Draft of Paper

Jessica Masri

LIT 6009

Dr. Logan

24 April 2009

“Monarch of the day”: Epistemology, Literacy, Light, and Nationalism

in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok

Lydia Maria Child’s first novel, Hobomok (1824), has been generously discussed in the field of American Literature, especially regarding its stance on patriarchy, women, and miscegenation. The novel is nearly always compared to Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, because all three novels are historical fictions which meditate on the future of the Native American people and race relations, particularly through the narrative device of miscegenation. While it is helpful to examine the ways in which Child and her contemporaries support or concede the cause of the Native Americans, and how their cause is related to the cause of women’s rights, Lydia Maria Child’s literary project as a whole has at times been overlooked. As her preface so explicitly tells us, Hobomok is Child’s personal attempt at a national literature, through the device of Romantic historical fiction. The courtship plot(s) imbedded in the novel, the critiques of patriarchy and bigotry, are all secondary goals serving her aim to create an American cannon, and she does so by constructing an American ideological perspective of epistemology and literacy.

Child uses the imagery of light to explore types of epistemology utilized by the Puritans and the American Indians, and from this comparison, draws conclusions about National literacy, power and imperialism. The first three quarters of Hobomok goes to great lengths to demonstrate the common humanity of the Europeans and Indians, even highlighting the Puritans’ failure to acknowledge the epistemology of nature which the Indians so prize. However, the last quarter of Child’s novel makes a violent tern, emphasizing the inadequacy of the Indian’s oral cultural knowledge, and urging the necessity of the Indians’ integration into Western literacy and renunciation of Native oral values for their survival and for the future happiness of the Nation.

In Revolution and the Word, Cathy N. Davidson announces the novel’s ability to challenge “notions of who should and should not be literate; . . . what is or is not suitable literary subject matter and form and style; . . . the term literature itself” (71). In the case of developing a national literature, we can return that the novel may also define these factors. In the case of Hobomok, the novel prescribes who is literate, the subject matter of literature, and the shape of American literature is itself. Child concludes that while nature and culture provide a universal sources of knowledge about spiritual truth, only through the epistemology of reason and written revelation can a race of people survive. She calls Americans to embrace natural, rational and revealed epistemology in order to outlive the fading nation of American Indians, represented by Hobomok, who only possess natural oral forms of knowledge, rather than a written, “enlightened” epistemology and literature.

“The American novel first appeared during the time when the domestic publishing industry enjoyed a new sense of vigor, nationalism, and professional pride” –Davidson 74

In 1815, the North American Review commented on the state of American literature, or more accurately, the lack thereof. The author suggested that the country’s lack of originality is due to the colonial nature of the country, which consisted of a transplanted, rather than native linguistic and communal culture: “national literature seems to be . . . the legitimate product of a national language” (W. Channing 308). The solution, suggested the critic, was for American writers to mine the treasures of the “oral literature of its aborigines” (314). A legitimate, national, written cannon, in other words, can only emerge from an oral language which is connected with the land it describes. This suggestion did not fall upon deaf ears. Many writers would take up the call to incorporate a Native American presence (like Morrison’s African presence) and oral tradition into their texts. Lydia Maria Child was no exception. Her 1824 novel Hobomok was her very first publication, written under the guise of male authorship, announcing herself only as “an American” attempting to write “a New England novel” (Child 3).

Child incorporates the Indian oral tradition primarily through the secondary character for whom the book is named: Hobomok, a Pequod Indian who historically, Along with Squanto, helped the Plymouth settlement survive their first generation. In the novel, the Native American’s oral literacy and epistemology is contrasted to the written literacy and epistemology of the Puritan community. In particular, Hobomok is compared to his rival for Mary Conant’s love, Charles Brown, an Episcopalian Englishman. In the end, Mary weds first Hobomok, and then, upon his unexpected return, Brown, Mary being released by Hobomok who escapes across the Rocky Mountains to the west. Mary’s meditations and judgment regarding the two heroes and all that they represent provide Child’s audience with a reading of America’s imperial situation and provides a path for future action.

Child presents her readers with three primary sources of light, which we are to equate with three different forms of knowledge. The two luminaries, the sun and moon, represent sources of knowledge, and the flame represents human possession of knowledge. Each of these three sources of light correlate with an aspect of epistemology, as well as human experience.

