By casting Indians as the abductors, the novel aligns itself with the country’s first best-selling books: the “captivity narratives” written in the seventeenth century by Puritans like Mary Rowlandson and John Williams. The emphasis of these stories, however, is on captivity as a trial of faith in the wilderness. Through both its volumes and across hundreds of miles of woods, Cooper’s story keeps the focus on the threat to Cora and Alice’s virginity : Will they be restored to their father “spotless and angel like, as I lost them,” as he anxiously asks at one point, or will they suffer “a fate worse than death,” the euphemism by which rape is referred to by more than one character? This plot is launched at the very end of chapter II, when from behind the bushes appears an Indian’s face, “as fiercely wild as unbridled passions could make it,” watching “the light and graceful forms of the females” riding through the forest with a “gleam of exultation” in his eyes. Cooper keeps this apparent threat hanging over the heroines’ maidenheads so compellingly that the only major complaint reviewers made was that the novel was unbearably suspenseful, too painfully exciting to read. In their anxiety about the fate of the women, however, Cooper’s readers seem to have missed the moment when Hawkeye turns this story back on them. As the heroes begin their second rescue mission near the start of the second volume, Hawkeye tells Duncan that the threat of rape is all in his white imagination: “I know your thoughts, and shame be it to our color, that you have reason for them; but he who thinks that even a Mingo would ill-treat a woman, unless it be to tomahawk her, knows nothing of Indian natur” (p. 221).

In this amazing revelation, the novel exposes the ideological act of projection that projects “unbridled passions” onto dark savages and suggests that if, like Duncan, readers have been thinking about sex, they should probably revise their reading of both the story and themselves. From this vantage point we can see that the story really begins at the very end of chapter I, and not with the lustful gaze of a savage looking at white women, but with the “indescribable look” Cora bestows on a savage. This event is staged very suggestively, at the very moment the white characters leave Fort Edward’s protecting walls to enter the wilderness. Until this moment, a veil has covered Cora’s face, but just as the nearly naked Magua runs past her to take the lead of the party, “her veil was allowed to open its folds, and betrayed an indescribable look of pity, admiration and horror, as her dark eye followed the easy motions of the savage.” The Last of the Mohicans dramatizes what the conventional decorum of Cooper’s culture repressed as “indescribable.” Out of Cora’s ambiguous gaze across racial lines, her attraction to and repulsion from the movements of Magua’s body, erupts the novel’s fantasy of angelic virginity and demonic desire. And as Hawkeye tells Duncan, as a fantasy it betrays more about our thoughts, who we are outside the walls or behind the veil of civilization, than about Indian nature.

Unlike Conrad, Cooper does not require his readers to acknowledge this insight. In fact, as in his treatment of the theme of “Indian removal,” his dramatization of desire is framed in a way that allows white readers to keep their distance no matter how deeply it takes them into its jungle. When Cora’s veil opens, it reveals that “her complexion was not brown,” but “charged with the color of the rich blood, that seemed ready to burst its bounds.” Her blush we can immediately attribute to her gaze at Magua, but readers don’t learn why the narrator uses the strange locution “not brown” to describe her until the middle of the novel, when her father tells Duncan that not only do Cora and Alice come from different mothers, but also that Cora’s mother had progenitors who came from Africa, that she was “descended, remotely, from that unfortunate class who are enslaved.” Thus “not brown” means “partly black,” so that Cooper’s fantasy includes all three of the races that inhabited his America. Cora is one of Cooper’s greatest female characters: brave, resourceful, generous, high-minded, and passionate. Alice is a much more typical Cooper “female”: so white, so chaste, so helpless that she is not much more than an icon of innocence. But while it is impossible not to admire Cora, her father’s revelation of her heritage has two major implications. Like Cora’s “indescribable look” at Magua’s body, his marriage to Cora’s unnamed mother reminds us that desire can transgress all the lines, burst all the bounds, that Cooper’s culture believed should confine it. But at the same time it allows white readers to identify Cora’s sexuality with her “blackness” rather than their own humanity. Seen this way, she is not only a dark heroine, but that stereotypi cal figure American fiction kept coming back to throughout the nineteenth century: the tragic mulatta, as much an “Other” as the dark savages, and like them doomed, despite all her strengths, by her race.

The novel’s wilderness, like the greenwood in Shakespeare or folklore, is a place of transformation. In the last section, particularly, the narrative recounts a dizzying number of metamorphoses: People turn into beavers and vice versa, Hawkeye and Uncas turn into bears, an Indian turns into David Gamut who later turns into Uncas, even Duncan paints his face like a Mingo. But the novel refuses to endorse the possibility of racial change through intermarriage, and at the end the racial boundaries are enforced with a vengeance. Duncan carefully removes his paint before being reunited with Alice, who has never given anyone’s body a look with the least hint of ambiguity in it, and this untainted white couple is allowed to survive and marry and through their racially unmixed offspring inherit the future. All the characters who have gazed across racial lines—Cora at Magua, Magua at Cora, Uncas at Cora—come together at the novel’s climax, but only to die.

That scene has the feel of both a ritual sacrifice and a perversely intimate dance of death. One of Magua’s Mingo henchmen “sheathe[s] his knife in the bosom of Cora.” “Magua burie[s] his weapon in the back of the prostrate” Uncas. The final task of killing Magua is left to Hawkeye. The theological overtones in the passage describing Magua’s fall from the rocks are obvious: “his dark person was seen cutting the air with its head downwards.” But the sexual undertones in the description of the action with which Hawkeye kills him also need to be acknowledged. Like those knives sinking into Cora and Uncas’s bodies, Hawkeye’s rifle resembles and replaces the phallus at the moment of sexual climax: As he starts to take aim on Magua, Hawkeye’s “frame trembled so violently with eagerness, that the muzzle of the half-raised rifle played like a leaf fluttering in the wind,” but after he draws “the agitated weapon” to his body, “the piece [becomes as steady as the rocks] for the single instant that it poured out its contents” (p. 351). “Sex and violence,” according to the Hollywood cliché, is the most dependable recipe for feeding the appetite of the popular audience. The Last of the Mohicans not only follows this formula, but it helps us to appreciate why we never hear the order of those terms reversed—it’s not “violence and sex,” but always “sex and [then] violence.” At the start, the novel arouses readers with “indescribable looks,” “unbridled passions,” and “nearly naked” Indian bodies, but the only consummations the narrative provides are its repeated acts of violence, which culminate at that moment in which Hawkeye’s rifle ejaculates death.