It’s not easy to see why this substitute satisfaction is so perennially attractive to so many people, what psychic need is fulfilled by this apparent cause-and-effect relationship between eros and violence. But as many other popular works besides Mohicans can testify, this dynamic works a powerful spell on audiences, and in this novel Cooper exploits it repeatedly, and always to great effect.

Eros and violence also define one context in which Hawkeye’s heroism can be understood. This man of action, alienated from conventional society but profoundly at home in the woods and among the people of another race, is Cooper’s greatest contribution to American, indeed world literature. As a mythic figure, the Leatherstocking can be identified with a variety of referents, from a legendary old world antecedent like Robin Hood to such quasi-legendary new world contemporaries as Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett. He has had many descendants in American literature and popular culture, from the late-nineteenth century’s “cowboy” hero through such twentieth-century film and TV avatars as the Lone Ranger (with Tonto in Chingachgook’s role). Looking at Natty Bumppo from a European point of view, the British novelist D. H. Lawrence, in Studies in Classic American Literature, concluded that Hawkeye is the quintessential American, and that “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer”: “What sort of a white man is [Natty] ? Why, he is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer.” The novel does repeatedly associate Hawkeye with killing. Half a dozen pages after we first meet him, he calls Uncas’s act of killing a deer “a pretty sight to behold!” Two chapters later he insists on killing a young colt. After leading the first rescue mission to victory, he doesn’t imitate Chingachgook’s example and scalp the fallen enemies (scalping, Natty says often, is an “Indian gift,” permissible for them but not lawful for a white man without a cross), but neither does he follow the examples of Uncas and Duncan and hasten to Cora and Alice’s side; instead, he makes sure his enemies are dead, “thrust[ing] his long knife [into their bodies], with as much coolness, as though they had been so many brute carcasses.” He also seems here at least as pleased to have recovered his rifle as to have rescued the females: “ ‘I have got back my old companion,’ ” he says, “striking his hand on the breech of his rifle”; as much as Cora and Alice’s father will worry later about their purity after they’ve been in the hands of the savages, Hawkeye worries about his gun here, “examining into the state of his rifle with a species of parental assiduity.” Tellingly, when at the Delaware camp there is a moment of doubt about which of two white men really is “La Longue Carabine,” Hawkeye’s Mingo name, the question is settled with that same “long rifle”: His identity is inseparably bound up with his ability to shoot and kill.

There can be no doubt, then, that Hawkeye is a killer, but that is only half of the story that Cooper is telling about him in the novel. At least as central to his character, and even more important in terms of the place he occupies in the larger fantasy, is the fact that Hawkeye is not a lover. Michael Mann’s 1992 movie adaptation of the novel drastically revises this aspect of his character, but Cooper’s text leaves no room for doubt on this score. The narrator, for example, tells us that, while Duncan carries Alice to safety in the Mingo camp, Hawkeye “had certainly been an entire stranger to the delicious emotions of the lover, while his arms encircled his mistress.” And Hawkeye himself confirms the “entire strange[ness]” of sex for him in an extraordinary speech to Duncan and Alice that begins: “I have heard that there is a feeling in youth, which binds man to woman.... It may be so. I have seldom been where women of my color dwell; but such may be the gifts of nature in the settlements” (p. 274). The urgings of desire, that fact of life that everyone else beyond the age of puberty knows viscerally, Hawkeye has only heard of, and he seems to have his doubts about it. From the start, when the veil is removed from Cora’s aroused face and the bushes part to reveal the apparently lustful gaze of the savage, the novel associates the wilderness with those desires, except in Hawkeye’s case. For him, life in the woods is a different and more invulnerable form of virginity than that of the novel’s two maidens; in the wilderness he lives outside the “feelings,” the passions that can be seen in the other characters’ eyes and are the cause of their abductions, captivities, and rescues, the large movements that carry them back and forth across the novel’s fantasy landscape. Natty stands apart from the bonds of desire that pull the others toward each other. As a rescuer, he is as selfless as any of the book’s lovers. He proves how much more there is to him than the “killer” when he risks his life to go back into the Mingo village to save Uncas, or when he offers Magua his own life in exchange for Cora’s. But note that he is equally willing to save Uncas or Cora, or, for that matter, probably anyone else. His sense of duty to other people, in other words, is absolutely uncompromised by any erotic longing. His sense of self, therefore, is inviolable.

Natty Bumppo’s autonomy is perhaps the most compelling reason Cooper and his readers kept coming back to him. Late in his career Cooper said he always intended to come back one more time and write a sixth Leatherstocking Tale depicting him amidst the events of the Revolutionary War. Given Natty’s status as an American archetype, the absence of a tale set in the 177Os leaves a conspicuous gap. Filling it, however, would have created problems for Natty’s biographer.