Why Alice jumped

Lascivious? I don't think so.

Magua seemed to change character in that moment, you see him swallowing, then lowering his knife.. some kind of realisation dawning on his face, he knows that Alice is contemplating suicide.. and I think Magua might just have realised that what he's done to Alice by killing Uncas (arguably her future/potential lover) is more or less the same as what was done to him by the English killing his family.

I think it's a combination of not wanting to live without Uncas and because she didn't want to live a life as a captive. The irony is if she had waited just a couple of more minutes she would have been rescued. Of course she may still have had no desire to live even if she had been saved. That is such a powerful, unforgettable and moving scene.



Go to bed Frank or this is going to get ugly .

Please help me settle a debate. My mother thinks Alice jumped off the cliff because she wanted to join the man she loved, Uncas, in death.

I think she's reading too much between the lines. I believe Alice jumped to escape being tortured and raped by Magua and his men. Magua even turns to her with a lascivious stare; then there's a shot of his knife shining in his hand, poised and ready to slice her open. Native Americans often raped white women and scalped them (white men did this to them after all).

What do you all think?

When I watched it a little while ago I was so confused, probably due to being bored the first half of the movie, and didn't know if the guy who fell before her and she were hawkeye and the girl in love with him because the two women looked too similar and a lot of the native americans looked similar and I was half watching in the beginning. I THOUGHT indeed that was hawkeye and the sister who loved him who made it out alive at the end, but then also I thought hawkeye was supposed to be a Mohican yet that older guy said he himself was the last one!

Since Alice looked like she was going to jump at the waterfall. Even with her sister Cora and Uncas still being alive. That tells me she didn't value her life very much. If she was willing to kill herself at that time. Than it should not be a surprise she would've killed herself on the cliff. Considering she thought all the people she loved are not alive and her hopes for a decent life is lost.

Saying all that I still believe she would've eventually killed herself even if Cora and Uncas were alive. She seemed suicidal to me. Probably suffered from profound depression.

White men did what? Scalped them after raping? Just ask the question without including your white guilt. You weren't there, you have no burden. Let it go. Be free

It's a courtesy to place a spoiler alert, or more importantly, NOT to put a spoiler in your subject header.

In the original novel there was a symbolic reason for it. Her and Madelaine Stowe's character were half-sisters. Alice's grandmother was in fact black. So according to the explanation given in the notes of the novel that I read, if her and Uncas had have got together then that would have symbolised all Americans, regardless of ethnicity, getting on with each other in the future (or at least not falling out due to ethnicity). Them both dying though symbolised that this would not happen, at least not for a long time.