You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.16 AVERAGE
3.16 AVERAGE
The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper (1826). ~~The usual warnings apply regarding detailed discussion of the plot. I will use the word “Indians” throughout this review to refer to indigenous Americans, partly because Cooper does so in the text.~~
Cooper was one of the first authors to really make a name for himself as a practitioner of specifically American literature, and as such, you’d think we might have to read more of him in school. But not a bit of it; I was never assigned a single word of his work. Very possibly, this was for the obvious reason that teaching The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper’s best-known book, would require a dedication to tactful but honest discussions about the way he imagines indigenous Americans, mixed-race people, and the white colonial presence. And yet Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn requires the same teaching approach, and many people seem to have read that in school. Perhaps it’s because of Cooper’s style; writing nearly sixty years before Twain, and thirty years before Hawthorne, he’s closer in tone and thematic interests to the romantic historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, with a lot of convolution even in his descriptions of action scenes. And yet the age of a book really is just a number; I found Mohicans more interesting and rewarding than Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. Or maybe it’s because Mohicans is a historical novel, and the idea of trying to get high schoolers to keep straight the differences between fictional 1757 (when the book is set) and actual 1826 (when it was composed) seems like a fruitless struggle.
The plot of Mohicans is basically a two-act structure, and there is a lot going on. In the first act, we meet Alice and Cora Munro, the daughters of the British commander of the colonial Fort William Henry on the shores of Lake George in New York State. The British are fighting the combined resources of French general Montcalm and his allies among the Huron Indians. The girls are journeying from a different British stronghold, Fort Edward, to be with their father. They are accompanied by a white British soldier, Duncan Heyward; a comic-relief singing-master named David Gamut, whom I found pointlessly irritating until he was given a surprisingly important function in the plot; and, initially, an Indian pathfinder named Magua. On their way, they meet Natty Bumppo, aka Hawkeye, a white man who has lived and trained with Indians as a scout for most of his life, and his two companions, Chingachgook and his son Uncas, who are the last survivors of the Mohican tribe; they have been adopted by the local Delaware Indians but are of different lineage. Hawkeye identifies Magua as a Huron and immediately distrusts him, offering his and his friends’ services as guides instead. This turns out to be a good idea. Magua comes back with reinforcements, the group spends a few nights defending themselves from the position of an island mid-river riddled with caves, Hawkeye and the Indians leave (reasoning that they’re more valuable dead than the two girls are), Magua explains his desire for vengeance against Colonel Munro (who introduced him to alcohol when he was working for the British, then whipped him for drunkenness) and offers Cora her life if she’ll agree to marry him; she refuses, the gang is saved by Hawkeye and the Indians (and we get our first hint that Uncas might be falling in love with Cora), and they sneak past the French siege of Fort William Henry to be reunited with their father.
In the second act, the stakes get even higher and the tension tenser. Munro, seeing that he’s severely outnumbered and his request for reinforcements has been refused, surrenders the fort without a fight. The British refugees, including women and children, are meant to be allowed to leave safely, but the Huron Indians allied with the French massacre them as they leave—a genuinely horrifying scene that begins with the apparently unprovoked murder of a single infant and its mother, then snowballs into all-out carnage. In the uproar, Magua abducts Cora and Alice; David Gamut follows them. The rest of the novel is (and this is a substantial simplification) taken up with the quest of Hawkeye, Heyward, Munro, Chingachgook, and Uncas to locate and rescue the women, a project that involves making use of Gamut’s status among the Hurons as a holy madman (because he won’t stop singing psalms), a bear carcass traditionally worn by the Huron shaman (cunningly used as a disguise), and complex diplomatic maneuvres with the extremely elderly chief Tamenund (who actually died in 1701, but shh, fiction!)
This is more plot than almost any of my American Classics reading project books have so far required me to summarise, and now that I’ve done it, what have I got to say? I’d like to talk about Cora. She is the daughter of Colonel Munro, but only the half-sister of Alice, and from the start we know there’s something unusual about her: her hair is dark, her blood “rich”, and her general demeanour is brave, protective, and proud. (Alice is hopeless, and hopelessly boring, a blonde drip who spends much of the second act unconscious. She is, of course, the beloved of Duncan Heyward.) Cora, it turns out, is mixed-race: her mother, Munro’s first wife, was from the West Indies and descended from a lineage that—at some undetermined point in the past—included enslaved people. It’s hard from this description to work out how un-white Cora is meant to be, visually; Cooper makes it possible for her to “pass”, although I prefer to think of her as a young Queen Charlotte from Bridgerton. At the time of Cooper’s writing, the “one-drop rule” was not yet codified in law, and we’re clearly meant to include Cora in the group of white people.
