Jappy
Rhymes with Happy, page 3
Literary observations: The Mirror of Women
On this page I am not interested
in the use of the word "Jap/Jappy" and its associations, but in the presentation
of Japanese women in two quite different contexts: (I) as the real live
"Japanese doll" living in a country where everything is on a doll-like
scale; (II) as the physical and cultural complement of the Western (usually
American) woman, presented in a mirror reflecting two women. These two
metaphorical situations are, so far as I have seen, mutually exclusive
(the doll inhabits books presenting a man's point of view; the mirror occurs
in books aimed at, and often written by, women). They both present the
Japanese woman as beautiful but somehow deficient.
I. Poupée Japonaise:
the Japanese Woman as a Doll
In Young Americans in
Japan (1892) by Edward Greey, a Japanese medical student in America
returns to Japan as the guide of his professor's family. Oto Nambo is the
exemplar of modern Japan, brilliant, gentle, appreciative of his country's
cultural achievements but desirous of improving conditions with Western
comforts, medical practices, and so on. However, he is introduced by the
very first image in the book, of a a Japanese doll with a map on his kimono,
captioned "The Japanese Doll's Arrival in the United States." Oto is instantly
humiliated by being bombarded with cucumbers (meant for any passing tramp)
and then by being addressed as "Miss"--based on his costume--by the Jewett
children. (The idea that the Japanese male appears, but is not, effeminate
because he "wears a dress" appears in some doll literature, notably Jingle
of a Jap.) He takes all this in stride, responding politely, and soon
is recognized as properly Americanized.
Although Japanese male dolls,
recognized as such, were common enough, calling a Japanese man a doll is
unusual; it automatically feminizes him, just as the American children
do to Oto Nambo by calling him "Miss." It is a striking way
to introduce a character who will be the mentor to the Jewett family
throughout the book and its two sequels, and it seems to confirm at the
outset the notion that the Japanese are to Americans as the feminine is
to the masculine--that is, inferior, less fully human. In the following
examples, the equation is simplified by having Japanese culture represented
primarily by a woman, who is in turn compared to a doll.
The Japanese woman as doll
seems to appear mostly in novels by men (Madame Chrysanthème
by Pierre Loti, My Japanese Wife by Clive Holland, and Poupée
Japonaise by Félicien Champsaur), though it also figures in
Kathleen Tamagawa's memoir, Holy Prayers
in a Horse's Ear, in which she considers herself to have experienced
life as a Japanese doll, and in Onoto Watanna's Sunny-San,
where it represents a particular, mistaken, Japanese attitude.
The idea
that the Japanese themselves are doll-like may emphasize various aspects
of an author's conception of the Japanese, spiritual or physical: beauty
and fragility, smallness and a miniature quality, awkwardness or stiffness
or jerkiness of movement, childlike naivety, lack of emotion, lack of moral
integrity or dignity, an incomplete humanity.
The metaphor
or analogy of a woman as doll-like occurs in Japanese literature also,
for example in the Tale of Genji, written
over 1000 years ago, or in the 2001 film Dolls by Takeshi
Kitano. Western writers certainly could also qualify Western women, or
certain classes of them, as doll-like, beautiful and human-looking but
"soulless." At some level this is the metaphor behind Ibsen's A Doll's
House.
The "Japanese
doll" image in Western literature, however, assumes that the reader is
somewhat familiar with Japanese doll culture, so that an image of what
a Japanese doll looks like would be evoked along with certain doll attributes;
a Japanese woman is not like a plump blonde baby doll, or a stick Dutch
doll, but like a small black-haired Japanese doll. On the other hand, these
texts do not usually mention actual doll-play; if real dolls were described,
that might weaken the metaphorical image of the woman-as-doll by contrasting
her humanity with the doll's actual soullessness. In the three main examples
I will cite (two of them French), the doll-like quality of the Japanese
is related to their willingness to serve Westerners, and in particular
of a woman to serve a man sexually.
