Pacific Sensations:

Seeing Yellow in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture

By

Colleen Tripp

B.A., California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, 2005

M.A., University of California at Santa Cruz, 2008

M.A., Brown University, 2011

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of American Studies at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2015

© Copyright 2015 by Colleen Tripp

This dissertation by Colleen Tripp is accepted in its present form by the Department of

American Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy.

Date______Professor Jim Egan, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate School

Date______Professor Robert G. Lee, Reader

Date______Professor Ralph Rodriguez, Reader

Date______Professor Susan Smulyan, Reader

Approved by the Graduate School

Date______Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

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CURRICULUM VITAE

Colleen Tripp was born in southern California and grew up in Westlake Village,

California. She attended California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, receiving her B.A. in English (2005), and later went on to earn her M.A. in Literature

(2008) at the University of California at Santa Cruz. At Brown University, Colleen earned her M.A. in American Studies (2011) and will receive her Ph.D. in American

Studies this May (2015).

Drawing on her interests in public humanities, Tripp has circulated her scholarship at conferences and in print during her academic career. She presented portions of her dissertation at conferences such as the American Studies Association,

New Media in American Literary History, and Central Modern Language Association, among others. In recognition of the originality of her research, she was awarded the 2013

CASA Paper Prize by the California American Studies Association for her first dissertation chapter, “Beyond the Black Atlantic: Lascars and Manila Men in Herman

Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,”’ and this paper evolved into a forthcoming article in the

Journal of Transnational American Studies. She has also published an encyclopedia entry on “The Gilded Age” in the Encyclopedia of American Populism by ABC-CLIO.

Her research and professionalization has been supported by several fellowships, grants, and archival work experiences. During the writing her dissertation, Tripp received

iv support from the Center for Historic American Visual Culture at American Antiquarian

Society, the California American Studies Association, the Dickens Project, among others.

She also was selected to work as an archivist for two acclaimed digital archives, the

Women Writers Project and the Modernist Journals Project, as well as become a fellow for HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and

Collaboratory), and these experiences were invaluable in shaping the visual culture of her dissertation.

Tripp brought the same creative ethos in her public outreach as a mentor and public humanist. Tripp was a three-year mentor for the Leadership Alliance Mellon

Initiative, a national summer research program for talented low-income and minority undergraduates. The students of the Leadership Alliance summer program—talented undergraduates from a variety of humanities disciplines—often discussed the rhetoric of race and class informing their social world, and these multi-disciplinary conversations deeply influenced her pedagogy and research.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

While I worked hard on my manuscript, I believe it takes a village to write a dissertation, and there are a number of people and organizations that I would like to thank for their time and care. First and foremost, I would like to thank my dissertation advisor

Jim Egan, whose big heart and open-mindedness helped me craft an interesting manuscript and encouraged a wonderful, enriching education here at Brown University.

Susan Smulyan, of course, also needs to be included in my thanks for support. Her mentorship helped me get past those moments of self-doubt and criticism, and her enthusiasm for public humanities and digital scholarship inspired much of my work.

Ralph Rodriguez’s help in matters of cultural studies and theory were essential to my interdisciplinary method, as were his professionalization tips that undoubtedly helped me navigate the perils of academia as a career. My chats with Robert G. Lee and his big-idea thinking were the original starting points for this manuscript, and I would like to thank him for inspiring my American Studies dissertation. Finally, I would like to thank the

California American Studies Association (CASA), the American Studies Association, and the American Antiquarian Society for all of their financial support during the writing of my manuscript and this part of my academic career.

My fellow graduate students and friends were also an invaluable source of comfort and laughs while at Brown University. Three cheers to Pia Sahni and Maj

Kargbo for having sensible, solid advice about research, relationships, and what not to

vi wear. Sara, you and I had some laughs and tears over cake and ice cream more than once, and I will always be grateful for your sweet friendship. Crystal, Heather, and Maria also need to be included in these thanks, if only because our dinner parties and meet-ups were always a source of fun and frivolity during even the most stressful of times. Chris Suh, you are my favorite California transplant, and I am grateful that we were able to work together during your time here at Brown and while at Stanford. Jeff Cabral, your financial-resourcefulness and generosity helped me in more ways than one, and I cannot thank you enough for your kindness.

I would also like to thank my closest friends and family for giving me hours of reprieve during those long days of writing. Mom, I always love your gift packages and cards in the era of everything digital, and I am so excited to be moving back home to you.

Ryan and Laurel, you two have been a rock for the family this year, and I can’t wait to see you two wed before the Fourth of July. Kendra, I foresee too many drinks and dinner dates in your neighborhood and my new home, and you should know I might dog-nap

Penny. Finally, Nicole, you might be the smallest and most stubborn woman I know, and your tenacity inspires me to do great things. Thanks for being the kind of best friend that

I write about in an acknowledgement such as this.

I dedicate this manuscript to Ronaldo Noche and John G. Tripp, two of the greatest men in my life that I have ever known. Dad, you concealed your final chapter, and your selflessness helped me write the last pages of this before you had to go. I love you. And Ronaldo, you are my punk rock knight in shining armor, and we’re riding off into the sunset in your old Toyota onto our California dream. PS, I’m driving and don’t forget the mixtape!

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………………………….viii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS……………………………………………………………..ix

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………..1-16

CHAPTER 1………………………………………………………………………….17-49 Beyond the Black Atlantic: Lascars and Manila Men in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

CHAPTER 2……………………………………………………………………….....50-85 The Only Good Chinese is a Dead Chinese: Frontier Cosmopolitanism in Ambrose Bierce’s “The Haunted Valley” and Karl Muller’s “Heathen Chinee” Pitcher

CHAPTER 3………………………………………………………………………...86-110 A China Trade-Inspired Book History: Decorative Arts and the Model Minority in Edith Maude Eaton’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance

NOTES……………………………………………………………………………111-118

BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………119-132

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“Heathen Chinee pitcher” (Harte), 1876………………………………………………....59

“Heathen Chinee pitcher” (Gambrinus), 1876…………………………………………...61

“Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (Cover), 1913……………………………………………...….94

“Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (Title Page), 1913…………………………………..…………96

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INTRODUCTION

American authors in the nineteenth-century vividly illustrated their fascination with Asian porcelainware. Some, like collector Alice Earle, remarked on the porcelain’s romantic designs, narrating a veritable world of exotic beauty seen in the comfort of one’s own home: “I have woven about it and halloed around it an Arabian

Nights romance of astonishing plot and fancy” (186-7). Yet, others interpreted porcelain in a decidedly different manner, reading the objects as a reminder of a dangerous Eastern empire known for its cultural and technological competency, from gunpowder to porcelain (Degenhardt 132).1 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow remarks that Asian objects

“filled us [Americans] with wonder and delight” but also “haunted us in dreams at night”

(231-2). Nathaniel Hawthorne describes Asian porcelain as “grotesque,” insinuating something strange, fantastic, and even ugly about Asia. His Asian tea set in the House of

Seven Gables was “painted over with grotesque figures of man, bird, and beast, in as grotesque a landscape . . . a world of vivid brilliancy” (76-7). Even after the twilight of the China Trade in America, Louisa May Alcott’s young protagonist Rose in Eight

Cousins; or, The Aunt-Hill (1875) “played she was really landing in Hong Kong when they glided up to the steps in the shadow of the tall ‘Rajah’” (75-6). Rose experiences

“China” through an almost dangerous proliferation of foreign goods, seeing the “samples, gifts, curiosities, and newly arrived treasures of all sorts [that] were piled up in pleasing pro-fusion and con-fusion” on the family’s China Trade ship (77). The young girl

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eventually sensationalizes Asian immigrants as the commodities themselves, remarking that a Chinese man looked as though he “walked out of one of those rice paper landscapes on the wall” (77).

An anonymous Boston Atlas writer in 1845 eventually names America’s contradictory pleasure of, and perhaps grotesque fascination with, Asian fine china and porcelain. The author writes: "Our first ideas of China-dom were formed at meal times, and illustrated with plates” (“Crockerydom” 1). Later, the reviewer suggests that

Crockerydom—his or her invented term for the knowledge of Asia through porcelain objects and the China Trade—persisted in structuring their encounters with Asian people and objects in America, even after having different experiences (“Crockerydom” 1). This nineteenth-century imagining of Crockerydom—an anecdote that loosely describes how objects of the Old China Trade informed middle-class American encounters with Asian peoples and things—is one of the many visual-verbal discourses I explore in my manuscript. Pacific Sensations: Seeing Yellow in Nineteenth-Century American Print

Culture engages with the global turn in American literary scholarship and explores representations of transpacific trade in American literature. Studies of American fiction have long acknowledged that the transatlantic trade of women, minorities, and goods played a crucial role in the formation of modern notions of whiteness and the nation.

Scholars have paid far less attention, however, to references of trade with China in U.S writing before and immediately after the Civil War. My manuscript argues that the China

Trade not only deeply informed both ante- and postbellum American literature but also, in the process, reflected and helped shape social practices of racialization, including the formation of the racial category “yellow” itself. I analyze figures related to the China

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Trade in nineteenth-century American literature—considering authors such as Herman

Melville, Ambrose Bierce, and Edith Maude Eaton—alongside material objects involved in the trade, including porcelain, lantern slides, and silks. Each chapter reveals how literary figures of the people and circuits of the China Trade in U.S. print were integral in producing and influencing Anglo-Americans’ sense of national and racial identity during the American Renaissance.

Interweaving the cultural legacy of the China Trade with American racialism and nationalism in print culture, Pacific Sensations asks two principal questions: what can be learned about the consumption of and identification with China Trade narratives in nineteenth-century American culture? And second, if and how could the circulation of transpacific narratives in America have helped shape and negotiate whiteness, Asian yellowness, and national identity before the complex convergence of modern racialism?

Previous literary scholarship of trade and identity in the United States, such as Nancy

Armstrong’s and Leonard Tennenhouse’s “The Problem of Population and the Form of the American Novel,” invokes the significance of the transatlantic in American literatures. According to Armstrong and Tennenhouse, the early American novel established national kinship by featuring representations of trade across the Atlantic world, and America was a cosmopolitan but de facto transatlantic culture (668). Paul

Giles’ book, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American

Literature, 1730-1860, also assumes a transatlantic framework in the formation of an

American literary canon and national identity.

More recent scholarship, however, has begun questioning the focus on the transatlantic in America, looking instead to the influence of the transpacific world in

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American culture and nationalism. Michelle Burnham’s “Early America and the

Revolutionary Pacific” calls for an understanding of the global phenomena that informed

American culture, suggesting that the events of the revolutionary Atlantic largely affected the American imagination of, and response to, the transpacific. Jim Egan’s Oriental

Shadows: The Presence of the East in Early American Literature similarly maintains a global perspective of American nationalism, arguing that representations of Asia in early

American fiction “offered the East as a solution to America's inferior civilized status by suggesting that America become more civilized . . . by adopting aesthetic styles and standards long associated with an East and cast as superior aesthetically to both America and Europe” (4). Caroline Frank’s historical book, Objectifying China, Imagining

America: Chinese Commodities in Early America, speaks directly to the importance of early American cultural and commercial exchanges with China, urging scholars to consider how the China trade and imaginings of Asia influenced the political development of the colonies and the formation of masculinity and nationalism in

America.

Extending this transpacific scholarship, Pacific Sensations provides new insight into conventional formulations of American nationalism that have overlooked the East and the China Trade in formulating our sense of whiteness in the nineteenth-century

American West, or more specifically, what I like to call the American Pacific frontier.2 In

Pacific Sensations, I examine how nineteenth-century authors of the American

Renaissance invoked figures of the China Trade in response to both their British forebears and the expanding Pacific world, specifically China, during an important transition in global trade: the move from the trade of transpacific things (the decline of

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the China Trade) to the migration of Asian people into the Americas during national expansion. The Old China Trade, of course, was the global, unregulated transpacific commerce of furs, silks, spices, and porcelain. However, in this manuscript, I focus on the U.S.’s direct informal trade with the Qing Empire of China, from roughly just after

American independence to the Treaty of Wanghsia in 1844. True to its history, the China trade constructed a general market map around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, and the various traders and financiers of the Cape of Good Hope route established fiscal and personal ties with Pacific trades over the centuries. Some Atlantic and Pacific trades, such as the Opium Trade and the China Trade, became inextricably linked as differing oceanic voyages were financed by the same families of traders and financiers.3 Warren

Delano, Jr., a descendant of Amasa Delano, was in fact both a China Trader and an illicit trader of Opium (Ward 70). Geoffrey C. Ward calls the Opium Trade “the dirty little secret” of the China Trade, and this illegal trade is said to have financed at least a third of

British revenue (70). These global circumstances of trade and labor—the rise of the

China Trade, the economic depression of Asia after the first Opium War, and the beginning of the international abolition of slavery—all contributed to the rise of Asian migration throughout the Americas. A quarter of a millions Asians, the majority of which were male due to immigration laws, entered the Americas in less than thirty years. While many of these men voluntarily left Asia for contract labor, others were oppressed and sometimes even forced unwillingly into indentured servitude and traded, from the sugar plantations of the Caribbean to the United States. Nineteenth-century authors surely heard and knew of these global changes in labor and what Melville calls this “strange history” of European, African, and Asian laborers in the New World, brought forth by numerous

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historical conditions, including the British Empire’s “Trinidad Experiment” of 1807

(Lowe 194).4

Addressing the U.S.’ historically-changing relationship with China, I argue that the social and political meanings of the China Trade in America—an extremely risky but lucrative global enterprise for the developing nation—and its subsequent related transpacific trades played a role in the formation of a distinct cosmopolitan national identity: a nationalism defined by both Eastern and Western aesthetics that identifies

America as an intermediate nation between ancient Asia and colonial Britain. To early

Americans of the newly independent nation, the cultural and commercial exchange of the

China Trade first represented what it meant to be modern and civilized and signified the meeting between classical eastern and western aesthetics. Edgar Allan Poe’s early

American poem "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade," for example, proposes what Jim Egan calls an "Orientalized vision of literature" that "offers a way for

American culture to be included in the category of civilized nations by having American aesthetic theory become more Oriental" (17-8). Much of the American China Trade culture shortly before and after independence, from the use of porcelain to reading short stories and travelogues about exchanges in Asia, expresses this American desire to claim culture they lacked through figures of Oriental empires, including China porcelain.5 After all, Americans use objects, like Asian-inspired porcelain and fine china, "to make meaning, to remake ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, and to sublimate our fears and shape our fantasies" (Brown 1). And, unlike the British who largely associated China porcelain with women and passivity, Americans associated the China

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Trade and its porcelainware with the country’s independence and the historical rigors of the perilous China Trade itself.

However, American representations of the China Trade began to change by the mid-nineteenth-century, narrating not romantic journeys to Cathay, but transpacific sensations of trade with grotesque yellow racializations of Asians on an imagined

American Pacific frontier.6 Sensational depictions of fine china, porcelain, and even merchants themselves continued in American culture even after the trade’s decline in

1844, notably in tales such as William Dean Howell’s A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) and Frank Norris’ “The Third Circle” (1896). Lisa Lowe contends in the “Intimacies of

Four Continents” that the negative western perceptions of East Asia first began circulating the transatlantic world in the nineteenth-century after the 1812 “Trinidad” experiment, when Asian indentured laborers replaced African slave laborers in the

Caribbean after the international abolition slavery. Minorities from the Atlantic to the

Pacific were laboring on New World plantations, and this new plantation culture helped consolidate a racial classification system of difference, similar to what we know as the modern color line. Thirty years later, after the Opium Wars and the rise of Asian

Immigration throughout the Americas, the same world division of racialized labor from the Trinidad experiment emerged in western nations. As Lisa Lowe remarks in ‘The

Intimacies of Four Continents,” “Not only did the post-1840 worldwide trade in Chinese laborers enable British abolition of the slave trade, but the British engagements with

China during and after the Opium Wars constituted conditions for U.S. liberalism, and inaugurated new modes of Anglo-American free trade and imperial intimacy” (208).

China was left economically and politically unstable after the Qing Empire’s loss of the

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first Opium War (1842) and the decline of the China Trade in 1844. High war costs and unfair trade regulations put into place by the British drained China of its resources, and this caused the Chinese empire to become politically unstable and the country to experience wide-spread famines and impoverishment. The fall of the Qing Empire, as well as the international abolition of slavery, encouraged the neo-colonialism of China and created the conditions for massive Asian immigration throughout the Americas. The

US financiers opened their doors to Asian, particularly Chinese immigrants, recruiting through both fair and exploitative means cheap laborers predominantly before and after the Opium Wars. Over half a million Asians, the majority of which were male due to immigration laws, entered the Americas in less than thirty years.

Middle-class Anglo Americans were concerned over finding the necessary supplement to transatlantic labor, but feared the proposed solution’s emasculating and corrupting influences: Asians living and laboring in America. The mid-nineteenth century

American representations of the China Trade particularly embody this social pharmakon of contact with Asia.7 If the China Trade was America’s first contact with Asia and helped establish the U.S. as a new western nation, the ever-increasing dependence on

China and the “foreign” transpacific, from the China Trade to now pejoratively called the

“Coolie Trade,” incited fears of the foreign because of changes to the Anglo-Protestant

American landscape. Early American encounters with China and the Far East were initially encounters of trade and culture (the China Trade) and not necessarily those of a colonial nature. In the words of Andrew Hadfield, “trade and profit were the principal goals, not colonization and conquest” (189). However, the U.S. experienced a dizzying growth of foreign-born populations—particularly the Chinese—in the middle decades of

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the nineteenth-century, while it also expanded its imperial reach throughout the Pacific

Rim. In 1860, approximately 3,000 Chinese immigrants lived among the 57,000 San

Franciscans. By the end of the decade, San Francisco’s population doubled to 100,000 residents and one out of three San Franciscans had been born in China, Italy, Germany, or

Ireland (Lee 27). US manufactured exports to China also increased from 2 million to 9 million from before and after the Civil War, and Chinatowns became major manufacturing centers by the end of the nineteenth-century (Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues

28).8 After the Spanish-American War of 1898, the U.S. informally colonized the

Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. The growth of Chinese immigrants in the U.S., compounded with imperialism of the Pacific World and greater American interest in consumerism and production of “foreign” Asian products, elicited anxieties and nativism in nineteenth-century American popular culture. These changes to the American social landscape forced Americans to reconfigure their notions of national identity and masculinity in an increasing transpacific, multi-racial, technological world.9

During this transpacific moment in mid to late nineteenth-century America, Asian immigrants were represented in high and low culture as an intermediate, visually- inscrutable, collective figure between blackness and whiteness and freedom and servitude, sometimes claimed as strange yellow figures, en-masse groups, or even phantoms.10 In 1876, Karl Muller, the German sculptor for Union Porcelain Works in

Brooklyn, New York, quite literally presented this evolving color line of grotesque blackness, whiteness, and yellowness with decorative figureheads displayed on his tete a tete tea service ware at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. As John Tchen notes in

New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the shaping of American culture, 1776-

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1882, Muller’s works feature, for example, a “spruce-looking Negro man’s head” on an

Asian-inspired porcelain sugar bowl and a “Chinaman’s head” on the teapot finial (57).

Similarly, American authors wrote of these images of yellow “Chinamen” or repeating figures of Asian “Ah Sin” into their poetry and prose, while newspapers covered resistant

“Oriental pirates” or “Coolies” in mutiny alongside tales of black slaves in mutiny.11

Even vagrancy laws implicitly targeted the people of color in America, including Asian populations. While racial categories, such as yellow, were still evolving in political and social meanings, Tchen clarifies in Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear that this development of racial signifiers in American culture meant that “the visual became the sense of civilization….This form of elite distinction, becomes the way the bourgeois elites distinguish themselves from their own citizens and non-Christian heathens at home and abroad” (101). Considering this, the sensationalized, even racialized China Trade representations hint at important social changes in national identity and cosmopolitanism, when “civilization” and “empire” evolved from ethnic groups with specific cultural practices to national groups whose peoples are “Creole” in culture but defined by racial ideologies.

No wonder, then, that the sensational figures of China Trade laborers and things—as seen in the works of Herman Melville, Ambrose Bierce, among others— disseminate fears of America’s first exchange and contact with Asia as a country. I argue that the nineteenth-century device of sensationalizing and conflating Asian commodities with Asian immigrants is particular to the rise of racial formation and the modernization of America, connoting the rise of racial sciences of the body. As David Palumbo Liu notes, the formation of a modern America was deeply attached to the Pacific region, and

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these figures of the China Trade suggest a global spatial economy influencing the formation of Americanness, but also suggest increasing American anxieties of the disappearance of a monocultural, artisanal United States in an increasingly multiracial, technological future (17). Unlike early American literatures of romantic Eastern aesthetics, the China Trade figures of the mid-nineteenth century implied dangerous ends: the one-way transmission of cultural values from the yellow peril to the white majority and the gradual replacement of European-descent workers by Chinese laborers. The feared outcomes of contact with Asia in this new era of China Trade representations included overconsumption (the dangerous stimulation of American consumerism to excess) and the decaying of American masculinity and spirit in a “reverse cultural imperialism” (J. Chung 33). This continuum of dangerous Asian laborers and objects in mid to late nineteenth-century American fictions were perceived as threatening American values, predominantly the value of craftsmanship, free labor, and manhood over commercialized culture and “Coolieism” complicit with the big businesses of capitalism.12

Pacific Sensations argues that this paired invention of Asian “yellowness” and sensational China Trade objects in American Renaissance fictions expresses the social paradox between Asian people and Asian objects in America. If the invocation of

European and Chinese aesthetics and civilizations played a prominent role in early

American culture and identity, nineteenth-century racialisms of Asian yellow, American whiteness, and European whiteness stand in as the contrasting models for American cosmopolitanism in these narratives. The pairing of things and people both naturalizes the historical consumption of romantic Asian-inspired objects in the social landscape, while

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also suggesting the foreignness of racialized Asian peoples in America via descriptors of visual-inscrutability and deception. This focus on the material and immaterial helped shape the slippery web of racial categories and nationalism advancing during this phase of American expansion and predates modern forms of Orientalism. The constellation of

Asian sailors, Manilamen, Lascarmen, coolies, and merchants in American literature, alongside Asian objects, persistently helped American characters distinguish whiteness and national identity against an invented category of racial “yellow” in these narratives. I examine these artistic representations of blackness, yellowness, and even shades of whiteness—such as Irish whiteness—that were part of the economy of racial classifications developing during the era. Much of my story focuses on middle-class

Anglo-America and the transition from British American to respectable American whiteness, but each chapter also returns to how representations of the China Trade comparatively negotiates the invention of a racial yellowness with blackness, whiteness, and mixed-race images.

My work thus adds to the growing body of American literary scholarship devoted to exploring how contemporary Asian stereotypes—from the modern yellow peril to the model minority in twentieth-century American literature—were heavily influenced by representations of transpacific trade. Drawing on Lisa Lowe, Colleen Lye, and others, I argue that when Asians entered the mid-nineteenth-century American imaginary, Anglo-

Americans developed particular ways of seeing Asian Americans. Lascars, Manila men,

Coolie laborers, and merchants of Chinese Junk and curios represented Asia in general in the works I study, and China Trade figures of first Asian contact embodied both the nostalgia and transposed fears of white Americans facing changes in labor, technology,

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and immigration patterns during the transition from what has been called the “Age of

Sail” to the so-called “Age of Steam.” The gothic themes of visual inscrutability and mystique explored in Pacific Sensations resonate with the modern discourses of Asian racialization, which include the seemingly inhuman, mechanical workings of the model minority and the menacing Asian en-masse yellow peril.

