Queer Desire and Colonial Power in Noa Noa and The Ebb-Tide

European representations of the Pacific have long depicted the region in feminized, idealized terms—a static paradise of erotic fulfillment, cultural innocence, and timeless beauty. This mythologized South Seas image, rooted in early travelogues and colonial art, persists not as a simple naïve fantasy but as a fraught site of colonial ambivalence. On the surface, imperial writers and artists celebrated the Pacific as an untouched Eden, yet beneath that celebration lay the projection of repressed European desires—particularly homoerotic and “feminine” longings—onto the islands and their inhabitants. In other words, the Pacific was cast both as an eroticized geography and as a canvas for European anxieties: the land itself became a sensual, liberating backdrop, and Pacific people were figured as exotic “Others” through whom taboo desires could be explored or disavowed. Far from accidental, these fantasies reveal how imperial power mythologized the Pacific as a space of gender and sexual fluidity, allowing Europe to disavow its own moral contradictions while still maintaining hierarchies of control and conquest.

At first glance, the presence of queer desire in colonial texts—where European men yield to vulnerability, relinquish authority, or grapple with unnamable attractions—might seem to destabilize imperial authority. Victorian masculinity, after all, depended on a rigidly heteronormative façade to legitimize its moral and racial superiority. Yet, as Lee Wallace argues in Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities, these ambivalences do not undermine colonialism. Instead, they become tools for its reinvention. By imagining the Pacific as a realm of “primitive” sexual freedom—a place where European gender binaries momentarily dissolve—colonial narratives were able to absorb and contain their own contradictions. In these works, queer and feminine longings are sublimated into art and story: they are presented as part of a mysterious, out-of-bounds Pacific world, safely set apart from Europe. This strategy turns potential threats to the imperial order into titillating exoticism, transforming transgressive desire into a symbol of regenerative primitivism while preserving the myth of Europe’s civilized innocence. In short, the imperial imagination could co-opt queer desire by locating it in a distant “paradise,” thereby rejuvenating the empire’s sense of adventure and vitality without challenging its power.

In this essay, I will attempt to examine these tensions in two key texts: Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide. Both works, set in the Pacific, feature European men whose performances of colonial masculinity unravel through queer desire. For Noa Noa, I use Wallace’s framework as a foundation to analyze how Gauguin navigates Tahiti’s gender-fluid world, displacing homoerotic tensions onto a “primitive,” romanticized, “sexless” Other. By subsuming his attraction to the androgynous woodcutter within his transformation into a “real Maori,” Gauguin transforms queer desire into a narrative of reinvigoration, one that is enabled by the knowledge of Polynesian same-sex possibility. Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide, however, complicates this framework. Through the charismatic figure of Attwater—a devout Christian colonialist who sublimates homoerotic desire into religious domination—the novella reveals conversion and piety as yet another means of exerting eroticized colonial authority. However, one of Attwater’s would-be victims, Herrick, in his feeble but stubborn refusal to acknowledge Attwater’s spiritual and erotic authority, exposes the fragility of this process. By rejecting the conflation of divine and homoerotic submission, but also remaining at the peripheries of the trio as a figure of unresolved contradiction, neither converted nor wholly resistant, Herrick suggests that not all queer ambivalence can be neatly folded into the colonial project. 

Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa (1897) offers a vivid case of a European artist projecting queer and feminine longings onto the Pacific—and illustrates how such longing is directed both at the exotic land itself and at its people. Gauguin, a French painter, traveled to Tahiti in search of an untouched paradise where he hoped to escape European convention. In reality, his time in Tahiti was marked by exploitative relationships that starkly reveal the colonial power imbalance underpinning his romantic vision. Gauguin infamously took multiple adolescent Tahitian girls as lovers (and “wives”), some as young as thirteen, and infected many of them with syphilis​. These disturbing facts cast a harsh light on the sensual daydream of Tahiti that Gauguin presents in Noa Noa. His gaze was undeniably imperial and predatory: he viewed the Pacific Islands as a realm of sexual availability and innocence ripe for his taking. At the same time, he cloaked his exploits in an aura of aesthetic and spiritual renewal, portraying himself as a weary civilized man reborn in a world of natural purity. 

