Tahitian Beaches and London Parlors: Transpacific Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

From the continent to the sea, my work re-centers the literary map of the long eighteenth century, arguing that the opening of a Pacific World found the Lost Paradise of the Enlightenment and generated a sexuality commensurate with Romanticism. My dissertation, “Tahitian Beaches and London Parlors,” uses a decolonial lens to question the colonial archive, and argues that a new designation of Transpacific Literature, a counterpart to Transatlantic Literature, was written on the borders of a Pacific world. British expansionist and American imperialist authors and sailors between the years 1760-1890 produced problematically rich literature about the paradisiacal, exotic, and “savage” islands of the Pacific. Specifically, the authorial creation of the narrative space of the Pacific Island Tahiti “generated geographies”—an Edenic “setting” where sexuality was divorced from function and married to aesthetics and form, leading to the romanticizing of the geopolitical physical space of Tahiti. Compared to the Atlantic, the difference is distance. The distance of England in the wider world from the South Pacific created time to incubate a particular narratological space that fueled a deceptive idea of Paradise; and the creation of “Paradise” in the Pacific powered the eroticism and exoticism of the South Pacific that devastated the subjectivity of the Pacific Islander. The new literary setting allowed for a new space of sexuality, one in which liberation from the functionality of sex was possible. The unearthing of an imagined fluid island sexuality created a Sexual Other against which the English either contrasted and defined their own monogamous heterosexuality, or explored, desired, and identified with nonmonogamy and other yet-to-be-named sexualities, as shown in Nocturnal Revels (1779). I posit that while the Pacific Islands initially resisted traditional colonization, desire acted as pseudo-possession in the eighteenth century, and writing acted as a form of compensatory imperialism. Closer to the Pacific than Europeans, American imperialists succeeded in the colonization of the Pacific through forced labor and cheap goods, as shown in Herman Melville’s Typee and Omoo. Missionary societies accomplished the containment of an “other” sexuality, and American Realist literature, such as Jack London’s South Sea Tales, reflects the lost Paradise. Transpacific literature both created and lost the Paradise of the Pacific that leads to the militarization, commercialization, and belittling of disappearing atollic nations today.