SOURCE: "A Reading History: 'Hobomok' and Its Audience," in Cultural Transformations: Lydia Maria Child and the Literature of Reform, The University of Georgia Press, 1994, pp. 11-29.

[In the following essay, Mills focuses on Hobomok, exploring the tensions in the novel over race relations and colonialism in America.]

When Lydia Maria Child produced her first novel Hobomok in 1824, she was especially conscious of the prevailing literary tastes and social views held by men who stood prominently behind the pulpits, podiums, and desks of such key religious, academic, and literary institutions as the Unitarian church, Harvard College, the North American Review, and the Boston Athenaeum.¹ The novel and its reception provide a case study in how a social ideology, uniquely concentrated in identifiable civic associations and eloquently set forth by community spokesmen, shaped the creation and interpretation of an early American novel. Tracing the relationship between Child and these institutions and their representatives—individuals such as John Gorham Palfrey, her brother Convers Francis, and George Ticknor—illustrates how her readers, especially the critics of the North American Review, sought to regulate the period's social views by suggesting proper subject matter for American narratives and monitoring the way this material adhered to their values. Thus, Hobomok emerged within an interpretive community guided by social interests as well as literary nationalism. Simply said, for Child, pleasing her readers was never strictly a literary matter.²

Boston's civic leaders would have seen in Hobomok many of their own literary prescriptions, liberal religious beliefs, and racial theories. Yet according to an early critique of the novel in the North American Review, the series of incidents that concludes her narrative—the objectionable union of Hobomok and Mary Conant, a Pequod Indian and a white Puritan settler, the birth of "an infant semisavage," and Mary Conant's eventual marriage to a previous lover after Hobomok's magnanimous departure—are "not only unnatural, but revolting … to every feeling of delicacy in man or woman." Significantly, however, Child's seemingly radical version of race relations in Colonial America did not get the book banned in Boston. For, while the reviewer questions the appropriateness of the events, he feels its "excellencies outweigh its faults."³ A close look at the novel and the Brahmin institutional structures that received it reveals what Boston leaders found suitable: dramatic use of American materials, the unfavorable portrayal of stern Calvinism, and accepted conceptions of the Indian character.

To understand the readers Child won and the values they (and she) would have seen within the text, we should look closely at one of the scenes that the Review literary critic found so disagreeable: Mary Conant's decision to wed Hobomok. The circumstances under which this violation of racial boundaries occurs are desperate. Hobomok first hints at the possibility of marrying Mary Conant after finding her alone and in despair following the deaths of her mother, her close friend Lady Arabella, and apparently her lover Charles Brown, who, Miss Conant had only recently learned, supposedly drowned at sea. (Only later is it revealed that Brown escaped the shipwreck.) The description of Conant's response to Hobomok is a moral lesson in prose:

There was a chaos in Mary's mind;—a dim twilight, which had at first made all objects shadowy, and which was rapidly darkening into misery, almost insensible of its source. The sudden stroke which had dashed from her lips the long promised cup of joy, had almost hurled reason from his throne. What now had life to offer? If she went to England, those for whom she most wished to return, were dead. If she remained in America, what communion could she have with those around her? Even Hobomok, whose language was brief, figurative, and poetic, and whose nature was unwarped by the artifices of civilized life, was far preferable to them.⁴

According to the narrator, Mary Conant has three options: return to England, remain in Salem, or marry an Indian. But the deaths of English relatives have closed off the first option. And her mother's death has made it hard for her to embrace the second. Significantly, sympathetic communion with her father, Roger Conant, and her fellow townspeople is less imaginable than a union with Hobomok. Ruled more by her conflicting emotions than by reason, Mary Conant concludes that only her uncivilized lover can promise love and companionship.

The daughter is unable to experience suitable companionship with her father and other villagers because they have attempted to govern her affections with harsh Calvinist doctrine. Exemplifying this stern and unsympathetic faith is Roger Conant, a man whose religion took root during misfortune and poverty (H, 8). Conant, like his fictional cousin Young Goodman Brown, colors the world with the dark shades of his own understanding of sin. Unlike Hawthorne's Brown, however, Conant finds solace with the band of believers who rejected the Church of England and who, Child writes earlier, might be described as "dark, discontented bigots" (H, 6). Not surprisingly, he is an outspoken adversary of the Episcopalian Charles Brown and, along with the leaders of Salem, votes to banish Brown because he threatens the community with his "false" religion. As important as what Conant believes to be Brown's open worship of the devil's faith, however, is his courting of Conant's daughter. These acts disrupt the public and domestic spheres of Conant's world. Even before the church elders exiled Brown from the town, Roger Conant had banished him from his cottage.

As if to convince readers more fully of the magnitude of the father's hardness of heart—and of Mary's justification for rejecting her community—Child offers Mary one last chance for communion with her father. Just after Mary Conant agrees to marry her Indian lover, she returns to her empty home and resolves not to accept Hobomok's proposal. However, before she can carry through with this decision, her father returns and finds her with Brown's prayer book. Mr. Conant is so controlled by his unbending faith that, even after his wife's deathbed injunction to soften his heart toward Brown for Mary's sake, he rejects sympathy in favor of doctrine: "My soul abhorreth [the prayer book], as it doth the spirits of the bottomless pit"(H, 122). This final act drives his daughter to the "unnatural" union.

