GHOSTS OF THE PACIFIC: IMAGINED MASCULINITIES IN BRITISH VOYAGE LITERATURE, 1697-1818 BY JEREMY WEAR DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Robert Markley, Chair Associate Professor Anthony Pollock Associate Professor Dana Rabin Professor Gillen D’Arcy Wood ABSTRACT Ghosts of the Pacific: Imagined Masculinities in British Voyage Literature, 1697-1817 argues that Pacific novels and travelogues redefine the parameters of eighteenth-century masculinity. By the end of the century, Pacific voyagers like James Cook were celebrated as national heroes and were popularly thought to embody Enlightenment ideals of reason and civility. Less than fifty years before, however, Pacific mariners were viewed as threatening figures whose transgressive identities flouted the traditional signifiers of polite masculinity like land ownership, marriage, and heredity privilege. Commercial and imperial expansion into the Pacific revealed, I argue, the profound instability of British masculinity, thus rendering the Pacific a site of both anxiety and celebration. The “empty” Pacific represented a laboratory of national and self- identification where Britons critiqued their empire even as they reified the new forms of masculinity necessary to expand and maintain it. By addressing how masculinities were fashioned in relation to Pacific travel, I reframe the “Pacific” as a literary problem. Scholars have discussed how bestselling Pacific novels and travelogues mobilized emerging scientific and economic discourses to rewrite the transgressive actions of voyagers as normative, gentlemanly pursuits, thereby weaving these discourses into the fabric of eighteenth-century social order. I recast this historicist approach, arguing that texts by authors like Daniel Defoe and Jane Austen imagine the Pacific as a rich, discursive field for representing both commercial and domestic subjectivities. Celebrated by polite readers, the novels and narratives of Pacific voyagers were an important means for questioning and reaffirming the unstable conditions of nation and selfhood. ii For Jill iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project could not have been completed without the generous help and support of many different people and institutions. I owe my greatest debt to Bob Markley, whose guidance and patience as a dissertation advisor is surpassed only by his prolific knowledge. Bob makes me rethink my understanding of the eighteenth century after every conversation we have, and I can only imagine he will continue to do so. Most importantly, Bob has been a kind and loyal mentor generous with his time, for which I will be forever grateful. I am also grateful to the members of my dissertation committee for their many contributions and corrections. Tony Pollock has listened patiently and helped to steer even the most errant ideas to more fruitful paths. Gillen Wood and Dana Rabin have provided invaluable insights for this project as it continues to develop. I am also deeply indebted to past teachers: John Dodd, who taught me how to read, Tam Carlson, who taught me why we read, and Misty Anderson, Jennifer Michael, and Dale Richardson, each of whom illuminated even the most obscure recesses of eighteenth-century literature with wit and grace. I also want to thank the various institutions that provided me with the financial means to conduct my research. I am grateful to the Graduate College at the University of Illinois for providing a final year of teaching releases so this project could be completed, and to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, UK, for providing funding to attend its 2012 Navy and Nation conference, which continues to pay dividends in its influence on my work. A wonderful group of friends and colleagues from Sewanee, the University of Tennessee, and Illinois has gracefully listened to the evolution of this project over the years. Mike Behrens and Neil Norman are not only two great friends, but two swift(ian) minds at home in the eighteenth century. Jess Mercado, Carla Rosell, Adam Prince, Ryan Sheets, and Dan Colson iv made life in Champaign fun. Fred Larabee and Charlie Nelson provided much of the intellectual energy in Annapolis, where this dissertation was completed. Finally, I wish to thank my family. My parents Boyce and DeLayne taught me that the setbacks are often more important than the successes. Justin and Edie provided good cheer and restored the soul, while Peyton and Henry serve as a constant reminder of what is really important. Last, but not least, I want to thank Jill. She has been a constant source of inspiration, and has taught me more than any book ever could about the happy life. