Anna’s House: A 1950s Haven for American Homeland Security and Family Values

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Notes

¹ The first book is a travel narrative while the second is a romance. See Morgan 131.

² Gertrude Lawrence became interested in playing the role of Anna on stage after watching the1944 film Anna and the King of Siam and introduced the idea to Rodgers and Hammerstein. The influence of this film is visible throughout the musical adaptation. After success on Broadway the musical was adapted into a Hollywood film in 1956.

³ Hopkins explains: Where “book readers might number in the hundreds of thousands,” “millions” would see Broadway and Hollywood adaptations of books. See; Hopkins 27.

⁴ Anna Leonowens was living in America at the time she wrote her two books. See, Hopkins 24; Morgan 171 and 177.

⁵ In her memoirs Leonowens described the need for a house as a simple “desire to secure for myself and my child some hours of privacy and rest” and a “wish for a quiet house or apartments, where I might be free from intrusion, and at perfect liberty before and after school-hours.” See Anna Harrtiette Leonowens, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (Oxford University Press, 1988), 16.

⁶ Leonowens did not hold all the values Landon gave her. Landon made her into a type of woman “whom Anna had known, and found to be so limited in their proselytizing beliefs” (Morgan 208). Anna Harrtiette Leonowens, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (Oxford University Press, 1988), 16.

⁷ In Romance of the Harem, Leonowens tells Tuptim’s story and her untimely end. However afterward the King told her “I have much sorrow, mam, much sorrow, and respect for your judgment; but our laws are severe for such the crime. But now I shall cause monument to be erected in the memory of Bâlât and Tuptim” (41).

⁸ King Mongkut was very much alive when Leonowens left Siam and he died when she was living in New York. See Morgan 160 and 173.

⁹ According to Susan Morgan, Margaret Landon and her husband “controlled or significantly directed American attitudes to Thailand for several crucial decades of the twentieth century, from the early years of World War II up through the beginnings of American involvement in Vietnam” (221–222).

¹⁰ The real-life Anna who died in 1915 did not live to see women gain equality in voting rights in either the United States or Great Britain. The nineteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which granted women the same rights as men in terms of voting, was passed in June 1919 and ratified in August 1920. See “19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Women’s Right to Vote (1920).” In Great Britain, the Representation of the People Act of 1918 gave women over 30 who owned property the right to vote and the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 extended the right to all women over 21. See “Women and the vote.”

¹¹ This thought is patterned after Francine D. Blau and Ronald G. Ehrenbert’s comment that in America between 1940 and 1995 the “sharp rise in married women’s participation in work outside the home that has spurred the expansion in the female labor force has caused a ‘subtle revolution’ in gender roles in the family and in the larger society” (Blau and Ehrenbert 1).

¹² In her memoirs Leonowens wrote that when she was called sir she reacted with “a smile for his comical “sir” (The English Governess 16).

¹³ Leonowen’s son was five and half when they arrived in Siam. The novel and musical portrayed the son as older and failed to mention the existence of Leononowen’s daughter, who was sent to England to go to school. See Morgan 86–88.