Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Annotated Bibliography for Child's Hobomok


Barnett, Louise K. “Nationalism and the Frontier Romance.” The Ignoble Savage: American Literary Racism, 1790–1890. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1975. 21–47.


Barnett opens his book by tracing the history of the frontier romance, from the original call for a national literacy which incorporated the Indian, to the eventual unpopularity of such narratives. Key to the analysis is the observation that in all the nationalist literature, the Indians, weather protagonist or antagonist, almost never existed as the actual center of the text, but only as a backdrop for the white characters. The Indians performed the role either of an ancient and noble civilization (like Greece) now gone, or of associates to international enemies and fierce barbarians. The texts which placed the Indians in too positive alight, or the white people in too dim a light were generally castigated by critics. Barnett explains that portraying the whites as equally savage would have endangered the belief in manifest destiny. Barnett’s research paints a panoramic context for the frontier romance and provides helpful perspective on the depiction of Indians in texts like Hobomok.


Brown, Harry. "'The Horrid Alternative': Miscegenation and Madness in the Frontier Romance." Journal of American & Comparative Cultures 24 (2001): 137-151.


Brown considers Child’s Hobomok, Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, and Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and their shared themes of miscegenation in light of national literature and the gothic. He posits that the stigma which surrounds miscegenation in these novels—be it portrayed as madness, sterilization, or living death—stems from racial and imperialist fears. Because miscegenation blurred the boundaries between “categories of national identity imagined by these romances,” nightmare ends were ordained for characters who participated in the act. Brown also takes into account the narrative of Mary Jemison, and suggests that the reading public, who, unlike literary critics, were less concerned with a national literature, were possibly more open to miscegenation than modern scholars realize.


Karcher, Carolyn L. “The Author of Hobomok.The First Woman of the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child. Durham: Duke UP, 1994.


Karcher takes a biographical/historical approach to examining Hobomok, pointing out the novel’s predecessors and influences specifically as a frontier romance: Irving, Cooper, Rowson, Breckinridge, and Charles Brockden Brown. She introduces the problem of displacement and miscegenation, discussing the ideas of John Neal and James Kirk Paulding, both which embrace the inevitability of Indian extinction. She also emphasizes the fact that Hobomok is more notable for its rebellion against patriarchy, in the form of male family, church, and government authority. She provides a reading of the novel with this lens, especially examining Mary’s longing for spiritual independence, and intellectual, cultural and natural connectivity through her lovers. Most of this essay appears as the introduction in the 1986 edition of Hobomok. The piece provides a very broad and deep analysis of both the culture and the text which assisted my own reading.


Marshall, Ian. "Heteroglosia in Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok." Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 10 (1993): 1-16.


Marshall suggests that as a female American author, Child is more open to incorporating heteroglot discourse into her text. She does this through layering author identities and voices, interweaving patriarchal and feminist dialect, including Indian dialect, using character zones, hybridizing Puritan and Indian imagery, and incorporating ghost writing in her plot. This appropriation of male voice provides authority to her anti-patriarchal text in a male-dominant world. Hobomok, Marshall suggests, is also anti-monological in its discussion of religion, race and politics. He even posits that the openness to heteroglosia may be what distinguishes female romantic writers from male. Marshall’s discussion of Indian dialect is most helpful to me in formulating my argument about national literacy and identity.


Matter-Seibel, Sabina. "Native Americans, Women, and the Culture of Nationalism in Lydia Maria Child and Catharine Maria Sedgwick." Early America Re-Explored: New Readings in Colonial, Early National, and Antebellum Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 411-40.


Matter-Seibel responds to authors such as Nina Baym, Maddox, and Ford who point out the inevitable reinscription of racism in female frontier novels such as Hope Leslie and Hobomok. Despite such condemnations, Satter-Seibel, responding to Judith Fetterly seeks to emphasize the social reform which Sedgwick and Child were enacting through their domestic fiction which sought to include Native Americans in the national family. This is accomplished through sentimentalizing the Indian characters and associating them with female but republican values, as opposed to Puritan male values. At the same time, Sedgwick and Child’s narratives smash nostalgic ideas of colonialism by incorporating the harsh realities of racial violence. By attributing self-reliance, civil disobedience and perseverance to the Indians in the narratives, they are further qualified to be national citizens. The dilemma comes in with the sexualized female body and miscegenation, both of which says Matter-Seibel, cannot be supported by the republic. The authors are thus entrapped attempting to negotiate irreconcilable terms. The article’s argument for Native American’s to be part of the national family is believable, however I will argue that Hobomok clearly sees the white race as the parents, and the Indians as the children who need to be educated especially in literacy.


