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The Troubled Union The Troubled u n i o n The Troubled union Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels John Morán González The Ohio State University Press Columbus Copyright © 2010 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data González, John Morán. The troubled union : expansionist imperatives in post-reconstruction American novels / John Morán González. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1129-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1129-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9228-0 (cd-rom) 1. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. American literature—19th cen- tury—History and criticism. 3. National characteristics, American, in literature. 4. Allegory. 5. James, Henry, 1843–1916—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Jackson, Helen Hunt, 1830– 1885—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo, 1832–1895—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PS377.G66 2010 813'.40935873—dc22 2010004013 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-1129-8) CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9228-0) Cover design by James Baumann Type set in ITC Century Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Mate- rials. ANSI 39.49-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 C o n t e n t s Acknowledgments vii Chapter 1 Introduction: The Historical Crisis of Post-Reconstruction National Allegory 1 Chapter 2 Speaking American: Henry James and the Dialect of Modernity 21 Chapter 3 The Hidden Power: Domesticity, National Allegory, and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona 50 Chapter 4 Blushing Brides and Soulless Corporations: Racial Formation in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don 85 Chapter 5 Epilogue: Decentering National Allegory 107 Notes 113 Works Cited 130 Index 136 a C knowledgments Upon learning that I spent my childhood in the Texas border town of Brownsville, many people comment upon my apparent lack of an accent, claiming that I don’t sound like a Texan. Apparently, I frustrated their expectation that my voice would provide a legible personal history. Like the Armenian migrant questioned by Henry James at the turn of the last century, I find myself the subject of categorical confusion in terms of ethnicity. My fair complexion, dark eyes, wavy hair, and middle-class man- nerisms make my social background interestingly ambiguous. However, I have little doubt that what speakers of “standard English” would call my mother’s Spanish accent would immediately place her as a recent Mexican immigrant even though she was born a U.S. citizen. On her lap and on my father’s knee, I learned Midwestern-inflected English and border Mexican Spanish, creating a little social chaos in their intersection. These conversations have often taken place far from the geopolitical borderlands of the United States and Mexico, but differences of other sorts from the East Coast to the West, from Texas to the Midwest, have made imagining this project possible. The surprising links between these places have as well. I would foremost like to thank my dissertation adviser at Stanford University, Professor Ramón Saldívar. His example, as a schol- ar and teacher sets the tone. My deepest appreciation extends to the other members of my committee, Jay Fliegelman and Al Gelpi. I would also like to acknowledge two unofficial members of my dissertation committee, Lora Romero and Susan Gillman, who gave great advice and support. I would also like to thank the members of my dissertation-reading group: Carrie Bramen, David Cantrell, and Eric Schocket were particularly vii viii • a C knowledgments constructive critics and even better friends. A special thanks goes to Josie Saldaña and Inés Salazar, who adopted me when I entered graduate school and guided me past its perils. A portion of chapter 3 was previously published as “The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona,” in American Literary History 16:3 (Fall 2004): 437–65. A portion of chapter 4 was previously published as “The Whiteness of the Blush: The Cul- tural Politics of Racial Formation in The Squatter and the Don,” in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton: Critical and Pedagogical Perspectives, eds. Amelia María de la Luz Montez and Anne E. Goldman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 153–68. I am grateful to Oxford University Press and the University of Nebraska Press for granting permission for the pub- lication of this material. I wish to acknowledge the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Stanford Humanities Center for their financial support during the completion of this project. A list hardly does justice to the organic sense of community built over time, but let me thank those who have made surviving academia possi- ble: Frances Aparicio, Betty