Mrs. Spring Fragrance, in Sui Sui Far’s The Inferior Woman, can be read as a subversive narrative as a means to comprehend the reasoning behind the rising American popularity of material Orientalism amongst white women during the 1870s and 1920s. Mari Yoshihara, a scholar in American studies with an emphasis on Asian relations, claims that “the material culture of Orientalism packaged the mixed interests Americans had about Asia—Asia as a seductive, aesthetic, refined culture, and Asia as foreign, premodern, Other—and made them into unthreatening objects for collection and consumption” (17). Mrs. Spring Fragrance subverts Yoshihara’s American and Asian dynamic by viewing white women as seductive, elusive, and foreign in an effort to turn …show more content…
Spring Fragrance’s appropriation of American dresses follows the trajectory of Yoshihara’s reasoning for the rise of material Orientalism. She is quick to launch into an anecdote involving her opinion on American dresses in regards to how tastes evolve: “’When I first came to America…my husband desired me to wear the American dress. I protested and declared that never would I so appear. But one day he brought home a gown fit for a fairy, and ever since then I have worn and adored the American dress.’” Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s initial reaction to the dress is telling—she categorized the American dress initially as a negative Other. However, her husband sexualizes American women and uses the object that is the dress as a vehicle for, what Yoshihara calls, seductiveness. The original threatening Other aspect of dress becomes so far removed from the American woman once seductiveness is involved. The trait of seductiveness does not remain with the object of the American woman, but is instead attributed to an unearthly fairy. Although it has been given a positive connotation, it is also not permanent object that weighs on her Asian identity. It is as easily removed as it is worn. It is appropriation at the will of colonizers, Mrs. and Mr. Spring Fragrance. The Spring Fragrance’s appropriation also isn’t limited to the tangible objects that serve as extensions of the white woman object. Mrs. Spring Fragrance is also guilty of appropriating the ideologies produced by the white …show more content…
Spring Fragrance desires to write an “immortal” book about the experiences of white women. While she calls all Americans “mysterious, inscrutable, [and] incomprehensible,” she is fixated on the American dichotomy of superior and inferior women. So much so, that her husband encourages her to seek out the superior woman, Mrs. Evebrook, to understand the dichotomy further. The interaction begins, as mentioned before, anthropologically and distanced. Her presence is soon acknowledged and she shares how she plans to curate her literary immortality: “My book I shall take from the words of others….I listen to what is said, I apprehend, I write it down.” Mrs. Spring Fragrance is clearly appropriating white women by “apprehending” them. She is appropriating the lives of white women and repurposing in a book for her own benefit. She can passively enjoy American objects while maintaining her Asian autonomy. Ultimately she may apprehend the white woman, write a book about the white woman, profit off the white woman, but she never has to be one
Lynn Peril writes a fascinating study of pink color and its historical connection to ideas and beliefs of femininity. Peril translates and defines Pink Think as collection of specific ideas, beliefs, and approaches of how and when is feminine behavior considered as proper. Throughout her book, Peril is pointing out various fundamental approaches and attitudes that are considered to be crucial for women achievements and accomplishments. Peril's Pink Think also advocates how greatest concern of femininity is related to women physical appearance (fashion and beauty) and their marriage (motherhood and housekeeper). Furthermore, Peril is demonstrating an evolution of femininity, and constant and intense impact of its norms and rules on women lives.
CoCo Chanel’s action of moving away from the older Victorian ideologies was a show of liberalism for women. The writer uses t...
As the stock market booms and society prospers, women’s fashion undergoes drastic change during the 1920’s. The hems of skirts and dresses rise to newer, more promiscuous level. The traditional long hair, supposedly the crowning glory of a women, is cut shoulder-length or shorter. Defined waistlines are lost, giving way to a shapeless and loose fitting style of clothing. Manufacturing of cosmetics emerges during this decade, and a variety of products become popular among women. The famous Gabrielle Chanel, more commonly known as “Coco Chanel,” introduces her renowned perform in the late 1920s (Yarwood 139). Peggy Whitley, dean at Lone Star College, sums up the newfound cosmetic craze in her American Cultural article: “Powder, lipstick, rouge, eyebrow pencil, eye shadow, colored nails. They had it all!” Associated with the distinct new styles of the era, the iconic “flapper girl” is born. This term is often used for women who donned the edgy style of the time, particularly with a defiant and independent outlook on life. Outside the exciting and rebellious life of the flapper girl, everyday clothing also experiences significant change. Relaxed sport’s attire bec...
