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The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 15 (2004)

A Legacy of Female Imagination:
Lydia Maria Child and the Traditionof Indian Captivity Narrative
Hisayo OGUSHI *The rise of the American romance often inspires controversy, but theorigins of the genre can safely be traced at least as far back as theAmerican Puritans, and in particular to early Puritan experiences of
Native Americans and the American wilderness. In this context, theAmerican romance is one of the earliest American discourses which isrooted in the racial and cultural differences of the Puritans as New World
immigrants and the Native Americans whose territories they invaded.
Puritan writers’ fears not only of physical danger but also of racial transgressions, such as miscegenation, inspired the launch of the Indian captivity narrative, a seminal romance subgenre, characterized by ardent
depictions of Indian savagery and the moral challenges it presented to
the Puritans.
The fate of the Indians’ captives seems to be represented in typicalcaptivity narrative style in Lydia Maria Child’s nineteenth-century romance, Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times by an American, publishedanonymously in 1824: “The captives were placed in an enclosed pieceof public land, and a guard of thirty men set over them” (41). The description of white captives surrounded by savage Indians is characteristic of
the Indian captivity narrative; but although Lydia Maria Child was merely twenty-two years old when Hobomok was published, her narrative
Copyright © 2004 Hisayo Ogushi. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
*Assistant Professor, Keio University

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soon departs from the conventions of the genre, demanding that we reconsider stereotypical images of captivity as well as the relationship ofethnicity and gender.
In Hobomok, Child describes an interracial marriage between a white
woman and an Indian man. It is remarkable that in early nineteenth-century America Child would approach the theme of interracial marriage ina positive light, and indeed Hobomok aroused anger and disgust in its
readers and reviewers. The nearly hysterical condemnation which greeted Hobomok may be understood in view of the spirit of the times, which
in turn offers insight into those essential problematic elements of the captivity narrative which inﬂuenced Hobomok so strongly.
This essay will examine the Indian captivity narrative and its inﬂuence on the rise of the American romance, and will speciﬁcally clarify
how the romance novels of Lydia Maria Child were direct descendantsof Puritan women writers. In the process, this essay will shed light onChild’s own views on ethnicity and femininity.
The Signiﬁcance of the Indian Captivity Narrative
Narratives of captivity and escape have played a role in world literature for as long as conﬂict and warfare have existed, but the Indian captivity narrative as a genre has played an especially important role in
American literary history.1 The Puritan immigrants from England cameto the New World to fulﬁll a mission, the construction of “a city upon ahill” as John Winthrop exclaims in his “A Model of Christian Charity,”
upon which they could pursue a religious life unimpeded. However, in
the New World the Puritans found their plans threatened by the American
Indians, with some of whom they found it difﬁcult to live in harmony.
The Indians not only attacked Puritan villages, but also captured white
people and spirited them away to Indian society.2
Since the Puritans came to America for religious purposes, their narratives of Indian captivity were written as variations on the conversion
narratives which commonly appeared in the seventeenth century. Thesenarratives were intended to promote Puritan solidarity by modeling thepreservation of piety in the face of suffering. The Indian captivity narrative was originally a variation of the conversion narrative in whichwhite immigrants recount autobiographically how they were attacked
and captured by the Indians, how they maintained their faith in God
despite the hardships they endured, and then how they attributed to God’s
glory their escape from Indian society. The captivity narrative was well-Hisayo Ogushi(p57)6/2 04.7.18 0:13 PM ページ 59

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suited as a genre to asserting the moral superiority of white Puritans
because it was invariably cast within a clearly binary framework: suffering whites contrasted with brutal savages.
Celebrated ministers such as Increase Mather and Cotton Mather madepositive use of the conversion narrative by emphasizing its religious
aspects. To the Mathers, captivity experiences played the role of punishment in God’s plan by which the community that is to be blessed by
God is puriﬁed. The rhetoric which they brought to bear on conversion
narratives is the same as that of the jeremiads; Indian captivity was interpreted as a religious allegory for the Puritans’ rediscovery of God’s omnipotence and their repentance in the wilderness: “Living through theexperience and returning home was considered a sign of divine favor”(Derounian-Stodola 19). Given this perspective, it was natural for theministers to use these spiritual autobiographies as sermon topics. The
Indian captivity narrative, thus, was employed to promote piety and solidarity in the white community.
However, as the captivity narrative developed, it gradually lost its religious disposition, until by the nineteenth century it had been transformed
into a more secular minor genre of romance which colonial era clergymen such as Increase Mather or Cotton Mather would never have accepted. In the course of this transformation, the Indian captivity narrative
was submerged into sensational and sentimental ﬁction through its frequent appearance in “the cheap, ephemeral booklets” called chapbooks,
which were published throughout the eighteenth and the nineteenth century (Neuberg 81). Indian captivity narratives contributed much to theformation of the chapbook tradition and were often reprinted.
Richard VanDerBeets observes that the Indian captivity narrative essentially portrays cultural adaptation. The narrative typically follows“the archetypal initiate” through a basic pattern of “Separation (abduction), Transformation (ordeal, accommodation, and adoption), and Return (escape, release, or redemption)” (562). Although VanDerBeets
makes reference to the captives’ gradual adjustment to Indian society,which had certainly not been a focus of attention in the colonial era, heultimately reduces this aspect to the “fundamental truths of experience”(562), by which VanDerBeets indicates that the Indian captivity narrative is an archetype of human experience, which could be applied andrecreated in the course of literature.
Indeed this is one conclusion which may be drawn, but like thepatriarchal Puritan ministers, VanDerBeets seems to have overlooked an

