ABSTRACT

THE BORDERLAND NARRATIVE: CROSS IDENTITY DISCOURSE AND RHETORIC IN

WINNIFRED EATON’S ME

In this thesis, I analyze the contradictory and complicated use of various

discourses in Winnifred Eaton’s memoir, Me: A Book of Remembrance, by

applying Gloria Anzaldúa’s idea of the borderland as a theoretical lens. The

purpose of this study is to read Eaton’s life narrative as a type of borderland text

where racist ideology is simultaneously upheld and broken down through the

complex shifting of discourses. My study follows the movement on a spectrum of

identity that moves between the dominant white discourses into the marginal

nonwhite discourses. First, I analyze Eaton’s construction of white discourse

through the absence of racial markers in language that allow her white audience to

perceive the narrator as white. This dominant white discourse is complicated when

Eaton characterizes her beauty as one that is suspicious to the white men around

her. This suspicion prompts some men to treat her as a possible fiancé, and others

to treat her as a concubine. Eaton’s text then moves toward a discourse of

nonwhiteness through the rhetoric of silence. The absence of words combined

with the visible interruptions of speech on the page allows Eaton to highlight the

racial tensions she and her sisters experienced. Finally, I claim that through shifts

in genre the borderland identity manifests itself within the structural format of her

text. As a result of the mix in discourse and genre, I conclude that the borderland

text is defined by its ability to transcend contradiction and tension within the body

of the life narrative.

Miriam Lizette Fernandez May 2013

THE BORDERLAND NARRATIVE: CROSS IDENTITY

DISCOURSE AND RHETORIC IN

WINNIFRED EATON’S ME

by

Miriam Lizette Fernandez

A thesis

submitted in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts in English

in the College of Arts and Humanities

California State University, Fresno

May 2013

APPROVED

For the Department of English:

We, the undersigned, certify that the thesis of the following student meets the required standards of scholarship, format, and style of the university and the student's graduate degree program for the awarding of the master's degree. Miriam Lizette Fernandez

Thesis Author

Ruth Jenkins (Chair) English

Chris Henson English

Asao Inoue English

For the University Graduate Committee:

Dean, Division of Graduate Studies

AUTHORIZATION FOR REPRODUCTION

OF MASTER’S THESIS

X I grant permission for the reproduction of this thesis in part or in

its entirety without further authorization from me, on the

condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction

absorbs the cost and provides proper acknowledgment of

authorship.

Permission to reproduce this thesis in part or in its entirety must

be obtained from me.

Signature of thesis author:

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing this thesis has been the single most challenging and satisfying

experience in my academic career. The ideas I present here are the product of

many events in my life—both academic and personal. I could never have made

sense of these moments without the help of my loving family, my loyal friends,

and my wonderful professors.

First and foremost, I would like to thank my family for their unfailing

support, their absolute love, and their willingness to provide me with an unlimited

amount of red bulls and chocolate. Specifically, I want to thank my beautiful

mother, Ramona Perales, for loving me and for believing that I can do anything.

Her faith in me gives me strength. I owe a huge thanks to my loving father, Javier

Fernandez, for supporting me in every decision I have made and for always fixing

my car when it needed it. His love and support means the world to me and

encourages me to do more, and be more. I want to thank my sister and brother-in-

law, Jackeline and Anthony Castro, for their encouragement throughout the

writing process and for never complaining when my books took over the dining

table. And I want to thank my baby sister, Stephanie Fernandez, for being my

favorite source of distraction.

I am thankful to Carlos Saucedo, Steven Camacho and Yesenia Ibarra for

their endless support, for our dinner and margarita nights, and for the decades of

loyal friendship. I am grateful to my friends and colleagues, Daniel Speechly and

Mathew Gomes, for listening to my thesis rants, for reading my early drafts, and

for helping me shape many of my ideas through our conversations.

I owe a great thanks to Samina Najmi for sparking my interest in the

multiethnic identity. Through her seminar on Asian American Literature, my very

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first graduate class, she guided me toward the ideas that would eventually grow

into this project. She gave me the confidence to believe in the value of my ideas

and challenged me in the best ways possible.

I am indebted to Asao Inoue, the most challenging professor I have had the

pleasure of working with, for introducing me to the rhetorics of race. The

foundation of this thesis comes from the theories that he helped me understand.

His guidance in these theories was crucial to the evolution of this project.

I am also thankful to Chris Henson for all of her assistance and support.

The lessons I learned in her Japanese Novels seminar were invaluable to my

writing and I am lucky to have had her feedback in this project.

Most of all, I am eternally grateful to Ruth Jenkins for all of her guidance,

patience, and support. Many years ago, when I first met Dr. Jenkins, I was a shy

young woman unsure of my ability to succeed in a graduate program. In a

meeting she probably doesn’t remember, she believed in me and encouraged me to

challenge myself. Since that day our conversations have been the cornerstone of

my academic and personal growth. Now, thanks to her support, I leave as a proud

and confident woman ready to begin a PhD program in Rhetoric and Composition.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

CHAPTER 1: THE TEXTUAL SPACES OF THE BORDERLAND NARRATIVE ................................................................................................ 1

Breaking the Binary .......................................................................................... 5

Situating the Role of the Author ..................................................................... 11

Borderland Narratives ..................................................................................... 15

Situating the Borderland ................................................................................. 18

CHAPTER 2: PASSING: CONSTRUCTING WHITENESS IN THE TEXTUAL SPACES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY ......................................... 27

The (in)Visible Marks of Whiteness ............................................................... 28

Constructing the Self Within the White Discourse ......................................... 37

Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 44

CHAPTER 3: SUSPECT BEAUTY: BIRACIAL PURITY AND PROMISCUITY .......................................................................................... 46

Stories of Womanhood and Whiteness ........................................................... 49

The Discourse of Pure Wife/Promiscuous Concubine .................................... 60

Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 70

CHAPTER 4: A SILENCE LOUDER THAN WORDS: RHETORICS OF SILENCE IN ME AND MARION ............................................................... 72

Silence: A Continuation of Speech ................................................................. 73

Lived Silences: Unspoken Identity ................................................................. 76

Textual Silence: Interruption of Speech .......................................................... 81

Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 85

CHAPTER 5: BORDER-RHETORICS ................................................................. 87

Nosotras: Blurred Genre ................................................................................. 92

Implications ................................................................................................... 102

Page

vii vii

WORKS CITED ................................................................................................... 103

CHAPTER 1: THE TEXTUAL SPACES OF THE BORDERLAND NARRATIVE

“Perhaps one of the most pitiful and undesirable positions in society in Japan is

held by the half breed. I mean the half breed whose blood is a mixture of the

Caucasian and Japanese… Born in Japan, and entered on the registers of that

country as Japanese citizens, they live strangely isolated both from their mother’s

people and from their father’s. If they at all resemble their father, or act or live

different from those about them, the Japanese look down on them, alluding to

them half contemptuously, as ‘half castes.’ On the other hand, Westerners are

inclined to regard them with interest, strongly mixed perhaps with a pity that the

proud sensitive heart of the half breed resents.”

—Onoto Watanna, “A Half Caste” and Other Writings

For most of my formative years I firmly stood in between two languages

and two cultures. At times it felt as though I was living in two very different

worlds: one world steeped in the Mexican culture while the other was composed

of my American culture. Each time I transitioned into one set of cultural scripts I

feared that I was betraying my other(ed) world. As I grew older, I began fearing

what I might lose as one culture became increasingly more dominant than the

other. Then when I was sixteen years old my family and I visited our extended

family in our old home: Guadalajara, Jalisco. It had been nearly ten years since I

was last there, but I could still vividly remember the streets I had walked as a child

and the single room above my grandmother’s house that had been our home. Even

now, if I try hard enough, I can recall with clarity what it feels like to walk those

same streets, enter those familiar buildings, and be, in some strange sense, home

again. But returning to Mexico was a strange experience; everything was at once

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very familiar and alien. The streets were the same; the old single room that had

once been our version of a house was the same; and even the cathedral in the city

looked and smelled just like in my memories. But the trip was bittersweet as I

realized that this was no longer my home, and although I had hoped I would easily

fit in and belong, I did not. People around me—family and strangers—could

easily tell I did not belong. My Spanish, although good, was different and limited.

I could understand everything, but I could not communicate in the same capacity

as I could in English. It was through this experience that I understood that I was

no longer Mexican even though I had been born there. My identity, as I came to

understand, was now a blurred combination of both my Mexican and American

culture.

By the time I was a college student at UCLA, I came to understand myself

as a Chicana woman, and when asked about my ethnic background I would

respond with Chicana, Latina, or Hispanic. For me, the words were

interchangeable although I later learned that for others they were not. Thus, when

a fellow Chicana angrily confronted me about my use of the word “Hispanic”

instead of “Latina,” I felt extremely hurt. She argued that I was betraying our

Indigenous heritage with a word that reflected colonization and honored the

Spanish colonizers. For her recalling the Spanish colonization of indigenous

groups was disgraceful, and the only proper way to refer to us was as Latino or

Latina. Yet, my use of the word “Hispanic” was never meant in dishonor of our

indigenous heritage, nor was it about honoring Spanish colonizers. Even within

Mexico, racial heritage is messy and cruel. The prejudice against dark-skinned

Mexicans (like my mother) is no secret, nor is the preference for light-skinned

Mexicans (like myself) hidden. Yet, in that moment I had no words to defend

myself. I felt ashamed and embarrassed, and I began to feel as though the word

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Chicana was being taken from me. I had known for years that I did not perfectly

fit within the identity of the typical American. My earlier trip to Mexico had also

highlighted that I did not fully belong within the identity of Mexican either. And

finally, as a college student, I was being called a bad Chicana. Through these

experiences my sense of identity was constantly destabilized as I tried to find a

place where I could belong.

My confused sense of identity eventually led me to Gloria Anzaldúa’s idea

of the borderland. I was already a graduate student when I first read this text, and

it was at that moment that my identity finally made sense to me. Described as a

“vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural

boundary...[and] a constant state of transition,” the idea of the borderland quickly

garnered my full attention (Borderlands 25). As I read those words, I knew then

why I often felt out of place no matter where I went or whom I was with. I could

not wholly be a part of either culture because I belonged to neither and yet I was a

product of both. As I came to understand the borderland space as my home, I

finally felt at ease with everything I am and everything I am not. In the years that

followed I began to study other texts with similarly complex multi-ethnic

backgrounds.

It was then that I encountered Winnifred Eaton’s work as a first year

graduate student taking a seminar on Asian American literature. From the very

beginning her work intrigued me, and I felt a strong pull to understand this

fascinating woman and her work. Her seemingly simplistic romance stories were

filled with racial contradictions, gendered tensions, and complicated identities that

were fossilized in her literature. Through her work I began to question the way

cultural and racial identities are produced and reproduced by texts. Literature, as I

found, is a space where identity is negotiated, created, and re-envisioned. I also

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came to realize that texts are spaces where the idea of the borderland manifests

itself. The borderland is not just an imaginary place of solidarity between those

who do not belong (like myself); the borderland is also an idea that presents itself

in the physical spaces of the texts we read.

Thus I set out to find the borderland’s mark within the writings of

Winnifred Eaton, an author who always stood on the borders of various identities.

Winnifred Eaton’s work, published in the early 1900s, reveals a complicated

understanding of race and gender at the turn of the twentieth century. Her racial

and cultural background is described as “a half-English, half-Chinese writer born

in French-speaking Canada and active in the United States and western Canada

during the first half of the twentieth century” (Cole 1). This background is further

complicated because as she began her literary career in the US, she constructed her

writer identity as a Japanese Eurasian named Onoto Watanna, writing several

successful “Japanese” romances. The fact that Eaton chose to pass as a Japanese

Eurasian at the start of her writing career makes her a controversial figure for

scholars in the literature field. Although her mother was Chinese, Eaton chose to

pass as a half English, half Japanese woman, a decision that has prompted many

scholars to see her as a type of inauthentic fraud. Some scholars see the “decision

to remain silent about her Chinese identity...as an embarrassed denial of her true

heritage,” while other scholars take the opposing side and “characterize her use of

stereotypical representations of Asians...as acts of subversion, depicting her as a

‘trickster’ figure” (Cole 2-3). Then there are those scholars who attribute her

complex and complicated writer identity as a possible tactic in order to “win a

large commercial audience” (Lape 120). Indeed, while there may be truth in these

assumptions, it is far too simplistic to characterize her literary career and her

personal choices in these binary terms.

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A binary reading is one defined by borders and walls. It assumes that a text

can only be one thing or another. In contrast, the borderland assumes that in the

small space where the border exists a thing, a person, a text can be multiple things

all at the same time. Anzaldúa claims that the “new mestiza copes by developing

a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity...She has a plural

personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out, the good, the

bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned” (Borderlands 101). Thus,

the idea of the borderland, in its tolerance for contradiction and ambivalence,

breaks away from the traditional binary reading and opens up various possibilities

for understanding the rhetorical choices that define a borderland text. This study

will thus adapt Anzaldúa’s ideas as a theory for reading and identifying a

borderland text by noting how the text itself moves between discourse and genre.

My reading of Eaton’s work will highlight the contradictory rhetorical choices, the

movements within a spectrum of discourses, and the problems with the popular

binary readings used on multiethnic texts today.

Breaking the Binary

When I first read Winnifred Eaton’s The Heart of Hyacinth I was so moved

by her story that I wanted to believe she was a true challenger of racism. I

imagined her battling racial stereotypes with the words and characters she created

in her novels. I wanted to position her on the side of literary heroes, the noble side

of literature. Even as I tried to focus on acts of resistance against racial

stereotyping, I simply could not help but see the various occasions when, rather

than challenge racist attitudes, her words supported them. I had a hard time

making sense of this contradiction: How could Eaton’s text offer both resistance

and support to the racist discourse of the nineteenth century? After a lot of

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consideration I realized that the problem lay within my very question. My initial

question revealed my reliance on a binary reading of multiethnic literatures.

Within a binary reading a text can only be challenging or accommodating to the

dominant discourse, not both. Such a reading makes the assumption that identities

and loyalties are stable wholes. As a result, if I wanted to understand this text, I

needed to reconsider my question from “how could she?” to “why did she both

resist and support the dominant racist discourse and what did that accomplish?”

Revising my assumptions led me to consider the danger of binary readings in

multiethnic texts as well as the tension between two cultural (and primary)

discourses negotiated in one text.

One contribution to the polarity of Eaton’s work is based on the popular

tendency of critical readings to position a text or author as a rebel or supporter of

dominant discourse. In Race and Resistance, Viet Thanh Nguyen observes, “In

many of the works… resistance and accommodation are actually limiting,

polarizing options that do not sufficiently demonstrate the flexible strategies often

chosen by authors and characters to navigate their political and ethical situations”

(4). This claim is reinforced by Xiaojing Zhou and Samina Najmi who state

“More often than not, critics have situated the formations of Asian American

literary traditions within Asian and Asian American histories and cultures, in

opposition to or separately from ‘mainstream’ European American culture and

literature” (4). Furthermore, Zhou and Najmi point out that Asian American

literature “has frequently been identified in terms of Asian American literature’s

resistance of subordination to mainstream America’s domination” (4). Both

scholars problematize the way Asian American texts are perceived because they

illustrate that these texts do not fit neatly into the labels that have been imposed on

them. To position a text—and writer—as a champion or betrayer of her mother

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culture is a one-dimensional, faulty approach. It negates the difficulty and

complexity of a multiethnic narrative that must negotiate between different

discourses in different situations. Each multiethnic story is different and complex,

and it should be read with an awareness of that complexity and fluidity. Each

narrative features different ways of understanding the multicultural narrative—and

individual—within particular situations that are dependent on unique political and

social environments. According to Zhou and Najmi, the binary approach

“overlooks the ways in which Asian American authors have resisted, subverted,

and reshaped hegemonic European American literature genres, as well as the ways

in which such interventions demonstrate a much more dynamic and complex

relationship between Asian American and traditional European American

literature” (4). Furthermore, Nguyen warns “The primary consequence of such

rigidity is that critics tend to evaluate resistance as positive and accommodation as

negative, without questioning the reductiveness of such evaluations” (7).

Following this trend my initial question about Winnifred Eaton’s ability to support

and challenge racist attitudes was founded on the popular tendency to view

multiethnic literature as part of a binary where challenging the dominant discourse

was a heroic act and supporting it was a cowardly one, thus complicating my

understanding of how to make sense of a woman whose texts do both things. Yet,

holding on to that binary would have inevitably meant that I would reduce Eaton

down to a simplistic category that did not do justice to the complexity of her work.

Until I was able to understand the borderland space and border-rhetorics as

a state of constant transition, I had a hard time making sense of this contradiction

in Eaton’s work. By holding onto this socially constructed binary of multiethnic

texts, we force readers to make a choice about where certain texts belong.

Essentially we box texts into one side of the binary or the other: villain or hero.

8 8

But reading through the lens of the borderland is reading outside of the binary box.

The borderland is about multiplicity and fluidity. Consequently, reading a text as

a borderland narrative means reading for multiple, fluid meanings. These

interpretive acts encourage readers to move beyond the black/white binary and

explore the richly complicated gray of the borderland space. Thus, knowing and

understanding the borderland narrative compels readers to abandon a binary

understanding of multicultural texts and urges their acceptance of multiplicity,

complexity, and fluidity. If we only read as “either this or that” rather than as

“this and that,” we end up with a one-dimensional simplistic reading. It is this

simplistic reading that has led to an “Us vs. Them” approach whenever

multiethnic literatures are studied. Consequently, texts like Maxine Hong

Kingston’s The Woman Warrior or Sandra Cisneros The House on Mango Street

are occasionally surrounded by controversy as readers try to decipher where they

fall within the binary. To that end I propose we reconsider Eaton’s

autobiographical texts, through the lens of the borderland narrative, in order to

understand the complexities of the borderland identity in the face of the racial

prejudice in the early twentieth century.

Reading the borderland as a rhetorical act, at its core, is about blurring

static categories and identities that are often considered mutually exclusive.

Multiple cultural identities are often blurred within the multiethnic text. Gloria

Anzaldúa reveals that in her writing there is a “whole struggle…between the

dominant culture’s traditional, conventional narratives about reality…and [her]

other counter narrative as a mestiza growing up in this country, as an internal

exile, as an inner exile, as a postcolonial person” (“Toward” 4). Anzaldúa

explains: “I cannot disown the White tradition, the Euro-American tradition, any

more than I can the Mexican, the Latino or the Native, because they are all in me.

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And I think that people from different fields are still making these dichotomies”

(“Toward” 8). Winnifred Eaton voiced a similar sentiment when she wrote: “I am

not Oriental or Occidental either, but Eurasian. I must bleed for both my

nations… Both my fatherland and my motherland have been the victims of

injustice and oppression. Sometimes I dream of the day when all of us will be

world citizens” (Watanna, Moser, and Rooney 177). Both writers reveal equal

loyalty to both their cultural identities, not necessarily choosing one over another

but instead moving between them as the situations call for it.

This fluid cultural identity is equally visible in their writing, but writing in

such a manner is risky business because the writer is essentially rowing against the

great tide of the status quo in the field of literature/texts. And when you are

caught shifting genres, disguising difference with the norm, you are what

Anzaldúa calls writing in “the inappropriate ways” and being the “bad girls not

making nice” (“Toward” 13). In Eaton’s primary autobiographical text, Me: A

Book of Remembrance, there are moments of complicity in promoting the

dominant cultural scripts and in allowing the narrators to pass as white even to its

readership. Today this would hardly seem like an act of resistance, or like a “bad

girl” not making nice, but within the context of the early twentieth century a self-

identified Japanese Eurasian writing an autobiography that positioned her as white

was a significant event. Today, the challenge of such a move is lost to readers

who view this act as a way of accommodating to the white discourse rather than

challenging it, but the issue is far more complex than it seems.

