TYPECAST AS A TRAGIC MIXED- RACE CONCUBINE OR SEDUCTRESS

Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez ask us not to reduce Isabel to the stereotypes of a tragic mixed-race concubine or seductress. She says this has happened in other books, the books for instance that are part of the YouTube video I posted. To be fair, I think each author tried to envision her and understand her role in General MacArthur's life, as their own gender and time and place and personal limitations allowed. So be it a powerful older man who treats a 'petulant and spoiled' younger woman to tea gowns, kimonos, and black lingerie' or whose existence in his life threatens his career, Gonzalez asks us to look deeper.

(Notes and observations having read pages 2-3)

Did Isabel, lonely and neglected despite being Kept, go out and seduce other men for fun?

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A little time out here:  After so many years reading and researching and writing around the subject of Mistresses here at Mistress Manifesto, the idea that a Mistress is the seductress, the idea that she always ends up in a tragedy, is not new to me. That Isabel Rosario Cooper is portrayed this way is no surprise to me. Implied is that women who have relationships with men who are already married or who do not marry them end up punished in some way, such as being murdered or ending in suicide. You will find several of those women in these pages.

So at this time I want to remind my readers that so much of our perceptions about mistresses come from books and books tend to be about exceptional people and extraordinary situations, of which being a Mistress is one of those. Overall, it's difficult to find information on those mistresses who were not exceptional people in extraordinary situations. That is why I say that the most successful of them may be people we never hear about. There are people who are happy with their station in life, whatever it happens to be, and that includes some wives and mistresses who willingly man share. It is an assumption that every woman wants marriage and a traditional marriage at that. It's also an assumption that a mistress is a kind of prostitute, there for the sex, with a thin veneer of a relationship keeping her and a lover together.

My feeling about Isabel Rosario Cooper so far is that she was likely influenced by coming from the Philippines, which to this day is quite mixed-race and also dominated by Catholic traditionalism. To this day a woman uniting with a much older man is not thought badly of there overall. Some of the women do seek marriage with American men who are older. Rather an older established man who can provide is considered a plus and American men know this. I know of more than one woman of Philippine heritage here in the United States who has, with the approval of her father, been a mistress. One of these women seemed especially servile. I knew that she had also been a mistress to a Hollywood producer previously and that her then-current man had also had mistresses in the past who left the relationship when marriage was not forthcoming. So I hoped this woman was not waiting for him to marry her. By servile I mean that she waited on him, cooking and serving food, and basically acted in-wait to his needs. Consider that if he was not going to marry her, those years she lived her life around him were years in which she was not getting an education or developing a career. 

Missy