Hannah Hecht's Blog

1. During the last class, we discussed Zitkala-Sa’s book of stories. I enjoyed her book the most out of anything that we have read so far this semester, and it really gave me a window to a different world. One of the things that we emphasized during our class discussion was Zitkala-Sa’s audience and the format in which her stories were published. She was really smart in realizing that the newly-enfranchised middle to upper class “club women,” especially the former suffragettes, were hungry for a new cause to fight for; “the Indian problem” fit the bill. Her careful planning and marketing (in order to recruit women to fight for her cause) kind of reminded me of the diligent marketing that Edith Wharton did to sell her books. The other thing that I found very interesting was the Christian symbolism set alongside the discussion of the Sioux religion and culture. Until Jacob mentioned it in class, I completely missed the symbolism of the apple. I wish that we had gone a little further with that, just because I think that the Biblical parallels bring a lot to the autobiographical stories. For example, that story portrays the young Zitkala-Sa as Eve, tricked into going to the land of red apples by the snake-like “palefaces.” Obviously, in the Bible story, the act of taking the forbidden fruit results in original sin, which is pretty much the worst thing ever, but did Zitkala-Sa really think that her decision to go be educated was such a terrible thing? In the end, she ended up becoming the voice of her people, and she seemed pretty proud of that accomplishment, although she often expressed small regrets. I’m not sure where I’m going with this, other than that it would be really interesting to further explore the biblical symbolism.

2. This week, we read both Madame Butterfly by John Luther Long and A Japanese Nightingale by Onoto Wantanna (Winnifred Eaton). I absolutely hated Madame Butterfly and enjoyed A Japanese Nightingale. For me, Madame Butterfly was relentlessly racist and exasperatingly one-dimensional in its portrayal of Cho-Cho-San. The middle and end of the book are written from her perspective (or at least, we are limited to only seeing and knowing things that she sees and knows) and yet, the reader still sees her only through Luther’s scathing caricature of a Japanese woman. It would make a little bit more sense for her to talk in that awful pidgin-English dialect (which was not only untactful, but also really badly constructed) if we were seeing her through an English-speaker’s eyes. As it is, the book paints her as being objectively annoying, stupid, and unintelligible, which is completely unfair since it is from her perspective, and she obviously understands what she is saying, even if she knows her English isn’t the best. Honestly, I have no idea why this book is still being read today. The story, while maybe original at the time, really isn’t all that interesting, and the poorly constructed dialect that dominates the narrative is nails-on-chalkboard grating.

I thought that A Japanese Nightingale was overall a much better story. The Japanese (or half-Japanese, as we find out) female protagonist still speaks in dialect, but it is much easier to read. Overall, the relationship between Bigelow and Yuki is much more multi-dimensional than the obsessive love that we see in Madame Butterfly. Both characters are dynamic, and their relationship is complex. I also thought that the plot was a lot more dynamic and full of suspense.

3. The secondary text for this week was the introduction to the book. The intro set the historical background in which both of these texts were written. The turn of the century marked a widespread fascination with Japanese culture among Americans. Each of these texts fulfilled the demand for more information on Eastern culture, and presented it through the safe and comfortable lens of an American traveler (Pinkerton and Bigelow). The text also gave some background information on each of the authors. John Luther Long was an American who “had never heard a Japanese speak English.” (At this point, I would say that he should have either done some extra background research or decided to write something with which he was more familiar.) Eaton, on the other hand, was actually half-Chinese. However, since Americans were generally anti-China at that time, she decided to pick a Japanese penname and write about Japan. Honestly, from having read each novella and the introduction, I think that each of these books were probably terrible sources of information on Japanese culture.