Heteroglossia in Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok

Heteroglossia in Lydia Maria Child's HobomokAuthor(s): Ian MarshallSource: Legacy, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1993), pp. 1-16Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679095 .

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Heteroglossia in Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok

Ian Marshall

Pennsylvania State University?Altoona

In

its canonized form, nineteenth

century American literature glorifies the independent, outspoken, self-re

liant individual, free of constraints, of ten alienated and outcast. The narra

tive voice is one of authority, or of

protest, singing what it knows to be true based on what it finds within the self. That voice, privileging traits usu

ally associated with masculinity, has

been taken to represent the essence of

America: confident, assertive, optimis tic, bold, even brash. Voices that lack

this sort of self-reliant authority have been relegated to a place outside the mainstream American literary tradi

tion.1

But there is something distinctly "un-American" about the voice of our

canonized literature. The individualism

celebrated by that narrative voice is

more autocratic than democratic; it fa

vors a single voice and ignores or

slights all others. Or to put it in terms

of modern literary theory, in particular the conceptions of Mikhail Bakhtin, the dominant narrative voice in Ameri can literature has tended to be mono

logic rather than dialogic or hetero

glossic?both terms referring to multi

voicedness or "social diversity of

speech types" or an interplay of voices

mingling within a novel or within a

narrator's voice ("Discourse" 263). On

the other hand, nineteenth-century women writers seem to have been

quite receptive to other voices and

perspectives, and less insistent upon the authority of their narrative voices

than were male authors. This trait of

women's fiction makes it not only more aesthetically appealing, accord

ing to Bakhtin's theories of the novel, but also more democratically inclu sive.

Lydia Maria Child's 1824 novel Ho

bomok, an historical romance sub titled A Tale of Early Times, serves as a fascinating example of the hetero

glossic content of women's fiction.

The setting is Salem, Massachusetts, circa 1630, amid religious controversy between the Puritans and various "her

etics" to their cause?antinomians, the

infamous Thomas Morton and his band

of profligates at Merrymount, and,

LEGACY, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1993. Copyright ? 1993 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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most immediately of concern in the

novel, Episcopalians. The colony also

remains in constant fear of Indian at

tacks, especially from the war-like

Pocasset chief Corbitant.2 The heroine,

Mary Conant, loves the cultured Epis

copalian Charles Brown, but her fa

ther, rigidly righteous in the Puritan

manner, opposes the match. The titu

lar hero Hobomok is a Wampanoag chief friendly to the English settlers

and enamored of Mary. When Mary's mother dies, and Brown is reported lost in a shipwreck, Mary falls into de

spair and "partial derangement"?and marries Hobomok (120). With him, she is alienated from her own people but content. She and Hobomok have a

son, but when Charles Brown unex

pectedly returns, Hobomok gracefully takes his leave. Mary and Charles

marry, the boy is educated at Harvard, and presumably all live happily ever af

ter.

It is not surprising that we can find a

variety of language styles and dialects in Child's novel. After all, it is a tale

written in the nineteenth century in

corporating purported accounts from

the seventeenth century. The novel, first published anonymously (the title

page attributes authorship to "an

American"), also purports to be the

work of a male narrator, though in fact

it is written by a woman. Child goes to

great lengths to disguise her female

identity, burying it beneath three

levels of male narration. The preface is

authored by "Frederic," who receives a

manuscript from an un named male

friend, the "American" of the title page; that manuscript is the work that fol

lows, but the "American" disguises his

authorship in turn by taking much of

his text from an "old, worn-out manu

script" penned by an ancestor who was in Salem when many of the events

of the story took place.3 Before the

"American" begins to quote from his

ancestor's manuscript, we receive a

hint of the blending of language styles that constitutes one aspect of the

novel's heteroglossia. The "American"

prefaces his lengthy quotations from his ancestor's manuscript by remark

ing, "I . . . shall . . . take the liberty of

substituting my own expressions for

his antiquated and almost unintellig ible style" (7). The quote that follows,

then, is not really a direct quote, de

spite the quotation marks, but a nine

teenth-century rendering of seven

teenth-century speech. Thus the novel

contains the language styles not only of two genders, but of two centuries.

To protect her male disguise, Child

convincingly manipulates anti-feminist

rhetoric through her male narrator and characters. The narrator says that

Mary's friend Sally Oldham, on hearing of a prospective suitor's arrival at

Salem from Plymouth, had, "in the true

spirit of female vanity, . . . judged that

nothing but her own pretty face was

the object of his journey" (22). The

misogynist viewpoint is even more

memorably presented by Sally's father, a minor character who seems to enjoy at least some degree of narratorial

sympathy. John Oldham proclaims that

all male errata are traceable to the in

fluence of "some pretty piece of Eve's

flesh" (60). Referring to his daughter in speaking to another of her rejected suitors, Oldham says, "The damsel is not worth the tears, which an onion

2



Ian Marshall

draweth forth" (18). Having the toler

ant and good-natured (if somewhat

buffoonish) Oldham make such judg ments suggests that male chauvinism is

pervasive in Puritan society and serves

to further Child's narratorial male dis

guise. It is highly unlikely that the

novel's apparent antifeminism reflects

Child's internalization of her culture's

misogyny, for she was to become a

leading spokesperson for women's

rights in the 1830s. Even as a teenager, in fact, she had been sensitive to deni

grating conceptions of women. In a

letter to her brother when she was fif

teen, she asked, "Don't you think that

Milton asserts the superiority of his own sex in rather too lordly a man

ner?" (qtd. in Karcher x).