This tension between reality and myth is central to Noa Noa’s narrative strategy. Gauguin’s personal pedophilia and racial attitudes (his tendency to call Tahitians “savages” even as he idolized their simplicity) inform the text at every turn, even when unspoken. They underscore that his supposed surrender to the island’s charm is never merely personal or benign—it is enabled by a vast inequality of power and a self-justifying fantasy of the Pacific as a permissive, almost child-like feminine space. Within this fantasy, the Pacific landscape and its people function as mirrors for Gauguin’s own illicit desires: the islands become a stage on which he can act out longings that would be forbidden or disdained in Europe.

In Noa Noa, Gauguin repeatedly feminizes and eroticizes the geography of Tahiti, as if the land itself invited his transgressive feelings. In one of the narrative’s most striking moments, he describes venturing into the lush interior with a young Tahitian woodcutter to find rosewood for carving. Immersed in the tropical forest, Gauguin contrasts his exhausted European body, “tired from countless efforts, upon whom lay the long and fatal heritage of the vices of a … corrupt society,” with the vigorous youth of his native companion, who moves with “the suppleness of an animal and the graceful litheness of an androgyne” (Gauguin, 21). This juxtaposition portrays the woodcutter as a figure of androgynous, “sexless” allure, embodying a natural gender fluidity that Gauguin associates with the Pacific’s “primitive” innocence. 

This contrast is drawn out in part due to Gauguin’s own shifting identity and perception of gender in Tahitian society. As Rod Edmond notes, “Gauguin himself had been dubbed taata vahine (man woman) on arrival at Papeete because of his shoulder-length salt and pepper hair. The local population seem to have taken him for a mahu, a recognized and accepted male transvestite figure within Tahitian society” (252). Unlike in Europe, where strict gender roles defined masculinity and power, Tahitian culture accommodated transvestite identities like the mahu, which opened up space for gender fluidity and the possibility to express queer, homosexual desire. 

By portraying the woodcutter as “sexless” then, Gauguin aligns the figure with a “primitive” gender fluidity while distancing it from homosexuality, which he associates with the decadence and corruption of European modernity. The young Tahitian thus becomes less a real person than a symbol, his androgyny a sign of a utopian wholeness untainted by Western categories. In Gauguin’s imperial gaze, the Pacific Islander is rendered a beautiful cipher that absorbs the artist’s conflicted desires. The Pacific environment and Polynesian body merge into one eroticized image of “natural” freedom, allowing Gauguin to momentarily experience queer desire as if it were a virtue bestowed by paradise rather than a personal “vice.”

Indeed, he asks himself, “Was it not rather the Forest itself, the living Forest, without sex-and yet alluring” (Gauguin 21). Here Gauguin explicitly directs his longing to the landscape: the tropical forest becomes a seductive, feminine entity (“alluring” and alive, yet ostensibly without the dangers of sexuality). By suggesting that the environment itself—not the young man—provokes his “horrible” surge of desire, Gauguin momentarily disavows the homoerotic attraction he feels. In effect, he splits the source of his longing between the mythologized space (the mystical forest, a kind of sensual womb of nature) and the feminized figure of the local boy (cast as a beautiful, sexless Adam). This clever displacement allows Gauguin to indulge a queer gaze without admitting to anything as direct as homosexual desire. The Pacific is painted as so inherently erotic and liberating that even the trees and air seem to invite a break from European morality. Gauguin can then imagine himself yielding to that invitation as a form of spiritual purification rather than personal lust.

Interestingly, this tension becomes more profound as Gauguin recounts following the woodcutter along the forest path. He notes an intoxicating mix of attraction and disorientation, asking: “why was it that there suddenly rose in the soul of a member of an old civilization a horrible thought? Why, in all this drunkenness of lights and perfumes with its enchantment of newness and unknown mystery” (Gauguin 22). In this moment, the rear view of the woodcutter assumes a peculiar significance in an “erotics from the back,” with the gender ambiguous figure disrupting the impenetrability of the male that underpins European notions of gender and masculinity (Wallace 129). This “sodomitical invitation,” as Wallace describes it, thus encapsulates Gauguin’s struggle with the destabilizing allure of queer desire, which both fascinates and unnerves him​. 

