“A Little God of His South Sea”: Queer Exoticism in the Decadent Pacific

Abstract

This essay explores the convergence of Decadence, queer sociality, and Pacific imagery in the work of American travel writer Charles Warren Stoddard and Japanese poet Yone Noguchi. For these writers, the “South Seas” seemed to epitomize a prelapsarian sexual innocence, exempted (at least provisionally) from capitalist calculations of value and the impositions of Victorian bourgeois morality. As such, the Pacific furnished a shared imaginary in which they could articulate transgressive homosocial intimacies, both with each other and with others in their bohemian circle. But these expressions of queer, cosmopolitan kinship also depended on well-worn stereotypes about native decline, in which Indigenous peoples were seen to embody an irrecoverable past—one doomed to disappear in the onward march of modernity. Drawing on postcolonial conceptions of extinction discourse and Indigenous agency, this essay will thus contend with one potential “misuse” of Decadence: that is, as the driver of an exoticism that perpetuated imperialist narratives about the inevitable extinction of Indigenous peoples.

1. Introduction

Although they never traveled there together, the romantic friendship between Japanese poet Yone Noguchi (1875–1947) and American travel writer Charles Warren Stoddard (1843–1909) was curiously bookended by dreams of Polynesia. The pair, both associated with the San Francisco-based bohemian set, had exchanged love letters for years before finally meeting in 1900, during a memorable multi-day visit that Noguchi narrated four years later in his National Magazine retrospective “In the Bungalow with Charles Warren Stoddard.” With wistful affection, Noguchi recalled his instant sense of connection with his “dear Charley” (Noguchi 1904, p. 304), as well as his irritation when the older man at once declared him “too Americanized” (p. 306). Noguchi immediately pinpoints the source of his companion’s disappointment—to Stoddard, “it would have been more natural had I been barefooted and in a Japanese kimono” (p. 306)—and moreover connects this frustrated desire to Stoddard’s well-documented taste for exotic young men. “Did he expect me to be another Kana Ana,” Noguchi wonders, referring to a beautiful Hawaiian youth featured in Stoddard’s (1873) South-Sea Idyls: “a little sea god of his South Sea, shaking the spray from his forehead like a porpoise?” (p. 306) The fog of Pacific nostalgia also loomed over the pair’s final meeting several years later at a dinner hosted by the Decadent poet Richard Le Gallienne, where the conversation turned to U.S. colonial activity in Polynesia, the systematic suppression of its native cultures, and the dwindling Indigenous population. Stoddard deeply bemoaned the loss: “they are a nation of warriors and lovers falling like the leaf,” he reportedly told Noguchi, “but unlike it, with no followers in the new season” (p. 307).

Taking Noguchi’s retrospective as its jumping off point, this essay will explore the convergence of Decadence, queer sociality, and the colonial Pacific gaze in a selection of Stoddard’s and Noguchi’s writings. To be sure, the South Seas had been the locus of Western sexual fantasy since first contact, but I would suggest that the region’s erotic appeal acquired a Decadent valence in the fin de siècle, when it became the backdrop for a homosocial coterie of bohemian writers that included Stoddard and Noguchi, as well as the American poet Joaquin Miller and, more peripherally, Robert Louis Stevenson. And while Stoddard is not typically classified as Decadent—at first glance, his oft-reiterated affinity for primitive life would seem to cut against Decadent celebrations of artifice—I would suggest that his primitivism was one expression of what Stefano Evangelista (2019), in the context of transnational Decadence, has described as the movement’s “ethos of transgression,” an ethos equally palpable in Stoddard’s overt queerness, his vocal dissent against industrial capitalism, and his strident rejections of the Victorian shibboleths of productivity, progress, and propriety (p. 316). For Stoddard and Noguchi, the modern world was a manifestly decadent one: sordid, unlovely, spiritually enervated. Polynesia, by contrast, seemed to epitomize a vital, prelapsarian sexual innocence, exempted (if only provisionally) from capitalist calculations of value and the impositions of bourgeois morality. As such, the exoticized Pacific furnished a shared imaginary in which they could express forms of homosocial intimacy otherwise marginalized in Western discourse. But as Stoddard’s leaf metaphor implies, this network of queer, cosmopolitan kinship—to adapt Kristin Mahony’s (2022) recent formulation—also trafficked in well-worn stereotypes about native degeneration. (The example of Kána-aná, to whom Noguchi compared himself and to which we will return later, is illustrative: in Stoddard’s telling, the once vibrant youth chafes against the “manacles of our modern proprieties” and drowns himself in a characteristically Decadent bout of ennui [Stoddard 1873, p. 70]). Polynesia’s role as a touchstone in the literary and personal relationships of Stoddard, Noguchi, and their friends depended on its figuration as a decaying Eden, where forms of idealized primitive life could be experienced before they disappeared forever under the onslaught of modernity. In their writings, the Pacific thus emerged as a site for queer expression and connection, but such freedom came at the expense of the region’s original inhabitants, whose lived experiences of (and resistances to) colonialism are occluded by the Decadent framing of contact as inexorably fatal to Indigenous cultures. By way of conclusion, I will turn to contemporary postcolonial and Pacific scholarship in order to contend with this particular “misuse” of Decadence: that is, as the driver of an exoticism that at once protested and corroborated imperialist narratives about the inevitable extinction of Indigenous peoples.

