Visiting a missionary school for girls in the central Chinese city of Chungking in the early 1890s, British writer Alicia Little entertained some disquieting thoughts about instilling Western values in Chinese children. Her reflections in Intimate China on the benefits and hazards of such teaching instance Britain's increasingly conflicted views of China in the last decades of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the passage manifests the long-held Victorian view that the Chinese mind and culture had lain dormant for at least a century and needed Western aid to awaken them to their full potential.Footnote ¹ On the other hand, her unease about children made “susceptible of outside influences” admits both to the limited effects of Western teaching on entrenched Chinese traditions and to the dubious advantages of alienating individuals from the values of the country that must house their futures. Writing some thirty years after the Second Opium Wars, which formally opened China to foreign traders, travelers, and missionaries, and less than a decade before the Boxer Rebellion, in which thousands of foreigners and Chinese Christians were massacred in retaliations against Western influences,Footnote ² Little's observations foreground pivotal problems in Britain's evolving relationship with China as well as dispute conventional models of East-West relations in the nineteenth century.

Despite their historical complexity, Victorian relations with China have been marginalized or ignored in accounts of Orientalism because they do not fit comfortably into available paradigms. “For all its dirt, smells, and incomprehensible manners China could be seen as the home of an ancient and highly literate civilization and a complex and sophisticated polity” (16), notes Nicholas Clifford, distinguishing Britain's wary respect for China's centuries-long intellectual history from the Orientalism that Edward Said has called “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (3). Norman Girardot more forcefully contests the hegemonic influence of such critical structures, emphasizing that it is crucial “to distinguish among different types of Orientalism (e.g., sinological, Indological, Islamic, Semitic, and so on, as well as important national variations) and the extent to which the process of cross-cultural intercourse can be reduced to some monolithic scheme of Western domination” (14). While it is true that missionaries and scholars continued their attempts to guide China toward a Western view of cultural progress throughout the nineteenth century and by in large did not, as Clifford notes, take the country “on its own terms” (74) until after the First World War, Girardot argues that by the late 1870s, China's increasing hostility against Western influences necessitated strategies for a cross-cultural exchange that could negotiate the fine line between melioration and acquiescence. Writes Girardot: “The realization that the relationship between missionaries and the Chinese had to take on more of the characteristics of a two-way conversation carried with it the potential danger of a reciprocity that could lead to the conversion of Christians as much as it could win over heathens” (219). Emphasizing the lingering seductiveness of a Chinese culture that had been considered by many eighteenth-century Britons as a philosopher's Utopia,Footnote ³ Girardot's comment situates Sinological Orientalism in an ideological chasm between narratives of imperial domination and dreams of cultural reciprocity. Unable to rely on assumptions of intellectual superiority and compelled to learn something of a nation with whom England shared, according to nineteenth-century Orientalist Max Müller, “no intellectual bonds” (808),Footnote ⁴ British residents in China became as susceptible to a destabilization of their values as the Chinese themselves.

For those foreign residents without the missionary's salvational interests, the tourist's passing pursuit of the picturesque, or the merchant's quest for material acquisition, the problem of maintaining those boundaries between the familiar and the strange, which Said notes were essential in giving “shape and meaning to the great Asiatic mystery” (44), became even more acute. Alicia Little was one visitor whose impressions of China were neither limited nor buttressed by an exclusive agenda and whose writings thus offer an unusually candid view into the vicissitudes of cultural exchange during a volatile political moment in Sino-British relations. She arrived in the port city of Shanghai in 1887 as the forty-one year-old bride of Archibald John Little, a British businessman with considerable prior experience in China, first as a tea-taster, then a merchant and entrepreneur.Footnote ⁵ Having already established a career as a novelist and activist for women's rights in England, she would spend the next twenty years of her life in China, recording her impressions and experiences, particularly of rarely-frequented inland regions, in travel books, biographies, and novels. These works highlight the difficulties of maintaining a stable subjectivity when forced at every turn to question one's judgments and perceptions. Yet I argue it is precisely the destabilization of her values and assumptions that permits Little to envision possibilities for self-realization disallowed by Western social constructs and to achieve an elusive alliance with the Chinese people. In particular, traveling and living in remote Chinese regions allowed Little to discard the gender expectations against which she had struggled during her life in England while her interactions with Chinese women during a crucial moment of national and feminist reform in the country helped her to reconcile her conflicting beliefs in women's independence and domestic responsibilities. Her writings suggest that, at least for some Victorians, exposure to the Orient resulted in a reconstitution of Western values that surpassed in scope any attempt to project a unified vision of the East.

