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GOLDSWORTHY LOWES DICKINSON (1862-1932), always wearing a little Chinese silk cap during his late years, famously declared to his students: "I am speaking to you about China, not because I once visited the country, but because, in a previous existence, I actually was a Chinaman!"1 China is considered to have been a romanticized and idealized utopia for Dickinson, and because of the much-told story of his association with the Chinese poet Xu Zhimo, Dickinson is also idealized as an impartial, loving, and faithful friend of China for many Chinese readers.2 The scholarship has recognized Dickinson's importance for Sino-British cultural communication in the early twentieth century3 but lacks a systematic, in-depth interpretation of his life-long interest in China and how it relates to his intellectual milieu. In fact, Dickinson's attitude towards China is paradoxical and ambiguous. He deeply loves and admires Chinese culture, but this admiration comes from an Eurocentric imagination, assimilation, and homogenization instead of from China itself. He symbolically subordinates himself to a cultural and gender Otherness in order to fabricate a new identity and to express his aspirations. The relationship between Dickinson and China needs contextualization rather than a reductive conclusion that he idealizes China as a utopia. He turns to China to respond to the modern crisis of the West, but his conception of China never implies a total rejection of the West. To make clear Dickinson's complicated, nuanced opinions towards China, and the multiplicity of reasons that help to explain his cultural attitude, this article will interpret the relationship between Dickinson and China from three aspects: the strategy of cultural transvestism in Letters from John Chinaman (1901);4 Dickinson's narcissistic journey to the East; and the links between Dickinson's affinity with China and his homosexuality.
Cultural Transvestism in Letters from John Chinaman
"Transvestism" is a term widely used in psychoanalytic studies referring to the practice of dressing and acting in a style of the opposite sex. Borrowing this term, Madeleine Kahn uses "narrative transvestism" to analyze eighteenth-century English novels which were written by men using a first-person female persona. she argues that through this narrative strategy, the male author could gain access to "a culturally defined female voice," play out "the ambiguous possibilities of identity and gender," and reassert "a masculine identity."5...