Deborah Kerr’s portrayal of the English widow Anna Leonowens in the 1951 film of the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit, The King and I, is a great depiction of an interesting woman and the play is an enduring examination of the mysterious and ambiguous attraction between a man and a woman of divergent cultures and races.  Anna is a widow with a young son who comes to the magnificent Siamese court, where she has been hired as a tutor to the king’s many wives and children. She arrives in  hoop skirts, dignified and yet not aloof, with a combination of  British refinement and maternal affection for her new students. The King, immortalized by Yul Brynner, is a charming tyrant.

With the death of her husband, Anna’s life has taken a difficult turn.  She exudes no bitterness. She is the antithesis of many contemporary female roles, such as the character April Wheeler in the vile 2007 movie Revolutionary Road. April has everything – beauty, two young children, an attentive husband, a roomy house in the suburbs – and yet she kills herself because her husband declines to move to Paris.

Anna and her son are essentially alone in a foreign land and yet in one scene, she gazes at a young couple and, in them, is heartened to find the counterpart of her past:

When I think of Tom.
I think of a night,
When the earth smelled of summer
And the sky was streaked with white,
The soft mist of England
Was sleeping on a hill.

I remember this,
And I always will…
There are new lovers now
On the same silent hill,
Looking on the same blue sea.
And I know Tom and I are a part of them all —
And they’re all a part of Tom and me.

Hello young lovers, whoever you are,
I hope your troubles are few.
All my good wishes go with you tonight,
I’ve been in love like you.

Several Broadway musicals of the fifties and sixties were interested in the issue of interracial attraction. South Pacific, West Side Story, and the King and I all examine the subject and come to the conclusion, at a time when there was still some social stigma attached to these pairings, that love across racial barriers is a real phenomenon. These plays do not condemn it. Anna and the King do not have a full-fledged romance, but it is clear they have feelings for one another. They do not attempt to translate these feelings into any kind of sexual affair. The King’s manliness, though over-the-top for Anna, is  deeply appealing. For him, Anna is something he has in none of his wives: an intelligent and articulate woman who will not pander to him. She is also highly feminine. In her, he glimpses the possibilities of Western love, the respectful pairing between one woman and one man. There is a sweet sadness to their friendship.

                                              ———   End of Initial Entry —————

 Sheila C. writes:

What an apropos posting! I remember well all those movies, and my agonized adolescent tears at the end of each. My particular favorite was the classic “Romeo and Juliet” directed by Franco Zefirelli, and I seem to recall a made-for-TV movie starring Patti Duke as the star-crossed lover of a Japanese American in the 1940s. Just as you note that Anna and the King never consummate their obvious romantic interest, however, neither do the lovers in “West Side Story” and “South Pacific.” Even when there is a physical joining, it is following a secret marriage, and the illicit pair always ends in tragedy. While each of these movies contains some classic liberal moralizing, meant to demonstrate how irrational racial hatred has killed a fine, pure love, either the social boundaries and conventions of the time or genre limitations meant that these multicultural and/or interracial pairings did not survive because they were not adapted to nor accepted by the culture they transpired in. This is a solid example of the social sense of “shame” I referred to in an earlier comment. While roundly critcized as Puritanical and hidebound by most of liberal, secular society, these conventions did arise as workable social solutions to real-life problems. Can they be destructive or intolerant? Yes, of course, particularly to the couples involved. But for the society/institution doing the shunning (think of the American Amish, for example) the practice is meant to protect the society as a whole from what is seen as “sin” and is known to be destructive to good orderliness. No, I’m not saying social order trumps love, for all those who I know are going to protest just that. Nor am I saying that every interracial couple is doomed to divorce or every interracial child is doomed to failure.

My point is one that other posters have better elucidated – that marriage is both a religious covenant and a social contract, and there are obligations involved in both that are at best strained and at worst corrupted and denied by most of these pairings. While I strongly disagree with the Indian and Arab practice of arranged marriages (I’ve read a number of Indians defending their tradition of marriage as far more successful in the long run than that of Western love marriages), I must concede that in the real world, love does not conquer all. And often, these days, what is mistaken for love is mere, fleeting, but intense sexual attraction. I cannot defend America’s shameful divorce rate or the apparent new practice, documented by that arbiter of all acceptable new social trends, the New York Times, of the “starter” marriage. In an age of instant gratification, the maturing sexual and social bond between married partners is seen as stale and boring, not the deepening and enriching bond it truly is. Surely it is the gay marriage crowd that also trumpets the “love conquers all” fallacy, and they also compare traditional marriage laws as discriminatory now just as antimiscegenation laws were to interracial couples. While these are very different issues, both of the aforementioned groups have the same mantra – that love, however each defines it, is all that is necessary for society as a whole and religious tradition not only to condone but celebrate such pairings, regardless of cultural traditions and centuries of human history to disprove their rightness or ultimate success.