That Mary Conant's fateful decision is made under duress is clearly and repeatedly shown throughout the chapter. A litany of mitigating circumstances reinforces the tragic nature of the marriage. The narrator, for instance, ponders the ill-advised choice: "It was strange that trouble had power to excite her quiet spirit to so much irascibility; and powerful indeed must have been the superstition, which could induce so much beauty and refinement, even in a moment of desperation, to exchange the social band, stern and dark as it was, for the company of savages" (H, 122).⁵ Hobomok himself wonders whether he is not witnessing the ruin of Mary Conant's mind. And, during the Indian ceremony, the "pale and motionless" bride is seen as one who would have "seemed like a being from another world, had not her wild, frenzied look revealed too much of human wretchedness" (H, 123).

Clearly, the events leading to this marriage—the deaths of the women with whom Mary had shared a close bond, the fateful co-incidence of Hobomok's appearance, the severity of wilderness life, her father's harsh Calvinism and brutish love, and Brown's supposed death—rival even Job's trials. The care with which Child portrays these circumstances reveals her understanding of the enormity of Mary Conant's transgression. The lesson, it seems, is not that an interracial, cross-cultural marriage is possible, but that it is the final tragedy in a series of cruel events.⁶

But there are other morals as well, lessons that arise from the book's place within the Boston literary and religious communities. Child's depiction of the "stern and dark" Calvinist village, for example, corresponds with literary and religious doctrines advanced most clearly by the writers of the Harvard-influenced, Unitarian North American Review.⁷

By the early 1820s, Child would have been familiar with fiction and reviews of fiction that encouraged specific portrayals of the relationship between New England's forefathers and Indians. Child's introduction to the dialogue about American literature actually began with her reading of the North American Review. In 1846, reflecting upon her career in a letter to Rufus Wilmot Griswold, editor of the anthology Prose Writers in America, Child herself described the essential role this journal played in the creation of Hobomok. Not long after settling into the home of her brother Convers Francis in 1822, Child says she "took up the N. American Review, and read Mr. [John Gorham] Palfrey's review of Yamoyden, in which he eloquently describes the adaptation of early N. England history to the purposes of fiction" (SL, 232). What she would have read is one of the many eloquent appeals urging American writers to use American materials in their novels. In promoting utilization of the untamed landscape, New England's Puritan heritage, and Indian customs, Palfrey seconded calls for a national literature raised by fellow Review critics William Tudor, John Knapp, and William Howard Gardiner.⁸ The epic poem that Palfrey reviewed—James Wallis Eastburn's and Robert Sands's narrative poem "Yamoyden"—suggested a rough outline for the plot of Child's narrative.⁹ Yet Child found especially inspiring and sugges tive Palfrey's own assertion that what distinguished American life and history from that of Europe—and thus would eventually define American fiction—was the uneasy grouping of two distinct races. According to Palfrey, Indian superstitions would "furnish abundant food to an imagination inclined to the sombre and terrible, their primitive habits admit of pathos in the introduction of incidents of private life, and in public there occurred events enough to find place for the imposing qualities of heroism."¹⁰

Immediately after laying down this April 1821 issue of the North American Review, Child wrote the first chapter of Hobomok, echoing Palfrey's eloquent claims for a usable American past: "Two centuries only have elapsed, since our most beautiful villages reposed in the undisturbed grandeur of nature…. God was here in his holy temple, and the whole earth kept silence before him!" (H, 5). And, she would add, "it is no wonder that men who fled from oppression in their own country, to all the hardships of a remote and dreary province, should have exhibited a deep mixture of exclusive, bitter, and morose passions" (H, 6). Attributing her boldness to Palfrey's words, Child relates in her letter to Griswold that she went on to finish the entire work in just six weeks.

While her fictional response to Palfrey's review indicates that Child subscribed to early literary doctrine, it also indicates that she understood prevailing Unitarian religious views.¹¹ In significant ways, Hobomok writ large New England's, and especially Boston's, struggle to discard the remnants of an orthodox religious faith and thus resonates with the beliefs of those who directly inspired Child's work. Palfrey himself, like Convers Francis, was a Harvard graduate and Unitarian minister who at the time of his review had already served nearly three years as pastor of Boston's prominent Brattle Street church. Palfrey, Francis, and their intellectual peers of the North American Review, after all, would themselves have been profoundly shaped by the shifting views that had changed the direction of their academy.¹² Less than two decades earlier, Harvard College had elected Henry Ware to succeed the moderate Calvinist David Tappan as acting president.¹³ And though by the early 1820s one generation of scholars had passed through the Boston institution, pamphlets and pulpit oratories communicated the intent of orthodox Calvinists to win back New England souls. By the time Child's novel was published in 1824, however, Calvinists suffered a second-class status and Unitarians controlled the institutions of power in Boston. Remembering the arrival of the Calvinists's Calvinist, Lyman Beecher, to Boston in 1825, Harriet Beecher Stowe would write: "All the literary men of Massachusetts were Unitarian. All the trustees and professors of Harvard College were Unitarians. All the elite of wealth and fashion crowded Unitarian churches."¹⁴ Living with a Harvard seminary graduate and Unitarian minister, Child shared the intoxicating draught from this cultural chalice. She participated in conversations at Watertown that included such figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and John Greenleaf Whittier; she continued to read the leading literary and religious journals, critiquing William Ellery Channing's article on Napoleon in the Christian Examiner (July-August 1827) in a letter to a young Margaret Fuller.¹⁵ The daily interaction with the forms and dialogue of cultural power helped determine her vision of Puritan ancestors.

