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Reading the Indians: The Ramona Myth in American Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Michele Moylan
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Despite, or perhaps because of, its popularity in 19th-century America, Ramona (1884), Helen Hunt Jackson's nostalgic novel of the California mission Indians, has seemed to offer little to academic readers. Seldom appearing on the lists of required reading for college courses in American literature, Jackson's novel has also been virtually ignored by literary and cultural scholars. Nevertheless, Ramona has had an active and influential “cultural life.” Jackson's Indian novel appealed to generations of readers from a wide variety of regions and socioeconomic classes. Published in the same year as Huckleberry Finn, Ramona first ran as a six-month serial in the Christian Union and subsequently amassed tremendous sales figures both in the United States and abroad. In 1885; for example, Ramona sold 21,000 copies as one of the year's best-sellers, and by 1900 readers had purchased more than 74,000 copies. Despite the lack of cheap, reprint editions, the novel continued to sell roughly 10,000 copies per year for most years through 1935. Held by 68 percent of U.S. libraries in 1893, it was one of only three contemporary novels held by 50 percent or more of the public libraries in the United States. Indeed, at least one of them had enormous trouble meeting public demand for the novel: in 1914 the Los Angeles Public Library was circulating 105 copies of Ramona, but it still had a waiting list; by 1946 the library had bought over a thousand copies of the novel. Never out of print, Ramona has been translated into “all known languages” and has been printed hundreds of times in dozens of editions. The popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin was phenomenal, but in Ramona Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel had a worthy rival. Clearly a powerful explanatory myth for generations of American readers, Ramona deserves serious attention from literary and cultural scholars alike.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 18 , October 1993 , pp. 153 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

NOTES

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15. As several theorists have suggested, we can consider all reading to be an act of “writing” in which the reader fills in the interpretive gaps left by the story. In response to the Ramona story, however, readers have played an unusually vigorous role as “writers” of the text. They have consistently not only filled in interpretive gaps but have actively contested the very details of the plot, radically changing some details from the original novel and ignoring others.

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64. The “Ramona Pageant” was not the only outdoor drama to sell the mission myth to residents and visitors alike in the early 20th Century. Starr notes that though the “Ramona Pageant” has outlasted all others, The Mission Play, which had its own playhouse in San Gabriel seating 1,450, was seen by “an estimated 2.5 million people between 1912 and 1929,” and its author/founder, McGroarty, John Steven, “was named poet laureate of California, knighted by the pope and the king of Spain, and twice elected to Congress” (Inventing the Dream, p. 88).Google Scholar

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