I suppose all this boils down, in the end, to how one views love and marriage. If one believes that each of us has one true, foreordained love and partner on this earth, then denying that love will be both tragic and catastrophic, regardless of social conventions. I don’t believe we each have only one true love, however, and I’ve come to believe that it is both acceptable and preferable, and ultimately successful for families in particular and society as a whole to steer youth in the direction of viewing members of their individual religious tradition or race or culture as the best group of potential marital partners. That is the reason for my ultimatum to my son. I’m more ambivalent on the Christian practice some recommend of absolutely no dating until marriage, and I share others’ concerns about how best to restructure societal traditions of dating and mating in the current age. Surely the mess we have now will not suffice, and leaves people like Joel angry at Christianity and the current practice of indiscriminate premarital sex, living together, and endlessly delayed marriage. There must exist some balance between physical attraction, compatibility, and social mores that can again result in stable traditional families. If the two interracial posters I’ve read have come from such unions, I can only offer my blessings and congratulations. I would be the last to condemn a union that is Christian, fruitful, and produces successful and well-adapted adults. I don’t recall anyone here saying that this cannnot ever happen across racial or cultural lines. What most of us have cautioned, however, is that in any society (i.e. not just “racist” America but Asian or Latin or even African countries) individuals will be forced by social conventions and structures to declare themselves, in a sense, as one thing or the other, and for various reasons (racial solidarity, racial preferences, job opportunities, family influence) this tends to result in a net loss for whites and Christian European society. As you noted, Laura, race is more than a social construct, and if the Chinese had settled America this would be a far different country, just as the overwhelming immigration of nonwhites has now changed this country irreparably. Some may see this a positive; I do not. I’m glad I did most of my world traveling before I married or had children, and saw Russia when it was still communist and England before it was mostly Pakistani. I can and do celebrate cultural differences when experienced within another culture; I reject those that then say I am racist or evil for wanting to return to my own, familiar home and hearth (and race and language and people).

Laura writes:

That’s an excellent overview. The idea that love is tragically pitted against tradition is not true. As Sheila says, “There must exist some balance between physical attraction, compatibility, and social mores that can again result in stable traditional families.”

By the way, not all those movies ended in tragic interracial pairings. As you may recall, the romance between Emile and Nellie in South Pacific ended happily. Technically, they weren’t an interracial couple, but Emile had children by a Polynesian woman so, in agreeing to marry him, Nellie was entering an interracial family. The play was very controversial when it came to Broadway in 1949. Some saw it as a celebration of interracial romance. When moviegoers are told this today, they are generally in disbelief that such a story could have been remarkable.

As you probably recall, there are two interracial romances in South Pacific, that between Emile and his deceased wife, and that between Lieutenant Joe Cable and Liat, the exquisite Tonkinese girl who is Bloody Mary’s daughter. It is never really clear in the movie why Boody Mary is so eager to get Joe Cable and her daughter paired. Is it opportunism? In any event, their romance is presented as the ultimate male fantasy of blissful fulfillment, both spiritual and sexual, with an island beauty who can swim very well. Joe was naturally doomed. He dies in a plane crash.

The song, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” sung by Joe is a strong condemnation of cultural attitudes against interracial romance. He sings:

You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear.

You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught. 

There is a scene in the play and movie that would be totally unacceptable today. I’m not sure how it was handled in the recent Broadway revival. Nellie is visiting Emile, the French plantation owner, when he presents his two dark-skinned children, who are beautiful. Nellie immediately is friendly to them. She then learns they are his children. The horror and confusion on her face are unforgettable. She begins to cry and runs from the scene.

These Broadway productions are evidence that America was grappling with this issue during the post-war years, up until all anti-miscegenation laws were abandoned in the 1960s. James Michener, author of Tales of the South Pacific, on which the movie was based, was married for more than 30 years to a Japanese woman. Michener told an interviewer for McCall’s,”We had to be rather careful about where we went. Or where I died.”

N.W. writes:

Sheila wrote: “In an age of instant gratification, the maturing sexual and social bond between married partners is seen as stale and boring, not the deepening and enriching bond it truly is.” 

I was reminded of the poem Richard Wilbur wrote for his wife Charlotte:

                For C.

After the clash of elevator gates
And the long sinking, she emerges where,
A slight thing in the morning’s crosstown glare,
She looks up toward the window where he waits,
Then in a fleeting taxi joins the rest
Of the huge traffic bound forever west.

On such grand scale do lovers say good-bye—
Even this other pair whose high romance
Had only the duration of a dance,
And who, now taking leave with stricken eye,
See each in each a whole new life forgone.
For them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn,

Bright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these
Who part now on the dock, weighed down by grief
And baggage, yet with something like relief,
It takes three thousand miles of knitting seas
To cancel out their crossing, and unmake
the amorous rough and tumble of their wake.

We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse
And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share
The frequent vistas of their large despair,
Where love and all are swept to nothingness;
Still, there’s a certain scope in that long love
Which constant spirits are the keepers of,

And which, though taken to be tame and staid,
Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,
A passion joined to courtesy and art
Which has the quality of something made,
Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent,
Like a rose window or the firmament.

 Sheila writes:

Thank you, N.W. That is a beautiful poem.

Laura writes:

“Is a wild sustenuto of the heart/A passion joined to courtesy and art” – those are beautiful lines. Marriage involves not just love, but craftsmanship.

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