Rachel M. Bright

"Irregular Unions":

Alicia Bewicke Little's A Marriage in China and British-Chinese Relations in the Late-Nineteenth Century

The year was 1842, and Britain had just finished a successful military campaign in China, a campaign that also signified a rather humiliating defeat for the Chinese army. The first Opium War reestablished Britain's profitable opium trade routes from India to China, and also established a new mode of British-Chinese relations, one that resulted in British control of the new colony of Hong Kong and semicolonial control over various treaty ports. The progressive optimism that this combined political and economic control seemed to herald for the British Empire was reflected in a piece in the newly established Illustrated London News:

A large family of the human race, which for centuries has been isolated from the rest, is now about to enter with them into mutual intercourse. Vast hordes of populations, breaking through the ignorance and superstition which has for ages enveloped them, will now come out into the open day, and enjoy the freedom of a more expanded civilization, and enter upon prospects immeasurably grander. (Illustrated London News, qtd. in Thurin 1)

Voiced at mid-century, this statement paradoxically depicts the Chinese as both "enveloped" by backwardness, yet capable of reform and progress; as ignorant, superstitious, and characterized as pest-like "vast hordes of populations," yet also seen as equal partners with the British in a "mutual intercourse." This varied and contradictory opinion could just have easily been voiced at the end of the nineteenth century. In a way, this statement can be seen as representative of the history or, more accurately, the story of the relationship between Britain and China and between the British and the Chinese during the nineteenth century. As Britain continued its imperial expansion, visions of a mythical Cathay and praise for the Celestial Empire, remnants of translations of Marco Polo's travels, increasingly were competing with visions of a China haunted by its long history, seen as out-of-date and shackled to its past. The story of British-Chinese relations in the nineteenth-century emerges as a story in which the British desire for chinoiserie-fantastically colored silks, aromatic teas and spices, delicate porcelain, exquisite decorative arts, and fascinating architecture-is progressively frustrated by China's limitation of foreigners to only a few treaty ports, the several attempts by the Chinese to ban or stop by force the British opium trade, and the populist destruction of European-funded infrastructure: from missionary and trade encampments to railroads later in the century.

A long-time resident of China, Alicia Bewicke Little was poised to comment on that history/story as the century ended. Her 1896 novel, A Marriage in China, is a reflection of the "imagined" history of British-Chinese relations-that is, the tone, tenor, and character of the relationship as imagined by the British. This "imagined" history-intangible and theoretical-is embodied both structurally and thematically in the novel. Structurally, the novel employs multiple plot lines and a wide variety of characters and settings as a way of representing the turbulence of the past fifty years of British policy in China. As Little historicizes the contemporary policies on China, she both supports and rejects those policies. Furthermore, in the tradition of the social problem novel, Little's ending symbolizes a possible solution to the problematic relations between the two countries-a solution that has similarities to those solutions proposed by pundits in the popular periodical press. Thematically, the imagined history is both personified in the two lead characters, Lilian Grey and Claude Fortescue, and reflected in the two countering themes of the novel: secrecy, deception, corruption, and disillusionment versus openness, truth, redemption, and innocent imagination.

However, A Marriage in China is not simply a reflection of history-the story of the late nineteenth century British presence in China was contested space, with diplomats, military hawks, merchants, sinologues, and missionaries all vying for control over how that story should be defined. Little herself was an active participant in this battle for both imaginative and actual control: her husband was a merchant who fiscally profited from the British presence in China, while she personally profited from the ability to travel to and write about exotic places. In addition to her travelogues and ethnographic narratives, Little had an ideological stake in China's future as the founder of the first Western anti-footbinding movement in China. By combining realistic "slice of life" details with imaginative fable, Little creates characters and situations that mirror and critique the attitudes and solutions proposed by these different groups. In other words, in A Marriage in China, Little both reinforces and dooms to failure the "imagined" history of British-Chinese relations: that is, the long and increasingly burdensome history of a recurring cycle of desire, disillusionment, frustration, and denial on the part of the British.

