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Ramona Memories Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California Dydia DeLyser Table of Contents REVIEWS: |
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$57.00 Cloth |
How the heroine of a nineteenth-century romance novel pervades southern California’s regional identity. The most important woman in the history of southern California never lived. The eponymous heroine of Helen Hunt Jackson’s popular 1884 novel Ramona, a half-Indian beauty raised on a wealthy Mexican rancho, nonetheless left an indelible imprint on southern California’s landscape. Within a year of its publication, landmarks identified with Ramona’s fictional life—her birthplace, her home, the site of her wedding, and her grave—became important, even canonical parts of a visit to southern California. One could take the Ramona freeway to town, cook like Ramona, and smell like Ramona. The novel’s romanticized version of California’s Hispanic past also inspired films, songs, musical instruments, jewelry, clothes, beer, wine, canned goods, collectibles, and a play that still draws thirty thousand people annually. Although historians and other writers have acknowledged Ramona’s importance in the shaping of southern California’s regional identity, there has never been an in-depth study of the origins and evolution of the “Ramona Myth”—until now. In Ramona Memories, Dydia DeLyser traces the myth’s emergence within the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tourist industry. DeLyser explores the establishment of tourist attractions by fans of the novel. She details the stories of individual Ramona enthusiasts who, guided by numerous travel books and articles, wove the text of the novel and its lavishly described locations into their own lives, from pilgrimages to either of the two ranchos acclaimed as Ramona’s home to Ramona-themed luncheons and hopeful honeymoon visits to the Wishing Well at her marriage place. Based on more than a decade of meticulous research, Ramona Memories reveals how a fiction—and the real places and products that it inspired—helped to make an idealized past visible, permeating southern California’s social memory. “A useful analysis of the symbiosis of fiction, tourism, and regional development. The author poses interesting questions about how visitors personalize both fiction and landscape.” —Pacific Historical Review “Makes a compelling case for the importance of Ramona in fostering a fictive ‘social memory.’ Well documented and generously illustrated. Recommended.” —Choice “This book is a delight to read. DeLyser’s prose is clear and expressive, and she has a great feel for a story, a great sense of which leads to follow and emphasize.” —Annals of Tourism Research “Ramona Memories chronicles landscape reflecting fiction and imaginary people becoming very real icons of culture, tradition, and nostalgia personified. In her work she has accumulated a substantial and catholic bibliography and good textual discussion of social memories as part of the outfall of the popular success of a romance novel.” —The Professional Geographer “The Indian maiden first stole the hearts of readers more than 120 years ago yet arguably still trumps all other fictional characters in their impact on a local landscape, its architecture and a romanticized lifestyle.” —San Diego Union-Tribune “Ramona, a 19th century novel that captured the nation’s imagination, is part of the inventive spirit that formed Southern California’s identity. Ramona Memories is a crisply written, useful guide to the state’s Ramona landmarks and a cogent look at the novel’s importance in Southern California history—imagined and real.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “DeLyser does more than just offer a social history of the cottage industry that Ramona generated; indeed, DeLyser investigates the convergence between the escapist fantasy of Ramona and the reality of California history and geography. What emerges is a crisp rendering of the ways in which Ramona influenced the development of Southern California history and culture. Ramona Memories is not only academic; those interested in reliving Ramona will be pleased with DeLyser’s accurate guide to the various landmarks and locales that are found throughout the novel.” —Women’s Studies Dydia DeLyser is assistant professor of geography at Louisiana State University. 296 pages | 52 halftones | 5 7⁄8 x 9 | 2005 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1. A Determind Author and Her Novel Conclusion: Ramona and Social Memory in Southern California |
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$18.95 Paper