Detecting Winnifred Eaton

In her recent introduction to Winnifred Eaton’s Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model (1916), Karen E. H. Skinazi explores the relationship between racial ambiguity—that of both the anonymous author and the heroines in Marion and its predecessor, Me: A Book of Remembrance (1915)—and the audience’s ability to detect racial coding. “Me’s success,” Skinazi states, “has been predicated on a mystery that allowed each reader the chance to become a literary Sherlock Holmes, cracking the codes of its vault of shocking secrets” (xvii). Later, Skinazi writes that a New York Times reviewer, playing detective, solves Eaton’s racial passing utilizing the science of detectionà la Edgar Allan Poe (xxi–xxii).¹ Skinazi’s allusions to the art of detection, although brief, are astute, leading to this essay’s rereading of Eaton’s legacy through the lens of detection and the anxieties produced by its failures, especially the threat of racial passing. It is no coincidence that Eaton published her fiction at a time when both classic detective fiction and African American passing tales were at the peak of their popularity.

Few critics have examined Eaton’s role in the detective genre.² This essay responds to this oversight by arguing that Eaton’s reliance on a trope of racial and ethnic passing, both in her choice of pseudonym and in her Japanese romances, cannot be fully appreciated without situating her within the context of the panic about detecting passing that swept America during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The unique lens of detective fiction allows us further to conceptualize Eaton’s role as a founding figure of Asian American fiction. This essay also highlights Eaton’s familiarity with rules of genre, particularly detective fiction and African American passing narratives, and her participation in the construction of racial epistemologies that were then being codified by law and perpetuated by scientific racism. Finally, Eaton’s practice and promotion of undetection, the tension between detection and revelation and knowing and telling, reveals her participation in and resistance to the detective genre itself.

This reading re-envisions Eaton’s legacy to Asian American Studies via Xiaojing Zhou’s call for resistance to and transformation of traditional hegemonic Western literary genres. As Zhou states, this critical approach “demonstrate[s] a much more dynamic and complex relationship between Asian American and traditional European American literature” (4). Eaton responded to white European America’s increasing racial anxieties and demands for detection—the central practice in detective fiction—with narratives of undetection. As a genre then predominantly authored by white males, detective fiction promoted and relied on conventional racial knowledges and boundaries under the guise of rationalism and critical reasoning. As a biracial woman performing ethnic passing, Eaton interrogated these strict racial borders while simultaneously accentuating the constant insecurities and anxieties fostered by undetection—knowing but not revealing. At the same time, Eaton not only responded but added to the growing breadth of passing narratives—a traditionally African American genre—by providing an Asian American perspective. Through her use of three popular genres (romance, detective fiction, and passing narratives), Eaton addresses both European America and black America, arguing for an inclusion of Asian Americans as participants in US culture, not as mere objects of study.

Eaton’s rise to fame as an author of Japanese romances occurred during the heyday of the passing narrative. Popularized from the second half of the nineteenth century into the Harlem Renaissance by writers such as Pauline Hopkins, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Nella Larsen, and Charles W. Chesnutt, among others, the passing narrative has been a well-established area of academic study in recent years³—including in Eaton scholarship, which also concerns Eaton’s own passing for Japanese—but little has been published on passing from a comparative race perspective,⁴ taking into account the larger discussions of racial passing that took place during the first quarter of the twentieth century. While traditional African American passing tales feature light-skinned characters passing for white in order to escape racist restrictions and injustices, Eaton’s passing stories, responding to her literary and cultural milieu, predominantly center...