Cross-Cultural Affinities between Native American and White Women in "The Alaska Widow" by Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far)

Mary Chapman

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Asian American and Pacific Histories American Literature and Culture Literature: history, themes, analysis

Abstract

When her work was recovered in the 1980s, Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far) was credited with founding the canon of Asian-North American literature.1 The earliest Eaton scholarship focused on her resistance to yellow-peril discourse through her sympathetic portrayals of diasporic Chinese and Eurasians.2 This scholarship contrasted Edith Eaton’s “authentic” self-presentation as the half-Chinese “Sui Sin Far” with her sister Winnifred’s posturing as Japanese noblewoman author “Onoto Watanna.” Although fascinating in many ways, this scholarship was circumscribed by both an exclusive focus on the politics of race as it intersected with gender—and the lack of access to Eaton’s complete and more internally self-contradictory oeuvre. Scholars relying on the same handful of anthologized works—“The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese” (1910), “Her Chinese Husband” (1910), “In the Land of the Free” (1909), “The Wisdom of the New” (1912), “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (1910), and “The Inferior Woman” (1910)—explored only a few of Eaton’s themes, most notably Eurasian marriage, tricksterism, and American anti-Asian racism. By focusing on Eaton’s depictions of North American Chinatowns, scholars have rarely recognized the broader transnational political contexts in which Eaton wrote or the cross-racial collaborations depicted in many of her works. Most have understated the significance of Eaton’s British, Canadian, Jamaican, and Chinese cultural referents and ignored significant interactions with the native communities—French Canadian, Caribbean, and even Native North American—that she depicts in much of her work. Nor have scholars adequately appreciated the carefully framed politics of what Sean McCann dismisses as Eaton’s “ordinary, mundane and domestic” settings (76).

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References

2005The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture 1992The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature 2002Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown missions and Japanese romances 1958A History of American Magazines 1885-1905.2005Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake 2000The Americas of Asian American Literature 1991Between the East and West: Sui Sin Far—the First Chinese-American Woman Writer 1981Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton: First Chinese-American Fictionist

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