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Susan Koshy is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University
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Sexual Naturalization

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments...............................................................................................................ixIntroduction..................................................................................................................1PART ONE | SEXUAL ORIENTS AND THE AMERICAN NATIONAL IMAGINARY1. Mimic Modernity: "Madame Butterfly" and the Erotics of Informal Empire.....................................................292. Eugenic Romances of American Nationhood....................................................................................50PART TWO | ENGENDERING THE HYBRID NATION3. Unincorporated Territories of Desire: Hypercorporeality and Miscegenation in Carlos Bulosan's Writings.....................914. Sex Acts as Assimilation Acts: Female Power and Passing in Bharati Mukherjee's Wife and Jasmine............................132Notes.........................................................................................................................163Bibliography..................................................................................................................187Index.........................................................................................................................203

Chapter One

Orientalism is better grasped as a set of constraints upon and limitations of thought than it is simply as a positive doctrine. -Edward W. Said, Orientalism

John Luther Long's short story "Madame Butterfly" (1898) was the first American incarnation of a white-Asian interracial romance that originated with Frenchman Pierre Loti's popular travelogue, Madame Chrysanthemum (1887). Long's story was subsequently adapted for stage by David Belasco (1900), revised repeatedly in early productions of Giacomo Puccini's opera Madam Butterfly (1904-6), and then revived in novels and pop musicals such as The World of Suzie Wong (1957) and Miss Saigon (1989). Indeed, such was its ubiquity as a cultural script that David Henry Hwang felt compelled to write a "deconstructivist Madame Butterfly" to counter the Orientalist myths he felt it perpetuated. Thus, over the course of a century, the Butterfly story emerged as a potent and fiercely contested cultural referent, once praised lavishly for its sympathetic rendering of its Japanese heroine but later satirized by writers like Hwang as an imperialist fantasy of the hyperfeminine Asian woman.

In the evolution of the Madame Butterfly narrative, Long's tale gradually faded from public consciousness while the Puccini version emerged as the Madame Butterfly story, erasing the memory of all its French and American predecessors.

But before Long's story achieved international popularity through Puccini's opera, it was subjected to repeated revisions by Belasco and Puccini. The frequency and nature of these changes point to the unsettling critique of U.S. racial nationalism and imperialism contained in the original story, which subsequent revisions sought incessantly to ameliorate. The opera's 1904 premiere at La Scala in Milan (in which the libretto followed Long's story very closely) turned out to be a spectacular fiasco. The disastrous reception prompted numerous alterations over the next two years, several times for Italian audiences starting with the Brescia performance in 1904 and then again for French audiences in the Paris premiere of 1906. The triumphant success of the revised Paris version sealed its status as the definitive script of Madam Butterfly.

The powerful critique of U.S. imperialism distinguished John Luther Long's "Madame Butterfly" from earlier and later versions of the story. Long Americanized the French version of the interracial romance by recasting it through discourses of American Orientalism. These discourses, in turn, circumscribed the scope of his political critique. While scholars have suggested that Long's "Madame Butterfly" was an adaptation of Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysanthemum, Long attributed his inspiration to a true story about a Japanese geisha told to him by his sister Jane Correl, the wife of a missionary in Japan. It appears likely that both sources contributed to the final shape of Long's "Madame Butterfly," but the discursive framework of Correl's account allowed Long to Americanize the story of a treaty-port liaison. Not only does Long substitute an American sailor-pointedly named Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton-for the Frenchman in Loti's autobiographical account, but he uses the story of the abandoned Japanese geisha and her child to explore how race, sex, gender, and class constitute the American national imaginary both in the domestic context of debates about immigration and in the geopolitical context of debates about American imperialism.

Appearing at the height of the Japonisme vogue in Europe, and feeding on the insatiable Western curiosity about Japan by offering the immediacy of a first-person account of the newly opened Oriental country, Loti's Madame Chrysanthemum gained an enormous following. Loti's travelogue provided a detailed account of an ostensibly exotic theme-his temporary marriage to a young Japanese woman. Temporary marriages like Loti's, between foreign men and Japanese women, were quite common in Japanese treaty ports at that time; the sexual arrangement was governed by Japanese customary law, whereby the man was expected to provide the woman with a house and payment in exchange for sexual services and housekeeping, and the marriage was considered to be dissolved when the man abandoned the woman. According to customary practice, the children of such unions belonged to the father, if he wished to claim them.

