A much more significant reason is Cooper's belief in "place." As a son of eighteenth-century rationalism, he accepted the concept of stratification is both society and government. It is true that he believed in the ascendency of the uncommon man, but this man was to better himself within his own stratum. Within his limited state — his freedom of individuality — he might even prove himself more worthy than someone socially above him. It is thus that Hawkeye, the most comprehensively noble personage in the book, always defers to the superior social and military rank of Colonel Munro, who proves himself unable to cope with the situation. Though it does not necessarily have to have such control over characterization, this concept of "place" probably was the most important reason for Cooper's static characters. While it is for Cooper an up-to-date and rational idea, it has its parallels with the ancient physiological theory of "humours," those four chief liquids of the human body which were believed to determine character. Substitute Hawkeye's emphasis on people's "gifts" for the belief in "humours," add the great variety that the subtlety of rational stratification would allow, and one may well come up with Cooper's static view of characterization in which it is more important to show what a man is like — and hence what his "place" is — than to show how he may basically change.
What of the characters that do show some change? The one evincing most potential for change is Gamut. He begins as a stock comic Yankee, as ungainly a putting together of arms, legs, body, and dress as Irving's Ichabod Crane of 1820. He is the only really unmanly male in the book (if we discount the cowardly young Huron, a very minor personage). He is a dedicated, simple-minded, blindly blundering psalmodist whose abrupt contacts with frontier realities give him pause to reflect. At the end of the story, he develops a belated manliness in giving chase and pathetically offering battle, in the final scene succumbing to the chanting of the grieving Delawares. In spite of the extended, intermittent presentation of his development, however, Cooper never quite convinces that there is any real inner change (Gamut's going into battle, for instance, is motivated as much by his seeing in it a Biblical parallel as by anything else). Colonel Munro's change is only that of a man whose disappointment and grief are rapidly making him senile. Once Cooper points to Uncas as an Indian coming close to losing some of his savage condition, yet the cause is not civilization but his growing interest in a woman. At best the change in him is only partial, and that is shown mostly through instinctive deferential good manners toward Cora. Two of these characters, then, indicate potential inner change, but all three reveal only outward manifestations. In none of them is there anything like an inner development that means a rebirth of his essential being.
