Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok

I must admit that while I was reading Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok I struggled to find interest in the narrative. A hundred and twenty pages into the novel, and having read Carolyn Karcher’s introduction, I realized that Mary’s interracial marriage to Hobomok would only take place out of Mary’s desperation (Child 123,125, 133,135). However, after reading Brian W. Dippie’s first three chapters of The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy, I found more potential in Hobomok. Dippie argues that during the 1800s the idea of the “vanishing” Native American race became a widely spread notion, which allowed “progressive” Anglo-Americans to reassert and to construct and American identity. Dippie writes,

the ‘inoxerable destiny’ of the Indians, like that of the wilderness with which they shared an almost symbiotic relationship, was to recede before civilization’s advance. Their fate had important implications for white Americans self-consciously searching for a national identity. (15)

Here, Dippie explains that disseminating inaccurate notions about the genocide of Native Americans, not only reinforced thoughts of more “civilized” times, but also ideas of a growing white American identity. Also that progress would become exclusively tied to the changing landscape, in which Native Americans would have to disappear because of their perceived interdependent relationship with the wilderness. The conception of a vanishing Native American race as part of an inevitable “destiny” becomes salient in Hobomok’s departure. After Charles Brown comes back from England and encounters Hobomok in the forest, Hobomok leaves. In fact, he seems to vanish into the wilderness. The narrator tells, “He paused on a neighboring hill, looked toward his wigwam… with a bursting heart again murmured his farewell and blessing forever passed away from New England” (Child 141). Thus, Hobomok appears to move deeper into the forest and disappear. After reading Dippie’s text, this passage seemed much more meaningful. It not only depicts Dippie’s point about the destined desertion of Native Americans, but also Karcher’s claim about Child’s growth as an advocate for equality.

In Hobomok, Child presents her early understanding of racial co-existence and intermingling, which based on the ending of the novel is destined to fail. Child’s Hobomok demonstrates how constructions of identity and nation permeate a text, and work to reassert such notions. For example, although the innovative part of this text is the idea of a white puritan daughter running away into the wilderness to marry a Native American, the narrative’s conclusion deems the idea of interracial marriage as desperate and fatal. Also the erasure of a Native American identity in Hobomok’s son (Child 150) works to reiterate the idea that power remains in the hands of the imagined growing white population—which connects to Ezra F. Tawil’s “Domestic Frontier Romance, or, How the Sentimental Heroine Became White.” Therefore Hobomok becomes interesting because of how it depicts the complexities of marking a change in understanding racial relations in America, and also how writing allows an author to develop new and more complex ideas about race. In Child’s case, writer’s growth can be seen in  her An Appeal For the Indians, which although far from perfect—and still saturated by the kind of nostalgia unveiled in Lora Romero’s “Vanishing Americans: Gender, Empire and New Historicism”—the text, certainly demonstrates a much more politicized and conscious writer…but we can talk about this in class. I am curious to hear what others thought.