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"Your notions are those of a gentleman," allows the Scottish-born Colonel Munro of his young southern subordinate, Major Duncan Heyward, "and well enough in their place,"' but the American wilderness is clearly not the place for them, a point frequently and indeed bitterly reiterated throughout James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. The passage of European mores and rivalries across the Atlantic is a central theme in the work of the first major American novelist, and in his most famous fiction the alien influence that particularly exercises him is a complex of behavior, values, and narrative structure best exemplified for him-and no doubt for his readers-by the character and trajectory of the typical protagonist of a novel by Sir Walter Scott.
While the sway of the enormously popular Waverley Novels has always been acknowledged-few accounts of Cooper's career fail to mention that he was called "the American Scott," along with the fact (noted, but rarely enlarged upon) that he resented this designation-the degree to which Cooper engages in a conscious, critical, even at times resentful dialogue with his great model and rival has not been given the attention it warrants.2 With all the other phenomena confidently detected in the psyche of the apparently oblivious creator of Leatherstocking, anxiety of influence-particularly at this early stage in his development-has been oddly neglected.3
Perhaps the best way to begin a re-examination of The Last of the Mohicans in this light is to assess the book's attitude towards precisely the character and values-these specifically Old-World "notions"-of Duncan Heyward, the man who, in most of the obvious ways, really must be considered its hero. The young Major and his behavior, I would contend, are fundamental, not peripheral aspects of Cooper's story. Character, as Peter C. Lapp and others have pointed out, "rivals and in some respects displaces plot as the main object of interest"4 for both the author and his readership, making the text's insistence on the qualities and faults of such a central figure too important to pass off lightly as the designation of yet another of those "genteel upper-class characters who-whatever we may think of them-were in Cooper's eyes the flower and justification of usurping white civilization."5 Heyward's character, furthermore, is too much his own, too distinct...