The Consubstantiality and Sentimentality of Character in  
Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance

“I offer the real Americans my consolations that they should be compelled to do that which is against their principles.”

“Mrs. Spring Fragrance”, Page 8

 

“If his wife was becoming an American woman, would it not be possible for her to love as an American woman—a man to whom she was not married?”

Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Page 14

 

Sui Sin Far, born Edith Maude Eaton (1865-1914), is often described as the earliest writer of Chinese descent to publish a book in English. Over the course of her life, she published several short stories and articles across the United States and Canada in newspapers such as Peck’s Sun, The Independent, and Detroit Free Press, among others. Her mother and father, Edward Eaton and Grace “Lotus Blossom'' Trefusis, moved from England to Montreal when Far was very young. Far later moved to Seattle and San Francisco where she would interview members from Chinatowns as a reporter. One of her earliest works, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian" (1909) presented Far as a representative voice for both the Chinese community and for an “American”/occidental one. Her refusal to conform to stereotypes associated with Chinese people was a reflection of her engagement with residents of Chinese communities and her identification with their struggles (Song 2003). Far published her first and only novel, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, in 1912—and the reception of the novel fell into two distinct categories: sentimentality for motherhood and sentimentality for the inequity of Anti-Chinese legislation (Hsu, 2011). Although the initial reception of the novel didn’t highlight its literary significance, Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Sui Sin Far’s career was brought to the attention of modern readers in the 1980s and 1990s with the publication of The Big AIIIEEEEE! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1991), and in other Asian American literary critics’ collections [1]. Reading Mrs. Spring Fragrance through the lens of sentimentality and rhetorically through the concept of consubstantiality—illuminate the ways in which she evoked sympathy and action from her readers during key movements in the early twentieth century.

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This is because Far’s works often explore public and legal sentiments towards Chinese people living in North America in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Particularly prevalent was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from entering the U.S., as well as the Page Act of 1875, which prohibited convicts, contract laborers, and sex workers from China. In Mrs. Spring Fragrance, the harsh anti-Asian laws that prohibited immigration, along with feminist themes and the suffragist movement are featured heavily. As noted by several scholars, Far was acutely aware of the suffragist movement and held ambivalent viewpoints towards mainstream suffragists, while simultaneously writing characters who are unequivocally feminist (Chapman 2008). However, some scholars have critiqued this reading and asserted that her texts justify Chinese traditions and critique progressive reform (McCann 1999). These events foreground the inclusion of specific characters in her work: specifically the inclusion of female, bi-racial, and queer characters. As mentioned in several of the chapters of Mrs. Spring Fragrance, characters such as: Pan: a bi-racial girl, Miss McLeod: a white teacher in a Chinese neighborhood, Pau Tsu: a Chinese woman who refuses to be Americanized, and Tie Co: a queer man whose death is overlooked by the authorities—are among the characters whose stories are heavily influenced by gender roles and the collisions of two cultures. As a bi-racial woman herself, Far’s characters are not only influenced by her experiences engaging with Chinese residents, but her own positionality as a reporter who sought to integrate herself into Chinese culture. Because of her position as a well-educated, well-traveled reporter, Sui Sin Far has significant influence over how the stories of early Chinese Americans are told.

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Far’s attempt to sentimentalize these characters has been documented thoroughly throughout various critiques, and follows a tradition of invoking political action through means of symbolism and language. Far emphasizes the vastness of her feelings through her characters and connects her sense of sentimentality to her mixed race status (Hsu 2011). Therefore, she is able to demonstrate the emotional effect of one racial community on another and vice versa. Many of Far’s stories and chapters feature characters who are sympathetic towards the Chinese while simultaneously assuming the feelings of a community that they are not part of. For example, in the chapter “The Gift of Little Me”, Far describes a white teacher experiencing searching for a lost Chinese child. The teacher – Ms, McLeod – states, “[the] distress of the Chinese people was hers” (90) [2]. This Scottish school teacher is assimilated culturally into a Chinese community and “[adopts] the Chinese people as her own when kinfolk had failed her” (90). Through projecting sentimentality onto a community through the lens of an outsider, Far is able to leverage her ability to show impartialness towards two communities. Moreover, sentimentality is also focused on a display of public emotion (Song 2008), which is an embodied form of pathos. This raises the question of the effectiveness of a display of emotion in evoking public action. Do the characters in Mrs. Spring Fragrance display true sentimentality to the effect of political change? To explore this line of questioning, I will argue that sentimentality in Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance is closely connected to femininity and characters who cross borders of gender, race, and class. I will also assert that the emphasis of sentimentality displayed through Far’s works can also be attributed to consubstantiality and the rhetoric of identification.

