Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T04:04:55.567Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Colonial Geographies, Imperial Romances: Travels in Japan with Ellen Churchill Semple and Fannie Caldwell Macaulay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2014

Ellen E. Adams
Ellen E. Adams*
Affiliation:
Alice T. Miner Museum
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In 1911, geographer Ellen Churchill Semple and novelist Fannie Caldwell Macaulay departed on an eighteen-month tour around the world. Semple was planning to do fieldwork in Japan, where Macaulay had lived from 1902 to 1907. This paper examines the texts that Semple and Macaulay produced as a result of their experiences in Japan: two articles published in geographical journals by Semple and Macaulay's novels The Lady of the Decoration and The Lady and Sada San. Travel and travel writing were one of the key ways in which white women manifested their cultural authority. Although their texts had very different purposes and audiences, Semple and Macaulay both drew upon and contributed to Orientalist discourses. In both cases, the women's authority ultimately derived from their positions as representatives of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant American culture, and their work helped reinforce U.S. power and the legitimacy of imperialism. By producing texts that criticized those aspects of non-Western societies that diverged from Western norms and praising those areas in which they conformed, they affirmed the superiority of Western, and specifically American, culture.

Type
Theme: Women's and Gender History in Global Context
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , April 2014 , pp. 145 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Censer, Jane Turner, The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895 (Baton Rouge, 2003), 6Google Scholar.

2 See Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, MA, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cox, Karen L., Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville, FL, 2003)Google Scholar; and Mills, Cynthia and Simpson, Pamela H., eds., Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (Knoxville, TE, 2003)Google Scholar.

3 Gardner, Sarah E., Blood and Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861–1937 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006)Google Scholar.

4 Brundage, Southern Past, 15–16, 28–29.

5 Townsend, John Wilson, Kentucky in American Letters, 1784–1912, vol. 2 (Cedar Rapids, IA, 1913), 181–82Google Scholar; Roach, Abby Meguire, “The Authors Club of Louisville,” Filson Club History Quarterly 31 (Jan. 1957): 28–37Google Scholar.

6 Newman, Louise Michele, White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York, 1999), 10–14, 19–20Google Scholar.

7 Johnson, Joan Marie, Southern Women at the Seven Sister Colleges: Feminist Values and Social Activism, 1875–1915 (Athens, GA, 2008), 79Google Scholar.

8 For a contemporary example, see Bailey, Thomas Pearce, Race Orthodoxy in the South and Other Aspects of the Negro Question (New York, 1914)Google Scholar. On southern attitudes toward race and foreign policy, see Hunt, Michael H., Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT, 2009), 51–52Google Scholar.

9 Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference, 12–13, 31–35. The titles of some books about women travelers are telling, such as Birkett, Dea, Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar; Middleton, Dorothy, Victorian Lady Travellers (London, 1965)Google Scholar; and Robinson, Jane, Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar.

10 Enloe, Cynthia, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, CA, 1990), 16Google Scholar.

11 Sterry, Lorraine, “Constructs of Meiji Japan: The Role of Writing by Victorian Women Travellers,” Japanese Studies 23 (Sept. 2003): 167CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Withey, Lynne, Grand Tours and Cook's Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750–1915 (New York, 1997), 280Google Scholar.

13 Sterry, “Constructs of Meiji Japan,” 172, 176.

14 Seat, Karen K., “Providence Has Freed Our Hands”: Women's Missions and the American Encounter with Japan (Syracuse, NY, 2008), 66–67, 71Google Scholar.

15 “Princess Oyama,” Vassar College Encyclopedia, http://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/alumni/princess-oyama.html; Elizabeth M. Howe, “History of the Class of 1882, Vassar College, Prepared for their Fiftieth Anniversary, June, 1932,” 112–18, Harry H. Laughlin Eugenics Collection, Special Collections Department, Pickler Memorial Library, Truman State University.

16 Howe, “History of the Class of 1882,” 118.

17 James, Preston E., Bladen, Wilford A., and Karan, Pradyumna P., “Ellen Churchill Semple and the Development of a Research Paradigm” in The Evolution of Geographic Thought in America: A Kentucky Root, eds. Bladen, Wilford A. and Karan, Pradyumna P. (Dubuque, IA, 1983), 40Google Scholar.

18 Semple, Ellen Churchill, “Influence of Geographical Conditions upon Japanese Agriculture,” Geographical Journal 40 (Dec. 1912): 589–90, 592, 594–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Ibid., 599.

20 Miscellaneous Materials, box 9, Ellen Churchill Semple Papers, Special Collections Library, University of Kentucky.

21 Semple, “Influence of Geographical Conditions upon Japanese Agriculture,” 600.

22 Ibid., 602–03.

23 Semple, Ellen Churchill, “Japanese Colonial Methods,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 45 (Apr. 1913): 259, 262–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Ibid., 267–68.

25 Seat, “Providence Has Freed Our Hands,” 129.

26 Semple, “Influence of Geographical Conditions upon Japanese Agriculture,” 607.

27 “Woman Geographer: Pioneer in a New Field of Research,” Daily Express (London), Nov. 5, 1912.

28 See, for example, “Training the Koreans: Excellent Plan of the Japanese Producing Good Results,” Dallas Morning News, May 4, 1912.

29 Domosh, Mona, “Toward a Feminist Historiography of Geography,” Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers 16:1 (1991): 96–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Macaulay, Fannie Caldwell, The Lady of the Decoration (New York, 1906), 4–5Google Scholar. The title of the book comes from the heroine's Japanese neighbors mistaking the watch pinned to her shirt for a medal from the emperor.

31 Mills, Discourses of Difference, 103–06.

32 Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (New York, 1989), 71Google Scholar.

33 Harris, Paul W., “Cultural Imperialism and American Protestant Missionaries: Collaboration and Dependency in Mid-Nineteenth-Century China,” Pacific Historical Review 60 (Aug. 1991): 309–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Reeves-Ellington, Barbara, Sklar, Kathryn Kish, and Shemo, Connie A., Introduction to Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960, eds. Reeves-Ellington, Sklar, and Shemo (Durham, NC, 2010), 4Google Scholar. On women and American missions, see also Hunter, Jane, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven, CT, 1984)Google Scholar; Singh, Maina Chawla, Gender, Religion, and “Heathen Lands”: American Missionary Women in South Asia, 1860s–1940s (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; and Tyrrell, Ian R., Woman's World/Woman's Empire: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1800–1930 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991)Google Scholar.

35 Seat, Providence Has Freed Our Hands, 10–11.

36 Macaulay, The Lady of the Decoration, 25, 32–33, 38–39, 142–43, 217.

37 Ibid., 92.

38 Ibid., 146.

39 “The Lady of the Decoration,” Current Literature 43 (Dec. 1907): 692Google Scholar.

40 Personal correspondence with Sarah Strong, Royal Geographical Society archivist, Nov. 5, 2009.

41 Russell, Lindsay, ed., America to Japan: A Symposium of Papers by Representative Citizens of the United States on the Relations between Japan and America and on the Common Interests of the Two Countries (New York, 1915), iii; 124–27Google Scholar.

42 Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York, 1979), 3Google Scholar; Yoshihara, Mari, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York, 2003), 6, 193–95Google Scholar.