To capture this cultural moment of the China Trade and racial formation most efficiently in my manuscript, I examine both American visual and print cultural productions of the nineteenth-century. In Pacific Sensations, I close-read print narratives, visual culture, and material objects as “texts” and consider a person’s use of a material object or image—such as gazing upon a porcelain pitcher of the China Trade—as an event of interpretation. Like the reading of books, the use and viewing of material culture is influenced by the historical period, the medium, and even the user’s humanistic tendency to envision or meditate their existence through culture. In the words of Chris

Lukasik, we live in a world where there is a “nuanced relationship between text and image, a media combination, an intermedial environment in which the sayable and the seeable coalesce and operate” (1). Nineteenth-century America was no different.

Americans began articulating the modern notion of race in language before it was truly envisioned, as seen in the anecdote of crockerydom, and the material culture of the China

Trade and the sight-centric stereotyping of Asians (as groups, phantoms, and more) also encouraged a print-visual method. Asian-inspired objects and visual culture then act as particularly useful examples of how language and the visual together participate in social practices and imaginings, including racial formation and a sense of Americanness. The rhetoric of “sensation” in China Trade literatures and material objects can be argued as

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the American response to the thrill and terror of global capital, but also as the Anglo response to East Asian laborers immigrating from the historically technologically-savvy

Chinese empire during the modernization of American society.

Pacific Sensations collectively considers these visual and linguistic identifications with the China Trade from the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century in American culture. I begin my manuscript with an analysis of Herman

Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” an 1855 serial previously discussed by scholars through a black-white racial framework. In “Beyond the Black Atlantic: Lascars and Manila Men in

Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” I argue that Melville’s characterization of “Lascar and Manila men” and “Malay pirates” as en-masse groups in “Benito Cereno” casts

Asians writ large as a phantasmatic, potentially sinister mass of people confronting the

Anglo-American China Trade captain. This opposition, seen through the barbaric Asian threat and the slippery term “yellow” insinuated into the scenes of the narrative, articulates the feared regression of the entire American social body through racial mixing with the “primitive peoples” of Asia. While the comparative racialization of blacks and

Asians in “Benito Cereno” grows in part out of their being the first populations to participate together in international, multi-ethnic crews using innovative nautical technologies, Asian bodies specifically begin to embody the transposed fears of

Americans facing changes in labor, technology, and the transnationalization of America during the era of global emancipation.

In “The Only Good Chinese is a Dead Chinese”: Frontier Cosmopolitanism in

Ambrose Bierce’s “The Haunted Valley” and Karl Muller’s “Heathen Chinee” Pitcher, I argue that Bierce’s story (1871) and Muller’s porcelain pitcher (1875) similarly portray

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Asian miners as harbingers of modern manufacturing in the postbellum era, but also emasculate Asians through suggestive homosocial relations between white ethnic artisan workers and Asian miners. Embedded in the texts’ murder of feminized Chinese workers and the pointed use of fine China in the home, “The Haunted Valley” and “Heathen

Chinee” pitcher nostalgically tie whiteness and crafts together, gesturing towards the making of a future, artisanal global Anglo masculinity (that domesticates European whiteness into American whiteness) through a figurative dominance over Asia. The domestication process is thus represented as two-fold in the texts: creating a white, working-class masculinity of immigrants that wields domestic authority and managing the home or domestic space in contrast to the true foreigner: Asia.

I conclude Pacific Sensations with “A China Trade-inspired Book History:

Decorative Arts and the Model Minority in Edith Maude Eaton’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” exploring the namesake tale of Edith Maude Eaton’s first and only 1913 collection, Mrs.

Spring Fragrance, during the twilight of America’s China Trade. I argue that the namesake tale’s protagonist Jade Spring Fragrance should be interpreted through both the book’s decorative arts and the geographies of transpacific trading outlined in the story.

The cover of Eaton’s book is red, a lucky color in China, and the drawings are inspired by popular China Trade paintings on mirror. Jade Spring Fragrance, too, named after the precious trade stone, is the wife of a China Trade merchant. Reading the character of

Mrs. Spring Fragrance through the book’s material history, as well as considering the story’s implicit critique of Irish Americans as “failed” immigrants, Eaton forges

American identity through transpacific trade and renders her diasporic Chinese characters ethnically “white”—a model American minority—through their real and imagined

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connection to cultural capital of the China Trade and its memory. The China Trade- inspired decorative arts of Eaton’s book cover and pages, chosen by the publisher with some input from Eaton, establishes the long history of America’s involvement with the

China Trade to bolster the collection’s investment in modern Americanness.

In summation, Pacific Sensations explores how the importation of Chinese commodities and figures of the China Trade in aesthetics of nineteenth-century print at once acknowledges the supposed foreignness of the objects, while simultaneously recognizing their already established naturalization in the American private and public space. Like Edith Eaton’s and Melville’s movement and mobility in their stories, these

China Trade representations suggest an Americanness encompassing a connected world in a network of the seas, both transatlantic and transpacific.

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CHAPTER 1

Beyond the Black Atlantic: Lascars and Manila Men in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

“Eyes” line the pages of Herman Melville’s 1855 serial “Benito Cereno.”1 Given the story’s plot, Melville’s fixation on structures of sight and ways of seeing makes perfect sense. “Benito Cereno” follows the basic story line of its source text, chapter eighteen of Amasa Delano’s Narrative of Voyages and Travels (1817).2 Delano’s travelogue recounts the tale of a black Muslim slave mutiny on board the Spanish Tryal off the coast of Chile in 1805. In his narrative, slaves seize control of the ship, but masquerade as if still enslaved when Delano and his China Trader stumble upon their drifting boat. Melville’s 1855 adaptation of the travelogue, which was published amidst intense U.S. debate over the implications of domestic slavery, engages these debates in a typically Melvillian way. He uses the violence and dehumanization of racialized slavery to draw attention to how we make sense of the world we see before us.3 The story leads readers to “see” one conclusion (peace on board), while simultaneously hinting, ever so subtly, that something is amiss among the Spanish sailors and black slaves (the ship is under mutiny). This proposed observational irony—arguably the foundation of the entire narrative—is also inextricably bound up with the logic of racial classification, if only because nineteenth-century U.S. racialism obscures the vision of Delano, the very character through whose subjective gaze we view some of the story’s events. From the

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ship which looked like a “whitewashed monastery after a thunder-storm” (113) to the wailing “throng of whites and blacks” (116) on board, we are prompted to see “Benito

Cereno” as a sea tale of race relations in a, colloquially speaking, black and white manner—there were whites and there were blacks on board.4

While investigations of the story’s enslaved African peoples and black-white racial dichotomy have taught us an incalculable amount, this focus risks obscuring references to people, places, and objects associated with Asia and the East more broadly in the story —references which are, it turns out, right before our eyes. Paying attention to the complex modalities of Orientalism in the story in no way diminishes the importance of slavery in the narrative, nor does such attention render less relevant previous analyses of the story’s engagement with emancipator possibilities of the Haitian Revolution and the infamous Amistad slave insurrection.5 Seeing instances of racialized “yellow,” along with figures of Asia and Islam in the story, reminds us of equally important historical contexts that have received less attention by scholars, but nonetheless played key roles in shaping American culture in the period.“Benito Cereno” appears, after all, just a few years before California passes the first anti-Chinese Exclusion law and when American abolitionists began critiquing American slavery through comparative references to

Ottoman slavery and “Turkish slaves” (Marr 155-6). Such a perspective highlights too, that the story is set in the South Pacific, the gateway to the so-called “riches of the East,” and, indeed, the San Dominick is a Spanish Galleon, an Asian trading ship of the Spanish empire. Delano’s ship is a whaler also engaged in the China trade, set to travel onto

Hawaii and the Asia Pacific at the end of the story. If this weren’t enough, Delano walks among slaves on the deck of the ship and twice imagines masses of Asians on board

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during personal moments of doubt and terror: he had heard of Asian pirates lying in wait under decks, “a hundred spears with yellow arms ready to upthrust them through the mats” (163). In another moment, the narrator fancies himself the famous Alexander the

Great, metaphorically undoing the Gordian Knot (known alternatively as a Turk’s Head) before he went on to conquer Asia.

In what follows, I propose that figures of Orientalism and references to “yellow” as a racial category play an indispensible role in “Benito Cereno,” a story long recognized as one of the major works by Herman Melville. Long before Asian curios and images of the Yellow Peril appeared in postbellum U.S. literature, literary figures associated with transpacific trade occupied central positions in the American literary imaginary. That is to say, U.S. literature grappled with a so-called “yellow problem” decades before the “yellow peril” emerged later in the nineteenth century. Melville’s deployment of references to the people and commodities of Asia in a story of mutineering black slaves serve as a reminder to scholars that race in the antebellum period emerges from more than a simple black-white binary. The complex racial world found in

Melville’s “strange history” of a slave riot on a Spanish ship in the Pacific suggests an

American frontier cosmopolitanism that both looked to its forebears (Europe), while also considering Asia as its future mainstay of expansion, labor, and culture (187).6 Melville’s references to slaves wearing turbans and searching for Turk’s head knots are suggestive of the parallels between American and Turkish slavery as two sides of the same coin, while the ghostly Asian indentured servants and pirates in the illegal/legal flow of capital in the story quite literally portray the emergence of “yellow” as a racial category and immigration into the Americas.

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The story’s transatlantic/Asia-Pacific crossings and oceanic gothic overtures speaks to increasing middle-class American concerns over finding the necessary supplement to transatlantic labor, but also fears of the solution’s emasculating and corrupting influences: Asians entering America. With increasing need for capital accumulation during the height of American expansion, the U.S. took advantage of transnational market relations in the wake of the Opium Wars and looked to Asia for both cheaper labor and goods, becoming increasingly dependent on the global Asia-Pacific trade network.7 In the 1850s, too, during the height of black-white abolitionist and pro-

Slavery rhetoric, Americans featured images of “Turkish slaves” in dime novels, newspapers, and more, wondering if the “bible of the Christian [was] less merciful than the Koran?” (Philadelphia Magazine 1). American plantations also housed African and

Asian laborers, while newspapers covered resistant “Chinamen” or “Coolies” in mutiny.8

Even American vagrancy laws implicitly targeted people of color, including Asian populations in the West. In short, the wave of Asian laborers in the landscape and imagination of the United States posed a threat to conventional notions of American identity, whiteness, and masculinity in an increasing transpacific, multi-racial, technological world.

This mid-nineteenth-century world of decrepit Manila Galleons, armed Asian laborers, and Malaysian pirates hiding beneath the deck of the ship in “Benito Cereno”— depictions of struggles over global capital and encroaching foreigners in America—are imagined in opposition to Anglo-American socio-economic progress. I want to argue that this opposition, seen through the portrayed barbaric Asian threat and the slippery term

“yellow” insinuated into the scenes of the narrative, articulates the feared regression of

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the entire American social body through racial mixing and primitivism with Asia.9 While the comparative racialization of Africans and Asians in “Benito Cereno” grows in part out of their being the first populations to participate together in multi-ethnic nautical crews using newly emergent technologies, people of Asian descent in the story specifically appear as a foreboding image of anonymous, en-masse groups. These groups function in the narrative as harbingers of modern changes in labor and economy and appear to threaten American Anglo-Saxonism—embodied here in the character of

Captain Delano—even as the financial health of the American nation is shown to increasingly depend on the developing Asia-Pacific shipping network.10 In Melville’s other masterpiece, too, Moby Dick, he articulates Asian bodies through the rhetoric of technology, noting their hearts of “wrought steel” (580) (among other technology- inflected descriptors) make them appear fit for modern technology and industrialization.

Asian peoples in American culture, in short, began to embody the transposed fears of Anglo- Americans in the nineteenth century facing changes in labor, technology, and the transnationalization of America. These moments in “Benito Cereno” indicate

Melville’s loose configuration of “Asian” as a racial category, and his exploration of the

US’s shift towards a global (and transpacific) future. His Pacific future, or “strange history,” paints an American network of labor and people that involves not simply chattel slavery, but also Malaysian piracy and the “wage slavery” embodied by Lascars,

Manilamen, and even Turkish slavery. This essay thus looks at an early moment of

Asiatic racial form/formation in American culture—a threatening, en-masse image of

Asiatic yellow in the middle of black mutiny.

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Melville’s overarching allusions to “seeing” race relations in America, needless to say, make “Benito Cereno” a compelling text of racial formation. His emphasis on vision-as-metaphor emphasizes not only the power of gaze and desire, but also the epistemology of a scan— the changing ideologies of how we interpret bodies and read the world in which we live. Fittingly, to encapsulate his reinterpretation of a past Muslim slave revolt, he begins and ends his story with images of Orientalized minority peoples whose prying eyes overlook the Americas.11 From his “intriguante’s eye” (111) wearing a veil of Islam on the first page to Muslim Babo’s black head on the last page, Melville establishes a cosmopolitan, Asia Pacific setting for his American story set during the Age of Sail just before the Barbary Wars. To begin, he describes two ships, the Spanish San

Dominick and American Bachelour’s Delight, in the harbor of Santa Maria. He pointedly likens the decrepit San Dominick’s hull to the partially-covered eye of a mixed-race woman wearing a saya y manto, which was an overskirt and thick veil adapted from the veil of Islam. He is also sure to predate the mutiny from 1805 to 1799, a date conveniently set before the international abolition of slavery and when U.S. congress passes “Toussaint’s Clause,” a clause establishing trade with Toussaint L’Ouverture’s newly black republic, Saint Domingue after the Haitian Revolution. Melville writes that:

With no small interest, Captain Delano continued to watch her—a proceeding not much facilitated by the vapors partly mantling the hull, through which the far matin light from her cabin streamed equivocally enough, much like the sun…. which wimpled by the same low, creeping clouds, showed not unlike a Lima intriguante’s one sinister eye peering across the Plaza from the Indian loop-hole of her dusk saya-y-manta. (111)

This floating Limanian eye underscores the interpretive and temporal logic of the narrative: Melville posits the death of the Spanish and Ottoman empires with this

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anachronistic image, but also foresees the future of a cosmopolitan, multi-racial, or even changed Oriental New World. Introducing questions of how we “know what we know” in the unfolding story, this intriguing woman becomes a dominant visual mirage of racial ambiguity that nearly crosses the ocean in her encounter. Like the watchful Muslim

Babo, her veiled eye paints the woman’s status as both an insider and outsider: not quite free, but able to have flexible mobility with the saya y manto and obscured identity. This verbal-visual complex of mixing cultures anchored to race—Melville’s italicized Spanish language, the Indian loop-hole garb, the Oriental veil—specifically challenges the era’s burgeoning visual taxonomy of reading the color line, including red, white, black, and yellow.12 Melville, of course, writes in the post-era of Samuel Morton’s popular Crania

Americana, an 1839 ethnography arguing for the importance of scientific racism and the strict division among four “races” of man.13 Considering this, the deceptive Creole eye suggestively hints at the nineteenth-century social changes in the etymology of “race,” which, at the time, was transitioning in meaning from ethnic groups with specific cultural practices to national groups whose peoples are “Creole” in culture but defined by racial ideologies. Like the San Dominick, the woman’s vision foretells America as becoming a site of global intimacies between multiple minority populations, most prominently Asia.

From this single, striking image, Melville presents the significance of Asian material culture in the Americas and, in this trope, genders the role of Islam in America through the veil. Not coincidentally, Melville wrote “Benito Cereno” four years after one of his favorite magazines, Harper’s Weekly, published “Lima and the Limanians,” an

October 1851 travel article discussing Peru, including the transcultural dress of the saya y manto and its potential for obscuring identity (“Lima” 598). In Lima, Peru, during

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Spanish dominion, the saya y manto (or skirt and shawl made from silk) rose in popularity with all classes of Limeñas. The conservative black garb covered the body, but allowed for the woman’s eyes to peek out. To some, this slight showing suggested brazen coquetry or even a form of masquerade because of the women’s ability to hide her racial identity. Many of these intriguantes (meaning both intriguing and scheming) found freedom in their sexual and racial anonymity and mobility. Most significantly, however, the shawl was reputedly used by some to conduct more discrete adultery and was an adaptation of the Veil of Islam (Robillard 301). The seductiveness and rebellious of the

Moorish veil in this portrayal nicely captures what Timothy Marr notes as Islam’s stereotypical role as the heretical rival and original cultural effrontery to America in nineteenth-century culture (4). The eye, distinct from Christian European heritage, sensationalizes Islamicism and loosely pairs the woman’s confining garb with Islamic oppression in his middle-class, antebellum text.

Considering the Islamic material culture quite literally changes the woman’s appearance over a panorama of the Pacific, Melville’s icon infers the historical and future western dependency on “the East” as a source of culture and identity formation. Flora

Tristan, the Parisian credited as being a founder of western feminism and author of

Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838) describes this adapted veil as a figurative symbol of the Orient’s influence on Peruvian national identity in the New World. She writes in her

1838 travel-writing on Peru:

A great many foreigners have told me about the magic effect on the imaginations of some of their number produced by these women . . . . The saya, as I have said, is the national costume, all the women wear it, no matter what their rank; it is respected and is a part of the country’s customs, like the veil of Moslem women in the Orient. These ladies go out alone to the theatre, to bullfights, to public gatherings . . . . they remain 24

free and independent in the midst of the crowd, far more so than the men… Freedom of action characterizes everything she does. (29)

The Spanish woman’s gaze spans across the ocean, much like the “Manifest Destiny” of

American expansion, but is only seen through the transparent Oriental veil from the days of the early Spanish empire. Here, Melville insinuates the future significance of the real and imagined “East” in western empires and juxtaposes Spanish and American imperialism. Melville’s remnant of the crumbling Spanish and Ottoman empires projects both a feminized and degenerative metaphor of a future America through the ethnic

Other. The Orientalized, gothic decay of the scene, too, as well as the Afro-Asians on this

“house and ship” (117), becomes suggestive of a future that is historically regressive and out of sync with the progressive narrative of a homogenous, Anglo-American, western civilization. Ultimately, the Islamic veil, a signifier of America’s first material contact with Asia, emerges as the first image of Benito Cereno’s Orientalist symbolic order that contradictorily presents Asia as both an ancient, enduring civilization and site of barbarity.

Melville’s dueling American and Spanish China Trade ships, overlooked by the veiled woman, geographically constitutes the Europe-America-Asia spatial economy being imagined in the story. Melville first describes Delano and his ship through a constellation of historical references to European colonists, all of whom plundered the developing Asia-Pacific for riches but shared a doomed fate. Santa Maria, the real-life island the ships are harbored by in the story, is one of Christopher Columbus’ ship names, while the San Dominick, or Santo Domingo, is the famed site of Christopher

Columbus’ former colonization experiment.14 Columbus, the western explorer who voyaged to “discover” the East Indies (Asia), instead traveled to the Americas and 25

attempted to form a colony. Columbus’ colony ended in enslavement of the Indigenous and ruin, and he died a poor man without fame. Augmenting an American piratical mystique, Melville adapts Delano’s real-life boat name, the Perseverance to the

Bachelour’s Delight, which is the ship name of the infamous buccaneer Captain John

Cooke who previously traveled and plundered these Pacific waters.15 Further emphasizing the crooked dealings of western empires and America itself, Melville details in his Piazza Tales edition of “Benito Cereno” that Delano’s “chief mate—athletic and resolute man . . . had been a privateer’s man,” and in his serial edition, this chief mate was also, “as his enemies whispered, a pirate” (241). Melville’s panorama of colonialist references colors American identity as not only defined through Asian colonialism, but as also distinctly imperial.

Delano’s cosmopolitan American identity—while colonialist—also depends on and is expressed through his use of Asian trade stuffs and mastery of the Asia-Pacific trade networks.16 Take, for example, the mundane details offered in the first pages of the narrative. A reportorial voice introduces “Benito Cereno”: “In the year 1799, Captain

Amasa Delano, of Duxbury, in Massachusetts, commanding a large sealer and general trader, lay at anchor, with a valuable cargo, in the harbour of St. Maria” (109). Santa

Maria is located off the mid coast of Chile, but Melville deliberately stations the island of the tip of the hemisphere, straddling an imagined critical edge of the western Americas and the frontier beyond. Lest we miss the story’s emphasis of U.S.- Asia economic relations, the narrator pointedly notes that Delano had just returned from Canton where he traded in “teas and silks” (155). The seasoned American Captain Delano’s successful trading in the South Seas and China Trade provided him with a bounty to give Cereno:

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“baskets of the fish, for presents” and “whatever soft bread the steward might have, all the remaining pumpkins on board, with a box of sugar, and a dozen of his private bottles of cider” (112, 121). Later, Delano offers up coffee for Cereno on his boat, showing off his refined accoutrements from Asia “as fine as any sultan has tasted” (225-6).

Here, Melville describes Delano through a menagerie of Asian commodities, from

China-trading to the coffee drunk by Islamic sultans, articulating trade with Asia as an imagined site of consumption in the story. Through this Orientalist figuration, Melville produces latent East-West socio-geographic connections that extend far beyond the tip of the story’s hemispheric and temporal implications. To recall, American colonial and trade interests in the “Orient” began long before the period in which “Benito Cereno” is set.

Delano, likewise, had recently returned from Canton, China, one of the three major Asian seaports for colonial western trading and a significant site for American cultural and material contact. Melville’s New World waters become distinctly anchored in the Asia

Pacific as Delano offers up multiple commodities acquired during his imperial sea routes, even miming Eastern royalty when drinking his coffee. Through this figure of the Turkish despot, Melville contradictorily draws similarities between the supposedly democratic, egalitarian American Captain and the monarch of an ancient Eastern civilization. He also draws parallels between the commodities of the Islamic Orient and the China Trade in a western pastiche of old and new Orients. The American captain resembles a greedy despot whose aggressive imperial relations span from the transatlantic to the transpacific.17

Not coincidentally, Melville’s tattered San Dominick Manila Galleon is in deep contrast to Delano’s New World, China Trade whaler. Delano spots the tattered Manila

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Galleon, a ship that once sailed the Pacific but is now sailing the transatlantic for the slave trade, as outlined by the sun of the Pacific horizon. He notes that the ship resembles the popularly-used ships of the Old World China Trade, or “the sometimes superseded

Acapulco treasure-ships, or retired frigates of the Spanish navy, which, like superannuated Italian palaces, still under a decline of masters, preserved signs of former state” (114). Melville emphasizes the Manila Galleon turned slave ship’s ghostly launch from death, considering “her keel seemed laid, her ribs put together, and she launched, from Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones” (114). During these thoughts, Delano sees that “the morning was one peculiar to that coast. The sea . . . seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a grey surtout” (109). In short, “shadows [were] present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come” (110), and the “past, present, and future seemed one” (236). He then boards the peculiar ship and enters, thinking he must be in “a strange house . . . in a strange land” with “strange inmates” such as “Lascars or Manila men” (117). “What did all these phantoms amount to?” (166). Delano wonders, as he was “feeling a little strange at first, he could hardly tell why . . . ” (173).

The decayed, haunted ship of the Pacific visually appears as an anachronistic site of European rule in the New World—an allegory of the decaying Spanish empire.

However, if we consider the ships side-by-side, Melville also visualizes and reimagines the American-New World present as not being in radical alterity to its European past.

Melville strategically makes a dichotomy of the two imperial ships, presenting Cereno’s

Manila-galleon-turned-slave-ship as spatially and temporally out-of-place on the ocean, but also haunting the American ship in the New World. As knowledgeable about the

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world of sea-faring as he was, Melville would have known that, historically speaking,

Manila Galleons were the Spanish imperial ships of Asian trade. Manila Galleons sailed from Manila to Acapulco to transport precious Asian spices, teas, and material goods, as well as Asian sailors and other working-class of the sea. In maritime history, this route documents the longstanding connection between the Americas and Asia, spanning from roughly 1565 to 1815. The Galleon Trade was also quite illustrious for the Spanish

Empire.18 Both ships then, share common socio-cultural linkages in Asia for commodity trading and forms of slavery and indentured labor, both black and yellow. And since the story is set in the past, Melville and his readers would be well aware of these ships’ futures. Delano’s ship points towards a growing trade between the U.S. and Asia, while

Cereno’s ship carrying a cargo of human commodities, not insignificantly, wreaks the last gasps of Spanish economic might through Asian trade.

