Patriarchal Puritanism, England, and the Native American in Hobomok

Like Katie mentioned in her blog, I too was hoping for a radical feminist/anti-racist text when I started reading Hobomok. What I found was a novel that seemed more interested in nationalist and religious issues. The various religious debates and sermons in the text were focused on establishing the Puritan Church in a new land and casting out the British Episcopal Church, thus effectively separating from England. In just one example of this, Mr. Conant puts separatist religious concerns above the concerns of race relations: “To my mind there is more danger of Satan’s killing us with the rat’s-bane of toleration, than the Lord’s taking us off with the Indian arrows” (37). Conant’s rejection of Charles Brown due to his religion is also the catalyst for the whole issue of miscegenation later in the novel. This seems to put the religious issues in a higher place of importance, at least at first glance.

Carolyn Karcher’s introduction helped me bring the two separate issues of religious nationalism and racism together as she showed the parallels between Charles Brown and Hobomok. She explains,

Both represent a fusion of nature and culture. Both foster the aesthetic impulses Puritan society contemns. Both fulfill the spiritual aspirations thwarted in Mary by a religion that has ruled out the feminist principle. Both embody the sexuality Puritanism seeks to repress. And both, above all, provide a means of defying patriarchal authority, as vested not only in Mary’s father but in the society for which he stands. (xxix)

Although I wanted to see a stronger feminist stance, the connection Karcher establishes between Brown and Hobomok shows that at its core the novel fights against patriarchal Puritan society. Even when Hobomok is replaced by Brown, the text still strongly rejects Puritan values, thus reinforcing ties with England.

 

Child refers to Mary’s past in England as a “fairy dream” (78), and she explains that “the remembrance of the little fairy” (46) that Mary was in England caused Charles to follow her to America. England is viewed as a positive, fantasy-like place straight out of romance. However, the romanticized past is no longer the present reality. Conant argues that “England has come to a dreadful pass in these days” (116). Even Charles Brown laments, “My hearte bleedeth for olde England, torne with religious commotions, as she hath beene, from the time of the second Tudor: but my feeble hand may not stop her wounds” (104). The solution is to bring a piece of England to America and to fuse it with certain native qualities found there just as Karcher fuses together certain aspects of Charles and Hobomok. Mary’s son is a clear embodiment of the intermingling of English and Native American, and his name specifically joins Mary’s two lovers together.

 

Ezra Tawil interestingly points out that the issue of race actually becomes more important than the issue of religion when Charles replaces Hobomok as Mary’s husband: “By giving his blessing to the same union which he had prohibited before Mary went native, Mr. Conant pronounces religious difference inconsequential in relation to race” (112). Reading the text in this light, Child clearly shifts the focus of her novel part way through. I was disappointed to see Child ultimately give in to the “popular convention” of the Vanishing American that “premised on a moralistic judgment, had become natural law” (Dippie 11). Not only does Hobomok disappear into the wilderness, but his son returns to England and relinquishes his Indian name.

 

Although Child doesn’t “move beyond racial egalitarianism to cultural pluralism” (215) in “An Appeal for the Indians,” I appreciated that this text showed a stronger anti-racist stance. Rather than reinforcing ties with England at the expense of the Native Americans, she clearly exposes the faults of white people in various nations at different periods of time while showing Indians in a positive light. She also directly attacks the convention of the Vanishing American, arguing, “How can people improve, who are never secure in the possession of their lands? Yet, while we are perpetually robbing them, and driving them ‘from post to pillar,’ we go on repeating, with the most impudent coolness, ‘They are destined to disappear before the white man’” (231). Child takes a much more radical stance against racism in this piece.