Injustice and Romance: Critical Reflection on Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona
“A Scene from the Ramona Pageant,” 2013, by Konrad Summers.
Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, first published in 1884, was initially met with mixed reviews by readers of the time. The novel is set after the Mexican-American War throughout the state of California following the life of a Scottish-Native American woman, Ramona, that was orphaned and subsequently fostered by a Mexican family, the Morenos. In the novel, the relationship between Ramona and her foster mother, Gonzaga Moreno, is described as full of tension due to Ramona’s mixed racial background. We see Ramona grow into a beautiful young woman who falls in love with Alessandro, a Native American man who has a friendly work relationship with the Morenos. Throughout the novel, we see the many hardships that both Ramona and Alessandro face due to the discrimination against Native American communities and how this pushes Alessandro to his demise. The novel ends with Ramona marrying Felipe Moreno, her once foster brother, and essentially being rescued from hardship and living a comfortable life.
Jackson published the novel during a time of turmoil and negative sentiment toward Native American communities. The social-political undertone in the plot was intended to change popular perspective and create support for Native American communities. The term “Native American” is used in the scholarship I engage with as well as by Jackson herself, which underscores the lack of specificity of the tribes present in the novel. However, from this point forward, I will primarily be using the term Indigenous peoples/communities to address folks with this background. Though the text had mixed reviews during its original publication, it remains relevant today and has been labeled as one of the most influential California texts. The novel still holds a strong cultural status that, while not popular in academic circles, has remained prevalent enough among the mass public to be labeled a classic text. But while the text was successful as a novel and in its efforts to raise social-political consciousness, it also engaged in many harmful tactics that resulted in the erasure of the Indigenous communities Jackson strove to help.
Matthew Wills notes Jackson’s evolution in her sentiment toward the Native American communities in his article “Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona Did What Her Nonfiction Couldn’t And Vice Versa”, stating how Jackson herself was initially “anti-Native American” until “she attended a lecture by the Ponca chief, Standing Bear, and his translator Bright Eyes” that started her on a path of advocacy and allyship. Jackson started to champion Indigenous communities by publishing a non-fiction piece entitled A Century of Dishonor, which initially reached few readers and lacked the popularity that Ramona gained from the start. To combat the low interest in a cause that Jackson was passionate about, she took to fiction to advocate for Indigenous communities and thus produced Ramona, a romance novel that captured a wider-than-anticipated mainstream audience.
But as Lisa Mullenneaux explains in the article “Doing Good and Making Trouble A Look at Helen Hunt Jackson,” the novel’s love story “spectacle eclipsed her message,” creating instead a “sugar coating of the pill” of the cruel reality of Indigenous communities facing genocide and land theft. Though the novel became popular and did, for some, shine a light on injustices toward Indigenous peoples, the fact remains that the novel, rather than initiating a t movement of change, romanticized a tragic story where the ones who lost the most were those of Indigenous descent. The largest impact the novel had was in tourism—creating a road map of California that the characters traveled, thus making these locations popular and lucrative. The Rancho Camulos Museum National Historical Landmark website notes that aside from its architectural and historical significance, Rancho Camulos is more widely known as a tourist spot as a result of Jackson’s reference to the style of the home and the area being similar to the setting of the ranch in the novel. As a result, the town trademarked the resemblance and currently promotes itself as the “Home of Ramona”. So comes the question: did Helen Hunt Jackson truly help Indigenous peoples or did she further propagate a false and harmful narrative?
If we look at the text itself and what it offers, right away we see the general terms Jackson uses in relation to the very communities she is trying to help. Rather than providing the specific names of the Indigenous tribes present in the text, we only get locations. Tribes from the San Luis Obispo Mission, Santa Barbara, and Temecula, are described as good Catholics, ready and willing to help on the ranch of wealthy Mexican-European aristocrats. Jackson, an investigative journalist, made conscious choices in the descriptions she included in the novel. These choices may have been made to make Indigenous communities more favorable in the primarily white reader’s perspective, but in making these choices Jackson actively erased important parts of the communities’ identities. With hundreds of tribes in the area, such as the Cahuilla, the Tongva, the Chumash, and several more, blanketing all tribes together causes more harm than help by reinforcing the harmful settler conception of Indigenous sameness and interchangeability.
Julia Sizek’s “Our Ramona: Multicultural Dreams and Legacies of the Great California Outdoor Play” notes that “Helen Hunt Jackson intended Ramona to be a protest novel against the mistreatment of Native Americans in the United States.” However, the novel was not successful in its efforts to warrant sympathy for Indigenous communities; instead, the novel was seen as a romantic tale where the protagonist “overcomes oppression to become saved or emancipated”. This is, of course, a protagonist that, though part Indigenous herself, was also of European descent and embodied several Eurocentric features and ideologies, such as blue eyes and strong Catholic belief.
This overshadowing of Jackson’s original goal was made more prominent through the plot of the text that presents tragic endings for the characters with Indigenous backgrounds, like Alessandro who tragically dies, and a happy ending for the characters of European descent like Ramona and Felipe. These rhetorical moves create a distraction from the issue at hand, which is the mistreatment and disenfranchisement of Indigenous communities. With the focus on the salvation of the protagonist Ramona and not the injustices done to Indigenous communities, the novel romanticizes the land and locations of the text.
Though the novel has maintained its cultural status as a staple nineteenth-century text, it did so by capitalizing on romance and geography s rather than shining light on colonizers’ tragic and persistent mistreatment of Indigenous communities. In recent years, we have seen the novel undergo more critical analysis, including of the way it approaches its championing and allyship. While Jackson’s intention may have been to advocate for Indigenous communities, the true cultural impact of the novel has been felt more in the realms of geography, architecture, and the colonial ideologies of salvation and redemption.
Even with the awareness of the harms the novel may have perpetuated over time, it remains a popular text for the time period as well as for the history and geography of California. However, a more fruitful approach to the novel may be to look at the way it has been adapted over the years. And, more importantly, we may question why this text continues to garner popularity with the general public—or better yet throughout the California area. One of the adaptations of the novel is the Mexican telenovela Ramona, which was produced by Televisa and aired in 2000 with an all-star cast that was broadcasted in Mexico and the United States, garnering a large audience. The telenovela adaptation remains mostly faithful to the original plot of the novel, changing only a few details in relation to the family connections between the characters. In the adaption, we see that Ramona is secretly adopted by the Moreno family as a favor to the matriarch, Ramona Srn.’s., former first love, the Scottish soldier that married an Indigenous woman. A more California-centric adaptation is The Ramona Pageant hosted yearly by the city of Hemet, California which, according to the Ramona Bowl Amphitheatre website, has been running since 1923 and brings in a large amount of the city’s tourism. Such adaptations have cemented the romance and tourist aspects of the novel, rather than bringing forth the issues the Indigenous peoples faced at the time of the original publication, and that they still continue to face. What these adaptations do is inform us as to how the novel has sustained its cultural status, with the international adaptation really emphasizing the romance aspect and the local play sustaining a significant tourist impact on the area. These homages reinforce the idea that the novel was a failure as a catalyst of change, and has arguably added to the mystification of the ongoing Indigenous injustices, but has not failed as a romance novel that has captured the public’s attention for years after its original publication.
Alejandra Marquez is an Insurrect! fellow.