From Noble Savage to colonial subject: Tahiti in eighteenth-century French literatur

This dissertation looks at the birth, evolution, and endurance of the theme of Tahiti as it unfolded in eighteenth-century French literature following the first European-Polynesian encounters. By drawing on both post-colonial theory and Enlightenment studies, I analyze how literary supplements inspired by the travel accounts that Bougainville and Cook brought back from the South Seas came to shape the enduring idea of Tahiti as earthly paradise in the French imaginaire. I show how these works signal the emergence of new literary techniques in writings about the Other, mirroring the evolution of an idea from anti-colonial, primitivist admiration of the Noble Savage in the 1770s to the proselytization of Enlightenment ideals in the actual colonization of Tahiti in the 1790s.;In my first chapter, I examine the origins of the myth of the Great Southern Land and its impact on pre-Enlightenment thought, literature, and colonial ventures. I focus on the Histoire des Sevarambes by Denis Veiras (1635-1683), to show how French geographical, ideological and literary parallel discourses fostered the cultural environment that came to govern the experience of actual encounters, such as Bougainville's ten-day call at Tahiti in 1769.;Such an encounter, and its retelling in best-selling travel accounts, was soon overshadowed by literary supplements that covered a wide spectrum of genres and styles. These supplements not only created the images of bountiful nature, political utopia and sexual heaven that have come to determine our vision of Tahiti, they also challenged the conciliation between a sincere anti-colonial discourse and an equally sincere faith in the universalism of Enlightenment ideals. In chapters two through four, I bring to light works of various genres that have attracted little critical attention until now: Nicolas Bricaire de la Dixmerie's essay Le Sauvage de Taiti aux Francais (1770); Marie Josephine de Monbart's epistolary novel Les Lettres Taitiennes (1786); and Abbe Guillaume-Andre-Rene Baston's epic novel Les Narrations d'Omai (1790). I present a full portrait of the Tahitian Noble Savage as created by the French Enlightenment and show how it offered the perfect crucible for a reflection on nature, gender, and civilization, and how the Tahitian native became the perfect candidate for a new European experimentation with colonialism---a mission civilisatrice born out of Enlightenment ideals.