While outwardly these two chapters are concerned chiefly with fright and action for entertaining the reader and multiplying difficulties for the characters, it also portrays the bloody cross-purposes of frontier strife: seven Iroquois are killed and two white men are wounded, while the male protagonists are finally confronted with a moral dilemma. Are they to face danger and probable death with calm, frontal bravery, or are they to turn to subterfuge and escape, hoping to effect a rescue but running the risk of being deserters? It is a bigger problem than that found in most sentimental novels, where woman's greatest threat is usually to her virtue or reputation. Here it involves the age-old physical responsibility of the male for the female and — greater yet — of the strong for the weak, the typical assumption in the myth of the American frontiersman. The decision and resultant escape of Hawkeye, whose Christian reasoning is notably different from that of the Mohicans, is of a piece with the American self-ideal about necessity and the ingenuity of "finding a way out." The fortitude of Cora at this point is also consistent with the accredited strength of American pioneer womanhood; it is she who sees beyond the immediate grave situation to a possible desperate solution for which she femininely entreats rather than insists. Further, though Cooper's females only seldom do so, in this instance Cora takes on the three-dimensional qualities of a real woman character when, revealing a bit of her personal feelings and utilizing Uncas', she urges the subtle distinction about messengers which leads the young Mohican to escape also.
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