Tompkins, Jane. “No Apologies for the Iroquois: A New Way to Read the Leatherstocking Novels.” Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. NY: Oxford UP, 1985. 94-121.

94-95 . . . the most popular novel of the [1820s] depicts the / confusion that results when people whose beliefs and customs bear no relation to one another, who share no common fund of values, come into collision on territory to which they all have a legitimate claim.

95 Peopled by storybook savages and cardboard heroes, and dotted with scalpings and hairsbreadth escapes, The Last of the Mohicans seems to cater to a popular taste for melodrama rather than to serious-minded speculation on the national good. . . . replete with sensationalism and cliché.

99 . . . an admission of ignorance about Cooper, among English department members, is less a shameful confession than a subtle boast. It is a boast which, not long ago, I made myself.

99 It was bloody and lurid and totally unbelievable, and at the same time almost fantastically complex—though not with the kind of complexity I was used to. . . . I began to see him as a profound thinker, one who was obsessively preoccupied not with the subtle workings of individual consciousness, but with the way the social world is organized. . . . His work seemed powerful and moving in the teeth of a hundred well-known faults, 100 but I could not explain its power or its intricacy in any literary vocabulary that was available to me.

100 What has been overlooked in the effort to protect Cooper from the charge that he relies too much on formulas and stereotypes are the formulas and stereotypes themselves. It is, I will maintain, the supposed weaknesses of Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels that constitute their greatest strength.

100 Although this is the climactic moment of their lives, we learn nothing of how it feels to them or what it means. Cooper’s utter lack of curiosity about the inner lives of his characters is not a feature of this scene alone but of every scene in the novel. He simply has no interest in the drama of the individual psyche which is the central subject matter of modern fiction.

101 Whatever it is that determines fate in this novel, it is not premeditated acts of the individual will.

103 . . . reading the Leatherstocking tales neither as modernist fiction manque, nor as ahistorical romance, nor as inartistic social commentary, but as social criticism written in an allegorical mode.

103 Already, one begins to see that Cooper’s focus in constructing his character is on the mixture of nationalities and races that Cora represents and on the social problems that the mixture will pose.

105 . . . an obsessive preoccupation with systems of classification—the insignia by which race is distinguished from race, nation from nation, tribe from tribe, human from animal, male from female—dominates every aspect of the novel. Conflicting loyalties, divergent customs, disparate codes of honor, habits of deportment, styles of dress, modes of knowledge and of skill—these occupy / 106 narrative commentary at every turn.

106 . . . then the characters of Cora and Magua do not appear to be crude caricatures, or defective versions of characters in other novels. Rather, they can be seen to function as starkly opposed cultural types whose confrontation on the cliff suggests the violent repulsion that exists between the social categories they represent. Indian versus white, male versus female, warrior versus virgin, pagan versus Christian. The meaning of the scenes they enact consists in the irreconcilable conflict between these categories, and that is why the characters are and must be stereotyped. Cora and Magua are stick figures who mouth stylized handbook creeds because they must delineate in as fixed and definite a way as possible the cultural categories they embody.

109 . . there is no choice to be made between the wigwam and the knife of le Subtil because the Anglo-Saxon tradition of racial purity would not permit it.

113 The grotesque concatenations of events, that these juxtapositions produce are what stand, in the Leatherstocking tales, in lieu of a plot. Just as the human figures in Cooper’s frontier fiction have the static quality of integers in a mathematical equation because they stand for fixed values in a system of value, so the plot has an air of artificiality and contrivance because it, too, answers the requirements of an abstract design. The various combinations and confrontations of characters, groupings, and regroupings test the possibilities of coexistence in a series of episodes that produce the improbabilities Cooper’s critics have called “souffles” and “comic opera material.”

119 . . . a villain in Cooper’s calculations is someone who is not true to his kind.

119 Instead of comparing Cooper’s plots and characters, then, to those of classical nineteenth-century fiction, where individual moral choice is at the center of attention, we must recognize that Cooper’s novels constitute a drama of an altogether different sort, a drama whose purpose is to work out the rules of coexistence that make human society possible in the first place. The Indians and maidens of his adventure stories are not cardboard figures to be laughed at or lamented over; his plots are not a series of clumsy devices strung together in haste. His characters are elements of thought, things to think with; and the convolutions of the plots, the captures, rescues, and pursuits of the narrative, are stages in a thought process, phases in a meditation on the bases of social life . . . .