| This is the first extended study of the life and literary oeuvre of Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton, an author of Chinese-British parentage who founded a tradition of Chinese North American literature in Canada and the United States. Sui Sin Far's writings are unique in their representations of the perspectives of Chinese immigrants to North America, especially women and children, at the turn-of-the-century, and in their initiation of a dialogue between North Americans of Chinese and European descents. A major significance of her work lies in its reversal of the dominant cultural perspectives on race in the literature of her era: she places characters of Chinese descent at the center of her fictional vision, casts those of European descent as outsiders or "other," and challenges "bachelor society" and Yellow Peril stereotypes about North American Chinatowns. Further disturbing conventional perspectives, Sui Sin Far features Chinese North American women or children as her protagonists: much of her fiction empowers these traditionally silenced populations to speak and dramatizes their struggle to maintain cultural integrity within the European-based society into which they have immigrated or been born. The study's basic premise is that the particular strategies Sui Sin Far devised to write against the dominant racial and cultural ideologies of her time cannot be understood in isolation from either her life experiences or the cultural environments within which she wrote. Sui Sin Far's ability to publish in the imperialistic marketplace of her era while remaining faithful to her pluralistic vision involved a variety of literary techniques, including the use of "trickster" figures who upset monologic views of reality and open a dialogic that calls to mind Bakhtin's "carnival," especially as Dale M. Bauer adapts Bakhtin's concepts to gender. Finally, Sui Sin Far's struggle and the ways she seeks to resolve it may offer a paradigm for examining other women writers marginalized by race or class who were publishing during the 1865-1914 time period. |
