Savage and Scott-ish Masculinity inThe Last of the MohicansandThe Prairie: James Fenimore Cooper and the Diasporic Origins of American Identity

Savage and Scott-ish Masculinity in The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie : James FenimoreCooper and the Diasporic Origins of American IdentityAuthor(s): Juliet ShieldsSource: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 64, No. 2 (September 2009), pp. 137-162Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncl.2009.64.2.137 .

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137

Savage and Scott-ish Masculinity in The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie: James Fenimore Cooper and the Diasporic Origins of American IdentityJ U L I E T S H I E L D S

James Fenimore Cooper famously was first dubbed “the Scott of America” in an 1822 issue of the North American Review.1 Although Cooper resented this label, subsequent critical comparisons between the two authors, such as George Dekker’s 1967 study James Fenimore Cooper: The American Scott, suggest that it carries a certain accuracy: Cooper adapted and modified for an American context the conven-tions of the historical romance that Walter Scott had employed to perform the work of British nation-formation.2 Yet, as these comparisons have demonstrated, Cooper was no mere imitator

1 See [W. H. Gardiner], rev. of The Spy, a Tale of the Neutral Ground, by James Feni-more Cooper, North American Review, 15 (1822), 275.

2 See George Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper: The American Scott (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967).

Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 64, No. 2, pp. 137–162. ISSN: 0891–9356, online ISSN: 1067-8352. © 2009 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

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138 nineteenth-century literature

of Scott; instead, as Ian Dennis has claimed, he “engage[d] in a conscious, critical, even at times resentful dialogue with his great model and rival.”3 In this essay I reassess Cooper’s liter-ary relationship to Scott by examining the depiction of Scots in Cooper’s novels. While critics generally have overlooked the Scottish descent of the primary non-Indian characters in Coo-per’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826)—Colonel Munro; his two daughters, Alice and Cora; and Major Duncan Heyward—and often describe them as English, Anglo-American, or even Anglo- Saxon, I argue that their Scottishness is far from incidental in Cooper’s account of American nation formation.4

The Last of the Mohicans suggests that Scots’ historic experi-ences of imperial exile might have encouraged them to adopt the prudence and self-control that Cooper attributes to the Mohicans, and enabled them to supersede temporarily North America’s native populations as bearers of an American iden-tity characterized on one hand by chivalrous sentiment and on the other hand by self-command. The novel sets Cora and Al-ice Munro’s captivity under the French-allied Iroquois against the French victory over, and the Iroquois massacre of, Colonel Munro’s British troops at Fort William Henry in 1757. By emu-lating the prudence of the eponymous Mohican, Uncas, Dun-can Heyward succeeds in rescuing his betrothed, Alice, but only

3 See Dennis, “The Worthlessness of Duncan Heyward: A Waverley Hero in Amer-ica,” Studies in the Novel, 29 (1997), 1. For further comparisons of Scott’s and Cooper’s historical fiction, see Armin Paul Frank, “Writing Literary Independence: The Case of Cooper—the ‘American Scott’ and the un-Scottish American,” Comparative Literature Studies, 34 (1997), 41–70; Alide Cagidemetrio, “A Plea for Fictional Histories and Old-Time ‘Jewesses,’” in The Invention of Ethnicity, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 14–43; Donald Davie, The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), pp. 101–16; and Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 3d ed. (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), pp. 162–82.

4 Nina Baym refers to Munro, Heyward, and Alice as English (see Baym, Feminism and American Literary History: Essays [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1992], p. 28). Forrest G. Robinson even more problematically describes “the marriage of Alice and Duncan as a union of racially pure Anglo-Saxons” even though Scots’ racial origins were extensively debated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (see Robinson, “Uncertain Borders: Race, Sex, and Civilization in The Last of the Mohicans,” Arizona Quarterly, 47 [1991], 16). While Lowland Scots claimed Anglo-Saxon descent, and Highlanders claimed Celtic origins, it is far from clear that either Duncan or Alice is from the Lowlands; indeed, their families’ Jacobitism suggests otherwise.

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the last of the mohicans and the prairie 139

at the expense of Uncas’s and Cora’s lives. The sequel to The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie (1827), rewrites its predecessor’s captivity-narrative to represent the subsequent supersession of Scots by a deracinated class of frontiersmen and women whose strivings for independence draw on Scots’ exilic adaptability while rejecting their feudal sensibilities. The Prairie describes the efforts of Heyward’s grandson Duncan Uncas Middleton to rescue Inez de Certavallos first from the migratory Bush family, which has kidnapped her for ransom, and then from the preda-tory Sioux Indians. It also recounts the bee-hunter Paul Hover’s parallel pursuit of Ishmael Bush’s niece and dependent, Ellen Wade. The Prairie depicts the diminishing utility of the chivalric sentiments of Scots to the United States’ westward expansion; yet it also suggests that the new class of frontiersmen to which Paul and Ellen belong have appropriated the diasporic sensi-bilities of Scots, particularly their ability to adapt to new and often threatening environments by adopting the traits and re-sources of other cultural groups. Although Paul and Ellen reject Middleton’s residual Scottish feudalism, they retain the exilic adaptability and colonial striving that Cooper accords to Scots. Read together as companion works, The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie trace the development of American identity formed through cultural appropriation rather than racial mixing.

Scots did in fact play a disproportionately large role in peopling British settlements in North America, and a striking number of mediators between Native Americans and the British and American governments were of mixed Scottish and Indian descent, including John Norton, Alexander McGillivray, and John Ross.5 Yet The Last of the Mohicans ignores the cultural and racial mixing that occurred historically among Scots and various Indian tribes. It also eschews the literary hybridization described

5 On Norton’s Scottish and Cherokee family, see Carl F. Klinck, “Biographical In-troduction,” in The Journal of Major John Norton, 1816, ed. Carl F. Klinck and James J. Talman (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1970), pp. xiii-xcvii. On Alexander McGil-livray’s integration with the Creeks of Alabama, see Michael D. Green, “Alexander McGillivray,” in American Indian Leaders: Studies in Diversity, ed. R. David Edmunds (Lin-coln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1980), pp. 41–63. On John Ross’s leadership of the Cherokees, see Gary E. Moulton, “John Ross,” in American Indian Leaders: Studies in Diversity, pp. 88–106.