Intimate China (1899), Little's first nonfiction work on her experiences in the country, exemplifies the impossibility of imagining a homogeneous Orient. In examining this work, I point out, first, how Little's self-contradictions and failure to establish a consistent perspective on the country undermine the tropes of dominance and othering common to European accounts of China. I go on to discuss how this inability to establish firm boundaries between self and other, familiar and strange, alienates Little from her British, female subjectivity while enabling her receptivity to alternative models of womanhood. Adjusting her assumptions about women's work to Chinese social conditions, Little allied herself with Chinese women reformers of the 1890s as they spearheaded political movements for the betterment of their situations in China and for the melioration of international relations. I conclude with a discussion of Little's novel A Marriage in China (1896), an account of a young British woman's self-discovery in China that reveals, more clearly than her travel books, the author's vision of cultural reciprocity between Europe and the Far East. While the novel's concluding image of cross-cultural harmony may, in light of later events, seem idealistic, its optimism offers a refreshing, alternative model for understanding nineteenth-century Orientalism and for re-examining relations with Asia in our own time.

I. China through Changing Lenses

While European merchants and missionaries had been visiting China since the Middle Ages,Footnote ⁶ the Treaties of Nanking (1842) and Tientsin (1858) encouraged an unprecedented influx of foreigners, who could explore and settle in newly-opened port cities and inland regions under government protection.Footnote ⁷ These visitors approached the country with a mixture of entitlement and trepidation that acknowledged the triumph of the Opium Wars as well as China's increased hostility toward the West. Touring southern China in the 1840s, soon after the end of the First Opium War, French missionary and traveler Évariste Régis Huc noted:

Widely read by the British public, Huc's writings typify the West's objectification of the Chinese in the early nineteenth century and its sanctioning of European aggression against supposedly obstinate, hostile natives. Conforming to the anti-conquest narrative that Mary Louise Pratt has defined as “strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony” (7), Huc's scornful disregard for the Chinese and their customs is here meant to be read as part of a self-defensive strategy to “inspire a salutary fear among the Chinese” (4). Forty years later, the same feelings of apprehension and privilege dogged British traveler extraordinaire, Isabella Bird Bishop. Arriving in Shanghai, a city developed after the Opium Wars as a model European settlement, Bird Bishop notes that she was “not prepared for the Chinese element being so much en evidence in the foreign settlement,” and goes on to ask anxiously: “Is Shanghai menaced by the ‘Yellow Peril’ as Malacca, Singapore, and Penang have been” (1: 31)? Bird Bishop's anxiety about a Chinese take-over was undoubtedly inspired by the many late-century rebellions against foreigners throughout the country. However, the irony of her question is obvious to the modern reader if not to the writer herself: It is China, not Europe, that has been menaced by foreigners. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, parts of China had been so white-washed that their original color could be conveniently forgotten.

Bird Bishop quells her temporary unease by assuring herself that the “Chinese are quite capable of appreciating the comfort and equity of foreign rule, and the various advantages which they enjoy under it” (32). Alicia Little is not so sure. From its outset, her Intimate China evades the conventions of the travel book, which, as Said points out, typically offers a refuge of stable authority “when the uncertainties of travel in strange parts seem to threaten one's equanimity” (93). Writing with the experience of over a decade living among the Chinese (in contrast to Bird Bishop's fifteen, peripatetic months) and for the benefit of those with scant knowledge of the country, Little nevertheless downplays her authority, emphasizing at various moments that her book does not “aim at being a storehouse of learning and a book of reference for all time, but rather at giving a picture, for those who know nothing of . . . a people among whom I have at least lived on somewhat intimate terms for the last eleven years” (169).Footnote ⁸ The comparison of her book to a picture is a favorite metaphor of Little's, and it aptly reflects her artistry. An avid photographer, she frequently used her camera to communicate with Chinese when she could not relate through spoken language. On several occasions, she accepts their artistic advice, as for instance, when she photographs the bottomless well at Fengtu and accepts the help of a priest who “said he would stand beside it with an incense stick, as that would look better” (55). At other times, she uses her camera to challenge her own initial perceptions of a place or people: In a Shanghai garden, she overturns her initial judgment of the Chinese as being “the most unpicturesque of human beings” by photographing them and thus making them “an integral part of a picture” (27).Footnote ⁹ Little's verbal picture of China similarly experiments with perspective and continually challenges her reader's desire for a stable viewpoint. As Little herself warns at the outset: “I mean to adopt various styles, sometimes giving him the very worlds in which I at the time dashed off my impressions . . . at others giving him the result of serious reflection” (5). Subsequently, the image she captures of the country is frequently blurred by seeming irresolution, reading like a semi-transparent stack of photographic negatives, all taken from different perspectives and superimposed upon one another so as to blur the focal object and draw attention, instead, to the variable subject positions of the observer.

