At the turn of the century, “Japan” was being imagined for the American public in a variety of ways. Sidney McCall, wife of Hegelian Ernest Fenollosa and close friend of Romanticist Lafcadio Hearn, sought a way to incorporate “Japan” into Fenollosa's broader Idealist arch while simultaneously preserving the titillation of Hearn's “ghostly tales.” By so doing, McCall attempted to reconcile divided notions of “femininity” in early Japanology (and American discourse at large). She utilized the form of the novel itself to work systematically through the schism between “feminine mystique” and “maternal feminism”; this uncertainty was resolved, for McCall, in her Idealist fictions from “Japan.”