Reinforcing the impression that Child's

series of narrators serves as a front for an authorial voice is a recurring motif

of ghostwriting in the novel. Several

characters record or deliver the

thoughts, words, and texts of others.

One of Sally's suitors, James Hopkins, sends a decidedly unromantic billet

doux via his friend John Collier, who,

Cyrano-like, adds an oral postscript

pleading Hopkins' case until Sally makes it clear that she prefers Collier

himself. When Collier reciprocates

Sally's feelings, Hopkins charges him

with improper conduct and reports him to the church. Sally is asked to

give an account of the matter, via let

ter, but she has the more decorous

(and literate) Mary write the letter. The letter partakes of both Sally's and

Mary's language styles; the wording is

clearly Mary's, being both proper and

eloquent, but Mary has insisted that

she would write the letter only if Sally would "provide words to the purpose"

(55). In linguistic terms, the letter

contains a deep structure (the mean

ing or intent of the words) provided

by Sally and a surface structure (the ar

rangement of the words themselves)

provided by Mary. Another instance of

ghostwriting appears later in the novel, when Hobomok leaves a note for Mary

announcing that he has performed a

divorce ritual (by burning some witch

hazel sticks that had symbolized their

union), thus freeing Mary to marry her true love Brown. Hobomok's note is

written by Governor Edward Winslow

of New Plymouth. This blending of narrative styles, of

written and spoken communication, of characters inditing texts of and for other characters, suggests the reason

for Child's narrative disguises. Just as

Hobomok's divorce needs official sanc

tion?that of the written word and

the patriarchal authority of church and

state, in the person of Winslow?so too does Child's fiction. By relying on manuscripts distanced from herself and somehow connected to the events

of the story, her narrative is made to seem less a fiction and more a piece of

history, less invention than fact.4 And

by adopting male poses, Child in es sence earns the sanction of the patri archal establishment of belles lettres

(Karcher xx). The male pose is a famil iar one for women writers, of course,

which led Elaine Showalter to suggest the name "Georgics" (in honor of Eliot and Sand) for works written by women

under male pseudonyms. The stance

lends needed authority to works writ ten by women in an era when their in

tellect and creativity were given short shrift. Further, the ploy allows women

writers to escape some of the "anxiety

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of authorship" inherent in undertaking a task associated with patriarchal au

thority (Gilbert and Gubar 48-49)5 Despite the narrative disguise of male

ness, Hobomok very much expresses Child's concerns regarding the status

of women, but without any sort of

monologic polemic. The novel accom

plishes this first through its plot, in

which a young woman is oppressed by her sternly Puritanical and tyrannical father and denied freedom in a matter

most crucial to her?the choice of a

husband. Beyond that, the novel en

acts, through its conflict of cultures

and language styles, a conflict inherent

in woman's role in nineteenth-century America. The cultures in conflict are

the Puritan and the American Indian, and by scripting much of her novel in

their voices, Child finds appropriate

language styles to explore not just an

early American clash of cultures be

tween the New World's settlers and

its native inhabitants, but also wom

en's opposing roles as defined in her era. Like the American Indians, she is

closely associated with nature, an asso

ciation that could take the form of nat

ural virtue and beauty, or of wanton

ness and immorality.6 Like the Puritans, she is regarded as caretaker of moral

virtues and purveyor of social mores.7

As with the cultures in the novel, these

roles can?and inevitably do?come

into conflict.

The Puritan dialect of the white set

tlers is marked by biblical allusion and

scripturally influenced syntax. Roger Conant speaks of the scriptural con

tent and style when he says, while up

braiding his neighbor Oldham for his

levity, "it's popish blasphemy to write

any thing without an especial refer

ence to the declarations of Scripture"

(39). Actually, scriptural reference

governs the settlers' spoken as well as

written discourse. Perhaps the high point of Puritan rhetoric is the Rever

end Higginson's sermon, a fire-and

brimstone-tinctured jeremiad along the

lines of Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in

the Hands of an Angry God." The ser

mon relies on the familiar conception of the New World Puritans as types of

the Israelites in Canaan, and the imag ery is of distinctly biblical origin. Those who have forgotten that "God

hath brought us out from among the

horsemen and chariots of Pharaoh"

and who dream of "stately palaces," warns Higginson, risk "the thunder of

divine vengeance" and a "fall into the

raging sea of fire which burneth for

ever" (64). In less exaggerated form, the scrip

ture-laced, apothegmic, morally con

cerned and judgmental language of the Puritan permeates even ordinary con

versation in Salem and is employed even by those outside the Puritan

power structure. For example, when

the lighthearted John Oldham replies to Roger Conant's charges that he is ir

religious, Oldham employs Puritan tac

tics of discourse in his defense: "'God

gave us laughter as well as reason, to

my apprehension. . . . Solomon saith, "there is a time for all things" and the

commentary that I put upon the text

is, that there is a time to smoke a pipe and crack a joke, as well as to preach and pray'" (39). Although the gist of the interpretation is in Oldham's flip pant, colloquial style, the interpretive method and the reliance on scripture as support for an argument are right out of Conant's Puritan book of rhetor

