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Romancing the Pacific Isles before Byron: Music, Sex, and Death in Mitford's Christina

2009; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 76; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/elh.0.0049

1080-6547

Elisa Beshero‐Bondar,

Asian American and Pacific Histories

Mary Russell Mitford's four-canto romance poem of 1811, Christina, the Maid of the South Seas , dramatizes the early history of Pitcairn Island, the destination of mutineers and Tahitian exiles following the mutiny on the HMS Bounty . Mitford's adaptation of Pitcairn's early history is unusual in exposing memories of a racial and sexual conflict that destroyed most of the original male founders. Within Christina , Pitcairn's traumatic memory is staged for its first outside visitors in song and oral narration. Mitford's attention to musical performance poses a Romantic tension between verbal authority and nonverbal resistance, echoed in Byron's The Island of 1823.