In her analysis of travel narratives, Dominika Ferens notes that Western tourists often feminized and eroticized Japan in their writings, portraying the landscape, culture, and women through the rhetoric of desire and aesthetics (“Two Faces of the Orientalist” 33). Such writing was produced against the backdrop of increased commodification of Japanese culture in the nineteenth century. Ferens observes that the authors of travel narratives “tended to describe the scenes around them as if they were representations of the more real figures painted on lacquer and porcelain” (37) and argues that it was through the aesthetic objects already familiar to Western readers that these authors negotiated their often voyeuristic relationship to Japan. William Elliot Griffis, for example, writes that living in Japan is like “living on a large painted and lacquered tea tray…[T]he landscape [sic] suddenly jumped up from the dead plane into the living perpendicular, and started into busy being’” (37). Ferens views such references as a product of the “booming trade in orientalia” and, implicitly, as a way for authors to better connect to their readership (37). She does not, however, analyze how Western desires to aestheticize Japan relate to issues of subjectivity and self-constitution, especially for the Japanese women who played key roles in male-authored narratives of the period.
Griffis’ passage suggests that the landscape becomes real only under the Western gaze. He does not simply provide Western readers—themselves stuck in the land of aesthetic substitutes for “real” Japanese culture—with unlimited access to Japan. His comments may be read as confirmation of his own power to bring those objects to a Western reality through observation (and perhaps voyeurism?). That the scene “suddenly” starts when he observes it brings to mind a director calling “action” on a stage of silent and unmoving actors (37). If Japanese beauty comes to life through the Western gaze, there is also an implication that such beauty was in fact made for the Westerner. For the Western tourist to filter his descriptions of the country through his relationship to Japanese commodities is to still keep Japan in the unreal, in a place of cold artifice.
John Luther Long’s Madame Butterfly may be read as an exploration of the Western male’s relationship to Japanese aesthetics. Pinkerton defines Cho-Cho-San only in aesthetic terms, making it difficult for her to see herself as anything but an artificial object of desiring male gazes. Like travel narratives, which often present a “real” Japan through comparison with the commodities that represent it, so too does Pinkerton elide his wife’s humanity by equating her with an artificial Western ideal of Japanese beauty. At the beginning of the novella, Pinkerton describes his wife as “quite an impossible thing, outside of lacquer and paint” (Long 33). The vice-consul mirrors this rhetoric when he observes that “It was, too, exactly in Pinkerton’s line to take this dainty…formless material, and mold it to his most wantonly whimsical wish” (64). In both descriptions, Cho-Cho-San’s womanhood is masked by male representations of her as an unsubstantial “thing”. Pinkerton’s poem, in which he refers to Cho as “jus’ a picture off of a fan,” suggests that he negotiates his real-life relationship to his wife through his knowledge of orientalia. He views the fan as the privileged object of origin or authenticity; Cho is merely a representation or copy. Interestingly, Pinkerton contains the female object of paint and lacquer, his “picture off of a fan,” in a space reminiscent of a museum or mausoleum, a timeless space “leased for nine hundred and ninety-nine years” and furnished with American hardware to protect its inhabitants from the gazes of outsiders (31).
The novella, through Cho-Cho-San, also dramatizes the Japanese female’s ambivalent relationship to Western views about feminine beauty and artifice. That Cho recites the poem about the fan to her son, inflecting Pinkerton’s words with her accent, perhaps means that she has internalized her husband’s refusal to acknowledge her humanity. As she prepares for her husband’s return, she tells her maid to “make a picture” of her son (71). In reference to her own beauty, she expresses a desire to look “ ‘Jus’ lig those old picture of Bunchosai!’” (71). As Honey and Cole explain in their footnotes of Long’s text, Cho imagines herself a living representation of fifteenth-century paintings by Bunsei Gaishi (71). Unlike the maid, who aspires to the beauty represented by nineteenth and twentieth-century porcelains, however, Cho searches for an aesthetic ideal reminiscent of a pre-Modern Japan untouched by Western influences and the Meiji Restoration. Here, her attempt to mirror herself after a lifeless aesthetic object may be read as an anti-Western gesture, if not an attempt at self-assertion. Interestingly, Cho never relinquishes her desire to become beautiful for her husband or to view him as the arbiter of aesthetic taste. She hopes that, in killing herself, she will be reborn “again beautiful—again as a bride’” (77). Her suicide takes place in front of a mirror, and the narrator provides an eroticized account of Cho watching and sensing her own body become covered in blood: “She could feel the blood finding its way down her neck…In a moment she could see it making its way daintily between her breasts” (78). Thus, even the act of her suicide, which the narrator presents as both a destruction and glorification of the female form, is committed in the name of becoming beautiful for others, or more specifically, for the idealized American male.
This leads me to question whether the Westerner’s fascination with Japanese beauty and aesthetic objects (both animate and inanimate) is not more ambivalent and pernicious than Ferens’ analysis suggests. Is there a sense of fear attached to the notion of Asian femininity and sexuality that causes the male author or voyeur to replace the feminine subject with containable objects of consumption? Is Pinkerton’s substitution of female subjectivity for artifice and objectivity a misogynistic, racialist, or Orientalist gesture, or is it all three? How does the commodification of Japan hinder, rather than facilitate, Western understanding of and tolerance towards that country?
No comments:
Post a Comment