When Child characterized the conflict between Mary Conant and her father, then, she drew upon this disenchantment with Calvinism. Like many in Child's generation and the generation before her, Mary Conant finds little religious or social nourishment from neighbors who have inherited a legalistic faith developed in response to an unrelenting environment. Like that of her creator, Mary Conant's religious spirit is more tolerant and imaginative, one nurtured less by an Old Testament regard for law than a New Testament elevation of divine love. Child reveals her own liberal beliefs in the novel when she writes that the Puritans thought little, "amid the fierce contests of opinion, of the latent treasures of mind or the rich sympathies of taste." Instead, she continues, a "sound, doctrinal exposition of Romans brought more religious warmth into their hearts, than the nightly exhibition of the numerous hosts shining in the broad belt of the heavens, those mighty apostles, which God has sent forth to proclaim throughout creation, his majesty and power" (H, 91). Because Salem's fathers seemed more concerned to keep Satan at a distance rather than God in their hearts, they were unable to give Mary what she asked of Hobomok: a love unaffected by social artifice or limited by a stern sense of duty. "Liberty of conscience," warned Goodman Higginson, "is the gilded bait whereby Satan has caught many souls. The threshold of hell is paved with toleration" (H, 65). What drove Mary to despair and in part compelled the Boston religious community to reform their faith was their heritage of a harsh and often unfeeling faith.

Child's belief that Calvinism did not nurture an enlightened and loving community had become a familiar judgment of a new breed of Boston ministers. In May 1919 William Ellery Channing forcefully articulated a Unitarian response to orthodox faith during his ordination sermon for Jared Sparks, an eventual editor of the North American Review and future reviewer of Hobomok. In pamphlet form this address, entitled "Unitarian Christianity," circulated more widely than any other before the Webster-Haynes debates over nullification in 1830.¹⁶ Belief in a vengeful God, Channing argues, will not lead to the development of good morals. On the contrary,

it tends to discourage the timid, to give excuses to the bad, to feed the vanity of the fanatical, and to offer shelter to the bad feelings of the malignant. By shocking, as it does, the fundamental principles of morality, and by exhibiting a severe and partial Deity, it tends strongly to pervert the moral faculty, to form a gloomy, forbidding, and servile religion, and to lead men to substitute censoriousness, bitterness, and persecution, for a tender and impartial charity.¹⁷

Channing's unsympathetic characterization of Calvinism anticipates Child's portrayal of Roger Conant. Interestingly, Channing (and Child) foresaw that such masculine severity had to be softened by "tender and impartial charity." His images and rhetoric prepare parishioners for a gentler faith. As Child suggests in her novel, this charity can be more powerfully displayed in the actions of women than in the cold doctrine of men.

The emerging liberal morality illuminates more than Child's characterizations of the differing religious temperaments of Roger and Mary Conant. It explains why such a book came to be written and what values such a book could promote. By challenging Calvinism for its perversion of the "moral faculty," Channing and other Unitarian apologists introduced more rational ways to see the struggle for salvation.¹⁸ In their enlightened religious and civic perspectives, proper habits and not inborn nature became increasingly important if redemption was no longer arbitrarily predetermined. The formation of virtuous habits, then, became the high charge of every Christian citizen. And, because the intellectual and religious education of its citizens fell upon the leaders of Boston, these city fathers employed private and public means to nourish the intellect and sentiment. While Child might not have embraced the "cold rationality of the Unitarians,"¹⁹ she did share this faith in reasoned self-restraint and believed that literature could foster a virtuous citizenry.

By writing in a form that, according to most reviewers and religious leaders, shaped the affections, Child joined in this cultivation of proper values. Not surprisingly, the caretakers of public good—those who controlled the publishing houses and promoted literary careers—attended to her fiction. Later in his life, George Hillard, a prominent Brahmin lawyer, acknowledged the important relationship between the merchant class and culture, and, importantly, between art and social values: "A country in which all men are engaged in acquisition of property … without books, without scholars, without ideas … contains within itself the element of destruction." Culture, Hillard told the Mercantile Library Association, taught "lessons of humility, patience, and submission."²⁰ Such values were especially important to inculcate in lower and middle classes whose changing status would disturb the social structure.

By the mid-1820s, Boston Brahmins had formed the Boston Athenaeum and the North American Review and thus had instituted the means to articulate their conception of social possibilities and of virtuous habits. Both these institutions shared common founders, including the Reverends William Emerson, John Eliot, and Joseph Tuckerman, among others. First producing the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review—the precursor to the North American Review which ran from 1805 to 1811—the group of men helped form the Athenaeum in 1807. The Boston Athenaeum provided a reading room for both the city's merchants and intellectuals and soon became a place "to encourage among its users the development of the moral and intellectual qualities most conducive to social stability; to induce a sense of identity, cohesion and solidarity among its patrons; and to facilitate the career success of proprietors and their families."²¹ Importantly, in 1832 Child became only the second woman to be granted access to the prestigious, all-male institution.

