Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona: The Romance that Became a Tourist Guide and Silenced the Mestiza

This study focuses on American writer and activist Helen Hunt Jackson and aims to explain why her romance Ramona (1884), originally intended as a form of literary activism on behalf of California’s Native Americans, failed to effect actual change in the situation of the state’s indigenous population and, instead, ended up as an accomplice in the late 19th-century development of Anglo California. Said development brought along not only the advance of railroad companies, real-estate investors and the tourist industry, but, most poignantly, the displacement and consequent genocide of its Native inhabitants. All in all, the paper will prove that a social and political vision like Jackson’s, weighed down by the systems of imperialism and capitalism, as well as the oppressive discourses of racism and sexism, was bound to entrench economic, sexual and racial inequalities despite its good intentions.

Legal Realisms

U.S. historians have long considered the Civil War and its Reconstruction as a second American revolution. Literary scholars, however, have yet to show how fully these years revolutionized the American imagination. One marker of this was the postwar search for a “Great American Novel”—a novel fully adequate to the breadth and diversity of the United States in the era of the Fourteenth Amendment. The debate over what full representation would mean led to a thoroughgoing reconstruction of the meaning of “literature” for readers, writers, politics, and law. Legal Realisms examines the transformation of the idea of “realism” in literature and beyond in the face of uneven developments in the racial, ethnic, gender, and class structure of American society. The ideal of equality before the law conflicted with persistent inequality, and it was called into question by changing ideas about accurate representation and the value of cultural difference within the visual arts, philosophy, law, and political and moral theory. Offering provocative new readings of Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Helen Hunt Jackson, Albion Tourgée, and others, Legal Realisms follows the novel through the worlds of California Native American removal and the Reconstruction-era South, of the Mississippi valley and the urban Northeast. It shows how incomplete emancipation haunted the celebratory pursuit of a literature of national equality and explores the way novelists’ representation of the difficulty of achieving equality before the law helped Americans articulate the need for a more robust concept of society.

Introduction

The introduction argues that the reconstruction of the American novel in the post-Civil War era had its roots in a confrontation with the legal remapping of the nation under the Fourteenth Amendment. William Dean Howells’s pivotal influence on the shaping of post-Civil War American literature, this chapter suggests, was rooted in his grasp of the challenge Reconstruction posed to the epistemological and legal foundations of the novel as form. Providing an initial definition of the idea of “legal realism” in fiction as the confluence between Fourteenth-Amendment universalism and a mandate to understand modern society from a plurality of perspectives, the introduction asserts that the project of creating an “autonomous art”—an art that was not subservient to politics, journalism, philosophy, or morality—involved embracing all of these fields in relation to the new definition of citizenship and in relation to a sociological panorama of American society. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s assertion that “the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience,” cut against the novel’s universalism but also opened up new possibilities of representation, which were embraced, extended, and criticized by Albion Tourgée, in defending the rights of African-American freedmen to equality, and by Helen Hunt Jackson, in articulating the rights of Native Americans to enjoy either the rights of nations or those of citizenship. Concluding with the idea that objective exploration of nescience in relation to the suffering of others can be a source of knowledge in law as in literature, the introduction explores the connection between legal right and the novel’s frameworks of sympathetic imagination and multi-perspectival dissonance.

