© 2013 Yi-ling Lin CULTURAL ENGAGEMENT IN MISSIONARY CHINA: AMERICAN MISSIONARY NOVELS 1880-1930 BY YI-LING LIN DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral committee: Professor Waïl S. Hassan, Chair Professor Emeritus Leon Chai, Director of Research Professor Emeritus Michael Palencia-Roth Associate Professor Robert Tierney Associate Professor Gar y G. Xu Associate Professor Rania Huntington, University of Wisconsin at Madison Abstract From a comparative standpoint, the American Protestant missionary enterprise in China was built on a paradox in cross-cultural encounters. In order to convert the Chinese—whose religion they rejected—American missionaries adopted strategies of assimilation (e.g. learning Chinese and associating with the Chinese) to facilitate their work. My dissertation explores how American Protestant missionaries negotiated the rejection-assimilation paradox involved in their missionary work and forged a cultural identification with China in their English novels set in China between the late Qing and 1930. I argue that the missionaries’ novelistic expression of that identification was influenced by many factors: their targeted audience, their motives, their work, and their perceptions of the missionary enterprise, cultural difference, and their own missionary identity. Hence, missionary novels may not necessarily be about conversion, the missionaries’ primary objective but one that suggests their resistance to Chinese culture, or at least its religion. Instead, the missionary novels I study culminate in a non-conversion theme that problematizes the possibility of cultural assimilation and identification over ineradicable racial and cultural differences. My dissertation redresses a significant oversight in current scholarship on American missionary novels, which focuses on those of the Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck only. ii Acknowledgments I am alone responsible for the deficiencies of my dissertation, but I gratefully acknowledge the help I received that made its completion possible. In addition to my family’s unfailing support, I am grateful for the expertise, generosity, and goodwill of the professors on my dissertation committee—Leon Chai, Waïl S. Hassan, Rania Huntington, Michael Palencia-Roth, Robert Tierney, and Gary G. Xu—as well as of the following people: Drew Bartley, Ryan Bean, Diana Michelle Belden, Anthony G. Bollback, Kari Bostrom, Chris Brennan, Ruth Tonkiss Cameron, Patricia Chapman, Jane Meleney Coe, Katherine Collett, Ann Gowen Combs, Vienna Cornish, Sarah Dana, Adam J. Dixon, Joan R. Duffy, Sharon Fetters, Russell L. Gasero, Erika Gorder, Geoffrey Gowen, Elizabeth Gray, Jerome B. Grieder, Ken Grossi, Emily D. Haddaway, Amanda Halash, Taffey Hall, Sharman Hartson, Don Haymes, Carol Holliger, Rachel Howarth, Sheila Ingram, Lisa Jacobson, Aimée Jannsohn, Shuyong Jiang, Seth Kasten, Chery Kinnick, Charles Knutsen, Duane Koening, Carol A. Leadenham, Yu-Lien Liu, Linda J. Long, Teri Mandic, Jean Yaukey Matlack, Leslie A. Morris, Claudette Newhall, L. Dale Patterson, Karen Pearson, Ming Sun Poon, Donna Carcaci Rhodes, Cally Rogers-Witte, Jim Rooks, Geoffrey Ross, Anne Cuyler Salsich, Eileen Meyer Sklar, James Stack, Heather J. Stecklein, Bruce H. Tabb, Hermann J. Trojanowski, Karen T. Wei, Rhonda Weygandt, Wan Shan Wong, Daisy Wright, David W. Yaukey, and Sandra L. Zaugg. iii Table of Contents Introduction………………..………………………………………..…………………………….1 I. Justification………………………………………………………………………………..1 II. Major Issues......................................................................................................................14 Chapter 1 The Late Qing Period: Religion and the Taiping Rebellion..........................................20 I. Historical Background…….......………………………………………………….............20 II. John A. Davis’s Novels…………….……………………………………………………39 Chapter 2 The 1910s: Reform and Revolution through the West…………………………….….61 I. Historical Background……….……..…………………………………………………….61 II. Abram Edward Cory’s Novel..………………………………………………..................77 III. Paul Richard Abbott’s Novel…………………………………………………………...84 Chapter 3 The 1920s: Politics—Alliance and Conflict between Nationalists and Communists……………………………………………………………………………………...95 I. Historical Background…………..