I. “American Hardware”: Exclusion in Long’s House on Higashi Hill
As a manifestation of the United States’ juridical unconscious, one could say that Long’s 1898 novella is a text in which a US American lawyer imagines a Japanese woman imagining herself as she performs in response to US law. But even before Cho-Cho-San begins her fantasied journey into US jurisprudence, the domestic relations that structure her marriage to Pinkerton are neatly representative of dominant conceptions of US sovereignty in the early period of Pacific expansion. The novella begins with a domestic dispute about the exclusion of Cho-Cho-San’s family from Pinkerton’s home. This argument mirrors the legislative debates about Asian exclusion occurring in both federal and state legislatures and courtrooms at the turn of the century.
Figure 1.2. Metropolitan Opera premiere of Madama Butterfly, 1907. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera Archives.
In the opening sequence, Cho-Cho-San asks her new husband, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, to explain the hybrid construction of their home:
Some clever Japanese artisans then made the paper walls of the pretty house eye-proof, and, with their own adaptations of American hardware, the openings cunningly lockable. The rest was Japanese.
Madame Butterfly laughed, and asked him why he had gone to all that trouble—in Japan!22
This early sequence is significant of two concerns that run throughout the narrative: an attempt to define and demarcate the territory of US sovereignty beyond US borders, and the crisis of subject constitution posed by figures and spaces that exist between and across both the United States and Japan.
Pinkerton’s response to Cho-Cho-San’s question is instructive: “‘To keep out those who are out, and in those who are in,’ he replied, with an amorous threat in her direction.”23 I will return to the first half of his answer later, but here I want to emphasize his “amorous threat” as that which announces the sexual and imperial valences of the narrative. The locks on the house (with “openings cunningly lockable”) function as something of a chastity belt that locks Pinkerton’s sexual conquest away from the rest of the world. It simultaneously describes the US military’s adventures in the Eastern Hemisphere, with expansion into Asian-Pacific sovereignties and territories. This was exemplified by Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 expedition to Japan, when Perry forced the Tokogawa Shogunate into a trade agreement with the threat of a naval attack on Nagasaki. Michio Kitahara, working with concepts adopted from Erving Goffman, argues that Perry’s mission was explicitly staged as a performance: “Since the Japanese were not accustomed to deal[ing] with the Americans, the skillful presentation of ‘appearance,’ ‘manner,’ ‘setting,’ and ‘personal front’ by Perry’s squadron [allowed] the ‘performance team’ [to] manipulate the Japanese effectively, control their definition of the situation, and make them open the country.”24 It can hardly be incidental that Pinkerton is a naval officer stationed in this same city. Indeed, the imaginary figure of Cho-Cho-San reflects the concurrent feminization of Asian nations that were seen as rife for conquest and dominance by the masculine US military that is represented by Pinkerton.
Just as Pinkerton and Cho-Cho-San stand in for an aggressive US military and passive Japan, the “American hardware” on the Japanese doors can be seen to reflect the US assertion of extraterritorial jurisdiction, the practice of claiming US sovereignty within Asian countries. In the novella, this occurs by way of a link to domestic structures of normative heteropatriarchy. On the one hand, a struggle over the exclusion of Cho-Cho-San’s Japanese relatives (those “who are out”) is an opportunity for Pinkerton to assert the sovereign right of exclusion, while it is also a means for taking possession of his wife. As Teemu Ruskola observes, the US assertion of extraterritorial jurisdiction in Asia (and China specifically) fundamentally transformed previous notions of sovereignty as being contained within the nation-state because “in China, among other places, American law did not attach to US territory but to the bodies of American citizens—each one of them representing a floating island of American sovereignty.”25 Pinkerton and his home mirror practices of extraterritorial jurisdiction performed by the United States, whereby sovereignty is delinked from the geographic boundaries of the nation and attached to the traveling body of the US agent abroad. His assumption of a home “in Japan!” with “American hardware” and his quick exclusion of Cho-Cho-San’s Japanese relatives neatly reflects the US government’s imperial practices of extraterritorial jurisdiction and exclusion as a means of constructing the nation and national identity.26 The result is that the space of sovereign exercise, which is to say the territory of US legal and cultural independence and self-determination, is dominated by Pinkerton, while transforming Cho-Cho-San into a figure that exists inside the United States from outside its borders, cut off from Japan while inside Japanese territory. Properly speaking, she is neither a US American nor Japanese subject. As such, she emerges as a transnational figure that floats between and is denied a proper place in both.
In defining the term transnational, Aihwa Ong places emphasis on trans as that which “denotes both moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something.”27 The transnational body is not only in a state of flux as she moves between spaces; she carries the potential to “change the nature” of the spaces that she traverses. This highlights the fact that, as Ramón H. Rivera-Servera and Harvey Young argue, a border must be conceptualized “as simultaneously a geographical locale and a condition/form of movement.”28 The border is realized through performance as the body moves between, across, and in relation to its often-porous limits. The body in performance thus poses a threat to the border because, “when bodies walk, drive, sail, or fly, their movements blur the here and there, constantly reorganizing the spatial relations and negotiating the consequences (political, social, economic, cultural) of their crossings.”29 In order to manage this threat, immigration law choreographs the immigrant’s body, placing limits on her range of movement or even her ability to cross into the geographical territory of the nation. For the Asian subject in the United States, this took the form of an exceptional juridical regime that was developed to control the threat of her perceived dance across borders. Cho-Cho-San’s figuration in Long’s novella and the struggle over who, precisely, is excluded from Pinkerton’s home is significant of this fact.
After Pinkerton explains his reason for installing the locks, Cho-Cho-San happily performs the mantle of authority created by the decision to exclude. This performance is quickly disrupted, however, when she learns just who it is that her husband wants to keep out: “She was greatly pleased with it all, though, and went about jingling her new keys and her new authority like toys,—she had only one small maid to command,—until she learned that among others to be excluded were her own relatives.”30 Cho-Cho-San repeatedly petitions Pinkerton to allow for her relatives to enter the home. However, he dismisses the family as “a trifle wearisome” and definitively rejects her attempts to bring the outside in.31
It should be noted that while much of the early exclusion legislation specifically targeted the Chinese, these technologies were expanded to similarly exclude other immigrants. And while US legislators were worried that targeting Japanese immigrants would offend the Japanese government, thus resulting in largely administrative means for securing Japanese exclusion (such as the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907), there was a general domestic consensus that all Asian immigration was undesirable by the turn of the century.32 Reading a narrative about a Japanese character alongside Chinese exclusion law and jurisprudence can be a useful exercise insofar as it helps to clarify the ways in which the domestic dispute in Long’s novella functions as an “allegorical narrative” significant of the national and legal debates born from “collective thinking” and, more specifically, collective anxieties about Asians in America. Long’s readers would have been well aware of the general anti-Asian sentiment that pervaded the country.