Beginning in 1815, the North American Review provided another visible forum for the promotion and governing of a social ideology. Its goals were carried forth from its predecessor, the Monthly Anthology. The Anthology had announced the desire to "guard the seats of taste and morals at home from the incursions of the 'paynim host.'"²² Writing to George Ticknor, one of the members of the Anthology Society and eventual patron of Child, Alexander Everett conspicuously connects the Anthology's (and its successor's) social ideology with its literary criticism: "A man who has seen anything of life tends not to be startled by examples of great profligacy and corruption of all kinds—but I love to believe that literature and philosophy afford the best security that one can have of general integrity."²³ In Everett's mind, the virtues imparted by literature secured more than isolated good; benefiting as well would be a community still testing the fit of democracy. It became the charge of people such as Alexander Everett, his brother Edward Everett, and George Ticknor to oversee the journal's fiction, manage virtue, and thus promote social stability.²⁴

Child demonstrated when she wrote Hobomok that she understood the responsibility these literary Bostonians spoke of privately and publicly. And, though within the next decade she would increasingly challenge the views these arbiters of social values urged, her successful efforts to obtain the patronage of George Ticknor after the first notice in the North American Review reveals that she appreciated the peculiar role such men could play in advancing the careers of young writers. Child could have chosen few others who surpassed this prominent figure's influence. Ticknor—a man whom one historian has called the representative literary Bostonian—was directly or indirectly involved with the founding and shaping of the Boston Athenaeum, the North American Review, and Harvard College.²⁵ He matured during a time when, in his words, Boston citizens "felt involved in each other's welfare and fate" and religious controversy and the slavery debate had not yet irreparably divided the sympathies of the "compact, united, and kindly community."²⁶

As her letter dated 29 March 1825 indicates, luck and ambition led Child (then twenty-two) to address George Ticknor. Evidently he had offered some "flattering observations" about Hobomok to Lois Curtis, the widow of his half-brother (SL, 3). Child's letter reveals that she wasted little time in seeking his help: "To have been praised by such a man was sufficient to urge me on to mightier efforts; and, under the influence of this inspiration, I had already commenced a new work, when a letter from my publisher [Cummings, Hilliard & Company] informed me that the sale of Hobomok had left me considerably in debt. 1000 were printed, and only half sold" (SL, 4). Child's letter to Ticknor indicates that she had a sure sense of the individual she addressed and the set of readers he represented. Striking a skillful rhetorical balance between respectful admiration and undaunted directness, Child cuts to the quick: "You may ask, what do you wish, or expect me to do? I answer, your influence in the literary and fashionable world is very great, and a few words timely spoken by you would effect more than my utmost exertions. Your judgment would have much weight with those whose taste is law" (SL, 4). In the end, Child tells Ticknor she is asking him to do what her brother cannot and informs the civic leader that both her brother and Mrs. Curtis are unaware of her "presumptuous action." Within two days, Ticknor answered Child's epistle. To her embarrassment, as her letter of March 31 reveals, he requested information regarding the terms of her publisher's contract, apparently with the intent of assisting Child financially (SL, 5).

The association between Child and Ticknor did not end when the difficulties surrounding the novel cleared up. Child dedicated The Rebels, the new book she had commenced at the time of her first letter to Ticknor, to her patron. The admiration Ticknor evidently felt toward Child resulted in useful public exposure as well. During the widely celebrated tour of Lafayette in 1825, Ticknor invited Child to a reception for the French general.²⁷ Finally, the two also exchanged research prior to the publication of Child's biography of Madame de Staël; Ticknor's lectures were part of Child's sources (SL, 21-22). The fruitful relationship between the two ended only when Child entered the abolitionist ranks. The breaking off indicates that prior to Child's call for immediate emancipation she and Ticknor shared compatible values within their spheres of influence.

Not surprisingly, Ticknor's well-placed words provided what Child had hoped—"a new currency to the unfortunate book" (SL, 4). More precisely, the circulation of his views communicated the work's consonance with Brahmin values and resulted in a more favorable review of Hobomok in the North American Review. Again, while the earlier critique had not been entirely unfavorable, it had given a false impression by reacting vehemently to the interracial marriage. To readers understanding that art fruitfully embodies a community ideology and that this prominent review journal stood as the voice for Boston social values, the critic of Child's first novel offered a message for both Child and the reading public: Mary Conant's marriage, remarriage, and reassimiliation into society disturbed her culture's lessons of order. Eliminate such an indelicate relationship, cater to the arbiters of taste, and success, both literary and social, would be attainable. "[Hobomok's] excellencies outweigh its faults," the reviewer observes. "We have been more particular in speaking of the latter, because we hope to hear again from the author, and feel assured that they are only the results of inexperience in this kind of writing; that the author may amend them and at the same time retain all the other qualifications for a good writer, which are here exhibited."²⁸ While the reviewer was careful to praise and not bury the work, his commendation was certainly not unqualified.

Whereas what had already been written and published could not be conveniently amended even if Child had wished it, the work could receive an amended reading, a reading that would much more clearly identify how the text fit within the value structure of its audience. In the July 1825 issue of the North American Review, the current editor Jared Sparks did this refitting with his critique of Hobomok and nine other American publications he terms "Waverley novels." After a brief discussion of the particular patterns of these novels (i.e., their historical nature, descriptions of real scenery as opposed to "arbitrary combinations of fancy," and dramatic dialogue), Sparks expresses the magazine's self-conscious efforts to guide popular tastes. He notes that it is his duty to "exercise a strict surveillance over this department of literature, to be careful in pointing out the merits or demerits of individual authors, as far as practicable, and prompt to oppose pernicious influences, and endeavor to give a beneficial direction to a force, that they cannot resist if they would."²⁹

The force that could not be resisted, of course, was the burgeoning interest in novels. The literary and religious journals evinced a persistent concern over the fearful effects of novel reading. As one reviewer for the Christian Examiner would write at the decade's end, the habit of novel reading was "injurious, for in its ordinary acceptation, it means an exclusive reading of works of mere amusement without judgment or selection." According to this reader, the "constant excitement of the mind, this living upon luxuries, would soon destroy the vigor of the intellect and feelings, even if novels were, which no one pretends, books to which we should go to borrow correct views of life and duty."³⁰ Still, like Sparks, this critic does not conclude that all romances are to be avoided. Rather, he simply concedes that the important question becomes whether or not a particular work will benefit or injure its readers.

