| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Oceania and Pacific Islands

Michael Sturma. South Sea Maidens: Western Fantasy and Sexual Politics in the South Pacific. (Contributions to the Study of World History, number 95.) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. 2002. Pp. x, 193. $63.95.

Denis Diderot called the South Seas "the great ocean of fantasy," a place where the unconscious of the European subject has free play, where all repressions are lifted, and where life is ceaselessly to be enjoyed. In his Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1772), he exhibits this fantasy in an exclusively sexual aspect, relying on the testimony of the first sequence of European voyagers to touch there, all of whom were surprised and most of them charmed by the apparent lack of restraint governing the sexual behavior of Tahitians. Here men and women went without clothes, James Cook reported, and bread grew upon trees. When he described a scene of public copulation in Tahiti, John Hawkesworth deeply shocked his British readers, although he had done little more than transcribe the journals of Cook and the botanist Joseph Banks. No wonder, then, that the image that most cogently represents the fantasy of the South Seas is that of handsome young women, like the one who emerged naked on the deck of Bougainville's ship when he reached Tahiti, like Venus (he said) rising from the waves. This is what Michael Sturma calls the myth of the "nubile" savage, the female inhabitant of a terrestrial paradise who vividly and voluptuously holds out the promise of Eve in Eden: sinless sex.

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