A case-in-point is Little's opening description of Shanghai. Writing some thirty years after the city's establishment, Little portrays a hodge-podge of cultural fusion that at first resembles Bird Bishop's attitude toward the city.

This initial picture is taken from the perspective of the Western traveler, offended by the invasion of Chinese into a city previously decorous with its “beautiful public gardens . . . its electric lights and its carriages, and great European stores” (2). Emphasis is placed here on the contrast between “us” and “them,” the latter presented as a blight of sartorial absurdity, geometrical incongruity, corporeal affront, and physical threat to the European visitor, who has little hope of repelling the onslaught of primitive wheelbarrows and ostentatious sedans.

But this initial image of a Chinese invasion upon European territory is overlaid a page later by Little's reflection upon the disappearance of an ancient civilization beneath the gloss of European modernity: “With their long nails, their musk-scented garments, their ivory opium-pipes, and delicate arrangements of colours, [the Chinese] cannot be without sensibilities. Do they feel that the Gaul is at the gates, and that the China of their childhood is passing away” (4)? The image here offers a perspectival shift from the impression of the tourist, seeking the picturesque Orient of willow-pattern plates to that of the resident who has interacted with the Chinese and is keenly aware of the history effaced by European incursion. This sympathy with the Chinese is reinforced several pages later when Little ventures to inhabit more fully a native nostalgia for the past: “Ah! the good old days of China tea and silk are gone. Are there better days yet to come in the new China that is to take the place of old China, which is passing away even as we talk about it” (12)? While ostensibly voicing the lament of the Chinese trader for the prosperous commerce of the past, these lines also express a greater unease about the Western forces shaping the “new” China according to its own visions of moral, intellectual, and social progress.

Little's feelings about the effects of such progress are poignantly expressed as she watches the end-of-year, prize ceremony at the Friends’ Girls’ School in Chungking. Witnessing the distribution of Caucasian dolls outfitted in lace-trimmed drawers and long, European dresses, Little wonders “if the little Chinese children would not have preferred Chinese-clad dolls to nurse” and then ponders the wisdom of giving these children “tempting-looking foreign gifts [that] . . . must predispose the little girls to wish to buy foreign things when they grow up, recollecting the delight that foreign things gave them as children” (242). The danger of cultivating such a taste for European objects and ideals of beauty is implied in the subtle parallel Little draws between the Chinese girls’ desire for Caucasian dolls and their mothers’ fascination with the missionary babies “with their faces so startlingly clean by comparison with the Chinese as to look like beings from another sphere, rosy, and kicking about their white fleecy shawls and other pure whitenesses. Disdainful, indeed, the babies appeared, and were themselves probably the crowning feature of the show; for the Chinese certainly delight in foreign babies, and are never tired of examining them” (242). Little's attitude toward the whiteness of the Caucasian babies is characteristically ambiguous. The passage seems at first to exalt the pristine purity of the Caucasian babies above the darkness of the Chinese children – a darkness often associated with moral failings by European visitors to China, who saw “Chinese dirt [as] the sign of a cultural vice crying out to be cured” (Clifford 47). While Little herself frequently remarks on the dust, mud, and dirt of China, even referring at one point, though arguably tongue-in-cheek, to the Chinese as a “slatternly, untidy, filth-loving race” (IC 348), here her hyperbolic language foregrounds the detrimental effects of such alien whiteness. In their silent, haughty scorn for their Chinese admirers, the angelic missionary babies embody the covert racial hierarchies underlying a seemingly beneficent moment of cross-cultural intercourse. More alarmingly, Little suggests, such displays of racial superiority may have the denaturalizing consequence of seducing Chinese mothers away from their own, not so white, offspring. Such implications not only question Western associations of whiteness with virtue but emphasize their potential damage.