Sparks's surveillance of Hobomok, then, suggests that, though Child's novel had not changed, the managers of virtue had revised their opinions and decided to define more closely the text's more beneficial features. Sparks first looks to his review's literary prescriptions in order to explain why Child included such an unrefined event. Granting that one must admit the "bad taste" and "disagreeable impression" of the interracial marriage, he qualifies such a harsh judgment by echoing the words of Child's novel and of Palfrey's 1821 review of "Yamoyden": "Still it should be remembered, in respect to its probability, that if our ancestors were more sternly virtuous, they were certainly without much of the delicacy and refinement of the present generation." He also excerpts episodes from Hobomok that disclose both his literary taste and social ideology: the deathbed scenes of the "Ladies" Mrs. Conant and Arabella Johnson (two women who have submissively sacrificed their lives for their husbands), the striking "delineations of Indian character" that depict the uncivilized nature of the noble Hobomok and his Indian rival, Corbitant, and Hobomok's decision to leave Mary Conant and disappear from white civilization after discovering that Charles Brown still lives. The review does not end with emphasis upon the unfortunate incident but with acknowledgement that the work is not of "the same ephemeral class, with some others of our American novels" and that "it will stand the test of repeated readings, and it will obtain them."³¹ This last judgment is high praise indeed—especially since conservative Boston reviewers consistently stressed the maxim that, if a book is worth one reading, it is worth reading more than once. With the increasing ability to buy many books, then, reviewers wanted to shape the criteria which readers could use to discriminate between an eternal and ephemeral class of literature.

What provided the opportunity for "repeated readings" was a reassessment of the novel—that is, a new interpretation evolving from a cultural negotiation between the author, text, and readers. In this interaction within one important sphere of influence, the novel survived in part because it served the demands of early nationalistic literary prescriptions, community religious beliefs, and expectations regarding acceptable social possibilities. While the unfortunate event of Hobomok could never be expunged, its role in the novel could be reframed and thus the primary "meanings" of the work amended.

Perhaps Sparks's views are most telling in the way they align Child's novel with the period's conception of the Indian in national life and literature. Sparks's own perception of Indians, a perception consistent with other writers of the North American Review, is evidenced in his analysis of the poem "Escalala, an American Tale." In this review published earlier in 1825, Sparks observes that with his few stern and uniform traits the Indian can never offer "those delicate and innumerable shades, which are spread over the surface of civilised society." Once the definitive Indian traits are told, then all is told; Indians' "generosity, contempt of danger, patience under suffering, revenge, and cruelty" are the virtues and vices that move their affections.³²

The literary manifestations of these views were the Indian types that populated the new American novels: the "noble savage" whose generosity was usually extended to whites and the vengeful native whose cruelty to settlers had no bounds. If, following Sparks's reasoning, writers stretched verisimilitude by Europeanizing native American characters, they violated one of the early prescriptions of historical fiction. Characters and events, after all, had to reflect what was then "known" about the past and about "savages." For Sparks, Child's vengeful Corbitant and generous Hobomok capture the limited strains of Indian temperament. Of course, juxtaposing this less sophisticated racial "type" with colonial ancestors helped writers define the American character, a figure who contained the more complex shades of civilization. Introducing extended excerpts of the confrontation between Corbitant and Hobomok, Sparks remarks that "the principle beauties in this work are to be found in the delineations of the Indian character" and confesses that "we have seldom met with more successful efforts in this way."³³ Thus, by embodying her community's understanding of "savages," Child served her reading public and achieved recognition.³⁴

Interestingly, while Hobomok's and Mary Conant's marriage and offspring seem to signal new social possibilities, Sparks's review overlooks this element of the novel in order to reinforce the reigning cultural view that the Indian and European races must remain separate. He can do so because Child's text is not entirely committed to the possibilities she offers. Though Child does alter the period's conventional plottings of Indian narratives—a fact that does manifest more enlightened views of race and herald her later commitment to a multiracial vision of America—she still sustains her culture's prevailing attitudes towards Indians throughout the novel. At key moments, Child carefully differentiates the Indians from the new race of Americans; she discriminates between an instinctual and educated understanding of God and between an ungoverned and civilized emotion.

Child introduces such distinctions when the awestruck Pequods and Narragansets observe the Puritan settlers' domesticated oxen. Apparently, though the Indians knew much about nature, these same people could not understand how Englishmen led "buffalo" around by the horns and compelled them to stand or walk at their will. Describing the Indians as "unlettered" and "untutored," Child draws attention to their untrained and undisciplined intellect and thus advantageously contrasts their European neighbors. However, the chapter's opening epigraph emphasizes an even greater lack:

Know ye the famous Indian race?
How their light form springs, in strength and grace,
Like the pine on their native mountain side,
That will not bow in its deathless pride;
Whose rugged limbs of stubborn tone,
No plexuous power of art will own,
But bend to Heaven's red bolt alone!
(H, 29)

Taken from Eastburn's and Sands's poem "Yamoyden," the lines capture one of the dominant features of the untrained race: their ability to endure even the harshest physical trials with stubborn pride. More importantly, however, the narrator's ensuing reflections affirm that in being the messengers of a just and powerful God the Christian Pilgrims command the heavens. Because the Europeans appear to control nature, the Indians see them as "the favorite children of the Great Spirit" (H, 29). This awe explains why the more powerful tribes did not "rise in their savage majesty" and eliminate the unprotected settlements. The narrator concludes that such a fact "is indeed a wonderful exemplification of the superiority of the intellect over mere brutal force" (H, 29). In establishing their city on the hill, the New England forefathers did figuratively wield "Heaven's red bolt."

