California Dreams and American Contradictions: Women Writers and the Western Ideal by Monique McDade (review)

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• California Dreams and American Contradictions: Women Writers and the Western Ideal by Monique McDade
• Margaret Doane

Monique McDade, California Dreams and American Contradictions: Women Writers and the Western Ideal Lincoln U of Nebraska P 2023. 252 pp. Hardcover, $55; Kindle, $39.99.

Monique McDade's California Dreams and American Contradictions: Women Writers and the Western Ideal "establishes a genealogy of western American women writers publishing between 1870 and 1945 to argue that both white women and women of color regionalized dominant literary trends to negotiate the contradictions between an American liberal individualism and American equality" (book cover). McDade analyzes works by Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–85); María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832–95); Edith Maude Eaton, writing as Sui Sin Far (1865–1914); Eva Rutland (1917–2012); and Joan Didion (1934–2021) to show how these writers were able to "adapt dominant literary forms to create critical reflection" (203). While some wrote in additional genres, all "wrote for magazines and … contributed to a journalistic regionalism in some of the day's leading newspapers and periodicals" (22). In order to gain publication, many of the works initially appear to follow acceptable plots and accepted gender and racial expectations, yet these writers are able to assert "alternative definitions and narratives for liberal personhood through rearticulations of popular genres and literary modes" (23).

The first two chapters "trace the ways sentimental narratives serve María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Helen Hunt Jackson in reimagining the nation's liberal foundations" (25). McDade shows how Ruiz de Burton "takes up the sentimental tradition to demand western American and Mexican American representative autonomy" (25), how her "complex network of female characters exposes the false promises the nation serves both women of color and white women through a rhetoric of domesticity as the growing nation further entrenches itself in exclusionary traditions to secure white male privilege" (26). Helen Hunt Jackson initially addressed "the U. S. government's mistreatment of Native American tribes across the United States" directly in her treatise, A Century of Dishonor, but was far more successful in gaining the country's attention with her "sentimental adaptation" of her views in her novel, Ramona (83, 84). Jackson "pivots her literary agenda to meet the expectations of her [End Page 83] established readership" by using the sentimental tradition, "a cornerstone [of which] is that regardless of who the novel appears to be about, it is always about the Anglo-American reader" (84).

Chapters on Sui Sin Far and Eva Rutland show how their writing reveals "the insidious ways racism, xenophobia, and white supremacy are imbedded in progressive initiatives and curtail efforts to construct an equitable western American ecology" (151). Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Sui Sin Far's character, wants her daughter, when she has one, to "walk in the groove of the Superior [white] Woman" rather than in the groove of the "inferior [Asian American] Woman" (119). Mr. Spring Fragrance is "accepted because his hard work makes him successful enough so that he is not a burden to society but not so successful that he becomes a threat to Anglo-American masculinity" (121). Rutland, an African American, is concerned with the "middle-class preoccupations with children, homemaking, and heterosexual marriage only to emphasize the oppressive programs such notions of respectability support" (159). Rutland and her family move from the South to Sacramento but still face racism—a different kind of racism, but racism nonetheless. She learns that the "integrated classroom is not to be celebrated for integration's sake but revisited as a new site of racial oppression" and that "Black students in the segregated school systems in the South are getting more out of their education because they are being exposed to Black history, artists, and leaders, an education that, in the very least, helps reaffirm their identities and self-worth" (168).

Joan Didion, chronologically the last of the writers, both opens McDade's book and closes it. There is more space for Didion in existing American narratives because, although "critics attempt an institutional silencing of Didion's deeply feminine expressions … the privileged Didion embodies that western American myth of progress, [so] the establishment also leaves room for her to revise her...