In recent years, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper have provided literary critics with useful examples of how an ideologically motivated refusal to think through the complexities of white, male subjectivity ends up contributing to a racist and proto-fascist aesthetic. This is an aesthetic, moreover, that is deemed to be entirely consistent with some of the ways in which Americans were trying to reimagine their national past and future in the wake of the war of 1812. “Cooper's fictions operate as strategies of containment,” writes Jonathan Arac, “imaginary techniques for negotiating the complexities of the life that both he and his readers were living” (“Establishing National Narrative,” 614). “Last of the Mohicans,” claims Dana Nelson, became a “culturally iconic text” because it “sidesteps the neurotic vantage of the son and assumes the more symbolically stable (if sterile) position of the father.” This move, she suggests, “complements the novel's misogynist obsession with racial purity” (National Manhood, 269–70).