“A Beautiful Idea”: The King and I and the Maternal Promise of Sentimental Orientalism

Abstract

Traditionally Hollywood films about America's relationship with Asia have been construed within the discourse that depicts Asian hordes encroaching on lands and women that are prerogatives of the white American male.1 In films produced before 1955 that depict Americans in Asia, the Asia-Pacific figures as exotic backdrop; Asian peoples appear either as seducers or monstrous military aggressors. Later films about American combat in Vietnam follow similar patterns.2 In contrast, many popular films produced between 1955 and 1962 thematize American efforts to forge bonds with Asians across racial, national and cultural barriers, that will be free from both aggression and a threatening undercurrent of sexual desire.3 The term is meant to capture the way that these films deploy a fusion of affect and science to neutralize the sexual charge of the Yellow Peril discourse while reversing the direction of encroachment.4 What's more, by casting American intervention as maternal, pedagogical benevolence, sentimental orientalist films construct Asians as children struggling toward a democracy coded as adulthood, and suggest that American intervention is required to save Asians from the foreign domination of old colonialisms on the one hand, and native barbarism on the other. These films and other sentimental orientalist texts cull their materials - their language, tropes, and incipient scripts - from nineteenth century sentimentalism's cult of feeling and idealization of motherhood, and orientalism's conviction of the Orient's imminent disappearance and incorporation into the West. As orientalism poses itself as a discipline, so does sentimental orientalism: it sees itself as a discipline in intimacy, a way of Americans knowing Asians that is free from power and self-interest. The first decade of the Cold War provided conditions that spurred this discourse to surface. Domestically, changes in the field of social work and psychology spurred new ways of thinking about the function and repair of mothers, children, and whole families. Internationally, pressures of Cold War politics and fear of nuclear holocaust spurred the will to find nonaggressive strategies for winning Asian dominoes from Communist rivals. As a matter of policy, albeit policy that was fleeting, and on first glance historically unmemorable but stubbornly recurrent, the US government endorsed independent, secular, grassroots humanitarianism as a model for such nonaggressive intervention.5 Emerging from the cross-fertilization of these domestic and international concerns, sentimental orientalism applies ideas about the proper function of the family and the grounds for social intervention into dysfunctional families as a ruler by which Asian national health might be measured and intervention into those nations legitimated. Such a discourse has potentially powerful impact upon the self-evaluation of the Americans who are its prime target. The goal of this article is to trace the popular film The King and as an instance, and as the instantiating text, of sentimental orientalism. While on its face this contact is between a British I and a Siamese King, Anna is functionally American. Through a focus on Anna, this article identifies the contemporary cultural scripts that the 1950s subjects of sentimental orientalist discourse would use to decode their own place vis-a-vis the Asian object of the film's gaze. Accordingly, in the article that follows, the film's invitation to American viewers is contextualized within popularly available tenets of psychoanalysis, child development psychology and, most particular to this article, the impact of these disciplines upon social work practices. Radical shifts in these disciplines in the years following World War II were played out in surprisingly populist arenas, including the musical plays of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the films made of their plays. These tenets discount the world of facts in favor of the world of affect. …