The Sun

The sun is Truth itself, the source of all light and, metaphorically, knowledge. The first chapter of Hobomok refers to sunlight as the knowledge of Christianity:

Two centuries have elapsed since . . . God was here in his holy temple, and the whole earth kept silence before him! But the voice of prayer was soon to be heard in the desert. The sun, which for ages beyond the memory of man had gazed on the strange, fearful worship of the Great Spirit of the wilderness, was soon to shed its splendor upon the altars of the living God. That light, which had arisen amid the darkness of Europe, stretched its long, luminous track across the Atlantic, till the summits of the western world became tinged with its brightness. (Child 5–6)

But although the novel opens with the seeming equation of sunlight with Christianity, we learn through the rest of the novel that this is not, in fact, Child’s intended message.

Child is less concerned with Christianity itself as with what she calls “true religion.” In Salem, religiosity is displayed through verbal conflict about scriptural texts and condemnation of other sects of Christianity; but true religion is like the sun: “Spiritual light, like that of the natural sun, shines from one source, and shines alike upon all; but it is reflected and absorbed in almost infinite variety; and in the moral as well as the natural world, the diversity of the rays is occasioned by the nature of the recipients” (69). The narrator seems to indicate in this passage that Truth is neither oral nor written, white nor colored, natural nor human, but rather may reflect off of any form as sunlight does. The question, rather, is in the source. This is why Governor Bradford says “follow the light which is given you,” and Mrs. Conant says “it appears to me that an error in judgment is nothing, if the life be right with God” (65, 75–76). So spiritual epistemology is universal and multifaceted. This has both positive and negative effects.

Because of Truth’s ability to be reflected in many forms, it is easily misappropriated by imperfect humans in its translation to language, in both oral and written forms. Mary grows weary of the constant “war of words” which exists in Salem, and Bradford instructs the colonists to “talk little about religion, and feel much of its power” and warns against “sharpen[ing] tongue against tongue, and pen against pen, and pamphlets [that] come out with more teeth to bite . . . This is but to betray the truth” (57, 64–65). Even scripture itself is questioned as a perfect source of human epistemology by Mrs. Conant: “the Bible is an inspired book; but I sometimes think the Almighty suffers it to be a flaming cherubim, turning every way, and guarding the tree of life from the touch of man. But in creation, one may read to their fill. It is God’s library—the first Bible he ever wrote” (76). The ability to consider nature as God’s “first Bible” is one of the positive inferences of universal of spiritual truth.

Because spiritual truth shines like the sun, the “untutored” Hobomok (84) may learn of God for himself:

[T]he 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 luster on the ignorance of man. . . . He had never read of God, but he had heard his chariot wheels in the distant thunder and seen his drapery in the clouds. (34)

Hobomok, then, has two forms of spiritual epistemology: inner light, which enters into his affections from God’s throne (like the sun), and nature, where he can hear and see non-verbal reflections of God. Likewise, Mary often receives more spiritual consolation from nature than from the written word. Shortly following the above passage we are told that “nature formed a ‘sanctum sanctorum’ in the recesses of Mary’s heart,” and much later we are told that “the souls of men were not open to the influence of nature. Little thought they, amid the contests of opinion,” of the stars which she calls the apostles of heaven (91).

While it is true that Hobomok considers nature and the affections as valid epistemological sources of truth, the book by no means discounts or passes over the more European epistemology of reason and writing. It is important to note in the above quote regarding Hobomok, the words, “revealed truth.” It is implied that the “mild luster” of the ignorant Indian’s Spiritual light is inferior to the “brightness of revealed truth” which is possessed by the western world. In particular, the narrator references scripture, or written revelation from God. If Mrs. Conant’s statement was true about the greater reliability of nature to scripture in spiritual epistemology, then what makes “revealed truth” more valuable than nature? We must conclude that it is not the content of scripture, but the form—writing—which the narrator seems to privilege. This becomes clearer when we look at the context of the quote: “Philosophy had never held up her shield against the sun, and then placed her dim taper in his hand . . . but there was within him a voice loud and distinct, which spoke to him of another world, where he should think, feel, love, even as he did now” (34). Philosophy, education, learning from the written word (which she quotes) is what Hobomok lacks—the bright rays of literacy. Regardless of spiritual value, it is the power which comes through written literacy which will decide the next “monarch of the day” on the North American continent (35).