4



Ian Marshall

ical practice. The Episcopalian Brown

and the theologically tolerant and lib eral women of Salem also rely on the

scriptural style of the Puritan men,

perhaps because they must speak the

language of the dominant power, the

"official" language style of their cul

ture, in order to communicate with

those in power. Best exemplifying the contrasting

American Indian rhetoric is the speech in which the angry warrior Corbitant

expresses his view of the Indians' fu ture to the conciliatory Hobomok:

And say, are not the red men like the stars in the sky, or the pebbles in the ocean? But a few sleeps

more, let Owanux [the English] suck the blood of the Indian, where be the red man then? Look for yes terday's tide, for last year's blos

soms, and the rainbow that has hid itself in the clouds! Look for the flame that has died away, for the ice that's melted, and for the snow that

lights on the waterfall! Among them

you will find the children of the Great Spirit. Yes, they will soon be as an arrow that is lost in its flight, and as the song of a bird flown by. (31)

As Corbitant's poignant lament illus

trates, Child's version of Amerind

speech is highly metaphoric, with most of its imagery drawn from nature and battle. It is also straightforward in

terms of diction and syntax and uses

uninflected verb forms. At times it is a

sort of Pidgin English, though always with a touch of poetry to it. In several

places Child reveals the consciousness

with which she is crafting Amerind

speech; she characterizes it as "the

brief, figurative language of nature"

(84). That language style reveals the essence of Child's conception of the Amerind character, at least in the case

of Hobomok, "whose nature," says Child, "was unwarped by the artifices of civilized life" (121).

Of course, when Bakhtin considers

dialogism a necessary trait of the

novel, he refers not merely to pure di

alogue but to the combinations of lan

guage styles within a narrative voice. Besides the directly reported speech of the novel's characters, the Puritan and Indian inflections in the narrative voice give Hobomok its dialogic cast.

Bakhtin speaks of "intonational quota tion marks," where indirectly reported speech takes on the stylistic patterns of the person whose speech is being reported ("From the Prehistory" 50). For example, when the narrator de scribes Mr. Conant's prayers after Mary disappears, the language is ostensibly his own, but the scriptural intonations are very much those of Mr. Conant:

"Fervently did he beseech that God would heal the wounded and broken

heart, and lead back all those who were wandering in errors to the true fold of Christ Jesus" (122). Similarly,

when the narrator describes Hobomok and Mary's Indian marriage ceremony, he reports that the presiding elder

speaks of "the duty of a husband to hunt plenty of deer for his wife, to love her, and try to make her happy," and the wife's duty to "love her hus

band, and cook his venison well, that he might come home to his wigwam with a light heart" (125). Some of the

language seems to reflect the narra

tor's viewpoint, such as his terming the ritual a series of "harangues," and

perhaps too the import of the benedic

5



Legacy

tion reveals the patriarchal culture of

the narrator and author. But much of

this rings like the wording of the

Indian speaker himself in the direct

syntax, the natural imagery, and the

metaphoric content (the "light heart"

indicating contentment). Bakhtin also speaks of "character

zones," where the narrator's language takes on the stylistic inflections of

whatever character is being described

("Discourse" 316). For instance, as Ho

bomok leads Mary away from Salem, after she has decided to leave her fa

ther's house and marry Hobomok, the

description mimics the syntax and nat

ural imagery of Amerind speech: "And

now might be seen the dark chieftain

seated in his boat, exulting in his prize, and rowing with his whole strength,

while the rays of a bright October moon shone full upon the contrast of

their countenances" (123). Although the perspective is clearly that of an ob

server watching from afar?and pre

sumably a white observer, given the

apparent fears about Indian savagery evident in the phrasing about Hobo

mok "exulting in his prize"?the po etic rhythms, the visual appeals, and

the natural imagery evoke an Amerind

consciousness. Perhaps the awareness

of character zones is what makes the

speech of the non-Puritan members of

the Salem community so full of Puritan

speech patterns. They are aware of

their audience.

Another element of heteroglossia ev

ident in Hobomok appears in what we

might call "setting zones." For in

stance, when Hobomok leaves his

pow wow with Corbitant and ap

proaches Salem, biblical overtones and

allusions increasingly flavor the narra

tive description, in this case suggesting important cultural knowledge denied

Hobomok: "The star, which had arisen in Bethlehem, had never gleamed

along his path; and the dark valley of

the shadow of death had never been

illuminated with the brightness of re

vealed truth" (33-34). The shift to Pu

ritan language here reflects the shift in scene as Hobomok leaves the wilder ness and returns to a civilization

where Puritan culture dominates.

This blending of languages, that of

the narrator and that of a character or

culture or setting, constitutes what

Bakhtin calls "hybridization," or "a

mixture of two social languages within

the limits of a single utterance" ("Dis course" 358). That is, we can usually find elements of two (or more) lan

guages in the dialogic discourse of the novel. Usually, one of those languages is that of the author or narrator. But

Bakhtin also notes that a novel might contain almost no language that is

purely the author's or the narrator's

("From the Prehistory" 47). In Hobo

mok the hybrid constructions usually

conjoin language styles that seem a

combination of the Puritan and the In

dian rather than a narrator's rendering of one or the other. The dialogue im

plicit in the hybrid construction is not

between the narrator and character, but between the speakers of the two

language styles represented. When

Mary and Hobomok marry, for exam

ple, there are several instances of the

narrator's voice incorporating either

American Indian or Puritan inflections, but there are also moments when the

derivation seems a mixture of both.

