"As to her race, its secret is loudly revealed": Winnifred Eaton's Revision of North American Identity.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Quebec-born Winnifred Eaton, a Chinese British woman who used the pseudonym "Onoto Watanna," was writing romances in New York, experimenting with the popular genre of Japonisme--the craze for all things Japanese. As Eaton advanced in her career, however, she became disgruntled with her writing, observable both by virtue of her shift in focus and in reading the words of her alter ego, Nora, in her autobiographical novel, Me: A Book of Remembrance (1915). Nora frowns on her own success, "founded upon a cheap and popular device," and declares, "Oh, I had sold my birthright for a mess of potage!" (153-54). As Me reveals, Eaton had a new project, one that was her true birthright. Without specifically identifying her own Chinese heritage, or returning to her fabricated Japanese identity, she nonetheless created clearly non-white Canadian characters in Me and its spin-off, Marion. The Story of an Artist's Model (1916), auto/biographical tales of American immigration and adventure. In doing so, Eaton extended and revised the Canadian American rhetoric--and literature--that focused on the white, Anglo-Saxon bond or "brotherhood" between Canadians and Americans.

Eaton was not a political novelist, and her characters face neither head taxes nor Chinese Exclusion Acts when they cross the Canadian-American border. Yet Eaton made an important innovation in Canadian American immigrant literature by revealing the experience of immigrating as a double outsider: as a racialized figure, and a Canadian. Some critics, knowing Eaton's background, wonder at the seeming "whiteness" of the characters of Me and Marion. In her study of Eurasian writers, Carol Spaulding, for example, notes: "The ... narratives [apart from Diary of Delia] written in the first person are Eaton's autobiography, Me, and her sister's biography, Marion. All of these are white narrators" (198). Similarly, Dominika Ferens, in her excellent account of the two well-known Eaton sisters, Winnifred and Edith, says Marion, written by both Winnifred Eaton and her sister Sara Bosse, is "a novel that paradoxically has an all white cast, although we know now that the title character was based on Winnifred's older sister [Sara]" (141). As Ferens also points out, however, the protagonist of Marion is clearly marginalized because she is not white; both Eaton and Sara/Marion "performed the exotic difference that mainstream society inscribed on their bodies, but they tried to maintain a distance between the role and their sense of self--a distance that allowed them to always keep in sight and occasionally parody the sexist/orientalist frame within which they posed" (142).

Eaton's implicitly racialized characters stand out in the somewhat established body of works of Canadian American literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More typical for the field were the proudly Anglo-Saxon, white Canadian Americans like Basil King, a writer from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island who had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. In King's The High Heart (1917), Alexandra Adare, a resident of Newport, Rhode Island, who is originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia, retorts, in answer to the question of who she is: "I'm a Canadian" (143). For her, citizenship is a complete identity. Her American interlocutor presses her to explain what else she is beyond "Canadian." She invites Alexandra to move toward her; she examines her closely. "Come over here where I can get a look at you," she demands, trying to determine "who" Alexandra is by her appearance. If it were not a given that Alexandra lacks racial otherness from the white, Anglo-Saxon characters who populate his American landscape, King tries to make it one, Americans can inspect their Canadian brothers and sisters closely, but they will not see difference written on the body. When, despite her explanation, Alexandra is asked again, "What are you besides being a Canadian?," she says, "Nothing" (144). She adds, "[T]here's nothing about me, that I have or am, that I don't owe to my country" (144).

King adamantly homogenizes Canadianness--which is precisely what Eaton challenges. Alexandra's reply is not couched in the familial, the racial, the ethnic or the individual, but only the national, yet in "Canadian," readers are meant to understand all of the above. The American, however, does not accept a national response to be sufficient. "Oh, a Canadian!" answers the American. "That's neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. It's nothing" (143). King disagrees--and he uses this dialogue to make his point. As the novel makes clear, "a Canadian" is weighted with morality, purpose, a way of being, and a position--as well as a clear racial makeup and heritage. "A Canadian" is a middleman between England and the United States, a conduit, a purveyor of Anglo-Saxonism. Alexandra tells her American sisters and brothers, "The Canadian understands America because he is an American; he understands England because he is an Englishman. It's only of him that that can be said" (144). According to King, the Canadian is the natural mediator between New Worlder and Old because he is both.

King is hardly original in thinking of Canada as the Anglo-Saxon linchpin between the United States and Britain; as Eaton would have been thoroughly aware, this theory was prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century. In his study This Kindred People: Canadian-American Relations and the Anglo-Saxon Idea, 1895-1903, Edward Kohn includes a litany of activists who employed this rhetoric. J. W. Longley, Attorney General for Nova Scotia, for example, positioned Sir Wilfred Laurier (prime minister of Canada 1896-1911), as the man who went "a long way to remove all causes which militate against friendly relations between Great Britain and the United States" (Kohn 70). And Agnes Laut, a Canadian journalist, wrote in the American journal Review of Reviews that "Friendly relations between the United States and the Dominion would do more to bring about a world wide Anglo-Saxon reunion than formal compact between the American republic and the British empire" (Kohn 79). In King's The City of Comrades, the Great War in which Canada was fighting was justified as not only a fight of good over evil, but also a testament to the Anglo-Saxon ideal, and in The High Heart, Alexandra several times speak of her loyalty to the "great Anglo-Saxon ideal of which the King is the symbol" (King, Comrades 232-33; Heart 40).

