“[T]he Ludicrous Transition of Gender and Sentiment”: Chinese Labor in Ambrose Bierce’s “The Haunted Valley”

Abstract

Ambrose Bierce’s first published short story, “The Haunted Valley” (1871), draws on prevailing stereotypes of Chinese immigrants in the United States as figures of sexual and gender deviance. The story depicts a central but absent figure, Ah Wee, as both prostitute and sodomite, confounding distinctions between man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual, laborer/prostitute, and white/Chinese. However, in its attempts to counter anti-Chinese hostility, “The Haunted Valley” inverts the logic of representations of Chinese sexuality as contagious perversion threatening the nation. The story portrays the maintenance of the boundaries of racial difference, rather than racial difference itself, as perverting proper gender and sexual identities and bonds between white men. It critiques anti-Chinese hostility as a ruse of white labor to hide its own transgressions and as a symptom of, rather than solution for, the degradation of white masculinity. The critique of racism relies on a generic one, a critique of sentiment and of the feminizing effects of sentimental narratives, and affirms and reinforces a shared heteronormative masculinity as an alternative to shared political action.