The Last of the Mohicans

As a dedicated writer without anything like a native literary tradition, Cooper was as handicapped as any of his American predecessors. Consequently, he relied on tradition from abroad and developed some of his own from the setting and folk tradition of his native land. The former tradition can be seen, for instance, in sentimental treatment such as the overstated, coquettish, and stiltedly articulated love between Major Heyward and Alice Munro. But Cooper's sentimentalism is never as thoroughly developed or as strictly committed as that, say, of Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797), which apes Richardson's classic Pamela right down to its form, a series of letters. It is a surprising paradox when one realizes that The Coquette is based on actual events in Connecticut, with the fiction only a thin veneer; but the story as presented, far from relying on its setting, could easily be shifted to another country like England. Such is not true of Cooper's work. The quality of events in The Last of the Mohicans is as indigenous as Hawkeye's cap of skins and his buckskin leggings, which made the scout known the world over as Leather-Stocking. The love between Heyward and Alice, sentimental though it is, could not have progressed in its precise way except on the American frontier and amid the events peculiar to the frontier condition. Cooper is fusing an established literary tradition with something of his own as a member of a new, green, and hitherto non-literary nation. In the fusing, that which is new becomes primary, as can be seen in the conclusion of the novel where the perfunctory pairing off and disposing of sentimental lovers is almost lost from sight in such overriding concerns as the dignity, ritual, and tragic passing of the Indians. The bringing together of the foreign and the native (witness Hawkeye's "ability" at times to use rather literary language and at other times to talk in the strict vernacular) is sometimes an uneasy amalgam, but the good reader will be careful not to take Cooper too much to task. The alchemy of innovation often means that some fool's gold will crop up with the real metal, and it would be as unfair to criticize the Wright brothers for being unable to fly a jet airliner as it is to insist upon Cooper's writing like a modern American novelist.