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essential aspect of the captivity narrative. “Transformation,” in VanDerBeets’s own terms of “ordeal, accommodation, and adoption,” also
applies to the theme of self-fashioning, as we shall examine in the worksof Mary Rowlandson, Elizabeth Hanson, Hannah Swarton and Hannah
Dustan. Interestingly, the traditional theme of self-fashioning in
American literature, which was in many respects antithetical to Puritan
ideology, appears to derive from these women writers. As Tara
Fitzpatrick points out, “in a twist on the conventional image of an untethered man conquering a ‘virgin’ wilderness, the American rhetoric of selfcreation in these Puritan captivity narratives issued predominantly fromwomen” (3).
Mary White Rowlandson:
First Self-Fashioner of American Female Identity
It is worth noting that the earliest Indian captivity narrative was written by a woman, Mary Rowlandson. The story of this white woman’s
captivity by savage Indians gained increasing popularity as it was retoldin chapbooks, exerting a strong inﬂuence on the tradition of sensational
ﬁction. It seems safe to relate the frequent appearance of Indians in nineteenth-century ﬁction to the secularization which the Indian captivity
narrative underwent in surviving in chapbook form.3
It is surprising not only that Mary Rowlandson wrote the ﬁrst Puritan
captivity narrative to defend her own purity in a society which valued
selﬂessness, but also that she wrote as a woman in a Western culture inwhich men have long prevented women from attempting the pen (Gilbert
and Guber 12). However, the complex interrelationship for female writers of self-fashioning and wilderness provided fertile ground for both
writing and publication of her adoption of captivity narrative.
According to Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, it was Increase
Mather who persuaded Rowlandson to publish her narrative, “TheSovereignty and Goodness of God,” which was ﬁrst intended for private
circulation(98). It seems probable that Mather liked Rowlandson’s narrative for its inclusion of more than sixty references to the Testaments,
as well as its explicit descriptions of God as the source of her endurance
throughout her sufferings. In other words, Derounian argues that the contribution of Rowlandson’s private experience to the religious community was highly appreciated by the male clergy.
Teresa A. Toulouse, on the contrary, reveals that beyond the narrative
itself and Rowlandson’s willingness to publish, Rowlandson was a gen-

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tlewoman whose husband was a minister and whose father was one of
the wealthiest men in Lancaster (656), factors which may also haveenhanced both the acceptability and reception of her story.4 Toulouse’s
explanation implies that in addition to the intended contribution of her
captivity narrative to the spiritual aims of the male clergy, it is no wonder that Rowlandson also addressed herself to particularly female concerns as well. For example, she clearly strove to express her purity ofbody as well as that of her spirit.
Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark framed this issue as follows:“Although no ethnological evidence indicates that northeastern Indiansever raped women prisoners, as Plains Indians sometimes did, female
captives sometimes felt a need to defend their sexual conduct” (14).
Rowlandson needs to assert her sexual purity, and does so in the last partof her narrative:
I have been in the midst of those roaring lions and savage bears that feared
neither God nor man nor the devil, by night and day, alone in company, sleeping all sorts together, and yet not one of them ever offered me the least abuseof unchastity to me in word or action. (70)In this passage, Rowlandson defends herself as a woman by sharing her
private proclamation that she was never sexually offended by the Indians—that the Indians contaminated neither her body nor her spirit. In
short, Rowlandson wants to clarify that she was not Indianized.
Rowlandson’s own writing, however, clearly contradicts her intentions on this point, in that it contains a detailed description of her
adoption of the Indians’ way of life to survive. Toulouse observes that
Rowlandson uses skills from her previous life in the course of adopting
an Indian lifestyle:If her [Rowlandson’s] afﬂiction of body denotes spiritual specialness and isa “sign” that she has not been spiritually “indianized,” [. . .] her often noted
ability to deal with her afﬂictions—to knit, sew, barter, beg and to survive on
the land just as well as captors—offers another reading of the meaning of
afﬂiction. A Puritan woman is here shown capable of indeed being ‘indianized’—on a secular level. (670–71)

