Rewriting paradise: Countering desire, denial, and the exotic in American literary representations of the Pacific (George Tweed, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Jack London)

This dissertation analyzes key patterns of American imperial disavowal and desire as dramatized in the works of Twain, Melville, and London. It juxtaposes these writers alongside indigenous voices that challenge the representations of their work: the testimony of a Native Hawaiian woman, Pi'ilani, whose account was written in 1906, and oral narratives from the Chamoru of Guam, who continue to protest a book published by George Tweed, an American soldier stranded on Japanese-occupied Guam during World War II.; Disavowal, the analysis argues, has sought to conceal the unruliness of American-Pacific relations behind an appearance of coherence. Unmasking the duplicities of the desire behind the disavowal reveals its grounding in notions of racial superiority and in a hyperbolized terror of the savage. The project traces these groundings by first establishing the terrain of American narratives that imagined the Pacific. It next examines how writers at the centers of American imperialism negotiated and redefined the terms of specific representations perpetuated by national mythologies and specific dissemblings ingrained in their identities. It argues that the travel narrative, a popular genre during the nineteenth century and the one which both Melville and Twain used as introduction to a much broader national audience, mirrors the anxieties and strainings over issues of nation, identity, and race that preoccupied the period in which it was so influential.; Simultaneously, the unmasking also excavates continuing Native defiance to American posturing. Pi'ilani's testimony, as one example, challenges both Twain's silencing of the Native body and London's degradation of it. The oral narratives from Guam defy Tweed's claims to heroism and question the innocence of the American imperialist argued by Melville. In their place, these Native narrators offer a more problematic definition of the American-Native relationship and argue, most of all, for the imperative balancing of Western narrative with Native testimony.