Perfect Knowledge

This chapter examines Helen Hunt Jackson as an exemplary figure for the Reconstruction generation of American writers. Nurtured on the sympathetic universalism animating the antebellum realism of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Jackson collided with the limits of this model at the moment of its triumph. A successful novelist and poet, Jackson became, in the 1870s, an activist for Native American rights. Working across a variety of genres—travel writing published in prestigious magazines such as The Century, the legal history A Century of Dishonor, and the novel Ramona—Jackson attempted to supplement sentimental modes of universalist appeal with legal arguments appropriate to the United States in the era of the Fourteenth Amendment and picturesque representational strategies appealing to a generation increasingly interested in racial, regional, and gender difference. Tracing out Jackson’s affiliation with a variety of contemporary writers, including Mark Twain, Albion Tourgée, and Henry James, this chapter shows how these writings engaged her in a generational rebellion against the high political moralism of the prewar generation. The “sentimental fools,” “sentimental tourists,” and “mugwump aesthetes” of postbellum literature rejected and transformed the sentimental tradition in ways that prepared the ground for a literary field defined by the paired ideals of autonomous literary experimentalism and authentic, pluralistic cultural expression. This chapter argues that Ramona, in its attempt to compromise between sentimentalism and the new epistemological and aesthetic particularity, must be read as an allegory of public agency in an age of violent territorial expansion and divided fields of discourse.

Literature of the New Year: Literary Variations on the Celebration of the New Year

Is the New Year really new or old? Happy or sad? Is it only part of the process and the cycle of seasons making one look back and think of death? Is it a time to wish to stay where one is or hope for opportunities and possibilities? Like a point in a circle, is every day a New Year’s day? Is it a time for nostalgia and reminiscence or promises and resolutions for the future? With the (Gregorian and the British Government) changes in the Western calendar at different times in history and with different countries/cultures celebrating the New Year at different times of the year and with the fiscal year, political (election) year, and academic year being different from the traditional New Year of January 1st, does the New Year mark the beginning and the ending in just an arbitrary way? Centuries ago Britain’s earliest Poets Laureate introduced the tradition of writing a New Year poem. Since then there have been many authors writing New Year essays and poems. They include Robert Herrick, Charles Cotton, Johann Von Goethe, S. T. Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Lord Alfred Tennyson, William Cullen Bryant, Helen Hunt Jackson, Emily Dickinson, George Curtis, Thomas Hardy, Fiona Macleod (William Sharp), D. H. Lawrence, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sylvia Plath, among others.

Strange Apathy

This chapter challenges the critical consensus that Helen Hunt Jackson fashioned her Indian reform novel Ramona (1884) after Uncle Tom’s Cabin, insofar as sympathy for her indigenous protagonists promises to bring them into the fold of personhood. As Jackson well knew, designating American Indians as persons was fully consistent with policies designed to dissolve tribal affiliations. By recovering Jackson’s stated interest in modeling her novel on the story of a hunted deer, and by drawing on theories of depression as a political emotion, the chapter rejects accounts of Ramona’s “sentimentality” while insisting that the novel’s aesthetic strategies are deeply affective. Specifically, it draws on Giorgio Agamben’s later notion of “bare life” to support a claim that Ramona lingers with animal-like desperation and depression to register the loss of tribal forms of political life and to trouble bureaucratic visions of efficiently managed populations.

Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age

Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age argues that late-nineteenth-century US fiction grapples with and helps to conceptualize the disagreeable feelings that are both a threat to citizens’ agency and an inescapable part of the emotional life of democracy—then as now. In detailing the corruption and venality for which the period remains known, authors including Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Adams, and Helen Hunt Jackson evoked the depressing inefficacy of reform, the lunatic passions of the mob, and the revolting appetites of lobbyists and office seekers. Readers and critics of these Washington novels, historical romances, and satirical romans à clef have denounced their fiercely negative tone, seeing it as a sign of cynicism and elitism. This book argues, in contrast, that their distrust of politics is coupled with an intense investment in it—not quite apathy, but not quite hope. Chapters examine both common and idiosyncratic forms of political emotion, including “crazy love,” disgust, “election fatigue,” and the myriad feelings of hatred and suspicion provoked by the figure of the hypocrite. In so doing, the book corrects critics’ too-narrow focus on “sympathy” as the American novel’s model political emotion. We think of reform novels as fostering feeling for fellow citizens or for specific causes. Not Quite Hope argues that Gilded Age fiction refocuses attention on the unstable emotions that shape our relation to politics as such.