The most conspicuous example of Rowlandson’s Indianization is foundin her description of foods. Rowlandson describes her gradual adoptionof the Indian diet as follows:
The ﬁrst week of my being among them I hardly ate anything; the second

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week, I found my stomach grow very faint for want of something; and yet it
was very hard to get down their ﬁlthy trash. But the third week, though I
could think how formerly stomach would turn against this or that and I could
starve and die before I could eat such things, yet they were sweet and savory
to my taste. (44)

Rowlandson acquires and accepts an Indianized taste for such fare ascorn and ground nuts, which she gathers alongside the Indians. Her senseof taste is changed, and moreover, her attitude towards eating is alsochanged.
Let us compare the following two quotations by way of examining thistransformation:
I asked him [an Indian] to give me a piece [of horse liver]. “What,” says he,“can you eat horse liver?” I told him I would try if he would give a piece,
which he did, and I laid it on the coals to roast, but before it was half readythey got half of it away from me so that I was fain to take the rest and eat it
as it was with the blood about my mouth, and yet a savory bit it was to me[. . .]. (45)

Rowlandson has clearly learned that she cannot persist in her previous
attitudes towards food without facing starvation.
The squaw was boiling horses’ feet; then she cut me off a little piece andgave one of the English children a piece also. Being very hungry, I had quickly eat up mine, but the child could not bite it, it was so tough and sinewy but
lay sucking, gnawing, chewing, and slobbering of it in the mouth and hand.
Then I took it of the child and ate it myself and savory it was to my taste.
(60)

In these examples Rowlandson acts towards the English child exactly as
the Indians did towards her: she deprived a poor child of food she had
previously regarded “ﬁlthy,” which clearly suggests her Indianization.
Yet another example of Rowlandson’s Indianization may be found in
the manner of her escape; Rowlandson employed the Indian barter system to purchase her freedom, exchanging herself for twenty pounds,
which she found while she was with the Indians. Thus, in spite of her
denial of being Indianized, her narrative demonstrates her adaptation into
the Indian society to survive.
Annette Kolodny acutely observes that without the Indians,
Rowlandson could not have survived in the wilderness (19). Fitzpatrickconcludes that it was only in the wilderness that Rowlandson could
achieve a self-enlightenment that had been repressed by Puritan society

