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The Marriage of Loti
By: Pr. Richard Berrong
[Click on images to enlarge]
When Viaud published his second novel, The Marriage of Loti,
in 1880, a year after Aziyadé, the situation vis-à-vis
visual images was almost the exact opposite. Whereas Viaud's
potential readers had had very definite images of the Near East in
general, and odalisques in particular, thanks to French art of the
preceding decades, they had virtually no visual images of Tahiti
or Tahitians, the subject of Viaud's second work. As a result,
Viaud's text had much more of a chance of forming their images,
along the lines of what Flaubert had hoped to be able to do with
Salammbô. |
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Market Day - 1892
We Hail Thee Mary - 1891
Contes barbares - 1902
Tahitian Women - 1891
Joyousness - 1892
Nave, Nave Moe - 1894
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There is perhaps some irony, then, in the fact that it was Viaud's
second novel that convinced Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) to make his
two trips to Tahiti, in 1891-93 and then again from 1895 to his
death in 1903. The irony lies in the fact that Gauguin, though
inspired in part by Viaud, painted Tahitians in a manner that made
them look very different from what Viaud's readers much have
imagined from his novel, thereby significantly changing how
subsequent readers would visualize his characters.
Perhaps the most striking
difference between Viaud's Tahitians and Gauguin's is the color of
their skin. Gauguin's Tahitians often look very close to black,
and certainly not in any way "white."
"Market Day" is perhaps an extreme example of this, as a few other
Tahitian paintings illustrate.
Still, it is obvious that
these women are all very dark-skinned.
Viaud's Tahitians, and in
particular the women, have a much less uniformly dark coloration.
At first Rarahu is described as having a "tawny color, verging on
brick red" (I:5), which is not unlike some of Gauguin's paintings
of Tahitian women.
Note Gauguin's repeated presentation of Tahitian women in
pairs, apparently of friends. Viaud also repeatedly depicts Rarahu
with her friend Téourahi.
A few times, Viaud describes the Tahitians as being
copper-colored (I:6, I:14, II:14). Twice he describes them as
being amber-colored (I:6, I:13), which is lighter still.
Several times, however, he goes so far as to suggest that they
might "pass" for white. At one point, in describing Rarahu, Loti
remarks that "without the slight tattooing on her forehead . . .,
you would have said that she was a young white woman" (II:14).
Earlier, when talking about Tétouara, a Kanaque who had been
brought to Tahiti years before, the text had asserted that "she
looked like a person from the Congo [a black, in other words] who
had been lost among a group of English misses" (I:10), suggesting
that the Tahitian women around her could somehow pass for young
Englishwomen.
The next striking difference between Viaud's Tahitians and
Gauguin's is their shape. As we have already seen, Gauguin's
Tahitian women, in particular, are all rather heavy set, one might
even say squat.
Viaud repeatedly, and from the very beginning of his novel,
explains that Tahitian women are "outside all the conventional
rules of beauty" (I:2), "their kind of beauty is outside all the
rules" (II:1), etc. Still, as with his remarks on their skin
color, he seems to undercut his initial assertions about their
form subsequently, making them appear, once again, more
"European," or at least more acceptable to his French readers. The
text describes Rarahu's arms as having "the perfection of
Antiquity" (I:5), she has an "antique grace" (II:23), and her
chest is compared to "beautiful statues of antique Greece"
(II:35).
Somewhat along these same lines, the novel describes Rarahu's
eyes as having "a caressing, childlike sweetness, like those of
young cats" (I:5). This, too, and the fact that Rarahu is
repeatedly presented with a pet cat, suggests a feline grace that
is clearly not at all what Gauguin was trying to suggest with his
rather squat, heavy-set Tahitian women.
The two artists' depictions of the
Tahitians are not totally dissimilar, however. Both present these
people as very preoccupied with a native religion that is full of
menacing spirits.
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