Abstract
I was halfway between Cheyenne and Laramie driving east on I-80 when I saw the sign for “Little America.” I remember Wyoming from the summer my family spent on a dude ranch near Jackson Hole when I was nine. Together with my brothers and sister, I rode slow ponies around a corral and wore out a pair of heavy-heeled, tan-colored cowboy boots I kept in my closet for years afterwards. Now, 30 years later, I thought I might buy another pair at this truck stop. But the view opening up around the curve of the exit smothered my nostalgia: faux colonial red brick buildings cluttered the wide horizon, disparaging its booted and hatted visitors as ill suited for the occasion—Paul Revere’s ride? The battle of Lexington and Concord?— the architecture revisited. Twenty-five hundred miles away and four thousand feet higher than the crooked Concord streets, surrounded by tumbleweeds rather than the unfurling fronds of Boston ferns, the iconography for “America” remained faithful to what Henry James calls in The Bostonians “the heroic age of New England life… the reading of Emerson and the frequentation of Tremont Temple.”3
The types and faces bore them out; the people before me were gross aliens to a man and they were in serene and triumphant possession. Nothing, as I say, could have been more effective for figuring the hitherward bars of a grating through which I might make out, far-of in space, “my” small homogenous Boston of the more interesting time.
—Henry James, The American Scene (172)1
The doctor’s most unnatural liking for foreigners… was the cause of [hisJ sending his only son Julian to be educated in Europe,—as if the best schools on earth were not in New England.… That liking was also the cause of the doctor’s sending Isaac to be a good-for-nothing clerk in sinful Washington, among foreigners, when he could have remained in virtuous New England.… And finally, impelled by that liking, the doctor betook himself to California, which is yet full of “natives. “
—Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It? (8)2
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Notes
Henry James, The American Scene (1907; Middlesex, England: Penguin Modern Classics, 1994) 172. Further references will be cited within the text.
Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It?, Rosaura Sanchez and Beatrice Pita, eds. (1872; Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1995), 8. Further citations will appear in the text.
Henry James, The Bostonians (1886; Middlesex, England: Penguin Modern Classics, 1978), 157. Further citations will appear in the text.
Amy Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and Empire,” in Emory Elliott, ed., Columbia History of the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 252. Additional references will be cited in the text.
While I am not interested in belaboring this point, it seems important (in the interests not only of nineteenth-century literary studies but also to reflect upon continuities with contemporary anti-immigrant activity) to refuse the consolations of euphemism in discussions of racial formations in literature, canonical or otherwise. To characterize James’s difficulties with “tatterdemalion darkies” and “the Hebrew conquest of New York” in The American Scene as “racial uncertainties,” for instance, (in Sara Blair’s Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 161), or to frame his representations of Jews in New York (“… multiplication, multiplication of everything, was the dominant note, at the bottorn of some vast sallow aquarium in which innumerable fish, of overdeveloped proboscis, were to bump together.… The children swarmed above all.… This, I think, makes the individual Jew more of a concentrated person, savingly possessed of everything that is in him, than any other human, noted at random—or is it simply, rather, that the unsurpassed strength of the race permits of the chopping into myriads of fine fragments without loss of race-quality? There are small strange animals, known to natural history, snakes or worms, I believe, who, when cut into pieces, wriggle away contentedly and live in the snippet as completely as in the whole. So the denizens of the New York Ghetto, heaped as thick as the splinters on the table of a glass-blower, had each, like the fine glass particle, his or her individual share of the whole hard glitter of Israel” [The American Scene, 100]) as “a productive openness… marked by a brooding ambivalence about the ‘intensity’ of the Jew’s ‘aspect’ and ‘race-quality”’ (Blair, 178) is to sidestep James’s own connections with what Blair herself rightly terms the “culture of racist gentility” (Blair, 161). The point is not to focus intellectual energy on indicting James, but simply to be frank about the political configurations he—or any other writer—participates in. Nor do I wish to single out Blair’s fine study, for this kind of rhetorical hesitation is the rule rather than the exception in scholarly treatments of the author. Further references to this study will appear in the text.
For two compelling studies of Ruiz de Burton’s significance to the Recovery Project and the questions her work raises about interpretation and pedagogy, see John M. Gonzalez, “Romancing Hegemony: Constructing Racialized Citizenship in Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don”; and Manuel M. Martin Rodriguez, “Textual and Land Reclamations: The Critical Reception of Early Chicana/o Literature,” both in Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and Chuck Tatum, eds., Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. II. (Houston: Arte PubGco Press, 1996).
