MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School
Certificate for Approving the Dissertation
We hereby approve the Dissertation
of
Tan-Feng Chang
Candidate for the Degree:
Doctor of Philosophy
Director: Professor Yu-Fang Cho
Professor Susan Morgan
Professor LuMing Mao
Professor Stefanie Dunning
Professor Anita Mannur
Graduate School Representative: Professor Liz Wilson
ABSTRACT
WRITING BETWEEN EMPIRES: RACIALIZED WOMEN’S NARRATIVES OF IMMIGRATION AND TRANSNATIONALITY, 1850-WWI
by Tan-Feng Chang
This dissertation examines transnational formation of race, gender, and empire through immigrant women writers’ engagements with the dominant trope of “women of empire,” a trope central to popular imaginations of the British empire and the U.S. empire during the period of 1850 and WWI. It analyzes ways in which narratives of migration and immigration could generate multiple and alternative forms of interracial relationship and cultural belonging. Rather than situating their works within one national tradition, it considers transnationalism as both an analytic frame and a cultural practice, thereby seeking to unravel how immigrant writers’ individual and cultural expressions were articulated through a series of complex negotiation and disarticulation with the empire. It traces the emergence of Asian and Caribbean immigrants as transnational mixed-race subjects, who borrowed, contested, and attempted to redefine imperialist conceptions of the home and the colony, and domesticity and otherness. Tracing immigrant writers’ non-essentialist articulation of subjectivity, it foregrounds their capacity to disrupt Anglo-American imperialism and coherence of whiteness in works including Mary Seacole’s The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Anna Leonowens’s English Governess at the Siamese Court and The Romance of the Harem, Edith Maude Eaton’s (Sui Sin Far’s) Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, and Winnifred Eaton’s (Onoto Watanna’s) “A Half Caste” and Other Writings. It thus conceptualizes Asian American and the Caribbean subjects as a kind of migratory position that appropriated and simultaneously undercut imperial cultures. As a transnational project, this dissertation contends that immigrant writers evoked and reworked the norms of white domesticity and womanhood in their attempt to imagine the possibility of transnational subjectivity and community building across the nations. The norms include women’s discourses on maternity, sympathy, kinship, and citizenship.
Situating women’s discourses within the previously under-examined contexts of Caribbean-Asian-American racial triangulation allows for a rethinking of both Black/White and Asian/American dichotomies in current comparative studies of race and empire. This examination of race as an inter-subject and triangulated concept accords with scholarship of comparative racialization. Such an analysis enables a more nuanced study of the differently racialized and gendered immigrant population in British and American imperial worlds.
WRITING BETWEEN EMPIRES: RACIALIZED WOMEN’S NARRATIVES OF IMMIGRATION AND TRANSNATIONALITY, 1850-WWI
A DISSERTATION
Summited to the Faculty of
Miami University in partial
fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English
by
Tan-Feng Chang
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio
2013
Dissertation Director: Professor Yu-Fang Cho
© Tan-Feng Chang 2013
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES iv
DEDICATION v
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER ONE Creolizing the White Woman’s Burden: Mary Seacole at the Colonial Crossroads between Panama and Crimea 13
CHAPTER TWO Siwilai-zing the Royal Harem: Anna Leonowens’s Siamese Court and Hidden Perfume’s Harriet Beecher Stowe 37
CHAPTER THREE Kin of a Different Kind: Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far) and Transracial Adoption 61
CHAPTER FOUR Whiteness in Another Color: Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) and Intra-racial Citizenship 87
BIBLIOGRAPHY 115
iii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: “A Great Time for Ireland!,” Punch, 1861. 102
Figure 2: “The Ignorant Vote—Honors Are Easy,” Harper’s Weekly, 1876. 103
Figure 3: “The Diary of Delia,” The Saturday Evening Post, 1907. 106
Figure 4: Claire Wolley & Delia O’Malley, Edith and Winnifred Eaton, 1907. 107
iv
DEDICATION
This dissertation is completed by much guidance and support from my teachers. I owe special thanks to the primary readers, Susan Morgan and Yu-Fang Cho. Professor Morgan guides me to study the relations between women and empire, which initiates this project and remains a central concern of it. Professor Cho, Director of the Dissertation Committee, offers critical feedback and writing advice on each stage of the dissertation’s progress. Her classes and articles on transnational Asian American criticism are a major influence on the development and new approach of my argument. My classes and conversations with Professor Stefanie Dunning and Professor Anita Mannur broaden my thinking of what it means to be an “Asian American” in relation to an African American and an Asian American of a different racial origin. Their comments encouraged me to take differing situations and contexts into consideration. I thank Lu-Ming Mao, the Departmental Chair, for his genuine and continuous support of my study for the past five years and a half. More like a parental figure, Professor Mao shows his belief in my work and inspires me to go on with my writing. I am grateful to Miami University of Ohio for providing an excellent learning place and various funding opportunities that make possible the completion of this dissertation. I thank Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, the Humanities Librarian, for her technical support of my research, and Sheila Sparks, the Library Associate of the Interlibrary Loan and WorldCat services, for kindly approving my book requests all the time. For companionship, I would like to indicate my appreciation to Sonya Parrish, Chanon Adsanatham, and Elham Shayegh for sharing ideas, drafts, and laughter. My deepest gratitude goes to my family. Their love and unending support for me makes the occasional lacuna of my writing life whole.
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INTRODUCTION
Writing between Empires: Racialized Women’s Narratives of Immigration and Transnationality, 1850-WWI
I. Introduction: Racialized Women’s Writings about Migration and Immigration In August 1870, the British nurse Florence Nightingale, who later became a national icon for her patriotic service, gave negative accounts of the Jamaican “Creole” woman Mary Seacole and her activity in the Crimean War. Responding to her brother-in-law, the MP Sir Harry Verney’s request for a reference to Seacole, Nightingale wrote, following a special note, “burn,” on the top of her manuscript letter, that She [Mrs. Seacole] kept—I will not call it a ‘bad house’ but something not very unlike it—in the Crimean War. She was very kind to the men and, what is more, to the Officers, and did some good, and made many drunk…I had the greatest difficulty in repelling Mrs. Seacole’s advances, and in preventing association between her and my nurses (absolutely out of the question)... Anyone who employs Mrs. Seacole will introduce much kindness—also much drunkenness and improper conduct, wherever she is. (qtd. in Seacole, “Appendix” 180) Nightingale’s deprecating remark of Seacole’s “drunkenness and improper conduct” coincided with the period’s dominant conception of the nonwhite woman as a site of sexual, racial, and political anxiety for both Victorian England and the United States after the abolition of the slave trade in the 1830s and slavery in the 1860s. The association of Seacole with the image of the mixed-race female migrant worker who somehow became homeless and sexually stigmatized during the emancipation exposes the late nineteenth-century expansionist logics of British and American cultures, the working of which relied not only on the domestic racial polarization between blacks and whites but also on a triangulation of race, nation, and empire through international contexts of war, migration, and Anglo-American cultural expansion to the Caribbean and Asian-Pacific regions. Further, Nightingale’s allusion to Seacole’s “improper conduct” that “respectable Officers were entirely ignorant of what I…could not help knowing as a Matron and Chaperone and Mother of the Army” (Seacole 180) reveals the tenuous position of the
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post-emancipation nonwhite woman in comparison with that of the white woman as the “Chaperone and Mother” of the empire. If, as scholars of Euro-American imperial cultures contend, empire was constituted as an extension of domesticity, and generally overseen by white women, what role did women of multiple or ambiguous racial heritages play? How did the figure of the migrant or immigrant participate in cultural productions of empire? Why is it significant to trace the literary voices of the racialized writers in studies of empires and their global manifestations? This dissertation examines how the nineteenth-century culture of empire has not just interpellated Anglo-American women as the subjects of empire, but it has simultaneously and discursively constructed “racialized”1 immigrant women as their nearest rivals. My interest lies in exploring how nonwhite women writers’ narratives of immigration borrow, contest, and attempt to redefine the norms of white domesticity that have positioned many of their white counterparts as what critics variously term “women of empire,” “agents of empire,” or “mothers of empire” (Burton Empire in Question; Chilton; Gikandi; Nussbaum; Sharpe). I build upon Amy Kaplan’s and Inderpal Grewal’s works to demonstrate the interconnections among domesticity, imperialism, and British and American women’s literary traditions. In their respective studies of nineteenth-century British and U.S. cultures of empire, Kaplan and Grewal delineate the spatial and political interdependency of “home” and “empire” in specifically female rhetorics and spheres of influence. Kaplan calls the rhetoric “manifest domesticity” in her analysis of popular women’s magazines and domestic fiction, which sought to represent home as a domestic and national sphere of empire that remotely controlled places such as Central America and Africa. Grewal illustrates how upper- and middle-class English women’s and Indian women’s travel narratives aimed to contest the meanings and boundaries of these tropes, “home” and “harem,” and by this relational approach, both of the English woman and the Indian woman were interpellated as rival agents of colonial modernities. I extend their ideas of the intersections between domestic/home and foreign/harem to delineate the specific articulations of immigrant women’s transnational identities that emerge from their negotiations of the duality between domesticity and
1 By “racialized” or “racialization” I refer to the historical and ideological process through which one particular immigrant group to Victorian England or America is classified as different from and inferior to the dominant white, middle-class, gendered subjects within the contexts of colonialism, slavery, and Euro-American imperial wars and expansions. 2
foreignness and between metropolis and colony. In challenging this duality, this project also explores how immigrant women’s works constitute non-essentialist forms of subjectivity and cultural expressions within and beyond British and American traditions and dynamics of canon formation. My study focuses on the works of four authors not only because they inhabited and wrote from the borders of Anglo-American literary and national traditions. It is also because their presence to these traditions challenged the nationalist rubrics, which often classified the nonwhite immigrant populations and their texts as part of an “assimilation/resistance” dialectic. To avoid fixing race as merely an ontological or ahistorical category of identity, this project conceptualizes race as a historicized discursive process that witnessed and participated in British and American imperialism and the coherence of whiteness since the second half of the nineteenth century. As such, this project foregrounds four Asian and Caribbean American women writers, whose works have been categorized quite divergently as: (1) the British Jamaican writer Mary Seacole’s The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, (2) the British Indian writer Anna Leonowens’s English Governess at the Siamese Court and The Romance of the Harem, (3) the Chinese American writer Edith Maude Eaton’s (Sui Sin Far’s) Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, and (4) the Japanese American writer Winnifred Eaton’s (Onoto Watanna’s) “A Half Caste” and Other Writings. Scholars have found the four authors’ texts especially troubling and have read them within competing nationalist—British and American, metropolitan and postcolonial, or assimilationist and separationist—ideologies and paradigms. The extensive discursive negotiations of these texts’ “true” values, identities, and relations to social conditions could have affirmed Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities” in his now classic definition of nationalism, were it not that the reading and represented communities of each of these texts varied widely from imperial rivals, cultural nationals, and decolonization activists. This project, rather than subsuming their voices to one national tradition, proposes to use transnational frames in order to unravel how immigrant women’s works produce contradictory relationships and counteracting force to Anglo-American imperial cultures in the longer histories of colonialism, racialization, and immigration. Ultimately, this project shows how racialized women’s narratives of immigration could generate transnational identifications and alternative forms of cultural affiliations in their attempt to redefine the norms of white domesticity—a central trope in the popular imaginations of empire. To this end, I have identified three primary reading approaches. 3
First, I explore ways in which their narratives of immigration attempted to negotiate imperialist conceptions of otherness by destabilizing the connected realms of domesticity and global politics. Second, I analyze how their negotiations with differences and multiple trans-local positionings actively engaged in the politics of Anglo-American imperial expansions and the concomitant ideologies of whiteness. Lastly, I demonstrate how their writing imagined the possibilities of transnational identification and cultural expression by moving within, around, and beyond Anglo-American racial and national belonging. The three reading strategies highlight the complexity and heterogeneity of Asian and Caribbean women’s articulations of “selves,” particularly in terms of their inter-subject relations with white women. In doing so, I want to highlight the transnational dimensions of their texts and their subjectivities. On the topic of literary production and subject formation, I am indebted to the pioneering scholarship of comparative racialization and transnational studies of race, gender, and empire. As these lines of scholarship argue, individual identity and literary expression ought not to be regarded as merely an “empirical” generalization. Rather, the two could be viewed as mutually informed, as both descriptions of “category” and areas of “comparative study” that attempt to name and disrupt the binary habits of literary and identity categorization (Hong and Ferguson 12-13). It is the contention of my dissertation that global imperial histories have positioned women as subjects from different locations (real or imagined) to speak to, across, and against one another.
II. Review of Transnational Literary Studies of Race, Gender, and Empire In the past two decades, women’s writing has emerged as a crucial field to engage in the culture of empires. One important question in this field, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty notes, is a kind of imperialism carried on by Western feminist writing about women of Asian and African descents from the nineteenth century to the present day. Assuming that these women need guidance to achieve freedom and equality, feminist accounts have “discursively colonized the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the Third World” (Mohanty 19). Although there have been scholarship addressing heterogeneity and contradictions of feminist discourses in the context of the British empire, many of these revisionist works establish gender as the primary locus of
4
difference and oppression.2 Considerations such as race, class, immigration, global economy, and imperial rivalries that have immensely shaped women’s cultural productions and their subjectivities during this period remain to be explored. Another important question is the uneven and unrecognized development of the literary traditions by nonwhite women whose writings were engaged in resisting the racialized patriarchal empire. Current approaches to literary representations of the British empires focus primarily on white women’s writing. Mary Louis Pratt and Sara Mills, for instance, call for more nuanced models to account for the contradictions between feminine inferiority and cultural agency in Victorian women’s travel-writing traditions. By highlighting women travelers’ difference to men (Mills) or downplaying their difference from local women (Pratt), they strive to challenge traditional gendered binaries of male and female, public and private, and colonizer and colonized. Nevertheless, their methods overlook the racialized gender practices and colonial global missions that have created new and uneven gender relations across racial, sexual, and national lines. How might critical study of the intersections of gender and race complicate the Eurocentric thesis of gender inferiority and cultural superiority? This question is taken up by recent research on Mary Seacole and Anna Leonowens. Inquiries on their personal and cultural achievements show the two authors’ long-term and intricate relationships to not merely British but American cultural formations as well. For instance, Sandra Gunning provides a convincing case to read beyond Seacole’s self-appointed role as a British “Crimean heroine,” who seemed to fight alongside the British empire against the Russian empire over Middle Eastern territories during the mid-century Crimean War. Gunning develops Paul Gilroy’s thesis on the “black Atlantic” to bear upon Seacole’s portrayals of the ties and tensions between British Caribbean and African American communities. Her analysis showcases the importance of situating the question of gender within the global context of war and colonialism. As she asserts, it is from this broader comparative context that we could read the nonwhite immigrant women’s subjectivities “not simply as an ethnicity but as a complex process of
2 A recurring issue in women’s studies of empire since its initiation in the 1990s has been the role gender plays in nineteenth-century imperial histories, particularly the question of whether Western women were complicitous with or resistant against imperialism in such histories and forms of knowledge. Two collections of essays best represent this body of scholarship: Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel’s 1992 collection Western Women and Imperialism and Philippa Levine’s more recent collection, Gender and Empire. 5
adaptability negotiated at the intersection of white and black colonial travel and out of the unique conditions of gendered, ‘colored’ identity in [colonial crossroads such as] the Caribbean” (963-964). While this reading appears somewhat transatlantic “American” in scope, my reading draws attention to Seacole’s articulation of an interstitial “Creole” identity, which allows her to not only deflect British and American imperial claims of the racialized migrant worker but also reclaim a distinct Caribbean mixed-race heritage. This “Creole” maternal position created by Seacole’s memoir revealed a complex intersection of raced, gendered, and maternal upward mobility of the Caribbean woman’s migration within and beyond the nineteenth-century transatlantic reach of the black subaltern culture. Anna Leonowens’s accounts of life in Siam also produce a wealth of readings that index the transatlantic traditions of racial and sexual struggles and solidarities. Her re-figuration of the royal family as a “harem” has caused a heated debate among critics of gender and empire. For instance, scholars of travel discourses, Susan Morgan and Caren Kaplan, propose opposing views on the political implications of the harem imageries. Morgan considers the possibility to broaden and internationalize Leonowens’s feminine interventions of several competing colonial and local masculine regimes surrounding the place. Kaplan, in contrast, argues that such interventions built on the rhetoric of displacement in the so-called 1990s’ “feminist politics of location,” which tended to inscribe difference and oppression onto Asia. In a different but related context, Inderpal Grewal’s study of Victorian women’s travel writing relocates the contestation around orientalism to the internal and international feminist struggles in British India. As she argues, nineteenth-century universalist feminists “have seen themselves only in relation to men have, in fact, been articulated in relation to other women” (11). I develop this critique to examine Leonowens’s interracial feminist expressions, tracing her Orientalist portrayals of Eastern women to American sentimental abolitionism. This approach encourages a rethinking of Siam’s “harem” as a major site of contestation for several contending cultural forces, including sentimental constructions of the harem in Western literature, Southeast Asian studies of imperial encroachments into this “forbidden” place, and Thai agency as well as engagement in colonial modernity. As an embodiment of this colonial modernity, Leonowens’s memoirs stimulate the parallel discourses of Anglo-American civilizing mission and Siamese civilized agency, showing how the white woman and the Siamese woman are interpellated as subjects of colonial modernity in relational terms rather than based on Euro-American views of development. 6
My framings of Seacole’s and Leonowens’s travel memoirs also builds upon recent transnational and comparative studies of empire in order to destabilize the dualities and power relations between East and West. Amy Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, as noted earlier, have alerted us the transnational routes of empire imbedded in the nineteenth-century notions of white womanhood and domesticity. Counteracting this discursive tenacity of whiteness, Mohanty, C. Kaplan, and Grewal’s advocacy for “transnational feminist cultural studies” is a groundbreaking intervention. Their studies attempt to explore the dynamics—rather than simply a coded relationship—between nativist and the globalist, culture and capital, and domesticity and foreignness. This dissertation considers transnational feminism as an important part of my interpretive lens. Specifically, I explore how feminist concerns about domesticity, which are developed in the following aspects in four chapters: maternity, sympathy, kinship, and citizenship, could only be articulated within transnational and interlocking logics of race, gender, and empire. Such a transnational research project illuminates significant linkages from white supremacy to imperial expansion, and thus enables us to examine the representations of the racial Other as signs of interracial solidarity or rivalry. As Grace Kyungwon and Roderick A. Ferguson argue, transnational or trans-racial solidarities are sustainable only when they allow us to see how “subjects, within racial collectivities, are differentially incorporated or excluded from the class, gender, and sexual norms of respectability, morality, and propriety and thus placed on different sides of the dividing line between valued and devalued” (3). Their work calls these inter-subject formations “strange affinities.” My dissertation addresses this call for understanding colored (im)migrant subjects’ ambiguous, displaced, and competing relations to Anglo-American citizens. Specifically, this project illustrates how Anglo-American national cultures constituted differently racialized and incorporated subjects and how norms of whiteness were in turn shaped or appropriated by such racial constitutions. Scholars of Edith Maude Eaton and Winnifred Eaton have been tackling the question of domesticity in transnational spaces of meaning making and social construction. Literary biographies showcase many “differences” in the two sisters’ literary and life careers: Born to a British father and a Chinese mother, who relocated the family to Montreal in early 1870s, the Eatons dedicated most of their works to the two cultures, China and Japan, respectively, and both claimed to write from their mother’s heritage. Dominika Ferens notes that when the two were situated in late nineteenth-century U.S. racial histories, their writings were primarily read in a “good sister—bad sister” divide. 7
Implicit to this view “both Winnifred’s subtle antiracist interventions and the muted orientalism of Edith’s work go unnoticed” (2). To move beyond the “orientalist/antiracist” paradigm, scholars of Transnational and Asian American Studies Lisa Lowe, Susan Koshy, and Yu-Fang Cho demonstrate how the national culture and U.S. citizenship have not just constituted but have constituted by their relationships against Asian immigrants, alien workers, and ethnic and sexual minorities. I develop this scholarship to analyze the historical racialization and alienation of Chinese and Japanese immigrants in the Eaton sisters’ narratives. Using a transnational lens, my analysis underscores how the Eatons’ works conflated and contested the spaces of domesticity and nationality, thereby revealing the restrictive logics of both in informing Asian American cultural productions and subject formations in the early periods of Chinese and Japanese immigration. Further, this dissertation studies transnational formation and awareness of subjectivity by showing how claims to Asian American identity are articulated through contexts of global wars and realignments of race rather than through binary and domestic racial classifications. I examine alternative forms of Asian and Caribbean immigration in the Eatons’ fictional and journalistic works, which not only expose and critique Anglo-American imperial ambitions in the Asia-Pacific and the Caribbean regions, but these writings also provide new insights to investigate Asian American immigration history as a transnational and triangulated inquiry. Sean X. Goudie and Gretchen Murphy have made compelling cases to illuminate how the Eatons’ representations of Asian and Caribbean populations complicate Anglo-American homogenous conceptions of whiteness at the turn of the twentieth century. Murphy, for example, powerfully points out that Eatons’ Asian characters claim a “white” racial belonging by having their Asian characters affirm Anglo-American norms against other “questionably” white subjects such as “Celts, Slavs, and Gauls” (161). My analysis of the Eatons’ works also explores the comparative racial politics in their representations of Asians. However, instead of focusing on how their Chinese and Japanese characters fight for a model citizenship, I discuss ways that their texts trouble the relationships between Asia and America by including the figure of the Irish or the Caribbean immigrant as the third term. This discussion of racial triangulation aims to show narratives of Asian American belonging, even as they strive for racial inclusion and equal participation, reveal—and at times reinforce—American racism and nativism. Through Asian and Caribbean women’s writing and identity, this dissertation aspires to join the dialogues established among transnational scholarship, immigrant 8
women’s narratives, and comparative studies of race and empire. Scholars have recognized the connections of these fields, and have suggested how an interdisciplinary study of these fields could disrupt hegemonic forms of literary and subject formations and could strengthen solidarities beyond the frameworks of masculinist nationalism and white feminism. Recently, British studies of empire from a transatlantic perspective begin to include Asian and African writers into British literary tradition before twentieth-century world wars, revolutions, and mass migrations (Rastogi and Stitt). Also, Asian American scholars and communities have been advocating different methods for reducing interracial hostility without erasing cultural differences. As Colleen Lye contends, it is critical to “examine the representation of Asiatic racialization from the standpoint of the racialized” (158). According to Lye, this approach allows us to more carefully interrogate the heterogeneous histories of Asian American racialization, as the formation of an Asian American subject depends largely upon the displacement of another racialized American subject. Following this cue, my project proposes to read transnationality and racial triangulation as key features of Asian and Caribbean immigrant writings. By borrowing, contesting, or resisting the dominant domestic and feminine norms, Asian and Caribbean women’s narratives of (im)migration present a possibility of creating alternative modes of cultural productions and spaces of belonging in Anglo-American empires of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
III. Chapter Division: Transnational Asian and Caribbean Literature My dissertation could be roughly divided into two parts: the transatlantic (Mary Seacole and Anna Leonowens) and transpacific (Edith Maude Eaton and Winnifred Eaton) literary traditions. This division not only reflects how the four authors’ works have been thus categorized by previous studies, but it also serves as an important starting point to mobilize them within and beyond the divisive paradigms from transnational lines of enquires. Through a transnational lens, this project evokes “Asian” as a category that could challenge the binary category of domesticity and otherness and destabilize the cultural norms of Anglo-American imperialism, but it is not itself a unified identity category. As Thai historian Tamara Loos notes, Asians as analytic loci have too often been construed as either a “colossal” undertaking or an immobile setting. Her works emphasize ways in which ideas and regimes of power flowed into and across several Asian regions with relational colonial histories. As such, the parameters of Asianness in my project range from the Caribbean, South Asian, to East Asian countries including China and 9
Japan. This broader scope helps us explore the specific geopolitics of these places in relation to one another and in relation to transnational studies of empire and racialized women’s writings. Chapter One, “Creolizing the White Woman’s Burden: Mary Seacole at the Colonial Crossroads between Panama and Crimea,” reads Seacole’s reputation of being a heroic “Mother” to British soldiers during the Crimean War as a special kind of cultural performance embodying what Shu-mei Shih and Françoise Lionnet call “creolization.” In their explanation, creolization underscores racial and cultural mixtures due to colonization, slavery, and migration. It is through narratives of mixture and migration, as they argue, that articulations of a transnational and non-essentialist Caribbean subjectivity are thus enabled. With this method, this chapter explores Seacole’s claim to the “Creole” and “yellow” identity that hasn’t been fully addressed by scholars of Victorian or American studies. I demonstrate how the interconnected notions of maternity, culinarity, and immigration in Seacole’s memoir appropriate and simultaneously reconstruct Victorian ideals of imperial motherhood and the racialized and gendered forms of domesticity. Her discursive performance of a Creole “doctress, nurse, and mother” could be interpreted as a response to Anglo-American conceptions of the boundaries between home and hotel, master and slave, and blackness and whiteness. Using “Creole” as both a kind of identity expression and theoretical intervention to understand Seacole’s triangulation of British-Caribbean-American relationships, this chapter argues how the construction of a mixed-race Caribbean immigrant subject, who is neither black nor white, neither Anglo-American nor entirely its Other, actually emerges from the processes of border-crossing and cultural creolization. Representations of her several maternal relationships across both sides of the Atlantic provide a reconfiguration of the British and American imperial cartographies in the middle of the nineteenth century. While the first chapter considers “domesticity” as a function of empire in light of the significance of the creolization of Seacole’s maternal position, the second chapter explores the domestic trope of the “royal harem” in Leonowens’s memoirs in relation to recent Thai scholars’ endeavors to highlight Siam’s alternative modernity vis-à-vis Western colonialism. Chapter Two, “Siwilai-zing the Royal Harem: Anna Leonowens’s Siamese Court and Hidden Perfume’s Harriet Beecher Stowe,” borrows Thongchai Winichakul’s concept of siwilai (which is coined from the English term “civilized”) to analyze how representations of Siam’s “harem,” or the royal palace, have become a site of colonial traffic across the competing global and regional powers and groups. As 10
Winichakul argues, due to several overlapping European colonial histories in Southeast Asia and their remappings of Siam’s “geobody” and national identity, midcentury Siamese officials and elites adopted siwilai as “a transcultural process in which ideas and practices from Europe, via colonialism, had been transferred, localized, and hybridized in the Siamese setting” (529). Extending this thesis, this chapter analyzes how Leonowens’s role as a governess in Siam sparks the parallel discourses of Anglo-American civilizing mission and Siamese siwilai agency. I trace Leonowens’s rhetoric of interracial feminism to American sentimental tradition, or what I call “racialized sympathy,” a kind of sentimental discourse central to the shaping of the U.S. racial and national projects through women’s abolitionist writings in the mid-nineteenth century. I argue that Leonowens’s sentimental construction of Siam’s “harem” women as “sexual slaves” facilitates her claim to an imperial women’s position while also reinforcing assumptions about Asian difference and inferiority. As critics have alerted, sentiments often render the boundary between races or cultures unnecessary while in fact leaving the rule of white civilization unchallenged. By analyzing how Leonowens’s memoirs draw upon and also rework literary sentimentalism, my reading seeks to complicate and complement the dominant framings of Leonowens’s status as an ambiguously imperialist writer in previously unexamined ways. If domesticity is a center of controversy in Seacole’s and Leonowens’s representations of motherhood and sentimentality, it has been constructed as an unstable ground by the Eatons’ works, where racialized immigration, kinship, and citizenship are called into question. Chapter Three, “Kin of a Different Kind: Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far) and Transracial Adoption,” examines a genealogy of transracial adoption narratives which shadow American relations with Asian and Caribbean peoples and communities in the early twentieth century. In contemporary studies of transracial and transnational adoption, particularly of the U.S. and East-Asian ties, scholars note how a discourse of “colorblindness” has obscured white privilege in reproducing the racialized patterns of desire, intimacy, and immigration. Both David Eng and Jodi Kim note that American wars and capitalist relations with Asia constitute the unequal flows of bodies, images, and values between Asia and America. Eng thus urges that “we must contest romanticized notions of privacy and family as outside capitalist relations of exploitation and domination” (9). This chapter seeks to redress the racialized structure and feeling of kinship through the Chinese immigrant writer Edith Eaton’s representations of transracial and transnational adoption. I theorize transracial adoption as an emerging form of Asian 11
and Caribbean immigration, which shape the U.S. conceptions and regulations of race, family, and nation in a complex Caribbean-Asian-American context of colonialism and immigration. In this context, Edith Eaton’s adoption narratives demand a rethinking of kinship and identity constituted outside the norms of racial and national purity by imagining one’s origin(s) as fundamentally hybrid, discrete, and border-crossing. To further complicate domesticity with the issues of race and citizenship, Chapter Four, “Whiteness in Another Color: Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) and Intra-racial Citizenship,” explores how Winnifred Eaton’s claim to Japanese American identity is contingent on the exclusion of blacks and some questionably white immigrants from the mainstream American culture. My reading of citizenship as an intra-racial construct develops recent scholarship on the political history of racialized citizenship, which suggests that American nationhood and citizenship were not just constituted by the black-white relationship but by Afro-Asian or intra-Asian hierarchy and racialization. As one of the pioneering efforts to move beyond race as a matter of black and white, Susan Koshy’s works reformulate whiteness as a “productive” system of power-knowledge, which generates “the dialectical relationship between the meanings of whiteness, blackness, and Asian Americanness” (“Morphing Race” 156). In unraveling such “intra-racial” entanglements, this chapter understands Winnifred Eaton’s articulation of Japanese American identity as a strategic response to American racialization and differentiation of Asians as permanently foreign and unassimilable. My analysis focuses on how she imagines Japanese America as an alternative space of belonging, during which American imperial ambitions in the Pacific coincided with those of the Japanese empire in the early 1900s. Although her celebration of an alternative Japanese belonging challenged whiteness as a prerequisite for aliens seeking American citizenship, Winnifred Eaton’s narratives ironically embrace middle-class American racism, as her claims to Japanese inclusion hinge upon the racialization of specific minority groups including Jamaicans, the Irish, and the Chinese. By analyzing the intra-racial formation of Asian American identity, this study urges for the need to examine the politics behind American inclusion, as we envision alternative expressions of belonging and community membership in the United States.