Consider this description of Mary con

templating her dismal state while en

6



Ian Marshall

joying some solace in the company of

Hobomok:

The moon, it is true, pursued her

heavenly path as bright and tranquil as ever; but the passing clouds made her appear hurried and per turbed, even as the passions of men

float before the mild rays of the

Gospel, making them seem as trou

bled and capricious as their own. Nature too, was in her saddest robe;

and the breeze, as it swept along the variegated foliage, sounded like the dismal roarings of the dismal ocean. (123-24)

The personification of the moon seems

like an American Indian's natural im

age, but much of the vocabulary (the moon's "heavenly path" and the "mild

rays of the Gospel") is clearly that

of the Christian community back in

Salem, and the typological reading of

the clouds harks back to Puritan values

and the Puritan way of cognition. Then

the passage returns to the natural im

agery associated with the Indian cul

ture. Here the two prominent dialects

of the novel seem to engage in direct

dialogue with one another. These lan

guages come into contact at the pre cise moment when Mary is about to

forsake Puritan society for that of the

Indians?whole cultures, ways of life, world views are weighed in the bal ance of the two language styles.

The conclusion of Hobomok strikes

many readers as problematic and un

convincing. As Karcher points out, the

ending "conspicuously excludes Hobo

mok himself," his return to the woods

enacting "the familiar white fantasy that the Indian will somehow disap

pear" (xxxii). And though the son of

Mary and Hobomok is nicely assimi

lated into white society (by going to

Harvard), the effect is still to annihilate

American Indian culture. The Indian is

conveniently removed from the text, but we have no evidence that the Puri

tan society of Salem has developed tol

erance enough to welcome into its

midst such persons as Episcopalians, half-breeds, and wayward daughters.8

In the book's final lines, Child at

tempts to resolve matters through an

image intended to suggest reconcilia

tion of the Puritan and the Indian cul

tures. She states that Hobomok's "faith

ful services to the Tengees' are still

remembered with gratitude; although the tender slip which he protected, has since become a mighty tree, and

the nations of the earth seek refuge be

neath its branches" (150). Planting im

agery has been associated with the lan

guage of the Puritans throughout the

novel, invoking the familiar metaphor of the Puritan community as a planta tion, where not just crops but the

seeds of a civilization are planted. To

cite just one example, Mary (to whom

the metaphor is most often applied) is described as

a lily weighed down by the pitiless pelting of the storm; a violet shed

ding its soft, rich perfume on bleak ness and desolation; a plant which had been fostered and cherished with mild sunshine and gentle dews, removed at once from the hot-house to the desert, and left to unfold its delicate leaves beneath the darkness of the lowering storm.

(79)

Shortly after this description, the plant

ing imagery becomes associated as

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well with Hobomok, at least insofar as

he is treated within Mary's character

zone; we learn that love has taken "root" in Hobomok, and that Mary rec

ognizes "the plant, though thriving in so wild a soil; and female vanity sin

fully indulged its growth" (85). The sudden association of the planting met

aphor with Hobomok perhaps is war

ranted in that other natural imagery in

the novel has consistently been associ

ated with Amerind language and cul ture. In the final description of the

"tender slip" grown into a tree, Child

hopes to marry the Puritan and the In

dian heritage in a single image?a mar

riage that can outlast the short-lived literal one between Hobomok and

Mary.

Somehow, though, the resolution is not convincing. What remains the es

sence of the book are the contending voices, engaged in a dialogue that can

never be gracefully and convincingly resolved. The image of Hobomok dis

appearing into the wilderness recalls similar escapes from civilization en

acted by numerous white male pro

tagonists of nineteenth-century Ameri can literature?Thoreau, Huck Finn,

Ishmael, Tommo of Typee, Natty

Bumppo, the great white hunters of numerous tall tales.9 But their avenues

of escape were largely unavailable to

women of the time; socio-cultural con

ditions and pervasive gender defini

tions effectively denied women social

and geographical mobility. The con

flict within Anglo-American middle

class women of the nineteenth cen

tury, between their roles as governors of moral behavior and their associa

tions with nature, was irresolvable within the established gender guide

lines of their time and place. And so it

is not surprising that the hasty reso

lution of Child's Hobomok leaves the sounds of irreconcilably different

voices echoing in our minds. In this

respect, Hobomok resembles other American novels open to what Dale M. Bauer calls "feminist dialogics"; refer

ring to The Blithedale Romance, The Golden Bowl, The House of Mirth, and

The Awakening, Bauer observes that, "While the plot resolutions give clo sure to the novels, the dialogue resists

that closure" (10).10 And so in Hobo

mok we hear an unresolved dialogue regarding womanhood in Puritan and Indian voices.