2. Charles Warren Stoddard’s “Barbarian Days”

When Stoddard first travelled to the Pacific in 1864, he was twenty-one and looking to recuperate from a nervous breakdown that biographer Roger Austen (1991) attributes in part to his adolescent wranglings with his homosexuality (p. 26). The Pacific, recommended by a family doctor for its warm climate, turned out to be congenial in more ways than one. As Patty O’Brien (2006) has observed, “unfettered sexual freedom for voyaging men was…the foremost myth of South Seas colonization” (p. 11), a myth perpetuated in the eighteenth-century accounts of James Cook, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, and other explorers who remarked, with varying degrees of rapt enthusiasm and prudish disapproval, on the perceived sexual licentiousness of Polynesian women. But equally paradigmatic in the history of Pacific encounter are early Western accounts of non-heteronormative Polynesians. Consider the Tahitian māhū, or third gender. To British observers, as Wallace (2003) explains, the māhū “announced sexual possibilities between men that cannot be recuperated to extant European models for thinking about male sexual ‘crimes’”; sodomy in particular, defined by its violation of culturally proscribed sexual norms, fails to encompass the figure of the māhū, who is “sanctioned by custom” and thus “maps out the more precarious field of sexual normativity across which Polynesian practice and European identity come together and swerve apart” (Wallace 2003, p. 16). The precarity that both fascinated and repelled early British visitors to Tahiti was intensified in Hawai‘i, where the social performances of aikāne—high ranking young men who served as both political aids and sexual partners for certain chiefs, but without the gender inversion or marked effeminacy of māhū—further confounded Western attempts to circumscribe normative sexuality. (This is especially the case because, as Wallace remarks, Hawaiians often interpreted the command structure on Cook’s ships in terms of the aikāne and chief relationship; records suggest that the British were surprisingly “unembarrassed” by the implication, and throughout their time in Hawai‘i “kept signaling this particular sexual availability” (pp. 47–48).) From the moment of contact, then, Europeans construed Polynesia as a space of sexual freedom, where codes governing sexual desire and gender presentation were not so much transgressed as reconfigured entirely. And while this construction of Polynesia as sexual utopia/dystopia contributed to broader imperialist discourses justifying Euro-American intervention in the region, I would stress here that Western sexual fantasies were not in all cases simply a means of enacting colonial domination in the realm of the personal. Indeed, what Joseph Allen Boone (2015) has suggested about homoeroticism in Orientalist art and literature might be usefully applied to some Euro-American experiences in the Pacific:

The act of crossing—whether traveling, writing, or reading—also tacitly signifies one’s willingness to offer oneself up to unsuspected, multiple ways of being. The traveling mind and mindful traveler become, in such instances, intimate participants as well as spectators in culturally specific situations that, on occasion, transform hitherto unquestioned certitudes into unknowns that must be confronted and worked through.

(p. xxxiv)

It was perhaps this very indeterminacy that appealed to young Stoddard upon his arrival in Hawai‘i. At a point in his life when he was wavering between religious traditions, uncertain about his aspiring literary career and unable to make sense of his own sexual impulses, Polynesia promised a more open field for creative and personal self-definition. The promise was more or less fulfilled on both counts: although Stoddard, ever the nomad, never settled permanently in Polynesia, he built his reputation on the sketches and stories he produced there, many first published in the California periodical Overland Monthly and later collected in the aforementioned South-Sea Idyls, Hawaiian Life: Being Lazy Letters from Low Latitudes (Stoddard 1894), and other travelogues. With its sumptuous, dreamy imagery and florid style, this body of South Seas work earned him some renown as a bohemian bon vivant in the style of Oscar Wilde, as well as an authoritative voice on the Pacific (Looby 2023, p. 2). Later, Noguchi (1914b, p. 128) would refer to the late writer as “dear old Stoddard of Hawaiian fame”.

More specifically, Hawai‘i roused in Stoddard what O’Brien describes (in a heterosexual context) as “visions of a lost classical past[,] wherein sexuality was untouched by the corrupting hand of Christianity or other negative effects of modern civilization” (p. 68). Of course, Stoddard was hardly the only Victorian traveler to conceive of his journeys in temporal terms, as voyages both across space and back in time: the notion that contemporary “savages” were developmentally equivalent to pre-modern humans was foundational to nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology, and many scholars have noted the consequently elegiac tenor of Victorian travel writing about the Pacific, where Indigenous lifeways appeared to be giving way under the pressure of colonial modernity (see Stocking 1987; Rennie 1999; Edmond 1997; Brantlinger 2003; Thomas 2021). But few writers articulated the clash between Polynesian past and Western present as starkly, nor staked their allegiances as stridently, as Stoddard. His Pacific oeuvre is laced with the language of sentiment and nostalgia, often premised (as I will reiterate later) on a Decadent ambivalence toward the modern. In his preface to the 1874 British reprint of South-Sea Idyls, published under the title Summer Cruising in the South Seas (Stoddard 1874), Stoddard characterizes the Pacific as the last bastion of “simple and natural life,” and moreover claims kinship with the uncivilized “islander.” “All the rites of savagedom find a responsive echo in my heart,” he writes, “it is like a dream dimly remembered, and at last realized; it must be that the untamed spirit of some aboriginal ancestor quickens my blood” (p. vi). With characteristic frankness—one twentieth-century reader has remarked that “Stoddard’s prose barely conceals its erotic implications” (Crowley 1991, p. xxvii)—Stoddard connects this sense of kinship directly to the Polynesians’ more permissive attitudes toward desire and embodied experience, which he considers part and parcel of their more natural, authentic existence. According to Stoddard, “with them ‘love is enough,’ and it is not necessarily one with sexual passion: their life is sensuous and picturesque, and is incapable of true interpretation unless viewed from their own standpoint.” “Among them no laws are valid save Nature’s own,” he adds, “but they abide faithfully by these” (p. vi). He frames the subsequent narrative as a means of resurrecting his cherished “barbarian days” in memory (p. 56), as well as a protest against the imposition of Western “civilization”—a bugbear of Stoddard’s—on an Indigenous population purportedly unsuited to its stultifying conditions.

