A Race So Different. Joshua Chambers-Letson
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figuration of Asian immigrants burdened with accented English was shorthand for Asian racial difference as that which impedes proper assimilation or the performance of proper national subjectivity. Thus, representations of broken English were inherently tied to the narration of Asian subjects as those that should be excluded from the national body politic. Take, for example, the Times’s description of the final words of Chae Chan Ping, just before his removal from the United States: “He said in pigeon [sic] English: ‘I don’t want to go back to China; I want to stop in California.’”53 Emphasizing his “pigeon” (a spelling error that figures him as both foreign and animalistic, or at least less than human) at the exact moment that he decries his removal from the nation confirms the article’s insistence that the Chinese must be removed and excluded from the United States. Like Cho-Cho-San, his “pigeon” is a means of representing the racialized Asian immigrant’s inability to perform as a proper national subject. It thus justifies his or her exclusion.
The use of dialect to mark the inferiority of racialized bodies was not new. Cho-Cho-San’s dialect, in both Long’s and Belasco’s treatments, is reminiscent of the “darky dialect” central to blackface minstrelsy. This form of dialect was also widely popularized in representations of African Americans in nineteenth-century US American melodrama and literature. As Eric Lott argues, blackface minstrelsy was significant of both a practice of domination and the desire for the dominant white culture to consume black racial difference.54 “Darky dialect” represented African Americans as unintelligible, inferior racialized subjects who were ripe for domination, while staging such subjects as projection screens onto which fantasies about the “liberties of infancy” could be displayed.55 The adoption of similar forms of dialect for the representation of Asian and Asian American subjects achieved similar ends and highlights the ways in which Asian racialization occurred across the differentiated representational landscapes of race in the United States.
That Long’s and Belasco’s adoption of a dialect that was at the very least referential to the dialects of blackface traditions is in keeping with the comparative racialization of Asian and African American subjects in both aesthetic and legal traditions of the era. Krystyn Moon shows how US composers in the nineteenth century, eager to satiate audience desires to consume exotic sounds of the “Orient,” turned to familiar “musical representations of difference” found in blackface minstrelsy: “By combining African American traditions with European Orientalism and transcriptions of Chinese music, they again played to notions of difference and inferiority and expanded on the conflation of the non-Western world.”56 This form of racial triangulation was similarly present in the law, most notably in Harlan’s Plessy dissent, figuring nonwhite racial difference as that which could be simultaneously consumed and excluded in the construction of ideal (white) national subjectivity. Thus, as Julia H. Lee observes, “the figure of the Asian was vital in mediating the relationship between blackness and American national identity, and in turn . . . blackness was key in imagining Asian racial difference in relation to the nation.”57 While the outcomes and effects of such processes were varied for different minoritarian groups, their mutually subordinate construction by the dominant culture bolstered the stability of whiteness as an ideal national subject position.
White audiences reveled in the ability to consume Cho-Cho-San’s dialect as that which signified the fetish of her exotic racial difference, while confirming the subordinate position projected onto racialized bodies by the logic of white supremacy. Her speech patterns thrilled the cosmopolitan New York crowd, as documented by one newspaper reporter who described Bates’s “delivery of Mr. Long’s curious patois as exceedingly interesting.”58 But they also confirmed the fact that she was utterly incompatible within the parameters set by the dominant culture to define ideal national subjectivity. The charming naïveté of Cho-Cho-San’s assumption that the language she is speaking would in any way pass for English is encapsulated by her failure to name it properly. She refers to English erroneously in the plural as “Unite’ State’ languages.” Her radically incommensurate relationship to the United States is thus figured through her speech, which breaks down and becomes incomprehensible as her status between Japan and the United States grows increasingly and tragically confused. Spectacularly exhibiting this contention, her final lines in the play are nearly gibberish: “Well—go way an’ I will res’ now. . . . I wish res’—sleep . . . long sleep . . . an’ when you see me again, I pray you look whether I be not beautiful again . . . as a bride.”59 Belasco and Long make Cho-Cho-San a tragic figure that is confused and confusing, broken, neither here nor there, incomprehensible and thus impossible. It is this incomprehensibility, her incompatibility with US culture and, ultimately, US law which results in Cho-Cho-San’s destruction.
The heroine’s tragic end is prefigured in each version of Madame Butterfly with a legal contract that is beyond her comprehension: the contract establishing Pinkerton’s rental of the home and his marriage to Cho-Cho-San for a period of 999 years. What the audience is told via Pinkerton in all versions and what Cho-Cho-San does not grasp, however, is that Japanese law (according to Long, Belasco, and Puccini) allows Pinkerton to simply walk away from both the house and the marriage without penalty. Looking back to Long’s 1898 novella, for example, we find a detailed discussion of the legal terms that structure the purchase of Pinkerton’s wife and the rental of his home:
With the aid of a marriage-broker, he found both a wife and a house in which to keep her. This he leased for nine hundred and ninety-nine years. Not, he explained to his wife later, that he could hope for the felicity of residing there with her so long, but because, being a mere “barbarian,” he could not make other legal terms. He did not mention that the lease was determinable, nevertheless, at the end of any month, by the mere neglect to pay the rent.60
The metonymic relationship between Cho-Cho-San and the house is established by way of the legal contract. (By the time we get to the opera, this distinction is dissolved, and both the bride and house are rented for 999 years.) Pinkerton, for his part, is protected by his mastery of the law. Understanding the legal limits placed on him by his status as a foreign “barbarian,” Pinkerton manipulates this status to set up a seemingly permanent arrangement that is entirely predicated on his ability to walk away from the house and wife at any point.
The play begins after Pinkerton’s abandonment, and in the first scene, we find Cho-Cho-San pacing the stage and hemorrhaging the limited funds left to her care by her husband on a rent that is beyond her means. She does so believing that (a) she is required to keep up the 999-year lease signed by her husband in his absence because (b) the lease is proof (to her) of his intention to return home. As she declares in the opening scene, while Suzuki counts the dwindling amount of money they are left, “If he’s not come back to his house, why he sign Japanese lease for nine hundred and ninety-nine year for me to live?”61 Belasco inaccurately stages Japan as a state of capricious lawlessness, suggesting that it is the fact that Japanese society exists without the benefit and securities of the US legal contract, and not Pinkerton’s abandonment of Cho-Cho-San, that is the root of the tragedy.62 The burden of blame is further shifted onto the heroine, as she is responsible for ultimately failing to grasp her proper position with regard to national and juridical categories of ideal subjecthood. Put clearly, she fails to comprehend the fact that she is hardly a subject at all but more nearly an object for exchange between nations and men.
All three versions of Madame Butterfly include a crucial scene in which the abandoned Cho-Cho-San is given harsh advice by Sharpless, Pinkerton’s friend who remains concerned with her well-being. In his endeavor, the marriage broker (Gobo) and a Japanese suitor (Yamadori) accompany Sharpless. Each man encourages her to move on and marry again. They assure her that remarriage would be legal given her circumstances. As they attempt to explain to her that her marriage is not binding under Japanese law, Cho-Cho-San rejects their counsel, curiously insisting that she is not subject to Japanese law. She claims, instead, that she is a subject of US legal jurisdiction.
In the dramatic adaptation, the scene unfolds thus:
Yamadori: According to the laws of Japan, when a woman is deserted, she is divorced. (Madame Butterfly stops fanning and listens.) Though I have traveled much abroad, I know the laws of my own country.