A House is not a Home: Gender, Space and Marquesan Encounter, 1833–34

Abstract

In August 1833, a party of American missionaries with their wives and children took up residence at Taiohae on Nukuhiva, one of the three islands that comprise the northern group of the Marquesas, only to abandon their station eight months later in April 1834. This paper looks at the journal records of those few months and considers the pressure that cross-cultural encounter placed on American notions of gender and the domestic ideology that underwrites it. Desperate to make a home in an alien land, the missionaries oversaw the construction of a residential compound but, as the months progressed, it became increasingly obvious that the walls they built were not secure. Far from being a place of respite, the compound was continuous with the native landscape and an indigenous sexual culture the missionaries could only register with disgust. Despite the best efforts of the female missionaries to model Christian family life, the peculiar domestic architecture of the mission dwellings formed not the desired proscenium between savage and civil but a more disorienting hall of mirrors in which Marquesan concepts of sexuality and space dissolved the distinction between public and private on which American notions of gender depended. Accordingly, the fate of the Marquesan mission allows us to revisit many of the critical commonplaces that circulate around women and Pacific missionary endeavour.