h

The main plot line in A Marriage in China follows the conventional romance plot: characters meet, fall in love, are separated for a variety of reasons, and are finally reunited at the end. The heroine, Lilian, a young orphaned heiress, meets and falls in love with Claude Fortescue during his visit to his aunt (who is Lilian's guardian). Lilian is so taken that she follows Claude back to China, convincing her missionary cousin Mrs. Betterson to let her join the mission. Lilian's innocence about China is contrasted with Claude's knowingness about China-his familiarity with the dissolute Mrs. Robinson, Shanghai's resident socialite, his extensive knowledge of the Chinese language and customs, and most importantly, the fact that he keeps a Chinese concubine and has two children by her. After a series of missteps and miscalculations, Claude and Lilian marry, but Claude doesn't tell her about "kitten" and the children. The strain of keeping his secret, of thinking that he must protect his young wife, and his growing realization that he is no better than the slave traders he bought "kitten" from, causes Claude to nearly have a nervous breakdown. In the end, Lilian does find out about Claude's past, and her knowledge becomes Claude's redemption. p> However, while the main plot line seems straightforward, the structure of the novel as a whole is very representative of the variety and conflict inherent in late-nineteenth century British opinions on China. As seen in the passage quoted from The Illustrated London News, these conflicting opinions were often expressed in the same article. For example, in an article that argues the dangers of Chinese emigration, Mrs. J. Weston Campbell uses the trope of the resistant "Chinaman" as a part of her scare tactics:

Other emigrants adapt themselves to their new home by losing the characteristics of the old; he never does. His pride and his conservatism are equally invincible. He will learn all that the West has to teach him for the sake of gain, but for no higher purpose; in heart and mind he is always Chinese. (61)

By arguing that resistance to outside influences is more than just an exploitative scheme on the part of the immigrant worker, that is, that resistance is actually an inherent characteristic, Campbell plays on the existing perception of the Chinese as essentially non-progressive. Moreover, that dependence on tradition is characterized as an unfortunate defect, a trait that will always hold the immigrant worker back, weakening his usefulness. However, later in the same article, Campbell-ostensibly still supporting her anti-immigrant stance-proceeds to praise the same workers she has just disparaged:

Weighted as they are by tradition, they must be both enterprising and courageous to leave home at all; to gain a living, much less a competence, in the face of hostile legislation in a foreign land, they must have patience, intelligence, and adaptability. To these they add unrivalled manual dexterity, a great capacity for organisation, and the instincts of a born merchant. (65)

"Tradition"-previously an inescapable facet of the Chinese nature-has now become analogous to an external characteristic that may possibly be shed to reveal the "enterprising" and progressive essence underneath. p> To a certain degree, Little critiques these attitudes by praising Chinese traditions. Large sections in the chapters "Life in an Outport" and "A Confession of Faith" are devoted to extolling the virtues of traditions such as feng shui, or the art of living harmoniously with one's surroundings, and Taoism, one of the three traditional religions of China (along with Confucianism and Buddhism). Additionally, when Mrs. Betterton tries to dissuade Lilian from going out to China, Lilian cites the traditional Chinese virtues of filial piety and a respect for the past (taught to her by Claude) as compelling reasons to go to China (19). Moreover, characters who fail to appreciate the "enterprising" nature and "adaptability" of the Chinese are generally presented in an ironic light. The missionary group Lilian has joined is based in Chungking, a port city on the upper Yangtze river. In order to reach Chungking at that time, travelers had to pass through a series of rapids and waterfalls-standard procedure involved the passengers getting out of the boats and walking along narrow mountain paths while "trackers" (low paid Chinese laborers) pulled the boats with ropes past the rapids. In a chapter about the trip, the group is walking on one of these paths and watching the trackers fight to keep the boats under control and moving up the river against the strong current. When the missionary doctor, Dr. Maxwell, expresses admiration for the trackers' strength and courage, another missionary, Mr. Jenkins, previously characterized as annoying and boorish, objects to the praise:

"I never know what you [Dr. Maxwell] mean by talking about Chinese courage and all that.... These men don't really pull. They are afraid to. Have you watched them rowing? I have not the patience, it is so ridiculous. And have you ever seen one catch a rope yet? Why, they turn away, and hide their faces, just as a woman would. Then the way they throw too! Oh, they are all a set of women rather than men." (132)

Jenkins's criticism is shown to not only be inaccurate, but also badly timed, as in the next moment, four of the trackers are pulled off the path to their deaths, while the remaining trackers and Dr. Maxwell must valiantly try to save the fifth. The twist in the plot thus simultaneously highlights Jenkins' error, while answering pundits who would call the Chinese inadaptable or effeminate.

