最后的莫希干人
最后的莫西干人简介
1757年,英法两国为争夺美洲殖民地而不停交战。在哈德逊河以西地区的诸多土著中,有一支叫莫希干族的,战争使之仅剩了老战士千家谷父子和他的白人养子豪克依三个人。一次,英军少校德勤在护送上校之女歌娜姐妹去威廉亨利堡途中,被实是奸细的休伦族向导马瓜诱骗,遭到法军民团的伏击。危急之中,三个莫希干人解救了他们,并护送他们去威谦亨利堡上校蒙路的营中。 途中,他们看到了被法军屠戮的民宅, 从豪克依口中,歌娜也理解了她们与土著在文化习惯上的诸多差异,并为他们对自由的维护精神而感动。
当他们来到威廉亨利堡时,却发现法军正在围攻英军。原来蒙路上校早已向韦将军发出求援信,不想落入马瓜手中而战况告急。于是,他只能迅速再向爱依堡的韦将军发信求援。
在蒙路营中,歌娜拒绝了德勒的再次求爱,却渐渐与正直、勇猛的豪克依产生了爱意。一次,因豪克依协助英军民团中的积逃跑而被抓,蒙路上校决定按军规吊死豪克依。歌娜十分不满,为这些土著的自由而激烈辩护。由于鞭长莫急,求援无望的蒙路只能率军向法军投降。法国将领文锦将军想以和平的方式逐出英军,而马瓜却因过去的宿仇而发誓要亲手杀死蒙路。于是,在英军的撤退途中,马瓜带领休伦族人再次围攻英军并杀死了蒙路上校。情急之中,豪克依挣脱索链救出了歌娜姐妹俩。三个莫希干人与歌娜姐妹和德勒少校在被敌人追捕中躲入一山洞。最终,马瓜他们还是赶到那里。无奈中,三个莫希干人跃入水瀑,而歌娜姐妹和德勒落入敌手。
豪克依等来到休伦族营地,豪克依冒死徒手入营,请求放人并揭露了马瓜的野心。可酋长最后还是决定要烧死歌娜,而其妹爱莉则被马瓜带走。关键时刻,德勒自求烧死以替换歌娜。在解救爱莉的途中,马瓜杀死了千家谷的亲子雍加,而不屈的爱莉跳崖而死。最终,马瓜死于千家谷刀下。而千家谷也成了最后一个莫希干人。这使我们形象地看到,北美殖民地的发展史,实质上就是这样一部印第安人的血泪史。
Introduction
It is the late 1750s, and the French and Indian War grips the wild forest frontier of western New York. The French army is attacking Fort William Henry, a British outpost commanded by Colonel Munro. Munro’s daughters Alice and Cora set out from Fort Edward to visit their father, escorted through the dangerous forest by Major Duncan Heyward and guided by an Indian named Magua. Soon they are joined by David Gamut, a singing master and religious follower of Calvinism. Traveling cautiously, the group encounters the white scout Natty Bumppo, who goes by the name Hawkeye, and his two Indian companions, Chingachgook and Uncas, Chingachgook’s son, the only surviving members of the once great Mohican tribe. Hawkeye says that Magua, a Huron, has betrayed the group by leading them in the wrong direction. The Mohicans attempt to capture the traitorous Huron, but he escapes.
Hawkeye and the Mohicans lead the group to safety in a cave near a waterfall, but Huron allies of Magua attack early the next morning. Hawkeye and the Mohicans escape down the river, but Hurons capture Alice, Cora, Heyward, and Gamut. Magua celebrates the kidnapping. When Heyward tries to convert Magua to the English side, the Huron reveals that he seeks revenge on Munro for past humiliation and proposes to free Alice if Cora will marry him. Cora has romantic feelings for Uncas, however, and angrily refuses Magua. Suddenly Hawkeye and the Mohicans burst onto the scene, rescuing the captives and killing every Huron but Magua, who escapes. After a harrowing journey impeded by Indian attacks, the group reaches Fort William Henry, the English stronghold. They sneak through the French army besieging the fort, and, once inside, Cora and Alice reunite with their father.
A few days later, the English forces call for a truce. Munro learns that he will receive no reinforcements for the fort and will have to surrender. He reveals to Heyward that Cora’s mother was part “Negro,” which explains her dark complexion and raven hair. Munro accuses Heyward of racism because he prefers to marry blonde Alice over dark Cora, but Heyward denies the charge. During the withdrawal of the English troops from Fort William Henry, the Indian allies of the French indulge their bloodlust and prey upon the vulnerable retreating soldiers. In the chaos of slaughter, Magua manages to recapture Cora, Alice, and Gamut and to escape with them into the forest.
