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New Women in the New Pacific: Japanese–American Romances in the Context of U.S. Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Gretchen Murphy
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In the title of a 1903 American Journal of Sociology essay, Ernest W. Clement announces a new phenomenon: “The New Woman in Japan.” By this title, he quickly explains, he does not mean to satirically compare this Japanese sociological development to the American “parody of man” usually associated with the phrase, because “such a creature as that called the ‘new woman’ in the Occident has not yet appeared to any great extent among the Japanese.” Although sometimes in Japan “the process of the new woman's evolution may be disfigured by some accident” producing “a sickening sort of person,” Clement's interest is not in particular aberrations, but rather in “the abstract, legal new woman” created by recent changes in Japan's civil code. In this abstraction Clement sees improvement on previous Japanese laws that “relegat[ed] woman to an abnormally inferior position.” Clement thus assures readers that, although Japan's modernization hinges upon its women's legal and cultural status, female advancement in Japan will not approach the “abnormal” excesses of the United States. Quoting Alice Mabel Bacon's influential book Japanese Girls and Women to stress this point, Clement explains that Japanese men are adopting many Western habits and opinions, but they still “shrink aghast, in many cases, at the thought that their women may ever become the forward, self-assertive, half-masculine women of the West.” Yet still, many of these Japanese men express “a growing dissatisfaction with the smallness and narrowness of the lives of their wives and daughters — a growing belief that better educated women make better homes.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 29 , October 2005 , pp. 395 - 418
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

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References

Notes

1. Clement, Ernest, “The New Woman in Japan,” American Journal of Sociology 8, no. 5 (03 1903): 693–94, 697CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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7. Influential examples of these respective formulations are Spivak, Gayatri's “Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 243–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rafael, Vicente's “Colonial Domesticity: White Women and United States Rule in the Philippines,” American Literature 67 (1995): 639–666CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kaplan, Amy's The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Colonialism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 23–50Google Scholar.

8. See, for example, Donaldson, Laura E., Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender and Empire Building (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Grewal, Inderpal, Home and Harem: Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lowe, Lisa, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

9. By capitalizing the term New Woman in this essay, I emphasize my treatment of it as a discursive rather than an actual sociological phenomenon. While many women were in fact seeking college degrees, careers in male-identified professions, physical freedom, and changes to patriarchal family and gender relations, these real-life new women are not identical to the fears, enthusiasms, and stylistic concerns bound up in the popular and vaguely denned term New Woman. On this distinction, see Roberts, Mary Louise, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

10. In this essay, I specifically discuss novels by John Luther Long and Winnifred Eaton, whose works provide examples of a larger body of fictional Japanese-American romances by writers like William Elliot Griffis, Archibald Clavering Gunter, and Frances Little. One reviewer of Eaton's work wrote that she joined the “perceptible literary drift to Japan” (“Japanese-American Romance,” Chicago Tribune, undated clipping, box 17, file 2, Winnifred Eaton Reeve Fonds, Special Collections, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta; hereafter called “Calgary archive” in the notes). Such romances, which share elements of setting, characterization, and narrative structure, have frequently been described as a distinct genre. Minor, Earl in The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958)Google Scholar comments on the proliferation of “pseudo-Japanese fiction” during this period, but dismissively states that, because of low literary quality, these romances “may be ignored in good conscience” (41). L. Moffitt Cecil Jr. pays closer attention to the “minor literary tradition” of Japanese-American romance in his 1947 dissertation, but in establishing this classification, he tends to homogenize the fiction by describing a single “myth” reflected and reinforced by all the stories — including Long, 's and Eaton, 's (“Our Japanese Romance: The Myth of Japan in America, 1853–1905” [Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1947])Google Scholar.

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13. The Japanese government began using the press to influence foreign public opinion in the 1870s, a project that resulted in a number of well-placed essays by Japanese writers on the common interests of Japan and America (Lefeber, Walter, The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations Throughout History [New York: Norton, 1997], 50Google Scholar; and Huffman, James “‘That Naughty Yankee Boy,’ Edward H. House, and Meiji Japan's Struggle for Equality,” Nanzan Review of American Studies 22 [2000]: 41–42)Google Scholar.

