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关键词：《最后的莫西干人》，种族观念，白人至上，矛盾情感
1 Introduction
Sometimes literature is not only a kind of art but also a mirror of the social life. Writers always put their thoughts, concerns or opinions of social issues into their works to extend their emotions. Therefore, when studying a literature work, scholars are always researching the history and the social situation of a given time. The novel The Last of The Mohicans not only shows us Cooper’s excellent literature cultivation but also his concerns about the American society of 1826, a society that was decaying both culturally and racially. Racial issues have long been the hot spot in American society. Nowadays, they are still being discussed by great numbers of scholars and critics both at home and abroad. In the early history of the United States, the racial discrimination was once focused on American Indians. Although the red were the original owner of American land, they were expelled, killed and oppressed by the white. The Last of The Mohicans can be regarded as a perfect work for scholars to study the early racial problems in American society. In this novel we can easily see the conflicts between the red and the white and the so-called contradiction between civilization and savageness. A further analysis of the novel, then, can be made to reflect Cooper’s racial views. People’s passion to study Cooper’s racial views has never faded with the elapse of time.
As the masterpiece of James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of The Mohicans, reflecting Cooper’s real Cooper’s real attitude towards the racial problems, attracts him the notice of a great number of literature critics. Therefore, a study of this novel enables us not only a better understand of the social system in Cooper’s time but a comprehension the way the white, among whom was Cooper, treated the Indians.
1.1 The Writing Background
James Fenimore Cooper is a unique American writer who is regarded as the forerunner and founder of American nationalist literature. The Last of The Mohicans is his pivotal work whose settings and themes are always argued by scholars and researchers of literary filed. Cooper’s racial views reflected in it are always a contentious issue, too. As a very famous writer in the early America, Cooper liked to explore the new ways and methods in the literary world. He once was the aggregate of honors such as the first excellent frontier novelist and the first writer who regarded literature as a mean to criticize the social issues. It’s generally believed that Cooper’s works established the basic standard for later ideological and aesthetic forms. His works are very popular with the people in a worldwide, especially the young.
Cooper lived in nineteenth century when the American government carried out a serious of policies aiming at Indians. The native Americans then become homeless and suffered the racial discrimination coming from the Whites. Faced with such kind of social situations, James Cooper kept a relatively conservative political footing in his daily life. But his sympathy for Indians’ tragic fates and criticism on the crudeness of the colonists are always appearing in his works.
Undoubtedly, Cooper’s frontier novel series The Leather Stocking Tales are the most famous in his all works. Actually the frontier novels at Cooper’s time were once a very hot issue. From the independent war to the civil war, the frontier of American kept stretching towards west. The American government got more land from the French and the Indians through purchasing and plundering. The westward movement was filled with endless and fiercely conflicts and wars including the wars between France and Britain and the white colonists’ spoofing and atrocity to Indians. These conflicts and historical changes in west frontier were vividly described in Cooper’s The Leather Stocking Tales. And the historical event that gives him the inspiration to write the series is the Fort William Henry massacre in the French and Indian war, which took place in 1757. For Cooper, this war in, and for, the wilderness of the North American continent completely disrupted the native American tribes who had dwelt on the continent for centuries. In Cooper’s view, as well as in the view of many American politicians of that time, the chaos generated by the white intrusion propelled the Natives toward vanishing. Although racial issue was sentimental, Cooper’s novel still reflects so many meanings and thoughts aimed at race in the United States, and the mood of mourning and elegy at the funeral ritual of Uncas indicates Cooper’s “strong feelings” toward the people who were vanishing.