Essay topics on Foster and Cooper

Due: Friday, September 26, 4 p.m., Cushing-Martin 134

Assignment: Write a 3-4 page critical essay on one of the following topics. You may also come up with your own topic, but you must clear it with me first. Be sure to ground your essay in close readings and specific quotations and evidence, and to lay out a well-defined argument.

Since this first essay is a short one, I expect you to limit the scope of your evidence by choosing just one or two scenes/passages/characters to analyze. Do not answer every question posed below; you should narrow these essay topics to fit your own interests. While you should place your close readings in a broader context, do not try to analyze the entire novel. It is better to write a detailed analysis of just a few passages than to generalize.

1) Analyze the role of parent-child relationships in either The Coquette or The Last of the Mohicans. In both novels, parents of the major female characters are either dead or absent for much of the novel. Why do the authors make this choice? Who, if anyone, serves as surrogate parents, and what does that tell us about the depiction of women and children? What stable parent-child relationships serve as a foil for the absent parents? In both novels, as well, we have the death of a child or children: what purpose do those deaths serve?

2) Discuss friendship as a theme in either The Coquette or The Last of the Mohicans. What social purpose do friends serve, and how is that different than lovers, spouses, or parents? In considering the significance of friendship, does it matter that the friends depicted are usually of the same sex, but not always of the same race, nation, or social class? You may wish to consider a pair of friends (such as Hawkeye and Chingachgook, Heyward and Uncas, Eliza and Lucy, Eliza and Julia, etc.).

3) Analyze the role of one or more minor characters in The Coquette: Julia Granby, Mrs. Richman, Mrs. Wharton, Mr. Wharton, Mr. Haly, or even the silent recipients Charles Deighton and Mr. Selby.

4) How does Foster use literary allusions and maxims or proverbs? Discuss the role of novels and/or other forms of literature in The Coquette. This novel is made up of private documents (letters); how do these letters function in relation to the published documents and public language that they sometimes cite?

5) Choose one or two examples of disguises in The Last of the Mohicans and analyze their function in the novel. Hawk-eye calls Magua “a lying and deceitful varlet” (114), but he and his allies use disguise and deceit repeatedly in their battle with the Hurons. What does it signify when white characters imitate Native dress or culture? Or when characters dress like animals? How is Hawk-eye’s integration into/appropriation of Native American dress and culture differ from, say, David Gamut’s?

6) Select a set of images of vision or veiling to analyze in The Last of the Mohicans. The novel gives us sharpshooters and veiled women; observant scouts and blind bumblers; hidden caves and highly visible hilltops. Choose one or two characters or a single set of images to unpack. Which characters have the best vision (literally or figuratively), and why? How do Cooper’s characters strategically employ their own visibility?

7) “What have such as I, who am a warrior of the wilderness, though a man without a cross, to do with books!” (117). Hawk-eye proclaims his “book” to be nature itself. How does Cooper use images of reading in relation to the natural world? How does nature function as a symbolic space? Who can and cannot read the language of the environment? Does the ability to read actual books have any value in this world?