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Ramona

Helen Hunt Jackson,

Valerie Sherer Mathes (Afterword),

Michael Dorris (Introduction)

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Jan 11, 2024 Sara rated it liked it

Shelves: american-west, allegory, indigenous-people, native-american, women-writers, 19th-century-literature, archive-org

He was fast becoming that most tragic yet most sublime sight, a man who has survived, not only his own time, but the ideas and ideals of it.

Reading Ramona is mostly important because it is a slice of history from the 1800s. Its author, Helen Hunt Jackson (who by the way hated being called by the three names because she felt it inappropriate to retain the name of a previous husband as a middle name when she had remarried), wrote Ramona as an ethical statement against the ill-treatment of Indians He was fast becoming that most tragic yet most sublime sight, a man who has survived, not only his own time, but the ideas and ideals of it.

Reading Ramona is mostly important because it is a slice of history from the 1800s. Its author, Helen Hunt Jackson (who by the way hated being called by the three names because she felt it inappropriate to retain the name of a previous husband as a middle name when she had remarried), wrote Ramona as an ethical statement against the ill-treatment of Indians following the annexation of California into the United States. A friend of both Emily Dickinson and Harriet Beacher Stowe, she hoped the book would serve the same purpose for the Indian population that Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had served for the black slaves.

Her expectations and desires were unmet, as Ramona became more an enduring romance story than a political one. I had varying states of enjoyment and boredom while reading it. The initial story of Ramona, an orphaned girl raised by a wealthy Mexican family, and her love for an Indian boy, Allessandro Assis, was captivating. The villainous Senora Moreno is actually the character that moves the plot and holds the reader. Once Ramona and Allessandro run away to marry, the story becomes more about the plight of the Indian and less about the characters themselves, and thus loses most of its impact. The conversation between the lovers is stilted and unnatural, so that pitying them is possible but loving or knowing them is not.

The edition I read was illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, of whose work I have long been a devotee. I would have been glad to have come across the book if for this reason only. I do not regret having read it. It is fairly predictable, the Americans are almost exclusively greedy and cruel, and Ramona is just too saintly to be real. On the other hand, it was almost a shock to me to know that a New Englander had written an indictment of this nature in 1884. For anyone who has read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I would say the feeling while reading the book is much the same. It is more like reading an allegory than a fiction. It is replete with the same kind of sensational melodrama. The hardships and injustice are, however, in too many instances, all too real.

Helen Hunt Jackson wrote the book over a three month time span. She published it in 1884 and died in 1885, without really knowing whether it would yield the results she had so hoped for. It was extremely popular in its time, has been reissued 300 times, and has never been out of print. I’m sure when I was young and still dewy-eyed, it would have been candy to me.
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