Charles Parsloe's Chinese Fetish: An Example of Yellowface Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Melodrama

Abstract

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the absence of Asian bodies on US stages resulted in actors developing what Josephine Lee calls "a complex set of codes for the presentation of the Oriental Other" that borrowed from the lexicon of Asian stereotypes.1 I group such codes—conventional associations of signs and meanings that purportedly convey "Asian-ness"—under the term yellowface performance. Actors in yellowface, such as Luise Rainer in the film The Good Earth, David Carradine in the television series Kung Fu, and Jonathan Pryce in the musical Miss Saigon have sparked debates about the production of Asian representations in dominant media.2 But the relative obscurity of nineteenth-century yellowface performers impedes contextualization of these disputes. This article excavates some of this history by sifting through extant records concerning the white actor Charles Parsloe during the 1870s.3 Because of the popularity of his "Chinamen" (a term I self-consciously invoke as a counterpoint to the lived experience of Chinese men), Parsloe provides the most comprehensive case study available with which to examine early yellowface practice. As a popular performer, his embodiment of the Chinaman both depends on and [End Page 627] informs hegemonic constructions of "Chineseness." Therefore, I theorize his performance practice as a kind of ventriloquism in which Parsloe animates the Chinaman as a fetish that substitutes for and conceals the dominant anxieties about Chinese immigrants among the white majority in the late 1800s. Charles Parsloe developed the Chinaman role through four melodramas: Bret Harte's Two Men of Sandy Bar (1876), Harte and Mark Twain's Ah Sin (1877), Joaquin Miller's The Danites in the Sierras (1877; hereafter The Danites) and Bartley Theodore Campbell's My Partner (1879). According to scripts and performance reviews, these theatrical productions depicted their Chinese characters through a performer's costume and mannerisms, with queue jokes and stage "dialect" frequently notated in dramatic texts. In the case of Parsloe, these signifiers apparently conveyed Chineseness to his audiences. James Moy cites several reviews of Mr. Parsloe's Ah Sin, the most flattering of which reads that the actor's portrayal could be "scarcely excelled in truthfulness to nature and freedom from caricature."4 In spite of the fact that Two Men of Sandy Bar and Ah Sin flopped commercially and critically, Mr. Parsloe used these productions to elevate his reputation from that of a competent character actor to the foremost player of Chinaman roles. After performing Hop Sing in Harte's drama and the title role in Ah Sin, Parsloe played Washee Washee in The Danites. According to his obituary, Parsloe next "toured in 'My Partner.' For 1,300 nights he played the role of Wing Wee [sic], the Chinaman, and his share of the profits amounted to over $100,000."5 To trace Parsloe's evolving embodiment of the theatrical Chinaman, I focus on the actor's yellowface performance in Ah Sin,The Danites, and My Partner as part of a "melodramatic formation" that reveals nineteenth-century attitudes about the Chinese in the US as well as the struggles over changing racial, class, and gender dynamics that characterized the slowly reintegrating union in the 1870s.6 In order to realize my investigation of Parsloe's Chinese fetish, I seek to revise history by reading through its margins, providing partial narratives based on limited historical records of what audiences actually saw when Charles Parsloe performed. [End Page 628] Locating Parsloe's Chinamen The relations between the United States and China during the late 1800s form the backdrop for the dramatic worlds that Parsloe entered as Hop Sing, Ah Sin, or Washee Washee. Although none of the plays in which these characters appearedexplicitly addresses international politics, media concerning US-China diplomacy likely informed the reception of Parsloe's Chinese characters, given the limited dispersal of that population on the East coast at this time.7 Although theatregoers probably had...