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James Fenimore Cooper's The last of the Mohicans is often seen as a simple adventure story within the historical frame of the French and Indian war. Only if we analyze the novel in a closer way, we will realize that it goes beyond this label and that its sources are many and varied, giving the work the richness of the genres on which Cooper's novel is based. These are romanticism, western, (being its author one of the forerunners of these genres in the U. S.
A. ), captivity narratives and epic. In works belonging to Romanticism, nature is given a great important role. In fact, the action takes place in the open air, except for the chapters of the siege of Fort William Henry, so it is the setting which predominates along the work. The close connection between the characters of romantic novels and nature is exemplified in the characters of Chingachgook, Units and Hawkeye, which apart from knowing the place where they live and being completely adapted to it, they consider nature as a divine entity.
In his introduction of this novel in the Oxford Classics edition, John Mcwilliams agrees with this affirmation of the concluding that for Cooper it was more than the place where they move; 'it was the very condition of life, the shaper of moral values and of human behavior, for good and for ill'. In a similar way, the same happens in other important romantic American novels such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Herman Melville's Moby Dick. In the former, Hester and his daughter Pearl live in close connection with nature as a source of moral freedom, and in the latter, the Nantucketeers consider themselves as part of the sea. The theme of nationalism, a recurring point of this genre, is present in two ways, showing on the one hand the adventures of the heroic pioneers of the U. S.
A. fighting in order create a new nation, and on the other hand, the adventures of the last two Mohicans, representatives of the mother of all Indian tribes. Related to this aspect, there is also an interest in knowledge about cultural origins. This question of nationalism also appears in Moby Dick since the Nantucketeers seem to consider themselves the only conquerors and owners of the seas, a fact which expresses the so-called 'manifest destiny' proclaimed by John Louis O Sullivan in 1845. In contrast, The Scarlet Letter tells a fictitious story in the seventeenth-century Boston criticizing the puritan American settlers. One of the main characteristics of the genre is the exaltation of the senses and emotions which are represented by Hawkeye and the Indians in general, which, as we have mentioned before, live closer to nature than the white men, which although they stand for reason and intellect they are incapable of adapting to a wild world in which they try to apply their rules, strategies and hierarchies.
In general, the image that we obtain of the white men is not a positive one for they are depicted as weak beings who can not defend themselves and have brought war to a peaceful country, as Magua claims in chapter 10: 'Was it war, when the tired Indian rested at the sugar -tree to taste his corn! Who filled the bushes with enemies! Who drew the knife!' In this way, the work portrays one of the basic aims of romanticism, that is, a revolt against rationalism. The question of history in The Last of the Mohicans may make the reader think that he is in front of a novel belonging to the genre of historical fiction. Some of the features of this genre can be applied to this work, but only superficially. The story is set in the past, the time period is the core of the story and therefore affects the events, we can find historical characters, mainly leaders, as General Montcalm, Brigadier-General Daniel Webb and Lieutenant-Colonel Monro) and places as Fort Edward and William Henry or Glens Falls.
But the reconstruction of the events is not faithful enough, as Mac Williams declares in his essay The historical Contexts of The Last of the Mohicans, since the Iroquois, the Delaware and the Hurons were not 'nomadic hunter-warriors' but quite the reverse, the historical allegiances between white-men and Indians are reversed in the novel, and the alleged Fort William Henry massacre after the British surrender was not such a thing. Apart from this, the siege of Fort William Henry is related in three chapters. As a consequence, although this it affects the narrative, it is only a point within the whole story, a fact that contrasts with other historical fiction novels par excellence such as Franz Were's Forty Days of Musa Date or Robert Grave's I Claudius, in which the historical facts and the narrative do not come apart. Historical fiction usually tells realistic stories, however, in The Last of the Mohicans, there are some improbable situations which are not suitable for this genre; for instance, the protagonists are constantly in danger but they are seldom hurt.
Apart from this, the chapter in which Hawkeye and Duncan Heyward disguises in order to enter Magua's village, apart from being improbable, gives the narration a comical quality which cannot let us consider it either as an actual or realistic story, an argument which is reinforced by the experience that David Gamut lives through, since he is allowed to live with Magua's hostile tribe without arousing suspicion only because the Indians like the music he plays. As a consequence, it is doubtless to affirm that the novel shows the features of escapist costume romances despite its pretense to historicity, setting in the past in order to lend credence to characters and adventures which sometimes are incredible, an affirmation which contrasts with the author's remark at the very beginning of the preface of the 1826 edition: 'The reader, who takes up these volumes, in expectation of finding an imaginary and romantic picture of thins which never had an existence, will probably lay them aside, disappointed. ' The Last of the Mohicans served as a source from which a new genre emerged, western. The novels, short stories, motion pictures and TV or radio shows belonging to this genre present a set of common features in such a way that it is undeniably to affirm that this work by Cooper is one of the main forerunners of this genre. The main theme is the taming of wild lands and the advance beyond their frontiers.
They show adventures dealing with the opening of the west to white settlement and the conflicts, mainly between the pioneers and the Indian Native Americans. The most significant difference between the representatives of this genre and its forerunner is that of setting and time; whereas the events related in The Last of the Mohicans occur in the territories near Lake Champlain before the Civil War, the others take place in western Mississippi, in particular the Great Plains and the southwest after the war. Captivity narratives are also a key source for The Last of the Mohicans as we can see in The Indians and their Captives by James Leverner and Hennig Cohen. They affirm that the character of Hawkeye is based on two legendary figures whose stories were quite famous among the American people of the eight-tenth century, a fact that has obscured their lives in such a way that what we know about them is a mixture of actual facts and legend. The first of them is Tim Murphy, which after the Indians killed his wife and children became a solitary person whose exploits and skills as scout, soldier and Indian fighter made him famous. The second one is Daniel Boone a Kentucky pioneer and adventurer whose life was recreated by several authors.
However, Leverner and Cohen do not observe that in Hawkeye there is a mixture of white and Indian cultures, a fact which helps the character to acquire an...
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