Yet she distinguishes herself from the group of whites, too, and with positive attributes: her courage, practicality, and morally principled decision-making. Both villainous Magua and princely Uncas desire her. Her refusal of Magua’s sexual advances is complemented by her murder at Uncas’s side (after which he too is killed), and their funeral rites in the novel’s final chapter figure the two of them as fundamentally married and belonging together in the afterlife, although as far as we can tell they never even touched each other while alive. On the one hand, this is easily read as a kind of racial-sexual determinism: Cora, the queenly but outcast mulatta, and Uncas, the kingly but doomed (because the last of his tribe) Indian, are “appropriate” mates for each other, in the same way that Heyward and Alice are an “appropriate” match in terms of race and class. On the other hand, Cooper makes us feel the kindred-ness of Cora’s and Uncas’s souls, even without making direct courtship part of the story; both react in similar ways to adversity, both seem to value the same sorts of behaviour, both are deeply loyal. What he has done, as an author, is what often seems to happen in fiction when a force like racist ideology comes into conflict with the instincts of a creator: almost against his will, Cooper has written characters who, while supposed to play second fiddle to a white romance, are actually far more engaging, unique, and complex. Alice and Heyward are meant to be our hero/-ine pairing, but who remembers them?
There’s absolutely scads more to talk about here, including the historical political situation that Cooper represents; the incredible complexity of tribal alliances with colonial powers before the Revolution (I recommend supplementing this, if you read it, with Wikipedia, which will at least give you some sense of who belongs to what Indian nation and which Europeans they’re allied with); and the character and motivation of Hawkeye, who has chosen to live outside of “civilisation”, loving Chingachgook like a brother and Uncas like a son, while also being the character who most frequently insists on his own racial purity. The writing style is a touch prolix, but if you can read Trollope, you can read Cooper. His other work is far, far less readily available than this one novel, but I wouldn’t say no to reading him again.
This is the eleventh book I’ve read in 2023 for my American Classics reading project, and also the earliest-written! Check out my blog for more: Tag: American Classics reading project.I’ll be posting my final book in December, followed by a wrap-up post reflecting on the project.
Cooper was one of the first authors to really make a name for himself as a practitioner of specifically American literature, and as such, you’d think we might have to read more of him in school. But not a bit of it; I was never assigned a single word of his work. Very possibly, this was for the obvious reason that teaching The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper’s best-known book, would require a dedication to tactful but honest discussions about the way he imagines indigenous Americans, mixed-race people, and the white colonial presence. And yet Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn requires the same teaching approach, and many people seem to have read that in school. Perhaps it’s because of Cooper’s style; writing nearly sixty years before Twain, and thirty years before Hawthorne, he’s closer in tone and thematic interests to the romantic historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, with a lot of convolution even in his descriptions of action scenes. And yet the age of a book really is just a number; I found Mohicans more interesting and rewarding than Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. Or maybe it’s because Mohicans is a historical novel, and the idea of trying to get high schoolers to keep straight the differences between fictional 1757 (when the book is set) and actual 1826 (when it was composed) seems like a fruitless struggle.
