A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Tahiti, where he soon realized in spite of his fascination that “Polynesia was not a garden
of Eden.” 229 In 1889, when Stevenson reached Honolulu, O’ahu’s capital was already a
‘modern town,’ boasting four hotels, electric street lights, mule-drawn tramcars, an opera
house, library, hospital, as well as several newspapers. Besides working on stories with a
Hawaiian setting like “The Bottle Imp” and “The Wrecker,” Stevenson became deeply
involved with the leprosy settlement on Moloka’i. Having made his permanent home in
Samoa in the meantime, Stevenson returned to O’ahu once more in 1893, shortly after the
overthrow of the monarchy. When the writer left for Samoa the same year, he had but one
more year to live.
Jack London wrote many short stories set in the Pacific, two volumes alone with a
Hawaiian setting. 230 In 1907, during his famous cruise aboard the yacht Snark he spent
four months on O’ahu. He returned at the height of fame in 1915 to stay another year. He
was the first visiting author to experience the islands as an American territory, not as a
kingdom. London drew freely on gossip, yarns and legends, fictionalizing actual
characters and events as variations of his favorite themes: man against fate, human
weakness and strength. His most famous Hawaiian story, “Koolau, the Leper,” is based
on the true case of a fugitive leper hiding on Kaua’i. Ko’olau has long become a Local
legend, a symbol of resisting the authorities and choosing how to live and die. London’s
text has recently been contrasted with the testimony of the real Ko’olau’s wife in a
contrapuntal reading by Ku’ualoha Meyer Ho’omanawanui, who thus highlights the
Orientalist ideology that informed London’s version of the story.
Generally, London’s personal paradise is constructed in similar hyperbolic fashion
as Twain’s unperishable memory:
Somehow, the love of the islands, like the love of a woman, just happens. […]
Truly, Hawaii is a woman beautiful and vastly more persuasive and seductive than
her sister sirens of the sea. […] When Hawaii was named the Paradise of the
Pacific, it was inadequately named. The rest of the seven seas and the islands in
the midst thereof should have been included along with the Pacific. “See Naples
and die” – they spell it differently here: See Hawaii and live. 231
229 Sister Martha Mary McGaw, C.S.J., Stevenson in Hawaii, Westport 1978: 22.
230 Jack London, The House of Pride, New York 1912, and On the Makaloa Mat, New York 1919. Both are
reprinted in A. Grove Day (ed.), Stories of Hawaii by Jack London, Honolulu 1965.
231 Jack London, “My Hawaiian Aloha,” in Day 1965: 276-82.
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