1. Pierre Loti's
novel
Madame Chrysanthème (Madame Chrysanthemum, 1888)
may have been the first novel set in Japan to win great international success;
it certainly contributed to Madame Butterfly and
a whole genre of
novels and plays about love-affairs between Westerners and Japanese
women. Loti introduces the Japanese-as-dolls image several times, and
his illustrators
responded with some drawings of actual Japanese dolls. The image of
Japan as a land of toy-sized implements (and people) evokes sometimes
smallness, sometimes an artificial and easily-broken-and-mended quality
he perceives (e.g. his house "is all made of paper panels, and can be
taken
down, when you want, like a child's toy," ch. 6). The Japanese woman as
a doll is above all deceptive--insincere, the promise of romance
without
the substance. Here is the first presentation of the image. The
narrator,
a sailor, has come to visit a marriage-broker in Nagasaki, with the
intention
of acquiring a temporary Japanese wife:
Then I want them
to bring me a meal... and then I want them to serve tea and rice to my
rickishaw-man waiting below--I want, I want lots of things, O my doll ladies
[mesdames les poupées], I will tell you them, one at a time, when
I can figure out how to put the sentences together.... But, the more I
look at you, the more I worry about what tomorrow's bride will be
like. I admit, you are almost darling--funny little things, with your delicate
hands and miniature feet--but really you are ugly and ridiculously small,
like knicknacks for a shelf.... (ch. 3)
When I had gone back on board
my ship, when the scene [of choosing a bride and arranging the payments]
played out in the town above reappeared in my mind, it seemed to me that
I had become engaged, just for a joke, among marionettes. (ch. 5)
So full of laughter, so joyful,
these little Nipponese dolls! --with a slightly forced joy, true, a bit
worked-up and sometimes ringing false--still I let myself go along with
it. Chrysanthemum is different, because she is sad. (ch. 7)
[On seeing a particularly
beautiful young Japanese woman in a highly romantic pose and setting:]
Still, it was not good to stop too long and become involved--it was just
another decoy. A doll like the others, obviously, a shelf doll, nothing
more. Looking at her, I told myself that even Chrysanthemum, appearing
in this place, with this dress, this lighting, this sun-halo, would have
been every bit as charming. (ch. 62)
2. In the same year as Madame
Chrysanthème, 1888, the American author Edward A. House
published a very different and much less popular novel about Japanese women
and their relationships with Westerners, Yone Santo:
A Child of Japan. The heroine is an aristocratic young Japanese
woman, befriended by an American doctor when she is only about 10, at which
time she explains to him that "My doll--you know, my doll is nobody"--that
is, the doll is not alive and is incapable of good or bad behavior (though
she attributes feelings to it; ch. 3). Some years later, when she explains
to the doctor that she is about to be married, we get this exchange:
"I am sixteen by
our reckoning, nearly fifteen by yours. A grown-up woman, doctor."
"A grown-up doll,
you little witch! How dare you talk to me of marriage?"
This may be taken as a sign
of the speaker's need to distance himself momentarily from Yone, whom he
continues throughout to regard as a child. She dies at the age of 17, after
nursing some Japanese children and a nasty American missionary woman through
a cholera epidemic. She dies in the arms of the doctor, a nice American
missionary woman, and a young Bostonian man who, having been forced by
the doctor to reconsider the propriety of a liaison with Yone, has come
to offer her marriage. Her Japanese husband, a boat wright, appears
just at this moment. He asks why they are all weeping (since Yone does
not seem immediately worth crying over to him). The Doctor replies:
“...we respected
and admired Yone very much, and loved her dearly.”
“What, that poor little
doll?”
“She was a good woman,
Santo, — the best woman I have known in all my life.”
“I never knew that,
Doctor-san, — never thought of such a thing. Are you sure of it?”
(ch. 34)
The doctor pronounces her ":
...this long-suffering, white-souled little pagan saint...." and is pleased
that the carpenter is able to understand that Yone was not a "doll" but
something better.
3. In Bertie Linton;
or, Lost in Japan by Percy Ainslie (U.K., 1891), a British family visits
Japan. Though a plot eventually develops, the first half of the novel
is mostly a lightly fictionalized tourist account. In a teahouse, however,
the mother of the family draws a powerful distinction between her daughter
and the Japanese waitresses:
Two
pretty girls now brought in the tea.... "I had no idea the women
were so nice-looking in Japan," said Mrs. Linton; "one always imagined
them to be snub-nosed, flat-faced little oddities."
"You
must remember these attendants are specially chosen for their good looks,"
replied the captain. "Now, Mrs. Linton, would you like me to flatter your
motherly vanity?"
"You
don't mean to say that you are going to compare Ethel to those black-haired
dolls," returned Mrs. Linton.
