The British travel writer and illustrator Constance Fredericka Gordon Cumming produced several books on her travels in the Pacific toward the end of the nineteenth century. In 1883, her two volume travelogue Fire Fountains: The Kingdom of Hawaii was published in Edinburgh containing several drawings of Hawaii¹s volcanoes by Gordon Cumming. In one drawing, her characteristic energetic, precise pen strokes describe craggy lava fields with molten rivers and smoke belching volcanic chimneys. Very small onlookers in Western attire comfortably sketch in the foreground of the tumultuous terrain. In this picture, literally explosive landscape is arranged into a dramatic but pleasing and information-filled composition through lively yet ordered marks. Like much of Gordon Cumming's voluminous text, this drawing expresses the exotic and potentially harmful world the traveller encounters through several framing devices: factual description, the sublime, and most notably, the picturesque. This latter term appears repeatedly throughout Gordon Cumming's writing, for she classifies virtually everything that she encounters as that which is or is not picturesque. What fails to live up to her expectations of picturesque exoticism, she catalogues with irritation. Her complaints center largely on the land itself, which she compares unfavorably to southern Polynesia. After Tahiti, she finds Oahu too arid, except for its rain forest and notably, its man-made gardens.
Gordon Cumming's desire for that which is both wild and tamed is ultimately satisfied by the lava flow on the island of Hawaii, and her analytical, poetic, and mythological descriptions of volcanoes serve as a vehicle for staging religious and moral development in Hawaii. Her verbal and visual imagery is highly symbolic, with verdant growth representing the spread of Christian righteousness. She writes: "As the menenia grass creeps silently and invisibly along the surface of the dry volcanic soil, only revealing its presence when the refreshing dews or rain showers call it into fullness of life ... so the good influence extended insensibly among the people; while in every isle some were found to whom the message of the Gospel proved a life-giving reality" (vol. 2, p. 115). Such an enrichment of that which is savage and impoverished is evident in Gordon Cumming's stylistically tamed drawings (underscored thematically with the inclusion of figures who are themselves shaping and containing the landscape through drawing), as well as her tamed narratives. Indeed, Gordon Cumming celebrates Queen Kapiolanis 1825 repudiation of the Volcano Goddess Pele in favor of the Christian God, and contends at the conclusion of her travelogue that Hilo was spared from the formidable 1881 lava flow because the town's inhabitants prayed to God for safety.
In my analysis of Gordon Cumming's few pictures and many words, I focus on those verbal images that reveal the disorder and disappointment her picturesque visual and verbal representations seek to efface. Picturesque images in the nineteenth century may dwell on irregular and mutable forms, but do so largely to arrange such forms into compositions that reference was is found to be pleasing in already sanctioned conventions. Such compositions consistently erase markers of ruinous development or class or ethnic privation--the very social and political realities that encouraged the privileged classes to romanticize much of what they encountered, especially in nature. Gordon Cumming's writing details--in largely uncritical terms--the unpleasant specifics of the natural, social, and political landscape that her pictures and much of her text excise. She laments her descriptions of impoverished soil and heathen natives, but luxuriates in her descriptions of verdant land and converted Hawaiians. Her illustrated travelogue therefore spells out the ideological and emotional investments many foreigners had (and continue to have) in Hawaii: namely that it conform to the fantasy of a tropical paradise that both excites and seduces, but which is tamed.
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