Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses Revisited

An N.C. Wyeth illustration of a scene from Last of the Mohicans

Why on earth would anyone in the twenty-first century bother to read The Last of the Mohicans?

This is a question that resounded in my mind as I sat in my study slogging through the book. Why on earth was I reading it? In retrospect, I might say morbid curiosity, but that would be somewhat disingenuous, really. When I picked it up, I had some vaguely inspired notion that it might be fun. Some seventh grade memory of enjoying the book--and of being disturbed by the brutal deaths in it--had lingered with me, but as I read through the clunky narrative, all I could think of was Mark Twain's utterly hilarious critique, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Twain got it right; if for nothing else, you should read this book so that you can appreciate Twain's essay.

There are some entertaining action sequences, but nothing in the book can withstand more than marginal scrutiny. The faster one reads the book, the better it is; you can get a sense of things without getting bogged down in the sometimes nonsensical prose. For a novel that focuses so much on the role of the wilderness landscape, it can be awfully hard to get your bearings straight as you read. When Cooper's characters enter into a cave, watch out--you'll never be able to get the dimensions of the cave right in your mind or be able to figure out how it is that they seem to be able to see in the utter darkness of an unlit space. Somehow they do, though, without so much as stumbling over a single crooked stone.

The primary object of Twain's ridicule is something that plays a key element in the book: the preternaturally keen sensory awareness of the scout Hawkeye and his two Mohican friends, Chingachgook and Uncas. CSI has nothing on these guys. They can detect half of a day-old mocassin print in a dry creek bed and tell you the wearer's weight, height, eye color, and what he had for lunch the day before. From a bent blade of grass they can tell which direction their prey, the wily and unkempt Magua, is going and how fast he is traveling to get there. Hawkeye is always waxing philosophic on the Indian's natural abilities to understand the way of the forest. "Whoever comes into the woods to deal with the natives, must use Indian fashions, if he would wish to prosper in his undertakings," Hawkeye notes, but he is no slouch himself; he knows, too, that moss grows on the north side of a tree. This guy never gets lost. He's what you had before GPS.

To boot, we get a heap of taciturn Indians--some good, some bad--who seem custom made for the cigar store. We get fainting ladies, and it is with one of those damsels--easily more Walter Scott than early American realism--that we nevertheless find one of the more compelling themes, something that not only gives graduate students something to talk about in relation to this book but also makes it very American in a crucial and (if you can get past the patronizing and dimensionally limited tone) surprisingly progressive way. Cora, the older of the two daughters of Colonel Munro, is at least a sixteenth black. It's no secret that noble savage Uncas fancies doomed, sad Cora more than just a little bit, and it's true that he would make a worthy match to her stalwart temper. Had there not been elements of tragedy at the end of the novel we might have seen a for-its-time daring display of racial integration on the frontier of American possibility. We also see a hint of complexity in the principal villain, Magua, aka Le Renard Subtil, whose disgrace is in no small part a result of negative peer pressure from whites: "Was it the fault of Le Renard that his head was not made of rock?" he asks rhetorically--rhetoric being one of his specialties. "Who gave him the fire-water? who made him a villain? 'twas the palefaces, the people of your own color."

In fact, the collisions of race and culture in this novel--and the way Cooper embodies the attitudes of his times toward these topics--do make it worthy of study--to graduate students, at least, and to anyone who wants insight into the mindset of early 19th century Americans, or Europeans, for that matter, since Cooper was a bestseller at home and abroad. Unfortunately, that still doesn't make this book any easier to read.