The time during which Eaton began her literary career was a tumultuous

time for Asian immigrants and Asian Americans within the US. According to

Elaine H. Kim in Asian American Literature, “Caricatures of Asians have been

part of American popular culture for generations... [pulp novels and dime

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romances], though popularly read in their day, have by now been quite forgotten,

but not before they contributed to national attitudes towards Asians” (3). In

Eaton’s case, the fact that she played into the use of stereotypes has become

problematic for many scholars who try to understand her work. Lape notes,

“Capitalizing on the stereotypes of Japanese people as exotic, Onoto Watanna’s,

novels are replete with ‘oriental’ stereotypes of Japan and Japanese people” (121).

Not only were the stereotypes of Japanese present in her novels, but her literary

persona also took on the role of the exotic “Other.” In her essay, “Winnifred

Eaton/Onoto Watanna,” Dominika Ferens claims that “Eaton read the orientalist

writings of Pierre Loti, Lafcadio Hearn, and Sir Edwin Arnold as a young woman

in Canada...For the young apprentice writer, then, there already existed a thirty-

year old tradition she could step into...To insert herself into that tradition...[she

had] to take on the role of exotic Other” (39). If Eaton wanted success she could

not simply become an outright spokeswoman against racism because her choices

were limited. Thus—in order to find success in her literary career—Eaton had to

adopt the tradition that was established by the more privileged writers who had

been exoticizing Japan decades before her. In “Ambivalent Passages,” Huining

Ouyang claims, “By appropriating the popular genre of Japanese romance and

adopting the guise of an exotic half-Japanese woman writer, she exploited her

white reading audience’s orientalist fantasies and enabled herself to achieve

visibility and authority” (211-12). In other words, although it is evident that Eaton

relied on orientalist stereotypes, it is also clear that she was merely following an

already established literary tradition. It would have been extremely difficult for

Eaton to find any kind of professional success had she outright challenged it.

Eaton herself had no contact with the Japanese or personal knowledge of Japan,

her knowledge of the country and its people was shaped by the established

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tradition of Orientalism. Thus, it is likely that she herself bought into some of

those stereotypes as well. A century later, it might be easy to expect Eaton to be

some challenging authority against stereotypes, but the fact of the matter is that

she was working within a very established masculine literary tradition of racist

stereotypes.

Situating the Role of the Author

Much of my discussion regarding Eaton’s work centers on her racialized

and gendered experience. I do not believe we can successfully understand the

movement between marginal and dominant spaces without understanding

Winnifred Eaton. This is not a study on Eaton’s life choices, but it is a study that

requires an understanding of Eaton as a racialized and gendered person writing at

the turn of the century. Thus, before moving into a discussion about borderland

spaces, it is important to situate the role of the author and the place of authenticity

within such a discussion.

There is a large body of critical work regarding the role of the author.

Questions regarding the author’s importance in a text are abundant in discussions

about literature but it is important to make a distinction between the mainstream

author and the marginalized author. Both Roland Barthes and Michael Foucault

argue that the role of the author is insignificant to the work for various reasons that

I want to address. In “The Death of the Author,” Barthes argues that the “image of

literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his

person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism [for example] still consists

for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the

man...” (875). The point Barthes makes is that the author becomes the center of

the work. The failure or success of the text is connected to the physical body of

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the author. For example, Winnifred Eaton’s choice to use a Japanese sounding

nom de plume is attributed to a perceived cowardice of Winnifred Eaton the

woman. Barthes concludes that when the author’s intended meaning becomes

central, the role of the critic becomes central as well. This author centrality is

especially problematic when we consider Foucault’s argument:

[The] author’s name serves to characterize a certain mode of being

of discourse: the fact that the discourse has an author’s name, that

one can say ‘this was written by so-and-so’ or ‘so-and-so is its

author,’ shows that this discourse is not ordinary everyday

speech...On the contrary, it is speech that must be received in a

certain mode and that, in a given culture, must receive a certain

status. (907)

The author-discourse problem is easily seen in the very recognizable names of

Shakespeare, Whitman, or Twain. A specific status of cultural wealth is embodied

in these names and in the work of these particular authors. Thus one can see how

focusing on authorship can be problematic to critical interpretations. Not only do

we center the role of the critic by focusing on the authorial meaning, but the author

also comes to symbolize a culturally charged set of values. As a result everyday

readers become unimportant as they are far too separated from the “true” meaning

of a text. Instead of a text being an example of multiplicity and complexity, we

adhere to it a universal truth that only the real critic can understand and decipher.

The effect of this “grand author” is that certain texts become a prized

intellectual possession of the critic and an inaccessible art to the everyday reader.

This culturally charged value in texts is in fact very similar to Pierre Bourdieu’s

argument regarding taste. Bourdieu explains “[t]o the socially recognized

hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or periods,

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corresponds a social hierarchy of the consumers. This predisposes tastes to

function as markers of ‘class’” (1-2). In other words when texts become

inaccessible to the everyday reader, those texts come to symbolize a social wealth

that becomes a class marker. Thus, something as simple as not enjoying or

understanding Shakespeare becomes a sign that those who cannot appreciate the

beauty and artistry of Shakespeare belongs to a lower class which lacks the

cultural wealth to appreciate such works. Bourdieu’s observation about cultural

wealth, coupled with the arguments of Barthes and Foucault, demonstrates how an

author’s name can become a sign of social status. However, when we take a

critical look at the authors that achieve such status we find that the majority of

these writers tend to be individuals that are already privileged in particular ways

and are usually a part of the cultural elite.

Most traditional and canonical works tend to be authored by white males of

the upper or middle class—all characteristics of privilege. According to Barthes,

“a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the

‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of

writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations

drawn from the innumerable centers of culture” (876). For both Barthes and

Foucault the value of the text comes from the language itself, from the reader’s

interpretation rather than the author’s purpose. The text is not a part of the author,

although one seems to stem from the other, and to understand the text one does not

need to understand its author. Barthes and Foucault view the author’s role as

problematic, but I believe that we must rethink this position when we look at the

author who exists within the marginalized spaces of society. Barthes argues that

the text comes from a multidimensional space in the innumerable centers of

culture, but when the text is located within a marginalized and excluded space in

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culture the author’s role has to be reconsidered. Barbara Christian, in her essay

“The Race for Theory,” argues that literary criticism has taken on aspects of

academic hegemony and as a result has ignored the voices of marginalized

authors. Christian notes, “The race for theory, with its linguistic jargon, its

emphasis on quoting its prophets... its preoccupations with mechanical analyses of

language, graphs, algebraic equations, its gross generalizations about culture, has

silenced many of us to the extent that we can no longer discuss our own literature”

(53). Furthermore Christian argues:

[The] new emphasis on literary critical theory is as hegemonic as the

world which it attacks. I see the language it creates as one which

mystifies rather than clarifies our condition, making it impossible for

a few people who know that particular language to control the

critical scene—that language surfaced, interestingly enough, just

when the literature of peoples of color, of black women, of Latin

Americans, of Africans began to move to “the center.” (55)

For Christian the move away from the (female) author of color and the move

towards literary criticism as a dominant force further obscured the presence and

importance of marginalized texts. To say that the author’s role is unimportant has

its merit when we speak of authors that are already at the center of a dominant

tradition. Although I concede that it is in fact dangerous to construct authors as

symbols of cultural status, I insist that there is value in understanding the cultural

and social position that an author has held within society. An author’ position is

important because it brings to light information about the social, cultural or

political situation, especially when the text is authored from a marginal standpoint.

Texts written from the margins expose certain aspects of culture that have been

ignored, misunderstood or misrepresented by some traditional canonical works.

15 15

Ultimately, understanding the social and cultural location of an author informs the

rhetorical choices made and the reasons behind such choices. Although an

author’s cultural standpoint may seem trivial, it is in fact crucial to understanding

the text as a type of borderland narrative. Within the borderland space a new type

of consciousness arises. Gloria Anzaldúa states that the “juncture where the

mestiza stands, is where phenomena tend to collide. It is where the possibility of

uniting all that is separate occurs” (Borderlands 101). Without understanding the

writer’s subjectivity, her unique space within the borders of multiple identities, it

is difficult to make sense of how the text becomes the fruit of the mestiza

consciousness, the space where the walls that create distinction can break down.

Borderland Narratives

It is important to understand the notion of double consciousness, a term

coined by W.E.B Du Bois, for the purpose of exploring tensions within the

identity construction of individuals that stand on the margins of society. Du Bois

argues “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with a

second-sight in this American world...this double-consciousness, this sense of

always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by

the tape of the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (568).

Furthermore, Du Bois describes a “two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls,

two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body,

whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (568). For Du

Bois, double consciousness comes from viewing one’s self through the eyes of the

white Americans that oppressed black Americans. Although I derive much of my

own analysis from this notion, I view this marginalized subjectivity, this type of

double consciousness, as a foundation of the borderland identity.

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The borderland, as imagined by Gloria Anzaldúa, is not a homogenous

space, and those who inhabit this space are not necessarily in harmony with one

another. Being a Latina woman whose identity exists within the borderland space

does not mean that my views will coincide with other Latina women from similar

backgrounds. My perception of the words “Chicana” and “Hispanic” did not

coincide with that of my classmate long ago, but that is no indication that one of

us was not a part of the borderland. Anzaldúa tells us the borderland is an

undetermined space of constant transition (Borderlands 25). Consequently, the

borderland is not something we can locate on a map. Instead, the borderland is a

shared feeling that manifests as an emotional and psychological space. The

borderland is the mestizo legacy, and it signifies the movement between multiple

linguistic, cultural, and social identities. As such the borderland is defined by its

heterogeneity, its fluidity, and its multiple discourses. Inhabitants of the

borderland may desire and strive to belong to the dominant culture while others

may value the marginalized culture more. Then, of course, there are those who

move between cultural positions simultaneously for most (if not all) of their lives.

Thus, it is important to understand that the borderland is not a homogenous place

because this allows readers of the borderland narrative to read openly and without

generalizing expectations. At its core the borderland is a state of fluid, constant

difference, and consequently inhabitants of the borderland may share the

conflicted feelings of belonging to multiple cultural positions even though their

stories vary greatly.

To that end I propose that the term borderland, which originates from a

Chicana text, not be restricted to the Chicano experience. Thus, as I use it here, the

terms borderland and borderland narrative are inclusive to any and all texts that

explore this unique position of multiplicity and fluidity. In fact, the United States

17 17

is a perfect place to explore the texts I call borderland narratives because

multicultural American citizens experience, to some degree, the tension and

negotiation between multiple cultural identities. Anzaldúa, like Du Bois, is

pointing to a sense of exile from complete social participation. It is the state of

being unwanted or rejected, a part of two cultures and yet a part of neither. In

essence, the borderland is a space where those who experience internal exile seek

to break and complicate the dualistic thinking that has plagued our notion of

identity. Anzaldúa declares: “As a person, I, as a people, we, Chicanos, blame

ourselves, hate ourselves, terrorize ourselves. Most of this goes on unconsciously;

we only know that we are hurting, we suspect that there is something ‘wrong’ with

us, something fundamentally ‘wrong’” (Borderlands 67). This internalized hatred,

or internalized oppression, becomes the root of the rhetorical choices an author

makes within the borderland text.

Anzaldúa describes writing as an act of healing, meaning making, and

transformation. Those who have lived within the borderland use writing to re-

envision the world so that it can balance and contain contradiction and ambiguity.

Anzaldúa tells us “writing invokes images from my unconscious, and because

some of the images are residues of trauma which I then have to reconstruct, I

sometimes get sick when I do write… But, in reconstructing the traumas behind

the images, I make ‘sense’ of them, and once they have ‘meaning’ they are

changed, transformed” (Borderlands 92). The traumas for the inhabitant of the

borderland revolve around the expectations placed upon his or her identity. For

Anzaldúa writing is both a healing and sometimes painful act because her home is

a painful location, neither here nor there. She describes her home as “this thin

edge of barbwire” (Borderlands 25), alluding to the sense of living in a

borderland, a space halfway between two different worlds. A borderland

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narrative, as I use it here, is a type of written narrative that negotiates the space

between multiple discourses. It is a constant push and pull, a painful act of writing

that creates an abstract space within a concrete text making sense out of that

emotionally charged “thin edge of barbwire” where the multicultural, multiethnic,

and biracial person exists.

Situating the Borderland

The borderland narrative is different and distinct from the category of

multiethnic United States literature because it is a lens of internal exile unexplored

by the generic label “multiethnic literature.” Multiethnic American literature faces

a troublesome condition as it is technically a culturally excluded part of the canon

of American literature (hence its subcategory), and while it exhibits postcolonial

characteristics, it is excluded from postcolonial studies. In a few words:

multiethnic United States literature is in a constant state of borderland, neither

here nor there. Yet, this is not a call for the inclusion of multiethnic literature into

the category of postcolonial studies because multiethnic literatures are different in

essence. Rather than facing the traditional exile, alienation, and oppression of

postcolonial literature, multiethnic literature reveals an internalized exile, a partial

alienation, and a desire for acceptance that is unique to the cultural geography of

the United States. The clear division between dominant and other has been

blurred in a messy, complicated way that does not occur within the postcolonial

state. According to Anzaldúa:

[What] is happening, after years of colonization, is that all the

divides disappear a little bit because the colonizer, in his or her

interaction with the colonized, takes on a lot of their attributes. And,

of course, the person who is colonizing leaks into our stuff. So we

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are neither one nor the other; we are really both. There is not a pure

other; there is not a pure subject and nor a pure object. We are

implicated in each other’s lives. (Borderlands 243)

It is here where Anzaldúa theorizes the idea that we (colonized and colonizer;

marginal and dominant) are implicated within each other’s lives in a messy,

permanent manner. Those who are marginalized in America suffer from an

internal exile: a belonging and un-belonging that limits and changes a person’s

ability to participate within the dominant discourse. This state of internal exile

seeps into multiethnic texts fossilizing the constant tension and negotiation of

multiple discourses.

The field of postcolonial studies, on the other hand, is a complicated

discipline that encompasses various fields and drastically different experiences.

Postcolonial studies are defined by an intersection between theory and experience;

one that often times resembles the experiences described within multicultural

American texts. There are similar power struggles and similar feelings of exile,

but the origins of those experiences and the way in which they are experienced is

nevertheless different. In An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory by Peter Childs

and Patrick Williams, the question of “when, where, and what is the

postcolonial?” is tackled and thoroughly complicated. For Childs and Williams,

[One] complication of the periodizing implied by post-colonialism

relates to the persistence of colonialism...[because] colonial powers

still operate colonies...The continuation of direct colonial control in

this way makes any un-nuanced talk of post-colonialism—and

especially a generalized ‘post-colonial condition’…difficult to

sustain. (5)

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For many peoples this state of post colonial has not yet been achieved, and for

those who have attained freedom, there are many ways in which this state of

freedom has not really freed them at all. The United States is of course a difficult

country to speak about in terms of post colonialism. According to Childs and

Williams, “The fact that the United States is a former part of the empire at the

centre of the colonialist enterprise, and is currently the leading force in the

economic and cultural globalization of imperialism, as well as perpetrator of

quasi-colonialist military actions worldwide, make it an especially difficult case”

(11). There are ways in which we might say that the United States is postcolonial,

but the complicated power hierarchy and the many groups of marginalized

cultures and groups within the United States (e.g., Native Americans) makes it

very difficult to position United States writing within postcolonial literatures.

Technically speaking the fact that the United States was a colony of the British

Empire makes it postcolonial. Yet, in reality, the dominance of American culture

over the various cultures that have been housed within the geographical spaces of

the United States can also be read as a type of cultural colonialism. However,

colonialism is usually defined by a military or legal discourse, a conscious

overpowering of another country or people.

Even so, the relationship between colonized and colonizer is very similar to

the relationship between dominant and marginalized in the United States.

According to Leela Gandhi in Postcolonial Theory:

[We] might conclude that the forgotten content of postcoloniality

effectively reveals the story of an ambivalent and symbiotic

relationship between coloniser and colonised... Albert Memmi has

argued that the lingering residue of colonisation will only

decompose if, and when, we are willing to acknowledge the

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reciprocal behaviour of the two colonial partners...Memmi’s

predication of this perverse mutuality between oppressor and

oppressed is really an attempt to understand the puzzling circulation

of desire around the traumatic scene of oppression. (11)

In other words, Gandhi is highlighting the reciprocal relationship of desire and

rejection within the colonizer-colonized interaction. There is a degree of desire in

the postcolonial condition just as there is a need to belong to the dominant culture

in the multiethnic condition. Gandhi also argues:

[The] careful retrieval of figures like [Mahatma] Gandhi and Fanon

is instructive to postcolonial theory. For when this theory returns to

the colonial scene, it finds two stories: the seductive narrative of

power, and alongside that the counter-narrative of the colonised—

politely, but firmly, declining the come-on of colonialism. It is

important to re-member both—to remember, in other words, that

postcoloniality derives its genealogy from both narratives. (22)

Although both postcolonial and multiethnic texts share a similar desire for

acceptance, the postcolonial text also craves a rejection of the dominant powers.

Yet, while postcolonial texts may seek to reject the colonizer, the multicultural

American text seemingly seeks for an understanding and inclusion of difference

rather than a total separation.

The desire for inclusion stems from the fact that the dominant discourse is

embedded and naturalized within the multiethnic identity. According to Linda

Alcoff, in her book Visible Identities, one misconception about identity is that

“identities represent discrete and specifiable sets of interests” (41). In other words

the problem with the multicultural or multiethnic individual is that she is perceived

as being loyal to one of her cultural identities leaving the individual as an outlier

22 22

of each group she belongs to. Alcoff argues “identities are not lived as a discrete

and stable set of interests, but as a site from which one must engage in the process

of meaning-making and thus from which one is open to the world” (43). Alcoff’s

view of identity coincides with that of the borderland as it highlights an

individual’s ability to shift between primary discourses as the situation calls for it.

Belonging to multiple cultural discourses leads the multiethnic individual to seek

inclusion and acceptance of his/her similarities as well as differences. This desire

for the inclusion of individual difference is one of the divergent factors between

postcolonial texts and multicultural American texts.

I want to stress that my study begins within the landscape of a hybrid

cultural identity placed within a long history of racism and social exclusion in the

United States of America. As such, there are times when I will rely on

postcolonial ideas but always from the standpoint of the borderland space and

experience. Thus, my questions are not about exile but are rather grounded in the

internal exile felt by those who simultaneously belong and do not belong: the

borderland inhabitants. As a result, my study revolves around the borderland

narrative and the lens of a borderland rhetoric that seeks to understand the way

internal exile is voiced in a text.

The importance of understanding the borderland narrative and its border-

rhetorics is not that it redefines multiethnic US literature or that it repositions it

into a different discipline or field but rather that it shifts the vantage point from

which we view it. The borderland narrative is not about a subcategorizing or a

relabeling. Instead it is an uncovering and studying of the rhetoric of internal

exile. Gloria Anzaldúa states:

Most of the post-colonial intellectuals are writing about their being

in exile from one country or the other…the work I am doing now

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looks at us Chicanas and the way we are internal exiles within our

own country. But there is a difference with regard to post-

colonialism… In academic circles there is a prejudice against that

[internal exile]. It is okay to listen to a black man like Homi Bhaba

from Britain…rather than take somebody from California who is a

Chicano/a and who has experienced some other thing. If you are

very exotic…this legitimates you more than being an internal exile.

We still don’t receive much attention and often aren’t listened to at

all. (Borderlands 243-44)

My primary interest is the state of internal exile that Anzaldúa identifies within the

borderland narrative. More specifically I will focus on the resulting rhetorical

choices of such an exile in the life narratives of Winnifred Eaton.

In 1915 Eaton wrote her first autobiographical novel, Me: A Book of

Remembrance, under the name “Anonymous.” Shortly after, Eaton wrote Marion:

The Story of an Artist’s Model and published it as “Herself and the Author of

‘Me.’” Both these texts were presented as forms of autobiography, yet the

inconsistencies they present complicate our understanding of these two texts as

straight-forward autobiographies or biographical works. But regardless of their

factual inconsistencies, or perhaps because of them, these two texts side by side

help us understand the role of the borderland narrative in American literature.