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CHAPTER ONE
Creolizing the White Woman’s Burden: Mary Seacole at the Colonial Crossroads between Panama and Crimea
While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for. —Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes
If minor formations become method and theory, then new analytics will be brought to the foreground that creolize the universalisms we live with today from the bottom up and from the inside out. —Shu-mei Shi & Françoise Lionnet, The Creolization of Theory
I. Introduction “I am a Creole…I have often heard the term ‘lazy Creole’ applied to my country People; but I am sure I do not know what it is to be indolent,” begins the memoir, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), written by the Jamaican woman Mary Seacole about her journey to the Crimean War (WA 11).3 Not only does the memoir portray Seacole as an industrious maternal figure, who nursed, housed, and cooked for British soldiers during the War, but it demonstrates her industry in the service of the “English people.” As she wrote: “I think all who are familiar with the West Indies will acknowledge that Nature has been favorable to strangers in a few respects, and that one of these has been in instilling into the hearts of the Creoles an affection for English people and an anxiety for their welfare, which shows itself warmest when they are sick and suffering” (WA 58-59). While this remark appears to flatter the English reader, it actually challenges the growing post-slavery English racism, which holds that British Caribbean populations were idle and insubordinate, and that the emancipation only diminished ex-slaves. In 1857, The Times, for example, published a series of articles
3 Reference to Wonderful Adventures is hereafter cited as WA. 13
about Jamaican “indolence” and “ingratitude” toward the English people who set them free (Salih 187). In this context, representations of Seacole’s creoleness expose and critique British imperial values by creating an interstitial subject position that challenges dominant discourses of Englishness and otherness. Her memoir’s celebration of an affectionate—though racialized—maternal identity illustrates how “Creole” functions as an identity expression and antiracist intervention for the Caribbean immigrant subject to counteract English racism while imagining alternative modes of cross-cultural belonging and solidarity. Chapter One discusses ways in which “Creole,” or creolization, provides a window for analyzing Caribbean women’s narratives about immigration, showing how such narratives tend to address the question of identity within multiple colonial histories and unstable workings of power, which enables a uniquely transnational articulation of race, gender, and empire in the Caribbean, as early as the abolition of slavery in the 1830s. “Creolization” as a new and special kind of transcultural or transnational movements is recognized by many. 4 Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih have noted how the concept of creolization refers to racial and cultural mixtures due to colonialism, slavery, and forced migration in the Caribbean (22). With the recent regional and transnational turns of identity politics, this concept works to explore, as Fatima El-Tayeb puts it well, “intersectional, sometimes contradictory workings of power structures and subject positions shaped though not determined by them” (xviii). This chapter brings to fore and seeks to continue scholars’ efforts to put into dialogues the study of creolization and that of immigration. In tracing the Creole, or creolized, aspects of literary and identity expressions, my analysis underlines the following questions: How does the post-slavery Caribbean woman writer establish her political legitimacy by laying claim to a mixed-race Creole immigrant subject position? How does claiming to this subject position generate multiple loyalties and new ways in which the subject could negotiate her regional, national, and transnational affiliations? How is this subject produced in relation to the female spheres of influence, notably motherhood, in the period of Anglo-American imperial expansion to the Caribbean?
4 The term “creolization” has received growing attention in the study of racial migration in the past fifty years. Since the influential works by Caribbean diaspora theorists Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Édouard Glissant, this concept has been reworked from being an instrument of the anti-colonial nationalist movements in the 1960s to being “capable of challenging nationalist projects for forging a more supple theory of non-essentialist identity formation and transnational belonging” (Ahmed et al. 279). 14
This chapter develops these questions in relation to the complex formation of a Creole, maternal, and immigrant subjectivity in Mary Seacole’s memoir. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, to a Creole hotelkeeper mother and a Scottish soldier father, Seacole narrated her role as a “doctress, nurse, and mother” of the Crimean War in her memoir (WA 110). The memoir begins with her youthful training as an assistant at her mother’s boarding house, where Seacole acquired “Creole” medicinal and culinary skills that proved very useful in her subsequent journeys across Jamaica, Panama, and the Crimean peninsula. Seacole built her mobility and entrepreneurial creativity almost entirely upon her maternal training and heritage. According to one English newspaper, Morning Advertiser, Seacole’s achievement in the Crimean War is equivalent to those of the two greatest war celebrities: “She is both a Miss Nightingale and a Soyer in her way…Her culinary powers are so great, that even Soyer told her the other day that she knew as much about cooking as himself” (WA, “Appendix” 173). Indeed, scholars have analyzed different ways in which Seacole’s memoir draws upon nineteenth-century woman’s literary conventions, including war memoir, travel writing, and autobiography.5 But much of this scholarship has identified Seacole as a new breed of the “black” Victorian; her claim to the mixed-race “Creole” identity hasn’t been fully explored. My analysis focuses on Seacole’s creoleness and its implications for dominant conceptions of race, gender, and nation. This analysis illuminates how the articulations of a “Creole” immigrant subject disrupt imperial whiteness and femininity in the post-slavery transatlantic world.
5 Scholars of Victorian studies tend to view Seacole’s memoir’s as evidence of diversity and inclusiveness of the British empire. Sandra Pouchet Paquet comments that Seacole “does not challenge the idea of empire; she struggles to redefine her place in it” (652). Sara Salih, although suggesting that Seacole’s autoethnographic accounts complicate the categories of “black,” “British,” and “Jamaican” by raising questions about “the classification and canonization of writers whose transcultural, transnational identities evade definition along cultural, racial, and/or national lines,” concludes that these “trans-” identities created by Seacole’s memoir are still “invested in colonizer’s terms” (189). Bernard McKenna considers Seacole’s memoir as a model of analysis for female travel writing, which reveals that “travel writing not only began to question English and imperial values but began to be written by figures from the periphery of society” (222). Samuel Gikandi, on the other hand, understands Seacole’s text not so much as an autobiography or travel writing as a representation of “colonialism’s culture in its contradictions and complicities, as a chiasmus in which the polarities that define domination and subordination shift with localities, genders, cultures, and even periods” (124).What this body of scholarship fails to explain is how both the empire’s racializing tendencies and the memoir’s antiracist endeavors go unexamined. 15
A crucial aspect of nineteenth-century imperial culture which Seacole’s memoir disrupts and recreates is motherhood. Nineteenth-century maternal discourse has played a crucial role in the making of race and empire. As literary historians show, motherhood functions as much as a political enterprise as it is a natural phenomenon in the Victorian age. Representations of mothers thus remain confined to stereotypical features that include “pure, self-sacrificing, and devoted, a spiritual influence and a moral instructress” (McMahon 2). Such idealization of the maternal imageries justifies an extension of women’s influence from the private, domestic sphere to the public, national, and global regimes. In her examination of the correlation between British feminism and imperialism in the nineteenth century, Antoinette Burton coins the term “imperial motherhood” to explain how motherhood, or womanhood in general, is conceived as a site of racial anxieties that must be patrolled vigilantly. As mothers, women are “race creators”; the continuity of race and prosperity of the nation are hinged upon the role women perform (Burton, Burdens of History 49-50). In light of this thesis, my analysis illuminates how Seacole’s “Creole” performance as a “doctress, nurse, and mother” in the service of the British empire generates new and critical meanings of motherhood. Further, I draw upon the work of Caribbean critic Brinda Mehta to provide an alternative account of motherhood within the specificity of the Caribbean context. Mehta’s work demonstrates how Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writers appropriate the historical colonial constructions of motherhood in their own terms. Conjuring up what she calls “Sycorax historicity”—the name of which derives from the monstrous maternal persona in a Shakespeare’s play, Caribbean writers are able to recuperate Caribbean womanhood by defying racialized and sexualized images of Caribbean women circulated in Anglo-American canons. As an embodiment of this concept of “Sycorax historicity,” Seacole’s representations of “Creole” or creolized motherhood challenge Victorian discourse of imperial motherhood. In doing so, these representations allow her to identify with the more empowering, anticolonial Caribbean cultural references that Mehta has demonstrated. The memoir’s language of food also serves as a powerful subtext to resist the deeply racialized and gendered forms of domesticity. In recent years, postcolonial and transnational studies are calling particular attention to the capacity of culinary narratives in making visible different cultural practices in the history of American immigration. A fundamental field that tackles the complex relationships between food and ethnic subjectivity is Asian American Studies. In current Asian American cultural criticism, 16
culinary writing emerges as a significant ethnic marker and has become one major pedagogical focus in this field (Fung i). Culinary discourse, as Anita Mannur contends, “bears witness to the complicated historical processes that have occasioned international migration and diasporic dislocation” (49). To trace how South East Asian Americans maintain ambivalent relationships with foods that are coded in cultural terms, Mannur develops the concept “culinary citizenship,” which prompts Asian immigrant subjects to claim “diasporic” subject positions over “national” or “traditional” ones (20). My reading of Seacole’s memoir borrows this concept of “culinary citizenship” to explicate the memoir’s construction of a Creole immigrant subject out of her multiple—often conflicting—affiliations with the British and the Caribbean nationalist positions. These culinary aspects of the memoir also reveal how Seacole appropriates and simultaneously reconstructs the ideal of Victorian maternity and its imperial values. By analyzing these creolized and interconnected dimensions of maternal, culinary, and immigrant practices, this chapter aims to illuminate how such a Creole narrative embodied by Seacole’s memoir could, first, challenge the racialized and gendered forms of imperial identities, notably motherhood, and second, generate non-essentialist and transnational spaces of cultural belonging. I will first discuss how Seacole’s claim to a discursive maternal position in her memoir about the Crimean War draws upon and reworks the model of imperial motherhood established by the better-known war heroine, Florence Nightingale. Her narrative appropriates Victorian discourse of maternal domination as a means to circumvent the dominant framing of her body as the sexual and racial Other. Then, the aspects of food and nursing in the memoir indicate how Seacole’s maternal rhetoric does not just identify her as either British or Jamaican subject. Rather, these elements construct her as an ideal mixed-race female immigrant subject through her “Creole” culinary performance. Last, to explicate Seacole’s visions of cross-cultural belonging, I turn to the memoir’s Panamanian section, where it opens up alternative modes of interracial tension and solidarity among post-slavery racial communities in and across North and Central Americas. Using “Creole” as both a kind of identity expression and anticolonial intervention to understand the triangulated British-Caribbean-American relationships that Seacole’s memoir illuminates, this chapter argues how the construction of a mixed-race Creole immigrant subject, who is neither black nor white, neither Anglo-American nor entirely its Other, actually emerges from the processes of border-crossing and cultural creolization. Through such a transnational Creole lens, Wonderful Adventures plays on and undercuts dominant ideologies of race (whiteness), 17
gender (motherhood), and nation (patriotism).
II. Maternal Creolization Motherhood is routinely placed at the center of the press and literary productions about the Crimean War (1854-1856). The Crimean War can be viewed as the first war in British history which valorized white women’s domestic labor at home and abroad, particularly when their labor—including nursing, housekeeping, and reproductive capacity— was deemed productive to the building of the empire. With the emergence of the British nurse Florence Nightingale as the national celebrity of the conflict, nursing became one of the most frequently quoted occupations that women could perform to not only repair and maintain the bodies needed for imperial expansion, but also import to the battlefield “symbols of Britishness such as medical supplies, uniforms, food, and books” (Howell, “Nursing Empire” 63). The connections between nurses and empire were indeed inevitable. By December, 1854, the mortality rate of British soldiers was so high that Florence Nightingale and her nursing corps volunteered to join the British Hospital in Scutari, one of the Crimean frontlines. One article, published by Times in October of that year, usefully summarized the elevated role which Nightingale’s medical reform stood in public: We sit at home[,] trying to picture the last moments of those dear to us, and our agony is increased by the fear that all was not done that might have been done to relieve their sufferings…The strongest man becomes helpless and dependent like a child in his hour of need, and we all know how, in such a case, a humble nurse, with no other recommendations than a kind heart and skillful hands, appears to the sufferer as a saving angel. (qtd. in Poovey 167) If the comparison between “humble nurse” and “saving angel” is too frequently drawn to mean anything, the writer’s association of the wounded soldiers with images of “a child in his hour of need” suggests just how nursing comes to represent a major feature of British motherhood in the context of the war. Nightingale’s own book, Notes on Nursing (1859), depicts nursing as an enforcement of middle-class domesticity with a mixture of military idioms and women’s conduct manuals. Her writing and participation in the Crimean medical reform were simultaneously domestic and military, womanly and imperial in nature (Poovey 187). At roughly the same time when Nightingale left for the Crimean battlefront, 18
Seacole traveled from Jamaica to London in the hope of securing a nursing post at Nightingale’s British Hospital. Thwarted in her attempt to obtain an interview with Sidney Herbert, the Secretary at War, who financed Nightingale’s corps, Seacole appealed to his wife, who informed that the quota of nurses had been filled. Seacole then resorted to one of Nightingale’s nurses. This woman, as Seacole reports, “gave me the same reply [as Mrs. Herbert], and I read in her face the fact, that had there been a vacancy, I should not have been chosen to fill it” (WA 73). Such incidents of racial prejudice enforced by white women upon a “coloured” woman are not unfamiliar to Seacole’s readers. In the first half of her memoir that depicts her experiences in Panama, Seacole remarks, in a tone of profound irony, another instance of “American politeness,” which occurred on her way back to Kingston from the Panama Peninsula (WA 55). Just getting on board an American steamer, she was “harassed”—to use Seacole’s own word—by a group of American women travelers who pressed her with a series of questions, including her place of origin, destination, and source of income (WA 56). One traveler, upon seeing an Englishman speak for Seacole, plainly displayed her abhorrence of the idea that blacks and whites could stay on the same boat: “a nigger woman don’t go along with us in this saloon…Flesh and blood can stand a good deal of aggravation; but not that. If the Britishers is so took up with coloured people, that’s their business; but it won’t do here” (WA 56-57). This white supremacist stance prompted Seacole to leave the steamer instantly and take the next “English” steamer instead (WA 57). Seacole’s decision to go to the aid of the British army and become a Crimean “heroine” (WA 72) reveals her desire to rewrite her experiences of racialization in England and in Panama. While Seacole claims the title of “Crimean heroine” to her own, her memoir suggests that she was aware that her role in the War was constantly measured against that of Nightingale in the press. The rivalry of the two women is evident in some of the references made about Nightingale in Wonderful Adventures. For instance, Seacole mentions her interview with Nightingale, who agreed to offer her shelter for one night when she traveled through Scutari to Balaclava, another Crimean frontline. While the memoir gives a laudatory account of Nightingale—who is depicted as an “Englishwoman whose name shall never die, but sound like music on the lips of British men until the hour of doom” (WA 82), this portrayal quickly contradicts itself in the next scene, when Seacole was informed that the hospital had no unoccupied room at that time except a laundress’s bed in the basement. Ironically, once Seacole established herself close enough to the battlefield, her place—which was called “British Hotel” in Balaclava and available 19
for lodging, cuisines, groceries, and medical care—garnered more popularity and fame than Nightingale’s hospital among the soldiers. In her justification of this apparent competition, Seacole appeals to the values of middle-class womanhood and domesticity. As she writes, “[m]ismanagement and privation there might have been, but my business was to make things right in my sphere, and whatever confusion and disorder existed elsewhere, comfort and order were always to be found at Spring Hill” (WA 101). Suggesting that her hotel is better equipped with domestic discipline and comfort than “elsewhere”—implying its counterpart, the British Hospital, Seacole avails herself of British middle-class feminine and domestic values, while debunking the ideology of imperial whiteness underpinning those values. At times, Seacole’s memoir evokes and reworks the stereotype of the “tragic mulatta” that signifies racial mixture and impurity. The figure of the “tragic mulatta” received transatlantic popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the United States, as Eve A. Raimon notes, the popularity of this figure lies in its capacity to symbolize the intersection of miscegenation and nationalism: “the sexual vulnerability of a mixed-race female subject and the reproductive potential she represents and enacts within the plot allow her literally to personify the anxieties and fantasies about the ascendant nation’s interracial future” (8). This mixed-race female subject had a long, and perhaps more complex, history of colonization and miscegenation in the Caribbean. The Caribbean Creole woman was perceived as sexually vital and available to the white man. Such racialized sexual stereotypes of Caribbean womanhood were prevalent in Victorian travel narratives to the British Caribbean. Anthony Trollope’s The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1860) serves as a prime example that reproduced these stereotypes: “[t]here is a mystery about hotels in the British West Indies,” as he remarks, “[t]hey are always kept by fat middle-aged coloured ladies who have no husbands” (Trollope 205). Running a hotel business that is simultaneously a maternal side of inheritance (according to the memoir, it was Seacole’s “Creole” mother who began this family business), Seacole could not be unaware of the images of sexual licentiousness which the mainstream culture had associated with her race and occupation. In fact, as critics have observed, Seacole’s memoir apparently evokes a range of “incompatible” or “hybrid” maternal imageries in order to “de-sexualize” the dominant framings of Caribbean womanhood.6 These
6 Nicole Fluhr, for example, argues that Seacole fashioned a hybrid maternal ideal by “juxtaposing English and Jamaican, middle- and working-class, and black, mixed-race, and white mothering practices”; these 20
maternal imageries work to downplay Seacole’s “femaleness,” and thus alleviate the considerable Victorian anxieties toward cultural mixture and the racial component of British nationhood. In particular, Seacole’s maternal rhetoric exemplifies how a colonial mixed-race subject could reshape the ideal of “imperial motherhood” embodied by the English woman such as Florence Nightingale.7 To avert some critique of her tending the wounded soldiers too closely, Seacole underscores her nursing and cooking skills in her memoir, seeking to associate these domestic and feminine virtues with the larger national strength. At times, she recounts how her role was a replacement for that of a British woman who was left at home: “more than one officer have I startled by appearing before him, and telling him abruptly that he must have a mother, wife, or sister at home whom he missed, and that he must therefore be glad of some woman to take their place” (WA 126). Calling herself a “mother, wife, and sister” to these British soldiers who fought far away from home, Seacole’s memoir challenges the genetic conceptions of race, family, and nation by opting for discursive, transcultural kinds of kinship and citizenship. The maternal figure in her narrative is a “mobile subject,” who, according to one critic, is able to recreate home and seek multiple cultural affiliations wherever she travels (Fish 7). Moreover, Seacole’s mixed-race persona redefines womanhood not merely as emotional or cultural practices but as a testimony to her racialized labor. In several scenes of Wonderful Adventures that reinforce her role as what might be called a surrogate mother, Seacole insists that it is a “woman’s” duty that she was called to the battlefield: “only women could have done more than they did who attended to this melancholy duty; and they, not because their hearts could be softer, but because their hands are moulded for this work” (WA 92). Whereas the mainstream discourse about middle-class white womanhood emphasizes a seamless relationship between emotion (the “heart”) and labor (the “hand”), there is an emphasis on the politics of gendered and racialized labor in Seacole’s
practices both legitimate her claim to the title of “mother” and construct her as an “inassimilable” subject (97). In an insightful analysis of the memoir’s “discursive maternity,” Deirdre H. McMahon shows how nineteenth-century discourse of motherhood presented Britishness—particularly in terms of the ideas of interracial kinship—as a contested category. As she contends, “discursive maternity desexualizes Seacole…, lending respectability to her presence among the many men with whom she constructs long-standing, intimate, but discursive bonds of kinship” (195). 7 It is a noteworthy fact that Nightingale signed herself as the “Mother of the Army” in her correspondences composed during the war (WA, “Appendix” 180). 21
representation of womanhood here. By claiming that her participation in the Crimea was grounded on maternal instincts (as a nurse) and racialized labor (as an immigrant), Seacole positions herself in proximity to the norms of Victorian womanhood and at the same time undercuts the privilege of whiteness in shaping the meanings of mixed-race womanhood. Although departing from Victorian notions of womanhood, the maternal persona created by Seacole’s memoir does not reduce the complexity of her mixed-race “Creole” heritage. How does Seacole’s self-identification as a “motherly yellow woman [who goes] to the Crimean and nurse[s] her ‘sons’ there” (WA 72) articulate a Creole subjectivity and reach for a wider transatlantic readership? According to recent critics Sandra Gunning and Sean X. Goudie, examining Seacole’s memoir in Caribbean-American contexts allows us to more clearly see how her text crafts an empowering narrative of mixture and alternative modes of cultural belonging. Gunning, for instance, has convincingly shown that a mixed-race woman’s subjectivity serves “not simply as an ethnicity but as a complex process of adaptability negotiated at the intersection of white and black colonial travel and out of the unique conditions of gendered, ‘colored’ identity in the Caribbean” (963-964). While this statement suggests how a mixed identity is shaped by and shaping historical tensions of black and white American relations, my reading calls attention to Seacole’s envisioning of a transatlantic Creole identity that is capable of creating multiple and alternative modes of cultural belonging, aiming to defy both colonial (Anglo-American) and anti-colonial (Afro-Caribbean) nationalist positions. Through a set of interlocking logics of the creolized cuisines and identities, Seacole’s memoir reveals a complex cultural politics about food, nation, and Caribbean immigrant femininity.
III. Culinary Creolization In constructing a Creole identity, Seacole’s narrative depends heavily on her Jamaican upbringing, which enabled her to travel and work as “doctress” in the first place. Seacole does not ground her medical knowledge in formal training or recognition, but rather in her Jamaican maternal inheritance. Her memoir sets out to build an industrious, pragmatic, and robust healer’s image of herself based on her Creole mother. As she depicts: “My mother kept a boarding house in Kingston, and was, like very many of the Creole women, an admirable doctress, in high repute with the officers of both services, and their wives, who were from time to time stationed at Kingston. It was very natural that I should inherit her tastes” (WA 11-12). She claims that she might have grown up to 22
fit the stereotype of a “lazy” Creole, were it not her training at her mother’s store in her youth (WA 11). Countering the prevailing stereotypes of Creole “indolence” and “infirmity,” Wonderful Adventures’s creolized aspects of food, medicine, and maternity offer a new and more powerful image of the Creoles to reconstitute the Caribbean mixed-race female subject position. The memoir’s articulation of Creole womanhood recalls what Brinda Mehta identifies as the practice of “Sycorax historicity” in her work. Specifically, the culinary and medicinal aspects of Seacole’s memoir embody the transcultural Caribbean feminist practice advocated by Mehta’s work, which aims to resist and reformulate colonialist and essentialist claims of identity. Mehta’s concept of “Sycorax historicity” provides a model for Seacole’s memoir to construct alternative accounts of Caribbean mixed-race womanhood through resisting the male-centered colonialist and nationalist formulations of female sexuality and belonging. To challenge these masculinist definitions, Mehta’s work re-interprets the story of Sycorax—a monstrous mother figure8—in Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, as an empowering discourse for Caribbean women writers to connect to and exorcize their own experiences of the “diasporic wounds such as colonization, patriarchal orthodoxy, gender disenfranchisement, migration, and exile” (184). The Sycorax discourse reconsiders the female-centered, anticolonial role played by women’s narratives that deal with cooking, nursing, and healing. These seemingly ordinary domestic practices are in fact highly politicized rituals, which seek to reclaim the neglected matrimonial cultural history and “re-sensitizing the mother tongue” in the Caribbean (Mehta 185). Seacole’s memoir could be regarded as a significant entry to the resurrection and continuum of Sycorax historicity. The memoir’s creolization of culinary and nursing practices crystalizes the antiracist tenets of the Sycoraxian discourse, which enabled Seacole to draw upon and also
8 In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Sycorax is the learned mother of Caliban, a native inhabitant of the imaginary isle “Argier,” later identified by literary critics and historians as a place based on one of the Caribbean islands. Sycorax is referenced negatively as a “damned witch” and “wicked dam” in Shakespeare’s text. She is banished from Argier by the Duke of Milan and her daughter Miranda for practicing witchcraft, when she is pregnant with her son Caliban. According to one critic, due to her characterization of the trauma of racialization, dispossession, and exile, “Sycorax has inherited and inscribed in her very flesh the whole history of the slave trade on West African soil and of slavery on West Indian plantations” (qtd. Mehta 25). In Mehta’s work, Sycorx is positioned as the beginning of Caribbean women’s gendered diasporic history and as an attempt to “decolonized and feminized Caribbean reason through epistemological ruptures found in postcolonial revisions of colonial thought” (25). 23
reconstruct the racial rubrics of imperial womanhood and domesticity in the nineteenth century. By making connections between culinary creolization and identity (re)formulation, Seacole is able to fashion herself as one of the early disciples of “Mother Sycorax,” who defied and redefined the colonial racialization and displacement of Caribbean womanhood. Food is a frequently evoked metaphor for creolized motherhood in Seacole’s narrative. Seacole underscores her surrogate maternal position in the Crimean War by nursing wounded soldiers and providing them food and shelter. She asked her readers to consider the linkages between food and identity to which her Crimean memoir assiduously turns: Don’t you think, reader, if you were lying, with parched lips and fading appetite, thousands of miles from mother, wife, or sister, loathing the rough food by your side, and thinking regretfully of that English home where nothing that could minister to your great need would be left untried—don’t you think that you would welcome the familiar figure of the stout lady whose bony horse has just pulled up at the door of your hut, and whose panniers contain some cooling drink, a little broth, some homely cake, or a dish of jelly or blanc-mange—don’t you think, under such circumstances, that you would heartily agree with my friend Punch’s remark: ‘That berry-brown face, with a kind heart’s trace Impressed on each wrinkle sly, Was a sight to behold, through the snow-clouds rolled Across that iron sky.’ (WA 111-112) Food does not merely provide comfort and nourishment. The discourse of food points to the complex interplay of race, gender, and nation in shaping one’s cultural belonging and senses of home. As the quoted passage suggests, making food that is redolent of an “English home” allows Seacole to successfully claim the position of a surrogate “mother, wife, or sister” to the British reader. Meanwhile, this passage challenges the exclusive role which white women played in building the empire. With affectionate, home-invoking culinary language, Seacole’s narrative is able to transcribe herself from “berry-brown face[d]” figure into “familiar” member of the British imperial family. However, referencing and writing back to the half-laudatory and half-sarcastic remarks published in Punch (which depicts her as a “brown” person with “kind” heart, who becomes visible 24
only when she offers help to white people in times of difficulty), the memoir’s food discourse positions Seacole in relation to, but not quite the same as, the romanticized white Englishwoman at home. The memoir’s culinary language evokes the feelings of “home” for the metropolitan reader while seeking to expand the boundaries of home and Britishness. On the one hand, the memoir’s culinary performance allows Seacole to claim a space within the dominant narrative that racialized or excluded her. Culinary details offer the reader “things suggestive of home,” which promotes the idea that one’s relationship to home is tied to his or her culinary taste and belonging. The memoir constantly bragged about how the Crimean store is capable of transforming battlefield into home: “had you been fortunate enough to have visited the British Hotel upon rice-pudding day, I warrant you would have ridden back to your hut with kind thoughts of Mother Seacole’s endeavours to give you a taste of home” (WA 123). In another example, Seacole recounted the popularity of her homemade rice-pudding among officers, who, according to the memoir, swarmed into her little kitchen with joyful greetings when she called out “rice-pudding day, my sons” (WA 123). This depiction of the hustle-and-bustle atmosphere of her kitchen is probably a direct contrast to an earlier scene in which Seacole, hoping to obtain a night’s lodging at Nightingale’s hospital, was obliged to wait in the hospital kitchen, where she noticed that their food was nothing but “cans of soup, broth, and arrow-root, while nurses passed in and out with noiseless tread and subdued manner” (WA 81). By juxtaposing her warm little kitchen with Nightingale’s “noiseless” and “subdued” hospital or with the “iron-skied” battlefield, Seacole’s food narrative thus takes on a new and political meaning. While the use of food in the memoir shores up Seacole’s maternal persona, it simultaneously renders her an ambivalent or diasporic subject created out of the ties and tensions between the British and the Caribbean nation-states.9 In this way, the memoir’s construction of Seacole’s culinary identity functions not so much to endorse an ideal, originary home as to recreate home for those who are forced to leave or lose their home. Indeed, the creolization of food reflects not only maternity but also Seacole’s mixed-race heritage. At one point, the memoir’s presents a long list of Seacole’s reputed
9 In the context of South Asian diaspora in North America, see Anita Mannur’s Culinary Fictions, which identifies the fractured and nostalgic-rendering subject as one crucial aspect of the South Asian culinary discourse. 25
dishes including “Turkish bread,” “curried,” “Irish stew,” “meat-pies,” “Welch rabbits,” “rice-pudding,” and “sponge-cakes that any pastry-cook in London, even Gunter, might have been proud of” (WA 122-123). Aside from showcasing Seacole’s ability to cook more than just “English” dishes, this long list of food is indicative of the growth of nineteenth-century British imperialism, which was accompanied by a rapid expansion of the British territory to Ireland, Turkey, India, and so on. Seacole’s culinary achievements induced the press to place her name alongside the chief culinary celebrity of the nation, Alexis Soyer. Prior to joining Nightingale in the reform of the Scutari Hospital in 1855, the French chef Soyer had achieved a national reputation in England for building model kitchens at London’s Reform Club and designing economic kitchens for the Irish poor during the Great Famine (1845-1852).10 Just as Soyer’s memoir, Culinary Campaign, which appeared in the same year as Wonderful Adventures, provides some sketches of his several encounters with Seacole, Seacole’s memoir returns his attention, noting that Soyer, “the great high priest of the mysteries of cookery…never failed to praise my soups and dainties” (WA 130). Despite this flattering portrayal of Soyer, Seacole mainly sees the French chef as a competition to her role as a cooking celebrity. Her memoir boldly suggests that: “I always flattered myself that I was his match, and with our West Indian dishes could of course beat him hollow” (WA 130). Interestingly, Seacole’s assertion to be the finer chef of the Crimean campaign makes her appear less British, as she notes that it is through her “West Indian” dishes that she could defeat the Anglicanized French man. In reclaiming her Caribbean mixed-race heritage, Seacole’s narrative creolizes her recipes and identity, and therein exposes the limitations of Euro-American epistemologies and aesthetics. Seacole’s reclaiming of a Caribbean mixed-race heritage at the heart of the British empire reenacts the kind of “subversive” culinary practice depicted by Brinda Mehta. Mehta observes that colonial cooks often received a creolized culinary training. They had to familiarize themselves with indigenous herbs and spices; they also had to develop skills in blending these ingredients with French or English seasonings to create the familiar odors and tastes of “home” for the colonizers. In this way, the cooks’ greatest achievement, as Mehta argues, “reside[d] in camouflage and subversive dissent…cooks could creatively season and destroy the colonial underbelly through gut wrenching dishes
10 For more information on Alexis Soyer’s Crimean memoir and his reception in England, see Murphy (2007). 26
and potently toxic potables. They could thereby establish their memorable culinary authority over the colonial stomach in acts of subversive cooking, fearful eating, and ‘creative’ feeding” (Mehta 54). Although Seacole never seeks to establish her authority through terror-inspiring dishes, Mehta’s characterization of subversive cooking is useful for unraveling the ways in which her cooking practices blur the boundaries between local and colonial, culinary and medical, and British and Creole. For instance, Seacole describes that as busy as she is in always attending to the hungry and wounded in the Crimean, she is very often “interrupted to dispense medicines; but if the tarts had a flavour of senna, or the puddings tasted of rhubarb, it never interfered with their consumption” (WA 123). This blurring of food and medicine corresponds to Seacole’s attempt to reconstitute the British family through her performance as a surrogate mother. Seacole’s substitution of medicine for food—or vice versa—as a way of “creative feeding” further disrupts what is called the “colonial culinary ethic” (Mehta 53), which requires the cook to preserve the “gastro-political” hierarchies between the colony and the metropolis and Englishness and mixed-race creoleness. Mixing food with medicine, Seacole’s culinary practice creolizes the palates of her British “sons” and the cultural norms which their bodies symbolize: Englishness and the empire. Her memoir makes it possible to claim a transnational Creole form of subjectivity for the British Jamaican immigrant who successfully reconfigures English national and political body through practices of culinary and cultural creolization. This creolized and culturally ambiguous subject position allows the memoir to evoke and also undercut dominant forms of domesticity that sustained Euro-American imperial cultures of the nineteenth century. Through her domestic labor such as nursing, healing, and food-making, Seacole’s memoir evokes an emerging discourse of what Amy Kaplan depicts as “manifest domesticity.”11 Kaplan coins the term to explain how American women’s writings juxtaposed “home” with “empire” by representing home as the domestic and feminine spheres of empire, which enhanced women’s status and participation in the expansionist activities of the empire. As a war memoir, Seacole’s narrative strategically embraces the values of “manifest domesticity.” She tells her readers
11 In a British Indian context, Inderpal Grewal also illustrates how Victorian discourses of domesticity such as home, femininity, and landscape became popular tropes in English travelers’ narratives about Indian incivility and opacity. Grewal’s analysis charts an emerging Indian nationalist discourse which aims to challenge and revise the domestic rubrics established by English colonizers (49-56). 27
that should they find her memoir leave any proceeding of the war unnoticed, it is because she “was mixing medicines or making good things in the kitchen of the British Hotel, and first heard [of] the particulars of it, perhaps, from the newspapers which came from home” (WA 128). This homely kitchen scene with Seacole preparing meals and medicines and worrying over the lives of British officers of the warfront indicates how the memoir exploits the images of middle-class domesticity and femininity to justify Seacole’s participation in and entitlement to the empire. On the other hand, this scene with Seacole “mixing medicines or making good things” is nevertheless redolent of the creolized culinary practice that enables her performance as a “white [mother], but not quite.” In addition to its Creole perspectives of food and maternity, the memoir subverts the dominant form of Crimean narratives by claiming that it has less to do with the history and more with “her-story.” To justify the “unhistorical” and “jumbling” type of writing her memoir shows, Seacole declares: “I am only the historian of Spring Hill…[U]nless I am allowed to tell the story of my life in my own way, I cannot tell it at all” (WA 128). In this declaration of her memoir as more a personal than a Crimean history, Seacole proposes an alternative form of self-writing that mingles and rewrites the imperial logic of history with her gendered and racialized immigrant subjectivity. This alternative account of the creolized Crimean history challenges the dominant rendition of the Crimean war from strictly British imperialist and expansionist perspectives. As the memoir draws to a close, the migratory form of Seacole’s narrative becomes even clearer. On the edge of bankruptcy when the war ended sooner than it was anticipated, Seacole wrote about her senses of rootlessness and alienation. Taking no interest in the happiness and expectation of those who were looking forward to going home, she found herself more sympathetic to a vagrant soldier, who is described as her fellow actor in her chronicle of the Crimean life: [W]ith him I acknowledged to have more fellow-feeling than with the others, for he, as well as I, clearly had no home to go to. He was a soldier by choice and necessity, as well as by profession. He had no home, no loved friends; the peace would bring no particular pleasure to him, whereas war and action were necessary to his existence, gave him excitement, occupation, the chance of promotion. (WA 164) If Seacole’s narrative has selectively modeled on Victorian values and association of home and empire, this closing scene is a blunt revelation that the hearth of the English home is no more home to Seacole and her kinds—the indentured soldiers and migrant 28
workers—than the lodging house on the Crimean battlefront. The war’s subplot does not project a “progressive” vision of the racial and sexual uplift onto the nonwhite actor. On the contrary, the war testifies the violent erasure of the existence of the racial actors from the field of victory, an erasure leaving them “no home [and] no loved friends” to return to (WA 164). Although Seacole sought to reconstitute her relationships with the British soldiers and empire through her maternal and culinary practices, her description of the battlefield as “home” betrays her ambivalently included status and partial affiliations with the empire. Seacole’s gloomy accounts of the outbreaks of disease, starvation, and poverty in Panama suggest further how a colored (im)migrant worker like her was constantly on the move and should be used to carrying “home” wherever it was needed. Her performance as a “doctress” in Central America, not unlike her role as a surrogate mother in the Crimean, gives voice to the culturally mixed and subversive form of subjectivity that her memoir consistently demonstrates. As Seacole’s narrative unravels, this articulation of a Creole immigrant subject, who is neither black nor white, neither Anglo-American nor entirely its Other, is nonetheless impossible without the processes of border-crossing and cultural creolization.
