Picturing Pleasure: Fanny Stevenson And Beatrice Grimshaw In The Pacific Islands

This article explores the travel writings, illustrated with photographs, of Fanny Stevenson and Beatrice Grimshaw, two 'lady travelers' who visited the Pacific Islands at the turn of the twentieth century. Although little critical attention has been paid to their books, these texts are significant contributions to the comparatively small archive ofEuro-American women's narratives of travel and encounter in the Pacific Islands from this period. Their representations of the Islands are at once conventional and unusual, and analysis of their texts adds significantly to the literature on women's travel writing, especially as the Pacific Islands are an underrepresented area in this field. Rather than producing generalized exoticist representations, their discussions of class, race, gender, and colonial politics are particular to the Pacific Islands, and illustrate various moments of contact at a key transition point in Pacific colonial history. Their use of photographs also forges a strong connection between their work and a longer history of image production by Westerners in the Pacific Islands. Using colonial history as a framework for exploration of class, race, and gender politics in the Pacific Islands, this essay argues that Stevenson and Grimshaw's works suggest ways that popular audiences may have experienced the Pacific Islands through word and image publications.