According to Wallace, a similar logic can be found in Gauguin’s 1892 painting, Manao Tupapau, where the positioning of the Tahitian model disrupts conventional representations of the female nude in a way that both emphasizes her otherness and complicates the viewer’s relationship with the image. The figure lies face down, her head turned to one side, with sharply defined contours along her back and shoulders contrasting with the softer rendering of her face. The body’s tilt, which gives the appearance of sliding off the bed, introduces a skewed perspective “capable of altering the spatial depth of the painting.” In addition, her slightly raised buttocks, emphasized by a curved stroke of orange paint, draw attention to the “point of entry.” 

This posture is deliberately provocative and indecent, emphasizing the model’s sexual availability while evoking a sense of vulnerability and exposure. It is also reflective of a broader connection between primitivism and psychoanalysis, as Wallace explains, referencing Hal Foster. According to Foster, Freud’s theories often associated “tribal peoples with pregenital orders of the drives, especially oral and anal stages,” linking genitality, and thus civilization, to achievements beyond the “primitive” (Wallace 122). Emerging in the same historical moment, primitivism and psychoanalysis both frame the “tribal, the feminine, and the homosexual” as arrested in early phases of psychic and cultural development. In this framework, the “primitive” becomes constructed as a regressive destination, a space where the repressions of civilization might be temporarily escaped.

Returning to Noa Noa in this context, we can see how Gauguin’s art and narrative exploit this possibility, drawing on the “primitive” to navigate and reframe queer tensions that might otherwise undermine imperial self-determination. Both works center on bodies, whether the androgynous, “sexless” woodcutter or the rear-facing model, that are positioned to evoke vulnerability and fluidity, aligning with the primitivist framework described by Foster. Conflating the native and the sodomitically perverse, both works allow Gauguin to oscillate “between European regression and indigenous truth in an inescapably formalist register” (Wallace 132). Indeed, as Edmond explains, “the momentary vision of androgyny offers a glimpse of the resolution of other divisions, cultural as well as gender, which Noa Noa seeks. At the same time, however, that divide cannot be bridged without destroying the integrity and innocence sought” (253). 

We find a clear example of this oscillation in the moment when the woodcutter turns to face Gauguin, who then observes: “The androgyne had disappeared. It was an actual young man walking ahead of me. His calm eyes had the limpid clearness of waters” (Gauguin 22). This shift allows Gauguin to relegate his earlier disorienting attraction and desire to the woodcutter’s androgyny, and maintain his own innocence to the threat of homosexuality. This becomes even more significant in the subsequent cutting of the rosewood tree, as Gauguin frames the act as a symbolic rejection of European corruption and a step toward becoming a “true savage” or “real Maori” (Gauguin 24). Yet, as Edmond suggests, the scene’s shifting states “leave it unclear whether the attack on the rosewood tree is the final stage of exorcising evil or a celebration of having already done so” (257). Thus, the gesture’s meaning remains unresolved, and the conversion leaves space for the ambiguity surrounding Gauguin’s desire and sexuality. 

By the conclusion of Noa Noa, Gauguin has not upended colonial authority or Victorian norms. Instead, he achieves a kind of aesthetically pleasing balance of ambiguity. He pushes at the boundaries of gender and sexuality, but in a very controlled way. Tahiti becomes a laboratory for his personal reinvention. The queer desires linked to Tahiti are both embraced and denied: they inspire Gauguin’s artistic and spiritual revival, yet they stay hidden under layers of symbolism and “primitive” mystique. The tension is never fully resolved, but Noa Noa turns that very lack of resolution into part of its charm. The text allows the reader to feel the undercurrent of erotic possibility in the Tahitian paradise, while still assuring them that Gauguin ultimately reasserts a conventional masculine role. In this manner, Gauguin’s colonial fantasy manages to have it both ways. It taps into “deviant” desires to add excitement and depth to his imperial adventure, but it simultaneously contains and neutralizes those desires within a primitivist myth. They never really threaten European authority or Gauguin’s identity as a European man.

Indeed, Gauguin’s racist and pedophilic mindset is never truly confronted in the narrative—his native companions (whether the androgynous youth or the young girl brides he alludes to elsewhere) remain idealized, compliant figures, never challenging his control. The Pacific, in his telling, is feminine in the sense of being submissive, enchanting, and available—a place where a European man can briefly shed his inhibitions and then return to his sense of command and his “civilized” mission after being “reborn” among simpler folk.

