LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY Edited by William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College A ROUTLEDGE SERIES 229x152 HB LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY WILLIAM E. CAIN, General Editor DEArH, MEN, AND MODERNISM THE OTHER EMPIRE Trauma and Narrative in British Romantic Writings British Fiction from Hardy to Woolf about the Ottoman Empire Ariela freedman Filiz Turhan THE SELF IN THE CELL THE "DANGEROUS" POTENTIAL Narrating the Victorian Prisoner OF READING Sean Grass Readers and the Negotiation of Power in Nineteenth-Century Narratives REGENERATING THE NOVEL Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau Gender and Genre in Woolf, Porster, Sinclair, and Lawrence INTIMATE AND AUTIIENTIC ECONOMIES James J. Miracky The American Self-Made Man from Douglass to Chaplin SATIRE AND TI-IE POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL Thomas Nissley V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie REVISED LIVES John Clement Ball Walt Whitman and Nineteenth­ Century Authorship THROUGH THE NEGATIVE William Pannapacker The Photographic Image and the Written Word in Nineteenth-Century LABOR PAINS American Literature Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott Megan Williams on Work and the Woman Question Carolyn Maibor LOVE AMERICAN STYLE Divorce and the American Novel, NARRATIVE IN THE PROFESSIONAL AGE 1881-1976 Transatlantic Readings of Harriet Kimberly Freeman Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS OF THE 1970s Jennifer Cognard-Black Joanna Russ and Dorothy Bryant Tatiana Teslenko THE REAL NEGRO The Question of Authenticity in DEAD LETTERS TO THE NEW WORLD Twentieth-Century African American Melville, Emerson, and American Literature Transcendentalism Shelly Eversley Michael Mcloughlin FICTIONAL FEMINISM THE OTHER ORPHEUS How American Bestsellers Affect the A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality Movement for Women's Equality Merrill Cole Kim A. Loudermilk THE COLONIZER ABROAD American Writers on Foreign Soil, 1846-1912 Christopher Mark McBride I~ ~~~;!~n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2004 by Routledge Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an iriforma business Copyright © 2004 Taylor & Francis. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The colonizer abroad: American writers on foreign soil, 1846-1912 / by Chris­ topher McBride p. cm. - (Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-4159-7062-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) I. Travelers' writing, American-History and criticism. 2. American litera­ ture-19th century-History and criticism. 3. American literature-20th cen­ tury-History and criticism. 4. Americans-Foreign countries-history-20th century 5. Americans-Foreign countries-History-19th century. 6. United States-Foreign relations-19th century. 7. United States-Foreign rela­ tions-20th century. 8. Imperialism in literature. 9. Travelers in literature. 10. colonies in literature. 11. Travel in literature. I. title. II. Series. PS366.T73 M38 2004 810.9'32-dc22 2003024439 ISBN 9780415970624 (hbk) This book is dedicated to my wife Kerianne and my sons Sawyer and Griffin. Without your loving presence, my life would lack the richness you so wonderfully give. V Table of Contents Acknowledgments ....•...................••.......•.. 1x Introduction ....................•.................... 1 Chapter One Melville's Typee and the Development of the American Colonial Imagination .....................•.................... 9 Chapter Two The Colonizing Voice in Cuba: Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s To Cuba and Back: A Vacation Voyage .............•............. 31 Chapter Three "The Kings of the Sandwich Islands": Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii and Postbellum American Imperialism .............. 59 Chapter Four Charles Warren Stoddard and the American "Homocolonial" Literary Excursion .................................... 89 Chapter Five "And Who Are These White Men?": Jack London's The House of Pride and American Colonization of the Hawaiian Islands .•.. 119 vii viii The Colonizer Abroad Conclusion ........................................ 145 Bibliography ....................................... 15 5 Index ............................................. 