Winnifred Eaton: Ethnic Chameleon and Popular Success

MELUS ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Ling
Keyword(s):  
Winnifred Eaton

Racial Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 267-284
Author(s):  
Jolie A. Sheffer
Keyword(s):  
Mourning Dove ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Black Authors ◽  
Writers Of Color ◽  
Us Imperialism ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Winnifred Eaton ◽  
Racial Realism ◽  
Definition Of

Realism as it has been articulated by white, middle-class literary gatekeepers since its heyday in the early twentieth century (and frequently into the present) has failed to address racism and imperialism of the era. Gene Jarrett describes black authors developing new literary forms in order “to re-create a lived or living world according to prevailing ideologies of race or racial difference.” This chapter expands Jarrett’s definition of “racial realism” beyond the black-white binary in order to show how writers of color from a variety of backgrounds crafted their own versions of realism, deploying allegory and making strategic use of stock genres such as the oriental romance and the western. For white readers in particular, these seemingly “nonrealist” plot elements provided intellectual distance from the contemporary injustices of racism in the age of US imperialism. However, for in-group readers, racial realism functioned both literally and figuratively to highlight experiences of racism and to legitimize histories too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented in mainstream literary realism. Writers such as Winnifred Eaton and Mourning Dove created their own texts that were shaped by multiple literary ancestors and spoke simultaneously, though distinctly, to white readers and to their own communities of color.

The Sword and the Chrysanthemum

2019 ◽  
pp. 138-174
Author(s):  
Grace E. Lavery
Keyword(s):  
Onoto Watanna ◽  
Winnifred Eaton ◽  
Madame Butterfly ◽  
Chinese Canadian ◽  
Castration Anxiety

This chapter argues that representations of the Japanese sword exhibit that distinctively feminized type of exquisite aesthetics. Feminized, because although Victorians were already interested in swords by the publication in France of Pierre Loti's story Madame Chrysanthème, it was through Anglophone revisions of that story that the play of the sword, as an instrument of internal and external violence, has become most deeply entrenched. This chapter follows the Chrysanthème story's mutation into the Americanized story of Madame Butterfly, the Anglo-Chinese-Canadian auto-Orientalizing revision of the Butterfly stories in the work of Onoto Watanna/Winnifred Eaton, and then to cinema: a Japanese body-horror movie named Audition (1999) and a couple of American blockbusters made by Quentin Tarantino. The particular form of body horror that psychoanalysis refers to as “castration anxiety” inevitably permeates Western concern with the samurai sword. But the chapter shows how such an object as a sword is here understood as both feminine, and feminizing, rather than as a kind of phallic auxiliary.

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