Justifying Cora Munro's Death: Social Usefulness in Cooper's Last of the Mohicans

points out that she looks very young. ⁴ In contrast to this, Cora whose face is at first hidden behind a veil, looks ‘fuller and more mature’ (9). When the fabric opens its folds, the reader gets a first glimpse of Cora’s blackness. ‘Her complexion was not brown, but it rather appeared charged with the colour of the rich blood that seemed ready to burst its bounds,’ Cooper describes (9). Nevertheless, Cora is by no means uglier than her sister. Cooper remarks: ‘And yet there was neither coarseness nor want of shadowing in a countenance that was exquisitely regular and dignified, and surpassingly beautiful’ (9). At this point, the reader is left to wonder about Cora and Alice’s diametrically opposite looks. It is the girls’ father, Colonel Munro, who accounts for the truth when he feels insulted by Major Heyward’s preference of Alice to Cora. Munro explains that when living in the West Indies, he formed ‘a connection with one who in time became [his] 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 administer to the wants of a luxurious people’ (146).

Cora’s mother, he admits, was partly black and passed on her racial impurity to her daughter. After the death of his first wife, the Colonel returned home to Scotland and remarried. He tells Heyward that his second wife, Alice’s mother, was ‘the only child of a neighbouring laird of some estate’ and consequently makes clear that she was as racially pure, that is, white, as he himself is (146). Even though their racial background explains why Cora and Alice look different, it does not provide an explanation for their dichotomous character traits. In contrast to Alice, Cora displays courage and self- reliance throughout the novel. For example, in Chapter 8, when the group is encircled by the Iroquois, Cora knows that she herself cannot escape. However, instead of fainting and sobbing like her younger sister, Cora stays calm and insists that the men attempt to flee. ‘… [T]ry the river,’ she suggests, ‘Why linger, to add to the number of the victims of our merciless enemies?’ (68). She instructs the men to try to reach Colonel Munro as quickly as possible and ask for his assistance, and then adds:

‘…if, after all, it should please Heaven that his assistance come too late, bear to him … the love, the blessings, the final prayers of his daughters, and bid him not mourn their early fate, but to look forward with humble confidence to the Christian’s goal to meet his children.’ (68)

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Cora’s Christian faith and her maturity give her the strength to act rationally in the face of danger. She also trusts in her own ability to judge any situation adequately and to find a way of dealing with it. Alice, on the other hand, only knows one way of coping with peril: hoping that someone else, preferably a white man, saves her. Alice’s weakness is, in fact, her most prominent character trait. She sobs, cries and faints innumerable times throughout the novel. ‘Alice’s extreme passivity constantly endangers her and her companions,’ Nina Baym writes. ⁵ Untrained for survival in the wilderness, Alice is ‘helpless, dependent, and infantile.’ ⁶ The fact that the girls are opposed in character as well as racial background explains why only one of them is labelled marriageable. However, modern readers of The Last of the Mohicans may find it paradoxical that it is Alice whom Cooper considers socially useful, and not Cora. To illustrate this, from a contemporary point of view, Cora is far superior to her sister. The traits that she possesses are, today, very desirable in a woman. Her intelligence and eloquence are as remarkable as her activeness and courage. Nevertheless, Heyward, who ‘functions in the novel as the reader’s surrogate,’ prefers Alice to Cora ⁷ . Why does Heyward, why would any man, prefer the weaker, childish sister, the one who constantly faints and sobs? Is it, as Heyward himself claims, because of ‘the sweetness, the beauty, the witchery’ of Alice (147)? It is necessary for a thorough analysis of the novel to consider 18 ^th as well as early 19 ^th century gender roles - the novel is set in 1757, but was published in 1826 -and to examine in how far Cora and Alice fulfil the expectations of their times. The society that Cooper depicts in the Leatherstocking tales in The Last of the Mohicans is dominated by men and strongly patriarchal. Women are at best marginal figures whose individuality is of no particular importance. They are seen as objects rather than persons. Men consider women priceless and fragile possessions that need to be protected at all costs. Therefore, it is Alice who ‘fulfils the implicit definition of a lovable woman.’ ⁸ She clings to Heyward with the dependency of a helpless, innocent child. As Baym puts it,

A white man does not need a woman fighting by his side, to inspire him, still less a woman mediating between him and the Indian enemy; he needs a woman to fight for and to fight about. White women best serve the white nation by sacrificing their dangerous dreams of independent selfhood, reining their sexual

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fantasies, and recognizing that they are most useful to civilization as protected possessions of white men. 9

This statement also explains why Cora neither matches the gender expectations of the 18 ^th century nor those of a 19 ^th -century readership. She is too independent, too eloquent, too strong willed and too self- reliant. In fact, she crosses gender boundaries throughout the novel by acting wisely and rationally in the face of imminent danger instead of begging for the protection and help of her male companions. To the male characters of The Last of the Mohicans, Cora’s character traits are threatening. If manhood is predicated on the successful defence of white women, no masculine character will marry a woman who embodies virtues such as courage, firmness and self-reliance. The fact that Cora is relatively independent endangers the concept of manhood of a society in which men are valued for their skill at rescuing or protecting the weaker sex, and in which ‘this skill is an important source of … pride and self-respect’ ¹⁰ . In short, Cora’s refusal to conform to gender norms and expectations makes her socially useless for white man, that is, inapt for matrimony.

In her essays on The Last of the Mohicans, Nina Baym restricts her concept of social usefulness to white - white and white - racially impure relationships. She neglects to deal with the racially impure - Indian relationship of Cora and Uncas. Baym admits that there is a discrepancy between white and Native American gender roles by writing that

Indian women fend for themselves and do quite well at it. White women appear in the forest so weighted down with all the appurtenances of their cultural role … that self-defence is out of the question. 11

However, she does not raise the question if Cora would have made a good match for Uncas. Would he have married her? Does Cora fulfil, or have the capacity to fulfil, the expectations of Native American culture?

Because of her racially mixed background, Cora is socially unacceptable in the so called civilized world in which she grew up. However, when considering Cora i n relation to Native Americans, her flaws may turn into advantages. Specifically, Cora is much closer to Native American culture than purely white characters, for example Alice or Heyward, could ever be. In this context, George Dekker raises the question of adaptability to the wilderness. He claims that Cora’s ‘ability to confront the hardships

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