Dragon Lady
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A Dragon Lady is a stereotyped caricature of an Asian woman: mysterious, cunning, beautiful, seductive, and cruel.
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Etymology
Although sources such as the Oxford English Dictionary list uses of “dragon” and even “dragoness” from the 18th and 19th centuries to indicate a fierce and aggressive woman, there does not appear to be any use in English of “Dragon Lady” before its introduction by Milton Caniff in his comic strip Terry and the Pirates. The character first appeared on Dec. 16, 1934, and the “Dragon Lady” appellation was first used on Jan. 6, 1935. The term does not appear in earlier “Yellow Peril” fiction such as the Fu Manchu series by Sax Rohmer or in the works of Matthew Phipps Shiel such as The Yellow Danger (1898) or the The Dragon (1913). A 1931 film based on Rohmer’s The Daughter of Fu Manchu was, however, entitled Daughter of the Dragon. Barring research that might shed further light on the etymology, it is plausible to assume that the term originated with the comic strip Terry and the Pirates.
Historical source for the Dragon Lady
Terry and the Pirates was an action-adventure comic strip created by cartoonist Milton Caniff. Joseph Patterson, editor for the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate, hired Caniff to create the new strip, providing Caniff with the idea of setting the strip in the Orient. A profile of Caniff in Time magazine recounts the episode:
- “…Patterson…asked: ‘Ever do anything on the Orient?’ Caniff hadn't. ‘You know,’ Joe Patterson mused, ‘adventure can still happen out there. There could be a beautiful lady pirate, the kind men fall for. . . .’ In a few days Caniff was back with samples and 50 proposed titles; Patterson circled ‘Terry’ and scribbled beside it ‘and the Pirates’…”
Caniff biographer, R.C. Harvey, suggests that Patterson had been reading about women pirates in one of two books (or both) published a short time earlier: I Sailed with Chinese Pirates by Aleko Lilius (pseudonym for unknown). Women pirates in the South China Sea figure in both books, especially the one by Lilius, a portion of which is dedicated to the mysterious and real-life “queen of the pirates” (Lilius’ phrase), named Lai Choi San (). “Lai Choi San” is a transliteration from Cantonese, the native language of the woman, herself — thus, the way she pronounced her own name. The Pinyin “Lai Cai Shan” represents the Chinese Mandarin pronunciation.) Caniff appropriated the Chinese name, Lai Choi San, as the “real name” of his Dragon Lady, a fact that led both Lilius and Bok to protest. Patterson pointed out that both books claimed to be non-fiction and that the name belonged to a real person; thus, neither the fact of a woman pirate nor her name could be copyrighted. (Neither Bok nor Lilius had used the actual term “Dragon Lady.”) Sources are not clear on whether it was Patterson or Caniff who coined that actual term, though it was almost certainly one of the two.
Usage
Since the 1930s, when “Dragon Lady” became fixed in the English language, the term has been applied countless times to powerful Asian women, from Soong May-ling, also known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, to Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu of Vietnam and to any number of racially Asian film actresses. That stereotype — as is the case with other racial caricatures — has generated a large quantity of sociological literature. (See Further Reading, below)
Today, “Dragon Lady” is often applied anachronistically to refer to persons who lived before the term became part of American slang in the 1930s. For example, one finds the term in recent works about the “Dragon Lady” Empress Dowager Cixi (Template:Zh-cpw), who was alive at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, In both these cases, however, articles written in the early 1900s about the Empress Dowager or reviews of Wong’s early films such as The Thief of Bagdad (1924) or Daughter of the Dragon (1931) — reviews written when the films appeared — make no use of the term “Dragon Lady.” (One writer, however, did refer to the Empress Dowager as “a little lady Bismark.”) Today’s anachronistic use of “Dragon Lady” in such cases may lead the modern reader to assume that the term was in earlier use than appears to be the case.
Is the term originally Chinese?
The term is, thus, almost certainly of Western origin and has less in common than Westerners might think with such terms in Chinese as long nü . That, indeed, translates as “Dragon Woman” or “Woman of the Dragon” and might be used in Chinese for a strong, aggressive woman, but it is generally not even used as an astrological designation of a woman born in the Year of the Dragon. In China, when the subject of zodiac signs comes up, men and women would both say “wo shu long” —that is, "I belong to (the House of) Dragon."
“Dragon Lady” as a figure of malevolence would be almost impossible as a Chinese coinage, given the fact that the Chinese dragon is an icon of strength, power, and good fortune. The very flag of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) itself was a coiled dragon set against a yellow background. In Chinese mythology, the dragon is benevolent, a strong, magical creature that is associated with the spring season and the life-sustaining qualities of water; indeed (at least as late as the 1930s), “…[dragons were] still openly or secretly worshipped [and] they [were] regarded as deified spirits of nature.”
Clearly, then, for a western publisher and cartoonist to come up with the term “Dragon Lady” as a symbol of malevolence, they are investing the “dragon” with meaning that the Chinese phrase, “Dragon lady/woman” could not have; they have incorporated the attributes of the dragon from European mythology, in which the dragon is an evil creature, one that spits hell-fire and devours maidens and that eventually must be slain. To the extent that malevolence may have encroached upon the original meaning of “dragon” in Chinese, in such an expression as “long nü” (“Dragon Lady” or “woman”) to describe a strong women, that is a Western influence due at least partially to the fact that the Chinese language has experienced great waves of lexical borrowing since the late 1800s.
The Western term also identifies “dragon” with “woman,” which would be unusual in Chinese. Virtually all cultures that share the traditional system of Chinese astrology — including Japan and Korea — regard the dragon as a male figure, functioning as such in various mythological roles as, for example, the powerful Dragon King of all waters (rain, draught, floods, fishery). It is true that the older stereotype of the Asian woman — that she is docile — changed considerably in the wake of the 1911 revolution in China and the later Chinese Civil War. Modern literature dealing with those periods, indeed, often portrays strong, heroic women, especially in the roles of helping to bring about and sustain the revolution.
The traditional dragon/male identity, however, has undergone some change in the last century. Recently, uses of “Dragon woman/lady” in modern Chinese include Xiao Long Nü, (Little Dragon Woman) the lead female character in The Legend of the Condor Hero, by Jin Yong, an example of the Wuxia martial arts fiction genre. In modern Chinese, the appellation Long Nü (“Dragon Woman/Lady”) carries at least some of the same meaning as the “original” Western version, at least that of daring, cunning, and strength (but not a malevolent seductiveness). The Western use of the term “Dragon Lady” has thus managed to create its own niche in Chinese, the language from which many Westerners erroneously assumed it must have come in the first place.
See also
- Ethnic stereotype
- Ethnic stereotypes in comics
- Stereotypes of East and Southeast Asians
- Stereotypes of South Asians
- Stereotypes of West and Central Asians
- Stereotypes of East Asians in the United States