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63(12). Moreover, Rowlandson succeeded in life among the Indians specifically because she was a woman; her skills in sewing and knitting, both
speciﬁcally feminine crafts in Puritan society, were instrumental in her
assimilation into Indian society. This aspect of Rowlandson’s and otherfemale captivities reveal the close relationship between femininity andIndianization; male captives such as John Williams seldom managed toadjust to Indian society, expressing in their narratives unbridled Indian
hatred.
Hannah Dustan: Woman of Legend
Rowlandson was not the only Puritan woman to be Indianized. Both
Hannah Swarton and Elizabeth Hanson also more or less adopted an
Indian way of life, despite their arguments that it was piety which saved
them. Hannah Swarton, for example, describes marked changes in her
eating habits in the wilderness, including the eating of groundnuts, weed
roots, and even dogs’ ﬂesh to avoid starvation. Elizabeth Hanson, who
was forbidden to wash off and dispose of the entrails of a beaver she hadcleaned, simply ate them out of intense hunger; Hanson also followed
the Indian practice of thinning milk with water to feed her baby. Furthermore, both Swarton and Hanson’s children remained with the Indianseven after their mothers returned to Puritan society.
Yet none would surpass Hannah Dustan in terms of Indianization.
According to Cotton Mather’s short but appalling report, “A Narrativeof Hannah Dustan’s Notable Deliverance from Captivity,” Indians“dashed out the brains of [Dustan’s] infant against a tree” (163) and captured Dustan, who has “lain-in about a week” (162). Unlike Rowlandsonand other captives, Dustan did not pursue a strategy of docile adaptation
to the Indian society. Instead, this bold woman Indianized herself bykilling ten Indians while they were asleep, scalping them in the Indian
manner of revenge (and perhaps ironically earning a reward of ﬁfty
pounds per scalp from the Massachusetts Colony).
In Regeneration through Violence, Richard Slotkin explains Dustan’s
actions as resulting from a process of Indianization:[A]s the case of Mrs. Rowlandson’s demonstrates, even the most pious
returned captives acquired altered outlooks on the nature of the wilderness
and the Indians [. . .]. They [returned captives] became, to some extent, symbolic amalgams of Indian and white characters; [. . .]. Even Hannah Dustan
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Mather himself justiﬁes Dustan’s murderous acts with a similar line ofreasoning: “being where she had not her own life secured by any law
unto her, she thought she was not forbidden by any law to take away thelife of the murderers by whom her child had been butchered” (164).
Though Mather’s defense of Dustan clearly aims to arouse Indian hatredamong whites, it is premised nonetheless on Dustan’s Indianization, forall that Homi Bhabha might say that her particular act of mimesis was“not quite.”5
As Dustan’s retaliatory killing of Indians makes clear, no one can say
who is the assailant and who is the victim in the captivity narrative. The
Indians were certainly her victims, though in captivity narratives bywhites it was the Indians who captured white victims. Yet predating the
Puritan captivity narrative is the extensive history of Indians who were
captured by the Spanish. Then as now Indians and Whites continue torealign a structure which has undergone countless realignments. Ultimately, there is no order in captivity narrative; as Cotton Mather so aptly
stated, nobody is secured by law because there is no law in the wilderness. It is precisely on this ground that the genre of captivity narrative
itself revolves around lawlessness.
The lawlessness of the captivity narrative brings to mind the views ofJean Bethke Elshtain in Woman and War. Elshtain concludes that women’s violence rises speciﬁcally when the social order is disturbed.
Collective male action can be moralized, can take place within the boundaries of the culturally sanctioned. Outside a horizon, fused with the story of
war/politics, female violence is what happens when politics breaks down into
riots, revolutions, or any anarchy: when things are out of control. (170)

According to Elshtain, it is in a state of chaos that the female self is created; when the order which governs the male world becomes corrupt, theinevitable intrusion of chaos creates space for women. Dustan’s revenge
occurred in such a feminine space, a place in which the judgment of men
did not apply because Puritan patriarchal standards and laws had no jurisdiction.6 It is in the wilderness that women’s self-fashioning is achieved.
The story of this bold woman was often retold in the nineteenth
century, in works including “The Mother’s Revenge” (1831) by John
Greenleaf Whitter, “The Duston Family” (1836) by Nathaniel
Hawthorne, or A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) byHenry David Thoreau. Nonetheless, Mrs. Dustan has never been accepted as a legendary frontier ﬁgure on the order of Daniel Boone, because

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she was essentially an anarchist transgressing the male social order.
Hawthorne, for example, treats Dustan’s vengeful behavior as if she werea horriﬁc mad mother:
Hark! That low moan, as of one in a troubled dream—it told a warriour’s
death pang! Another!—Another!—and the third half-uttered groan was froma woman’s lips. But, Oh, the children! Their skin are red; yet spare them,
Hannah Duston [sic], spare those seven little ones, for the sake of the seventhat have fed at your own breast. “Seven,” quoth Mrs. Duston to herself.
“Eight children have I borne—and where are the seven and where are theeighth!” The thought nerves her arm; and the copper coloured babes slept thesame dead sleep with their Indian mothers. (43)

For Hawthorne, Dustan was an “awful woman” (45), in contrast to her“tender hearted, yet valiant” husband who narrowly escaped from theIndians without hurting anybody (45). In the same vein, Thoreau locatesthe anecdote of Dustan emphatically in the past, writing “those times
seem more remote than the dark age” (53).
After forming her self in the wilderness, Hannah Dustan can no longer
be viewed as acceptable in terms of male-delineated social standards;
Hawthorne’s typically negative characterization of Dustan suggests that
she is far from the feminine ideal desirable to men, not only because she
is aggressive but also because she is a self-made woman. Yet Dustan’s
narrative proves that women’s selves emerge in the wilderness, and it
might further be argued that women in the seventeenth century requirecaptivity in order to liberate themselves from cultural and social bondage
through violence.
Hobomok as a Reverse Captivity Narrative
The Indian captivity narrative survived into the nineteenth century innumerous works of sensational ﬁction.7 In contrast to the original seventeenth-century captivity narrative, which encouraged Indian hatred,
nineteenth-century ﬁctions romanticized the Indians as noble savages.8
Lydia Maria Child’s ﬁrst romance, Hobomok (1824), also presents sympathetic stereotypes of Indians, yet the Indian that Child created in her
romance behaves with far greater passion than reviewers or ordinary
readers of her time expected: the Indian hero impregnates a white heroine. While Mary White Rowlandson wrote and published her captivity
narrative as a proclamation of her purity, Child provoked her reviewers
and readers with a romance about mixing races.