Next to the Puritan and Indian dia

lects, the most prominent language style is that of the literary tradition Child inherited. Her frequent quota tions from and allusions to works by

writers such as Burns, Cowper, and

Bryant suggest her connection to that

tradition, and so do the shadings of her

language. The style of the sentimental

tradition, for instance, is evident when

Mary finds herself overcome with grief at her mother's grave. Her inability to

weep may seem uncharacteristic of a sentimental heroine, but Child ex

plains it in language that expresses the

heart of that tradition: "The sorrow

that can be exhausted, however keen

it may be, has something of luxury in

it, compared with grief when her foun

tains are all sealed, and her stormy wa

ters are dashing and foaming within

the soul" (120). Even here, though, there are traces of the novel's domi nant Puritan and Indian dialects; the

language of the sentimental tradition

employs the natural imagery typical of her Indian language ("stormy waters

8



Ian Marshall

dashing . . .") and reflects the spiritual concerns of her Puritan language (". . .

foaming within the soul"). Child's debt to literary discourse is

most apparent in her renderings of

American Indian speech. The frequent

personifications of nature, which she

usually associates with American In

dians, may derive from Child's read

ings in the neoclassical tradition, and

her reliance on natural imagery to de

velop the Amerind perspective may owe as much to Anglo-American liter

ary romanticism as to actual native

American linguistic patterns. In Corbi

tant's elegiac speech about the passing of Amerind culture, for example, the

powerful image of evanescence in the

phrase about "snow that lights on

the waterfall" sounds remarkably simi

lar to a line from Robert Burns's "Tarn

O'Shanter": pleasure, says Burns, is

"like the snow [that] falls in the river,/ A moment white?then melts forever"

(444). In truth, the novel probably does

not contain authentic heteroglossia. Child's version of American Indian

speech may be successful in literary terms, but it is not necessarily his

torically accurate. As Michael Dorris

points out, Anglo-American fictional

depictions of Indian speech employ "a

ritualized form of language, the bas

tardized product of eighteenth- and

nineteenth-century clerical translators at treaty conferences." This "stereo

typical Indian speech" reflects "white

desires to see all Indian cultures as

one," all relying on metaphor as "the

basis of every indigenous thought pat tern" (153).

In employing this language, Child was attempting to fulfill the contempo

rary call for a national literature based on native materials. Karcher notes that

William Channing's 1815 "Essay on

American Language and Literature"

identifies American Indian narratives as a source of "linguistic and myth

ological riches" that could form the basis of a distinctly American literature

(xvi).11 Channing's description of In

dian language reads like a prolegom enon for Child's practice in Hobomok:

The language of the Indian . . . was made to express his emotions dur

ing his observance of nature, and these emotions were taught him at a school, in which the master was

nature, and a most unsophisticated heart the scholar. Hence it is as bold as his own unshackled concep tions, and as rapid as his own step. It is now as rich as the soil on

which he was nurtured and orna mented with every blossom that blows in his path. It is now elevated and soaring, for his image is the ea

gle, and now precipitous and hoarse as the cataract among whose mists he is descanting. In the oral literature of the Indian, even when rendered in a language enfeebled

by excessive civilization, every one

has found genuine originality. (313-14)

In his description of American Indian

speech, Channing mimics what he sees

as its distinctive characteristics, but he seems less successful than Child, per

haps because he is himself too closely bound to academic discourse; that is, his own language is too "enfeebled by excessive civilization," as he puts it, to

give a faithful rendition of American

Indian speech. Child, who was denied a Harvard education except as far as

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she could receive one second-hand

through correspondence with her

brother (Karcher ix?x), manages to

avoid the tinge of pedantry in her ren

derings of Amerind speech. Still, the

absence of pedantry does not guaran tee her accuracy. But according to

Bakhtin, the question of authenticity

may well be moot, for all a writer can

ever give is "an artistic image of an

other language," a "stylization" of it in

her own ("Discourse" 362). And so

Child's rendering of American Indian

speech inevitably contains two linguis tic consciousnesses and two language

styles.12 The same applies to her ver

sion of Puritan speech. Before condemning Child for the

inauthenticity of her language, we

should recognize that Child's purpose is not so much to accurately render

American Indian or Puritan speech, or

to give voice to the Puritan or Indian

experience in America. Rather, it is, at least in part, to appropriate these

voices to express something of wom

an's experience. And if woman's meta

phoric "marriage" to nature (her "In

dian" side) conflicts with her role

as maternal purveyor of moral values

(her "Puritan" side), then one role or

another must be relinquished. Hobo

mok first challenges moral codes for

the special constraints they put upon women (the challenge taking the form

of Mary's rebellion against her Puritan

father), then denies women's identi

fication with nature (via the dissolu

tion of her marriage to Hobomok). If

the act of relinquishment imaged in

the figure of the disappearing Indian

rings false, it is because we may see it

not only as an unpalatable or unlikely

solution to social problems, but also as

an unconvincing resolution of the psy chic dilemma being played out in the

book's pages through languages in op

position. Child's heteroglossia in Hobomok,

then, is a means for her to explore

conflicting assumptions about women's

place in her society. But those assump tions and that place may also have

made possible her open ness to het

eroglossia in the first place. According to the nineteenth-century notion of

"true womanhood" (as outlined by Barbara Welter), one of woman's chief virtues is submissiveness, a quality

compatible with the submerging of the

authorial ego that makes heteroglossia

possible. Though nineteenth-century women writers by the very act of writ

ing challenged the social constraints

regarding woman's role, the idea that

subservience is a virtue may have en

couraged their willingness to open up their texts to voices other than their

own.

