The Worthlessness of Duncan Heyward: A Waverley Hero in America (1997)

Your notions are those of gentleman, allows Scottish-born Colonel Munro of his young southern subordinate, Major Duncan Heyward, well enough in their place,(1) but American wilderness is clearly not place for them, point frequently and indeed bitterly reiterated throughout James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of Mohicans. The passage of European mores and rivalries across Atlantic is central theme in work of first major American novelist, and in his most famous fiction alien influence that particularly exercises him is complex of behavior, values, and narrative structure best exemplified for him--and no doubt for his readers--by character and trajectory of typical protagonist of novel by Sir Walter Scott. While sway of 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 fact (noted, but rarely enlarged upon) that he resented this designation--the degree to which Cooper engages in conscious, critical, even at times resentful dialogue with his great model and rival has not been given attention it warrants.(2) With all other phenomena confidently detected in psyche of apparently oblivious creator of Leatherstocking, anxiety of influence--particularly at this early stage in his development--has been oddly neglected.(3) Perhaps best way to begin re-examination of The Last of Mohicans in this light is to assess book's attitude towards precisely character and values--these specifically Old-World notions--of Duncan Heyward, man who, in most of 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 main object of interest(4) for both author and his readership, making text's insistence on qualities and faults of such central figure too important to pass off lightly as designation of yet another of those genteel upper-class characters who--whatever we may think of them--were in Cooper's eyes flower and justification of usurping white civilization.(5) Heyward's character, furthermore, is too much his own, too distinct from others even of his own class, race, and background, for it to be adequate only to discuss his treatment as explication of type, in manner proposed by Jane Tompkins. While characteristics of his social group and culture are certainly part of his significance, there is directed towards him an animosity too intense to be plausible expression of Cooper's overall view of white, male officer-caste of day. In short, text's venom towards this suspiciously Waverleyan protagonist remains largely undescribed and unaccounted for. There has been, of late, movement away from an acceptance of Heyward as mere cipher, blandly conventional projection of contemporary readership's approval. Forrest G. Robinson speaks persuasively not just of his erratic judgement and bumbling, his being a little `thick,' but also of his larger shortcomings, ultimately indicative of the hollowness, even hypocrisy, of white moral pretensions.(6) Donald Ringe goes further, detailing way Heyward's false heroics are consistently mocked.(7) For Ringe, however, this behavior is function of Cooper's aesthetics, his deployment of mode of mock heroism, just as fearful misapprehensions by all book's personages spring from its dominant Gothicism. Heyward is eventually cured of both tendencies, and assumes modest role in closing sections of narrative.(8) Robinson, for his part, dilutes negative effects of text's portrayal by making them merely one phase of ever-familiar ambivalence of its author, who is, yet again, divided against himself and whose duplicitous treatment of young man reflects desire simultaneously to expatiate and deny guilty truth of American history, to appease an unconscious need to have it both ways. …