Why Was Ah Sin a Failure?
In 1875, Mark Twain and Bret Harte, two of the most popular writers of the day, thought that they could make profits by collaborating on a play starring Charles Thomas Parsloe, the actor who had successfully enacted the role of a Chinaman in Harte’s Two Men of Sandy Bar. Although the play, Ah Sin, dramatizes Harte’s popular poem, "Plain Language from Truthful James,” it turned out to be a failure. It played for only five weeks in New York before embarking on a brief tour.
Having faded into oblivion, the play was never printed until 1961.1
Despite its commercial failure, the play is a significant document, particularly in the history of the frontier melodrama, because it features a Chinese character as a narrative device to secure the happy ending. Whereas nineteenth-century American Orientalism tended to marginalize and feminize the Orient, the play features the Chinese as the central character to disrupt American racial stereotypes. Margaret Duckett and James Moy rightly observe that its failure may have come about because audiences found its characterization of the Chinese unacceptable.2 Dave Williams also asserts that the play failed due to anti-Chinese movements in the West of the US.3 Whereas most of the American playwrights denied their Chinese characters any degree of importance, Ah Sin is the only play on the nineteenth-century American stage to endow a non-villain Chinese with a role crucial to the plot. Moreover, the Chinese character, at the centre of the action, manipulates most of the American characters, in contrast to the Chinese role presented in most of the other contemporary plays as an object of ridicule. The play’s radical departure from stereotypes of the Chinaman may bring to the audience the unpleasant fact of racial divergence, especially if the spectators were workers in competition with the Chinese for manual jobs.
This paper argues that, in addition to its disruption of the stereotypes of the marginalized Oriental male, the play has also created ‘unacceptable’ representations with regard to the established views of gender relations, especially in its depictions of white females and their
relations with the Chinese servant. To examine this less well-explored reason for the failure of Ah Sin, this paper will demonstrate how the use of gender in this play serves to negotiate the dominant racial discourse of American Orientalism.
As in traditional frontier melodrama, the primary characters in Ah Sin include the hero, the villain, and the comic. The major plot, according to the New York Times, concerns Broderick’s rascality in his attempt to murder Plunkett and then to accuses York of the crime.
Just as a committee of lynchers is about to act upon a verdict of guilty, Ah Sin fastens the guilt for the deed upon Broderick by the exhibition of the murderer’s coat which Broderick thought he had long since done away with and, Plunkett being subsequently brought into court safe and sound, the piece terminates happily.4
1 The quotations from Ah Sin in this essay are from the play script used for the first performance at the Fifth
Avenue Theatre, New York, on July 31, 1877.Twain, Mark. Ah Sin: A Dramatic Work by Mark Twain and Bret Harte. Ed. Frederick Anderson. San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1961.
2 Margaret Duckett, Mark Twain and Bret Harte (Norman OK: Oklahoma University Press, 1964), 146-151; James
Moy, “Bret Harte and Mark Twain’s Ah Sin: Locating China in the Geography of the American West,” in Gail Nomura, Russell Eudo, Stephen H. Sumida, and Russell C. Leong, Frontiers of Asian American Studies (Pullman WA:
Washington State University Press, 1989), 187-194.
3 Williams, Dave. Misreading the Chinese Character: Images of the Chinese in Euroamerican Drama to 1925.
New York: Lang, 2000. 211.
In Daly’s playbill,5 the character Broderick is introduced as ‘a Knave through circumstance over which he sought to have control.’ The episodes surrounding him follow the theme of the cheater cheated, of the white gamblers outwitted by a Chinese man in Bret Harte’s ‘Plain Language.’ The subplot is in connection with the romance between York and Shirley Tempest, who impersonates Plunkett’s daughter in order to test York’s love for herself. In Daly’s playbill, Shirley Tempest is described as ‘a San Francisco Belle, and Heiress of an adventure spirit.’ Throughout the play, she is anxious to know if York, the man she loves, loves her for herself, rather than for her wealth and social status. When Shirley invites Plunkett’s wife and daughter to meet York at the luncheon, she implores them to personate her and her mother. These women’s disguises and their interactions with York, Broderick and Ah Sin evoke postbellum approaches to masculine and feminine behaviour.
Although ideals of masculinity after the Civil War, with accelerating industrialization, underwent re-evaluation, what retained prominence was the notion that men should shield and protect women, who were regarded as weak and dependent.6 During the time when women were beginning to demand equal rights, frontier heroines may be significant as the model role. The play Ah Sin, then, invokes the interplay among the shifting notions of American womanhood and the feminization of the Chinese male labourers.