14. Komatz, Midori, “Japan and the United States,” The World's Work 3 (1901): 1386–93Google Scholar. The popular conception of this alliance, which peaked around the time of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), sometimes described the United States and Japan as united in being “new,” modern nations on the international scene (Japan, despite its 2,500-year-old civilization, was represented as new because of the radical changes brought by the Mieji Restoration). At other times, the alliance was represented as a partnership of “sea” powers like the United States, Great Britain, and Japan against “land” powers like France, Germany, and Russia (see LeFeber, , Clash, 32–64Google Scholar; and these primary sources: Strong, Josiah, Expansion Under New World Conditions [New York: Baker and Taylor, 1900], 186Google Scholar; and Mahan, Alfred ThayerThe Problem of Asia and Its Effect Upon International Policies [New York: Harper Brothers, 1900], 108)Google Scholar. Americans imagined a special relationship between themselves and the Japanese even though Great Britain, unlike the United States, was formally allied with Japan through the Russo-Japanese War and was the first nation to offer Japan the equal status of a Western nation in diplomatic treaties.

15. See Beisner, Robert, Twelve Against the Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968)Google Scholar; Welch, Richard E., Response to Imperialism: The United States and the Philippine-American War 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and Markowitz, Gerald, ed., Anti-Imperialism, 1895–1901 (New York: Garland, 1976)Google Scholar.

16. Carnegie, Andrew, The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays (New York: Century, 1901)Google Scholar. See also Murphy, Gretchen, Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of US Empire (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. Colleen Lye observes that Long's novella and the earliest 1904 version of Puccini's opera both offer “a stringent critique of American domination in the Pacific,” but Lye doesn't consider the era's debates about U.S. Pacific expansion as a context for Long's critique (Lye, , “M. Butterfly and the Rhetoric of Anti-essentialism: Minority Discourse in an International Frame,” in The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interpretations, ed. Palumbo-Liu, David [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995], 273)Google Scholar.

18. Long, John Luther, Miss Cherry Blossom of Tokyo (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1905), 38Google Scholar. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text.

19. Long, John Luther, The Fox Woman (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1900), 80Google Scholar. Subsequent citations to this work are noted parenthetically in the text.

20. Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 225–41Google Scholar.

21. Yoshihara, Mari, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

22. Kipling, RudyardFrom Sea to Sea (New York: Doubleday, 1914), 1:312Google Scholar. See also Rosaldo, Renato's “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 107–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. Kaplan, , Anarchy of Empire, 92–120Google Scholar; and Hoganson, Kristen L., Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish American and Philippine American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 29–42Google Scholar.

24. Wilkinson, Endymion, Japan Versus the West: Image and Reality (New York: Penguin, 1990), 123Google Scholar.

25. Hueng, Marina, “The Family Romance of Orientalism: From Madame Butterfly to Indochine,” in Visions of the East: Orientalism and Film, ed. Bernstein, Matthew and Studlar, Gaylyn (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 160Google Scholar.

26. Long, John Luther, Madame Butterfly, Purple Eyes [and Other Stories] (New York: Century, 1898), 64Google Scholar. Subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text.

27. See Hueng, , “Family Romance,” 163Google Scholar; and Browne, Nick, “The Undoing of the Other Woman: Madame Butterfly and the Discourse of American Orientalism,” in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, ed. Bernardi, Daniel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 228Google Scholar.

28. Belasco, David, Six Plays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929), 23Google Scholar. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text.

29. Groos, Arthur, “Lieutenant B. F. Pinkerton: Problems in the Genesis of an Operatic Hero,” Italica 64, no. 4 (1987): 655, 664CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. Groos, , “Lieutenant B. F. Pinkerton,” 658Google Scholar.

31. Gina Marchetti interprets this revision as one way in which Long, 's ambivalence about empire is softened although not entirely removed in later versions on page and screen (Romance and the Yellow Peril: Race, Sex and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993], 86, 88)Google Scholar.

32. Hueng, , “Family Romance,” 166Google Scholar.

33. In Belasco, Kate does also call Butterfly a “plaything,” but her line primarily expresses her lack of anger and jealousy toward her vanquished rival, thus emphasizing Kate's generosity and understanding rather than merely her thoughtless condescension: “Who in the world could blame you or — call you responsible — you pretty little plaything” (30).

34. Clement, , “New Woman in Japan,” 697Google Scholar.

35. Fraser, Mary Crawford, “Japanese Women and the New Era,” World's Work 12 (1906): 7631Google Scholar.

36. Quoted in Tyrell, Ian, Women's World / Women's Empire: The Women's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 93Google Scholar.

37. Takahira, Kogoro, “American Women and American Friendship for Japan: A Thanksgiving Message to the American People,” Women's Home Companion 32 (11 1905): 1Google Scholar.