Drawing parallels between the San Dominick’s decay and Delano’s acquisition of cargo at the end of the narrative, Melville’s dueling ships convey the anxiety of the new

American empire deteriorating in the same fashion as the preceding Spanish empire. The haunted San Dominick, currently a slave ship, suggests the transatlantic slave trade was responsible for the deformation of the Spanish empire, while its illustrious Asian commodity-trading past was an acceptable colonialist relationship. However, when considering the paired ships and metaphors of monarchy, Asia, and slavery together,

Melville here also suggests a foreboding American future dependence on Asia for trade, including labor. Delano imagines Lascars and Manila men on board (Asian indentured laborers) as he walks the ship deck, pairing blackness and yellowness in the story. He figuratively depicts Asian people rising from the grave by describing the ship as

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Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones, or the biblical story of dead empires in what we now know as Asia being resurrected from ruin. Melville casts this imperial Anglo-Asian relationship as doomed, threatening the robust Anglo-Saxon American empire of the future.

The crux of this maritime encounter then relies on the literary landscape of

“Benito Cereno” reimagining the very real landscape of transatlantic and transpacific trades as symbiotic flows of capital and goods—rather than separate, hemispheric trades as popularly remembered today. True to its history, the China trade constructed a general market map around the Cape of Good Hope (Africa), and the various traders and financiers of the Cape of Good Hope route established fiscal and personal ties with

Pacific trades over the centuries. Some Atlantic and Pacific trades, such as the Opium

Trade and the China Trade, were inextricably linked as differing oceanic voyages were financed by the same families of traders and financiers. Warren Delano, Jr., a descendant of Amasa Delano, was in fact both a China Trader and a trader of Opium (Ward 70).

Geoffrey C. Ward calls the Opium Trade “the dirty little secret” of the China Trade, and this illegal trade is said to have financed at least a third of British revenue (Ward 70).

These global circumstances of trade and labor—the rise of the China Trade, the economic depression of Asia after the first Opium War, and the beginning of the international abolition of slavery—all contributed to the rise of Asian migration throughout the

Americas. A quarter of a millions Asians, the majority of which were male due to immigration laws, entered the Americas in less than thirty years. While many of these men voluntarily left Asia for contract labor, others were oppressed and sometimes even forced unwillingly into indentured servitude, from the sugar plantations of the Caribbean

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to the United States. Melville surely heard and knew of these global changes in labor, and

Melville’s Delano and his American ship then are figuratively sailing into this future

“strange history” of European, African, and Asian laborers in the New World, brought forth by numerous historical conditions, including the British Empire’s “Trinidad

Experiment” of 1807 (Lowe, “Haunted” 194).

In fact, after Captain Delano boards the San Dominick, Melville stylistically and contextually forges associations between the Muslim African slave laborers and Asian indentured servants.19 Delano perceives the San Dominick as “a shadowy tableaux” of dream-like reveries (118) and continues pondering the space on board, thinking he must be in “a strange house...in a strange land” with “strange inmates” such as “Lascars or

Manila men” (117). “What could all these phantoms amount to?” Delano wonders, as he was “feeling a little strange at first, he could hardly tell why” (173). Melville’s eerie scene, reminiscent of the gothic genre, portrays sensationalized ethnic indentured laborers in an emerging global market.

To Delano, an Anglo elite captain with the money and status to be globally mobile, the San Dominick is also a majestic, run-down “house” within his cosmopolitan purview of the Asia Pacific, made strange and uninhabitable by the people of color.

Melville borrowed much of his story from Captain Amasa Delano’s 1817 travelogue, A

Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. In the travelogue, Delano documents his encounters with Asian laborers, noting that Manilamen of the Philippine Islands are “peculiarly savage,” while Lascars of Calcutta “are cunning, and cheat whenever they can” (167, 242). Contrasted with the oppressed African slaves on the ship, Melville’s Lascars and Manilamen, or his contracted Asian sailors, were well

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known as the unsung non-European, working-class of the seas. Interestingly enough, while “Lascars” first originated as a catch-all, collective moniker for African and Asian sailors from the Indian Ocean working for the British empire, the term in the nineteenth- century increasingly became anchored to a racist taxonomy of laboring Indians and other

Asians—from Burmese, Bengali, and more—in the western world (Pereira 1).20 The word, in Delano’s time, meant something akin to un-free laborers, but not quite slaves, and by the mid-nineteenth century, lascars received one-fifth to one-third of the pay of their European counterparts (Grandin 313). This linguistic change in Lascars’ meaning is partially due to the influx of Indian sailors to and from Britain during the Napoleonic

Wars in the early nineteenth century, when Britain increasing recruited soldiers and servants from their colonies, including India. The rising visual cultures of race and scientific “types of mankind” also influenced changes in language, such as the racialization of the mixed laboring community.21 Melville’s deliberate imaginings of

Lascars during Delano’s encounters with Muslim slaves draws intersections between anxieties of ethnically-segmented, transnational labor and the role of the Orient in

America.

More than simply referencing India, Melville’s Manilamen references the Filipino sailors working the Spanish Manila Galleons that entered into Euro-American commerce through the expansion of global trade in the nineteenth century. These Philippine sailors came to be known as Manilamen, employed by American, British, French, Japanese, and other foreign vessels in multi-ethnic crews (Aguilar 369). Knowing Melville read and adapted Amasa Delano’s Narrative of Voyages, he arguably took inspiration from

Delano’s description of Filipinos. Delano writes: “I have seen most of the Philippine

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Islands… There is a class of people among them, who have sprung from Europeans and the natives, and who are said to be peculiarly savage. A large portion of them are of

Spanish blood, and are well known under the title of Manilla-men” (166). He goes on to say that, “The English will not insure a ship, if she has as many as five or six of these people on board. Many sufferings and losses have been experienced from them, and they are often associated with the Malays in piratical attacks upon ships (166).” To Delano,

Manilamen are mixed-race, descendants of both Spanish and Asian heritages, and an obvious troubling mix of white and yellow races for Captain Delano. These mixed-race

“savages” complicate Delano’s transatlantic sense of pure Anglo-Saxonism, considering mixed-race Spanish-Asian peoples are migrating throughout the transpacific in the Old and New World. When Delano encounters Lascars—a form of unfree Asian laborer—and mixed-race Filipinos, his “strange” feelings are as much about his fear of mutiny as they are a fear of multi-racialism and impure Anglo-Saxonism in a transpacific world.

Melville’s imaginings of Asian indentured laborers may have pointed towards multi-ethnic laboring migrants, but in many ways, he also signified a particular anxiety of pan-Asian laborers en-masse in his fictions. Like Delano, Melville emphasizes Asians as cunning or barbaric, but also invokes themes of technology, haunting, and later horde- like racial forms in more than one of his fictions. In Melville’s Moby Dick, for example, published four years before “Benito Cereno,” Asian laborers appear as phantoms, looking

“less swart in aspect” with “vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas” (233). Their bodies appear fit for modern technology, because of their “[h]earts of wrought steel.” He continues, “Those tiger yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like five trip-hammers they rose and fell with

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regular strokes of strength, which periodically started the boat along the water like a horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer” (580, 236). Similarly, the laborers’

Parsi leader Fedallah is “tall and swart, with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips” and wears a Chinese jacket and turban.

From these descriptions, Melville does little to decipher in Moby Dick whether or not these laborers are Middle Eastern, Chinese, Filipino, or mixed-race, collapsing the men into a general Asiatic racial category. However, he does predominantly describe

Asian bodies as uniquely fit for the future of modern industry and uses commodities of the China Trade to further exoticize the Asians. With Moby Dick’s racial categories proving difficult to read or untangle but showing similar racialized themes and motifs,

Melville’s Asian characters seemingly emerge from anxieties of expanding transnational markets and technology in nineteenth-century America, as well as fetishism of luxury

Asian goods. Melville collapses multiple categories of identity into a multi-ethnic and diverse, but nonetheless distinct, category of Asian in Moby Dick.

Four years later in “Benito Cereno,” Melville characterizes “Lascar and Manila men” as an en-masse group of phantoms—rather different, for example, from his earlier description of laboring migrants as simply “natives of the Manillas.” Perhaps because of their genealogy as foreign labor in a changing modern global economy, Melville’s racialization takes its form as a phantasmatic, potentially sinister mass of Asians from around the globe confronting the Anglo-Saxon captain in his story. Amitav Ghosh’s research on early global trade shows that Melville’s eerie, horde-like imaginings of

Asians—one of the many images of Asian peoples having inscrutable exteriors and interiors–are far from anomalous in American culture. Historically-speaking, Lascars and

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Manilamen, as Amitav Ghosh argues, were harbingers of industrialization and the modern global economy for white America (57). He writes:

[T]hey were possibly the first Asians and Africans to participate freely, and in substantial numbers, in a globalised workspace. They were among the first to travel extensively; the first to participate in industrial processes of work; the first to create settlements in Europe; the first to adapt to clock-bound rhythms of work-time (the shipboard regime of four-hour work-shifts, or watches, was one of the most exacting disciplinary regimes ever invented); and they were the first to be familiar with emergent new technologies (nautical engineering being itself one of the pioneering technologies of the industrial age). (57)

As Robert Lee explains, Asians in the United States created a disjuncture between an imagined edenic past and commercial future (31). The increasing migration of Asian laborers in U.S. trade circuits, along with the rise of permanent Asian residents in 1850s

America, created a time-space compression that affected Americans sense of the “Orient” as both foreign but now within the “domestic.” Lascars and Manilla men, those technologically-savvy individuals without a national allegiance and increasingly associated with Asia, affected the language and rhetoric racializing future Asian immigrant populations in the U.S.—literally the “form” of their racialization in print and visual culture. Unlike the China Trade that Melville represents with nostalgia, Delano’s encounters with Asian laboring bodies generates a sensational, visually-charged rhetoric that characterizes Asian peoples as a visually-inscrutable mass, hinting at something both ancient and modern, barbaric and yet cunning.

Even further, other Asian subjects are imagined at the heart of Melville’s tattered slave ship, figuratively gesturing towards a transpacific future and affecting the interior

(moral) decay of the American social body. Delano, again while walking around, imagines a group of Malay pirates under the deck of the San Dominick:

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Among the Malay pirates, it was no unusual thing to lure ships after them into their treacherous harbours, or entice boarders from a declared enemy at sea, by the spectacle of thinly manned or vacant decks, beneath which prowled a hundred spears with yellow arms ready to upthrust them through the mats. Not that Captain Delano had entirely credited such things. He had heard of them- and now, as stories, they recurred. (366)

Melville’s consistent en-masse depiction of Asians colors them as a population of racial tramps supposedly lacking self-governance in this metaphoric American “home” on the

Pacific frontier. If the Anglo, propertied, American can freely enter and exit public and private space, the yellow savage pirates exhibit a different relation to space, being more immobilized than Delano and even the black slaves, but using their restriction by drawing explorers by trickery to the heart of their ship for looting and violence.

The image of yellow pirates concealed within the heart of the ship, too, imagines

Asians as affecting some sense of interiority for Melville’s Delano—whether that be moral virtue, racial purity, or bodily health. Returning once again to the influence of

Narrative of Voyages and Travels in “Benito Cereno,” Delano writes in his travelogue:

“The Malays are known to chew and smoke a kind of plant, by which they are intoxicated, called bangue. This is a most powerful and active stimulant. It begins to operate very soon upon the system; produces an ungovernable frenzy in two or three hours; and gives great vigor to the muscles, while it takes away all discretion from the mind” (166-7). Here, Delano relays that Malays lack self-governance because of a weak moral fiber—that is, they act violently because of their inability to refrain from substance abuse in the face of oppression. Even worse, Delano then relays that the Malays corrupt the white sailors they come into contact with overseas: “Our own people, and some of our midshipmen, after being ashore, while we were among the Philippines, came on board, and were for a time incapable of being restrained from acts of violence, except by a very 36

superior force, in consequence of having joined with' the natives in smoking or chewing the bangue” (166-7). Delano goes on to qualify the Malays’ use of the drug is mainly because of their oppression in society, but the message is clear: the possible mobility of the concealed one hundred yellow arms, as well as their deadly spears, gestures to

“yellow” as both the feared category of race (Asians) and the color recognized as the pernicious, sickly, and even deathly humors of the body. Considering Delano takes control of both ships and mixes their cargo by the end of story, these less than virtuous

Asian phantoms lurking below the slaves foreshadows the multi-racial future to come after slavery that will surely follow the American in his travels across the Asia Pacific.

Melville, not coincidentally, writes this sea yarn during an historical flashpoint of

“yellow” as a developing racial category in U.S. culture. Like many middle-class New

Englanders, Melville acquired much of his information on both slavery and Asia from the popular newspapers and presses of New York—the era’s “news capital” of the nation

(Casper 238). Asia was an important topic in 1850s United States when the onset of the

Opium Wars affected American traders’ price of customs and reminded Americans of their deep dependence on trade with Asia. The Opium Trade, in fact, accounted for 20 to

30 percent of the goods bartered by the U.S. in the China Trade during the first half of the nineteenth century (Tchen, New York 47). Even more, “Coolie,” a British bureaucratic term sometimes used interchangeably with “Lascar” to describe indentured laborers, entered the American imagination to specifically connote the rise of Asian immigration from Canton in the 1850s. These cheap laborers traveled by boats to the Americas to work from the guano pits of Peru to the mining shafts of San Francisco. Mutinies and resistance occurred during the horrendous conditions of Asian migration and indentured

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servitude, and American newspapers and broadsides responded by splashing Orientalist rhetoric and stories across their newspapers, emphasizing Asians as ethnic vagabonds, victims, and villains. In 1852, the New York Times’ article, “Sailors in Trouble,” for example, reports that thirty-five Chinese, Malays, and Portuguese sailors assaulted a sea captain, quite the “sensation.” Yet another headline invokes the horrors of the Coolie trade: "Piracy and Murder--the Coolie Trade."22 Even photographers and tableaux vivants began to capture visual “living” pictures of the sutured East and West, featuring material

Oriental garb in daguerreotypes or still actors capturing dramatic scenes of colonial

Eastern history, like the cutting of the Gordian Knot on board.23

Because yellow was still evolving as a racial category in American culture,

Delano invokes the color yellow to also describe Cereno, emasculating and displacing the

Spanish head of the ship. Vigorous American Delano meets and speaks with the Spanish captain of the decrepit ship, Benito Cereno, who appears “corpse-like,” sickly and fragile

“with a joyless mien” and notable “yellow hands” (138). In fact, Don Benito’s “faithful servant” and slave Babo, who always wears an innocent, “good-natured grin,” cares for his master with more energy and vigor than the captain himself. The blacks, too, emasculate the Spanish whites on board by the end of the story, killing most of their ranks and capturing the rest. Nevertheless, Delano reads the cranial structure of Cereno’s face and surmises that Benito Cereno’s weak nature belies his rigorous entrepreneurial heritage, because he belongs “to one of the most enterprising and extensive mercantile families” (153) and “was a true offshoot of a true hidalgo Cereno” (154). He even reads

Delano’s temperament as like that of European ruler Charles V: “His manner, upon such an occasion was, in its degree, not unlike that which might be supposed to have been his

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imperial countryman’s, Charles V, just previous to that anchoritish retirement of that monarch from the throne” (125-6).

Delano reads Benito Cereno’s “race” though his facial profile and bust, understanding his fitness and even humanity through his off-white skin color and cranium. However, compared to Delano, Cereno is also not pure white with hands that are “small” and “yellow.” Even in the real-life travelogue of Amasa Delano, the

American captain has mixed opinions of the Spanish, remarking that “the Spanish are not a very industrious people and do not make such great dispatch as some men would . . . “ but also “the Spanish gentlemen are the noblest spirited men I ever was acquainted with”

(496, 295). Thinking through this white to white/yellow pairing, Melville suggests that

America, known for looking forward to its passage to India, also had anxieties of a revival of the Old World European empires, as embodied by Cereno as Charles V.

American identity is both indebted to and looking to its previous European forebears, but also becoming Asiatic as well, as suggested by the symbolic economy of Orientalist elements in the story.

After meeting the yellow, withered captain, Delano walks the deck and experiences intense East-West time-space compressions, much like the popular tableaux vivants of the early to mid nineteenth century. Tableaux vivants were silent, motionless, parlor theatrics, usually employed by the middle-class women of the home to delight and edify guests.24 Enacting memorable scenes of Greek and Roman History, the bible, and more, these non-continuous narratives uniquely explored what Robert Lewis argues is

“the nineteenth-century perception” of “the climactic moment, the extreme emotion, the graphic portrayal of a single melodramatic incident or episode” (288). Delano witnesses

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on the deck of the San Dominick, rather than in a domestic parlor, a series of intense

Oriental “living pictures” featuring armed Malay pirates under the hatches with a

“hundred yellow arms,” phantoms of Asian indentured Manila men, and East-West mythology. In one key scene, he stumbles upon an old man who “looked like an Egyptian priest, making Gordian knots for the temple of Ammon” (181). The old man throws him a knot and tells Delano in broken English (the only English ever spoken by the Spanish) to “Undo it, cut it, quick” (182) and that the knot was “for someone else to undo . . . ”

(182). For the moment, Delano was left “knot in hand, and knot in head” (182). Then, an

African slave on board brushes off the actions of the old Spanish sailor (now Egyptian priest) and asks for the knot. Delano hands it to him, and the African “ferreted into it like a detective Custom House officer after smuggled laces” (182-3). This scene of mixed metaphors—a pastiche of transatlantic and transpacific trades and Old and New World empires—gives but a brief glimpse of the global economies and commodities dominating the story.

Melville anchors the American fervor for Asian commodities in his tableaux vision of a western temple’s evolution into a customhouse (an urban government building processing imports and exports of a country). The narrator creates another instance of vision and race outside a white-black frame. In fact, Melville’s scene of multiple gazes and racial subjects suggest the complexities of the story’s race relations: white, middle class men survey non-white peoples and goods, while the of-color employed laborers help in “ferreting” out the Gordian knots and laces. Interestingly enough, the black slave becomes domesticated as a worker for the state in this scene—no longer foreign cargo and a distinct worker contributing to the body politic. In contrast, the gendered (female)

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laces and (male) Gordian knots are presented as en-masse, foreign commodities to be strictly controlled, bought, and sold. When considering the use and meaning of the commodities at the time, laces were notably traded and smuggled between the U.S. and

Belgium, France, and Ireland, and like the puzzle of the Gordian knot, lace appears as an

“openwork of threads that have been twisted, looped, and intertwined to form patterns”

(Rogers 347). The 1839 Opium War, too, is said to have begun after China ferreted out and destroyed a large supply of Opium attempted to be smuggled in by the British

(Tamura 20). Adapting this constellation of events and histories, the Gordian Knots suggest inextricable East-West relations, and the laces are clearly transatlantic in their symbolism. Melville uses his temple-turned-customhouse scene to signify the developing global economy, which includes Asian culture and people, insinuating itself and influencing transatlantic Anglo-Saxon culture.

Not simply an imagined material presence, Melville hints at circulating gossip of mutineering Asians, along with resistant black slaves, that poses a grave threat to the racial hierarchies organizing U.S. culture. Delano “heard” of these present stories as an aural word-of-mouth rumor, but he gives them only partial credence considering their un- authoritative, populist source. On the very first page of the serial, Delano feels uneasy due to “the sort of stories, at that day, associated with those seas . . .” (1). Melville notably includes multiple iterations of disloyalty and unease on every single page of his serial: he includes “conspirator” and “pirate” eight times throughout the text, while

“suspicious” occurs in twelve instances and “uneasiness” in seven instances. Together with the numerous references to historical mutinies of which Melville’s almost entirely white audience would have been well aware, the narrative’s intimations of non-white

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characters speaking out-of-earshot calls forth various revolutions from across the globe, where working-class, minority groups sought recognition of their rights. This recognition or resistance for U.S. whites in 1855 was inextricable from images of gruesome violence and challenges to structures of power that granted one race dominion over another. As

Lisa Lowe describes in Immigrant Acts (1996), gossip, in fact, is multivocal without origins or borders, exemplifying “both antinarrative and antirepresentational strategies that dehierarchize linear narrative accounts . . . with a popular, multiple record of very different kinds of activities and modes of social organization” (115). Melville transforms a historical story of an African slave rebellion into a white character’s concern that he and his entire race are potentially under siege by a global community of revolutionaries, including and perhaps most especially Asian laborers and Malay pirates. Because of the story’s revealed mutiny, Melville’s gossip registers as a credible social record of the façade of social relations on board and insinuates the circuits of resistance between minorities in the New World.

Still, Melville’s representations of the American color line in “Benito Cereno” imagine distinct differences between “black,” “white,” and “yellow.” “Benito Cereno” is peppered with Delano’s ideological justifications of slavery. Interestingly, the story is set before the international abolition of slavery by the British and American empires, but written after the transatlantic slave trade was abolished and while the United States was on the brink of the Civil War. This may explain Melville’s interesting juxtaposition between the ship and the home in the narrative—his exploration of not only the international effects of slavery, but also its domestic effects. While New Englander

Delano functions as a symbol of the abolitionist North, his comments are strikingly

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similar to white American plantation culture, breaking down the supposedly racist slave- holding/non-slave-holding divisions of the United States. He envisions blacks as socially fit to serve Anglo-America because “there is something in the Negro which, in a peculiar way, fits him for avocations about one’s person. Most Negroes are natural valets and hair-dressers . . .” (199). He even insinuates blacks as naturally enjoying the indentured, unfree labor, and even while working, they exude “a certain easy cheerfulness, harmonious in every glance and gesture; as though God had set the whole Negro to some pleasant tune” (200). Female slaves, too, are “[u]nsophisticated as leopardesses; loving as doves” (175). Delano’s judgment of blackness reads much like the paternalistic, sentimental rhetoric of nineteenth-century plantation culture: slavery, as thought by

Delano, is a domestic trade and cash nexus that benefits slaves and plantation owners alike. Delano judges blacks as inferior but domestic subjects that would benefit from a

Christian white household, but they are also effective, domesticated “body-servants” for the American middle-class whites. His implicit familial remarks, comparing blackness in contrast to whiteness in America, situates whiteness and slavery as an “American” familiar social relationship, even familial in its regard.

If Asians are mere collectives of yellow pirates and phantoms, Melville suggests the prominent anti-hero black characters of “Benito Cereno” can be incorporated into

America as laborers, but not necessarily members of the American body politic. Melville wrote “Benito Cereno” just 3 years after the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestselling Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the sentimental novel portraying blacks as non-violent, peaceable victims of the slave-trade. This story was also written while the memory of the

1839 Amistad rebellion still circulated in American public memory. Melville, in dramatic

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contrast to Stowe and Delano’s descriptions, characterizes blacks on board as violent, socially-savvy individuals who were close to succeeding in a masquerade of social relations. With a hint of sympathy, Melville notes that Babo was devastated and mute after being once again enslaved. “As for the black—whose brain not body, had schemed and led the revolt, with the plot—his slight frame, inadequate to that which it held. . . .

Seeing all was over, he uttered no sound” (269). Black Babo, small in stature but magnanimous in leadership, controlled the entire ship through violence, theatrics, and manipulation. Melville emphasizes that Babo’s brain, not body, led the revolt, and reverses historic black stereotyping that paints slaves as brutish figures without cerebral intellect. Melville writing Delano’s paternalistic rhetoric alongside the true unfolding of events through the deposition (“the key to fit the lock” (264)) hints at the subjectivity and self-governance of the oppressed black slaves, who resist their oppression by all possible means. Even more interestingly, Melville’s black laborers are capable of inflicting harm to the hierarchy of white captains, while Asians remain as “phantoms” of the prose and

Asia as largely influential through objects and imports.