The most frequent object of Stoddard’s nostalgic reflection, not to mention his sexual attention, is the beautiful Polynesian youth. His Pacific memoirs abound with examples: the aforementioned Kána-aná, Hua Manu, a boy whom Stoddard whimsically dubs “Joe of Lahaina,” Kahéle, and Kane-Pihi, among others. Like the multifaceted trope of the “beautiful boy” that Boone traces everywhere in Orientalist discourse (p. 67), Stoddard’s relationships with his Polynesian companions both invite and resist comparison to the forms of pederasty that his readers would have associated with classical Greece and the Middle East. Kána-aná, for instance, is introduced as a sylph-like androgyne, with a “round, full, rather girlish face,” “lips ripe and expressive,” and “eyes perfectly glorious, —regular almonds—with the mythical lashes ‘that sweep,’ etc. etc.” (Stoddard 1873, p. 28). Perplexed by the boy’s ambiguous dress, Stoddard briefly refers to Kána-aná as “it” until settling on masculine pronouns (p. 27), and he later claims that some of his American friends questioned “whether he might possibly have been a girl all the time”—a supposition Stoddard denies without elaboration, though we can assume he would know given that they shared a bed in their time together (p. 43). Similarly, Stoddard’s first recollection of “Joe of Lahaina” is as a desirable, yet pointedly unsexed body bathing in the moonlight, “a figure so fresh and joyous that I began to realize how the old Greeks could worship mere physical beauty and forget its higher forms” (p. 114). Joe’s penchant for self-decoration and enthusiasm for what Stoddard terms “housekeeping” (p. 113) likewise underscore the boy’s effeminacy. By contrast, the “colossal” Hua Manu—who, in one certainly fictionalized anecdote, saves Stoddard’s life by feeding him his blood—embodies a distinctly masculine beauty, with “an arm like Jove’s” and back hair thick enough for Stoddard to cling to after their canoe capsizes (p. 152). More intriguingly, Stoddard’s own positionality relative to these beautiful boys does not always mesh with conventional articulations of the imperial gaze. Neither does it precisely exemplify the dynamics of reversal or refusal that Ann E. Kaplan (1997), drawing on the work of Homi Bhabha and others, associates with diasporic and avant-garde cinema, or which Hawaiian studies scholar Stephanie Nohelani Teves (2018) identifies in contemporary performances of “defiant indigeneity.” In Stoddard’s memoirs, gazing is instead an act of mutual vulnerability, a vector for expressions of power and desire that (however temporarily) dissolve the hierarchies of race, age, and nationality. He depicts these cross-cultural encounters as courtships in which he occupies, even relishes, the passive feminine role: Kána-aná reportedly has a smile “that flatters you into submission against your will” (p. 28), and Stoddard is helpless to resist when the boy declares that they will live together in his village; when Hua Manu, treading water alongside Stoddard’s boat, offers him a gift of birds’ eggs, the older man recalls leaning over the gunwale “in the attitude of the Juliet in the balcony scene, assuring that egg-boy that my heart was his” (p. 153). For Stoddard, these instances of pliancy bear out his fantasy of the Pacific as a sexual utopia where connections can be forged freely, outside the structural constraints of gender normativity, White supremacy, and all the other social artifices of “civilization” (p. 31).

But these utopian fantasies are untenable under the conditions of modernity, and nearly all of Stoddard’s beautiful boys come to untimely ends. Stoddard’s idyllic life with Kána-aná, for instance, devolves into an indolence from which he feels he must extricate himself: in a tacit allusion to Alfred Tennyson’s ([1832] 1842) poem “The Lotos-Eaters”—a popular touchstone for Victorian travel writers struggling to convey Hawai‘i’s balmy climate—Stoddard compares their existence to the sleep-inducing poppy, which, “living only to occupy so much space in the universe,…buds, blossoms, goes to seed, dies, and is forgotten” (Stoddard 1873, p. 37; see also Hopkins 1862; Bird 1876). Fearing a fate like that of Tennyson’s mariners, who give up all thoughts of home “to live and lie reclined,/On the hills like Gods together” (p. 183), Stoddard convinces Kána-aná to join him in San Francisco, where his culture shock serves as the basis for several humorous fish-out-of-water anecdotes. Stoddard’s tone turns serious again as Kána-aná grows homesick, and Stoddard eventually sends him back to Hawai‘i, bidding farewell to “all that I ever knew of genuine, spontaneous, and unfettered love” (p. 55). The tale picks up again some unspecified time later, when Stoddard seeks Kána-aná in his village only to find that he has drowned himself, unable—so Stoddard claims—to “return to his original sphere of trust and contentment” after having experienced the “artificial and hollow life of the world” (p. 70). Similarly, Stoddard writes of losing touch with Joe of Lahaina for several years before rediscovering him, now grossly disfigured, in a remote leper colony on the island of Moloka‘i; earlier descriptions of Joe’s roguish humor, resplendent dress, and classical beauty stand in stark counterpoint to Stoddard’s final glimpse of him, “sitting and singing in the mouth of his grave, —clothed all in death” (p. 127). Perhaps most evocative of this motif of the tragic native is the fisherman Kane-Pihi, whose story is recounted in Stoddard’s 1894 memoir Hawaiian Life. Like Stoddard’s other beautiful boys, Kane-Pihi’s appeal derives from his animal sensuality, of a piece with the simplicity of his life: Stoddard first meets him lying on the sand, a “slim, sleek creature, unconscious, unclad, sprawled inartistically, absorbing sunshine and apparently steeped to the toes in it,” and he goes on to awe Stoddard with his athleticism in the water (pp. 212–13). But ten years later, Stoddard unexpectedly finds the so-called “man-fish” (p. 222) serving time in prison, where he later dies of smallpox.