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by Tim Fulford, through which “ancient Celts and contemporary Native Americans were imaged in terms of each other over and over again” in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Brit-ish and American works.6 Although Cooper’s Mohicans may at some level derive from Scott’s Highlanders, which in turn may be drawn from accounts like James Adair’s History of the American Indians (1775), The Last of the Mohicans assigns Indians and Scots to contiguous rather than identical stages on the developmental path from savagery to civilization. Cooper accords Scots a feu-dal chivalry that is an improvement over the tribal savagery of Indians, but that is nonetheless inadequate to the task of extend-ing civilized values and republican government westward across America. The Last of the Mohicans situates its male characters along a gendered continuum of national identities that runs from brut-ish masculinity to overcivilized effeminacy. Cooper contrasts the savage violence of the Iroquois with the sophisticated hypocrisy of the French to imagine an American masculinity whose pri-mary representatives in the novel are the Mohican Uncas and Duncan Heyward, a southerner who is “half a Scotsman.”7 As Uncas, the most civilized of the novel’s savages, teaches the re-fined and romantic Heyward the fortitude and prudence neces-sary to survive in the wilderness, Heyward progresses toward, but fails to realize fully, Paul Hover’s embodiment of a deracinated American identity that unites aspects of chivalry and savagery to confront successfully the challenges of westward expansion. The cultural appropriation through which Heyward and Hover become American offers a model for the literary relationship between Cooper’s and Scott’s historical romances. The Leath-erstocking Tales borrow selectively from the Waverley Novels, rejecting their valorization of feudal chivalry while incorporating their representation—itself drawn from Enlightenment histori-ography—of cultural appropriation as a mechanism of teleologi-cal social development.

6 Tim Fulford, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756–1830 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), p. 196.

7 James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans; A Narrative of 1757, ed. James A. Sappenfield and E. N. Feltskog (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1983,) p. 151. Subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text.

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By incorporating characters of Scottish ancestry into The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie, Cooper not only traces the formation of an American identity marked by sentiment and self-command but also explores the transformation of Britain’s North American colonies into the United States, a nation with its own colonial projects. Eighteenth-century Scotland, which in 1707 united with England to form Great Britain, arguably shared the colonies’ political and economic dependence on England. Yet Cooper’s comparisons of Scottish Americans and Native Americans reveal the limitations of recent characteriza-tions by historians and literary critics of Scots as colonial sub-jects.8 While both Scots and Native Americans in The Last of the Mohicans are exiled or alienated from their respective home-lands, only Scots have the opportunity to assimilate into a for-mative European-American society. Moreover, the imperial mi-grations of Scots, according to Cooper, are a direct cause of the exile and eradication of Native Americans. In a nascent Ameri-can nation, Scots themselves become colonizers. In contrast to The Last of the Mohicans, which is set prior to American indepen-dence during the Seven Years or French and Indian War, The Prairie, set following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, foregrounds the new political autonomy and westward expansion of the United States. While The Last of the Mohicans describes the Mo hicans’ supersession by Scottish immigrants in the Ameri-can colonies, The Prairie in turn describes the obsolescence of Scots in the newly formed United States. Together, The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie trace the connections between Scottish and Native American diasporas in order to depict the syncretic formation of an American masculinity that is neither savage nor overcivilized, and that comprises chivalric sentiment and savage self-control.

Before examining this American masculinity in greater detail, however, I first want to discuss the historical conditions of the Scottish diaspora that Cooper depicts in The Last of the

8 See, for example, Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 2d ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1999), pp. 7–39; and Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 19–34.

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Mohicans. Eric Richards and Christopher Harvie have desig-nated the 1707 Anglo-Scottish Union of Parliaments as the source of a distinctive eighteenth-century Scottish “emigra-tion ideology” comprising “values and techniques appropri-ate to overseas settlement, and a lessened attachment to the native soil.”9 The Union incorporated Scotland’s parliament into England’s, leaving Scots few opportunities to participate in the government of an Anglo-centric Great Britain. The Union also opened England’s colonies to Scots, however, offering them the prospect of prosperity and advancement abroad in exchange for the loss of Scotland’s political autonomy at home. Munro’s and Heyward’s military employment is characteristic of even well-born and relatively prosperous Scottish emigrants, many of whom left Scotland to defend Britain’s imperial pos-sessions. These two characters are further representative of an eighteenth-century Scottish diaspora in that their migrations seem to have been dictated to some extent by the Jacobite re-bellions of 1715 and 1745, which Scott explores respectively in Rob Roy (1817) and Waverley; or ’tis Sixty Years Since (1814). Scott suggests that the Jacobites’ attempts to reinstate the Scot-tish Stuart monarchy on the British throne were motivated by a desire to recover Scotland’s pre-Union independence and to preserve the values and institutions of feudal society. The anti-Scottish prejudices exacerbated by the unsuccessful 1715 and 1745 Jacobite rebellions further limited the already restricted participation of Scots in a nominally British government and perhaps motivated their “muscular seizure of opportunities . . . throughout the Atlantic world” (Richards, “Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic Empire,” p. 87).

Scots represent for Cooper a strange blend of exilic adapt-ability and Old World feudalism. The scant but pertinent details that Cooper provides about Duncan Heyward’s family history suggest that he is descended from some of the two thousand

9 Eric Richards, “Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic Empire,” in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 77. See also Christo-pher Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics, 1707 to the Present, 3d ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 95–96.

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Scots transported to the American colonies following the 1715 Jacobite rebellion. Like most of these exiles, Heyward’s fam-ily was from the landed classes, formerly “an ornament to the nobles of Scotland” (Last of the Mohicans, p. 157). Further like these Jacobites, who tended to settle south of the Chesapeake Bay, Heyward’s family has established prosperous plantations in the American South.10 Munro, in contrast, represents those “ancient and honourable” Scottish families that were not trans-ported, but that were left impoverished by the Jacobite rebel-lions and so forced to rebuild their fortunes in the colonies (Last of the Mohicans, p. 159). As a young man, Munro left Scot-land “in the service of [his] king” and eventually settled in the West Indies because he was too poor to marry his beloved Alice Graham, the daughter of “a neighbouring laird of some estate” (p. 159). Munro explains: “it was my lot to form a connexion with one who in time became my wife, and the mother of Cora. She was the daughter of a gentleman of those isles, by a lady, whose misfortune it was . . . to be descended, remotely, from that unfortunate class, who are so basely enslaved to adminis-ter to the wants of a luxurious people” (p. 159). After his first wife’s death, Munro returned to Scotland with Cora, where the wealth he had accrued on his West Indian plantation allowed him to marry his still unwed childhood love, who died giving birth to his second, purely Scottish daughter, Alice.

