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Article Excerpt
Helen Hunt Jackson and Clorinda Matto de Turner's novels Ramona (1884) and Aves sin nido (Birds Without a Nest, 1889) share much in common. Perhaps most importantly, both authors wrote their novels as part of a program of advocacy for Native Americans. In this essay, I argue that in their activist novels, both authors employ the tropes of sentimentalism and interracial romance to criticize the ideology that defended the mistreatment of Native Americans. (2) I must qualify this statement by saying that while in certain ways sentiment and interracial romance function hand in hand in these works, in other ways they work independently. In other words, one should not confuse the cultural work they do, (3) and I will thus draw an analytic distinction between the function of sentiment and interracial romance in both novels. After discussing the ways in which these novels utilize these strategies, I will discuss the discursive limitations of the criticisms that Ramona and Aves sin nido propose, i. e., how their attacks fail. In making these claims, I will keep in mind that while the two novels utilize similar rhetorical strategies in order to criticize race-based oppression, the cultural work done by the two novels is distinct in response to the particular socio-cultural needs of the United States and Peru. Specifically, Ramona criticizes United States expansionism and Indian dispossession, while Aves sin nido promotes a modernizing agenda in favor what it understands as barbaric modes of victimizing Indians. With these differences in mind, I will devote part of my discussion to detailing Jackson and Matto's particular national and historical contexts.
Oftentimes, those doing comparative analyses of Inter-American literatures come to an impasse when trying to find common ground between North American and Latin American texts. The fact that the United States and Latin American nations have extremely divergent histories has caused this difficulty, and these differences have become more obvious in our contemporary world, in which the United States and its southern neighbors have an antagonistic relationship and differ greatly in terms of culture as well as statures and aims in international politics. These differences find, of course, iteration in the nations' respective literatures, and the consequent incommensurability has prompted a number of critics, such as the Cuban poet and essayist Roberto Fernandez Retamar, to assert that comparing the literatures of the Americas is naive and impossible. (4) Retamar is correct to point out the significance of the Americas' divergent histories and the challenges that difference presents to comparatists. However, the problem is not insurmountable, as discussing parallel rhetorical strategies, such as the similar ways in which Jackson and Matto employ sentiment and interracial romance in Ramona and Aves sin nido, does allow the critic to find significant links. Indeed, there is a growing body of scholarship that fruitfully compares Latin American and North American texts. (5) Furthermore, I would contend that one can think of the incommensurability that Retamar points out as less of a hindrance than a tool because when one thinks of these differences in conjunction with rhetorical similarities, it allows the critic to better conceptualize the specificities of the nations in the Americas. In other words, by comparing rhetorical and generic links in New World literatures in a historicist vein, one can bring into greater view the diverse ways in which the nations in the Americas formed, and in keeping with this claim, I devote much attention in this essay to discussing the particular historical contexts that produced these two novels. In sum, I intend for this essay to be a part of this growing body of comparative scholarship and to build on work like Debra J. Rosenthal's by further analyzing the relationship between Ramona and Aves sin nido. At a time when demographic shifts in the Americas are making it more and more difficult to claim strict delineations between North American and Latin American culture, such comparative work is nothing short of necessary as it begins to establish dialogue between the literary works these nations have produced as well as between the scholars that work on them.
Before I discuss these two novels, it will be useful to give a brief working definition of the term sentimentalism. Nineteenth-century sentimental rhetorical practice has roots in eighteenth-century philosophical discussions of sympathy. Adam Smith, in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), argued that in order for someone to exercise sympathy for another, that someone must imagine him or herself to occupy that other's position. In the United States, various reform movements that intended to improve the status of underprivileged groups adopted this theory by calling for people to imagine themselves in the position of the abject. In fact, something of a culture of sentiment developed. In her analysis of stories of suffering slaves as indicative of a shift in religious sensibility that took place in the Antebellum States, Elizabeth C. Clarke describes a community of sentiment in which "[m]any envisioned the good society as a network of benevolent believers, united by ties of sentiment, their hearts quivering with affectionate regard for the well-being of others" (477). In Latin America, which also imported sentimentalism from Europe, one can similarly understand the term, as Ana Peluffo claims, as an authorial "deseo de hacerle derramar lagrimas al lector por la suerte de un Otro-etnico en peligro" (2005: 13) ["desire to cause the reader to shed tears for the fortunes of an endangered ethnic Other"]. With these points in mind, when I refer to Ramona and Aves sin nido as novels that employ sentiment, I refer to how they share the humanitarian tactic of depicting physical and psychological pain in order to produce sympathy and right feeling. Both novels, moreover, plead to an ideal readership attuned to the suffering of the abject, a readership like the one Clarke describes.
Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona has as its historical context the social upheaval in California after the Mexican-American War, which terminated in early February of 1848 with American victory as recognized by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The treaty's most important provisions established an officially recognized United States/Mexico national border; in effect, the United States gained a great amount of territory in the present-day American Southwest. The subsequent settlement of the region was an expression of the United States' belief in its Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny was a political doctrine that James Monroe articulated first and that Democrats used to defend their expansionistic policies; proponents contended that expansion was obvious ("manifest") and necessary (it was the United States' "destiny"). While the doctrine was politically controversial due to opposition from Whigs, the Democratic hegemony over the politics of the Mexican-American War insured that Manifest Destiny found voice in the laws related to Southwest expansion.
The discourse on property characterized by these laws would prove unfortunate for the Mexicans and especially the Native Americans living in the area. (6) Ramona, which is replete with depictions and discussions of unjust dealings over property between the Mexicans, Indians, and Americans, criticizes this discourse on land ownership. Jackson constructed the novel's narrative through her accumulation of various factual accounts, such as the story of a murdered Indian man survived by his wife Ramona. The novel's titular main character is the adopted daughter of Senora Moreno, who is not fond of Ramona due to her distaste for Ramona's mestiza ancestry. When Ramona grows to be a woman, she falls in love with Alessandro Assiz, a Cahuilla Indian who works on the Senora's ranch. Despite the pleas of Felipe, the Senora's son who loves Ramona as a sister, the interracial relationship that Ramona and Alessandro engage in enrages the Senora. Ramona then realizes that her adoptive mother has never cared for her and elopes with her lover, who has at this point learned that American settlers have dispossessed his tribe of its lands. The life led by the two is far from happy as greedy Eastern settlers constantly take Ramona and Alessandro's meager belongings, and the couple is thus forced to lead a life of poverty and migrancy. Eventually, a ruffian kills Alessandro. Soon after, Felipe, who had been searching for the couple, finally finds Ramona and takes her back to his estate, which he has inherited from the now-dead Senora. At the novel's close, Ramona and Felipe marry and come to live a satisfying life together after they leave California for Mexico.
Ramona portrays the factual story of how the United States sent government commissions to the Southwest to regulate property ownership according to United States law. These commissions, which took massive amounts of land from the Mexicans and Indians, employed the practice of challenging the validity of the Mexicans' rights to their property by imposing unfamiliar legal standards on the Mexicans. The commissions required that the Mexicans provide proof of ownership of their lands and often decreed that the deeds the Mexicans presented did not hold up to United States standards. In such cases, the commissions took the Mexicans' properties and then sold them at low rates to settlers from the East. The Native Americans were even more unfortunate: the Mexicans often tacitly gave the Native Americans their land but did not provide them with deeds, making tribal lands easy targets for the land commissions.
Jackson developed her knowledge and positions on these historical issues from her career as an activist and government official. In the years preceding her writing of Ramona, Jackson expended a great amount of energy attempting to elicit public sympathy for the forcibly removed Nebraska Ponca Indians. (7) Jackson furthermore published a comprehensive study entitled A Century of Dishonor (1881) that described the United States government's abuses of the Indians. She sent a copy of this book to every member of Congress with a hand-written inscription on the cover that said, "Look upon your hands: they are stained with the...
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