As national siblings of the Americans, turn-of-the-century Canadians found their mission was to promote the interdependency of Anglo-Saxon nations, or "keep it in the family." In The City of Comrades, Frank Melbury, a Montrealer living in New York, becomes one such crusader, striving to persuade Americans of the need to lose their national insularity. Frank considers himself "the American citizen's blood brother," whose national duty consists of convincing this brother to join the Great War (King, Comrades 360). Kohn's book is filled with quotations of Americans and Canadians referring to each other in familial terms, as sharing the same "blood," allowing North Americans to find common ground in their "family" of Anglo-Saxonism. John Charlton, a Canadian Member of Parliament who was born in New York, spent his career trying to improve trade relations between his native and adopted country, writing in The North American Review in 1897 to endorse "better relations between the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon family" and "the best interests of the Anglo-Saxon race upon the American continent" (Kohn 76-77). Robert McConnell, the editor of the Halifax Morning Chronicle, wrote in an 1899 article titled "Commercial Relations between Canada and the United States," that "There is room and scope enough on this continent for the two Anglo-Saxon nations, Canada and the United States--daughters of a common mother, custodians of a common liberty--to work out their separate destinies" (Kohn 81). In these constructions of kinship, there seems to be little room for stories that shed light on Canadian minorities who came to the United States and could not automatically base their bonds with Americans on their shared Anglo-Saxon heritage.

As used by King, politicians both in favor of continental unity and free trade agreements, and journalists, Anglo-Saxonism was both a cultural heritage, as well as a race--as if it were whiteness in its truest form. For Goldwin Smith, a British Canadian journalist and writer who endorsed continental unity, 1776 was the greatest tragedy in the Anglo-Saxon family; his marriage to an American woman was his personal contribution to heal the familial breach. In a letter to Andrew Carnegie published in The North American Review, Smith calls the merging of the two nations "a moral reunion of the race," and adds, indignantly, that "The American people expended, as it is reckoned, eight billions of money and a million of lives to rectify their relations with five millions of whites at the South, though the five millions of whites brought with them four millions of blacks.... Will they treat as a matter of indifference the cheap and bloodless rectification of their relations with five millions of whites at the North unencumbered with any fatal appendage?" (Smith 171, 172).

Smith and others advocated political union to minimize the presence of the African Americans, the French Canadians, and the nationalities, "radically, perhaps unalterably, alien to our civilization," that were threatening to invade white, Anglo-Saxon North America (177). Imagine, then, Eaton's choice of maximizing the visibility of such alien, non-white minorities on both sides of the border. Smith declared that "immigration of Chinese or any other alien nationality [cannot] be effectually controlled unless the whole continent is brought under one jurisdiction" (177). He even condemned the Canadian government for raising revenue through the Chinese immigrants--which is to say, collecting head taxes from them instead of excluding them. He declared that doing so gave the Chinese a "back door" to the United States. Whereas Smith was inciting white North American readers to defend their racial borders, Eaton's stories were busy flouting that "back door," and demonstrating that "alien" nationals roamed freely on the continent (177).

King, in contrast, carefully constructed a Canada for the American that is the "new white man's empire," as he calls it in The City of Comrades (168). Unlike his contemporary, the Canadian poet Robert Stead, whose poem "The Mixer" reads, "I take 'em as I get 'em, soldier, sailor, saint and clown / And 1 turn 'era out Canadians-all but the yellow and brown," King does not even acknowledge the presence of non-whites in Canada (Stead 10). In The High Heart, he has Alexandra show deep resentment when her British friend speaks of "Colonials" (which is to say, Canadians) as "a kind of race of aborigines, like the Maoris or the Hottentots--only that by some freak of nature they were white" (King 354). King believes in and expects solidarity of the Anglo-Saxon peoples--of Britain, Canada, and the United States. When an ugly, "awful" Jew suggests that the United States is only partly built on the Anglo-Saxon element, Alexandra maintains that the "principle" is the same, suppressing certain realities for the sake of rhetoric (385-87).

Over one hundred years earlier, examining North America "from Nova Scotia to West Florida," J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur defined the "American" as a man with a "strange mixture of blood," perhaps even including the "awful" Jew of King's construction (Crevecoeur 67, 43). While non-Europeans would not have entered Crevecoeur's consciousness as a part of this mixture, non-Anglo-Saxons certainly would have. But in the field of literature, that diversity was scarcely recognizable even by the end of the nineteenth century. F. O. Matthiessen located in Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, five white AngloSaxon men, the heart of the American Renaissance; he took this rule of thumb further to say, in his biography of Theodore Dreiser, that Dreiser was "virtually the first major American writer whose family name was not English or Scotch-Irish" (4). Although slave narratives certainly had their value (primarily political), the writers that dominated the literary American landscape were of white, Anglo-Saxon descent, and Canada's writers were of similar stock; Philippe Ignace Francois Aubert de Gaspe, credited with writing the first French Canadian novel, was not popular in his time, even if his L 'influence d'un livre (1837) is now considered a landmark work. As "cousins" and "brothers," Canadians and Americans were of the same genetic makeup, Canadians insisted, even if xenophobic Americans sometimes suspected otherwise--a fear encoded in the American's physical inspection of Alexandra in King's The High Heart. These familial relationships seem to bear out not only in the rhetoric of the writers, but in their "blood": Bliss Carman, the "unofficial poet laureate of Canada," was a cousin to Emerson; Charles G. D. Roberts, the "father of Canadian poetry," was Carman's cousin; E. Pauline Johnson, who, like Eaton, was only half-white and famously wrote of her aboriginal heritage at the turn of the twentieth century, was the daughter of Emily Howells, cousin to William Dean Howells.

