44 pages • 1 hour read
John Rollin RidgeThe Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1854A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Cycle of Racist and Anti-Racist Violence
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racism and episodes of racially motivated violence, including sexual assault. It also references domestic violence.
The world of Ridge’s novel is characterized by relentless back and forth of criminal, judicial, and vigilante violence. Ridge describes both murders and executions in graphic detail and suggests that the ultimate victims of all this bloodshed are the nation (“our poor bleeding country” [66]) and the natural world.
For Ridge, “prejudice of color” and the “antipathy of races” lie at the root of all this bloodshed (9). Joaquín is a victim of racial hatred and violence, to which he responds with hatred and violence of his own. The novel suggests that the persecution Joaquín experiences is not merely unjust but illogical, with the use of disguise as a recurrent motif calling into question not only the legitimacy of racial hierarchies but even the reality of race itself, except as a social construct. The fact that Joaquín can pass so comfortably as a white American suggests that the apparent differences motivating racial conflict are purely superficial. When the young American hunter seeks to persuade Joaquín to spare his life, he pledges “not as an American citizen, but as a man” (68). On one level, then, Ridge would seem to suggest that all human beings are equal regardless of race.
Ridge’s anti-racist rhetoric is somewhat complicated, however, by the intense racism of much of his text. Ridge’s portrayal of the Chinese prospectors whom Three-Fingered Jack so gleefully slaughters and of the opportunistic Tejon Nation mean that his novel is hardly a manifesto for racial equality. Ridge’s assimilationist beliefs are relevant here, as Joaquín’s virtue is bound up in his embrace of the American ideal (just as his violence stems from America’s failure to live up to that ideal). To the extent that America rejects those who conform to its prevailing culture and ideology simply because of their race, the novel implies, it is at fault.
More than racism per se, Ridge is therefore ultimately preoccupied with the lawlessness that stems from it. By flouting the very ideals on which (the novel suggests) American society rests, “injustice to individuals” can create an imbalance that upsets “society” and “the world” (136).
The Redemptive Power of a Woman’s Love
Like many 19th-century texts, Ridge’s novel promotes an idealized notion of femininity in which women are moral guardians entrusted with nurturing and ennobling men. For example, Edward’s anger with the outlaws is mollified as a consequence of Rosalie’s intercession. Similarly, when the same racist mob that attacks Joaquín rapes Rosita, she responds by tearfully urging him to bear the injustice and relocate elsewhere so that they can live their lives in peace.
As this latter example illustrates, the patience and selflessness of the novel’s women is often indistinguishable from martyrdom. This passive female suffering in the face of a violent, patriarchal society also colors the novel’s depiction of the natural world, which the novel associates with women and likewise figures as purer than corrupt human society. The narrator, for instance, describes Rosita’s tears upon her brother’s death as seeking to cleanse a feminized Mother Earth. It therefore falls to the novel’s male characters to seek justice on behalf of both their lovers and the land. Joaquín’s desire to avenge his “country” of “her disgrace,” for example, borrows the language of sexual violation:
It was the year which would close his short and tragical career with a crowning glory—a deed of daring and of power, which would redeem with its refulgent light the darkness of his previous history and show him to aftertimes […] as a hero who has revenged his country’s wrongs and washed out her disgrace in the blood of her enemies (70).
If the virtuous suffering of figures like Rosita seems to effect little change, this attempt by Joaquín to “redeem” himself proves even more disastrous, resulting in his death and Rosita’s widowhood. By and large, the novel suggests that the long-suffering patience and forgiveness of its female characters is the better course.
However, there is one major exception to this pattern: the figure of Margarita, who subverts and challenges the roles assumed by the other female characters in the book. Rather than fading in despair when her husband is killed, she promptly remarries. When her new husband abuses her, she murders him in his sleep and marries a third time. Unlike Rosita, Carmelita, and Rosalie, Margarita responds actively to male violence. Moreover, she does so in a way that borrows the “language” through which conventional feminine virtue speaks in the novel: tears. Ridge describes her crying after she kills her second husband: “[T]he inconsolable widow wept […] long and well over the husband, whom she like a second, nay the thousandth Jezebel, had made a corpse” (71). The novel condemns Margarita’s behavior, but her acts introduce a note of uncertainty into its depiction of femininity—not merely that Margarita’s methods might be more successful, but also that the feminine virtue the novel celebrates might be performative.
American and Californian Identity
At the opening of the novel, Ridge states that his intention is to contribute to the first histories of California, when they come to be written. Ridge is therefore seeking inclusion in a historical orthodoxy that has yet to be established. Parallels immediately emerge between Ridge, an unknown author and person of color living on the margins of society, and his Mexican outlaw subject, Joaquín. The marginality of author and hero is also shared geographically (as a borderland) and symbolically (as a new state) by California itself. If California is accepted as American, the novel suggests, Joaquín should be as well—a point underscored by the fact that he comes to California in search of gold, just as many white Americans did.
In fact, the novel persistently associates Joaquín with America—or at least with a true, ideal national identity that is closely linked to values like justice and hard work. When confronted about his right to mine, Joaquín struggles to understand how those confronting him could so thoroughly misunderstand what it means to be American: “He had learned to believe that to be an American was to be the soul of honor and magnanimity, and he could hardly realize that such a piece of meanness and injustice could be perpetrated by any portion of [that] race” (154). Although Joaquín ultimately swears vengeance on Americans, he largely retains the values that the novel associates with America. What’s more, the novel itself continues to distinguish between the idea of America and the actual political status quo, which the novel characterizes as “false” and an abomination. This is why Ridge writes of Joaquín’s early oppressors that “[t]he country was then full of lawless and desperate men, who bore the name of Americans, but failed to support the honor and dignity of that title” (9).
The novel associates this ideal state of “honor and dignity” with the physical geography and natural beauty of the land itself. Mount Shasta symbolically represents the transcendent justice that would make the “Golden State” live up to its name. Here too, the novel implies a close relationship between Joaquín and American identity; the anti-American banditti live in harmony with the natural world, which often seems to almost deliberately collude in their acts of rebellion. In fact, Mount Shasta itself becomes their hideout at one point, implying that the outlaws are more representative of American ideals than America itself, that America has fallen so short of its deals that lawlessness now occupies the place of law, or both.
