ABSTRACT
For the Victorian cultural imagination, the South Pacific represented a liminal space in which all things were possible, and in which the tenets of civilization could be rethought. The sexual freedoms of South Seas island culture offered an imaginative theater in which Victorian domesticity, both revered as the cornerstone of civilization and resented as oppressive to masculine liberty, could be put to the test. This chapter investigates the representation of masculinity and domestic relations in an anthology of short fiction, entitled By Reef and Palm, by Australian writer George "Louis" Lewis Becke. It focuses on the opposition in these stories of two feminine figures: the "White Lady" and the "Brown Woman". This opposition is cited explicitly in the title of the anthology's very first story: "Challis the Doubter. The White Lady and the Brown Woman". The white lady, a classed and gendered figure, is mostly an absent presence in the stories.