Anglo-Canadians, then, coming to the United States, which they began doing in large numbers in the 1830s, (1) wanted to be sure to appear to lack "other"ness--whether racial, religious, or hereditary. King reinforces this notion by insisting that ethnic and racial otherness was for the "Maoris or the Hottentots," not Canadians. Eaton, on the other hand, showed readers of King and other Canadian American writers a different kind of Canadian immigrant to the United States. Although Nora Ascough, the protagonist of Me has a clearly Anglo-Saxon name--as Anglo-Saxon, say, as Winnifred Eaton--she quickly begins to drop hints that she does not have a face to match it. (2) She is no Alexandra Adare; she might "pass" as white, but not completely. Without quite detailing the source of her looks, she says, "I myself was dark and foreign-looking" (Eaton, Me 41). But whether this darkness is still a type of whiteness is not altogether clear. Ferens astutely observes the complicated way that whiteness itself is represented in Eaton's work. Studying the characters of Marion, Ferens explains:

   While race is not thematized in the novel, the "white" characters
   represent a full spectrum of color, from Marion, whom a painter
   likens to a half-caste Indian girl, through the Jewish Cohen family
   and the "small and dark" (32) Italian suitor named Benvenuto whom
   Marion rejects, to Paul Bonnat, who "looks like a Viking" and wins
   her heart. (142)

Ferens suggests that the characters that inhabit Eaton's autobiographical fiction might have helped readers rethink whiteness. (3)

Yet the racial ambiguity of Eaton's heroines also allowed Eaton to delve into her own racial ambivalence. The Jewish Cohens and dark-skinned Italian might be represented by Eaton, but the "Viking," after all, wins Marion's heart. Through Marion and Nora, Eaton pays homage to the Alexandra Adares even as she shows her American readers that there is more in Canada than their white-skinned sisters. Nora eyes the white people around her with envy--and not a small degree of internalized racism, as most readers today cannot miss. "I myself was dark and foreign looking, but the blond type I adored," she states. "In all my most fanciful imaginings and dreams," she adds wistfully, "I had always been golden-haired and blue-eyed" (Me 41).

Unlike Toni Morrison's Pecola Breedlove, however, Nora, on some level, comprehends that white beauty is not the only saving grace. Nora does not come to this realization by losing her racism-internalized or otherwise. Despite her proclamation that "one color ... is as good as another" in Canada, Nora tells a story of a hooked-nosed part-Hebrew black man who holds out his hand to her, causing her to write, "I was filled with a sudden panic of almost instinctive fear" (Me 40). When this same man tells her he loves her and tries to kiss her, she tells her readers she had dreamed of gods and heroes whispering those words to her, not a "great black man, the 'bogy man'" of her childhood days (55). The same woman who asks, "What should I, a girl who had never before been outside Quebec, and whose experience had been within the narrow confines of home and a small circle, know of race prejudice?" runs away from the black man, fearing that the "great animal" (her emphasis) is running behind her (41, 55).

Although she does not seem to overcome her racism (Me, after all, is written in hindsight), Nora does eventually recognize the advantages of her own differences in custom and coloring, and she highlights them. As the New York Times reporter notes in the investigative article, "Is Onoto Watanna Author of the Anonymous Novel 'Me'?" she does not deny her non-white side at any point. "I come of a race, on my mother's side, which does not easily forget kindness," she states at one point (Me 189). At another point, she kisses her friend's hand, claiming "women of my race do things like that under stress of emotion" (269). "People stared at me," she writes, "as if I interested them or they were puzzled to know my nationality" (166). She is told that she is "picturesque, interesting, fascinating, distinguished" and "lovely" (184).

But this same exoticism which makes Nora interesting also makes her sexually vulnerable, and the same applies for her sisters. The "foreign" or "exotic" element becomes conflated with sexual permissibility for white characters throughout these stories, as is typical in an era of Orientalism. In Me, both Dr. Manning and Mr. Hamilton treat Nora as a sexualized object. And in Marion, the young Ascough girls inappropriately go out with older gentlemen unescorted, which Diana Birchall, Eaton's granddaughter and biographer, calls "alarming." Birchall says that if these stories are true, the girls must have been considered "fast" (22). They do seem to be seen as "fast" by the men, though it is likely that the permissibility stems not from their sexual forwardness but from the fact that they are too plentiful to be controlled, not to mention that they are the daughters of a mother who does not know the mores of the land. When Marion's lover suggests cohabitation, her (foreign) mother's potential resistance to such an impropriety is dismissed when he laughs and says, "Your mother is a joke" (Eaton, Marion 109). In "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian," Eaton's sister, Edith, tells of a similar reception to her racialization: "[when] it begins to be whispered about the place that I am not all white, some of the 'sporty' people seek my acquaintance." One man frankly tells her: "I would like to know you. You look such a nice little body.... I will tell you all about the sweet little Chinese girls I met when we were at Hong Kong. They're not so shy!" (Mrs. Spring Fragrance 226).