Munro’s history illustrates the ambivalent relationship of Scots to metropolitan England and its colonies; while Munro is disempowered by England itself, he profits from its colonies. His passive phrasing in speaking of his first wife—“it was my lot”—allows him to disclaim responsibility for forming a “connexion” with a mulatto. Instead, he attributes his interracial union to Scotland’s prior “unnatural union with a foreign and trading people,” or to the Anglo-Scottish union that gave Scots access to England’s colonies (Last of the Mohicans, p. 159). Again refusing

10 See David Dobson, Scottish Emigration to Colonial America, 1607–1785 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994). On Scottish emigration patterns, see also Richards, “Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic Empire,” pp. 67–114; and David Hackett Fis-cher, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 605–15.

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personal culpability, Munro describes slavery as “a curse en-tailed on Scotland” by England, implying that Scots participate in the oppressive institution of plantation slavery only because they themselves have been oppressed by the English. As Munro discovers in the West Indies, and as Heyward’s family’s South-ern plantation further illustrates, empire offered Scots material prosperity at a moral cost. The history of the political and eco-nomic disempowerment of Scots within Britain perhaps makes Munro and Heyward each more keenly aware that his colonial affluence depends upon the even greater disempowerment of non-European peoples. Yet this recognition does not prevent ei-ther Munro’s embarrassment at admitting his “connexion” with a woman of African descent, however remote, or Heyward’s revulsion at the thought of marrying the racially mixed Cora. Similarly, although Munro and Heyward are exiles of sorts, they show little concern about the displacement of Native Americans from their lands. In fact, The Last of the Mohicans situates the imperial migrations of Scots as a cause of Native Americans’ unfortunate but, for Cooper, seemingly inevitable eradication, as Heyward’s appropriation of Uncas’s prudence and fortitude renders Uncas extraneous to a formative American nation.

The Last of the Mohicans defines American identity in opposition to a savage, brutish masculinity, on one hand, and an overcivilized effeminacy, on the other hand. The novel’s primary representative of unrefined savagery is Magua, one of the Iroquois or Hurons whom Leatherstocking describes as “a thievish race” of “skulks” and “vagabonds” (Last of the Mo-hicans, p. 37). In contrast to Magua’s “knavish look” (p. 39), the Mohican Uncas resembles a finely chiseled Grecian statue “of the noblest proportions” (p. 53). Cooper invites readers to attribute Magua’s moral degeneracy to his “mongrel” or mixed blood (p. 39), while Uncas’s moral nobility and unmixed lin-eage are delineated in his “high, haughty features, pure in their native red” (p. 53). Magua and Uncas respectively embody the stereotypes of the ignoble and noble savage that, according to Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., have “persist[ed] from the era of

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Columbus” onward.11 Cooper gave these stereotypes new life by drawing on early-nineteenth-century theories of race that posited possibly immutable and inherent connections between physical appearance, moral attributes, and purity of blood.

Magua and Uncas differ from each other most markedly in their capacity for sympathy and, as a result, in their treatment of women. Enlightenment historians including Adam Smith, David Hume, William Robertson, and John Millar argued that a people’s capacity for sympathy indicated its progress from bar-baric tribal origins toward the historical telos of commercial civ-ilization. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), for instance, Smith claims that “the savages in North America” regard “the weakness of love, which is so much indulged in ages of human-ity and politeness, . . . as the most unpardonable effeminacy.”12 While these savages possess a “heroic and unconquerable firm-ness,” a “humane and polished people . . . have more sensibility to the passions of others” (Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 207). Smith theorizes that savage peoples must cultivate courage, fortitude, and self-command in order to endure the hardships of their daily existence. Civilized peoples enjoy the prosperity, security, and leisure necessary to cultivate more refined virtues, including sympathy. Smith’s student John Millar developed this argument in his Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771) by suggesting that a people’s civility could be gauged by their valu-ation of refined, “feminine” virtues like sympathy and, accord-ingly, by their treatment of women. Millar concurs with Smith

11 Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), p. 71. On early-nineteenth-century racial theory and Indian removal, see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 189–207.

12 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 205. Enlightenment historians posited that all societies passed through predictable and relatively discrete stages as they progressed from their primitive origins toward enlightened modernity. They also assumed a fun-damental uniformity of human nature in temporally and spatially disparate societies, which meant that all primitive peoples should share similar traits, as should all civilized peoples. For an introduction to Enlightenment historiography, see Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976); on its in-fluence on early-nineteenth-century historical fiction, see George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 73–78.

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that when men must exert “their utmost efforts to procure the bare necessaries of life,” they are incapable “of feeling the deli-cate distresses and enjoyments of love, accompanied with all those elegant sentiments, which, in a civilized and enlightened age, are naturally derived from that passion.”13 Millar proceeds to complicate Smith’s scheme by differentiating the forms that heterosexual passion—a particular type of sympathy—takes in feudal and commercial societies. As a people progresses from tribal savagery to feudalism, continual warfare for property and power creates “the high notions of military honour, and the romantic love and gallantry, by which the modern nations of Europe have been so much distinguished” (Origin of the Distinc-tion of Ranks, p. 87). Feudal society, in which men and women occupy very different spheres, is “naturally productive of the utmost purity of manners, and of great respect and veneration for the female sex” (p. 96). Eventually, the development of commerce and “the cultivation of the arts of peace” (p. 107) bring men and women into convivial conversation. Men learn to overlook women’s physical weakness and to “set a value upon those female accomplishments and virtues which have so much influence upon every species of improvement” (p. 108). Women are no longer “objects of those romantic and extrava-gant passions” proper to chivalry but instead are regarded as “friends and companions” (pp. 108–9). Smith’s and Millar’s accounts of the distinctions between savagery and civilization reveal the extent to which Cooper’s constructions of masculin-ity not only draw upon Enlightenment history but also depend upon women. Female characters in both The Last of the Mohi-cans and The Prairie are touchstones by which the civility—and Americanness—of male characters can be measured.