IV. Medical Creolization Just as her Crimean narrative depicts her ambivalently as both “Mother” and “Other,” Seacole’s journey to the Isthmus builds up her robust healer’s image by challenging scientific racism while maintaining her senses of British superiority. The Isthmus does not present itself as a homogenous socio-political entity, nor is it a pleasant place of residence in Seacole’s account. When she left her hometown, Kingston, for Panama in 1850, Seacole traveled as a “doctress” and stayed with her brother, Edward, who had kept a traveler’s tavern in the city of Cruces. The Seacoles’ presence in the Isthmus was not unusual. After the 1838 abolition of the slave trade in all British colonies, Jamaican planters, unable or unwilling to hire freed blacks, started to import a large amount of Chinese and Indian indentured laborers as replacements for slaves. This reduced employment led to the migration of numerous black Jamaicans to Panama, many of whom were recruited by the U.S. Railroad Company for the construction of the trans-Isthmus railroad.12 Alongside this massive labor migration was a smaller but visible
12 Approximately sixty percent of the labor force in the Panama Railroad project (1849-1855) was composed of black Jamaican men (Goudie 300). 29
group of Jamaican Creoles who sought economic prosperity in the “New World” by running stores and inns for American travelers on their way to the California Gold Rush in 1849. The Seacoles arrived in Panama when Panama was on the economic boom driven by labor migration, railroad building, and the gold rush. But it was also a time when the relationships between black and white Panamanians were exacerbated by its recently-achieved political independence from the Spanish empire and the growing Anglo-American encroachment onto the place. Perhaps worse than the political instability were several outbreaks of malaria, yellow fever, and cholera epidemics that killed thousands of Panamanians and travelers each day. Seacole’s memoir captures the midcentury Panamanians’ hopes and concerns for the rapid socio-political changes and the impacts of these changes on domestic racial relations. Her claim to the role of a “yellow doctress” from British Jamaica allows her to alleviate the growing racial tensions and maladies in post-independent Panama and at the same time keep her distance as a cultural superior. The title of a “yellow doctress” claimed by Seacole’s Panama narrative underlines her interstitial and intercultural subject position in Americas in terms of her race and nationality. The “yellow” color as a trope for Asians’ and Asian Americans’ “partly colored,” “interstitial,” or “mediating” status in dominant narratives of American racial relations has been extensively discussed by scholarship of comparative racialization.13 While Seacole is certainly not an Asian, nor is she identified as a black, her depiction of a decolonizing and multinational black Republic in the Isthmus crystalizes what Paul Gilroy calls the “black Atlantic” aesthetics. As Gilroy argues, contemporary studies on black American and European literature ought to move beyond “the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” to fully occupy what he calls “the black Atlantic,” a space that underlines both cultural specificity and solidarity—rather than choosing one over the other—among black diasporic subjects (Gilroy 19). Seacole’s narrative suggests a possibility to read her work within Gilroy’s “black diaspora” study. Her accounts of the post-independent multiracial communities in Panama reveal the multilayered racial and national affiliations and struggles among
13 For an excellent discussion on Asians’ and Asian Americans’ middle status under the Jim Crow system of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American South, see Leslie Bow’s Partly Colored. See also Shu-mei Shih’s 2008 essay, titled “Comparative Racialization,” which provides a critical summary of recent publications on this field. 30
Native Panamanians, African Americans, Spanish Indians, and British Jamaicans. But Seacole’s narrative also complicates Gilroy’s thesis by providing an inconsistent—and sometimes Eurocentric—view of race. Whereas she praises the U.S.-born and runaway blacks, Seacole portrays Native Panamanians and Indian Americans negatively by referring to them as “slaves.”14 The memoir’s construction of Seacole’s identity as a Jamaican “yellow” doctress affirms her role as mediator of and fighter against Euro-American imperial encroachments onto black Panama. This construction nonetheless reveals that Seacole’s critique of Euro-American expansionism and her revisioning of the Creole-black relations do not necessarily annihilate colonial racism and black ostracism in the rivalry and triangulation of the British-Jamaican-American relationships. Seacole’s claim to be “yellow doctress” challenges an extended discussion on the theory of “mulatto/a’s sterility” produced by racial science, political treaties, and colonial literature of the nineteenth century. In his infamous study, The History of Jamaica, published in 1774, the British Governor in Jamaica Edward Long, has begun to draw the analogy between “mulattoes” and “mules,” and has called the offspring of white and black Jamaicans “yellow broods,” who were believed to be “defective and barren” (qtd. in Young 7). By the middle of the nineteenth century, this idea of “mulatto’s sterility” was likened to the larger anxiety over colonial racial mixing, which could lead to deformity, disease, cowardice, corruption, treason, and degeneration in medical and political terms (Young 99). On the American side, the dominant discourse on the sterility of the mulatto/a was primarily associated with the intertwined horrors of incest and miscegenation due to slavery. For instance, viewing miscegenation as an “incestuous” act and a “sin against nature,” American scientist and Harvard professor Louis Agassiz advised that “[n]o effort should be spared to check that which is abhorrent to our better
14 In her insightful study of Seacole’s memoir, Sandra Gunning has foregrounded this intra-racial conflict and has warned against the dominant framings of the mixed-race texts as necessarily in support of cross-racial solidarity. For Gunning, Seacole’s memoir challenges current scholarly desires for evidence of interracial or international solidarity at the expense of a more thorough reading of the domestic racial and sexual struggles. As she rightly observes, “the displacement of national in favor of racial affiliations does not necessarily preclude black racism or announce the complete repudiation of power relations established under European colonialism” (Gunning 967). The following analysis develops this view to demonstrate how Seacole’s articulation of a Creole subjectivity challenges American logics of white supremacy yet reinforces British cultural superiority. 31
nature, and to the progress of a higher civilization and a purer morality” (Young 149). Written at a point as miscegenation prohibition was at its full fledge, Seacole’s memoir constituted a daring counter-narrative to the transatlantic racial science by seeking to legitimize its heroine as a mixed-race Creole doctress.15 Seacole’s primary identity in Panama as a “doctress” instead of a tavern-keeper like her brother (or as a surrogate mother which she adopts in the Crimean part of the memoir) challenged the predominantly white and male-centered medical field, where the participation of women was unwelcome or barred because of their assumed intellectual and sexual inferiority. Seacole’s accounts of Panama undermine the dominant prescriptions of the black as the source of disease and contagion. When she depicts the outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever in Cruces, she notes that the black Panamanians were “constitutionally cowardly” and displaying a “slavish despair” to the diseases, whereas “Americans and other foreigners in the place showed a brave front” (WA 31). While this contrasting account of “cowardly” Panamanians and “brave” Americans seemed to reinforce the idea of black inferiority, it contested the prevalent scientific racism that would associate African and Jamaican populations with the causes of deformity and disease. According to midcentury medical discourse, members of African race possessed an enhanced resistance to certain diseases that originated in tropical environments, because they themselves were the carriers of tropical diseases to Americas or the Europe and therefore grown immune to these diseases. Such a racialized linkage between blackness and disease is embodied by Charles Darwin’s canonical work, The Descent of Man. Darwin wrote that “[i]t has long been known that negroes, and even mulattoes, are almost completely exempt from the yellow-fever, so destructive in tropical America. They likewise escape...fevers that prevail along at least 2600 miles of the shores of Africa…This immunity in the negro seems to be partly inherent, and partly the result of acclimatization” (qtd. in Howell, “Mrs. Seacole Prescribes Hybridity” 118). In her rebuttal to the popular conception that cholera was racially inherent to peoples of African descent in general and of Jamaican origin in particular, Seacole asserts that “[her] people” considered cholera to be “contagious,” and it was “a steamer from New Orleans [that] was the means of introducing it into the
15 Jessica Howell’s analysis of Seacole, for example, emphasizes the interconnected scientific and “constitutional” language of the memoir. This focus, as Howell argues, permits Seacole to prove her legitimacy as a “hybrid Briton” by appropriating and undermining the scientific Eurocentricism (“Mrs. Seacole Prescribes Hybridity” 110). 32
island” (WA 17; 27). Suggesting that North America rather than British Jamaica was the breeding ground for cholera, Seacole’s rebuttal disrupts and further reverses the colonialist linkages between disease and race. While Seacole rejects colonial linkages between diseases and blackness, she nonetheless comes to believe that white supremacy and slavery were peculiarly “American” problems. Seacole condemns American slavery without reserve. As she states: “if I have a little prejudice against our cousins across the Atlantic…it is not unreasonable. I have a few shades of deeper brown upon my skin which shows me related—and I am proud of the relationship—to those poor mortals whom you once held enslaved, and whose bodies America still owns” (WA 21). Calling Americans as “our cousins across the Atlantic,” Seacole’s statement strategically places herself on the same side of the ocean with her British readers. Yet implicit to this positioning is the idea that the Caribbean people, who were “once held enslaved” by England, should be recognized as legitimate subjects within the extended power of the British empire. Also, in her sympathy for American blacks who were “still own[ed]” by their white masters, Seacole’s narrative critiques the implementation of white supremacy while remaining “safely” British. As she depicts, she would stand aloof from local blacks who were “terribly bullied by the Americans,” the latter being castigated as a gang of “independent filibusters, who would fain whop all creation abroad as they do their slaves at home...[It was not until] Englishmen were present, and in a position to interfere with success, this bullying was checked” (WA 43). Seacole’s comparison of how white British men and white American men had very different attitudes and interactions with the black populations abroad and at home acknowledges British liberalism and antislavery movements. By displacing the issue of race onto Americans, Seacole’s staging as a liberal British subject became a compensation for her being “a few shades of” darker than her British counterpart. Just as Seacole encourages comparisons between British and American male travelers, she occasionally compares herself to a “lady traveler” who conformed to the Victorian codes of dressing and femininity as a way to express her senses of cultural superiority among Americans. This assumption of the role of a “lady traveler” paves the way for Seacole to critique American racism and unsophistication. Traveling through Panama, Seacole was carefully “attired in a delicate light blue dress, a white bonnet prettily trimmed, and an equally chaste shawl” (WA 20). She distinguished herself from American women travelers, who were portrayed negatively as “unfeminine,” “unmannerly,” and who “appeared in no hurry to resume to dress or obligations of their 33
sex” (WA 26). The masculinized or desexualized womanhood seemed to intensify anti-black Americanness domestically and internationally. By condemning American womanhood, Seacole does not just challenge American racism, but she also seeks the avoidance of being treated as the “kindred” of American slaves. She relates to her readers that “the majority [of the women she encountered] came from the Southern States of America, and showed an instinctive repugnance against any one whose countenance claimed for her kindred with their slaves” (WA 51). Yet, despite her occasional claim to be a British colonial, her relationship to the British empire is ambivalently coded all the same. As is discussed previously, in order to serve the title of the “Crimean heroine,” she borrows and remolds the values of imperial womanhood by occupying a M/Other’s position. It is through this interstitial, and at times subversive, Creole subjectivity that Seacole’s critique of Euro-American cultural imperialism moves beyond colonial conceptions of race, gender, and empire.
V. Conclusion: Afro-Caribbean Creolization In its critique of Euro-American imperialism, the memoir’s Panama section presents transnational Creole subjectivity and alternative modes of racial solidarity by taking part in the black and white struggles for power and cultural influence in the Isthmus in the 1850s. The political atmosphere of Panama was not very different from that in post-slavery Jamaica. After the emancipation, both Panama and Jamaica quickly evolved into a multicultural and racially diverse nation with continued struggles against old and new forms of Euro-American encroachments. Seacole’s memoir depicts midcentury Panama’s shifting social and political milieus in an admiring tone. Her narrative celebrates Panama as a potential cradle of a black nation consisting of a variety of race and cultural communities. Commenting this black nation’s one crucial member—runaway slaves from the United States, Seacole considers these slaves’ escape as signs of their strength and desires for self-rule: “the same negro who perhaps in Tennessee would cower[] like a beaten child or dog beneath an American’s uplifted hand, would face him boldly here, and by equal courage and superior physical strength cow his old oppressor” (WA 44). According to the memoir, these runaway blacks were “enterprising” and “superior” men. They soon occupied important positions in the Republic of New Granada, where Panama was a part during the years between 1830 and 1858, and the entire political scene was swayed by the activism of American ex-slaves, who were determined to defend New Granada from American invasion: “the New 34
Granada people were strongly prejudiced against the [white] Americans... [W]hen the American Railway Company took possession of Navy Bay, and christened it…, the native authorities refused to recognize their [the American Company’s] right to name any portion of the Republic” (WA 51-52). Seacole eulogizes the Republic’s assimilation of black subjects through adopting an anti-American stance. By showing how African Americans were key contributors to Panama’s hard-won independence, her narrative imagines the black Republic as a fundamentally anticolonial and antislavery “New World,” where black, white, and mixed-raced peoples were made free and equal. The memoir’s depiction of black Panama further permits Seacole to articulate alternative modes of transnational community and transracial solidarity. The black Republic, as the memoir notes, comprised various peoples of African descent and of sometimes rivaling nationalities, including English, North American, Latin American, native Panamanian, and the Caribbean. Importantly, Seacole’s vision of transnational solidarity does not privilege one nation over another, nor does her vision completely annihilate intra-racial and regional conflicts. In this transnational community she depicts, there have been “ceaseless quarrels which have disturbed between Chagres and Panama” and between natives and runaway slaves in their collective “resistance against its powerful brother,” the U.S. government (WA 68). In addition, what may appear “radical” to contemporary notions of the “Black Atlantic” world is, Seacole’s vision of transnational black solidarity does not rule out the possibility of white participation and partnership. To the contrary, her memoir suggests that it is through a comparative analysis of British and American displacement of blackness that her appeals to a trans-Caribbean Creole subjectivity and solidarity are most consistently and strongly made. For instance, she celebrates Panama’s racial inclusion and diversity with the English by suggesting that “[i]t is one of the maxims of the New Granada constitution—as it is, I believe, of the English—that on a slave touching its soil his chains fall from him” (WA 52). Implying that the sovereign state of Panama developed an “English” antislavery constitution, Seacole’s narrative privileges a white British connection over a white American connection. However, in another occasion, when a white male friend commented regretfully that “she ain’t one of us…that Providence made her a yaller woman” and then proposed marriage in order to “bleach” her, Seacole rejected this racist remark sharply, saying: “If it [my complexion] had been as dark as any nigger’s, I should have been just as happy and as useful, and as much respected by those whose respect I value” (WA 49). In this incident, Seacole’s rejection to be “white” and loyal to one nation-state revealed 35
her idea that racial solidarity could look beyond the color-based hierarchy by reclaiming an interstitial and empowering Creole and “yellow” subject position. Embodying this transnational Creole form of personal identity and political affiliation, Seacole’s memoir represents a successful example of how a mixed-race woman’s immigrant narrative could evoke and rework Anglo-American imperial values, and simultaneously create multiple, trans-local forms of cultural and racial affiliations across the Atlantic.
36
CHAPTER TWO
Siwilai-zing the Royal Harem: Anna Leonowens’s Siamese Court and Hidden Perfume’s Harriet Beecher Stowe
Universalist feminist discourses have seen themselves only in relation to men have, in fact, been articulated in relation to other women. —Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem
[T]he Siamese quest for siwilai was a transcultural process in which ideas and practices from Europe, via colonialism, had been transferred, localized, and hybridized in the Siamese setting. —Thongchai Winichakul, “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’”
I. Introduction Contemporary representations of Anna Leonowens’s role as a royal governess at the palace of Siam (renamed Thailand in 1939) reveal a long and intimate relationship with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This literary lineage can be traced to both authors’ investments in notions of sentimentalism, abolitionism, and female solidarity that become dominant in American literature and political culture since the middle of the nineteenth century. Twentieth century’s literary and visual constructions of Leonowens’s story are especially revealing in this connection. For instance, the 1950s Broadway and Hollywood versions of The King and I represent the King of Siam, Maha Mongkut, as Simon Legree, the vicious slaveholder and sexual predator in Stowe’s novel. In a dazzling dance episode, a group of the palace women perform a play called “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” seeking to demonstrate Siam’s cultural modernity, political sovereignty, and capability for self-rule to King Mongkut’s foreign guests and emissaries. The play is narrated by one of the king’s minor wives, Tuptim, who is bound to the King against her own will. In her retelling of the famous scene of Eliza’s fleeing across the ice-packed river, where her pursuer, the fictional King “Simon of Legree,” drowns, Tuptim is so affected by Eliza’s act that she breaks away from her role as a narrator and concubine to proclaim: “I too am glad for death of King! Of any King who 37
pursues a slave who is unhappy and who tries to escape!” (Rodgers and Hammerstein II). Mongkut, perceiving the threat to his authority in this proclamation, rises furiously from the audience and makes a silencing gesture to remind Tuptim of resuming her “proper” place. Through its deployment of the African-Asian similarities, The King and I conveys the urgency to put an end to the state-sanctioned violence, notably the institutions of slavery and polygamy. But in doing so, the film conflates notions of American slavery and Siamese polygamy by constructing the King as an Oriental despot, who mistreats women as slaves. The production of “Uncle Thomas” underlines several questions this chapter seeks to address: how do we make of Tuptim’s reenactment of Eliza’s escape in the context of nineteenth-century Siam’s relationship with the West? Why does Stowe’s text become an important index for understanding this relationship? And what role does the English governess Anna Leonowens play in relation to recent scholars’ endeavors to highlight Siam’s alternative modernity without glorifying monarchy or condemning it as a product of colonial education? This chapter sets out to rethink Siam’s “harem”16 as a major site of contestation for various cultural forces, including sentimental constructions of the harem in Euro-American literature, Southeast Asian studies of Western imperial encroachments into this “forbidden” place, and Thai agency as well as engagement in colonial modernity. I develop the works of Thai historians Tamara Loos and Thongchai Winichakul in order to more carefully examine the function of the royal harem in its specific cultural setting and in relation to recent transnational American scholarship on race, gender, and nation. According to Thai scholars, nineteenth-century Siamese modernity, as characterized by elite nationalism (for Winichakul) or family law (for Loos), is a “transcultural” or “transnational” reform process in which Western ideas and practices, via colonialism, are both adopted and contested in the Siamese setting (Loos Subject Siam; Winichakul “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’”). As an embodiment of this colonial modernity, Leonowens’s role as a governess to the King’s wives and children stimulates a parallel discourse of Anglo-American civilizing mission and Siamese civilized agency of her time. Her memoirs, while depicting herself as a sympathizing agent to what she depicts as “our
16 I use the term “harem” to refer to the Siamese institution of polygamy, which was severely attacked by foreign counsels and legal advisors since the reign of King Mongkut but it remained a legal—and political—practice for Siam’s ruling classes until 1935. This usage aims to depart from the sexualized definition of the term as a “seraglio” from the Orientalist tradition. For further discussion on the legal reform and abolition of polygamy, see Tamara Loos (2006). 38
‘benighted’ sisters of the East” (English Governess 6), destabilizes the notion of sisterhood as a reliable source for building personal connections and political affiliations with the “Eastern sisters.” In fact, the language of sisterhood in Leonowens’s memoirs proves just how intricate the relationship between feminism and imperialism is.17 Although sisterhood allows Leonowens to reconceive the often male-dominated discourses of the harem, such approaches induce many problems. A major problem of discursive sisterhood lies in the claim that women share a set of common oppression necessarily leading to feelings of sympathy and identification for one another, regardless of their race, class, and nationality. This claim, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty notes, often posits Western sisterhood or feminism as a universal solution to the problems women face, and has thus “discursively colonized the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the Third World” (19). Mohanty’s contention is significant, as scholarship on Leonowens’s works has noted how the rhetoric of sisterhood facilitates rather than attenuates her claim to a feminine imperial position. For instance, writing about the connections between the harem imagery and imperial ideology in The King and I, Caren Kaplan acutely refers to the role of sisterhood in the film as a female form of “colonial rescue fantasy,” which links issues of gender to the justification of Western interventionism and neo-colonialism in the 1990s (39). In part, my reading of Leonowens’s writing on sisterhood builds upon postcolonial and transnational feminist studies advocated by Mohanty and Kaplan. To move beyond a gender-focused criticism, as this line of scholarship has suggested, my analysis shows how colonial female solidarity reframes racial oppression as sexual oppression and how this reframing actually breaks down boundaries between subjects in terms of the displaced racial difference and suffering. Thus, this analysis provides a more nuanced account of the racialized gender practices promoted and codified by colonial sisterhood discourse. The displacement of race and racial feelings in the notion of colonial sisterhood epitomizes what I call “racialized sympathy.” Racialized sympathy can be defined as a kind of sentimental discourse central to the shaping of the U.S. racial and national projects through women’s abolitionist narratives. My use of the term develops scholarly discussions on literary sentimentalism and its tendency to reproduce existing racial
17 Susan Morgan’s article in Place Matters is among the earliest efforts to situate Leonowens’s writing in relation to gender and comparative empire studies. 39
hierarchies. In recent publications, Elizabeth Duquette and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas have illustrated how the display of “sympathy,” “emotion,” or “sentiment” could generate new and critical lens to analyze the racialization of African Americans and nonwhite immigrants at moments of national crises, when the private investment of emotion and public segregation of race are considered to be mutually constituted.18 Specifically, Duquette examines how sentimental culture is revived and also resisted during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods. On the one hand, sentimentality supplies a racialized understanding of sympathy, which seeks to replace feelings for the slave with allegiance to the nation. On the other hand, for many African American detractors, the sentimental trope of the “loyal slave” circulates in postbellum narratives simply re-inscribes the stereotypes of black servitude and inferiority. Examining the politics of emotion, race, and economy in a contemporary context, Ramos-Zayas’s work unravels the implications “emotions” hold for the construction of the U.S. racial politics and citizenship. In her analysis, emotions are deeply socialized aspects of action and relations. They provide markers for the minority and immigrants to fit into the existing black-white racial spectrum. In their studies of sentimental and emotional terrains of the nation’s racialization practices, sentiment often renders the boundary between races or cultures unnecessary while in fact leaving the rule of white civilization unchallenged. I extend this scholarship to argue how Leonowens’s memoirs build upon the sentimental construction of the Siamese royal women as chattels and of herself as a sympathizing imperial subject. Tracing Leonowens’s literary connection to American sentimental tradition or what I call the discourse of “racialized sympathy,” this chapter will complement and complicate the dominant framing of Leonowens’s status as an ambiguously imperialist writer in previously underexamined ways. Part II of this chapter explores how Leonowens’s sentimental accounts of Siam’s “harem” facilitate her claim to an imperial woman’s position. Evoking the rhetoric of sisterhood, her memoirs construct the harem as a site of women’s oppression and reinforce assumptions about Asiatic difference and inferiority. Then, as a means to destabilize Western values of the harem, Part III analyzes how Leonowens’s contradictory representations of King Mongkut reveal
18 My idea of “racialized sympathy” also draws on Yu Fang Cho’s critical discussion on the sentimental emancipatory discourse developed particularly in the nineteenth-century Chinese-American literary contexts. Cho has defined and contested sentimental constructions of Chinese and Chinese Americans as “a culture of benevolence” (“Domesticating the Aliens Within” 116). 40
both her civilizing agency and his siwilai policy. Her memoirs contain both positive and negative accounts of Mongkut’s attempt to achieve cultural and political intimacy and equality with the West. Yet, through her exposé of the harem, Leonowens conflates and condemns Siamese sexual and political culture, which provides the grounds for her articulations of cross-cultural female identification and solidarity. Thus, Part IV and Part V depict the two Siamese royal women, Tuptim and Hidden Perfume, and the degree to which they serve as transnational subjects in Leonowens’s narratives. My analysis focuses on how the memoirs’ different constructions of the two women—one sentimental and the other spiritual—show both the possibility and limitation of transnational female solidarity that Leonowens’s narratives enable. This analysis ultimately suggests that narratives about Siam’s alternative modernity demand a rethinking of the imagined boundaries between the East and the West and the spiritual and the sentimental as well as material.