Yet, alongside Little's criticisms, Little also contributes to prevailing negative stereotypes. A striking example occurs in a description of the large municipal graveyard outside of Hankow:

...Chinese graves have nothing sad or solemn about them, they look like rounded hillocks, or big molehills, except where here and there one more ornate has a tablet or a decorative wall and altar. Only at times the thought of the dead men watching round is apt to overpower the lonely European, for round each Chinese city the space occupied by the dead is larger than that occupied by the living, with not a tree, not a flower planted over all its hillocky acres, till one wonders what the end of China must be when the dead have occupied it all. (75)

In this description, the weight of tradition (to paraphrase Campbell) is meaningless-the graves "have nothing sad or solemn about them" and they are characterized as insignificant "rounded hillocks" or denigrated as "big molehills." Moreover, the weight of Chinese tradition is clearly described as threatening to the future of China and to living Chinese. Instead of Lilian's ideas about respectful gestures to the past or the strength of Chinese traditions, the graveyard is so oppressive, so all encompassing that it threatens even the possibility of progress and change that the progressive European would be sure to encourage. Even the "lonely European" is "apt to [be] overpower[ed]" by the force and weight of the past. This metaphor is repeated throughout the novel, most significantly in the portrayal of the relationship Claude has with the concubine, a relationship which is primarily portrayed as a step backward (as retarding progress). Not only is the Chinese girl beneath him in terms of race and status, but also as he later justifies it to Lilian, the practice of keeping concubines is a long tradition in China. Claude vaguely expresses the hope that the custom will be eradicated, just as the polygamy evidenced in the Old Testament eventually fell out of practice, but his hope does not materialize in a decisive scheme for changing his own practice (290). The circumstances surrounding the conception and birth of his two Eurasian children are equally lacking in purpose or clear forward direction. Claude is described as drifting from a secretarial arrangement with the slave girl to a sexual one-his children appear rather mysteriously as he is also described as feeling sorry for, but to a greater degree, being disgusted by the concubine he has bought (50-1, 101-3). The portrayal of Claude's relationship thus uncritically reflects popular British perception of the larger political relationship between Britain and China.

h

The young Lilian Grey is thus dropped into this contested space with her task clearly outlined for the reader: first described as the "angel in the house," she is destined to develop into the "savior in the house" (although she remains relatively unaware of her destiny for most of the novel). However, Lilian is not simply confronted with the necessity of saving or rescuing the man she loves-there is also the existence of the "kittenish" and non-threatening concubine and the two children (the villainess is not villainous). To combat this complication, Lilian is portrayed as an ultra pure and innocent woman: from the lilies in her name to the initial description the reader has of her: "Very young and very pretty, yet the first thing every stranger noticed about Lilian Grey was rather her high-bred air and carriage than her beauty. With a dainty grace, that was an inherent part of herself, she now offered the first pink of the season to the dark lady" (3). Everything about her indicates her youth, yet when Claude sees her for the first time, he sees her not as a girl, but as a woman (an innocent and unknowing woman, but a woman nonetheless). Likewise, the first description of Claude is striking and memorable, not for his brute masculinity but for his sensitivity. Claude's is a "mobile expression," with "eyes that seemed to read the innermost natures of those they looked at." However, his sensitivity does not undermine his subtle and gendered power: "...he talked with quaint turns of phrase, and picturesque, unexpected touches of his journey home and of China, so as to make all the places he mentioned for ever after cease to be merely places in the map, and instead become his places, which it seemed hardly as if anyone else had a right to visit, or even live in, without his leave and by express permission" (10). Lilian's vision of Claude's travels is the ultimate imperial fantasy, redolent of Adam naming the animals in Genesis-the idea that the ability to name gives one eternal power over the named. For Lilian, the person who will eventually save Claude by reshaping him, her first experience is of being named and shaped by him. By the time Claude leaves for the return to China, he has left her a new identity (although she does not know it):

When he went away she was, what he took her for at the first, a woman, with cultivated tastes, not stored very specially with facts so far, emphatically not a learned lady, but with cultivated tastes, and an awakened intelligence, and above all with a heart that could feel, a woman's heart; no longer a child, but a woman, with a woman's capabilities. (11)

These "woman's capabilities," combined with her innate purity, define Lilian as a benevolent imperialist, a definition that will become very important in the task Lilian faces in China.