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………………..............1 CHAPTER 1 DAMPIER’S LEVIATHAN: DISCIPLINING THE MALE BODY IN THE VOYAGE LITERATURE OF WILLIAM DAMPIER………………………..………………...23 CHAPTER 2 NO DISHONOR TO BE A PIRATE: IMAGINING INFINITE ADVANTAGE IN DANIEL DEFOE’S PACIFIC NOVELS…………………………………………..…….......64 CHAPTER 3 SCURVY AND THE PROBLEM OF NAVAL MASCULINITY IN A VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD BY GEORGE ANSON……..….…………………………………….....114 CHAPTER 4 SEEING ENGLAND IN TAHITI: IMPROVEMENT AND THE ISLAND RACES..…………..…………………………………………………………………………….158 CHAPTER 5 GO EAST, YOUNG WOMAN: REWRITING THE PACIFIC TRADITION IN PERSUASION…..……………………………………………………………………………....208 REFERENCES ………………………………………………………………………………...256 vi INTRODUCTION This dissertation offers an account of the profound influences the Pacific Ocean had on the literature and culture of the eighteenth century, and how that ocean served as an imaginative space where the contested nature of self and nation was explored in the nascent age of empire. As a supplement to scholarship that looks at the Pacific through a postcolonial lens, my work examines how Britons used the Pacific as a site of self-identification, imagining both their cultural ancestors (Tahiti’s “island race”) and their imperial future (Terra Australis Incognita, for example) to lie in Pacific waters. Thus, this dissertation shows how eighteenth-century notions of nation and selfhood are conceived of by identifying with Pacific islands and peoples, or by imagining a national future based upon a conjectural Pacific space. While the Orientalist discourse of “us” and “other” eventually comes to hold sway in the nineteenth century, Pacific literature reveals a much more fluid paradigm where identity was in flux, even as Orientalism’s ideological underpinnings begin to come into clearer focus.1 Britain held no colonial possessions in the Pacific until very late in the eighteenth century, and while Orientalism is undoubtedly one of the defining binaries of Britain’s later empire, the marginalized position the British held in the Pacific and in relation to Pacific Rim nations like China, Japan, and the sultanates of Southeast Asia, as well as Spain’s American empire, reveal a much more fraught, less self-assured view of self and other. Given Britain’s marginal position in the intra-regional trade networks of these 1 Consider Jonathan Lamb’s assessment, who argues for “no metaphysical distinction division between the European self and its so-called other. There is not on one side an “I” capable of writing a history into which the subaltern “I” on the other side is speechlessly incorporated as its predicate … Europeans … were engaged as exigently as the Polynesians in the struggle to preserve the self.” Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001): 5. Robert Markley argues, “The confrontation of English writers with China and Japan became a catalyst for their recognition that the discourse of European empire was an ideological construct— part self-conscious propaganda, part wish fulfillment, and part econometric extrapolation to sustain fantasies of commercial prosperity, if not imperial conquest.” Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 9. 1 countries and European ignorance of the Pacific itself, literature like the Pacific novels of Daniel Defoe and the voyage narratives of William Dampier and George Anson further reveals the Pacific to be an imaginative construction, whereby voyagers and novelists narrate the conditions that would banish the grim imperial realities of scarcity, ecological degradation, and slavery. These texts also imagine how the figures defined by empire—explorer, pirate, and merchant (to name a few)—fundamentally alter codified understandings of “home.” The “empty” Pacific functions rhetorically as blank canvas on which Dampier, Defoe, and Anson, and later James Cook’s naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster and Jane Austen, paint their own commercial speculations and imperial ideologies. By the mid-eighteenth century, this blank space on the map had become a laboratory to explore British identity, much like it was for earlier buccaneers, where discussions of commerce, gender, race, nation, and empire could be theorized and mediated. Before Cook’s voyages and John Hawkesworth’s narratives codified Tahiti in the English imagination as a sort of male, adolescent fantasy land of free love and natural abundance, the hopes of accessing tightly-controlled Far Eastern markets dominated the thought and intention of European captains who sailed in the Pacific. Economic historians have debunked the myth of a monolithic eighteenth-century