Linguistic Regionalism and the Emergence of Chinese American Literature in Sui Sin Far's Mrs. Spring Fragrance

Abstract

Beginning by suggesting that Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton (1865-1914) readily fits none of the categories recent critics have established within Chinese American literature, this essay situates her as a regionalist writer whose work demonstrates her struggle against mainstream representations of the Chinese in the late nineteenth-century American press and who achieves artistic form and a strategy for helping her readers see differently through her use of the English language in Mrs. Spring Fragrance. The key to understanding Sui Sin Far's contribution to American literature lies in analyzing her use of English in this volume that serves as the culmination of her career. Writing what Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse have called ”language on the border land” (192), or what I am calling in this essay the linguistic bicultural, Sui Sin Far, after years of struggle, discovers in the structures of English itself how to represent the Chinese experience in America. She refashions English in such a way both as to reflect that experience and to demonstrate her immigrant characters' consciousness of the ways the English language encodes a dominance that reflects U.S. politics of the period. The essay contrasts Sui Sin Far's regionalism with ”local color” representations of the Chinese in the writings of Bret Harte, and offers a linguistic reading of several stories in Mrs. Spring Fragrance -”Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” ”The Inferior Woman,” ”In the Land of the Free,” ”The Wisdom of the New,” ”The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” and ”Its Wavering Image.”