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“SEE HOW I AM RECEIVED”: NATIONALISM, RACE, AND GENDER IN WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT? 9 Amelia María de la Luz Montes It was the anniversary of some great day in New England when the Misses Norval were to make their farewell appearance in church before leaving for Europe—some great day in which the Pilgrim fathers had done one of their wonderful deeds. They had either embarked, or landed, or burnt a witch, or whipped a woman at the pillory, on just such a day. The reverend gentlemen of our acquaintance were to hold forth to their respective congregations, who idolized them, and would have mobbed and lynched anyone daring to hint that the two divines solaced themselves with a jug of whisky after those edifying sermons; that it was “John Barleycorn, and not John the Baptist,” Mr. Hackwell said he liked to consult after church. They did not know how many puns the witty Hackwell had made on Demi-John, and Saint John, and Jolly-John, which last was himself. —Who Would Have Thought It? (62) 1 Must I always be a listener only, never hit back? —Juvenal, The Satires 1.1 IN María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel Who Would Have Thought It?, the reader is transported to a New England which is in the throes of the Civil War. Within this historical background, the novel parodies and satirizes New England’s religious and political life through Ruiz de Burton’s Mexican American perspective. Indeed, Mexican and American religion (Protestant and Catholic) and politics (American civil unrest and French colonization of Mexico) are intertwined in this novel. The quotation above encapsulates Ruiz de Burton’s dislike for Protestant hypocrisy. Her description of the “great anniversary day” portrays the revered “Puritan fathers ” as misogynistic caricatures. The only women mentioned within this historical illustration are either branded witches or women scourged at the pillory.2 Historically, men were also punished at the pillory, but Ruiz de Burton’s careful placement of women at the pillory and men as fathers or reverends emphasizes her critical opinion of women’s subject position in New England. Ruiz de Burton furthers the parody by illustrating the real man-behind-the-scenes: Reverend Hackwell as a drinking insouciant rather than a solemn holy man. Despite the irreverence of Reverend John Hackwell’s “Jolly-John” and “John Barleycorn” titles, these are tame 177 parodies compared to the reality of his actions later in the novel, which slowly descend into a web of lasciviousness and insatiable greed.3 I begin with this excerpt because in many ways it serves as a reference point on which to embark upon my argument for this essay. First, however, I turn to early-nineteenth-century Anglo writer Lydia Maria Child, whose book Hobomok departs from traditional novels of that time and highlights social and class concerns which Ruiz de Burton later takes up in the 1870s. Child’s work positions the American Indian and the Anglo-American together within the domestic sphere.4 This was unheard of in the 1820s. Carolyn Karcher, who recovered and edited Child’s writings , has said: Child founded both a female countertradition of American literature and an alternative vision of race and gender relations in one of our earliest ¤ctional genres, the American historical novel. A genre created speci¤cally to forge a nationalist consciousness and cultural identity in the newly independent United States, the American historical novel inevitably exhibited the same central contradiction as American history itself—the contradiction between an ideology based on the premise that all men are created equal and a political structure based on the assumption that people of color and white women do not fall under the rubric “men.” (xv) I use Karcher’s words as a preface to my argument because Ruiz de Burton shares in the idea of a “female countertradition.” Karcher says that the American historical novel reveals “contradictions” inherent in the American political and social framework. Child’s work opens discussions of race and gender, speci¤cally in regard to the American Indian and AngloAmerican woman. I follow Karcher’s line of argument and broaden it by integrating a discussion of the Mexican American woman in nineteenthcentury Anglo-American society. I argue that Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? unravels the inherent contradictions of American ideology in regard to the Mexican American. Her use of satire and parody unmasks the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny and displays the hypocrisy among...

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