The Downstairs Girl

This section marks the blurring of boundaries between Jo and Miss Sweetie, both within Jo’s sense of self and in the outer world, evoking the theme of Being Heard Versus Being Invisible. Nathan sees Miss Sweetie without her disguise, and more barriers between the two come down, foreshadowing their closeness. With Nathan, Jo speaks her mind, bantering in her wittiest, sharpest voice, which shows she feels uninhibited with him. When Nathan asks Jo who she is, she responds: “If that is how you plan to snare the ladies, you should consider rewiring your trap” (201).

The conversations between Jo and Nathan highlight their shared love and feeling for language. In fact, words have been a source of great solace and comfort for both Nathan and Jo, and as they walk to Riggs’s brothel they discuss their favorite words, such as “hullaballoo” (202) and “quixotic” (202). The focus on language and words is important as it ties up with the text’s theme of finding and expressing one’s voice. Nathan’s statement implying he and Jo are white shows that Nathan continues to think Jo is white until she completely lets go of her disguise. The glimpse of her that he saw earlier doesn’t make him realize she is Chinese. This foreshadows the reveal of Jo’s origin: Jo partly passes as white, because she is the daughter of a Chinese man and a white woman.

Jo’s meeting with Billy Riggs is an important event because it exposes the sexual threat to young women like Jo. Even as Jo walks unchaperoned through the unseemly part of the city, she faces comments such as, “Look, Rufus, we drank our way clear to China” (196). The image of a naked Riggs waiting for Jo in his tub is the epitome of the double racist-sexual threat. Lee deliberately exaggerates the shock Riggs’s appearance offers to highlight that underneath the world of etiquette and social frivolity, society contains a current of sexual violence. Women are forced to seek the protection of class and men to keep this threat at bay. When Jo walks into Riggs’s chambers without a man, she appears fair game to someone like Riggs. Riggs’s racism toward Jo is undisguised, such as when he demands, “I’ve always wanted to feel a China girl’s hair” (212). Each of his grotesque actions, such as emerging naked from the tub and exposing himself to Jo, is meant to intimidate her. The incident with Riggs highlights society’s hypocrisy: While gentlewomen are supposed to be the epitome of virtue and can be ruined by a single scandal, men like Riggs freely operate brothels.

The growing influence of the Miss Sweetie column in this section foreshadows that Jo will soon run into detractors. The first hint of opposition is the Bells’ decision to postpone Jo’s column on abandoning outdated and unnecessary customs. The other is the decision of Merritt’s fiancée to cancel her engagement based on Miss Sweetie’s stance that marriage is not essential for every woman. Marriage being the central pillar of society, this opinion is bound to stir a hornet’s nest. For Jo, the marriage question comes from a deeply personal space, since she’s a young single woman who is supposed to marry whether her heart is in it or not. Caroline too faces a similar conundrum: She is happy to have an affair with Mr. Q., but does not necessarily want marriage. Nevertheless, she is forced to go through social engagements to showcase herself and perform marriageable skills like playing music and flower arrangement. Further, Caroline’s poor body image must stem from the fact that she needs to look beautiful in order to be marriageable. That is why she devotes herself to creams and potions, and in a show of misplaced anger, resents Jo for her good looks.

One of the text’s characteristics is that even overtly negative characters are given a chance to change and adapt, as in the case of Caroline. Jo’s perspective on Caroline has begun to shift, since she senses kinship with her on the question of marriage, which ties into The Importance of Intersectionality for Political Change. At the same time, Caroline continues to display racist and elitist attitudes, such as when she assumes Noemi must have caused her hives. Noemi, being Black and poor, is an easy scapegoat. Caroline doesn’t even consider the possibility that the offence may be an accident or perpetuated by someone else, and forces Noemi to be suspended. Caroline’s complex portrayal shows that she is a tough character to redeem, yet the text’s open-heartedness extends to her as well.

The influence of the Miss Sweetie column has its basis in historical fact. Advice columns were a great way for newspapers to directly engage their readers. Though the advice column took off in 18th-century England, its heyday began in the mid-19th century. Initially, men or male pseudonyms were writing agony uncle columns, but as more women began reading newspapers, publishers used agony aunt columns to target this demographic. Though 19th-century women’s columns dealt with practical advice and advice around social mores and manners, columnists like Dorothy Dix (1861-1951) used them to promote the cause of women and Suffrage. Dix was one of the most popular advice columnists of 19th-century America. Another popular column was “Dear Beatrice,” begun by writer Mary Manning in 1898. The response to Dear Beatrice was so phenomenal that an overwhelmed US postal system refused to deliver all reader letters to Manning’s postbox. Manning would often have to go to the post office herself to retrieve the letters. Lee reimagines this historical tradition as a means for a Chinese American young woman not just to express herself, but also to put forth radical intersectional and feminist views.