She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, California Dreams and American Contradictions: Women Writers and the Western Ideal, and reported the following:
On page 99 you will find a critical reading of a character often oversimplified and overlooked in Helen Hunt Jackson’s enormously successful sentimental romance, Ramona:Learn more about California Dreams and American Contradictions at the University of Nebraska Press website.Aunt Ri is often discussed as Jackson’s ‘woman-centered critique’ of western American expansion. Such arguments read Aunt Ri’s benevolence towards Ramona and Alessandro as a model for how Jackson wishes popular society to treat Native American communities. However, Aunt Ri’s benevolence is still inappropriate given her intrusion upon Native American lands, and when Ramona is read as a cross-regional account of American labor anxiety in the post-Reconstruction era, Aunt Ri’s character serves as Jackson’s vision for an imperial maternalism.The rest of the page offers a few textual examples of how Jackson’s seemingly progressive character, Aunt Ri, is rhetorically and thematically fueled by an ambivalent acceptance of Native Americans.
The Page 99 Test plays out perfectly here.
The page sets up a reading of Aunt Ri, a character many have read as Jackson’s representative of progressive politics, that pulls out the inconsistencies, complacencies, and ambivalence in western American histories of regional progress and progressive politics. The page sets a foundation for reading Aunt Ri as a character Jackson builds out of tropological progressive language that actually serves to prop up white women’s power over ethnic others rather than incorporate them into western American society as equals.
As a whole, the book “draws attention to the fundamental problems in the American literary establishment’s cooption of a ‘progressive’ rhetoric to produce and disseminate literatures about the American West from the Manifest Destiny era through the American civil rights movement” (24). In the particular discussion I offer on page 99, I critique Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Indian reform novel” as less about Native Americans and raising awareness for their displacement in the American West as it is about the particular anxieties Anglo-American women faced in the late 19th century as changing forms of labor impacted Victorian “women’s culture.” As such, Jackson’s implications of “progress” and “progressive” politics lends itself to a settler-colonial impulse that can’t help but objectify Native American identities and undermine Ramona’s and Alessandro’s claims to the land and to their humanity. The literary examples on page 99 imply that Aunt Ri—a Southern, white woman displaced after emancipation changed the social labor landscape in the South—is more prepared to “mother” the West than Ramona, effectively repurposing Aunt Ri’s disintegrating “Republican motherhood” in the South onto a western American Native American family.
--Marshal Zeringue
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