The “realist” era of American Literature is pretty self-explanatory. After the Civil War, the irrational stories that composed the Romantic era seemed out of touch with everyday American life (Norton, “Realism”). Instead of complicated, contrived symbols, realist authors focused on depicting life objectively. The American Dream, then, became a little more muddled than the overt symbols of Romanticism allowed.
Born with the name Edith Maud Eaton, Sui Sin Far “adopted [her] pen name as an assertion of her Chinese identity” (Belasco 1327). In her story “It’s Wavering Image,” she explores the social struggles of Chinese Americans through her protagonist, Pan. Pan has a Chinese father and a white mother. However, she does not consider her mixed ethnicity to be of much concern until she becomes romantically involved with a white man named Mark Carson.
On an extrapolated level, Mark Carson represents a racist America that struggles with accepting anything aside from black-and-white narratives: he says Pan can not be both Chinese and white, she must choose one. However, the analogy goes deeper. Because Pan is indeed half Chinese, America never would have treated her with all the privilege that it afforded white women. For a moment, when confronted by Mark Carson, Pan is stuck in a sort of half-world where she cannot truly exist in either plane. This forced duality is reminiscent of the duality imposed on all those who cannot truly achieve the American Dream, yet who also cannot escape the overbearing influence that its proponents exert.
In the end, Pan “…being a Chinese woman, was comforted.” (Far 1334) She chose life outside the “American Dream”. She chose life outside conformity to one distinct “superior” identity. She chose what made her happy: herself.
The video below (a video reenactment of the popular children’s book Are You My Mother?), while simplistic, represents the struggles that Americans like Pan had to go through. Because the American Dream almost necessitates a decidedly “American” identity and because the American identity in Pan’s time was perpetuated as white, the little bird’s struggle to “fit in” with any identity it comes across is reminiscent of Pan’s dilemma of which “identity” in which to classify herself. In the end, the bird finds home right where it started just as Pan chose herself as her identity.