Autobiography is a narrative that heavily relies on memory, experience, and

notions of truth from one particular writer. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s

Reading Autobiography highlights the complicated tensions of autobiography that

point to autobiography as anything but an objective truth. For Smith and Watson,

life narratives are “the historically situated practices of self-representation [that]

may take many guises as narrators selectively engage their lived experiences and

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situate their social identities through personal storytelling” (18). Thus,

autobiography or life narrative is a culturally grounded form of self-representation

that relies on subjective knowledge.

Autobiography as life narrative rather than genre is an important distinction

especially in this circumstance as it opens up a space where we can make sense of

the inconsistencies, omissions, and general contradictions such texts exhibit.

Smith and Watson’s idea of life narrative is approached “as a moving target, a set

of shifting self-referential practices that, in engaging the past reflect on identity in

the present” (1). For Smith and Watson life narrative represents a socially situated

act of meaning making which engages with memory, experience, identity, space

and agency to create that meaning. More importantly, Smith and Watson engage

with cultural scripts and the ways those scripts are questioned or reproduced in

autobiographies.

Grounded in the idea of autobiography as life narrative, this study begins

by focusing on the fluid movement of discourse in Eaton’s primary life narrative,

Me, and occasionally engages with her second life narrative, Marion. I begin

chapter 2 by mapping the construction of a white discourse that positions Eaton as

a white narrator. Here, I argue that the absence of a textually visible dialect or

linguistic accent allows Eaton to pass as a white narrator. Thus, she is positioned

within the dominant discourse. In chapter 3, I focus on the complications that

Eaton’s biracial beauty presents in the face of male suitors. More specifically, I

begin with the argument that beauty acts a racialized and gendered discourse. Yet,

because Eaton is biracial her beauty is suspect in the eyes of men; some of which

who try to marry her and others who attempt to make her into a concubine. In

chapter 4, I argue that Eaton positions herself within a nonwhite discourse through

the rhetorical use of silence to voice racism. Here, I rely on the absence of words

25 25

and disruptions of dialogue that appear primarily in Marion. These three chapters

map a spectrum of discourse movement that begins with white discourse and

moves toward nonwhite discourse. Finally, in chapter 5, I move away from a

discussion of discourse shifting to one that focuses on the genre shifts in the text.

This genre shifting I call border-rhetorics, a terms that reflects both a conscious

tactic used to reach the masses as well as an unconscious side effect of the

movement between various discourses a multicultural individual experiences.

My purpose is to apply the type of re-vision that Adrienne Rich talks about,

a re-vision she describes as “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of

entering an old text from a new critical direction” (18). This is the type of re-

vision I seek to achieve as I explore historical texts from the contemporary lens of

the borderland space. I contend that the previous way of reading these texts

(through the use of dualistic thinking) has ignored the text’s ability to house

multiple discourses and various contradictions. Adrienne Rich explains “For

writers, and at this moment for women writers in particular, there is the challenge

and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored. But there is also a

difficult and dangerous walking on the ice, as we try to find language and image

for a consciousness we are just coming into” (19). The type of consciousness I

explore here is based on the idea of the mestiza consciousness that Anzaldúa

describes. It is a consciousness that “break[s] down the subject-object duality that

keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images of her work

how duality is transcended...A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the

individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle”

(Borderlands 102). This consciousness is different than the type of consciousness

Adrienne Rich seeks. Although a woman’s consciousness, Rich’s consciousness

is also one that comes from a white middle class standpoint. In contrast, the

26 26

mestiza consciousness of the borderland narrative is one that complicates race,

class, and gender. The mestiza consciousness within the borderland narrative

breaks through the walls of dualistic thinking to create a space where difference

and contradiction are contained, balanced, and cherished. The borderland text is

the space where one can uphold and break down racist ideology and where such an

action makes perfect sense.

CHAPTER 2: PASSING: CONSTRUCTING WHITENESS IN THE TEXTUAL SPACES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

There are various markers of racial and ethnic identity that our bodies hold

and that other bodies around us see and recognize. Sometimes those markers are

found in our skin color and our facial features. Other times those markers are

more cultural, taking shape through our clothes, hair styles, and spoken language.

To complicate things further, markers of our racial and cultural identity are not

just in the language that we speak but also in the ways that we speak that

language. Accents become markers of some type of otherness because they

communicate difference to those who hear us. In the literature produced by

Winnifred Eaton, otherness in her characters is often marked by the textual accents

(or dialects) she constructs through a dialogue that looks and sounds different from

standard white English. Eaton communicates to her white audience the otherness

of her (mostly) Japanese characters by visibly reproducing an accent, or dialect, on

paper. Thus, the noticeable absence of accents in her biographical work, Me and

Marion, serves to communicate that Eaton herself is a part of the dominant

discourse: she becomes a white narrator through the noticeable absence of textual

accents and dialects.

Accordingly, Winnifred Eaton’s life narratives become acceptable to her

American audience because she is able to successfully position herself within a

white discourse. Eaton does not go as far as trying to pass for a white woman, yet,

by omitting the accents and dialects that all her nonwhite characters usually carry,

she does allow herself to “pass” as white to the audience. Since Eaton is literate in

the dominant discourse, that is to say the white discourse, she is able to write

herself as white within the spaces of her biographical works. This act becomes

more complicated and political because of Eaton’s biracial background. Although

28 28

Eaton never denied her heritage, and in fact she arguably capitalized on it, in the

social climate of the early twentieth century, passing (whether textual or physical)

was highly controversial. Even today, many scholars take note of Eaton’s

apparent whiteness in Me and Marion, the 1916 sequel to her first autobiography.

For example, in the essay “The Poetics of Liminality and Misidentification,”

Katherine Hyunmi Lee observes “Eaton refers to herself throughout Me as ‘Nora

Ascough’ and avoids mentioning her mother’s Chinese heritage in a rather

unconvincing attempt to ‘pass’ as white” (18). Similarly, in the essay “’As to her

race, its secret is loudly revealed,’” Karen Skinazi highlights that “Some critics,

knowing Eaton’s background, wonder at the seeming ‘whiteness’ of the characters

of Me and Marion” (32). Skinazi reveals that for scholars such as Carol Spaulding

both narrators in Me and Marion are, in fact, white narrators and for Dominika

Ferens the novel Marion “has an all white cast, although we know now that the

title character was based on Winnifred’s older sister” (qtd. in Skinazi 32). For

Skinazi, the value in Me and Marion is predicated on diversifying the Canadian

identity. My focus, however, is centered on Eaton’s alignment with the dominant

white discourse that allows both of Eaton’s narrators, Marion and Nora, to pass as

the voices of white women. On the one hand, an alignment with whiteness allows

her texts to be easily consumed by her largely white audience. On the other hand,

Eaton’s use of a white discourse allows her to construct her own dominant identity

as that of a white woman—even as it highlights her own differences.

The (in)Visible Marks of Whiteness

Winnifred Eaton’s story, in Me, begins when the young Nora travels to

Jamaica for her first job. On her way to Jamaica the narrator, an older Nora,

recalls the family and life she leaves behind. At this point, and even later in the

29 29

narrative, racial tensions are hardly discussed and, in fact, Nora claims that

Canada has no such racial tensions. However, when recalling her parents Nora

tells readers that her “father was an artist…[and her] mother had been a tight-rope

dancer in her early youth… Moreover, she was a native of a far-distant land, and I

do not think she ever got over the feeling of being a stranger in Canada” (3).

Although not directly stated, being a “stranger” in Canada can be connected to

racial tensions regardless of Nora’s constant denial of racial prejudice. For most

of Me, race and racial tensions are seemingly treated as secondary issues with little

weight to Nora’s story and development as both a woman and a writer. Even

though Nora dismisses the idea of racial prejudice, the narrating voice in Marion

immediately positions racial heritage as an ongoing issue within the Ascough

family (the real-life Eatons). The opening scene shows the corner grocer talking

to a stranger about the Ascoughs as Marion enters the store. The narrator notes “I

felt ashamed and humiliated to hear our family thus discussed. Why should we

always be pointed out in this way and made to feel conspicuous and freaky? It

was horrid that the size of our family and my mother’s nationality should be told

to everyone by that corner grocer” (Watanna and Bosse 1-2). The effect is that

Nora’s assertion “that in Canada we do not encounter the problem of race” is

problematized and revealed to be untrue (W. Eaton 41). Thus the question Nora

poses in Eaton’s Me: “What should I, a girl who had never before been outside

Quebec, and whose experience had been within the confines of home and a small

circle, know of race prejudice?” (41) is answered in Marion: she should know it

well. So well, in fact, that the real life Winnifred Eaton is able to successfully

create, through her novels, worlds that take place in the far away land of Japan

without raising much suspicion. Her mastery at creating novels that took place in

faraway lands with foreign characters had much more to do with her experience

30 30

and understanding of racial tensions in North America than they did with her

knowledge of Japan.

One of the ways Eaton is able to successfully construct an imaginary Japan

for her readership is through the use of accents and dialects in the novels’

dialogue. In the essay “False Accents,” Angela Pao explains, “accents of all kinds

(foreign, regional, class) function not on the mimetic plane (what is referred to)

but on the semiotic plan (the production of meaning)” (359). According to Pao,

accents function as sets of markers that position one within a social group. The

accent itself produces a meaning beyond what is being said. It communicates to

those around that the speaker is different. The textually constructed accents Eaton

uses in her Japanese romances serve to signify that certain characters are outsiders.

Those with accents belong to the social group of the Japanese and those without

accents (or those who speak in standard white English) belong to the dominant

white group (Eaton’ s primary audience). In addition, Pao utilizes the research of

Hodge and Kress to highlight that “the difference [in phonetic sound] did not label

reality differently: it’s main function was in the plane of semiosis, to label the kind

of speakers differently” (qtd. in Pao 359-60). Pao points to the use of accents as

an embodied marker of race when she concludes “accents are the primary markers

of ethnicity for the actor” (369). In live theater an actor’s physical appearance and

voice are used to mark him or her with race and gender. Similarly, in literature,

the descriptions written by the author and the dialogue tied to the character mark

him/her with the appropriate race and gender. Thus, in Eaton’s fiction the dialects

and accents of her characters in dialogue serve to mark them with ethnicity and

race. Yet, such marks not only help to tie race and gender to a character but

additionally, according to Pao, accents are also important “for establishing one’s

position and possibilities in a socially stratified society” (360). Thus, the

31 31

characters that have accents are not only marked with race and gender, they are

also marked by social status and value. In the English language those who speak

the standard form of English receive a higher social status than those who deviate

from this established norm.

Social status and value can only be attributed to characters through a frame

of reference that relies on an unequal power distribution. In this case, that frame

of reference is the social relationship between those with accents and those

without. In the essay “Passing: Race, Identification, and Desire,” Catherine

Rottenberg argues that “norms work by constructing a binary opposition between

white and black (or nonwhite) in which white is always privileged over black”

(437). In a racial binary between white and nonwhite, white is the preferred

model. In a spectrum of speech a similar binary is also created. In this binary we

have one side that groups together those who speak standard white/academic

English as the norm and those who have a dialect or accent as the opposing side

(the non-preferred). The non-standard speech is perceived as undesirable

primarily because it is also connected to those who are nonwhite or those who are

white but foreign. The connection between forms of speech and status is not a

natural or organic relationship. Instead, this relationship is a racially constructed

relationship that values features of whiteness. Rottenberg observes, “The concept

of race, like gender, does not denote a natural phenomenon, but rather ‘groups

together attributes which do not have a necessary or natural relationship’” (437).

Likewise in Racism, Sexism, Power, and Ideology, Colette Guillaumin argues a

similar concept about the nature of race. Guillaumin argues that skin color, as a

marker of race, is not a natural occurrence but a constructed reality. For

Guillaumin the relationship between a person’s skin color and the value and status

in their lives is a constructed relationship built on a system of marks. Guillaumin

32 32

posits that the marks of race are “not nature” but instead are actually the result of a

“social relationship” (145). In order to become fossilized, and naturalized, the

social relationship evolved over a long period of time and utilized legal discourse

that supported an unequal power distribution. Thus, the use of accents as a

signifier of value and status can only be achieved through the existence of an

unequal social relationship.

Although Guillaumin’s argument centers on social relationships, she also

notes that markers of difference and power can be anything. The markers only

become truly significant when they are crystallized by legal discourse, as is the

case with race as documented by various scholars such as Linda Alcoff, Ian Haney

Lopez, and Michael Omi and Howard Winant, to name a few. In a similar

fashion, accents only act as marker of race and difference because they, like the

definition of race, have been entered and accepted into the public and legal

discourse as a normative fact. In “Accent, standard language ideology, and

discriminatory pretext in the courts” Rosina Lippi-Green highlights the way

accents act as markers used for discrimination and upheld by legal discourse.

Lippi-Green tells the story of the well-educated Ms. Mandhare, a native speaker of

Marathi, who was fired from her job as a librarian due to her heavy accent.

Although “civil action was decided in Ms. Mandhare’s favor...the decision was

reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals in favor of the school board” (164). Lippi-

Green argues that “For most people, accent is a dustbin category...accent is how

the other speaks...[and it] is the first diagnostic for identification of geographic or

social outsiders” (165). In addition, she argues that “Much of linguistic variation

is structured around social identity...but nonlinguists know it too, and act on it:

accent becomes both manner and means for exclusion” (165). Lippi-Green points

to the tendency of the larger public to view non-standard accents as a way of

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labeling or stereotyping another. In essence, the public is already using non-

standard English as a marker of difference, and furthermore, as a natural marker

of difference. Not only is the public using accent to denote differences between

individuals, they also come to accept this difference as natural, organic, and

factual. Guillaumin distinguishes between two types of marks: the dress mark (a

mark placed on a body) and the natural mark (a mark assumed to belong to the

body). Guillaumin notes that the “‘natural’ mark differs from the dress mark or

the mark inscribed on the body known by pre-modern societies.... [because] the

old mark was recognized as imposed by social relationships, known as one of their

consequences, while the natural mark is not presumed to be a mark but the very

origin of these relationships” (142). Before the natural mark, the dress mark was

understood as something that was imposed on another. Now, the natural mark

assumes that any difference is physically real, biological, and a natural occurrence

rather than a social one. Thus, accents act as natural markers of gender, race, and

class because they cannot be shed from the body; they are not imposed on the

individual, and they are treated by the public as a natural signifier of social status.

The social relationship between a speaker and a speaker with an accent thereby is

a relationship where power is unequally distributed and the natural mark is viewed

as the natural, not socially constructed, reason for such a difference.

In the Japanese romances Eaton wrote, the use of accents, within the space

of the text, is used to reinforce the notion of racial and social difference between

Western characters and Asian characters. Jean Lee Cole observes that Eaton’s

popular biracial character, Yuki, is difficult to connect with because of her heavy

accent. Cole explains, “The dialect Eaton uses in rendering Yuki’s speech

distances her from the outset” (20). Cole argues that “the dialect is so tortured that

it makes most modern readers cringe: at one point, she apologizes, ‘I very sawry, I

34 34

din know you caring very much for poor liddle me’...The primary effect of Yuki’s

speech is one of alienation and difference” (21). Not only does the Yuki’s speech

allow the reader to distance him/herself from the character, it also facilitates a

characterization of Yuki as a childish character that can’t be taken seriously. Yuki

is othered, not only by the fact that she is Eurasian, but also by the fact that she

can’t speak standard American English.

However, unlike Eaton’s popular romances, the life narrative Me uses

accents in a very different way. Unlike the majority of Eaton’s work, Me and

Marion are written in a voice that is marked by the absence, rather than the

presence, of the dialects and accents that her novels were known for. The absence

of dialects and accents in her life narratives is an important choice because

language (present and absent) is always political and always meaningful. In

“Language and Identity Politics,” Lea Ramsdell argues “language choice becomes

a political act for these writers [of autobiography], a means of positioning

themselves in relation to power” (166). Ramsdell observes that in autobiography

the relationship between language and the self is vital. In her study, for example,

Ramsdell says that these “writers view language as the very essence of their

selves. They cannot conceive of telling their life stories without putting the

spotlight on their linguistic affiliations” (167). Her study concludes that for each

writer language and identity is constructed in different ways, and the narratives

give insight into how each writer’s identity is affected by language. In Eaton’s

case the same can be argued, especially as it pertains to the absence of accents and

dialects. Cole argues that “Though, she never denied her Asiatic background, she

also believed she was ‘culturally white’—since she was, in the contemporary

sense of the word, white ‘by appearance, by education, and by tastes’” (102).

Thus, while someone like Anzaldúa might use her life narrative to achieve

35 35

“recognition of her hybrid languages, people, and self” (Ramsdell 175), someone

like Winnifred Eaton can also use her life narrative in order to be recognized as a

part of the dominant discourse. Anzaldúa, for example, feels that her native

Spanish is ignored and silenced for the preference of English and so she uses her

life narrative to force an inclusion of her ignored Spanish. For Eaton, the social

climate of America simplified racial difference by excluding nonwhite individuals

from full social participation in the dominant white discourse. Thus, just as

Anzaldúa uses the landscape of autobiography to seek an acceptance of her

difference, Eaton uses the landscape of autobiography to seek acceptance of her

sameness.

The lack of racial markers in her narrative seems to be a purposeful act that

highlights the complexity of Eaton’s identity (both her otherness and her

sameness). Although both Me and Marion are written from the perspective of a

seemingly white narrator, there are a few instances where accents and dialects

show up on the page. In Me, for example, Eaton uses the presence of a young

black girl to construct a social relationship where Nora is clearly positioned as an

insider rather than an outsider:

‘Mandy was a round-faced, smiling, strong-looking girl of about

eighteen. Her hair was screwed up into funny little braids that stuck

up for all the world like rat-tails on her head. She had shiny black

eyes, and big white teeth. She called me “chile,” and said: “I hopes

you sleep well, honey chile.”.... “Isn’t there any one on this floor but

us?” I asked. “No; no one else sleeps up here, chile,” said ‘Mandy;

“but Dr. Manning he hab he labriterry there, and some time (sic) he

work all night.” (81)

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Here, the addition of a regional intonation on Mandy’s speech positions Nora as

the non-accent speaker, and thus as an insider, while it leaves Mandy as the

racialized other. Just as Yuki is distanced from the reader, Mandy’s dialect serves

the same purpose. Mandy’s words “Dr. Manning he hab he labriterry there, and

some time (sic) he work all night” (81) show that she is different and also

uneducated. Her accent is not from the fact that she speaks another language; it is

tied to the fact that she is a black, uneducated outsider in a world of whiteness.

More specifically, it is through Mandy’s racialized position that Nora is associated

with a white discourse while Mandy takes her place in a nonwhite discourse. This

is because according to Catherine Rottenberg “in a society in which white is the

ideal norm, one is assumed to be white unless one looks black” (438). In this

particular case, although Nora is open about her biracial background, the lack of

accent and dialect on her speech positions Nora as part of the norm and as

seemingly unmarked. Thus, in the written spaces of her autobiography, one is

assumed to be white unless one sounds nonwhite. In a world without a Mandy,

Nora’s subject position could be placed in the spaces of the nonwhite discourse.

Yet, the fact that Eaton creates characters that are further in the margins than she is

allows her to assume a seemingly white subject position. Interestingly, it is the fact

that Nora’s speech is unmarked that marks her as a potential bearer of whiteness.

Guillaumin argues “the system of marks has been present for a very long

time...although it is not always noticed, and in its most constant form it is too

familiar to be seen” (139). For Guillaumin the unnoticed mark is just a sign of its

power. It is so potent that it becomes invisible because it is assumed to be the

norm. Rottenberg, too, confirms, “the invisibility of the mark of whiteness is

exactly the mark of its privilege” (438). Mandy’s blackness and accent mark her

as different, as a deviation of the norm. Since the norm is the ideal, and the ideal

37 37

is the white (and because the absence of marks signify the privilege of whiteness),

Nora’s apparent lack of linguistic marks and association with the norm position

her within the realm of whiteness. Hence, Eaton’s inclusion of accents in this

limited format begins to position Nora, and thus Eaton, as part of the white

discourse.

