Ashley Salter
LITR 5535
Dr. White
October 2003

 Convergence of Romantic Narrative and Captivity Narrative
 in The Last of the Mohicans  

If, in a lecture, conversation, or television program, someone mentions Romanticism or “The Romantics,” our minds likely turn to English lyric poetry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Probably, snatches of Coleridge or Keats or Blake run briefly through our minds.  We might remember a few generalizations about these poets’ work – their reverence for nature, the high value they placed on emotions over reason, their celebration of the individual.  If, however, we turn our attention to the unique manifestation of Romantic ideology in American literature, a distinctly different set of characteristics emerges.  Certainly American Romanticism shares some themes and styles with related European literary periods, but it is remarkable for its variations from earlier movements.  In Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, we see several of these American qualities converge in a classic text of American Romanticism.  We can also trace the development of the American Romantic spirit from pre-Romantic writings such as those of John Smith and Mary Rowlandson. 

In contrast with the English equivalent, Romanticism in America is probably most identified with works of prose rather than poetry.  Seminal writers of the period are primarily fiction writers such as Poe, Hawthorne, and Cooper.  We can trace the genre of the romance narrative, alternately called a romance novel or simply a romance, back to chivalric tales written in medieval France.  The writers of The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms identify several common ingredients found in the plots of romance narratives: “high adventure, thwarted love, mysterious circumstances, arduous quests, and improbable triumphs” (414).  Characters in a romance tend to be wholly good or wholly evil rather than realistically complex and contradictory.  The language of romances tends to be extravagant.  Romantic plots typically involve a quest or journey that requires characters to cross boundaries, sometimes physical but often social or psychological, and move toward transcendence.  A separation of lovers, searching for a lost object, and a cycle of capture and rescue are actions frequently found within romance storylines. 

Cooper’s Mohicans blends these conventions of romance narratives with the specifically American genre of the captivity narrative.  These narratives – some factual, some more fictionalized than others – were quite popular and widely read before Cooper crafted his novel.  The genre was born of conflicts between Native Americans and European settlers in the New World.  Captivity narratives always involve a separation, a journey, and a rescue – a series of traditionally romantic devices.  Smith’s recounting of his capture by Powhatan and Rowlandson’s story of her captivity are notable examples.  Both of these authors, though documenting essentially factual events, recreate Romantic patterns that come to fruition in Cooper’s tale. 

Smith’s account was first published in 1612, and embellishes a series of events that occurred in the Virginia colony in 1607.  The narrative commences with his explorations seeking needed trade with the Indians.  The narrator promptly sets Smith up as a heroic figure with exaggerated prowess, bravery, and goodness.  He is characterized as “Captain Smith, who, by his own example, good words, and fair promises, set some to mow, others to bind thatch, some to build houses, others to thatch them, himself always bearing the greatest task for his own share, so that in short time he provided most of them lodgings, neglecting any for himself” (46).  When his first overtures to the Indians are not immediately accepted, Smith becomes aggressive, and “though contrary to his commission, [he] let fly his muskets, ran his boat on shore; whereat they all fled into the woods” (46).  This is the first indication of the contrast Smith sets up between himself, the Englishman, and the Native Americans who capture him.  He goes on to repeatedly describe his captors as savages.  Their appearance and actions he holds in contempt, referring to the “many strange triumphs and conjurations they made of him” (48) and, later, their “strange gestures and passions” at the start of a ceremony (50).  Smith relates his injuries from the fighting when he was captured:

Finding himself beset with 200 savages, two of them he slew, still defending himself with the aid of a savage, his guide, whom he bound to his arm with his garters and used as a buckler, yet he was shot in the thigh a little, and had many arrows that stick in his clothes but no great hurt, till at last they took him prisoner (48). 

Throughout the narrative, he seems to exaggerate the odds against him or his skill when outnumbered as well as to list a ludicrous number of men set to guard him at various times.  Although Smith is not a writer of the Romantic era, this propensity to cast all Indians as weak and evil and himself, the white male European, as strong and good, connects with Romantic utilization of static, one-sided characters.

