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Discourses of Race and Disease in British and American Travel Writing About the South Seas 1870-1915

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Discourses of Race and Disease in British and American Travel Writing About the South Seas 1870-1915 Discourses of Race and Disease in British and American Travel Writing about the South Seas 1870-1915 by Jeffrey Scott Clayton A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Auburn, Alabama December, 18, 2009 Keywords: literature, travel, imperialism, race, pacific, disease, Copyright 2009 by Jeffrey Scott Clayton Approved by Chris Keirstead, Chair, Associate Professor of English James Ryan, Associate Professor of English Patrick Morrow, Professor of English, Emeritus Abstract The nineteenth century saw the islands of the South Pacific colonized by the Western powers, including the United States. Because of this relatively late date compared to other colonized regions of the world, the imperializing process was more widely witnessed and reported. Among the wider range of witnesses were literary travelers, including Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London. These writers came to the Pacific in the wakes of earlier, influential figures such as the explorer James Cook, the naturalist Charles Darwin, and the novelist Herman Melville, all of whom contributed to the appeal of the Pacific islands. These literary travelers would see a region decimated by disease, epidemics that spread because of the isolated nature of the Pacific, a situation that resulted in a lack of immunity to many Eurasian diseases, including smallpox, tuberculosis, syphilis, and leprosy. Trollope visited Australia, where he viewed the dislocation and depopulation of the Aborigines dispassionately. Stevenson came in 1888, seeking relief from his chronic tuberculosis. He was appalled by the degradation of the islanders and settled in Samoa. London, who visited in 1907 and again afterwards, initially viewed the struggle between white and native through the lens of his racist philosophies, derived from Freidrich Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer. Later, as his own health weakened, he began to write more sympathetically of native peoples. Postcolonial studies have grown over the past three decades, led by writers such as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, but the South Pacific has received relatively little attention compared to the Caribbean, the Middle East, ii Africa, and India. However, Mary Louise Pratt’s theories of the “seeing-man” traveler and the contact zone, important redefinitions of imperialist behavior and the frontier, respectively, address New World colonialism in a way that acknowledges the differences between Old and New World colonizations. Because of the similarities in the colonial experience, Pratt’s theories of New World imperialism have been adapted to the adjacent world of the Pacific. One major critique of Pratt is that she ignores the literary traveler in favor of explorers and naturalists. This study demonstrates that in an analysis of South Pacific imperialism, literary authors as often complicate her theories as vindicate them. iii Acknowledgments To my family and friends, for their encouragement and belief in me. iv Table of Contents Abstract.........................................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................iv Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: Captain Cook and the Allure of Tahiti: Looking Backward to the Dawn of Pacific Imperialism ............................................................................................................................... 20 Chapter 2: The Naturalist and the Whaler: Charles Darwin, Herman Melville, and Two Approaches to the Exotic .......................................................................................................... 43 Chapter 3: Anthony Trollope: The Eminent Victorian and the Case of the Disappearing Aborigines................................................................................................................................... 74 Chapter 4: A Thorn in the Side of Imperialism: Robert Louis Stevenson, Outsider Identity, and the Repression of Culture in the South Seas............................................................................. 115 Chapter 5: Leprous Identity: Jack London’s Transformative Journey through Disease and the South Pacific ............................................................................................................................. 170 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 224 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 228 v Introduction This study of professional writers of a certain era, roughly the 1870s, when Anthony Trollope made his first tour of the Antipodes, to the 1910s, when Jack London penned his last pieces of fiction drawing on his Pacific experiences, is intended to make clearer the ways in which popular authors at the height of Western colonialism presented the farthest reaches of the imperial project –both lands and people—to their readers back home, using both readings of these authors’ works as well as the analytical tools provided by the rise of postcolonial theory, especially that of Mary Louise Pratt. Pratt and her work with the concept of the gaze—the way vision is often equated with ownership and control—and that of the contact zone—a give-and- take area more expansive in terms of physical space and reciprocal influence than the frontier— are both theories which she roots in the unique New World experiences with imperialism. In this study, I will adapt and modify her theories in order to apply them to the unique context of the Pacific, especially in the way her concept of the “seeing-man” is complicated by the writers who will be examined here. The relevance of this dissertation lies mainly in two aspects of South Pacific imperialism. First, the lands of the Pacific were among the very last to be colonized, in most cases not until the nineteenth century, affording us a more diverse look at the process, as improved efficiency in transportation and communication allowed not only a few officials, explorers, and soldiers to witness it, but missionaries, adventurers, emigrants, and, most importantly for us, writers. The three primary authors examined in this study, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, and 1 Jack London, were mostly fiction writers, but all three generated extra income for their trips by agreeing to supply non-fiction impressions of what they saw, usually in the form of letters to various newspapers but also with book-length travelogues, published after the journey’s end. This combination of skill and opportunity provides us with an unparalleled portrait of the long, continuing process of colonization. While Anglo-Indian writers like Rudyard Kipling chronicled a long-term occupation in medias res, as did Joseph Conrad with Africa and Malaysia, among other locations, Trollope, Stevenson, and London, as well as two important antecedents I will also examine, Herman Melville and Charles Darwin, were in on the ground floor, watching as settlers pushed out natives, epidemics decimated populations, and Western nations jockeyed for positions of influence in the few archipelagos left with some semblance of independence, thus gazing at something different than those in other regions of empire. Secondly, less work has been done on colonization in the South Pacific and its long term effects than on regions such as India, the Middle East, or the West Indies, even in this era of blossoming postcolonial studies. To be sure, we have witnessed an upsurge of postcolonial criticism concerning the South Pacific in the last couple of decades, but much remains to be done, especially when compared to the sheer amount of attention directed at other areas of the postcolonial world sparked by the works of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and others. The contemporary era of South Pacific criticism can be traced back to A. Grove Day’s Mad About Islands (1987), which focused attention on a number of novelists who had traveled the South Seas; if a criticism can be made of Day’s work, it is that it is light on analysis, instead taking a “literary biography” approach, content to trace the writers’ itineraries without an in- depth study of the context and legacy of the works produced out of these voyages. Nevertheless, 2 it retains its importance for inaugurating this era of robust critical attention paid to the South Seas and the literary production associated with it. Eight years later, Neil Rennie published Far-Fetched Facts, a thorough survey of works set in the South Pacific, although he is concerned more with how the concept of the region affected writers more than with how actual contact with the South Pacific was manifested in the texts of certain writers. After Day and Rennie, critical works have begun appearing more frequently, some focused on themes and motifs, such as Michael Sturma’s study of the South Seas maiden trope, many more on individual writers—Stevenson and Herman Melville are particular beneficiaries in this regard, as several studies have been published on both in the last decade. Nevertheless, if we date postcolonialism’s ascendancy back to the 1978 publication
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