"No,
no," laughed the captain. (p. 35)
3. Clive Holland's
My
Japanese Wife (1902) is almost a pastiche of Madame Chrysanthème,
telling of an Englishman in Nagasaki who falls in love with a Japanese
girl, whom he calls Mousmé (Loti's French spelling for the Japanese
word for "girl," now spelled musume). The book is in fact a sequel,
or rather prequel, to a novel called Mousmé. His "experiment"
is different from Loti's hero's: he will marry a Japanese woman not as a temporary
expedient but as a "real" wife to take home to London. His friends warn him he will "tire of her"
(as a child tires of a doll); the arrangements are in terms of her family
being "induced to sell her" though he has the option to "take her on trial."
All this elaborates the idea of the wife as a toy to be purchased, used,
and discarded, and though that is not the story, in fact the idea that
the young couple are playing at marriage recurs frequently. Terms
such as toy-like, tiny, child-size, doll-like, or doll's-house,
fairyland
or make-believe, are on nearly every page of the book, emphasizing
the idea that Japan allows a kind of return to childhood, a realm of irresponsibility:
My Mousmé!
with Dresden-china tinted cheeks, and tiny ways; playing at life, as it
always seems to me, with the dainty grace of Japan, that idealised doll's-house
land. Mousmé... [has] the delicately pretty face of a child-woman
with innocent, soft eyes and finely arched brows...(p. 1)
Our little dinner of toy-like
viands is gone through ...the little dancing-girl fluttered softly
in.... What a droll doll she is! Childish, with an assumption of innocence
which is as charming as it must be unreal. An elegant, slender little figure,
full of dainty grace. Her face painted--till it looked positively funny--its
whiteness hiding the native transparency of her warm-hued skin, all damask
rose and nut-brown tinted. And the two little dabs of rouge--oh! with what
inartistic exactness they are placed, one on either cheek.... childishly
pouting lips... charming baby-curls... (p. 24, 28-29)
Miss Hyacinth (for that was
Mousmé's name, I soon discovered), so fresh and delicate, a little
figure off a tea-caddy, quaint and charming withal, [had ensnared]... my
own admiration already. (p.33)
Mousmé, like Chrysanthemum,
is not quite a doll herself--she is contrasted with the dancing-girl of
the second quotation. She is more like a painting; thus she is also
"a yellow-faced, painted scrap of a woman" in the mental reproaches addressed
to Clive by his sister (82); "a scrap of daintily dressed femininity" as
she writes a letter (98); "the fantastic little figure I love so well"
as she lies ill upon the matting (167); and "like some toy woman taken
bodily from off a screen or jar decorated by an artist drawing his inspiration
from models of the highest types" (79-80).
4.
Félicien Champsaur's
Poupée Japonaise ( meaning "Japanese
Doll"; 1912; I am using a 1922 text which boasts 33,000 copies in print)
is another novel which recounts a temporary marriage between a Western
man and a Japanese woman, but in this case it is a historical novel (set
around 1860) with a large cast of Japanese characters, and the main figure
is Sameyama, the "Japanese doll" of the title. It is the biography of a
particular, not typical, woman of pleasure: Sameyama begins as a well-bred
bourgeoise, goes to work in the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters to save the
family's fortunes, then is purchased as a wife by Jack Campbell, a British
sailor with whom she has fallen in love.The lives of the prostitutes are
presented as an exotic sexual fantasy, with the insistence on the extreme
youth and eagerness for sexual experience of the girls, emphasis on their
sensual relations with each other, and accounts of seductions and provocative
entertainments (Edward House, in his little book Japanese Episodes,
describes a group strip-tease dance by geisha, but Champsaur's version
is inevitably prurient rather than ethnological). The image of the doll
is explicitly identified with the women of pleasure, and intensifies in
the chapters in which Jack first enters the Yoshiwara and meets Sameyama,
one of which is entitled "Dolls on Display." As in other works, the doll-like
quality of the women has to do with smallness and fragility, but also with
a kind of moral quietness linked to stupidity and self-centeredness.
For an illustration showing
the heroine as a doll (from the Table of Contents), see the Book
Illustrations page.
Under the strings
of lanterns draping the house-front windows, they seemed, in their varied
poses and calm occupations--some reading, others playing the shamisen or
amusing themselves by concentrating on a game of go, the boards
set up between them, or motionless--mysterious live dolls, which a luxurious
lover of artifice, some mystic of pleasure, had dressed like darling hieratic
dolls, children and women at the same time, disturbing, in the half-light
created by the street-lights shining in the room where they sat. (book
2, ch. 15)
[Harry and Jack are
walking in the Yoshiwara; Harry speaks]: "[The Japanese create beauty]
marvelously with, besides, a kind of artificiality, that gives their backdrops
an ephemeral quality that doubles their charm.... The women.... are charming,
but like works of art; you look at them and you want to hold them in your
hand. I would like to own these living knicknacks--perfect automatons which
I would fill out with my dreams of supple grace and sweetness. They are
like Saxe or Oriental Sevres porcelain, bizarre because the details of
their decoration are less banal." ...
