Transgressing the Silence: Lydia Maria Child and the Philosophy of Subversion

This article extends Leonard Harris’ suggestion that Lydia Maria Child’s writings and political activism contituted a philosophy of insurrection. I maintain that an important aspect of this insurrection is best understood as subversion. Subversion is the ability to transgress a gag order without getting caught, to break the silence surrounding injustice without being identified. It is the ability to gradually infiltrate hegemonic ways of thinking and to work from within to reform unjust social practices. This type of political and philosophical resistance is reflected in Child’s treatment of the “Death of Chocorua” and Hobomok, stories of the oppression of native peoples, which she takes up in the early 1830s.