In sum, Noa Noa shows clearly how the imperial imagination co-opts queer and feminine longings. By relocating these taboo desires to an exotic realm and mythologizing that realm as pure and healing, Gauguin turns what might have been a damning moral contradiction into proof of Tahiti’s liberating magic. The price of this maneuver is a severe distortion of reality: it papers over real exploitation and inequality with the sheen of art. In the end, Gauguin’s ambivalent depiction of the Pacific reinforces the colonial project. It reassures his readers (and himself) that European moral purity can be restored in the islands, even as it uses the Pacific land and people as erotic tools for that redemption.

Where Gauguin’s Noa Noa wraps queer desire in a personal primitivist fantasy, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide (1894) offers a more overtly dark and ironic look at how queer longings and colonial power intermingle, with a particular focus on religion as a tool of domination.

Stevenson’s novella follows three morally ambiguous Europeans (Herrick, Davis, and Huish) as they drift through the Pacific, seeking to escape both poverty and punishment for fraud. Focusing on the second half of the narrative, their desperation has led them to a remote island presided over by a mysterious Englishman, Attwater. Seeking to steal Attwater’s pearls, the trio hatch a plan to kill him, only to find their plans unraveling amidst drunken stupor, shifting allegiances, and Davis’s eventual conversion to Attwater’s version of Christianity.

As in Gauguin’s tale, the Pacific in The Ebb-Tide serves as a distant, primitive backdrop where normal social rules can fall away. But the form of desire that plays out on this island is very different and more shocking: it becomes a homoerotic pursuit under the guise of evangelical Christianity. Attwater, the self-proclaimed master of the island, personifies this blend of religion and power. He presents himself as a devout Christian missionary while also being a ruthless pearl trader. He wields imperial authority, mixing pious talk with an ever-present threat of violence. Attwater also has a peculiar personal charisma that deeply unnerves the three outsiders. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Attwater’s interactions with the other men—especially the introspective gentleman Herrick and the rough sea captain Davis—are loaded with suppressed homoerotic tension. Attwater’s method is to “convert” others, both spiritually and psychologically, thereby bending them entirely to his will.

Stevenson thus uses Attwater to explore a different facet of the colonial queer dynamic: instead of a European projecting desire onto a native “Other,” here a European (Attwater) projects his forbidden desires onto the very structure of colonial interaction (master vs. supplicant) and the institution of religion. The island remains an exotic backdrop, but the drama centers on how power dynamics between these European men carry an undercurrent of sexual desire, especially so far removed from Victorian eyes.

From the moment Herrick, Davis, and Huish arrive at Attwater’s island (tellingly named “New Island”), Stevenson sets up layers of irony that play with the roles of colonizer and colonized, and with expectations of savagery and civilization. Indeed, the dual significance of their journey is important to consider: it represents both a “fresh start” and adventure from the Europeans’ perspective and a corrupt invasion of foreign territory and property. 

Far from a defenseless “native” chieftain though, Attwater’s English background is made obvious when we see him flying the “red ensign of England” and describing the island’s setup as if it is a solid English farm with a small village attached (94). This scene echoes idyllic British countryside images, showing how Attwater tries to reshape the island into a version of home, transplanting English culture into foreign soil. In fact, he has already turned his island into a mini-empire, complete with a plantation, a chapel, and a disciplined workforce of Pacific Islanders under his command. Attwater’s method of control and discipline also solidifies his authority and reaffirms the colonial side of his identity. Described as having “an eye that bid you beware of the man’s devastating anger,” he maintains a regime of constant observation and control over both natives and visitors (97). By maintaining this constant surveillance, he ensures that no rebellion or interference can threaten his dominance. As such, he reduces others to objects of his gaze, whose intentions are interpreted through his lens of authority.

Stevenson thus plays with the roles of invader and native in this scenario. Initially, Herrick and the others approach Attwater’s island as if they were the colonizers and Attwater the “native” prey. They look at the island—and even its English master—as something to plunder, much as earlier European adventurers viewed Pacific islands and chiefs during the age of empire. But very quickly, this expectation is subverted. Attwater is not a defenseless native nor simply another European visitor. He is a hybrid figure—part missionary, part tyrant, part seducer. He even boasts, “I was making a new people here,” as if he were a local king creating his own tribe (Stevenson 112). As Oliver Buckton observes, Attwater “combines traits of the ‘savage’ with modern technology, marksmanship, and guile,” effectively blurring the line between colonizer and “native” in the eyes of the less savvy newcomers (267). This ambiguity in Attwater’s identity makes the power dynamics on the island unstable and unpredictable. It also sets the stage for the queer undertones in his dealings with Herrick and Davis.