Winnifred Eaton appears to vacillate between considering the sexualization of Nora's raced body positive, as it allows her to rely on the kindness of strange men, and negative. She accuses the man who keeps her as his would-be mistress, and who fills her room with Oriental rugs and clothes her in Oriental dresses, of looking upon her as a kind of curiosity (Me 311,241). Eaton's ambivalence about the "exotic/eroticism" which shades her characters' whiteness is still present years later. In Sunny-San (1922), her last Japanese novel, the heroine at first only bears the "taint" of white blood, but one hundred pages in, the narrator asks readers to "consider the situation" of a girl "mainly of white blood, with just a drop of oriental blood in her--enough to make her a bit different from the average female of the species, enough, say, to give a snack of that savage element" (10, 100). The savage, of course, indicates something more primitive, more sexual--even though, for the most part, Eaton wants us to see Sunny as a virtuous, mostly white, girl. In an interview that followed Sunny-San's publication, Eaton reflects on what she considers the major difference in the attractions of Eastern and Western women: "One thing Western women have, which they can never teach the East. It is beauty--personal beauty. The Oriental woman is charming. But the Occidental woman--preeminently the Anglo-Saxon type--is beautiful" (qtd. in Birchall 139). Eaton, is, of course, like Sunny, Nora, and Marion, both "Oriental" and "Occidental"--charming and beautiful. So through the examples of herself and her characters, the "lesson" that she adds to these musings becomes meaningful: "The thing for us all to do is just to remember that we belong to the same human family, and that, as good brothers and sisters, we ought to help each other out whenever and wherever we can-instead of talking about Yellow Perils!" (139). Using the very familial language generally reserved for Anglo-Saxons, Eaton finds a way to turn her racial ambivalence into a pedagogical tool.

Eaton's ambivalence about her "half-caste" state also helped her entrance to the Canadian American literary scene. Without some homage paid to its more generic (whiter) conventions, her writing might have been too unfamiliar. In fact, her writing follows many of the traditions established by Canadian American writers. Like the characters of Harvey J. O'Higgins's Don-A-Dreams (1906), Eaton's Canadian characters in Me and Marion move to the United States in search of greater opportunities; in Me, Nora, like Eaton, is an aspiring writer. Once in the United States, Eaton's Canadians find a world filled with deception, difficulty, and all the vices they were raised to avoid--another common trope. O'Higgins's transnationals find themselves being tricked by "con agents" and turning into alcoholics in Don-A-Dreams, for example; Gilbert Parker's border-crossers learn how to drink bourbon, smoke bad cigars, and gamble in the United States in Northern Lights; and Charles G. D. Roberts's Canadian heroine is "mined" south of the border in "Stony Lonesome: A Story of the Provinces."

Americans are often portrayed in Eaton's fiction as insincere flirts or charlatans. The story of a Japanese immigrant, "The Loves of Sakura Jiro and the Three Headed Maid," published in 1903 in Century Illustrated Magazine and reprinted in "A Half Caste" and Other Writings, echoes the themes of Canadian American fiction of the time with its contrast of the immigrant's honesty, purity, and hard work, and the American's phoniness. In this story, Sakura Jiro, newly arrived in the United States, joins a circus sideshow and falls in love with Marva, the three-headed lady. He looks upon her with awe, thinking, "these Americans were capable of producing anything, and why not a three-headed lady?" (Eaton, "A Half Caste" 62). The narrator adds that "Jiro had no doubt it was genuine" (62). Sakura is a talented magician and is constantly devising new acts for the audience to enjoy. But, as he discovers, Marva's "magic" takes no talent; Americans create their magic through something closer to fraudulence than skill. Sakura goes to great lengths to impress this American woman only to see her take off her two extra heads and confess: "It was all a trick" (66).

In Me, Eaton shows the Canadian immigrant learning similar lessons. Like Sakura, Nora is at first dazzled by American glamour, to which her Canadian plainness is unfavorably compared. In her first encounter with an American, she is ridiculed by a woman who is disgusted by the feeble-mindedness of Canadians: "'You poor kid!' she said. 'I don't know what's the matter with you. I don't know what your folks were thinking of when they sent you off to the West Indies in Canadian clothes. Are they all as simple as you there?'" (16-17). This woman, who is Nora's bunkmate on a boat to Jamaica, is also amused by Nora's confusion of clothing sizes (she mixes bust and waist measurements) and her lack of knowledge in regard to tipping help staff. "Good heavens!" the roommate, who later calls Nora "a vast object of pity," cries, "where have you lived all your life?" seeming to expect the answer of "under a rock" rather than Nora's: "In Quebec" (18, 19). Nora describes her feeling at the American's regard: "I grew uncomfortably red under her amused and amazed glance. In the seven days of that voyage my own extraordinary ignorance had been daily brought home to me" (18). The relationship between the two, while friendly, is marked repeatedly by a distinction in knowledge that is attributed to national difference--a fact that is highlighted by the girls' "names." While readers learn second-hand that Nora's roommate "told me her name and learned mine," readers do not get the same privilege; they learn no names here (13). Hence, we only know at this point that the narrator is from Quebec; as for the roommate, she is consistently called "American girl" or "my American friend" (12, 18).

