Isabella Bird & the Holiday-Making Hawaiians

One passage I found particularly fascinating can be found near the end of Isabella Bird's "The Hawaiian Archipelago" (pp. 120-122 in Pacific Passages). Bird, who has travelled to Hawaii in the face of a chronic illness, seems to find temporary respite from her sickness in enjoying the culture of Hawaii. However, despite the passage's seeming innocuousness, it carries many subtle hints of a more condescending Anglo-American delusion. Much like many of the other observers literature in this book, Bird's musings are dripping with fantastical representations of the Hawaiian lifestyle. In one particularly telling sentence, she depicts Hawaiian women swimming in the sea as "maidens...with garlands of flowers round their heads and throats" (Bird 121). On first glance, it appears that she is merely painting a lush and peaceful portrait of the women. But in using diction like "maidens," a thoroughly condescending term, and by casting them as these quasi-mermaid figures, Bird is establishing a stereotype. She is placing an admittedly subtle hegemonic structure around the figure of the Hawaiian female.

The final section of this passage concludes as such: "There was no toil, clang, or hurry. People were all holiday-making (if that can be where there is no work), and enjoying themselves, the surf-bathers in the sea, and hundreds of gaily-dressed men and women galloping on the beach. It was serene and tropical. I sympathize with those who eat the lotus, and remain for ever on such enchanted shores" (Bird 122). Again, Bird dramatically fantasizes over the Hawaii forever (dis)placed in her imagination. These "enchanted shores" are only magical because a white, Anglo woman has deemed it so. Instead of picking beneath the surface (or should I say the shore?), Bird pretends that the only concern of the island is this "holiday-making." She presents the citizens as glorified retirees with permanent smiles painted across their faces. In short, she assists in (mis)representing the island as an oasis, an Eden, a place of definite relaxation and free from all quotidian cares. She plays a role, as with many of the other visiters, in typifying the outsider's lust for the escapism that Hawaii seems to offer. But buried beneath the layers of sand, the oily paint coating of those surfing borads, the billowing waves of the surf, existed a whole underground of untapped sources, of more complicated histories, of conflict and suffering, of a culture engrained in a complicated story. But I guess it's easier to just kick back and observe the surf than to peel back the supposedly ideal surface of Hawaii's sandy coat.

-Jon Vorpe