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Hobomok is a historical novel about Puritan society set in Naumkeak(Salem), Massachusetts circa 1629. In this novel, the protagonist, Mary
Conant, leaves behind a life on her rich grandfather’s English manor tojourney to the New World with her sick mother in search of the religious
freedom which her father, Roger Conant, desires for his family. In thosedays, the Indians often raided the colonists, but thanks to Hobomok, an
Indian who acted as an intermediary, the whites and the Indians secured
peace. As the novel develops, Hobomok forms a secret love for Mary,
despite his awareness that she loves Charles Brown.
Brown, however, is a young Episcopalian whom Roger Conant hates
and whose marriage to Mary he opposes. Since Charles refuses to convert to Puritanism, he is ordered by the Governor to return to Britain.
Charles, however, boards a ship for India, and the news soon arrives in
Naumkeak that the ship has sunk in a storm. Along with the death ofMary’s mother, the news of Charles’s death drives Mary into “a bewilderment of despair that almost amounted to insanity” (120), and she
ﬁnally decides to marry Hobomok and thereby gives a great despair to
her father. Three years later Mary bears Hobomok a son. However,Charles has in fact survived the shipwreck, and returns to Naumkeak
only to ﬁnd that Mary is the wife of Hobomok. Knowing Mary’s feelings, Hobomok leaves her forever and returns to the deep forest. Little
Hobomok is raised in white society, growing up to attend Cambridge
University.
Child was not the ﬁrst writer to deal with a close relationship between
an Indian and a white. For example, James Wallis Eastburn’s epic poem
Yamoyden: a Tale of the War of King Philip, in Six Cantos narrates atale of the tragic love of an Indian man, Yamoyden, and a white maiden, Nora, both of whom die in King Philip’s war. This popular epic won
a favorable review in North American Review in 1821, which directly
inspired Child to write Hobomok. In this twenty-two-page review of
Yamoyden, the anonymous reviewer attested: “This is one of the mostconsiderable attempts in the way of poetry, which have been made inthis country” (466).
Hobomok was also highly praised in some reviews, but never wholeheartedly. One anonymous reviewer emphasized the unnaturalness of
this romance (262–63), and another review, by Jared Sparks, criticized
the novel with the observation that not all readers would approve of it(87). What most upset these two reviewers was clearly Child’s depictionof miscegenation in seventeenth-century Puritan society.

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However, it is striking that while the reviewers of Hobomok harshly
criticized the relationship which Child described in Hobomok, themixed-race story of Yamoyden was well-received. Twentieth-century
critics such as Carolyn L. Karcher or Lelands S. Person, Jr. attempt toresolve this paradox through their explication of Hobomok as a novel
which concerns Mary’s “rebellion against patriarchy” (Karcher, “introduction” of Hobomok xx) more than racial problems, and which would
thus offend contemporary male readers.9 Child’s characterization ofRoger Conant also embodies signiﬁcant departures from the historicalﬁgure. Historically speaking, Conant contributed to the foundation of
Salem community and was much respected, but Child made him into afanatic father, who could represent her anti-patriarchal attitude.
Hobomok indeed takes a feminist point of view as these critics demonstrate, but neither Karcher nor Person provide an adequate explanationof how Child could express her “rebellion against patriarchy” by transgressing racial borders. If Child’s view of female identity in Hobomok
aroused the aversion of reviewers, it may have done so due to the innately female self-fashioning which Mary Conant undertakes, an aspect of
the novel which is directly in the tradition of the Indian captivity narrative.
It might be argued that Hobomok cannot be considered a captivity narrative simply because the Indians make an appearance in the novel. The
heroine is not captured by the Indians. On the contrary, Child departs
from the conventions of the genre by portraying another kind of captive:
in place of the white captives “placed in an enclosed piece of public land,
and a guard of thirty men set over them” (41), Child’s reader discovers
Indian captives—the Puritans, acting on Hobomok’s advice, trap their
Indian enemies. In other words, Child portrays the Puritans as captors
and the Indians as captives.
Besides describing the capture of those who are wholly outside of
Puritan society by those who are within it, Child also presents anothertype of captive: one who wishes to escape the strictures of society. Mary
Conant, the heroine of the romance, has “no sympathy with her father’s
religious scruples” (46), and strongly expresses her longings for herhomeland: “My heart yearns for England, and had it not been for mygood mother, I would gladly have left Naumkeak to-day” (19). These
remarks of Mary suggest that she has little desire to understand herfather’s religious fanaticism, and that only her sick mother keeps her inNaumkeak. Mary suffers her [fate] as if she were a captive, remainingHisayo Ogushi(p57)6/2 04.7.18 0:13 PM ページ 68

