Melville's Scornful Musings (plus a beautiful poem that has nothing to do with this class whatsoever)

Melville, the visiting writer, on the missionaries and their poorly organized mission:

"To read pathetic accounts of missionary hardship, and glowing descriptions of conversions, and baptisms taking place beneath the palm trees, is one thing; and to go to the Sandwich Islands and see the missionaries dwelling in picturesque and prettily furnished coral-rock villas, whilst the miserable natives are committing all sorts of immoralities around them, is quite another" (Melville 86).

These visiting writers penetrated the Hawaiian milieu of the time with their caustic and "vitriolic" remarks about the culture. Melville seems hell-bent on criticizing everyone who was involved with the missionary era, choosing to condemn both missionaries and natives in his unforgiving portrait of Hawaii. It seems Melville himself is a quasi-missionary, at least in his scathing castigations, as he belittles the inhabitants of Hawaii and calls attention to this period's ineffectiveness. 

This passage in particular presents an antagonistic portrait of the missionaries. At first, it seems that Melville may be siding with those underrepresented Hawaiian natives, but by the end of the paragraph, it becomes abundantly clear that he has even less compassion for the Hawaiian communities. His sardonic tone seems an apt reflection of the more general visting writer style: hyper-critical, self-aggrandizing, and unapologetically demanding. These writers, especially Melville, feel it is their place to revise/rewrite/reinterpret the conditions of a conflicted Hawaiian nation. 

He also claims that "here, as in every case where Civilization has in any way been introduced among those whom we call savages, she has scattered her vices, and withheld her blessings" (Melville 86).

The line "those whom we call savages" creates a dissonance between the writer (Melville) and the denigrated natives of the Hawaiian islands. There is an obvious distance between the righteous visting writer and those lowly "savages." His suggestion that "Civilization" has been introduced to Hawaii is infuriating -- he's essentially claiming that the missionaries were the first to "civilize" the native communities. Furthermore, he claims that any such attempts at civilizing "savages" can only result in failure (a scattering of vices). 

His biting portrayal of the missionary period is pertinent to the larger theme of Hawaii as a penetrable item of re-imagining. Melville doggedly inserts his own ideologies into the framework of Hawaii at the peak of its missionary period in order to assert a dominance and establish an entirely new sense of Hawaiian identity. He and his visting colleagues served only to perpetuate Hawaii as a site of Anglo/American re-imagined communities/cultures and as such, they have played a detrimental role in the development of an autonomous, freely dictated Hawaiian identity. Natives, locals, and anyone else (living in Hawaii or otherwise) who comes across these journals of Melville's and Co. should be quick to realize that these writings are one major source of the inaccurate literatures that permeate the global perception of Hawaii. 

-Jon Vorpe

P.S. Here's a James Wright poem that has nothing to do with the class. I read it this morning and it has yet to leave my thoughts. Enjoy.

"Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota"

by James Wright

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,   

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.   

Down the ravine behind the empty house,   

The cowbells follow one another   

Into the distances of the afternoon.   

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,   

The droppings of last year’s horses   

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.