"Oh!
Pretty dolls!" said Jack. They were now watching... the courtesans; the
youngest ones, serious under the fire of their looks, seemed like statues
ready to come alive at a breath or a kiss.....
"Yes,
these mousmés," said Jack smiling, "are rare curios, but not at
the moment much like women. I'd be a bit afraid to undress them."
"It must
have the charm of sacrilege. These little women, like jewels to rent or
purchase, preserve a religious quality."
"Yes,
they make you think of baby goddesses." (book 2, ch. 15)
[Harry and Jack are
walking on a festival day; Jack remarks he would like to see Sameyama,
who reminds him of a French girlfriend. Harry replies:] "Bah! my friend,
these women are better and worse than our former or future women, insofar
as they have no consciousness of their ideas. These little women are aware
of nothing but being pretty, with no other motive in dominating men's souls
than to get praise for their beauty. It's better, because they are harmonious
dolls. It's worse, because some of them are like dream-automatons of voluptuous
grace, while others are fools who can't imagine life without the suffering
of impossible dreams of true love." (book 2, ch. 22)
"The lips of the courtesans
of Edo's Yoshiwara, my darling, are beautiful and sweet to the taste;
but yours alone have for me the divine enchantment of the Kiss. You, my
one and only adored one now, you were she who does not love, but who was
loved for her beauty.... under the silk kimono you hide more precious treasures,
and in order to know them I have given you my soul. My body, Sameyama (you
Japanese doll, so pretty and so alive!), is bound to your body; my lips
are riveted to yours, in my mind, even when, out of breath after the climactic
moment, our mouths must separate." (book 3, ch. 5).
5.
To these examples I will add a couple of references from Onoto Watanna's
Sunny-San (1922). Onoto
Watanna (pseudonym of Winnifred Eaton, a half-Chinese Canadian woman) was
the most popular Japanese-romance novelist of the period 1899-1910; her
presentation of Japanese (or half-Japanese, or culturally Japanese) girls
as morally superior, able to take charge of their own romantic lives, cut
against the usual American perspective according to which the Japanese
woman's conflict of duty and love seemed trivial or tragic. It also forms
an interesting contrast with the American stereotype of the tragic
mulatto woman, who is isolated from both the negro and the white communities
by mixed race. Sunny-San,
the last "Japanese" novel, published some 10 years after the previous one
(and after Watanna had pretty much discarded her Japanese image and subject
matter), takes place mostly in New York City; its heroine, only one quarter
Japanese, is typical of Watanna's vigorous women. However, Sunny's
mother does qualify as a "tragic mulatto" and also as a Madame
Butterfly type, and Watanna uses the "Japanese doll" image to emphasize
this. She seems aware of its history and power, and she analyzes
it with striking clarity:
[Sunny's
father] had acquired a sentiment not merely for the land, but for the woman
he had taken as his wife; above all, he was devoted to his little girl....
His marriage to the mother of Sunny had been more or less of a mercenary
transaction. She had been sold to the American by a stepfather anxious
to rid himself of a child who showed the clear evidence of her white father....
The result was to breed in him at the outset a feeling that he would not
have analysed as contempt, but was at all events scepticism for the seeming
love of his wife for him.... He deluded himself into believing that his
Japanese wife, like her dolls, was incapable of any intense feeling. [On
his announcing his intention to divorce her and leave Japan] her smiling
mask betrayed no trace to the American agents of the anguished turmoil
within. Indeed, her amiability aroused indignant and disgusted comment,
and she was pronounced a soulless butterfly." (pp. 74-76)
Here,
then, the woman-as-doll is contrasted with actual dolls, and the idea that
the woman is like them in having no "soul" is made explicit and then dismissed.
Sunny's mother refuses compensation and refuses to give up her daughter,
and becomes a beggar fleeing her former husband's agents; she eventually
becomes an acrobatic performer at a teahouse, and dies young leaving her
fourteen-year-old daughter to take her place.
Sunny is rescued from the teahouse and "adopted"
by a young American, Jerry, whom she eventually follows to New York. Although
he is engaged to Miss Falconer, he and Sunny fall in love. When Jerry's
mother and Miss Falconer discover this, they confront Sunny and send her
forth into the New York City streets with a broken heart. Only after this
scene does Miss Falconer tell Mrs. Hammond that she no longer intends to
marry Jerry.