The sheer repetitiveness of this downward arc—of the youths listed above, only Káhele escapes the memoirs unscathed—invites us to read these homoerotic narratives as lapsarian allegories for what Stoddard describes in Hawaiian Life as “Progress—the ogre of the nineteenth century—Progress with a precipitous P” (Stoddard 1894, p. 177). Each of these boys enters Stoddard’s ken in a state of innocence, as “child[ren] of Nature” whose temperaments are precisely suited to their charmed tropical circumstances (p. 210). Each of them comes into fatal contact with modernity: Kána-aná of South-Sea Idyls chafes under the “new restraints” (p. 46) of social life in San Francisco and wilts like a flower, “transplanted…from the hot sand of the Orient to the hard clay of our more material world” (p. 52); Joe develops a taste for dandyish Western dress and eventually contracts leprosy; Kane-Pihi is “seduced into the town” by a missionary and embarks on a short but eventful career as a con artist (Stoddard 1894, p. 228). In every instance, they are “transformed by civilization” in ways that clearly evoke the Biblical fall; Stoddard writes that Kane-Pihi, for example, “had eaten of the tree of knowledge and fallen in its shade” (p. 230). Crucially, too, and as I will reiterate later, Stoddard interprets their respective life stories within the framework of what Patrick Brantlinger (2003) has termed “extinction discourse,” according to which Indigenous peoples were widely assumed to be dying out. As Brantlinger further explains, extinction discourse is omnipresent in nineteenth-century writing about indigeneity, “often taking the form of proleptic elegy, sentimentally or mournfully expressing…the confidence of self-fulfilling prophecy” (p. 3). Such confidence is perceptible in Stoddard’s Pacific memoirs, where conventional elegy for the fallen Hawaiian youth slips seamlessly into proleptic elegy for the race as a whole: for Stoddard, Kane-Pihi’s degeneration from “perfect human animal” (Stoddard 1894, p. 222) to petty criminal illustrates how his people’s “doom is accomplished” (p. 210), their fate spelled out in census tables, as well as the visual evidence of vacant churches and decayed villages. That Stoddard punctuates Kane-Pihi’s story with an indictment of the “American Missionary,” whom he accuses of capitalizing on “the grave of the [Hawaiian] nation” (p. 238), does not change the fact that he presumes the death is a foregone conclusion.

The degree to which Stoddard recognized his own complicity, both in the Indigenous depopulation crisis and U.S. imperialism in the Pacific more broadly, is an open question. On the one hand, he never takes explicit responsibility for the supposed corruption of his beautiful boys, even when (as in the case of Kána-aná) he is the means by which they encounter civilization’s corrupting forces. On the other hand, his tendency to vacillate between humor and elegy has the effect of ironizing his more extravagant expressions of affection for Pacific Islanders, especially in his later work. In 1894, with the benefit of hindsight, he would dismiss the “impulsive preface” (p. 107) to Summer Cruising in the South Seas—in which he declared his affinity for the “sensuous and picturesque” natives—for “propitiat[ing]” a “multitude of sins” (p. 108). While he never names these sins, his subsequent meditation on the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy a year prior suggests at least a peripheral awareness of how his “guileless” tourist’s fantasies may have contributed to his beloved islands’ colonization (p. 108). Taken as a whole, Stoddard’s later writings lapse into a pessimism that Chris Bongie (1991) identifies with exoticism in the fin de siècle, an era in which global imperialism threatened to efface the differences between self and other in which the exotic imagination takes root, making the exotic “seem less a space of possibility than one of impossibility” (p. 17). The self-defeating nature of the exoticist project, i.e., contact with the exotic dispels the distance that makes the exotic so tantalizing, is evident throughout Stoddard’s memoirs, and in his late writing, becomes the occasion for some sincere soul-searching. At the very least, his equivocation toward his own sentimentality poses a particularly complex, attenuated iteration of what Renato Rosaldo (1989) has termed “imperialist nostalgia.” To the extent that Stoddard’s conflicted nostalgia emerges from the friction between the forces of political, technological, and economic modernization (epitomized in an American culture he reluctantly represents) and forms of pre-capitalist social organization (epitomized in Hawaiian culture), I would add that we can consider this nostalgia itself Decadent. As Regenia Gagnier (2021), Robert Stilling (2018), Cherrie Kwok (2025), and other scholars of the movement have shown us, Decadence encompasses more than the relatively narrow set of themes and styles that we associate with the London and Paris avant-garde. Rather, Decadence might be productively thought of as a global reaction to the tumult of fin-de-siècle experience, as “social relations under[went] processes of deformation” and “cultures looked at, reified, and fetishized each other” (Regenia Gagnier 2021, p. 167). Stoddard’s Pacific memoirs, poised between his fetishized ideal of Indigenous authenticity and the modern imperial machine that threatened to destroy it, register one particularly vexed irruption of this more immanent form of Decadence.