II. Royal Harem and Colonial Sisterhood Harem literature is from the very beginning a distinctly female realm of cultural production. Since the eighteenth century, tales of the Eastern harem have garnered a substantial readership in the Western world, especially England and France. Although it is initially dominated by male authors, writing about the harem quickly emerges as a large and popular area of female activity when Eastern travel becomes more socially acceptable to women. Also because the harem, literally meaning sacred or inviolable, is forbidden to foreign men, accounts by women writers who are able to visit or temporarily inhabit the harem are considered extremely rare and thereby establish a lucrative cultural market (Lewis 12).19 Meanwhile, the harem performs significant cultural functions. According to Reina Lewis, the harem does not merely operate as a “titillating but painful emblem of the aberrant sexuality and despotic power that characterizes…the non-Christian Orient”; Rather, by the middle of the nineteenth century, women’s harem is primarily conceptualized in terms of “Western domestic gender relations…that privileged female access and prioritised the intersubjective observation […] of the gendered participant” (Lewis 13). Contrary to their male counterparts, female travel writers such as Amelia Edwards, Flora Shaw, and Harriet Martineau provide eyewitness testimonies to address
19 See Reina Lewis’s work (2004) for a comprehensive and inter-subjective study of British and Islamic women’s harem literature from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Her approaches to the texts are nevertheless gender-based. 41
the oppression of Eastern women in the harem. Martineau’s 1848 travel narrative to Egypt described the secluded women as “the most injured human beings I have ever seen—the most studiously depressed and corrupted women whose condition I have witnessed” (129). Such a narrative function as a double critique of the gender codes abroad and at home, the latter characterized by men’s eroticized accounts of the harem and its inhabitants. But women’s harem narratives serve more than a gender critique of the Oriental and their own societies. In constructing the harem as an emblem of domestic gender violence, women’s narratives function to demystify and desexualize the harem while reinforcing the cultural superiority and equality of Western womanhood. As Islamic historian Leila Ahmed notes, Western women, having overcome the myths about women’s innate inferiority in their society, become obsessed with these myths about women segregated in the harem: “[t]o conceive of us as existing mindlessly passive, indifferent, perhaps unaware of our oppression, tolerating a situation no Western women would tolerate…is to assume, and imply our ‘inferiority’” (526). Similarly, Inderpal Grewal unravels the complicity between feminism and imperialism in nineteenth-century British travel narratives to India. As she contends, Western feminist activities that “have seen themselves only in relation to men have, in fact, been articulated in relation to other women” (11). Rather than continuing a separatist or universalist thinking of the East and the West, Grewal’s study highlights the comparative racial and sexual formations between Western womanhood and Oriental womanhood within the framework of colonial epistemology. In her analysis, feminist writings about the harem do not so much intend to expose the oppression of the Other as they seek to assert the superiority of the Self. Leonowens’s travel memoir to Siam is both about the Other and about herself. Despite her self-representation as an English gentlewoman, Leonowens was born in India to an Anglo-Indian mother and Welsh soldier father, and possibly lived in a squalid barracks of the East Indian Company infantry regiment and attended a regimental school (Brown 590; Morgan, “Introduction” xi). As Susan Morgan notes in her introduction to the 1991 reprint of The Romance of the Harem, literary biographers are now more concerned with how Leonowens becomes so learned and articulate if she truly comes from a working-class and mixed-raced lineage (xvi). Between 1862 and 1867, Leonowens was employed by King Mongkut to work in Bangkok as a royal governess in his palace. The next ten years saw her constant travel in the United States, trying to support herself and her children through writing and giving lecture tours on Siam. The two travel books about Siam by Leonowens, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870) and The 42
Romance of the Harem (1873), were first published in the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine noted for its serialization of antislavery and suffragist writings from popular American authors including Harriet Beecher Stowe. As a regular contributor to Atlantic Monthly and personal friend to Stowe, Leonowens was surely aware of the magazine’s pronounced antislavery stance and therefore attempted to weave female antislavery messages into her travel accounts of Siam. Not unlike a Victorian travel writer discussed in Lewis’s work, Leonowens’s memoirs depict the Siamese harem as a space of strict gender stratification. Through speaking of and against the oppression of the harem women, her memoirs effectively represent herself as a benign civilizing force. Leonowens’s writing rehearses dominant perceptions of the Eastern harem as a site of oppression and difference. The first memoir, The English Governess repeatedly emphasizes Leonowens’s role as a “governess” and an “English” in order to demonstrate her difference from the harem women. Upon arrival, when being inquired by a woman if she intends to join the members of the harem, Leonowens rejects the “monstrous suggestion” indignantly, clarifying that: “I am only here to teach the royal family. I am not like you. You have nothing to do but to play and sing and dance for your master; but I have to work for my children” (The English Governess 20)20. The perception of the harem woman as an idler and plaything derives partly from Leonowens’s position as a working mother and partly from her Christian opposition to polygamy and its denigration of polygamy or concubinage as a “pagan” practice (EG 20). The memoir’s denigrating account of the harem is also shaped by the dominant conception of “home” as an expression of the English self. Not unlike a Victorian “lady” traveler’s memoir to the East, a substantial portion of The English Governess recounts her struggle with the King to obtain a private residence outside the confines of his palace. One conversation most clearly indicates the distinctions the memoir makes between the home and the harem and between the English woman and the Eastern woman: “I beg your Majesty will remember that in your gracious letter you promised me ‘a residence adjoining the royal palace,’ not within it.” He turned and looked at me, his face growing almost purple with rage. “I do not know I have promised. I do not know former condition. I do not know anything but you are our servant; and it is our pleasure that you must live in this palace, and—you shall obey.” (EG 46-47)
20 Reference to The English Governess is hereafter cited in the parenthesis as EG. 43
This dialogue between the King and the governess offers two significant meanings of home in Leonowens’s text: on the one hand, the act of securing a home while traveling abroad is symptomatic of nineteenth-century imperial womanhood. The discourses of home and domesticity invite readers to assume the narrator’s position as a “proper” middle-class Englishwoman. On the other hand, this act of establishing herself far away from the Eastern harem reinforces the notion of English freedom and superiority, a notion which is rendered plausible through the images of the “Asiatic” woman as “indolent, improvident, greedy, intemperate, servile, cruel, vain, inquisitive, superstitious, and cowardly” (EG 23). By setting herself apart from the harem and from stereotypical images of “Asiatic” womanhood, The English Governess upholds Western womanhood as an ideal of universality, equality, and freedom. Leonowens’s tales of the harem also indicate a strong connection to nineteenth- century American sentimentalism. In the last few decades, literary critics have debated over the role sentimental culture plays in building interracial and international relationships for the American nation. Jane Tompkins’s study sets out to explore sentimentalism as a genre that transmits an emotional state, usually suffering, to produce a politically useful sense of being in another’s shoes.21 Influential as this argument is, recent scholarship, best represented by Laura Wexler and Lauren Berlant, cast doubt on whether sentimentalism and sympathetic narratives can enable positive cross-racial identifications and political affiliations.22 As Berlant notes, sentimentalism might “justify ongoing forms of domination” by offering the short-lived satisfaction of tears rather than a sustained critique of structural inequality (40). The following analysis extends this scholarship to examine how literary sentimentalism could account for Leonowens’s representations of Siam’s harem women as “slaves.” Her texts reveal that sympathetic and sentimental renderings of women’s oppression in the harem often posit the Eastern
21 Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs (1985) and Lauren Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture (1977) are among the earliest attempts to analyze the politics of sentimentalism in relation to nineteenth-century women’s culture. Whereas Tompkins’s study focuses on the political work that sentimentalism embodies and unleashes, Douglas’s study contends that sentimental texts lack substantial political power, because such texts posit (white) female virtues as the new economic order that rejects ideas of social change. 22 See also Laura Wexler’s Tender Violence (2000); Shirley Samuels’s edited collection, The Culture of Sentiment (1992). For a different treatment of how sentimentalism figures in opposition to modernist culture, see Aaron Ritzenberg’s The Sentimental Touch (2012). 44
women as sexualized and racialized Other, through which Leonowens’s claim to an imperial identity is thus enabled. Sentiment works to reframe the institution of the harem as a form of “sexual slavery” in The English Governess. In a chapter that recalls the “Shadows and Whispers of the Harem,” the narrator evokes sentimentalism to conflate the secluded women with American slave women: “How I have pitied those ill-fated sisters of mine, imprisoned without a crime! I had never beheld misery till I found it there; I had never looked upon the sickening hideousness of slavery till I encountered its features here: pain, deformity, darkness, death, and eternal emptiness” (EG 72). The secluded women are re-configured not only as slaves but also as criminals, who are “imprisoned without a crime.” This reconfiguration of Siamese royal women actually derogates rather than redeems them, a lot of whom serve, intentionally or not, as powerful agents to strengthen the political ties between the noble families and their original families or countries (Morgan, Place Matter 233; Loos, 110-117). This reframing of Siamese polygamy as a kind of “slavery” further suggests how Leonowens’s description of the harem borrows and reworks American antislavery rhetoric during the Civil-War period. Women’s antislavery appeals tend to draw special attention to the intersection of gender and antislavery strategies. For instance, the renowned Southern diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut has written poignantly about the same degradation shared by white women and women of color within the system of slavery: “We are called wives, and as such we are recognized in law; but we are little more than superintendents of a colored seraglio” (Chesnut 122). Her Civil War memoir makes repeated references to the “colored seraglio” and “black harem” to condemn the often silenced and denied sexual violence in the American South. While, for Chesnut, these exoticized images of the Oriental harem function as an antislavery statement, they nonetheless displace the horrors of slavery and its oppression on women onto the Orient. Likewise, Leonowens’s memoir evokes the so-called “bonds of womanhood” in American antislavery texts by transcribing Eastern women into hapless slave women. The English Governess opens with an impression of Siam that is characterized by bewildering cries of women and children, making her wonder: “[h]ow many of our sisters, how many of our daughters, how many of our hearts’ darlings, are thus, without friend or guide or guard or asylum, turning into untried path with untold stories of trouble and pain!” (EG 12). Throughout, Leonowens, who is not unlike a White Northerner traveling in the South to prompt slaves for selling their stories, provides nearly 20 stories of the women who are rendered as sexual slaves in King Mongkut’s palace. Retelling these women’s stories, the 45
memoir vilifies the institution of the harem as the chief obstacle for Siam to evolve into a civilized and modern country. Meanwhile, the memoir’s sentimental accounts reify these Eastern women as objects of “our” sympathy and victims deprived of “their” agency. This critique of the harem becomes noticeable in her portrayal of the King as a knowledgeable but tyrannical man. Through this comparison of the harem with American slavery, the memoir condemns the sexualized political culture in Siam, which in turn facilitates Leonowens’s claim to the position of a sympathizing imperial subject.
III. King Mongkut and Anti-Colonialism of the Harem Leonowens’s portrayal of King Mongkut, the ruler of Siam (1851-1868) and her employer, is ambivalent. The portrayal of the King features a contradictory merging of liberal reform and sexual despotism. These contradictory accounts have much to do with Leonowens’s double role as a governess to the royal children and a personal secretary to the King himself, a situation that requires her to mediate the worlds between the public and the private, the English and the Siamese, and the personal and the political. Situated within these conflicting domains of subjectivity, The English Governess reveals how its portrayal of the Siamese King could be interpreted as what critic Chu-Chueh Cheng calls a “rhetorical vehicle” for Leonowens to cope with her sense of “displacement” and to “re-place” herself squarely into Anglo-American imperial activities in Southeast Asia (Cheng 151). Indeed, The English Governess frequently negotiates the contradiction of a female writer’s feelings of sexual inequality and cultural superiority in her travel to the East. The memoir shows both the King’s siwilai policy and the governess’s imperial agency by depicting the King as a liberal-minded reformer yet tyrannical patriarch. In doing so, however, the memoir’s articulation of cross-racial solidarity is made possible through the rationalization of Western superiority and interventionism over Asia. Leonowens’s portrayal of the king derives mostly from the complicated role she played in the Siamese court. The Siamese became aware of the West as a new imperialist threat after the military defeat of the traditional regional powers such as Burma, India, and China in the first half of the nineteenth century. Siam, despite facing ceaseless diplomatic pressure and veiled military threats, was never formally colonized. Nevertheless, as scholars note, the fact that Siam was never formally colonized did not exempt the country from being influenced by Western imperial activities in the region (Harrison and Jackson ix). Especially during the reign of King Mongkut, Siam achieved its sovereign status through strategically adopting pro-British reform and modernization 46
policies, while simultaneously remaining a firm and independent anti-Christian state (Winichakul 530). Mongkut’s letter of employment addressed to Leonowens illustrates this desire to keep the Siamese people open to Western knowledge but free from the yoke of Christianity.23 In fear that Leonowens would indoctrinate Christianity in his court and his children, Mongkut gives a special order regarding the governess’s duty. He wrote, as Leonowens’s memoir notes, that: “the followers of Buddha are mostly aware of the powerfulness of truth and virtue, as well as the followers of Christ, and are desirous to have facility of English language and literature, more than new religions” (EG 5). But Leonowens’s memoir suggests that she is not merely an English tutor. Rather, she serves as personal secretary to the King on foreign correspondences and affairs. At one point, she commented on Siam’s treaties with England and France, apparently being well-informed of the two empires’ long-term rivalries for greater influence in the region: His majesty, though secretly longing for the intervention and protection of England, was deterred by his almost superstitious fear of the French from complaining openly. But whenever he was more than commonly annoyed by the pretensions and aggressive epistles of his Majesty’s consul he sent for me—thinking, like all Orientals, that being English, my sympathy for him, and my hatred of the French, were jointly a foregone conclusion. (EG 172) As a “surrogate” consul, Leonowens holds that England is more a protector than a threat to the Siamese. Speaking of Mongkut’s treaty with the French, however, she taunts his attempt to ally with the French as a “superstitious fear” of the English. In emphasizing the positive influence of English education and friendship on Siam, The English Governess could be read as a major proponent of Western civilizing mission abroad and colonization in the Asia-Pacific region. However, even as Leonowens portrays herself as an English consul with civilizing tendency, her accounts of Mongkut’s administration, especially with regards to his power to rule Siam through liberal policies and progressive reforms, affirm that he is a competent king. As the memoir depicts, “he [the King] was, in many aspects, an able and virtuous ruler. His foreign policy was liberal; he extended toleration to all religious sects; he expended a generous portion of his revenues in public improvements… he did much to improve the condition of his subjects” (EG 159).
23 For an insightful treatment of Leonowens’s missionary position in her writings of Siam, see Susan Brown (1995). 47
The memoir’s most severe critique of Mongkut’s administration lies in his construction of the harem. The English governess groups all the women in the palace as the King’s sexual partners, although many of them appear to be retinues, female officials, and contracted laborers.24 For instance, Leonowens’s second memoir, The Romance of the Harem, focuses entirely on the issue of Siam’s polygamy and its impact on the country’s development: “Polygamy or, properly speaking, concubinage—and slavery are the course of the country” (The Romance 10). In both memoirs, Leonowens deliberately connects the sexual with the political, and through this connection she suggests that King Mongkut’s sexual life represents his political corruption. Further, she frequently describes Siam’s polygamous culture as a brutal practice that sexually denigrates and enslaves women. As she remarks in a scene where she encounters one of Mongkut’s concubines: The repulsive uncomeliness of this woman had been wrought by oppression out of that which must have been beautiful once…In the brutal tragedy of a slave’s experience—a female slave in the harem of an Asian despot—the native angel in her had been bruised, mutilated, defaced, deformed, but not quite obliterated. (EG 20) A “female slave in the harem of an Asian despot” is a frequently evoked trope throughout Leonowens’s accounts of Siam. This sweeping representation not only reinforces the woman as a victim but it simultaneously constructs the King of Siam as an Oriental despot, whose “perverse” sexual behavior disqualifies him for running a nation. Just as the King appears to be a bad husband, he turns out to be a bad ruler: “His moods were so fickle and unjust, his temper so tyrannical, that it seemed impossible to please him; from one hour to another I never knew what to expect” (EG 180). Such negative accounts of the King solidify Leonowens’s claim to an enlightened and imperial subject position. The more “tyrannical” Mongkut appears to be, the more “civilized” Leonowens herself is. The English Governess concludes with an emphasis on Siam’s issue of polygamy and the notion of European superiority: “What may be the ultimate fate of Siam under this accursed system, whether she will ever emancipate herself while the world lasts, there is no guessing…[T]he influence of European ideas, and the compulsion of public opinion, may yet work wonders” (EG 185-186). By envisioning Siam’s future as a woman’s emancipatory project, the memoir builds the concepts of civilization and freedom on
24 As historian Tamara Loos (2006) estimates, King Mongkut had in total 50 wives, 35 of whom born him 82 children. 48
Western gender ideology, which stipulates that “a society’s treatment of women was frequently held up as evidence of its degree of civilization” (Levine 6). Through this gender critique, the memoir reinforces the assumed differences between Oriental savagery and Western civility. But, the idea that the harem comes to embody Siam’s savagery in general and King Mongkut’s despotism in particular is mostly a Western imagination. As literary and historical scholarship shows, the harem actually existed as a crucial anti-colonial institution in the nineteenth century, at the point when Western empires sought to project the rhetoric of “emancipation” and “progress” to their expansionist logics toward Asia. For instance, Susan Morgan’s study of Leonowens’s travel memoirs has pointed out how the harem was a hallmark of nineteenth-century Siam’s nationalism: “With its group of royal and nonroyal mothers coming from families all over Siam, the harem had a key political function as a unifying institution, existing in relation to one central paternal figure with the power to make sate decisions for all the territories of Siam” (Place Matter 233). Morgan’s analysis builds on the notion that the harem is primarily a male-dominated enterprise. In highlighting the contradiction between gender and nationalism of women’s travel narratives, Morgan argues that Leonowens’s rhetoric of international sisterhood create alternative, that is, female-centered perspectives against the local and colonial masculinist formulations of the harem. Although this argument suggests that the relationship which a woman has—whether she is Western or Eastern—with the harem is necessarily an exploited and unhappy one, Morgan’s analysis opens up a new venue for thinking how Leonowens’s memoirs could move beyond the competing local and global claims of female subjectivity and embodiment. The following sections explore how Leonowens’s second memoir, The Romance of the Harem, enables an articulation of transnational subjectivity and alternative modernity in her sentimental representations of Siamese harem women. My analysis extends Tamara Loos’s treatment of polygamy and its status in Siam’s legal reform in the nineteenth century. In her insightful study of the modern history of Siamese family laws, Loos has demonstrated how laws, especially regarding the practice of polygamy, came to represent Siam’s institution of modernity: Siam proved to Western powers, through “the abolition of polygyny and adoption of monogamy, its transition to modernity” (Loos 110). Her study, instead of re-centering polygamy as the main issue that would privilege Western concerns, traces what it means for both Siamese and Western legal reformers when they never reached a consensus on the legitimacy of polygamous marriages during 49
the years from 1855 to 1930s. This study of polygamy is significant for two specific reasons. First, Loos’s study illustrates how polygamy does not just function as signs for Siam’s oppression and barbarity, but it generates signs for Siam’s alternative modernity vis-à-vis the “civilizing” projects of the West. Secondly, by using a transnational and colonial analytic frame, her work redefines polygamy as “a practice that made Siam’s form of modernity palpably alternative” (110). My analysis of polygamy’s role in The Romance discusses these two aspects with a third consideration: how the memoir’s descriptions of polygamy evoke and rework American sentimentalism. This consideration allows me to examine how sentimental representations of the Siamese harem provide both the conditions of possibility and limitation for building transnational subjectivity and female solidarity between Western women and nonwestern women. My discussion focuses on the stories of Mongkut’s two wives, Tuptim and Hidden Perfume, who represent an internal class and racial hierarchy within the harem: Tuptim appears pitiful, whereas Hidden Perfume is regal; Tuptim is illiterate, whereas Hidden Perfume is highly learned and motivated; Tuptim dies as a slave, whereas Hidden Perfume lets free the slaves in her palace. Given these contrasting representations, the two royal women signify a “progressive” process of transition from sympathy to equality, and from bondage to freedom. While the figure of Tuptim seems to embody the mystification of slavery in colonial harem discourse, it is Hidden Perfume, a head wife and former slave owner, who identifies herself as Harriet Beecher Stowe in speech and manner and with whom Leonowens really identifies. The Romance’s narratives of cross-racial identification reveal that articulations of transnational subjectivity and female solidarity are often available through the displacement of the rights and equality of the nonwhite and nonwestern women.
IV. Tuptim and the Logics of Racialized Sympathy Leonowens’s accounts of Tuptim epitomize the colonial harem narrative that often construes the cloistered women as victims of masculine sexual and political ambitions. Presented under the chapter titled “A tragedy of the Harem,” Tuptim is a young and beautiful Burmese girl taken as a peace offering to the King of Siam. According to the memoir, the “gifting” of women and children was part of Siam’s political culture, which was constituted by loyalty to the absolute monarchy: “Every noble, prince, and merchant sought to obtain the royal favor by gifts thus presented, it being fully understood between the giver and receiver that whoever gave the most costly presents should receive the 50
largest share of royal patronage and support” (The Romance 15).25 Despite her role as the king’s new favorite, Tuptim appears “disobedient,” “naughty,” and “willful” and refuses to heed the rules of the harem (RH 16). Depicted as too “artless” to conceal her aversion to the harem life, she finds refuge at Leonowens’s school, which offers her great solace by transcribing her true feelings into English. She secretly copies in English the name of her lover, Khoon Phra Balat, who joins a monastery after her entrance to the harem. One day, Tuptim disappears from the palace. She is found disguised and shed in the monastery, where her lover presides. Accused of adultery, Tuptim faces severe trials, mutilation, and fire execution, but she insists on their innocence till the last minute of her life. As the story unfolds, the “sublime heroism” transfigures Tuptim from a child into a hero as she exclaims on the scaffold: “I have not sinned, nor has the priest my lord Balat sinned. The sacred Buddha in heaven knows all” (38). In a sympathetic depiction of Tuptim’s rebellion and heroic martyrdom, Leonowens’s text depicts the Oriental harem woman’s sublimation from servitude to freedom vis-à-vis her accusers’ atrocity and inhumanity. But, it is also because of sympathy’s narration of the cloistered woman into a slave woman that Leonowens’s memoir enhances rather than diminishes the racialization and sexualization of the Asian woman. The portrayals of Tuptim are repeatedly sentimentalized and imbued with slavery. In both Leonowens’s memoir and twentieth-century’s dramatic adaptions, Tuptim’s story not only deploys American antislavery rhetoric but it calls on the vision of postbellum Pacific expansion to Southeast Asia. In Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1955 film, Tuptim comes to borrow an English reading and Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the very book that Leonowens lends her. A few scenes later, at the king’s diplomatic dinner, Tuptim performs the narrator’s role in the “Uncle Thomas” show, which is roughly adapted from Stowe’s novel and is probably scripted by Tuptim. Through the figure of Tuptim, the film makes ample intertextual references to black slavery in order to, as Shannon Steen has observed, “convince U.S. audiences of the need to liberate Asia” (26). While the film’s associations of Tuptim with slavery can be discerned by her interpretation and internalization of Stowe’s novel, such associations between Tuptim and black slavery are less literally drawn in The Romance. Rather, the memoir’s construction of Tuptim as a slave girl has more to do with her connection to the harem and her apparent class and racial inferiority. With her working-class Burmese origin, Tuptim is characterized as impetuous and unruly
25 Reference to The Romance of the Harem is hereafter cited in the parenthesis as RH. 51
in comparison to other wives’ obedience and sophistication. Tuptim’s free expressions of her loathing to be sexually bound to a man she has no emotional ties—regardless how powerful the man is—display a subaltern artlessness and unruliness. Tuptim’s affection for another man and her escape from the palace to be with him also structurally stigmatize her as a slave woman. In cinematic representations, Tuptim is physically and emotionally tied to a sexualized and racialized realm of American slavery by her identification with Stowe’s Eliza. Eliza’s escape models for Tuptim the path to achieving love, freedom, and happiness. This consideration of “love” as a potential source for emancipation and humanity is well-researched by scholars of nineteenth-century sentimentalism. Yu-Fang Cho, for instance, has proved in a rigorous study of nineteenth-century women’s California magazines how their sentimental appeals to love and marriage tend to project racial difference and inferiority onto the immigrant subject. In her illustration, sentimental accounts of the Chinese “slave girls’” reform—that include their pursuit of love and marriage to obtain full personhood and American citizenship—often reinforce the irreformability of the Chinese by rendering death as their ultimate solution to freedom (Cho 118-126). In the same vein, the desire to build a life around true love in a conjugal relationship rather than the patriarchal rules of royal polygamy dominates Leonowens’s sentimental narration of the Siamese harem women’s lives. These individualized concepts of freedom and sexuality are particularly palpable in Tuptim’s story. As she directs her affection and loyalty to a monk (to whom she is previously betrothed) rather than a king (with whom she actually has sex), Tuptim represents an emancipatory future for Siam that is contingent on individualized and modernized sexual and political affiliations. These scenes of escape for true love’s sake serve as a counterforce to the authoritarian terms of royal sexuality, and further signal the transformation of Tuptim from being a subaltern figure to modern liberal subject. When sentimental pursuits of love and personhood signify a “progressive” transition from bondage to freedom, such descriptions also resurrect the prevalent codification of the sentimental subject as potentially fallen, contemptible, and culpable. Tuptim’s story crystalizes the contradictory workings of American sentimental discourse to “liberate” and “civilize,” while simultaneously re-codifying the sentimentalized subject as an Other. For instance, the pursuit of free love might facilitate Tuptim’s emergence as a modern liberal subject, but it criminalizes her as a sexual and political offender and mars Asian womanhood in general. The criminalization of Tuptim takes place in court. Refusing to take her words for truth, the Siamese judges, nonetheless, force Tuptim to 52
confess her adulterous relationship with another man through inhuman tortures. The court’s double exploitation of Tuptim—by denying her rights to defense and criminalizing her agency—reveals the strikingly similar legal status between Siamese harem woman and American slave woman. Jeanne Elders Dewaard’s study of the paradoxical status of the slave in law is a helpful source here. Dewaard characterizes the slave’s legal status as “complete annihilation of the will in civil law and full personhood in criminal law—as either criminality or submission” (22). Drawing on legal and literary examples, she analyzes how the law effaces white violence on black women by constructing them as either sexually submissive or harboring murderous intentions. While literary texts such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Clotel seek to “redeem” the slave, the political agency these sentimental novels claim for white women’s influence often makes the slave’s “noncriminal agency” impossible (Dewaard 22). Similarly, in an attempt to redeem Tuptim, Leonowens’s text builds her own agency on the criminality of Tuptim’s agency, that is, on Tuptim’s sexual and political transgression. This representation of Tuptim’s agency both humanizes and criminalizes, urging her to transform from a slave into a martyr in the contradictory politics of sentimental representations. The tragedy moves toward its climax as Tuptim and Balat are condemned to death. Facing the death penalty fearlessly, Tuptim is repeatedly depicted as a heroic martyr. Leonowens represents this transformation with astonishment: “the simple child was transformed into a proud, heroic woman, and, as she sat there, she seemed so clam and pure, that one might think she had already crystallized into a lovely statue” (RH 27). Importantly, this sentimental narration of Tuptim’s transformation from a “simple child” into a “proud, heroic woman” recalls Leonowens’s own struggles with the king to maintain her role as a righteous and sympathetic British woman. She pleads for a stay and clemency for Tuptim’s execution. But Mongkut rejects her furiously. In addition, he orders the execution to be conducted outside Leonowen’s house in order to exact his “vengeance against any person who should again dare to oppose his royal will and pleasure” (RH 35). Thwarted in her attempt to rescue Tuptim, Leonowens feels obliged to attend and record the execution as a token of her sympathy: My windows were closed upon the scene; but that tiny figure, with her scarlet scarf fluttering in the breeze, had so strong a fascination for me, that I could not withdraw, but leaned against the shutters, [as] an unwilling witness of what took place, with feelings of pain, indignation, pity, and conscious helplessness which can be imagined. (RH 37) 53
This bountiful display of interracial sympathy is politically dangerous because it denies any agency in the nonwestern woman and demonizes and authenticates the power of the nonwestern man. Caren Kaplan has written cautiously against such representations of Eastern womanhood as a pitfall of “international sisterhood.” As she notes, “[w]hen a figure such as Tuptim is constructed as a romantic, tragic victim, the narratives of nonwestern women in resistance against local and global forms of oppression are displaced” (Kaplan 48). Indeed, the textual development of Tuptim from a victim to a martyr obscures the possibility that her story provides counterpoints to local gender and global racialization. The execution scene of Tuptim crystalizes her role as a sentimental heroine. According to Leonowens, she is not the sole spectator. When the executioners applies tortures on Tuptim, the cheering crowd were “awed into silence”; instead of being awed into loyalty to the absolute power of the King, the public are impressed by Tuptim’s “calm self-possession,” so much so that that they “prostrate[] themselves in worship of that childish form” (RH 37). To represent her “sublime heroism,” the memoir offers a graphic and detailed reportage of the execution scene of Tuptim: Every torture that would agonize, but not kill, was employed to wring a confession of guilt from the suffering Tuptim; but every torture, every pang, every agony, failed, utterly and completely failed, to bring forth anything but the childlike innocence of that incomparable pagan woman. The honor of the priest Balat seemed inexpressibly more precious to her than her own life, for the last words I heard from her were: “All the guilt was mine. I knew that I was a woman, but he did not.” (RH 39) The horror of the public execution is reminiscent of Foucault’s discussion of “sovereign power.” Foucault distinguishes “sovereign power” from “disciplinary power” to demonstrate that public punishments such as torture and execution are politically dangerous. Public spectacles are intended to display the sovereign’s power, connect horror with crime, and ally the public with the sovereign in opposition to crime. The ritual backfires, however, for the sympathy of spectators usually lies with the criminal rather than the sovereign. As he writes: “out of the ceremony of the public execution, out of that uncertain festival in which violence was instantaneously reversible, it was this solidarity [with the criminalized] much more than the sovereign power that was likely to emerge with redoubled strength” (Foucault 63). While, for Foucault, popular sentiment is thought as an unreliable social control system, it proves to be an effective avenue for 54
overthrowing the rule of absolutist monarch in Leonowens’s text. Through Tuptim’s heroic sacrifice, Leonowens invites her mainstream American audiences to condemn Asian tyranny and sympathize with the criminalized. However, precisely because such sentimental language reifies East-West hierarchy—in which the East is barbaric and the West is democratic, the politics of sentiment ought to be rethought and reconfigured to envision a more reciprocal basis of international or interracial solidarity.