"My purpose [in confronting
Sunny] was to make sure that if I were
not to have Jerry neither should she--that Japanese doll!" All the bottled-up
venom of the girl's nature came forth in that single utterance. (p. 203)
II. The Mirror of Women
 |
The American Girl in
Japan
Harrison Fisher (American,
1875-1934)
Fisher, the son of an artist,
was one of the most successful commercial artists of his day, specializing,
along with Charles Dana Gibson, in idealized images of the "the American
Girl." This is one of a series of prints in which this fabulous creature
visits various countries. A striking image of the contrast between the
romantic, intellectual, and socially free American woman and the more colorful
but restricted Japanese women. |
The episode of the mirror
or scene contrasting two women, one Japanese and one Western, as
two types of beauty, is surprisingly frequent and may have originated in
an historical account (1 below); it recurs several times however in a kind
of romantic fiction in which, of course, the Western woman is an important
character, and the relationship between her freedom to love and choose
a mate is strongly contrasted with the Japanese social obligation of a
daughter to marry (or otherwise determine her sex life) according to her
father's wishes. The American girl's proposed ideal biography arranges
love, marriage, and sexual fulfillment in that order, but allows flirtations
and the pleasure of manipulating men. In the Japanese system (at least
as presented in these novels), love, marriage, and sexuality are
more distinct social and moral categories which have little to do with
each other. In different novels, different solutions to this tension are
proposed: in some, the Japanese woman achieves the American ideal, while
in others her fate is, by contrast with the American one, tragic. As the
two women look at themselves and each other and remark on the contrast
between their complexions, they enjoy a moment of sisterhood, representing
the "best types" of their respective "races," though the primacy of the
fair-haired type is emphasized in most cases by references to her height
and in some cases by the fact that the Japanese girl speaks a broken English.
1. The Russian Navy Captain
Rikord's account of his adventures in Japan /n1/
was published in 1818. His mission in approaching Japan was the rescue
of six Navy personnel who had been captured by Japanese officials while
attempting to map and describe the Kuril (Kurile) Islands, an archipelago
north of Hokkaido claimed by both Japan and Russia. Rikord's success depended,
in the end, on the services of a Japanese gentleman, a captain and merchant,
who, having been captured by Rikord, turned out to be willing to serve
as an honest go-between in the negotiations. Shortly after the capture
of this gentleman, a "Japanese lady" (she was evidently the merchant's
mistress, since his wife is mentioned later) from his ship boards Rikord's
ship, the Diana, and is introduced to "a young and handsome lady,
the wife of our surgeon's mate." Under the eyes of the men, the two women
...quickly formed
an intimacy. Our countrywoman endeavored to entertain the foreigner with
what the women of all countries delight in; she shewed her her trinkets.
Our visitor behaved with all the ease of a woman of fashion.... But the
fair complexion of our countrywoman seemed most of all to attract her attention.
She passed her hands over her face, as though she suspected it had been
painted, and, with a smile, exclaimed "Yoe! Yoe!" which signifies good.
I observed, that our visitor was somewhat vain of her new ornaments, and
I held a looking-glass before her, that she might see how they became her.
The Russian lady placed herself immediately behind her, in order to shew
her the difference of their complexions. She immediately pushed the glass
aside, and good-humouredly said "Varee! Varee!" (not good). She herself
might have been called handsome; her face was of the oval form, her features
regular, and her little mouth, when open, disclosed a set of shining black
lacquered teeth. Her black eye-brows, which had the appearance of having
been penciled, overarched a pair of sparkling dark eyes.... Her countenance
was expressive and interesting, and she was altogether calculated to make
a very agreeable impression. She could not be more than eighteen.... On
taking leave... I hinted to our countrywoman, that she should embrace her.
When the Japanese observed what was intended, she ran into her arms, and
kissed her with a smile.
These events of course took
place more than 40 years before Perry's eventful voyages to open commerce
with Japan. The country was still closed to non-Japanese, and accounts
like this one demonstrate both Western curiosity about Japan and the Japanese
interest (in defiance of ferocious edicts) in non-Japanese cultures. It
is striking that Rikord (and his reviewer) take in stride without comment
the Japanese captain's and his mistress's differences in manners and appearance
from what they might expect, and emphasize the virtues and beauties of
the Japanese.