Constructing the Self Within the White Discourse

Eaton’s use of accents throughout most of her career, and the clear absence

of them in Me, construct the racial and social identities of her characters. It places

them within particular discourses that are easily identifiable by current and past

audiences. James Paul Gee has argued that a discourse “is a sort of ‘identity-kit’

which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to

act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular role that others will

recognize” (542). A discourse community is a complicated intersection between

real bodies and socially constructed traditions. In her discussion of tropes, Krista

Ratcliffe argues that “tropes are terms within discourse, the socially constructed

attitudes and actions associated with these terms become embodied in all of us

(albeit differently) via our cultural socialization” (111). Ratcliffe’s study positions

whiteness as a trope that “designates both people and practices” (112). As a trope,

nonwhite individuals can practice whiteness, but as a discourse only whites can

embody whiteness. This is because, as Gee has noted, “someone cannot engage in

a Discourse in a less than fully fluent manner…Discourses are connected with

displays of an identity; failing to fully display an identity is tantamount to

announcing you don’t have that identity, that at best you’re a pretender or a

beginner” (545). Eaton’s Eurasian identity complicates and problematizes the

distinction between whiteness as a trope and a discourse.

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Being partially nonwhite suggests the possibility that Eaton is merely

practicing whiteness as a trope. However, being white from her father’s side (and

being capable of passing as white) makes it possible to view Eaton’s life narrative

as embodying a white discourse, rather than just practicing a white trope.

Ratcliffe argues “Performing whiteness is often a very visible practice for non-

white people” (112). By that same token, Ratcliffe also observes that the act of

“performing whiteness is often an invisible practice for white people” (113). In

Eaton’s Me and Marion the narrator’s voice is almost invisibly white. It is not an

obvious act and there are no embarrassing displays of “acting white.” Thus, I

argue that Eaton’s narrative is embodying a white discourse since the narrators are

invisibly embodying whiteness to the common reader.

Admittedly, there are moments when Eaton’s narrators appear to be acting,

except that rather than acting as white they merely seem to be acting middle class

and worldly. This is best exemplified early on in Nora’s voyage to Jamaica when

she realizes she does not have the right clothes. She notes: “To my unutterable

surprise, I found a metamorphosis had taken place on deck during my four days’

absence. Every one appeared to be dressed in thin white clothes” (14). It is upon

witnessing this transformation of everyone on board that Nora finally realizes her

mistake: “Slowly it dawned upon me that we were sailing toward a tropical land...I

had come away with clothes fit for a land which often registered as low as twenty-

four degrees below zero! My clothes scorched me; so did my burning shame. I

felt every one’s eyes were bent upon me” (15). In this moment Eaton is able to

highlight what an outsider looks like. Nora has shown herself to be outside the

world-educated discourse of those traveling to Jamaica. Yet, her interactions with

most white characters are easy and uncomplicated. Most of her discourse

mistakes tend to come from the realm of gender and class rather than race. Within

39 39

the realm of racial discourse, Eaton’s Nora is able to pass without many markers

of difference, except those that she herself points to.

It isn’t only through invisibility that Eaton positions herself within the

white discourse. One way in which Nora mirrors whiteness is through her fear for

blackness (a normative action for white women in the nineteenth century). When

Nora first arrives in Jamaica she claims she has only ever seen one black man and

thus “with a genuine thrill of excitement and fear…[she] looked down upon that

vast sea of upturned black and brown faces” (20). Later, when she meets the

politically powerful black man Mr. Burbank, Nora expresses anxiety over having

to work with him. She notes: “I was startled to find that this man I had been

planning to cultivate was black. I do not know why, but as I looked down into that

ingratiating face, I was filled with a sudden panic of almost instinctive fear, and

although he held out his hand to me, I did not take it” (40). It is precisely this

“instinctive” fear of blacks that positions her within a white discourse; a white

discourse known to view blacks as undesirable. In “Passing” Rottenberg argues

that physical traits are used to link social attributes in a white hegemonic society

and “Accordingly, a series of traits linked to whiteness (civilized/intelligent/

moral/hardworking/clean) and blackness (savage/instinctual/simple/licentious/

lazy/dirty) have been concatenated in the service of specific social hierarchies”

(437). Because black individuals have a long history of being demonized within a

white discourse, the fear Nora exhibits further aligns her with whiteness. In

response to Nora’s actions she is lectured by Miss Foster: “She reminded me that I

could not afford to snub so powerful a Jamaican as Burbank, and that if I had the

slightest feeling of race prejudice, I had better either kill it at once or clear out of

Jamaica” (40). The surprising issue is not that Eaton expresses prejudice against

the black citizens of Jamaica but that she continually reinforces the idea that she

40 40

has no racial prejudice at all. Nora explains, “As a matter of fact, I had literally

never even heard the expression ‘race prejudice’ before and I was as far from

feeling it as any person in the world. It must be remembered that in Canada we do

not encounter the problem of race. One color there is as good as another” (41).

Nora’s claimed ignorance of race prejudice as a self-proclaimed Eurasian allows

her to pass unnoticed and unmarked by her predominantly white American

audience.

Although references to a lack of racial tensions are at first localized to her

experiences in Canada, Eaton nevertheless uses American nationalist discourse to

support her own lack of racial awareness. Nora states “Vaguely I had a feeling

that all men were equal as men. I do not believe it was in me to turn from a man

merely because of his race, so long as he himself was not personally repugnant to

me” (41). But this is proven untrue even before the words are written down on

paper, especially because Mr. Burbank’s repugnance is always attached to his

racial identity. Nora describes a face “almost pure black” and a nose “large and

somewhat hooked…[because] he was partly Hebrew” (40). Outside of this, he

seems thoroughly presentable as she describes his “gold-rimmed glasses with a

chain, and these and his fine clothes gave a touch of distinction to his appearance”

(40). As Miss Foster quickly notices Nora rejects shaking Mr. Burbank’s hand

because he is black not because he is repugnant. And, if he were repugnant to the

young Nora, it is a repugnance completely rooted in racial prejudice.

Furthermore, Eaton clearly captures the spirit of the American constitution

through the phrase “all men were equal as men” as it highlights those self-evident

truths of American nationalism that “all men are created equal.” Perhaps this is a

way of connecting to her American audience, but whether that is true or not the

phrase has a more important role. While the phrase simultaneously reflects

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American idealism, it also connects a set of ironic racial and sexual prejudices to

this strong American saying. How can it be true that all men are created equal

when Black men and other men of color are treated unequally? Without

highlighting these questions or stating the ironic failing of American idealism,

Eaton brings at least a partial awareness of this to some readers. Additionally,

because whiteness is often naturalized for Western readers the word “man” is

really symbolic of “white man” whereas anytime that a man (or woman) is not

white, they are described as being a man “almost pure black” (40) or a “black girl”

(93). Thus, the simple phrase “all men were equal as men” is at the surface a

claim of equality but underneath reveals that only white men are created equal as

white men and that those who are not white and not men must suffer the effects of

a gendered, racialized hierarchy. Thus, the idea of an America without racial

prejudice is clearly a sarcastic superficial statement at best. The phrase “all men

are created equal as men” is very deliberate because it not only points to the

naturalization of whiteness in terms like “man” or “woman” but it also

simultaneously calls attention to the fact that all women are not treated equally.

Perhaps this is the loophole that allows Eaton to speak honestly. After all, the

Eaton sisters only talk about racial tensions as it concerns the women in the

family. Eaton’s mother was a foreigner in Canada, and Winnifred Eaton and her

sisters were considered “foreign-looking,” while her father, a British man from a

well-respected family, does not suffer the same fate.

Upon first meeting Mr. Burbank, Nora is informed that she must let go of

racial prejudice due to his power but this is contradicted immediately after. Nora

states:

[Mr. Campbell] told me it was necessary for us to keep on the right

side of Mr. Burbank, who was one of the greatest magnates and

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philanthropists of Jamaica, but he took occasion to contradict some

of Miss Foster’s statements. It was not true, he said, that there was

no social distinction between black and white in Jamaica…but as a

matter of a fact, though the richest people and planters were of

colored blood; though they were invited to all the governor’s parties

and the various official functions…though many of them were

talented and cultivated, nevertheless, there was a fine line drawn

between them and the native white people who counted for anything.

This he wished me to bear in mind, so that while I should always act

in such a way as never in the slightest to hurt or offend the feelings

of the colored element…I must retain my dignity and stoop to no

familiarity… (42)

The lesson for Nora is that she must be polite enough with the powerful black men

in Jamaica, but she must never forget that they are black and are to be kept at a

distance. Consequently, Mr. Campbell’s words allow the young Nora to cultivate

the racial prejudice she has already exhibited. Although various black men in

Jamaica are treated with respect and superficial equality, the kiss by a black man

to a woman who is not black breaks the fine line of social courtesy. Even in Mr.

Campbell’s warning, one can read a disdain for the relationship between black

men and white women when he tells her she must “stoop to no familiarity” and

she must always preserve her dignity. This particular part of his warning reads as

a warning to keep Mr. Burbank at a romantic distance. Furthermore, the fact that

when talking to Nora he notes that there is a social distinction between black and

white supports the view that Campbell sees Nora as belonging to the white social

group.

43 43

Interracial relationships were highly controversial during the nineteenth and

early twentieth century, especially between black men and white women. In Me,

Nora recounts a highly controversial scene between herself and the black

politician Mr. Burbank. At the end of a meeting, Nora finds herself alone when

Mr. Burbank seizes this opportunity to kiss her. Nora describes:

Suddenly I felt myself seized in a pair of powerful arms. A face

came against my own, and lips were pressed hard upon mine. I

screamed like one gone mad. I fought for my freedom from his arms

like a possessed person. Then blindly, with blood and fire before my

eyes and burning heart, I fled from that terrible chamber. (55)

Shortly after this event Nora leaves Jamaica with the help of Dr. Manning who

offers her a position at his home in Chicago. While this scene is controversial for

various reasons, the reaction other men have when hearing about this helps to

position Nora within a white discourse once more.

To Nora, Burbank is an animal whom she must escape from as she states,

“On and on I ran, my first impulse being to escape from something dreadful that

was pursuing me. I remember I had both my hands over my mouth. I felt that it

was unclean, and that the rivers and rivers could not wash away that stain that was

on me” (55-56). While the unclean feeling could very well come from the nature

of the act, it is more likely that the unclean and unforgivable act is rooted in racial

prejudice. Nora’s disgust is an acceptable reaction, especially given that she is a

mostly white narrator.

The fact that other characters are equally shocked and angry about this

encounter supports the idea that Nora is quite constantly perceived as a white

woman. In particular, Roger Hamilton (Me’s romantic protagonist) displays a

reaction that associates Nora within the white discourse. During their first

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encounter Nora tells Roger about the incident with Burbank and his reaction is

heavy with racial disdain. Nora describes “He did not say a word as I talked, but

when I came to my experience with Burbank, he leaned across the table and

watched me, almost excitedly. When I was through, he said softly: ‘Down South

we lynch a nigger for less than that,’ and one of his long hands, lying on the table,

clenched” (75). Roger’s reaction is violently racialized, but the fact that

Burbank’s actions are potentially punishable by death associates Nora with a

feminine whiteness. Had Burbank forced a kiss upon a black woman the act

would be passed off as a very male trivial act rather than a social violation. Nora

is assumed to be white (or close to whiteness) because Roger Hamilton assumes

Burbank’s kiss is in fact a social violation that deserves death.

Conclusion

Winnifred Eaton spent most of her career practicing a reverse passing.

Rather than pass as a white woman (which she could have), she chose to pass as a

Japanese Eurasian. Still, in her life narrative, Eaton does the very opposite of

what she had done up until that point in her career. Rather than construct a

Japanese Eurasian narrator, Eaton constructs a white narrator. The significance of

this act is that Eaton manages to include herself within an exclusive discourse that

rejected difference and simplified identity within a powerful binary. The

construction of a (non) white narrator associated with a white discourse

destabilizes the place of whiteness and the subject identity of the marginalized

other. Although Eaton manages to do this through a number of tactics, most of

them are deeply embedded within her feminine identity. Eaton is able to

successfully construct herself within a white discourse through the absence of

accents and dialects, but also by the reactions that those around her have when

45 45

they see her. In particular, it is the reaction of men that seem to position her

within a realm of whiteness. Yet, as I will discuss in chapter 3, her relationship

with various white men is often complicated because they recognize her as a

nonwhite woman just as much as they recognize her as a white one. In the same

way that her identity borders between a white discourse and a nonwhite discourse,

her beauty is equally problematized as it stands in between the borders of the

feminine ideal and the postcolonial concubine. Somewhere in the thin edge of that

border, Eaton’s beauty and identity problematize the various social expectations of

what it means to be white, nonwhite, and female within the American landscape of

the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

CHAPTER 3: SUSPECT BEAUTY: BIRACIAL PURITY AND PROMISCUITY

Deborah Tannen claims that there is no unmarked woman. Everything

about a woman marks her as different: her clothes, hair, make-up, shoes, and even

her name. Aside from the fact that we live in a world where the male discourse is

privileged over a female discourse, I wondered what else marked women so

profoundly. Tannen observes, “Gender markers pick up extra meanings that

reflect common associations with the female gender; not quite serious, often

sexual” (411). In the context of Tannen’s observations, I considered the role of

beauty in women’s lives. Beauty has been consistently redefined and imposed

upon women’s bodies across various different cultures and various different times.

Beauty, in particular, seems to be a phenomenon that is almost exclusively placed

upon women’s bodies. It defines the ideal and the unwanted, the desirable and the

rejected and what signifies these things is always situated and contextualized by

the ideals of the society. Thus, beauty changes as the society changes.

In Mexico, for example, having light skin is highly valued and thus viewed

as a marker of beauty. This particular social value is most likely inherited from

the hierarchical caste system put in place by the Spanish during their colonization

of Mexico. At the top of the list were the Peninsulares (European born Spaniards)

then the Criollos (Europeans born in Mexico), the Castizo (A child born from a

Spaniard and Mestizo), the Mestizo (A child born from a Spaniard and an Indio),

the Mulattos (a child born from a Spaniard and a Negro), Indios, and finally the

Negros. This caste system determined the social perks any given individual could

receive. Your heritage determined what kind of job you could have, where you

could live, and how much status you could hold. Often an individual’s skin color

and physical markers determined the extent of what he or she could or could not

47 47

have. Even today in Mexico one can observe an unofficial type of caste system

defined by a spectrum of whiteness. You can see it on television by observing the

lightness of the beautiful heroines in soap operas, or the limited roles of darker

actresses who tend to play servants or a poor neighbor. The history of Mexico’s

cultural clash lives on in the traditions of beauty and lightness that its people

continue to uphold today.

In a society characterized by cultural, racial, and ethnic clashing the

tradition of status and skin tone demonstrates that those with power and

dominance dictate the definition of beauty. Beauty is a subjective notion and can

thus be intertwined with issues regarding power, status, morality, economics, and

race. North America has been a geographic space that has historically, and

currently, been plagued by racial and cultural tensions. Thus, it should be

expected that notions of beauty have been (and will continue to be) marked by

racial tensions. According to Anne Anlin Cheng in her essay “Wounded Beauty,”

“Aesthetic standards have often been deployed by thinkers from Immanuel Kant to

Thomas Jefferson as literally the last moral ground on which to justify racist

practices” (192). Cheng’s argument is founded on the premise that “Much of what

has been written about beauty’s relationship to femininity speaks...to and from an

exclusively middle-class white paradigm” (192). Feminine beauty is not a

tangible, objective artifact. It is subjective and as such is subject to the traditions

and ideals of those whose gaze defines what it means to be beautiful. Feminine

beauty is thus constructed through and by the values of the dominant group. In the

case of the United States, we are really talking about a white masculine discourse

that imposes ideals of beauty upon female bodies.

More specifically, the nineteenth century white masculine discourse

constructed an ideal feminine beauty through the image of the well-behaved,

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white, child bearing, nineteenth-century wife/woman. This ideal nineteenth-

century beauty is the woman who is to be married, the woman whose body will

carry the future, and as such she is to be respectable and respected. That’s not to

say that she was sexually undesirable, but within the discourse of family and

dominance she was to be sexually unavailable or else her image was sullied.

However, the beautiful woman of color played a different role because she was not

to be married and thus she was viewed as a sexually available body. The notions

of beauty in this particular time period were not just labels placed upon women

that distinguished the beautiful from the plain because these labels grew to become

a type of discourse imposed upon women’s bodies.

Thus, beauty, as I study it here, is a discourse of race and gender used to

construct and define the relationships between white men and women (white,

nonwhite, and biracial). Because beauty represents the ideal in a society, I argue

that the discourse of beauty was used to tie moral virtue to white women and

promiscuity onto nonwhite women. This discourse of beauty played out through

the juxtaposed notions of virtue and promiscuity as it pertained to white and

nonwhite women. However, when it came to the biracial woman (who could pass

as either) the discourse of beauty played a different role that converged aspects of

the virtuous woman and the promiscuous woman. Winnifred Eaton’s

autobiographical texts demonstrate that the biracial woman experiences the

discourse of beauty very differently, that in her experience she is perceived as

simultaneously pure and promiscuous. Her beauty, the beauty of the biracial

woman, is thus suspicious to the men who gaze upon her because her beauty

borders between two opposing spaces in the moral spectrum. As a result, men

who approached her either tried to turn her into wife or into concubine, the latter

49 49

being a relationship that symbolically mirrors and recreates a gendered colonial

relationship.

Stories of Womanhood and Whiteness

During the course of Eaton’s lifetime true womanhood, or rather the ideal

and good womanhood, was defined by virtues of piety and purity. Holding such

virtues was not enough to grant you the title of “good woman” because

womanhood was still complicated by issues of race and class. In addition to

holding the right virtues a woman also had to have the correct appearance as well

as the correct lineage. The complexity of being a good woman in many ways acts

like a particular discourse community because it is a combination of doing and

being. James Paul Gee in “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics” notes that “any

moment we are using language we must say or write the right thing in the right

way while playing the right social role and (appearing) to hold the right values,

beliefs, and attitudes...These combinations I call ‘Discourses’” (542). This

definition of discourse fits the complicated task of meeting the good woman

identity because having virtue alone would not make someone an ideal woman.

For “True Womanhood” to be complete a body had to possess the right

physicality, morality, and class identity. Thus, being defined as a good woman

really meant that you possessed and enacted the right discourse and belonged to

the correct discourse community. It is my argument that beauty was a narrative

driven discourse used to control and restrict women in the nineteenth and early

twentieth century.

Narratives about feminine beauty were so powerful at the turn of the

century that they shaped discourses about femininity. This is because narratives

don’t simply tell stories about the human experience; they often also shape human

50 50

reality. According to Walter Fisher in “Narration as a Communication Paradigm”

“symbols are created and communicated ultimately as stories meant to give order

to human experience and to induce others to dwell in them to establish ways of

living in common, in communities in which there is sanction for the story that

constitutes one’s life” (6). Fisher points to narratives as symbols that shape moral

constructs. Through story telling we define the acceptable ways of living together.

We thus set up rules and expectations for the entire group. These rules then

become pillars of morality and in no time simple narratives become cultural truths.

In Mexico, for example, there is one common narrative about La Llorona, the

haunted spirit of a mother who seeks the children she murdered during her

lifetime. In various versions of the story La Llorona is a bad wife, a promiscuous

wife, or simply a woman who refuses to let her husband leave. The death of her

children by her hand is viewed as either a selfish act, or an act of manipulation.

