The Golden Tahitian Body and The Cold English Iron/殖民地的肉体

Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 170-171.

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The nails of the Dolphin represent a version of sexual commerce between Europeans and Tahitians somberly at odds with the Arcadian tropes of Bougainville. The Tahitians seem to have responded eagerly to the introduction of iron into their society—they had none before the arrival of the Europeans, and it must have appeared an exotic and marvelous substance, immediately suitable for making fishhooks and other tools and weapons. Bougainville reports that the Tahitians already have knowledge of the European metal and a word for it, aouri, which puzzles him until he eventually learns of Wallis’s visit, about ten months before his own, and reasonably surmises that aouri is a Tahitian rendition of the English iron. It may then be that the apparent facility of sexual commerce with the Tahitians derived from their immediate, and intelligent, perception of the utility of this new substance introduced among them—as if their granting of sexual favors really meant: iron at any price. If this were the case, they would be behaving in the manner imposed upon many colonized peoples, offering their natural resources in exchange for modernization. Gauguin will regularly describe the bodies of Tahitians as “golden”—Et l’or de leur corps (And the gold of their bodies), he lyrically entitled one of his paintings. In the commerce of the Dolphin, the golden body of pleasure is the natural resource exchanged—at bargain rates—for grim, utilitarian English iron. Complicit with the commercial exchange is a tropology: the precious but primitive “found” resource, belonging to an economy of abundance, enjoyment, and waste, set against the manufactured commodity, belonging to an economy of scarcity, capitalization, and repression. The Golden Age perceived by the French captain and crew was already, thanks to the English, on the way to its degradation into an Iron Age.

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I have not seen this interpretation suggested in the literature on the discovery of Tahiti, but it has a certain force of logic: once you discover that your stones are no match for their cannon and musket balls, you try to seduce them. Make love, not war. If this were the case, the myth of Tahitian sexual freedom would be the direct product of the European armed intrusion, and rather than an indication of a Golden Age, a tactical reaction to superior force.

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© Copyright by Dun Wang (王敦). All rights reserved. 著作权拥有者：Dun Wang (王敦)。