II. Of Boundaries and Bindings

Little's early life as a traveler, novelist, and women's rights advocate sensitized her to the special strengths and susceptibilities of Chinese girls and women. Indeed, her sympathy for the equivocal positions of the girls at the Chungking missionary school may very well have stemmed from her own uncomfortable marginality vis-à-vis British values. Born in Madeira and raised abroad, Alicia Helen Neva Bewicke settled to middle-class life in England with a healthy skepticism toward social frivolities and domestic expectations. But she was also sufficiently indoctrinated in these values to prevent their wholesale rejection. Subsequently, she was caught, along with other women of the fin de siècle, between respect for high Victorian domestic ideals and attraction to new possibilities for self-realization. Her early works reflect an irresolvable contention between her advocacy of women's independence on the one hand and a defense of marriage and maternal instincts on the other. “Might she not . . . unite the two dreams of love and fame” (1: 45), reflects the eponymous heroine of Margery Travers (1878), struggling to reconcile her desire to be a singer with her romantic interests. Margery does realize her singing ambitions, but in a chapter entitled “Thorns as Crowns,” finds her successful career unsatisfactory. It is not until she becomes “Mrs. Dalrymple Bruce, the ex-great singer” (3: 300) and a surrogate mother to Dal's son that Margery finds complete fulfillment. As her friend reflects toward the novel's end: “Now, in the course of nature, your voice will soon be going off, and so you will leave the stage, and devote yourself to domestic happiness, and take the proper position of a woman as a subordinate to her husband, wonderfully useful of course also at charity concerts and parish festivals” (3: 300–01). The author's own scorn for such domestic proprieties here wrestles with the imperative of the marriage plot, which ultimately eclipses the heroine's hard-won, professional achievements. Similarly, while the successful poetess of Miss Standish (1883) might acknowledge that a wife's character is “more dependent and less energetic than an unmarried woman's” (2: 110), she also discovers complete happiness only in matrimony. The narrator's closing remarks are telling: “Emilia as a wife is a wife indeed, and far more absorbed into her husband's identity, pursuits, and ways of thinking, than ever seems to be the case with those professedly docile women, who have not graduated in the school of women's rights” (2: 140–41). Here, Emilia Standish's independent pursuits as a poet and political activist are reduced to preparatory training for her destiny as wife and mother. The novel ends, predictably, with the heroine's “whole soul imbued with the awful importance of the early education of the two children one always clinging to her knees” (2: 141).Footnote ¹⁰

Alicia Bewicke's own marriage to Archibald John Little fractured the domestic paradigms she constructed for her heroines. Six months after her wedding, she departed with her husband for China, thereby escaping Emilia Standish's gloomy proclamation: “When [women] have become wives, they are bound indeed” (MS 2: 109). Little's marriage initiated a series of literal and metaphorical boundary-crossings. Although she had traveled considerably before her marriage, China overturned all previous experiences of the “idle tourist life [of] dilettante singings and sketchings and expeditions” (2: 83) that so exasperate Emilia Standish. Besides removing her from familiar European contexts, the demands of her husband's job frequently left Little to explore the country on her own. While initially terrified to find herself in “a whole cityful of Chinese so hostile to foreigners and especially to foreign women” (IC 13), she eventually began to test her independence, deliberately defying expectations for European women. Refuting the claim that “it was impossible for an English lady to walk in [the filthy streets of Chungking],” Little decides “it was impossible for me to live in Chungking unless I did . . . so after showing myself about as much as I could in a sedan-chair with the curtains up – unlike the other ladies, who all kept theirs down in those days – I determined to attempt a walk, with my sedan-chair, of course, following behind to show I had some claim to respectability” (IC 81). The careful balance Little strikes here between defying racial and gender expectations and maintaining “some claim to respectability” indicates her increasingly tenuous and considered hold on Western values, which she can choose to discard at will. The emphasis here on self-display reveals that as she travels farther from Westernized cities like Shanghai, her European identity becomes less a constitutive element of her being and more a performance staged for an expectant, Chinese audience.