3. Stoddard, Noguchi, and Queer Kinship in the Decadent Pacific

Intriguingly, and more pertinently for my purposes here, this skein of Decadent tropes and preoccupations also shaped Stoddard’s rapport with other men living and working in the Pacific, in ways that defy clean-cut racial interpretation. Robert Louis Stevenson, for instance, first traveled to Polynesia at Stoddard’s recommendation (Peri 2024), and Stoddard would later lens his memories of him through his own conception of the Pacific as an imperiled queer Eden. In his 1903 memoir Exits and Entrances (Stoddard 1903), published a decade after Stevenson’s death in Samoa, Stoddard recalls being struck by the younger man’s appearance on their first meeting: “unfleshly to the verge of emaciation,” Stevenson seemed “more likely to be revolted than appealed to by carnality of form” (p. 17). Stoddard found his work similarly frigid, “replete with elegant mannerisms typical of high-bred intelligence” but with no “pronounced flesh-tint” (p. 22). This disembodied intellectualism was precisely what Stoddard hoped would be remedied in Polynesia, where Stevenson would face “truth personified” in the naked, “sun-browned” figure of the Pacific Islander (p. 20). As Stoddard further recalls, Stevenson’s hypothetical reaction itself became the occasion for exotic fantasy:

I used to love to picture the bread-fruited suburbs of Papeete appealing to the softer senses of the poet. There [Stevenson] could not fail to encounter the voluptuous Tahitian…I said to myself, apart from the inevitable animate attractions, the consummate splendour of vast palm plantations, the lisp of the reef-zoned effeminate sea, the almost overwhelming fragrance of indolent gales heavy with the perfume of citron and lime—these will surely paint his skies a richer colour and inflame the blood of his heroes, if not that of his heroines.

(pp. 27–28)

It might be easy to dismiss this as a straightforward instance of vicarious pleasure, in which Stoddard reexperiences Tahiti’s “voluptuous” appeal through Stevenson’s eyes. But in the context of Stoddard’s professed admiration for the other writer—Stevenson had the “rare kind of personality that inspires in the susceptible heart a deep though passionless love” (p. 16)—we might also read his daydream as an oblique expression of frustrated desire for a man whose hieratic ethereality seemed to resist eros altogether. After all, it is the prospect of Stevenson’s sexual awakening, not the Tahitian’s, that fires Stoddard’s imagination here. The Pacific is likewise central to Stoddard’s recollections of the poet Joaquin Miller, also the subject of an essay in Exits and Entrances. In Miller, whose physicality and self-described “unlearned, uncouth” verse contrasted strikingly with Stevenson’s sexless genius, Stoddard recognized a kindred spirit: “never had a breezier bit of humanity dawned upon me this side of the South Seas,” Stoddard later remarked of their first meeting in San Francisco (p. 223). Stoddard promptly invited Miller to join him in Tahiti, and while he declined at the time, the pair went on to develop an intimate friendship that included brief stints of cohabitation in Rome and New York. (Miller would later travel to Hawai‘i to report on the treason trial of deposed queen Lydia Lili‘uokalani; like Stoddard, Miller depicted Hawai‘i as a tropical paradise overshadowed by the twin specters of Indigenous “decadence” and political unrest [Miller (1895), p. 3; see also “Joaquin Miller’s Testimony (1895)”].) For Stoddard, then, Decadent Pacific imagery functioned as a kind of gay code, a structuring metaphor that allowed him to normalize and articulate dissident desires under the guise of an escapist “return to [the] state of nature” amid a “degenerate” modern world (Stoddard 1894, pp. 226, 231).

The potency of the exotic as a shared topos for the expression of homosocial affection is apparent in poet Yone Noguchi’s life and work. Born in Nagoya in 1875, Noguchi fell in love with English literature as a teenager and traveled alone to the U.S. in 1893, with few resources and middling spoken fluency; by the time he returned to Japan eleven years later, he had published several volumes of English-language poetry and prose, helping to initiate the Anglophone haiku form that would later be adopted by Ezra Pound and other modernists, and also cultivated connections with avant-garde writers across America and Britain (Sueyoshi 2012, pp. 18–19; Lavery 2019, pp. 82–87). Noguchi was particularly enmeshed in San Francisco’s bohemian community, which, like many other modernist movements, integrated the non-European and antimodern into a general program of cultural subversion (see Gluck 2005; Gatheral 2020). As his biographer Amy Sueyoshi points out, the exotic was a popular medium of exchange in those circles: for instance, Stoddard took to signing his letters with the Hawaiian salutation aloha, and the White writers and artists in his orbit often exchanged kimono and Japanese prints as gifts. This exoticism informed Noguchi’s reception among the bohemian literati, where he was the object of Orientalist curiosity and (especially among a select set of men) much fawning affection. Gelett Burgess, publisher of the bohemian “little magazine” The Lark and co-editor of Noguchi’s debut collection Seen & Unseen (Noguchi 1896), painted the then-twenty-two-year-old poet as an Eastern sage, “come to do his part in recalling the ancient glory of the great poets and philosophers of his land; watching, calm-eyed and serious…to see if the old words can live in the Western civilization; and if the sheeted memories of the Past may be re-embodied in our English tongue” (Burgess 1896, p. i). That same year, the playwright and bohemian tastemaker Porter Garnett ([1896] 1897) dedicated a poem to Noguchi that compared him to Persian poet Omar Khayyam, praising in particular Noguchi’s capacity to transform the “Wilderness of Life” into transcendent “Visions of a Life more blessed.” Stoddard offered a similar assessment in his introduction to Noguchi’s (1897) second collection, The Voice of the Valley, where he enthused over the young poet’s “startling originality and power” and “charming audacity of innocence.” To Stoddard, Noguchi was an untouched “child of nature” possessed with the “sensuous imagination of the Oriental,” a capacity that in turn lent his verse “primitive eloquence” (Stoddard 1897, p. 10). As Sueyoshi further observes, perceptions of Noguchi’s supposed atavism, which linked him to an earlier and more barbaric but also more innocent past, converged with broader stereotypes of Japanese men as childlike and effeminate, investing in his person “much of the same mystique and allure as [Stoddard’s] Native Hawaiian male lovers” (p. 131).

