The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific.(Book review)

The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific, by Patty O'Brien. McLellan Endowed Series. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2006. x, 347 pp. $50.00 US (cloth), $25.00 US (paper).

Patty O'Brien's The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific promises a sweeping analysis of Europe's "discursive creation of the Pacific" (p. 15). The book succeeds as an overview of key issues and texts in that creation. The title, however, overstates the book's achievements. The "Pacific" is really only a few islands in the South Pacific, Hawaii, and Australia. There is no discussion of Asia, the Americas, or most of the South Pacific. The book covers fairly well-trodden, albeit important, ground, and does so by applying well-used analytical categories and drawing upon typical literature. O'Brien offers a helpful summary of interesting scholarship. In fact, there is a lot of summarizing, making the book read more like a compendium of other writings. Phrases like "as someone has shown" and "as someone else has demonstrated" dominate the text, and it seems like none of the authors disagree with each other.

O'Brien is concerned with "the authentic moment when Tahitian women were seemingly pure embodiments of women from classical myths" (p. 4), arguing for a …