Human Agency in the Face of Telegraphic Determinism: Sentiment and Satire in Ruiz de Burton's Who Would Have Thought It?

In May 1844, Samuel Morse and his associates successfully relayed a message through the new medium of the telegraph, sending the words "What hath God wrought" from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore and back again.¹ Following the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863, Julian Norval, Lola Medina, and Lavinia Sprig—perhaps the three most likeable characters in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's novel Who Would Have Thought It? (1872)—might reasonably have wished that the telegraph had never been invented. Having finally been able to join their beloved Julian during his recovery from battle wounds at Fortress Monroe, Julian's future bride Lola and his aunt Lavinia relish the "very pleasant" cessation of "telegraphic orders" from Julian's tyrannical mother in Washington.² When a telegram does arrive with instructions from Mrs. Norval, Julian casts it into the flames without reading it, ensuring his plans to return to New York with Lola and Lavinia are not thwarted by his mother's contradictory demands. This section of the novel is dominated by the exchange of telegrams and bodies between these three cities—Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and New York—as various romantic intrigues and rivalries come into stark relief. The hilarity of these chapters, apparently central to the sentimental aspects of the novel's plot, serves as a satirical indictment of governmental and military communications—and the petty as well as noble causes that motivate them—during the Civil War. Throughout the conflict between the Union and the Confederacy, military andcivilian leaders competed for authority over the telegraph.³ Ruiz de Burton's novel draws on this historical struggle in order to explore the technological dimensions of political power in a presidential democracy at war with its own citizens.

The agency of the telegraph proves to be provocatively limited in Who Would Have Thought It? as Ruiz de Burton instead demonstrates the enduring human tendency toward miscommunication. As John Durham Peters has argued, communications—"various modes of symbolic interaction" ranging from hieroglyphics through telegraphy to virtual reality—can never "solve the problems of communication"—"the project of reconciling self and other"—even as we continue to imagine that "better wiring will eliminate the ghosts."⁴ Ruiz de Burton offers a salutary example of how the telegraph merely exacerbates existing dynamics of human behavior, providing an urgent warning against attributing agency too easily to technological actors. Indeed, Who Would Have Thought It? includes a prescient negotiation of the dichotomy between control and freedom that Wendy Chun has discussed in relation to modern fiber optic technology. Chun identifies the Internet as simultaneously "an unfailing surveillance device" and "an agency-enhancing marketplace," aspects of its operation that are contingent upon each other regardless of our paranoia or our fantasies.⁵ The telegraph in Who Would Have Thought It? is similarly represented as failing to follow through on the threat of control and the promise of freedom its users believe in.⁶

Rather than subscribing to a fantasy in which the impersonal tyranny of the machine can be blamed for the follies of humanity, Ruiz de Burton insists upon the continuing power of human bodies and emotions to determine events, emphasizing how new forms of communication tend to replicate existing patterns of behavior in both the political and domestic spheres. This essay therefore examines Who Would Have Thought It? in the context of an emerging scholarly discussion on the influence of new communication technologies on and in nineteenth-century literature. As this discussion has been primarily focused on more canonical figures such as the realists Henry James and Edith Wharton, the inclusion of Ruiz de Burton in this conversation challenges many previously drawn conclusions about the particular transformations of nineteenth-century life and fiction that resulted from the introduction of telegraphy. Who Would Have Thought It? provides an unusual critique of our attitudes toward technology, a critique that remains relevant to modern readers by denying the very novelty of new technologies.

A Mexican-American who reached the apex of Washington society through her marriage to a Yankee...