The Cartographic Regionalism of Mary Hallock Foote, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Mourning Dove

Amber LaPiana

This study establishes a relationship between literary and visual cartographies of the North American West by analyzing regional fiction by Mary Hallock Foote, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Mourning Dove in relation to contemporaneous maps, thus offering a more thorough understanding of how particular women writers produced, challenged, and supported notions of the West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.I first situate literary regionalism as a genre that emerged during the nation's growing geographical interest and argue that it intersects with a particular cartographic narrative concerning the perceived closing of the western frontier. In Chapter 2, I read Mary Hallock Foote's first novel, The Led-Horse Claim: A Romance of a Mining Camp (1883) alongside maps that advertise the claims of Leadville, Colorado, and argue that the fiction undermines the cartographic narrative of a transparent, profitable mining industry. Rather than perpetuate the myth that fortunes are easy to find, Foote links mapping and boundaries to violence. Next, I argue that Helen Hunt Jackson's novel Ramona (1884) gains new significance in light of her concern with the mapping and surveying of Indian reservations, evident in her other writings. Ramona came out the same year that the Office of Indian Affairs published the Map of Indian Reservations within the Limits of the United States. The second iteration of the map, published five years later, includes an inset of the Mission region not included in the original, a modification that is a testament to the influence of her work. Finally, I read Mourning Dove's Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Range (1927) as a counter to the rationalized versions of the Flathead Indian Reservation depicted in maps marketing the opening of the reservation for non-Indigenous settlement with a highly romanticized version of the landscape. The novel contests the cartographic erasure of the indigenous population by describing the landscape from the perspective of an indigenous woman. The pairing of maps with specific examples of regional literature offers new insights regarding regionalism's simultaneous critique and solidification of mainstream culture, allowing us to rethink the power of regionalism in cartographic terms.

The Cartographic Regionalism of Mary Hallock Foote, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Mourning Dove

Files and links (1)

Abstract

Metrics

Details