ation, and even permitted her fairer, though certainly not more beautiful companion, to proceed unattended, while he sedulously opened the way himself for the passage of her who has been called Cora.
Alice is a strong character and a strong woman, to the point where she can at times be foolhardy. Much of the novel skirts the issue that concerns the males of the time--what will the Indians to white women if the latter are captured. Alice in particular becomes a catalyst for tensions between her protectors, with Heyward seeing himself as the civilized man who should be protecting her from the rougher type represented by Hawkeye and the Indians. Alice represents the early American values derived form the British and then tempered by the frontier experience. She is the beginning of this process.
Half a century later, Henry James would create women who would represent a more advanced development in the same national female character. Often, James wold compare these women to their European counterparts, and he would find that the Americans tended to be the innocents while the Europeans were depicted as decadent. Henry James was indeed interested primarily in the impact on Americans of contact with Europeans, and several of his works show how Americans may be corrupted by their encounter with Europeans and how they are certainly tested by the experience. The title character in Daisy Miller is an American visiting Europe. For James, Europe is a corrupting influence, a society that may be ancient by comparison but that has therefore had longer to become decadent and corrupt. Daisy is a particularly good example of the free, open, and even naive American whose freshness and honesty seem out of place in European society. The aristocratic people she meets are all suspicious of her and her demeanor, believing that she is in some way fooling them when in fact they are more likely to put on a social face to hide the truth from the re...