Despite Lilian's ascension to womanhood (courtesy Claude), after being transported to a foreign land, Lilian is labeled as a girl again. In Lilian, the British community only sees a girl who is foolishly trying to do womanly (if not manly) things-travel into the interior of China, become a medical missionary, become a teaching missionary. Again and again, the idea that these are women's jobs is repeated-occupations for strong souls, not for delicate flowers like Lilian. When Claude finally asks Lilian to marry him, he forgets his earlier acute assessment of Lilian's capabilities, and assumes, like everyone else, that her purity and innocence is girlish (194). Based upon this assumption, Claude steers Lilian into childlike activities and behaviors: he asks that she wear the dress she wore when they first met (forgetting that it had womanly associations for him then), doesn't tell her about the concubine or the children, tries to keep her from contacting Mrs. Betterton for fear she will tell Lilian the truth, encourages her to engage only in light social pursuits, and avoides discussing his work (199-200, 204-5, 207-10).

His haste to wed is based on his idea that once wed, they can never be "put asunder" yet Claude's feeling of safety is buttressed only by his constant vigilance and the fantasy world he's created around Lilian. Despite Claude's efforts to cut Lilian off from people who might reveal the truth (a difficult task considering it's an open secret in Shanghai), Lilian, with a rather ungirl-like persistence, innocently acts in ways that threaten Claude's house of cards. Lilian manages to secretly send a telegram to Mrs. Betterton to let her know the news of the marriage; in addition, Lilian is very insistent on wanting to volunteer as a teacher in a school for Eurasian children-the same one Claude's children attend (211, 225). Claude also actively imagines Lilian as a young girl, the same young girl that he called a "mirage" during his trip to England. By doing this, he creates the fantasy that he has married a person without a past and without a connection to reality. By distancing Lilian from her own past (a past that includes his education of her and the experience of her trip to China), and by seeing Lilian as an angelic creature, separate from reality, Claude hopes to save himself from exposure and shame. Meanwhile, Lilian is beginning to wilt, not under the strain of being a girl trying to be a woman (which is what everyone assumes), but under the strain of being a woman pretending to be a girl.

Claude is thus emblematic of the progressive force of British knowledge and learning-the British mind and spirit set out to travel, record, possess, and control the world. He names and possesses the world imaginatively for Lilian before she ever leaves England. Yet, at the same time, Claude's "fatal flaw" is intertwined with that same progressive, imperialistic force-the legacy of conquering is a heavy burden of responsibility and guilt, a burden that Claude tries to escape and mitigate. During his first encounter with Lilian, Claude advises her to "avoid reality" and "escape from ever knowing the truth about anything" (10). To Lilian, his attitude is one of "lounging through life, always full of information as an encyclopedia, always whimsical as to his method of communicating it" (12). His original purpose in buying the Chinese girl was to save her from slavery. Yet as Mrs. Betterton points out, she is no more to him than a slave-his act of mitigation only entangles him more deeply in the sexual politics of imperialism (50-1). His life's academic work also negates this desire to escape reality: his quest is to find the truth of Taoism by closely studying the writings of Lao-Tzu. His sense of responsibility and guilt makes Claude almost paranoid that Lilian will become knowledgeable or has become knowledgeable. He calls her Cassandra during an ill-fated meeting in the Niukan Gorge; and upon bumping into her at the Shanghai river gardens after he thought she had left for England, he nearly doesn't propose because her aloofness designates her (in his mind) as a society girl, a younger Mrs. Robinson if you will (87, 189).