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in her own society for the reason that she cannot “be disobedient to him[her father]”(20):For her mother’s sake, she endured the mean and laborious ofﬁces which she
was obliged to perform, but she lived only in the remembrance of the fairy
spot in her existence [in England]. Alone as she was, without one spirit thatcame in contact with her own, she breathed in the regions of fancy; and manyan ideal object had she invested with its rainbow robe. (47)As female captives in the seventeenth century were compelled to escapetheir own society in order to ﬁnd themselves, Mary feels a strong urge
to ﬂy from the place to which she belongs. Furthermore, as shall be seen,
Mary decides not to return to England, but rather to enter the Indian society or wilderness, a locale which an ordinary woman would shun.
Mary’s decision brings to mind the notion of “female space,” asexplained by Alice Jardin in Gynesis: “The space ‘outside of’ the conscious subject has always connoted the feminine in the history of Western thought—and any movement into alterity is a movement into thatfemale space” (114–15). Both Jardin and Elshtain refer to the wilderness
outside of Puritan community as a space for women—a chaotic, lawlessarea. Mary, who has been deeply uncomfortable with her environment,
desires a female space beyond the conﬁnes of male-centered Puritan
society.
Philip Gould and other critics, however, ascribe Mary’s ﬂight to theIndians’ community to insanity caused by the death of her mother andthe persecution of her lover, Charles (Gould 129). Indeed, Child describes Mary’s confusion at length:
A bewilderment of despair that almost amounted to insanity. She [Mary] sat
down by her mother’s grave, and wished to weep. . . . There was chaos inMary’s mind;—a dim twilight, which had ﬁrst made all objects shadowy, andwhich was rapidly darkening into misery, almost insensible of its source. . .
. In the midst of this whirlwind of thoughts and passions, she turned suddenly
towards the Indian, as she said, “I will be your wife, Hobomok, if you loveme.” “Hobomok has loved you many long moons,” replied he; “but he loved
like as he loves the Great Spirit.” “Then meet me at my window an hour
hence,” said she, “and be conveyed me to Plymouth.” (120–21)

Perhaps assaying to portray Mary’s motivation sympathetically, Childexcuses her seemingly pointless elopement with the Indian as madness;
indeed, between having a heartless father and losing both her mother andlover, Mary has good reason to go mad. However, Child later reveals a

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hidden conscious willfulness behind Mary’s decision; when Hobomok
asks if she is ill, wanting to give her medicine, Mary replies laconically“I am not sick” (124). Hobomok, thus “again convinced of her rationality, went forth to make arrangements for his marriage” (124). With Marythus explicitly asserting her “rationality”, “chaos in her mind” is nolonger a convincing excuse for her ﬂight: instead, it should be considered a strategy which the heroine employs for her own purposes.
The Indian captivity narratives of women writers such as Rowlandson
and Dustan suggest, as we have seen, that captivity by Indians helps thecaptive to liberate herself from male-centered social bondage, to accomplish her individual self-fashioning in the wilderness. In this sense,
captivity—no matter how much suffering it might entail—is ultimately
indispensable for women to gain the self-awareness which in Puritan
society was supposed to remain humbled before God. In Hobomok, Mary
enters the Indian community of her own free will because she has alreadybeen a captive in the male-dominated Puritan society.
Furthermore, this relationship between captivity narratives by female
writers of the seventeenth-century , and historical romances set in thecolonial era but written in the nineteenth century can be illuminated further through a legendary event that occurred in 1636 in Massachusetts
Bay Colony: the antinomian controversy . Anne Hutchinson, the ﬁgureat the center of this controversy, immigrated to the new world as adisciple of John Cotton, grandfather of Cotton Mather, who, as mentioned earlier, used captivity narratives to promote hatred of Indians.
Hutchinson, believing people should reconsider their religious faith,strongly demanded that the reconstruction of the patriarchal theocracy
in New England society. This brave woman’s ideology, by asserting thepossibility of direct revelation from God, implied the superﬂuousness ofthe clergymen who had been conducting the congregation. John
Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote about her
in his diary on October 11, 1636:
One Mrs. Hutchinson, a member of the church of Boston, a woman of a ready
wit and bold spirit, brought over with her two dangerous errors: 1. That theperson of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justiﬁed person. 2. That no sanctiﬁcation can help to evidence to us our justiﬁcation. – from these two grew manybranches. (193)

Eventually, Hutchinson was persecuted, banished, and ended up being
killed allegedly by Indians after her “monstrous birth” (qtd. in Hall 85).

