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The Eternal Embrace: Ghostly Maidens in Sidney McCall's Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 July 2010
Abstract
At the turn of the century, “Japan” was being imagined for the American public in a variety of ways. Sidney McCall, wife of Hegelian Ernest Fenollosa and close friend of Romanticist Lafcadio Hearn, sought a way to incorporate “Japan” into Fenollosa's broader Idealist arch while simultaneously preserving the titillation of Hearn's “ghostly tales.” By so doing, McCall attempted to reconcile divided notions of “femininity” in early Japanology (and American discourse at large). She utilized the form of the novel itself to work systematically through the schism between “feminine mystique” and “maternal feminism”; this uncertainty was resolved, for McCall, in her Idealist fictions from “Japan.”
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References
1 Sidney McCall writes in her preface to Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, “The influence of Hegel remained with (Fenollosa) a vital and constructive factor throughout his life.” Ernest Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, Volume I (London: William Heinemann, 1912), xiii.
2 For more on Fenollosa's joint ventures, see Larry Chisolm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963).
3 See also Van Wyck Brooks, Fenollosa and His Circle (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1961).
4 Fenollosa, xxiv.
5 Though she was not a formal member of the St. Louis or Concord schools active at that time, McCall did share many of their ideological goals as well as uncertainties. See Dorothy G. Rogers, America's First Woman Philosophers: Transplanting Hegel 1860–1925 (New York: Continuum. 2005).
6 Fenollosa, 437.
7 Elizabeth Bisland, The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, Volume 1 (Westminster: Archibald, Constable and Co., 1906), 403.
8 Georg W. F. Hegel writes, “the real subject-matter is not exhausted in its purpose, but in working the matter out.” “Spirit,” according to Hegel, resists “edifying” and instead finds its nature in dialectical becoming. Georg W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Digireads Publishing, 2009), 12.
9 For more on this approach to Japanese culture see William Hosley, The Japan Idea (Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1991).
10 Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Woman and American Occupation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4.
11 Christopher Benfrey, The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan. (New York: Random House Paperbacks, 2004).
12 Yoshihara, 6.
13 Chisolm, Fenollosa, 120.
14 For further analysis of the dialectical forces at work in Japanology see also Robert A. Rosenstone's Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
15 For more on Hearn's style see Carl Dawson, Lafcadio Hearn and the Vision of Japan (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
16 Christine Guth, Longfellow's Tattoos (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2004), 26.
17 Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumer's Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 31.
18 Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 47.
19 Sidney McCall, Out of the Nest: A Flight of Verses (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1899), 64.
20 Ibid., 110.
21 Sidney McCall, The Breath of the Gods (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1905), 148.
22 Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism (Duluth: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 173.
23 The Breath of the Gods, 85.
24 The aspects of Eastern religion projected onto this “ghost” can be expressed in the statement from Judith Snodgrass that Buddhism “would provide the competition with Christianity that was essential if the West was to reach its full evolutionary potential.” The “ghost” of Japan would unnerve early twentieth-century Christians but it would also force them to become “better Christians.” Judith Snodgrass, Presenting Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 151.
25 Sidney McCall, Truth Dexter (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1901), 7.
26 Ibid., 86.
27 Ibid., 5.
28 Ibid., 36.
29 Ibid., 222.
30 For more on this anxiety see also Thomas Tweed, The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844–1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). In addition, Christine Guth discusses Americans' obsession with (and repulsion from) the Buddhist ritual of cremation: “Such images no doubt fueled fear and horror of a practice that for many Christians brought to mind the fire and brimstone of hell.” Guth, Longfellow's Tattoos, 195.
31 Truth Dexter, 188.
32 Ibid., 88.
33 Ibid., 181.
34 The Breath of the Gods, 11.
35 Ibid., 151.
36 Ibid., 275.
37 Ibid., 418.
38 Ibid., 420.
39 Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 154.
40 Ibid., 171.
41 Sidney McCall, Dragon Painter (Tokyo: Ganesha Publishing, 2002), 236.
42 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 111.
43 The Breath of the Gods, 173.
44 Hegel, 25.
45 Truth Dexter, 158.
46 Ibid., 320.
47 Ibid., 334.
48 Truth Dexter, preface.
49 Ibid., 346.
50 Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, 170.
51 Truth Dexter, 361.
52 The Breath of the Gods, 5.
53 Ibid., 363.
54 Ibid., 409.
55 Ibid., 410.
56 Ibid., 405.
57 Ibid., 412.
58 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 23.