Attwater’s outward persona is that of a strict Christian gentleman, and he wields religion as a means of control. He constantly preaches about sin, repentance, and Providence, speaking with the fervor of a missionary and projecting moral superiority. Yet beneath this religious facade lies (or perhaps is expressed through) a very personal desire. When Attwater interacts with Herrick, the spiritual rhetoric transforms into a kind of courtship, blending salvation with seduction. Attwater first urges Herrick to embrace “the grace of your Maker and Redeemer, He who died for you, He who upholds you, He whom you daily crucify afresh?” These words are not only spiritual, for Attwater also reveals a personal attraction to him: “‘I am fanciful,’ he added, looking hard at Herrick, ‘and I take fads. I like you’” (113). The shift from religious persuasion to outright admiration blurs the line between conversion and seduction. He intensifies this feeling by declaring Herrick “attractive, very attractive” (113), and when Herrick fails to reciprocate, the disappointment is immediate: “The rapture was all gone from Attwater’s countenance; the dark apostle had disappeared.” (115) 

This moment is pivotal. Attwater’s gaze and language shift from the general and divine to the pointedly personal. The fervent missionary becomes an ardent admirer; the promise of God’s embrace blurs into the suggestion of his own. Stevenson leaves little doubt that Attwater’s interest in Herrick is more than spiritual concern. The Pacific island setting facilitates this unusual melding of roles: removed from conventional society, Attwater can play the part of both zealous priest and desirous suitor without any outside check. Religion becomes the language through which he expresses a homoerotic attraction that cannot be named openly.

Herrick’s reaction to Attwater further illuminates the queer dynamic at play. Herrick is mesmerized and repelled in equal measure. He feels “an immense temptation to go up, to touch him” and is simultaneously “intrigued, puzzled, dazzled, enchanted and revolted” by Attwater (Stevenson 116). In Herrick’s internal struggle, there is again the familiar movement towards the “tired shuffle” that Wallace finds in Gauguin, in which the attraction is first defined as personal, then class, then religious. He is drawn to Attwater’s charisma and perhaps the promise of forgiveness and belonging that Attwater offers, but he also recoils at the thought of surrendering his independence and dignity—especially in a potentially sexual way. Herrick’s very modern skepticism (he is pointedly atheist and cynical) gives him a resistance that Gauguin’s yielding persona never mustered. Where Gauguin was able to submerge himself in a primitivist fantasy, Herrick cannot so easily give in to Attwater’s queer combination of religion and intimacy. Thus Herrick’s rejection, “No one can like me,” to each of these shifts conflates them all into one, and in doing so, Herrick throws up a barrier that Attwater, for all his authority, cannot penetrate (Stevenson 113). He remains un-converted and unconquered, at least in spirit.

Yet, if Herrick stands at the periphery, Captain Davis by contrast provides a foil by willingly stepping into the submissive role that Attwater’s power structure demands. Davis starts out as a co-conspirator in the murder plot, but his weak resolve and heavy drinking leave him easily swayed. When their clumsy attempt to kill Attwater fails (Huish meets a gruesome end during the confrontation), Davis ultimately surrenders, shifting from plotting murder to becoming Attwater’s “spoiled darling and pet penitent” by the end of the story (170). 

It is important to note that Stevenson illustrates this in a very intimate scene: Davis awakens from his stupor cradled in Attwater’s arms. This once tough, independent sea captain is literally being held like a child (or a lover) by the very man he intended to kill. From this point on, Davis is “broken” in both body and will. He converts to Attwater’s brand of Christianity with the zeal of one who has narrowly escaped death and believes he’s found his savior. Davis begins to refer to Attwater in the language of religious adoration, blurring the lines between Christ and the man before him. In the final scene, he even beseeches Herrick to join their devotional circle, urging him to believe so that Attwater (and by extension Christ) can “fold you in His arms” (170). Davis’s new faith conflates Jesus and Attwater into one figure, transforming religion into a mode of intimate submission, and thus, in this triangular configuration, he becomes the worshipper, Attwater the deity, and Herrick the nonbeliever who cannot be brought into this queer spiritual union. 