But the American's glamour is cheaply bought--for $1.50, in fact. Wearing her new American shirt-waists, Nora does not make didactic speeches like King's Alexandra about the good of Canadians who are "simpler ... less intellectual ... poorer ... and less, much less, self analytical" than Americans and yet have "a knowledge of what's what that [Americans] couldn't command with money" (King, Heart 43). Instead, Nora learns when it is worth being simple and when she is better off commanding things with money. When she arrives in Chicago, she finds housing at the YWCA, and her roommate, a girl named Estelle Mooney, is described in terms of her style and figure--and her hair. Nora gushes: "her hair appeared such a wonderful fabric that really one could scarcely notice anything else about her. It was a mass of rolls and coils and puffs, and it was the most extraordinary shade of glittering gold that I have ever seen" (Eaton, Me 117). But, like Marva's two superfluous heads, the hair is removable. Nora explains:

   I could not imagine how she ever did it up like that--till I saw
   her take it off! Well, that hair, false though it was, entirely
   dominated her face. It was stupendous, remarkable. However, it was
   the fashion at that time to wear one's hair piled gigantically upon
   one's head, and every one had switches and rolls and rats
   galore--every one except me. (117-18)

Becoming suspicious of American abundance like her compatriot characters in other Canadian American fiction, Nora decides to attribute the difference between her own full head of hair (the genuine article) and the others' lack (and falseness) to national difference: "Canadian girls all have good heads of hair. I never saw an American girl with more than a handful" (118). Preferring her own natural good head of hair, Nora here saves her money and learns her lesson about things that seem too good to be true.

While it is easy to read this scene within a framework of turn-of-the-century Canadian American literature, it is also evident that her "good head of hair," "pure black in color" is not really a feature shared by all Canadians. One would think that a reader of Me could hardly fail to notice the number of times that Nora's (unnamed) race arises as a factor in the many episodes that fill her memoirs. Newspapers and magazines, searching for the anonymous source of Me, zeroed in on the "Japanese" writer, Onoto Watanna. Getting it only slightly wrong (since Eaton was not Japanese by her family ancestry), the New York Times declared: "As to her race, its secret is loudly revealed in almost every chapter, for she cannot conceal the glow of pride she feels in being half Japanese" ("Is Onoto Watanna Author" 74). The investigator, pleased with him or herself, adds:

   We find her kissing the sleeve of tall Roger Avery Hamilton,
   because she was so short, and also because such a salute was the
   custom of her country. That country means Japan. What better proof
   of Japanese origin is there in the line in which the authoress says
   that she had never seen a woman in hysterics. Again the ways of
   Nippon come to the surface when she tells how strange she looked in
   even fashionable garments, for the charm of the women of the land
   of the wisteria is much obscured even by the best of the Occidental
   modes....

   That she who has revealed herself in "Me" was thoroughly imbued
   with the ideas of a Japanese is shown by the serious manner in
   which she considers the proposal of the merchant from Tokio. (74)

This is an amazingly sexist, Orientalist reasoning, and yet the New York Times reporter realizes something that makes Eaton's Canadian American immigrant narrative a significant revision: Eaton is clearly racializing her Canadian character.

The revision is significant because, in the context of Canadian American literature, Eaton's writing does not offer itself up to the traditional marketing strategies employed by Canadians writing or selling their books in the United States. As James Doyle explains in The Fin de Siecle Spirit: Walter Blackburn Harte and the American/Canadian Literary Milieu of the 1890s, "American critics and editors were stereotyping Canadian writers as regional nature poets and nationalists," and because they were getting regionalist nature writing published, the writers were encouraged to keep writing it (39). A good example of such stereotyping can be found in William Dean Howells's review of books which includes Eaton's A Japanese Nightingale. Howells does not recognize Eaton's work to be of Canadian origin at all, and he concentrates on the way the "pretty little novelette" has a directness, a simplicity, and a sincerity that cause him to say, "If I have ever read any record of young married love that was so frank, so sweet, so pure, I do not remember it" (881). While his reading of Eaton's novel is blatantly sentimental, his approach to Gilbert Parker's The Right of Way and Dr. Henry Van Dyke's The Ruling Passion is, in contrast, nationally-focused. He lauds the representation of Canada in The Right of Way, filled with "drunken lumbermen," habitants', seigneurs, and cures, and "the cold rivers, the hard, clear skies, the snowy woods and fields, the frozen villages of Canada," feeling that Parker's novel "gives one a realizing sense of the Canadians, not only in the country but in the city, at least so far as they affect each other psychologically in society, and makes one feel their interesting temperamental difference from Americans" (873). He also appreciates The Ruling Passion for its depiction of the "Canadian landscape and character" (875).

