Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195146998
- eISBN:
- 9780199787890
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195146998.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
This chapter re-examines the cultural and political legacies of Edith Eaton who wrote under the pen name Sui Sin Far, and her more commercially successful sister Winnifred Eaton who wrote under the ...
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This chapter re-examines the cultural and political legacies of Edith Eaton who wrote under the pen name Sui Sin Far, and her more commercially successful sister Winnifred Eaton who wrote under the pen name Onoto Watanna. These sisters, born of a Chinese mother and English father, were the first Asian American writers, publishing in the late 19th and early 20th century. Edith was identified as Chinese American and was long considered by Asian American critics as the origin of Asian American literature. Winnifred was identified as Japanese and was considered by these critics to be less authentic and less political. Resisting the idealism of Asian American literary criticism allows us to see that the political and ethical choices made by both the Eaton sisters are viable, and that these choices remain as valid options for Asian American intellectuals and other panethnic entrepreneurs today.Less
This chapter re-examines the cultural and political legacies of Edith Eaton who wrote under the pen name Sui Sin Far, and her more commercially successful sister Winnifred Eaton who wrote under the pen name Onoto Watanna. These sisters, born of a Chinese mother and English father, were the first Asian American writers, publishing in the late 19th and early 20th century. Edith was identified as Chinese American and was long considered by Asian American critics as the origin of Asian American literature. Winnifred was identified as Japanese and was considered by these critics to be less authentic and less political. Resisting the idealism of Asian American literary criticism allows us to see that the political and ethical choices made by both the Eaton sisters are viable, and that these choices remain as valid options for Asian American intellectuals and other panethnic entrepreneurs today.
Grace E. Lavery
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691183626
- eISBN:
- 9780691189963
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691183626.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter argues that representations of the Japanese sword exhibit that distinctively feminized type of exquisite aesthetics. Feminized, because although Victorians were already interested in ...
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This chapter argues that representations of the Japanese sword exhibit that distinctively feminized type of exquisite aesthetics. Feminized, because although Victorians were already interested in swords by the publication in France of Pierre Loti's story Madame Chrysanthème, it was through Anglophone revisions of that story that the play of the sword, as an instrument of internal and external violence, has become most deeply entrenched. This chapter follows the Chrysanthème story's mutation into the Americanized story of Madame Butterfly, the Anglo-Chinese-Canadian auto-Orientalizing revision of the Butterfly stories in the work of Onoto Watanna/Winnifred Eaton, and then to cinema: a Japanese body-horror movie named Audition (1999) and a couple of American blockbusters made by Quentin Tarantino. The particular form of body horror that psychoanalysis refers to as “castration anxiety” inevitably permeates Western concern with the samurai sword. But the chapter shows how such an object as a sword is here understood as both feminine, and feminizing, rather than as a kind of phallic auxiliary.Less
This chapter argues that representations of the Japanese sword exhibit that distinctively feminized type of exquisite aesthetics. Feminized, because although Victorians were already interested in swords by the publication in France of Pierre Loti's story Madame Chrysanthème, it was through Anglophone revisions of that story that the play of the sword, as an instrument of internal and external violence, has become most deeply entrenched. This chapter follows the Chrysanthème story's mutation into the Americanized story of Madame Butterfly, the Anglo-Chinese-Canadian auto-Orientalizing revision of the Butterfly stories in the work of Onoto Watanna/Winnifred Eaton, and then to cinema: a Japanese body-horror movie named Audition (1999) and a couple of American blockbusters made by Quentin Tarantino. The particular form of body horror that psychoanalysis refers to as “castration anxiety” inevitably permeates Western concern with the samurai sword. But the chapter shows how such an object as a sword is here understood as both feminine, and feminizing, rather than as a kind of phallic auxiliary.