The plot of Mohicans is basically a two-act structure, and there is a lot going on. In the first act, we meet Alice and Cora Munro, the daughters of the British commander of the colonial Fort William Henry on the shores of Lake George in New York State. The British are fighting the combined resources of French general Montcalm and his allies among the Huron Indians. The girls are journeying from a different British stronghold, Fort Edward, to be with their father. They are accompanied by a white British soldier, Duncan Heyward; a comic-relief singing-master named David Gamut, whom I found pointlessly irritating until he was given a surprisingly important function in the plot; and, initially, an Indian pathfinder named Magua. On their way, they meet Natty Bumppo, aka Hawkeye, a white man who has lived and trained with Indians as a scout for most of his life, and his two companions, Chingachgook and his son Uncas, who are the last survivors of the Mohican tribe; they have been adopted by the local Delaware Indians but are of different lineage. Hawkeye identifies Magua as a Huron and immediately distrusts him, offering his and his friends’ services as guides instead. This turns out to be a good idea. Magua comes back with reinforcements, the group spends a few nights defending themselves from the position of an island mid-river riddled with caves, Hawkeye and the Indians leave (reasoning that they’re more valuable dead than the two girls are), Magua explains his desire for vengeance against Colonel Munro (who introduced him to alcohol when he was working for the British, then whipped him for drunkenness) and offers Cora her life if she’ll agree to marry him; she refuses, the gang is saved by Hawkeye and the Indians (and we get our first hint that Uncas might be falling in love with Cora), and they sneak past the French siege of Fort William Henry to be reunited with their father.
In the second act, the stakes get even higher and the tension tenser. Munro, seeing that he’s severely outnumbered and his request for reinforcements has been refused, surrenders the fort without a fight. The British refugees, including women and children, are meant to be allowed to leave safely, but the Huron Indians allied with the French massacre them as they leave—a genuinely horrifying scene that begins with the apparently unprovoked murder of a single infant and its mother, then snowballs into all-out carnage. In the uproar, Magua abducts Cora and Alice; David Gamut follows them. The rest of the novel is (and this is a substantial simplification) taken up with the quest of Hawkeye, Heyward, Munro, Chingachgook, and Uncas to locate and rescue the women, a project that involves making use of Gamut’s status among the Hurons as a holy madman (because he won’t stop singing psalms), a bear carcass traditionally worn by the Huron shaman (cunningly used as a disguise), and complex diplomatic maneuvres with the extremely elderly chief Tamenund (who actually died in 1701, but shh, fiction!)
This is more plot than almost any of my American Classics reading project books have so far required me to summarise, and now that I’ve done it, what have I got to say? I’d like to talk about Cora. She is the daughter of Colonel Munro, but only the half-sister of Alice, and from the start we know there’s something unusual about her: her hair is dark, her blood “rich”, and her general demeanour is brave, protective, and proud. (Alice is hopeless, and hopelessly boring, a blonde drip who spends much of the second act unconscious. She is, of course, the beloved of Duncan Heyward.) Cora, it turns out, is mixed-race: her mother, Munro’s first wife, was from the West Indies and descended from a lineage that—at some undetermined point in the past—included enslaved people. It’s hard from this description to work out how un-white Cora is meant to be, visually; Cooper makes it possible for her to “pass”, although I prefer to think of her as a young Queen Charlotte from Bridgerton. At the time of Cooper’s writing, the “one-drop rule” was not yet codified in law, and we’re clearly meant to include Cora in the group of white people.
Yet she distinguishes herself from the group of whites, too, and with positive attributes: her courage, practicality, and morally principled decision-making. Both villainous Magua and princely Uncas desire her. Her refusal of Magua’s sexual advances is complemented by her murder at Uncas’s side (after which he too is killed), and their funeral rites in the novel’s final chapter figure the two of them as fundamentally married and belonging together in the afterlife, although as far as we can tell they never even touched each other while alive. On the one hand, this is easily read as a kind of racial-sexual determinism: Cora, the queenly but outcast mulatta, and Uncas, the kingly but doomed (because the last of his tribe) Indian, are “appropriate” mates for each other, in the same way that Heyward and Alice are an “appropriate” match in terms of race and class. On the other hand, Cooper makes us feel the kindred-ness of Cora’s and Uncas’s souls, even without making direct courtship part of the story; both react in similar ways to adversity, both seem to value the same sorts of behaviour, both are deeply loyal. What he has done, as an author, is what often seems to happen in fiction when a force like racist ideology comes into conflict with the instincts of a creator: almost against his will, Cooper has written characters who, while supposed to play second fiddle to a white romance, are actually far more engaging, unique, and complex. Alice and Heyward are meant to be our hero/-ine pairing, but who remembers them?