V. Hidden Perfume and the Spiritual Regeneration In contrast to the sentimentalized Tuptim, the memoir’s portrayal of Hidden Perfume provides a different model of transnational female solidarity. “Hidden Perfume,” meaning “soft power” or a kind of power that can “render [life] fairer and more beautiful” (RH 246) is an English translation for Sonn Klean, a chief wife in the harem and a dear friend to Leonowens. Having produced a son, Sonn Klean, not unlike many others, is cast aside by the king. According to Leonowens, what makes Sonn Klean unique is her positive attitudes to life and her passion in learning things that are “pure, noble, brave, and good, and to adopt them, whether Pagan or Christian in their origin, and to leave dogmas, creeds, and doctrines, to those who were inclined to them by temperament” (RH 246). A firm believer in Buddhism, Sonn Klean is not opposed to Christianity. She endorses and assists translating the Bible into the Siamese language. In her excitement to find some likeness between Christianity and Buddhism, she tells Leonowens: “O, your sacred P’hra Jesus is very beautiful! Let us promise one another that whenever you pray to P’hra Jesus you will call him Buddha, the Enlightened One; and I, when I pray to my Buddha, I will call him P’hra Jesu Karuna, the tender and sacred Jesus, for surely there are only different names for the one and the same God” (RH 248). Sonn Klean is also cited as a zealous reader of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “She knew all the characters by heart, and spoke of them as if she had known them all her life” (RH 248). To express her sympathy for the author, she releases 132 slaves in her palace and employs those who refuse to go to work for her as paid servants. Because of its focus on the mutual learning and non-hegemonic identification for the Western woman and the Eastern woman, the story of Sonn Klean does not reinforce the Orientalist conceptions of the uncivilized East and the enlightened West as Tuptim’s story does. Rather, Leonowens’s portrayal of Sonn Klean introduces an alternative method for thinking colonial modernity by developing a spiritual rather than sentimental articulation of female identity and solidarity. Leonowens’s school represents a kind of “educational reform” that calls for 55
Siam’s modernization. Her presence could be recognized as a major force to a series of civilization programs initiated by King Mongkut and his royal elites, who consumed Western languages, scientific technologies, and other forms of scholarship eagerly and who considered themselves as the “enlightened” generation (Winichakul 533). As such, Leonowens’s presence in Siam is not merely marked with British imperialist emblem but it also reveals the Siwilai-zing ambition of the Siamese. This is evident in The Romance’s chapter on “Stray Leaves from the Schoolroom Table,” which provides many incidents and reflections on her teachings in the royal palace of Siam. Most of Leonowens’s lectures focus on geographical and astronomic learning. These classroom memos suggest the Siamese people’s general lack of scientific acquisition. For instance, speaking of astronomy, she recalls how “each [of her pupils] had his or her own idea about the form of the earth, and it needed no small amount of patient repetition to convince them that it was neither flat nor square, but round” (RH 240). Geography appears a further poorly developed subject in Siam. Siam’s map, according to the memoir, contains just three countries: Siam, Burma, and England (RH 241). The English map and globe thus cause a “sensation” among the Siamese, who find it hard “to see Siam reduced to a mere speck on the great globe, but there [is] some connection in the fact that England occupie[s] even a smaller space” (RH 242). Despite her somewhat imperialistic tone, Leonowens’s teaching memos seldom give prejudicial accounts about Buddhist doctrines as most of her contemporaries’ travel memoirs to the East do. Leonowens at times represents herself as steadfastly defending her British Christian values, but on the whole her memoirs, The Romance in particular, eschew a religious construction of mission. It is perhaps because of her close ties with the women in the harem that Leonowens came to believe that, as Susan Morgan has argued, “in the female world…, spiritual lessons become a matter of transcultural transmission” (“Hidden Perfume” 252). Through her dialogues with Sonn Klean, Leonowens represents how the spiritual terrains of culture are capable of contesting the dominant dualistic categorization of race, gender, and nationality. Her memoir which involves Sonn Klean demonstrates the importance of spiritual reconstruction for Thai elites and the transnationalization of the female spiritual subjectivities. The Romance’s construction of Leonowens as a civilizing force is counteracted by its spiritual ties to Sonn Klean as a Buddhist authority. Sonn Klean shows Leonowens not only the way “they” need not to learn from “us” but also how much “we” could learn from “them.” Two conversations best illustrate how religion serves as the foundation for 56
cross-cultural understanding between the two women. One day, intrigued by the Buddhist praying rituals, Leonowens asks: “Sonn Klean, you were praying to that idol?” (RH 248). Her interlocutor does not say a word immediately. Later, “laying her hand gently upon [Leonowens’s] arm,” Sonn Klean replies: “shall I say of you, dear friend, that you worship the ideal or imagine which you have of your God in your own mind, and not the God? Even so say not of me” (RH 248). The anecdote exemplifies Sonn Klean’s intelligence and wittiness for making her Western friend to realize that Buddhist principles and practices are not more irrational or backward than Christian ones. For Sonn Klean, just as she claims on another occasion that “there are only different names for the one and the same God” (RH 248), Theravada or Thai Buddhism is a transnational cultural practice. This idea of Buddhism without borders, or rather, a Buddhist practice that crosses and redraws borders, is conveyed through a legend by Sonn Klean. The legend depicts a grieving mother who cannot recover from the sudden death of her beloved child. She carries the dead baby around, imploring every person on her way to revive her child. Finally, she meets the Buddha. Buddha promises to cure her baby only if she leaves the child with him and brings back some mustard seeds from “a house where no child, parent, husband, wife, relative, or slave has ever died” (RH 251). The woman does what she is asked to do. But she is unable to discover a single house free from the dead. Being enlightened, she returns to the Buddha, who speaks wisely: “you thought that you alone had lost a son, but now you have learn that the law of death and of suffering is almost all living creatures, and that here there is no permanence” (RH 253). Sonn Klean tells the legend in order to console Leonowens when the latter is just bereft of a close relative. Leonowens does not response to the story sufficiently; she only recalls that it is narrated “in a voice full of the tenderest sympathy and affection” (RH 250). Nevertheless, this story provides a stark contrast and veiled critique of Tuptim’s narrative. While the sentimental appeals of Tuptim’s story tend to project difference and inequality onto the Eastern woman, the spiritual values of Sonn Klean’s story disrupt the reified social and national categories by suggesting that “the law of death and of suffering” is borderless and transitory. Through its emphasis on a spiritual rather than sentimental display of feelings and identity, Sonn Klean’s Buddhist lessons serve as a counter-narrative to the previously dualistic constructions of the East and the West and the enlightened and the benighted. Even Sonn Klean’s antislavery proclamation is reshaped in a Buddhist fashion. 57
She claims to be “good like Harriet Beecher Stowe,” “never to buy human bodies again,” and to “have no more slaves, but hired servants”; but she also emphasizes the association between antislavery movement and Buddhism: “Buddha had once taught kings to respect the rights of [their] fellow-creatures” (RH 249). Here, in crux, Sonn Klean construes her antislavery work as complementary to her commitment to the Buddhist doctrine. Identifying Buddha more as a teacher than a god, Sonn Klean’s tales show the pivotal role Buddhism played in shaping the Siamese moral culture and national identity. Her antislavery claim draws upon but also undercuts American sentimental culture by rendering her antislavery position a distinctly Buddhist trait. But, this does not suggest that Sonn Klean’s claim to a spiritual construction of identity is free from foreign influences. Neither is it entirely opposed to the West. According to Thongchai Winichakul, the idea of “the spiritual,” as is represented by Siamese Buddhism, which comes to embody the essential Thainess/Siamness, as is opposed to Western “materialism” and “capitalism,” is strongly advocated since the nineteenth century but not without its problems. Although Buddhist Siamese perceive themselves as spiritually superior to the materialistic Westerners, they acknowledge the need to reinvent and modify their Buddhist-defined identities in relationships with the West. As Winichakul remarks, “the currently existing Thai Buddhism that is so widely praised in nationalist discourses as the core of ‘Thainess’ is the product of a local transformation induced by Western influences” (“Coming to Terms with the West” 149). Following Winichakul’s analysis, Sonn Klean’s antislavery position could be rethought to be an articulation of her agency as both a Buddhist Siamese and a Siwilai-zed abolitionist. This commingling of Siamese Buddhism and American abolitionism by Sonn Klean, or Hidden Perfume, provides a new way to address Siam’s colonial modernity and national identity in the middle of nineteenth century and beyond.
VI. Conclusion Despite the limitations of her appeals to a Western female abolitionist project in the process of “civilizing” Siam, Leonowens’s accounts of the Siamese royal women suggest an alternative possibility to seek the connections between religion and the modern nation state of Siam. In conclusion, I turn briefly to Leonowens’s portrayal of King Mongkut’s son and successor, Maha Chulalonkorn (r. 1868-1910), who serves as a successful example of Siam’s mixture of Eastern and Western civilization. Appearing near the end of The Romance, the figure of Chulalonkorn embodies Siam’s alternative 58
modernity, a modernity that is characterized by its oscillation between and syncretism of the Buddhist monarch and the siwilai-zed democracy for an expression of Siam’s sovereign power. This strategy of an “in-between” nation and national identity is manifested by King Chulalongkorn’s use of a Buddhist emancipatory rhetoric during his inauguration speech. Leonowens’s depiction of this speech shows how the distinction between the spiritual and the sentimental-material needs not to be clearly defined. Perhaps, it is this tension between the spiritual and the sentimental-material and between Eastern and Western articulations of identity and solidarity that multicultural dialogues are thus enabled and sustained. Having discussed the evils of slavery, The Romance depicts how Chulalongkorn emerges as a rightful ruler in Siam in the ending chapter. His ascendance to the throne is quickly followed by the “siwilai-zed” emancipation proclamations. Already in his 1868 inauguration speech, Chulalongkorn has guaranteed every Siamese subject his or her personal and religious freedom: “It is our will that our subjects of whatever race, nation, or creed, live freely and happily in our kingdom, no man despising or molesting another on account of religious difference, or any other difference of opinions, customs, or manners” (RH 266). Chulalongkorn then proposes his antislavery agenda to the Council of the State. When he is told that legalizing the abolition of slavery will counter the general interests and constitutions of the State, the king takes the abolition in his power. Like Sonn Klean, he declares to free the slaves in his palace (RH 268). Repeatedly depicted as a “young” and “brave” king, Chulalongkorn never stops trying to free the country from slavery. In his second inauguration speech, the king proclaims that “from the first day of January 1872, slavery shall cease to be an institution in our country, and every man, woman, and child shall hold themselves free-born citizens” (RH 268). In this portrayal of Chulalongkorn as a national hero who single-handedly brings down the inveterate system of Siamese slavery, Leonowens makes an implicit commentary on the differences between the reign of Chulalongkorn and that of his father: whereas Mongkut represents tyranny, polygamy, and worst of all, slavery, Chulalongkorn represents freedom, emancipation, and modernity. In Chulalongkorn’s rule, Siam gives birth to “a new empire” (RH 265). Significantly, this “new empire” assimilates and also undercuts Western, especially American, concepts of freedom and progress. Chulalongkorn might build his concept of freedom on Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation, but it is in his ambition to restore Siam to its precolonial Buddhist state that his claim to Siamese 59
freedom becomes crystalized. The memoir recalls his youthful ambition to restore his country to an “original” and “free” state: when a mere boy, on hearing the death of President Lincoln, he had declared that if he ever lived to reign over Siam, he would reign over a free and not an enslaved nation; that it would be his pride and joy to restore to his kingdom the original constitution under which it was first planted by a small colony of hardy and brave Buddhists…They called the spot they occupied ‘Muang Thai,’—the kingdom of the free. (RH 267) In this somewhat “Americanized” version of Siamese national allegory, the figures of a small group of “hardy and brave Buddhists” represent the historical forefathers whose experiences of slavery, migration, and occupation establish the modern state of Siam. Buddhism alone cannot define Siam’s national culture and international status in the second half of the nineteenth century. Emancipatory project and state power are conflated during the reign of Chulalongkorn. By representing him as a Buddhist abolitionist, who is almost American president, but not quite, Leonowens’s memoir shows how King Chulalonkorn’s sovereign power reflects and contests the Western influence. Further, this strategic conflation might serve as a solution to Siam’s “dilemmas” raised by Winichakul. Winichakul suggests that since the middle of nineteenth century, Siam/Thailand has been faced with the dilemmas of “[t]o be or not to be like the West. To follow or not to follow the West” (“Coming to Terms with the West” 150). Leonowens’s representations of Sonn Klean and Chulalonkorn show there are ways to reconceive these questions. In the last few chapters, her memoir suggests that Siam’s alternative modernity is made possible by rethinking both the connections and contradictions between the East and the West, Buddhism and abolitionism, and the spiritual and the sentimental, without necessarily choosing one over the other.
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CHAPTER THREE
Kin of a Different Kind:
Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far) and Transracial Adoption
Today, we might consider how the politics of colorblindness reconfigure whiteness as property to focus critical attention on the private structures of family and kinship as the displaced and privileged site for the management of ongoing problems of race, racism, and property in U.S. society. —David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship
[I]f we are to adopt an expanded notion of reproductive justice, one that includes the right of birth mothers to parent their children, then the denial of that right—and of the material conditions that make it possible to exercise that right—constitutes a biopolitical regime contributing to the social death of a growing body of poor, racialized, and gendered birth mothers throughout the world, including the United States. —Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire
I. Introduction In his play, Trying to Find Chinatown (1996), David Henry Hwang subtly tackles contemporary debates over Asian American identity in relation to the question of “birth.” In the play, a white man, Benjamin, who identifies as a Chinese American like his adoptive parents, is seeking his “roots” in New York’s Chinatown. He stops to ask direction from an Asian-looking street musician, Ronnie, who assumes that Benjamin is a racist tourist who stereotypes him as a Chinatown pimp. As Ronnie retorts: “What are you gonna ask me next? Where you can find the best dim sum…a genuine opium den…[and] meet Miss Saigon for a night of nookie-nookie followed by a good old-fashioned ritual suicide?” (Hwang 287). Benjamin then explains that despite his white skin, he believes he is an Asian American by virtue of adoption at birth and is searching for familial, cultural, and geographical affiliations of that identity. Yet, this explanation only throws Ronnie into a fit, insisting instead the biological determinism of race: RONNIE: I don’t know what kind of bullshit ethnic studies program they’re running over in Wuss-consin [sic], but did they bother to teach you that in order to find your Asian “roots,” it’s a good idea to first be Asian? (Pause.) 61
BENJAMIN: Are you speaking metaphorically? RONNIE: No! Literally! Look at your skin! … BENJAMIN: Well, you can’t judge my race by my genetic heritage alone. RONNIE: If genes don’t determine race, what does? BENJAMIN: Perhaps you’d prefer that I continue in denial, masquerading as a white man? (Hwang 289-290) This highly charged exchange between the points to a central question in the inherently multicultural and multiracial U.S. society: is race a matter of birth, a natural endowment of biology? Or is it a postnatal and postracial development shaped by social relationships and affinities? What is the basis of racial identity for literary imagination and criticism dealing with transracial adoption? Why does the narrative of transracial adoption become so prominent in both studies of (multi)ethnic literature in general and Asian American studies in particular? How does the figure of transracial or transnational adoptee complicate the notions of race, family, and nation as biologically grounded and interlinked? In recent years, transracial adoption has emerged as an important subject through which debates about definitions of race, class, family, gender, sexuality, and nation take place. Literary critics and historians especially call attention to the ways that such debates could expand and challenge our idea that identity is produced primarily through familial and national affiliations. For instance, Mark C. Jerng and Cynthia Callahan have investigated how “transracial,” 26 or the U.S. domestic adoption, took shape in legal and literary discourses from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. In his study of legal and literary discourses on Native American and African American adoption during the period, Jerng shows how these discourses reveal “specific crises in the reproduction and naturalization of norms of personhood at the conjunction of familial, national, and racial logics” (x-xi). As he contends, through analyzing the interlocking norms of race, family, and nation that regulate the status of the adoptee, it is possible to see how early writers anticipate, consolidate, or challenge specific kinds of affiliations before transracial
26 In adoption discourses, domestic adoptions, often labeled “transracial,” have been separated from international adoptions, labeled “transnational.” This separation, as Jodi Kim rightly observes, obscures the way in which most transnational adoptions, particularly from Asia, have also been transracial (279 n. 51). Like Kim, I use the term transracial to emphasize the significance of race. When I use the term transnational or transpacific, I refer to an adoption practice that is international but not necessarily interracial. 62
adoption becomes a fully recognized state institution in the U.S. in the 1920s. Callahan examines these crises of belonging throughout twentieth-century fictional accounts of transracial adoption that constantly raise the question: what constitutes an “authentic” identity in a nation reckoning with racial and ethnic differences and immigrant problems? In her analysis of some of the major twentieth-century literary genres that could be characterized as “transracial” narratives, including passing, captivity, and immigration narrative, issues of authenticity loom large at personal and collective levels that necessitate a reconfiguration of American racial and national belonging. Building on Jerng’s and Callahan’s analyses, this chapter draws upon current discussions on the interconnected logics of race, family, and nation that have profoundly shaped the nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary adoption. Further, my analysis focuses on how the workings of empire bring forward a new version of “violent belongings,” to borrow Amy Kaplan’s phrases, which generate the majority of the U.S.-Asian adoption narratives since twentieth-century American wars in Asia. Chapter Three explores literary adoption and the central issues of kinship and citizenship in Edith Maude Eaton’s (Sui Sin Far’s) work.27 Born in 1865 to a Chinese mother and a British father, and has remained unmarried and supported herself entirely by writing in defense of the Chinese until her death in 1914, Edith Eaton is now the focus of several literary recovery projects in both Asian American literature and women’s studies. Many of her works, including dozens of short stories, journalistic articles, and one book, were published under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, meaning the “Chinese Lily” (White-Parks 50). Over the past few decades, Asian American literary criticism has seen fit to claim Edith Eaton as the first Chinese woman writer in the United States and as a “maternal figure,” to whom such contemporary writers as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan turn for “roots” (White-Parks 6). Yet, this approach, as critics caution, requires the interpellation of her as a Chinese “racial” or American “national” subject—often at the expense of the alternative subject positions available in her self-portrayal as a “Eurasian” woman (Roh-Spaulding 21; Shih 49), or as a “cultural orphan” whose identity, according to Hsuan L. Hsu, “cuts across lines of class, race, gender, and nation” (Hsu 96). My analysis of Edith Eaton attempts to move forward with the new dialogue, which suggests the interpellation of her as neither exclusively Chinese nor exclusively American in order to
27 The author is referenced as “Edith Eaton” throughout this chapter in order to be distinguished from her sister, Winnifred Eaton, whose work is the primary subject of analysis in the next chapter. 63
explore the alternative modes of racial and national belonging that emerged from her representations of transracial and transnational adoption. In doing so, this analysis responds to Amy Kaplan’s call for “the transnational turn in American studies,” a method which allows for “decentering the tenacious model of the nation as the basic unit of knowledge production,” so that it “traces alternative spaces and modes of belonging to collectivities [that are] not subsumed by the nation-state…[but] reconceives immigration as multidirectional movements” (Kaplan 11-12). Indeed, as this chapter argues, Edith Eaton’s adoption and immigration narratives conflate and contest the ideologies of imperial domesticity and whiteness, therein revealing the restrictive logics of both in informing Asian American cultural productions and subject formations in her time. While previous chapters read the “domestic” as a function of empire for reproducing racialized maternity and sympathy, this chapter analyzes how domesticity is construed as an unstable site in Edith Eaton’s narratives of transracial and transnational adoption. Here, I consider adoption as an emerging trope for Asian and Caribbean immigrations, which not only reconfigure the relationship between the U.S. empire and the British empire as well as their competitions over Asia, but it also provides a new avenue to investigate Asian American literary histories and subjectivities as a transnational inquiry. In terms of methodology, David L. Eng and Sarah Dorow have examined how transracial or transnational adoption could offer a model of “relational” or “transnational” consideration of race, family and empire by examining the adoptive parents’ and the adoptee’s identity formations within and beyond the American framework. Dorow argues that transracial adoption constitutes the largest form of Asian Pacific migration to the United States in the past two decades. Such forms of adoption migration on both sides of the Pacific “reproduce the boundaries between Asia and America and between the racialized identities and white privileges, although they also make possible the crossings of these boundaries” (Dorow 22). Similarly, in his analysis of the U.S.-Asia adoption that is set in the context of the 1990s discourse of queer globalization and liberalism, Eng suggests how narratives of the transnational adoptee from Asia offer a possibility to conceive “Asian American identity [as] not reliant on an assumed (blood-line) kinship or a naturalized story of immigration, assimilation, and settlement” (The Feeling of Kinship 107). To join this broader conversation on U.S.-Asia adoption, I analyze how Edith Eaton’s adoption narratives evoke and also challenge Anglo-American imaginations and regulations of race, family, and nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Specifically, my analysis reveals that her 64
narratives expose the racialized and gendered practices of the U.S.-Asian adoption, while privileging certain form of transnational kinship by rendering such relations constituted through “blood ties” that seem to be capable of transcending the U.S.-China cultural and national boundaries. This chapter aims to trace a genealogy of transracial adoption that stretches and crisscrosses Anglo-American, Caribbean, and Asian nations and communities in Edith Eaton’s work. Using a transnational lens, my analysis underscores the alternative modes of racial and national belonging in her work by demonstrating how her representations of transracial and transnational adoptions challenge the norms of white domesticity, femininity, and citizenship that undergirded Anglo-American cultural and neocolonial encroachments into the Caribbean and Asia Pacific regions. To illustrate how Edith Eaton’s works reconfigure imperial cultural norms through the trope of adoption migration, this chapter begins with two stories that illustrate the cultural politics of adoption in the context of the turn-of-the-century U.S.-Caribbean relations. In “Away Down in Jamaica” (1898) and “The Sugar Cane Baby” (1910), each story represents a rival definition of Caribbean womanhood that resists and redefines the colonial notions of white, middle-class domesticity and femininity. The chapter then discusses how the mixed-race families in Edith Eaton’s short story collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), provide a significant space where the seemingly contradictory practices of the U.S. politics of inclusion and anti-Chinese racism are made visible or resolved. In her turn-of-the-century Chinatown stories that include transracial adoption, such as “Pat and Pan,” “The Gift of Little Me,” and “The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese,” the adoptee—whether Caucasian or Chinese—are portrayed as a culturally mixed or fluid American subject, a condition which anticipates the strengths and restrictions in contemporary U.S. practices of multicultural family and adoption. Next, this chapter juxtaposes Edith Eaton’s “Children of Peace” (1912) and Kate Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby” (1893) to show how the two stories reinforce rather than reduce myths about “origin” as they claim a “natural” and legitimate relationship to the nation. Despite both stories play on the “origin,” they also call for a rethinking of identities constituted outside the norms of racial and national purity by imagining one’s origin(s) as fundamentally hybrid or discrete. As this chapter begins with the trope of “birth,” it concludes with the trope of “return” in contemporary Asian American writings on transracial or transnational adoption. The conclusion rethinks the narrative trajectory of “Children of Peace” as a recuperative transpacific racial position for post-adoptive and 65
Asian American subjects. This consideration suggests how Edith Eaton’s work predates and complicates recent discussions on the U.S.-Asian adoption as a reinforcement to the dichotomy between Asianness and Americanness.
II. Contesting White Womanhood and Racialized Adoption Although Edith Eaton’s representation of early Chinese immigrants’ lives in the United States has gained substantial attention in current studies of Asian American transnationalism, her Caribbean stories remain understudied, suggesting that there exists a larger politics of ethnic authenticity in the context of Asian American literary criticism.28 As one of the few critics who look beyond the question of “authenticity” to that of “ethnography” in Edith Eaton’s work, Dominika Ferens argues how the exclusive focus on her Chinatown narratives might render “the muted orientalism of Edith’s work go unnoticed” (2). Edith Eaton’s Caribbean tales certainly carry on some “orientalist” weight. She was commissioned as a “foreign” (“white”) journalist for a large Kingston newsletter for six months between 1896 and 1897. During this period, much of her coverage of the local culture was intended to promote tourism and foreign investment from wealthy visitors of the West, despite the fact that she was “not [one] of them” (Ferens 70-71). Because of the Jamaican narratives’ relatively “exotic” odor in comparison with her other writings, critics raise questions as to the significance of these narratives to Edith Eaton’s later emergence as an influential Asian American author. For instance, writing about Edith Eaton’s short story entitled “Away Down in Jamaica,” Martha Cutter asks: “What was Sui Sin Far’s purpose in writing this story? What was her goal in sending it to Lummis?29...Does Jamaica represent a space of racial and gender mobility or of immobility? And how does she represent the ‘native’ woman?” (85-86). According to Cutter, Edith
28 Arnold Pan’s article (2010) is a solid analysis of both the potentials and limitations to read Edith Eaton’s work in relation to recent trend on Asian American transnationalism through her representations of middle- and upper-class Chinese merchants. Cho Yu-Fang (2009), on the other hand, provides a different take on this approach to Edith Eaton’s work as a part of the “transnational racialized power structure” that often renders the Chinese as “victims” denied to agency and legitimacy (“Yellow Slavery” 38-39). For an insightful investigation of Edith Eaton’s work in a specific Afro-Caribbean regionalist context, see Sean X. Goudie (2008). For discussions that focus on Edith Eaton’s treatments of transracial families and adoption, see Cynthia Callahan (2011) and Hsuan L. Hsu (2010). 29 Charles Fletcher Lummis is the editor of California’s premier regional magazine, Land of Sunshine (1894-1935). 66
Eaton’s use of exoticism challenges the male publishers’ and mainstream audiences’ tendency to read her as an “exotic other” (88). My analysis, however, shows how the strategic use of exoticism is to contest the white woman’s authority. I argue that Edith Eaton’s stories delineate an alternative and anti-racist model of “brown” womanhood through her exposé of the establishment of Anglo-American femininity and domesticity as exclusively white. Her tales of the transracial adoption in Jamaica reveals how the imperial notions of white womanhood and domesticity rely on the racialized conceptions of the “brown” Caribbean woman. “Away Down in Jamaica”30 is a love tragedy about the seemingly ideal couple, Kathleen Harold, a white American woman of some fortune, and Wycliff Walker, a “dark, handsome face[d]” planter-merchant based in Jamaica (“Away” 94). Uncertain about her feeling for Walker, Kathleen agrees to marry him in lieu of another suitor, Phil Everett, a Canadian-born journalist working at a local newspaper station. Walker, who is depicted as a successful but callous businessman, seeks to be a “reformed” man by marrying a “respectable” woman like Kathleen (“Away” 94). However, his past haunts him still. One day, Walker receives a note from Kathleen to break their engagement in return for his decision to attend a business trip at the expense of their wedding plans. On his way to persuade Kathleen to resume their relationship, Walker is intercepted by Clarissa, a beautiful Jamaican mixed-race woman, who was once seduced and abandoned by him some years ago. Clarissa is a “lady” and an adoptee in a wealthy white Jamaican family before she elopes with Walker. In spite of her unwavering love for Walker, Walker sees her as a part of his youthful debauchery and unruliness that he is anxious to put behind. As he tells Clarissa, he has given up all his “wild ways, drinking, gambling, and so forth…to be married” with another woman (“Away” 94). Heartbroken, Clarissa vows that she would take her revenge. Meanwhile, Kathleen takes up most of her time nursing the dying Phil, who has contracted malaria and become very ill after Kathleen agrees to marry Walker. The story ends with the murder of Kathleen by Clarissa. Kathleen’s body is “fixed up and sent back to her people in the States,” and Clarissa is diagnosed “mad and ordered [] to be locked up, but she get[s] away…and has hidden where no one can find her” (“Away” 95). By pitting Clarissa against Kathleen, the story plays on the age-old rivalry between American womanhood and Caribbean womanhood for the attention of the white man with an ironic, tragic turn.
