Madame Butterfly (1898) and A Japanese Nightingale (1901) both
appeared at the height of fin-de-siecle American fascination with
Japanese culture, which was in part spurred by the Japanese
exhibits on display at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. These two
novellas -- usually dismissed by literary critics and scholars
because of their stereotypical treatment of Asian women -- are
paired here together for the first time to show how they defined
and redefined (often subversively) contemporary misconceptions of
the "Orient." This is the first reprinting of A Japanese
Nightingale since its 1901 appearance, when it propelled Winnifred
Eaton to fame.
John Luther Long's Madame Butterfly introduced American readers
to the figure of the tragic geisha who falls in love with, and then
is rejected by, a dashing American man. Although Long emphasized
the insensitivity of Westerners in their dealings with Asian
people, the self-annihilating, ever-faithful Cho-Cho-San typified
Asian subservience and Western dominance in ways that audiences
continue to find appealing even today. Eaton's A Japanese
Nightingale, in contrast, has been long forgotten. Yet it provides
present-day readers with a fascinating counterimage of the suicidal
geisha: Eaton's heroine is powerful in her own right and is loved
on her own terms. Eaton's novel is also significant for its hidden
personal nature. Although she wrote under the Japanese pen name of
Onoto Watanna, Eaton was half Chinese. Living in a society that was
virulently anti-Chinese, she used a Japanese screen for her own
problematic identity.
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