The story is so powerful that children run and hide at the sound of her imagined

cries, but the moral of the story is that a woman must first be a good mother over

her other roles as either woman or wife. These childhood narratives in Mexico are

used to scare children, but they are also a useful warning for women whose duty it

is to become good mothers. In the United States the narratives are less founded on

myth than they are on religious rhetoric. William Kirkwood in “Parables as

Metaphors and Examples” looks at the use of religious parables as a type of

rhetorical strategy. Kirkwood notes that parables suggest, “all narratives are

examples or a series of examples, whether or not they portray ‘exemplary’

behavior” (423). According to both Fisher and Kirkwood, narratives have the

power to become a symbol of correct behavior even though a single story does not

necessarily have the power to do this. For such a symbol to become a true

exemplar of morality it has to be persistent and powerful. Celeste Condit, for

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example, notes that in order for something to be assimilated into public discourse

it has to create “a given vocabulary (or set of understandings)” that can be

“integrated into the public repertoire” (6). Condit notes, “‘protective’ legislation

for women was passed by employing and simultaneously strengthening a

definition of all women as weak, vulnerable, and worthy of protection because of

their inherent reproductive role-motherhood” (6). Condit also notes that rhetoric

can “communicate social change to people by using language as a medium that

negotiates a collective ‘expression’ of social conditions and social interests. No

idea can have force of its own. Only if that idea is convincing to a large number

of people will it carry social force and gain materiality” (8). Thus a national

narrative about the good woman does not come from one source but rather from a

multitude of stories that together construct an understanding of true womanhood

for men and women.

One source for the discourse of good womanhood comes from the literature

of the time. According to William Wasserstrom in Heiress of All the Ages, “The

idea that women incarnated the meaning of a whole culture was indeed unique in

history [to Americans]” (126). Wasserstrom notes that the “American girl

embodied her society...and literature was forced to examine the mechanisms of

both [women and stories] in order to understand either” (126). Wasserstrom and

other scholars note that American womanhood was tasked with upholding

American tradition, strength, and value. According to A. Cheree Carlson, this

tendency to characterize good womanhood with American virtue and tradition was

actually a new occurrence. Carlson notes that the character of the good woman

“was transformed into a distinctive entity and given the heavy responsibility of

guiding the morality of the nation...This extreme form of identification led to a

fascination with the ‘proper’ female character, for as she went, so, symbolically,

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went the national character” (5). This preoccupation with a woman’s character led

to the conduct literature of the nineteenth century, a tradition that only reified the

melding of womanhood with American virtue. In Gender and Rhetorical Space in

American Life Nan Johnson notes that “parlor traditions of rhetoric…helped to

sustain the icon of the white, middle-class woman as queen of her domestic sphere

by promoting a code of rhetorical behavior for women that required the

performance of conventional femininity” (2). Additionally, Johnson argues:

[R]hetorical pedagogies designed for a popular audience, such as

elocution manuals and letter-writing handbooks and other instructive

commentaries about rhetorical behavior, represent cultural sites

where the tension between expanding roles for women and equally

intense desires to keep those roles stable manifests itself in open

controversy about how to value women’s words. (2)

Wasserstrom and Johnson point to a number of complicated issues regarding

womanhood that deal with women as the bearers of future Americans and as

bodies in a society seeking a voice. Part of the panic came from the changing role

of women at the turn of the century. Women had the option of adhering to either

the version of “True Womanhood” or the version of “New Womanhood.” Jean

Lee Cole notes that in Eaton’s time women were “No longer simply the ‘angel of

the house’” (43). Many women “were attending college, and many of these New

Women not only remained single after graduation but pursued lifelong careers as

teachers, journalists, doctors, and lawyers” (Cole 43). The fact that some women

could suddenly reject the national narrative of true womanhood was a scary

prospect.

Femininity wasn’t just to be protected because it was the weaker sex but

also because protecting the virtue of femininity meant protecting the virtue of

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American ideals. Cole observes that at the turn of the century there was an

increase in domestic fiction that dealt with the tensions between versions of

“True” and “New” womanhood. In many novels, such as one named Mother,

there was a support of “the prevalent view that women, as primary caregivers,

were responsible not only for the welfare of their individual home and family but

for the creation of good Americans-and many of them” (Cole 46-47). In addition

to the changing roles of women, America was also facing a large immigrant base

that seemingly threatened to take over. As a result women were given the national

task of bearing American children that would uphold American values. Facing the

revelation that “minorities and immigrants...were reproducing at a much higher

rate than ‘old stock’ populations” President Roosevelt viewed “the decreasing

birthrate among white (and well-to-do) women as nothing less than a national

emergency” (Cole 47). Given the changing roles of women, and the increase in

immigrant and minority populations, the discourse of conduct literature became

much more important as it was a way to continue to dictate, through narrative, the

proper etiquette of the white, child-bearing woman. Johnson reveals that in such

conduct literature the white middle class woman is portrayed as the reigning

queen; thus she is the ideal feminine beauty. Yet, although the white middle class

woman is empowered above any women (white and nonwhite) who do not fit the

ideal notion of femininity, conduct literature is still being used to control the

spaces women were allowed to have a voice in the nineteenth century. So

although I will argue that white women were ideal feminine beauties because

within their material bodies they house abstract notions of virtue and morality, I

am not arguing that they are empowered through such as a discourse. As Johnson

points out such a discourse was created to manage the spaces in which women had

power and thus this type of discourse was a way to manage women.

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In addition to literature, legal discourse was another area that helped to

construct and reify the definition of womanhood. According to Carlson, “there

was a strong and unquestioned tendency to define American culture as ‘a republic

of virtue’...Virtue, as an embodiment of all that was morally superior about the

United States, was celebrated in song, novels, plays, speeches, and art. It was also

argued about, molded, and set in place by the law” (4). Legal discourse helped to

reinforce what was acceptable behavior for women and that which was

unacceptable through court decisions. Women could be legally declared insane if

their social demeanor did not match what was expected of a woman. Carlson also

establishes that “In the nineteenth century, the law was white, male, and middle

class. This held true even throughout the antebellum period and changed only

slowly after the Civil War” (4). The dominance of this white and male discourse

becomes significant due to the power legal discourse had in constructing popular

opinions. According to Carlson:

The stories told in courts of law... possess more concrete effects

upon human behavior. Jurors based verdicts on these stories.

Judges write decisions that enter into the narratives of precedent and

set the boundaries for future arguments. The press copies them for

distribution of moral precepts to the masses. Eventually, elements of

the story integrate themselves into the ‘law’ so thoroughly that they

become ‘facts.’ Facts are hard to dispute and harder to escape. (2)

Similar to Carlson, Celeste Condit argues, “Over time, a powerful social group’s

way of describing the general interest may become embedded within the public

vocabularies and practices. Future arguments for that group’s interests are then

easier to make, because supporting practices and the warrants for the arguments

are already in place” (7). Both Condit and Carlson suggest that when a dominant

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group begins to define the identity of another group they essentially take control

over the way that group is treated and viewed by the general public. Thus, for the

powerful white male discourse to establish through public discourse and legal

discourse what it meant to be a good woman was a significant and overwhelming

act. Essentially, women were socially and, sometimes, physically constricted due

to such definitions.

Womanhood was defined in a number of ways using their domestic roles as

mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters. Barbara Welter in “Cult of True

Womanhood,” argues:

The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged

herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors and society

could be divided into four cardinal virtues—piety, purity,

submissiveness and domesticity...Without them, no matter whether

there was fame, achievement or wealth, all was ashes. With them

she was promised happiness and power. (152)

Following this discourse of good womanhood, much of the nineteenth century and

early twentieth century saw a rise in the number of conduct books aimed towards

the good woman. In these conduct books qualities such as gentleness and

cleanliness are emphasized. These very qualities of good womanhood were used

to define beauty in such a way that beauty equaled morality. According to Jen

Cadwallader in her essay “‘Formed for labour, not for love’: Plain Jane and the

Limits of Female Beauty,” “The conflation of beauty with virtue is pointedly

repeated in the nineteenth-century versions of the [Beauty and the Beast] tale”

(237). Cadwallader explains that “Lamb’s description of Beauty is constructed as

a logical equation: because Beauty is so gentle, good, kind, etc, she necessarily

equals ‘beauty’” (238). Thus, in part, beauty stands in for moral virtue.

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According to Samantha Kwan, in “Navigating Public Spaces,” beauty is viewed as

a marker of personality. Kwan argues that various “social-psychological research

indicates that beauty functions as a visible status cue that operates in a similar

manner as race or gender and shapes expectations about an individual’s

personality and behavior” (146). Furthermore, Kwan observes, “Individuals often

assume that beautiful people are good and/or talented and expect them to be

smarter, lead better lives, hold more prestigious jobs, and have happier marriages”

(146). For Kwan, beauty is not just a sign that someone is visually pleasing to

others because beauty is joined to the assumption that a person has a particular

pleasant personality or moral behavior.

Beauty, however, was not just a conflation of femininity and beauty; it was

also a point where morality and virtue converged with whiteness. As a result of its

high status and cultural/economic wealth, whiteness becomes attributed to beauty.

In White Women, Race Matters Ruth Frankenberg, for example, argues that the

“right to appropriate land (vis-a-vis Native Americans) and to be free rather than

enslaved (vis-a-vis African Americans) were racially defined and justified on

ground of inborn superiority [and thus] marriage and procreation across racial

lines would in fact threaten the power structure itself” (74). Frankenberg alludes to

a theory of whiteness as status that is based in economics. Whiteness appropriated

power and status for an individual and the lack of whiteness limited one’s access

to that power and status in a similar fashion as the caste system established in the

Spanish-inhabited Mexico. Thus to protect this economic upper hand interracial

relationships were looked down upon as it threatened the economic hold of the

group. In Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu argues:

Cultural (or linguistic) competence...function both as a source of

inculcation and as a market...These conditions, perpetuate in the

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mode of utilization—i.e., in a given relationship to culture or

language—function like a sort of ‘trade-mark’, and, by linking that

competence to a particular market, help define the value of its

products in the various markets. (65)

Bourdieu’s argument points to the marketability of social status. Thus, in the

same way that education or art becomes a cultural commodity, whiteness becomes

a commodity as well. Furthermore, it is a commodity attached to femininity,

beauty, and morality in order to control and manage the white woman but also to

justify the oppression and abuse of nonwhite women.

Thus, when we define beauty and morality in white women, we are not

only defining what those terms mean; we are also defining what their opposites

entail when they are attributed to the bodies of nonwhite women. According to

Anne Cheng in “Wounded Beauty” “much of the writing about beauty over the

centuries has pondered beauty as a dichotomy (articulated by Daniel Deronda in

the famous opening of that eponymous novel) between good and evil, between

absolution and curse” (191). Thus the ideal beauty is not just defined by feminine

morality but also be a general sense of what goodness means. In defining beauty

as goodness, through a notion of dichotomies we also, simultaneously, define non-

beauty/plainness as potentially evil, bad, and/or immoral. In talking about beauty

and whiteness Kim Hall, in her essay “Beauty and the Beast of Whiteness,” notes

that we can understand race and beauty by looking at artifacts such as the Drake

jewel (a jewel given to Queen Elizabeth that portrays on one side cameo of a black

face superimposed upon a white face and inside a portrait of the queen herself).

Hall notes that the jewel is “particularly useful for contextualizing the concepts of

race and beauty... because the cameo itself juxtaposes white and black faces...The

combination of black cameo with miniature portrait also draws attention to skin

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color in a way that may reinforce the value of whiteness” (464). Part of this

reinforced value comes from the juxtaposition of blackness and whiteness in the

jewel. Hall argues:

dualist thought (thinking solely in terms of binary oppositions,

particularly good versus evil) plays a central role in racial

oppression; in this case the colors produce a scene in which ‘the

forces of good and evil are in conflict, each struggling to win over

the other.’... To restrain the bad group helps the forces of good win

over the forces of evil.’ (465)

Hall and Cheng appear to point to the use of beauty as a dichotomy between white

morality and nonwhite immorality. If beauty is equal to goodness and morality,

then non-beauty is equal to immorality, and because whiteness is the ideal then it

is tied to beauty.

By conflating beauty with morality, goodness, and whiteness we are also

defining what it means to be un-beautiful: morally void, bad, and nonwhite. This

allows the non-white woman to be viewed as sexually available because she is not

the ideal wife that will give birth to a continued American tradition through her

children. In Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes we see the narrative of the

sexually available nonwhite women being constructed early on through the genre

of travel writing. For example, in describing the travel writing of a man named Le

Vaillant, Pratt notes, “Le Vaillant becomes a smitten suitor pursuing the object of

his desire. The discoverer turns voyeur as he hides in the bushes to watch Narina

and her companions bathe in the river, then steals their clothes. The erotic drama

is represented as simple and good-humored on all sides, and no hearts get broken”

(87). Such behavior would be shunned by the conduct literature of the time and

thus would have been completely inappropriate for the ideal wife. Yet, for the

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nonwhite woman there was no other way of viewing her than through a highly

sexualized gaze. In the early twentieth century, the infamous case of Rhinelander

vs. Rhinelander made headlines throughout the United States when the wealthy

Leonard Rhinelander sought to annul his month long marriage to Alice

Rhinelander (formerly Jones) on the basis that she had committed fraud by lying

about her black heritage. Alice seemingly appeared white to most who saw her

but had black heritage through her father’s family. This case brought to the

forefront issues of interracial marriage, racial identity, and passing. According to

Carlson, “At one time or another until the 1960s, forty-one states or colonies had

[anti-miscegenation laws]” (139). Carlson notes that Leonard’s lawyers relied on

the “implicit proof of Alice’s sexual aggressiveness [that] lay in the white vision

of black womanhood” (143). Thus, in this case the characterization of Alice

Rhinelander relied on stereotypes of black women as sexually promiscuous, the

opposite definition of the ideal white woman. In order to prove their case Alice’s

lawyers had her bare her breasts to the judge and jury. Carlson argues that “It is

arguably one of the most shameful moments in the courtroom, but it was

extremely effective...[because] It did not matter whether Alice really did embody

her race, what mattered was whether the jury believed it” (148). And they did, the

jury’s verdict was in favor of Alice Rhinelander but the end of the trial had

thoroughly and completely disgraced Alice and her family. In discussing this

same case, Alcoff argues that baring her breasts was effective because “The

assumption operating here is that no one can completely ‘pass’ because there will

always be some sign, some trace, of one’s ‘true’ identity” (7). The Rhinelander

case highlight a number of important issues, the first of which is that nonwhite

women were perceived as promiscuous unlike their white counterparts whose

identity was established through a discourse of beauty and purity. The second is

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that a biracial woman in the early twentieth century is a suspicious beauty. Her

apparent white features allow her to have the social expectation of respect and

marriage but her nonwhite features also allow her to be viewed and treated as a

sexually promiscuous aggressor. And it is this very contradiction in expectations

that Winnifred Eaton reveals through her biographical texts.

The Discourse of Pure Wife/Promiscuous Concubine

After the success of her first anonymous autobiography, Eaton wrote

Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model and published it anonymously as well.

Marion was to be a biographical story of her older sister Sara who tries to make it

as an artist but ends up becoming a model in the United States. Winnifred Eaton

writes Marion in the first person, in a similar fashion as Me, even though the story

is presumably about her sister and not herself. Thus it is difficult to extract what is

being said on behalf of Sara and what is being spoken from Edith Eaton’s own

mind. Although reading Eaton’s autobiographical work is a complicated matter it

is still a journey worth taking. In reading these two texts side by side we can learn

a lot about the cultural tensions and politics of the time as they pertain to women,

including the borderland space that is actively being constructed here. By noting

the tensions between what is culturally acceptable and what the constructed

characters experience, we can begin to break down the cultural scripts that Eaton,

as well as her sisters, had to maneuver in their roles as biracial women.

One of the key issues they all face is the way their beauty is perceived and

noted by those around them. For example, in the opening scene of Marion the

local grocer and a stranger are discussing the Ascough family (the real-life Eatons)

as the young Marion enters the store. They first note the strangeness of the family

commenting on the “eleven cheeldren” (Watanna and Bosse 1) of the couple.

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There Marion recalls how “The man to whom Monsieur Thebeau had been

speaking, had turned around, and was regarding me curiously. I felt abashed and

angry under his compelling glance. Then he smiled, and nodding his head, he

said: ‘You are right. She is pretty—quite remarkably pretty!” (emphasis original,

Watanna and Bosse 2). The racialized inspection of the young Marion is

disturbing of course, but it also serves to reflect and highlight one of the ways

beauty is racialized. According to Linda Alcoff in Visible Identities “The truth of

one’s gender and race... are widely thought to be visibly manifest” (7). The

emphasis in Marion’s beauty appears to come from the surprise that a biracial

child would be as beautiful as a child of a single Anglo-Saxon race. The emphasis

Eaton places on “is” highlights what may have been an initial disbelief that a

Eurasian child would be very beautiful. Thus, Marion is being studied because she

is both biracial and beautiful.

The scene at the grocery store in Marion is very similar to one that Edith

Eaton, the eldest sister, experienced as a young child. In “Leaves From the Mental

Portfolio of an Eurasian” Edith Eaton recalls being in a children’s party when she

is called over by an older man to be inspected:

There are quite a number of grown people present. One, a white

haired old man, has his attention called to me by the hostess. He

adjusts his eyeglasses and surveys me critically. ‘Ah, indeed!’ he

exclaims. ‘Who would have thought it at first glance? Yet now I see

the difference between her and other children. What a peculiar

coloring! Her mother’s eyes and hair and her father’s features, I

presume. Very interesting little creature!’ (950)

Edith bitterly recalls this racialized inspection nothing that “For the rest of the

evening I hide myself behind a hall door and refuse to show myself until it is time

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to go home” (950). Edith’s experience demonstrates the idea that there is always a

marker of difference in the racially ambiguous individual that may be found if one

were to look hard enough. Alcoff argues that “Because race works through the

domain of the visible, the experience of race is predicated first and foremost on the

perception of race, a perception whose specific mode is a learned ability” (187).

Alcoff’s argument essentially points to the idea that race is perceived as materially

real and thus the biracial woman is believed to bear some mark of her otherness.

It is the reason why the grocer in Marion and the old man in “Leaves” seek to find

evidence of some racial truth in the young girls’ faces. Ultimately the insistence

of various men to inspect a young biracial woman points to the emphasis and

importance of racial identities and to some extent feminine beauty. According to

Alcoff in “The truth of one’s gender and race, then, are widely thought to be

visibly manifest, and if there is no visible manifestation of one’s declared racial or

gendered identity, one encounters an insistent skepticism and an anxiety” (7).

Alcoff points to the anxiety and skepticism of the racializing gaze held by those

who seek to know what another’s heritage truly is. Alcoff asserts that due to

“visible” nature of our gender and race, the ambiguous individual is met with

suspicion as those gazing upon her seek to find the “truth.” Thus a racially

ambiguous woman is looked upon because her beauty is suspicious to the white

men who look upon her. Alcoff claims, “The assumption operating here is that no

one can completely ‘pass’ because there will always be some sign, some trace, of

one’s ‘true’ identity” (7). A similar assumption operates in both inspections of the

Eaton girls as strangers seek to find that evidence of truth in the young girls’ faces.

Just as Alice Rhinelander won her case because the judge and jury believed her

racial identity was in fact visible through her breasts, the men who look upon

Nora, Marion, and Edith are searching for some sign that will confirm that their

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suspicious beauty is in fact a nonwhite beauty. For Edith Eaton this experience

was thoroughly negative and humiliating, yet for Marion the experience of being

studied is only negative at the beginning but once she is referred to as being

“pretty” she forgets her anger and resentment.

Not only is it evident that beauty in a biracial child seems unexpected to the

white men who view them, but the desires and perceptions of the young girls are

evidence to the complicated racial tensions as well. Upon returning home the

young Marion wonders if the French stranger could be correct about her prettiness.

Marion thus turns the racialized gaze upon herself as she conducts her own

inspection in the mirror, an inspection through the lens of whiteness. Watching in

the mirror, Marion asks “Was I really pretty then? Surely the face reflected there

was too fat and too red. My! My cheeks were as red as apples. I pushed back the

offending fat with my two hands, and I opened my eyes wide and blinked them at

myself in the glass. Oh! if only my hair were gold! I twisted and turned about, and

then I made a grimace at my own face” (Watanna and Bosse 3). The most

interesting and telling part of this inspection is the desire to have golden hair,

typically a feature of whiteness. Catherine Rottenberg explains, “certain subjects

are encouraged to privilege and thus desire attributes associated with whiteness,

but concurrently these same subjects are forced to identity as [nonwhite]” (442).

