Cooper’s characters embody some of the broad stereotypes
held during the colonization of America. Racial tensions underlie The Last
of the Mohicans. At this point in the novel, Magua represents the
nineteenth-century stock figure called the noble savage, an Indian
for whom the white population feels both sympathy and horror. Whites
may celebrate Magua for his willingness to help them, but they also
fear his cultural differences and his familiarity with a terrain
they find fearsome. Cora embodies the typical white reaction to
Indians—terror and fascination. Cooper also suggests that Cora feels
a sexual attraction to Magua. Attractions like Cora’s, or even the
imagined possibility of such attractions, terrified white males, who
feared intermarriage and interracial sexual contact between Indian
men and white women. This fear of interracial contact partially
motivated the widespread removal of Native Americans during the
nineteenth century. Cooper complicates the stereotype of the white
woman attracted to the Indian man by making Cora dark, her hair
black like a raven. Cora transgresses society’s rules when she looks
at Magua with desire, but in some ways, Cooper suggests, her desire
for him seems natural.
These two chapters both begin with epigraphs from Shakespeare’s
plays—one from Richard II and the other from The
Merchant of Venice. By invoking the lofty language of Shakespeare, Cooper
announces his intention to write serious literary fiction. In the
early nineteenth century, when Cooper was writing, the American
novel was a fairly new form and its respectability uncertain. Cooper
aims to give the American novel credence by quoting Shakespeare. Richard
II chronicles the fall of a king, an appropriate subject
for The Last of the Mohicans, which depicts a society
that will one day shake off kingly rule and become democratic. The
Merchant of Venice is famous for its treatment of anti-Semitism
in the Jewish figure of Shylock; quoting from that play suggests
that the novel will explore racism.
