The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona

A key metaphor of Helen Hunt Jackson's popular 1884 Indian reform novel, Ramona, brings together white women's housework, pluralistic nation building, and domestic subject making. Aunt Ri, awhite Southerner out West who overcomes her prejudices against Indians, weaves rag carpets of what she calls the "hit-er-miss" pattern (410). In these domestic productions, there are "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" (410). Claiming she has never seen a "hit-er-miss" rag carpet "thet wa'n't pooty," Aunt Ri delights "in the constant variety in it, the unexpectedly harmonious blending of the colors" (410). Modeling the novel's ideal of an inclusive racial tolerance, the multihued rag carpet represents a post-Reconstruction US that makes no distinctions on account of color.¹ Indeed, civic and aesthetic virtue flow from the juxtaposition of domesticated difference, while Jim Crow segregation only produces displeasing results: those who "hed 'em planned aout" from "ther warp" to "ther stripes" are always "orful diserpynted when they cum ter see 't done" (410). Post-Reconstruction domesticity posits diversity in integration, and harmony in diversity; the incorporation of all citizens, actual or potential, regardless of race, appears as the necessary task and happy result of white women's housework. Tidying up the human fragments of empire, Ramona illustrates domesticity's centrality to late-nineteenth-century US imperialism and suggests how white women's engagement with the colonial project advanced their own quest for national agency.

Casting the aftermath of manifest destiny less as an intense conflict between tribal nations and the US for political sovereignty and cultural survival than as the apparently noncoercive consolidation of e pluribus unum, Indian reform novels such as Ramona highlight the critical need to join two areas of literary investigation—domesticity and imperialism—which have typically been theorized separately.² Far from positing an unbridgeable chasm among the domestic, national, and foreign spheres, these novels articulate their synergy in US imperial endeavors. The discourse of separate spheres, as has often been pointed out, obscures the complex and conflicted ways middle- and upper-class white women experienced the patriarchal operation of familial life and the masculinized affairs of market and state. If previous scholarly considerations have failed to take into account domesticity's imperial entanglements, then recent efforts by Lora Romero, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Laura Wexler, Susan Gillman, Amy Kaplan, and others have provided a much needed theoretical corrective.³ Challenging current scholarly notions of domestic discourses as simply engaged in the politics of antipatriarchal resistance or simply disengaged from the racialized practices of US imperialism, these studies demonstrate the need to rethink the politics of domesticity within the framework of the production of colonial difference. This crucial emphasis upon colonialism's domestic imaginary returns the scholarly locus of investigation to the cultures of US imperialism, or, in other words, to the role of civil society in fostering imperial expansion and consolidating colonial settlement.⁴

"Manifest Domesticity," as Kaplan terms the antebellum nexus of imperialist and domestic discourses, delimits national citizenship by imagining the imperial nation as a home whose territorial expansion requires strict racial boundaries to remain white.⁵ According to Kaplan, imperial conquest expands the indirect influence of the empire of the mother along racial lines: "The Manifest Destiny of the nation unfolds logically from the imperial reach of woman's influence emanating from her separate domestic sphere" since domesticity "imagines the nation as a home delimited by race" (597). Antebellum domesticity consolidates manifest destiny by providing the conceptual framework through which to fashion colonial difference. Invoking the imminent threats of racial violence and interracial sexuality posed to white homes by colonized Others, the logic of antebellum domesticity mandates an ethnic cleansing of the nation, including the deportation of blacks (slave or free), the...