Narrative Gender Alignments and International Policy

In the "Musicals and Modernization" chapter of Cold War Orientalism, Klein provides the following analysis of the masculinity and femininity present in The King and I:

“The King and I is a variation on the Madame Butterfly narrative: a representative of America comes to Asia, falls in love with an Asian, the romance doesn’t work out, the Asian dies, and the American takes over the upbringing of their shared child. The King and I inverts the sexes, but in many ways the gender remains constant: Anna is partially masculinized as the bearer of Western knowledge and authority, while the King is partially feminized by his ignorance and his intense eroticization” (214).

Although her use of Madame Butterfly seems to me flawed, in that it ignores the callousness/emotional disengagement of the American presence and the serious naivete of the Asian figure, Klein makes a good point here. The gender roles of both the King and Anna are complicated by their alignment with a masculine, invading West and a feminine, eroticized East. However, it is intriguing that so much of Anna and the King’s dialogue is concerned with the proper roles of men and women, with the King arguing for a world of male sexual domination and empowerment while Anna encourages a partnership on equal footing. As Klein points out, Anna’s Westernizing force is, furthermore, explicitly linked to her domesticity rather than to a forceful presentation of power: she fights for a house of her own, teaches the Siamese proper table manners, etc.

In this way, then, I think it’s interesting to counter Klein’s point about the gender alignments of Anna and the King with her own point about the way the middlebrow, pro-modernization imagination conceived of Westernization at the time. If we understand Anna—and by extension the West—as particularly feminized, and understand the King—and by extension the East—as representative of unchecked, “barbaric” masculinity, it is informative to compare that concept with the view we studied at the beginning of the term. For example, the eroticized, feminine descriptions of Asian landscapes in tourist narratives spring to mind as a point of comparison. The shift in the gender alignments between the early explicitly imperialist era at the turn of the century and the sympathetic, somewhat culturally pluralistic attitude of the West during the Cold War mirrors the change in international policy.