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What she demonstrates is that the heretic was to be put into the land foraliens: in other words, Puritan society placed heretics and Indians in thesame category as being equally and absolutely “Other.”
Surprisingly, such was the extent of the nineteenth-century’s reevaluation of Ann Hutchinson that it may be called a “Hutchinson revival.”
The most famous exemplar is, of course, Hester Prynne, but this is not
the ﬁrst case of Hutchinson’s revival. David Reynolds offers several
other novels whose heroines’ behavior and disposition are exceedingly
Hutchison-like (344). While “adultery” is a crime of immoral sexualassociation with someone outside of marriage, “heresy” means an association with dangerous thoughts outside of orthodoxy. Otherness is always to be punished.
The similarity between Mary Conant and Anne Hutchison enables us
to reread Hobomok as an early nineteenth-century reevaluation of
Hutchinson . Mary also advances into the wilderness resisting her bigoted father who never allows heterodoxy, and gives a “monstrous birth”
as a result of sexual intercourse with an Indian, a plot that enacts the joining of religious otherness as embodied by Hutchinson and Indianizedotherness as represented in female captivity narratives. Mary, thus, has
to escape into the wilderness by her own will precisely because the tradition of female otherness requires her desertion of white Puritan patriarchal society. A woman’s position in Puritan society resembled that ofa captive, thus the usefulness of combining the otherness represented by
Hutchinson and the otherness represented by the Indianization of a
Puritan woman in the wilderness in order to write a narrative of female
liberation through redeﬁnition of self. But still a question arises: Even if
Mary needed to ﬂee Puritan society, why does she decide to spend herlife in Indian society when she has long wanted to return to England?
Mary Conant: A Woman Who Expands the Female SpaceThe marriage of an Indian man and a white woman was highly provocative to contemporary reviewers, eliciting such criticism as “Nowthis is a train of events not only unnatural, but revolting, we conceive,to every feeling of delicacy in man or woman” (anonymous 262–63);
and “It is very bad taste, to say the least, and leaves upon the mind a disagreeable impression” (Sparks 87). The fear of the rape of white females
by colored people which required Rowlandson to declare her purity inthe seventeenth century doubtless remained in the nineteenth, andreviewers’ repugnance for Hobomok is understandable in terms of thisfear.

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A LEGACY OF FEMALE IMAGINATION71

Yet in Hobomok Child recreates a traditional Indian captivity narrative for women, attaching a deeper signiﬁcance to miscegenation thanher antecedents. In effect, Child reverses the structure of the rape narrative in which a colored man violates a white maiden,10 with a story inwhich a white woman forces an Indian man to have a sexual relationship. It is Mary who offers the proposal of marriage to Hobomok (“I will
be your wife, Hobomok, if you love me”) and as Child reveals, Mary
does so in a state of “rationality.” Mary is far from the helpless maiden
we often see in sensational ﬁctions of the period; rather she is given therole of exploiter of an obedient Indian.
This reversed structure may be explicated in light of Hobomok’s disappearance into the woods when Charles miraculously returns alive to
Naumkeak.
The Indian [Hobomok] gazed upon his rival [Charles], as he stood learning
his aching head against a tree; and once and again he indulged in the designof taking his life.
“No,” thought he. “She [Mary] was ﬁrst his. Mary loves him better thanshe does for me: for even now she prays for him in her sleep. The sacriﬁcemust be made for her.” (139)

Hobomok, who is seduced by Mary, leaves his society to allow Mary toreturn to her Puritan society with her child, little Hobomok, and marryCharles; eventually, people around her forget this poor Indian. Mary is
not the stereotypical heroine of sentimental ﬁction deserted by her unfaithful lover. Instead, she plays the role of colonialist femme fatale whobrings ruin to the noble savage. Here we cannot help but ﬁnd the tradition of sensational ﬁction radically subverted.
Mary goes into the “female space” outside of her male-dominatedsociety and produces chaos. The medium of this chaos is racial hybridity, which is antithetical to the purity so highly esteemed by the Puritans.
Thus, Mary’s interracial relationship may be understood as solely a necessary precondition for having a hybrid child. As noted, women transgress the patriarchal convention in the wilderness, which enables themto establish their own “self” to liberate themselves from the bondage.
The plot of racial transgression inherited from captivity narrative is a
gateway to female imagination.
Charles can never be more than a surrogate father to this child.
Hobomok, biological father of Little Hobomok, cannot claim his paternity because he remains an Indian, no matter how well he behaves likean Englishman. Through his “long residence with the white inhabitantsHisayo Ogushi(p57)6/2 04.7.18 0:13 PM ページ 72

