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• W2082404022 abstract "Reviewed by: The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels David Anthony The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels. By John Morán González. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. 146 pages, $44.95/ $9.95. John González begins The Troubled Union, his elegant study of the post-Reconstruction historical romance novel, with a provocative gesture to Mark Twain’s 1885 Huck Finn. What does it mean, he asks, that Twain concludes his famous examination of race and slavery with the narrator’s desire to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” (1)? His answer is that the West acts during this period as a site of fantasy resolution, one wherein the lingering national tensions between North and South can be imaginatively resolved via the imperialist ethos of Manifest Destiny. And nowhere is this more provocatively revealed, he suggests, than in the historical romance of the mid-1880s, a subgenre he describes more specifically as the “romance of reunion.” The Troubled Union is organized around three fairly disparate historical romances from this period: Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886), Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884), and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885). But as González explains, the very heterogeneity of the lineup—“an expatriate aesthete, a passionate New England reformer, and a dispossessed Californiana”—speaks to the widespread nature of imperial thinking in a period often overlooked in studies of US nation formation (18). And though the book is somewhat slim (112 pages, exclusive of notes), González is quite successful in showing how the courtship and marriage plots of these narratives allegorize national reunion and how they do so in ways that delimit and ultimately foreclose the possibility of racial integration. Instead, he suggests, these texts privilege an increasingly corporate form of white identity. Indeed, for González, the romance of reunion is interesting precisely for what it seems to want to avoid, or for the limits of its imagination in fashioning an “imperial formation of national identity” (18). As he puts it in a provocative passage about the repressed primal scene [End Page 443] of national violence, “the sexual nature of white men’s violent colonial exploitation of nonwhite women, as witnessed by large mestizo and mulatto populations, prohibited the national incorporation of indigenous and African peoples even figuratively in the face of remembered wrongs” (11). The Territory, it turns out, isn’t the utopian space Huck imagined it would be—or rather, “the rest” of the imperial nation caught up with him sooner than he expected. González therefore builds on work by Doris Summers, Laura Romero, Amy Kaplan, and others by demonstrating the limits and failures of the romance plot. Thus in his discussion of The Bostonians, he illustrates how James’s preoccupation with the possibility that dialect had “colonized the realist novel” dovetails with his concern over the “uncouth manners and mouths of U.S. women”—so much so that he constructs a plot in which the misogynist southerner Basil Ransom forces an apparently unhappy “union” upon the northerner Verena Tarrant (24, 49). For González, this forced union of North and South is James’s imagined effort to preserve a white Anglo-Saxon culture that he saw as threatened from within by immigrants (a fear reflected, González argues convincingly, twenty years later in Henry James’s The American Scene [1907]). Similarly, González shows in his examination of Ramona how the love story between a Californiana mestiza and a Diegueño Indian works to stage the “imagined incorporation of Indians as citizens” and thus eliminate “cultural difference through racial tutelage” (58, 60). But he also explores how, on the other hand, such incorporation is itself forestalled when the Native American character reverts to a state of mad savagery, and the novel’s mixed-blood heroine flees to Mexico with her white adoptive brother. Here, González argues, we see a prime example of the strategic failures of the reunion romance. And it is this failure that González again traces in his reading of the marriage of two “white” Californios in The Squatter and the Don..." @default.
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• W2082404022 date "2012-01-01" @default.
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• W2082404022 title "<i>The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels</i> (review)" @default.
• W2082404022 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2012.0008" @default.
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