Melville consolidates his Asian and Afro racial comparisons in the figure of a mixed-race slave who, dressed in pleasing accoutrements of middle-class Orientalism, serves lunch to the white captains just before the exposure of mutiny. Delano’s fears of mutiny are quelled momentarily after Cereno invites him to a luncheon, where Delano and Cereno are ushered in by a feminine steward—a “tall, rajah-looking mulatto, orientally set off with a pagoda turban formed by three of four Madras handkerchiefs wound about his head, tier on tier—approaching with a salaam, [who] announced lunch in the cabin” (211). The scene is a fluid, visual triangulation of white, black, and yellow

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as the two Anglo captains “sat down, like a childless married couple, at opposite ends of the table” (214). Delano notes that the complexion of the mulatto is “hybrid” with “a

European physiognomy” (212) and comments on this racial mixing:

‘Don Benito,’ whispered he, ‘I am glad to see this usher-of-the-golden-rod of yours; the sight refutes an ugly remark once made to me by a Barbados planter that when a mulatto has a regular European face, look out for him; he is a devil…. For it were strange indeed, and not very creditable to us white-skins, if a little of our blood mixed with the African’s, should, far from improving the latter’s quality, have the sad effect of pouring vitriolic acid into black broth; improving the hue, perhaps, but not the wholesomeness.’ (212-3)

They feast, and soon after, Delano invites Cereno to board his boat, boasting in true ruling-Muslim fashion of his coffee that is “as fine a cup as ever any sultan tasted” (225-

6).

As with Moby Dick’s Fedallah, Melville presents the steward as the embodiment of oriental ethnicities, mixing Arab, Indian, and other signifiers into one character.

However, “Benito Cereno” differs in its sensual, feminine gendering of the Islamic/Asian steward in a narrative of slavery. Rather than the frightening Fedallah, Melville’s mixed- race, turban-wearing phallic “goldenrod” (211) mixes symbols of Turkish and African slavery, hinting at the enslavement of Asian men and women and the well-worn stereotype of mixed-race individuals and “Orientals” as an indeterminable “third sex.”25

The slave appears like a “rajah,” which is a ruler of the East Indies or Asia, while wearing a “turban,” a popular clothing piece worn in both Asia and Africa. If Delano and

Cereno are a childless couple, clearly Cereno, who is sickly and “yellow,” is the gendered female half of the dichotomy, while Delano intimates an aggressive masculinity.

Delano’s dominance culminates as he intimates deflowering the “goldenrod” of his gaze, an overt image of the phallus and “yellowness” of Orientalism. These particular 45

descriptors set this scene as a luncheon of Oriental accoutrements specifically consumed through the sensuous body of a slave that appears as both old and new forms of race- based slavery of Africa and Asia.

The gendered female, but sexually-male “yellow” slave troubles ways of seeing race and slavery in the narrative. The “mulatto” slave is swathed in contrasting ethnic markers of excessive sensual yellowness, as opposed to the earlier portrayal of the sinister, ghostly masses of Lascars, Manila men, and Malays. Melville, not coincidentally, writes during the height of the expansion and transnationalization of

America—the moment when the multinational, multi-lingual Islamic empires were crumbling, more East Asians were immigrating to the Americas, and abolitionists were fighting for equality and the end of slavery. The employment of racial yellow in “Benito

Cereno,” now associated with Asians, mixed-race Muslim slaves, possibly Turkish slavery, and even the Spanish, serves as a strategically employed visual signifier of feminized passivity in contrast to vigorous American whiteness. This makes sense, considering that Asians, mixed-race persons, and European-Americans were previously conflated in American racial discourse as lesser shades of white and yellow: true yellow, off-white, or yellow-brown.26 Melville’s racially and ethnically-ambiguous slave shows the mixed presentation of “Orients” in America and the movement towards national communities being defined by racial identity as opposed to ethnicity. Melville’s

Orientalist luncheon, too, seemingly does more than establish the white captains as sharing in an heirloom past of Asian antiquities; Melville painting Delano’s desire for the

Turban-wearing slave may critique rhetoric of Turkish slavery as a more desirable, alternative form of enslavement.

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Melville fittingly ends his narrative of the American color line with rattling white bones and a severed black head in the Pacific, a macabre visualization of a black-white continuum. Delano’s lunch promptly ends when he decides to leave this “haunted pirate ship” (184) and “strange history” (187). As told by the legal deposition, Delano climbs down from the ship, but sees “that the fag-end, in lashing out, whipped away the canvas shroud about the beak, suddenly revealing, as the bleached hull swung round toward the open ocean, death for the figurehead, in a human skeleton; chalky comment on the chalked words below, ‘Follow your leader’” (239-40). Aranda’s bones (the owner of the slaves on board the ship) now cover the bust of Christopher Columbus, the ship’s original figurehead. At this moment, Delano realizes the state of mutiny on board the San

Dominick. He uses violence to quell the mutineering slaves and collects the ship’s bounty. The slaves soon go to trial, and Cereno, irrevocably affected by the ordeal, remains forlorn and emotionally distraught even after the slaves are sentenced, claiming that a “shadow” has been cast over him by “the negro” (268). As for Babo’s fate, he is beheaded for his role as a conspirator, and Melville notes that “the head, that hive of subtlety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza, met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites; and…three months after being dismissed by the court, Benito Cereno, borne on the bier, did, indeed, follow his leader” (269).

Melville’s San Dominick figurehead on the Asia Pacific is a cautionary palimpsest of a decaying Anglo-Saxonism in a multi-racial New World. While the sinister layering of bones literally prompts Spanish sailors to follow their new black leader, Melville’s image of bones on top of the Columbus figurehead (and Delano’s watching its unveiling as he leaves this “strange history”) also foreshadows American colonization in the New

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World and Asia Pacific. If the initial “discovery” of America began from the search for a passage to India, Delano, like his Spanish forebears, will follow suit, expanding into the

Asia Pacific using both black and yellow peoples to support national expansion. As we saw earlier in the narrative, too, if Manilamen were already descendants of the Spanish, the intermarriage of whiteness and yellowness has already begun. In fact, the macabre scene suggests the impurity or fiction of a pure whiteness. Anglo-Saxonism as a transatlantic racial category, seen through the layering of white bones upon the Columbus figurehead, literally presents decay to the bone, or a degenerating sense of whiteness in a multi-racial present and future. Babo’s fully-fleshed head, in contrast, looks onto the

Pacific and holds the metaphoric gaze of the white captains, peering at Aranda’s bones and Cereno’s corpse as now objects in a reversal of the master/slave dialectic. Cereno realizes that the shadow of blackness and, even further, the “shadow” (268) of the dying transatlantic slave trade “would have ended the scene” (266), which it did. Considering the mixed-race, Orientalist luncheon right before the mutinous unveiling, the setting of the Asia Pacific and Orientalism becomes central to the racial reading of the final scene.

Babo’s gaze across the Pacific, like the woman’s eye in the introduction, insinuates the rise of Anglo-Asian linkages in the Americas and the need for a global abolition of slavery.

Melville’s dramatic staging of Orientalist accents throughout the narrative functions as the unarticulated “ghost in the machine” of the black-white Gordian knot- like complex in “Benito Cereno” (Morrison 136). Rather than discussing blackness, I call attention to the function of yellowness in this story of migration and labor. From the

Asian laborers held away under the hatches to the yellow, alluring mixed-race slave,

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Orientalist racial constructions inform the meaning of race throughout the narrative. In fact, Orientalism, and race in general, is so deeply rooted in the narrative’s conception of nation and personhood that it refuses untangling or articulation. Not surprisingly, Cereno and Babo are both silenced in the end of tale, unable to communicate, and the Gordian

Knots and laces of the tale remain tangled. Melville’s “Benito Cereno” thus began, and still remains, in the grey, indeed.

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CHAPTER 2

“The Only Good Chinese is a Dead Chinese”: Frontier Cosmopolitanism In Ambrose Bierce’s “The Haunted Valley” and Karl Muller’s “Heathen Chinee” Pitcher

Few pieces of fine china evoke the “Chinese problem” in nineteenth-century

America quite as memorably as Karl Muller’s “Heathen Chinee” pitcher (1876).1

Muller’s Asian-inspired pitcher, shaped like the “Sweetheart Pitchers” used in homes and hotels, adapts Bret Harte’s wildly successful poem, “Plain Language of Truthful James”

(Scharnhorst 377).2 In Harte’s 1870 poem, Irish Bill Nye attacks Chinese Ah Sin after a poker game in nineteenth-century San Francisco. In Muller’s vision of the “Heathen

Chinee” on the pitcher, however, something more homosocial is afoot in the Wild West.3

On one side of the lotus flower-rimmed material good, Bill Nye violently dominates the

“heathen Chinee” Ah Sin in an uncomfortable embrace. Nye passionately grabs Ah Sin’s clothes and leans menacingly over him, bearing a long, phallic-looking knife that Muller added to the scene. Nye’s slightly-open shirt and exposed muscular chest is in deep contrast to the delicate features and long hair of Muller’s Ah Sin, leading a viewer to wonder if Ah Sin is a man, woman, or perhaps a womanish man. Imagining the “Heathen

Chinee” pitcher poured in the comfort of someone’s home or in the saloon, Bill Nye ends up on top of Ah Sin like strange bedfellows, and the phallic-like knife enters into the immigrant man’s body from Nye’s waist. To be sure, if Harte’s “Plain Language” comments on the state of Chinese immigration, Muller’s pitcher—with its sweetheart 50

form, lotus flowers, and homosocial undertones—explores much more than simply

Asians in America.

My chapter, “The Only Good Chinese is a Dead Chinese,” looks at the portrayal of American cosmopolitanism on the frontier in Karl Muller’s “Heathen Chinee” pitcher and Ambrose Bierce’s short story, “The Haunted Valley.”4 Not coincidentally, at the moment Anglo-Saxonism was becoming a transatlantic racial category and the white

Victorian bourgeois family took a prominent role in western social norms, Bierce’s short story and Muller’s pitcher imagine white frontiersman disciplining deviant, feminized

Asian subjects in a developing Pacific frontier (Kaplan, Anarchy 39). Unlike most cosmopolitan texts that focus on urbanity, Muller and Bierce’s works explore the formation of Americanness through a frontier cosmopolitanism, where Anglo-American identity is negotiated on the Pacific coast through interactions with immigrant stock characters (“greasers,” “chinamen,” pagans) who are excluded from participating in politics, property ownership, and legal justice.5 Clearly, Muller’s sinophobic, China porcelain adaptation of Harte’s poem, along with Bierce’s short story of an interracial,

Anglo-Asian love triangle between an American, European, and an Asian laborer, objectifies China and reimagines America in the home. Bierce and Muller juxtapose

China goods and indentured Asian servants with white frontiersman and western artisan craftsmanship to express the middle-class anxiety of Asian immigration and foreign trade in America.6

I argue in “The Only Good Chinese is a Dead Chinese” that figures of the China

Trade—such as an Asian-inspired pitcher—and Asian immigrants are recognized as a continuum of the pernicious, but seemingly inextricable Oriental elements of the private

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American home, the public saloon, and even American identity itself in the two texts. As

H.J. West insinuates in his 1873 book, The Chinese Invasion, Americans began visualizing and writing about the effects of Asian immigration penetrating and dislocating even the most private of spaces (from domestic space to American subjectivity) long before the 20th century images of a Yellow Peril. He writes, “Before long, everything we eat, touch, smell, or look at, will be the effects, either directly or indirectly, of Chinese slavery…” (7). While Muller’s bar pitcher projects a scene of sinophobic violence between miners as part of American home decorations, Bierce’s frontiersman protagonist builds a new “hermaphroditic” home and killed his “sweet”

Chinese Ah Wee after he found him in the arms of a European immigrant. Even Bierce and Muller’s fictional characters’ forms of labor and origin stories, too, align the western- pacific region contradictorily with both a national and Pacific Rim nexus of trade—a simultaneously unique local region embedded in global processes.8 The interracial love story of “The Haunted Valley,” after all, begins at the port of San Francisco, where

American Jo wins Chinese immigrant Ah Wee in a card game from a white European servant, who is also an immigrant.

From Europe to China and America, Bierce and Muller’s fictional pairing of robust, transatlantic Anglo working-class laborers on the frontier with emasculated Asian immigrants unites whites to resist both the technological and racial “Chinafication” of the

United States in the story, betraying the disquiet of dependence on “chinese slavery” and markets of the fabled Orient after the Civil War. In the 1860s and 70s, when Chinatowns were becoming major manufacturing centers and US manufactured exports to China increased from 2 million to 9 million, the wave of new Asian laborers (mainly Cantonese

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from the New Delta region) into the United States (Chen 66) forced Americans to reconfigure their notions of “Americanness” and masculinity in an increasing transpacific, multi-racial, technological world (Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues 28).

Journalist Henry Robinson writes in his 1869 article “Our Manufacturing Era” the significance of the western Pacific region in nineteenth-century America. He writes that

“running the eye over the whole map of the world, where can it rest upon a more favored region [California] for a great manufacturing centre… In these days…machinery has become the real mudsill of society, and the Chinaman comes in but one remove above it”

(283). Muller and Bierce’s texts both resist and define America through the supposed

“Oriental” future in modern manufacturing, expressing American identity through a triangulating spatial economy between America, Europe, and Asia in the western frontier environment.

More than simply western Americana, Bierce and Muller’s implied scenes of

Asian-Anglo violence, atypical domestic life, and Asian-inspired porcelain portray the

Pacific Rim as influencing the formation of the American home and, by extension, the national spirit. Their texts’ depictions nostalgically tie whiteness and craft labor together, gesturing towards a future, artisanal transatlantic Anglo community (that domesticates

European whiteness into American whiteness) through a figurative dominance over Asia.

As Amy Kaplan notes in “Manifest Domesticity,” “Through the process of domestication, the home contains in itself those wild and foreign elements that must be tamed” (581). If the home is also a metaphor of the nation in the two texts, the domestication of transatlantic Anglo-Saxonism is represented as two-fold: the creation of a white, working-class masculinity that wields domestic authority, as well as managing

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the home or domestic space in contrast to the true foreigner: Asia. The home, in the process, is transformed to contain the foreign elements (namely technology and Asia in

America) and works to unify Anglo men of different classes.

Bierce and Muller’s texts explore an historic moment in American cosmopolitanism that combined both images of Asian-inspired china and racialized depictions of Asian peoples on the American Pacific frontier.9 Much of American culture shortly before and after independence, from the use of porcelain to reading short stories and travelogues about exchanges in Asia, expresses an American desire to claim culture they lacked through figures of Oriental empires, including China porcelain.10 After all,

Americans use objects and read stories, like Asian-inspired porcelain and Oriental tales,

"to make meaning, to remake ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, and to sublimate our fears and shape our fantasies” (Brown qtd. in cover). However, if

Americans once used and consumed Eastern aesthetics on fine china to mark themselves as civilized and different from their European forebears, Asians entering the Americas was an unwanted, even perverse result. Americans went from simply “knowing Asia” through china goods and fictions, to now reading about sensationalized accounts of yellow slavery and opium dens, hearing about vagrancy laws in the news, and employing and interacting with Asians in their respective homes and communities. Americans incorporated Asian Americans into their everyday sightlines, and this changed the way they wrote, thought of, and talked about the particularities of race. Bierce and Muller’s texts capture and explore this particular era of American Orientalism then, as it transitioned in the nineteenth century from the external, imagined Orient on imported

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Asian crockery to also stereotyping of Asians as social and racial pariahs who lived outside of social norms (Zboray 273).

Bierce and Muller may pejoratively envision Asians as emasculated individuals lacking self-governance, but their choice to make card games the prominent center of exchange in their texts critiques nativism and social-racial relations in America and suggests that exiling immigrants will not resolve the complicated Gordian knot of race relations in the US. The Chinese immigrants in their work are harmed for besting

Americans at their own game—Euchre, to be exact. Ah Sin literally cheats Bill Nye in

Euchre, while Ah Wee cheats on Jo, who had unknowingly won Ah Wee during a poker game from her/his already established European immigrant lover. Card games, in many ways, are America: a risky, money-based past-time of meritocracy that mirrors the tenets of free market capitalism. The games are also contradictory, unifying players of different social strata while also establishing a social hierarchy: the winners and losers, of course.

Bierce and Muller’s Chinese laborers swindling frontiersman Bill Nye and Jo, once immigrants themselves, not only express the American anxiety of incoming ethnic peoples being more physically and mentally fit for the changing economic landscape, but also shows disquiet over changes to the social-racial fabric of American society. Poker- playing becomes a lesson of social Darwinism and a reminder of the unpredictability of the free market for Americans.

From Harter to Muller and Bierce, representations of Anglo-Asian card games going awry in American culture expresses the middle-class American anxiety over a multi-racial America immersed in the Pacific economy. A crucial dimension of the poker narrative is the multiple forms of racial “yellowness” and “whiteness” that were imagined

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in its adaptation—the anxiety of multiple races in an imagined homogenous republic. As

Peter Gibian argues, “if we trace one long and important alternative line of American writing as it develops through the nineteenth century…we find an ongoing, anxious debate about the powers and limits of the cosmopolitan…and America as a cosmopolitan culture” (20). Indeed, in as early as the 18th century, Americans were identifying Asia with negative cosmopolitan consumption and medical cosmopolitan plagues, or that

“cursed black [China] tea” as an all-consuming plague (Agathocleous 389).11 During the nineteenth-century, the Chinese immigrant eventually became a figure of rootless masses and technology, or a barbarous foreigner working for cheap in factories and sapping vital resources and capital in America. Considering this, if "Coolie” became a derogatory racial conglomeration and Anglo-Saxon became a transatlantic racial category—both emerging worldwide during the era of slave emancipation—how might a simple beer pitcher and short story manifest the complex nuances of Asian race formation in the

United States? We might do well to start at the beginning, exploring western empires’ historical fascination with Asia and porcelain objects of the China Trade.

***

U.S. Secretary of State John Hay remarked in 1898 that “the Mediterranean is the ocean of the past, the Atlantic is the ocean of the present, and the Pacific is the ocean of the future” (qtd in Dixon 46). However, as early as the 17th and 18th centuries, early-

Americans were exploring their futures in the Asia-Pacific. To the tea they drank to the vessels they drank out of, early American identities were formed by their trade and imperial linkages between Asia and the colonies, including influences of Asia’s material products, peoples, and imagined allure. The new British-Americans imported an

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extraordinary amount of Chinese goods (approximately 70 million pieces of porcelain) into the colonies before 1800, using China porcelain ware and more for cultural capital and social devices (Finlay 142). Even in popular culture, travel narratives to find the fabled markets of the Orient were wild bestsellers, including John Rickman’s unauthorized account of Captain Cook’s sea voyage Journal of Captain Cook's last voyage to the Pacific Ocean on Discovery, published in Philadelphia 1773. American

Orientalist practices, particularly acquiring fine China through the China trade, positioned

Americans in the center of a global trade with the Euro-Atlantic and Asia in the 18th and

19th centuries.

China and crockery in the U.S. were largely part of the early American culture of reprinting and importing distinctly European-Asian styles —material productions whose visual graphics and stylistic touches were adaptations of European porcelain works and imports from the China Trade. American-made pottery rose in the 1730s, when English- born Huguenot Andrew Duché discovered “Carolina-clay” and built the first American pottery factory in South Carolina (Baldwin 7). However, none of his products are intact today. Gouse Bonnin and George Anthony Morris thus are cited as the first potters of

America, successfully producing soft-paste porcelain in their Philadelphia factory,

American China Manufactory, which they erected in 1770 (Cotter 248). Many of their

American china relics imitate the blue and white soft-paste style of the Bow factory in

England and are worth thousands today.

American pottery moved away from reprinting and importing in the 1870s when

Thomas Smith & Co’s factory, Union Porcelain Works, crafted goods with American- inspired themes. From Americana dinnerware to vases and pitchers, Union Porcelain

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Works created the first “true” hard-paste, uniquely “American” porcelain meant for hotel and domestic use in 1863 (Frelinghuysen 190). This Brooklyn, New York-based company Union hired chief designer Karl L.H. Muller to actively pursue an American style unseen in the American pottery landscape. Muller, a German immigrant renowned for his European figural group “Minstrel’s Curse”, interpreted American life through its popular print culture, taking inspiration from “American literature and everyday life”

(Bolger 476). Karl L.H. Muller rose in celebrity after debuting his Union Porcelain line of true “American” porcelain in the 1870s. He recreated popular, genre-type figures, such as the schoolboy and blacksmith, as well as images of famous Americans, for the decorative arts of Union porcelain ware (Bolger 476). The result was “an eclectic set of symbols” of print culture “applied to conventional forms” of material culture (Bolger

476).

Muller designed a popular Orientalist print-to-material-culture adaptation, aptly titled the “Heathen Chinee” pitcher, for Union Porcelain Works’ American genre collection in 1876. This popular decorative pitcher was inspired by Brett Harte’s popular satirical poem, “Plain Language of Truthful James,” which was currently undergoing multiple print lives in American culture, appearing as the “Heathen Chinee” broadside, pamphlet, song, and play “Ah Sin” by Mark Twain and Bret Harte (Moon 42). “Plain

Language of Truthful James” was even being quoted in congress as evidence of the savagery of the Chinese (Metraux 177). From H.J. West’s “The Chinese Invasion” to

Harte’s ‘Heathen Chinee”, the anti-Chinese movement was well underway, and Muller’s use of Ah Sin and Bill Nye as popular images of Americana speaks to the pulse of 1870s

American culture.

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Muller expresses the state of contemporary Americana, and perhaps the future of

America, through Ah Sin and Bill Nye’s final scene of confrontation on the anti-Chinese pitcher. In Muller’s adaptation, Harte’s Irish, working-class laborer Bill Nye, gestures menacingly and leans over Chinese immigrant Ah Sin. The Chinese man had cheated plain-speaking “truthful” James in a card game, and Nye seeks to exact revenge and even the playing field. The pitcher itself captures the tale’s motif of vigilante justice as Nye wields a long, phallic knife pointed towards the Chinese man. Nye clutches the man’s chest while menacingly leaning over him. Ah Sin, dressed in traditional Chinese garb and painted with rat-like, even feminized features, leans back and drops playing cards from his sleeves.

Illustration 1: Karl Muller, “Heathen Chinee Pitcher.” (Harte) 1876.

Porcelain pitcher. Brooklyn Museum, New York. 59

The violence of the scene (and it being a gendered male as a beer pitcher) is in deep contrast to the delicate Oriental lotus flowers adorning the pitcher—flowers that are often a symbol of love, femininity, and purity (Tajima 308). Clearly, Asians are racialized as neither male nor female on Muller’s pitcher, but certainly freakish—freakish here meaning a social construction of bodies interpreted as non-normative. Considering material objects are both conduits of participation and bearers of meaning, the pitcher’s contradictions of race suggests that there is more than meets the eye in the relationship between Anglo-Americans and Chinese, as well as in the use value of China goods in

American culture and public space.

Muller, a German immigrant himself, completes the spatial and racial triangulation between Europe-Asia-America on his pitcher with a jovial scene of leisure as Brother Jonathan imbibes with the German patron saint of beer, King Gambrinus

(Metraux 173). In deep contrast to the queered Asian figure on the first side, Muller accentuates on the other side of his pitcher an aggressive, homosocial American masculinity and the assimilation of white, immigrant working-classes. German immigrants here are insinuated as productive members of the American body politic. In the 1840s, European social and political unrest contributed to a large flight of talented

Europeans, including Muller himself, to migrate to the United States. German immigrants were well-known as the first group to introduce lager into the U.S., which became a popular Northwest American commodity and form of leisure (Curry 1). An interesting throwback to antiquity, Muller presents German whiteness as having a long, established history—an enduring civilization of whiteness that should be celebrated in America, as

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well. He also suggests that Anglo-Europeans are self-governing, civilized individuals that are fit for the American republic: emigrating, heterosexual Christian entrepreneurs able to trade in commodities and expand American capitalism and contribute to western society.

