Hobomok

[3] However, before too long (and partly due to Child's intervention in Boston literary circles), many prominent Bostonians celebrated the novel.

The events of the novel take place between 1629 and 1632 and concern the settlement of Plymouth and Salem, Massachusetts, by British-born Puritans, who are seeking religious freedom in the New World.

Sally is known for presenting controversial opinions and for being assertive, as well as for being a free spirit who is apprehensive of the structure that living amongst a colony may bring to her life.

Hobomok is referenced throughout the story as the "savage" who helps the Puritans travel from Salem to Plymouth, acting as a literal and figurative connection between civilization and the natural world.

The men discuss religion until Hobomok returns and an attack is mounted on the people of Salem, specifically with the intent of burning down the Conant's house.

Collier travels back to Plymouth to deliver the unfortunate news of Sally declining James Hopkins's marriage proposal.

Mr. Oldham, Sally's father, attaches an additional note speaking to his discomfort with the growing restrictions placed by the church.

Many weeks have passed, during which Mr. Collier has visited Sally as often as possible and Hobomok has divided his time equally between his home near Plymouth and the Conant's house.

A trial is held by Governor Endicott and the church elders to try and prove that Brown's Episcopalian religion is disrupting the community.

In the monotonous winter following Brown's departure, Hobomok pays frequent visits to Mary and his love for Mary—"the child of good spirit"—intensifies.

Mary passes the spring with much weariness of her lonely state; luckily, in June, she is joined by Mr. Isaac Johnson and his wife Lady Arabella, another prominent English family who comes to build the New World.

The Conants warmly welcome the Johnsons to a dinner, at which they discuss the current affairs of the monarchy and the church, including Brown, who has found good favor in England.

The next morning, Lady Arabella awakes to say goodbye to her husband and asks him to give Mary her wedding ring; she dies thereafter.

Days after the joint funeral, Mr. Johnson dies of a broken heart and asks to be buried at Tri-Mountain (Boston) to look over the work he's done.

While sitting at her mother's grave, Mary witnesses an apparition of “a vessel” in the clouds and interprets it as a bad omen toward Brown's return.

Mr. Skeleton is tasked with telling Mr. Conant, who is relieved that she is alive but finds it more torturous to know that she is married to a non-white, non-Puritan man.

[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 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.

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.

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.

She becomes wild and powerful, like the untamed North American land, validating the fear held by male authority figures that women would be uncontrollable in the New World.

The novel suggests that the unstable nature of early American colonies was due, in part, to social repression and disparate distribution of power.

Oldham uses the metaphor that the church is “running its horses so hard, and drawing the reins so tight, that they might raise up and caste their riders into the mud.” The novel suggests that Mary's relationship with Hobomok constitutes one such rebellion.

However, the character Hobomok remains in the category of the "noble savage": a loyal ally to the white settlers who is considerably westernized and, in the 19th century context, civilized.

In fact, Child imagines a collaborative and inter-cultural relationship between the white settlers and Native Americans through the problematic but also harmonious marriage of Hobomok and Mary.