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  • The Queer Newspaperwoman in Edith Eaton's "The Success of a Mistake"
  • Jean M. Lutes

When is a mistake not a mistake? Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far's "The Success of a Mistake" promises, in its very title, to reward error with triumph—a paradox that will not surprise scholars familiar with Eaton's fondness for irony and her flair for upending cultural assumptions. The protagonist, Miss Lund, is a white Seattle newspaperwoman who mixes up her facts while reporting on a Chinese betrothal and unexpectedly finds herself in the role of matchmaker.1 The story hinges, then, on the circulation of misinformation, and it begins with a mistake about sex: Miss Lund's article announces that a Chinese mother has gone to San Francisco to find a husband for her daughter, when in fact the mother has gone to find a wife for her son. At least two people, it turns out, are grateful that the reporter got the story wrong, since her misreporting derails the daughter's already-arranged marriage and paves the way for her to marry the man she loves instead. The story casts the newspaperwoman as an assimilationist Cupid who helps to Americanize her Chinese subjects even as she profits from their cultural differences by reporting on them. But it is in the emotional register of Eaton's reporter-heroine that I think this story might push us to see Eaton's work, and perhaps the larger journalistic tradition to which it contributes, in a new way. In this essay I call attention to one dimension of that emotionality: the queer subtext of the plot, which depends upon the reporter-heroine's sympathetic identification with her source and her charged relationship with a female missionary friend. By staging debates between the reporter and the missionary over the nature and source of the reporter's mistakes, Eaton contests the very definition of a thing incorrectly done or thought. As one misconception follows another in this lighthearted tale, she creates a network of relations that function best when they are misunderstood. It is easy to wonder, then, whether the same holds true for the bond between the reporter and her same-sex friend. [End Page 280]

Adding "The Success of a Mistake"—originally published in the Seattle promotional monthly the Westerner and recently rediscovered by Mary Chapman—to Eaton's known oeuvre reminds us of the importance and complexity of the author's journalistic background.2 As an authorial figure, the fictional Miss Lund signals the influence and relevance of Eaton's experiences as a professional journalist. She also reminds us that Eaton belonged to the group of realist and modernist writers who launched their literary careers as reporters. In 1908, the year this story was published, Eaton listed her occupation as "journalist" in the Seattle census (Solberg 36n1). She had been contributing articles to newspapers on a regular basis since the 1890s, including at least one from which "The Success of a Mistake" draws directly, a piece on "Betrothals in Chinatown" published in 1903 in the Los Angeles Express. The reporter-heroine's misreported betrothal story echoes, in both structure and content, Eaton's Los Angeles Express article.3

More broadly, "The Success of a Mistake" calls attention to a vibrant counter-tradition of women's reporting, one that was not necessarily progressive but which was almost always—in one way or another—queer. By associating Progressive Era newspaperwomen with queerness, I do not mean to suggest that they would have identified as or understood themselves to be lesbians (or inverts, a term more common at the time). While some, like Eaton herself, remained single, and some lived with other women in long-term relationships, it is not the manifestation of their specific sexual desires or their self-identified sexual orientation that concerns me here. Rather, it is their participation in a public phenomenon, the newspaperwoman's emergence as a cultural icon in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century North America, that can itself be understood as queer in its confounding of sex and gender norms. Between 1880 and 1900, women reporters became a highly visible minority in otherwise male-dominated city newsrooms, and fictional newspaperwomen...

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