The Land Made Incarnadine
James Fennimore Cooper's book The Last of the Mohicans is designed to entertain us the way that any novel would, for it is replete with entertaining characters and swashbuckling deeds. However, Cooper also wanted to do more than simply entertain his readers. He wanted to make them more aware of what was happening in the world around them, of how the coming to America of the Europeans had changed the entire natural and social order of the New World. And in order to impress on his readers the seriousness of those changes he chose the most potent symbol possible: That of blood. This paper analyzes the use of the symbol of blood in this Cooper uses blood to stand for a number of different ideas in the book. It serves, first of all, as a symbol for knowledge and even more specifically for the ways in which we come to know our way in the world - how things come to be "in our blood". When European settlers came to America in the 17th century, they found themselves in a world that was entirely alien to them. They had neither literal maps to the country nor any metaphorical ones to understand their relationship to new kinds of plants and animals, new kinds of soil to b
Bumpo argues against this kind of law - more in deed thanin word - proposing that people follow what is natural rather than what isartificial. The idea of blood connection is central to this concept: Bumpois arguing that the settlers should not try to maintain ties of blood totheir Old World families and to the Old World past: In coming to the NewWorld they had taken on new identities. For the Mohicans, blood will be spilled, and their lineage will end (http://www. The last of the Mohicans is the last of their blood, which remains untainted even as it soaks for the last time the lands they called home. He believes that there must be some way to bring together good people in a way that transcends culture. Each clings toan idea of separateness and of racial purity as defined by the blood thatflows in each one of them. By looking to the blood ties, they looked backward to home. He asks of his readers the same question that Shylock asks of his listeners: Are we all not human' If you prick us do we not bleed' But the other characters in the book - especially the settlers looking back in confusion to the security of their lives in Europe but also the Indians, understanding the perilous position of their lives as the settlers grew ever more and more hungry for land - see blood only as something that divides them from each other. For the settlers, blood is and will always be a way of splitting the world into here and there, into before and after, a barrier between them and the savages they saw around them. edu/cooper/articles/suny/2001suny- axelrad. In what follows, Cooper writes, the "flow of blood might be likened to the outbreaking of a torrent; and as the natives became heated and maddened by the sight, many among them even kneeled to the earth, and drank freely, exultingly, hellishly, of the crimson tide" (http://external.
Common topics in this essay:
America Europeans,
America Bumpo,
Natty Bumpo,
Europe Indians,
William Henry,
Fennimore Cooper's,
natural law,
idea natural law,
mohicans blood,
symbol blood,
blood symbol,
blood spilled,
natty bumpo,
settlers blood,
idea natural,
world blood,
|
Acceptance Essays