Besides Blair’s book, see, among others, Jonathan Friedman’s “The Poetics of Cultural Decline: Degeneration, Assimilation, and Henry James’s The Golden Bowl,” in American Literary History 7 (Fall 1995), 3: 477–99; and Ross Posnock’s “The Politics of Nonidentity: A Genealogy,” in Donald Pease, ed., National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).
James writes to Wharton in February 1905 of Vanderbilt’s Asheville, North Carolina, estate: “one’s sense of the extraordinary impenitent madness (of millions) which led to the erection in this vast niggery wilderness, of so gigantic and elaborate a monument to all that isn’t socially possible there,” as cited in Susan Luria, “The Architecture of Manners: Henry James, Edith Wharton, and the Mount,” American Quarterly 49, no. 2 (June 1997), 298. The conflation of such racist language about the South with a classically northern template (the language of the Puritan errand invoked by “vast” and “wilderness”), suggests that James is parodying Vanderbilt’s secular mission over and against the northern spiritual quest that forms the bedrock of ideas of the U.S. nation.
Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don, eds. Rosaura Sanchez and Beatrice Pita (1885; Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1993), 69. Further references will appear in the text.
Owen Wister, The Virginian (1902; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) 95. Succeeding references will appear in the text. In fact, James and Wister enjoyed a close personal and literary connection. Wister’s mother remained one of James’s closest friends, and Wister himself read several of his manuscripts to James. Wister read portions of the southern plantation fiction he published in 1906 as Lady Baltimore to James while the latter sojourned in Charleston and composed his own commentary on the postwar South that became, the year following Wister’s novel, The American Scene. See Richard Shulman’s introduction to the 1998 edition of The Virginian for further discussion of this relationship.
See also Richard Henry Dana’s condescending Two Years Before the Mast (1840; New York: New American Library, 1964); and William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); as well as the extensive histories of California by Hubert H. Bancroft. For more sustained attention to Anglo American representations of Californios, see Genaro Padilla’s My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1993) and Rosaura Sanchez’s Telling Identities: The Californio testimonios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
Without in any way dismissing the depth of Ruiz’s relationship with Captain Burton, Aranda’s politically contextualizing comments on this wartime marriage to Captain Burton are suggestive: “In light of the unlikelihood of the Mexican military coming to their rescue, Ruiz de Burton’s family must have sought out, like other families, crucial relations with Anglo American officers” (draft of “Contradictory Impulses: Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Resistance Theory, and the Politics of Chicana/o Studies”). See in addition Aranda’s reading of family in Ruiz’s work: “In the Spanish language, familia, family or familiar, as in what pertains to the family, conveys the understanding of not only an extended family, but also a network of in-laws, godparents, friends, neighbors, business associates, and even, at highly charged rhetorical moments, the nation” (draft of “Contradictory Impulses”). See also the published version of this essay in Cathy Davidson, ed., American Literature 70, no. 3 (September 1998): 551–79.
Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912; New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), 47.
Sui Sin Far, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” in Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, eds., The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature (New York: Meridian, 1991), 120.
As noted by Rudolph M. Lapp in his classic study, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 220.
Letter to Mariano Vallejo, March 8, 1861, as cited in Amelia de la Luz Montes, “Es Necesario Mirar Bien: Nineteenth-Century Letter Making and Novel Writing in the Life of Marfa Amparo Ruiz de Burton,” in Maria Herrera-Sobek and Virginia Sanchez-Korrol, eds., Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. III (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2000), 18.
For additional background on Ruiz de Burton’s stay in the East, see Rosaura Sanchez and Beatrice Pita’s comprehensive introduction to the republished edition of Who Would Have Thought It? (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1995); Jose F. Aranda Jr.’s essay “Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton,” in Harris, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography. New York: Gale Publications, 1999; Amelia Maria de la Luz Montes’s “Maria Amparo Ruize de Burton Negotiates American Literary Politics and Culture,” in Joyce W. Warren and Margaret Dickie, eds., Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000); as well as her piece “Es Necesario Mirar Bien: Nineteenth-Century Letter Making and Novel Writing in the Life of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton,” in Herrera-Sobek and SanchezKorrol, eds., Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage.
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© 2000 Anne E. Goldman
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Goldman, A.E. (2000). Beasts in the Jungle. In: Continental Divides. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299705_2
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