Chapter 12 - Affect and Form in the Writings of the Eaton Sisters

Summary

Drawing on insights from affect theorists Silvan Tomkins, Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, and Sue J. Kim, this chapter argues that Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna developed sophisticated understandings of what affects do: how they are triggered, modulated, and extinguished though human interaction in an unequal field of power relations. Not only did they use writing to meditate on the ways in which fear, hatred, and contempt for the Chinese in North America had shaped their own affective systems, but they also sought to understand what fictional representations of affects could do to the reader. When looked at from the perspective of Tomkinsian theory, such works as “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” and Marion are clearly structured around scenes of shaming, linked by complex reparative scripts that model ways of responding to shame, from self-effacement and withdrawal, through anger and contempt for others, to constructing allegories of a nonracist society and becoming politically engaged. Using such a reading strategy allows us to appreciate particularly those narratives by the Eaton sisters which have hitherto been dismissed as naively sentimental.