The Chinese character Ah Sin bears a resemblance to the first Chinese male immigrants to America, who challenged the era’s gender categories through their affiliation with women. In the first three acts, the play follows some of the feminizing portrayals of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth-century yellowface performance. Act 3 concludes in a tableau in which Mrs. Plunkett catches Ah Sin ‘by the pigtail and pounds him with fan’ (72). The braiding of the queue and its occasional filling out with artificial hair were considered evidence of femininity, not to mention that few Chinese men grew beards, while facial hair was popular among male Americans. Also, as a laundryman and domestic servant, Ah Sin is doing jobs that were deemed by mainstream American society as feminine work, and therefore emasculated him.
Americans displayed great ambivalence toward the sexuality of Chinese men, and such representations functioned to endorse Western sense of superiority. Lisa Lowe accurately argues that ‘Chinese male immigrants could be said to occupy, before 1940, a “feminized” position in relation to white male citizens.’7 We might want to ask another question: What is the Chinese males’ position in relation to white women? This is one of the questions the play Ah Sin may have invited the audience to answer.
Ah Sin opened in Washington, D.C., in May 1877, and moved to New York for a July opening at Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theatre. Shortly in August 1877, the California legislature's Special
Committee on Chinese Immigration warned of the threat of ‘cheap labor,’ and requested Congress to strictly limit the entrance of Chinese immigrants to the US. Moreover, the Committee inscribed anxieties about the moral degradation of white working-class men and women, the "pestilence" of "our own race" caused by Chinese ‘servile labor.’8 Starting in the 1870s, more and more former
5 The playbill of Ah Sin on Tuesday Night, July 31st, 1877, in Daly’s 5th Avenue Theatre (collected by University of
Wisconsin Libraries).
6 Roger A. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
11.
7 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996) 11.
8 Hiroyuki Matsubara, “Stratified Whiteness and Sexualized Chinese Immigrants in San Francisco: The Report of
white miners were forced to become unskilled laborers. Criticizing low wages and unemployment, white workers in San Francisco condemned degraded work performed by Chinese workers.
Following the July riots of 1877 and the development of the Workingmen's Party of California (WPC), the anti-Chinese labour movement employed gender and sexuality, in addition to class and race, to depict white working women as victims of competition from Chinese male workers. Expressing concern over displacement by Chinese labor, male unionists used the rhetoric of a campaign to protect workingwomen in the service sectors, arguing that the competition forced white women to earn their livelihoods in saloons and brothels. By presenting Chinese male immigrants as a threat to Caucasian women, working-class union members endeavoured to persuade the middle-class not to employ Chinese domestics or patronize Chinese laundries.
As such, gendered outrage, invigorated by racial antagonisms, was central to white male activists’ interpretation of labour’s crisis. WPC accentuated that a powerful white male labour movement was to fight for the purity of white womanhood, the sanctity of the white family, and the prosperity of the nation.9 Racial conflict, described in terms of gender conflict under the banner of protecting women's morality, not only related to the clash between Chinese laborers and American male union members, but also triggered the tension between Chinese domestics and white women.
Ironically, these white male activists seldom paid earnest attention to women’s rights except for combating against racial others. According to Donna Dickenson, the beginning of the
nineteenth century marked a significant diminishment in women’s freedom, when anti-feminist attitudes in America developed after the publication of Godwin’s Memoirs of Mary
Wollstonecraft.10 Denouncing revolutionary feminism’s insistence on women’s interest in the public sphere, conservative women writers defined the domestic sphere as the God-ordained place of women, and reasserted the pre-Enlightenment notion that women needed to rely only on their moral authority to indirectly influence men. Mary Spongberg also observes that prescriptive literature written by men during this period promised women personal fulfilment through self-negation and self-sacrifice.11 By the 1830s, women enjoyed considerably less social and economic freedom than had seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American women. A woman was judged according to how well she lived up to the virtues of submissiveness, piety, purity, and domesticity. Women had little social or economic power, and their legal rights were restricted. Although voices were raised against this view of women by nineteenth-century feminists including Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, they did not represent the general view. By mid-century, collections of female biography tended to focus upon heroines of domestic life, including the heroines of the American Revolution such as Mercy Otis Warren, Abigail Adams and Hannah Lee Corbin.12 These collections highlight women’s moral superiority, and see the feminine domestic virtues as having transcended those of the masculine public realm. Also, Elizabeth Ellet promoted the ideal of an educated womanhood, which would extend beyond a passive ‘cult of true womanhood’ through patriotism and domestic ability.13
9 Gardner, Martha Mabie. "Working on White Womanhood: White Working Women in the San Francisco
Anti-Chinese Movement, 1877-1890." Journal of Social History 33.1 (1999): 73-95.
