Oriental Staging, Femininity, and Language in The Letter

On the surface, William Wyler’s The Letter (1940) engages in pure and unapologetic oriental minstrelsy. Edward Said’s critical writings on orientalism (1978) might suggest that such mediated portrayals, like the academic field, of orientalism innately “characterize the Orient as alien and to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage” through generalizing images, tropes, and stereotypes (Said, 71). Conversely, the minstrelsy present in The Letter is not necessarily overt or even mocking, and therefore only perpetuates preexisting racial and ethnic stereotypes as defined by Western mass media. However, ways in which twentieth-century notions of “the Orient” are subverted and challenged in the film give The Letter a thematic and contextual edge, particularly when realized through a feminist lens. Here the Orient is established as a space wherein exoticized forms of Western transactions and interactions—particularly, those that do not involve spoken language—may take place between women, thus undermining the very Western values they crudely reflect.

In the same way that Said likens the practice of orientalism to a “staging” of Eastern tropes and archetypes by Western thought, so do the characters in The Letter seem to be “staged” to some end. Said claims that the fixity of “images” of the Orient allows them to stand in for larger, “diffuse” ideas that are inscrutable to Western sensibilities; in the same way, the “characters” of the Orient embody different tropes, and thus roles, that satisfy the European’s imagination of the oriental stage (Said, 66). This “insensitive schematization” and archetyping of the Orient both diminishes the nuance and complexity of Eastern cultures while imbuing the idea of them with a sort of staging or performativity (Said, 68). Leslie herself spends a great deal of time performing, establishing herself as one who inhabits different roles within the orientalist paradigm. Leslie’s ability to perform and stage herself according to the situation reinforces the notion of fabrication, which is in turn reflected by her needlepoint work with silk. Such a preoccupation with fabrication and creation is evocative of Said’s claims about the origins of orientalism, which is itself a constructed discipline, a “textual universe” of both books and “mimetic artifacts” (Said, 52). Even more compelling about Leslie’s own constructed existence is that it is easily disguised by her femininity. Matters of role switching in the universe of The Letter belong to women, and Leslie is the epitome of this manipulation of her femininity, to the ignorance of the men around her. (Leslie can even change her outfit as quickly as she changes roles; Joyce merely figures that she could instill such feminine, domestic prowess in his wife by “[teaching] Dorothy how to do it.”) In addition, her silk work is simply considered a feminine pastime, the kind of mundane practice associated with domesticity. However, Leslie is not so trapped in a vicious cycle of performance as she is ensconced in her non-oriental, Western privilege, which allows her to construct an aura that can manipulate her femininity. In the orientalist paradigm of staging and performance, Leslie uses all of the tools she can—her presupposed passivity, her femininity, and her Western advantage—to become any “type” but the oriental.

Contrastingly, both the minstrelesque oriental aesthetic and Leslie’s performative manipulation are shattered by the characterization of Mrs. Hammond. The widow is not so much the convergence of dual worlds (“West” and “East”) as she is the subversion of both. The film’s portrayal of natives is reinforced by stilted language and positions of subservience: Ong plays jovial lackey to Joyce, Leslie’s servants (albeit one) are unbending in their loyalty, and Chung Hi is a disturbingly uninspired Asian stereotype. Indeed, these characters merely “[speak] through and by virtue of the European imagination” (Said, 56). Most importantly, however, they speak. In contrast, Mrs. Hammond’s formidability comes from her lack of language. Her inability—or her refusal—to speak English is the source of both her power and her obscurity. On the surface, this absence of language is either a reductive or critical allusion to the silencing of women, European or not (or both), in colonial-imperialist contexts. In any case, the stoical Mrs. Hammond’s relative speechlessness imbues her with strength and allure. Mrs. Hammond thus embodies the European’s image of the Orient: “the exotic, the mysterious, the profound, the seminal” (Said, 51). To this end, why is a Eurasian woman the ultimate oriental figure in the film? She is mixed-race and thus challenges any sense of West-versus-East dichotomy. However, on a more profound level, Mrs. Hammond is the “most” oriental figure in that she is the most like—and unlike—Leslie. In this sense, Mrs. Hammond’s characterization possesses more nuances than it may appear; she is not merely Leslie’s “complementary opposite” (Said, 58). If Leslie is the epitome of Western deflection and constructed reality, Mrs. Hammond is both a reflection of Leslie’s feminist self-sufficiency and an actualization of a wholly oriental mystique.