Magua regards both Mohicans and Europeans as effemi-nate precisely because of their chivalric respect for women. He declares that “the pale faces make themselves dogs to their women” and that the Mohicans, who have adopted European ways, “are content to be called women” (Last of the Mohicans, pp. 42, 50). Magua, by contrast, regards Alice and Cora as a

13 John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 3d ed. (London: J. Murray, 1779), p. 55.

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means through which he can revenge himself against their father, Munro, who once had whipped Magua “like a dog” for his drunkenness (p. 103). Magua’s canine imagery distinguishes his own emasculation from the voluntary subservience of Euro-pean men. Magua hopes to reassert his masculine prerogative by keeping Cora as his captive and wife, so that “when the blows scorched the back of the Huron, he would know where to find a woman to feel the smart. The daughter of Munro would draw his water, hoe his corn, and cook his venison” (p. 105). Al-though Cora acknowledges her father’s “imprudent severity” in beating Magua, she is horrified to discover that her captor might “revenge the injury inflicted by Munro, on his help-less daughters” (pp. 103, 104). Magua’s desire for vengeance not only emphasizes his arguably justifiable lack of sympathy for Munro, but it also illustrates his lack of chivalry. Gary Dyer has argued that Cooper challenges Walter Scott’s valorization of chivalry by showing that chivalry rests on “an economy gov-erned by desire.”14 Because Magua feels no sexual desire for Cora and Alice, he feels no impetus to protect them. Cooper, however, does not, as Dyer implies, represent all Indians as uni-formly impervious to either sexual desire or chivalric ideals.

While Magua remains resistant to the civilizing influence of feminine virtues, Uncas is evidently so deeply impressed by Cora’s charms that his haste to rescue her renders his efforts, in Leatherstocking’s words, “more like that of a curious woman, than of a warrior on his scent” (Last of the Mohicans, p. 120). Cooper invites readers to attribute the Mohicans’ relative po-liteness and sophistication in comparison to the Iroquois to their earlier contact with Europeans. They have had more time to acquire the relatively refined morals and manners of the settlers. Uncas’s comparative civility is evident in his silent joy when he and Heyward succeed in tearing Cora and Alice from Magua’s clutches:

The manhood of Heyward felt no shame, in dropping tears over this spectacle of affectionate rapture; and Uncas stood, fresh and

14 Dyer, “Irresolute Ravishers and the Sexual Economy of Chivalry in the Romantic Novel,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 55 (2000), 350.

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blood-stained from the combat, a calm, and, apparently, an un-moved looker-on, it is true, but with eyes that had already lost their fierceness, and were beaming with a sympathy, that elevated him far above the intelligence, and advanced him probably cen-turies before the practices of his nation. (p. 115)

Although Uncas does not weep unabashedly, as does Hey-ward, neither does he remain “a stranger to any sympathy” (p. 112), as does the temporarily defeated Magua. Even as Un-cas’s “blood-stained” appearance relegates him to the realm of savagery, his furtive appreciation of Alice and Cora’s joy and relief reveals his civility. Cooper makes it clear that Uncas’s union of refined sympathy with stoic courage is unusual; his “beaming” eyes represent “centuries” of progress from savagery toward civilization. Yet Cooper does not go so far as to sug-gest that Uncas’s “instinctive delicacy” is unnatural (p. 115). Although sympathy is contrary to his “habits,” it is compatible with his “nature” (p. 114).

In contrast to both Magua’s indifference to suffering and Uncas’s stoic sensibility, the French general, Montcalm, reveals his overcivilized effeminacy in displays of false feeling and af-fected sympathy. He embodies the xenophobic stereotypes of French sophistication that were common in mid-eighteenth-century British and early-nineteenth-century American litera-ture. Montcalm’s “insinuating polish” and great attention to “the forms of courtesy” persuade Munro that “if the truth was known, the fellow’s grandfather taught the noble science of dancing” (Last of the Mohicans, pp. 162, 153, 151). Munro dis-putes not just the sincerity of Montcalm’s martial valor but also the courage of the French more generally when he declares: “The beauty and manliness of warfare has been much de-formed . . . by the arts of your Monsieur Vauban” (p. 161). Like Vauban, a military architect whose fortifications Munro deems a form of “scientific cowardice” (p. 161), Montcalm conquers through strategy rather than strength. Thus Montcalm ulti-mately extorts surrender from the “commanding and manly” Scotsman (p. 162) not by defeating the British troops in battle, but instead by intercepting a letter from Munro’s superior, Gen-eral Webb. Munro bitterly contrasts Montcalm’s cunning to the

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true “dignity” that he associates with the Scottish Order of the Thistle, “the veritable ‘nemo me impune lacessit’ of chivalry” to which Heyward’s ancestors belonged (p. 157). Much as Munro regards Montcalm’s affectations as representative of all French military officers, he is highly conscious that his own actions reflect on Scotland’s virtues as well as on his personal honor. He regards his decision to surrender as an act of humanity in-tended to save the lives of his troops, declaring that “it would but ill comport with the honour of Scotland, to let it be said, one of her gentlemen was outdone in civility, by a native of any other country on earth!” (p. 152). During their meeting, Mont-calm exposes his own lack of civility when he claims to need a translator to negotiate with Munro and subsequently reveals that he has understood perfectly Heyward’s and Munro’s con-versation in English. More crucially, Montcalm demonstrates the emptiness of his reputation “for courage and enterprise” in his refusal, or inability, to prevent the Iroquois’ massacre of British soldiers, women, and children following Munro’s sur-render (p. 94). Although Montcalm maintains that courage “as strongly characterizes the hero” as humanity (p. 153), his own cowardice renders Munro’s humanity toward his troops worth-less. Montcalm’s lack of integrity compels the narrator to point out “how easy it is for generous sentiments, high courtesy, and chivalrous courage, to lose their influence beneath the chilling blight of selfishness, and to exhibit to the world a man who was great in all the minor attributes of character, but who was found wanting, when it became necessary to prove how much principle is superior to policy” (p. 180).

