n to Magua. Attractions like Cora's, or even the imagined possibility of such attractions, terrified white males, who feared intermarriage and interracial sexual contact between Indian men and white women. This fear of interracial contact partially motivated the widespread removal of Native Americans during the nineteenth century. Cooper complicates the stereotype of the white woman attracted to the Indian man by making Cora dark, her hair black like a raven. Cora transgresses society's rules when she looks at Magua with desire, but in some ways, Cooper suggests, her desire for him seems natural.
             These two chapters both begin with epigraphs from Shakespeare's plays-one from Richard II and the other from The Merchant of Venice. By invoking the lofty language of Shakespeare, Cooper announces his intention to write serious literary fiction. In the early nineteenth century, when Cooper was writing, the American nove
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