Race Mixture in Nineteenth-Century U.S. and Spanish American Fictions

Gender, Culture, and Nation Building

Debra J. Rosenthal

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780807855645, 9780807828991
• eBook ISBN: 9780807875957
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Race mixture has played a formative role in the history of the Americas, from the western expansion of the United States to the political consolidation of emerging nations in Latin America. Debra J. Rosenthal examines nineteenth-century authors in the United States and Spanish America who struggled to give voice to these contemporary dilemmas about interracial sexual and cultural mixing.

Rosenthal argues that many literary representations of intimacy or sex took on political dimensions, whether advocating assimilation or miscegenation or defending the status quo. She also examines the degree to which novelists reacted to beliefs about skin differences, blood taboos, incest, desire, or inheritance laws. Rosenthal discusses U.S. authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, and Lydia Maria Child as well as contemporary novelists from Cuba, Peru, and Ecuador, such as Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Clorinda Matto de Turner, and Juan León Mera. With her multinational approach, Rosenthal explores the significance of racial hybridity to national and literary identity and participates in the wider scholarly effort to broaden critical discussions about America to include the Americas.

1. Race Mixture and the Representation of Indians in the United States and the Andes

Miscegenation in national literature repeats as a hemispheric theme across the Americas, for many U.S. and Latin American novels figure Indian-white mixing. To many intellectuals both northern and southern, a newly formed nation implied and necessitated a new national literature. For example, in an 1815 issue of the North American Review, William Channing lamented “the barrenness of American literature viz. the dependence of Americans on English literature, and their consequent negligence of the exertion of their own intellectual powers” (314). In 1821, John Gorham Palfrey wrote, “Whoever in this country first attains the rank of a first rate writer of fiction will lay his scene here. The wide field is ripe for the harvest, and scarce a sickle yet has touched it” (1). Both men believed that the United States had distinctive natural resources for novelists to draw upon: Puritans, dramatic landscapes, wilderness, and, most important, indigenous populations. Significantly, many early U.S. writers answered Channing’s, Palfrey’s, and others’ nationalistic calls by penning fictions that prominently featured Native Americans. Even more significant is that many early white authors not only portrayed natives but also represented them in terms of sexual relations with colonists.¹ Linking a new body politic to the body human, these writers based literary sovereignty on Indian-white interracial mixing. We can draw a hemispheric literary parallel in the Andes region, where authors of the national novels of Ecuador and Peru, Juan León Mera in Cumandá (1879) and Clorinda Matto de Turner in Aves sin nido (1889), similarly explicitly turn to race mixture to elucidate national concerns. In Mera’s evocation of his country’s history and landscape and in Matto de Turner’s contention that she is “making” Peruvian literature, both authors choose to frame their plots with anxiety about interracial sexual mixing.

In discussing the portrayal of natives in white-authored fiction, Latin American literary scholars, particularly of Andean literature, have identified two distinct genres, indianismo and indigenismo, and have developed a vocabulary to discuss them. Indianismo and indigenismo describe social as well as literary movements in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Spanish American literature, respectively. Indianismo, concerned with the portrayal of passive, uncivilized natives in an exotic, erotically charged natural setting, is often aligned with nineteenth-century romanticism and romanticized notions of the Other. Examples of indianista novels include José Martiniano de Alencar’s O Guarani (Brazil, 1857) and his Iracema (1865), Manuel de Jesús Galván’s Enriquillo (Dominican Republic, 1879), Mera’s Cumandá, and Juan Zorilla de San Martín’s Tabaré (Uruguay, 1886). Indigenismo is inspired by different cultural contexts and different attitudes toward Otherness. Associated with twentieth-century realism, indigenismo can be characterized as a socially progressive movement that exposes white and mestizo exploitation of Indians and advocates their eventual liberation. Examples of indigenista novels include Matto de Turner’s Aves sin nido, Alcides Arguedas’s Raza de bronce (Bolivia, 1919), Jorge Icaza’s Huasipungo (Ecuador, 1934), Gregorio López y Fuentes’s El indio (1935), Ciro Alegría’s El mundo es ancho y ajeno (Peru, 1941), and possibly José María Argueda’s Yawar fiesta (Peru, 1940).