Illustration 2: Karl Muller, “Heathen Chinee Pitcher.” (Gambrinus)

1876. Porcelain pitcher. Brooklyn Museum, New York.

Muller’s palimpsestic American porcelain, with its reference to Harte’s popular anti-Chinese poem, renders white ethnics as “American” and suggests nostalgia for an

Anglo, artisanal, monocultural past without the advancing Asian immigrants and technologies of the era. He emphasizes this representation through not only the graphics of the pitcher, but also its fine details: the spout and lotus flowers. Muller’s rims the top of his pitcher with yellow and red lotus flowers, typical to the decorative arts of fine 61

China. However, the flowers ringing the top are interrupted by the fierce-looking walrus spout and seal handle: two popular North American exports to Asia (“Pacific Fur

Company” 1). Muller’s spout of transpacific commodities emphasizes a mastery of hemispheric trade linkages in the Pacific as the intended user pours beer from the mouth of the growling walrus (spout). Considering the pitcher’s imaginative mapping of trade commodities and people presented, the “grammar” of the graphics suggests that Anglos and Asians are the savage-civilized racial coupling of the pitcher’s decorative arts.

Asians, of course, are presented as the freaks of Anglo-American society, envisioned as effeminate male beasts and inscrutable vermin with long queues that sap capital and challenge white masculinity. Muller establishes what Matthew Guterl would call a racial sightline of whiteness versus yellowness, a hegemonic, common set of conventions in the national popular that interprets bodies as either normative or foreign by contrasting visual signifiers and establishing a national civic space and community via racial discourse

(Guterl 5). This particular sightline interprets American whiteness and Orientalism as comparative and mutually constructive, thereby structuring people’s encounters in the material world as they see through the visual medium of race in America.

Muller’s uniquely American porcelain ware featuring queered Asians is an artifact of the relationship between the rise of visual culture, racial profiling, and Asian ethnographic knowledges in 1870s America. The Boston “Great Chinese Museum” in the mid-nineteenth-century, after all, led its visitors under an awning that read: "Words may deceive, but the eye cannot play the rogue" (Peters 5). The museum catalog even emphasizes "that sight, as well as description is necessary to make a lasting impression upon the mind" (Peters 3). Paul Atkinson reminds us that ethnography emerged as a

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science in nineteenth-century America, and that “ethnographies are, then, socially conceived products that emerge at particular historical junctures and are formed through a dense constellation of complementary and competing bodies of knowledge. They are intertextual, frequently speaking through and across other ethnographic accounts of other social worlds” (9). Muller, too, instructs his users on the ethnography of yellowness in

America via visual-physical signifiers of the people presented in the pitcher. Muller’s ethnographic, stark visual contrast between Irish Nye and Ah Sin casts a White-Asian juxtaposition on his native-produced object, which becomes central to the pitcher’s

“reading” of race.” As Ronald Zboray emphasizes, “Visual engagement with the collected [Asian] artifacts, coupled with the able guidebook, would transform information into experience and thus into knowledge” (271). Muller uses the visualization of yellow- white race relations, artifacts in the form of fine china, and the parable of “truthful

James” and cheater “Ah Sin” to create the experience of his pitcher and broker a mass- knowledge of yellowness that bridges differences in whiteness in America.

If the Heathen Chinee is visualized as the racial “yellow,” then Muller’s Bill Nye and Brother Jonathan act as the amenable white foil of this pitcher’s sightline. Together the men portray the positive assimilation of civilized, western white immigrant men in an imagined shared spatial economy running from North America to Europe. The Heathen

Chinee will eventually end up on his back as the pitcher is poured, because what else

“does Ah Sin have up his sleeve?” (Tchen, New York 199). In contrast, the robust, pan-

European-American white common men on the other side of the pitcher suggests white immigrants creating their place in the community through the commodification of the sensationalized Chinese laborer John Chinaman and domination of Pacific trade. Rather

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than the rise of technology and “coolies,” the robust white body defines Americanness through white masculinity and artisanal trades, such as beer and seal fur trading. Being an American in the world of the “Heathen Chinee” pitcher thus meant racial-policing of the Orient, control of technologies and trade, orderly domestic environments, and rational gender relations. Imagining the beer pitcher in-use at a saloon, with its delicate Oriental detailing, portrays white, working-class European immigrants discursively becoming

American white against a deviant, feminized Asia in this nineteenth-century picture of the American “melting pot.”

The textual device of queering and killing Chinese immigrants seen on this nineteenth-century cultural object—as well as in the short stories of Bret Harte and

Ambrose Bierce, the propaganda of the Workingman’s Party, the cartoons of Thomas

Nast, and more—presents a disquieted America trying to order and control what Jack

London would call “the Chinese problem.”12 Asia was an important topic in mid- nineteenth-century America, when the onset of the Opium Wars between China and

England affected American traders’ price of customs and reminded Americans of their deep dependence on the lucrative China Trade.13 Migration from the east rose, too, as wartime in China from the Opium Wars depressed its economy. These circumstances forced many Asian subjects, particularly from Canton, China, to become migrating laborers—globally denigrated as “coolies” headed west, although not all Asian immigrants were indentured or forced to migrate (Yun, Coolie Speaks

100). In fact, as Yong Chen argues, many of the immigrants willingly came from the

New Delta region, which housed the most developed market economy of China and more prosperous individuals willing to venture away to pursue money-making

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opportunities along the Asia Pacific (Chen 12). Thus, not coincidentally, at the same moment transatlantic slavery was being formally abolished in the western world, Asia was opening as a labor market. Asian laborers traveled by boats to the Americas to work from the guano pits of Peru to the mining shafts of San Francisco.14 During this time of heavy traffic, Americans became concerned over the social and economic repercussions of the influx of Asian immigrants from Asia and Latin America and the overdependence on foreign markets.

Muller’s “Heathen Chinee’ pitcher then, representing Asia as both racial caricature and China Trade commodity, particularly captures this expression of xenophobic anxiety anchored to technological and economic changes. The pitcher’s form is not far from British-Americans’ first racialization of Asia, of course, who first interpreted Asia through the very commodities they used at home: Asian crockery. One nineteenth-century American even claims, "Our first ideas of China-dom were formed at meal times, and illustrated with plates” and named this racial form of Asia "Crockery- dom” (“Crockerydom” 1). He or she later suggests that Crockerydom, which formed their imagining of Asia, persisted in structuring his or her encounters, even after later readings of different texts about Asia and having different experiences of Asia in America

(“Crockerydom” 1). The Orientalist craze among 1870s fashionable householders that included converting bedrooms into spaces of Asia, like harem smoking rooms, suggests the continued magnification of yellowness as sensational spaces and objects of consumption in the nineteenth century (Hoganson 63-4). However, the rise of dystopian, technological novels describing a yellow peril making America “alien” in the late nineteenth-century also suggests the association of Asia and Asian immigration with the

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rise of factory work and manufacturing. Not coincidentally, between 1860 and 1890, San

Francisco’s Chinatown changed from a commercial-service industry site to a major manufacturing center. On a national scale, over half of American workers were farmers in 1870, but by the 1910s, over two thirds were factory workers (Jacobson, Barbarian

Virtues 65).

If, as Sarah Wilson argues, gender is produced through one’s actions in lived spaces such as work and home, then Americans use the “Heathen Chinee” pitcher for a mini-performance of minstrelsy and artisanal pride that bolsters white male morale and unique craftsmanship on day-to-day basis (59). Of course, studies of reception remind us that objects elicit multiple readings and uses; this allows some users, for example, to experience the culture of high society via the pitcher, while it give others a critical distance from ethnic peoples and the pleasure of an imagined white American manhood.

These uses are never necessarily mutually exclusive experiences and form the nexus of interpretive effects of Muller’s ware. Users imagine themselves trespassing into an insular, high society with their fine American-made porcelain, while the portrayal of the

Heathen Chinee and the white working classes on the beer pitcher meant never losing sight (both literally and figuratively) of their populist origins. The pitcher’s lotus flowers hearken back to the original China trade items of the 18th century that decorated the rooms of Early Americans, establishing the long history of china imports into cosmopolitan America. However, if the dystopian implication of Harte’s poem is that

“Ah Sin” bests Bill Nye at his own game, then Muller also attempts to undermine “John

Chinaman” at his own game. Muller creates a uniquely anti-Chinese porcelain good through American manufacturing and renounces fine china pouring tea (an import

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commodity of Asia) through the pitcher’s pouring of a hearty lager. Lager, of course, is an Anglo commodity, first invented in Europe but brought to the states by German immigrants. This distinctly “American” ware—from the pouring of the lager to the anti-

Chinese accents—mimes the actions of those American rebels that rejected and threw that “cursed weed” and “plague” of the “China coast” (black tea) overboard during the revolutionary Boston Tea Party in an effort to show their own maritime strength and domestic exports (Frank 175, 193). The pitcher’s metaphoric restoration of the working to middle-class white man’s domestic authority in use combats a dystopian future in manufacturing, or what Hayot calls “the reinscription of the logic of individual, craft labor in the body of the singular, individuated protagonist…. the value of manual labor over factory work, [and] manhood over coolieism” (Hayot 105). Muller’s telling dichotomy between American masculinity and Orientalism represents American identity as not only anchored in a global sense of space and in relation to Asia, but also expresses the linkages between the formation of racial and sex-gender categories in America.

Muller’s domestic ware portrays a transnational spatial economy of Anglo-Saxon communities while also betraying the deep Oriental character of America. Muller’s global constellation of Angloness downplays differences between whites and white ethnics in the US to rally together the Anglo-Saxon community against the perceived flood of the “yellow peril.” Thinking of the pitcher as a tool of leisure and in everyday use, Muller combines both domesticity and imperialism—domesticating whiteness in

America to include European ingenuity through the dominance of an Asia-Pacific. Of course, the absence of women in Muller’s text strays from the ideal scene of American domesticity: a woman tending the hearth, or the very “heart” of the space of the nation

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and family. However, the emasculating of Asian men may be a clue to Muller’s grammar of gender and its relation to race on the American frontier. To better understand this interplay between frontier cosmopolitanism, masculinity and femininity, and representations of the home, we will turn to Ambrose Bierce’s “The Haunted Valley,” where the many homes of the frontier story, underwritten by threatening, feminized Asian accents and a notable absence of women, suggest that Asia itself has entered the private sphere and affected the California community, and perhaps America at large.

***

Just five years before Muller crafted the “Heathen Chinee” pitcher, Ambrose

Bierce crafted his own anti-Chinese text, “The Haunted Valley.” While Bierce wrote a significant number of frontier fictions, he is popular for his biting political satire and critique of American nationalism through gothic depictions of war, spectral ghosts, and broken families in fiction (Davidson, Introduction 12). Cathy Davidson claims Bierce is the “premodern precursor to post-modern fiction” because of his preoccupation with

“protagonist perceptual processes” (Experimental 134, 27), while Michael Davidson suggests Bierce was part of a “homosocial literary bohemia” emerging in postbellum

America” (22). Critics, however, have yet to recognize the degree to which Bierce also understood middle-class American identity—indeed, even the Anglo-American household itself—as produced via an evolving transpacific and transatlantic cosmopolitanism.

Bierce’s first published short story and first foray into American cosmopolitanism, “The Haunted Valley,” explores a transgender, homoerotic love triangle between Jo, a white American frontiersman, and his Chinese and Anglo-

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European servants, Ah Wee and Gopher, on the California frontier. Because of the story’s complex story-line, a short summary of its Oriental elements are as follows: a young New

England journalist meets Whisky Jo Dunfer, an alcoholic white frontiersman in

California’s Haunted Valley. While the two are drinking together in Jo’s “hermaphrodite habitation” that is both a bar and home, Jo proclaims he killed his own Chinese laborer

Ah Wee while they were “sticking up shanty” together because he persisted in “felling trees like they would in China” instead of the “Melican way” (89). Jo takes tobacco from his fine china box while scolding the journalist: "You youngsters are too good to live in

Californy: you'd better all of ye git back to New England, fur none of ye don't understand our play and … [you] can afford to hang out liberary ideas about Chinagration.” The journalist notes that “poor Jo meant Chinese immigration, and in which he included ever thing relating to that people.” During his rant, Jo believes he sees the dark eyes of Ah

Wee in a knot hole of his home and leaves in a flight of terror. The journalist believes there’s more to the story of Ah Wee’s murder, but leaves the community. Five years later, the Journalist returns and runs into Jo’s European laborer, Gopher, who has the same

“glittering brown eyes” (94) as Ah Wee. Gopher confesses to the journalist of the former love triangle: Jo won Ah Wee from Gopher in a poker match. Gopher then disguised himself and followed the two to the Haunted Valley to work for Jo. When Jo discovered

Gopher and Ah Wee in an embrace, he killed the Chinese laborer. Jo confesses to the murder in court, but the small California community praises Jo’s actions due to the current state of sinophobia in the state and nation. Jo is acquitted and elected justice of the peace. Jo, haunted by his transgressions, begins drinking heavily and built his current hermaphroditic establishment far away from the shanty. Gopher grows increasingly

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insane from the grief. Jo eventually dies after mistaking a glittery brown eye in his barroom for Ah Wee, which is in fact Gopher voyeuristically watching Jo.

Like Muller’s pitcher, Ambrose Bierce’s “The Haunted Valley” situates frontier cosmopolitanism through the crafts and domestic elements of the frontier short story.15

After all, the OED’s earliest definition of “foreign” is "out of doors" or "at a distance from home", which makes the home and foreignness two intimately-connected concepts

(Kaplan 581). In Bierce’s nineteenth-century era of the separate spheres doctrine, the home should provide a sense of comfort and familiarity in contrast to the public world and marketplace, where there is “a place for everything and everything in its place”

(“Brother Jonathan”). However, the many homes presented in the “Haunted Valley”—the unfinished interracial shanty and the “hermaphrodite habitation” built later—do not exist as places of refuge or peace (88). Instead, the homes, and even the valley itself, manifest intersections of transnational public, social, and economic forces, particularly the politics of Chinese indentured servitude and gender and sexuality in America.

From its ghosts to gothic overtones, Bierce’s homes and places harbor secrets of

Asian-Anglo sexual intimacies, where specters of guilt and memories stalk inhabitants and the past impinges on the present. Bierce’s first unhomely site is the Haunted Valley at large. The narrator describes in a familiar, confiding manner the location of the

“Haunted Valley,” using local neighboring establishments and people to establish its whereabouts: “A half-mile north from Jo. Dunfer’s, on the road from Hutton’s to Mexico

Hill, the highway dips into a sunless ravine, which opens out on either hand, in a half- confidential manner, as if it had a secret to impart at some more convenient season” (88).

Bierce introduces the valley through a third party narrator, which is a common regionalist

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technique: a young, visiting East coast journalist discovers a local dramatic event that unfolded during his visit to this “haunted” west coast space. The narrator’s conversational-style lends the tale an air of “regional” authenticity, and we trust that the narrator will be a faithful reporter of the “facts” in this ghost story. Emphasizing the mysteriousness of the place, the narrator avoids using map coordinates, city locations, street names, or even public buildings to denote the exact location of the haunted valley.

Instead, he introduces the valley via familiar-sounding neighborly locales and later names the valley in a foreign language (Spanish “canon”) in the middle of the English language prose (88). These linguistic sleights of hand position the valley somewhere in-between all the locales and between both Spanish and English language, literalizing the place’s incommunicable secrets and foreshadowing the valley’s interracial relations.

Not simply geographic in-betweeness, Bierce presents the Haunted Valley’s temporal present not being in radical alterity to its European past in the story. In a creative reimagining of New World conquest, Bierce makes the journalist a Columbus figure as he describes the geography of the land. The New Englander enters the valley and found himself in what seemed like an “unbosomed” Spanish “canon” (88) and experiences “a sudden coolness” entering “the deep shadows of the ravine. There was a kind of death-chamber hush in the valley, it is true, and a mysterious whisper above”

(90). He sees Ah Wee’s grave and summons the specter of Christopher Columbus, who mistook the Americas for Asia, to encapsulate his affective reaction to the view: “I viewed that lonely grave with something of the feeling that Columbus must have had when he saw the hills and headlands of the new world. Before approaching it I leisurely

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completed my survey of the surroundings” (91). The valley is neither here nor there to the journalist, striking him as reminiscent of another world and not of the present era.

Bierce’s haunted valley is a spatial, conceptual, and temporal quandary in the story, disobeying the conventional social logics of mapping, gender construction, and nation-time. Of course, Bierce reimagining explorer Columbus surveying the Haunted

Valley and Ah Wee’s grave suggests a figurative masculine conquest of the Asia Pacific and New World as a whole. However, Bierce’s valley is also an “unbosomed canon”, which connotes the opening of a woman’s chest and thereby the undoing of feminine itself, but also resists being gendered masculine as well. Bierce makes the Haunted

Valley and America at large not a feminized virgin land, but a transgender frontier—an oddity in cultural signifiers. This transpacific hidden valley and its masculine dissonances is frightening because it could be both nowhere and everywhere in the American landscape.

Bierce’s strange transgender frontier forebodingly insinuates the repercussions of continuing western fascination with the East—a veritable Anglo-Asian cosmopolitan valley that has become strange and unknowable. His unhomely, gendered pairing of

Chinese Ah Wee and American Jo in the story, like Muller’s pitcher, explores expressions of American anxiety to preserve an imagined monocultural and artisanal past and keep sovereignty “over a multiracial, feminized, mass-produced future,” embedded in the murder of Chinese worker Ah Wee and in the many homes of the Haunted Valley landscape (Hayot 105). In the cosmopolitan story, the valley frontier inhabitants all immigrated from around the globe, particularly Europe and Asia: Ah Wee from China,

Gopher from Europe, and the narrator from New England. The global characters and their

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migrations represent the transnational foundation of this “national” frontier story, and

Bierce stages the particular Asia-Europe-America spatial economy with his journalist-as-

Columbus scene. When the journalist mistakes the New World for Asia (like Jo’s later use of “Chinagration”), he is also visualizing the entirety of China coming to America, and mimes Daniel Webster’s famous 1850 declaration of California’s landscape as being

“Asiatic in…formation and scenery” (Webster 187). Drawing parallels to Spain’s decay as an empire due to the international abolition of African slavery, Bierce’s Spanish accents in his story of Chinese indentured servitude presents the reliance on

“Chinagration” (Asian indentured labor) as deforming the nation and making the new

American empire as primitive as its forbearers. The valley thus becomes a site of colonial convergences stuck in time and space and a borderlands vision straddling both a

European colonial past and an Asiatic American future. Both the Spanish geographic- linguistic sleights of hand and Ah Wee’s grave conflate this “local” space as simultaneously European in nature (formerly the Spanish empire) and as an extension of the Asia Pacific.

The effect of Jo mistaking the glittering brown eyes of one European immigrant

(Gopher) for another ( Chinese Ah Wee) not only gives weight to the triangulating relations between the men, but also portrays the malleable standards for reading constructions of race. Gopher, who is described as Jo’s “queer little manservant”, is implied to be European, or as Matthew Jacobson would say, a “whiteness of a different color.” European immigrants in the U.S., while ostensibly “white,” experienced varying degrees of racial discrimination due to shifting ideas of “American whiteness” and who exactly has access to its privileges. Gopher then was a foil to Jo in this love triangle,

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being perceived as a non-threatening romantic competitor for Ah Wee because of his small stature and “queer” ethnic nature. Through a white to white pairing, Bierce suggests that America, known for looking forward to its passage to India, also had anxieties of a revival of the Old World European empires. American identity, then, is both indebted to and looking to its European forebears, but also becoming Asiatic as well, as fear of “cooliedom” takes over the Pacific West. The “secret” of the valley then was not only material (the homosocial intimacies and murder), but also figurative and psychic: the valley embodies the desire and anxiety of a former British America depending on and colonizing Asia, a figurative site where the known limits of masculinity and civilization come undone as the U.S. opens to Asia.

Bierce, complementing his spatial metaphor of the “haunted” valley, describes Jo as a decayed, phallic tree on the frontier. He, in fact, pairs Ah Wee and Jo as aged tree stumps growing together and provocatively suggests that Jo became sexually-confused through environmental metaphors by buying both labor and intimacy from Chinese Ah

Wee. When the journalist first meets Whisky Jo Dunfer, a “very important personage in those parts” with “a deep-seated antipathy to the Chinese” (88), he unmistakably appears like a gnarled old tree: “…Apparently about forty years of age, a long, shock-headed fellow, with a corded face, a gnarled arm, and a knotty hand like a bunch of prison-keys.

He was a hairy man, with a stoop in his walk” (88). Bierce, in his 1901 edition of this story, emphasizes the importance of this tree metaphor by re-titling the first chapter of this story as “How Trees are Felled in China.” In the narrative, the journalist, notices the growing together of phallic Chinese and American-style cut trees when he returns five years later to visit the half-built shanty and the gravestone of Ah Wee. The journalist

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notes “the stumps and trunks of the fallen saplings [of the shanty], those that had been hacked ‘China fashion’ were no longer distinguishable from those that were cut ‘Melican way.’ It was as if the Old World barbarism and the New World civilization had reconciled their differences by the arbitration of an impartial decay — as one day they must” (92). Bierce’s gendering and racializing of trees growing together comes to a head when the journalist reads the gravestone of Ah Wee. He is surprised to see a “transition of gender and sentiment” written by Jo, who curiously refers to Ah We as both “he” and

“she” and used the front door of their half-built house as the grave stone. The journalist thinks that the front door and transgender references “marked this as the production of one who must have been at least as much demented as bereaved” (91). Bierce’s decayed trees (phallic in nature) and the irrational forms of gender running through the tale poses yet another perceptual quandary: did Jo’s faculties and masculinity become “demented” from his close-proximity and intimacy with Ah Wee or because of his murder/exile of the

Chinese immigrant?

Jo and Ah Wee’s romance—from the front door grave to the decayed, phallic,

Chinamerican trunks (my own linguistic amalgamate)—expresses the material intersections between nineteenth-century changes in Anglo-American masculinity and

Asian immigration. Bierce here speaks to the stricter gender determinism and growing public concern over the decline of white masculinity and domestic authority in an increasingly “feminized” landscape of industrialization and immigration. Asian

Americans, encouraged to immigrate to the U.S. as indentured servants, were entering into cheap factory labor as well as domestic jobs, out of necessity. The racialization of

Asian-Americans became a particularly gendered discourse of alterity due to their taking

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“woman’s work” and because of the US’s institutional banning of Asian immigrants from heterosexual institutions (such as marriage) and female immigration. By working for lower wages than the white man would (or “could,” as we shall see), the coolie came to signify the “increasing transnationalization of labor markets.” His feminized body, in contrast to the robust American body, was imagined as more fit for the factory and technology and signified an Asiatic future (Hayot 101). Not coincidentally then, the separation of male work space and domestic space in the mid-nineteenth century Anglo, middle-class home became increasingly entrenched, as well as the notion of separate gendered spheres of influence. In Bierce’s story, Jo tries to assert his masculinity and domestic authority through an artisanal bar after Chinese Ah Wee’s infidelity and murder; after all, lager is an infamous, Anglo artisanal commodity of the Northwest.

However, Jo ends up plagued by his own construction, considering his current expression of domestic space is hermaphroditic and, as we find out at the end of the story, he is haunted by the ghost of Ah Wee.