What makes Hobomok different from others in his tribe is his identification with the enlightened values closely connected with the domestic world of Mary Conant and with spiritual insights fostered in nature. Like the Indians who watch in amazement the domesticated oxen, Hobomok wonders at Mary's magical curing of his mother's illness. After his own priests had pronounced that his mother would die, Mary administered the cordials that saved her. Child weaves the words of worship into Hobomok's response to Mary Conant: "and ever since that time, he had looked upon her with reverence, which almost amounted to adoration" (H, 33).³⁵

Significantly, Child details Hobomok's reaction to this miracle worker shortly after Corbitant, his Indian rival, questions Hobomok's faithfulness to his own race. Corbitant himself rejects any possibility of amalgamation between the distinct cultures and asserts that Hobomok is more sympathetic to "the white-faced daughter of Conant" than to the women of his own tribe (H, 31). Hobomok, it is revealed, has refused to marry an Indian woman. Corbitant angers and confuses Hobomok through both his perceptive estimate of Hobomok's feelings and his prediction of genocide. (Child terms this prophecy the "melancholy presentiment of the destruction of his race" [H, 33].) What follows this confrontation is a revealing series of events. Setting Hobomok alone in nature—within the tranquil environment of a setting sun, warbling birds, and majestic seacoast—Child offers a Christianized translation of Hobomok's uncivilized contemplation of the Book of Nature: "The star, which had arisen in Bethlehem, had never gleamed along his path; and the dark valley of the shadow of death had never been illuminated with the brightness of revealed truth. But though the intellect be darkened, there are rays from God's own throne, which enter into the peacefulness and purity of the affections, shedding their mild lustre on the ignorance of man" (H, 33-34). The knowledge of God is revealed to Hobomok not in the philosophy of men but through his "chariot wheels in the distant thunder" and "drapery in the clouds" (H, 34). This ability to see God in the stars links the spiritual natures of Hobomok and Mary Conant. Again, Mary has in part rejected her father's religion because he and his stern neighbors are warmed more by the doctrine of men than by "the nightly exhibition of the numerous hosts shining in the broad belt of the heavens" (H, 91). Unlike Corbitant, Mary's Indian lover shows the potential for enlightenment. And, like Mary Conant, Hobomok's enlightenment is defined in terms that resonate with Channing's sermon "Unitarian Christianity" and anticipate the "transcendentalisms" of the next decade.

Yet, though Child seems to be suggesting that the Indian may discover the truths available to any man with an open heart, she reminds the reader that even one such as Hobomok, a man who seems redeemed by his worship of Mary Conant and by an instinctual feeling of God, is confined by his nature. The dramatic postscript to this momentary peace reinforces this cultural gospel. Gazing at the stars appearing on the dark horizon, Hobomok is shaken from his reverie by the whizzing arrow of Corbitant. Thrust back into reality, he quickly counterattacks, revealing the definitive passions of the Indian rather than the shades of civilized life. Having offered a rendering of the truths all enlightened men may glimpse, Child now returns to the "realities" of the "untutored" race: '"Love your enemy,' was a maxim Hobomok had never learned, and the tomahawk was already raised above the head of his stupified victim, when the sound of voices was heard in the thicket, and springing into his former path, he pursued his way homeward, as fleetly as some wild animal of the forest" (H, 34). In Child's fictional world, it seems that Hobomok can only come so far on the path from savagery before he must turn his back upon civilization. At the end of the novel, Hobomok again mirrors this plunge into the thicket. Discovering that Charles Brown still lives, Hobomok rejects his impulse to kill his white rival and instead decides to sacrifice his own desires for those of his wife. Ironically, his most "civilized" or "chivalrous" act is one that seems forever to preclude Hobomok's Christianization and any lasting cultural amalgamation.

In the conclusion to Child's novel, we learn that Mary Conant's and Hobomok's "semi-savage" offspring—renamed Charles Hobomok Conant—distinguishes himself at Harvard, finishes his studies in England, and, not surprisingly, eventually loses his "Indian appellation" and thus the more conspicuous traces of his indelicate history (H, 150). The novel Hobomok, like Charles Hobomok Conant, experienced a similar cycle of cultural accommodation. First uneasily accepted by genteel reviewers, it finally achieved the praise that assured its place upon the bookshelves of a cultural elite. At this point in her career, Child welcomed such acclaim. As yet, she more readily accepted the values of those who promoted her.

But though the Indian is purged from both Mary Conant's and her son's life, Conant's survival signals that Child's imagination followed different paths, even when embodying some of the beliefs of her conservative readers. In her unwillingness to sacrifice Mary Conant, Child demonstrates that her fiction's lesson—her story's message and values—must also be found in a community's reassimilation and not rejection of a fallen character. In one of her next major productions, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), Child would much more dramatically test her community's ability to accommodate a writer whose works and acts transgressed social and literary boundaries.

Notes

¹ For analyses of Boston literary culture and the values it promoted, see George E. DeMille, "The Birth of the Brahmins," Sewanee Review 37 (April 1929): 172-88; Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians (New York: Dutton, 1947); Stanley French, "The Cemetery as Cultural Institution: The Establishment of Mount Auburn and the 'Rural Cemetery' Movement," American Quarterly 26 (March 1974): 37-59; Paul Goodman, "Ethics and Enterprise: The Values of a Boston Elite, 1800-1860," American Quarterly 18 (Fall 1966): 437-51; Martin Green, The Problem of Boston (New York: Norton, 1966); and Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1970).