Recent scholarship has modified

Welter's unitary model of "true wom

anhood," especially objecting to the

notion that women's virtues were

merely passive ones.13 Scholars have

also demonstrated that women were

not so completely submissive to men

or removed from the working world as

the cult of true womanhood might make us believe. Mary P. Ryan points out that American women affected the

economy through both home-centered

labor and work outside the home, and

affected society through their posi tions of power in churches and chari

table institutions and within the family

(191). However, the means by which

10



Ian Marshall

women exercised their power re

flected a mind-set antithetical to

monological authority. Ryan notes that women wielded influence via the art

of persuasion, not by relying on some

recognized sense of their authority

(74), and effective persuasion requires an open-ness to the give and take of

dialogical discourse. Moreover, to ex

ercise power within the family or at

church or in charitable organizations, women needed to recognize their con

nections to others, and that recogni tion also implies a willingness to hear

and heed the voices of others.14

The feeling of moral responsibility for others, the willingness to set aside

ego, and a sense of community and

connection all made nineteenth-cen

tury women potentially receptive to

heteroglossia. To some extent, these

elements of female socialization are

still at work today. The contemporary

psychologist Carol Gilligan comes

close to employing the languages of

both the cult of true womanhood and

Bakhtinian dialogics in explaining women's differences from men: "Sensi

tivity to the needs of others and the

assumption of responsibility for taking care lead women to attend to voices

other than their own and to include in

their judgment other points of view"

(16). Sensitivity to other perspectives may have been especially prominent in

the work of early nineteenth-century women writers, not just because their

lives were delineated in terms that

emphasized women's responsibility as

moral caretakers, but because in the era of romanticism "female" traits like

empathy, feeling, and intuition became

intellectually respectable.

On the other hand, romanticism was

more conducive to masculine mono

logism in some ways. As Susan Phinney Conrad points out, romanticism "relo

cated the source of value and order

from the external world to the per

ceiving self, investing it with an almost

divine authority." Conrad notes that

this romantic emphasis on the self, im

plicit in the act of writing, was incom

patible with the "tenets of 'true woman

hood,'" but that romantic approval of

sensitivity and feeling helped women

overcome their discomfort with au

thorship (10). Heteroglossia may have

provided a stylistic means of reach

ing that accommodation. Incorporat

ing heteroglossia into their texts could

give women a technique for expres

sing empathy, and it could help them avoid the romantic writer's apparent

assumption of "divine authority." In

this sense, open ness to heteroglossia may partially distinguish female from

male romanticism.

Perhaps another factor that helped determine the dialogic approach of a

nineteenth-century woman writer like Child is the fact of her marginalization. Women's exclusion from the dominant discourses of their society (partic ularly in government and academia) made them, at least in part, outsiders

looking?and listening?in. According to Bakhtin, the outsider's position can

be a source of strength, since "the most intense and productive life of

culture takes place on the boundaries . . ." ("Response" 2). Marginality and

exclusion from elite institutions might explain why male writers like Melville and Whitman also tended to be at

tuned to heteroglossia, whereas their

11



Legacy

college-educated peers Hawthorne and

Emerson were not.

For all these possible reasons, Child

turned the conditions of woman's

social constraint into the aesthetic

power of heteroglossia, and in turn

used heteroglossia to express the con

ditions of woman's place in her soci

ety?affiliated with nature like the In

dian; concerned with moral virtue like

the Puritan; involved in the transmis

sion of culture, including its literary

heritage, as reflected by her adoption of the sentimental manner. In the het

eroglossia of Hobomok, Child also ex

presses a democratic impulse to give voice to persons (American Indians

and women) who may lack the au

thority to speak for the society as a

whole or even for themselves. Her

frontier romance indicates the demo

cratic sympathy that led her later in

life to speak out more straightfor

wardly against the oppression of Amer

ican Indians (in The First Settlers of New England in 1829 and An Appeal for the Indians in 1868), African

Americans (An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Afri cans, 1833), and women (The History

of the Condition of Women in Var

ious Ages, 1835). Instead of the self

assured, single-voiced utterances that

have in the past been mistaken for the

voice of the American writer, novels

like Hobomok offer a dramatic inter

play of voices that more fairly repre sents the diversity of American cul

ture. Further, if we give Bakhtin's

notions of the defining characteristic

of the novel any credence, the het

eroglossic element makes Child's ro

mance, and perhaps the work of other

women writers who open up their nar

rative to seldom-heard voices, more

aesthetically satisfying than works

purged of speech diversity.

Notes

1. Both Nina Baym, in "Melodramas of Be set Manhood," and Judith Fetterley, in her in

troduction to Provisions, have pointed out the

masculine bias inherent in traditional defini

tions of what constitutes the canon of great American literature. Baym also observes that

women in nineteenth-century American litera

ture are associated with the social constraints

that male protagonists feel they must escape from in order to achieve self-definition. Thus

women are not just ignored in works embody

ing the essence of the American literary tradi

tion, but are depicted as the adversary (70

73). 2. I hesitate to use the term "Indian" to re

fer to the native peoples of the Americas, since

it is of course absurd to refer to these peoples with a term that bespeaks nothing of their heri

tage or language or culture but instead reveals

only the geographic misconceptions of early

European explorers of the Americas. But it also

seems absurd to refer to the "Indians" as "native

Americans," since that term, politically correct

or not, reflects the same European derivation.