Jo, in the end of the narrative, transforms into the penultimate environmental, phallic metaphor: a gnarled old tree, like the decayed wood of a ruined home, whose

“knotty hand like a bunch of prison-keys” and bar/home materially and psychically attempts to ‘lock away” the interracial, homoerotic secrets of the valley that plague him

(88). When the journalist begins patronizing Jo’s establishment, he notes that it is a

“hermaphrodite habitation, half residence and half groggery” located “upon an extreme corner” of the man’s estate. While drinking together, “this long consumer [Jo] sprung the lid of a Chinese tobacco-box, and with his thumb and forefinger forked out a wad like a miniature hay-cock. Holding this reinforcement within supporting distance, he fired away

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with renewed confidence…” (88). He gave a “fragmentary revelation,” telling the journalist that before his current bar/home, he was “sticking up a shanty” in the valley with his Chinese cook, Ah Wee, and his European worker, Gopher. Jo intimates he killed

Ah Wee while building because he was “not felling trees” (89) correctly, and then Jo used the doorstep of the failed new shanty as the Chinese man’s gravestone. From building a shanty with Ah Wee to then killing him over “felled trees,” Bierce hints that this relationship is outside of American, middle-class social norms.

Bierce, after introducing the fallen trees, Ah Wee-Jo coupling, and

“hermaphroditic” bar-home, presents the gendered separation of spheres and even

“Americanness” in the Haunted Valley as far more ambiguous social categories than first appeared. Bierce’s Jo is sexually-exiled from middle-class sensibilities, seen particularly in his manic “deranged…fragmentary revelations” (92) and his literal migration to his

“hermaphrodite habitation” (88). Bierce’s bar-home combines the masculine, public business of labor with domesticity itself, making typically “masculine” and “feminine” space ambiguous in affiliation and in-between genders. To recall, separate spheres ideology of the era imagines boundaries between the private, feminine space of the home and the public masculine space of labor and politics. In the mid-nineteenth century

American middle class home, separation of male work space and domestic space became increasingly normalized due to changing labor forms and social mores emerging out of western industrialization (Wilson 61). Innovative, more affordable building techniques and supplies in the mid-nineteenth century made the physical expression of separate spheres now widely-available available to the American middle class (Wilson 71). Thus, if gender is produced through lived spaces, including the domestic home and public space

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of work, then Jo’s actions in the bar, a typically masculine space, now mime that of a middle-class woman (Wilson 59). Rather than a housewife using fine china for cultural capital in the parlor, Jo takes tobacco from his Chinese tobacco box while at the bar, a precious China trade object and memento of American Orientalism. Even Jo’s reference to Ah Wee as transgendered, or both “he” and “she”, implicates Ah Wee’s and perhaps his own, gender-divergent behavior.

Bierce thus disrespects the social categories of “masculinity” and even

“Americanness” and alludes to Jo and Ah Wee as an inextricable foil in the narrative. Just like the domestic home built from objects of public commerce like lumber, American identity is formed through a crucible of international relations and suggests the cosmopolitan nature of America. However, Jo becoming western (a justice of the peace, even) through relations with Ah Wee ended up decaying his moral and physical sensibilities. This is both because of the atrocity itself (murder) and because of Jo’s sexual relations and participation in indentured servitude. As Colleen Lye argues, the

Chinaman or coolie as a figure represents “a biological impossibility and a numerical abstraction, whose social domination” threatened the disappearance of the “robust

American body” (9). Bierce here suggests Jo participated in his own demise. From the scale of the home to the community, the trees on the frontier, including Jo, are also being figuratively “felled” by China. Jo’s body, California, and even the nation itself, is becoming a conceptual haunted valley—Asiatic in character with an unknowable future.

Whisky Jo Dunfer explicitly ties his local dispute and murder into the national

“bearin’s of this whole [China] question”, explicitly making this “private” problem of the narrative also a problem of the public sphere. Jo, drunk and upset, takes from his Chinese

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tobacco box and sheds light on how his private tragedy relates to the state of “the Chinese question” in the US:

"You youngsters are too good to live in Californy: you'd better all of ye git back to New England, fur none of ye don't understand our play and … can afford to hang out liberary ideas about Chinagration" (by which poor Jo. meant Chinese immigration, and in which he included ever thing relating to that people)…And this long consumer, who had never struck a stroke of honest work in all his life, sprung the lid of a Chinese tobacco-box, and with his thumb and forefinger forked out a wad like a miniature hay-cock. Holding this reinforcement within supporting distance, he fired away with renewed confidence… I tell ye, youngster, ther a bad lot, and ther agoin' fur every thing green in this country….like a herd of 'Gyptian locusses! I had one of 'em to work fur me, five years ago, and I'll tell ye all about it, so't ye ken see the bearin's of this whole question. "

Jo’s Egyptian locusts portend China as a foreign primitivism changing Americanness and masculinity in the story. Egyptian locusts were one of the ten plagues that preceded

Moses leading the Hebrews into wilderness. In this fable, the pharaoh of Egypt disallows the people of Israel to leave and celebrate God in the wilderness. Two men, Moses and his brother, respond by bringing ten ecological disasters as historical portents or signs, including the 8th plague of locusts. In Bierce’s metaphor then, “Chinagration”, like a herd of Egyptian locusts, is the historical portent for white Americans. Jo’s proclamations insinuate an apocalyptic future, like his own ruin as a “felled tree”: a nomadic plague of

Chinese will spread over the nation and kill the agricultural and economic bounty of the

U.S.

In this metaphor, Jo imagines the ethnic Chinese as free-wheeling insects with unlimited mobility that will contaminate the social demography and landscape, changing the very face of America from white to multi-racial. Asian immigrants will “take everything green” because their cheap labor undermines the tenets of Yankee free labor

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and capitalism. As a herd, they will sap the nation of its resources, from agriculture to money, and enter the most private of spaces. Americans then are prevented from

“entering the wilderness” of the marketplace and becoming self-made entrepreneurs, affecting their masculinity and sense of Americanness. “Chinagration,” or Asia coming to

America, means the extinction of the white, self-made man in an unknowable

Chinamerican future.

Jo, as a “long time consumer” of snuff with his Chinese tobacco box, implies the more socially-acceptable consumer relationship with Asia: the American China trade.

Bierce’s china box reference establishes the long historical ties between America,

Europe, and China in the China Trade. Since the nascent of the British colonies,

Americans have been fascinated with the colonization and riches of Asia. Early American colonists constructed an informal economy of piracy in Asia waters to defy English ruling and gain their own access to wealth and “the Orient”. Not surprisingly, this piratical “self-made man” narrative arguably became central to middle-class American identity, or the remaking of self on both landed and oceanic frontiers.16 White middle- class women in the nineteenth century, too, typically collected precious China goods for adornment and cultural capital, if only because participation in an Orientalist discourse helped women gain authority and agency normally denied to them in other aspects of sociopolitical life (Yoshihara 10).17 As shown, Jo only continues his talk after taking snuff from his precious Chinese tobacco box, garnering courage through the cultural capital of Oriental fine china and a perceived dominance over Asia. He imagines himself through a particular vision of Asia—the external, aestheticization of Asia as an enduring civilization and emptied of an internal, historically centered space. Jo’s use of the

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Chinese tobacco box during his rant in the hermaphrodite bar then suggests the proper place of Asia in America (as a feminine commodity in the home), but also betrays the sexual and social anxiety he feels as Asians immigrate to America (Ah Wee) and change

American social relations.

Bierce’s significant contrast between “chinagration” and precious fine china of the home straddles the era’s changing representations of Asian alterity in popular culture.

In nineteenth-century American Orientalist discourse, Asia figures as both a refined, enduring civilization on crockery, while also racial freakery found at PT Barnum’s museum exhibits. Gabriel Alexander Bowles explores Asian identity in the United States in “Designs in Chinese Color: China in the Galleries of Modernist Little Magazines,

1912-1935”:

Because they [the Chinese] developed an enduring civilization, they necessarily complicated the ongoing discourse of alterity—of civilized (i.e., white) versus primitive (e.g., Africans and Native Americans)—in contemporary debates over national self-definition. Moreover, Chinese products, carried often by Yankee shippers, were an integral part of coastal northeastern Americans’ domestic environments. These omnipresent imports fueled Northeasterners’ construction of an image of China. (272)

Americas were first introduced to Asia on the bowls, plates, and decorative wares of their nineteenth century-imported Asian crockery, an aesthetic imagining divorced from the realities of the modern state and used in leisure. Later, with the rise of scientific racism and sensational literatures, the “scripted, sensationalistic freakery” of P. T. Barnum effectively marketed racist stereotypes and phenomenology through his mid-nineteenth- century museum exhibits.

Straddling this dichotomy, Ah Wee is both the face of “Chinagration” and disloyalty, and Jo and Gopher’s refined object of fascination. Jo admits he thought “dead 81

loads o' that Chinaman” and “doted onto 'im.”Ah Wee “wus so little, with a face 'most as fair as yourn, and big, black eyes.” However, Gopher “goes loony” from his grief and while talking to the journalist, accuses Jo of not treating “her white”:

'Nine years ago!' he shrieked, throwing out his clenched hands -- 'nine years ago, w'en that big brute killed the woman who loved him better than she did me! -- me who had followed 'er from San Francisco, where 'e won 'er at draw poker! -- me who had watched over 'er for years w'en the scoundrel she belonged to was ashamed to acknowledge 'er and treat 'er white! -- me who for her sake kept 'is cussed secret till it ate 'im up! -- me who w'en you poisoned the beast fulfilled 'is last request to lay 'im alongside 'er and give 'im a stone to the head of 'im! And I've never since seen 'er grave till now, for I didn't want to meet 'im here” (127). 18

Here, Gopher divulges the revolving relationship of intimacy and labor between the main characters of the Haunted Valley. While Ah Wee’s sense of agency is unknown, Gopher clearly did the most labor of the trio. He cares for Ah Wee before and after his/her relationship with Jo, buries Jo, fulfilling his last request. Considering his considerable emotional and physical labor, Gopher resents Jo, the patriarch of the story, for being

“ashamed to acknowledge” Ah Wee and treat him/her “white.” Of course, here Bierce makes a pun of the phrase “treat her right” and changes it to “treat her white” in a later edition of his story to make clear the relationship between a person’s given rights and their visual skin color in the story’s framework. The social hierarchy of the fiction becomes clear: white frontiersman Jo is the fully socially-mobile American, while

Gopher remains a manual laborer, fit for public culture because of his European whiteness but barred from social mobility. Ah Wee then is the penultimate intersectional subject, hidden from society by Jo because of being both queered and ostensibly “ethnic” yellow.

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Ah Wee, however, returns like a wronged man or woman from the grave and betrays Jo’s deep-rooted intimacy and reliance on Chinese labor. Jo’s death, like a scene from an American Gothic novel, is staged in his decaying home with glittering eyes peering out of suggestive peepholes in home walls. Jo, after talking with the journalist about Chinagration, looks to the wall and, in terror, he screams:

Heavens! what a yell! It was like a Titan in his last, strong agony. Jo. staggered back after emitting it, as a cannon recoils from its own thunder, and then dropped into his chair, as if he had been stricken down like a beef — his eyes drawn sidewise toward the wall, with a stony stare that made my flesh creep on my bones. Looking in the same direction, I saw, with a quick chill of the scalp, that the knot-hole in the wall had indeed become a human eye — full, black eye, that glared into my own with an entire lack of expression more awful than the most devilish glitter. I involuntarily covered my face with my hands, to shut out the horrible illusion…(90)

Jo, like a Titan being overthrown by the next race of Olympian gods, screams as he sees

Ah Wee’s glittering eyes staring at him through a peephole in his hermaphrodite habitation. The narrator, too, covers his face to shut out the “illusion” of the dead Chinese laborer. Gopher later informs the narrator that Jo dies from seeing the eye of Gopher, instead of Ah Wee. Gopher had been voyeuristically watching the men through the wall, unbeknownst to Jo.

Jo becoming the object of Ah Wee’s and Gopher’s gaze in his own home is a fitting conclusion to this horror story. Rather than Jo being an agent of murder and sinophobia safely quarantined from his deeds, he becomes haunted and immobilized by

(what he believes) is the ghostly gaze of Ah Wee. Domestic elements are supposed to provide comfort in nineteenth-century rhetoric, but Jo’s home becomes, quite literally, haunted as the scene of Chinese redemption. Both figuratively and literally, Jo’s sense of home and at-homeness is decayed. The gaze through peepholes of inefficacious walls

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implies the lacking sturdiness and privacy of the home itself, while Jo, becoming the object, loses his autonomy and becomes displaced from domestic authority. Ah Wee’s penetrating gaze dissolves any gendering of spaces in Jo’s home, bridging both the saloon and outside space. Rather than the 19th century serialized movement between gendered rooms (kitchen, library, etc.), Jo’s house became a communal hermaphroditic space

(Wilson 67). The blurring of “outside” and “inside” makes simultaneous the interiors and exteriors of the home and blurs what was once foreign and domestic. Jo can never “leave home” because he never quite left, and he is in permanent displacement from a space of the domestic—neither here nor there.

Ah Wee isn’t homeless then, and Jo’s home isn’t “womanless,” after all: rather,

Ah Wee has haunted Jo’s home during the duration of this story. Ah Wee, characterized by his invisibility, homelessness, and objectification as a commodity passed between

Gopher and Jo, is finally made visible, albeit only by a part of the body (the eye). The eye becomes the image-story-in-itself. This eye conveys the well-worn gothic motif of the power of the gaze to shape representation and interiority, specifically in that of the imperial gaze. Ann Kaplan writes, “The imperial gaze reflects the assumption that the white western subject is central much as the male gaze assumes the centrality of the male subject” (78). If Jo’s killing and oppression of Ah Wee forces the Chinese man into feminized subjugation, then Ah Wee’s inverted colonial gaze forces Jo into a different subject position of gender-racial power asymmetry. “The gaze is integral to systems of power and ideas about knowledge,” and Ah Wee takes the position of the gazing male by surveying Jo (Kaplan 78). Of course then, both men co-emerge from this dichotomy. If

Ah Wee was the transgendered racial subject killed by employer Jo (after Jo’s prying

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eyes witnessed Ah Wee and Gopher’s sexual intimacy), then Jo becomes the queered object of Ah Wee’s haunting gaze, feminized and lacking domestic authority typical to the heterosexual, white, male American. In Bierce’s atypical text of domesticity, domestic order is broken, and Chinese Ah Wee is figured as a large eye in the wall, metaphorically disrupting the rational order of Jo’s own sexual normativity and the

Anglo-American home at large.

To some, Bierce’s gothic short story merely reflects anti-Chinese tensions in

America. We might even say, as Amy Kaplan argued about nineteenth-century regionalist texts in “Nation, Region, and Empire,” that Bierce commodifies the west coast as a form of literary tourism.19 However, as shown, American cosmopolitanism and

Orientalism changed when Anglo-Americans began to interact with Asian people directly, face-to-face, as opposed to simply engaging with porcelain and fine china imported from Asia or imitative of designs associated with Asia. In this chapter’s comparative archive of Americana, Muller and Bierce’s texts are underwritten by threatening Asian accents and the notable absence of women in the home, suggesting that

Asia itself has entered the private sphere and is affecting the state of the nation. These texts link race formation and the gendering of the private sphere to feminize Asian immigrants and express frontier identity through European, American, and Asian influences in nineteenth-century America. Both texts’ expressions of uncertain futures and dislocations of the home—irrational categories of gender, hints of foreign in the domestic sphere, the loss of craftsmanship—may be precisely their point. The American home is now disorderly, affectively changed by the specters of Asia now inhabiting both the public and private realms.

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CHAPTER 3

A China Trade-Inspired Book History: Decorative Arts and the Irish in Edith Maude Eaton’s “Mrs. Spring Fragrance”

Edith Maude Eaton’s short story collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) couldn’t be more different from the sensational portraits of Asia, Asians, and Asian objects one finds in U.S. literature produced as the nineteenth century came to a close through the early years of the twentieth.1 During this period, the portrayal of Asian objects and merchants in American fiction, from Frank Norris to William Dean Howells, was often associated with the onset of a new, modern world that threatened to replace

Anglo-American craftsmanship and manhood with commercialized art and what was known as “Coolieism” complicit with the big businesses of capitalism.2 We have seen glimpses of the birth of these fears in Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” which—as I demonstrated in my first chapter—casts Asian immigrants as menacing yellow phantoms threatening American captain Amasa Delano during a slave mutiny, while my chapter on

Bierce’s “The Haunted Valley” (1871) demonstrates another part of the development of late nineteenth-century stereotypes by dramatizing the eventual decay of Anglo masculinity on the American frontier through feminized Asian laborers. By the late nineteenth century, an entire genre came to life whose very name, “Yellow Peril,” left no room for doubt as to the extent of the threat the people, objects, and ideas associated with

Asia posed for U.S. values and the fictionally singular and uniform culture which those values supposedly spawned.3 In addition to the low-brow dime novels which cast

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America in peril from across the Pacific, elite authors provided more nuanced but no less uniform vision of the pitfalls of too much Asian influence on a still unstable American culture. For instance, Arthur Vinton’s dystopian Looking Further Backward (1890) paints a dystopian America ruled by Eastern empires, whereas William Dean Howell’s A

Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) and Frank Norris’ “The Third Circle” (1896) suggest dangerous outcomes of American trade with Asia, emphasizing the overconsumption of foreign goods (the dangerous stimulation of American consumerism to excess) and the decaying of American mind and spirit by Asia in a “reverse cultural imperialism” (Chung

33). Jack London’s essay “The Unparalleled Invasion” (1904) went as far to predict the dissolution of western empires and the rise of an imperial Japan and China.

Mrs. Spring Fragrance differentiates itself from these developments in American literary history by its very appearance, texture, and content. The book’s cover decorations employ a style popular more than a hundred years earlier during the height of the British

American China Trade, and, to even further draw the reader’s attention away from contemporaneous representations, the reader would find upon opening the book Eaton’s

English prose imprinted onto paper with images inspired by eighteenth-century chinoiserie: a Chinese harbor scene of a man in a boat with Chinese-style drawings of animals and vegetation on the land (qtd. in Ling).4 On the right side of each of the book’s pages, or, one might say, on the right side of each reminder of the long history of the discipline and aesthetic qualities associated with Asia, four characters encapsulate the scene, roughly translated into English, “Happiness, prosperity, and long life” (qtd. In

Ling). If the reader manages to pay attention to the content of the prose, he or she would find a book populated with stories of Chinese merchants, Chinese merchants’ daughters,

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Oriental Bazaar owners, and other Chinese laborers working in international commerce of the twentieth century. In fact, few authors of early twentieth-century America explore in detail the China Trade in America as Eaton does.

In what follows, I argue that Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s physical and textual differences point us towards the way Eaton encourages her largely white, American readership to re-imagine themselves as part of a Western-Asian world of commerce and culture.5 More precisely, in an era when Asian figures implied a dangerous one-way transmission of cultural values from the yellow peril to the white majority, Eaton’s invocations of the China Trade suggests an American cosmopolitanism that both looked to its forebears (Europe), while also considering Asia as its mainstay of expansion, labor, and culture. Amidst the anti-Chinese movement and immigration restrictions of the early twentieth-century, Edith Maude Eaton's Mrs. Spring Fragrance enters into the anti-

Chinese debates and argues for Asian immigration by taking her American readers back into an earlier historical moment in the US when China was thought of more favorably: during the pre-industrial era of the China Trade.6 She illustrates this historical revision of culture in two ways: both in the material arts of her book and in her stories connected with the character whose name serves as the book’s title. Discourses of the anti-Chinese movement contemporaneous with the publication of Mrs. Spring Fragrance associated

Asians with the onset of modernity and characterized the Chinese as the new working- class undercutting American traditions. Eaton intervenes in this seemingly ubiquitous discursive order, connecting her middle-class Chinese characters with not modernity, but with pre-industrial trade with China, and in doing so, she relates the Spring Fragrances with early American republican values honoring craftsmanship, virtue, and discipline.7

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Eaton’s use of physical and print adaptations of the China Trade experience in her book during this cultural and economic crisis—meaning, her exploration of how Anglo users imagined themselves as authentically American through the material objects and print texts of the China Trade in modern America—ostensibly tells the story of the

Chinese American experience, but also conversely narrates the influence of the real and imagined figuration of China in American nationalism. Eaton’s importing of Chinese commodities into the aesthetics of her book and narrative at once acknowledges the supposed foreignness of the objects, while simultaneously recognizing their already established historic naturalization in the American private and public space. Like Eaton’s sense of potential movement in her physical arts (the boat on water, mirror paintings in transatlantic circulation, and more), her book and title tale adds to the sense of an

Americanness encompassing a connected world within a network of the seas, both transatlantic and transpacific.

If Eaton’s Chinese merchant families revive pre-capitalist traditions to help alleviate the American anxieties of Asian immigration in the twentieth-century, Eaton's recurring Irish immigrant character, Carman, particularly represents the ills of modernity and racial inequality in her narrative and contemporary America at large. In this imagined revision of the racial antagonism between Irish and Asian working classes, Eaton illustrates Irish Carman as the foil to her title tale’s protagonist, Jade Spring Fragrance, a

Chinese merchant’s wife.8 While Irish immigrants are typically portrayed as "meat and potato" brutes in turn of the century American print, Eaton portrays Carman as a figure of

Anglo modern America whose mass journalistic writing for the tabloid The Gleaner, as well as his unrestrained consumerism and prejudice against non-whites, show just how

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detrimental unfettered “Americanizing” or western modernization can be.9 Carman as a figure in “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” embodies the perceived decay of American values caused by western big business, racism, and runaway material consumerism in the nation.

Rewriting the persistent characterization of Asians as related to the onset of capitalism,

Eaton’s characters and plot show how—unlike the “authentic,” hybrid Chinese-American manners of the Spring Fragrances—the Irish-American is conditioned by his capitalist environment and is the true “heathen” of the story.

To make my case for this chapter argument, I first provide a short biography of

Edith Maude Eaton, who writes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far. Despite being born in Britain and beginning her career in

Canada, Eaton claims she is a “Chinese American” author writing on the transcultural relations between the United States and China in her stories. After detailing Eaton’s biography, I will consider Eaton’s book as an object, paying close attention to the book cover, print, and page design and situating her aesthetics within the current popularity of pre-capitalist art. Finally, I will analyze the tales associated with the title character, especially the book’s first story, the aptly named, “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” discussing the comparative racialization of the Irish and Chinese characters in the narrative and its relation to the economy of China Trade images associated with Spring Fragrance and her husband in the story.

Reading the character of Mrs. Spring Fragrance through the book’s material history, as well as considering the story’s implicit critique of Irish Americans as “failed” immigrants, Eaton forges American identity through transpacific trade and renders her diasporic Chinese characters ethnically “white”—a model American minority—through

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their real and imagined connection to cultural capital of the China Trade and its memory.

Indeed, in these ways, the decorative and textual arts of Eaton’s book ends up leaving its own imprint in both art and politics of the era. Eaton establishes and revives the long history of America’s involvement with the China Trade to bolster her collection’s investment in modern Americanness while also working to inspire favorable Chinese-

American associations during the height of the anti-Chinese movements.

***

Born in England in 1865, Eaton was the older of two bi-racial daughters born to

English silk merchant Edward Eaton and his wife, Grace “Lotus Blossom” Trefusis.

Edward met his wife, Grace, a Chinese girl adopted by American missionaries, while conducting business in China (White-Parks 10). In 1873, the Eaton family relocated to

Canada for work. Edith Eaton, as a young woman, first began her literary career in

Montreal, but eventually left Canada to pursue writing in the United States. She lived in

San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston, self-identifying as Chinese-American and writing short sketches of the “Chinese” experience in America for a number of magazines, including the Overland Monthly, the Land of Sunshine, and Out West (White-Parks 9).

