Trauma and typology: 'The Last of the Mohicans' and its filmed versions (1909--1992).

摘要

This study compares The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper with five of its filmed versions: Leather Stocking (1909), The Last of the Mohicans (1920), The Last of the Mohicans (1932), The Last of the Mohicans (1936) and The Last of the Mohicans (1992). These comparisons demonstrate and comment upon how American ideas about race and gender have been constructed and reconstructed since the nineteenth century. Film adaptations are not only a reworking of the original text, but may include any cultural references that have accumulated around the original or subsequent versions at the particular time the adaptation is made.; Adaptation is fundamentally a phenomenon of repetition. It formally announces its self-consciously referential status most often by claiming the original text's title as its own. I situate film adaptation next to two other modes of repetition---trauma and typology---phenomena of compulsive repetition---to understand why this particular narrative has been revised so many times.; While traumatic repetition is involuntary and due to disassociation, typological exegesis is deliberate and formal, fundamentally a narrative technique which recycles narrative in response to cultural anxiety around issues of identity and historical culpability. I locate the impetus for The Last of the Mohicans repetition in an anxiety about national origins and identity, specifically guilt concerning the extirpation of indigenous peoples during the colonization of North America. This extirpation is the trauma that the repeated narrative continually represses. The trauma of the "massacre" by Native Americans of the British and colonials after the French victory at Fort William Henry in August, 1757 is substituted for the trauma of the extirpation of Native Americans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moreover, more often than not, the trauma of the Fort William Henry "massacre" is evaded as well. This historical and cultural analysis tracks the colonial and national treatment of Native Americans, the development of the Hollywood studio feature and how colonialism, masculinity and race are depicted and re-enacted in these six texts.