With these classifications, Latin American scholars have developed an accepted taxonomy by which to distinguish the various modes of representing indigenous peoples (Peter J. Gold; Rosemberg; Rodríguez-Luis).² In marked contrast, scholars of U.S. literature do not have such categories; critical discourse grapples with ways to talk about nineteenth-century writings about Indians.³ In other words, the many U.S. novels dealing with Indians are not distinguished by the ways they represent natives. Instead, such novels retain their primary classification of romance, frontier novel, sentimental fiction, and so forth and are only secondarily referred to as writings about Indians. Captivity narratives constitute a separate genre because they are actual autobiographical accounts, and westerns are differentiated by their emphasis not on Indians, but on masculine adventure, violence, guns, horses, the gold rush, the western landscape, railroads, sheriffs, and saloons. Lucy Maddox suggests that if Indians appear in a work of fiction, then it is usually classified as a romance (telephone conversation).⁴ The blossoming field of Native American literature in the United States, in which Indians write about themselves, is, of course, quite distinct from the appropriation and representation of Indians by whites. Maddox agrees that critics have a literary blind spot and cannot recognize the substantial body of writings about Indians. However, Maddox herself does not distinguish between different types of representation of natives: she construes all novels as socially and ideologically similar. Further, Maddox is more interested in the political and cultural representation of the Indian figure than in the representation of Indian-white sexual mixing (Removals). The lack of ways to describe differing white-authored representations of natives suggests that critics of U.S. literature have not found such classification useful. In fact, until the critical boom in interest in such novels as Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827),⁵ scholars often assumed that few nineteenth-century authors were interested in the political and cultural dynamics of Indian-white relationships and that Cooper stands as the only significant writer in this area (Maddox, Removals 6).

Even though critics of nineteenth-century U.S. literature have no vocabulary to describe Indians’ representations, the period from the 1820s to the 1880s nonetheless witnessed a shift in the novelistic representation of Native Americans and their sexual relations with whites. For example, Child in Hobomok, Cooper in The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Sedgwick in Hope Leslie, and other early novelists simultaneously portray the Indians romantically, as “noble savages” to be pitied or feared by whites, and tragically, as a doomed race fated to genocide through assimilation. Later in the century, however, particularly once federal Indian removal policies were underway, writers cast the figure of the Indian differently. For example, as we shall see, Helen Hunt Jackson in Ramona (1886) protests the continued exploitation of southern California Indians by the U.S. government. Twain in “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians” (1886) portrays the Sioux as debased and corrupt rapists.

Because Andean literature has a vocabulary specific to novelistic portrayals of Indians, an examination of indianista and indigenista literature, especially in light of U.S. novels about Indians, can be useful for demonstrating the significance of miscegenation to any national literature. In this chapter, I intend to familiarize scholars of U.S. literature with the Andean categories of indianismo and indigenismo to demonstrate how, when we speak of comparative literature of the Americas, similar literary concerns (here, white-authored novels about Indians) find various modes of critical discourse. Pérez-Firmat endorses the idea of “appositional” or “cheek-to-cheek” literary comparison that places “works side by side without postulating causal connections” so that “confluence takes precedence over influence and causal links, even when they exist, are deemed less relevant than formal or thematic continuities” (4). Using this idea of appositional literary comparison, I wish to suggest that New World studies scholars might gain a new perspective on white-authored novels about Indians by considering other hemispheric epistemologies.⁶ I am not recommending that we squeeze U.S. literature into borrowed categories; rather, I am proposing that Latin American models of organizing discourses may challenge received conceptions of U.S. literary heritage. By viewing Cumandá alongside The Last of the Mohicans and Hope Leslie and then turning to Aves sin nido juxtaposed with Ramona and “Huck and Tom,” we can see how all these fictions consciously articulate significant issues regarding the centrality and shifting representation of native-white sexual mixing. In such fictions, historical, political, and literary concerns pivot around the anxiety about interracial sex, suggesting that in both the United States and the Andes, the portrayal of Indian-white sexual relations influences a novel’s thematic and national concerns.

Nineteenth-century U.S. fiction also conveyed anxiety about race mixture in slave narratives, slave novels, and proslavery romances. Although racial anxieties were displaced primarily onto Indians in Ecuador and Peru, such anxieties were displaced onto both Indians and blacks in the United States. Yet, reform movements in the United States that inspired Indian and slave reform fiction were separated by fissures of time and politics. True, José Martí linked the “Indian question” with the “Negro question” in his “composite figure of Stowe-and-Jackson [that] links the world-famous North American abolitionist with the nationally prominent spokeswoman for the Indian cause, bringing together what are in the United States the distinctly separate reform movements of the Negro and the Indian” (Gillman, “Ramona” 92). Nevertheless, although a comparative examination of race-reform fiction concerning U.S. slaves and Native Americans is beyond the scope of this book, a reexamination of genre borders and portrayals of Indians can point scholars to a pan-American dialogue on indigenous otherness. As Spanish imperialism waned in nineteenth-century Latin America, Anglo domination and expansionism rose in the United States, thus different literary takes on the fictional representation of Indians under Ibero-Catholic colonialism and Anglo-Protestant imperialism emerged.