Skipping the drunken lumbermen, Eaton focuses on the success story, common both to Canadian American tales and most turn-of-the-century immigrant texts; only her success story comes as a direct result of this racial or "foreign" element. When Me ends triumphantly, with Nora rising to stardom as a writer, she says: "I wrote a little story of my mother's land. I had never been there, and yet I wrote easily of that quaint, far country, and of that wandering troupe of jugglers and tight-rope dancers of which my mother had been one" (Eaton, Me 125). From that story comes another, and Nora's professional possibilities seem unlimited by the book's closing (even though Me found Eaton on the descent as a writer). Just as Don finds success in writing a play called "Winter" about his heritage in O'Higgins's novel concerning a Canadian who has come to the United States, so too does Nora. Only Nora does not write about winter at all, it seems--making her, like her creator, a rare Canadian American writer who did not rely on depictions of the harsh, northern landscape. (4)

Rapidly following Me, and written in the same vein, Marion: The Story of An Artist's Model is also filled with the travails of the Canadian immigrant in the United States who learns a new culture and vernacular and who engages in the illicit love affairs of an unmarried woman. But Marion does not follow the identical path that Me does. In Marion, the narrator does not claim that in Canada, "one color ... is as good as another" or that a girl from Quebec could know nothing "of race prejudice." In fact, the discrimination of the Ascoughs, as reported by the authors, sounds similar to the race prejudice recounted by Edith Eaton in "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian":

   Whenever we children are sent for a walk our footsteps are dogged
   by a number of young French and English Canadians, who amuse
   themselves with speculations as to whether, we being Chinese, are
   susceptible to pinches and hair pulling, while older persons pause
   and gaze upon us, very much in the same way that I have seen people
   gaze upon strange animals in a menagerie. Now and then we are stopt
   and plied with questions as to what we eat and drink, how we go to
   sleep, if my mother understands what my father says to her, if we
   sit on chairs or squat on floors, etc., etc., etc. (Mrs'. Spring
   Fragrance 220)

Although Marion does not "out" the family as Chinese, in the first lines of the book, she allows a French Canadian character to describe the situation of the "Ascough" family in his own words:

   In dat familee dere are eleven cheeldren, and more--they come! See
   dat leetle one? She is tres jolie, n'est ce pas? De father he come
   from Eengland about ten year ago. He was joost young man, mebbe
   twenty seven or twenty eight year ol', and he have one leetle
   foreign wife and six leetle cheeldren. (Eaton, Marion 1)

Marion says she feels "ashamed and humiliated" to hear her family spoken of the way they were, and explains that they were commonly pointed out and discussed in this way because of "the size of our family and my mother's nationality" (2).

The opening scene of the novel immediately seems to change the reason that Marion had claimed in Me for escaping to the United States. In Me, the two sisters, Nora and Marion, have a chance meeting in the United States, and Nora explains: "She had left Quebec on account of an unhappy love affair" (Me 67). Now, the unhappiness of that love affair is contextualized within a place where word of her ethnicity marks her.

Unlike Me, which begins with a departure from Quebec, Marion lingers in the Quebec setting for a good deal of the book, allowing readers to situate ethnic Canadians through the attitudes of and responses to white Canadians. Like her sister in Me, Marion wishes for golden hair and all that it represents, and comes to agree with her neighbors' assessment of her family. But the girls are not without pride. When a neighbor calls her family "heathenish," Marion sticks out her tongue in derision (Marion 8). When their father returns from a trip to England in which he sought help from his parents, Ada (a thinly disguised Edith Eaton) triumphantly announces that had he stayed abroad, he could have "'lived in the lap of luxury,' but he came back to his noisy, ragged little 'heathens,'" instead (16).

The love affair that drives Marion to the United States is with Reggie, an Englishman who has come to Canada; "younger sons of aristocrats," Marion explains, "were often sent to Canada" (28-29). Reggie's proposal comes on condition that his father agrees to the marriage. But what would "the governor" think of a fiancee who, according to her employer, looked like a "little Indian girl" (73)? When Reggie delays in telling his parents about his engagement, Marion interprets the setback as a class issue, as can be seen in the following exchange:

"I told them I knew very well a girl who was the granddaughter of Squire Ascough of Macclessfield, but I haven't had the nerve yet to tell them--to--er--"

I knew what he meant. He hadn't told them about us here, how poor we were, of our large family, and how we all had to work. (77)

Marion fills in Reggie's blank in a particular way, thinking that class alone--an apparently surmountable barrier considering that she was the granddaughter of a squire--separates her from her lover's family. This class assumption, however, is never confirmed, the ellipsis never filled in. In fact, the assumption makes little sense. Not only does Reggie allude to the respectability of the Ascough name, but when Marion accuses Reggie of thinking her family is not good enough for his, his response again shows that class is not the issue: "I've always said your father was a gentleman" (80).

Instead, the blank space can be occupied only by the Ascough mother. After all, Nora announces in Me." "the greatness of my father's people had been a sort of fairy-story with us all, and we knew that it was his marriage with mama that had cut him off from his kindred" (26). The focus on the Ascough father at the expense of the mother is remarkably similar to the textual silence Nora creates, the one that Linda Trinh Moser says, in her Afterword to Me, makes it difficult to read Me as autobiographical. Moser argues: "After devoting attention to describing her father's British ancestors, the refusal to disclose her mother's racial background (especially after signaling its importance) creates a narrative gap" (365). Reggie's focus on the Ascough father also creates a narrative gap--especially glaring considering how much space is devoted to the other characters' treatment of the Ascoughs as a result of their "foreign" mother.