Madame Chrysanthemum was published when Loti had already established his reputation as a celebrated author of fiction and nonfiction in exotic settings, many of which focused on his relationships with Asian women. These accounts combined close descriptions of the locale with sensual descriptions of his sexual adventures. However, Madame Chrysanthemum-named after the Japanese geisha he marries while in Japan-is a conspicuously unromantic and unexotic account and represents a marked departure from his other romances. In Madame Chrysanthemum, the absence of romance and the lack of exoticism are inscribed within the writer's hostile encounter with Japanese modernity, which he reads as a sign of the parodic, the artificial, and the ugly. Loti, like many other Western writers before and after him, showed a strong preference for an idealized and premodern Japan rather than the Westernizing Japan. In Loti, the pointed antipathy toward Japanese modernity is expressed through his emphasis on the physical unattractiveness of the Japanese woman, her imperviousness to his presence, and the tedium of their sexual arrangement. Their relationship seldom escapes the frame of the coldly economic, and even the rare moments of sentiment or sexual interest depicted in the story are rapidly deflated. For instance, at the conclusion, in a rare mood of regret and sentimentality, the narrator bids farewell to Chrysanthemum and casts a nostalgic, lingering glance at her still-prostate form framed in a ceremonial bow in the doorway. A few moments later, however, when he hurries back to retrieve a forgotten item, he discovers Chrysanthemum in the bedroom, wholly absorbed in biting and testing the gold coins he had left her as payment. The chastened Frenchman gathers his bag and bids a second farewell to his former wife, noting wryly the outwardly submissive appearance of the decorously prostrate young woman.

Despite Long's denial of literary indebtedness to Loti's book, critics point to certain structural resemblances in arguing for their intertextuality. They note the appearance in both texts of a sailor buddy who recommends the geisha as a recreation to the main character and references to certain common dates.

But while there are similarities of plot between the two stories, Long's story reinscribes the Frenchman's narrative within the framework of American Orientalism. He rewrites Loti's sardonic port-of-call liaison between two distant partners as a tragic story about the unrequited love of a Japanese geisha. Long's story centers on a Japanese woman, called Cho-Cho-San or Butterfly in his tale, who enters into a temporary marriage with a callous American sailor, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton. He urges her to convert to Christianity and to Americanize and promises to return after a brief period to take her to the United States. She waits for his return and gives birth to a blonde, blue-eyed baby in his absence. During this time, a wealthy Japanese man, Yamadori, proposes to her, but she rejects him, believing herself bound to Pinkerton in an "American marriage." After a few years, Pinkerton returns accompanied by Adelaide, the white American woman he married after leaving Japan. Pinkerton dispatches Adelaide to inspect and claim the child. Satisfied that the child looks white, Adelaide arranges to take him back with her to the United States. Cho-Cho-San learns of Pinkerton's remarriage and attempts suicide. After she plunges the knife into her breast, she changes her mind and decides to live for her child instead. When Adelaide arrives to pick up the child the following day, she finds the house empty.

Long replaces the opaque peripheral character of the geisha, the object of Loti's denigration, with the courageous Cho-Cho-San, driven by poverty and family obligations into selling herself into marriage with a barbarian, only to discover herself helplessly in love with him. The emphasis in Long's story is on Cho-Cho-San's victimization by Japanese customary law and the privileges extended through it to Americans in Japan, consequent upon the "opening" of Japan. By setting the action in a treaty port and centering it on a geisha's tragic predicament, Long highlights the double jeopardy of Japanese femininity caught between Japanese patriarchy and American racism. From Loti to Long, the geisha goes from being the unknowable object to the suffering subject in the asymmetries of power produced by Japanese entry into modernity. Long's narrative is attentive to the powerlessness of the Japanese woman in these shifting geopolitical alignments and explores tentatively the prospects for her empowerment.

Long's story of white-Asian miscegenation offers a "cognitive and libidinal map of U.S. geopolitics" because it reveals the strains in ideologies of American democracy created by American expansion in Asia and Asian immigration to the United States. As I demonstrated in the introduction, the white man-Asian woman dyad emerged from a history of interracial intimacy in which the Asian woman was identified with forms of extraterritorial desire that are excluded from the moral order of marriage and nationhood. Long's story invokes this repressed history of illicit interracial intimacy but does so to insist upon the links between the nation and its extraterritorial spaces. "Madame Butterfly" emphasizes the need to recognize the mutually constitutive nature of these two spaces. Long also highlights the inextricable connections between American expansionism and Asian immigration to the United States by showing that Cho-Cho-San's desire to emigrate is the effect of Pinkerton's presence in her country. Thus, he transforms the story of an overseas sexual adventure into a critique against nativism at home and imperialism abroad. In this respect, his story differs markedly from Loti's love story, which centers on a financed sexual arrangement that literally and figuratively begins and ends in Japan.