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In conjunction with the lens of sentimentality, Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives [3] (1969) provides a framework of consubstantiality, which seemingly contradicts the intended political effect of sentimentality. Burke asserts that consubstantiality is the ability to identify with another individual while still holding distinct identities and values (RM 20). Burke describes consubstantiality as a means of: “acting together” and “having common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, and attitudes'' (RM 21). The idea of consubstantiality is broadly contradictory to sentimentality because it limits the ability for individuals to evoke pathos. Therefore, when characters interact, we can understand their rhetorical purpose as an agreement or attitude rather than a call to action. While this is primarily along the lines of evoking ethos or the values that underlie decision-making, I contend that both consubstantiality is also present in the novel’s attempts of creating sentimentality between characters: specifically in the portrayal of white characters trying to assimilate into Chinese culture and Chinese characters trying to assimilate into American society. While the characters of Mrs. Spring Fragrance embrace various Chinese cultural traditions (primarily those surrounding marriage and ceremony), one of Far’s tactics is to uphold Chinese values while demonstrating commonalities between both sets of cultures. She also foregrounds the empathic aspects of consubstantiality by highlighting how the characters can hold each others’ emotions, while not completely embodying each others’ experiences.

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This inclusion of consubstantiality demonstrates that the choice of social action is limited, especially when it applies to characters who are attempting to assimilate into another culture. This is prevalent in the chapters, “The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese” and “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu”. Both of these chapters feature women – one white and one Chinese, who are faced with assimilation into a new culture. In “The Story of One White Woman '' the main character – a divorced white woman named Minnie – marries Liu Kahnghi, a Chinese businessman. After marrying Liu Kahnghi, the narrator feels that he is more sophisticated and reserved than her former husband, but describes a “barrier of race [and] consciousness” (108) between them. While there are various cultural differences, the couple evokes a form of consubstantiality when the narrator says “I feel him behind me, protecting and caring for me, and that, to an ordinary woman like myself, means more than anything else” (104). While Minnie never admits to feeling a strong bond with her husband, she also contrasts his “boyish ways” to the marriage customs of the Chinese, which she considers “far more moral” (109). The contrast between the infantilization of her husband’s appearance and the moral, rightful manhood of his character acts as an embodiment of consubstantiality. The idea of “belonging to someone as their wife” collides with the ability of those with more power (in this case, Millie), to have influence over others’ consciousness. While the couple allows each other to assert their individual ideas and values to “act together” in certain moments, they still uphold their own ideas of traditions and culture.

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Consubstantiality as a model can also clarify several of the moments in Mrs. Spring Fragrance where characters only inhabit parts of other characters’ identities. The emasculation of Liu Kahnghi is another example of sharing only a part of one’s consciousness with another. From the viewpoint of a white, English-speaking reader at the time, the subtleties of the infantilization of Asian men and women and the consequences of late 19th century “Yellow Peril” may not be so obvious. However, Far ends this chapter with the line “I can only remember that when they brought my Chinese husband home there were two red balls in his pocket. Such was Liu Kanghi – a man” (110). After Liu Kanghi is killed, only then does he embody the masculinity that the narrator distantly acknowledges. Another pattern that is established is that characters in a position of power only recognize or cognitively identify with the parts of another characters’ identity (mainly pertaining to characters with less power such as women or queer characters), after they are absent from the story or have passed away.

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This shift from partial agreement to empathy is one way that consubstantiality (a form of ethos) moves towards political agency and identification. Burke constitutes the idea of “identification” in his book, Rhetorical Situation, where he states:

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       If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity. If men were wholly and truly of one substance, absolute communication would be of man’s very essence. It would not be an ideal, as it now is, partly embodied in material conditions and partly frustrated by these same conditions (22).

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The idea of partial embodiment aligns with several of the characters’ relationships in chapters such as “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu”. In “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu”, a bridegroom named Wan Li Fo asks for his bride to join him in the United States. Tau Su, his bride, adapts poorly to life in the United States and becomes frightened after attending a physician’s appointment. She decides to go into hiding and asks for a divorce much to Wan Li Fo’s dismay. Throughout this short and moralistic story, Wan Li Fo only realizes his wife’s dilemma and fear of becoming Americanized after finding her hiding place. The perspective of the husband and the marital dilemma constitutes a limited material condition – perhaps pointing towards the importance of a shared habitus in maintaining some form of agreement between two individuals. The most fascinating aspect of this chapter is the inclusion of the bystander character, Adah Raymond, who is a friend and frequent visitor to Pau Tsu’s house. Adah is the name with which Edit Eaton/Sui Sin Far identifies with (63). Far is described as “Adah” by her sister Winnifred in Marion: The Story of An Artist’s Model, and in Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Hsu 2011). Adah Raymond observes both Pau Tsu and Wan Li Fo’s dissolution, but hesitates to intervene or protest against it (116). The last lines of the chapter end with Adah graphs the meaning of Pau Tsu’s sadness; she proclaims, “Lord, what fools we mortals be!” [4] and “I ought to have known. What else could Pau Tsu have thought?” (120). The disillusionment and eventual realization of Pau Tsu’s sadness signifies the limitations of Adah’s identification with Pau Tsu. Although Far’s stand-in narrator employs modes of consubstantiality, she fails to fully identify with Pau Tsu until it is too late. In the end, Adah Raymond demonstrates how she is frustrated by the same conditions that bring herself and characters such as Pau Tsu to agree upon shared values. Perhaps, this gradual construction of consubstantiality differs from true sentimentality because of the limitations of social and political action.