30 Reference to “Away Down in Jamaica” is hereafter cited in the parenthesis as “Away.” 67
Kathleen’s presence in this story embodies the influence of the white American woman and the notions of the “domesticated” empire. She represents the nineteenth-century imperial reach of American womanhood, which held that woman’s power resided in the “domestic” realms and linkages between the home and the nation. Such understandings of womanhood are depicted by Amy Kaplan as “manifest domesticity.” As Kaplan defines, “manifest domesticity” denotes the female imperial discourse, which “redresses and reenacts the contradictions of empire through its own double movement to expand female influence beyond the home and the nation while simultaneously contracting woman’s sphere to police domestic boundaries against the threat of foreignness both within and without” (“Manifest Domesticity” 585). The characterization of Kathleen follows this double compulsion to dominate and domesticate the foreign. Kathleen’s ties with the Jamaican hinge on her desire to maintain the privileged status as white imperial woman. This is indicated in the colonial landscape of Jamaica’s sugar plantations which Kathleen evokes in the very beginning of the story: “banana plantations and acres of cane fields stretched far away; vistas of loveliness opened up on all sides, revealing glimpses of dazzling sea and shining beach” (“Away” 90). This vision reifies Jamaica as a colonial site which serves to supply domestic luxuries and comfort with which Kathleen is associated. Kathleen’s privileged status not only derives from her whiteness but also from her representation of ideal womanhood. She is an embodiment of traditional femininity, including gentleness, nurturing, and compliance. A “respectable” woman, she is believed to be capable of “reforming” a wicked man as Walker, who embodies an emergence of Anglo-American imperial ambitions in the Caribbean region. It is also through her connections to Walker that Kathleen can become a fully domesticated woman in Jamaica while claiming her racial and moral purity and superiority. If, in “Away,” Kathleen characterizes the feminized terrains of the empire, we may consider Clarissa’s presence as Edith Eaton’s early attempt to contest and revise this form of womanhood before she begins to write more consistently on Chinese womanhood. The Caribbean cultural critic Sean X. Goudie has read Clarissa as Edith Eaton’s exploration of a mixed-race Creole subjectivity within the context of post-emancipation Afro-Caribbean cultural expressions. According to Goudie, Clarissa is Edith Eaton’s endeavor to “[c]reolize her own imagination by reviving and transforming suppressed non-Western ideologies and cultural practices…Clarissa’s Afro-Creole revenge through obeah…ruptures calcifying binaries: white and black, civilized and uncivilized, reformed 68
and unreformed, uplift and betrayal, redemption and degeneration” (314). Clarissa, initially Walker’s victim but eventually his rival, represents an unresolved—and perhaps irresolvable—history of personal and collective oppression and exploitation which constantly haunts, defines, and threatens the empire. Clarissa’s presence in the text embodies both the physical and the spiritual regeneration of the Afro-Jamaican cultural roots and communities. Her “brown” skin is marked by the colonial vestiges of Jamaican miscegenation, abandonment, and forced migration and adoption. Meanwhile, she symbolizes the resurrection of a subaltern black culture and community through her resource to Obeah. In “Away,” Obeah serves as a significant subtext that gestures toward Clarissa’s mixed-race Creole heritage and identity—an identity hidden from her when she is adopted by a well-to-do white couple as a little child. Clarissa’s life with the white family provides her an opportunity to become “a lady” until her elopement with Walker (“Away” 92). The subsequent betrayal and abandonment by him prompt Clarissa to relinquish white connections and live instead among black peasant and maroon communities of the Blue Mountains in Port Antonio, where Obeah is actively practiced. As Goudie suggests above, Edith Eaton’s use of Obeah does not merely challenge the perceived boundaries between white and black, civilized and uncivilized, and uplift and betrayal. The emplotment of Obeah facilitates Clarissa to reclaim her birth identity by disrupting the hegemony of whiteness represented by the union of Kathleen and Walker. The mysterious chants of “Wickliff Walker, Wickliff Walker” that interrupt Kathleen and Walker’s “lover’s talk” when they are alone one day apparently originate from Clarissa’s practice of obeah (“Away” 91). Further, as Goudie also observes, Clarissa’s invocation of Obeah could serve a powerful counter-narrative against the proliferation of anti-Obeah statutes in Jamaica in the 1890s (315-316). The anti-Obeah prohibition culminated in the passage of “Obeah Law No.5” in 1898, the same year when “Away Down in Jamaica” was published. This statue not only undertook to prohibit public access to Obeah but it also outlawed the “composition, publication, and distribution of obeah pamphlets” (Goudie 316). Written against this censorship, Edith Eaton’s Obeah subtext gives voice to the silenced and criminalized cultural practitioners who were perceived as threatening to a civilized community. It solidifies Clarissa’s claim to an “outlawed” Caribbean adoptee’s position over the privileged white femininity she used to assume. This symbolic import of Obeah culminates in Clarissa’s murder of Kathleen. Kathleen is murdered slowly by the poisonous flowers sent from Clarissa. Often depicted 69
as a woman with naïve charm, Kathleen never seems to wonder why she receives these flowers from a stranger each day. When the anonymous flower giver is identified to be Clarissa, “a brown girl…adopted when a little child by some rich white people…[who] brought her up like a lady, but some years ago she ran away,” Kathleen is not suspicious, only saying: “Indeed! Quite a romantic history! Next time she comes I would like to see her” (“Away” 92). She is unaware that Clarissa is capitalizing her romanticized vision of life in order to exact her revenge on Walker. Kathleen’s death, however, is not followed by the triumphant ascendance of Clarissa in the end. To the contrary, the story concludes that Clarissa submerges from public attention and has “hidden where no one can find her” (“Away” 95). Set as Kathleen’s rival, Clarissa loses her stage after Kathleen’s death. The poison which Clarissa procures from the “Obi man” for killing Kathleen both racializes and criminalizes Clarissa, turning her into an “outlaw” in the white society where she used to belong. Her “disappearing” act upon Kathleen’s death in the end entails a double meaning. On the one hand, it affirms Clarissa’s racialized and sexually stigmatized status in comparison with the ideal of imperial femininity assumed by the white woman. On the other hand, this tragic ending disrupts the structural opposition between the white woman and the racialized woman by allowing the exploited and racialized woman to take her revenge with impunity. Here, it is worthwhile to pause and rethink Cutter’s question: what are we to make of this story within Asian American cultural criticism and current discussions on transracial adoption? According to Cutter, the cultural aspects of the story show Eaton’s appropriation and subversion of her editor’s desires, similar to Walker’s, to “keep the native woman, the exotic other, in her ‘appropriate’ place” (Cutter 88). While this reading challenges the gender construction of the “brown” woman, it does not address how the mixed-race womanhood is also constructed in relation to the white womanhood and the mainstream readership. I employ a comparative model for analyzing the question of womanhood not only because “Away” exposes the racial rivalry between the white woman and the racialized woman; but it is also because this analysis reveals how Edith Eaton’s story could be interpreted as a critique of the power structure that necessitates the rivalry that eventually serves neither white nor racialized woman within the patriarchal racial empire. Through such comparative lens, both “proper” and “improper” forms of femininity fail, thereby demanding a redefinition or rethinking of what becomes of domestic and feminine norms at the racial and colonial frontiers of the empire. Just as the poisonous flowers in “Away” symbolizes the racialized and rivaling 70
“brown” womanhood, Edith Eaton’s the other Caribbean story, “The Sugar Cane Baby,” evokes and contests racial stereotypes by representing a “snake” as the incarnation of South Asian motherhood. “The Sugar Cane Baby”31 depicts the problematic of adoption in a hierarchical colonial relation of race, family, and nation. The story opens with an Edenic painting of one afternoon of the plantation life on a Caribbean island. A baby lying in a bamboo clearing is sucking on a small piece of sugarcane and surrounded by a colorful array of birds, insects, lizards, tree trunks, and “a green spotted snake” (MSF 258). Like many Indians in the Caribbean between the mid nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the baby’s mother is a contract laborer.32 She has carried her baby on her back while working in the field all the morning, and has to lay him down because he becomes restless in the afternoon. The baby and snake are discovered by two convent sisters, who exclaim: “A Hindu child! […] Oh, these mothers, these mothers! What love have they for their children when they can leave them like this?” (MSF 259). The baby is then relocated to the missionary orphanage amid a very different environment: The sugar-cane baby lay in a little white crib in a long white room full of other little white cribs. Around him, some in cribs and some out, were a number of other babies…Most of them were pure pickaninnies, but not a few bore the mark of the white man in complexion and feature. The sugar-cane baby was distinguished as being the only little native of Asia. (MSF 260) The shift of these scenes—from nature to culture, sugarcane plantation to convent orphanage, and “green spotted snake” to “long white room full of…other babies”—is indicative of the social and economic disparities between white and nonwhite populations in the Caribbean American region. The missionary orphanage is full of black and mixed-race babies, suggesting that these babies are considered abandoned because of their race, while their mothers might be performing labor required by the capitalist empire
31 As most of Edith Eaton’s stories discussed in this chapter, “The Sugar Cane Baby” is excerpted from her short story collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, first published in 1912 and reprinted by Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks in 1995. Future reference to the 1995 edition is cited as MSF in the parenthesis. 32 According to Walton Look Lai, approximately 700,000 Indian people went to the Caribbean as indentured laborers from 1838 to 1917. The majority of them went on a 5-year contract due to poverty, famine, or political persecution at home. For an in-depth analysis of the growth of the Indian community in the nineteenth-century Caribbean and its different development and racial status from those of the Chinese Caribbean community, see Lai, 204. 71
that these missionaries are part of. In the case of the sugarcane baby, the white missionary women believe that the child’s mother fails to perform her maternal duty. She is associated with the “snake,” a biblical symbol of degeneracy and deceiving femininity. As the orphanage’s Mother Superior asks rhetorically: “Is a person who could leave her baby beside a snake on the high road fitted to care for him?” (MSF 261). Suggesting that the mother’s delinquency is equal to the menace of a snake, these mission women construe the Asian womanhood as signs for Asian degeneracy and moral corruption, and thus justify the missionary adoption of nonwhite children. This missionary discourse of transracial adoption proves to be harmful for the Asian populations. The themes of “rescue” have predominated Anglo-American women’s magazines and travel accounts to Asia throughout the nineteenth century. Such “rescue” narratives, as scholars note, often frame the U.S.-Asian relations as “domestic moral concerns rather than as transnational economic issues, thus…obscuring…disciplinary and coercive tendencies” of the missionary rescues (Cho 121). In other words, although missionary forms of adoption might stem from humanity and compassion for the cultural other, such discourses nonetheless reinforce popular Western belief that Asian culture is itself devoid of the means for achieving humanity and equality. In her analysis of America’s cold war imperialism in Korea, Jodi Kim argues how the condition of possibility for transnational adoption from Asia has led to what she calls the parallel “social death” of the adoptee and the birth mother (212-223). Edith Eaton’s narrative exposes the ostracization of the birth mother through the convent sisters’ proclamation that the Asian mother is unfit for taking care of her own child. Also, the adopted children—including the Asian “foundling,” “pure pickaninnies,” and racially-mixed babies—suggests that the missionary adoption is a highly racialized practice. Without a single “white” child, the mission home represents the moral and economic high ground of the white people. Thus, in its attempt to prove the universalism of Western humanity, missionary adoption creates opportunities for building transracial family and intimacy, while simultaneously reproducing the racial divisions of womanhood. Edith Eaton casts doubt on the universalist discourse of Christian salvation by showing how the “birth” family and culture are of paramount importance in this adoption story. When the Indian child is dying of self-inflicted starvation at the orphanage, Leila Caroll, an American journalist, observes: “the baby is breaking its heart for its mother!…The snake was harmless…[I]t had been trained by the baby’s father to guard the little one” (MSF 260-261). The snake around the baby could signify an anti-Christian 72
cultural force such as “Hinduism, in which serpent deities are often benevolent and nurturing” (Hsu 125). Furthermore, depicted as a surrogate mother in this story, the snake symbolizes an alternative and empowering form of Asian womanhood in opposition to the kind of “racialized adoption” of the mission home. The story’s conclusion asks us to reconsider the cultural politics of motherhood: the Indian baby refuses to eat until his mother finds him: “The child clung to her, so tight, so close, that they wondered at his strength…She picked up the sugar cane and held it to his lips. He sucked eagerly” (MSF 261). The affective scene of reunion eventually brings Mother Superior to tears and to reinterpret the situation, allowing the mother to take her baby home. Thus, highlighting the racial concerns of adoption, the story of sugarcane baby generates a productive criticism on two levels: it questions the prevailing forms of racialized adoption in Anglo-American women’s narratives. Also, it reveals how such narratives often tend to incorporate the Asian subjects by racializing and gendering them. Ultimately, these Jamaican-based adoption narratives ask for a redefinition of the Caribbean womanhood and embody alternative cultural structure of kinship emerging from the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racialized adoption.
III. “White; But All the Same”: Chinatown Adoption V.S. Anti-Chinese Agitation Departing from the “exotic” aura of her Caribbean writings, many of Edith Eaton’s Chinatown fictions dwell on the domestic themes of love, marriage, and childrearing. As these topics allow her to address the distinctiveness of Chinese American culture, they also challenge the sensational and exotic accounts of the Chinese—accounts such as slavery, patriarchy, and criminality—that were most immediately called upon to legitimize the anti-Chinese exclusionary policy and culture in the United States (Cho 115). This section of the chapter develops the aforementioned concept of missionary or “moral” adoption to explore Edith Eaton’s turn-of-the-century Chinatown fictions that involve transracial adoption and family. Borrowing Emily Cheng’s analysis which contends that the Cold War politics of the U.S.-China adoption privileges “white womanhood in forcing [the] multicultural family” (6), I examine the role white women play in the assimilation and racialization processes of the Chinese in Pacific-Coast Chinatowns. My analysis focuses on how Edith Eaton’s representations of Chinatown adoption verbalize and seek to resolve the contradictions of the U.S. liberalist and imperialist attitudes toward Chinese immigrants. Edith Eaton’s narratives complicate Cheng’s analysis by envisioning Chinese American adoptees as a potential literary and political medium for forging emancipatory 73
and racially fluid subjects. Yet, these narratives of Chinatown adoptees also express the problems for conceiving the future of Chinese American national identity and citizenship, as they are thwarted by the intensification of anti-Chinese legislation from 1880s to 1910s. Contrary to the standard trajectory of transracial adoption which follows the migration and adoption of Asian children by white parents, “Pat and Pan” tells the story of two children, a white boy, Pat, and a Chinese girl, Pan, growing up together in Chinatown and the forced removal of the boy from his adoptive home under the influence of a white woman. The opening scene borders on the threat of the infantilized miscegenation, as it depicts that Pat and Pan lie “sound asleep in each other’s arms. Her tiny face was hidden upon his bosom and his white, upturned chin rested upon her black, rosette head” (MSF 160). The cuddling children are discovered by a white missionary teacher, Anna Harrison, who insists that Pat, the adopted son of a Chinese merchant, should attend her school nearby, for “a white boy to grow up as a Chinese was unthinkable” (MSF 161). Later, the white missionary teacher arranges for Pat to be adopted by an affluent white household. Initially, Pat resists parting with his Chinese sister, protesting that “I will not leave my Pan! I will not leave my Pan!...I am Chinese too!” (MSF 164). However, in the final scene of the story, Pat appears with new clothes and friends, and grows into his position as a white boy. When he hears Pan call him by name and his friend’s sneering: “hear the China Kid!,” Pat shouts toward Pan: “Get away from me!...Get away from me!” (MSF 166). Commenting on the paradox of “choice” in this story, S. E. Solberg argues that Edith Eaton demonstrates a “conviction that environment is more important that [sic] heredity, [and] that race is an accident” (35). Despite its effort to reinterpret race as an articulation of an individual’s will rather than his or her body, what makes this argument seem somewhat simplistic is the fact that the culture of transracial adoption has repeatedly enhanced the “choice” of the white middle-class American family and kinship, and this condition of “choice,” according to critics, usually relies on the relative lack of choice for racially marked parents to keep their birth children or adopt a white child (Kim 212; Yngvesson 230). “Pat and Pan” exposes and reverses this racial disparity imbedded in the dominant culture of adoption in the United States. As a member of the dominant race, Pat is nonetheless adopted by a Chinese American couple, who are entrusted with the rearing of Pat as their own child before his mother dies. To uncover white supremacy, Edith Eaton juxtaposes Chinese Americans’ and white Americans’ responses to transracial adoption. 74
The white missionary teacher, Anna Harrison, is surprised to find a white boy growing up in a Chinese community after she is thus informed by a local fruit vender. Although the Chinese fruit vender identifies Pat as “white; but all [the] same, China boy,” Harrison dismisses this “reverse” adoptive arrangement as “unthinkable” (MSF 160-161). In showing the white society’s intolerance of the adoption of white children by Chinese parents, Edith Eaton depicts how Harrison insists that Pat should learn “the speech of his ancestors” (MSF 162) and then be paired with white parents who could “raise him as an American boy should be raised” (MSF 164). The “matching” of an adoptee with a family of similar racial and physical traits became some kind of an unwritten rule in the early twentieth century. The idea of “matching,” as Mark C. Jerng points out, “construct[s] the adoptive family ‘as if’ it were biological, using likeness to sustain identification and deny difference within the family” (94). Edith Eaton’s adoption narratives do not merely pose a great challenge to this dominant history of adoption based on “likeness.” The story of Pan, in particular, provides an alternative narrative to the privileged forms of Chinese or African adoption by white American families, since the uneven social power has dictated who is permitted to adopt and whose children become available for adoption (Callahan 16-17). Countering this racial disparity, Edith Eaton delineates the loss and injustice experienced by the bereft Chinese parents who have to give away Pat: “they yielded him without protest. But deep in their hearts was the sense of injustice and outraged love” (MSF 164). Such issues of racial disparity in the conventions of adoption are taken up again in Edith Eaton’s another Chinatown story, “The Gift of Little Me.”33 The story opens in a schoolroom where Little Me is ashamed because, unlike his schoolmates, his poor family cannot afford a Chinese New Year’s gift to the white missionary teacher, Miss McLeod. A few days later, Little Me’s younger brother vanishes, and his family mobilizes the whole community to search for the lost child. When they locate him in McLeod’s tenement house, a Chinese merchant, who has held a grudge against the teacher, accuses her of “child theft.” He asks the townspeople to “[t]rust her no more,” for she, “under the guise of friendship, had ingratiated herself into their hearts and homes, was in reality a secret
33 This story is excerpted from the most recent collection of Edith Eaton’s writings by Hsuan L. Hsu (2011). In his introduction, Hsu explains that the 1995 edition omits the story probably due to the story’s “sentimental” values (20). Because Hsu’s edition is also named Mrs. Spring Fragrance, I cite this particular story in the parenthesis as (“Little Me”) to avoid edition confusion. 75
enemy” (“Little Me” 91). But the Chinese refuse to turn against the teacher who adopts their concerns as her own. In Miss McLeod’s mind, Edith Eaton depicts, “[t]he distress of these Chinese people was hers; their trouble also. Had she not adopted them as her own when kinfolk had failed her?” (“Little Me” 90). The tension is eventually resolved when Little Me discloses that it is he who has secretly left the baby in Miss McLeod’s house as a gift, having too literally interpreted the story she tells at Christmas, about “the giving of a darling and only Son to a loved people” by God (“Little Me” 87). In this ironic turn, “The Gift of Little Me” undercuts the exclusive dyads of white parents and Chinese children by imagining adoption as a reciprocal and interactive transaction, in which the Chinese community replaces the role of the white teacher’s biological kin by adopting her into the community, just as she serves as the Chinese schoolchildren’s intellectual model. Edith Eaton’s accounts of adoption as a mutually beneficial process of transculturation echoes the notion of “transnational reproductive justice” advocated by Jodi Kim. In her examination of the post-WWII formation of Asian America, Kim calls for “transnational reproductive justice,” a praxis which not only enables a more nuanced analysis of the material and colonial conditions that have deprived the rights of the birth mother to parent her own child (170). This praxis also allows women to fight for each other rather than “pit (birth) mother against (adoptive) mother” (Kim 187). I suggest that we could read Edith Eaton’s stories in relation to Kim’s concept of adoptive justice. In most of her Chinatown adoption narratives, Edith Eaton calls attention to the rights of the Chinese birth parents and adoptive parents, whose reproductive and citizen rights were denied by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and subsequent restrictions extending its effects until its repeal in 1943 (Lee 4). Facing the increasingly rigid legislation to deny Chinese entry and intermarriage, the Chinese community responded by creating “paper” child and kinship for those who could afford to purchase their ways into the United States. Both “Pat and Pan” and “The Gift of Little Me” hark back to this repressed history of adoption (im)migration at different levels. While Pan’s story disrupts the coded relationships of the white parent-Chinese child patterns of adoption, Little Me’s story imagines adoption as a transcultural process in which the boundaries between Asia and America are constantly under debate and negotiated. The ending of Little Me’s story emphasizes this culturally interactive aspect of adoption. When the mission teacher tells Little Me that she likes his “gift” too well to keep it, he responds: “Ah, yes…You keep my brother in your heart and I keep him in the house with me and my father and mother. That best of all!” (“Little Me” 94). In this depiction of adoption as a transcultural 76
experience, Edith Eaton’s story presents a new possibility to circumvent the need to choose between the Asian (birth) and American (adoptive) mothers—a need that often reifies the dichotomy between the two. Perhaps the most subversive treatment of transracial adoption in Edith Eaton’s oeuvre is her story titled “One White Woman Who Married a Chinese,” which subverts white supremacy in a number of ways, most notably by vying Asian manhood against white manhood for the construction of an ideal, middle-class, and mixed-race American household. This story depicts a Chinese man, Liu Kanghi, who rescues a despairing woman, Minnie, from her abusive ex-husband, James Carson, by marrying her and raising her child as his own. Narrated by Minnie, the story makes an even more explicit comparison between the two men. The ex-husband Carson is depicted as a progressive-thinking lawyer, who takes interest in “labor politics, socialism, woman suffrage, and baseball” (MSF 67). In spite of—or because of—his self-proclamation as a suffragist, Carson coerces Minnie to resume her work as soon as she gives birth to their child, so that he has the freedom to write a book on social reform while developing an affair with a coworker who he regards as a more congenial companion to him than Minnie’s “narrow-mindedness” (MSF 68-69). Minnie finally divorces Carson, because his bitterness and betrayal makes her “feel it a disgrace to be a woman and a mother” (MSF 70). Unlike the educated but brutish Carson, Liu is from the beginning a gentle-hearted stranger who intercepts Minnie’s suicide attempt and gratuitously provides for her and her baby until Minnie becomes independent; later, he loves and marries her in spite of the barrier of race. Countering the prevailing images of Chinese men as publicly “effeminate” yet privately “tyrannical” (Eng Racial Castration, 90-93), Minnie’s accounts of Liu suggest that it is Liu rather than Carson who serves as a model for American domestic and gender norms: “My Chinese husband…is always a man, and has never sought to take away from me the privilege of being but a woman” (MSF 77). As a successful businessman in public and loving husband and father at home, Liu symbolizes an emerging form of Asian American masculinity, which increasingly relied on the economic inclusion of Chinese merchants and the roles that these middle-class subjects played in shaping Asian-American commerce and relationships, domestically and internationally (Pan 90). Not only do Minnie’s accounts of Liu as an ideal masculine domestic subject counteract the legal prohibition on White-Asian miscegenation. But the story’s depiction of the children who are born or adopted through such mixed-race families also suggest 77
how they may presage a multicultural American future in which the contradictions between white Americans and racialized Americans could be productively negotiated rather than always being posited as insurmountable tensions and divisions. Minnie’s daughter from the first marriage is closer to Liu than she is to Minnie. The vision that future American family and nation are ones of racially mixed and fluid compositions is underscored when Minnie conveys her hopes and fears for their biracial son: “my boy, the son of the Chinese man, is possessed of a childish wisdom which brings the tears to my eyes; and as he stands between his father and myself, like yet unlike us both, so will he stand in after years between his father’s people and his mother’s people” (MSF 77). This portrayal of a biracial child’s ambiguous and “in-between” cultural position corresponds to Edith Eaton’s representation of herself as a “connecting link” between the East and the West in her autobiographical essay, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” (MSF 230). On the one hand, this mixed-race figure symbolizes the possibility of replacing a stringent biogenetic explanation of identity with a more culturally fluid and transformative one. For example, Minnie and Liu’s son is celebrated among his kin as “[a] prophet!...[A]fter him, the name of half-breed will no longer be one of contempt” (MSF 82). On the other hand, this hybrid subject also carries distinctively “biological” markers of identity: he at once resembles and differs from his racially “pure” parents. Further, as a Christ-like figure, his identity is revealed when he suffers for the peace and equality among both Chinese American and white American communities that his parents represent respectively. In this envisioning of the future of Asian America as a result of the fusion and contradiction between blood and culture, Edith Eaton’s stories complicate and undercut both biological and postnatal (or postracial) articulations of identity in contemporary debates on the question of “origin” in transracial adoption.
IV. The Question of Origin The question of “origin” is a vexed one in contemporary (multi-)ethnic American studies. Historically, narratives about origin—narratives that include passing,34 immigration, intermarriage, and transracial adoption—have proved useful for white authors to cope with their anxieties over American belonging during some of these large-scale domestic and international conflicts since the middle of the nineteenth century:
34 By “passing,” I refer specifically to the behavior or writing of a non-white person that masquerades as white. 78
the Civil War, the height of Jim Crow and segregation, the Chinese Exclusion Acts, and American wars in Asia (Jerng xii). In such cases, transracial adoption tends to adhere to existing social order and configure forms that reinforce racial, sexual, and familial hierarchies and therein preserve the American nation as white. However, origin narratives also enable authors to imagine non-normative forms of belonging through the racially mixed or ambiguous characters. As Cynthia Callahan contends, transracial adoption’s “disruption of ‘blood’ as the binding substance of kinship results in a corresponding subversion of the social norms that presume race to be shared within families and, implicitly, in bloodlines” (18). Thus, while the adoption discourse could symbolize a “disruption of blood” that challenges biological conceptions of race, there is simultaneously a move to readmit biology and the norms of “purity” in defining American racial and national belonging. In bringing into analysis this paradox of “origin” as a binding force for larger forms of collectivity such as race and nation, this section compares and contrasts two contemporaneous stories, Edith Eaton’s “Children of Peace” and Kate Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby” to show ways in which these two narratives play on the myths of “origin” or “bloodline” to varying degrees and purposes. In both narratives, the practices of adoption reinforce rather than reduce prejudices against identities constituted outside the racial, sexual, and familial norms. The adoptees’ identities are constituted primarily in relation to their “natural” bloodlines and affiliations. But, even as they underscore biogenetic thinking of identities, both narratives complicate the U.S. racial formations by calling attention to the larger contexts of colonial and diasporal subject formations. “Désirée’s Baby” presents the postbellum Southern identity deeply steeped in fantasies about the continuity of pure bloodlines and anxieties about the contamination of Otherness. In comparison, “Children of Peace” depicts early Chinese immigrant subjects whose social status and affiliation are not so much shaped by American domestic racial relations but rather Chinese transnational tensions and ties. This comparison argues how the two narratives demand a rethinking of identities constituted outside the norms of racial and national “purity” by imagining one’s origin(s) as fundamentally hybrid, discrete, and diasporal. “Désirée’s Baby” crystalizes an example of adoption that reifies race categories as pure, natural, and absolute. Désirée, a foundling presumably left by a group of passing Texans, is found and raised by the Valmondé, a childless Louisiana planter family. When she comes of age, Désirée marries Armand Aubigny, a neighboring plantation owner. 79
They are a happy couple until their firstborn arrives. Initially, the baby is regarded as a blessing to the union on both sides—the arrival of the male child not only consolidates Désirée’s role as a wife and mother, but it softens Armand’s disposition greatly, who is depicted as exhibiting an “imperious and exacting nature” toward his slaves (Chopin 244). Yet, it soon becomes apparent to everybody, and to Désirée herself, that her son is not “purely” white. When she searches for an explanation from Armand as to their baby’s complexion, he accuses her of putting him and his family name to shame because, as he remarks, “the child is not white; it means that you are not white” (Chopin 245). Unable to face this accusation, Désirée disappears with her child into the bayou. This tragedy, however, ends not with her disappearance but with Armand’s epiphany that he is the one who is “black.” As he is burning Désirée’s and baby’s belongings in the backyard, Armand finds a letter, written in his mother’s hand and addressed to his father, saying: “I thank the good God…that our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery” (Chopin 247). Chopin’s representations of adoption in this story are two-folded. The admission of Désirée into the postbellum white Louisiana community may posit that race is grounded in “families,” the immutable “blood ties.” Chopin’s portrayal of Désirée confirms rather than threatens this doctrine of “racial purity.” As is indicated by her name, the white-looking Désirée is “the wished-for one,” “the desired one” (Chopin 242). More than a child of abundant parental love and care, Désirée grows to be an ideal Southern belle, who is able to entice Armand to marries her instantly despite her “obscure origin” and lack of a prestigious family name, “as if [he was] struck by a pistol shot...The passion that awoke in him…swept along like an avalanche, or like a prairie fire…that drives headlong over all obstacles” (Chopin 242). Even though Désirée’s “obscure origin” creates a crisis of belonging when she gives birth to a mulatto child, the text suggests that it is Armand who is not pure white yet who makes Désirée a scapegoat to secure his passing as white.35 Armand’s response links the maternal body to what Alys Eve Weinbaum calls the “race/reproduction bind,” a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mechanism that conjoins notions of racial “purity” with women’s reproductive capacity
35 Ellen Peel (1990) discusses how Armand is aware that he has a black mother and is himself legally “black” based on the “one-drop” rule before he marries Désirée. The marriage is a cover-up for his black identity. See also Callahan’s elaboration on this idea in relation to the nature/culture debate on race in the 1890s (68). 80
and their roles within the nation-state. Weinbaum argues that “Chopin represents race as reproducible, national belonging as maternally orchestrated, and the maternal body as the repository for imbricated racial and national identities” (16). Désirée’s story not only represents the maternal body as a signifier for racial identities, but it also suggests how white maternity has gradually replaced black maternity in securing American national belonging as white in the 1890s.36 When Armand accuses Désirée for “blackening” their child, Désirée protests her whiteness as an innate and bodily form of identity: “I am white! Look at my hair, it is brown; and my eyes are gray…[a]nd my skin is fair…Look at my hand, whiter than yours, Armand” (Chopin 245). Through Armand’s (de-)racialization and of Désirée, Chopin represents critically how it is usually women, but seldom men, who bear on the complicated task of reproducing race and racial hierarchies. While the story might reinforce white maternity, “Désirée Baby” also undercuts the claim that whiteness is an inherited and inviolable estate by rendering it as a perpetually deferred concept under the system of slavery. In destabilizing white identity, Chopin suggests that the “pure” origin is unthinkable without the threat and displacement of Otherness. This is evident in her ironic parallelism between the white woman, Désirée, and the mulatta woman, La Blanche. La Blanche is a quadroon slave girl owned by the Aubigny plantation. Just as her name means “whiteness” in French, La Blanche, parallel to Désirée, is associated with sexual desire in the story. As Désirée reveals, however subtly, when her baby cries one day, “Armand heard him…as far away as La Blanche’s cabin,” thus showing the possible sexual connections between her husband and the slave woman (Chopin 243). Later, the resemblance between one of La Blanche’s “quadroon boys” and her own child unveils to Désirée the truth about her child’s identity. Implying that the child’s race is a maternally inherited form of displacement, Chopin’s narrative further demystifies this “race/reproduction bind” by placing white maternity and black maternity on the same level. When Désirée appeals to whiteness through a set of bodily traits (“brown hair”, “gray eyes”, and “fair skin” [Chopin 254]), Armand rebuts these biological signifiers for whiteness, claiming that the bodily traits which Désirée embodies are “[a]s white as La Blanche’s” (Chopin 245). Leveling Désirée and La Blanche,
36 While the antebellum miscegenation law depended on the reproduction of black women to ensure that all children born to slave women became slaves, the same legal apparatus began to invest “white” blood and maternity as “inalienable property” in the aftermath of the Civil War. White maternity was carefully protected because, as legal scholar Cheryl Harris notes, “[w]hiteness conferred on its owners aspects of citizenship that were all the more valued because they were denied to others” (qtd. in Weinbaum 20). 81
Armand’s remark seeks to displace his blackness to the maternal body, including his own mother, who becomes the real racial “Other” in the story. The revelation of Armand’s identity as a mulatto in the end, however, does not mean that Désirée is “white” or whiter than Armand. Through Désirée’s suicide and infanticide—a crime which was historically associated with black maternity rather than white maternity, Chopin suggests that there is no white person in this text, and that whiteness may be articulated as différance, as an idea or practice that is always already derivative and devoid of an origin. This de-recognition of whiteness begs the question: is it possible to construct a “pure” origin from the transracial or transnational adoption? This question is taken up by Edith Eaton’s story titled “Children of Peace” in a different racial context of American belonging. “Children of Peace” opens with two Chinese students, Pau Tsu and Liu Venti, who are in love and decide to marry and move to San Francisco’s Chinatown. The couple’s families in China have been enemies since their father’s student years. When the news of their marriage is brought home, Pau Tsu, the heroine, receives a scathing letter from her father, asking: “are you not ashamed to confess that you love a youth who is not yet your husband? Such disgraceful boldness will surely bring upon your head the punishment you deserve” (MSF 129). To this accusation, her husband, Liu Venti, responds: “Our parents,” he claims, “kn[o]w not love…Let us, therefore, respectfully read their angry letters, but heed them not. Shall I not love you dearer and more faithfully because you bec[o]me mine at my own request and not at my father’s” (MSF 129). But years’ hardship and solitude in America awaken the couple’s longing for their kin in China. With the birth of their twin sons, memories of their own childhood come mingling with their hope and worry for their children’s future. Thus, they manage to send the twins as a peace offering to each side of their parents, hoping that the two families would reconcile with each other and with their son and daughter. A few months later, the twins ask grandparents for their parents; when in vain, they try to run away together. This finally brings the grandparents into reconciliation, realizing that their selfish rancor has put their offspring in exile in a foreign land for years. The story ends happily with a characteristic Eatonian motto, in which Pau Tsu, on receiving a letter that is signed by both of their parents asking them to return home, exclaims: “Oh Liu Venti, love is indeed stronger than hate!” (MSF 137). “Love” is indeed a salient marker of the Chinese couple’s transnational positioning in the story. As literary scholar Yu-Fang Cho argues, in the context of the anti-Chinese sentiments in the nineteenth-century U.S., “free love” does not just prove the 82
immigrant couple’s capacity to build a life that is essentially human and American. Such narratives of sentimental romance simultaneously construct the Chinese as “failed” or “partial” subjects by assimilating their laboring bodies while denying them rights to naturalization and citizenship (126). In other words, while the practice of American “free love” could facilitate the claim to emancipation and assimilability, it also re-inscribes the U.S.-China dichotomy by positing the former as the locus of choice and freedom, whereas the latter as the locus of inequality and oppression, which is palpable in Chinese endorsement of polygamy, arranged marriage, and perpetual bachelorhood (Cho 114). “Children of Peace” deploys this discourse of “free love” to demonstrate how the Chinese couple’s successful adjustment to the American life is originated from the relatively lack of freedom and choice in China. By depicting how their choice to marry for love rather than family arrangement is “shameful” and punishable by repudiation and exile based on Chinese customs, Edith romanticizes the young couple as transnationalized racial subjects whose adoption of American values makes them the most favorable kind for assimilation and naturalization. The couple seems to prosper as they live away from their quarrelsome kin and pursue instead an elective and sympathetic affinity in the adopted country. They make a modest living by running a mixed-race school that accommodates different races and classes of people, including “adult pupils of their own race, a few white night pupils, and…Children” (MSF 131). Through these alternative ties, the immigrant couple epitomizes the kind of American “new blood” whose various social connections and interracial interactions challenge both Chinese patriarchal order and American racial hierarchy at the turn of the twentieth century. While such non-biological connections facilitate the couple’s process of Americanization, concerns about racial origins gradually take hold of their life as their children are born. Just as the Chinese couple is idealized as the model immigrant through the rhetoric of “free love,” Edith Eaton also depicts how this idealization is contingent upon their racialized status as the “perpetual foreigner” in the United States (Lowe 5). This is especially true when Pau Tsu and Liu Venti worry that their beloved sons would continue to live in perpetual “exile” in a foreign land just like themselves. They wonder: “Must their beloved sons ever remain exiles from the land of their ancestors?” (MSF 131). In recent years, “exile” emerges as one of the major discourses to address and critique the historical displacement of Asian Americans as “nonwhite aliens ineligible to citizenship” (Lowe 20). Both David L. Eng’s and David Palumbo-Liu’s studies have begun to explore how the discourse of “exile” could better capture the contradictions of Asian American 83
citizenship (Eng Racial Castration, 204-228) and the complex production of the exilic or diasporic subject formations as imbricated with the U.S.-Asian power dynamics around the 1900s (Palumbo-Liu 343-356). Paradoxically, Edith Eaton’s narrative reveals the possibility to build Asian American “diasporic” subjectivity through its return to “origins.” Contrary to the conventional diaspora narratives which often reify the Asian oppression and American emancipation binary, “Children of Peace” imagines how biological “blood ties” and transpacific kinship could reemerge as an a powerful source for Asian American racial formation. In this particular narrative, as Edith Eaton suggests, America is not so much as a point of “arrival” and “melting pot” (Eng 204) but rather a point of transition and transpacific kinship remaking for the Chinese: “those children who had met in a foreign land, and in spite of their fathers’ hatred [in China], had linked themselves in love” (MSF 136). Further, this scene of reunion between the Chinese grandparents and their Americanized offspring provides an alternative mode of adoption (im)migration, viz., the adoption of American children by Chinese parents. Through this “inverse” and “eccentric” adoption narrative, it is possible to see how Edith Eaton’s work pushes us to consider the emergence of a new pattern of transpacific adoption that envisions the more diverse and reciprocal relationships between Asian and American geopolitical entities.
