Re-Imagining Illness

The inspiration for my post comes from an observation that Molly made in her October 9^th blog post: “Throughout his short stories, Santos frequently describes Filipinos as ‘sickly’ or dirty, and repeatedly describes white Americans as ‘neat’ and especially as ‘clean’ or ‘clean-looking’.” Although dirt and disease are obviously negative markers, they do work to make the “invisible subjects” (Filipinos) “visible” when compared to the blank-white background associated with white Americans. Which made me wonder, is there a similarity between Santos’ coding of Filipinos as “sickly” and Hisaye Yamamoto’s unwell female characters in her short stories “Seventeen Syllables” and “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara.” Both of Yamamoto’s stories feature female characters who suffer from mysterious and, potentially, entirely psychosomatic diseases. Although the precise of origin of Mrs. Hayano’s and Miss Sasagawara’s illnesses are not articulated in both stories, it is only through their diseases that they become objects of interest to either of the narrators. Considering the long and racist history of association between Asian-Americans and metaphors of contagion, I find it striking that both Santos and Yamamoto would appropriate images of diseased Asian bodies in their own work.

I am particularly interested in how madness/mental anguish becomes inscribed on the female body through physical disease in both stories. In “Seventeen Syllables,” the narrator describes Rosie’s discomfort visiting the Hayano household:

“[a visit to the Hayano’s was] painful because something had been wrong with Mrs. Hayano ever since the birth of her first child. Rosie would sometimes watch Mrs. Hayano, reputed to have been the belle of her native village, making her way about a room, stooped, slowly shuffling, violently trembling (always trembling), and she would be reminded that this woman, in this same condition, had carried and given issue to three babies.” (9-10)

Although the cause of Mrs. Hayano’s mysterious ailment is never disclosed, there is an implicit parallel set up between Mrs. Hayano and Rosie’s mother through the reference to Mrs. Hayano’s “native village.” In both short stories, female sexuality is invoked as a possible source of female bodily suffering; however, in “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara,” Yamamoto also highlights how the mechanisms of modern healthcare, with its emphasis on “observation” have the potential to aggravate, and, perhaps, even cause further illness.

All of this makes me think of a number of questions I would like to raise on the blog: first, how does illness operate in Yamamoto’s text? Can a comparison be made between internment and quarantine? Does confinement breed disease along with discontent?