Noguchi’s attitude toward this mystique and its homoerotic subtext shifted over the course of his American career. At its outset, he tended to resist racialized attention. Joaquin Miller, who had hosted Noguchi at his Oakland farm and fostered his early poetic ambitions, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the young Japanese poet wanted to “write for America”; Noguchi refused to take publicity photos in Japanese dress, and his earliest collections eschew Orientalist subject matter (Sueyoshi 2012, p. 27). Seen & Unseen, for instance, largely belies Burgess’s claims of Eastern esotericism, opting instead to explore the Decadent themes of ennui, moral ambivalence, and nihilism in a series of prose poems that evoke the ornate sensuality of Edgar Allen Poe, Paul Verlaine, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Fitzgerald (translator of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám), and Oscar Wilde, all of whom Noguchi would later cite as influences (see Noguchi 1914a, 1914b). The speaker of “Seas of Reverie,” to take one illustrative example, revels in melancholic reflection, captured in an oceanic metaphor that recalls Swinburne’s synesthetic, sadomasochistic fantasies of self-dissolution: “gossamer-surging, pleasure-foamed, dream-bodied seas of reverie, odored with passion…My soul, heavy-weighted with the dusts of life still, alas! lingering in the rusty, broken body, sinks downward to the bottomless bottom of Reverie’s sea…” (Noguchi 1896, p. 50). The nature imagery of Seen & Unseen and The Voice of the Valley is likewise rooted in Romantic and aesthetic neopaganism rather than the Japanese landscape subjects that Noguchi would take up in later years. The Voice of the Valley, with its long free-verse lines and exultant cosmological vision—“Behold, a baby flower hymns the creation of the universe” (Noguchi 1897, p. 42)—is particularly indebted to the sexually dissident work of Walt Whitman, in which Noguchi had been “initiated” by Miller (Noguchi 1914b, p. 21). Of course, Noguchi could not efface every trace of foreignness from these early writings: as Blake Allmendinger (2021) remarks, their “faulty English and strange metaphors appealed to…a western fetish for Japanese culture in all its forms” (p. 98). But Noguchi’s goal, clearly, was to present himself as the rightful heir to an Anglo-American literary legacy, and not simply an exotic dilettante. His commitment to Western poetics is apparent, too, in his theorization of the Anglophone haiku, which, as Grace Lavery (2019) points out, “would not precisely import aesthetic effects from the Japanese, but rather amplify and extend” an “Orientalness” Noguchi found already endemic in nineteenth-century British verse (p. 89).

In his flirtatious private correspondence with Stoddard, however, Noguchi played up the miscegenetic nature of their relationship: he professed to be merely a “Japanese youth” in need of “good advice,” and declared himself a “most feminine dove” to Stoddard’s “honest sweet gentleman” (qtd. in [Sueyoshi 2012, p. 39]). His subsequent work embraced his Japanese background, often in ways that conflate racial otherness with other forms of gender and sexual deviance. His epistolary novel The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (Noguchi [1901] 2007), for example, renders his immigrant experience through the lively voice of Miss Morning Glory, a Japanese ingenue accompanying her diplomat uncle on a tour of the U.S.; like Noguchi, Morning Glory lives with an eccentric poet in a rustic commune outside Oakland, and over the course of her travels, develops erotically charged friendships with White men and women—most notably with a girl named Ada, who gives Morning Glory her “first taste of the kiss” (p. 31). The queer cross-cultural intimacy that Noguchi ventriloquizes through Morning Glory is expressed more directly in his collection From the Eastern Sea (Noguchi 1903), which includes a poem dedicated to Stoddard. While much of the collection touches on heterosexual desire—at the time of writing, Noguchi was embroiled in a love triangle with his editor Léonie Gilmour and journalist Ethel Armes—“To Charles Warren Stoddard” is the only poem that names the object of its devotion, and one of the few to present romantic love as literal rather than a metaphor for the poet’s relationship to nature. The poem’s specificity in turn lends a bold concreteness to its marriage metaphor:

Night! The spirit of resignation homes in the night. We eloping from the vile land, ask a lodging of the master of solitude.

O wind! Death-messages from God are sent unto flowers and leaves. Ah, the autumn with frosting teeth tells her fate as a deserted wife!

Stillness! All mortals send their dreamships heavenward on the tide of sleep. Thou and I, Charles, sit alone like two shy stars, west and east.

(p. 23)

Of note here is how Noguchi recasts the isolation of racial and sexual difference as the grounds for radical sympathy between people who at first appear to have little in common. Separated by their hemispheric origins, “west and east,” but united in their desire to “elope” from the workaday world, speaker and addressee find camaraderie in their shared abjection. In this sense, “To Charles Warren Stoddard” meshes with the overt Orientalism of the rest of the collection, which announces its exoticism in its title and the illustration of Mount Fuji on its frontispiece, as well as its syncretic bricolage of Japanese, pagan, and Biblical allusions; just as Stoddard found refuge in his self-imposed Pacific exile, Noguchi conceives of his union with Stoddard as a compensatory outgrowth of his alienation from both his homeland and mainstream American society. Sueyoshi, Noguchi’s biographer, points out how his life bears out this connection between cultural otherness and sexual liberation: “as aliens in foreign land,” she speculates, Noguchi and other queer Japanese men “may have found a space in which they could express less conventional intimacies with undue passion” (p. 115).