2. In John Luther Long's
Miss
Cherry-Blossom of Japan (1895; he was the author of "Madame Butterfly"
a couple of years later), an American widow and a Japanese girl who has
been to Bryn Mawr both love the secretary of the American legation; after
many twists and obstacles, he is united with his Sakura-San. Long introduces
a scene in which the two women, touching each other, examine themselves
together in a mirror. The Japanese girl is standing behind the American
woman, having been massaging her forehead.
Mrs. Haines, with her head thrown backward, was looking up at her. The
girl let her satiny fingers glide caressingly down over her hair and eyes
and cheeks, and the dazzling whiteness of her bosom. She liked this: it
was so much like a child's pretty caressing. Sakura-San looked wistfully
downward. Then she shook her head hopelessly.
"Your
eyes are purple--like the wistaria blossoms yonder.... Did no one ever
say that you are beau-tiful?" she asked.
She shook
her head.
"Ah!
that is ver' strange. I thing you are beau-tiful, but I never yaet
heard some one sesso. Is it not proper at your America to sesso?"
"Certainly,
if one thinks so," said the other, indulgently.
"An'
that is a thing I do not under-stand: that the gods give the barbarian--like
we call you"--she explained, smiling--"such yellow hair, an' pink cheeks,
an' blue eyes, an' white skin--an' all so great an' tall an' strong?"
"Nor I why
they have given the heathen--as we call you--the mysterious eyes, and hair
of the night, the skin of polished ivory, and the voices and manners of
goddesses. Everyone after his kind, dearest," said Mrs. Haines, comfortingly.
"Oh! Do you
like that darkness?"asked the girl, gladly, looking into the little
mirror on the mantel.
"Yes; we light-haired
and light-complexioned people prefer our opposites in those particulars....
I like yours very much."
"I like
you
ver' much, also," said the girl, laying her dusky head on the blonde one
beneath, and slipping her palms within her bodice, as children do.
"I love
you," laughed the other woman, in delight at the girl's artlessness. "There!"
"Oh! loave--loave--loave!
What is that loave?" (ch. 7)
Mrs. Haines came close to the
ideal American woman's life, having loved and been loved by the young gentleman
in question when they were young; however, she believed her younger sister
loved him too, and sacrificed herself to family interests in a loveless
marriage to a wealthy gentleman. Now that he is dead, she is still refusing
to accept the young man's attentions, hoping he will marry her sister,
and in this campaign she realizes that Sakura-San, the "new Japanese woman",
is an enemy. The young American's Japanese secretary is the designated
fiancé of Sakura-San, and she undergoes a long period of imprisonment
when she refuses to marry him; her beloved must break in on the marriage
ceremony to rescue her, but Mrs. Haines herself finally helps the young
lovers escape.
3.
Onoto Watanna's first novel (of ten) with a Japanese setting, Miss Numè
of Japan (1899) exploits the Miss Cherry-Blossom triangle of
two women, one a white American and one Japanese, both in love with an
American diplomat (this time, the vice-consul in Tokyo); the Japanese
fiancé, however, is transformed into an attractive and idealistic
Japanese man, educated in America, who loves and is loved by both women
in different ways. The American girl cannot decide between the Japanese
youth, with whom she has flirted on shipboard, and her American fiancé;
her indecision leads to the Japanese boy's suicide and her own nervous
breakdown. However, Numè-San and the American man fall in love quite
naturally and at the end of the novel are set to live happily ever after.
Watanna
imitates scenes and themes from Miss Cherry-Blossom, including the
scene cited above, but with important changes. Cleo Ballard (a character
who seems to have represented a meditation on the author's
own romantic experiences/n2/), like Mrs. Haines, poses a strong physical
contrast to the Japanese in general--her hair is golden-brown (or red),
her eyes blue, and she has enough stature to be described by Numè
as "Americazan big proud girl" (ch. 21). However, Numè and her fiancé
Orito are presented as having a beauty that transcends any specific "nationality"
or type. Here Cleo spots Orito on board ship:
"I would like to know him .... Really, he is very good-looking."
"Oh,
yes, I suppose so--for a Japanese," her companion [cousin Tom] interrupted.
The girl
looked at him in undisguised disgust for a moment.
