| Surveying more than a century of Asian American women's literary writing, this dissertation examines the politics of domesticity in 20th century Asian American literature. My point of departure is the Eaton sisters, the origin of Asian American literature in the late nineteenth century, and from there I attempt to provide a map that shows how Asian American feminine gender construction has been contingent on the cultural, national, and racial strife between Asian womanhood and white American womanhood. I particularly address what I see as conflicting desires within and behind Asian American women's voices that endlessly shift the notion of Asian American home and domesticity.; The narrative of domesticity is, of course, a narrative of womanhood, but at the same time, it is also a narrative of nationhood. In that light, I argue that not only the American domestic situation but also the implicated context of global America, especially American foreign relations with Asia, serve crucially to locate Asian American women's subjectivity both in the American national imaginary and in Asian American writerly imaginations.; Chapter one reconsiders John Long's Madame Butterfly via comparison with its contemporary narratives by Onoto Watanna and Sui Sin Far, revealing how the prototype of Asian/American interracial romance is actually narrativized with the trope of imperial domesticity, against which an Asian American female subject is born. Chapter two analyzes Asian/American mother-daughter relationship in works by Velina Hasu Houston, Nora Okja Keller, and Lan Cao, showing how the daughter's sense of American self is constructed primarily against the Asian maternal body that is inscribed with the national memory of U.S. expansionism in Asia. Chapter three attends to the figure of an Asian/American female domestic in an American household, problematizing the disciplinary status of white middle-class domesticity that is established and subverted in texts by Jade Snow Wong, Bharati Mukherjee, and Gish Jen. Lastly, chapter four addresses the disintegrated and diversified notion of American home and American domesticity suggested by Ronyoung Kim, Ruth Ozeki, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka, envisaging the heterogeneous outlook of Asian American womanhood, beyond the dichotomy of white emulation and Asian matrilineal heritage. |