Writing under the pseudonym “Sui Sin Far,” Eaton’s work achieved a substantial readership during the era. She published more than a dozen stories between 1890 and

1915, and her one and only book was reviewed by the New York Times, the Boston

Globe, the Independent, and the Montreal Weekly, among others (White-Parks 200-2).

Despite facing certain discrimination in the publishing industry as a mixed-race woman writing about immigrants and minorities, Edith Eaton compiled her life’s work in a short story collection titled, Mrs. Spring Fragrance. Published in June 1912, Mrs. Spring

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Fragrance is a motley collection of comic, tragic, and satirical stories illustrating the tensions of Chinese Americans in the United States at the turn of the century. Her book is divided into two sections: “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” and “Tales of Chinese Children.” The first section focuses on adult fictions, named after the protagonist of the namesake tale,

Mrs. Spring Fragrance. The second section focuses on a mix of stories about children and stories for children.

The organization of Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s content (from adult to children), as well as the short story names (“The Dreams that Failed, “The Wisdom of the New,” and

“The Americanizing of Pau Tsu”) reflects the collection’s major themes: the assimilation experiences of first and second-generation Chinese Americans and China-American intercultural trade relations. At the time, Eaton was writing to a primarily white audience who, due to contemporaneous racial attitudes, were primarily interested in the exotic and

Orientalist spectacle (White-Parks 7). Considering Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s diverse characters and portrayal of class relations, Eaton intends to revise for her readers the early twentieth-century stereotypes of Asians in culture that portray Asians peoples as either a sinister mass of lower-class thugs or as a yellow peril that threaten American ways of life.10 In her sketch, “The Chinese in America,” Eaton claims that, “[F]iction writers seem to be so imbued with [these] ideas that you scarcely ever read about a

Chinese person who is not a wooden peg” (234).

To adapt the current pejorative discourses about the Chinese, Eaton illustrates a bourgeois “Eurasian” identity in her short story collection, particularly invoking the mixing of Asian and American cultures. Carol Roh-Spaulding argues that Eaton insisted on “creating hybrid motifs and characters . . . depicting Eurasian consciousness as one

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that wavers between but remains permanently resistant to either culturally-imposed notion of categorical purity, Anglo or Chinese (156).” Naturally, Eaton conveys and critiques American nativism in her stories—specifically, citizenship and nationalism based on racial ideologies—through a prolonged exploration of the China Trade and

American-Chinese transculturation. Quite literally portraying the supposed “mixed” or blended interiority of her characters in stories such as “Its Wavering Image” and “Mrs.

Spring Fragrance,” Eaton focuses on middle-class Chinese Americans, many of whom are immersed in East-West commerce. Almost all of her domestic fictions focus on

American trade with China with references to Chinese merchants, and her stories consistently suggest that a hybridity of “Americanness” and “Chineseness” served as a defining feature of main characters. Her most common and prominent references to this hybridity lies in the exchange and consumption of Asian goods in her stories.

The theme of hybridity can be found in the very materiality of the book itself. The physical book is constructed to resemble a China Trade object and, in doing so, its content is associated with the sublime qualities of the old trade’s porcelain, fine china, tea, and other objects and goods. Unlike the en vogue ephemeral pulps of the time, including the seemingly ubiquitous yellow peril narratives, Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s book cover and pages are notably delicate and artistic and a blend of American and

Chinese design, associating the stories with the gravitas of Orientalist heirlooms and distinguishing her representations of Asian people, places, and things from competing representations already in circulation. These material distinctions begin with the book’s publisher. A.C. McClurg and Company put out Mrs. Spring Fragrance, a house that was

“against cheap book-making” and considered it a “danger to the trade” (Tebbel 442). To

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produce Eaton’s collection, A.C. McClurg and Company chose the external printing company, Plimpton Press of Norwood Massachusetts. Evident from Mrs. Spring

Fragrance’s book aesthetics, Plimpton Press considered their “printing as art” and book- making as a “total concept” (Plimpton Press 75). Their 1911 yearbook defined the “book beautiful” as a “composite thing, made up of many parts, and may be made beautiful by .

. . its literary content, its materials . . . or each of its parts in subordination to the whole which collectively they constitute” (Plimpton Press 78). Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s very composition, the materials that constituted its very physical existence and through which readers first consumed it visually, distinguished Eaton’s Asians from every other one in

American literature.

Illustration 3: Edith Maude Eaton, “Mrs. Spring Fragrance.”

(Cover) 1913. Book arts. HathiTrust Digital Library

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Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s blended international book arts, combined with its subject matter, set the stage for an exploration of the past and present historical continuum of China in America. The book cover was red, the color associated with happiness and luck in China (White-Parks 197-8). “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” is printed across the top of the cover in gold, calligraphic-style letters, while four characters, roughly translating to “happiness, prosperity, and long life,” are vertically aligned along the bottom right corner. The mixing of languages on the cover reinforces the meaning of the red motif as well as the imagined East-West spatial economy of the story. The language on the cover frames a scene of spring itself: dragonflies superimposed on two white lotus flowers that emerge from a water ripple embossed across the cover’s center.

Another Chinese lily (a visual translation of Sui Sin Far’s name) appears on the spine of the book, and its long stem extends down the spine between the gold-lettered title “Mrs.

Spring Fragrance” at the top and the publisher’s name “A. C. McClurg” at the bottom

(White-Parks 197-8). Finally, the pages themselves are grey-green or “lotus-toned.”

Eaton’s prose itself is superimposed over a Chinese harbor scene with a Chinese-style drawing of a crested bird perched on a bamboo branch. This landscape design, referred to as a shan shui (hills and streams) was typical of Chinese imports and, as in Eaton’s book arts, featured a number of basic elements, including birds, trees, fishermen, etc (Haddad

10). Chinese characters also line the bottom right corner of each page, posing the contrast between English and Chinese languages and once again reinforcing an East-West motif.

Overall, the drawings imitate the style of China-inspired heirloom antiquities of early

America, particularly the reverse paintings on glass mirrors of the China Trade (qtd. in

Ling).11

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Illustration 4: Edith Maude Eaton, “Mrs. Spring Fragrance.” 1913.

(Title Page) Title Page. HathiTrust Online Digital library.

In foregrounding objects and images associated with pre-industrial America and residual notions of China that clash with contemporaneous discursive formations, the very material qualities of Eaton’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance conjure the history of

Americans marking their independence and identity with trade with China, as well as the positive ethnographic imaginings about Asia and its people. To do so would likely have called forth for her readers the wide range of associated narratives and ways of imagining

America’s relation with China. For instance, the pseudonymous children’s author Peter

Parley, whose works were popular before the 1850s, took the scenes on early American

Asian porcelain quite seriously as Asia itself, dictating in his children’s book that,

“Everyone is familiar with their [the Chinese’s] dress, personal appearance, and aspects of their houses, from the drawings in their porcelain” (21-2). Yet another nineteenth-

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century American author, this time from the Boston Atlas, reviewed P.T. Barnum’s

Chinese Museum and claimed that he first learned of China through Asian crockery: "Our first ideas of China-dom were formed at meal times, and illustrated with plates”

(“Crockerydom” 45). As John Haddad notes, the lack of accessible information on China and the paucity of visual print culture in the early nineteenth-century meant that, “Owners of willowware and Canton china, then, apparently took quite seriously these small designs that we now deem unrealistic and purely ornamental” (49). For the American users of China Trade objects, these decorative images provided an escapist, sublime reality, much like the reading of a book on an Oriental Garden of Eden or Arabian

Nights, but also were thought to be instructive of the nobility of Asians in their design.

Mrs. Spring Fragrance thus re-imagines the China Trade cultural legacy in terms of a transatlantic and transpacific genealogy and landscape that is associated with a more

“authentic”—because more closely associated with the birth of the U.S.—pre-industrial

America. The material qualities of Eaton’s only book emphasizes a precapitalist

American through Asian objects and, in the process—here I am applying June Hee

Chung’s analysis of the book’s language to its physical properties—suggests “Asian items belong to an old, established set of traditions rather than having been mass- produced” and contrasts Eaton’s stories with the “cheapness and bright gaudiness” of yellow peril narratives that showcases the “anxieties of the loss of art and beauty in a capitalist world” (45-6).

***

These very issues of race and modernity appear in the book’s stories as well, especially in the title story. “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” depicts the misadventures of the

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diasporic, Chinese merchant’s wife Jade Spring Fragrance, who plays matchmaker to her second-generation Chinese American friends. The Spring Fragrances are a China Trade merchant couple, immersed in Pacific Northwest commercial-suburban life. In the story,

Mrs. Jade Spring Fragrance is busy match-making her second-generation Chinese friends,

Laura Chin Yuen (or Mai Gwi Far) and Kai Tzu, who are in love, but barred from getting married. Unfortunately, Laura’s more conservative first generation Chinese American parents have already arranged Laura’s marriage to the Chinese government schoolmaster’s son, Man You, and they are displeased with Kai Tzu’s American upbringing. Jade, unhappy with this tragic situation, travels to San Francisco (under the guise she is visiting her cousin) and hatches a plan to unite the lovers. While helping the couple, she dispenses advice to them via quotes by Lord Alfred Tennyson, the famous

British Poet, who she inaccurately and humorously refers to as an “American author.”

She also dreams of taking tea with her husband, who she misses dearly.

Meanwhile, Sing Yook Spring Fragrance overhears his wife quoting Tennyson, and Carman, the Spring Fragrances’ Irish neighbor, mistranslates the quote, which leads

Sing Yook to mistakenly believe his wife Jade is consorting with a paramour during her recent trip to San Francisco. Sing Yook continues worrying throughout the story about

Jade’s fidelity and the possible dissolution of their marriage. In the end, however, all conflict between couples is resolved. Jade successfully unites not only her friends Laura

Chin Yuen and Kai Tzu, but also the schoolmaster’s son Man You with one of the prettiest bachelorettes of the Chinese American community in San Francisco, Ah Oi. The impending nuptials of all couples are announced, and Jade explains her ruse to her husband, who, in the moment, realizes his misunderstanding of the situation and the

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Tennyson quotes. Sing Yook ends up feeling grateful for his dedicated, clever wife and presents Jade with a jadestone pendant. The story ends happily with Jade receiving her jade necklace on their wedding anniversary.

From Eaton’s Tennyson references to transpacific breezes and tea, Eaton introduces the Spring Fragrances in her book as “model minorities before their time,” or in the very least, Eurasian in many facets of two different stories (Pan 92).12 “Mrs. Spring

Fragrance” is a portrait of the Chinese merchant class as a culturally-elite, self-governing class of people who are more interested in labors of love and art than an economic bottom-line. Eaton notes in “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” that, “Mr. Spring Fragrance, whose business name was Sing Yook, was a young curio merchant. Though conservatively

Chinese in many respects, he was at the same time what is called by the Westerners,

‘Americanized.’ Mrs. Spring Fragrance was even more ‘Americanized’” (1). Later in

Eaton’s collection, Mr. Spring Fragrance is characterized as a veritable rags-to-riches story in “The Inferior Woman”: “As a boy he had come to the shores of America, worked his way up, and by dint of painstaking study after working hours acquired the Western language and western business ideas” (33).

Because “Spring Fragrance,” like Eaton’s mother’s name “Lotus Blossom,” calls forth the traditional pet names that rural Chinese families gave to their daughters, Eaton quite literally depicts Jade’s and Sing Yook’s rise from the rural class to the merchant class, contradictorily suggesting their “Americanness” is from learned business acumen in international trade relations between China and the U.S. (White-Parks 52). She also genders and positively references trade and business as a respectable vocation, describing

Sing Yook’s “painstaking study” of capital exchange as part of his masculine coming-of-

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age story as a Chinese American. From these transpacific beginnings and the circulation of western ideas, Mr. Spring Fragrance goes on to become a middle-man in the global

China-U.S. exchange. Significantly, Eaton here suggests Mr. Spring Fragrance is

“American” because of his economic mobility as a global migrant by virtue of his

America-Asia trade links and migration.

Eaton also introduces Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s American identity through metaphors of mobility and the transpacific, but Jade’s “exchanges” focus on matters of the heart and consumption of high culture. We are introduced to Jade by a measure of her

Americanization, which is particularly through the transatlantic high culture of Tennyson:

Jade is “more Americanized” than her husband, and she quotes British Lord Alfred

Tennyson at length. Like her husband, she is also notably characterized by her mobility and class status, describing her visiting relatives in San Francisco and being “invited everywhere that the wife of an honorable Chinese merchant could go” (6-7).

Emphasizing the East-West economy of images Eaton names the Spring Fragrances as

Chinese and American translations of jade: “Sing Yook” in Cantonese translates as

“Jade” (qtd. in “Interview” of Lee). This introduces the Spring Fragrances as reciprocal figures of China and the United States. Completing the metaphor of movement in her description, Eaton invokes oceania when describing her protagonist: “There was a spring like freshness in the air on the day that Mrs. Spring Fragrance came home. The skies overhead were as blue as Puget Sound stretching its gleaming length toward the mighty

Pacific, and all the beautiful green world seemed to be throbbing with springing life”

(18). In the end of the story, after Jade successfully crafts both marriages, her friend

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Laura not coincidentally sees Jade through the window of her American home, describing her as, “the sweetest jade jewel in the world!” (18).

In making Jade a nexus of transpacific and transatlantic culture, Eaton reflects on the United States’ inherited culture and identity from its former colonial authority,

Britain, as well as Jade’s own country of origin, China. Like Sing Yook, Mrs. Spring

Fragrance is depicted as both transpacific but also shown as “Americanized” because of her learned transatlantic values and migration. Her mobility and Pacific West migration in the passage—as opposed to Sing Yook’s capital exchange—is the business of family and community. Mrs. Spring Fragrance freely travels the Pacific West due to her merchant’s class privilege, and while her husband creates links and exchanges for the

China Trade, Jade puts Chinese and American family, friends, and relatives into contact, particularly through her match-making of “Americanized” Chinese. In fact, her depth of blended, Eurasian interiority is quite literally shown through her American home’s window, when Laura “sees” her through the American window as a Jade jewel of the world. While recognizing Jade as foreign, this also naturalizes Jade in the American home. Eaton’s tongue-in-cheek misquoting of Tennyson then, is in fact, not a misquote, but a commentary on Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s own transnational identity and her relation to the global phenomena—this time being the popular circulation on Tennyson in

America and also Chinese American trade—that inform modern notions of

“Americanness.” The circulation of Tennyson and Jade as a matchmaker/ coveted trade jewel completes Eaton’s spatial economy between China and America, clearly positioning the Spring Fragrances as embodying a union of old and new Asian-American cultures and a significant mix of Atlantic and Pacific.

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If Sing Yook’s Americanness is inherent in his Chinese merchant public persona of selling on commodities on a global stage, Eaton emphasizes Jade’s American sensibility through a variety of private, domestic scenes showing her feminized consumption of global commodities. Eaton first shows Jade sending letters of love to her husband while staring at her crafted, bejeweled rings. She “gazed complacently down upon her bejeweled fingers and folded in with her letter to Mr. Spring Fragrance a bright little sheaf of condensed love” (10). Towards the end of the story, Eaton pairs the transatlantic with the transpacific once again via letter-writing, but this time through Sing

Yook’s quotes of Lord Alfred Tennyson and Jade’s imagined taking of tea. Jade becomes excited when her more conservative Chinese husband includes a Tennyson quote in his latest message to her, and she wishes, at that moment, she could take tea with him. Eaton writes, “Perhaps he had been reading her American poetry books since she had left him!

She hoped so. They would lead him to understand her sympathy for her dear Laura and

Kai Tzu . . . Mrs. Spring Fragrance began to wish she could fall asleep and wake to find the week flown, and she in her own little home pouring tea for Mr. Spring Fragrance”

(15). In the end, Eaton even completes her Eurasian story with Jade receiving a jadestone pendant from her husband on their anniversary, a sign of their eternal affection and union.

Eaton feminizes and domesticates the Chinese merchant couple, showing them as a normative, heterosexual couple in an American home dealing with matters of love and assimilation. Jade is even seen through the window of her house, suggesting her moral interiority, like the American home, is also at the heart of the nation.13 Eaton’s Jade then is not something foreign in which the American home is contrasted against, but part of its essential foundation. Eaton also naturalizes these global influences of American identity

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even further by showing Jade’s typical “American” material and print texts are, in fact, both transatlantic and transpacific in origin. Jade, for example, writes that she is excited by her husband’s interest in British poetry and believes this reading will help him relate to her own understanding of American marriages and western culture at large. Jade’s interest in her husband “learning” American” values through Tennyson, of course, infers the already cosmopolitan nature of America—British and American cultures share so many common aspects that reading high art of either nation would help you understand both. Not simply a transatlantic scene of culture though, Jade also imagines herself taking tea with her husband after he reads transatlantic poetry, as if to convey a transatlantic to a transpacific (tea from China) oscillation of culture and value. In the end, Eaton even describes the couple through descriptors of the natural world (shores of the Pacific, the

Puget sound), which is in deep contrast to the current negative portrayals of Asians as

“middle-men” of capitalism and industrialism.

Eaton’s numerous material and figurative cross-cultural, cosmopolitan symbols— from the book arts to the Chinese merchants—further begs the question of how the balance or imbalance of power between China and America affects the United States and

Asia abroad. Eaton, in fact, portrays a changed China due to Sing Yook Spring

Fragrance’s one-sided American business dealings in her second short story of her collection, “The Inferior Woman.” Eaton describes the changing landscape of China due to American capitalism: “Through his [Sing Yook’s] efforts trade between his native town and the port city in which he lived had greatly increased. A school in Canton was being built in part with funds furnished by him and a railway syndicate, for the purpose

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of constructing a line of railway from the big city of Canton to his own native town, was under process of formation, with the name of Spring Fragrance at its head” (31-2).

Eaton’s imagining of trains and building in China emblazoned with “Spring

Fragrance,” a common peasant name, suggests America’s influence and modernization of

China via economic and social policies. Sing Yook furnishes the western modernization efforts in China, but this supposed philanthropy infers the uneven relationship between

China and America in its expansion of western values. After Sing Yook’s work is complete, China’s landscape will begin to resemble the modern American landscape

(with trains and buildings), and Sing Yook’s benevolent work seems to be more of the

“gospel” of trade and capitalism, which the U.S. currently has the foothold in trade and policies (Pan 90). As Arnold Pan argues, the existence of the favored class of Chinese merchants in the early-twentieth-century United States “depended on a global economic system which subordinated China to the west” (90). Eaton’s portrait of China as modernized is thus both foreign and yet familiar, because the Pacific is already the frontier of the U.S., and the Spring Fragrances themselves embody an oscillating figure of foreign and domestic, or the supposed foreign already in the domestic. They are a

Eurasian merchant family that revises current stereotypes of Chinese in America, but their subject position also suggests the delicate alliance between modern Americanization and Chinese values.

Similar to Sing Yook being an ambassador of American values, Eaton’s decision to name her story after the barren, match-making female protagonist based in the Pacific

Northwest revises current stereotypes of Chinese, but also reimagines the Spring

Fragrances as “converts” from older, traditionalist Chinese norms to new, normative

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American social codes. Between the two, Americanization is portrayed as the balance between Eastern and Western values, but inequity between the two countries is also palpable. Eaton describes Jade as a figurative intercultural vessel: she loves babies, but is unable to have them: “She had had two herself, but both had been transplanted into the spirit land before the completion of even one moon” (7). Rather than having children,

Jade’s current focus is on matchmaking, jade, and jewels, considering “she had signified a desire for a certain jadestone pendant” for her anniversary (10). When she travels to San

Francisco, she even describes America as a paternal figure to China, claiming in a letter to Sing Yook that she was on “a most agreeable visit” and the benevolent “Mrs. Samuel

Smith, an American lady, known to my cousin, asked for my accompaniment to a magniloquent lecture the other evening. The subject was ‘America, the Protector of

China!’” (7).

Through heavy-handed metaphors of reproduction and paternalism, it becomes clear that the Chinese merchant couple “reproduces” a Eurasian cosmopolitan sensibility in America that also makes the transpacific itself an extension of America. As David

Palumbo Liu argues, “In a very essential manner, America’s modernization called for its penetration into the Pacific region,” and the Pacific Rim was already imagined as an economic and political extension of the American frontier, particularly after the acquisition of Pacific colonies in the Spanish-American War (17).14 Between the two, the

Spring Fragrances become veritable ambassadors of Chinese and American culture and the supposed differences between the two circulating cultures begin to wane, if only because of the clear political imbalance between the countries.

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Eaton exaggerates the perils of “Americanization” and its relation to race by reviving the historical antagonism between Chinese and Irish immigrants in America. She establishes an Irish immigrant as a foil in her story: the arrogant, sensationalist journalist and neighbor, Carman. In “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” Carman ultimately sets the stage for the misunderstanding between the Spring Fragrances, insults the Chinese in America as not “real” citizens, and misunderstands transatlantic high art. For Eaton, Irish Carman ultimately embodies the exact opposite of a virtuous, cosmopolitan American: bad manners, racism, and cheap, dishonest journalism that participates in western materialism’s commercialized decay of fine art and excessive passive consumption.

Because Eaton conceptualizes American race relations within an international context, it is no surprise that, within the covers of her East-West inspired “book beautiful,” Irish immigrants represent a failed Americanness that lacks authenticity and transpacific virtue. The book history of Mrs. Spring Fragrance reveals Eaton’s deliberate comparison of Irish and Chinese immigrants in multiple stories, and Eaton even invokes the pejorative phrase “beef and potatoes” (126)—in contrast to Chinese rice—to describe an Irish character in her other stories, which is the phrase used by the largely Irish

American Federal Labor movement that was anti-Asian (Gompers 19). Carman and the

Spring Fragrances in fact appear together in both “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” and “The

Inferior Woman.” While Eaton’s Carman is not initially identified as any specific ethnicity or race in “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” the surname Carman is suggestive of

English, Scottish, or Irish origins. Plus, in “The Inferior Woman,” the second story of

Eaton’s collection that focuses on the Spring Fragrances, Eaton describes Carman as having an “impetuous Irish heart” and contrasts him with the couple (28). In the second

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edition of “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” Eaton even added an additional satirical exchange between Carman and the Spring Fragrances that further juxtaposes their identities in the narrative (White-Parks 215).

Considering her persistent Irish-Chinese pairings, Eaton is sure to satirize Irish

Carman from the beginning to the end of “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” suggesting that he may be phenotypically “white,” but his laziness and self-absorption is a sign of lacking

Eastern virtue. When Mr. Spring Fragrance first overheard his wife quoting Lord Alfred

Tennyson in her advice to Laura (who was currently barred from marrying her current beau because of previous arranged marriage), he was curious as to what the quote meant.

He asks his neighbor Carman for help in translating the quote, “Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all.” Eaton writes Carman’s response as:

“Certainly,” returned the young man with a genial smile. He was a star student at the

University of Washington, and had not the slightest doubt that he could explain the meaning of the universe” (5). Eaton’s Carman then insinuates the quote means it’s better to love, even if unrequited or have lost it. Hinting at Carman’s propensity for a non- monogamous love, Eaton writes, “The young man smiled pensively and reminiscently.

More than a dozen young maidens “loved and lost” were passing before his mind’s eye,” and Mr. Spring Fragrance then “turned away to muse upon the unwisdom of the

American way of looking at things” (5).

Highlighting Carman’s promiscuity, Eaton here critiques the young man’s passive consumption of art, his lack of self-control, and his decayed middle-class values. Despite being book-learned with an American education, Carman shows his immaturity and arrogance in the very beginning of the scene, first when the narrator comments that

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Carman “had not the slightest doubt he could explain the meaning of the universe.” Then, when Sing Yook asks Carman to translate the Tennyson quote, Carman insinuates that the quote could mean promiscuity, hinting at his own “multiple” maidens that have come and gone. Within the sentimental genre of the marriage plot, this is Eaton’s undeniable critique of Carman as a cad. Carman’s careless interpretation also causes panic in Mr.