“Undue passion” neatly describes Noguchi’s (1904) National Magazine feature “In the Bungalow with Charles Warren Stoddard,” with which I began the essay. Subtitled “A Protest against Modernism”—by which he means modernity, not the literary movement—the piece proclaims Noguchi’s affection for Stoddard with a candor that was remarkable even amid their relatively free-wheeling bohemian crowd. “So,” he begins, “our love (love between Stoddard and me, by Buddha’s name) was sealed one Spring day, ’97.” On that day, Noguchi gathered flowers on Miller’s estate in Oakland, climbed a hill, and “threw…kisses” in the direction of his “imaginary Charley,” whom he knew only through letters (p. 304). When they finally met at the titular bungalow, the pair immediately settled into perfect accord: they “talked on many things far and near,” “agreed on every point,” and later slept in the same bed together, in an atmosphere of companionable solitude that recalls the final lines of “To Charles Warren Stoddard.” Although Noguchi nominally objects to Stoddard’s disappointment at his lack of a kimono—“Did he expect me to be another Kana Ana,” Noguchi writes, “a little sea god of his South Sea, shaking the spray from his forehead like a porpoise?”—he otherwise expresses fondness for Stoddard’s “lovely” Pacific writing, which he connects to the older writer’s sense of temporal and cultural displacement. In Noguchi’s estimation,

[Stoddard] had been in the South Sea to shake off the world’s trouble. He had returned to civilization again, perhaps after turning to a half-savage. How he wished to be a barbarian, and live forever in some cozy spot! There would be nothing jollier than to eat with one’s fingers, using a leaf for a platter. He is always puzzling to find out where he belongs. Not in America, to be sure.

(p. 305)

This longing to “shake off the world’s trouble” by retreating into a “barbarian” past is a sentiment with which Noguchi sympathizes. In a parallel to Stoddard’s distaste for his Western dress, Noguchi experiences a twinge of disappointment at the bungalow’s “modernized” amenities, such as a doorbell—a “door knob if you must,” Noguchi concedes (p. 305). His resistance to the doorbell is on one level facetious, but it is also emblematic of the Decadent logic underlying the essay’s “Protest against Modernism.” For both writers, the material developments of modern industrial capitalism had left humankind aesthetically and spiritually impoverished, hemmed in by the strictures of productivity and respectability; only in the primitive South Seas could one practice the forms of liberated “love” that Noguchi, quoting Miller, elsewhere defined as the “heart of Nature” (Noguchi 1914b, p. 40). But Noguchi, as a native to the Pacific himself, was both the object and agent of this nostalgia, so he is perhaps better able to recognize the impossibility of returning to the longed-for past: hence his concluding sketch of Stoddard at Le Gallienne’s New York dinner, where Stoddard “appeared like an abandoned boat—perhaps a Hawaiian canoe—terribly tottering on the ocean waves, not knowing where he was going.” Noguchi’s retrospective thus parallels the aging, obsolescent Stoddard with the “nation of warriors and lovers” that, as Stoddard laments at that same gathering, “are falling like the leaf” (p. 307). The parallel is underscored by the essay’s mournful conclusion, in which Noguchi quotes the final line of “To Charles Warren Stoddard”: “Stoddard has left New York for good, as he said…Is it our fate that we drift away from each other? ‘Thou and I, O Charles, sit alone like two shy stars, West and East’” (p. 308). Where the original line emphasized a solidarity bred out of shared deviance from social expectation, the downbeat ending of “In the Bungalow” recontextualizes the relationship between these “two shy stars” as one of fateful estrangement. Their disparate backgrounds, once a license for their flirtation, have become an inescapable barrier to lasting union, and their romance recedes into that bygone era for which Noguchi yearns.

This turn toward elegy corroborates Sueyoshi’s reading of the essay as a “conclusion rather than a beginning to [Noguchi]’s sexually ambiguous and thus potentially queer writing” (p. 104). As she points out, Noguchi had composed “In the Bungalow” shortly after returning to Japan, and his subsequent work both drew on and fed into the broader stigmatization of homosexual practices in his home country. But this later body of writing, while more censorious on the subject of same-sex desire, also sustains and in some ways intensifies the Decadent exoticism that he had developed under Miller’s and Stoddard’s tutelage, and which furnished the basis for his homoerotic entanglements with Stoddard. In his essay collections Through the Torii and The Story of Yone Noguchi (Noguchi 1914a, 1914b), this exoticism takes the form of conscientious resistance to the modern, which Noguchi associates with the industrialized West, in tandem with a nostalgic longing for the past as embodied in “old” Japan and the Pacific more generally. In “The Fourteenth of December,” for example, Noguchi recounts an epiphany he experienced in a Tokyo restaurant, as he looked around at the Europeanized manners of his fellow patrons and wondered “if this was real Japan where our fathers, only fifty years ago, wore two swords in the place of the gold watch of to-day, and ate rice gruel in place of beef and lobster” (Noguchi 1914a, pp. 67–68). For him, the change is not a happy one: as a self-described “savage in my heart” and a “lover of tropical immorality” (p. 75), Noguchi chafes against the “prosaic life we are leading,” instead seeking relief in daydreams of the forty-seven rōnin and other incidents from Japan’s feudal past (p. 73). “Our modern Japan is going mad over every sort of Western thing,” he complains elsewhere (Noguchi 1914b, p. 174). And yet, for all his inveighing against Westernization, Noguchi’s anti-modern traditionalism continued to draw inspiration from contemporary Western Decadence. If anything, Decadent influences are more conspicuous in his later prose, which engages critically with the work of Rossetti, Wilde, and W.B. Yeats, alludes to formative encounters with Verlaine’s poetry, and quotes at length from neopagan novelist Fiona Macleod (William Sharp) and Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. (Noguchi’s essay “Netsukes,” a series of paradoxical aphorisms about art, life, and pleasure, is a case in point; his assertion that “there is no other way to cure the soul’s illness except by the senses” [Noguchi 1914a, p. 188] is a near-verbatim riff on Lord Henry’s theory of New Hedonism in The Picture of Dorian Gray [Wilde ([1890] 2005), p. 26]). Stoddard, too, hovers in the background of Noguchi’s late-career Decadence. Though he downplays the erotic elements of their relationship, Noguchi glosses his own poetics in language that Stoddard might have used: “my song,” Noguchi reflects, “is always with the falling leaves and the dying day” (p. 158).