The Moon

The moon, in turn, is a “planet” or object of nature which reflects the light of the sun, shining more dimly, but beautifully, in the darkness. Child consistently correlates the moon with human imagination, especially as it is embodied in cultural knowledge/epistemology—this includes everything from mythology and folklore, to art and poetry. As the sun denotes reason, so the moon denotes fancy.

Most especially, the moon is associated with the pre-Christian mythology of both European and American people. This is seen clearly in the first chapter of the novel, during the famous mystic circle scene:

A shadow was one moment cast across the bright moonlight; and a slender figure flitted by the corner of the house. . . . The rays of the full moon rested on her face, . . . taking a knife from her pocket, she opened a vein in her little arm, and dipping a feather in the blood, wrote something on a piece of white cloth, . . . then taking a stick and marking out a large circle on the margin of the stream, she stept into the magic ring, walked round three times with measure tread . . . Whoever’s to claim a husband’s power,/ come to me in the moonlight hour. . . . Whoe’er my bridegroom is to be,/ Step in the circle after me. (13)

The ritual which Mary practices resembles the many traditional British husband-hunting spells which were especially popular in the middle ages. The circle which she draws by a stream recalls the Angle belief in fairy circles, where the fair folk would dance in the moonlight. Fairy imaginary is used throughout the novel in reference to Mary, England’s past spiritualism, and the court of King Charles. The narrator calls Mary “the youngest little blooming fairy [who] had been lately recalled from the home” of her grandfather and his “magnificent halls” which she remembers as “that fairy spot in her existence” (8, 47). It is appropriate that that Mary’s beloved court is associated with fairy lore and English paganism, since both are despised by the Puritan people. King Charles’s catholic queen is compared to a snake, and his court to ancient Egypt and the courts of Baal. Even Governor Bradford condemns those who “had rather dance round the May-pole of Morton, bedecked with ribbons and lascivious verses” than follow Puritan piety (65).

The moon is repeatedly referred to as the “bright circle” as is the court of King Charles.

Like the sun, the moon shines on the world universally. The light of mythology, folklore and fancy does not shine on England alone. Mary notices and meditates on the “Fair planet”:

how various are the scenes thou passest over in thy shinning course. The solitary nun, in the recesses of her cloister, looks on thee as I do now; mayhap too, the courtly circle of kin Charles are watching the motion of they silver chariot. . . . Thou has kissed the cross-crowned turrets of the Catholic, and the proud spires of the Episcopalian. Thou has smiled on distant mosques and temples, and now thou art shedding the same light on the sacrifice heap of the Indian and the rude dwellings of the Calvinist. (48)

The passage focuses upon places of worship, in one sense, but architecture in another—a creative cultural production of human spiritual and religious devotion. What is universal is not the form, but the source of light itself—the mysticism of the human imagination.

In the same chapter as the above meditation, Mary meets with her suitor Brown, and they speak in the language of love, quoting the poetry of Spencer’s Fairy Queen, again invoking the ancient European mythology. Ironically, this text is also well noted as a pro-protestant, anti-catholic church text, which promotes both the puritan-like passion possessed by the colonists, as well as Queen Elizabeth, who founded the Anglican church they so despise. The texts acts as a hybrid of the novel’s warring factions--Of Puritan and Anglican, Christian and pagan, written and oral traditions. It is a British of a nationalist texts which can serve as a model for the American Nationalist text. Such a text, Child herself is attempting to create. That Mary’s grandfather Rivers sends her an actual edition of Spencer’s Fairy Queen, is then no surprise.

As with the sun, lunar/cultural knowledge can be embodied in an oral form—mythology and legend—but is more perfectly incarnated in written form. In the opening passage of Hobomok, we see a reference to moonlight as the unreliable epistemology of oral tradition: “In most nations the path of antiquity is shrouded in darkness, rendered more visible by the wild, fantastic light of fable” (5). This “wild, fantastic light” of darkness is compared with the “luminous” view of American time, rendered to us by the country’s youth, and more specifically, by its written record. After all, it is an ancestral written document which the narrator claims is the source of her New England novel, “an old, worn-out manuscript” which gives details of years, geography and names which may be verified by other written manuscripts. In this way, written epistemology is depicted as more valuable than oral when it comes to understanding cultural history, and by extension, identity and destiny.