Two important transactions between Leslie and Mrs. Hammond illustrate the intersections between questions of orientalist staging, femininity, and language. The “Chinese quarter” to which Leslie and Joyce venture to retrieve the letter is portrayed as exotic and mystifying, and a hubbub of economic exchange of “oriental” goods; this is the stage of the first transaction between the film’s two central women. The expressive staging of the women here unsubtly favors Mrs. Hammond, the mistress of this particular domain. She stands above Leslie as if on a pedestal, conspicuously dominating her. This mise en scène both imbues power unto the inscrutable widow, while also visually reinforcing that only she, as both a woman and as an embodiment of the oriental mystique, can see through Leslie’s role-playing. In an assertion of this authority and wisdom, she demands, via a translator, that Leslie take off her veil—her disguise of choice in this latest role-play. Herein, the orientalist paradigm of roles and types is exposed for what it is: a product of the European imagination of the oriental, one that Leslie (usually) can manipulate by using her femininity to set herself apart from it. Here, however, Mrs. Hammond has the power—she is both the feminine and the obscure that, through the conviction of her silence, refuses to subscribe to any construction or paradigm. What would in the West be a benign, capitalistic exchange—a letter for some money—is instead a life-or-death transaction between two women, where wordlessness replaces the language of exchange, undermining the legitimated “vocabulary” of discourse that belongs to Western notions of the Orient (Said, 71). The second transaction of sorts—Mrs. Hammond’s murder of Leslie—is even more telling. The act is at once violent and supremely intimate: it takes place in the nighttime; Mrs. Hammond’s weapon of choice, the knife, contrasts with Leslie’s phallic gun used to kill her lover. But how this killing is “staged” belongs to the world of the oriental. Leslie almost knowingly walks into her fate, playing her final role as a willing victim, prepared for a final absolution. Her silent foray outside signifies this transition into the oriental world; she retreats from her party, a world of male-dominated social structures and Western notions of justice, to the outdoors, where she seeks a different sort of conclusion to her charade. This passing from the courtroom to the courtyard is an unsubtle dramatization of “the distance and difference” between Leslie’s “Old World” and the new one she is about to enter (Said, 55). The stabbing, performed by Mrs. Hammond, is swift and sacrificial. In a wordless, breathless moment, the two women once again abandon the constraints of Western language to convey another message to one another. The fate that Leslie has spun for herself spins out; oriental-feminist justice, as it were, is served.

The spatial, social, and economic milieu of The Letter suggests that the oriental stage is one where these feminine, if not feminist, transactions can, and do, occur. Twentieth-century colonialist philosophies were manifested through hegemonic sociopolitical structures dominated by men and reinforced by antediluvian systems of justice (the unsubtle opening sounds of gunshots awakening the natives; the powdered-wig world of the male-dominated courtroom). However, the oriental stage becomes a self-positing entity that crudely reflects but ultimately rejects the Western mind that created it. Women and minorities might control fate here, whereas white men usually exert control through capitalistic exchange and feudal justice finds itself oblivious to and beguiled by Eastern mystique and the opaqueness of both white and “oriental” femininity. Here, too, the power of language is replaced with the inscrutability of performance. That a 1940 Hollywood film might have so progressively (and subversively) treated issues of race, gender, and power in this way is perhaps evidence of a sheer rejection of Western constructions of the Orient. Perhaps the Orient, in this film, is inevitably “orientalized,” but only to the effect that progressive notions are espoused most effectively on a regressive stage.