Comparing Hope Leslie 'And The Last Of The Mohican'

Hope Leslie, by Catherine Maria Sedgwick, receives praise for being a more truthful, faithful, or positive depiction, when compared to James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohican’s. However, both novels perpetrate the same majority views on cultural interactions. The respective narrators of Hope Leslie and The Last of the Mohicans apply a similar spin in their descriptions of violence, character abilities, and wrongdoing in a way that favors the White characters over the Indian characters.
One example of this spin is in how descriptions of violence perpetrated by White characters compare to descriptions of violence perpetrated by Indian characters. A major example of this is in the Last of the Mohicans. The white character, Hawkeye has killed a few Hurons during the break between Chapters 23 and 24. This violence is off screen and only related to the audience through another character, Magua’s description of it (Cooper 232). This compares to an earlier passage in the novel, which describes Huron violence. In this passage, Huron women curse at Uncas and insult the Delawares. Cooper even labels one woman as foaming at the mouth (Cooper 222). In this passage the violence is explicit and the perpetrators are branded as animalistic and having no traces of humanity. These two passages,
In Hope Leslie, when Hope and Faith reunite and have spoken for a while, Magawisca and Uneco believe they should move on from the scene. However, Hope believes her emotions overpower both of their sense and they should remain in their place to keep talking. As a result of this, Magawisca and Faith get captured (Sedgwick 238). In this situation the white character faces little to no repercussions for her actions, hope merely becomes ill. However, Magawisca and Faith, an Indian and converted white character get punished for Hope’s