In contrast to the sensual, unhealthy Mrs. Robinson, who excuses and justifies Claude's dissolute behavior, when Lilian saves Claude, she does it by forgiving him completely and unreservedly, but she also holds him accountable and responsible for his actions. One way she does this is by asking Claude to bring his children into their home, so they can raise them as a family, a progressive and socially shocking solution (303). Lilian also embodies Claude's responsibility: when Claude finally tells her the truth, she is relatively silent at first. But when she tries to stand up, she collapses to the floor, falling into a sickness that eventually results not only in a miscarriage, but also in the loss of her ability to have children (291). Thus, at the moment of Claude's salvation, which is also the moment at which he remembers that Lilian is a "pure" and "loving" woman, Lilian's biological womanhood is utterly destroyed. Yet it is this childless space that enables her to provide that radical solution to the "problem" of the two Eurasian children: since she cannot have children of her own, she will love and raise Claude's. Alicia Bewicke Little was an optimist and a reformer, and she believed that history can be reconciled and changed for the better. The happy ending of A Marriage in China with Claude and Lilian presiding over his Eurasian flock in England seems to offer a solution to both the negative tenor of their personal history and oppressive weight of the political history between Britain and China. Moreover, as represented by Claude's British-Chinese children, the solution does not involve a hands-off approach by Britain: while the means are decried (Claude's sexual exploitation of the concubine), the ends are valued (his son excels at Cambridge and is seen as a future reformer of China; his daughter is sweet and intelligent and is forecasted to marry a Cambridge professor). Claude is thus redeemed through his growing acceptance of his existing Eurasian children-an acceptance that his English wife already possesses. The colonial wife (Lilian) has already bridged the racial gap; it remains for her colonial husband (Claude) to do so in reparation for previous sexual exploitation. Moreover, salvation lies not in some ephemeral creature, born of gossamer and the morning dew-salvation lies in a real woman (Lilian) who has lost a child through miscarriage and shoulders the responsibility of caring for her husband's previous children regardless of the social consequences.

Yet Little also undermines this solution: for one, it is a solution that requires them to leave behind the environment in which the problem of exploitation resides and presumably still exists. In fact, as the ending of the book reinforces, the actual history of the poor relations between Britain and China still exists-there are still conflicting viewpoints on what to do, frustrations and tensions are still escalating. While Marriage does provide some hope for the future of British policy in China in the form of Claude's son, this is a distant future. In the meantime, the Fortescues are forced to live in England to escape persecution, and Shanghai traders continue to lose money on Chinese ventures. The institutions and practices are still in place that forced the personal and political histories into these positions. Little's resolution to the problem that her plot has created for the characters, as well as the problem that history has created for Britain's relations with China is almost disturbingly neat-and contrary to what has gone before. She has made such a case for the difficulty of resolving history (personal and otherwise) that the ending seems tacked on-somewhat like the very neat ending of Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton.

One final sticking point in the solution proposed is that Little has conveniently taken care of the Chinese mother's voice in all of this by marrying her to a Portuguese Eurasian from Macao (an old Portuguese treaty port) and giving her more children to care for. This is a negative ending in terms of the fact that her children by Claude are taken away, but certainly more positive than Jane Eyre's solution to the "Other" woman, in which the first wife goes mad and burns to death, a circumstance which motivates, but also removes her from, the plot. Yet here too, Little seems to resist a completely conventional ending. We are told that the Chinese mother raises her children Anglican after asking Claude what his beliefs are: "...this request of hers looked a little as if the poor Chinese slave girl-the kitten of years ago-had had a soul all the time, if Claude Fortescue had but known where to find it..." (311). Yet as the sentence continues, even this positive note is taken away from the concubine: "...and as if in some indirect way he had yet made an impression upon it..." (311). Like Lilian, the Chinese girl has been trained for doing good by a man who paradoxically cannot recognize the good in her. In the final analysis, the ending to Little's novel about the tenuous relationship between Britain and China and a husband and wife is just as tenuous as the subject matter.

Notes

1 Increasingly, scholars are beginning to recognize a semicolonial relationship between Britain and China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See John Darwi???? in, "Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion" (English Historical Review, 112.447 [1997]: 614-42) and The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume III: The Nineteenth Century (Andrew Porter, ed., Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1999).