Little's ability to disengage from the constraints of European propriety in general and gender expectations in particular was further enabled by the demands of traveling through a country ill-equipped with modern transportation. Of making the four hundred-plus-mile overland journey from Ichang to Chungking, she writes:

Elisabeth Croll has noted of this adventure that in “denying her female presence,” Little “came to feel that men had great advantages in travelling” (31). While this may be true at moments, what emerges from this passage is neither resentment for having to disguise her gender nor envy for her husband's greater freedom. Rather, Little seems to delight in the attentions of her breathless audience and in the recognition that gender and race might, at times, become as easily exchangeable as clothing. Taking advantage of her Chinese audience's confusion, she experiments playfully with alienation from her racial and sexual markings, even imagining the thoughts of her puzzled onlookers as she dramatizes this moment for her readers. If Intimate China captures China and its people in multiple, shifting lenses, it presents an equally ambiguous picture of the author herself, who continually escapes the boundaries of her own frame.

One ideological frame shattered by Little's experiences in China was her preconception of the mutual exclusivity of women's work within and without the home. Repeatedly in her interactions with Chinese women, Little noted that domesticity need not be incompatible with involvement in broader spheres of influence. As a Chinese cook informs Little at one point: “Foreign ladies are not like our ladies; they don't understand anything about business, and take no part in their husbands’ affairs” (IC 177). That women could exert an appreciable impact in the male worlds of business and politics while still maintaining their positions as wives and mothers came as a revelation to Little, who remarks frequently on Chinese women's keen business sense and communication skills: “[W]henever I have seen [Chinese ladies] brought into intercourse with foreign men, or even Chinese men, on matters of business, I have been struck by both their ease of manner and their quiet dignity. It is true they are rather given to address a man, as if he were a superior being; but, further than that, they in nowise convey the impression that they are accustomed to consider themselves as at the service or pleasure of men. . .” (170). Archibald Little's business dealings gave his wife frequent opportunities to observe such interactions. Describing a Chinese matron who had come to Little's husband about her son, an employee of the company, she notes: “I must add that, for all her being a lady, she went on her knees to my husband on arrival, and tried to do so again on going. But in conversation with him she was anything but on her knees” (178).

Little's observations of Chinese women's ease within and without the home corroborate with customs dictating married women's behavior in the late imperial period.Footnote ¹² Susan Mann notes that while marriage confined women to the domestic realm, wives were also urged to maintain their dignity and authority in their husbands’ homes (“Grooming” 97). Such a stance differed considerably from expectations placed on the British wife. For while Victorian ideals of the domestic angel drew a rigid boundary between what Mary Poovey has called a depoliticized, moralized private sphere and a competitive, self-interested public world (10), Chinese divisions between male and female spaces did not incorporate such ideological polarities: “[T]he distinction between nei and wai – between women's inner sphere and men's outer sphere – is quite unlike the Western dichotomy separating the ‘domestic’ from the ‘public’ sphere,” argues Mann. “Instead . . . the principle of bie – separate spheres – is invoked to stress that wives and mothers inside the home embody the moral autonomy and authority on which husbands and sons must rely to succeed outside. All are part of a family system that constitutes a seamless, unitary social order centered on the home and bounded by the outer reaches of the imperium” (Precious Records 15). In exerting their authority inside the home, Chinese mothers and wives modeled for their sons and husbands the dignity and authority these men were expected to exhibit outside the home. The self-assertiveness shown by Chinese women raised with such principles thus poses a striking contrast to the married heroines of Little's early novels. In a country where, Little observes, there is scant association between marriage and love and where matrimonial conditions often resemble those of a business contract,Footnote ¹³ women naturally assume more independence from their husbands, acting with the self-possession denied to British women trained from girlhood to “be pleasing to the men among whom they found themselves” (MS 1: 133) and who, upon marriage, are compelled, by law or custom, to cede their independence.Footnote ¹⁴ While Little was hardly ready to advocate Chinese matrimonial customs in toto, she found undeniable appeal in a marriage system that enabled rather than nullified a woman's political and social agency.

The permeability of domestic and public spheres was further enhanced in China by late-century reforms that directly coincided with Little's residence in the country. Beginning in the early 1890s, Chinese women began to agitate for educational improvements, arguing that increasing women's literacy would contribute to national strengthening (Judge 160–62). These arguments culminated in the 1898 Reform Movement, a concerted effort to modernize China after its defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), and resulted in the establishment of the first Chinese-founded school for girls (1898), the first women's association in China (1897), and the first Chinese women's journal (1898). A primary goal of these institutions was to better equip mothers for educating their children but, as Nanxiu Qian and others have argued, what began as an effort to encourage women's service to their sons and their country became a self-propelled movement by women for greater autonomy and authority in the political and social world.