V. Conclusion: The Question of Return In conclusion, I would like to briefly discuss a central paradox of constructing the post-adoptive child’s identity through the trope of “return.” Although it has been argued that transracial adoption disrupts biological determinism of kinship and racial identity, there are growing efforts made to explore as to how the family or the country of “birth” continues to play a role in orientating the adopted child toward the family or the country of “adoption.” In their respective studies of the Korean adoptee Deann Borshay Liem’s documentary film, First Person Plural (2000), David L. Eng and Jodie Kim have offered productive discussions on the significance in which the post-adoptive subject displays physical and affective “returns” to the birth place in order to articulate different and empowering modes of American belonging.37 My conclusion joins this discussion by
37 Eng argues that the trope of “return” allows the adopted child to claim a “reparative position of race” by creating a “psychic space for two ‘good enough’ mothers” as a way to negotiate her mothers’ and her own “disparaged Koreanness” and “idealized whiteness” (The Feeling of Kinship 157-158). Situating Borshay 84
contemplating on how Edith Eaton’s adoption narrative uses the trope of “return” to create a “recuperative” racial position for Asian American subjects, a position that enables one to remember the repressed past and envision different presents and futures. Through this brief discussion on the question of “return,” this conclusion aspires to call for future rethinking of fictional and nonfictional transracial or transnational adoption that contests rather than reifies the relationship between Asia and America. Edith Eaton’s “Children of Peace” showcases this “recuperative” position by imagining how the “returns” to one’s birth place and birth family could produce empowering effects on post-adoptive subjects. This story further represents a double return that disrupts the boundary between what is Chineseness and what is Americanness. On the one hand, the return of the “exilic” couple to their birth country constitutes an example of Chinese American transpacific kinship formation. On the other hand, the return of the “gift” children to their birth parents idealizes an Americanized notion of the privatized middle-class nuclear family (as opposed to the traditional Chinese extended family and arranged marriage). Edith Eaton’s narrative suggests that the couple’s return is biologically and culturally driven. The couple’s desire to reunite with their families in China is not entirely personal. It is the historical displacement of Asian Americans as what Lisa Lowe calls the “perpetual foreigner” that prompts them to seek an alternative future in China. In making China their future home, Pau Tsu and Liu Venti also seek to negotiate another repressed history symbolized by their patriarchal birth families, which displace their Chineseness as they become married in the American way. Fighting Chinese patriarchy and American racism, the couple’s “return” suggests how the claims to an alternative Chinese American identity could be articulated through recuperating transpacific Chinese kinship bonds. However, the couple’s return simultaneously reinforces an American ideal of the nuclear family. This is palpable when the children rebel against the idea that grandparents are “just the same as” birth parents by running away to search for their own parents (MSF 134). Thus, through this double “return,” “Children of Peace” ultimately converges and contradicts Chinese and American conceptions of kinship and citizenship. Paradoxically, as Edith Eaton suggests, it is also
Liem’s story within the post-Cold War U.S.-Korean relations, Kim’s study reveals how “her adoption is part of a longer history of collective imperial violence that refuses to be assimilated within or sutured to contemporary discourses of ‘healing’ and ‘reconciliation’” in the prolonged aftermath of America’s wars in Asia (207). 85
due to these contradictions between blood and culture and between Asia and America that we are able to imagine a recuperative and transpacific racial position for post-adoptive and Asian American subjects in the past and in the future.
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CHAPTER FOUR
Whiteness in another Color: Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) and Intra-racial Citizenship
No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country. —James Baldwin, “On Being White and Other Lies”
So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself…and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. —Gloria Anzaldúa, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”
I. Introduction In 1922, the United States Supreme Court upheld the ineligibility of Japanese for citizenship in a landmark case that stood unchallenged until 1952 when the McCarran-Walter Act abolished racial restrictions for immigration and naturalization. The case involved a Japanese immigrant, Takao Ozawa, who petitioned for naturalization after living a respectable life in the United States for twenty-eight years. He landed in San Francisco in 1894, working while putting himself through Berkeley High School and the University of California. In 1906, he moved to Honolulu, where he was employed by an American company and was married to a local woman, who was also a Japanese immigrant. They had five children, all brought up speaking English. In his brief to the Supreme Court, Ozawa highlighted his and his family’s complete Americanization: he and his family had lived continuously within the United States or its territory for many years; they had no ties to Japan or any Japanese institution in Honolulu; and he was married to a native speaker of English, and the whole family attended exclusively American churches and schools (Ichioka 11). Ozawa fulfilled all of the naturalization requirements except one—his race. The Japanese was judged to be neither “white” nor African in racial terms, a prerequisite for aliens seeking naturalization as prescribed by the earlier statutes of 1790 and 1870. Further, by classifying the Japanese as a member of the “Asiatic” race and thus “clearly ineligible for citizenship” (Ichioka 16), the Ozawa ruling, as historian Mae M. Ngai has observed, was the culmination of the exclusionary practices of the U.S. citizenship, which sought to constitute itself through and against the 87
“racial unassimilability” of immigrants from South and East Asia (Ngai 37-38). The ruling of Ozawa revealed whiteness as a binding force that shaped American identity and nationhood in the early decades of the twentieth century. At the core of this case was the question of whether the Japanese could be considered a “free white person” based on existing Naturalization Acts. The first Act of 1790 had established whiteness as a precondition for full citizenship by restricting the right of naturalization to “white persons.” After the Civil War, in 1870, Congress extended the right to naturalize former slaves, making “persons of African nativity or descent” eligible for citizenship, while American Indians and Asians still remained disqualified (Ngai 38; Koshy, “Morphing Race” 166). Even when the legal status of African Americans was significantly enhanced, their social and economic conditions within the framework of the United States as a white nation improved only marginally. In a comprehensive study of the central role whiteness played in the naturalization history, Ian Haney-López points out that among the fifty-two cases being brought in state and federal courts from 1870 to 1952, all, except one, applied for naturalization by identifying as white, although, after 1870, citizenship could also be claimed by those who were black (35-36). While the “race” of these petitioners did not seem to explain the overwhelming amount of “white-person” cases—since the petitioners involved were a diverse group from Syria, India, Mexico, Hawaii, the Philippines, China, Korea, and Japan, and several were biracial, the fact that all Asians seeking citizenry by trying to prove that they were white reinforced the prevailing notions of white supremacy and black and nonwhite servitude. If, as recent scholarship contends, nineteenth-century discourses of citizenship have not just constituted “white persons” but have also constituted differently racialized subjects, what does it mean to rethink citizenship in terms of both inclusion and exclusion, and assimilation and resistance? How did the ambiguously included subjects represent and re-appropriate the ideal of whiteness, a primary sign of the U.S. citizenship in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How might claims to Asian American identity be articulated in relation to not just whiteness but to blackness as well? This chapter examines how the pre-1952 Asian American national identity was constituted in relation to American Pacific expansion and differential inclusion of minority and racial groups for political or economic affiliations that left ideologies of white supremacy unchallenged. My analysis focuses on the regulation of Japanese naturalization at a time when American imperial ambitions in East Asia and the Pacific coincided with those of Japan. In the global contexts of war and migration, the question 88
of Japanese assimilability or “whiteness” was inextricably linked to the U.S. and Japanese geopolitics of Pacific expansion and Japan’s emergence as a rival nation to Western imperial powers. Domestically, articulations of Japanese as American complicitly reinforce American racism toward secondary citizens or noncitizens including Africans, the Irish, and the Chinese. By analyzing the differential and often contradictory process through which nonwhite aliens become an American subject, this chapter presents a modest critique of the view that citizenship has ceased to be an effective gatekeeper of American national identity and belonging since the middle of the nineteenth century.38 Countering this view, I explore how legal and literary discourses of Japanese inclusion are dependent on the exclusion of blacks and some questionably white immigrants from the mainstream American cultural and political body. This “intra-racial” approach thus demonstrates how the discourse of citizenship continues to serve a powerful rhetorical context, within which various racial groups define themselves for and against one another, and are in turn defined by their specific relationships to white Americans. My reading of citizenship as an intra-racial construct builds upon recent scholarship on the political history of racialized citizenship.39 Asian American writers and scholars are especially concerned about how the traditional model of black-white binary could no longer depict the depth and complexity of the race problems which nineteenth-century America was facing in the coextensive areas of racial formation and national belonging. More nuanced models of citizenship were needed in order to account for the inclusion of Asians as the latest “cultural Other.” As one of the pioneering efforts to move beyond race as a matter of black and white, Susan Koshy’s study reformulates whiteness as a Foucauldian “productive,” rather than repressive, system of
38 Literary historian Walter Benn Michaels dismisses citizenship as an analytic model because, after Civil War, “[American] identity is disconnected first from citizenship…Wops and kikes can participate in American elections, but being able to participate in American elections doesn’t make them American” (15-16). Put in another way, Michaels suggests that if blacks or some questionably white immigrants—“wops and kikes”— could be called American citizens, then citizenship has played a less constitutive role in defining who belongs in the United States and who does not. 39 Colleen Lye, Helen Jun, Lisa Lowe, and Susan Koshy are a select few whose works have benefited many and whose works I draw upon the most. Three recent articles are excellent examples of the ideas that American nationhood and citizenship were not just constituted by interracial (white-black) but by intra-racial (Afro-Asian or intra-Asian) hierarchy and racialization in the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries: see Moon-Ho Jung’s “Outlawing ‘Coolies,’” Shu-Mei Shih’s “Comparative Racialization,” and Yu-Fang Cho’s “Cultural Nationalism.” 89
power-knowledge, which recognizes “the dialectical relationship between the meanings of whiteness, blackness, and Asian Americanness” (“Morphing Race” 156).40 Although dialectical accounts of “Afro-Asian” Americanness could provide heterogeneous racial models for citizenship, such frameworks, according to Colleen Lye, tend to evoke the Asian American as “a third term to trouble binary habits of racial classification and analysis than to illustrate the genuine multiplicity of racial logics and racisms” (“Afro-Asian Analogy” 1733). Following this cue, my analysis does not merely focus on how claims to Japanese inclusion complicated American racial formations by reconfiguring black and white relationships. This chapter also discusses how Japanese struggles for inclusion were bundled and complicated with anti-black and anti-Chinese American nationhood. One author’s outputs thematize the intra-racial construct of Asian American identity—those authored by Winnifred Eaton.41 Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954) had been highly popular and prolific on the turn-of-the-century American literary scene. Between 1890 and 1930, she wrote nearly a novel a year, and numerous short stories, magazine articles, and screenplays. Much of her writing chose to represent interracial romances with spunky Japanese or Eurasian heroines and white American men, and many were published under a Japanese pseudonym, Onoto Watanna. According to her autobiographical novel, Me (1915), she spun these tales of her “mother’s land” out of an “instinctive feeling” (Me 176), while, in reality, she was born in Canada to a Chinese missionary mother and British merchant father. Given this discrepancy, contemporary critics have found it difficult to situate Winnifred Eaton’s writings in relation to other Asian Americanist texts, as a result of which the comparison might indulge in the “good Asian/bad Asian” dichotomy (Ferens 2; Oishi “Introduction,” xi). To overcome this
40 Helen Jun’s and Julia Lee’s works also challenge the framework of whiteness as the dominant tradition for depicting nineteenth-century racial categories and relationships in the United States. My reading of Japanese anti-black rhetoric departs from Jun’s concept of “black Orientalism.” Jun defines black Orientalism as a discursive reconstruction of nineteenth-century African American national identity, which operated to secure black inclusion and citizenship at the expense of the rights and interests of Asians, mainly the Chinese. To the contrary, my analysis reveals that early twentieth-century Japanese American struggles used appeals to be white that at times conceived African and Chinese as inferior and interchangeable colonial subjects. 41 The author is referenced as “Winnifred Eaton” throughout this chapter for being distinguished from her sister, Edith Eaton, who is the primary subject of analysis in the previous chapter. 90
dichotomy, I propose to read Winnifred Eaton’s articulations of Japanese American identity as a strategic response to the U.S. racialization and differentiation of the Asians as permanently foreign and unassimilable. In portraying Japanese Americanness as an alternative space of belonging in the nation, her narratives ironically embraced middle-class white racism, as her claims to Japanese inclusion were contingent upon American racialization of specific minority groups including Africans, the Irish, and the Chinese. By showing how Asian American identity is an intra-racial construct, this study allows us to more carefully examine the politics behind American inclusion, as we envision alternative expressions of belonging and community membership in the United States.
II. Japanese America The turn of the twentieth century seemed a perfect time for claiming a “Japanese” identity. Despite the U.S. enforcement of “Asiatic” exclusion laws, the question of Japanese naturalization, or whether they could be deemed as “white,” was subject to debate before Ozawa’s decision, whereas the Chinese were effectively barred from entry since the 1882 Exclusion Act.42 This exceptionalism was primarily due to Japan’s emergence as a “rival” to Western imperial powers. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan made an unexpected and triumphant debut on the global stage, with its miraculous military victories over China in 1895, Russia in 1905, and Korea in 1910. Alongside its increased influence in the Pacific region was the development of Japan’s “eastward expansionism,” an imperial ideology which held the American West Coast as a frontier to the Japanese empire (Azuma 10). However, as Japan became a major power during the Pacific expansion era, its economic and political influences quickly turned from a “miracle” into a “threat” to most Americans. California newspapers ran sensational headlines warning about the “Japanese invasion,” charged the Japanese with “crowding out” white Americans, and organized anti-Japanese campaigns that demanded the extension to the Japanese of the Chinese Exclusion Act (Azuma 37). The campaigns
42 As Mae M. Ngai notes, the immigrant law “not only speaks to the nation’s vision of itself, it also signals its position in the world and its relationships with other nation-states” (9). Ngai suggests that the problems of immigration and citizenship have reached beyond American domestic racial boundary and should be investigated in the history of global colonialism and hierarchies of race and nation. This chapter draws upon such historiographies to account for Winnifred Eaton’s complex negotiations of Japanese American identity and citizenship within the context of Pacific war, expansion, and immigration. 91
culminated in the 1908 Gentlemen’s Agreement between the U.S. and Japan, in which the Japanese government agreed to limit the emigration of laborers and permit that of merchants and students of higher education to the U.S., as an alternative to an outright exclusion that the Chinese faced (Azuma 41). If this “agreement” indeed made the Japanese seem like an ally to the U.S. internationally, or easier to be assimilated domestically, what did this imply about Japanese American writing and identity during the early twentieth century? Winnifred Eaton’s Japanese writings illustrate two important aspects of the making of Japanese American identity in the early 1900s. First, her writing reveals that Japan’s pursuit of status as a major world power immensely shaped Japanese immigration experience and racial formation in the U.S. Second, her representations of Japanese American struggles for social and political inclusion undercut the perceived links between whiteness and citizenship. Nonetheless, doing so, her articulations of Japanese legitimacy and desirability as American subjects reinforce American racism and racialization of the less “civilized” groups, notably Africans and the Chinese. Mindful of how international wars and racism fluctuate Japanese American identity, this analysis seeks to contribute to a larger intellectual endeavor to address how global ranges of imperialism and politics of migration have redrawn American racial landscapes, and have fostered the concepts of “internationalism” or “transnationality” within American studies, which foreground the immigrant’s and minority’s divided senses of belonging in the nation.43 Historian Eiichiro Azuma, for example, has illuminated how Issei—the Pre-WWII Japanese immigrants—constantly needed to negotiate their positions “between two empires,” that is, between the parallel and competing nationalist projects of their country of origin and country of settlement that both defined and transformed their lives (4). Winnifred Eaton’s writings reflect the Isseis’ “in-between” subject positions. Further, her texts illustrate the complexity and agency of Japanese American subjects by having Chinese Americans and African Americans mediate the contradictions of being Japanese and American
43 See Amy Kaplan’s call for “the transnational turn in American studies,” 11. For recent book-length projects which develop comparative studies of race, empire, and immigration in nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural representations, see Colleen Lye’s America’s Asia; Helen Jun’s Race for Citizenship, Leslie Bow’s Partly Colored, Gretchen Murphy’s Shadowing the White Man’s Burden, Julia H. Lee’s Interracial Encounters, and Yu-Fang Cho’s forthcoming book, Uncoupling American Empire: Cultural Politics of Deviance and Unequal Difference, 1890-1910 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013). 92
simultaneously. Thus, I suggest that narratives about Asian American belonging, even as they strive for inclusion and equal participation, reveal, and at times appropriate, the uneven processes of adjusting and resisting to the dominant racial ideology. Nowhere in her oeuvre was Winnifred Eaton more critical of the dominant view of Japanese immigration than her 1907 essay, “The Japanese in America.” This essay, published in the Eclectic, is a response to a New York Times editorial depicting the growing anti-Japanese agitation when the U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt intervened in the 1906 San Francisco School Board’s decision to segregate Japanese students.44 The author, known only as M.E.C., depicts a heated discussion among passengers on the train she rode one night. Obviously siding with the agitators, M.E.C. notes a man’s warning that mixed education would encourage sexual relations between Japanese men and white women, and that the Japanese man would aspire for university admission and “crown the white man out” (7). According to M.E.C., Japan’s success in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) and its treaty with the U.S. in 1899 convince many Japanese that they should be treated as white Americans. This “egoism” has prompted a Californian Japanese to appeal to the State Court for the same privilege of naturalization that is granted only to white immigrants. As she points out, the question of Japanese immigrants is not that they are like the Chinese but that they are not enough like them: the humble Chinese know their place as servants in the U.S., whereas the Japanese man “[would] not take his place with the Chinese” (7). The essay concludes by advising that Asians should remain an “inferior race” in America: “it is simplified to some extent when one is the dominant race and the other the definitely subjected one—the latter the servant class, and content to remain so” (7). In “The Japanese in America”, Winnifred Eaton challenges the ideology of American superiority epitomized by M.E.C.’s accounts. Central to her argument is the idea that the Japanese are much less different from Americans than Americans themselves would believe. As she questions, “Conceit Japan certainly has. What race has not? What of the conceit which makes the bland statement that because of its peculiar skin-color, a race is superior? Since when did the Oriental nations become the slaves or servants of the
44 Roosevelt ordered to have the school segregation revoked in his 1906 address to Congress. But, to palliate agitators seeking Japanese exclusion, in 1907, he secured from Congress legislation barring Japanese immigration from Hawaii and thus eliminated one major source of Japanese immigrants without explicitly targeting against them (Azuma 30-31). 93
Caucasian race?” (A Half Caste 175).45 Counteracting the stereotype of the Japanese as the so-called “servant class,” Winnifred Eaton asks her white, middle-class, female readers to consider the vital role servants play in the domestic and the nation. In her rebuttal, as a new breed of servant, the Japanese are a “self-respecting, clean, and descent” people, who has “elevated the station of the servant” in this nation (176). She states defensively that “[w]e are all servants—of various sorts” (177), a statement which seeks to repudiate the class- and race-biased values underpinning the notion of “Japanese inferiority.” In what might be considered a rhetorical move, Winnifred Eaton encourages her female readers to identify with Japanese servants just as they take pride with their housekeeping role. As she asks, “why is the work of a home, the cooking, the ministering to our personal wants and needs, not to be esteemed?” (177). Drawing an analogy between the status of women and that of servants in the context of immigration, Winnifred Eaton shows how the question of Japanese immigration is never simply about race. Rather, it has intersected with the domestic sphere and has revealed the feminized and racialized formation of an American home and citizen. This racialized and gendered formation of the domestic space becomes evident when the “The Japanese in America” positions the narrator as an “American” woman. As it states in the very beginning—albeit not without a touch of irony, that this essay aims to “appeal to the fair-minded, right-thinking Americans for ordinary justice and sane judgment for ‘the little brown man’” (173). Later, despite her praise for Japanese decency and admirable working ethnics, the narrator mentions her own encounters with two Japanese domestics, both of whom end up being dismissed from her home. The dismissal could be attributed to their failure to accustom themselves to the American way of life. One is over-Americanized, as indicated by his contempt for his role as a domestic servant; the other seems utterly un-American by taking his daily bath in public in Japanese style (177). Through this anecdote, the narrator is able to distance herself from the Japanese domestic laborers, through which she legitimizes her role as an American woman who holds the right to dominate or dismiss them. As the text positions Winnifred Eaton as a fellow citizen to white, middle-class, female readers, it also betrays her ambivalence in occupying this position. In countering M.E.C.’s claim that “[t]he Asiatic must remain the inferior race…[or] he must remain in
45 Unless otherwise noted, all of my citations of Winnifred Eaton’s short writings are excerpted from the 2003 edition titled “A Half Caste” and Other Writings, edited by Linda Trinh Moser and Elizabeth Rooney. 94
his own country” (7), Winnifred Eaton develops a culturally ambiguous stance at the close of her essay: I am not Oriental or Occidental either, but Eurasian. I must bleed for both my nations. I am Irish more than English—Chinese as well as Japanese. Both my fatherland and my motherland have been the victims of injustice and oppression. Sometimes I dream of the day when all of us will be world citizens—not citizens merely of petty portions of the earth, showing our teeth at each other, snarling, sneering, biting, and with the ambition of murder at our heart’s core—every man with the savage instinct of the wild beast to get the better of his brother—to prove his greater strength—his mightier mind—the superiority of his color. (A Half Caste 177) Like those heroines she creates in her fictional writing, Winnifred Eaton reclaims her racially-mixed “Eurasian” identity in order to counteract the supremacist assumptions of “Asiatic differences” as signs for their incapacity to assimilate into the mainstream American culture. Further, in her rejection of a world where inhabitants are waging race wars against one another, she casts the figure of the Eurasian as the “world citizen,” who could embody the future orientation of American national expansion and multicultural development. In this vision, the Eurasian recreates and also transcends the boundaries of race and culture set by both Asian Americans and white Americans.46 While this racially mixed figure appears to usher in a hybrid and postracial future, it also conveys the idea that race will not be rendered invisible or meaningless, but rather become more ethnically marked and segregated in the United States. As the above passage suggests, if it were not the existing prejudices against those who come from the colonized nations, Winnifred Eaton would embrace her (ethnically) Irish and Chinese identity as heartily as her English and Japanese identity. Paradoxically, it is precisely because being Chinese or Irish means being ineligible for citizenship in the 1900s that Winnifred Eaton comes to avail herself of the privileges conferred by the British and Japanese sides of her heritage. Thus, although Winnifred Eaton envisions America to be the future of racially mixed and fluid Eurasians
46 In her examination of Winnifred Eaton’s Japanese fictions, Huining Quyang argues how the hybrid and fluid subjectivity embodied by Winnifred Eaton’s Eurasian figure both defies and reifies the stereotypes of the tragic and unassimilable Eurasian. As she writes: “While Watanna [Winnifred Eaton] affirms the ideal of fluid identities, she also expresses her awareness of the difficulties of attaining this ideal in a racist and imperialist context, underscoring Eurasian passing as an uneven process of accommodating and resisting the dominant racial ideology” (212). 95
like herself, her lifelong performance as a Japanese author reveals just how American racial meanings and boundaries are increasingly shaped by and shaping the global politics of wars and affinities. In the context of Sino-Japanese comparative racialization, Winnifred Eaton’s claim to a Japanese identity disqualifies her from being an “authentic” Chinese. Historians have shown that the relationships between Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans deteriorated rapidly during the years of Sino-Japanese Wars (Azuma 129-130; Ngai 172-173). The conflicts inspired a broad range of patriotic sentiments on each side. Nationalist supporters of each group considered their work as complimentary to their struggles for American inclusion, and the rhetoric of both groups often intensified interracial oppression and antagonism. As in the case of Japanese Americans, driven by Japanese-American expansionism, it is not uncommon for many Issei leaders to deploy anti-Chinese rhetoric in order to facilitate Japanese assimilation and naturalization into the U.S. national body. The Japanese Patriotic League in San Francisco (1888-1906), for example, published an article enumerating why the Japanese were more qualified than the Chinese for the right of naturalization: How do the Japanese in America and the Chinese in America differ? First, the Chinese in America represent the lower class of the Chinese race, and the Japanese in America the upper-class of the Japanese race. Second, the Chinese are so backward and stubborn that they refuse the American way. The Japanese, on the other hand, are so progressive and competent as to fit right into the American way of life…In no way do we, energetic, and brilliant Japanese men, stand below those lowly Chinese. (Azuma 37-38) As Azuma points out, assuming that they were the “pioneers” of imperial Japan’s overseas development, Japanese immigrants mirrored American dominant racial thinking in order to place themselves securely above other racialized groups in California, especially above the Chinese. They agreed that the excluded Chinese were composed mainly of the labor class, who were too “backward and stubborn” to assimilate. In keeping with American orientalists’ stance, Issei elites then asserted that the Japanese, having proved their capacity to adapt to American life, should be deemed as a superior race to the Chinese and an equal to white Americans. Colleen Lye has brought to light such “intra-Asian differences, differences whose elision is also an aspect of American Orientalist discourse” (“The Sino-Japanese Conflict” 158), and argued how it is critical to “examine the representation of Asiatic racialization 96
from the standpoint of the racialized” (158). According to Lye, this approach allows us to more carefully interrogate the heterogeneous histories of Asian American racialization, in which the constitution of an Asian American subject depends largely upon the otherization and displacement of another Asian American subject. With Lye’s approach in mind, Winnifred Eaton’s claim that she is “Chinese as well as Japanese” (177) illustrates her appropriation and dramatization of these intra-racial tensions and struggles rather than trying to eliminate them. Indeed, Winnifred Eaton became widely known as a “Japanese” author and remained silent about her Chinese heritage throughout her life career.47 It is only during the outbreak of the WWII and the denouncement of Japanese jingoism in the Western press that she disassociated herself entirely from Japan and was quoted in an interview as saying, “I’m ashamed of having written about the Japanese, I hate them so” (Ferens 140). In her defense of Japanese inclusion, she rehearses the Issei’s notion of Japanese superiority over the Chinese in racial, economic, and military aspects. As “The Japanese in America” remarks, “[y]es. Japan is ‘bursting with conceit’…crowned with her new war laurels, Japan’s vanity is more apparent at the present time” (175). By encouraging the reader to identify with Japan’s pride and military success, the essay thus forgets how these “laurels” were culled from Japan’s invasion and colonial rule of the Chinese in the years of two Sino-Japanese conflicts (1894-1895 and 1937-1945). Thus, in her claim to a Japanese American identity, Winnifred Eaton simultaneously disavows her Chinese ancestry that is historically subjugated and otherized by both white and Japanese Americans. If Winnifred Eaton’s writing on Japanese immigration casts doubt on the assumptions of American superiority, her autobiographical narrative does not. In narrating her life in Jamaica during the year of 1896, Winnifred Eaton portrays herself as a youthful American woman in danger of racial degradation epitomized by the political and sexual empowerment of black men. Sandra Gunning, writing incisively about racial stereotype, sexual violence, and lynching in American literature of the 1890-1912 era, observes that black rapists “proved particularly useful for white Americans seeking to come to terms with post-Civil War anxieties over national unity, black emancipation, altered gender roles, growing labor unrest, European immigration, and the continued evolution of the United States into an increasingly multiethnic nation” (6). Gunning notes here that the
47 Ironically, Winnifred Eaton concealed her half-Chinese identity throughout her entire literary career, except when she claimed to be “Chinese as well as Japanese” in “The Japanese in America.” 97
rhetoric of black sexual transgression reflects white Americans’ anxiety and rejection of black Americans’ rights to social equality and citizenship. Winnifred Eaton capitalizes anti-black rhetoric to fortify her role as an American woman. Her autobiographical novel, Me (1915) not only reiterates the same stereotype of the black male rapist but also transfers the seemingly U.S.-specific figuration to her representation of post-emancipation Jamaica. By evoking the image of the black rapist, Winnifred Eaton’s Me strengthens the interlocking logics of white American womanhood and nationhood through the displacement of black Jamaica. Two scenes in Winnifred Eaton’s accounts of Jamaica merit particular attention: the scene of her arrival and the scene of departure. In early March of 1896, Winnifred Eaton traveled from her hometown in Quebec for a job as a journalist in Kinston, Jamaica. Upon arrival, she is overwhelmed by the sight of a large number of black inhabitants in the city. As she narrates, I was amazed to find that this crowd was made up almost entirely of negroes. We have few negroes in Canada, and I had seen only one in all my life. I remember an older sister had shown him to me in church—he was pure black—and told me he was the “Bogy man,” and that he’d probably come around to see me that night. I was six. I never took my eyes once from his face during the service, and I have never forgotten that face. (Me 19) Julia H. Lee has ably described how this scene reenacts the trope of interracial colonial encounters, where the natives’ “blackness, shame, and guilt” serves an important purpose of implying the explorers’ “whiteness, innocence and privilege” (91). As Lee explains, Winnifred Eaton frames her first sight of the island through the binary axes of colonial discourse, by which she is empowered to “name the negroes” and assert her own superiority as a “white” subject (91). But, appearing “white” does not automatically make Winnifred Eaton an American subject. The text actually indicates that she is then a Canadian and has seen none but one black man in her home country. Even as the act of naming endows her with a certain colonizing power, Winnifred’s memory of her childhood encounter with the “Bogy man” exposes her fear when she is confronted by a black subject. I argue instead that it is through this fear of black men—rather than an exercise of power over them—that Me evokes and reworks the trope of the black rapist, which, according to Gunning, was increasingly tied to the consolidation of the ideal (white) American womanhood at the turn of the twentieth century. The autobiography’s 98
expressions of anxiety or abhorrence of blackness facilitate the autobiography’s construction of Winnifred Eaton as a white female American subject while leaving her racialized identity unmarked. The fear of being sexually and politically overpowered by black men saturates Winnifred Eaton’s accounts of Jamaican. Her narrative repeatedly brings up how she reacts to the sexual advances of black men with “sudden panic” and “fear” that is characterized as “instinctive” (Me 40). The articulation of her fear over the prospect of miscegenation suggests that black sexuality is unrestrained and primitive, and threatens to violate the ideal of white womanhood and the social order it underpins. Further, these anti-black references, perhaps unexpectedly, shore up her claim about Japanese as “white” when she depicts her abhorrence to a black man’s proposal with feelings of indignation and self-humiliation. The black man, Burbank, is described as a rich businessman, who is active in politics and the press and allegedly one of the most influential figures in Jamaica. In their first meeting, Winnifred Eaton is so shocked to discover that Burbank is a “pure black” that she refuses to shake his hand (Me 40). Winnifred Eaton’s fear seems to be justified, for one day Burbank suddenly announces his love and proposes marriage. He then kisses her without any sign or encouragement from her. To this offense Winnifred Eaton reacts wildly, but exactly the same as a white woman would act if she were accosted by a black man: I screamed like one gone mad. I fought for my freedom from his arms like a possessed person. Then blindly, with blood and fire before my eyes and burning in my heart, I fled from that terrible chamber. I think I banged both my head and hands against the door, for later I found that my forehead and hands were swollen and bruised. Out into the street I rushed. I heard Verley Marchmont call to me. I saw him like a blur rise up in my path, but behind him I fancied was the other—that great animal who had kissed me. (Me 55) The dramatic tension of this scene recalls the historical “rape” scene in D. W. Griffith’s landmark film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), which comes out in the same year as Me. Stalked by a former slave, Flora Cameron leaps to her death from a mountain ridge. The tragedy galvanizes the formation of the Ku Klux Klan as heroic means to protect white womanhood and the southern states from the ravages of black rule in the aftermath of the Civil War (1861-1865). Strikingly similar to the film’s sentiment, Roger Hamilton, Winnifred’s mysterious benefactor from the United States, states that “[d]own South we 99
lynch a nigger for less than that” (Me 75) when he is told about Burbank’s intention. If viewed in tandem with this film, Burbank will not merely be a freed black man. Rather, his blackness must be perceived as a threat to the heroine’s purity, desirability, and whiteness. The remark that only “lynching” could justify his assault solidifies Winnifred’s status as a white or near-white subject. By evoking the trope of the black rapist—indeed, by reenacting the role of the tragic white heroine in Griffith’s work, Winnifred Eaton transfers American anti-blackness to her construction of the U.S.-Jamaican relation as tantamount to the encounter between the colonizer and the colonized. Her autobiographical writing thus provides a complicated account of Asian American agency and inclusion that is available through the displacement of blackness.
