Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Susan Koshy is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the Universityof Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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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...