A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

For the Hawaiian Reader and other collections, he selected passages that yielded
the exotic, either as beautiful, paradisiacal, sublime, and desirable, or as primitive, pagan,
in need of redemption by the superior white man. The texts he compiled are understood
today as the Oceanist extension of Orientalist writing, appropriating place as a projection
space for touristic/erotic/adventurous desires, discursively displacing its nonwhite
inhabitants, either by constructing them as savages and children, or by leaving them out
of one’s depictions of ‘paradise’ altogether. A brief glance at this ‘old canon’ may suffice
to evaluate the general thrust of its texts and their authors. Take this early characterization
of Hawaiians written by George Vancouver’s mate Thomas Manby after his 1793 visit:
Before we became acquainted with these people we considered them as a
ferocious and turbulent set of savages. This character they are by no means
entitled to, as they are mild and tractable; uncivilized, unpolished, and in a true
state of nature, they possess great courage, and will not tamely bear an insult or an
injury. […] To each other they are free, easy, and cheerful, and show more real
good nature than I have seen in your better regulated societies. During the whole
of my stay I was never witness to a quarrel: they delight in jokes, which were
never known to produce an angry brow or an uplifted arm. 222
A missionary wife rhetorically asked in her journal, “Can anything so fair be defiled by
idol worship and deeds of cruelty,” 223 while planter, merchant, and journalist James
Jackson Jarves commented on the transition phase between “heathenism and
missionaryism,” which he experienced when living on Oahu from 1837 to 1846:
National songs and festivals all smacked of eternal damnation. There was
absolutely nothing left to the poor native for the indulgence of his physical forces,
or the development of his intellectual, but that which he hated most, hard labor
and theological learning. […] The most rigid principles of the most rigid of
Protestant sects were made the standard of salvation for the most sensualized of
races. 224
222 Manby in Day/Stroven 1959: 47.
223 From Laura Fish Judd, Honolulu: Sketches of the Life, Social, Political, and Religions, in the Hawaiian
Islands from 1828 to 1861, in Day/Stroven 1959: 69-81, here 70.
224 James Jackson Jarves, “Between Heathenism and Missionaryism,” in Day/Stroven 1959: 82-88, here 84.
Jarves also wrote the first novel with a Hawaiian setting, Kiana, published in 1857 and no longer available
in print.
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