One major deterrent to women's new positions was the tradition of footbinding. “The reformists claimed the nation was weak because its men were weak, its men were weak because their mothers were weak, and their mothers were weak because they had bound feet” (Judge 171). While Alicia Little's campaign against footbinding has been noted by many critics, it has not been studied within the context of Chinese nationalism and the proto-feminist reforms of the 1890s. Such neglect overlooks an important moment of cross-cultural collaboration. Founding the Natural Feet Society (T'ien Tsu Hui) in April 1895, Little assembled a group of non-missionary, European women to help her gather and distribute poems, tracts, and other material on the detrimental effects of the custom by prominent Chinese and British authorities. The initiative stemmed, in part, from Little's own long-held and long-frustrated dream of heroic action, which could be fulfilled precisely because, as a stranger in a strange land, she felt bound by neither Chinese nor European customs and expectations.Footnote ¹⁵ But her personal ambitions resulted in the formation of a politically potent alliance that cooperated with Chinese reformers’ own re-evaluations of women's roles in home and state. Believing that maternal sympathy was a quality transcendent of racial differences and thus a unique point of cross-cultural understanding, Little and her society organized mixed-race discussions, to which Chinese mothers were encouraged to bring their daughters, encouraged Chinese women to take leadership positions within the society, and commissioned tracts with special appeals to Chinese mothers. Observing that mothers were often harsher enforcers of footbinding than men and that it was often mothers who sat by their daughters’ beds with a stick to “beat the girl should she disturb the household by her wails [of pain]” (IC 140), Little emphasized the intense suffering of girls during the early years of binding and stressed the incompatibility of good mothering and footbinding. Citing one example of a girl whose feet were amputated as a result of binding, she points out that “the mother of the child was a confirmed opium-smoker, and her indifference had led to the result indicated” (143). Subjecting one's children to such pain, Little suggests, can only result from a compromise of natural feeling and in this, she was supported by numerous Chinese women who, in poems and tracts, chastised fellow mothers for their indifference to daughters’ suffering. Childless herself, Little took on the responsibility of caring for Chinese girls as both a personal and political mission, turning her beliefs in maternal responsibility into a foundation for cross-cultural collaboration.Footnote ¹⁶

It is difficult to overlook Little's personal investment in the Natural Foot movement: her self-satisfaction in becoming a recognized political figure; her delight in holding captive audiences during cross-country tours; her appreciation for the pathos of suffering Chinese girls, which is described melodramatically in her nonfiction work In the Land of the Blue Gown (1908). But it is also important to recognize her efforts to preserve Chinese integrity at a critical moment in Sino-British relations and in Chinese women's efforts to reappropriate their natural bodies and native cultures. Little's recognition that her own cultural customs need be neither binding nor integral to her self-stability allowed her to establish a contact zone where cultural reciprocity could temporarily be achieved.

III. A Marriage of East and West

Little's first novel after her marriage gives some indication of her personal transformation in China while also offering a more direct indictment of British attitudes than her nonfiction. A Marriage in China (1896) is the story of Lilian Grey's journey up the Yangtze River to China's interior; a journey comparable to Marlow's more familiar venture up the Congo in Heart of Darkness (1899) in its implications for the heroine's self-discovery and its critique of Western civilization. For Lilian, as for Marlow, the river voyage entails an unmooring from the safety of familiar cultural constructs and a confrontation with the fears and desires submerged beneath social conventions. Claude Fortescue, a Sinologue and British consul stationed in Chungking, is the putative Kurtz, “gone off his head” from living more than six years among the Chinese and studying the language “without any steady routine to counterbalance it” (23–24). One character's comment that “’No European brain can grapple with Chinese and remain balanced’” (24) might, with a change in racial designation, apply to Kurtz's surrender to the African wilderness. But while Conrad may, according to Chinua Achebe's famous critique, reduce Africa to a dreamscape of the Western imagination, Little interrogates the motives behind this reductive view and explores the possibility of balancing receptivity to Chinese culture with recognition of the irresolvable differences precluding Western intervention. In portraying Lilian's attempts to achieve this balance, Little overturns Western fantasies of its salvational role in China and proposes a vision of cross-cultural understanding sensitive to contending national perspectives.