Long allegorizes the contradictions of informal empire through the moral crisis it creates within the bourgeois domestic order. Eva Saks observes that the outlawing of miscegenation created a crisis in representation because it had the effect of inverting traditional moral categories: "While punishing interracial fornication more severely than intraracial fornication, it punished interracial marriage most severely." In the case of relationships between white men and Asian women overseas, this moral hypocrisy was reproduced through a territorial logic-what happened over there could be condoned and forgotten because it lay outside the moral and legal order that operated within the U.S. nation. It is precisely this moral contradiction contained within the thesis of extraterritoriality that John Luther Long critiques in "Madame Butterfly." Long's story suggests that the sexual license associated with the extraterritorial location of the Asian woman can be domesticated and normalized through marriage and assimilation.

By using the treaty port as a setting for his story of miscegenous love, Long revealed the production of American imperial nationality along the sea routes that bound the informal overseas empire to the continental United States. Like D. W. Griffith's later film, Broken Blossoms (1919), Long's story uses the Asian treaty port as a setting for renegotiating the meanings of American masculinity and nationhood in the shift from territorial nationhood to informal empire. The theme of informal empire is integral to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature but has until recently received little critical attention. In his account of the "privileged settings" of American fiction, Philip Fisher lists the wilderness, the homestead, and the city as the principal spaces where the meanings of American culture are explored. He explains that "privileged settings" are not necessarily the spaces where the key events take place, but, "instead, they are the ideal and simplified vanishing points toward which lines of sight and projects of every kind converge.... [F]or America, these settings have had an unusual force, because of the need for vanishing points and guiding patterns during the rapid construction of the culture." Fisher's list of settings, while illuminating, restricts the meanings of Americanness to its continental boundaries and thus fails to recognize the formative influence of overseas empire in producing American national culture and ideology. The invisibility of extraterritorial locations such as the treaty port as a "privileged setting" can be seen as symptomatic of the exceptionality of imperialism and the erasure of Asia in accounts of the construction of American culture.

Asia formed a critical discursive site for framing the debates about imperialism and immigration in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century when Long was writing his fiction. The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 marked the first time in the history of the United States that racial identity was used as a basis for excluding immigrants and denying them naturalization. After the act's passage, the anti-Oriental movement, which had its base among the white working class on the West Coast, directed its efforts to excluding Japanese immigrants who had begun entering the country in larger numbers to replace the excluded Chinese workers. Racial anxiety around the Japanese presence harnessed earlier Yellow Peril discourses mobilized against the Chinese, highlighting Asiatic unassimilability, depravity, and heathen practices; it also tapped into proimperialist discourses endorsing American expansionism in Asia and depicting Japanese imperialism in the region as menacing and dangerous. The term informal empire, which gained currency at this time, designated the newness of American imperialism and articulated the strategic advantage of neocolonialism as a uniquely American mode of power destined to supersede old-world European colonialism. Thus, the growing Japanese population within the U.S. and Japanese imperial ambitions in Asia were seen by exclusionists as threatening Anglo-Saxon national identity and world dominance. Long's "Madame Butterfly," which appeared at this time, positioned itself against the jingoistic rhetoric of its time and sought to counter racism and imperialism through its depiction of the assimilability and desirability of the Japanese woman and its alternative vision of a U.S.-Japanese union.

In his interracial romance, Long criticizes the informality of American empire by depicting the asymmetry of American-Japanese relations; nevertheless, he leaves suggestively open the question of whether some other form of international collaboration-specifically of Japanese aesthetic culture with American political institutions-might not promise a utopian romance of rejuvenation for both countries. In this respect, Long's critique does not in the end escape the binary of tradition-modernity that underlies Orientalist discourse, although it does offer a trenchant critique of unregulated imperialism. Long's "Madame Butterfly" suggests that American institutions of law and marriage may liberate Japanese women from the tyranny of Japanese customary law, while Japanese premodern aestheticism and simplicity may counterbalance the negative influences of American modernity. In this manner, Long seeks to resolve the contradictions in American democracy by envisioning a symbolic marriage of the United States and Japan.

Despite its rejection of imperialism and racism, Long's critique was constrained by his reliance on discourses that were themselves embedded in American expansionism. Although the sentimental narrative of interracial romance enabled a critique of racial and sexual exclusions, it did not provide a discursive framework for apprehending Japanese modernity as "coeval" with U.S. modernity. Rather, the gender hierarchy of the white man-Asian woman dyad reinforced the secondary positioning of Japan in relation to the United States. Yet, if Long's story does not provide an alternative vision of Japanese modernity, its conclusion does offer a metacommentary on the limitations of Orientalist tropes in representing the Japanese woman's resistance. In a striking narrative twist, Long stages the disappearance of his heroine from the story at the moment of her feminist emergence, signifying that her resistance serves as a vanishing point for textual representation. Cho-Cho-San and her baby literally vanish without a trace at the end of the story.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Sexual Naturalizationby Susan Koshy Copyright © 2004 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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