Three days later, Heyward, Hawkeye, Munro, and the Mohicans discover Magua’s trail and begin to pursue the villain. Gamut reappears and explains that Magua has separated his captives, confining Alice to a Huron camp and sending Cora to a Delaware camp. Using deception and a variety of disguises, the group manages to rescue Alice from the Hurons, at which point Heyward confesses his romantic interest in her. At the Delaware village, Magua convinces the tribe that Hawkeye and his companions are their racist enemies. Uncas reveals his exalted heritage to the Delaware sage Tamenund and then demands the release of all his friends but Cora, who he admits belongs to Magua. Magua departs with Cora. A chase and a battle ensue. Magua and his Hurons suffer painful defeat, but a rogue Huron kills Cora. Uncas begins to attack the Huron who killed Cora, but Magua stabs Uncas in the back. Magua tries to leap across a great divide, but he falls short and must cling to a shrub to avoid tumbling off and dying. Hawkeye shoots him, and Magua at last plummets to his death.Cora and Uncas receive proper burials the next morning amid ritual chants performed by the Delawares. Chingachgook mourns the loss of his son, while Tamenund sorrowfully declares that he has lived to see the last warrior of the noble race of the Mohicans.
Analysis of Major Characters
Hawkeye
Hawkeye, the protagonist of the novel, goes by several names: Natty Bumppo, La Longue Carabine (The Long Rifle), the scout, and Hawkeye. Hawkeye stars in several of Cooper’s novels, which are known collectively as the Leatherstocking Tales. Hawkeye’s chief strength is adaptability. He adapts to the difficulties of the frontier and bridges the divide between white and Indian cultures. A hybrid, Hawkeye identifies himself by his white race and his Indian social world, in which his closest friends are the Mohicans Chingachgook and Uncas. Hawkeye’s hybrid background breeds both productive alliances and disturbingly racist convictions. On one hand, Hawkeye cherishes individuality and makes judgments without regard to race. He cherishes Chingachgook for his value as an individual, not for a superficial multiculturalism fashionably ahead of its time. On the other hand, Hawkeye demonstrates an almost obsessive investment in his own “genuine” whiteness. Also, while Hawkeye supports interracial friendship between men, he objects to interracial sexual desire between men and women. Because of his contradictory opinions, the protagonist of The Last of the Mohicans embodies nineteenth-century America’s ambivalence about race and nature. Hawkeye’s most racist views predict the cultural warfare around the issue of race that continues to haunt the United States.
Magua
Magua, an Indian of the Huron tribe, plays the crafty villain to Hawkeye’s rugged hero. Because of his exile by Colonel Munro, Magua seeks revenge. He does not want to do bodily harm to Munro but wants to bruise the colonel’s psyche. Magua has a keen understanding of whites’ prejudices, and he knows that threatening to marry the colonel’s daughter will terrify Colonel Monroe. Magua’s threat to marry a white woman plays on white men’s fears of interracial marriage. When Magua kidnaps Cora, the threat of physical violence or rape hangs in the air, although no one ever speaks of it. Whereas the interracial attraction between Uncas and Cora strikes us as sweet and promising for happier race relations in the future, the violent unwanted advances of Magua to Cora show an exaggerated fulfillment of white men’s fears. However, while anger originally motivates Magua, affection eventually characterizes his feelings for Cora. He refuses to harm her, even when in one instance his actions put himself in danger. Magua’s psychology becomes slightly more complicated by the end of the novel, when sympathy tempers his evil.
Major Duncan Heyward
Heyward plays a well-meaning but slightly foolish white man, the conventional counterpart to the ingenious, diverse Hawkeye. While Hawkeye moves effortlessly throughout the wild frontier, Heyward never feels secure. He wants to maintain the swagger and confidence he likely felt in all-white England, but the unfamiliar and unpredictable landscape does him in. Some of Heyward’s difficulties stem from his inability to understand the Indians. Still, despite Heyward’s failings, Cooper does not satirize Heyward or make him into a buffoon. Heyward does demonstrate constant integrity and a well-meaning nature, both of which mitigate his lack of social understanding. Cooper also treats Heyward gently because Heyward plays the most typical romantic hero in the novel, and so he must appear strong and handsome, not ridiculous and inept. Heyward and Alice, although presented as a bland couple, make up the swooning, cooing pair necessary to a sentimental novel.
Cora Munro
The raven-haired daughter of Colonel Munro, Cora literally embodies the novel’s ambivalent opinion about mixed race. She is part “Negro,” a racial heritage portrayed as both unobjectionable and a cause for vitriolic defensiveness in her father. She becomes entangled with the Indian Uncas, a romantic complication portrayed both as passionate and natural and as doomed to failure. Dark and stoic in comparison to her sister Alice’s blonde girlishness, Cora is not the stereotypical nineteenth-century sentimental heroine. Though she carries the weight of the sentimental novel, she also provides the impetus for the adventure narrative, since her capture by Magua necessitates rescue missions. Cora brings together the adventure story’s warfare and intrigue and the sentimental novel’s romance and loss. With Cora, Cooper makes two genres intersect, creating the frontier romance.
Uncas
Uncas changes more than any other character over the course of the novel. He pushes the limits of interracial relationships, moving beyond Hawkeye’s same-sex interracial friendships and falling in love with Cora, a white woman. Whereas Cooper values interracial friendship between men, he presents interracial sexuality as difficult and perhaps always doomed. In the end, Uncas is punished for his taboo desires, perhaps because Cooper thinks he should be punished, or perhaps because Cooper wants to show that Uncas’s close-minded society will punish racial mixing. Hawkeye becomes a father figure for Uncas, and Uncas eventually becomes a natural leader of men by combining the skill of Hawkeye with the spirituality of a revered Indian leader.