² See Richard Johnson, "What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?" Social Text 16 (1986-87): 38-80 and Jane Tompkins, "An Introduction to Reader-Response Criticism," in Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980), ix-xxvi. Johnson's definition of cultural studies as an analysis of power and of social possibilities and his suggestive discussion of a text's role in the circuits of culture helped me rethink the fluid role Child's novel played within public and private spheres. Tompkins's overview reinforced my belief that teachers and scholars do their own important cultural work when they reinsert the text within its historical milieu. Literature is written to affect one's thinking and thus one's action in the world. Seeing the text as an active agent in shaping social values and political positions reframes the way students and teachers can think about literary works.

³ "Hobomok," North American Review 19 (July 1824): 263.

⁴ Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok & Other Writings on Indians, ed. Carolyn L. Karcher (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1986), 121. Subsequent page references will be from this edition.

⁵ In part the chaos Mary experiences also arises from a curious ritual she performs early in the book. Wishing to discover who is to be her husband, she enters the outskirts of the forest and chants, "Whoe'er my bridegroom is to be, / Step in the circle after me" (H, 13). To her surprise, Hobomok rather than Charles Brown first follows her steps. Though Brown immediately trails, later during her moment of personal crisis Mary cannot shake the import of Hobomok's having "appear[ed] in the mystic circle" (H, 121).

⁶ For another reading of this interracial marriage, see Karcher's introduction to Hobomok. Based in part upon her analysis of Child's revision of "Yamoyden" (the epic poem which forms the basis for Hobomok), Karcher argues that "Child's radical revision of patriarchal script thus culminates not in the reassertion of patriarchal authority, but in its overthrow, not in the death of a heroine who has dared to challenge the religious, racial, and sexual ideology on which patriarchy rests, but in her achievement of happiness and with it the triumph of the alternative values she has embraced. Mary returns to the Puritan community on her own terms, unscathed by her violation of its taboos against miscegenation and divorce" (xxxi-xxxii). Whereas I agree with Karcher's interpretation of the novel as an attack upon Puritanism and the patriarchal structures which house these Puritan values, I also believe that Child's reviewers were not necessarily eager to "[expunge the novel] from the historical record" (xxxiv).

⁷ Any analysis of the early literary doctrine of the North American Review begins with the scholarship of Harry Hayden Clark. See Clark, "Literary Criticism in the North American Review, 1815-1835," in Transactions of the Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 32 (1940): 299-350. See also Neal Frank Doubleday, "Doctrine for Fiction in the North American Review: 1815-1826," in Literature and Ideas in America: Essays in Memory of Harry Hayden Clark, ed. Robert Falk (Athens: Ohio UP, 1975), 20-39; Frank Luther Mott, ''The North American Review, " A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850 (Cambridge: Belknap, 1957), 2: 219-61; Darwin Shrell, "Nationalism and Aesthetics in the North American Review: 1815-1850," in Studies in American Literature, ed. Waldo McNeir and Leo B. Levy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1960), 11-21; and Robert E. Streeter, "Association Psychology and Literary Nationalism in the North American Review, 1815-1825," American Literature 17 (1945): 243-54.

⁸ See especially William Tudor, "The United States and England," North American Review 1 (May 1815): 61-91, and "Miss Huntley's Poems," North American Review 1 (May 1815): 111-21; John Knapp, "National Poetry," North American Review 7 (December 1818): 169-76; and W. H. Gardiner, "The Spy," North American Review 15 (July 1822): 250-82.

⁹ See Karcher, "Introduction," Hobomok, xvii-xxxiii.

¹⁰ John Gorham Palfrey, "Yamoyden," North American Review 12 (April 1821): 484.

¹¹ As Deborah Clifford notes in her biography, Child, while influenced by her brother's faith, was attracted to another liberal religion, Swedenborgianism. See Crusader for Freedom, 36-38. "As a member of [Convers'] household," Clifford writes, "she was a faithful attendant at Sunday services in the First Church of Watertown. She also joined the women of the parish in distributing food, clothing, and other necessities to the town's poor. But Convers' growing attachment to Unitarianism found no echo in her own heart" (36). Instead, in the fall of 1821 Child signed her name to a "declaration of faith in the doctrines espoused by the Swedenborgian Church," and "on February 10, 1822, the records of the Boston Society of the New Jerusalem show that Lydia Maria Francis had been admitted a member of the Society" (38). Swedenborg believed in what he called a doctrine of correspondences. That is, he held that "everything in the natural world, including man, is the expression of, and corresponds to, some higher spiritual reality" (38).

¹² Palfrey and Convers Francis attended Harvard together. Francis, in fact, was a friend of Palfrey and had supported him during his unsuccessful efforts to be elected to Phi Beta Kappa at the end of Palfrey's junior year. Palfrey also officiated Convers's ordination at Watertown in May 1819. See Frank Otto Gatell, John Gorham Palfrey and the New England Conscience (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1963), 25-26, and Clifford, Crusader for Freedom, 35.

¹³ See Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 4-7. Howe writes that any "student of Harvard Unitarianism quickly learns that it was—and was considered in its day—the religion of an elite" (7).

¹⁴ Ibid., 8. For a more extensive account of this conflict between Calvinism and Unitarianism in the Boston area, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: Norton, [1973]), part 1, "A Calvinist Girlhood, 1800-1823." In conjunction with her study of Catharine Beecher, Sklar recounts the battles that her father, Lyman Beecher, waged with Boston's religious liberals.

