Strange Apathy

Abstract

This chapter challenges the critical consensus that Helen Hunt Jackson fashioned her Indian reform novel Ramona (1884) after Uncle Tom’s Cabin, insofar as sympathy for her indigenous protagonists promises to bring them into the fold of personhood. As Jackson well knew, designating American Indians as persons was fully consistent with policies designed to dissolve tribal affiliations. By recovering Jackson’s stated interest in modeling her novel on the story of a hunted deer, and by drawing on theories of depression as a political emotion, the chapter rejects accounts of Ramona’s “sentimentality” while insisting that the novel’s aesthetic strategies are deeply affective. Specifically, it draws on Giorgio Agamben’s later notion of “bare life” to support a claim that Ramona lingers with animal-like desperation and depression to register the loss of tribal forms of political life and to trouble bureaucratic visions of efficiently managed populations.