"How
ignorant you are, Tom!" she replied impatiently. "As if it makes the slightest
difference what nationality he belongs to!" (ch. 2)
Here Arthur Sinclair, Cleo's
fiancé, first sees Numè, with whom he will fall in love,
at a ball in Japan:
... a young girl. Sinclair could not see her face at first, because her
head was turned from him. She was dressed very simply in a soft white gown,
cut low at the neck, the sleeves short to the elbows. She wore no jewels
whatever, but in the mass of dense black hair, braided carelessly and coiled
just above the nape of her neck, were a few red roses.... He could not
have told what there was in her face that struck him so with the peculiarity
of its beauty. Her nationality puzzled him. (ch. 20)
Thus, instead of a "mirror scene,"
in which American and Japanese beauty are contrasted to the benefit
of the former, the "mirror scene" becomes a defiance of types and of a
hierarchy of types. The following scene, with its intimate exchange about
love and beauty between an older, married American woman [Mrs. Davis] and
the Japanese girl [Numè] she has decided to promote socially, clearly
echoes the scene quoted above from Miss Cherry-Blossom, though without
a mirror and without the mutual admiration that produces a double description:
Numè
slipped down from the chair Mrs. Davis had placed for her, and sat on the
floor instead, resting her head against the older woman's knee.
"Orito [her fiancé, absent for many years] will return tomorrow...."
"Do you
love him, sweetheart?"
The girl
raised wondering eyes to her.
"Luf?
Thad is so funny word--Ess--I luf," she said....
"It is
a shame to tie you down already, before you have had a chance to see anything
or any one, hardly. You aren't a bit like most Japanese girls. I don't
believe you realize how pretty--how very, very lovely and dainty and sweet
you are. Sometimes when I look at your face I can't realize you are a Japanese
girl. You are so pretty."
"Bud
the Japanese girl be pretty," Numè said, with dignity; "pretty more
than Americazan girl," she added, defiantly.
"Mrs.
Davis laughed. "Yes, they are--I suppose, some of them, but then
an American can't always understand their style of beauty, dear.
You are different.... [When you wear American clothes] I couldn't tell
you were anything but an American girl;--no, not an American girl--you
are too pretty even for that--you are individual--just yourself, Numè."
"The
Americazan lady always flatter," the girl said, rising to her feet, her
face flushed and troubled. "Japanese girl flatter too; Japanese girl
tell you she thing' you vaery pritty--but she nod mean. Tha's only for
polite. Thad you thing me pretty--tha's only for polite." (ch. 16)
In Watanna's
later novels, she dispensed with the American girl character and focussed
on Japanese heroines, whose "individual" beauty was explainable by their
being the product of an Asian-European marriage (Japanese Nightingale,
Tama, Sunny-San), European
raised as Japanese (Heart of Hyacinth), or even of mixed Japanese
caste (Wooing of Wistaria). Her own sense of her uniqueness as a
half-Asian, half-European North American, free to invent herself and to
"pass" as whatever she pleased--even Japanese--allowed her to envisage
the "two types of beauty", Western and Eastern, expressed in one
woman.
4. This twining of two women's
fates was reversed in some later romantic novels, where the Japanese girl,
however Americanized, is doomed. In Breath of the Gods by Sidney
McCall (pseudonym of Mary Fenollosa, 1906), best friends Gwendolen and
Yuki stand side-by-side in the first chapter:
"... Mamselles.... Let me look at you together before you descend the stair."
[The dressmaker] sat back upon her heels to enjoy the picture.
"Yes,"
cried Gwendolen, "that's right. Take us both in." Laughingly, she drew
Yuki's arm, with its long, trailing sleeve of gray, tightly within her
own. They rested together, swaying, --smiling..., two types as far apart
as the two sides of earth which had given them race.
Gwendolyn
was fair almost to the extreme of golden blondness. Her features were small
and perfectly related; her nose deliciously interrogative at the tip. Her
brows and lashes, drawn in a darker hue, gave touches of character and
distinction. She was very slender, erect, and was poised as though she
grew in the wind. The long tulle draperies shook and stirred as if vitalized
by her energy. She was all white and gold. Her heaped-up skeins of hair,
amber necklace, gloves, slippers, and stockings gleamed with a primrose
hue, and the freckles on her orchids (poor flowers, just caught up hastily
from an ignominious corner) repeated the yellow note. [The orchids are
a gift from the man she will eventually marry.]
Beside
her, Yuki Onda, a few inches lacking in height, impressive, nevertheless,
and held with a striking yet indefinable difference of line, smiled
out like a frail Astarte. Her pallor had an undernote of ivory, where Gwendolyn's
was of pearl. Her head, with its pointed chin, bore, like a diadem of jet,--balanced,
like a regal burden,--the spread wings of her hair. Beneath a white, low
brow her eyes made almost a continuous, gleaming line. The little nose
came down, straight and firm, with a single brush stroke. All the
humanity, the tenderness, the womanhood of her face lay in the red mouth
and the small, round chin. Her smile was startling, even pathetic, in beauty....