167 Acknowledgments A project of this size is not possible without the help of many. For their assistance with all phases of this work, I am grateful for the help and inspiration of my dis­ sertation committee members, Wendy Martin, Alfred Bendixen, Robert Hudspeth, and Emory Elliott. I am particularly indebted to Alfred Bendixen who has guided me as both a mentor and a colleague, providing insight and motivation when I needed them. For the privilege of accessing their Jack London materials, I would like to thank the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California. For their gen­ erous help in obtaining hard to find printed items, I am grateful to the reference librarians at the Honnold Library, Claremont, California State University, Los An­ geles, Fullerton College, and Solano College. I would also like to express my grat­ itude to the participants in the Fourth Biennial Jack London Society Symposium, held at the Huntington Library in October 1998, for their helpful questions, com­ ments, and suggestions on an earlier version of my Jack London chapter. ix Introduction Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation. - Ernest Renan, "What Is a Nation?" The history of America is very much a history of a nation connected to the sea. It was via the Atlantic that the continent was "discovered," and it was across this same ocean that North America was settled by Europeans. Many of these settlers wrote revealing accounts of their travels in journals and notebooks. In March 1630, Englishman John Winthrop and a collection of his compatriots sailed from Southampton for America aboard the Arbella. Winthrop had been chosen Gover­ nor by the Massachusetts Bay Company, and he used this leadership role as a mo­ tivation for composing his famous "Model of Christian Charity" on board the ship. Here, Winthrop delineates his vision for "a City upon a Hill" and warns his sub­ jects: "Now the onely way to avoyde ... shipwracke and to provide for our poster­ ity is to followe the Counsell of Micah; to doe Justly, to love mercy, to walke humbly with our God."1 Fearful of a shipwreck on this perilous journey, Winthrop believes that adherence to religious principles will assure the safe arrival of his party. His concerns about the dangers of ocean travel were not unique among early American sea travelers, however. Reliant on successful ocean journeys to reach the New World, the Puritan mission was invariably tied to the sea. Donald Whar­ ton explains: "For immigrants in the colonial period (and later times as well), the transatlantic crossing was both the trial by which one began a new life and a met­ aphor for the transition into a life of grace.''2 However, after arriving at this new place, a settler's life was full of difficulties. As Philip Fisher argues, foremost was the need for "a 'clear land' where a 'new world' might be built.''3 Only when the continent was "clear" of natives, settlers believed, could "superior" Anglo-Saxons assert their political, religious, and economic control over the new territory. Hence, for European voyagers, the sea journey was just the beginning of a Western imperial mission that saw its culmination in the colonization of America. 1 2 The Colonizer Abroad This vision of America is what I define as the American colonial project. America itself was the product of colonization, but once the country began matur­ ing into a full-fledged, independent nation, it looked to acquisition of the land des­ perately needed for expansion. Initially, this pushing outward took the form of pressing westward through an ever-moving frontier. However, by the mid-nine­ teenth century, this frontier was rapidly disappearing with the opening of the trans­ continental railroad, establishment of telegraph service, and replacement of sailing vessels with steamships. Confronted with this troubling situation, America looked abroad, and it was toward the islands of the South Pacific, Cuba, and Ha­ waii that America turned its attention. Like North America itself, these lands were already occupied, so America was forced to continue its burgeoning imperial project via the often-celebrated water. "By the beginning of the nineteenth centu­ ry," writes Nathaniel Philbrick, "the American enthusiasm for the sea had become a point of national pride."4 Out of this delight in accomplishments ranging from the early English arrivals in America to the country's highly successful nine­ teenth-century whaling industry, the United States fashioned a new vision for its future. American history is tied immeasurably to the ocean, but as the land frontier closed the sea voyage became linked to expanding imperial and colonial motives.5 For a definition of these key terms, I follow Edward Said, who writes: '"Imperial­ ism' means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; 'colonialism,' which is almost always a conse­ quence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory."6 Moreover, David Spurr further clarifies these