Shannon Costello

It seems unfair for someone to find out in my first paragraph what I had to read halfway through James Fenimore Cooper’s book to learn, but I will explain the title. “Wish-Ton-Wish” is the main location in the story, which is in turn named after the whippoorwill, or American night hawk. The “wept” is the “mourned one”, the seven-year-old girl who is taken captive by the Narraganset Indians.

I would call the story a tragedy; certainly I cried bitter tears over it. Cooper tends to set up intolerable situations, where the only solution to the problem is for someone to die. I see this in “The Spy” with Isabella and in “The Pilot” with the guardian of the heriones. I used to think this business of setting up problems with near-impossible solutions not good plot technique. My sister and I would do that in our childhood games, to the point where we were unable to extricate our characters and continue the story without retracting previous words or events. We rarely considered having our characters die, though. Oh, the dramatic opportunities we allowed to slip by!

This was the first Cooper book I had read where the author pitted the Indians against the Puritans. (Cooper is amusing because he lets his opinions come through. I was left with the distinct impression that the Puritans were prone to go just a little too far in their religious views.) The Indians/Puritans combination is extremely interesting because the Puritans’ “meek acceptance” of whatever calamity befell them resembles the Indians in their refusal to display any emotion whatsoever. Normally the “palefaces” are expected to show plenty of emotion.

The resulting contrast between the “palefaces” and “redskins” was not as stark. In fact, this story showed the human side of the Indians very clearly. They, too, knew what it was to love and to lose their homes and loved ones. We were also allowed to see the less human side of those of European descent. The Puritan family contemplated keeping an Indian boy captive forever. This is interesting in the light of their own grief and sense of loss at losing their child to the Indians. Cooper never comments on this contrast. I wonder why?

I prefer happy endings, but am learning to appreciate dramatic and tragic endings. Books such as “Brave New World” and “Moby Dick” are worth reading for their endings alone. Maybe there is a parallel to life. Relationships lead to moments of emotional turmoil, but the relationship is worth it. I cried at the end, but getting to “know” the main characters throuhout the story made it worth the emotion.