Whereas Magua embodies savage masculinity and Mont-calm represents overcivilized effeminacy, Heyward and Uncas, as characters that unite prudence and compassion, fall some-where between these two extremes, with Heyward somewhat closer to Montcalm’s refinement, and Uncas closer to Magua’s savagery. Magua and Uncas, the ignoble and noble savages, obviously are foils; yet Uncas and Duncan, as their names sug-gest, are also doubles, and they share a sympathetic bond that transcends their cultural differences. This bond is formed dur-ing a skirmish with Magua’s band of Iroquois, when Heyward’s “slight sword was snapped” and Uncas intervenes to save his

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life (Last of the Mohicans, p. 71). After the encounter, “the two young men exchanged looks of intelligence, which caused Duncan to forget the character and condition of his wild as-sociate” and to vow that he “never will require to be reminded of the debt he owes” to Uncas (p. 73). It is significant that Un-cas saves Heyward’s life not through “bodily strength,” of which Heyward possesses a good deal, but rather “in the coolest and readiest manner” through the careful judgment that Heyward markedly lacks (pp. 71, 73). Indeed, as Forrest G. Robinson and Ian Dennis have noted, Heyward’s imprudence makes him a less than competent hero despite his chivalric ideals. During the first half of the novel, Heyward falls asleep when he is meant to be keeping watch, attracts the Iroquois’ notice by firing his gun at importune moments, and rushes into battles from which others must extricate him. When Alice playfully greets him as a “recreant knight! he who abandons his damsels in the very lists!” she elicits Heyward’s “chagrin” because her mockery is perhaps a little too close to the truth (p. 149). But if Heyward is, as Robinson has described him, “a little ‘thick,’” or some-what lacking in the reasoned judgment and self-command that we might expect of a hero, he is hardly, as Dennis would have him, a “criminally inept” parody of one of the passive protago-nists in Scott’s Waverley novels.15

Unlike the eponymous hero of Scott’s Waverley (an Eng-lishman initially enthralled by the primitive customs of Scot-tish Highlanders), Heyward does not encounter savage society only to retreat thankfully to the safety of civilization. Instead, he recognizes the usefulness of Uncas’s cautious self-control in frontier warfare and begins to emulate it. His prudence is put to the test when he determines to infiltrate an Iroquois camp in which Alice is imprisoned. As Heyward prepares for his mission, Leatherstocking warns him: “You will have occasion for your best manhood, and for a sharper wit than what is to be gathered

15 See Robinson, “Uncertain Borders,” p. 16; and Dennis, “Worthlessness of Dun-can Heyward,” p. 2. The classic account of Scott’s protagonists’ passivity is Alexander Welsh’s The Hero of the Waverley Novels (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963). Ian Duncan makes an argument similar to Welsh’s (see Duncan, Modern Romance and Transforma-tions of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992], pp. 53–59).

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in books, afore you outdo the cunning, or get the better of the courage of a Mingo! . . . remember, that to outwit the knaves it is lawful to practise things, that may not be naturally the gift of a white skin” (Last of the Mohicans, p. 229). Chivalrous courtesy will get Heyward nowhere with the Iroquois, so he must fight fire with fire (as Leatherstocking does literally when Sioux Indi-ans set fire to the land around him in The Prairie), by employing sharp wit, prudence, and “presence of mind” to find and free Alice (Last of the Mohicans, p. 233). While Heyward, disguised as a traveling conjuror, is seeking clues to Alice’s whereabouts, Uncas is chased into the camp by Iroquois warriors. Rather than jumping impulsively into the fray to save his friend, as he might have done previously, Heyward saves Uncas from a “fatal blow” by subtly sticking out his foot to trip up the most menacing of the Mohican’s pursuers, thereby “precipitat[ing] the eager sav-age, headlong, many feet in advance of his intended victim” (p. 238). In saving Uncas’s life, Heyward does not simply re-pay his debt and prove his friendship; he also demonstrates his newfound ability to think on, and with, his feet.

Even as Heyward saves his life, then, Uncas becomes, in the novel’s logic, an expendable character. Of course to many of Cooper’s readers, Uncas’s race automatically would have ren-dered him a disposable character, even though the novel’s title suggests that he is also its most important character. But while Uncas’s function in The Last of the Mohicans thus far has been to protect Heyward and the Munro sisters from the Iroquois’s cunning attacks, Heyward becomes increasingly, although not entirely, capable of undertaking this task himself. Heyward has acquired his double’s judgment and self-command, and in do-ing so he has checked his own tendencies toward overcivilized effeminacy. His union of feudal Scottish chivalry with savage Indian prudence and self-control signals the evolution of an American identity that will reach its telos in The Prairie. Despite Uncas’s growing capacity for compassion, his death at the end of the novel prevents him from cultivating this American mas-culinity, which consequently is identified exclusively with white settlers. Whereas Heyward demonstrates the ability of Scots to adapt to the hardships of frontier warfare while maintaining civi-lized values, the Mohicans’ progressive refinement ends not in

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civilization, but in eradication. Significantly, it is Magua who deals Uncas’s death blow. Scottish appropriation of the noble savage’s skills renders the Mohicans superfluous, while the ignoble sav-age’s violence ideologically justifies for Cooper the westward re-moval of Native American tribes that was occurring as he wrote.

While literary critics generally have agreed upon the centrality of masculinity to the construction of “national and diasporic identities” in early-nineteenth-century America, the character they most often identify as Cooper’s model of a dis-tinctively American masculinity is not Heyward but Leather-stocking, also known variously as Hawkeye and Natty Bumpo.16 As a frontiersman, Leatherstocking has mastered the selective appropriation of Native American traits that Dana D. Nelson terms “playing Indian.”17 Leatherstocking not only speaks to the Mohicans in their own language, but he also shoots as sharply, listens as acutely, and endures suffering as patiently as do Uncas and his father, Chingachgook. At the same time, he displays “through the mask of his rude and nearly savage equipments, the brighter, though sunburnt and long-faded complexion of one who might claim descent from a European parentage” (Last of the Mohicans, p. 28). Leatherstocking’s identification with Mohican customs prevents him from reas-similating into the European settlements, but his aversion to racial mixture prevents him from integrating through marriage into a disappearing Mohican society. Leatherstocking’s solitary self-sufficiency illustrates Nelson’s claim that “playing Indian is often associated with claiming a notably isolated manly in-dependence” (“Cooper’s Leatherstocking Conversations,” p. 141); yet this is not the manliness that Cooper associates with an American identity defined by chivalric sentiment and savage

16 See Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 8. On masculinity and American identity, see Caleb Crain, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (New Ha-ven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001); and Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2001). On Leatherstocking’s status as an American hero, see Robinson, “Uncertain Borders,” p. 8; and Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper: The American Scott, pp. 82–97.

17 Nelson, “Cooper’s Leatherstocking Conversations: Identity, Friendship, and De-mocracy in the New Nation,” in A Historical Guide to James Fenimore Cooper, ed. Leland S. Person (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), p. 141.

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fortitude. Although Leatherstocking possesses the self-control and presence of mind that Heyward must cultivate, he evidently cannot develop the heterosexual sensibility—or the reverence for women and feminine virtues—essential to chivalry. This in-difference to female charms suits Leatherstocking for the hard-ships of frontier life so antithetical to domestic comforts, but it also unfits him for participating in the population and civiliza-tion of the American wilderness.