Small wonder, then, that Noguchi entertained a lifelong fascination with the islands of Stoddard’s Pacific travelogues, a fascination which extended from his youthful sympathy for the cause of Hawaiian independence to his identification with Kána-aná, the “little sea god” of Stoddard’s South Sea (Noguchi 1914b, p. 31). Like Stoddard, Noguchi was compelled by Polynesia’s apparent concatenation of natural fecundity and premature decay; Stoddard’s islands seemed to suit Noguchi’s maxim, drawn from both Japanese and Western literary traditions, that “life will be more beautiful from the reason of contrast with death…and death, again from the contrast with life, will be more tender in pathos, more subtle in rhythm” (Noguchi 1914a, p. 158). For Noguchi, as for Stoddard, the seeming inability of Polynesians to adapt to Western modernity only enhanced the Pacific’s morbid glamour by transforming it into what Bongie describes as an exotic “elsewhere,” in which one could briefly recuperate certain values—closeness to nature, sexual liberty, pleasure for its own sake—that were incompatible with global capitalism (p. 5). That such a recuperation was temporary complicated but did not demolish the fantasy. On the contrary, for a figure like Noguchi, who spent his later career shunning the queer associations of his earlier days, the irrecoverable nature of those premodern values enabled him to speak of his relationship with Stoddard as if the connection were ancient history, even while Stoddard was still alive. Decadence reconfigured the Pacific into a horizon of queer possibility, where visitors might adopt and shed the freedoms of “savage” life at will.

4. Decadence and the Fatal Impact: A Caveat

What makes this use of Decadence also a “misuse,” to return to the watchword of this special issue, is twofold. First, and as I have suggested already, Stoddard’s posture of vulnerability to the Indigenous gaze had the effect of sanitizing the very real imperial dynamics that structured his encounters, thus staging what Mary Louise Pratt ([1992] 2008) has described as anticonquest—a strategy for representation, characteristic of post-Enlightenment travel literature, “whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony” (p. 9). Second, and more significantly, Stoddard’s and Noguchi’s conceptions of the Decadent Pacific relied on Indigenous population collapse in order to create certain literary effects. In his many panegyrics to beautiful but doomed Hawaiian youth, Stoddard never questions the inevitability of the youth’s unseasonable demise, though he sometimes evinces enough self-awareness to regret his own part in it; Noguchi, who knew Hawai‘i only through books, had no reason to question Stoddard’s accounts, especially since they comported with his artistic investment in the contrast between life and death. To put it another way, their Decadence aestheticizes the idea of “fatal impact,” which held that the arrival of Europeans in the Pacific precipitated devastating and irreversible demographic consequences for its native peoples (Moorehead 1966). The fatal impact thesis, though a powerful anti-colonial critique, had the effect of perpetuating the imperialist fatalism of nineteenth-century extinction discourse into the twentieth century, presuming (as Stoddard and countless other Victorian writers did) the eventual disappearance of Indigenous cultures. In seeking to defend Indigenous “victims” from European domination, scholarship that emerged from the fatal impact interpretation also tended to overlook the dynamism of Pacific Island societies, as well as the agency of native individuals as political actors in their own right (see Edmond 1997; Brantlinger 2003; Geiger 2007). Instead, over the past several decades, post-colonial scholars have increasingly focalized what Anishinaabe poet and scholar Gerald Vizenor ([1994] 1999) has termed “survivance” (p. vii), or an active sense of continued Indigenous presence in the world. As Lorenz Gonschor (2019) points out, Pacific historiography has likewise been animated by a renewed attention to native agency, especially in the field of Hawaiian studies: work by Kamanamaikalani Beamer (2009), ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui (2014), David A. Chang (2016), Noenoe K. Silva (2017), and others reminds us that Kanaka Maoli culture not only survived, but in many ways flourished, after the supposedly fatal cataclysm of contact. If nothing else, the continued existence of native peoples throughout the Pacific today explodes Stoddard’s pronouncement, all the way back in 1894, that their “doom” was already “accomplished.”

But for Stoddard, the accuracy of his prognostications was always less important than the Decadent atmosphere they helped to generate. The Pacific was for him an escapist idea, a tenuous Eden where a man who professedly “hate[d] civilization” might play at returning to nature—free, for the moment, from the “formalities of society” and the drudgery of labor under capitalism—before once again doffing society’s “manacles” (Stoddard 1873, pp. 62, 70). Although his relationship to Western conceptions of the Pacific was quite different from Stoddard’s, Noguchi also utilized exoticism, both his own and that of his imaginary South Seas, to give voice to same-sex attractions that might raise eyebrows in other contexts. The Decadent Pacific thus furnished a repository of idioms, images, and themes from which both writers could draw in their overlapping queer fantasies. “Business, worry, and the world in general”: this was the wearisome grind from which Stoddard and Noguchi found respite, albeit briefly, in the “original and beautiful barbarism” of a South Seas of their own creation (Stoddard 1894, pp. 7–8).