The hero is a white man with a veneer of exoticism.
While the books themselves may feature an interracial couple, their covers generally do not. To allow Cora to live and marry would have called into question the right to slaveholding but also colonist expansion which was responsible for displacing millions of other people of color. Described as “descended from that unfortunate class who are so basely enslaved to administer to the wants of a luxurious people,”(Cooper, 310) it was impossible for Cooper to allow Cora and Duncan to marry as he was a native of a slaveholding region. In the novel Duncan, a white Southerner is in love with Cora. Ultimately, Cora dies where Alice survives. This sets Cora and Alice up in direct contrast light/dark, feminine/unfeminine, pure/tainted.
Alice’s older half sister Cora is the daughter of a West Indian woman and is thought to be a “quadroon.” She stands up to the Huron people and acts as her sister’s protector just as fiercely as the male protagonists in the book. Cooper says of her, (she is) “some beautiful emblem of the wounded delicacy of her sex.” (Cooper, 124). She is described as being childlike in her innocence and is in constant need of rescue. Alice Munro is, “surprisingly fair,” (Cooper, 378) She is the stereotypical damsel in distress. There is further evidence of how color is perceived by looking at the differences between the Munro sisters.
Hawkeye skirts the line of “Other,” while remaining socially acceptable due to his whiteness. While purely white he can speak several native dialects and his adopted family, Chingachook and Uncas, are Mohicans. The book’s central character Natty Bumppo, or “Hawkeye,” is depicted as a cultural hybrid. Written in 1826, it is set during the events of the French and Indian War. The Native American sub genre really begins with James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans.
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