Other research has devoted to unveiling the origins and the development of their stereotyping and put them among the historical contextual frameworks (e.g., Kawai, 2003, 2005; Prasso, 2005). Research has shown that those stereotypes are not all without merits. The China doll/geisha girl stereotype, to some degree, presents us with a romanticized woman who embodies many feminine characteristics that are/ were valued and praised. The evolving stereotype of the Asian martial arts mistress features women power, which might have the potentials to free women from the gendered binary of proper femininity and masculinity. Nevertheless, the Western media cultural industry adopts several gender and race policing strategies so as to preserve patriarchy and White supremacy, obscuring the Asian women and diminishing the positive associations those images can possibly imply. The following section critically analyzes two cases, The Memoirs of a Geisha and Nikita, that I consider to typify the stereotypical depictions of Asian women as either the submissive, feminine geisha girl or as a powerful yet threatening martial arts lady. I also seek to examine
During the Art Deco era the calla lily became one of the most popular flowers around. Whether in florist shops or on artist canvases the calla lily became a recurring theme. Like many flowers before it the calla lily came to be more than a flower on its own but it represented the idea of femininity. The calla lily was used by artists such as Tamara de Lempicka, Diego Rivera and Georgia O’Keeffe as a symbol of femininity and feminism. Through examining their works, in relation to their own lives and the events of the day, I will explore how the calla lily came to represent a new type on femininity and feminism.
When sixteenth and seventeenth century explorers returned to Europe from their journeys to Africa, they constructed and disseminated degrading stereotypes of African women based on the observations they had made abroad. Basing their perceptions of women off of European women’s bodies, these explorers noticed and commented on how African women’s bodies differed in many aspects—these disparities then became justifications for the differential treatment between these two groups of women. Because these African American women didn’t conform to the basic norms of womanhood that the explorers were accustomed to, they were quick to categorize them as strange, animalistic and hypersexual; their bodily forms, attire and skin color called attention to their otherness in the corporeal and social realm. Skin Deep, Spirit Strong offers a compilation of essays that document the observations made, the generalizations that were produced and the treatment that resulted from these interactions. The negative generalizations that these early European explorers made about African American women, had and to this day continue to have a significant effect on the way in which black women are viewed physically and sexually not only in the private sphere but also publicly.
Asia and Asian peoples have typically been portrayed by western culture to fit certain perceptions. Stereotypes and pre-ordained ideas about Geisha have been created due to many reasons. These reasons are misrepresentation in Hollywood and film, a culturally western gender-based male language as the dominator of language, a lack of esthetic-cultural appreciation and understanding from foreign males who encountered geisha, and finally the confusion between the geisha and prostitute districts and what curtails as a true geisha. Orientalism, which is a western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient, by placing limitations on it and defining it as the “Other” (Said, 3, 1979), has influenced the creation and strengthening of the submissive, exotic, and decadent geisha. Unfortunately these romanticized images continue to persist and are used to give false understandings of the geisha.
The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening were two works written during the Age of Expression. The entire country was going through an era of Reconstruction; politically, socially, culturally and econmically . The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening are feminist works aimed at the psychological, social, and cultural injustices during the era. According to Mizruchi, “ Cosmopolitanism aroused dis-ease: depression and disaection were prevalent in a society whose pace and variety seemed relentless. Yet the same circumstances also instilled hope. For it was widely recognized that the burgeoning heterogeneity of a newly global America would be a source of enduring vitality.”(Mizruchi, 2008) The wives portrayed in these works defeated the attitudes of their husbands during this patriarchal culture.
Under the guise of making themselves attractive to men, Chinese women endured painful foot-binding rituals that left them scarred for life. We may view such a cultural practice as extreme but are twenty-first century women any less bound to androcentric ideas of what is attractive than our forebears? Foot-binding in ancient china was designed to make women dependent on their men and proved to be a symbol of male ownership that restricted women to their homes, since women whose feet were bound could not venture far from home without an escort or the help of servants.
In the novel, the author proposes that the African American female slave’s need to overcome three obstacles was what unavoidably separated her from the rest of society; she was black, female, and a slave, in a white male dominating society. The novel “locates black women at the intersection of racial and sexual ideologies and politics (12).” White begins by illustrating the Europeans’ two major stereotypes o...
Though many of these stereotypes seem unwarranted, some stem from a historical background of Asian discrimination. For centuries Asians were viewed as “oriental” because of the apparent difference between Western and Eastern cultures such as choice of clothing and pronunciation of native languages. In doing so, many individuals were mystified by the mysterious and foreign Asian customs. Consequently, Americans treated Asians as if they belonged to a lower social class. With the ongoing disparagement of Asians, women faced much of the prejudice; “the few women who did emigrate to America were harassed through legislation and stereotyped as prostitutes or objects of white male sexual fantasies” cite. As a result, the perceptio...
French, Katherine L., and Allyson M. Poska. Women and Gender in the Western past. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Print.
Marsden, Jean I. "Modesty Unshackled: Dorothy Jordan and the Dangers of Cross-Dressing." Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture vol. 22. Ed. by Patricia B. Craddock and Carla H. Hay. East Lansing, Michigan: Colleagues Press Inc. 1992. 21-36.
The world of the women is not comprised solely of setting the table for tea or determining which day to wash the white clothes or the colored clothes; there is a darker side to their lives. The mot...
middle of paper ... ... It also analyzed the influences of modern dresses. As Palmer and Clark (2005) mentioned earlier, both decades are the classic era in fashion history.