As a writer who trafficked in romance and regionalism and the popular sentimentality which dominated much of American fiction in the 1880’s Helen Hunt Jackson is today an example of a once-popular writer who is today all but forgotten and unknown out of Hemet, California. The popularity of Jackson’s stories managed to continue will into the next century, however. Evidence of this is tied directly to her 1884 novel Ramona: by 1936 it had already been adapted into three different films. A silent version in 1916 was followed by a “talkie” version complete with a song written expressly for the film that would go on to become popular in its own right. The 1936 remake added yet another cinematic innovation to its popular narrative: Technicolor.
That the novel proved quite popular with the movie industry is not merely incidental trivia to a discussion of the novel itself. Helen Hunt Jackson writer content to tell a story and sit back and watch royalties roll in. She was one of the first and most prominent white activists to work on behalf of the interests of the country’s native indigenous population, commonly termed “Indians” at the time. In 18181 she published A Century of Dishonor, a non-fiction accounting of the injustices perpetrated upon indigenous tribes that became for many Americans their first indication that the dime-store myths of the settling of the west might just not be absolutely entirely accurate. The problem for the author and its subjects, however, was that the term “many Americans” in this instance described only a fraction of the population. To wit: the book failed to land as she had hoped and thus she put all her efforts into bringing the issues of mistreatment of Native Americans to as broad as swath of the reading public as possible by disguising her political activism as a simple romance novel which enjoyed a popularity among readers roughly equal to that of those dime-novels mythologizing the west.
That romance novel was Ramona and it is a story about the arrival of settlers to California—Mexican, Spanish and native tribes, that is—who are eventually forced to put their efforts into maintaining their way of life against the encroaching herd of American settlers arriving from the east. The plan was for Ramona to do for the rights of the native population what Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done on the issue of slavery: instill a rightful sense of outrage though a bit of slick marketing trickery. Sell the sizzle of the fiction to entice readers to chew on the steak they would discover within. Unfortunately for Jackson and her cause, this plan also failed to land but for exactly the opposite reason that her non-fiction attempt failed. A Century of Dishonor was virtually ignored by readers while they gobbled up Ramona over the course of multiple printings.
The problem was that she had disguised her political activism too well. While the story is clearly about social issues set within the context of the opening of the western frontier, it also features an aspect much more familiar to readers. It is a Cinderella story. Ramona is the Cinderella figure dominated by foster mother who finds Prince Charming in the handsome son of no less than an actual “Indian chief.” The narrative was just too much for readers to lose themselves in and the results say everything: sweeping cinematic epics, a spike in tourism to those California sites mentioned on the novel, the annual Ramona Festival in Hemet still going strong nearly a century later and, of course, almost absolutely no change at all in the condition of indigenous tribes.
