The Last of the Mohicans

Whenever you read an older novel or watch an older movie or play an older video game, you expect it to be dated in some way, and do your best to judge it accordingly. The original Legend of Zelda, for instance, is hideous to look at, clunky to control, and completely void of story. But because it's nearly prehistoric (by video game standards), it gets a free pass for all of those modern-day sins and when people rave about it today they do so because it is, all things considered, a fun game to play. Still, those shortcomings do exist. They do affect just how enjoyable the game can be in this day and age. Even if we can forgive it for being dated, The Legend of Zelda is dated all the same. Most readers of this blog know that I often struggle to get through a lot of nineteenth century literature because of how thickly and heavily worded it can get. The Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, is no exception. In an effort to write an American novel that would be respected overseas by the British, who still considered themselves to be culturally and intellectually superior to their former colonies, author James Fenimore Cooper uses the thick and heavy prose that was in vogue in Britain at the time to romanticize the American frontier and wilderness. The result was a novel that was incredibly popular on both sides of the Atlantic, but critically panned as well for lacking tonal consistency. An extremely outspoken critic of the book, and of Cooper in general, was Mark Twain some fifty years later, who wrote a lengthy essay detailing all kinds of "offenses" Cooper was guilty of, especially regarding fluctuating personalities of the main characters and greatly exaggerated superhuman feats. To be honest, I didn't notice many of these issues, and if I did they didn't bother me. Late in the book, once character dresses up in a bear suit, and the idea that other people were buying his disguise seemed a bit far-fetched to me, but other than that I had no real issues with the plot or the characters. My usual gripe about unnecessarily heavy prose notwithstanding, my biggest problem with this novel was a race-based one. Specifically, I'm still not quite sure what Cooper's stance on racial segregation between whites and native Americans was. It seems complicated at best. On the one hand, the novel's hero, Hawkeye, is a white man who befriends and lives with Indians and who adapts their ways as his own in order to survive to in the wilderness. On the other, that same hero is unabashedly proud of his pure white heritage, and maintains a number of times that just because he's adapted many Indian ways does not mean he has any Indian blood in him. Further complicating the racial overtones of the story, a white man falls for a white woman who has a mixed race half-sister. And the father of these women accuses the man of racism for favoring the white one over the mixed one. But the mixed one, herself, falls for a Native American. And Cooper implies that she does so because something about her own mixed-race-ness makes other non-whites appealing to her. Meanwhile, the chief antagonist of the novel, Magua, seeks to plant his seed in the mixed-race daughter in an act of vengeance against her father; Magua knows that "tainting" this man's bloodline with Indian blood will psychologically torment the guy. But thsi is the same guy who has already fathered a half-black daughter, and who has accused the white daughter's white suitor of being a racist for ignoring the half-black daughter. Confused? Me too. Maybe Cooper was trying to pull off a novel in which he offers some progressive ideas but also plays into his audience's fear of Indian assimilation. And ultimately the mixed-race daughter and both of the Indians who wanted to put it in her end up dying, leaving no more mixed-race would-be couples, so is Cooper himself suggesting that mixed race couples are doomed? Or does he use this threesome as a group of tragic heroes who we're meant to empathize with? It sounds like either way, Cooper was progressive for his own time, but his racial ideologies seem fairly discriminatory here and now in the modern day. So I return to where I began this post, and posit that while it's easy to acknowledge the datedness of certain works, it can also be difficult to view them without a present-day bias of some sort; I have no idea what The Last of the Mohicans is trying to convey on the racial front, and as such, I have no idea whether or not I found its themes engaging and agreeable. I did love the 1992 Daniel Day-Lewis movie though. That musical score was absolutely awesome.