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of Plymouth,” (36) as well as his marriage to Mary, Hobomok acquires
an Englishman’s manner to such a degree that “he seems almost like an
Englishman” (137). However, “almost” does not mean “completely.”
Hobomok is almost white but not quite, and as such fulﬁlls his purpose
when he helps Mary to have a child of mixed race.
Much as Hobomok, despite his every effort, can never be a perfect
Englishman, Mary is also Indianized but not quite; however, in Mary’s
case this serves the larger purposes of the narrative. Mary is Indianized
to some extent, gives birth to a hybrid child, and returns to the white
community with her interracial child to expand the female space. For thisreason, Mary cannot return to England, where she would have been subject to another hierarchical—that is, patriarchal—society. As the Indian
was indispensable to the captivity narrative as the impetus for women’s
self-fashioning, Hobomok is essential to Mary’s self-fashioning in
Puritan society. Mary does not proclaim her carnal purity as did
Rowlandson, nor does she slay the Indians as did Dustan. Nonetheless,all of these writers used the Indians to establish female selves, establishing a legacy of female imagination in American literary history.
NOTES
1The captivity narrative is not peculiar to the Puritans, but it clearly played an important role in colonial New England. As Fitzpatrick argues in “The Figure of Captivity:
The Cultural Work of the Puritan Captivity Narrative,” “the New England Puritans did
not invent the captivity narrative, nor did they monopolize the market in the seventeenth
century. But while Puritan, Catholic, and Quaker alike read in their captivities the designof Providence, only the Puritans interpreted their trials as at once chastisements for insufﬁcient faith and as God’s extraordinary means of converting the ‘lukewarm’ and conﬁrming those he would elect” (Fitzpatrick 7).
2
Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola identiﬁes four reasons for the Indian’s takingof white captives: revenge, ransom, replacement of members, and use as slaves (TheIndian Captivity Narrative, 2–8). Thus the Indians did not exclusively kill or enslave
white people for revenge, although a considerable number of Indian captivity narratives
focused on the brutality and savageness of the Indians.
3
The mythologization of the Indians as the Vanishing American Other is another reason for the frequent appearance of Indians in the nineteenth–century novel. Lora Romero
points out that forty novels about “the cult of Vanishing American,” including James
Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, were published between 1824 and 1834(385).
4
Derounian-Stodola also accounts for the difﬁculty of publishing books for women
written by women. It is clear that Rowlandson could never have published her autobiographical narrative without the help of ministers such as Increase Mather (98).
5
In his essay on mimicry in post-colonial discourse, Homi K. Bhabha discusses how“mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal,” and how mimicry inevitably includes the differences (86).

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73

6

In The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of American Frontiers, 1630–
1860, Annett Kolodny argues that myth or fantasy constructed by men excludes womenfrom male-dominated sociey, and that women therefore must journey to the frontier(wilderness) to pursue their own fantasies, while men construct their myths in the forests
or woods.
7
Referring to the great popularity of the Indian captivity narrative in Britain, Nancy
Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse framed a unique theory in “The American Originsof the English Novel,” to the effect that the Indian captivity narrative strongly inﬂuenced
British sensational novelists such as Samuel Richardson (397–98).
8
According to Roy Harvey Pearce, from around 1815 on, scholars believed that the
Indians were the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes (The Savage of America 63). In
general, the romanticization of the Indians reﬂected the diminishing menace which theIndians represented. Richard Slotkin explains that “with the gradual vanishing of the
Indian populations east of the Appalachians, it became possible to romanticize theIndians as the noble savage and to employ him as a symbol of American libertarianism
and independent patriotism” (418).
9Child published this romance anonymously (“by an American”). It is therefore difﬁcult to argue that reviewers criticized Hobomok simply because it was written by awoman.
10
Daniel Williams argues that in rape narratives of New England, the race of the rapist
is not signiﬁcant: “. . . all of the rapists were out of control, regardless of their race.
Although a character’s blackness served as an obvious symbol of depraved self-indulgence, this was not necessarily a uniquely black tendency. Though expedient, skin color
was only one means used to identify the Other” (200). More to the point is the common
description of rapists as equivalent to thieves whose violations of women represented
transgressions of male property.

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