Similarly, Anne Anlin Cheng confirms that “The primacy of white beauty as a

value continues to drive those are most oppressed by it...it is not surprising to hear

that women of various ethnicities and nationalities continue to be influenced by

dominant ideas of white female beauty” (194). For Rottenberg this desire to be

white is an attempt “to remain viable and not be completely marginalized in a

white supremacist power regime” (446). When Marion inspects her own body,

she does so through a lens of whiteness. She grimaces to herself because she lacks

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the golden hair of the white ideal beauty. Even though she, and her sister, can

pass for white Marion still displays an obvious tension that she feels over her

nonwhite features.

This is a recurring theme not only throughout Marion but also in Me as

well. In Me, Nora observes, “I myself was dark and foreign-looking, but the blond

type I adored. In all my most fanciful imagining and dreams I had always been

golden-haired and blue-eyed” (41). Prior to this Nora states, “I was not beautiful

to look at, but I had a bright, eager face, black and shining eyes, and black and

shining hair. My cheeks were as red as a Canadian apple. I was a little thing, and,

like my mother, foreign-looking” (6). Nora, in her descriptions of herself, seems

to constantly contrast her nonwhite features with her white features. She has dark

hair and eyes but she has a bright face, she is of the blond type. In most of Me,

Nora compares herself to other girls, usually speculating that she was not as

beautiful as they were. Many of these girls had blond hair as well. However,

although Nora claims to not be very beautiful this statement is usually followed by

a summary of all the men who try to romance her or fall in love with her. The

appeal of both Nora and Marion is likely tied to their suspicious (biracial) beauty.

In both Me and Marion beauty serves as a way of marking women through a

racialized standard of beauty. Cheng maintains that “Beauty in the racial register

is always in danger of obscuring the distance between the standard and the exotic;

indeed, the standard is only beautiful when it embodies—barely beneath the

skin—the exotic, and vice versa” (207). In Cheng’s view beauty must maintain a

balance between the ideal standard and a dash of exoticism. Cheng believes that

the beauty of the character of Clare in Passing and the Nancy Kwan in Flower

Drum Song comes from the biracial nature of their beauty. Cheng points out that

“[Nancy] is at once the American standard (the ‘L.L.D’: ‘long legged dame’) and

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the Asian exotic (‘Fan Tan Fanny’). Similarly, Clare [from Passing] is at once a

beauty that all can agree on (her apparent ‘whiteness’) and a beauty that is exotic

(the ‘unusualness’ and unlikeliness of her dark eyes)” (207). The men who view

them, whether aware of this or not, are attracted to their ability to fit the standard

and to violate it. In Eaton’s life narratives the biracial beauty of Nora and Marion

seems to get them quite a bit of male attention.

The (suspect) beauty of Nora and Marion, perhaps because they are

biracial, also becomes a source of danger for the girls throughout the two

narratives. Besides the ordeal with Burbank in Eaton’s Me (a scene in which Nora

is forcibly kissed by the black politician), Nora experiences one more sexually

threatening act against her while she is in Jamaica. After accepting to go on a

walk with the white American, Dr. Manning, she finds herself in an uncomfortable

situation. The walk begins in the safety of the hotel verandas and as the streets

grow darker the walk becomes more menacing. Nora describes the scenes as

follows: “The farther we strolled from the hotel, the darker grew the paths. Across

the white backs of many of the women a black sleeve was passed. Insensibly I felt

that in the darkness my companion was trying to see my face and note the effect

upon me of these ‘spooners’” (48). In this particular scene darkness is associated

with sexuality because the darker the streets get the more sexually illicit the

situation gets. Dr. Manning is seemingly testing the virtue of Nora as he looks

upon her face to see what reaction she will have to the sexuality around her.

When she rejects his advances he questions her virtue asking her: “Come, now, are

you trying to make me believe that the young men who come to see you do not

make love to you?” (49). In essence, Manning is accusing Nora of being,

potentially, sexually available. Manning seemingly positions this belief upon

Nora’s suspicious beauty when he tells her “You are pretty...and far more

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interesting than any other girl in the hotel. I think you exceedingly captivating”

(49). This implies that Cheng is correct when she claims that for the biracial

characters what is most beautiful about them is “their doubleness: their presence as

not purity, but mélange” (207). This mélange, or mixture, is precisely what

compels Dr. Manning to test Nora’s virtue. After trying to force a kiss upon her,

Nora recalls that he asks: “‘By the way, why do you object to being kissed?’ just

as if it were unusual for a girl to object to that” (49). Nora’s commentary upon

the question signals the tension between the expected behavior of a white woman

and the expected behavior of a nonwhite woman. Manning assumes she is

sexually available only because he recognizes something “interesting” and

“captivating” about her that the white women in the hotel do not possess: markers

of non-whiteness.

Dr. Manning’s actions are at first forgivable because they remain as only

perceived threats but during Nora’s stay at his home the perceived threats turn into

concrete evidence of danger. At Dr. Manning’s home Nora is showed to her

room, a room that shares a door to the doctor’s office. During her first and last

night there Nora recalls:

I am a light sleeper, and the slightest stir or movement awakens me.

That night I awoke suddenly, and the first thing I saw was a light

that came into the room from the partly opened door of the doctor’s

laboratory, and standing in my room, by the doorway, was a man. I

recognized him, though he was only a silhouette against the light.

The shock of the awakening, and the horrible realization that he was

already crossing the room, held me for a moment spellbound. Then

my powers returned to me, and just as I had fled from that negro in

Jamaica, so now I ran from this white man. (82).

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The scene is menacing and leads readers to believe that Dr. Manning meant

serious wrongdoing against our heroine. But Nora is not the only Eaton who

seems to be easy prey for the men around her.

In Marion during a scene between Marion and her sister Ellen, we see the

sexual expectations placed upon the Eurasian girls. Marion describes being in the

carriage with Ellen and two men when all of a sudden “Colonel Stevens had put

his arm just at the back of me, and as it slipped down from the carriage seat to my

waist, I sat forward on the edge of the seat” (Watanna and Bosse 27). At the same

time, Ellen exclaims “Marion, let’s get out of this carriage. That beast there put his

arm around me, and he pinched me too” (28). Rather than apologize for their

inappropriate behavior the two men are outraged that Marion and Ellen are upset.

Mr. Mercier, the second man in the carriage, asks: “For these children did you ask

me to waste my time?” (28). Like the scenes in Me, this scene implies that the

men have a different expectation from the girls than they would have for white

women. Because their beauty is suspicious (a combination of white and nonwhite

markers) the men assume that they can treat the girls in ways that violate the social

expectations of a gentlemen and a lady.

Sometime later Marion finds love with the English gentlemen Reggie who

proposes to her soon after. After a long engagement Marion once again brings up

the issue of the wedding date to which Reggie responds: “Darling girl, if we were

to marry, you cannot imagine the mess it would make of my career. My father

would never forgive me...Be my wife in every way but the silly ceremony. If you

loved me, you would make this sacrifice for me” (126). In response Marion is

outraged, stating: “He was a beast who had taken from me all my best years, and

now—now he made a proposition to me that was vile!—me, the girl he had asked

to be his wife!...I was guilty of no fault, save that of poverty” (126). It is in this

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way that the relationship between Reggie and Marion ends. Just like the men

before, Reggie has a sexual expectation of her that he would not have of a white

woman. Although Marion wonders what she did besides be poor, the problem for

Reggie is the fact that Marion is biracial and thus, unsuitable to marry.

Nora, like Marion, goes through a similar experience with her main love

interest Richard Hamilton. Although Hamilton never directly asks Nora to be his

mistress, there are various occasions when Hamilton attempts to “keep” her. In

one instance, after noting her poverty and lack of fine clothes Nora tells us “After

a pause he moved nearer to me, and I thought he was going to put his arm about

me, but he did not. He said in a lowly voice: ‘You can have all the fine clothes

you want’” (172). Although Nora does not view the suggestion that he can

provide for her as outrageous, her friend Lolly does. Lolly informs Nora that if

she allowed Hamilton to buy her clothing then “people would be saying the he was

‘keeping’ [her]” (226). Yet even after this warning Hamilton manipulates

situations so that he inevitably ends up purchasing various clothes for her and a

large room that she can use for her writing—all of this while he is married.

In both instances, Hamilton and Reggie seek to make Nora and Marion,

respectively, their mistresses. Cheng’s analysis highlights the appeal of Nora and

Marion as biracial women to Hamilton and Reggie as white men of a certain social

status, but their strange relationships which border between a proper relationship

and an improper one need a different explanation. Like the narratives of morality

and femininity, white men of the time would have also been exposed to a

particular narrative of romantic relationships with nonwhite women. According to

Mary Louis Pratt, the travel narrative of a man named Stedman caused a lot of

sensation due to “his idealized romance and marriage with the mulatta slave

Joanna” (90). Pratt informs us “As Stedman tells it, he met the 15-year-old Joanna

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shortly after his arrival in Surinam, at the home of a colonist where she was a

house slave and a family favorite. He was instantly smitten by her beauty and

charm, both embellished by a state of relative undress” (90). The relationship is

problematized by Stedman’s ability to move between plantation and Europe. Pratt

summarizes the story of the couple as follows:

The couple’s life together includes an Edenic interlude in a rural

cottage (built for them by slaves), and the birth of a son who is

baptized Johnny. Periods together alternate with separations as

Stedman returns to the jungle or Joanna to her plantation. When

Stedman’s regiment is recalled to Europe, he again importunes

Joanna to come with him, and she again refuses. Stedman leaves

without her, promising to send money. Five years later, married in

England to someone else, he receives news of Joanna’s death,

apparently by poisoning at the hands of people envious of her

prosperity and distinction. Their son arrives in England with two

hundred pounds accumulated by this mother, and later dies at sea as

a young sailor. Stedman closes his book with an elegy to the lost

son, and a tearful farewell to the reader, who, it is hoped, has been

able to “peruse this narrative with sympathetic, sensibility.” (93)

The relationship between Stedman and Joanna is really a relationship of the

colonial concubine. This type of relationship mirrors the relationships that

Hamilton and Reggie seek of Nora and Marion. Like Stedman they want the

freedom to love and take care of the women as though they were their wives (or

rather their concubines) while still maintaining a social status and a legitimate wife

that others would approve of. Pratt claims that it is “easy to see transracial love

plots as imaginings in which European supremacy is guaranteed by affective and

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social bonding; in which sex replaces slavery as the way others are seen to belong

to the white man; in which romantic love rather than filial servitude or force

guarantee the willful submission of the colonized” (95). Applying this view to the

relationships Hamilton and Reggie attempt to have we can see that Nora and

Marion are viewed as a sexual property to be had. Rather than have a relationship

based on love, Hamilton and Reggie are establishing a relationship based on

property, ownership, and power. In this relationship the benefits are solely

possessed by both men while the women would have to live in shame, known for

their social transgressions.

Conclusion

Beauty is often perceived as a thing someone possesses; yet in Eaton’s life

narratives beauty is a discourse women experience. As illustrated by the

experiences of Marion and Edith Eaton, as children, those who gaze upon the

biracial beauty search for the markers of the nonwhite body. As much as they are

interested in finding these markers of difference, men who gaze upon the adult

women are unsure of whether to treat them as white women or as sexually

available nonwhite women. The suspiciousness of their beauty is thus a source of

potential danger as the men who come across both Nora and Marion test the limits

of each girl’s virtue. Yet, even when they find men who love them those men still

try to establish a relationship that mirrors the colonial concubine relationship, a

relationship in which Nora and Marion are viewed with suspicion as they

seemingly walk a fine line between the socially acceptable and the socially

immoral. A cloud of silence often surrounds such a dangerous relationship. Had

Hamilton and Reggie succeeded they would have gained a mistress/concubine

who would be kept in secret and silence. In addition to this silence, the readers

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understand what Hamilton and Reggie seek, and why they seek it, even when

those intentions are not explicit but rather implied through an absence of words.

And yet, by portraying these events under the guise of naivety, Eaton is able to

appropriate silence for her own uses. In various instances Reggie’s silence can be

read as racial prejudice and Hamilton’s silences display his suspicions about

Nora’s virtue. Thus, without saying very much Eaton is able to capture and

problematize the gendered and racialized tensions of her time.

CHAPTER 4: A SILENCE LOUDER THAN WORDS: RHETORICS OF SILENCE IN ME AND MARION

Silence has long been considered a symbol of oppression and submission

by the Western world. Those individuals who do not speak are assumed forcibly

silenced (by some oppressing power), rather than purposefully silent. As I’ve

noted earlier, Western tradition has a tendency of perceiving the world through a

binary outlook. In the case of silence, it is assumed that speech is the desired state

of freedom and empowerment, while silence is viewed as the disenfranchised state

of oppression. In some cases, this may very well be true. Silence has the

capability of oppressing an individual when that silence is imposed upon him or

her. However, silence does not simply equal the lack of power, and it does not

always signal oppression or submission. Silence, just as spoken language, has the

ability to communicate explicitly and implicitly. The deliberate use of silence can

be just as powerful as the deliberate use of words. In its most essential way,

silence is a part of speech and acts in similar ways as words on a piece of paper.

The conscious decision to be silent, the absence of words, and the

interruption of language are all rhetorical tools that have the capability to

communicate. Words, both spoken and written, can be read by analyzing what

they mean, what they imply, and how they are formulated together to create a

larger significance. Similarly, silence, just as words, can be read and studied.

Silence communicates, and in Winnifred Eaton’s Me and Marion, silence is used

to communicate a racial tension that cannot be explicitly spoken. Eaton wields

silence as a rhetorical tool to highlight the complexity of race in the Western

world. During the time when Eaton authored most of her books, the United States

was plagued by a culture that actively sought to silence women and all racialized

individuals. Such an environment would have made it difficult for any woman to

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succeed as a writer, let alone a nonwhite woman writing about interracial

relationships. It is a wonder how Eaton was able to get away with much of the

content of her famous novels. Yet, if we adapt a perspective from the standpoint

of silence, then Eaton’s success and life choices become clearer. In addition to

this, by reading her life narratives for moments of silence, it becomes apparent that

Eaton’s life narratives do in fact tackle the issue of race. Yet, they do so by

implicating its readers within a cloud of silence that has the power to covertly

communicate racism through the absence of words and the interruption of speech.

In reading the silences of her life narratives, Eaton’s constant discourse

shifting (the moves she makes between dominance and otherness; whiteness and

non-whiteness) comes full circle. While the absence of dialect and linguistic

accents in both Me and Marion allow Eaton to construct a white discourse for

herself, the textual and lived silences she adopts help move her toward a nonwhite

discourse. Having moved between the borders of these discourses Eaton embraces

the mestiza consciousness by “breaking down the paradigms...[and]

straddling...two or more cultures” (Borderlands 102). The use of silence, the

construction of whiteness, the ambivalence of her beauty, all allow her texts to

create “a new mythos—that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way

we see ourselves, and the ways we behave—la mestiza creates a new

consciousness” (Borderlands 102). This new consciousness is one that is

established on the very contradictions apparent in both the words and silences of

her texts.

Silence: A Continuation of Speech

Silence has long been viewed under a negative light, especially as concerns

its role in women’s lives. Within a dominant masculine discourse women have

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long suffered a silencing or interruption of their voices. Even Anzaldúa recalls the

role silence had in her gendered upbringing when she notes, “well-bred girls don’t

answer back” (Borderlands 76). Anzaldúa observes, “having a big mouth,

questioning, carrying tales are all signs of being mal criada. In my culture they

are all words that are derogatory if applied to women” (Borderlands 76). In this

particular example, being a woman meant that you had to be silent and speaking

out would mean that you were a bad woman. These social and gendered views of

silence are the most prevalent whenever we speak about silence but they are not

the only views. Currently, a wave of feminist research has re-visioned the role of

silence in women’s lives.

Various scholars in rhetoric and feminist studies have proposed that silence

be viewed within the spectrum of communication and speech instead of as its

opposite. Anne Gere, for example, insists “Instead of seeing silence as speech’s

opposite, we can conceive of it as a part of speech, located on a continuum that

puts one in dialogue with the other” (206). Silence, thus, becomes merely a

continuation of speech that can be read in the same ways as spoken and written

language. Gere’s theoretical move from silence as opposite to silence as a

continuum of speech is a necessary one due to the long standing Western tradition

of viewing silence and speech as yet another binary. Patti Duncan, in Tell This

Silence, explores “the cultural meanings of speech in the United States” and

argues that although speech is “often conceptualized as the opposite of silence” it

is, in fact, untrue as “the two are not binarily opposed but have most often been

understood through such a framework within Western culture” (3). In addition to

this, Cheryl Glenn observes, in Unspoken, “Often, silencing is an imposition of

weakness upon a normally speaking body; whereas silence can function as a

strategic position of strength” (xix). Like Glenn and Gere, a number of scholars

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agree that speech and silence are not opposites; they are merely complementary

forms of communication. Gere’s theoretical approach to silence opens up the

possibility to “show how silence conveys meaning and interacts with speech”

(207). Glenn, like Gere, attributes meaning to silence when she argues, “that

silence—the unspoken—is a rhetorical art that can be as powerful as the spoken or

written word” (Unspoken 9). In her essay, “Silence: A Rhetorical Art for

Resisting Discipline(s),” Glenn argues that while “some silences are, indeed,

unproductive or passive, not all are” and even when the silence is not a conscious

choice but a “forced position” silence still “carries meaning” (203). Glenn, like

Gere and Duncan, argues that “Silence is not, in itself, necessarily a sign of

powerlessness or emptiness; it is not the same as absence; and silencing for that

matter, is not the same as erasing...silence is an absence with a function”

(“Silence” 203). The function of any silence is dependent on the situation where it

arises. For that reason any study about silence needs to be grounded in an

understanding of the rhetorical situation that surrounds it.

In Winnifred Eaton’s life, and texts, silence takes various forms and comes

from a variety of structures (both textual and lived). Perhaps the biggest act of

silence Eaton takes comes in the form of her identity, an identity that she actively

kept silent about. According to Glenn, “Neither speech nor silence is more

successful, communicative, informative, revealing, or concealing than the other;

rhetorical success depends upon the rhetorical situation” (“Silence” 203). Duncan,

clearly in agreement with Glenn, suggests “both speech and silence must be

examined for their implicit meanings, the assumptions that underlie our

understandings of them, and the complicated association they have for and with

marginalized groups of people in the United States” (3). Taking a cue from Gere,

Glenn, and Duncan, I propose to look at Winnifred Eaton’s life choices and

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narratives through the lens of a rhetorical silence and by situating those choices

and narratives within a cultural and social context. Here, I am interested in seeing

the way different types of silence in different rhetorical situations communicate to

Eaton’s readership (then, and now).

Lived Silences: Unspoken Identity

The cultural climate of the period is vital in situating and analyzing Eaton’s

choice to remain silent about her identity. Eaton wrote most of her texts in the

early twentieth century, a time known to have rigid gender roles and tense racial

politics. The extent of this atmosphere on Eaton’s choices is thus an important

component to any study about her choice to remain silent and hide her true

identity. Cheryl Glenn argues that when “silence is our rhetorical choice, we can

use it purposefully and productively—but when it is not our choice, but someone

else’s for us, it can be insidious, particularly when someone else’s choice for us

comes in the shape of institutional structure” (“Silence” 204). This prompts me to

question the extent to which a restrictive silence could have been imposed onto

Eaton’s body and work.

Early twentieth century authors had various social and cultural restrictions.

