Chapter 11 - Decorative Orientalism

Summary

This chapter looks at the influence of “decorative orientalism,” in which Asian objects and images inspired acts of consumption, display, and performance in American homes, on the literary imagination of a persistent racial type: the “Butterfly.” This figure of submissive and suicidal Asian femininity was central to a set of popular stories of interracial romance between Asian women and white European or American men, including Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème (1887), John Luther Long’s story Madame Butterfly (1898), and Giacomo Puccini’s opera, Madama Butterfly (1904). These works have been interpreted as pointed indictments of Western colonialism, as grossly racist misrepresentations, or both. My objective here is less to monitor the degree of accuracy within these representations than to consider how they articulate and manage anxieties about not only intercultural desire, but also consumption and excess. I conclude by examining how Winnifred Eaton’s interracial romance, A Japanese Nightingale (1901), subtly but significantly varies the terms of decorative orientalism in order to provide a biracial heroine with a measure of lasting value.