ABSTRACT
In the years after the U.S. naval victories over England in the War of 1812, increased U.S. activity in Oceania inspired literally hundreds of nautical novels and short stories, along with ballads, poems, plays, pamphlets, and other cultural productions, lending some credence to Thomas Philbrick’s assertion that “before 1850 the American frontier was primarily a maritime one; that the sea rather than the continental wilderness was the principal focus of the yearnings and imaginings of the American dream” (Philbrick 1961: vi). The body of nautical literature, crucial to the emerging American Pacific archive, collectively called out for stepped-up U.S. energy, scientific exploration, and enterprise in the region, and laid the groundwork for imagining the U.S. empire-to-come as commercial, in opposition to European territorial ambitions.1 This vision would be epitomized and commented on in Melville’s telescoped history of Nantucketers as early agents of deterritorialized globalization: “two thirds of the terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires” (Melville 1988: 64). (On Melville’s ambiguous paean to these processes see Lyons [2005].)
At the same time, in the narrative of a growing antebellum “Young America,”
Oceania functions as an arena for the developing masculine national narrative in which atavistic Islanders figure as that within the self that must be recurrently colonized. Oceania in this primal scene is, as Kathy Souter suggests, a “place of violent contrasts, with no middle ground,” that restages what Melanie Klein describes as an infantile division that is not outgrown but compulsively returned to in moments of stress (Souter 1999: 109). These psychological dynamics are registered imaginatively in the U.S. national narrative, with its widening NorthSouth rift, economic panics, racial traumas, and international conflicts, with the vast and oneiric Oceania appearing as an absorbing space within which U.S. power (naval, scientific, commercial) could constitute itself through expansion. Recurrently, as Leslie Fiedler and others have noted, the “classic” texts of U.S. literature have a juvenile cast, and wind up in illustrated forms on children’s bookshelves, thinly covering the nation’s aggressive, gendered, and raced ventures as boyish adventure. What Dorfman and Mattelart argue of juvenile literature, with its “self-colonization of [its] own imagination,” is redoubled in Oceanian contexts: “this lovely, simple, smooth, translucent, chaste and pacific region, which has been promoted as Salvation, is unconsciously infiltrated by a multiplicity of adult conflicts and contradictions” (Dorfman and Mattelart 1971).