2 Barry Milligan argues that while other oriental countries (what we now consider to be the Middle East and India) quickly lost their fantastical mystique to the scimitar-rattling image projected in works like The Arabian Nights, China retained its mystery and desirability. It was not until the late eighteenth century, around the time of the failure of the Macartney embassy to secure a treaty, that negative or threatening images of China begin to appear in English literature, namely in the "opium-tinged narratives" of Coleridge and De Quincey (19-20).

3 It seems appropriate to give some biographical background since both the text and the author have fallen into obscurity. Alicia Helen Neva Bewicke was born in Madeira, moving to London at some point in her early twenties. She spent the next two decades writing novels and essays and participating in the London women's rights scene. In November 1886, she married Archibald Little, a successful tea taster in China who had already spent twenty years there. Arriving in China at the beginning of 1887, Alicia soon began writing again, under both Alicia Bewicke Little and Mrs. Archibald Little. During her twenty years in China, Little wrote three novels, five travelogues, a guide to Peking, dozens of articles, edited two of her husband's books on China, was active in the Shanghai Women's Society, and founded the T'ien Tsu Hui (the Natural Foot Society, an anti-footbinding organization). Returning to England in 1907 when Archibald's health failed, Little continued to work on behalf of women's rights and against footbinding. Her Times obituary recognized her as a "well-known expert on China" and for her "extraordinary kindness of heart which she showed especially to the poor and unfortunate." Information compiled from Croll; Little, Round About My Peking Garden; Little's obituary in The London Times; the RLIN Online Bibliographical File; and the British Library Public Catalogue.

4 The concubine is never named in the novel and rarely speaks. Variously she is known as "kitten," "the poor slave girl," and "the Chinese girl." Her speaking parts are limited to requesting permission to continue to darn Claude's socks (after he definitively breaks off the sexual part of the relationship) and asking what religion Claude was raised in.

5 For more examples of arguments that focus on China's inability or unwillingness to embrace Western-style progress, see John McCarthy, "China and the West" (The Quarterly Review, 163 [1886]: 65-85) and "Western China-Its Products and Trade" (The Quarterly Review, 171 [1890]: 205-34). For articles that equate that lack of progressiveness to femininity, see F. Thorold Dickson, "Some Aspects of a Chinaman" (Macmillan's Magazine, 34 [Oct 1900]: 411-8) and the anonymously written "Missionaries and Mandarins" (Macmillan's Magazine, 23 [Dec 1870]: 171-6.

6 Little even apologizes in the Preface for including too much information about Chinese traditions such as Taoism.

7 See, for example, chapter 1 of Little's Intimate China (London, Philadelphia: Hutchinson & Co., J. B. Lippincott Co., 1901).

8 This follows Deirdre David's argument that while women may have pictured the colonial enterprise differently (by virtue of being disenfranchised in the culture in power), they nonetheless pictured it through the filter of colonialism and imperialism. Thus even areas of resistance are encoded within the text of compliance (Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995).

Works Cited

British Library Public Catalogue. 12 Oct 1999 .
Campbell, Mrs. J. Weston. (Signed C. de Thierry.) "The Sons of Han [Chinese Emigration]." Macmillan's Magazine. 80 (May 1899): 58-66.
Croll, Elisabeth J. Wise Daughters from Foreign Lands: European Women Writers in China. London: Pandora, 1989.
Little, Alicia Bewicke. A Marriage in China. London: F. V. White & Co., 1896.
---. Round about My Peking Garden. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905.
"Mrs. A. Little." Obituary. The London Times. 6 Aug. 1926: 17e.
Research Library Group (RLG) Union Catalog (RLIN). 12 Oct 1999 .
Thurin, Susan Schoenbauer. Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842-1907. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1999.

Rachel M. Bright first became interested in Alicia Bewicke Little by way of a biography project in a Victorian Non-Fiction seminar taught by Sally Mitchell. She would like to thank her colleagues from that class, since their bibliographies of nineteenth-century periodicals helped supply some of the sources for this paper, and Deirdre David, whose comments on the first version of this paper greatly improved the revision. In addition to her interest in little known British women writers who have written about their experiences in China, her teaching/research interests include nineteenth-century British literature, postcolonial Asian literature, international women's writing, and technical/scientific writing.