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Where do the borders of consubstantiality and sentimentality lie in Mrs. Spring Fragrance? Perhaps, Sui Sin Far’s sentimental storytelling style values the textuality of the “private speaking” between characters, rather than the public speaking that “U.S. suffragists associated women’s political self-expression” (Chapman 2008). In this reading, consubstantiality focuses on the character’s attempts at identifying an individual's shared values, while sentimentality relates to a larger social action – in this case, through the dialogue and interactions between characters. In the chapter titled “The Smuggling of Tie Co '', a Chinese man named Tie Co intends to be smuggled to New York by a white man named Fabien, who is skilled at the art of contraband. Tie Co and Fabian engage in a brief romantic/sexual encounter, and Tie Co later flees the scene in order to avoid getting caught. When Tie Co’s body is recovered the next day, his body is described as “the body found with Tie Co’s face and dressed in Tie Co’s clothes was the body of a girl–a woman” (136) and Fabian continues to ponder Tie Co’s life and death. In death, he is feminized: something that provokes some sentimentality within Fabien, but fails to prompt social action from him outside of his consciousness. This is demonstrated through Fabian’s inability to say or do anything different after being released from jail a week later.

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This brief chapter summarizes the distinction between consubstantiality and sentimentality at the heart of Sui Sin Far’s characters. While the chapter is told from Fabian’s point of view (a more masculine character), the glimpses of Tie Co’s character is demonstrated mostly through his dialogue and the description of his body. When Tie Co says “Two men run away behind there” (135), it elicits an action from Fabian. The inclusion of these characters point towards the subtleties in sentimentality that only go as far as to prompt a change of the white characters’ consciousnesses. Perhaps, this is where the merging of consubstantiality and sentimentality occurs. Characters such as Fabian are stand-ins for a broader white, English-speaking audience that Far attempts to appeal to. The author tries to persuade her audience of the social reform surrounding discriminatory policies against women and Asian Americans while allowing the audience to only glimpse specific moments of dialogue from more marginalized characters. The “shared consciousness” and momentary agreement is demonstrated through Far’s use of vivid descriptions and through showing similarities between the Chinese characters and her audience. However, at the time of publication, these stories must have sounded quite different from the stereotypical images of Chinese migrants (Wang 2008) and may have not prompted social action in the ways that Far anticipated. The limitations of political and social action are what makes these stories grapple with both sentimentality and consubstantiality. With that being said, how can readers use a model to read Far’s work rhetorically?

 

Rhetorical Effect

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Far’s ability to describe her male and female character’s thoughts and feelings in great detail, even when they are not the primary narrator, distinguishes them from mainstream portrayals of Chinese people at the time. She gives many of her characters mortal fortitude and describes them in an unusually positive light, because she is aware of the rhetorical situation and literary tradition that she is writing in (Wang 2008). Several of her characters, including stand-ins for herself, are limited in the portrayals of perspectives for a western audience. However, she utilizes narrative form and dialogue to create a rhetorical situation that western audiences are familiar with. A significant example of this is throughout the chapter, “Its Wavering Image”. In this section, a half-white and half-Chinese girl named Pan navigates her bi-racial identity. She makes a friend named Mark Carson, who “was Pan’s first white friend” (81). The title of the poem references a rhetorical tradition, and is a nod towards a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem titled “The Bridge”. Throughout the chapter, Pan dissuaded from identifying as “Chinese” by her friend Mark Carson. She stands her ground and asserts that the Chinese people look upon her as their own (82) and that she is a Chinese woman (85). From Pan’s perspective, Far writes:

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       “There shone: “Its Wavering Image.” It helped her to lucidity. He had done it. Was it unconsciously dealt–that cruel blow?...None knew better than he that she, whom he had called ‘a white girl, a white woman,’ would rather that her own naked body and soul had been exposed, that things, sacred and secret to those who loved her, should be cruelly unveiled and ruthlessly spread before the ridiculing and uncomprehending foreigner” (84)

