Infanticide and Cultural Reproduction in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans

INFANTICIDE AND CULTURAL REPRODUCTIONIN COOPER'S THELASTOF THE MOHICANS MaryChapman The legend of Hannah Dustan, who scalped her native American captors after they attacked her home and killed members of her family,provides one of the earliest accounts of infanticide in the New World: "On March 15, 1697,"Cotton Mather writes, the Salvages made a Descent upon the Skirts of Haverhill .... The Nurse trying to Escape, with the New-born Infant, fell into the Hands of the Formidable Salvages; and those furious Tawnies coming into the house, bid poor Dustan rise ... ; but e'er she had gone many Steps, they dash'd out the Brains of the Infant, against a Tree. (Mather, 264) Reports of colonists' children killed by native Americans recur in both autobiographical captivity narratives and their fictional descendants. In The History of Maria Kittle, for example, two mothers lose their infants to "Salvages"while their husbands are away from the settlement: "An Indian, hideously painted," writes Bleecker, "strode up to Cornelia ... and cleft her white forehead deeply with his tomahawk ... [H]e deformed her lovelybody with deep gashes; and tearing her unborn babe away, dashed it to pieces against the stone wall" (Bleecker, 19-20). This account of violence to mother and child is followed by another baby-killing only a few pages later: "She resigned him to the merciless hands of the savage, who instantly dashed his little forehead against the stones" (Bleecker, 21). This scenario is repeated in the novel Hope Leslie: "The Indian ... now sprang forward and tore the infant from its mother's breast ... tossed him wildly around his head, and dashed him on the doorstone" (Sedgwick,65). What is the significance of dead babies in American literature? What are the ideological contradictions surrounding representations of America as a new and fertile landscape in which all possibilities of a future society are brutally extinguished when children are killed and women/mothers excluded? Although these quotations from early American fiction and nonfiction give consistent accounts of what it might have been like to have 408 Mary Chapman children killed during an Indian raid on a white settlement, no ethnographic evidence of a war practice of infanticide among North-Eastern native American tribes exists. Historian James Axtell has argued that East Coast Indians customarily took English women and children as prisoners-of-war, sellingthem to the French or adopting them, rather than killing them: The pattern of taking women and children for adoption was consistent throughout the colonial period.... They captured English settlers largely to replace members of their own families who had died, often from English musketbaHs or imported diseases. Consequently, women and children--the "weakand defenceless"-were the prime targets of Indian raids. (Axtell,304) If we accept Axtell's argument, then the repeated scenario of the absent father, hysterical mother and their nursing babe murdered by savages suggests that native American baby-killing was not a historical reality as much as a literary construct calculated to appeal to white American readers, a trope that caught the American imagination early in the colonial period and continued to have metaphorical power after the Revolution. 1 Nineteenthcentury American novels, for example--no longer strictly based on captivity narratives--continue to feature acts of violence against offspring, both literal and metaphorical, a fact that points out not so much an inherent violence in native Americans but rather a white American anxiety over biological and cultural reproduction. To explore this issue, I would like to examine Cooper's The Last of the Mahicans, in which the eighteenth-century theme of baby-killing is subtly modified to include the slaughtering of innocent animal offspring and the psychological killing of children through denial of paternity. Critics have discussed this novel in terms of "homosocial bonding," the "perpetual blood brother theme" and the "almost inarticulate, but unquestioned love" which binds Chingachgook to Natty Bumppo (Fields, 53). While relationships between men are crucial in this novel, I am more interested in the feminist issues of infant-killing and the exclusionof the mother, and in the disruption to natural and cultural reproductive processes that these create in the text. Narratives of a people's transition from colony to nation often document the...