Examined from a different perspective, Miss
Numé can be viewed as a pioneering effort to ques-
tion racial stereotypes at the turn of the last cen-
tury. In Eaton’s novel, the vivacious blond coquette
does not get her man—or any man she loves, for
that matter, as she winds up in a loveless marriage.
Instead, genuine and lasting love is accorded only
to the Japanese heroine. In this way, Eaton reverses
the Orientalist trope set by fellow American author
John Luther Long in Madame Butterfly, the pub-
lishing sensation of the previous year. In Long’s
novel, the American sailor chooses an American
wife over the hapless geisha. By contrast, Eaton
makes Numé an attractive, fiercely independent
character who questions the same clichés that
made Japanese women popular in this era. Unlike
Butterfly, Numé is remarkable not for her weak-
ness but for her strength. Thus we can condemn
Eaton for catering to her market by making this,
the first Asian-American novel, a Japanese rather
than a Chinese-American romance. Nevertheless,
Eaton is to be credited for paving the way for more
complex definitions of ethnic heritage and for
presenting strong Asian women to her audience as
role models and heroines.
Bibliography
Cole, Jean Lee. The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton:
Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity. New Bruns-
wick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
Eaton, Winnifred. Miss Numé of Japan: A Japanese-
American Romance. With a New Introduction by
Eve Oishi. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1999.
Kay Chubbuck
Mistress of Spices, The
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (1997)
A magical fairy tale, The Mistress of Spices is a
blend of a gender-reversed Beauty and the Beast
romance and a bildungsroman of an Indian im-
migrant in the United States. The unwanted and
unattractive protagonist, Tillotama (Tillo), has a
hybrid sense of selfhood that fluctuates between
Indian and American ideas. By using magic re-
alism, Divakaruni bears witness to Tillo’s and
the other disenfranchised characters’ struggles,
thereby preventing their lives from collapsing into
invisibility. With the added fantastical agency, Tillo
is able to construct a hybrid Indian-American self
using a central tenet of Hindu philosophy: the
evolution of the soul through several reincarna-
tions for fusion with the divine. By undergoing
these rebirths in varied bodily forms, the soul is
able to learn from its mistakes and refine itself
through pain and suffering. As the soul agonizes
over its suffering, it recognizes its own culpability
and is humbled by its insignificance in the larger
cosmic universe.
However, for disenfranchised people, such era-
sure of the ego-self is politically dangerous. It is
this condition of “invisibility” that allows the pow-
erful to maintain their elevated status quo with
the powerless. Thus, Tillo is forced to establish an
identity that is considered useful, only to erase it
in order that her soul might evolve. She must con-
struct an illusory self so as to understand the self
as a construct of sociopolitical forces. Divakaruni
uses the idea of the evolving self to construct an
Indian-American identity for Tillo and includes
elements of the Beauty and the Beast romance to
bring about her final transformation.
Tillo recounts her many incarnations from the
unwanted female child, Nayan Tara, to the god-
dess of wealth, Bhagyavati, to the professional
emotional healer, the Mistress of Spices. Tillo
shuts herself within the walls of her exotic Indian
grocery store, where aromatic spices work their
restorative magic. The store is a safe haven for new
immigrants and Tillo helps them unobtrusively;
but the store also allows her to meet and fall in
love with the rich and sophisticated, but lost and
unanchored, Raven. The erasure of Raven’s Na-
tive American identity haunts him because when
he was a child his mother broke all ties with their
community in an effort to distance him from the
alcoholism and poverty beleaguering their kin.
Raven’s desire to return to his Native American
identity and rekindle its spirituality is made dif-
ficult by his lack of knowledge and initiation into
its lived culture. Ironically, while Tillo’s mother
allows her culture to dictate the rejection of herMistress of Spices, The 19 5