The symbolism of being “folded in His arms” is clearly both spiritual and sensual: to be folded in the arms of Attwater/Christ is to be held lovingly and completely. With Davis’s complete submission, Stevenson essentially lays bare the subtext—religion, in this context, is equated with an erotic surrender. The colonial authority figure has become a kind of living deity on his island, expecting not just obedience from those below him, but their love. Attwater’s power is secured not by open brute force (though the threat of violence is always there), but by inducing in his subjects a state of voluntary submission that is as much emotional as it is spiritual. It is a master–penitent relationship that carries a charge of the master–lover as well. In the end, Attwater effectively “tames” Davis to be his devoted servant and admirer, a transformation that serves to reassert hierarchy on the island (Attwater firmly on top, literally and figuratively) after the disturbance caused by the intruders.

Through the triangle of Attwater, Davis, and Herrick, Stevenson’s story dramatizes a colonial encounter filled with erotic ambivalence, yet it doesn’t conclude with a simple imperial triumph. In many respects, what happens on the island supports Wallace’s idea that empire can reinvent itself by absorbing queer desires. Attwater’s blending of Christian conversion and homoerotic attraction is a clear example of how imperial discourse (here, the “civilizing” mission of saving souls) can camouflage and channel a forbidden personal longing. By converting Davis so completely, Attwater neutralizes the threat Davis posed and actually strengthens his dominion—turning a potential rebel into a fanatical disciple. The result is a new social order on the island that is perversely stable: the troublemakers have been either eliminated (Huish is dead) or assimilated (Davis is under Attwater’s control). The Pacific setting, once again, has allowed a kind of experiment in power that would be unthinkable in ordinary society. Its isolation gives Attwater the freedom to play out this extreme dominance-and-submission drama under the banner of religious salvation. In the process, Stevenson illustrates how religion contributes to eroticized dominance: faith and scripture become tools through which Attwater justifies what is essentially a psychological and sexual conquest. His colonial authority is reinforced both by material control on one hand and by spiritual-erotic awe on the other.

However, Stevenson does not present this ambivalent conquest as absolute or unchallenged. Herrick remains the insoluble grain of sand in Attwater’s machinery. He refuses to be converted or to reciprocate Attwater’s peculiar advances. By the end of the novella, Herrick stands apart. He neither joins Attwater’s “flock” nor attempts to fight him; he simply withholds himself. This quiet resistance is crucial: it means Attwater’s victory is incomplete. Unlike Gauguin’s tale—where no native character voices opposition and the European’s ambivalence is smoothly absorbed into a personal myth—Stevenson gives us a character who cannot be absorbed. Herrick’s depression, guilt, and perhaps latent moral core make him impervious to Attwater’s seductions. He sees the hollowness of Attwater’s project and refuses to validate it.

Herrick’s presence is a reminder of the limits of this strategy of co-opting queer ambivalence. Not everything can be folded into the imperial project. Herrick’s stubborn stance highlights how predatory Attwater’s behavior really is: in the end, it looks less like a benevolent conversion and more like the breaking of a man’s will for the sake of power. Through Herrick, Stevenson injects a note of skepticism—even subversion—into the colonial fantasy. The Pacific in The Ebb-Tide is not just a passive paradise stage for European desires; it becomes an active pressure-cooker that exposes the fault lines in those desires and in imperial logic itself.

Attwater’s triumph, such as it is, is partial and uneasy. In a sense, it validates Wallace’s point that queer ambivalence can be repurposed to uphold imperial dominance—but only up to a point. Stevenson also shows that such dominance is neither total nor guaranteed. The roles of savior and sinner, colonizer and colonized, have been scrambled in the heat of the island’s events, and what emerges is a far cry from the “stable paradise” myth. Instead, Stevenson gives us a grim little empire held together by fanaticism and fear, and a lone skeptic (Herrick) standing on the sidelines, utterly unconvinced. In this stark light, the eroticized rituals of power that Stevenson depicts feel more dystopian than utopian, more an indictment of colonial excesses than an endorsement.