38. Ferens, Dominika, Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 120–23Google Scholar. This tendency to hear subversion in Eaton's voice is a reaction against previous critics of Asian American literature who either ignored Eaton or treated her as an embarrassment and foil to her “good” sister Edith, who embraced her Chinese Eurasian identity instead of hiding it behind a Japanese pseudonym. While I want to problematize the idea that Eaton was more subversive than Long, my goal in doing so is not to return to a dismissal of Eaton as merely conventional or acquiescent. See also Birchall, Diana, Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 79–84Google Scholar; and Ouyang, Huining, “Behind the Mask of Coquetry: The Trickster Narrative in Miss Numè of Japan: A Japanese-American Romance,” in Doubled Plots: Romance and History, ed. Strehle, Susan and Carden, Mary Paniccia (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003): 86–106Google Scholar.

39. Cole, Jean Lee, introduction to Madame Butterfly / John Luther Long and A Japanese Nightingale / Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton): Two Orientalist Texts, ed. Cole, and Honey, Maureen (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 5Google Scholar.

40. According to Dominika Ferens, Eaton writes “Orientalism with a difference” by adapting its conventions into an interrogation of the very concept of race. For Ferens, a crucial aspect of this subversive strategy is using Japan as a safe and imaginary laboratory or “field” for proving the viability of interracial love and marriage. “By locating the action of her stories in ‘Japan,’” Ferens, claims, “Winnifred removed her characters from the field of U.S. racial politics” (Edith and Winnifred Eaton, 155)Google Scholar. For Ferens, the important thing about Eaton's “Japan” is that it was a faraway, unthreatening fairyland of difference. With this claim, Ferens joins other Eaton critics in celebrating Eaton's tricksterlike ability to evade U.S. prohibitions against interracial romance by setting her stories abroad. See also Cole, Jean Lee, The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press), 41Google Scholar; and Shea, Pat, “Winnifred Eaton and the Politics of Miscegenation in Popular Fiction,” MELUS 22 (1997): 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41. Here I am placing Eaton in the context of U.S. literature despite her Canadian birth and her late-career assumption of the identity of “Canadian author.” As I demonstrate here, the national context in which her “Onoto Watanna” works were written and read crucially shaped and informed those narratives.

42. Eaton Archives, box 16, file 17.

43. See, for example, U.S. diplomat Denby, Charles's dismissive treatment of the term entangling alliances in his essay on “America's Opportunity in Asia” (North American Review 166 [1898]: 35)Google Scholar.

44. Chuh, Kandice, “Imaginary Borders,” in Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 279CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45. Watanna, Onoto, Miss Numè of Japan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 16Google Scholar. Subsequent citations are noted in the text.

46. Shinoda, Masatake, “Japan and America,” Independent 52 (1900): 1050Google Scholar.

47. Watanna, Onoto, A Japanese Nightingale (New York: Harpers, 1903), 19Google Scholar. Subsequent citations of this work are noted parenthetically in the text.

48. To stress the contrast, however, a number of Eaton critics have curiously ignored that the tragedy of Long's conclusion is not Butterfly's suicide but her adoption of Western individualism in an Oriental world that cannot support such feelings. Sometimes this amounts to what seems a willful misreading of Long's conclusion. In her essay “Rewriting the Butterfly Story,” Huining Ouyang states that, in contrast to Eaton's work, Long's “master plot” relies on the “major Orientalist trope” of “Asian female self-sacrifice” to sanctify and elevate the heroine to the level of martyr while showing her willing submission to Western culture. With this statement, she implies that the master plot has the same meaning in Long as in later versions and suppresses that Long's Butterfly does not literally become a martyr (Alternative Rhetorics: Challenges to the Rhetorical Tradition, ed. Gray-Rosendale, Laura and Gruber, Sibylle [New York: State University of New York Press, 2001], 208Google Scholar). Similarly, Cole, Jean Lee seemingly misrepresents Long when she writes that, in his novella “the childlïke, naive Butterfly is brought to life by Pinkerton, only to be killed off by his neglect” (Literary Voices, 18)Google Scholar.

49. Haney-Lopez, Ian, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 61–67Google Scholar.

50. Roosevelt, Theodore, Messages of the President of the United States Communicated to the Houses of Congress (Washington: U.S. Government Print Office, 1906), 36Google Scholar.

51. Joseph M. Henning observes that American diplomatic interest in Japan frequently overlapped with a number of other constituencies, including Japanese propagandists wishing to garner American sympathies for Japan, American missionaries who associated civilization with religious rather than geopolitical influence, and teachers and writers like Lafcadio Hearn, William Eliot Griffis, Edward House, and Alice Mabel Bacon who were more personally invested in promoting cross-cultural (although usually American-dominated) understanding (Outposts of Civilization: Race, Religion, and the Formative Years of American-Japanese Relations [New York: New York University Press, 2000])Google Scholar.