(Download) "Justifying Cora Munro's Death: Social Usefulness in Cooper's Last of the Mohicans" by Nina Dietrich # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Justifying Cora Munro's Death: Social Usefulness in Cooper's Last of the Mohicans
- Author : Nina Dietrich
- Release Date : January 17, 2003
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 82 KB
Description
In James Fenimore Cooper’s fiction, ‘women are of central social significance. [Cooper’s] theme is society, and he defines women as the nexus of social interaction,’ Nina Baym argues1. She claims that the author is not interested in women’s personhood or individuality, but rather in their usefulness for society. According to Baym, matrimony is ‘the chief “statement” of the social language’.2 Therefore, if a woman is apt for marriage, she is socially utile. One of the main aspects of The Last of the Mohicans is the dichotomy between the half-sisters Cora and Alice Munro, to whom the concept of social usefulness can be applied. On the one hand, Fenimore Cooper presents Alice, who is fair, helpless and infantile, as marriageable. On other hand, Cora, the dark, courageous and initiated sister, is considered unsuitable for wifehood. Instead of letting Cora be united in marriage with the Indian Uncas in the end of the novel, the author decides to kill both of them. Many of his contemporaries have urged Cooper to change the unhappy ending. One critic, for instance, writes:
Every event as we go along points to a favourable termination, when just at the winding up, the design seems to be capriciously reversed, and [Cora and Uncas] are most summarily and unnecessarily disposed of. The vessel, having braved all the dangers of her voyage, sinks as she is floating into smooth water.3
James Fenimore Cooper, however, ignored such criticism and kept his original ending. Nevertheless, the issue of Cora’s death is still open to controversy. This essay will explain why, to the author, killing his heroine was preferable to letting her marry either Major Heyward or Uncas. The composition will achieve this task by, first of all, comparing Cora to her sister Alice. It will furthermore focus on Baym’s concept of social usefulness in the light of gender expectations of 18th and 19th century America and attitudes towards race. Finally, Cooper’s opinion on multiracialism in the New World will be examined.
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