¹⁵ The presence of Emerson, Parker, and Whittier is mentioned in SL, 3 and CC, 23. To Fuller, Child writes that she is "not prepared to give [Channing's review] the unqualified praise, which many bestow. Neither do I think its spirit sufficiently impartial. I like his high theory exceedingly; but is there no injustice in comparing Bonaparte with a certain abstract, ideal excellence, rather than with any of his species?" (SL, 11). Already Child is questioning the views of cultural leaders and revealing a willingness to entertain differing positions—though she does admit later in the letter that she herself is not an "unqualified admirer of Bonaparte."

Convers Francis's growing prestige among the Unitarian clergy certainly helped Child's career. For response to Francis's 1826 sermon preached at the ordination of Rev. Benjamin Kent, see "Francis's Ordination Sermon," Christian Examiner 3 (July-August 1826): 333-36.

¹⁶ Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 100.

¹⁷ Ibid., 101.

¹⁸ See Howe, chapter 3, "Reason and Revelation."

¹⁹ Clifford, Crusader for Freedom, 36.

²⁰ Goodman, "Ethics and Enterprise," 444. Boston's wealthy merchants and intellectuals clearly understood that, while America could celebrate its democratic principles, such an emphasis on individual responsibility had its risks. Boston Brahmins feared related threats to social stability as well: the influx of European immigrants, a growing industrialism, and the eventual clerical disestablishment.

For studies of Boston and New England worries over changing social and economic conditions (and the effects of such changes upon class, race, and gender relationships), see Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1977), and Oscar Handlin, Boston's Immigrants, 1790-1880: A Study in Acculturation (Cambridge: Belknap, 1941). For a study of the impact of clerical disestablishment, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Anchor, 1988).

²¹ Story, "Class and Culture in Boston," 190.

²² Quoted in David B. Tyack, George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967), 26.

²³ Ibid., 28-29.

²⁴ In his 1824 Phi Beta Kappa address, Edward Everett, editor of the North American Review from 1820 to 1823, asserted that "it is impossible to anticipate what garments our native muses will weave for themselves. To foretell our literature would be to create it" (quoted in Doubleday, "Doctrine for Fiction in the North American Review, " 20). Such a statement implies the lofty intentions of Review editors and critics.

²⁵ See Green, "George Ticknor: The Aristocrat in a Democracy," in The Problem of Boston, 102-21.

²⁶ Tyack, George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins, 13.

²⁷ See Baer, The Heart Is Like Heaven: The Life of Lydia Maria Child, 42.

²⁸ "Hobomok," North American Review 19 (July 1824): 262.

²⁹ [Jared Sparks], "Recent American Novels," North American Review 21 (July 1825): 79-81, 81 , 83.

³⁰ "Novels," Christian Examiner 6 (May 1829): 173.

³¹ [Sparks], "Recent American Novels," 87, 90, 95.

³² [Jared Sparks], "Escalala, an American Tale," North American Review 20 (January 1825): 211. For Sparks's correspondence regarding Indian policy during the latter part of the 1820s, see Herbert B. Adams, The Life and Writings of Jared Sparks (Freeport: Books for Libraries, 1970), 1: 274-82.

Published in July 1838, Jared Sparks's and Cornelius Conway Felton's review of Thomas McKenney's and James Hall's History of the Indian Tribes of North America provides another interesting analysis of Native American traits and literature. See "McKenney and Hall's History of the North American Indians," North American Review 47 (July 1838): 135-48. The writers criticize Native Americans for their failure to "blend themselves with their conquerors, as if there had been some natural repugnance between the white man's and the red man's blood" (138). Such commentary wrongly implies that the reviewers were willing to accept amalgamation when they clearly were not.

Their comments on "Indian" fiction also show how tastes had evolved: "Poets and novelists have given the rein to their imagination, in describing the poetical life, and picturesque eloquence, of the Indians. The representations they have given are utterly false. There is nothing pleasing to the imagination in the dirty and smokey cabin of the Indian chief" (138). His comments regarding Native American religion still resonate, however, with aspects of Child's novel: "His religion is founded upon the simple conception of a Supreme Being… . His views of another life are distinct enough, but utterly insufficient to produce any exalting tendency in his conduct and character in this" (139).

³³ [Sparks], "Recent American Novels," 90.

³⁴ See Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1965), 213-14. Pearce sees Child's character as exemplifying the noble Indian type and the book as relating the "destruction of heroic savage life" (213). Pearce offers a much larger context within which to understand Indian narratives. See part 2, "The Life and Death of the American Savage, 1777-1851."

³⁵ The use of Mary as a "healer" and as the agent for any possible reform in Hobomok demonstrates how well a figure of the domestic realm could embody her period's values. What William Ellery Channing and others imagined in their new faith, after all, was that "tender and impartial charity" could replace the severe legalism of Calvinism. To trace the features of this rational and humanistic faith, Unitarian spokespersons who doubled as literary critics turned to the language of the heart. They increasingly found this language in the domestic sphere.

A review of Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, the work of another novelist championed by the North American Review, further encourages this delineation of domestic life. Though W. H. Gardiner explains that what distinguishes Cooper's works and this particular novel is its unending dangers and escapes, he also observes that the continuous stream of compelling action could be "relieved, and their effect consequently heightened, by the mixture of a little quiet domestic life." For instance, "a few in-door pictures something above those at the quarters of Colonel Munro, and a few strokes of humor … would have been a prodigious improvement" (Gardiner, "Cooper's Novels," North American Review 23 [July 1826]: 191). In Child's work it becomes clear that domestic life would provide an important stage upon which to celebrate and inculcate cultural values.