There’s absolutely scads more to talk about here, including the historical political situation that Cooper represents; the incredible complexity of tribal alliances with colonial powers before the Revolution (I recommend supplementing this, if you read it, with Wikipedia, which will at least give you some sense of who belongs to what Indian nation and which Europeans they’re allied with); and the character and motivation of Hawkeye, who has chosen to live outside of “civilisation”, loving Chingachgook like a brother and Uncas like a son, while also being the character who most frequently insists on his own racial purity. The writing style is a touch prolix, but if you can read Trollope, you can read Cooper. His other work is far, far less readily available than this one novel, but I wouldn’t say no to reading him again.
This is the eleventh book I’ve read in 2023 for my American Classics reading project, and also the earliest-written! Check out my blog for more: Tag: American Classics reading project.I’ll be posting my final book in December, followed by a wrap-up post reflecting on the project.
adventurous
challenging
slow-paced
Still working my way through the classics. I enjoyed the book, but I couldn't help thinking that I am so glad that people do not talk like this in real life today. And if they did then, wow....
Rating this 2.5 stars because it was just okay, but there's too many complaints from me to justify giving it 3 stars.
You know how H.P. Lovecraft was SUPER racist even back in a time when being racist was the social norm? This felt like that for me. I felt like the author was trying way too hard to hit every single nasty stereotype he could think of and went out of his way to be exaggeratedly racist. You can write the book without all that.
He also babbled. Both with the descriptions and the dialogue. There was so much extra words being used it read like one of those essays in schools where you're just trying to hit a word count. Which also made it kind of boring. I ended up speeding this audiobook up to 2.5. I NEVER listen to audiobooks on 2.5 but there was so much extra wordage on the page, and the narrator talked so slow, that it was necessary.
I'm also going to complain about the way he wrote the women, despite it probably being the normal viewpoint of that time period, but they were just there to further the plot. They were constantly abducted and in danger and in the way. Their sole purpose was to be abducted and to get in the way it seemed. Characters in books that exist for no reason other than to be an unnecessary plot point irritate me. Why'd you do them like that?
And circling back to what I said about the babbling - every single time Hawk-eye spoke? We don't need to be reminded every other conversation that he's a white man. It was redundant and got annoying after the third time. And then it just kept going.
At least now I can say that I've read this, I guess. It was fine. Subpar, if you will.
You know how H.P. Lovecraft was SUPER racist even back in a time when being racist was the social norm? This felt like that for me. I felt like the author was trying way too hard to hit every single nasty stereotype he could think of and went out of his way to be exaggeratedly racist. You can write the book without all that.
He also babbled. Both with the descriptions and the dialogue. There was so much extra words being used it read like one of those essays in schools where you're just trying to hit a word count. Which also made it kind of boring. I ended up speeding this audiobook up to 2.5. I NEVER listen to audiobooks on 2.5 but there was so much extra wordage on the page, and the narrator talked so slow, that it was necessary.
I'm also going to complain about the way he wrote the women, despite it probably being the normal viewpoint of that time period, but they were just there to further the plot. They were constantly abducted and in danger and in the way. Their sole purpose was to be abducted and to get in the way it seemed. Characters in books that exist for no reason other than to be an unnecessary plot point irritate me. Why'd you do them like that?
And circling back to what I said about the babbling - every single time Hawk-eye spoke? We don't need to be reminded every other conversation that he's a white man. It was redundant and got annoying after the third time. And then it just kept going.
At least now I can say that I've read this, I guess. It was fine. Subpar, if you will.
adventurous
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
The writing in this book is generally not good — one of the only novels I’ve read where I have actively disliked the prose on a line by line level. Very uselessly wordy. Maybe that is just how people wrote in 1831, but I did not enjoy it in a modern reader. However, this book is significant from a historical point of view in terms of American attitudes toward natives and the development of American literature, so I appreciated reading it from those perspectives. My edition also had commentaries in the foreword and after the story that helped me contextualize the novel.
I'll just point you to this link to a Mark Twain essay titled Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences.
He states it much better than I ever could.
http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html
He states it much better than I ever could.
http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html
Mark Twain was right; this is unreadable. Watch the 1992 movie version instead (or even the 1936 film).
An exciting story but so ponderously told. And if he mentioned either of the Munro women's "weakness of their sex" one more time, I was going to scream. The antiquated language made this a difficult and not entirely enjoyable read.
Wow, I haven't been so glad to be done with a book for a long time. This was tedious and exhausting.