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South Sea Gothic: Pierre Loti and Robert Louis Stevenson ROSLYN JOLLY University of New South Wales "POLYNESIAN STORIES are generally pretty grim," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson.1 He devoted a chapter of his travel book In the South Seas to an analysis of the "graveyard stories" he encountered throughout the Pacific, products of the "horrified nocturnal imagination ," stories of the dead preying on the living, of spirits preying on the dead, of bush-demons and devil-women.2 "It is plain we have in Europe stories of a similar complexion," he observed, arguing that the Polynesian aitu was "clearly the near kinsman of the Transylvanian vampire."3 Such an impulse to relate Polynesian occult traditions to the province of European gothic enabled nineteenth-century writers in the Pacific to make a distinctive contribution to the literature of terror. This essay compares the use of South Sea gothic in Pierre Loti's The Marriage of Loti (1880) and R. L. Stevenson's "The Beach of Falesá" (1892). These two fictions share a subject and narrative method—in both, a male European offers a first-person narration of his relationship with a Polynesian woman—but each employs gothic elements to very different effect . Pierre Loti was the pseudonym used by French sailor and novelist, Julien Viaud. His stories, which drew upon his travels around the world as an officer in the French navy, were well known in nineteenth-century England, where they helped to shape contemporary understandings of "the exotic." Henry James, for example, declared that Loti's "distinguishing sign" was his "appreciation of the exotic," and the Daily Chronicle's reviewer of Stevenson's narrative of Samoan affairs, A Footnote to History, speculated that Stevenson may have been drawn to the Pacific by "a Pierre Loti's fancy for exotism."4 Indeed, English reviewers of Stevenson's Pacific writing often used Loti as a point of orientation —literally, in that they adopted his orientalist perspective as a grid 28 JOLLY : STEVENSON for imaginatively processing the strangeness of Polynesia. Reviewers compared "The Beach of Falesá" to Loti's oriental stories of crosscultural romance such as Le Roman d'un Spahi and Madame Chrysanth ème.5 The Marriage of Loti made an important contribution to European ways of imagining the Pacific: James called it "a wonderful extension of the reader's experience—a study of the nonchalence of the strange, attractive Maori race and the private life of Polynesia."6 The narrative was based upon the journal record of Julien Viaud's visit to Tahiti in 1872, and combined his own experiences with those of his elder brother, who had been in Tahiti in 1859.7 The story tells of the doomed love affair between a British naval officer, Harry Grant, and a young Tahitian girl, Rarahu. Loti, the Tahitian name adopted by Grant, is the same as the pen-name used by Viaud, and this duplicated, pseudonymous exoticisation of hero and author creates a strangely compressed sense of the text's mixed autobiographical and fictional components. "Loti" becomes the sign of both an author-function and an order of personal experience in which the exotic and the erotic reinforce each other in a fantasy of male metropolitan desire for the primitive other, which James summed up as "the attitude of 'conquest.'"8 The Marriage of Loti is marked by a series of generic shifts, each one bringing to the text both a dominant mood and a distinctive way of organizing the narrator's relationship to his story. The first third of the novel takes the form of a South Sea idyll: what Rod Edmond calls a "feminized and eroticized" Polynesia is the setting for a classic celebration of "soft" primitivism,9 as Loti and his young Tahitian lover, Rarahu, enjoy a "sweetly languid existence" in which hours of "simple happiness" are passed "in the monotony of an eternal summer."10 The keynote of this idyllic Polynesia is stillness: life is "immobile," "dreamy," "silent," "indolent," "idle," "monotonous," and, it seems, "eternal."11 The apogee of the tropical idyll is found at "noontimes" by the brook at Fautaua, where Loti, Rarahu and their companions bathe, rest and dream, passing the hours as Loti claims...

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