Popular Culture Review
boundary marker of empire. Such “primitive” women were highly liberating to
the western male imagination; they seemed to promise a deliverance from the
strict sexual codes imposed on white Christian women. The social historian
Anne McClintock describes this effect:
As European men crossed the dangerous thresholds of their known
worlds, they ritualistically feminized borders and boundaries. Female
the blank seas of their maps with mermaids and sirens. Explorers
called unknown lands “virgin” territory. Philosophers veiled “Truth”
as female, then fantasized about drawing back the veil. In myriad
of which men oriented themselves in space, as agents of power and
agents of knowledge. (24)
But boundaries and borders also can be danger zones, as is indicated in Martin
Eden by the Hawaiian woman’s leprosy. This was the illness most feared by
threat to white racial purity.
Yet the call of the colonial, even with its gender anxieties and threats
to the white male body, lures Martin back to the tropics and away from the
effete rot of the white metropole. Martin’s fear of alienation and disintegration
is deeper than any dread of devolution in “savage” lands. His intensifying
(Wylie 98-99). The South Seas are thus constituted as a site for the physical
and spiritual reinvigoration of the depleted Edwardian male. The Islands
function as a site of western remasculinization as well as an untamed frontier
free from restrictive Euro-American codes.
Martin’s San Francisco ennui is worsened by the suicide of his friend,
Russ Brissender, a defeated poet. In despair over Russ’ death, Martin
summons up a catalyzing and transformative Polynesian vision of
breakers, he made out a small canoe, an outrigger canoe. In the
stern he saw a young bronzed god in scarlet hip-cloth dipping a
of Tati, the chief, and this was Tahiti, and beyond that smoking reef
lay the sweet land of Papara and the chief’s grass house by the
river’s mouth. . . . He knew there was singing among the trees and
that the maidens were dancing in the moonlight. . . . (Martin Eden
410)
Given that Brissenden was dying of consumption and alcoholism, this robust
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