Leatherstocking’s apparent incapacity for romantic love or heterosexual desire highlights women’s reproductive im-portance to American nation-formation while also revealing the “murkiest most unsavoury element” in The Last of the Mohi-cans (Davie, Heyday of Sir Walter Scott, p. 109), Cooper’s much-remarked-upon antipathy to miscegenation.18 Leatherstocking, who proudly describes himself as a “man without a cross,” or without the racial admixture that taints Cora, says skeptically: “I have heard that there is a feeling in youth, which binds man to woman, closer than the father is tied to the son. It may be so. I have seldom been where women of my colour dwell” (Last of the Mohicans, p. 265). The Last of the Mohicans suggests that heterosexual desire cannot, or at least should not, cross racial boundaries, conceived of broadly in terms of light and dark, European and non-European, blood. Thus Cooper invites us to attribute Uncas’s and Cora’s mutual attraction to their dark blood, and Duncan’s preference for Alice over Cora to Alice’s pure Scottish parentage. If, for Cooper, like must attract like, then European men cannot acquire the Native American traits necessary to successful settlement through interracial marriage. They can, however, acquire these traits through homosocial bonds like the friendships between Uncas and Duncan, and between Chingachook and Leatherstocking; or through the pa-ternal and filial love uniting Leatherstocking and Uncas, and, in The Prairie, Leatherstocking and Hard-Heart. These bonds join like with like in gendered rather than racial terms and en-able the transmission of traits through cultural appropriation

18 See Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, pp. 205–9; and Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 94–121.

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rather than racial mixing. While Leatherstocking professes a complete incomprehension of heterosexual desire, he under-stands the tie between father and son, and cannot conceive of a stronger feeling than his paternal love for Uncas. When Ma-gua kills Uncas, Leatherstocking and Chingachgook’s friend-ship grows stronger through their shared grief: “Chingachgook grasped the hand that, in the warmth of feeling, the scout had stretched across the fresh earth, and in that attitude of friend-ship, these two sturdy and intrepid woodsmen bowed their heads together, while scalding tears fell to their feet, watering the grave of Uncas” (Last of the Mohicans, p. 349).

Uncas’s death reminds us that although friendships be-tween men in The Last of the Mohicans certainly are not “entirely without social significance,” as Nina Baym has claimed (Femi-nism and American Literary History, p. 19), they can produce no offspring. While the process of cultural appropriation through which Leatherstocking and Heyward learn to play Indian is cru-cial to the formation of an American identity combining pru-dence and sympathy, it is not in itself sufficient to create an American people. Heyward demonstrates, however, that homo-social and heterosexual bonds are not mutually exclusive. Dur-ing his stint in the Iroquois camp, Heyward finds that, “in addi-tion to the never-ceasing anxiety on account of Alice, a fresher, though feebler, interest in the fate of Uncas, assisted to chain him to the spot” (Last of the Mohicans, p. 244). Heyward proves his newfound strength of mind in an attempt first and foremost to rescue Alice, but secondarily to help Uncas, the friend from whom he has learned caution and self-command. When Hey-ward plays Indian, he goes all out; but unlike Leatherstocking, who regularly wears his “mask of his rude and nearly savage equipments,” Heyward performs his part only for a short time and for the explicit purpose of rescuing a woman. Heyward’s union of chivalrous sentiment and savage fortitude may be as short-lived and incomplete as his performance in the Iroquois camp, yet it is Heyward, rather than Leatherstocking, who ad-vances America toward Cooper’s masculine ideal, quite simply because the heterosexual desire informing the codes of chiv-alry means that Heyward will marry and reproduce, thereby as-sisting in the peopling of a new nation.

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The Last of the Mohicans represents the work of American nation-formation in gendered terms, assigning to men the task of cultural appropriation and to women that of racial repro-duction. Similar to that in Scott’s Waverley, the romance plot in The Last of the Mohicans compares the desirability of fair and dark heroines, with fair heroines representing passivity and do-mesticity, and dark ones representing an adventurousness that “chafe[s] against the bonds of decorum” (Welsh, Hero of the Wa-verley Novels, p. 71). The dark heroines in both Waverley and The Last of the Mohicans are stronger and seemingly more capable of enduring adversity than their fair counterparts. Although in both cases the dark woman’s self-sufficiency evokes the hero’s ardent admiration, it fails to elicit the stirrings of a chivalrous desire to protect and cherish her. Such women arguably are too “savage”—too robust and resilient—to function as the heroines of chivalric romance. Thus Cora, with her Creole ancestry, is much better suited to surviving the trials of life in the Ameri-can wilderness than her faint-hearted Scottish sister, Alice, whose limbs are more or less useless when it comes to holding her upright. For instance, when Cora and Alice are captured by Magua, Cora demonstrates the “fortitude and undisturbed reason” that Heyward often lacks (Last of the Mohicans, p. 82), while Alice turns to Cora “with infantile dependency” (p. 108). Cora is a substitute protector whose native endurance enables her to support Alice throughout their travails in the wilderness, until Heyward is prepared to assume this task.

Cora’s heroism wins the admiration of Magua, Uncas, and Heyward, yet insofar as Cooper invites us to trace her fortitude to her dark blood and its traces of savagery, Cora is not ac-countable for her virtues, which figure as a kind of perversion of normative gender identities. Alice, by comparison, has no distinguishing qualities other than her Scottish fairness, her ap-propriately womanly weakness, and her adoration of Heyward. She functions to evoke chivalric sentiment from Heyward and to provide him with occasions to test his judgment. Cooper acknowledges the possibility of marriage between Cora and Heyward only to reject it firmly as, if not entirely repugnant, then undesirable and unnecessary to the process of American

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nation- formation. When Munro accuses Heyward of “scorn[ing] to mingle the blood of the Heywards, with one so degraded” as Cora, Heyward claims moral superiority to “a prejudice so un-worthy of [his] reason,” instead pleading Alice’s sweetness and beauty as the cause of his lack of interest in her sister (Last of the Mohicans, p. 159). Yet it is Cora’s “degraded” blood that ren-ders her too self-sufficient and even too masculine to be an ob-ject of Heyward’s chivalric passion. Although marriage between Heyward and Cora might have symbolically effected the union of prudence and chivalry that Cooper valorizes, the marriage also would have tainted the racial purity of a formative Ameri-can identity. Heyward’s emulation of Uncas’s virtues achieves the same purpose while avoiding racial admixture.

