University of Nevada, Reno Genres of Resistance: Western-American Womanhood and Authorship A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Monique A. McDade Dr. Katherine Fusco/Dissertation Advisor May, 2020 THE GRADUATE• SCHOOL We recommend that the dissertation prepared under our supervision by entitled be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Advisor Committee Member Committee Member Committee Member Graduate School Representative David W. Zeh, Ph.D., Dean Graduate School i Abstract Genres of Resistance: Western-American Womanhood and Authorship traces a genealogy of diverse, Western-American women writers who play with dominant literary genres to recover the histories and narratives written over by the nation’s discourses of Manifest Destiny, westward expansion, and American exceptionalism. The project is predicated on Benedict Anderson’s argument in Imagined Communities that the nation is an invention and that an homogenous, continuous national identity is imagined and sustained through print capitalism, specifically the 18th-century novel and newspaper industry. The project recognizes that, as the American nation moves into the 19th and early-20th centuries, the literary marketplace undergoes dramatic shifts and changes just as the nation is expanding geographically and increasing its global presence. Thus, the project is concerned with how the late-19th and early-20th century women writers considered—María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sui Sin Far, and an author this dissertation is introducing for the first time into critical discussions, Eva Rutland—use new genres (the short story and the travel essay) and new literary modes (sentimentalism, regionalism, and realism) as a means to speak back to the homogenizing efforts of dominant literary productions. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that the Western-American women writers considered in this project manipulate dominant literary genres to contest and compete for representative authority over the American West—its geography, its history, and its cultural and political identity. ii For Harper, my daughter. May you be as inspired by the women in your life as I was by the those in mine. iii Acknowledgments As I complete the final touches on this dissertation, I am humbled by the amount of work my mentors have put into this project as well. First, I want to thank my Dissertation Advisor, Dr. Katherine Fusco, for providing ceaseless support and feedback throughout this process. Her critical aptitude inspired me and guided me towards new and more sophisticated ends. I am fortunate to have worked with Katherine in the classroom as well, where she excels at fostering an energetic and productive learning environment for her students. Many of my own teaching strategies are indebted to her and to the impact her teaching had on me. I truly aspire to be as great of a teacher and mentor as she is. I would also like to thank the other members of my Dissertation Committee—Dr. Jen Hill, Dr. Dan Morse, Dr. Daniel Enrique Pérez, and Dr. Meredith Oda. Thank you for believing in the work I accomplished in this dissertation and for offering your advice and enthusiasm for its future. The work produced in this project has benefited immensely from each of the specific interests and critical pressures these scholars have brought to the table. Mentors, however early on in our lives we meet them, are not easily forgotten. I also want to extend my deep gratitude to Dr. Hellen Lee, who took me under her wing and helped me find my voice. I will never forget that she first introduced me to author, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, forever changing what I thought about literature, about women writers, about the American 19th century, and about my own role in the university. And finally, I want to thank the numerous members of my family who are always ready to do what they can to help me be successful. To my parents: thank you for believing in me when I couldn’t believe in myself. To my brothers, Buddy and Chris (yes, you too): thank you for being my first opponents, giving me the opportunity to practice my argumentative skills at an iv early age. I want to thank my Grandma Pama, who predicted my destiny in the university despite my fierce declarations that I was done with school back in 2012. I must thank my late Grandma McDade. Without her artistic energy, I never would have developed the creativity for academia. Of course, I thank my husband and partner, Ryan, for bearing with me through it all and reminding me it would all be worth it in those unbearable moments. And Harper, my daughter, I thank you for making the process of writing a dissertation that much harder and for showing me just how much I can handle. Lastly, I want to thank all the women in my life—real, literary, fictional, historical—who have inspired me to be strong, adamant, and unapologetically loud. v Table of Contents Abstract i Dedication ii Acknowledgments iii Introduction: Western-American Narratives From the Interstices: Regional Women and Their “Nothing Subjects” 1 Chapter One: The “Autoethnographic” Heroines in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Sentimental Novels, Who Would Have Thought It? and The Squatter and the Don 32 Chapter Two: Negotiating Manifest Destiny: Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and the Intimacies of the Western-American “Contact Zone” 81 Chapter Three: Sui Sin Far’s Genre of Intervention: The Sketch and the Twisted Truths and the Inauthentic Real of American Literary Realism 136 Chapter Four: An Alternative “Politics of Respectability” in an Autobiography of Western-American Integration 203 Conclusion: “Things had better work here:” Didion, Speechlessness, and a history of “Empty revolution” 271 Works Cited 283 1 Introduction Western-American Narratives From the Interstices: Regional Women and Their “Nothing Subjects” From the mid-19th through the mid-20th century, Western-American women writers have produced literary works that stand to correct some of the myths the American West tells about itself. The challenge for women writers writing from and about the American West is to account for the ways these Western-American myths and histories not only exclude them but also for how they play a role in shaping their own identities and perspectives. The women writers considered in this dissertation navigate the American literary marketplace through a manipulation of these Western-American myths and histories, but also through a manipulation of their own identities as women, as writers, and as minoritized Americans. For instance, Joan Didion, who emerged as a writer in the mid-20th century, struggled throughout her career to form a politics around an identity indebted to Western-American histories of Manifest Destiny, the pioneer spirit, and American exceptionalism. Joan Didion’s first novel, Run River (1963), is often forgotten under the success of her second, Play it As it Lays (1970), and her two earliest essay collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979). While these three later publications have been praised for their social commentaries and sharp critiques of American sociopolitical institutions, Run River is a much more intimate novel, one which remains close to the sort of decaying domestic space Didion herself grew up in in the Sacramento Valley. The novel is marked by its cyclical structure and its existence within a tug-of-war conflict with the history of the American West and the undeniable and inevitable transformation of a Western-American city like the post-WWII 2 Sacramento, California. The novel tells the story of two families, the Knights and the McClellans of Sacramento’s landed aristocracy, both of which have, like Didion herself, ancestral ties to the first Anglo-American families of California, including the Donner Party. The novel begins in August of 1959 with Lily McClellan (previously Knight) discovering her husband, Everett McClellan, has just shot her lover on the banks of the Sacramento River behind their hops ranch. After the first four chapters, readers are shuttled back in time in a section titled, “1938-1959,” in which Didion recounts Lily’s and Everett’s early relationship, their Reno marriage, and detailed accounts of their domestic life together between these years. The last two chapters return to that moment in August 1959 when Lily walks down to the river bank to find her husband standing with a gun over the dead body of her lover. The novel ends with a second gun shot, sounding the moment in which Everett ends his own life. Many critics have noted that, while good in theory, the novel’s structure lends itself to the criticism that “[n]othing ‘happens’ between the first and second shots fired” (Randisi 41). As in Guy Davenport’s 1963 National Review article on the novel, critics have questioned the purpose behind Didion’s first novel: “[b]ut what do they mean? The details of a pattern are organized and organization is principle. What’s that principle?” (Henderson 91). These arguments seem confused rather than provoked by Didion’s structure. However, when critics tell us “nothing ‘happens,’” what they mean is that the novel deals in intimate, feminine spaces that are seen as inconsequential to national experiences and therefore, “nothing” important. When these critics question Didion’s principles in the novel, they are really questioning how such an intimately domestic narrative can lend anything of value to a national literary consciousness or a national 3 literary identity. In other reviews of the book, published between the novel’s 1963 debut and our contemporary moment, there continues to be a devaluation of Run River as a consequence of the novel’s association with femininity and a domestic literary tradition, rather than for its structure, style, or syntax, all of which are underhandedly praised by these critics.