Erynn Kim, Yale University
By examining how the poem “Yellow Fever” functions within the overarching framework of Mad Honey Symposium, this paper studies how Sally Wen Mao alludes to the propensity for classics to be used to give credence to modern modes of discrimination and seeks to demonstrate how Mao’s own interaction with classic works simultaneously dethrones the classics from any default position of authority and offers a path of resistance to damaging stereotypes. Mao’s work provides fertile grounds for discussion with classical reception studies—particularly Lorna Hardwick’s “fuzzy connections” and Emily Greenwood’s omni-local model—and makes steps toward salvaging the politically expedient alliance offered by “Asian American” as an identity (Park, 21) without centering that identity around a shared experience of racism.
In “Yellow Fever,” Mao frames a tirade against the fetishization of Asian women through the (mis-)reception of Hokusai’s Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. While the original work is a playful depiction of mutual pleasure, it is also considered a predecessor of modern tentacle erotica, which tend toward depictions of violent, non-consensual sex. Impressing this modern inclination upon Hokusai’s work, Mao repurposes the image from a representation of desire to a misrepresentation of identity that reinforces the stereotype of Asian woman as submissive, exotic sex object. This disconnect between original expression and eventual reception is part of a larger conversation in Mao’s collection about the role of art and its reception in the construction of identity.
While “Yellow Fever” looks at a classic East Asian work, the framework of Mad Honey Symposium focuses primarily on western classics. The opening poem, “Valentine for a Fly-Trap,” offers a parallel to “Yellow Fever” with its rejection of the female representation depicted in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. By rooting these female stereotypes, both eastern and western, in classic artworks, Mao points to the classic as a means to give authority to modern constructs of identity even as she rejects the construct. In the eponymous “Mad Honey Soliloquies,” Mao offers an alternative method of engaging with the classics, reimagining the voices of Xenophon and Pompey through fictional quotations and colloquialisms and thereby deconstructing the hierarchal relationship between the past and present as source to receiver into something more malleable and egalitarian. Overall, Mad Honey Symposium suggests that reconfiguring the paths of connection between modern stereotypes and their historical iterations can help free identities from their historical baggage and make way for rehabilitation, if not reform.