“What dictates the plot of Hobomok is not its author's awareness of racial issues, but her rebellion against patriarchy. The result is a revolutionary insight into the connection between male dominance and white supremacy."[5]
Child was an avid reader of classical and contemporary works during her adolescence: Homer, Johnson, Milton, and Scott.[6]
In her early twenties, she was inspired by essays written by literary critics in the North American Review, exhorting American writers to develop a genuinely American literature, free of European influence. [7] American geography and social history was said to offer “panoramic landscapes, heroic Puritan settlers, and exotic Indian folklore” with which to forge compelling romance novels.[8] Child was familiar with the time-line of Puritan history and had lived in Maine (then a portion of Massachusetts) for eight years, where she had numerous encounters with the indigenous people.[9]
The epic poem Yamowyden (1820) and Hobomok
The 23-year-old Child discovered the narrative poem Yamowyden, a Tale of the Wars of King Philip: in Six Cantos (1820) when examining an old edition of the North American Review. Written by James Wallace Eastburn and Robert Charles Sands, the work had been provided an enthusiastic review by critic John G. Palfrey, declaring it a milestone in American literature. The poem, according to Palfrey, was a vigorous and striking dramatization of the King Philip’s War (1675–1676), demanding emulation from American writers.[10] Lydia Maria Child recalled:
I had never dreamed of such a thing as turning writer; but I siezed [sic] a pen, and before the bell rang for afternoon meeting I had written the first chapter, exactly as it now stands…[9]
The degree to which Child’s Hobomok was influenced by the earlier narrative poem is disputed.[11] Biographer Carolyn L. Karcher notes that the similarities between are not superficial:
Both describe their Indian title characters as “cast in nature’s noblest mould [sic]”; both feature Anglo-American heroines who elope with Indian lovers in defiance of paternal wishes. And both model themselves on William Shakespeare’s Othello having their dark-skinned heroes win the love of a white woman through eloquent recitals of their exploits and adventures.[12]
Karchner reports that Child’s “political consciousness” on the historical facts relating to the systematic expiration of native populations beginning in the American colonial period was fundamentally flawed at the time she penned Hobomok.[5] As such, the central theme that emerges in Hobomok is more a resistance to male patriarchy than opposition to white supremacy, the latter which Child would soon embrace and becoming a highly influential abolitionist in the 1830s and 1840s.[13]
Four years after writing Hobomok, in 1828, Child would join her spouse, David Lee Child, in crusades against the dispossession and expulsion of Cherokee Indians from ancestral lands in the Gulf Coast interior of the United States. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 ordered these largely agrarian people to occupy lands west of the Mississippi in what is now the state of Oklahoma. The removal was ultimately effected in The Trail of Tears of 1838.[14]
