Pan's Burden: Intertextual Aesthetics and Illiberal Cosmopolitanism in Sui Sin Far's "Eurasian" Stories

For my heart was hot and restless,And my life was full of care,And the burden laid upon meSeemed greater than I could bear.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Bridge" (1845)

I give my right hand to the Occidentals and my left to the Orientals, hoping that between them they will not utterly destroy the insignificant "connecting link."

—Sui Sin Far, "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian" (1909)

I've had enoughI'm sick of seeing and touchingBoth sides of thingsSick of being the damn bridge for everybody

—Donna Kate Rushin, "The Bridge Poem" (1981)

Recent years have witnessed the considerable enlargement of the catalog of works by Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton).¹ As Mary Chapman notes in her anthology Becoming Sui Sin Far (2016) "Eaton's expanded oeuvre, now consisting of over 260 texts, demonstrates that she was far more prolific than previously believed, publishing quite actively throughout her career."² Naturally, newly discovered texts have drawn attention from scholars, yielding insights about the intersectional reach of Far's fiction for women of color, as well as key revelations about her readership in periodicals such as The Westerner and The Land of Sunshine.³ At the same time, the mass digitization of once-obscure periodicals (representing the immense labors of archivists) enables us to re-contextualize some of Far's best-known works and reassess their meaning. In her recent book, The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time (2018), June Howard exemplifies this point by re-framing one of Sui Sin Far's most well-known stories, "'Its Wavering Image'" (1912) in terms of its intertextual connections to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Robert Louis Stevenson. These links, as Howard ably shows, reveal a sophistication to Far's work heretofore unnoticed by critics.

Still, there is much more to be said about this important text, which Marjorie Pryse suggests "may be [Far's] best story."⁴ While researching the literary-historical context of Far's "'Its Wavering Image,'" I have come across an anonymous text that casts further light on the work's development. This story, "Her Burden" (1893), similarly appropriates the text of Longfellow's lyric poem "The Bridge," albeit in a less sophisticated way than Far's later narrative. In this essay, I discuss this archival find in the context of an argument about the gradual development of Far's fictional narratives dealing with what she terms "Eurasian" (mixed-race Chinese and American) characters. While several of Far's stories touch upon mixed marriages between Chinese and American characters, three fictional texts heavily feature a female Eurasian protagonist and present her biraciality as part of the central conflict of their respective narratives: "Sweet Sin" (1897), "Woo Ma and I" (1906), and "'Its Wavering Image'" (1912).⁵ Focusing on these texts, I illustrate how Far's approach to the figure of the Eurasian in her fiction not only registers a change in content—shifting from a relatively simplistic portrayal of a racially-doomed protagonist affiliated with the "tragic mulatta" stereotype to a more sophisticated and assertive figure—but also a change in form. Over the course of three decades, I argue, Far's texts about Eurasian women—female characters born from interracial relationships—become increasingly and significantly intertextual.⁶ By the time she published "'Its Wavering Image'" in 1912, Far's recurrent interest in narrating Eurasian experience produced an intertextual aesthetic that reconceived this embodied experience through creative practices of literary identification.

Throughout the following pages, my discussion will compare and contrast Far's early work to patterns of racialization mediated through the literary tradition of sentimentalism; demonstrate how her representations of Eurasian women differ internally as well as in contradistinction to her full-blooded Chinese women characters; and elucidate how "'Its Wavering Image'" showcases a refined instance of Far's Eurasian fiction that registers strategic appropriations of cosmopolitanism and canonical American literature in a regionalist context. Along the way, I will engage with compelling theorizations, emergent in the last few years, of the mixed...