"As to her race, its secret is loudly revealed": Winnifred Eaton's Revision of North American Identity

Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, Quebec-born Winnifred Eaton, a Chinese British woman who used the pseudonym Onoto Watanna, was writing romances in New York, experimenting with the popular genre of Japonisme-the craze for all things Japanese. As Eaton advanced in her career, however, she became disgruntled with her writing, observable both by virtue of her shift in focus and in reading the words of her alter ego, Nora, in her autobiographical novel, Me: A Book of Remembrance (1915). Nora frowns on her own success, founded upon a cheap and popular device, and declares, Oh, I had sold my birthright for a mess of potage! (153-54). As Me reveals, Eaton had a new project, one that was her true birthright. Without specifically identifying her own Chinese heritage, or returning to her fabricated Japanese identity, she nonetheless created clearly non-white Canadian characters in Me and its spin-off, Marion: The Story of an Artist's Model (1916), auto/biographical tales of American immigration and adventure. In doing so, Eaton extended and revised the Canadian American rhetoric-and literature-that focused on the white, Anglo-Saxon bond or brotherhood between Canadians and Americans. Eaton was not a political novelist, and her characters face neither head taxes nor Chinese Exclusion Acts when they cross the Canadian-American border. Yet Eaton made an important innovation in Canadian American immigrant literature by revealing the