Spring Fragrance, who initially thought the quote meant to cherish the person you are with and live a chaste life with them. Carman’s tomfoolery ultimately triggers one of the major conflicts for the Spring Fragrances in the story, and Sing Yook is left to ponder the

“unwisdom” of Americans and wonder if his wife might be in love with another man.

Eaton’s first scene alone crafts a deliberate comparison between the Spring

Fragrances and Carman, exploring what Matthew Frye Jacobson would call a “whiteness of a different color” in America (1).15 Irish immigrants, while ostensibly defined as

Anglo peoples, were still assimilating in the middle-class American imagination. This was partially due to American culture’s overwhelming nativism and strong social arbiters of whiteness based on US traditions. As Jacobson argues, whiteness in American culture was currently being reified by the era’s “national encounters with ‘barbarian dominions’ even more problematic than the white immigrants themselves— from constant (and constantly narrated) contact with ‘black morsels’ like the nations of the plains, Mexico,

Hawaii, Samoa, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines” (161). In the social realm of race in America, the Irish were then still “becoming” white and held less social capital. Even worse off, however, were the Chinese in America, who were barred access from participating in citizenship and perpetually seen as foreign. In “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” then, Eaton rewrites this logic of race relations, depicting the Spring Fragrances as the

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cosmopolitan but decidedly “American” couple improving their community through matchmaking and their Irish Carman neighbor as a threat to American values in the story.

Towards the end of the story, the Spring Fragrances figuratively appear more

“American” as they interact with Irish Carman, who undemocratically cites Britain in his descriptions of America while referring to Anglos like himself as “real” Americans.

Carman asks to be the only white man invited to the Spring Fragrance’s party, stating,

“But, Mr. Spring Fragrance, don’t invite any other white fellows. If you do not I shall be able to get in a scoop. You know, I’m sort of an honorary reporter for the Gleaner. . . I shall call it ‘A high-class Chinese stag party!” (12). He then aptly uses a metaphor of

British nobility to describe Americanness, saying “Just as soon as a foreigner puts his foot upon our shores, he also becomes of the nobility—I mean, the royal family” (12).

When Sing Yook asks, “What about my brother in the Detention Pen?” Carman responds using British phrases, saying, “Well, that is a shame—‘a beastly shame,’ as the

Englishman says. But understand, old fellow, that we real Americans are up against that—even more than you” (12).

In this scene, Carman is expressed as a journalistic figure of white tourism, a man who uses emotion and “sensation” to capitalize off of Asian stereotypes and is willing to venture into the privacy of his neighbors’ own home to do so.16 And this is all despite their neighborly camaraderie and the couple’s obvious assimilation. To add insult to injury, Carman then insinuates his friends, the Spring Fragrances, are not truly

“Americans,” and his invocation of the “royal family” associates him with crumbling

European colonialism and empires. Eaton obviously satirizes her Irish character’s non- monogamous leanings and undemocratic proclamations, making him unrepresentative of

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American bourgeois society within the economy of racializations in her story. Carman— in contrast with the cosmopolitan Chinese merchant classes— is a non-productive citizen who is incapable of self-governance. Eaton valorizes the Spring Fragrances’ as not only more noble people, but also citizens in a more noble profession (the China Trade).

In an era when Asian immigrants were represented as opium addicts, gamblers, and even threatening masses, Edith Maude Eaton’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance is remarkable in terms of its ethnic and racial representations, but also in its ability to relate the history of American culture and Chinese culture. The nineteenth-century maritime experience of the transpacific obviously generated much of the writing of the American post- revolutionary public, and Eaton’s book is just one example of how authors responded to the objects and people of the Pacific oceanic world and its lingering effects in our modern social world. If ways of seeing race are informed by supposedly shared spaces and experiences, then the legacy of the China Trade and its use in the home inform racial formation, as well. Eaton’s focus on domestic fictions and trade is very deliberate, grounding her short story collection in the physical, the sentimental, and the “real” to make clear the everyday emotions and reality of Chinese American life.

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NOTES

Introduction

1Weapons using gunpowder were employed by both the Chinese and the Mongol forces in the 13th century, and prior to porcelain’s mass importation and eventual manufacture in England, the porcelain teacup (now a symbol of English national culture) was thought to embody superior Chinese technology and aesthetics. For more on weapons and technology, see Jiahua Zhou, Ancient China's Technology and Science.

2 Like the deep South of the U.S., which has been historically-imagined in American culture as both a foreign and domestic region, the American Pacific was formed by a unique set of trade and social linkages both inside and outside of the US and transformed the imagining and role of the west coast in the nineteenth century. “American Pacific” regionalism is evinced by regionalist writers including Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and Bret Harte and emerged in American magazines out of historical changes in Orientalist print and time-space compressions of the global economy. John Eperjesi argues that the Northwest fur trade and the China Trade, the first mediums of exchange linking U.S. and Asian economies, led to Americans exploring new Pacific Island items to trade on, hire laborers, and refuel ships. This expansion of trade, along with the onset of the Coolie Trade in the 1840s, particularly contributed to the figurative “gradual temporal and spatial compression of the Pacific [in culture], where the islands are being drawn closer to each as well as to the United States and China” in the American imagination (45). For more, see John Eperjesi, The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American Culture.

3 See Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba for more on the ensconced family relationships between global trades.

4 Melville contrasts both African slaves and Asian indentured laborers in his 1855 short story, “Benito Cereno,” often referring to the scenes of mixed labor and his story as a whole as a “strange history.” Also, during the Trinidad experiment, New World plantation owners experimented by replacing African slave laborers with Asian indentured laborers in the Caribbean after the international abolition slavery. See Lisa Lowe, “Intimacies of Four Continents” in Haunted By Empire.

5 The new British-Americans and early Americans imported an extraordinary amount of Chinese goods (approximately 70 million pieces of porcelain) into the colonies before 1800, using China porcelain ware and more for cultural capital and social devices. For more, see Caroline Frank, Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America.

6 I invoke regional cosmopolitanism in this essay not only because the imagining of regionalism in print also meant the public imagining a national common space, but also because many of the magazine- born, regional texts I study became national sensations, experiencing second publishing lives in nationally- circulating books and magazines.

7 Jacques Derrida writes that the pharmakon is both the poison and the remedy: “The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of) difference” (127). See Derrida, Dissemination. 111

8 Yong Chen writes that “The emergence of these [garment] factories during the 1860s and 1870s turned Chinese San Francisco into a manufacturing center . . . In 1885, the investigating committee of San Francisco identified more than two hundred and fifty manufacturing units in Chinatown that employed a total of over two thousand people” (66). See Chen, Chinese San Francisco.

9 For more on American Pacific expansion, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples At Home and Abroad, 1876-1917. See also Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community .

10 My three chapters on Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Bierce’s “The Haunted Valley,” and Eaton’s “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” explore this persistent imagining and stereotyping of Asians as visually- inscrutable.

11 Bret Harte and Mark Twain’s play “Ah Sin” and Bierce’s short story “The Haunted Valley” both employ stereotypes of Asians as either duplicitous or ghosts.

12For scholarship exploring the concept of “coolieism” in American culture and its relation to constructions of masculinity, see Eric Hayot, "Chinese Bodies, Chinese Futures" in Representations.

Chapter 1

1 I will be citing “Benito Cereno” from Melville’s 1856 published short story collection, The Piazza Tales. However, Melville, in fact, first published “Benito Cereno” in volume 6 of Putnam's Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art from October through December of 1855. There are no significant textual differences between the editions. See Melville, Piazza Tales.

2 For a more detailed account of Melville’s adaptation of Delano’s travelogue, see Harold H. Scudder, "Melville's Benito Cereno and Captain Delano's Voyages” in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America .

3 For more on the role of epistemology in “Benito Cereno,” see Nancy Roundy’s, "Present Shadows: Epistemology in Melville’s “Benito Cereno” in Arizona Quarterly . See also Mary Rohrberger, “Point of View in ‘Benito Cereno’: Machinations and Deceptions” in College English .

4 While I examine the symbiotic processes of Atlantic and Pacific trades in the story, previous scholars of “Benito Cereno” typically examine comparative formations of blackness and whiteness through a distinct transatlantic lens based on Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double- Consciousness. For more examples of this transatlantic framework, see Dana Nelson, "The Word in Black and White: Reading "Race" in American Literature ; Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850; and Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville.

5 Carolyn Karcher makes a powerful argument for the influence of the Amistad slave insurrection on Melville’s writing of “Benito Cereno” in "The Riddle of the Sphinx: Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’ and the Amistad Case" in Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno. However, Melville also most obviously borrows from Delano’s travelogue, and this story of mutiny—much more than the Amistad tale—gestures towards the inhumanity of slavery and the problematics of American empire.

6 Cosmopolitanism, born from Enlightenment principles and the growth of democracy during the Age of Revolution, is defined by the Pauline Kleingeld and Eric Brown in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as the universalist ideal recognizing “all human beings, regardless of their political affiliation, are (or can and should be) citizens in a single community” (1). The history of American cosmopolitanism

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though is best described as a history and culture of multiple cosmopolitanisms in the U.S. This liberal, abstract ideal has been applied or invoked in multiple realms of American culture: moral cosmopolitanism, political cosmopolitanism, material cosmopolitanism, and more. Like Tom Lutz in his book Cosmopolitan Vistas, “I intend cosmopolitanism as a term [in this essay] that collapses the distinctions between the economic, ideological, and artistic realms” to show the ways in which, for example, the cosmopolitan acquisition of China goods and stuffs from the “Orient” was also a discourse of race formation in the mid- nineteenth century (27). See Pauline Kleingeld and Eric Brown, "Cosmopolitanism," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. See also Tom Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value.

7 For more on the Age of Revolution, see David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam Armitage, The Age of Revolutions in a Global Context, 1760-1840. Also, the Asia-Pacific, while previously examined in scholarship as a monolithic extension of Asia and space of Euro-American production, is a region of diverse and rich cultures with a long history of symbiotic trade relations with western empires. See Rob Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond for more information on Anglo-colonial imaginings of the Asia-Pacific region and its role in western consumption.

8 For more on southern American plantation owners’ interest in Chinese labor, see Gordon H. Chang, Asian Americans and Politics: Perspectives, Experiences, and Prospects. See also Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba.

9 Colleen Lye looks at forms of twentieth-century American Orientalism articulating Asians as degenerative to Anglo-Saxonism. I predate her argument, arguing that similar Orientalist discourses were emerging in mid-nineteenth-century America. See Lye, America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945.

10 Moon Ho Jung’s Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation gives a wonderful overview of the significance of “coolie” in US culture and the history of the sugar plantations in the Americas.

11 Greg Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World is the most up-to-date account of the Tryal revolt. Grandin convincingly suggests that Melville combines facets from the two real-life instigators of the revolt—an educated, west African Muslim Babo and his son Mori—into the single character “Babo” for Benito Cereno.

12 See Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking for more on the formation of yellow and the development of the racial color line in American culture.

13 Famous for its cranial constructions, the brilliance of Crania Americana, of course, lies in Morton’s scientific “discoveries” linking a person’s exteriority with their interiority, relating the color of one’s skin to their bone structure and brain. With this work, he defines race as a “truth” of human behavior and a taxidermic signifier of person and character. Morton describes the “Mongolian family,” for example, as, “This great division of the human species is characterized by a sallow or olive colored skin, which appears to be drawn tight over the bones of the face; long black straight hair, and thin beard. The nose is broad, and short; the eyes are small, black, and obliquely placed, and the eyebrows are arched and linear; the lips are turned, the cheek bones broad and flat…” (5). See Morton, Crania Americana.

14 For more on the role of Columbus in “Benito Cereno,” see Mary Y. Hallab, "Victims of ‘Malign Machinations’: Irving's ‘Christopher Columbus’ and Melville's ‘Benito Cereno" in The Journal of Narrative Technique.

15 Cooke, an infamous English privateer, exploited communities off the Pacific coast of Latin America for food, boats, and money. He later died off the coast of Costa Rica from an illness he picked up in Chile during his looting. See David F. Marley, “Cooke, John” in Pirates of the Americas. 113

16 Frank’s Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America explores the significance of the China Trade in early America.

17 In his book The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism, Timothy Marr brilliantly argues that Melville strategically juxtaposes Islamic despots and American sea captains throughout his work to suggest the moral bankruptcy and greed of his era.

18 Thomas Salmon, an eighteenth-century traveler, remarks that “Manilla lies between the rich kingdoms of the E. and W. that it has been esteemed the best situation in the world for a foreign traffic. . . . [S]ilver is brought from New Spain, or Mexico and Peru, diamonds from Golconda. . . . [s]ilks, tea, Japan, and Chinaware, and gold dust from China and Japan . . . ” (69). For more on the Manila Galleons, see Thomas Salmon, The Modern Gazetteer. The Seventh Edition, with Great Additions. A New Set of Maps, Etc.

19 As Grandin outlines in Empire of Necessity, the west African slaves on board the original Tryal were Muslim. Atufal’s name, for example, was likely the compression of a first and last name, considering “Fal” was a popular surname in Sengal (98).

20 In Pereira’s article, “Black Liberators: The Role of Africans & Arabs sailors in the Royal Navy within the Indian Ocean 1841-1941,” he argues that when the British Royal Navy’s boat, the Boscawen, returned to London from its final voyage in 1761, out of the thirteen non-British crew paid-off in London, one had a Muslim name and a number of the others had West African names such as Babtunde or Tunday (Yoruba), Akua (Fante), and Badu (Akan). This, among other evidence, suggests that the East India Company regularly employed Africans on their ships sailing between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in earlier eras.

21 In 1860, for example, “Asiatics” emerged as a category in California’s census, and in 1870, “Chinese” appeared as a color on the national population schedule, along with White, Black, Mulatto, and Indian (Hochschild 86). For more on the emergence of the color line in the national census, see JL Hochschild, “Racial Reorganization and the United States Census 1850-1930: Mulattoes, Half-Breeds, Mixed Parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican Race” in Studies in American Political Development.

22 See the New York Daily Times, the Detroit Free Press, and others for more on Orientalist rhetoric: "Sailors in Trouble." New York Daily Times (1851-1857): 4. Nov 16 1854. ProQuest. Web. 14 Feb.2015 . “The Oriental Question Not Settled.” Detroit Daily Free Press (1853-09-10): 2. ProQuest. Web. 14 Feb.2015 . "Piracy and Murder--the Coolie Trade." New York Daily Times (1851- 1857): 1. Jul 21 1853. ProQuest. Web. 14 Feb. 2015.

23 Not simply covering ancient mythology, parlor games and performances also featured Orientalist popular culture references of the era. In William Brisbane’s Dicks arlor hibitions: Containing a Large and Varied Collection of Elegant Home Amusements, Including Tableaux Vivants (1882), for example, they describe the characters and props needed to perform a shadow pantomime for “Ah Sin in Search of a Meal” (7).

24 For a fascinating look at the gendered, racialized consumption of tableaux vivants, see Monika M. Elbert, "Striking a Historical Pose: Antebellum Tableaux Vivants," Godey's" Illustrations, and Margaret Fuller's Heroines" in New England Quarterly .

25 For more on Asians as the “third sex,” see Lee’s Orientals. For more on mixed-race peoples, see Emma Jinhua Teng, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842–1943.

26 See Keevak for more on the development of different shades of racial yellow.

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Chapter 2

1 In 1876, Luther Tracy Townsend published The Chinese Problem, a treatise on the problems of Chinese in America. For more on Muller’s pitcher, see Alice Frelinghuysen, American Porcelain, 1770- 1920. The Metropolitan Museum of Art published American Porcelain, 1770-1920 alongside their exhibition of the same name from April 8, 1989 to June 25, 1989.

2 Scharnhorst notes that, if counting all the adaptations of Harte’s poem, this was one of the most widely published poems of the century.

3 For the short duration of this article, I explore the intersection of racial and sexual representations of Asians in American popular culture, particularly Asians being defined as the “third sex” in 19th-century Anglo-America. I consider sexuality, in conjunction with race formation, as an apparatus composed of discursive strategies ordering social relations and constituting subjects. Mentions of gender here refer to the dichotomous social discourses of feminine and masculine and are not necessarily tethered to sex, i.e. whether a person is a supposed man or woman. For more on the history of sexuality and homosexuality, see Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. See also David M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality .

4 My title is an adaptation of the popular 19th and 20th-century anti-Chinese phrase, “The only good chinaman is a dead chinaman!” Luella Miner, a Christian missionary who founded China’s first college for women, briefly mentions the use of this phrase in her 1903 book, China's Book of Martyrs: A Record of Heroic Martyrdoms and Marvelous Deliverances of Chinese Christians During the Summer of 1900: 14.

5 For example, Bierce’s “The Night Doings at Deadman’s” (181) and “The Haunted Valley” (124) both critique sinophobia in California mining communities. For more information, read Jerome Hopkins and Ambrose Bierce, The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce (Bison Books: 1984).

6 For more on Asian immigration in the nineteenth century, see Ronald Takaki’s Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989: 28.

7 For more, see H.J. West, The Chinese Invasion: Revealing the habits, manners and customs a/the Chinese, political, social and religious, on the Pacific coast. (San Francisco; Excelsior office, Bacon & Company, Book & Job Printers, 1873): 7.

8 For more on regional literatures and the production of space, see Hsuan L. Hsu, Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-century American Literature .

9 I invoke literary cosmopolitanism in this essay not only because Pacific regionalism is a significant American imagining of transnational common space that should be explored, but also because Harte and Bierce’s supposedly regional narratives, paradoxically, became national sensations and experienced second publishing lives in books and magazines.

10 The new British-Americans imported China porcelain ware and more for cultural capital and social devices. For more, see Frank’s Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America.

11 Cosmopolitanism is a multi-faceted concept and can be used in either negative or positive connotations. As Agathocleous and Rudy note, “Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill famously called the globalization of capitalism cosmopolitan, and highly contagious diseases were labeled cosmopolitan as well (as Mary Wilson Carpenter's contribution to this issue demonstrates)” (389).

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12 For example, see Thomas Nast’s “Martyrdom of St. Crispin” 16 July 1870 in Harper’s Weekly. See also "The First Blow at the Chinese Question" [cover] from The Wasp: v. 2, Aug. 1877- July 1878, and Jack London and Richard Gid Powers, The Science Fiction of Jack London: An Anthology. Boston: Gregg Press, 1975.

13 Teemu Ruskola’s “Canton Is Not Boston: The Invention of American Imperial Sovereignty” gives a brief history of Canton’s connection to the China Trade and the importance of the China Trade to American empire.

14 See Paul Ropp, China in World History for more on the Opium Wars’ affecting trade policies and the birth of the “coolie.” See Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation gives a wonderful overview of the significance of “coolie” in US culture and the history of the sugar plantations in the Americas.

15 Bierce published multiple iterations of this story, but the first edition published in the Overland Monthly in 1871 features more examples of local dialects and illustrates the cosmopolitanisms unique to California. See Ambrose Bierce, “The Haunted Valley.” The Overland Monthly. 7.1 (1871): 88-95. Roman & Company, 1871. For a standard edition of the story, see Ambrose Bierce, “The Haunted Valley,” The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce, ed. and comp. by Ernest Jerome Hopkins (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).

16 See Frank’s Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America for more on the US’s participation in piracy and the China Trade.

17 See Mari Yoshihara’s Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism for more on how white, middle-class America women helped construct Orientalism from the 1870s to the 1940s.

18 Here, I use the quote from a later edition that is the exact same wording, except for the useful inclusion of “wite”. See the second edition of “The Haunted Valley” in Hopkins’ The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce.

19 I am speaking rhetorically, and no critics have argued that Bierce’s “Haunted Valley” is merely an escapist text. However, Amy Kaplan argues that “local color” regional literature, much like Bierce’s “The Haunted Valley,” often served as a form of urban escapism, or “literary tourism.”

Chapter 3

1 Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton), Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Chicago: AC McClurg, 1912). I am referring to the book arts and prose from the first edition of Edith Maud Eaton’s short story collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance. For more on the rise of sensational Asian racial stereotyping in twentieth-century American popular culture—from yellow perils to opium dens and Chinatown romances—see William Wu, The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, 1850-1940 .

2 Eric Hayot’s "Chinese Bodies, Chinese Futures” in Representations explores the association of Asian immigrants with the onset of modernity and the ills of factory labor, paying particular attention to the un-free nature of “coolieism” in American culture and its relation to constructions of Anglo masculinity. Frank Norris’ “The Third Circle” depicts a depraved Opium den and white slavery in San Francisco, while Cecil Demille’s film The Cheat focuses on a duplicitous Asian merchant.

3 For a complete history of the Yellow Peril fiction genre, see Wu, The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, 1850-1940.

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4 Jinqi Ling translated the decorative and textual arts of Edith Eaton’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance for author Annette White-Parks. Also, chinoiserie is defined in the Fairchild Dictionary of Fashion as, “Those designs in textiles, fashion, and the decorative arts that derive from Chinese styles.” For more, see C. Calasibetta and P. Tortora, The Fairchild Dictionary of Fashion .

5 For more on the influence of the transpacific and Asia in American cosmopolitanism, see Egan, Oriental Shadows: the Presence of the East in Early American Literature. See also Lee, Orientals.

6 For more on the anti-Chinese movement and Immigrant Acts, see Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics and David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier.

7 Eaton was one of many American artists also interested in elements of anti-modernism, a social movement that T.J. Lears calls “a transatlantic dissatisfaction with modern culture in all its dimensions: its ethic of self-control and autonomous achievement, its cult of science and technical rationality, its worship of material progress” (4). Many antimodernists, not coincidentally, turned to pre-industrial and pre- capitalist art forms for inspiration. Eaton invokes pre-capitalist China Trade decor to comment on the current social ills of modern America and to inspire more favorable associations with Asian immigration. See Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 .

8 For more on the history of antagonism between Irish and Asian working-class immigrants in America, see, for example, Joshua Paddison, American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California .

9 Americans feared that modernity was weakening the manly vigor of American men who were stuck as paper-pushers, factory laborers, and other less physical workers. Matthew Frye Jacobson discusses the American obsession with instilling primitive, “barbarian virtues” during expansion because of this feared effeminacy in Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples At Home and Abroad, 1876-1917. These virtues are of course also related to the American dependency on nonwhite foreigners as both reliable consumers of American products abroad and industrious workers in the developing U.S. as well.

10 For a complete list of the various Asian stereotypes in American culture, see Jack Tchen and Dylan Yeats, eds. Yellow peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear.

11 For more on reverse glass mirror paintings of the China Trade, see Frieder Ryser, Reverse Paintings on Glass: The Ryser Collection.

12 David Palumbo Liu defines the model minority: “The contemporary notion of the “model minority,” founded upon the supposed persistence and rearticulation of “traditional Confucian values” in Asian Americans, whose success lies in their ability to adapt Asia to America as well as to transform America through the application of a Confucian ethos” (21). This describes Asians as a “model” minority because of their passivity and malleability, as well as their conformity to western systems of value, such as heterosexuality and capitalism. For more, see David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier.

13 The home was often invoked as a symbol of the “heart” or spirit of the nation. The home could also be then thought of as symbolizing the core or foundation of American identity. For more on depictions of domesticity and the home in American culture, see Amy Kaplan, "Manifest domesticity," American Literature.

14 For more on the opening of the Pacific and its relation to American empire, see Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898.

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15 For more on the history of Irish Americans in the United States, see Joseph Lee and Marion R. Casey, eds. Making the Irish American: History and heritage of the Irish in the United States.

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