The perfection of moonlight epistemology and literacy is presented to us in the form of Spencer’s Fairy Queen. As mentioned before, the poem was written for the purpose of venoratating a new new national identity formed under Queen Elizabeth and the Anglican church. The reason this piece is associated with moonlight, however, is because of its appropriation of ancient oral tradition and mythology: that of the fairies, as the name announces.

The Flame

The third form of light which plays a key role in the novel is the flame, or fire-light. The flame appears continually in the narrative as a symbol for human life and the possession of knowledge. That it represents both of these things is crucial. Those who sustain a flame are those who survive. The flame is equated with life, bloodline, reason, cultural knowledge, and religious knowledge. If the flame is preserved, then all of the these things are preserved as well.

When first describing the Puritans, the narrator uses this flame imagery to describe the protestant’s imperial mission: “the pure flame of religion was every where quenched in blood;—but the watchful vestal had kept the sacred flame still burning deeply and fervently. . . . Without doubt, there were many broad, deep shadows in their characters, but there was likewise bold and powerful light” (6). What the narrator continues to flush out is the fact that although the Puritans were proud and bigoted, they had the power of mind and firm resolve that was needed for the construction and survival of the American nation; as it is said of Mr. Conant, whose “unyielding pride . . . was at once the source of his greatest virtues and his greatest faults” (95). Because of this flawed but rigorous people then, this flame which traveled from Europe to America, a religious and imperial flame based in written knowledge, is kept alive.

In comparison, the Indians are struggling to keep their lantern lit. In chapter four, the narrator introduces the great Indian Corbitant, whose “prophetic eye foresaw the destruction of his countrymen” (31). Angry with Hobomok for making peace with the white men he proclaims: “are not the red men like the stars in the sky. . . let Owanux suck the blood of the Indian, where be the red man then? Look for the flame that has died away, . . . as the song of the bird flown by” (31). Corbitant sees that Hobomok’s flame is given in love to Mary Conant, and she rather than Corbitant’s kinswoman, would also continue Hobomok’s bloodline. Corbitant’s assertion is reinforced in the next chapter, in which Hobomok “sat before the fire, the flickering and uncertain light of a few decaying embers falling upon his face . . . his dark, expressive eye rested on Conant’s daughter” (36). Thus the flame, in this manner, represents survival through primogeniture and blood line, which is weakening, particularly in this novel, through the Indian’s devotion and attraction to the white people.

The Indian’s flame is also intellectually weaker than the Puritans. The narrator notes that while the Indians were indeed strong enough to crush the young white settlements, the intellect of the Europeans triumphed over the Native’s brute force. The flame which the “poor, unlettered Indians” seem to have only two flames. The first is contained in the firearms which the colonists gave to them: “they could speak thunder and spit fire as well as the white man” (29). The second is the flame given to them by nature itself.

Chapter four begins with an epigraph from the poem Yamoyden: “Know ye the famous Indian race?/ How their light form springs, in strength and grace,/ Like the pine on their native mountain side,/ That. . . . bend to Heaven’s red bolt alone!” (29). That this quote appears at the beginning of the chapter which first introduces the theme of (seemingly) determined Indian extinction seems to imply that the Indians’ fall can only be due to the decree of a greater God than their own. As the Narrator notes: “their [the Indian’s] prophets were troubled with rumors of a strange God” (30). In fact, Hobomok even says twice that part of why he is attracted to Mary is because he sees in her “so bright an emanation from the Good Spirit,” and it is this attraction which “usurped such empire in his heart” (84). Empire is indeed an appropriate word. The Great Spirit of the Indians is portrayed in the novel as a god who reveals himself through nature, and is known otherwise only through oral tradition. The Puritans also share an oral tradition which acts as an epistemology about their God; they Puritans in the novel almost never speak without quoting directly from scripture; but, their oral tradition is based on a written word.

While the Narrator throws serious doubt on humans’ ability to interpret or appropriate this word through the “ever-varying light of human doctrine” (58), the fact that it is written, alone, privileges the religion. It is a part of the European tradition of reason and enlightenment—enlightened not for its “inner light” but for the light of learning and letters. We may conclude that while Child sees the Indians and Puritan’s as equally enlightened spiritually by the sunlight of “true religion,” that there is significant inequality between the two races’ intellectual light, which is reflected in a difference of epistemology and literacy. It is the superiority of intellectual enlightenment and epistemology, then, which gives the white people the ability to conquer the “poor, unlettered Indians” (29).

