the superior officer: he and Munro. And in the second half, Munro, who is too old to learn the ways of the Indian, has virtually no role. In the savage wilderness of the second half, Munro becomes a cipher. To transform yourself, become like an Indian, you must be young: David Gamut and Duncan, who experience the most change in the novel, are also the youngest. One s actions are determined ultimately by blood, though one s character can also be shaped by environment. Alice and Cora, the women, are captives throughout, the objects of the men's desire. The plot centers around their safety and their virtue, and the whites need to become like Indians in order to preserve their virtue.

3 In the first half, it is Cora who tells Hawkeye and the Mohicans to fly: David and Heyward, who have not yet been immersed in Indian ways, stay by their women as valiant chivalric white warriors. Hawkeye and the Mohicans realize that this is futile. When they re in the cave, and being surrounded by Indians, Uncas initially wants to stay only because he loves Cora, and his love for her proves his demise. She is his femme fatale. Without Cora, Uncas would presumably still be living. But they leave the women and the white, femininized men in the cave because they realize they have a better chance of surviving and of recovering the women if they follow Cora's advice and flee. Cora's black blood allows her to understand Indians in a way that Alice totally cannot. In fact, of all the characters, Alice if the greatest idiot, the most pathetic, and the least comfortable in the frontier. In fact it is because of her thanking God and clinging to the rock, while she s in the cave in the first half, that the group is discovered by Magua and the Hurons. Hawkeye has been raised by Indians, but makes it clear that he has the morality of the white man. He understands pity, tenderness in a way that Indians don't. Morality is depended upon race for him and for the narrator: He is secretly satisfied about his white skin, even though he hunts and kills like an Indian, or almost like one, and is proud of it. Hawkeye speaks English in a way that the king would not be ashamed to answer, but he also speaks the Delaware language; h prefers the Delaware language. This is in contrast to Duncan Heyward, who speaks English and French but not Delaware. As for the Hurons, they are all skulks and vagabonds. Born a Mingo one will die a Mingo. A Mingo is a Mingo. An Indian is an Indian and will behave like one. "What might appear proper in a red skin," Hawkeye says, "may be sinful in a man who has not even a cross in blood to plead for his ignorance." (Man without a cross): A MAN, not an Indian, without a cross. Indians are not real men, even though they are admirable. When his friend Chingachgook kills the French scout, Hawkeye can only smile and shake his head: "Twould have been a cruel and an unhuman act for a whiteskin; but 'tis the gift and nature of an Indian, and I suppose it should not be denied! Hawkeye doesn't kill Magua after tying him up in the cave only because of his white skin. "Nothing but the color of his skin had saved the lives of Magua and the conjuror, who would have been the first victims sacrificed to his own security, had not the scout believed such an act, however congenial it might be to the nature of an Indian, utterly unworthy of one who boasted a descent from men that knew no cross of blood." (no crossed blood; and not raised by Christians). B) There is a mirroring among the characters that emphasize the theme of individual regeneration through violence and the permanence of race:

4 David and Duncan presumably emerge from their warfare with Indians as better whites; they are more capable of defending themselves, more able to live in this new wilderness world. Hawkeye, by contrast, never embraces civilization: He is the link between the savage and civilized states: While he can cry after hearing David first sing his song, he refuses civilization. Hawkeye has a natural longing for the the hunt and the chase. If paradise is ordained for happiness, he says, he would almost rather go to the glorious hunting grounds of the redskins than to the white heaven. He realizes that the whites and Indians go to different places when they die: even God -- Providence -- refuses to intermingle the races. But he has been Indianized to such a degree that he stands on the border between white and red, civilization and savagery. He stands on the frontier; is a frontiersman. "Hazard and danger had become necessary to the enjoyment of Hawkeye's existence." And since he is a white man with Indian ways, and older, unable to revert back to civilization, his place is on the frontier, the space that unites civilization and savagery, red and white. Hawkeye s role in the development of the new nation is to pave the way from savagery to civilization, to teach effeminate whites how to survive in this new world. Hawkeye is a mirror image of Chingachgook: They are both older. Both single. Both love the hunt and the chase. The one, while white, knows the way of the Indian and comfortably lives among them. The other, while Indian, knows the way of whites, and can work with them, can be allied with them. It is appropriate, providential, that neither love a woman. Their love is the wilderness. Both are frontiersman, the last of a breed, and for the frontier hero, to love a real woman is fatal. There is also a wonderful juxtaposition between Hawkeye and David Gamut. Both are white men, the one almost too Indian; the other, no matter how hard he tries, can never become anything like an Indian. The most David can do is to dress like an Indian or a savage bear, and vow to kill like an Indian. David, despite his grotesque, gangling appearance, looks enough like Hawkeye that he can pass for him in the Huron camp. David, through training in the wilderness, seems to acquire some semblance of physical coordination. Hawkeye hates books, prefers oral speech to writing things in books because in oral speech the lie can be given to the face of a cowardly boaster. Not in books. David is born and bred on books: He is an effete intellectual, who initially is completely uncomfortable in the wilderness: Gamut is a New England Puritan. His book of psalms is "especially" for New Englanders. Even David Gamut s name suggests his persona: David from the Bible -- consistent with his Puritan New England heritage-and Gamut, which means the whole series of musical notes.

