“White Slaves” and the “Arrogant Mestiza”: Reconfiguring Whiteness in The Squatter and the Don and RamonaPosted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Women on 2012-01-04 03:53Z by Steven |
American Literature
Volume 69, Number 4 (December, 1997)
pages 813-839
David Luis-Brown, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and English
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California
In Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) and The Squatter and the Don (1885) by Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton are indisputably political novels, representing conflicts over land, class position, and racial status in California in the 1870s. These novels represent Anglos, Californios, and Indians as struggling for social position following the U.S. annexation of one-half of Mexico as a result of the Mexican War of 1846-1848. However, although most critics view these texts as political, their insufficient historicization of narrative form has led them to misconstrue as antagonistic the relationship between form and reform in these novels. Despite the canon-expanding feminist criticism of Lauren Berlant, Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins, and others, which has allowed us to read as politically engaged the previously marginalized genres of melodrama and romance, Michael Dorris associates melodrama in Ramona with improbable events, simplistic characterization, and chaste love; Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita split Squatter into “two tracks, one historical and one romantic.” Sánchez and Pita view the romance as a love story inadequate to Squatter’s historical content—conflicts over racial caste. According to the logic of such constricting definitions of romance, a politically engaged, protofeminist nineteenth-century sentimental text would be a contradiction in terms, a clearly untenable conclusion given recent feminist scholarship.
Feminist scholarship on sentimentalism has allowed us to grasp the point of view expressed by José Martí, an early admirer of Ramona. In the prologue to his 1888 translation of Ramona, Martí argues that Ramona’s sentimental qualities constitute its political strength…
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