Sui Sin Far’s Jekyll and Hyde: Divided Subjects and Utopian Alternatives

Sui Sin Far’s fiction investigates the anxieties of white masculinity and the reification of racial identity, which is embodied in a statue of Robert Louis Stevenson in her short story “Its Wavering Image.” Reading the statue as a “dialectical image” illuminates the doubling and splitting that haunts early twentieth-century white American masculinity and is displaced onto Chinese-American and Eurasian subjects. This essay demonstrates Sui Sin Far’s nuanced participation in American literary and social movements of her time, most significantly her utopianized imaginings of mixed and ambiguously raced children in America.