5 Hawkeye is the classic anti-intellectual fighter/hero; he is also anti-new Englander. He prefers the Indians of New York to the effete intellectuals of New England. But while Hawkeye has degenerated a bit too far into frontier life ever to live in civilization, David, after his frontier experience, seems to become smarter, stronger, more virile and manly. Duncan Heyward also experiences this regneration of character. In fact Heyward is the racial opposite of Uncas. Even their names: Uncas and Duncan. Compared to Uncas, Hawkeye more limited in the ways of the Indian. And compared to Duncan, Hawkeye is more limited in the ways of whites. This new civilization rests on the likes of Duncan as warrior, who dutifully protects the women, and marries the lily white one, and David, the intellectual, who learns a bit of the ways of the wilderness. Much like the structural mirroring in the novel--the first part set in the world dominated by civilized historical consciousness, and the second half dominated by mythic savage consciousness--the characters are also mirror images of each other, paired racially: Uncas and Duncan; Hawkeye and Chingachgook; and Magua and Montcalm. Magua and Montcalm are white and red versions of one another. Both are chiefs; both are eloquent speakers. Both are cunning politicians. Both are courageous: Montcalm will eventually prove his bravery in his death on the plains of Abraham. Magua proves his bravery by rejecting Hawkeye's offer to exchange himself for Cora. And both know how to negotiate and ally themselves with the opposite race. But like the other pairings, they are also fundamental opposites owing to their racial makeup. There is also the love triangle between Uncas, Magua, and Cora. All three are outcasts: Cora, owing to the taint of black blood; Magua has been cast out of his tribe; and Uncas is the last of the line, isolated by history. Both Magua and Uncas are destroyed by their love for Cora. But they are also opposites: Uncas loves chastely, Magua, lasciviously, and lustfully. Magua represents the Indian in decline, corrupted by his mixed blood, his interaction with white civilization, and his booze. Uncas is the purebred Indian, at the height of his race's development, but also the last. C) These formal elements, the racial typing, mirroring, and regenerative theme of violence all point to the overarching theme in the book: That the last of the Mohicans gives way to the first of the Americans: Cooper first needed to get British out of the way: He needed to distinguish the American colonists from the British and the French and other Europeans. He does this in a number of ways:

6 First, the fall of Fort William Henry, which Cooper recounts historically in the first half, did historically figure prominently in the colonists disdain for the British. The opening of the novel itself frames the setting for the emergence of America as distinct from England. The French are advancing with an army as "numerous as leaves," and the British, under General Webb, fear this advance. As leaders, the British are characterized as "imbeciles," and they have already met with a series of defeats. The incompetence and arrogance of the British, as all readers in 1826 knew, would lead to American independence. Additionally, the British are described as arrogant; the colonists in the first part walk humbly on the left, while the British soldiers walk arrogantly on the right. The British are also stupid and cowardly. Munro becomes a nobody in the American wilderness in the second half. And he acknowledges, after his meeting with Montcalm, that an Englishman is afraid -- afraid to support a friend. The events of the novel embody a theory of pre-ordained human progress, a wellordered process of historical change: the decline of both the Indian and the European on the continent, and the creation and rise of the American. Duncan and Alice will marry at the end, and make American babies. And that is the way that Cooper suggests that the narrative must end. They are the future Americans. Cora is one of the book's grotesques: she is flawed by her mixed blood, too strong for her own good, too self-sufficient; to sexual to have a space in this new world. Had she lived she would destroy the American Cooper describes. And so she must die, much as Uncas must die. Cooper makes it clear that Uncas and Cora were NEVER fated to be together. Even at the end, Hawkeye realizes the futility of a union between Uncas and Cora, even in death: David, in his sermon, says that "the Being, we all worship, under different names, will be mindful of their charity; and that the time shall not be distant, when we may assemble around his throne, without distinction of sex, or rank, or color. Upon hearing this, the scout shakes his head: "To tell them this," he says, "would be to tell them that the snows come not in the winter, or that the sun shines fiercest when the trees are stripped of their leaves." Hawkeye, like Cooper, understands that God has reserved separate places for the separate races. So the novel traces an inevitable historical process in which a physical, masculine, Indian culture, embodied in the bachelors -- Uncas, Magua, Chingachgook, and Hawkeye -- gives way to a more spiritual, feminine, white culture, reinvigorated by experience in the wilderness, represented by the union of Alice and Duncan. And European powers get broken down. It is a novel of natural process and of natural progress. Like the woodland plants, the Indian rose, flourished, and died; the time of the white man in America has come, but the cycle remains. Cooper wants us to see in the Indian the germ of our own character and fate. He wants us to see that intermarriage and mixed blooded characters are fatal to national growth.

7 Additionally, the idea that the white man s racial career might, like the Mohicans, end in extinction was part of the cyclical theory of historians during Cooper s day; and this prophecy of racial mongrelization and extinction would become more and more prominent as the century progressed.