At the end of the novel, this intellectual superiority is what causes Mary to prefer Charles Brown to Hobomok, even when she believes Brown to be dead.

However, it is not the Bible itself that the narrator seems to promote in Hobomok—on the contrary, she calls the reliability of the Bible into question many times in the text.

The Future of a Nation

Mary’s final decision—comparison of Hobomok and Brown

Hobomok’s removal West

In an article which evaluates both Sedgwick and Child’s novels, mark G. Vesquez argues that by converging Native American and Euroamerican cultures, that Hobomok privileges the “inductive, ‘natural’ method of understanding represented by Native American culture” and the “language of women and Native Americans” over the “failed language of white patriarchy” (174). Such a reading, however, does not take into adequate account the last third of Child’s novel, which is of the highest import in our final interpretation of a national literacy.

Child, while sympathetic to the Indians’ “natural” epistemology, clearly cannot value Native American literacy on the same plane as the Western. Many scholars, such as Judith Fetterley, argue that, like Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, Hobomok’s ending must be seen as an attempt to satisfy its audience’s expectations about race, in order to promote the more pertinent message about gender reform (511). Similarly, Sabina Matter-Seibel believes that the conventional sentimental ending of Hobomok should be ignored in the overall analysis of the work’s reformative material (413). However neither theorist takes seriously enough Lydia Maria Child’s racial supremacy, which is clearly present, even in her heroic, 1868, An Appeal for the Indians which says that the Native Americans are “[s]imply . . . younger members of the same great human family, who need to be protected, instructed and encouraged . . .” (220). In other words, while Child promotes the common humanity of the Indians, she still views them as savage and in need of education, a new epistemology of written literacy.

This opinion could not be more strongly reflected than in the ending of Hobomok, in which Mary and Hobomok’s son grows up to attend a Cambridge University, becoming completely integrated not only into the Western social culture, but academic culture specifically. In “The American Origins of the English Novel,” Armstrong and Tennenhouse trace the way that England’s development of print technologies affected displaced certain speech communities in the American colonies and aided the governance of European rule (386). In a similar manner, the written literacy of the New Republic which adopted the Native American presence, served to promote the extinction of the Indian’s oral tradition. This transformation is represented when Mary’s child drops the middle name of his father, and goes only by his first and last name “Charles Conant,” symbolizing the erasure of the oral and written elements of the Native American linguistic tradition from his identity. By forming a written national literature which defines national identity, the early American Republic colonized the epistemological and oral literary identities of the Native Americans, extending their Imperial control across land and cultures.

Conclusion

While Child’s literary efforts to reform the patriarchal and racist views of her day should not be minimized, in regard to her construction of a national literature, her Eurocentrism must be acknowledged. *The first two thirds of Hobomok focuses on showing the similarities between written and oral, European and Indian cultures, and the shared humanity of the Indians and Puritans. She even goes so far as to argue that the unlike the Indians, Europeans ignore one of the most perfect sources of knowledge: Nature. But the last third of her tale argues that reason and literacy are essential for survival in the new American Empire. Natural epistemology is not enough—education, cultivation, civilization, and reason are necessary for an enlightened understanding and imperial growth. While the native Indians played a brief role in protecting/guarding the seedlings of greatness, they themselves cannot take part in this greatness, due to their ignorance. There might exist noble savages such as Hobomok . . . but they are still savages. Their children should be raised and lovingly inculcated into the American Empire, but their origins, the name of their father, must be silenced forever. The oral must be overcome by the written.*

Works Cited

Armstrong, Nancy and Leonard Tennenhouse. “The American Origins of the English Novel.” American Literary History 4.3 (1992): 386-410.

[Channing, W.]. “Essays on American Language and Literature.” North American Review 1 (1815): 307–14.

Child, Lydia Maria and Carolyn L. Karcher. Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians. 1986. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2001.

Fetterley, Judith. “‘My Sister! My Sister!’: The Rhetoric of Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie.” American Literature 70 (1998): 491–516.

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.

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.