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This section illuminates the rhetorical significance of using various perspectives and narrative techniques such as symbolism to help the reader identify with Far’s characters. Pan’s statement that she’d rather have her true self exposed to the foreigner than face another blow such as that, emphasizes Far’s use of rhetoric as a means of sentimentality. Additionally, her use of rhetorical strategies and vulnerability of her characters subverts expectations while simultaneously forcing her readers to identify with them. [5] The repetition of both “Chinese woman” and “white woman” throughout the chapters, I would argue, is Far’s emphasis on this perceived dichotomy. Far is perhaps one of the earliest writers to complicate this dichotomy for bi-racial characters and to have her characters reclaim and identify themselves with their marginalized (in this case, Chinese) identity. Throughout the first section of the novel titled, “Mrs. Spring Fragrance”, the distinction between what values are “American” and what ones are “Chinese” is embodied by the character of Mr. and Mrs. Spring Fragrance. Similarly, Far inserts familiar quotations from poems and plays. In this section she includes the line: “Is better to have loved and lost, / Than never to have loved at all” [6] (36), and repeats it to demonstrate “old-fashioned” notions of marriage (43). The emphasis of using English writers’ works to describe Chinese values rhetorically, points more towards the consubstantiality of these notions for white audiences, but provides a strong rhetorical voice for Chinese Americans in the communities she served.

 

Sentimental Futures

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Sui Sin Far’s characters inhabit a space between two cultures, as well as between masculinity and femininity. While several scholars have emphasized the sentimental aspect of her work, many of her characters can also be read through the lens of consubstantiality. Sui Sin Far’s work of pioneering early depictions of Chinese Americans and subverting expectations is just as significant as her contributions to pursuing racial equity. While audiences from the early 20th century might have been partial to some of Far’s progressive claims, her rhetoric humanized residents of Chinatown and made her work incredibly significant for the time period. Since then, her letter in the Montreal Daily Star has been used by Chinese-Canadians who fought to be reimbursed for the head tax that was imposed on Chinese immigrants from 1885-1923 (White-Parks) and her texts adapted into Asian American scholarly critique.

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Her characters enact forms of consubstantiality through agreeing to shared value systems and beliefs, while still remaining somewhat distant from white audiences. Far simultaneously uses rhetoric to create shared identification with her characters, who are based on her own experiences and interviews of residents from Chinatowns. Therefore, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, with its multiple narratives and perspectives, uses sentimentality to evoke social change within her characters and uses consubstantiality to aid the audience in identifying with the characters’ plights. To rhetorically adapt and subvert expectations, all the while presenting readers with a means to create justice and equity through identification is what makes her body of work so significant to both rhetorical and Asian American scholarship.

 

Notes

[1] S.E. Solberg, “Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton: First Chinese-American Fictionist” (1981) is an early example of a literary critique of Sui Sin Far. Solberg argues that Far deserves recognition and explores the multifaceted details of her life. This essay also highlights the question of choice over one’s identity and the mainstream literature and attitudes towards Chinese Americans during that time period.

[2] When referencing the original text, I will use page numbers. Any notations from Hsuan L. Hsu’s introduction to Mrs. Spring Fragrance or footnotes will be cited accordingly.

[3] Throughout this essay, A Rhetoric of Motives will be referenced as (RM).

[4] William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, III.ii.115.

[5] Burke’s idea of “identification” from: Kenneth Burke, “Burke, Rhetoric-Old and New,” New Rhetorics, ed. M. Steinmann, Jr., (New York: Scribner’s, 1967) 62-63

[6] From Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem, “In Memoriam A.H.H.”

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References

Burke, Kenneth. (1969). A rhetoric of motives. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kenneth Burke, “Rhetorical Situation,” Communication: Ethical and Moral Issues, ed. Lee Thayer (London: Gordon, 1973) 268
Chapman, M. (2008). A “Revolution in Ink”: Sui Sin Far and Chinese Reform Discourse. American Quarterly, 60(4), 975–1001. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40068558
McCann, S. (1999). Connecting Links: The Anti-Progressivism of Sui Sin Far. The Yale Journal of Criticism 12(1), 73-88. doi:10.1353/yale.1999.0009.
Solberg, S. E. (1981). Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton: First Chinese-American Fictionist. MELUS, 8(1), 27–39. https://doi.org/10.2307/467366
Song, M. H. (2003). Sentimentalism and Sui Sin Far. Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 20(1-2), 134+. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A111270412/AONE?u=umuser&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=08e1c078
Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton (2011). Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Hsu, Hsuan L., Ed.) Broadview Press. (Original work published in 1912)
Wang, B. (2008). REREADING SUI SIN FAR: A Rhetoric of Defiance. In L. MAO & M. YOUNG (Eds.), Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric (pp. 244–265). University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt4cgqmc.16
Annette White-Parks. (n.d.). A Reversal of American Concepts of “Other-ness” in the Fiction of Sui Sin Far. Melus. USA: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.