Viewpoint of the Conquered Mexican-Californian (Sánchez)
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MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School CERTIFICATE FOR APPROVING THE DISSERTATION We hereby approve the Dissertation Of Andrea Sant Hartig Candidate for the Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Director Whitney Womack Smith Reader Katie Johnson Reader Gwndolyn Etter-Lewis Reader Rodrigo J. Lazo Graduate School Representative Sally A. Lloyd ABSTRACT LITERARY LANDSCAPING: RE-READING THE POLITICS OF PLACES IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY REGIONAL AND UTOPIAN LITERATURE by Andrea Sant Hartig My dissertation, “Literary Landscaping: Re-reading the Politics of Places in Late Nineteenth-Century Regional and Utopian Literature” explores questions about how places themselves perform in or help facilitate performances of resistance and the creation of geographic subjectivity. My chief concern at the outset of the project was to defend and demonstrate the usefulness of place as a thematic focus in the rereading of nineteenth-century American literature. I argue for the value of reading landscapes in literature as conscientiously constructed, as acts of thematic cartography. As a kind of mapping, these landscapes can be understood as political elements in the text that should be examined, explained, historicized and questioned. By moving my thematic lens through first a “regional” text, Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) and then a “utopian” text, Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self (1902-03), I develop a methodology drawn from regional literary theories and cartographic criticism, a thematic lens that migrates beyond its prescribed borders illuminating the latent possibilities for reciprocal cross-genre and transdisciplinary reading practices and illuminating several profound gaps within regional and utopian literary criticism such as the exclusion of “outsider” texts in regionalism and the absence of African American and Native American texts from the utopian literary canon. Taken as a whole, these chapters work to illustrate the following arguments. First, this project argues for the value of reading landscapes in literature as conscientiously constructed, as acts of thematic cartography. As a kind of mapping, these landscapes can be understood as political elements in the text that should be examined, explained, historicized and questioned. Second, the political power of literary landscapes is a shifting and subjective narrative element. The relative familiarity or distance of a reader to the landscape, the spatiotemporal representation, is a functional component of whether or not its constructed-ness, its political (re)presentation of location will be legible to the reader. Third, this project as a whole illustrates the problems and decisions inherent in the activity of literary criticism bent on genre creation and maintenance. By critiquing genre, this dissertation also works to challenge the unquestioned institutionalization of particular reading practices. LITERARY LANDSCAPING: RE-READING THE POLITICS OF PLACES IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY REGIONAL AND UTOPIAN LITERATURE A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English by Andrea Sant Hartig Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2005 Dissertation Director: Whitney Womack Smith TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1 1. THE POLITICS OF PLACE ............................................................................ 9 Digging in the Dirt: Patriotism in the Absence of History........................... 10 Creating a Past: Historic Preservation at the Turn of the Century ............... 21 Paper Landscapes: Reading the Chorography in Literature......................... 26 2. THE RISKS AND REWARDS OF LITERARY LANDSCAPING IN TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY AMERICA ........................................................ 33 Critical Cartographies: Re-mapping Regional Literary Criticism ............... 40 Misplaced Places: Contemporary Regional Literary Scholarship................ 44 Regionalism as the National Project in Early Twentieth-Century Regional Literary Criticism.......................................................................... 53 Toward a Paradigm Shift.............................................................................. 63 3. RE-REGIONALIZING RAMONA: A CHOROGRAPHIC REAGING OF HELEN HUNT JACKSON’S POLITICAL NOVEL....................................... 65 Helen Hunt Jackson: A Reluctant Activist................................................... 68 Just a Tourist’s Sentimental Love Story: Literary Criticism of Jackson’s Ramona ......................................................................................................... 73 Jackson’s Chorographic Novel: Unpacking the Layers of Loss, Tension, and Transition................................................................................ 79 A New Map, a New Direction?: Southern California After Jackson ......................................................................................................... 85 “The Pageant is the Drama in which the Place is the Hero and the Development of the Community is the Plot” ............................................... 91 4. THE PLACE OF “NO PLACE”: RE-READING UTOPIAN LITERATURE.................................................................................................. 96 ii Historical Contexts: Why We Might be Inspired to Hope for Utopia ........................................................................................................... 104 Finding the Hidden Utopia in Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’ Novel, Of One Blood................................................................................................ 108 Telassar: A Troubled and Troubling Utopia ................................................ 122 CODA ........................................................................................................................... 127 WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................... 132 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I heartily offer my thanks to all my supporters during this, at times arduous, at times transcendent, dissertation experience. I would like to especially acknowledge my gratitude to my five committee members whose enthusiasm, suggestions, and questions have been invaluable from the beginning stages of this project to the end. Individually, I would like to thank Whitney Womack, my dissertation chair, for her patience and her accessibility. She was the recipient of more than one panicked correspondence as we attempted to discuss this project from our respective states, Alaska and Ohio, and other states of confusion and clarity. Katie Johnson, also an intrepid reader, I want to recognize for her questions and suggestions. I appreciated her generosity and willingness to go out of her way to meet with me during her vacation and family time. My other committee members, Rodrigo, Sally, and Gwen all added their individual marks to this project through their insights and questions. I believe I had the best collection of scholars for this project in these committee members and I am grateful for their friendship. I want to also thank the hard working staff members of the Mat-Su College Library in Wasilla, Alaska and my friends and colleagues at Miami University’s Interlibrary Loan department. The ILL crew at Miami has been a particular boon to both my pride and my research skills and I am thankful for the opportunities I had to work with them while attending Miami. I would like to thank my family and my partner whose daily support carried me through late nights and many early mornings. Finally, I would like to thank Debra Morner whose timely reminders saved me on more than one occasion. To all these folks and the many cheerleaders and guides along my journey, thank you from the new Dr. Andrea! iv INTRODUCTION My dissertation project began with a weekend trip with my sister to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. During our guided tour, which consisted of a description of the geologic features as well as the human history of the cave, our National Park Service guide, a white woman, related how the earliest guides to Mammoth Cave were African-American slaves. Some of these guides became very well known and respected experts on this underground space during an era of increasing tourism.1 Our contemporary park guide described that in this place, early tourists, mostly white wealthy men, would experience a reversal of power. This reversal occurred as they placed their wellbeing in the hands of their African-American slave guides, trusting to be led safely through the darkness and around the hazards of that unfamiliar landscape. I was immediately struck by the idea that just a short distance above my head these same guides had had little, to no power, were property to be bought and sold, punished, and otherwise treated as chattel for labor. This limited, spatially contained, but extraordinary power reversal became the impetus for my thinking about how places contribute to and indeed may create possibilities for powerful challenges to social and political ideologies. If Mammoth Cave slave guides could carve out a space of power, although geographically and temporally bound, are there other spaces, other geographies that have historically enabled marginalized groups to assert power and agency? Can places themselves facilitate or enable these reversals of social power? Armed with these questions