man without a cross

[James Smith]

Interestingly, I just finished the book about a week
ago.  I read being "without a cross" as a religious
statement, that Natty is not irreligious but equally
accepting and equally sceptical of Christianity and
the native beliefs.

There's a discussion of the phrase "man without a
cross" at
http://mohicanpress.com/wwwboard/messages1/7156.html

The posters there seem fundamentally to agree with
you, that it is a statement of racial purity, but also
that it implies much more.  To quote part of one entry
by "Elaine",

"This one line is enough to provide essays on who
Hawkeye is and is not. A brief summary; it identifies
him as a man with no actual religion (though he
espouses Christian principles), no family, no cultural
ties, no world in which he truly belongs. He is as he
is ... a natural man. The tragedy of it, as Cooper
intends it I think, is to place Hawkeye in a limbo. He
doesn't really belong to either culture by which he is
surrounded, nor does he really fit in either age ...
the old or the new. He is a loner; an island. A man of
the wilderness."



--- Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote:
> The other day I wrote:
>
> >>>>>
> I have just started _The Last Of The Mohicans_ and
> am puzzled by the
> repeated use of the expression "man without a
> cross", often used by the
> hero Hawkeye (Natty Bumppo, aka Leatherstocking aka
> Deerslayer...)
> sometimes in reference to himself. Maybe it means a
> frontiersman, one who
> travels the Indian country but is not a missionary;
> but I have not been
> able to puzzle it out clearly. Can someone enlighten
> this benighted soul?
> <<<<<
>
> Having finished the book, I now understand it
> better. In the first
> paragraph of (iirc) Chapter XXVI Hawkeye uses the
> expression in a more
> expanded form and fuller context, making it clear
> that "no cross of blood"
> refers to ethnically unmixed heritage: for Hawkeye,
> "white" with no
> admixture of "redskin". Cooper refers to the natural
> differences between
> the races (I'm giving up on scare quotes, take them
> as read) on almost
> every page. I still don't get *why* he uses this
> expression in all the
> places he does, but that's a literary question, not
> a linguistic one.
>
> Does anyone know whether the expression was commonly
> understood in Cooper's
> time or in 1752, the time in which the story is set?
>
> -- Mark A. Mandel


=====
James D. SMITH                 |If history teaches anything
SLC, UT                        |it is that we will be sued
jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com     |whether we act quickly and decisively
                               |or slowly and cautiously.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere!
http://mail.yahoo.com/