When Marion finally realizes that Reggie will never marry her, she leaves by train for the "Land of the Free" (Eaton, Marion 136). Indeed, here she can be free to pass as a white Canadian. This new identity bestowed upon the border-crosser is akin to the one claimed by a woman who is described by Edith Eaton in "Leaves" (this woman is Winnifred and Edith's sister May, reveals Birchall). She is a "half-Chinese, half-white girl" whose "face is plastered with a thick white coat of paint and her eyelids and eyebrows are blackened so that the shape of her eyes and the whole expression of her face is changed." This girl, knowing how Chinese are regarded in United States, chooses to "pass." Edith Eaton reports: "It is not difficult, in a land like California, for a half-Chinese, half-white girl to pass as one of Spanish or Mexican origin" (Mrs. Spring Fragrance 226). While this woman is not able to pass as white as easily as Marion is, the implication is clear: as a race, the Spanish are commonplace--acceptable, if not ideal. The Chinese, thought to be unassimilable, were simply beyond the realms of white society. Border-crossing allows for a rewriting of history, and May chose to use it to omit her Chinese ancestry. Elaine K. Ginsberg explains "passing" as a kind of "trespassing"--a way to assume a new identity and access the privileges of another. Ginsberg argues that "passing" creates the space for agency, including the opportunity to "construct new identities" (16). But with this advantage comes losses, as well. Birchall writes: "May's concealment of her Chinese blood was complete; the knowledge was not even passed down to her own grandchildren" (Birchall 19). Passing then becomes a form of erasure, though its imprint does not disappear altogether. The "poor child" who passes as Spanish or Mexican "lives in nervous dread of being 'discovered,'" and maybe Marion does too--but the privilege of truth seems to reside only with the reader (Eaton, E., Mrs. Spring Fragrance 226).

The narrator, on the other hand, seems to suffer from amnesia; although readers will remember the girl who is taunted as a child and jilted as a young woman, once Marion crosses the border, she seems to be miraculously stripped of race and ethnicity. Suddenly, it is her Canadianness in relation to Americans that is highlighted, and as a result, her racial heritage bears quite a different kind of significance from her sister Nora's in Me. Far from the French who knew her secret and whispered about her family, Marion bonds with the French now. She and a friend, Rose St. Denis, chat in a hybrid French-English language. Montrealers look out for her. Her entree into the world of modeling comes by way of a man who tells her: "Miss Ascough, I am going to give you some good advice, chiefly because you are from my old Montreal" (Eaton, Marion 148). The Canadian American man steers Marion toward her new career. Marion initially considers her first encounter with the new land in purely negative terms, complaining that Boston is ugly compared to Montreal, the people speak vulgarly, and they are completely ignorant of Canada. Furthermore, Marion is told that if she stays, she will starve. Ultimately, however, the landsmanship she finds there, as O'Higgins's characters find in New York, saves her.

Yet Marion--herself not amnesiac--is always interested in the backgrounds of the people she meets. When her employer, Mr. Menna, laughs at German attitudes, Marion tells him, "You're a German yourself," but his response does not make sense to her: "I'm an American" (255). Later she asks Mr. Menna about another artist, Mr. Bonnat: "Is Mr. Bonnat a Frenchman?" (255). Although "Menna seemed uncertain of his nationality," he responds firmly in the negative, assuring Marion that Bonnat "went to college in America" and got "his Ph.D. at Harvard" (255). Marion, ever-interested in the non-American background of her acquaintances, insists: "The name is French.... Are you sure he's not French?" (256). Marion is concerned with the national heritage of her peers, and has her own national heritage to present to them. Like Alexandra, she can suddenly say "I'm a Canadian" and nothing else. Addressing her as though by name, a bartender asks: "How's the little Canadian girl?" (227). Having a different (but not "foreign") national identity apparently allows Marion to shed her ethnic past and racial skin; one difference satisfies the curious.

This "different" Canadian, readers discover, rapidly becomes steeped in the mores of American life. As is typical of the genre, Canadianness, for Marion, is linked to a gentler, more innocent way of life, and Americanness to corruption; convinced to pose nude for the first time, Marion mentally escapes to a remembered Hochelaga, to her brother pulling her on a sleigh through the thick snow. But the national difference does not always cast the United States in a negative light. Separated from the traditions of home, she learns about notions like gender equality. "It was a revelation to me," she explains of mixed-gender associations, "as in Canada, as in Europe, the simple friendship between men and women is not known as in the United States" (227). While all the heroines of the Canadian American fiction that imitated "Evangeline" are forced to learn that a loss of idyllic Acadia is a loss of innocence, Marion's relationship to her "loss" is a little more complex. (5) She discovers that innocence can be a kind of ignorance. Listening to Wagner's operas, she reports:

   His "Tristan und Isolde" rang in my ears for days, and by the time
   I heard "Die Meistersinger," I was able thoroughly to enjoy what
   had been unknown land to me. We Canadians had never gone much
   beyond a little Mendelssohn, which the teachers of music seemed to
   consider the height of classical music, and the people were still
   singing the old sentimental songs, not the ragtime the Americans
   love, but the deadly sweet melodies that cloy and teach us nothing.
   (289-90)

Marion becomes attached to her new land: "I did not want to leave New York even for two weeks. I had begun to love my life there" (290). When she is given the opportunity to "begin where [she] left off in Montreal," she decides it is not worth it; there is nothing she wants more than to be in New York (295). When Marion realizes "this was my homer." she fully embraces her new Canadian American identity (301).