This was especially the case for a female writer, and more so when that female

writer was nonwhite. Silence can be read, but it has to be read with an

understanding of the context that surrounds it. Nan Johnson, in Gender and

Rhetorical Space in American Life, establishes that white women were at the top

of the social hierarchy as a direct result of parlor rhetorics (2). In this particular

case, conventional femininity was attached to silence. Johnson observes that in

order to control women and constrain “the political power of women’s discourse”

parlor books “redirected women to rhetorical roles in the home” in order to keep

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them from “their access to the public rhetorical spaces where the fate of the nation

was debated” (2). This was the time when notions of “True Womanhood” were

highly prevalent, and the consequences of violating such an ideal would have been

heavily felt. Johnson demonstrates that “By worshipping the quiet woman,

influential proponents of public opinion such as the Ladies Repository reinscribed

for a postbellum readership a definition of true womanhood that equated silence

with feminine virtue and enthusiastic vocality in women as true womanhood's

opposite” (48). Thus, a woman speaking out would have been automatically

labeled as the opposite of the cultural ideal. Furthermore, the popular conduct

books “participated in the rhetorical repatriation of the woman back to the parlor

by overtly discouraging women from having strong voices, literally and culturally,

and by reminding American readers that if happiness was to be secured, women

should keep to their former place in the home and do it quietly” (Johnson 49). Not

only was a woman’s reputation at stake, national peace was too. Similarly, Jean

Lee Cole reminds us that there were “Competing images of American

womanhood...at the turn of the century” during the time Eaton was writing (43).

Cole concedes that although “More and more women were attending college, and

many of these New Women not only remained single after graduation but pursued

lifelong careers as teachers, journalists, doctors, and lawyers,” most women “did

not wholly reject the ideal of True Womanhood and still desired a quiet married

life with children” (43). Thus, the culture of the time was one where women were

demonized for speaking out and revered for remaining silent. Consequently,

although more women were speaking out within the public domain, there was a

potent culture that imposed a social silence on the women who did speak because

no one would dare listen to a woman who had lost all her virtue the moment she

spoke out.

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Yet even within a culture of female silence, Eaton was able to voice stories

that broke many of the cultural expectations of the time. Cole notes, “it was

certain that at this time, printing stories that spoke about interracial couplings at

all, let alone sympathetically was a risky proposition” (39). Even so, “In her

Eurasian romances, [Eaton] succeeded in describing a potentially threatening,

multiracial society of which both she and her audience were already a part” (41).

Even as she achieved this she managed to come out of it virtually unscathed in the

public eye.

Eaton’s success was founded on her constructed identity, and thus, her

decision to remain silent about the truth was in fact the thing that empowered her

to write what she wrote and get away with it. Cole observes that “By taking on an

exotic pseudonym and writing within the romance genre, Eaton thus gave

comprehensible form to a voice that...was as yet ‘unheard in any land’—the

Orient or the West” (19). Eaton’s constructed identity allowed her novels to be

read as simple love stories from Japan. Cole points out that what readers “saw

instead was a ‘prettily decorated,’ ‘daintily illustrated,’ a ‘fragrant flower’ of a

story” (22). Under such a guise, Eaton’s novels allowed “readers [to] implicitly

recogniz[e] the existence and humanity of [biracial individuals]” (Cole 41).

Although Cole recognizes that Eaton’s literature did not drastically change social

perceptions of biracial individuals, it is at least clear that her novels did paint them

in a softer light than was accustomed at the time.

Choosing to be silent about her true identity gave Eaton the power to write

about controversial topics without any real backlash. Although her novels did not

make drastic changes in society, they did at least begin to pave the way for future

writers. Ouyang notes that Eaton “devised strategies of passing not only to escape

personal and racial persecution but also to achieve authorship in a white-male-

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dominant literary marketplace” (211). Furthermore, according to Ouyang, “still

largely convincing the reading public, Watanna’s Japanese writing persona

continued to allow her to dissimulate as an exemplar of the feminine, simple

aesthetic and authentic ethnographer of Japan” (211). While various scholars,

such as Ouyang, have looked at Eaton’s nom de plume as a type of passing, I look

at it here through the lens of silence: an intentional silence about a lived identity.

In Glenn’s study of Anita Hill, the audience is asked to ponder whether silence

was the only recourse available to Hill at the time when she decided to keep

silence about the workplace sexual harassment. Glenn argues, “In rhetorical

terms, the answer is a definite ‘maybe.’ Kairos—or timeliness and

appropriateness—depends on the rhetorical situation, in this case one constructed

by powerful political (mostly white) males and a nonwhite female and prevalent

belief that any harassed woman is somehow responsible for the behavior”

(“Silence” 268). Similarly, Eaton found herself in a situation where a largely

white audience would have condemned her for speaking out about racism and

interracial relationships. And yet, according to Pat Shea, “Considering that Eaton

sometimes explored such taboo subject matter as interracial dating in her works,

her wide popularity demonstrates the author’s ability to cleverly structure such

themes in a manner which would not offend the white readers who purchased her

books” (20). This ability to write about such taboo topics without offending her

white readership came directly from her silence about her identity.

Without the guise of a simple Japanese girl, Eaton’s work would have been

widely ignored or condemned. Thus, in a world where women were expected to

remain silent, Eaton took on a persona of simplicity that allowed her to speak

volumes about issues in America. Cole demonstrates Eaton’s successful passing

when she writes “Eaton’s romantic novels sat nicely on this shelf of ‘Japonica.’

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Her books, like the porcelain and lacquers that became more and more common in

American homes by the turn of the century, were highly decorative” (25). This

outwardly decorative view of her work, and her continued silence about her

identity, is a rhetorical choice meant to give her power to speak when she would

have otherwise had none. Glenn concedes that “it’s difficult to imagine a rhetoric

of silence, let alone silence as resistant rhetoric” but in fact she argues, “silence

and silencing can be sites of disciplinary resistance” (“Silence” 281). At the time

of her writing career, Eaton’s choice to be silent about her true heritage and

background was a clever way of gaining popularity. Today, her decision to pass

as a Japanese Eurasian is the source of her questioned authenticity. According to

Cole, “Eaton’s choice of Japan has been contrasted, of course, with her sister

Edith’s decision to make China the source of her cultural heritage” (98). Cole

claims:

Eaton had begun her career as Onoto Watanna writing articles for

women’s magazines about Japan and had staked her fortune on the

American fascination with Japanese culture. The environment of

intensifying anti-Japanese sentiment thus threatened her very

livelihood. But rather than retreat from her Japanese identity as it

became a liability, she defended it; in particular, she insisted on the

refinement of Japanese culture and the wholesome quality of

Japanese home life. (49)

Thus, even when it became unpopular to be Japanese, Eaton continued to keep her

silence and used her popularity to defend the Japanese culture.

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Textual Silence: Interruption of Speech

In addition to remaining silent about her true identity, Winnifred Eaton

appropriated a type of rhetorical silence within her life narratives through the use

of an absence of words and a disruption of speech. According to Glenn “when the

delivery of purposeful silence is considered a strategic choice, its presence

resonates with meaning and intention—just like that of the spoken word”

(‘Silence” 282). Silence has the potential to be quite rhetorical when there is a

deliberate use in mind. In Eaton’s life narratives silences work to communicate

information that cannot be spoken and to implicate the reader within an unspoken

knowledge.

In Me, for example, the use of silence is connected to Nora’s relationship

with Roger Hamilton. At one point Hamilton makes note of Nora’s poverty when

he asks her about her clothing. In this particular scene, Hamilton moves closer to

Nora and speaks in a low voice, an act that is suggestive of a secret. All he says to

her is this very simple sentence: “You can have all the fine clothes you want”

(172). Nora merely brushes this off explaining that this isn’t the case with her

salary. Yet, although Nora seems to be naive about this, Eaton and her readers are

not. Eaton relies on an absence of words in order to implicate the reader in the

knowledge of an immoral proposition. While Nora seems ignorant, the reader

understands that Hamilton is aware that Nora cannot afford any good clothes.

Thus, the statement that she can have whatever she wants acts as a proposition for

an illicit sexual affair. The fact that the reader is aware of this implicates the

audience.

Sometime later, Hamilton manipulates a situation so that he is able to buy

Nora very expensive clothes without her knowledge. Taking her to a shop he tells

her everything is on sale and somehow, magically, everything adds up to forty

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dollars (the exact amount she has to spend). Upon arriving home Nora’s best

friend, Lolly, notes that she must be having some kind of affair with Hamilton.

Nora takes the bill and throws it at Lolly, “Everything came to exactly forty

dollars. Lolly looked the bill over carefully; then she put her cigarette in her

mouth, and looked at me. All of a sudden she began to laugh....‘You blessed

infant,’ she cried, ‘I’m in the dust at your feet. One thing’s sure, and I guess

friend Hamilton is wise to that: there’s no one like you in this dull old world of

ours!’” (246). In this particular scene Eaton clearly withholds the fact that

Hamilton has tricked Nora into letting him pay for her clothes. Yet, through

Lolly’s response the reader understands that this is the case. According to

Birchall, “It must be recalled that Winnifred had absolutely no support system in

her early working life...Furthermore, it was a time when the vast majority of

women did normally depend on being ‘kept’ by men in some way or another; their

husbands, fathers, brothers—or their lovers—were their ‘keepers,’ in ways either

sanctioned or unsanctioned” (39-40). Birchall illustrates that during Eaton’s

lifetime it was quite possible to rely on men for financial support, as is highlighted

in the scene with the clothes.

Not only is Eaton’s life narrative filled with silence and absence of

information, the truth regarding her life story is characterized much in the same

way. Birchall has proposes that “It is impossible to know if there really was a Dr.

Manning or a Mr. Hamilton or if they are purely imaginary creations,

superimposed on a backdrop that realistically reflects Winnifred’s own life” (39).

The cloud of silence Eaton surrounds herself with reaches the two most vital

characters in her narrative. Whether Hamilton was a real man whom she had an

intense love for is a question that cannot be answered. Likewise, readers are left

in the dark about Eaton’s and Nora’s true virtue. According to Birchall “It is

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natural to assume that she had love affairs...With her strong attraction to

men…and her independent single life, it is possible she did. Yet it must be

remembered that love affairs generally had consequences in those days, and

Winnifred had a strong moral streak” (40). What seems to be clear is that Eaton

was at least aware that in her portrayal of her younger self, Hamilton was a man

who was trying to “keep” her in unsanctioned ways. And yet, by including the

right information and excluding certain key facts Eaton is able to create a cloud of

naivety around Nora and an implication of illicit knowledge for the reader.

While Me deals with gendered tensions through silence, the absence of

words and information becomes much more racialized in Marion as key

interruptions in speech communicate to the reader the racial tensions that are

mostly left unspoken in Eaton’s life narratives. According to Cole, it is the

presence of racial tensions that have prompted many critics to view Marion as

Eaton’s “ethnic autobiography” because it is here where her “Chinese ancestry

becomes a factor in their relationships with each other, their parents, and potential

romantic partners” (80). Interestingly, many of these racial tensions seem to be

highlighted through a rhetoric of silence. In Marion a primary love story is that

between the young Marion and a young man named Reggie Bertie. After making

their relationship official with Marion’s family, Marion recounts this event:

“When he was going that night, and after he had kissed me good-bye several times

in the dark hall, he said—but as if speaking to himself: ‘Gad! but the governor’s

going to be purple over this.’ The ‘governor’ was his father” (Watanna and Bosse

64-65). In this particular scene, Reggie’s speech is abruptly stopped before we

can find out why his father will be angry about his relationship with Marion.

Marion does not make any note of this, only to imply that he was not talking to her

but to himself and to tell us that the governor is his father. This is only one scene

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where Reggie hints at the disapproval of his family if they knew who Marion

really was. In another scene, shortly after, Reggie explains: “’My word! My

people would take a fit if they thought I married a working girl. I’ve been trying

to break it to them gradually about our engagement. I told them I knew very well

a girl who was the granddaughter of Squire Ascough of Macclesfield, but I haven’t

had the nerve yet to them—to—er—‘” ( 76). In this particular dialogue Reggie’s

speech is abruptly interrupted and stopped. We have dashes that signify his

absence of words. While the unspoken words could very well be concerned with

the family’s poverty (as Marion assumes) but it is just as likely, if not more, that

his silence speaks to a racialized prejudice. When confronted with the idea that he

thinks himself more than her family, Reggie tells Marion “ ‘Oh, I say, Marion,

that’s not fair. I’ve always said your father was a gentleman’” (80). In the above

instances Reggie points to a preference for Marion’s father and his heritage than

for Marion’s heritage from her mother’s side. When he speaks about her to his

family he emphasizes that she is the daughter of Squire Ascough of Macclesfield,

not the product of an interracial marriage.

The fact that he does not tell his family of his engagement is further proof

that she is undesirable for marriage in their view. Additionally, when confronted

with this bias his only defense is that Marion’s father is a gentleman in his eyes

but there is no mention of the rest of the family. Thus, Reggie’s racial prejudice is

once again left unspoken but it is the words that are not said that point most

strongly to the racial tensions of the time. He speaks out in defense of the Eaton

patriarch for being of British blood, but for the rest of the family there is no

defense or honor in his view. The most telling of all is the final conversation

between Reggie and Marion where he proposes the worst possible thing to her.

Reggie tells Marion “’Darling girl, if we were to marry, you cannot imagine the

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mess it would make of my career. My father would never forgive me. Don’t you

see my whole future might be ruined? Be my wife in every way but the silly

ceremony. If you loved me, you would make this sacrifice for me’” (126). When

confronted with such an indecent proposal Marion says, “He was a beast who had

taken from me all my best years, and now—now he made a proposition to me that

was vile!—me, the girl he had asked to be his wife! What had I done, then, that he

should have changed like this to me? I was guilty of no fault, save that of poverty.

I knew that had I been possessed of those things that Reggie prized so much, never

would he have insulted me like this” (126). Yet, beyond the issue of poverty

Marion was also guilty of being biracial and although there are few times when

this is highlighted the unspoken words and silences leave the possibility that in

Reggie’s eyes her mother’s heritage is her greatest flaw. The Eaton patriarch gave

up a life of riches for his wife and children, but Reggie was unable to give up so

much for Marion. The only life he could see for himself was one where Marion

served as his mistress while he maintained appearances for the rest of society and

his family. Whether Reggie loved Marion becomes irrelevant because in the end

he could not get past her racial identity.

Conclusion

Silence, as stated by various scholars, is not the lack of communication

because in certain spaces silence communicates a lot. Various types of silences

surrounded Eaton’s life; both in her lived experience and in the textual spaces she

creates. Much of her career was spent in silence about her true racial identity. Her

autobiography, Me, may have been the single easiest place for Eaton to reveal her

true story since she published it anonymously. However, at the time of its

publication, audiences and critics alike wondered about the true identity of the

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anonymous writer. Perhaps Eaton anticipated that her memoir would receive this

much curiosity and attention. It is also possible that instead of revealing her story

to a dangerously critical audience she made the conscious choice to continue her

silence as an act of empowerment. This is a very powerful decision, and while

many scholars today view this as a problem of courage, authenticity, or identity, in

light of the world she lived in such a decision should also be considered as an

empowered resistance. Rather than be labeled by society, to be looked at through

the white gaze, Eaton constructs her identity based on what suits her at the time.

In her texts, Eaton uses the absence of words and the interruption of speech to

highlight the things that cannot be said in polite society. She exposes the illicit

and dangerous world women had to navigate, especially nonwhite women. She

also highlights the difficult way a biracial identity affected the romantic

relationships of a woman.

In addition to this, by analyzing the silences in her life and in her texts the

complexity of genre is also exposed. An autobiography, characterized by the

truthful story telling of someone’s life, is complicated and problematized as a

number of inconsistencies begin to appear through the silences. Did a man named

Hamilton exist? Did Winnifred have an affair with him? The blending of fact and

fiction, truth and romantic cliché, is yet another factor of the borderland narrative.

In this particular case, it is what I come to view as a border-rhetoric: the mixing of

genre and discourse within the spaces of one text—an act that opens up various

possibilities as we continue to study multiethnic American literature.

CHAPTER 5: BORDER-RHETORICS

When I first heard of the borderland, that in-between space that acts as a

home of multiplicity, I imagined it as a cosmic space where everyone belonged by

virtue of not belonging anywhere else. It was an imaginary place that only those

who moved between various discourses could begin to comprehend. It wasn’t

until I read Winnifred Eaton’s autobiography Me: A Book of Remembrance that it

occurred to me that perhaps the borderland might articulate itself in the textual

spaces of a book. The ways in which Eaton’s Nora spoke and acted in

contradictions interested me. Those critics who had read Me didn’t know what to

do with a text that mixed autobiography and fiction. In addition to this, the book

also incorporated the stylistic features of the coming of age and romance story

archetypes. It occurred to me then that it was the form and structure of Eaton’s

writing that was in and of itself a textual manifestation of the borderland. Thus, I

came to see this simple truth: the borderland is not just an imaginary space; it is a

rhetorical form that exists in the writings of those from the borderland. I came to

understand that the rhetoric of the borderland was defined by the shifting genres

and styles that matched the content of borderland narratives.

For me, Eaton’s text was a part of the borderland because it existed within a

harmonious contradiction. I could see the ways in which Eaton’s words aligned

her with whiteness, just as I could see the way the absence of certain phrases and

words also communicated a complex nonwhite identity. Many of her most

racially charged remarks sounded both sarcastic and serious. The way in which

men seemed to fall at her feet and endanger her wellbeing was an interesting

contradiction as well. Thus, as I read Eaton’s life narrative I began to see that in

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this simple, straightforward text there were a lot of interesting shifts and

contradictions.

Where the borderland narrative reveals these constant shifts in discourse

and loyalty, the rhetoric of the borderland reveals this same nature within the

structure and form of the narrative. This is most evident in the works I’ve

analyzed by Winnifred Eaton, as well as other contemporary writers such as

Maxine Hong Kingston and Gloria Anzaldúa. In each case, the writers display a

shifting of style and genre. They move with care and ease from the fictional or

mythological to the factual. Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, for example, is

“hailed by critics as an exemplar of Asian American literature’s subversive nature

as well as an emblematic feminist Bildungsroman” (Lee 19). In addition, Woman

Warrior is also praised for its “radical departure from the traditionally linear

autobiography narrative structure” (Lee 19). Those familiar with this text have

undoubtedly noticed that this particular autobiography blends cultural narratives

and myths that could easily be categorized as “fictional.” Similarly, Gloria

Anzaldúa’s Borderlands is considered an autobiographical work famously known

to blend Spanish and English, poetry, memory, theory and cultural myth. Written

nearly a century earlier, Winnifred Eaton’s autobiographical text, Me: A Book of

Remembrance displays the same type of blurring and blending of genre that has

made the texts by Kingston and Anzaldúa groundbreaking. The blurred

conventions of genre in these autobiographical texts act as what Mary Louise Pratt

names autoethnographic expression and Sidonie Smith calls autobiographical

manifestos. For both Pratt and Smith this is a rhetorical act of rebellion with the

purpose of revealing past transgressions and gaining cultural acceptance. As I

have noted in the previous chapters, Eaton’s life narrative captures a desire to

belong to multiple subject positions. Rather than be simplified as one thing,

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Eaton’s problematizes what it means to be white, what it means to Eurasian, and

what it means to be woman through her skillful use of different discourses.

The fluid movement between multiple discourses in a text defines what I

have come to call the border-rhetorics. Sometimes the moves are conscious, and

other times they are unconscious. Although border-rhetorics were born out of the

need for inclusion, they have evolved since then. The mixture of genres and styles

may be a natural result of the hybrid writer as a result of the different traditions

they are exposed to by their multiple cultural positions. Gloria Anzaldúa asserts

that

We all of us find ourselves in the position of being simultaneously

insider/outsider. The Spanish word ‘nosotras’ means ‘us.’ In

theorizing insider/outsider I write the word with a slash between nos

(us) and otras (others) [nos/otras]. Today the division between the

majority of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is still intact. This country does not want

to acknowledge its walls or limits, the places some people are

stopped or stop themselves, the lines they aren’t allowed to cross.