Although I have briefly mentioned the categories indianismo and indigenismo, I would like to elaborate on them a bit to better adapt them for U.S. modes of representing Indians.⁷ The romantic, sentimental indianismo literary movement derived from French Enlightenment thinkers who were popular throughout South America, especially Michel Montaigne in “Des Cannibals” and Voltaire, Guillaume Thomas François Raynal, and Jean-Françoise Marmontel (particularly in Les Incas). Rousseau’s ideas about the inherent goodness of humanity if uncorrupted by civilization, and the “noble savage” state of humans before the rise of social organization, led to a literary valorization of nature and Indians in their exotic, “pure” state. Chateaubriand, an influential intermediary between natives and Western literature, provided a model for all subsequent indianista writing in his Atala (1801). Johann Gottfried von Herder’s romantic racialism and the German Romantics—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich von Schlegel, and Johann Wolfgang van Goethe—also influenced views of the Indians. With their emphasis on the return to local color and nature, the German Romantics recognized the appeal of the Americas’ wilderness and savages (Sacoto 24–32).⁸ Finally, Cooper also inspired the genre; Mera, for example, acknowledges Cooper in his preface to Cumandá.

Indigenismo aligns more with realism and socialism; it was influenced by anticlericalism, scientific positivism, faith in progress, and was later buoyed by Marxism (Muñoz 72, 74). Drawing a distinction between the two genres, Aída Cometta Manzoni argues that

la literatura indianista se ocupa del indio en forma superficial, sin compenetrarse de su problema, sin estudiar su psicología, sin fundirse con su idiosincrasia. La literatura indigenista, en cambio, trata de llegar a la realidad del indio y ponerse en contacto con él. Habla de sus luchas, de su miseria, de su dolor, expone su situation angustiosa; defiende sus derechos; clama por su redención.

[Indianista literature is superficially concerned with the Indian, without penetrating his problems, without studying his psychology, without understanding his idiosyncrasies. Indigenista literature, on the other hand, tries to approach the reality of the Indian and come into contact with him. It deals with his struggles, his misery, his pain; it exposes his anguishing situation, defends his rights, cries out for his vindication.] (20)⁹

Indigenista writers, mainly urban-educated and reasonably knowledgeable about the Indian majority (Pratt, “Women, Literature, and National Brotherhood” 61), studied the social, economic, and political conditions of native peoples in an attempt to understand their worldviews and problems. They also looked back to the pre-Columbian world to reinterpret the conquest and national history and thereby destroy the myth of the romantic Indian (Muñoz 102). Overall, indigenista novels are revisionary, have a distinct political platform, contain bits of native language, feature recognizable stereotyped characters, and support violent remedies for the Indians’ plight (Echevarría 290). Evelio Echevarría goes so far as to claim a unique position in world literature for indigenismo as a genre written by whites on behalf of an oppressed minority. He maintains that few abolitionist novels can match the zeal with which indigenista novels rally for Indian liberation (289).

The answers to the Indian problem suggested in indigenista novels tend to fall into two categories: what Muñoz calls the liberal solution and the socialist solution. The liberal solution to Indian oppression resulted in the destruction of Indian culture: recognizing that those who exploited Indians would never favor charitable education and equality, liberals advocated rapid industrialization and modernization, a capitalist system intolerant of native communal, quasi-feudal social and commercial structures. Under this plan a dictator figure favorably carried out such destruction without affecting middle-class interests or investments (138–39). The socialist solution favored mestizaje: interracial mixing with whites so that Indian race and culture would lose distinct identity, on the theory that mestizos would inevitably adopt the dominant white culture and reject Indian identity as inferior. José Carlos Mariátegui rejects this theory with a blistering condemnation: “To expect that the Indian will be emancipated through a steady crossing of the aboriginal race with white immigrants is an anti-sociological naiveté that could only occur to the primitive mentality of an importer of merino sheep” (Urquidi 25). Involuntary on the part of Indians, mestizaje usually appears in novels as a white man’s rape of an Indian woman. But like indianismo, indigenista novels, written by whites, appealed to the urban reading public, not to the natives themselves. Nevertheless, while indigenista novels glorify Indians’ salvation, inevitably the native is denied a future as an Indian. Indigenismo as a genre dwindled around 1960 when novelistic innovations by the “boom” writers superseded interest in Indians.