That is, it characterizes the indigenous peoples of this continent as natives of a place named

after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. The term "aborigine" would be a denotatively

appropriate and non-biased term for those peo

ples usually called "Indians," but connotatively the term is firmly associated with the native

peoples of Australia. Michael Shields, in a letter

to Canadian Geographic, proposes the word

Indigene as a collective noun to refer to the

indigenous peoples of this continent. The Latin

root of the word makes it easily translatable

into other romance languages (i.e., indigene in

French), and its linguistic similarity to the cur

rent term "Indian" would make the shift in us

age simple. Until there is some agreement upon

appropriate terminology, however, I will rely on the widely understood and accepted but

admittedly flawed (misAppellations Indian, American Indian, and Amerind?mostly be

cause the American Indians whom I have

known themselves use these terms.

3. According to Carolyn Karcher, in her ex

cellent introduction to the Rutgers edition of

Hobomok, Child's actual sources of information

12



Ian Marshall

about colonial American history were such Pu

ritan chronicles as John Winthrop's Journal and The History of New England, 1630-1649,

William Hubbard's General History of New En

gland, and Nathaniel Morton's New England's Memorial (xxi).

4. Child's claim to be presenting historical

documents rather than creating a fiction was a

typical novelist's ploy at the time. Cathy N.

Davidson in Revolution and the Word points out that critical censure of the novel persisted "well into the nineteenth century" in America.

Thus, "virtually every American novel . . . de

fended itself against the charge that it was a

novel, either by defining itself differently ... or

by redefining the genre tautologically as all those things it was presumed not to be?moral,

truthful, [and] educational . . ." (40). Davidson

shows that critics of the novel were especially concerned about its influence upon women

(45). The prevailing patriarchal distrust of fic tion apparently had a direct impact on Child's

life. Karcher says that Child's father "tried to

cure his [adolescent] daughter of her unfortu

nate predilection for reading by banishing her

to the frontier town of Norridgewock, Maine, where her newly married sister could initiate

her into domestic avocations befitting a

woman" (ix-x). 5. Kelley also speaks of the "crisis of iden

tity" that nineteenth-century women writers ex

perienced. By writing and publishing, women

writers assumed "male roles of public figure, economic provider, and creator of culture"

(no. 6. Many scholars have elaborated upon the

association of women with nature in the litera ture of the Western world. Annette Kolodny in

The Lay of the Land offers the most thorough

analysis of the implications of that association in male-authored American literature. Ecofemi

nist scholarship takes as its starting point the

association of woman and nature, though one

of the issues ecofeminists deal with is the valid

ity of that association. For excellent introduc

tions to ecofeminist thought, see Janice Monk's

"Approaches to the Study of Women and Land

scape," Karen J. Warren's "Feminism and Ecol

ogy: Making Connections," and Jim Cheney's "Eco-Feminism and Deep Ecology." For explo rations of the validity and implications of the

woman/nature connections, see Sherry B. Ort

ner's "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Cul

ture?," Ynestra King's "Feminism and the Revolt

of Nature," and Patrick D. Murphy's "Sex-Typ

ing the Planet: Gaia Imagery and the Problem of

Subverting Patriarchy."

Kristin Herzog, in Women, Ethnics, and Ex

otics, studies the literary connections between women and nonwhite races, both being de

scribed in our culture as "more passive, less

logical; more imaginative, less technically in

clined; more emotional, less incisive; and more

religious, less scientifically oriented" (xi-xii). Karcher comments upon the association of women and Indians in Hobomok, but she adds

that the association of both with nature is far from absolute. Mary is attracted to the culture

represented by Charles Brown, and Hobomok

exhibits many qualities associated with West ern ideas of culture. Karcher notes, for in

stance, that Hobomok's poetic narratives reveal an aesthetic impulse (xxviii-xxix).

7. Barbara Welter speaks of the special re

sponsibilities of women as preservers and pro moters of religious values in her chapter of

Dimity Convictions entitled "The Feminization

of American Religion." The "traditional reli

gious values ... [of] humility, submission, and meekness [were deemed] incompatible with success" in a society that prized aggressiveness and competitiveness in the political and eco

nomic spheres. But since women were denied

meaningful participation in those realms any

way, they could maintain the "more soft and

accommodating" traits associated with both re

ligion and femininity (84). Ann Douglas also discusses the identification of women with reli

gious values in nineteenth-century America in

The Feminization of American Culture. This

association is not something perceived only by

twentieth-century scholars, however. Hersh

quotes several feminist leaders of nineteenth

century America making claim to the special re

ligious nature of women; to cite just one, Sarah

Grimke wrote in an 1856 newspaper article that "the strength of the moral world lies in

woman ... in her heart religion has found its home" (qtd. in Hersh 275). In an 1886 letter Child clarifies that women's apparent moral su

periority?that is, her "Puritan" role?is not in

nate, but results from current gender defini tions. "I believe there is a sex in souls," writes

Child. "I don't think there is inherent superi

ority on either side; I simply think there is a

difference. That difference is indicated by their voices. Woman's floats higher, and is more per vasive, but less powerful. Her whole organiza tion is finer, keener, less strong. . . . but I think the reason is to be sought not so much in their

natures, as in the constant education they re

ceive from the influences of their position in

society" (Selected Letters 461). 8. Leland S. Person defends the ending, and

13



Legacy

Hobomok's "departure and replacement by Charles Brown," on the grounds that it makes

possible the fulfillment of Mary's two dreams.