Hopefully sometime in the future we may become nosotras without

the slash. (Keating and Anzaldúa 254)

For Anzaldúa, what originally began as a colonized individual has since evolved

into a hybrid citizen of multiple cultural stand-points. There is no getting rid of

the “nos” (the dominant subject) without fracturing the self. Gloria Anzaldúa

summarizes her take on the evolution of the colonized individual in the United

States in this way:

I want to speak of the nos/otras concept. It used to be that there was

a “them” and an “us.” We were over here; we were the “other” with

other lives and the “nos” was the subject, the white man. There was

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a very clear distinction. But as the decades have gone by, we—the

colonized, the Chicanos, the blacks, the Natives in this country—

have been reared in this frame of reference, in this field. All of our

education, all of our ideas come from this frame of reference. We’re

complicitous because we’re in such close proximity and intimacy

with the other. Now “us” and “them” are interchangeable. Now

there’s no such thing as an “other.” The other is in you, the other is

in me... I can’t disown the white tradition, the Euro-American

tradition, any more than I can the Mexican, the Latino, or the Native,

because they’re all in me. (“Toward” 8)

In Spanish the word “nos” is a pronoun that translates into “us” or “we.” “Otras”

is the feminine version of “others” or “them.” Apart the two words can roughly be

translated as “us” and “them” but put together “nosotras” simply means us, a more

comprehensive “us” than “nos” by itself: a symbolic “we.” The Nos/Otras

complex represents the various issues within border-rhetorics. On the one hand

this is a complete individual that is made up of multiple discourse communities

(one dominant and one outlier), and on the other hand you have a tension between

these two discourses as they conduct situational shifts. The harmony between the

multiple discourses comes from the individual accepting the multiplicity of her

identity; the tension comes from the larger social environments which privilege

one discourse over the other and expect a singular primary discourse.

According to Gloria Anzaldúa there are alternate ways of writing, and that

“alternate way is colored by the Western frame of everything. What I’m trying to

present to you is another way of ordering, another way of composing, another

rhetoric; but it is only partly new. Most of it is cast in the Western tradition,

because that’s all that I was immersed in” (“Toward” 13). Anzaldúa’s inability to

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break away from the dominant (Western) discourse is a result of being within the

larger scope of Nosotras. Just as you cannot take away the marginal from the

dominant you can’t take away the dominant form the marginal because it is

discourse embedded within her identity. But just because one is immersed in

Western modes of writing does not mean that one has to be limited by them either.

To Anzaldúa the road towards change comes in the symbolic form of the Trojan

Burra, where the multicultural writer gift-wraps difference within the norm. Thus,

what appears to be one thing (one single genre) becomes another as you begin to

uncover the text. This is exactly what Anzaldúa’s text does. Anzaldúa’s book

Borderlands/La Frontera is in itself a creation and example of the borderland

space and the mixed genre that characterizes border-rhetorics. Anzaldúa’s text is

part autobiography, part theory, part poetry, and part history. It moves between

the static genres we know to create a fluid text that transforms into and out of each

genre. Andrea Lunsford asserts:

In turn, living in and rendering such contradictions and

transformation [of the new mestiza] calls for a new kind of writing

style. In Anzaldúa’s case, this means a rich mixture of genres—she

shifts from poetry to reportorial prose to autobiographical stream of

consciousness to incantatory mythic chants to sketches and graphs—

and back again, weaving images and words from her multiple selves

and from many others into a kind of tapestry or patchwork quilt of

language. (“Toward” 2)

Lunsford calls it a “new writing style,” but Anzaldúa is not the first to write in

such a form, nor will she be the last. Anzaldúa’s work was an obvious mixture of

theory, autobiography, and many other genres of writing, yet other multicultural

writers have done this as well (although perhaps not as openly or obviously).

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Writers like Maxine Hong Kingston (autobiography-myth-memoir), Sandra

Cisneros (fiction-poetry-autobiography-theory), Kao Kalia Yang (autobiography-

myth-memoir), bell hooks (theory-autobiography), and of course Winnifred Eaton

(autobiography-biography-fiction) have all used shifting genres within the form

and structure of their writings.

The Nos/Otras complex thus reveals two key features of border-rhetorics.

The first is that the multiethnic subject, characterized by the togetherness of

Nosotras, represents the inevitable mixing of both dominant and non-dominant

primary discourses within one text. The blurring of these two discourses is both a

natural style as well as a conscious rhetorical choice meant to reveal the

transgressions against the multiethnic identity and a call for its acceptance in the

larger social sphere. This is precisely what I point to in my discussion about a

constructed white discourse (chapter 3) and the use of silence as a rhetoric of race

(chapter 5). In those two instances we see a blending of dominant and marginal

discourses within the scope of a single text. The second feature is the tension

between the dominant and non-dominant discourse that is characterized by the

nos/otras schism. This feature is most evident in my discussion about beauty

where I explained the ways a body (and an identity) is constantly shifting between

associations with whiteness and problematic association with otherness viewed

through a lens of whiteness. This particular relationship is much more

problematic, and at times dangerous, while the shift between the constructed white

discourse and the silent rhetoric of race is far more harmonious and organic.

Nosotras: Blurred Genre

Between 1915-1916 Eaton wrote her only autobiographical works: Me: A

Book of Remembrance and Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model. Both these

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texts have problematized our understanding of autobiography and life narrative

because they are anchored by the format of the fictional tale. In the introduction to

Me, Jean Webster tells readers that this book “is pure reporting; the author has not

branched out into any byways of style, but has merely told in the simplest

language possible what she actually remembered” (W. Eaton 1). Webster assures

readers that what they are about to embark on is a narrative of pure fact, and based

completely on memory, with the exception of some names and places that were

changed for the protection of certain identities. However, in the afterword to Me,

Linda Trinh Moser tells us otherwise as she points out that “Despite the

biographical similarities, the work contains stylistic elements which make readers

question its veracity. The text is not ‘pure reporting’...[and] the narrative

combines two popular literary genres: the rags-to-riches story and the romance”

(W. Eaton 361). Not only does Me rely on stylistic elements of other genres, but

many of the “facts” Eaton reports are today called “autobiographical fictions” by

her granddaughter Diana Birchall in the biographical work Onoto Watanna: The

Story of Winnifred Eaton. In Birchall’s work there are nearly three chapters

dedicated to unraveling the truths and fictions in the autobiography Me. Birchall

notes, “Winnifred, at her most clear and convincing in portraying her own

character, was not so successful with Mr. Hamilton. Perhaps he was not based on

reality after all but was a fictional ‘fairy godfather’ partly inspired by Jean

Webster’s book Daddy-Long-Legs, which Winnifred deeply admired” (53).

Hamilton plays a key role in Eaton’s story, and the fact that his existence is

doubtful reveals the frustration of many readers who simply do not know what to

make of Eaton’s work. Still, as noted by Birchall, many facts can be corroborated

with newspaper clippings and other primary documents even though Eaton’s flair

for the dramatic make it hard to distinguish reality from fantasy.

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Various autobiographical fictions Eaton included in Me revolve around her

pseudo-writer-identity. Eaton’s is best described as “a half-English, half-Chinese

writer born in French-speaking Canada and active in the United States and western

Canada during the first half of the twentieth century” (Cole 1). This background is

further complicated because as she began her literary career in the United States,

she constructed her writerly self as a Japanese Eurasian named Onoto Watanna,

writing several successful “Japanese” romances. Thus for most of her career as a

young author, Eaton was believed to be Japanese Eurasian rather than what she

really was: Chinese Eurasian. In her autobiography Eaton has the opportunity to

come clean; in fact by this time there is a widespread Japanese resentment. Me

was published anonymously giving her even further clearance to speak “honestly.”

Yet, Eaton doesn’t exactly lie in her autobiography; instead she creatively bends

the truth. In the first page of her memoir Eaton clearly establishes her “otherness”

when she reveals that her mother is “a native of a far-distant land” (3). Although

she clearly avoids specifying which far-distant land, she nevertheless reveals this

aspect of her identity, even as she carefully controls what information her

audience receives. Another small autobiographical fiction is her age. In Me she

states she was a “girl of seventeen” leaving for Jamaica “with exactly ten dollars

in her purse” (4). However, Diana Birchall notes that “Winnifred was not

seventeen when she so daringly left her home, but twenty; however, seventeen has

more éclat” (27). Furthermore, Birchall claims that Hamilton, “Nora’s chief

lover…may have been a fictional construct, superimposed to give the book a

romantic plot; or perhaps she was pouring out the story of a genuine early passion”

(50). In addition to this, various other interviews conducted at the time place her

in different locations and present new autobiographical fictions not included in

Me.

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The blurred line between fact and fiction is unsettling within Eaton’s text

due to our rigid understanding of autobiography as a static genre, a genre that is

often mischaracterized as a truthful retelling of someone’s life. For many readers,

a genre is a static set of conventions but this is not the case—not about genre in

general or autobiography in particular. According to Carolyn Miller in “Genre as

Social Action,” “Genre refers to a conventional category of discourse based in

larger-scale typification of rhetorical action; as action, it acquires meaning from

situation and from the social context in which that situation arose” (163).

According to Deborah Dean, in Genre Theory, “genres represent all sorts of

interactions (some textual and some not), are defined more by situation than form,

are both dynamic and flexible, and are more an explanation of social interaction

than a classification system” (9). For both Miller and Dean genres are rhetorical

practices dependent on the situation within a society. Consequently, genres are

fluid social acts capable of changing when the situation calls upon it.

However, although genre theory now views traditional genres as fluid

discourse, the factual inconsistencies, or rather autobiographical fictions, in

Eaton’s Me are the reason why the text is generally difficult to accept as an

authentic autobiography. In “The Poetics of Liminality and Misidentification”

Katherine Hyunmi Lee states: “Present-day critics generally characterize the text

[Me] and its author [Eaton] as little more than literary novelties” (18). Lee

summarizes: “Amy Ling wryly notes that the ‘boundary between fact and fiction

[in Me] is not at all clear’…while James Doyle derides Eaton for ‘perpetuat[ing]

an artificial and ethnically false legend about herself’” (18). However, whether

there are fictions within an autobiography should not be enough cause to disregard

it as an authentic text, especially when we view autobiography as a fluid act of

meaning making rather than as a static genre.

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In the same way that Miller and Dean advocate for genre to be viewed as a

discourse, Julie Rak in Negotiated Memory advocates for a similar move within

autobiography studies. According to Rak, “Autobiography must be thought of as a

discourse rather than as a genre and as a discourse that is sustained by the

trappings of identification that have underwritten what the self is and how it has

been seen in much of the Western world” (ix). More importantly, Rak argues that

“when autobiographical discourse is used by writers or speakers who do not have

access to the privileges of autobiographical identity…then the discourse changes

as it is used, even as it brings certain advantages” (ix). Rak contends that people

utilizing autobiography from the margins will inevitably change the conventions

of the genre as it molds to the particular situation of the writer. For Winnifred

Eaton this situation was racially tense and complicated. During the time in which

Eaton was writing there was a lot of anti-Chinese rhetoric known as “sinophobia.”

Thus, pretending to be Japanese was a commercially sound and safe move. In

Reading Autobiography Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson propose that life writing

is not a “single unitary genre or form” but instead is “the historically situated

practices of self-representation [that] may take many guises as narrators

selectively engage their lived experience and situate their social identities through

personal storytelling” (18). If viewed from the perspective of self-representation,

then Winnifred Eaton’s autobiography is as true as any. Even with Eaton’s flair

for the dramatic, an autobiography is never clear unbiased fact. Smith and Watson

argue that “Life writing and the novel share features we ascribe to fictional

writing: plot, dialogue, setting, characterization, and so on” (9-10). Consequently,

the autobiographical fictions Eaton includes do not invalidate the authenticity of

the text but rather serve an entirely different and rhetorical purpose.

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The autobiographical fictions Birchall refers to serve to embed the narrative

with familiar archetypes of popular American genres such as the romance

(exemplified by the Hamilton love story) and the bildungsroman (exemplified by

Nora’s quest to become an author). This is where the notion of autoethnographic

expression serves a purpose in understanding border-rhetorics. In fact, a probably

reason for the existence of border-rhetorics might simply be a survival mechanism

we have inherited from a painful past of cultural collisions. In the beginning

stages of this cultural collision—the colonization of what we now know as the

United States of America—there were various ways that the dominant culture

dealt with the existing Natives. At times this was peaceful, other times violent,

and often the cultural colonization was achieved through the use of discourse and

narrative to construct popular stereotypes that served to dehumanize Natives. Just

as I have argued that narratives were used to construct notions of beauty, history

has shown us that early European travelers in America used their pen and paper to

construct a false reality imposed on the bodies of Natives through narrative. Mary

Louis Pratt illustrates this through the use of travel writing. In Imperial Eyes, Pratt

argues that the use of travel writing helped to create the Western identity in

opposition to the Other. Thus the construction of a myth that characterized Native

Americans as savage allowed the European settlers to construct themselves as

civilized. The use of ethnographic texts, embedded with racist stereotypes crafted

the white male as the dominant identity and all others as the undesirable,

marginalized groups. Pratt notes that the “initial ethnographic gesture is the one

that homogenizes the people to be subjected, that is, produced as subjects, into a

collective they” (62). Thus, rather than being an objective scientific study, early

ethnographies promoted the reification of hegemonic ideals in order to construct

the Western culture as dominant. One can only know the Western man as

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civilized and superior by knowing that his opposite, the Other, the Oriental, is a

savage and inferior being. Thus, the move towards what we now call

autoethnography came as a response to these misrepresentations constructed by a

white discourse. When the Western colonizer names a colonized group and

constructs a stereotypical identity of the Other, he controls the image and

definition that is later distributed and consumed by the masses. Autoethnography

is the response to this act whereby a person that has been defined by the dominant

decides to re-define his/her own self by constructing new narratives. Reed-

Danahay states,

One of the main characteristics of an autoethnographic perspective is

that the autoethnographer is a boundary-crosser, and the role can be

characterized as that of a dual identity...The notion of

autoethnography foregrounds the multiple nature of selfhood and

opens up new ways of writing about social life. A dualistic view of

the autoethnographer may be better substituted with one stressing

multiple, shifting identities. (3)

This exact definition fits with the inhabitants of the borderland and by extension

the borderland narrative. It is the shifting of identities, or cultural standpoints, that

allows a writer to “open up new ways of writing” in order to resist and reconstruct

the stereotypical labels and thus re-present him/herself. Pratt uses the term

autoethnographic expression to reference “instances in which colonized subjects

undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s terms”

(9). In essence, autoethnographic expression means that a writer in the margins of

society has to appropriate or mimic dominant models in order to reach the

dominant audience successfully. This is exactly what Eaton does when she relies

a newly constructed white discourse that positions her as a white narrator. By

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appropriating whiteness for herself Eaton reaches a wider audience and begin to

reconstruct how identity is understood.

For Eaton the use of popular archetypes such as the romance and the

coming-of-age plots can be viewed as a rhetorical move meant to reach a white

female audience in the early nineteenth century. Jean Lee Cole, for example,

claims that “Eaton’s ‘real’ story, had she tried to tell it…would have been difficult

for most Americans to swallow…By taking on an exotic pseudonym and writing

within the romance genre, Eaton thus gave a comprehensible form to a voice

that…was as yet ‘unheard in any land’” (19). Thus, the use of popular genres in

her autobiography can be viewed as a natural discourse shift but also as a

rhetorical tactic used to reach the dominant white audience of the time. In

ReWriting White, Todd Vogel touches on the reasons for the border-rhetoric when

he states:

African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese Americans also

transcended the meaning denoted by the language. These people

performed their words; they acted out their messages in a manner

that demonstrated command of society’s cultural capital. They

exhibited their ability to create or interpret society’s aesthetic codes

with the choices they made about the structure of their essays, the

forum for their orations, the very identity they crafted as racialized

outliers in society. (1)

People who did not have the stage to speak freely had to conceive of new ways to

get their voices heard. Vogel also argues that the “focus on language as cultural

competence grounds the understanding of how power works in society. ‘Standard‘

language is, after all, the dialect of the group with power…One path of struggle

for marginalized people is to, at once, master ‘standard‘ English even while

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asserting their own value and priorities” (5-6). This is the key aspect of border-

rhetorics, as this form of writing takes the standard, or dominant, canon/model and

adopts it to the writer’s own set of valuable differences. In Anzaldúa’s case we see

a mixture of language (Spanish/English; Theory/Poetics/Life Narrative).

Similarly, in stories like that of Kao Kalia Yang and Maxine Hong Kingston we

see memoirs that embed real life stories (memories) with cultural myths

seamlessly. In Eaton’s case we see a mixture of discourse and a blending of fact

and fiction. In all of these examples women writers have taken the dominant

model of genre and transformed it to fit and blend in with their cultural difference.

Sidonie Smith addresses the value of such rhetorics in her essay “The

Autobiographical Manifesto” which explains, “formerly ‘subject’ peoples begin to

resist the totalizing definitional politics of traditional autobiographical practice”

(186). For Smith the autobiography crafted by the “racialized outliers” that Vogel

mentions transforms the genre of autobiography into that of the manifesto. Smith

suggests that a manifesto “is a proof, a piece of evidence, a public declaration or

proclamation…for the purpose of making known past actions, and explaining the

reasons or motives for actions announced forthcoming” (189). In Eaton’s case, as

well as Kingston’s and Anzaldúa’s, the actions forthcoming are the demand for

acceptance and inclusion. This is best exemplified by Vogel’s commentary on

Eaton’s older sister: Edith Eaton. In discussing Edith Eaton’s “reverse passing”

(the act of passing for nonwhite as opposed to passing for white) one extremely

similar to Winnifred Eaton’s own reverse passing, Vogel claims that Edith Eaton

uses this strategy convince her white audience that “The mix between the two

[races], a hybrid she called ‘Eurasian,’ combined the best from mainstream

American culture and the ancient culture of China. In this way, she demonstrated

that the Chinese were not heathens, unable to assimilate” (105). This echoes

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Winnifred Eaton’s work as her romances, essays, and short stories tend to revolve

around racially mixed romances and Eurasian characters that the audience cannot

help but fall in love with. Yet, it is Eaton’s older sister Edith Maude Eaton who is

highly respected for using her work as a platform to fight against racism, while

Winnifred Eaton’s work is viewed in a far less complimentary light. According

to David Shih in “The Seduction of Origins,” “Over the past decade, Asian

American literary criticism has seen fit to extend this metaphor [of Edith Eaton’s

stories as her progeny] by installing her as the grand maternal figure of all Asian

American letters” (48). Shih summarizes scholarly criticism of Edith Eaton by

noting “Elizabeth Ammons, for instance, has Sui Sin Far ‘anticipating her spiritual

great granddaughter Maxine Hong Kingston’” and recalling that “Annette White-

Parks calls [Edith Eaton] the ‘foremother to the women writers of Chinese

ancestry…to whom such contemporary writers as Maxine Hong Kingston and

Amy Tan look for roots’” (48). Of course, the great irony is that Edith Eaton’s

championing work was written in the same manner, with a similar guise, as her

younger sister Winnifred Eaton. Neither Eaton sister had ever visited Japan or

China; both sisters researched the cultures they were writing about, and both

sisters, used an Orientalized pen name to publish their work. Thus, both Eaton

sisters take part in what Vogel names “reverse passing,” an attempt to create a

more humane and accepting image of Asian Americans. While the fiction that

both Eaton sisters wrote tends to focus on the extreme other—the Chinese

immigrant or the Japanese citizen—both women wrote autobiographical pieces

that focused on the Eurasian in America. Although Winnifred Eaton’s Me does

not approach racism and racial tensions directly, she indirectly reveals various

plights of the multiethnic individual.

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Implications

The work I begin here is merely a starting point for re-visioning the

autobiographical work of multiethnic women in the United States. The borderland

is not just an imaginary place; it is also a theoretical standpoint. I have briefly

mentioned the work of Maxine Hong Kingston and Kao Kalia Yang as other

examples of the borderland rhetoric but the truth is that I believe there are far more

borderland narratives and borderland rhetorics. In this project I made the

conscious choice to focus on women’s autobiographical narratives because I

believe fictional narratives and men’s narratives are likely filled with their own set

of interesting and complex issues. Masculine discourse and fictional narrative are

another set of borderland aspects worth exploring. For too long the field of

literature has stood by simplistic definitions and binaries that strip multiethnic

narratives of their complexity, contradiction, and richness. It is difficult to look at

a text that constantly contradicts itself and moves between discourse, identity, and

genre, but the work is worth the prize—a prize that entails a richly complicated

and open-ended understanding of identities and narratives defined by multiplicity.

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Miriam Lizette Fernandez

April 17, 2013