10 Donna Dickenson, Margaret Fuller: A Woman’s Life (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), xvi.
11 Mary Spongberg, Writing Women's History since the Renaissance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) 112. 12 See Jesse Clement, Noble Deeds of American Women (Buffalo: Derby, 1851).
The celebration of domestic womanhood turned out to be effective in encouraging the discourse of women’s rights.14 Even before the rise of organizes feminism in the nineteenth
century, several writers looked to history to plead the improvement of women’s social status. Lydia Maria Child’s History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations (1835) highlights the importance of women’s moral influence. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845),15 Margaret Fuller undercuts masculinist arguments about women’s inferiority, and uses historical examples to show how men placed women upon pedestals while simultaneously depriving them of their economic, legal and political rights.
The story of Ah Sin takes place in the frontier mining camps, sites where the initial Sino-American encounter took place, and where, as women were scarce, oppositions such as male/female and white/nonwhite were thrown into disarray. On the frontier, the large male population
demanded feminized service industries, and the abundance of gold enabled men to pay handsomely for such services. Historians have argued that gold rush demography raised the value of women's labour, as some women made a good living and achieved a degree of independence that exceeded the nineteenth-century norm.16 Men were now more than ever aware that women's household work had real economic value to society, and therefore set a higher social value on women as wives, whose unwaged domestic duties used to be disregarded.
Due to the shortage of women, however, Chinese males often substituted for female labour. From the 1870s to the end of the century, Victorian families were anxious about hiring Chinese household labour, and the Chinese Servant Question became a heatedly debated issue. Part of the problem lay in the fact that initially the Chinese workers were unable to understand what the American lady said to them. Many Chinese men learned domestic skills, including laundry, gradually by imitating their American hostesses. The play Ah Sin attempts to provoke laughter at the Chinese servant’s imitation. In Act 3, when Mrs. Tempest tries to teach Ah Sin how to set a table, she accidentally places one plate too near the edge, and it falls off. Ah Sin then ‘touches plate after plate to table, then slams it on the floor—then stands back pleased.’ Mrs. Tempest is annoyed and comments: ‘Oh, is there nothing to you but imitation?’ (53).
Yet, even though Mrs. Tempest regards him as a ‘poor dumb animal’ (53), her daughter Shirley describes him endearingly: ‘Poor Ah Sin is harmless—only a little ignorant and awkward’ (66). Teaching the Chinese servant enables American women to assert their individualism beyond the domestic sphere. When these white women endeavour to civilize the pagan Chinese servant by teaching him housekeeping management, their experiences bring them more confidence in their own contributions to family and society. According to Karen Leong, middle-class American women as the civilizing forces played a key role in cultural imperialism.17 Also, as Amy Kaplan demonstrates in The Anarchy of Empire, the tight interdependency of women's domestic practices with international policy and imperialist ideology indicated that the function of the feminine sphere
14 Nina Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1995) 214.
15 First published in the July 1843 Dial as an essay titled “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman versus
Women.”
16 Joann Levy, They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush (Hamden, Conn., 1990), 91-107. 17 See Leong, Karen J. The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the
to domesticate the foreign enabled the reach of women's civilizing influence being extended outward from the home.18
The final scene in the play Ah Sin alters traditional gender codes for white women, much as it does for the Chinese worker. Through his successful deployment of intrigues, Ah Sin restores his manhood and transforms himself from an emasculated fool into a version of the frontier hero, using whatever means are available to assist with the cause of justice. In similar vein, Shirley Tempest reverses the stereotype of Victorian notions about frail womanhood when she insists that she defend York in the court. She tells her father, a retire lawyer: ‘All my life, till this day, I was a girl, and a subject. To-day, I am a woman!’ (75). In the trial of York, Shirley’s bravery in defending a man she loves, impresses even the lynching mob, as one of the miners tells her father: ‘. . . that girl of yours has said more in one minute than you have in 60’ (84). Consequently, by deploying racialized and gendered tropes, the play illustrates the role of white women in American Orientalism, while negotiating Victorian ‘cult of true womanhood.’
18 Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