First, she manages to rebel against patriarchal

authority and her "male-dominated culture" by

marrying Hobomok (and thus gaining, symbol

ically, a "place in nature"). But then she also

manages to marry a "socially approved hus

band" (683-84). However, these dreams are

mutually exclusive, or at least they cannot be

fulfilled simultaneously. 9. William S. Osborne points out that Ho

bomok is "one of our literature's earliest alien

ated heroes," not just because of his escape into

the wild at the conclusion of the novel, but be

cause he loses his Indian identity in his life with

Mary among the white settlers (511). 10. This sort of open-endedness is implicit in

Bakhtin's ideas. "Authentic prose discourse," he

says, "... cannot fundamentally be . . . dramati

cally resolved (brought to an authentic end)"

("Discourse" 326). Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson identify "unfinalizability" as "a global

concept of [Bakhtin's] thought" ("Introduction"

16), and they point out that "heteroglossia . . .

is used to make . . . discourse unfinalizable"

(Mikhail Bakhtin 316). 11. Karcher points out that John Gorham

Palfrey's review of Yamoyden, a narrative poem

by James Wallis Eastburn and Robert Sands, more than Channing's essay influenced Child's

decision to write a historical novel about the

early days of white settlement in New England. Karcher traces several parallels between

Yamoyden and Hobomok, among them their

authors' sympathies for the Indians in their con

flicts with the Puritans (xviii?xix). 12. Arnold Krupat, discussing Amerind auto

biographies, similarly contends that American

Indian language as written in English is almost

inevitably dialogic. If the life-story is told to a

white editor, the autobiography consists of "his

torically specifiable dialogues between two per sons from different cultures." If the Indian

writes it, in English, the autobiography contains

"significant experience of two different cul

tures." Although some Indian autobiographies

attempt to present (monologically) the privi

leged voice of "a dominant period style that de

fines which texts are candidates for being taken

seriously," most "achieve a high degree of dia

logism?to acknowledge and dramatize . . . the

bicultural nature of their textual formation . . ."

(141). 13. Nina Baym, for instance, notes that the

image of "the beautiful, useless, passive, deli

cate, clinging creature"?the essence of true

womanhood as defined by the diaries and men

tor literature studied by Welter?was to some

extent supplanted, at least in the minds of nine

teenth-century American literary reviewers, by an alternative ideal of womanhood, that of

"a hardworking, busy, tireless, resilient, ever

cheerful helpmeet: kind, wise, consolatory,

sympathetic; a workhorse wife and mother?

mainly wife?whose self-subordinating toil

and attention support individuality in others"

(Novels 102). Though this "other" ideal of womanhood may have allowed for activity where before there was permitted only pas

sivity, self-abnegation and self-sacrifice were

still considered paramount. 14. Ryan's findings emerge from a study

of public documents in Oneida County, New

York. In a similar study, Suzanne Lebsock in The

Free Women of Petersburg examines public documents from Petersburg, Virginia, in an ef

fort to establish the parameters of women's

lives. Like Ryan, Lebsock finds the cult of true

womanhood essentially accurate in its delinea

tions of nineteenth-century women's roles but

adds some necessary qualifications. Women

were not unfailingly subservient to men, notes

Lebsock, and their loyalty to female community could take precedence over their regard for pa triarchal power: "they were quite willing to un

dercut male authority when the welfare of a be

loved kinswoman was at stake" (143). Nancy F.

Cott examines early nineteenth-century wom

en's sense of a female community in The Bonds

of Womanhood. Like Ryan and Lebsock, Cott

finds that the cult of true womanhood certainly set limits on women's independence, but per

haps overstated the extent of their submissive ness: "women were neither victims of social

change?passive receivers of changing defini

tions of themselves?nor totally mistresses of

their destinies" (4). For an excellent review of the developments

and changes in critical perceptions of the cult

of true womanhood and the accompanying doctrine of women's "separate sphere," see

Linda K. Kerber's "Separate Spheres, Female

Worlds, Woman's Place. The Rhetoric of Wom

en's History." Kerber sees three stages in the

development of the "separate spheres" meta

phor. The first, influenced by Welter's outline

of the cult of true womanhood, entailed identi

fying the separate sphere and reading it as "a

theme central to women's historical experi ence." The second stage refined the earlier defi

nitions, "introducing the liberating possibilities of a 'women's culture.'" The third and current

stage involves the dismantling of the notion of

14



Ian Marshall

separate spheres, seeing it as in part a rhetorical

construction and seeking to recognize women's

influence on "the main course of human devel

opment," instead of somehow apart from it all

(17).

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Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin. U of Texas P, 1981.

-. "Discourse in the Novel." The Dia

logic Imagination 259?422. -. "From the Prehistory of Novelistic

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-. "Response to a Question from the

Novy Mir Editorial Staff." Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emer

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1-9.

Bauer, Dale M. Feminist Dialogics: A The

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Baym, Nina. "Melodramas of Beset Man

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can Quarterly 33 (1981): 123-39. -. Novels, Readers, and Reviewers:

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Burns, Robert. "Tarn o' Shanter. A Tale."

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Kinsley. London: Oxford UP, 1969. 443 49.

[Channing, William Ellery]. "Essay on American Language and Literature."

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Cheney, Jim. "Eco-Feminism and Deep Ecology." Environmental Ethics 9

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-. Lydia Maria Child: Selected Let

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Conrad, Susan Phinney. Perish the

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Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England,

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Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

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Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Lit

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