III. Irish America If, as Winnifred Eaton’s texts testify, Asian American identity is an inherently contradictory construct within which claims to Japanese inclusion are contingent upon the exclusion of blacks and the Chinese, where is the place of the Irish in this interracial competition for rights to citizenship? The following section examines how Anglo-American conceptions of Irish racial inferiority facilitated the transfiguration of the Japanese immigrant from racial Other into ethnic citizen. Current Irish American studies tend to focus on the extent to which late nineteenth-century Irish immigrant subjects did not just become Americans but white Americans in spite of apparent difficulties and contradictions.48 However, an investigation of the racialization of the Irish in the mainstream nineteenth-century magazines exposes the historical linkages between Irish Americans and African Americans. Winnifred Eaton’s representation of the Irish as “not-quite-white,” or perhaps black, subjects draws upon and complicates the dominant narratives about Irish whiteness. In several of her fictions that involve a triangulated relationship among Irish, Japanese, and Anglo-Americans, the Irish are deployed to prove the cultural superiority of imperial Japan and Japanese subjects, which often places the Japanese in closer proximity to white Americans. Borrowing the dominant discourse which constructs the Irish as “bad” and “black” immigrants,
48 As David Roediger, Matthew Frye Jacobson, and Noel Ignatiev contend, Irish and southern and eastern European immigrants commonly construct and assert their “whiteness” by allying themselves with racist campaigns targeted toward African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian and Mexican immigrants. My argument about the comparative racialization and rights to citizenship of Irish, black, and Asian populations derives from and also complicates their historical findings. 100
Winnifred Eaton represents the Japanese as the relatively civilized and disciplined cultural subjects more qualified for American citizenship. Yet, through her travesty of Irish incivility and celebration of Japanese superiority, Winnifred Eaton’s negotiation of an alternative cultural belonging reinforces the racially restrictive structure of the U.S. citizenship even as it disrupts the norms of whiteness as an ultimate solution to political inclusion in an earlier period. In the nineteenth century, the Irish were repeatedly coded as a subjugated or inferior people. One reason this representation of the Irish as a racially “marked” group prevailed is how it provides the ground for the expansion and dominance of Anglo-American culture at home and abroad: as one of the colonized subjects under British rule, the Irish were treated as what David Roediger calls “not-yet-white” immigrants in the United States (Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness 184-185). When the newly-arrived Irish and the post-emancipation blacks came to occupy related social and economic spheres in the labor market, the idea that the Irish are probably “colored” and thus bearing “savage” or “simian” physiognomies began to circulate widely in the press on both sides of the Atlantic (Pearl 191). For instance, the well-known English magazine, Punch, published a caricature in 1861 under the heading of “A Great Time for Ireland,” which connected an anonymous Irish independent writer to a grumbling ape in the zoo (figure 1). More than merely a caricature, this association of the Irish as an ape in human attire conveyed an imperialist ideology that the Irish immigrants were perceived as evolutionary throwbacks, which rendered them physically and intellectually incapable of gaining an equal footing with Anglo-Americans.
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Figure 1: “A Great Time for Ireland!,” Anonymous Author, Punch, 1861.
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Figure 2:
“The Ignorant Vote—Honors Are Easy,” by Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly, 1876.
This tendency to depict the Irish with a stereotypical simian-like physiognomy, while popular in England, was also familiar to nineteenth-century American readers, as the population of Irish immigrants increased. Thomas Nast’s “The Ignorant Vote: Honors Are Easy,” which appeared on the cover of Harper’s Weekly in 1876, derided the Irish vote as ineffective as the black vote (figure 2). Although represented in whiteface, the simian-featured Irishman was literally balanced out by the black man on a scale, implying that the counting of the two groups’ votes might undo American democracy. This anti-Irish caricature not only manifested itself in demeaning interracial comparisons but also inscribed in such comparisons American nativism and fears of the nation’s 103
ever-increasing immigrant populations. Commenting on the prevalence of the Irish-black comparisons during the Reconstruction period, historian Andrew M. Greeley observes that, “[t]he comparison was always favorable to the blacks, most likely because the freed black ‘knew his place’ and the Irishman did not; the black was properly grateful for what the abolitionists had done for him, and the Irishman seemed not at all grateful for his second-class citizenship” (qtd. Byrne 135). The representation of the Irish as the “freed black” proved convenient for American abolitionists, whose anti-Irish discourse elicited support from both domestic laborers and the English overseas. Far from merely an imitation of English oppression, American anti-Irish discourse pitted domestic laborers such as freed blacks, Asian coolies, and Irish workers against one another, while also seeking to maintain the dominance of Anglo-American culture by identifying certain minority groups as “nonwhite” at specific junctures. Paradoxically, as Winnifred Eaton’s work reveals, it is through this anti-Irish discourse that the expression of the Japanese American national identity as white is most pronounced and coherent. In Winnifred Eaton’s writings, the Irish are invariably represented as the working class immigrants less capable of social and racial fluidity that characterizes her Japanese characters. This stereotype of the Irish as an uncivilized and unassimilable group is explicitly conveyed through “Delia Dissents” (1908), a short story based on the eponymous novel, The Diary of Delia, which is published a year before. Following the novel, this short story is narrated in Irish brogue from the viewpoint of a housemaid, Delia. Delia’s main point of contention in both texts is servants’ welfare. In particularly the sequel, she launches a “sarvints yunion” seeking to improve the working conditions for nearby domestic servants of a number of different races and nationalities, including the French, Swedish, Jewish, Japanese, and African Americans. The founding of the union seems to effect a positive social change for the working-class through individual and collective voices. Delia declares on the first day of their meeting that this union intends to give voice to “we puir loan hard-warking crachures labor wid the shweat of our brows and uther parts of us besides. We have been crooly composed upon for sinchuries, but the time has arrived at last…lit us, ladies and gintleman, [] dishcuss the ways and meens of improving our crool and unfortunut position” (A Half Caste 123). While this opening speech sets an egalitarian and de-raced tone for the forum, it is soon clear to everyone that this is not the case: the white American woman threatens to quit the party if “cullured peeple [were] admitted” (123); the Japanese man argues for male dominance in the domestic sphere based on the assumption of female inferiority (124); as for Delia 104
herself, she disputes and rules out agenda that does not help her own condition. Being a general housemaid, Delia undertakes the entire responsibility of running a house and insists upon working over twelve hours a day, thus making it difficult for the union to pass any reform at all. The story, instead of rendering different and oppressed voices heard, remains exclusively in the “voyse” and “tung” of Delia. Linguistically, Winnifred Eaton’s text is unrelenting in exposing its narrator as a racial Other. According to Dominika Ferens and Jean Lee Cole, Winnifred Eaton’s strategy to narrate the story in Irish brogue has the effect of “coloring” and “leveling” all characters, regardless their class, race, gender, and nationality (Ferens 175-176). Aside from humorous, Delia’s voice could be viewed as a major site of contestation, where individuals and groups display dissent, question grounds of allegiance, and blur social and linguistic boundaries (Cole 5). Cole cites Gloria Anzaldúa’s famous passage to elaborate on the idea that language is closely tied to one’s ethnic identity formation, which entails an oppositional relationship with the dominant culture. As Anzaldúa asserts, “if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself” (qtd. in Cole 5). Delia’s language is indeed conveyed in this Anzaldúan model of linguistic freedom and identity reconstruction. During the course of the union’s campaign, Delia’s speech is so eloquently made that it brings out the “moyst eyes of minny of [her] lisseners” (123) or otherwise “silince” them (128), and she does not hesitate to use her “oratry” to pursue her ends. When the white American nursemaid seeks to preclude the joining of a black domestic so that she can keep her southern identity untouched, Delia passionately speaks out for the rights and equality of nonwhite participants and proclaims that the issue of race, among others, should be carefully approached in the servant union (123). This description of Delia’s borrowing of abolitionist rhetoric is two folded: on the one hand, it serves as an anti-racist critique of contemporaneous writings on the “servant problem” by women reformers in Winnifred Eaton’s time; on the other hand, it exposes Delia’s own racialized status through her rhetoric of the “cullured quischun.” Thus, in making Delia a race solicitor, the text powerfully asserts and also exploits Delia’s racial and linguistic differences. Winnifred Eaton’s construction of Delia as doubly Other—both linguistically and racially—is not accidental. The linguistic-racial representations of Delia’s otherness could be read as a response to popular reform literature on the instability of American domestic service in the early 1900s. In her analysis of Winnifred Eaton’s defense of the domestic 105
service for immigrant workers, Cole points out how society’s stigmatization of domestic servants is stimulated by the demand and worry for the increasing number of foreign workers, who might “degrade” this occupation as a whole. Reformer Harriet Prescott Spofford, for example, notes the analogy between race and class in her assessment of the “servant problem”: “It is not the circumstance that servants are called servants which makes the trouble. It is that we do not think highly enough of them as a class; that we are apt to regard their work as degrading and themselves as automata; that too frequently we feel about them as if they were as different a race from ourselves as though they were chimpanzees” (qtd. Cole 66). The reclassification of the servant into a different race—as, in Spofford’s own phrase, “chimpanzees”—reveals just how much the status of domestic laborers has not just deteriorated but has constituted the racialized or otherized status of immigrant workers in early twentieth-century America.
Figure 3: “The Diary of Delia,” by Guernsey Moore,
The Saturday Evening Post, 1907.
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Figure 4: Claire Wolley & Delia O’Malley, by May Wilson Preston, Edith and Winnifred Eaton. 1907.
This idea that the serving class belongs to a different race is strongly felt by Winnifred Eaton’s readers. The anonymous illustrator of the 1907 Saturday Evening Post edition of The Diary of Delia characterizes Delia as a stout, middle-age, dark-skinned woman, even though she is a twenty-year-old in the novel (Figure 3). Another illustrator, May Wilson Preston, who provides illustrations for Doubleday’s edition, represents Delia as racially distinct from her mistress Miss Claire Wolley, the daughter of an upper-middle-class family living in New York. Whereas Claire stands for a typical
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“Gibson Girl” as Ferens has suggested (176), Preston’s Delia exhibits simian features including an upturned nose, prominent cheekbones, and oversized hands and feet (Figure 4). Such visual and linguistic representations function to underscore Delia’s ethnicity. They also mark her as an “Other within,” a potential threat to white femininity and domestic order epitomized by Claire Wolley or the unnamed American nursemaid. Peter Flynn, in his study of early twentieth-century American cinema, has argued how the Irish maid frequently serves as a doppelgänger for the American wife: as the maid helps bring comfort and order to the home, she also, as a source of “contamination” herself, needs to be rendered “foreign,” “unruly,” and “clownish” (4;8;10). Indeed, Delia is such a conflicting figure in Winnifred Eaton’s text. Although she takes up the role of “Miss Pressydint” in the servant union, Delia is nonetheless the most faithful, hard-working, and uncomplaining servant of all. She is determined to abide by heavy working hours and duties that other servants consider demeaning or oppressive. In the end, she becomes an enemy force the union must do away with. In this characterization of Delia as cultural Other (linguistically and racially) yet faithful member for the family she works, Winnifred Eaton positions Delia as a threshold figure who is able to blur the boundaries between servant/family, housemaid/housewife, and Americanness/Otherness. It is also this ambiguous figuration of the Irish servant as a domesticated Other that the Irish tend to embody a displaced form of Anglo-American domestic and national norms in Winnifred Eaton’s texts. In Winnifred Eaton’s writings, the idea that the Irish represent an inversion of Anglo-American cultural norms is particularly true when the Japanese comes to embody these norms. Her short story, “The Wrench of Chance” (1906), depicts an array of Japanese-Irish dissimilarities that capitalize the stereotype of the Irish as an inferior race in order to prove the Japanese as otherwise. In the story, Michael Lenahan, an Irish sailor and fugitive from English law, seeks refuge in a small town of Japan. Lenahan is offered an English teaching position at high school. Although engaged as a “Professor of English,” Lenahan changes his title to “Professor of Irish,” an act betraying his “characteristic effrontery” and the inferiority of his knowledge (79). The text emphasizes that it is Japanese “tolerance and leniency” that the boorish and roving Lenahan is able to claim a sense of home in a foreign land. After twenty years’ residence in Japan, Lenahan asks for an extension of his rights to Japanese citizenship and a bride. Both of his requests are granted. His bride, Yiguri, a student on whom he fixed his fancy, is forced to “[m]arry the beast of the town” (80). Yiguri is described as a classic Japanese lady: dainty, demure, 108
and docile. As a “victim,” she reluctantly submits herself to Lenahan, who drinks, smells, and treats her like a “slave” (80-81). But Yiguri proves to be a faithful and caring wife, tending to her husband as if he is “a helpless baby” (82-83). This does not touch Lenahan. When, one day, Lenahan learns the news that the man he thinks he murdered is alive, and that he has fled the law for nothing, he immediately decides to return to Ireland alone. Being too cowardly to tell his wife that he is leaving her behind, Lenahan invents a convenient lie: that he leaves to fight for his adopted country against Russia. Yiguri is overjoyed to hear about Lenahan’s decision, thinking that she is “the wife of one both brave and noble, who will give his life for honorable Dai Nippon!...[she] misjudged [her] husband. The gods made him a hero—not a beast!” (85). Her words reveals that Winnifred Eaton’s vision of Japanese feminine and domestic ideals construct the Japanese woman as racially, culturally, and morally superior to the Irishman. Lenahan’s inferiority is not only depicted as an inherent quality; it also exhibits in his unwillingness to assimilate into the progressive and refined society around him. He fulfills the stereotype of the Irish as a “bad immigrant.” The context of war provides another crucial ground to solidify the claims to Japanese superiority over the Irish. Published one year after the Russo-Japanese War, the story could be viewed as Winnifred’s response to popular debates as to whether the Japanese secure the status of “whiteness” in America by defeating Russians. Proponents for Japanese whiteness tend to play on the century-old feud between Anglo-Saxon and Russian empires since the beginning of the nineteenth century. As Gretchen Murphy argues, Winnifred Eaton’s Japanese subjects seem “whiter” as they are pitted against the stereotypes of some “questionably white” immigrants such as “Celts, Slavs, and Gauls” in her war-themed novels (161). This argument is particularly useful for examining how Winnifred Eaton’s Japanese subjects lobby for a “white” racial identity through rhetoric of Irish incivility, cowardice, and treacherousness in “The Wrench of Chance.” Lenahan’s intention of abandoning his marriage and Japan in her time of need shows that he abuses and betrays the expectations of Japanese law and citizenship. His cowardice and betrayal becomes all the clearer in comparison with Japanese enthusiasm and determination to sacrifice their lives for defending their country. While the small town of his residence is sending its best and bravest men to the warfront, Lenahan, drunken and loud-voiced, celebrates his departure with his Irish friends and related to them how he has been pressed to adopt a “haythen name” and “haythen wife” (86). Two Japanese officers in the teahouse overhear him. Vexed by his words, they make Lenahan join the actual military service, for 109
which he fights and dies as a Japanese soldier, as he has promised to his wife. His body is sent back to his wife, whose reverence for Lenahan is even greater, since, as Yiguri remarks: “he g[a]ve his honorable life for an adopted land” (91). In his sacrifice, Lenahan seems to be redeemed at the end of the story, although this redemption is gained through the patriotic discourse of Japanese nationalism and citizenship at the expense of his Irishness. Winnifred Eaton is careful to point out that Japanese racial identity does not entirely depend on the male-dominated spheres of military power and heroism. In her story, the notion of Japanese whiteness and gentility is best illustrated by her Japanese heroine such as Yiguri or her alter ego, Nora Ascough, in Me. Yiguri represents the politicized female sphere that perceives women’s body and sexuality as an emblem of Japanese nationalism and citizenship. Just as her physical appearance marks her “patrician blood” (82), Yiguri is depicted as a “true” woman and patriot, who will sacrifice her own interests for those of her family and nation. Yiguri’s sense of patriotism distances her from the well-known Madame Butterfly character invented by John Luther Long. Instead of tragically loving her Western husband and his foreign ways, Yiguri despises them, and Lenahan has to trick her into devotion by assuming the role of a Japanese man. When she learns that Lenahan is prepared to join the war with Russia, she puts aside her contempt for him and claims to be a “miserable worm at [his] feet, fit only for [his] augustness to tread upon” (84). During the absence of her husband, she serves as a nurse in a local hospital tending to the wounded. She proudly displays the national flag on the roof of their house, a gesture “signifying to the world that this was the home of a Japanese soldier” (84). Winnifred Eaton emphasizes here the overlapping of domestic and national spheres. For Yiguri, home is the cradle of the nation; it is therefore necessary for Lenahan to be recognized as a Japanese soldier before she could truly claim the position of a loyal wife as well as citizen. This female discourse of citizenship allows Yiguri to claim access to both the home and the nation and to overstep the gendered boundaries between the two. It strengthens the Japanese woman’s role as a loyal and desirable citizen through the intersected discourses of home and nation while suggesting that the Irishman fails to do so.
IV. The Irish-Japanese Rivalry If, in “The Wrench of Chance,” claims of citizenship require elimination of racial differences, these differences become how various immigrant subjects are included in 110
America in Winnifred Eaton’s another story, “The Loves of Sakura Jiro and the Three Headed Maid” (1903). Set in a New York freak show, “The Loves of Sakura Jiro” represents an ensemble of performers who exhibit physical anomaly and variation for public view. In current scholarship of American sideshows, critics have argued the importance of analyzing the constructed role of the freak body in a specific historical context.49 Thomas Fahy’s and Cynthia Wu’s works, for instance, demonstrate the way “freaks” could generate multiple, often intersecting, narratives of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and nation, which helps us identify why certain subjects were marginalized or freakishized from the mid nineteenth to early twentieth century. “The Loves of Sakura Jiro” illustrates how the figure of the freak exposes the intra-racial construction of and competition for American citizenship which sideshow scholarship seeks to address. Specifically, this story unravels the “de-naturalizing” processes of the immigrant bodies through the spectacle of a freak show that displays these underclass immigrant populations as racialized and sexualized Other vis-à-vis the mainstream Anglo-American audience. Situated in the contexts of comparative racialization of Irish and Asian immigration, “The Love of Sakura Jiro” ultimately suggests how nonwhite immigrant subjects are differently (de-)naturalized in their struggles for American citizenship. “The Loves of Sakura Jiro” tells of a love triangle between the Japanese student Jiro, his rival, the working-class Irishman Kelly, and their love interest, the white American woman Marva. The story opens in a New York dime museum where Jiro, running short of money to continue his study, makes a living by performing Oriental feats and illusions. The show comprises four performers with different brands of tricks. Jiro captivates the audience with tricks that are “subtle” and “delicate” (63). He takes a platform beside the tobacco-chewing and fire-breathing juggler, Kelly. In a distant corner of the room is the “three-headed maid” performed by the blonde American Marva. Next to her stands the female snake charmer Yido, whose ethnicity is left unknown. The show
49 Thomas Fahy argues that the freak challenged the viewer to think about the constructed boundaries “between normal/abnormal, able/disabled, and ordinary/extraordinary” (17). In his analysis, American freak shows of 1900-1950 reflect anxieties about black and gay struggles for equal rights and political inclusion. In a related but different context of Asian American exclusion, Cynthia Wu reconsiders the cultural work performed by the famous “Siamese twins,” Chang and Eng Bunker. She analyzes how the Bunkers emerge as a literary trope for both narratives about the conjoinment of the North and South in the postbellum United States and narratives about the conflation of Chinese origin and racial “disability” that justified the anti-Chinese exclusion laws in the late nineteenth century. 111
manager perceives the profit of hiring Jiro, who can compete with Kelly for a broader audience’s attention: “it will be the East and the West, side by side, [each] exploiting the best of their characteristic civilizations” (63). Jiro, however, desires the attention of one particular viewer, Marva. Although he grows increasingly popular in the show, Marva considers Kelly as a superior actor because his trick is “bold” and “brave-like” (63). Desperate for love, Jiro then conducts an elaborate trick that nearly kills him—and wins. His “manly” act finally prompts Marva to slip off her two false heads, jump onto Jiro’s platform, and declare her love to the unconscious Japanese man in her arms. The notion of “freakishness” evoked in this story can be read as a parody of social stereotypes and norms imposed on the immigrant body. Fahy notes that the success of the freak lies in his or her ability to “represent what the audience [is] not,” and to “simultaneously challenge and reinforce binaries about gender (male and female), race (white and nonwhite), and bodies (able and disabled)” (2-3). Indeed, to function as “freaks,” Winnifred Eaton’s characters learn to perform exaggerated versions of race, class, gender, and sexuality: Marva represents a dutiful housewife wearing three heads; Yido can switch between an oriental snake charmer and a regular servant in a flash; Kelly shows off working-class manhood such as tobacco-chewing and fire-breathing; Jiro plays subtle in the battle of love. These freakish acts are both familiar and unfamiliar, both enticing and strangely threatening to the onlookers. They reenact the roles and expectations that define ordinary social actors including the housewife, servant, worker, and student. Yet, in rendering them freakish, Winnifred Eaton’s story emphasizes the denaturalized and constructed aspects of her characters’ racial and sexual identities. As her representation of the tension between Jiro and Kelly suggests, while the Japanese man appears emasculated to American viewers, the Irishman takes on masculine attributes that are considered black or lower-class. Neither of the men can fit squarely in the domestic gender and racial norms. This conflation of freakishness and foreignness in Winnifred Eaton’s text further reveals how the mainstream society projects its desires and anxieties onto the foreign or freak body. Although Winnifred Eaton’s use of the racial freak denaturalizes race by exaggerating racial stereotypes, it fails to question the privileged white racial status embodied by Marva. Marva adds to a long list of white feminine and domestic idols in Winnifred’s stories. Encased in a cabinet and remaining aloof, the beautiful and three-headed blonde appears especially desirable with “three mouths to kiss” (62). For Jiro, the act of the three-headed lady is regarded as “a mark of extreme favor of gods” (62), and 112
he must “win the right to kiss them…,even if he added to himself all three of the heads requiring separate hats and individual meals” (64). Marva is more than a character in this story. In Winnifred’s depiction, the role of the American wife she plays often distances her from other freak performers and “elevates” her to the position of the mainstream audience. Both Kelly and Jiro are subject to her gaze and its regulating power. Her response to the two men’s performance clearly follows American Orientalist tradition to reify the gendered divide between the feminized East and the masculinized West. The tricks that Jiro initially invent to court her are dismissed as effeminate, “just like any lady who happened to be born a Hindu could do; but there is nothin’ manly and bold-like” (63). In contrast, Kelly, who performs the all-muscle working-class Irishman, “had only to put a quid of tobacco in his mouth, with his Gaelic grin, and shoot balls of flame, to move the triple-necked lady to admiration” (63). To counter this orientalist view, Jiro adopts Yido’s suggestion to attempt “something more in Kelly’s line, but something better than he can do” (64). His final act—he inhales a can of gas and blows it into a cooking stove to make cakes—is suicidal but “manly” enough to win Marva over. The freak show represents the process of comparative (de-)naturalization through the rivalry between an emasculated Japanese man and a hyper-sexualized Irish man for the love of an idealized white woman. This rivalry epitomizes the differential histories of racialization of the Irish and the Japanese at the turn of the 1900. Although both groups were represented as “near-white” subjects, the representation of the Irish as a primary site of working-class masculinity and urbanity constituted a specific racialized position that was imagined as uninhabitable to the Japanese. The emasculation of the Japanese was not merely originated from the orientalist logic that generally perceived Asians as feminine and inferior whereas Americans as superior and masculine. This feminized status was also linked to the history of Asian American racialization or what Lisa Lowe aptly calls “oedipalization,” in which Asian populations were represented as strongly identified with a “pre-colonial” motherland and therefore unable to be recognized by the patriarchal authority of the U.S. state (Lowe 214; n18). Jiro’s racialized feminization has much to do with his contradictory desires to be seen as the “Japanese wonder” and to take on the masculinized task where Irish masculinity and workers are produced. Although these desires seem to be fulfilled by winning Marva’s admiration at the end of the story, Jiro’s claims to masculinity and citizenship are still mediated through white female authority that determines how relationships between gender and race can be represented. Thus, even as Jiro represents an alternative site of Asian American masculinity, this story ultimately 113
reaffirms rather than destabilizes the central role of white womanhood plays in the construction American racial and gender norms.
V. Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated how articulations of Japanese American identity unraveled the intra-racial formations of the U.S. citizenship that left the norms of whiteness uncontested. Unlike most Southeast Asian immigrants, the Japanese occupied an “exceptional” status in the U.S. due to Japan’s emergence as a Pacific empire and its equal diplomatic standing with the U.S around the turn of the twentieth century. This exceptionalism reflected in legal and literary representations of Japanese Americans as “white,” particularly whiter than some problematically included groups such as blacks, the Irish, and the Chinese as Winnifred Eaton’s writing exemplifies. Winnifred Eaton’s narratives of Japanese inclusion are significant here not just because they illustrate how the representations of Japanese inclusion often appropriate the ideal of whiteness to solidify the ideas of Japanese cultural superiority and compatibility with white civilization. More importantly, these representations address how one’s racial or ethnic identity is a relational concept that is not so much determined by the perception of the dominant white Americans as it is contingent upon, as Colleen Lye acutely notes, the “standpoint(s) of the racialized” (“The Sino-Japanese Conflict” 158). Winnifred Eaton’s accounts of Japanese American identity not only internalize the ideologies of nonwhite inferiority but also nonwhite racism, including anti-Japanese remarks which feminize and exoticize the Japanese man. Her depiction of Japanese racial identity as “white” but “nothin’…bold-like” provides an earlier example of American Orientalism that locate Asians outside the parameters of American national citizenry and culture.
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