Samuels, Shirley. "Women, Blood, and Contract." American Literary History 20.1-2 (2008): 57-75.


Looking at Child’s Hobomok, Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, and Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Shirley effectively demonstrates how the symbolism of women’s blood-shed and miscegenation serve as a conduit for discussion about 19th century Anglo-Indian relations and land-contracts. Thus, women’s bodies act as a form of social contract, contracts which are ultimately instable. Their blood becomes the sacrifice and their bodies the gifts which are prohibited from cross-racial exchange, and must be atoned for when this law is broken. Female sexual desire becomes dangerous when its object threatens the perpetuation of a family in its own image. The inclusion of such desire in the novels both condemns and predicts the future practice of inter-racial marriage. Shirley discus’s Hobomok’s sacrifice of a deer as his substitute, rather than using human blood. The dear becomes food for the white family, as his disappearance feeds their survival. Shirley’s analysis supports my argument that Mary’s marriage to a white man at the end reinforces racial supremacy and survival.


Sederholm, Carl H. "Dividing Religion from Theology in Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok." American Transcendental Quarterly 20.3(2006): 553-64.


Sederholm argues that besides arguing for racial and patriarchal reform, Lydia Maria Child is also concerned with religious reform in Hobomok. Citing the later works of Child on religion (The Progress of Religious Ideas, Through Successive Ages, and “Spirit and Matter”) he explains that Mary’s husband ritual is an expression of personal and universal spiritualism. While Calvinism teaches that there is a remnant who find the truth, Child believed that all could find such a truth, not in doctrine but in sentiment. Thus, religion such as Mary’s can be practiced without theology. Particularly useful in this novel is Sederholm’s explanation of the importance of Mary writing in her own blood for the religious ritual.


Stevens, David J. “Hobomok: A Brief Case Study from the Beginning of the Genre.” The Word Rides Again, Rereading the Frontier in American Fiction. Athens: Ohio UP, 2002. 34–49.


Stevens discusses Hobomok as an example of early frontier literature which supports his overall argument that frontier romances should be examined on a case-by-case basis. He points out the novel’s appropriation of the American Indian for the purposes of defining the white citizen of a new nation. He takes issue with Karcher and Gussman for overlooking too easily the racial biased that Child and Sedgwick possess, citing letters in which Child admits a strong disdain for Indian culture, despite her dutiful feelings toward their rights as land-owners. Stevens strongly emphasizes the fact that while profitable comparisons can be made, scholars should be careful not to closely associate the works of Cooper, Sedgwick and Child because in reality each represented a very different form of frontier literature, and because each author has a larger literary identity than is embodied in their most discussed novels.


Tawil, Ezra F. "Domestic Frontier Romance, or, How the Sentimental Heroine Became White." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 32.1 (1998): 99-124.


Tawil refutes the body of scholarship which promotes Child and Sedgwick’s frontier romance novels as primarily racially progressive in comparison with white male frontier fiction. Instead, he proves that the female heroin’s choice to marry a white man rather than a colored man was just as racially destructive as a white man killing a colored man. In fact, it took both the male and the female version of the frontier romance to inscribe the racial biased of our national identity onto modern day ideology. Tawil does a fantastic job identifying the racial problems inherent in Hobomok, especially by relating them back to the nation’s ideology.


Vásquez, Mark G. "'Your Sister Cannot Speak to You and Understand You As I Do': Native American Culture and Female Subjectivity in Lydia Maria Child and Catharine Maria Sedgwick." American Transcendental Quarterly 15.3(2001): 173-90.


Vásquez argues that through its denigration of Puritan rhetoric, retelling of history, feminine mediation and veneration of Indian folk-lore, Hobomok privileges the “natural” language and discourse of women and colored people over failed discourse of white, patriarchal language. This, in turn, enables women and Indians in her novel authority over their own subjectivity. Vásquez also examines Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie. While his arguments about female dialogic acting as a mediator and plot mover, his argument for the supremacy of Native American voice does not take into account the racial supremacy which the novel embodies, particularly in its silencing of Hobomok and the erasure of cultural identity for his son.


Images: Thomas Cole: "The Course of Empire Arcadia" and "Falls of Kaaterskil"

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