Although Heyward and Alice’s marriage preserves the racial purity of a formative American people, it also perpetuates feudal values and institutions that, Cooper sug-gests, have outlasted their utility in the United States. As sequel to The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie reveals the partiality or in-completeness of Heyward’s progress toward an ideal American masculinity by contrasting Heyward and Alice’s grandson, Dun-can Uncas Middleton, with the frontiersman Paul Hover. As his first and middle names suggest, Middleton unites Heyward’s chivalry with Uncas’s fortitude. Leatherstocking describes Mid-dleton as “Uncas, in name and spirit.”19 Yet Heyward’s incor-poration of Uncas’s name into his family lineage ironically em-phasizes Heyward’s chivalrous generosity at least as much as the heroism of “the poor, naked, painted warrior,” Uncas (The Prai-rie, p. 113). Leatherstocking is delighted to learn that Heyward did not merely describe Uncas as his friend, but “even boasted of the connexion” and immortalized it by “bestow[ing] a name on his first-born, which is likely to be handed down, as an heir loom among the rest of his descendants” (p. 113). Although

19 James Fenimore Cooper, The Prairie: A Tale, ed. James P. Elliott (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1985), p. 154. Subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text.

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Middleton’s naming is a condescending and rather empty ges-ture of remembrance on Heyward’s part, it nonetheless reflects the continued importance of Uncas’s virtues, if not of his person and his race, to a formative American identity. Middleton reveals that following the events recounted in The Last of the Mohicans, Heyward increasingly identified America as his home. While Heyward fought for the British in 1757, he sided with the Amer-ican revolutionaries in 1776: “my grandfather did not forget his birth-place, but threw off the empty allegiance of names, and was true to his proper country; he fought on the side of Liberty” (The Prairie, p. 112). We are invited to imagine that Heyward’s adventures in The Last of the Mohicans fostered his appreciation for American liberty, and that the skills he acquired from Un-cas may have played a role in securing the United States’ inde-pendence from Britain. But although Heyward recognizes the United States as his “proper country,” Middleton, two genera-tions later, remains allied to European feudalism.

Middleton’s auspicious name might seem to mark him as the epitome of American manhood, representing his union of chivalrous sympathy and stoic self-command. Yet much as Un-cas is superseded by Heyward in The Last of the Mohicans, Mid-dleton is superseded by Hover in The Prairie, because he contin-ues to cling to feudal traditions that have limited usefulness on the American frontier. Middleton’s name thus also signifies his position midway between the feudal chivalry associated with his Scottish forbearers and the modern republicanism underpin-ning America’s westward expansion. Middleton’s belatedness is most clearly illustrated in his marriage to Inez de Certaval-los, which occurs before Inez is abducted by Ishmael Bush and before the novel’s action begins. Their marriage follows the United States’ acquisition of the formerly Spanish territory of Louisiana and is one of the “family unions” that “began to ce-ment the political tie which had made a forced conjunction, between people so opposite in their habits, their educations, and their opinions” (The Prairie, p. 156). Although Middleton’s marriage to Inez brings together Catholic and Protestant, old world and new, it also affirms the feudal institutions of which Inez’s father is a living relic. Don Augustin de Certavallos is “the chief of one of those ancient colonial families, which had

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been content to slumber for ages amid the ease, indolence, and wealth of the spanish [sic] provinces” (p. 156). At the end of the novel, after rescuing Inez first from Ishmael Bush and subsequently from the Sioux Indians, Middleton exchanges military service for the role of feudal patriarch, albeit an active rather than an indolent one. He assumes “various situations of responsibility and confidence, which both served to elevate his character in the public estimation and to afford the means of patronage” (p. 376). It is ironic that Middleton’s exercise of pa-tronage, a feudal privilege and obligation, eventually renders Scottish chivalry superfluous to a formative American identity.

In much the same way that the Mohicans become expend-able once Heyward begins to emulate Uncas’s prudence, Scots become superfluous as Paul Hover and Ellen Wade make use of Middleton’s feudal patronage to further both their own eco-nomic prosperity and intellectual improvement and the United States’ westward expansion. Heyward’s and Middleton’s union of chivalry and stoicism thus becomes in The Prairie simply a stepping-stone in the development of a more inclusive and progressive American identity. Paul and Ellen are of American birth and indeterminate heritage. They belong to the masses that peopled the frontier settlements following the Louisiana Purchase, yet they also represent a natural national aristocracy. The narrator remarks that Ellen’s hand “might, both by its deli-cacy and colour, have graced a far more elevated station in life” (The Prairie, p. 36), and Leatherstocking is surprised to find a man of Paul’s “spirited mien engaged in so humble a pursuit” as honey gathering (p. 32). In spite of these outward markers of nobility, Paul and Ellen are strangers to the formal codes of chivalry. The narrator explains that although both “the Ameri-can borderer and his European prototype” participate in “the march of civilization” and the spread of “wealth, luxury, and the arts,” the primary distinction between the two is that the American “is not a knight” (p. 66). The narrator is perhaps somewhat disingenuous here. Admittedly, Paul is blunt and sometimes even crass compared to Middleton; yet he does fol-low Ellen across the prairie to make sure that her uncle, the lawless Ishmael Bush, does her no harm, and he does refuse to save his own life by fleeing Bush’s camp unless Ellen agrees

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to accompany him (pp. 174–75). He shares Middleton’s chiv-alrous impulses tempered with unassuming practicality and industriousness. Despite the narrator’s renunciation of Ameri-can knighthood, Duncan Middleton and Paul Hover’s quest to rescue Inez and Ellen arguably renders The Prairie, in its plot structure at least, a romance. But although Paul’s and Ellen’s appearances and manners suggest that they were intended for social stations higher than those they initially occupy, no discovery of noble origins catapults them to happiness at the novel’s end. They prosper through their own hard work and prudence, with some assistance from Middleton. Paul Hover surpasses his dependence on Middleton, and with it the feudal hierarchies and values that Middleton represents, by recapitu-lating the American colonies’ development in his own person. From a bee-chaser or honey-gatherer, he goes on to become first “a landholder, then a prosperous cultivator of the soil, and shortly after a town-officer” (p. 376). Hover progresses through the stages of hunting and agriculture to end up a leader of a civilized and prosperous frontier town.

