Sui Sin Far's Genre of Intervention: The Sketch and the "Real" in Realism and Naturalism

Abstract

Sui Sin Far's Genre of InterventionThe Sketch and the "Real" in Realism and Naturalism Monique McDade (bio) In "The Inferior Woman," the second sketch to appear in Sui Sin Far's (Edith Maude Eaton) 1912 collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Mrs. Spring Fragrance contemplates writing a book about Americans. "As she walked along," Sui Sin Far writes, "she meditated upon a book which she had some notion of writing. Many American women wrote books. Why should not a Chinese" (28)? Thus, Sui Sin Far begins by questioning the imbalance in American literary representative power. Her seemingly simple question—"Why should not a Chinese?"—points to the deep-rooted prejudices that recognized minority Americans as subjects rather than authors of American literature. Mrs. Spring Fragrance determines her "first subject will be 'The Inferior Woman of America'" (34), a figure who represents the nineteenth-century's New Woman and through whom Mrs. Spring Fragrance hopes to unveil what makes Americans "so interesting and mysterious" (28). The act of writing is, as Mrs. Spring Fragrance understands from dominant examples, an act of exposure and of making sense out of the "mysterious." "The Inferior Woman" is a story with overlapping layers. While the story points out the imbalanced relationships in representative power, it also critiques the ways dominant literatures portend to tell the "real" and "true" experiences of their subjects. To learn about the "mysterious" "Inferior Woman" and to collect material for her book, Mrs. Spring Fragrance secretly observes a conversation between the "Superior Woman," a woman who represents the era's feminine ideal, and her mother about the "Inferior Woman." Observation—a literary strategy deployed by Sui Sin Far's realist and naturalist contemporaries—is reconfigured here to expose the exploitation and unwilling participation of their literary subjects. In the process of connecting seemingly disparate global intimacies of labor and mobility, Lisa Lowe explains that '"intimacy as interiority,"' as opposed to [End Page 78] the dominant meaning of intimacy as an individual's sexual experiences, "is elaborated in the philosophical tradition in which the liberal subject observes, examines, and comes to possess knowledge of self and others. Philosophy elaborates this subject with interiority, who apprehends and judges the field of people, land, and things, as the definition of the human being" (21). Observation and interpretation become the mark of "the human being," further suggesting that those who observe are not observed themselves and that, quite the opposite, those observed cannot be observers. Lowe challenges this foundational liberal philosophy to argue that "this sense of intimacy" is a "particular fiction that depends on . . . the circuits, connections, associations, and mixings of differentially laboring peoples, eclipsed by the operations that universalize the Anglo-American liberal individual" (21). Lowe's framework for evaluating intimacy helps us to see the complex "circuits, connections, associations, and mixings" between Sui Sin Far's Anglo-American and Chinese characters as they stand in opposition to the often one-dimensional and flattened characters in the era's realist and naturalist texts. By reading Sui Sin Far's sketches for their network of intimacies, we can better identify the overlapping histories and cultural knowledges that Sui Sin Far brings to light through her rejection of realism's and naturalism's observational, and supposedly objective, literary qualities. Importantly, Sui Sin Far shows how even a book about a social outlier like the "Inferior Woman" is filtered through the gaze of dominant, "respectable" society. Rather than observing the "Inferior Woman" directly, Mrs. Spring Fragrance listens in on a conversation between the "Superior Woman" and her mother. The two women contemplate the ways in which the "Inferior Woman" "does not compare with" the "Superior Woman" (36). What is supposed to be an objective, observational account of the "Inferior Woman" is actually an observational account of the dominant society's prejudice towards her. Although the story starts off with Mrs. Spring Fragrance's determination to write a book in defense of the "Inferior Woman," this overheard conversation leads Mrs. Spring Fragrance to declare to her husband: '"I love well the Inferior Woman; but, O Great Man, when we have a daughter, may Heaven ordain that she walk in the groove of the Superior Woman'" (41). Even...