Rowlandson, who was held captive for nearly three months in 1676 and later wrote of her experiences, also makes use of this dichotomy.  In addition to savages, she refers to her captors variously as “heathen” (136), “ravenous beasts” (138), “barbarous creatures” (138), and “those roaring lions, and savage bears, that feared neither God, nor man, nor the devil” (148).  Like Smith, she unflinchingly depicts Indians as base and foreign to her superior English sensibilities.  But, despite, her insistent listing of the atrocities they committed in pillaging her community and taking two dozen colonists as prisoners, her portrayal is not without an occasional glimmer of a more three-dimensional perception of Native Americans.  She mentions repeatedly that she and her dying child were given nothing but a tiny amount of cold water over a period of nine days.  She also recounts a night when she was kicked out of her master’s wigwam to make room for their company.  After inquiring for a place to sleep at several other wigwams, she finally encounters kindness.  “An old Indian bade me to come to him and his squaw gave me some ground nuts; she also gave me something to lay under my head, and a good fire we had; and through the good providence of God, I had a comfortable lodging that night” (143).  Unsurprisingly, Rowlandson does not attribute the Indian couple’s kindness to the couple themselves but, instead, to the protection of God.  Her piety is the equivalent of Smith’s bravado.  It allows her to perpetuate the opposition of bad Indians and good English settlers, heightening the differentiation by emphasizing God’s supposed siding with her people when they have been victimized by “heathens” and held captive in a “wilderness condition” (140).

Returning briefly to Smith, the climax of his narrative, when Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas, supposedly rescues him from execution by her people, demands some examination.  There is some question of whether Smith understands the intentions of the rituals conducted around him during his captivity.  He remarks on the strangeness of the Indians painted faces, comparing them to devils “painted half black, half red” with white around all their eyes (50).  He ascribes meanings to the meal, corn kernels, and sticks ritually placed around a fire.  “Three days they used this ceremony,” he writes, “the meaning whereof, they told him, was to know if he intended them well or no” (51).  But one must wonder if Smith really was about to have his brains beaten out, as he claims.  We know that he has distorted or exaggerated the role of Pocahontas in this ceremony.  Smith rewrote her as the heroine of his captivity story seven years after it originally appeared.  This fact lends itself to connections between the semi-factual narratives Cooper would have been familiar with and the fictional captivity narratives he would include in The Last of the Mohicans.

Cooper, of course, had considerable opportunity to absorb the genre of the captivity narrative before writing in the captures and rescues in Mohicans, one of which takes place after the skirmish at Glenn Falls, the other after the fall of Fort William Henry.  The author was also steeped in the European Romantic tradition and lived in France while writing some of the Leatherstocking Tales.  We can trace conventional elements such as mystery, quests, and unlikely triumphs in Mohicans, but we also find a crystallization of the unique American elements Smith and Rowlandson were developing.  Cooper picks up on the pre-existing impulse to Romantically cast all Indians as wholly evil characters, and pulls off a surprising innovation.  In Mohicans, the dichotomy shifts from good settlers/bad Indians to a carefully wrought distinction between the good and evil Indians in the novel.  Hawk-eye elucidates this difference when he first encounters Heyward’s party and finds that their original guide, who has become lost, is a Huron adopted by Mohawks.  He scoffs at the notion of any Indian lost in the woods and lectures Heyward:

“A Huron!” repeated the sturdy scout, once more shaking his head in open distrust; “they are a thievish race, nor do I care by whom they are adopted; you can never make any thing of them but skulks and vagabonds.  Since you trusted yourself to the care of one of that nation, I only wonder that you have not fallen in with more” (37).

Hawk-eye rounds out his opinions of Indians by expressing his high esteem for Delawares and Mohicans, whom he praises for their honesty and their skill as warriors (37-8).  He continues this opposition throughout the novel.  Magua, the adopted Huron, moves from rakish Byronic hero to absolute scoundrel with his unsavory proposition to Cora in Chapter XI (102-5).  Uncas, the last of the Mohican line, becomes the hero, finding lost trails and proving essential during the two rescues.

            Cooper’s knowledge of Indian names, tribes, and historical facts may not be completely accurate.  Twain criticized his imprecision in word choice, inattention to detail, and tendency to exaggerate.  We can easily see how Cooper’s methods typify the Romantic writer’s approach to fiction.  What we might not readily appreciate is the real situation which was playing out in Mohicans – the unresolved tension between European settlers and the Native Americans whose lands they were claiming for their own.  Cooper twists the prototypical depiction of evil Indians exemplified in Smith and Rowlandson, extending a slight hope for a more balanced view of the conflict.  This is not to say he never relies on Indian stereotypes or that he realistically depicts any of his characters.  Rather, he expanded the uniquely American approach of earlier writers who poured Indians and settlers into the Romantic mold of good and evil characters.  In the process, he created a classic text of American Romanticism by using Romantic conventions to explore a cultural conflict of the New World. 

Cooper, James Fenimore.  The Last of the Mohicans.  New York: Penguin, 1986.

Murfin, Ross, and Supryia M. Ray.  The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, 2^nd edition.  Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

Rowlandson, Mary.  From A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.  The Norton Anthology of American Literature, shorter 6^th edition.  Ed. Nina Baym.  New York: Norton, 2003.

Smith, John.  From General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles.  The Norton Anthology of American Literature, shorter 6^th edition.  Ed. Nina Baym.  New York: Norton, 2003.