The Winnifred Eaton Archive is a research and teaching tool that offers over 300 works by Winnifred Eaton Babcock Reeve (1875-1954). Winnifred Eaton was a popular early Asian North American author, journalist, screenwriter and playwright whose best known works were published under the pen-name “Onoto Watanna,” a controversial persona that she assumed for over two decades. She was also the sister of Edith Eaton (“Sui Sin Far”). Drawing on the resources of libraries and special collections from around the world, this digital archive provides freely accessible scans and fully searchable transcriptions of much of Winnifred Eaton’s collected oeuvre. Our goal is to provide a more complete picture of this complex and problematic figure. The archive will expand as Eaton’s known oeuvre expands. It also houses supplemental materials: photographs, reviews, illustrations, a biography, a bibliography, and unpublished manuscripts. Read More

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• The Wife of ShimadzuShimadzu, the owner of a quiet Japanese restaurant tucked away inside a New York City brownstone, horrifies his Japanese patrons when his new wife cashes in on Japanese stereotypes to attract American customers. But the Wife of Shimadzu plays only a minor role in this story. At its center are the sensitive artist Narabara and the coyly named half-Japanese heroine Otama Wallace, who find love—and choose the “better part” of their respective cultural and racial identities—in the urban cosmopolitanism of turn-of-the century New York. Read More Written by Jean Lee Cole
• The Half CasteAs one might expect, Winnifred Eaton’s writing commonly displays deep sympathy for mixed-race people and sometimes portrays them in unconventional ways. Nevertheless, nonfiction works like “The Half Caste” show she was not immune to the popular logic of scientific racism. Claiming that each race possessed fixed biological characteristics, scientific racism contributed to notions that mixed-race people were, by nature, volatile and internally divided. While Eaton remarks, here, that half castes are often beautiful and intelligent, she discusses their emotional dispositions in terms that sometimes suggest mental illness. Her observation about suicide, in the penultimate section, gestures to the figure of the “tragic mulatto,” a popular nineteenth-century literary trope of doomed racial hybridity. Although the subject of Eaton’s observations is the mixed-race person of Japanese and European descent, her use of the term “half caste”—originating in the British Empire, where it frequently referred to persons of mixed European and Indian descent—suggests a broader characterization of mixed-race experience. Read More Written by Spencer Tricker
• Barbary Coast OutlineIn 1929, Winnifred Eaton wrote an original screenplay outline that tells the story of a young reformer who falls in love with a girl from the San Francisco underworld and realizes the limits of his reformist ideology. Through its sympathetic representation of underworld characters, Barbary Coast challenged the censorship guideline popularly known as the Hays Code and the reformist zeal that necessitated it. It also reflected the industry’s confused shift from silent to sound films through its unconventional form—as it features dialogues, notes about post-production, shot specifications, and set descriptions. In particular, these set descriptions, with their nuanced attention to visual and auditory detail, showcase how Eaton translated her faculty for conjuring evocative visions of time and place (seen previously in texts like A Japanese Nightingale and Cattle) into the novel medium of film. Read More Written by Ethan Eu and Thomas Playfair
• Johnny’s Calf and Pa’s Cow“Johnny’s Calf and Pa’s Cow” is one of many stories Eaton set on the prairie after her relocation to Alberta ranch country. Her characters, marked predominantly by vulgar rawness with fleeting moments of affection, offer readers a glimpse of Canadian prairie life. Eaton appears to leave Johnny’s hard-working mother intriguingly out of her title just as Pa, in the story itself, cannot recognize Ma’s significant contributions to their household. Perhaps she is like Pa’s cow, milked for all its worth? Read More Written by Sijia Cheng
• The Loves of Sakura Jiro and the Three Headed MaidThe freak show and the dime museum trace their roots to New York’s American Museum, established by P.T. Barnum in 1841, which featured such attractions as the Feejee Mermaid and the “Siamese Twins,” Chang and Eng Bunker. By 1903, when Eaton published “The Loves of Sakura Jiro and the Three Headed Maid” in the highly respected Century Magazine, the freak show was firmly entrenched in American popular culture. In this story, Eaton introduces Japanese identity as a new kind of “freak” (with a nod to the 1893 Columbian Exposition’s Midway Plaisance) and shows how the resourceful Sakura Jiro is able to parlay that identity to his advantage. Read More Written by Jean Lee Cole
• I am a White N[---]This incomplete typescript explores a common topic in Eaton’s oeuvre: the lived experience of mixed-race people. Rather than presenting this figure as a spectacle, however, “I am a White N[---]” highlights the precarity of racial passing in the US, where a single drop of Black blood disqualified one from whiteness and full citizenship. In this regard, it recalls contemporary narratives such as James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929). Though the use of a slur in the story’s title indicates the protagonist’s bitterness at American racism, her eventual rejection of Black identity illustrates Eaton’s sensitivity to the lure of white privilege despite economic hardships that cut across the color line. Eaton’s use of the terms “Creole” and “quadroon” showcases this period’s attention to minute degrees of racial and cultural distinction. The phrase “white n[---]” entered English usage as early as the late 1820s. The US antebellum period witnessed a shift in racial ideology from nativism to white supremacism (i.e. a shift in attention from one’s origins to one’s skin color), during which Northern politicians and union organizers often made invidious comparisons between white wage labor and slavery. In 1836, a story with a similar title (“The White N[---]”) was published by the (then) well-known Nova Scotian humorist Thomas Chandler Haliburton. His usage, in a tale about the auctioning off of white orphans and elderly folk, suggests “a white person likened to or treated like a black slave” (Oxford English Dictionary). Notably, in Eaton’s nonfiction article “The Half Caste” (1898), she observes that the word “n[---]” was sometimes applied to mixed-race people of Japanese and European descent. Read More Written by Spencer Tricker
• Barbary Coast TreatmentWritten by Winnifred Eaton and Charles Logue, the treatment for Barbary Coast follows Roger Storm’s attempt to sanitize the red light district in San Francisco and the conflict that arises through his infatuation for Lily, a proud resident of the district. Building on Eaton’s earlier outline, the Barbary Coast treatment makes changes to character names and various elements of the plot while giving a clearer voice to her characters through extended sections of dialogue, developing themes of race, class, and female companionship. Many of these revisions reflect the heavy film censorship of the Hays Code era, and despite the treatment being over sixty pages long, little of it, if any, survived the script’s editing and eventual production at MGM studios in 1935. Read More Written by Delaney Anderson, Amanda Law, Meghna Chatterjee, and Camille Lopez