While Intimate China attempts to capture the multi-faceted reality of the country, Little's novel concerns itself with China's place in the Western imagination and uses this imaginary construct as a measure of British consciousness. For Lilian and her aunt, Miss Gardiner, China is reduced to an assortment of curios displayed in their middle-class, Northampton home. Describing the various Chinese objects given her by her nephew, Claude Fortescue, Miss Gardiner explains: “He brought me those two dear old monsters by the fireplace last time he came home, and that lovely bit of sang de boeuf he sent me from Peking. Oh! and that cushion, and my brooch, and nearly everything I have that is not strictly useful,” (AM 2). The decorative, useless, and exotically abstruse items in Miss Gardiner's home are fragments of the willow-pattern, Oriental dream world that Little attempts to dispel in Intimate China: These odd bits of chinoiserie, the narrator wryly suggests, are more representative of the idle, picturesque, “still life” (8) led by Miss Gardiner and her niece than the realities of their original country. Lilian, in particular, personifies the beautiful but ineffectual, displaced objects surrounding her. Orphaned at an early age and sheltered in her aunt's conservative home, the seventeen-year-old heroine half acknowledges her spectral existence, wondering vaguely, “Must I not be real” and reflecting that “It is so hard to know what a woman can be” (10). The parallel between Lilian's unrealized, womanly potential and the unreality of the Chinese objects appropriated by Claude Fortescue is asserted by the latter on a visit to England: “I wonder – I wonder if Chinese towns only existed upon Chinese vases, we might fancy equally poetically about them [as about Grecian urns],” Claude muses to his young cousin after reading her Keats’ ode, then quickly urges Lilian to “escape knowing the truth about anything. Avoid reality, Miss Grey!” (10). For Claude, who has experienced isolation, humiliation, and disillusionment in China, Lilian, like her ornamental objects, offers the refuge of a fantasy world to which he can no longer return but may try to preserve in her innocence. The picturesque Orient, Little suggests in the novel's initial scenes, is a product of Europeans’ desire to escape their own sense of inadequacy when confronted with an incomprehensibly foreign world and to sustain, through the safe-guarding of portable artifacts, their visions of privilege and authority.

Lilian's innocence and the fantasy of Western sovereignty it represents are jeopardized when Miss Gardiner dies, and Lilian leaves for China with a missionary group headed by her late mother's friend Miss Betterton, who, like the other travelers to China's interior, doubts the delicate heiress's capacity to cope with the “dirt, filth, squalor” (AM 17) and general hardships of China. Lilian, however, confounds these expectations, proving “there was a latent store of energy and power of endurance in her slight frame” (21) that make her even more resilient than her fellow travelers. Lilian's power of endurance results, Little suggests, from an openness of mind and absence of ulterior motive that distinguish her from the missionaries, merchants, and government officials around her. “I know nothing about the Chinese, what they believe, or hope, or fear,” Lilian states, defending her singular lack of intention. “I should not know how to set about making Christians of them, for I should not know how much change was needed in them. I don't know what they are now really. . . . If they were to be Christians like our butcher or grocer at Northampton, I can't see how that would be of any use” (33). Lilian's apathy toward profit and influence and her refusal of preconceived notions about the Chinese protect her from the sense of isolation and futility resulting from her companions’ efforts to set themselves apart from the Chinese through shameless exploitation, refusal to learn the language, surrounding themselves with European amenities in an “elaborate scheme of subterfuge” (42) or staunchly insisting on European proprieties of dress and behavior. Lilian's amusement at such futile attempts to cling to the familiar increases in proportion to her rising interest in the Chinese: “We know nothing of their hopes and fears,” she remarks as her boat passes by a river town, “We just look in upon them as we pass along. It seems so like life” (58). For Lilian, the journey into China's interior exposes the artificiality of European social conventions that defined her previous existence and inspires her to abandon her useless, ornamental life by becoming a doctor.