………………………………………………………..95 II. Sherman A. Nagel’s Novel……………………………………………………………..134 III. Vincent H. Gowen’s Novels…………………………………………………………...155 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................193 Epilogue.......................................................................................................................................197 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….220 iv Introduction I. Justification From a comparative standpoint, the American Protestant missionary enterprise in China was built on a paradox in cross-cultural encounters. In order to convert the Chinese—whose religion they rejected—American missionaries adopted strategies of assimilation (e.g. learning Chinese and associating with the Chinese) to facilitate their work. My dissertation explores how American Protestant missionaries negotiated the rejection-assimilation paradox involved in their missionary work and forged a cultural identification with China in their English novels set in China between the late Qing and 1930. I argue that the missionaries’ novelistic expression of that identification was influenced by many factors: their targeted audience, their motives, their work, and their perceptions of the missionary enterprise, cultural difference, and their own missionary identity. Hence, missionary novels may not necessarily be about conversion, the missionaries’ primary objective but one that suggests their resistance to Chinese culture, or at least its religion. Instead, the missionary novels I study culminate in a non-conversion theme that problematizes the possibility of cultural assimilation and identification over ineradicable racial and cultural differences. In the long history of the American Protestant missionary enterprise in China (which began in 1830, when the first American Protestant missionary Elijah Coleman Bridgman裨治文, 1801-1861, appointed by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1829, arrived in Canton, or Guangzhou 廣州, the capital city of the Guangdong 廣東 province, and ended in 1949, when the Communists took over China) the most common strategies of assimilation adopted by American missionaries were taking Chinese names1 and learning the 1 A good source to check missionaries’ Chinese names is Directory of Protestant Missions in China (1915-1950), previously published as a section of The China Mission Year Book 1 Chinese language, including its dialects when necessary. Mission boards would not allow missionaries to preach the gospel in Chinese until they became competent in reading and speaking. They were also encouraged to master Chinese in writing so that they could translate the Bible into different dialects, revise the translated Bible, and/or publish in Chinese in both religious and non-religious fields.2 All in all, missionaries’ Chinese writings were in three major (1910-1925). In addition to following the year book in providing information about missionaries’ denominations and stations, the directory supplements the year book by adding the years of missionaries’ first arrival in China and, although not in every issue and not for every missionary, their Chinese names. For missionary wives (who may be missionaries themselves), the directory does not specify their Chinese names but designates them as wife under their husbands’ entries. A useful source to check earlier, nineteenth-century, missionaries’ Chinese names is A. Wylie’s Memorials of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese: Giving a List of Their Publications, and Obituary Notices of the Deceased, with Copious Indexes (1867). Also useful is to look at the secondary sources of Wan guo gong bao 萬國公報 (having two English titles. From 1874 to 1883: The globe magazine; from 1889 to 1907: A review of the times), a Chinese monthly published from 1868 to 1907 by the American Methodist missionary Young John Allen 林樂知 (courtesy name: 榮章) (1836-1907). (The newspaper was named Jiao hui xin bao 教會新報, The church news, from 1868 to 1874.) As many contributors to that Chinese monthly were Western missionaries and the monthly had English tables of contents as well, its secondary sources usually provide correspondence of their missionary authors’ Chinese to English names. See, for example, Bennette 297, Wang Lin 342-33, and Yang Daichun 60-62. 2 For a general discussion about missionaries’ language learning, with some references to American missionaries’ learning Chinese and their language achievements, see Arthur Judson Brown, The Foreign Missionary 90-95, 166-70. As Brown points out, missionaries may rely on the grammars, lexicons, and phrase books compiled by earlier missionaries (90). In addition, some American missionaries’ memoirs and biographies provide concrete details about their Chinese learning experience. Although some missionaries did not start to learn Chinese until they reached China, Elijah Bridgman started learning Chinese while he was on board the ship to China. See Bridgman 30 and 33. In her memoir, Henrietta Hall Shuck (1817-1844), the first American female