Ellen’s participation in Paul’s prosperity is another marker of chivalry’s American decline. The narrator comments:

By that progressive change in fortune, which in the republicks is often seen to be so singularly accompanied by a corresponding im-provement in knowledge and self-respect, he went on, from step to step, until his wife enjoyed the maternal delight of seeing her children placed far beyond the danger of returning to that state from which both their parents had issued. (The Prairie, p. 376)

Whereas Middleton regards Inez much as Heyward did Alice, with an overwhelming romantic ardor, Ellen and Paul share the companionship that, according to John Millar, can only exist between men and women in post-feudal modernity.20 The pair-ing of Inez and Ellen revises the distinctions between dark and fair heroines that The Last of the Mohicans and Waverley share in common. Despite her dark coloring, Inez demonstrates the “natural timidity, and that retiring and perhaps peculiar lassi-tude which forms the very ground work of female fascination,

20 See Millar, Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, pp. 107–9.

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in the tropical Provinces of Spain” (p. 157), and that Middle-ton finds equally fascinating in Louisiana. Her “reserved and imposing” manner even cows the proud Sioux chief, Mahtoree, who considers “humb[ling] himself before a woman” to be “re-versing all the order of society, and . . . endangering the dig-nity of a chief” (p. 290). Yet Inez’s “natural weakness” (p. 286), which inspires the passion of both Middleton and Mahtoree, renders her less suited to the hardships of frontier life than Ellen, who unites Alice’s fairness with Cora’s fortitude. In con-trast to Inez, Ellen responds to captivity under the Sioux with “an air of spirit and resentment” (p. 287). Her resilience shows Paul that in Ellen he has found “a partner every way, worthy to cope with his own thoughtless and buoyant temperament” (p. 287). Ellen’s energetic determination clearly is crucial to Paul’s advancement. Paul and Ellen’s partnership represents for Cooper an improvement on Heyward’s and Middleton’s chivalrous devotion to Alice and Inez, respectively, much as this chivalry is in its turn an improvement on Magua’s savage dis-dain both for women and for men who admire them.

While The Prairie’s vision of American identity is in some ways more expansive than that of The Last of the Mohicans, in-cluding common men and women, it is racially more exclusive. Even more so than Scots, Indians in The Prairie have exceeded their usefulness to the development of an expanding Ameri-can nation. The Prairie’s Sioux Indians are “demons” and “rep-tiles,” “a treacherous and dangerous race” that lacks the Mohi-cans’ sterling qualities (The Prairie, pp. 37, 38, 40). Although the noble Pawnees defeat the ignoble Sioux, the Pawnees show their weakness by participating in their own exile. The narra-tor remarks that the Pawnees “appeared disposed to consult the most trifling of the wants of that engrossing people, who were daily encroaching on their rights and reducing the red-men of the West, from their state of proud independance [sic] to the condition of fugitives and wanderers” (p. 365). Unlike Cooper’s Scots, who transform diaspora into an opportunity for colonization, the Pawnees seem destined to wander into ex-tinction. The “engrossing people” who are “encroaching” on Native American rights implicitly includes not just the grasping Bush family, but also those like Paul and Ellen, whose desire for economic independence conflicts with and prevails over that of

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the Pawnees. Tracing the development of this class of frontiers-men and women through The Last of the Mohicans and The Prai-rie reveals the extent to which, for Cooper, their character had been shaped by the native peoples whom they displaced.

Through The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie, Cooper constructs a genealogy of American identity determined by cultural appropriation rather than by blood inheritance. Hey-ward’s emulation of Uncas’s prudence advances America from a state of barbarism while preserving the best qualities of that state. Similarly, Middleton’s patronage allows Paul Hover, and with him America’s frontier settlements, to attain new standards of republican virtue that render Middleton’s feudal values out-moded. This appropriative model of historical change and identity formation also explains Cooper’s understanding of his own relationship to Walter Scott. The Leatherstocking Tales, Cooper suggests, do not emulate, and perhaps fall short of, the Waverley Novels; instead, they selectively borrow and diverge from their Scottish predecessors. Thus, in an 1831 letter to the editor of the New Monthly, Cooper objects to being called “the ‘rival’ of Sir Walter Scott.” He declares: “Now the idea of rivalry with him never crossed my brain. I have always spoken, written and thought of Sir Walter Scott (as a writer) just as I should think and speak of Shakspeare—with high admiration of his talent, but with no silly reserve, as if I thought my own position rendered it necessary that I should use more delicacy than other men.”21 While acknowledging Scott’s influence, Cooper rejects the suggestion that he is peculiarly indebted to Scott. Moreover, by comparing Scott to Shakespeare rather than one of their esteemed contemporaries like Byron, Cooper arguably relegates Scott to the literary past. Similarly, by writing Scots into his novels, Cooper represents both savagery and feu-dalism as stages through which America has passed, and Scott as an author for the old world rather than the new.

University of Washington

21 James Fenimore Cooper, letter to Samuel Carter Hall, 21 May 1831, in The Let-ters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James Franklin Beard, 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1960–68), II, 83.

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abstractJuliet Shields, “Savage and Scott-ish Masculinity in The Last of the Mo-hicans and The Prairie : James Fenimore Cooper and the Diasporic Ori-gins of American Identity” (pp. 137–162)This essay reassesses James Fenimore Cooper’s literary relationship to Walter Scott by examining the depiction of Scots in The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Prairie (1827). Read as companion texts, these novels represent the imperial migrations of Scots as a cause of Native Americans’ unfortunate, but for Cooper seemingly inevitable, eradication. They also trace the development of an American identity that incorporates feudal chivalry and savage fortitude and that is formed through cultural appropria-tion rather than racial mixing. The Last of the Mohicans’ Scottish protagonist, Duncan Heyward, learns to survive in the northeastern wilderness by adopting the Mohicans’ savage self-control as a complement to his own feudal chivalry; in turn, The Prairie’s Paul Hover equips himself for the challenges of westward expansion by adopting both the remnants of this chivalry and the exilic adaptability and colonial striving that Coo-per accords to Scots. I suggest that the cultural appropriation through which Heyward and Hover achieve an American identity that incorporates Scottish chivalry and sav-age self-command offers a model for the literary relationship between Cooper’s and Scott’s historical romances. The Leatherstocking Tales borrow selectively from the Waverely Novels, rejecting their valorization of feudal chivalry while incorporating their representation of cultural appropriation as a mechanism of teleological social development.

Keywords: James Fenimore Cooper; The Last of the Mohicans; The Prai-rie; Walter Scott; Scots

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Documents

Savage and Scott-ish Masculinity inThe Last of the MohicansandThe Prairie: James Fenimore Cooper and the Diasporic Origins of American Identity