Like Lilian, Little's experiences in China distanced her from European social expectations, but her travel narratives are also marked by a consciousness of the British values and assumptions that keep her always at a respectful distance from her Chinese acquaintances and make her hesitant to assert her authority. The importance of recognizing one's own native values in the absence of social reinforcement is emphasized by Little's depiction of Claude Fortescue, whose attempt to wholly reject his British culture is, the novel suggests, neither healthy nor possible. While initially, Claude's desire to “get at the inner life of the [Chinese] people” contrasts with his fellow Britons’ focus on governance, commercial profit, and proselytizing, his efforts to “discard European principles and rules of conduct, just because they are European, not Chinese” (AM 99–100) are equally misguided and perhaps more destructive than outright exploitation, as illustrated by his endeavor to rescue a Chinese prostitute.

Susan Thurin has interpreted this passage as indicative of the narrator's racism, highlighting the nameless Chinese girl's symbolic representation of Claude's moral failure (168).Footnote ¹⁷ But the novel's general skepticism toward Christianity and European pretensions demands that the passage be read with some irony. Claude's moral failure lies, the passage suggests, not in the degradation of his alliance with a Chinese prostitute but rather in his inability to recognize her humanity: to Claude, she is both soulless and animalistic. Unable to discard his Christian conceit and his ideal of “high-minded English girls,” Claude reduces his Chinese wife to an ornamental collection of delicate body parts and British, feminine prototypes, transforming her into a reflection of his fantasies much like the displaced oriental objects in his aunt's living room. Claude's attempt to become Chinese only blinds him to the imposition of values that both deny justice to his putative object of salvation and betray his own best intentions. His continued sexual exploitation of the Chinese girl, despite his belief in “the purity of the race” (101) and his disdain for his two Eurasian children, exemplify the mutually destructive consequences of his dissociation from his own culture. While not condoning a eugenicist viewpoint, the novel emphasizes the impossibility of fully inhabiting another racial and cultural mentality while exposing the self-interest underlying rescue fantasies based upon such assumptions of cultural understanding.

The novel, however, does end with a rescue. In marrying Claude and forgiving him for his actions, Lilian saves her cousin from acute self-recrimination over his relationship with the Chinese girl and prevents further mental anguish by convincing him to move back to England, where he settles comfortably into life as a Professor of Chinese at Cambridge. In many ways, the ending confirms the colonial love plot in which the European's reabsorption by Europe represents, as Mary Louise Pratt has argued, the inevitable failure of cultural reciprocity. However, the novel also resists this conclusion in Lilian's adoption of Claude's Eurasian children. Moving them to England where, rather improbably, they will suffer less discrimination for their illegitimacy, Lilian becomes the guardian not only of Claude's household but, proving the compatibility of domestic and political labor, of a future international alliance: “[G]reat interest now centres in Claude Fortescue's son, who, people already say, is to cast his father quite in the shade as a Chinese scholar; for people in Cambridge expect great things of the lad, who is to combine Chinese and European culture. . . . Lilian already foresaw that [the girl] would marry some Cambridge professor with a lively theoretical interest in race distinctions, and a complete practical ignorance of Chinese deficiencies. In that case, he would certainly get a thoroughly practical wife” (305). Rescued from the stigma of illegitimacy in China, Claude's biracial children carry the potential of a genuine understanding between two nations separated by ignorance on the one hand and theoretical abstraction on the other. As idealistic as Lilian's (and Little's) vision might be, it also serves as an antidote to the Orientalist fantasies that, the novel suggests, may have destructive consequences for both nations.

That Little's vision of cross-cultural harmony may have been overly optimistic is confirmed by British reviews of A Marriage in China, one of which stated that the novel makes “one long to repeat the warning . . . ‘Keep the breed pure’” (“A Marriage” 52). While such statements – inevitably spurred by escalating political tensions in China – might seem obvious misreadings of Little's text, current critical frameworks similarly fail to account for individual efforts to build cross-cultural collaborations between England and China during the nineteenth century. Monolithic Orientalist frameworks not only present an inaccurate view of Victorian relations with China but also deny the present a valuable basis for cross-cultural understanding. In this essay, I have attempted to show that despite concessions to Victorian prejudices, Little's work sought to construct just such a history for cross-cultural understanding. By demonstrating the impossibility of constructing a homogeneous view of China and displaying the variable subjectivities that Europeans can adopt in their interactions with the Far East, Little's work posits an alternative basis both for understanding nineteenth-century Sino-British relations and for constructing critical views of the Orient in our own time.