Plotting Maidens and Traitors

This chapter maps sympathy’s place in the emplotment of what became known as the “New Southwest” after the U.S.–Mexican War. The chapter reads sympathy in the work of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, who opposed U.S. settlers plotting out the American West. In Life Among the Piutes, Hopkins countered the proposals that would eventually become the Dawes Act of 1887, which prescribed allotment (parceling land for tribesmembers’ individual ownership) and severalty (stripping Native Americans of tribal citizenship). She guides Anglo readers in understanding “love thy neighbor as thyself” as a principle best expressed from far away. After Gwin’s Land Law of 1851, de Burton lost a fortune defending her family’s rancho against U.S. squatters. In The Squatter and the Don, she inverts the stock character of the “sad” Mexicano to associate U.S. Americans with tears and grief through the figures of the white railroad baron, corrupt lawyer, and settler citizen.

On Sympathetic Grounds

On Sympathetic Grounds lays out sympathy’s vital place in shaping North America. The book puts forward a critical method for thinking about sentimentalism as a genre, mode, and political and affective outlook people have used to cultivate a sense of intimacy across distance—that is, an affective geography. Chapters intersperse theoretical reflections on the affective production of space with analyses of valleys that become vales of tears, heart-rending oratory, and weeping rock formations, as well as emplotments of narrative and continent in works by Harriet E. Wilson, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. Philosophers and rhetoricians regard grounds as necessary conditions for argumentation. This book takes grounds to be geopolitical, geoaffective, and geophysical, mapping them as alternately shaky, unsettling, and stabilizing. Circulating across bodies and surfaces, sympathy has enriched conditions for living at the same time that it has mercilessly enlisted some bodies and lives as the grounds for others’ well-being.