Performing Irishness in Western Women's Regionalism

Abstract Performing Irishness in Western Women’s Regionalism:Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna), Annie Batterman Lindsay, and Mary Hallock Foote This article examines the performance of “Irishness” in fiction by three Western women regionalist writers: Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna), Annie Batterman Lindsay, and Mary Hallock Foote. The half-Chinese American/Canadian writer Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954) posed as a Japanese woman. Unlike her better-known sister Edith Maud Eaton (Sui Sin Far), whose Chinatown stories revealed American racism, Winnifred Eaton, under the pen name Onoto Watanna, wrote a series of popular Japanese-themed romances as well as stories told through the persona of an Irish servant. As Gretchen Murphy has shown, Watanna’s depiction of Irish characters, sometimes acting as exemplars to their Japanese hosts and sometimes as simply bad examples, constitute a guidebook to U. S. masculinity and citizenship in her Japanese novels. (Annie) Batterman Lindsay (1854-1926), though virtually unknown today, was a popular and prolific Western writer as well as an editor of the Western magazine Land of Sunshine. Although her sole volume of collected stories, Derelicts of Destiny (1899), focuses on Pacific Northwest tribal cultures, she was celebrated in her own day for writing "the best Irish dialect ever written by an American." A native Californian from a military family, Lindsay’s shape-shifting performance of ethnic identities, like Eaton’s, makes crucial use of popular understandings of the Irish as key cultural agents in the multicultural settlement of the west. Foote, a popular Western writer, wrote of the mining country of Idaho. Considering Eaton, Lindsay, and Foote in the context of their Irish characters highlights the sense of performance that is integral to the versatility of personae that they adopted, which in turn matches their relationship to region. Eaton, Lindsay, and Foote are “trans-regional”; that is, although their focus is the West (especially, in Eaton’s case, in her later novels set on a ranch in Alberta), their fiction is situated through landmarks both natural and cultural in various spaces throughout that region, making it difficult to call them “California writers,” say, or “Pacific Northwest writers.” Moreover, each performed as an identity not her own, including speaking through male narrators: Eaton, as mentioned previously, in passing as Japanese and adopting an Irish accent in some stories; and Lindsay, in writing in the first person as a member of the Duwamish, Shoshone, or other tribes and including tribal languages (in their Chinook jargon form) as part of her stories yet writing her famous Irish dialect in others. I argue that performing Irishness, an ethnicity both exotic and yet well understood in the early twentieth century, served as a bridge to additional ethnic performance and as a deflection and a departure from the “authenticity” often associated with—but a constraint upon—women’s regionalism.

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