Perhaps Marion can adopt this attitude because she knows that she can keep with her the "innocence" of Canada and also learn the sophistication of the United States, without sacrificing either in the name of patriotism. Perhaps it is because, among the French and the Germans who are also American, Marion recognizes the largeness of "America." Or perhaps it is because in America, her background is simply "Canadian"--which it cannot be in Canada. Marion, Eaton's second experiment in Canadian American writing, was potentially threatening to nativist readers; here, Eaton demonstrates that in crossing a border, a person suddenly has, to borrow a term from Mary C. Waters, "ethnic options" (typically associated with people of European descent); though Marion still needs a "descent," she can choose her national descent over her racial descent. This choice is obviously advantageous: in King's The Dust Flower, readers see the difference between the diverse foreigners who fill the book (they are maids and butlers at best, and aspire no higher) and the Canadian (though impoverished to the point of homelessness, the heroine of King's novel, by its end, marries the rich American man who lives "only a few doors from Fifth Avenue" [Flower 41]).

Whereas King, of course, relied on the racial and cultural "sameness" thought to be shared by the two countries, Eaton, with. the racially ambiguous heroines of her auto/biographical novels, defied any sense of "sameness"--within Canada and across the border. Writing these novels, Eaton expanded and diversified Canadian American literature. Without being blatantly didactic, she forced readers to recognize the heterogeneity of Canada as well as that of the United States--since Nora, after all, is living in the United States. So too is Marion, who, unlike her sister, chooses not to live as an ethnic or racialized Canadian American. In these two novels, Eaton did more than find a niche in Canadian American cross-border writing; she also demonstrated that the bond that Canada and the United States shared had to transcend the Anglo-Saxon ideal touted by King and others.

Finally, creating these surprise non-white Canadian characters, Eaton--most likely unintentionally--set up readers for her last literary project (perhaps an even truer birthright): her Canadian novels. Moving back to Canada some years after publishing Me and Marion, Eaton began to home in on Canadianness--within Canada. "Now that she has been reclaimed from her long residence in the States," Eaton's friend Elizabeth Bailey Price wrote of her upon her move to Alberta, "she is desirous to be known henceforth as a Canadian" (qtd. in Birchall 144). Eaton furthermore announced that it was "of vital importance to Canada that its authors remain at home" (146). As such, she launched her new project, which involved two Alberta ranching novels. As focused on Canadian diversity as her auto/biographical novels, Cattle and His Royal Nibs contain a colorful cast of characters. Cattle includes dirt-poor "milk-white" Nettie; the "man-woman" Englishwoman Angella who works the land; and the kind Scottish man, Dr. McDermott (Cattle 10). In Nibs, there is Hilda, the heroine, an Albertan ranch girl as "wild" as she is "dusky" (causing at least one critic to wonder about her racial makeup) (Cole 121); Cheerio, the second son of an Englishman come to Canada to make his fortune; Jake, the "half-breed" idiot; and a number of "Braves" (Eaton, Nibs 245). And, significantly, in both novels, she includes a Chinese cook, by the name of Chum Lee, who saves the heroine at the end. In her ranching novels, in other words, Eaton did what critics of her "Orientalism" would have appreciated finding in her early novels: she championed Chinese characters.

Works Cited

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Birchall, Diana. Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001.

Brodkin, Karen. How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1998.

Cole, Jean Lee. The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2002.

Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John de. Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth Century America. 1782. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Doyle, James. The Fin de Siecle Spirit: Walter Blackburn Harte and the American/Canadian Literary Milieu of the 1890s. Toronto: ECW P, 1995.

Eaton, Edith [Sui Sin Far]. "The Gamblers." Fly Leaf 1 (Feb. 1896): 14-18.

--[Sui Sin Far]. Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. Ed. Amy Ling and Annette White Parks. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1995.

Eaton, Winnifred [Onoto Watanna]. Cattle. New York: A. L. Butt, 1924.

--[Onoto Watanna]. "A Half Caste" and Other Writings. Ed. Linda Trinh Moser and Elizabeth Rooney. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003.

--[Winifred Eaton Reeve]. His Royal Nibs. New York: W. J. Watt & Co., 1925.

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Karen E. H. Skinazi

University of Alberta

Notes

(1.) Goldwin Smith famously said that even if the Americans did not annex Canada, they were annexing the Canadians.

(2.) In Me, Nora lays claim to an illustrious English line: "My father's an Oxford man, and a descendant of the family of Sir Isaac Newton" (26). Birchall notes that Newton's mother was Hannah Ayscough, which could be the source of the name of Eaton's alter ego, Ascough (7).

(3.) A number of books recently have been written on the construction of whiteness of European immigrants: Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White; Karen Brodkin's How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America; and Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno's Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America.

(4.) Walter Blackburn Harte, who published the work of such up-and-coming Canadian writers as Peter McArthur, Susan Frances Harrison, Agnes Maule Machar, and Ethelwyn Wetherald while assistant editor at New England Magazine, changed the direction of Canadian and Canadian American writing, which previously had been focused on images of the snowy white North with its snowy white inhabitants (Doyle 50). He also published "The Gamblers," the debut American story of his sister-in-law, Edith Eaton (as Sui Sin Far), in the February 1896 premiere edition of Fly Leaf the little magazine he briefly ran.

(5.) See Carrie MacMillan's article, which discusses the flurry of novels invoking Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1847 poem, "Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie." The list includes Marshall Saunders's Rose a Charlitte: An Acadian Romance (1898), Grace Dean (McLeod) Rogers's Stories of the Land of Evangeline (1891), Carrie Jenkins Harris's A Modern Evangeline (1896), and Charles G. D. Roberts's A Sister to Evangeline (1898).