Response 3: Wherein Mrs. Comstock Experiments with Rejuvenation and Becomes White: Resurrecting Racism in Gene Stratton-Porter

Anti-Chinese yellow peril flyer

Japanese immigrant girl (early twentieth-century California)

Janet Malcolm's review of Gene Stratton-Porter's Her Father's Daughter (1921) in The New York Review of Books (1/15/2009) focuses on the novel as a record of the kind of anti-Asian immigrant sentiment that was prevalent in Los Angeles in the early twentieth century.  If indeed Stratton-Porter was readily susceptible to this predominant collective sentiment as Malcolm suggests, the racial "hatred" that Stratton-Porter allegedly "enthusiastically embraced" can be read symptomatically.  Specifically, Stratton-Porter's anti-Asian racism is readable as anxiety symptom--the Asian immigrant "other" becomes in the yellow perilous discursive context of a racially divisive L.A. the abjected [disease] symptom that she attempts to contain and manage--that is, ironically, by relocating to L.A. from a life-long residence in Indiana to recover from flu-exacerbated overall exhaustion. 

Thus if Oka Sayye (which does not read as an authentic Japanese name) is symptomatically killed off in Her Father's Daughter (to contain orientalist anxiety), how then, can A Girl of the Limberlost, published twelve years prior to Her Father's Daughter be reread in the context of Malcolm's allegation of anti-Asian racism?  This question can be answered with the observation that Kate Comstock's "rejuvenation" experiment in Chapter 18 reinscribes the over-valuation of white skin both as a sign of female beauty and as a passport for upward socioeconomic mobility.  This reinscribed over-valuation could become the anti-Asian subtext of Her Father's Daughter.                 

Through a dubious home-concocted organic "evil-smelling" skin-peeling regimen, Kate Comstock alchemically achieves the "delicate porcelain white" skin that is the prized socioeconomic passport enabling her to pass for "the other girls' mothers" (345, 347).  While her whiteness (as racial attribute) is affirmed through her proud assertion, "I always knew I was white underneath it [tanned/sunburnt surface]" (349) the alternating appearance/disappearance of the highly valued and extremely elusive Yellow Empress/Yellow Emperor moth specimen provides Limberlost with its subtext of ambivalent desire.  In fact, the Yellow Empress/Emperor reads like an allusive orientalist short-hand sign, or enigmatic cipher, for the nonwhiteness that is otherwise discursively banished or marginalized (or uneasily contained) through Kate Comstock's skin-whitening "experiment."  The yellow color of the prized moth, then, becomes the color of subversive and ambivalent desire (i.e. Philip Ammon's for Elnora).  At the same time, yellow is intensified into the gold embroidery and accessories that materialize the economic value that Edith Carr splendidly embodies at her engagement ball. 

Thus it can be concluded that while racial whiteness emerges as prized spectacle through Kate Comstock's "experiment," yellow is de-racialized (i.e. becomes an ambiguous multivalent sign) even while uneasily suggesting the banished racial nonwhiteness of Mrs. Comstock's strange beauty "experiment."