“Ramona”
The story was intended by its author to do for Native Americans (Indians) what Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done for African-Americans: draw attention to the plight of their struggle and the injustices committed against them in the name of the United States government. Thus, the novel itself was written specifically to become a work of symbolism.
The Love Story
Jackson had already tried once before to grab the attention of the nation on behalf of treatment of the native tribes and had been summarily ignored. That work was a non-fictional essay titled “A Century of Dishonor.” Having decided to pursue the idea of mimicking Harriet Beecher Stowe by masking the outrage within a more commercial product, Jackson focused special attention on the romance of her plot as a means of inducing readers to the book in the hope of allowing the wider framework of the story to fulfill the more seriously. The love story thus becomes a symbol within the symbolic status of the book what the author herself described as a ““sugar coating of the pill” in which the pill was drawing attention to the need for reform of government policy toward “the Indians.”
Aunt Ri
The character of Aunt Ri is widely believed to be based directly on Jackson herself and also works as symbol for what she herself represented. Aunt Ri personifies the progressive development of the white American who did succumb to the dissemination of the myth of the wild savages, but who overcame the propaganda to dismiss unsupported racial biases before moving to the point of genuine respect.
Aunt Ri’s Rag Carpets
It is practically impossible to read the book without tripping over the symbolism of Aunt Ri’s “hit-er-miss pattren” rag carpets. Over the course of about three-hundred words, the phrase recurs four times. And just in case repetition doesn’t do bring the attention the author desires, descriptive imagery should do the trick:
“no set stripes or regular alternation of colors, but ball after ball of the indiscriminately mixed tints, woven back and forth, on a warp of a single color…constant variety in it…unexpectedly harmonious blending of the colors.”
What is being described here is more than a rug, obviously. It is a symbolic description of the author’s own desire for the future of California’s—and by extension, America’s—melting pot population.
Father Junipero Serra
Father Junipero Serra is a complicated symbol in the novel. He is intended by the author to be a symbol of the benevolent figure whose founding of Catholic missions throughout the region brought civilization to the indigenous people already living there. And, indeed, this was a widely held and unquestioned view by almost all Catholics and many Americans. However, revelations from Serra’s own diaries and church records in the century since have—in spite of his canonization as a saint in the 21st century—have transformed him to most non-Catholics as a symbol of oppression rather than civilization.
