Winnifred Eaton Project

Book Exhibit

The Winnifred Eaton Book Exhibit was held in March, 2007, at the R. P. Bell Library, Mount Allison University.

The Canadian Connection

His Royal Nibs

Despite the fact that Eaton was born in Montreal and lived in the Canadian prairies towards the end of her career, she is often left out of anthologies of Chinese-Canadian writers, and has been claimed by the United States just as, if not more, eagerly as by Canada. These two books, His Royal Nibs and Cattle, are set in Canada, and are a good example of how her Canadian and English heritage influenced her writing. Both books are set in Alberta, where Eaton and her second husband Francis Reeve had a cattle ranch. Both have English characters in them, reflecting an interest in her father’s ancestry. The use of English “remittance men” as characters provides an interesting detail pertaining to both Canadian and British history. The main characters, young women as in all of her other novels, are Canadians. Her knowledge of the Canadian landscape is obvious, and her personal experiences on a cattle ranch lend authenticity to her stories. Both of these novels also include details that provide an accurate portrait of life in Canada after World War One. These books serve as a reminder of the range in Eaton’s novels, and of her rightful place in the Canadian canon.

Why Mount Allison University?

Winnifred Eaton Books at Mount Allison

Why do we have these books? The acquisition numbers imply that they were acquired in the 1970s, although it is possible that the books had been in the library for some time before they were assigned numbers. However, the books were acquired long after their publication, at a time when many critics regarded Eaton’s works as sentimental, popular and full of negative stereotypes. For these reasons, it seems quite unusual that Mount Allison possesses such a variety of Winnifred Eaton’s works. Yet, given the history of Mount Allison during the late 1960s and the 1970s, obtaining these books does not seem so strange. The Canadian Studies department was established in 1969, which began in increased commitment to teaching Canadian subjects. The creation of the Canadian Studies program led the library to increase the acquisition of books by Canadian authors. One of the goals of the library during this time was to have every Canadian writer represented in the library’s Canadiana collections. In order to facilitate this, acquisition librarians consulted Reginald Watters’ A Checklist of Canadian Literature and Background Materials: 1628-1960, in which fifteen of Eaton’s works are listed. Our library has seven of these novels, revealing the tenacity with which these books were acquired at a time when many were long out of print.

Short Stories

A Japanese Nightingale

Although A Half Caste is not as visually interesting as the older books in the collection, it is an important collection of some of Eaton’s short stories, which are an important aspect of her career. The sheer volume of Eaton’s works serves to illustrate the extent of her popularity, and her ability to reach a large audience. Eaton wrote dozens of short stories for women’s magazines, of which only a few have been included in A Half Caste. Harder to find stories, which are not as widely available in print, have been compiled by Dr. Jean Lee Cole, and are available online at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/eaton/browse/. Publishing in magazines like Red Book, Ladies’ Home Journal and The Metropolitan Magazine meant that Eaton’s fiction entered the home of thousands of women, and her continued success speaks to her ability to appeal to popular tastes while still introducing controversial topics, like interracial romances. The lack of literary sophistication that comes across in some of Eaton’s earlier stories actually helped her, because it made the scenario of a half Japanese girl who had learned to speak English seem more believable to white readers, and thus set her apart from other woman writers.

A Japanese Nightingale

Tama

Despite her half-English half-Chinese ancestry, Winnifred Eaton went to great lengths to create and maintain a fictional Japanese identity. In addition to writing under a Japanese pseudonym (Onoto Watanna) Eaton set many of her novels in Japan, used images from Japanese artists (like Kiyokichi Sano’s image on the left), used a Japanese signature (above), and fabricated biographical information, accompanying this information with publicity photographs (like the one on the right) which depicted her in stereotypically exotic Japanese dress. What was the motivation for adopting this Japanese identity? From Diana Birchall’s biography we not only know that Eaton did not have any biological connection to Japan, but that she in fact had never been there. Instead, it is likely that she depended on her professional connections with Sano, Genjiro Yeto and Gaza Foudji for her information on Japan. Why would anyone go to such measures? As Amy Ling outlines, with regard to the judgment of minorities in America at the turn of the century, the Japanese were “at the top of the ladder” (5). Respected both because they had won wars against China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, and because few of them had then immigrated to the United States, the Japanese were generally looked upon kindly and exoticized by the average American. The Chinese, on the other hand, were regarded as an incomprehensible subhuman and, largely due to the thousands of Chinese labourers who aided in the construction of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, a threat to white workers all over America. This divide is outlined nicely in a passage from Edith Eaton’s “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian:”

“Somehow or other I cannot reconcile myself to the thought that the Chinese are humans like ourselves,” said Mr. K.

“A Chinaman is, in my eyes, more repulsive than a nigger,” replied the town clerk.

“Now the Japanese are different altogether. There is something bright and likeable about those men,” added Mr. K.

It is not hard to see Winnifred’s motivation in encouraging her constructed Japanese identity to blossom. The decision, of course, was not without consequence. As a result of this choice, Winnifred is often scorned for having denied her true heritage in favor of commercial success.

Race and Romance

After her death in 1954, much of Eaton’s work remained largely disregarded. This was, in part, due to the sentimental romance formula which pervaded her work. Many of her earlier works, like A Japanese Nightingale and Miss Nume of Japan, were particularly troubling for scholars interested in Asian American literature as they “appeared simply to parrot conventional stereotypes about Asians, and Asian women in particular” (Cole 3). However, more recently these works are being heralded as invaluable sources in Asian American literature. Though they may be structured in the form of “seemingly simple romance stories,” they also, as Pat Shea points out, “serve as a gauge of the complex sexual and racial attitudes of both the author and her turn of century American audience towards issues of miscegenation between Asians and Whites” (19). As an author who had achieved popular success, and was, in turn, able to introduce new ideas to fairly wide public, Eaton was faced with a unique challenge. On the one hand, she had the rare opportunity to “raise the awareness and tolerance of her readers towards [interracial] partnership by presenting positive images of miscegenation in her works” (19). On the other, in order to maintain popular success, “Eaton had to appease her audience by appealing to the commonly held (often racist) values of American society” (19). As both Shea and Jean Lee Cole agree, Eaton was able to successfully accomplish both these demanding objectives through the Asian female/white male romances of Yuki and Jack in A Japanese Nightingale. As Cole explains, through heroines like Yuki, Eaton was able to address issues such as interracial romance, biraciality, and ethnic difference. At the same time, by setting the novel in faraway Japan and taking on the charming voice of the geisha, Eaton capitalized on an audience interested in exoticized Japanese culture. Ultimately, it is clear that there is more to Eaton’s “seemingly simple romances stories” than one might initially think. These early works, denigrated for decades after Eaton’s death, possess important hidden complexities in their “delicate balance of concession and resistance,” indicating both Eaton’s awareness of the value systems of her readership and her boldness in manipulating them to accommodate issues of interracial miscegenation at a time of social volatility (Shea 21).

Works Cited

Text by Jessica Nowlan and Jamie Munro