Ambivalent Passages: Racial and Cultural Crossings in Onoto Watanna’s <i>The Heart of Hyacinth</i>

Abstract

Appearing in the early fall of 1903 in time for the Christmas season, The Heart of Hyacinth, like romances by Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), was widely promoted holiday gift book, enchanting readers with its exquisite design and its delicate, charming tale of Japan. (1) For many, their pleasure in the novel's appearance and sentiment was enhanced by their knowledge of its author's alleged nativity or ethnicity. As one reviewer emphasizes: We have childish pleasure in things Japanese.... There is, therefore, piquant pleasure for us in story of written by Republican). Similarly, another reviewer opens by introducing the author Onoto Watanna, the dainty little gentlewoman from Japan, who writes so delightfully of her native country (Heart, Banner). Others, on the hand, attribute the author's sympathy with life (Kinkaid) or her portrayal of as seen from the inside Register) to her half-Japanese parentage. Thus, still largely convincing to the reading public, Watanna's writing persona continued to allow her to dissimulate exemplar of the feminine, simple aesthetic and authentic ethnographer of Japan. Watanna's performance of Japaneseness, through her romances and especially her authorial persona, links her with the practice of passing, or the crossing of identity boundaries by those on the racial and cultural margins. (2) An act of transgression, passing allows individual in the liminal position, Elaine K. Ginsberg puts it, to assume new identity, escaping the subordination and oppression accompanying one identity and accessing the privileges and status of the other (3). As woman of Chinese and English descent living and writing in era of virulent anti-Chinese sentiments in North America, Watanna devised strategies of passing not only to escape personal and racial persecution but also to achieve authorship in white-male-dominant literary marketplace? By appropriating the popular genre of romance and adopting the guise of exotic half-Japanese woman writer, she exploited her white reading audience's orientalist fantasies and enabled herself to achieve visibility and authority in field dominated by such luminaries Lafcadio Hearn, Pierre Loti, and John Luther Long. (4) In The Heart of Hyacinth, however, passing serves not only tactic of ethnic female authorship but also important narrative strategy that governs both theme and plot. Although reviewers have variously described it an ideal gift-book, a idyll, or delicate Japanese love story, (5) Watanna's novel weaves, in effect, complex narrative of identity in which she negotiates with orientalist binary constructions of the East and the West and explores through the Eurasian figure the promise and perils of boundary crossing. As its title suggests, Watanna's novel centers on the tale of Hyacinth, white American orphan who has been adopted and reared by woman and who discovers her white racial origin when her American father attempts to claim her seventeen years after her birth. Although she eventually comes to terms with her white parentage, her heart belongs to her adoptive mother and to Komazawa, the Eurasian foster-brother she grew up with and with whom she now falls in love. However, like Watanna's first novel, Miss Nume of Japan, The Heart of Hyacinth tells more than what its title seems to imply. (6) Hyacinth's struggles with her familial, cultural, and racial allegiances intersect with her adoptive Eurasian brother's negotiations of his own mixed heritage. Despite her discovery of her white heritage, Hyacinth claims identity and resists Western colonial paternalism, while Komazawa passes into British society and navigates his biraciality with apparent ease in his endeavors to become English. …