Bell, Alicia Schmidt-Camacho, Elaine Chang, Maria Cotera, Dionne Espinoza, Dane Johnson, Marcia Klotz, Rob Latham, Tiffany Ana López, Lee Medavoi, Diane Nelson, Steve Pitti, Margo Ponce, Brian Rourke, Xiomara Santamarina, and Lucia Suarez. Cynthia Williams, Andrea Torrice, Don McLean and the Lorax group get special acknowledg- ment for constantly reminding me not all intelligent life resides in aca- demia. I’d like to thank my colleagues in the Department of English, the Cen- ter for Mexican American Studies, and the Department of American Stud- ies at the University of Texas at Austin: Phil Barrish, Brian Bremen, Evan Carton, Oscar Casares, James Cox, Ann Cvetkovich, John McKiernan González, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Steve Hoelscher, Meta Jones, Martin Kevorkian, Julia Lee, Gretchen Murphy, Domino Perez, Jennifer Wilks, and Emilio Zamora. A special thanks goes to José E. Limón for his brilliant mentorship. The folks at The Ohio State University Press have been fantastic to work with. I would especially like to thank Sandy Crooms and Eugene O’Connor for nurturing this book to fruition. I owe Linda Webster a brace of thanks for indexing this book and my previous one. A generous Uni- versity Co-operative Society Subvention Grant awarded by the University of Texas at Austin helped bring this publication to print. A special thanks goes to Stephanie Boydell and the Special Collections division of the Sir a C knowledgments • ix Kenneth Green Library at Manchester Metropolitan University for provid- ing the splendid Walter Crane cover art. On a more personal note, this book would have never been written without the persistent support of my family: Paul and Mari González, Móni- ca González, Pedro and Angelita García, Pamela and Joey Delgado, Kit and Leslie Ashby. Uncle John sends much love to Lynn, Pierce, and Lillian Ashby and Paul Delgado, as well as to Pablo Abiel, José Cáleb, and Monica Lucero González. Finally, my wife, Patricia Marie García, has been inter- locutor, editor, and advisor throughout the publication process. Together with our daughter Angelita “Tita,” you make all things possible through your love. In the experience of writing this book, I hear my parents’ voices echo in the passages of text I have written. That echo has moved me, at times only half-conscious of the influence, into matters of nationalism and liter- ary form in the context of the late nineteenth-century United States. Their voices stand, not as guards but as guides, at the borders of a multitude of lived experiences in the United States: migration, citizenship, cultural difference, and diaspora. I dedicate these pages to them, Juan y Matiana González. C h a p t e r 1 introduction The Historical Crisis of Post-Reconstruction National Allegory Love had set himself a hard task. He had set before him this problem: “New England Puritanism and Southern Prejudice; how shall they be reconciled?” —Albion Tourgée, Bricks Without Straw (1880) Ruins, to be interesting, have to be massive. —Henry James, The American Scene (1907) In the final chapter of Mark Twain’s 1885 novel The Adventures of Huck- leberry Finn, Huck itches to “light out for the [Indian] Territory,” heading west “ahead of the rest.” Leaving behind the undercivilized ex-slave Jim and the overcivilized, watch-minding Tom Sawyer, Huck anticipates dis- placing his recently completed North-South journey upon the Mississippi River with an East-West trajectory that promises “howling adventures amongst the Injuns” (321). This change of direction is also a change of purpose, one that suggests a national reorientation away from the divisive North-South travails of Reconstruction and a resumption of a familiar nar- rative of imperialist nation building along an East-West axis. While Fred- erick Jackson Turner’s essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” most succinctly expressed this metaphoric reorientation in 1893, many novels of national reconciliation from the 1880s to the turn of the twentieth century forged the sense that the United States would reunite as a white nation by returning to the imperial expansionism of its pre–Civil War past. Huckleberry Finn, set forty to fifty years before its 1885 publication date, is a national allegory detailing the post-Reconstruction plight of the 1 2 • C h a p t e r 1 unfree freedmen. The novel, particularly its troubling final chapters, plays out the paradox of the Jim Crow re-enslavement of legally freed ex-slaves. Yet Indian Territory was also new around 1840, having been organized by Congress in the 1834 Indian Trade and Intercourse Act. Anticipating the removal of the Cherokee and other southeastern tribal nations, President Andrew Jackson and Congress enacted a key colonial management policy integral to the development of Manifest Destiny, along whose westward path of empire Huck gleefully trips.
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