Yuki's
robe, in deference to hours of pleading from Gwendolyn and Pierre Le Beau,
was Japanese to the least detail. The robe hung about the girl in long,
loose folds of crêpe, mist-gray, rising in soft transitions from
the dark band of the hem to pearl tones at the throat.... Into the curdled
substance of the crêpe, cherry-flowers were dyed, or rather, breathed
in... --pale shapes which glimmered and were gone ... as though borne in
moving water. Besides the black note of her hair there was one strong crash
of contrast in the obi, or sash, a broad and dominating zone, black, too,
with fire-flies of gold upon it. For hair-ornaments she wore a cluster
of small pink flowers that had the look of cherry-blooms, and a great carved
ivory pin, pronged, like a tuning-fork, an heirloom in her father's family.
(pp. 3-4)
The orchids, choice of dress,
and ivory hairpin all foreshadow the romantic lives of the two women. As
the novel develops, Yuki, who (like Long's Cherry-Blossom) has had an American
education, is torn between Pierre Le Beau, an unprincipled French artist
with whom she is in love, and a great Japanese statesman who is in love
with her and whom her father wants her to marry. The main characters meet
in Washington, D.C., then travel to Japan, where Yuki marries the statesman.
However, the conflict continues, and her dilemma leads to her own (very
noble) suicide. Gwendolyn, by contrast, takes refuge in her relationship
with the secretary of the American legation, a relationship which develops
simply from affection to love to marriage and children.
5. In The Kingdom of
Slender Swords by Hallie Rives (1910; cover illustration at left),
tall blonde Barbara has just arrived in Japan and met Haru, a young woman
who will help her learn Japanese language and customs.
Laughingly Barbara
caught the other's slim wrist and drew her before the mirror. By oriental
standards the Japanese girl was as finely bred as herself. In the two faces,
both keenly delicate and sensitive, yet so sharply contrasted--one palely
olive under its jetty pillow of straight black hair, the other fair and
brown-eyed, crowned with curling gold--the extremes of East and West looked
out at each other.
"See,
Haru," said Barbara. "How different we are!"
"You
so more good-look!" sighed the Japanese girl. "My jus' like the night."
"Ah,
but a moonlighted night," cried Barbara, "soft and warm and full of secrets.
When you have a sweetheart you will be far more lovely to him than any
foreign girl could be!"
Haru
blushed rosily. "Sweetheart p'r'aps now," she said, "--all same kind
America story say 'bout." (p. 65).
"Soft and warm and full of secrets,"
it is the Japanese girl, Haru, whose sexuality is at stake: at the behest of her
fiancé "sweetheart," she goes to live with an enemy of Japan, finding
information that saves Japan's honor; she ends up a Buddhist nun, both
victim and hero of patriotism. Barbara survives some contrived situations,
involving being courted by an American millionaire who, though young, dies
conveniently leaving her his yacht, to become engaged to the secretary
of the American legation, who happens also to be an aviator hero who uses
Haru's information to save Japan and the world from war.
One might say that in this
best-seller and in Breath of the Gods the Japanese woman, though
gentle and obedient, is "the madwoman in the attic," the sexually active,
sexually treacherous, and tragic figure of the female which is the dark
shadow of the American woman who is courted by and chooses the correct
husband. In Long's novel Miss Cherry-Blossom, on the other hand,
it is Mrs. Haines, the sexually experienced but sexually confused woman,
who plays this role.
Bibliography: For a larger context for this
material, see "Consuming Madame
Chrysanthème: Loti's 'dolls' to Shanghai
Baby" by Sandra Lyne, in the online
journal Intersections 8
(October 2002), and Embracing the
East: White Women and American Orientalism, by Mari Yoshihara (Oxford
University Press, 2003).
/Note 1/
The quotations are drawn from the anonymous Quarterly Review XXII
(London: John Murray, March/November 1820) review of the following book:
Narrative
of my Captivity in Japan, during the years 1812 and 1813; with Observations
on the Country and People, by Captain Golownin, R. N., to which is
added An Account of the Voyages to the Coasts of Japan, and of the Negociations
with the Japanese for the release of the Author and his Companions,
by Captain Rikord, 2 vols. 1818. The quotation is on p.124 of the review
article, and is part of a longer quotation coming from pp. 261-63 of Rikord's
part of this book.
/Note
2/ See the biography Onoto
Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton,
by Diana Birchall, Eaton's granddaughter (University of Illinois Press,
2001).