Mera’s Cumandá and Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans

Writing in the genre now known as indianismo, Juan León Mera (1832–94) penned the pioneering fiction of Ecuador, Cumandá; o, Un drama entre salvajes (Cumandá; or, A drama among savages), published in 1879. Mera studied the local Quechua language and incorporated Indian themes into his poetry, fiction, and criticism. He considered himself a lifelong supporter of Ecuador’s native population, both as a writer and as a governmental worker. In the novel, Mera details the geography and panoramic scenery of his beloved country to create an evocative local color resembling an exotic regionalism. He chose to write about primitive jungle natives, not the sierra natives of his adulthood, and set the novel seventy years back in time to 1808, twenty-two years before Ecuador achieved independence. Like Child, Cooper, Sedgwick, and Jackson in the United States, Mera situates his story in a mythic, simple past as if to plumb the depths of national history to find room for his reinterpretation of it. By setting their novels back in time, these authors evaded the reality of contemporary Indians’ unfavorable conditions. Like some U.S. authors, Mera projects onto his Indian characters an aura of mysticism and stereotyped uncivilized exoticism.¹⁰

The idyllic, remote setting of Cumandá, however, might have another political purpose besides allowing Mera to recast history in his own image: the distant corner of Ecuador housing his novel’s inhabitants may represent the border territory constantly in dispute with Peru. Situating a national novel in contested land suggests reappropriating and reclaiming that land as part of one’s history and national identity. Instead of disengaging him from contemporary politics, such a move on Mera’s part would place him in dialogue with political struggle and give Cumandá a nationalist agenda. Further, Mera’s government affiliation illustrates Fernando Unzueta’s point that outside of Latin America, “while government officials may participate in public discussions, the public sphere is independent from the state.… Nevertheless, in Latin America, partly because of censorship, but mostly on account of the close relationship between power and the letter … such a separation has not been necessarily clear” (23). In other words, because in nineteenth-century Latin America a man of letters was often a man of government, the nationalism of Cumandá stems from the correlation between the rise of the public sphere and Mera’s official status. Geoff Eley notes that “the emergence of nationality (that is, the growth of a public for nationalist discourse) was simultaneously the emergence of a public sphere” (296). Therefore, according to Unzueta, such “overdetermination is particularly relevant in the Latin American context, where most ‘literary’ organizations, discursive projects, and institutions have specific political and national agendas” (23).

Significantly, Mera openly acknowledged his debt to Cooper and Chateaubriand: “Bien sé que insignes escritors, como Chateaubriand y Cooper, han desenvuelto las escenas de sus novelas entre salvajes hordas y a la sombra de las selvas de América, que han pintando con inimitable pincel [I well know that distinguished writers such as Chateaubriand and Cooper have set the scenes in their novels among bands of savages and the shadows of the American jungles, which they have painted with inimitable brushstrokes]” (40). Cumandá parallels The Last of the Mohicans in many places, most notably in the cruelty of Magua and Tongana, the numerous episodes of danger and narrow escapes, the flights through the woods, the taking of prisoners, the rescues, the final scenes in which Indian and white mourn together over the body of a woman, the idealization of natives that nonetheless denies the purity of their unbaptized souls, and the insistence that society cannot accommodate a mixed-race marriage that unites white and Indian families. If the leading indianista novelist points to Cooper as his inspirat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Race Mixture in Nineteenth-Century U.S. and Spanish American Fictions: Gender, Culture, and Nation Building
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Inter-American Interracial Intercourse
• 1. Race Mixture and the Representation of Indians in the United States and the Andes
• 2. Temperance and Miscegenation in Whitman’s Franklin Evans
• 3. Cuban Slave Fiction: Race Mixture in Sab
• 4. Floral Counterdiscourse: Miscegenation, Ecofeminism, and Hybridity in Lydia Maria Child’s Romance of the Republic
• 5. The White Blackbird: Miscegenation, Genre, and the Tragic Mulatta in Howells, Harper, and the Babes of Romance
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index