The Addressed and the Redressed: Helen Hunt Jackson's Protest Essay and the US Protest Novel Tradition

Abstract

Abstract: If the American protest essay is available to writers who engage in political advocacy, what is its relationship to the much more famous protest novel tradition? Writings in the protest mode, even those by established novelists, are often considered non-literary on the grounds that they are too polemical, ephemeral, or earnestly partisan. This article examines the case of Helen Hunt Jackson, whose protest novel Ramona (1884) was a wild commercial success and spawned a myth of New California that persists to the present day. But the novel has its origins in A Century of Dishonor (1881), a dense protest essay published three years prior, in which Jackson seeks justice in a direct appeal to the US Congress on behalf of American Indians. Jackson's overlooked essay version of Ramona provides an instructive case study of how protest essays may better perform the political work often attempted—but not always achieved—in the protest novel. Whereas literary studies often dismisses protest essays as non-literary, merely political, or journalistic, or in some way positions them as subsidiary, my project places such work at the centre of a literary tradition deeply concerned with the fulfilment of the nation's promises to be inclusive.