A popular figure in mystery movies from the 1930s to the 1960s, Charlie Chan has more recently been the target of cultural critics unhappy with “white-washing” hiring practices in Hollywood and with the stereotypical portrayal of Chinese and other Asians in popular culture generally. However, the books are often funny and full of smart observations about culture, in particular clashing cultures. This paper explores how, in The House Without a Key (1925), the liminal, otherworldly, space of Hawaii transforms John Quincy Winterslip, a Harvard-educated Boston financier, such that he becomes, at the end of the book, “human at last”. But how and why does the Hawaiian space and the Chinese character of Chan humanize him? I argue that the novel is a meditation on education, more specifically re-education, of the kind that Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, in their defense of literary and cultural study, championed in the late nineteenth century. Within the framework of Arnoldian and Paterian concepts (of the ideal self and of how to live an authentic life), this paper examines the tension in the novel between economic rationalism (which dominates Winterslip’s life in Boston) and aestheticism (which frightens him in Hawaii). I demonstrate how the curious structure and playful linguistic style of Biggers’ novel frames the relation between financial security and personal freedom, reason and emotion, data collection and storytelling; and encourages us to see (as Chan does) aesthetic experience and education as an extension of, rather than a threat to, practicality, empiricism and rationalism.

Authors:
John Griffith, National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan

About the Presenter(s)
Professor John Griffith is a University Professor/Principal Lecturer at National Taipei University of Technology in Taiwan

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