"In Constant Fellowship with One Unseen": Negotiations with the Native Other and American National Identity in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona

Writers such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Octave Mannoni have used postcolonial psychoanalysis to analyze the interrelations between the political aspects of the colonial situation and the psychological conditions of the colonizers and colonized. However, there has been little research into the development of the national "psyche" of the United States as a postcolonial state during the nineteenth century in relation to its own brand of imperialism, namely Indian removal. This article draws on the recent postcolonial psychoanalytic methodology of Ranjana Khanna to extrapolate how U.S. nineteenth-century fiction dealt with the legitimacy of national expansion and the American state pertaining to Indian displacement. I will discuss Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) in terms of how it works against masculine conceptions of violent frontier conquest while advocating for Indian assimilation. Nonetheless, I propose there is a dissonance at the heart of her reform agenda, which more generally reflects the nation's melancholic negotiation with its historical treatment of the Indian. Jackson's national ideal emerges from the conflicts between her assimilationist discourse, her racial attitudes, and her preservation of tribal sovereignty, an ideal that underscores her conception of the U.S. as a participatory, democratic state. The preservation of an undefined Indian-otherness, one that cannot be reduced to the parameters of the American imaginary, exists to validate the choice of assimilation and define the boundaries of national community in the novel. Nonetheless, this epistemic space of the Other is never fully delineated or directly explored. Jackson incorporates rather than assimilates the Native American into the nation by variously drawing upon and repressing his otherness to define a sense of national community. I will propose that her conception of American subjectivity is melancholic as a result of this dissonance, which links back to the national psyche's historically conflicted understandings of Western frontier colonization.

________

Bringing a postcolonial psychoanalytic apparatus to Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) enables exploration of the novel's conflicted approach to Native American assimilation, recognition for tribal sovereignty, and the national ideal in nineteenth-century southern California. Drawing upon psychoanalytic and postcolonial theories advanced by Ranjana Khanna in Dark Continents (2003), I propose there is a melancholic dissonance at the heart of Jackson's reform agenda which emerges from the preservation of a racially and culturally different unassimilable Other—"the Indian"—that is also used in discourses of native sovereignty as an extension of the democratic ideal of the American state. Although Jackson condemns the violent nature of U.S. imperialism, she nevertheless supports the idea of civilizational expansion under the proviso that it is regulated by the enlightened dictates of domesticity. This article will examine a conflict in the narrative of Ramona between its desire for assimilation, its suppression of resistance towards this end, and yet its implicit recognition of Indian sovereignty, which underscores its particular national ideal. This recognition in turn necessitates its paradoxical acknowledgment of native resistance. Melancholic markers are produced by the failure of the narrative's approach to show national identity in which the Other is absorbed and erased. Such signifiers of melancholia are identifiable, for example, in Ramona's repressed Indian subjectivity at the end. Furthermore, the novel's romantic plot deflects attention from its compromised political agenda and therefore tries to contain the unassimilable elements generated by an inability to effectively assimilate the Indian into the national corpus.

Postcolonial Psychoanalysis

Before turning to analysis of Jackson's conflicted national ideal and her ambivalent treatment of the Other, I will detail some key concepts dealt with by Khanna and others which will later afford unique insights into the political-psychical dynamics of the text. One of Khanna's central contentions is that national affiliation entails specific forms of haunting, narrative, sites of memory, and psychical effect. She also adopts Freud's terms, melancholy and melancholia, demonstrating how they can be used to critique colonialism and its effects.

For Khanna, melancholia can be characterized in an ethico-political context as a remainder which "insists on...