Lydia Marie Child

Bio: http://www.bookrags.com/biography/lydia-maria-child-dlb/ 2/10/07.

Hobomok

I find Child interesting primarily through her political affiliations, which were abolitionist and feminist. She wrote effectively for her causes although her elequence did not always advance her literary career.

Hobomok is the name of a male Indian, but the novel has to do with the amours and marriagiability of a young lady in the early MA, 200-odd years prior to Child herself. The narrator is a young man, who arranges a frame story about how a friend of his has written a manuscript. The male friend's manuscript has a female focalizer, and this unmistakable female focus constitutes the rest of the novel.

The primary focalizer is female. The male characters seem uniformly wooden, dogmatic, and clueless, including those whom Child seems to consider appealing. The young women are adventurous, resourceful, though naive in ways that must have been charming. Their repeated anger seems more than merited by the foolish males, who drone on about church attitudes towards romance in the face of an apparently causeless looming war with some local Indian tribes, with no obvious reference to politics or economics, aspects of life with which Child herself must have understood but considered as outside the scope of interest.

Synopsis.

1. Mary Conant, resists her crusty father to love young Charles Brown, albeit chastely, per the customs.

2. Charles Brown has to leave, hopes to come back and marry her.

3. News arrives that Charley Brown has died.

4. When Mary's caring mother dies, Mary despairs.

5. Mary marries Hobomok because he's a nice guy who'll help her escape her father. Hobomok seems completely conscious of this circumstance, but marries her anyway.

6. Charles Brown turns out to have jumped ship and hung out in the colonies for several years; he returns to claim Mary as his bride, and asks poor Hobomok where to find her.

7. Hobomok leaves, abandoning his son because his wife loves Brown. Child carefully describes this event to exonerate Mary and Hobomok of the obvious criticisms, with little success.

8. Child asserts blandly that the son's well raised. It's unclear whether the "great tree" that Hobomok has produced is the child or the American nation built on his grave.

For Child this in part is a tale of the noble Indian -- without a twig of judgment. She patronizes, interrupts narrative to comment on the state of his judgment, make explanations and excuses for his lack of literacy and Christian education and so forth. To some extent she may be looking out of the eyes of focalizer Mary Conant, but such irony is weak and inconsistent at best. Given that she did make real sacrifices for minority causes, this is an interesting gauge of how far American society was from egalitarian ideals.