The recent revival of South Pacific has relevance for today's discussions of race
Mills, Nicolaus
FIFTY-NINE YEARS after its Broadway debut, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's South Pacific is once again drawing applause. At this year's Tony Award ceremony, it topped all musicals,...
...What stops Nellie from going ahead with the affair is not Bill's shallowness but his admission that he is a married man...
...At this year's Tony Award ceremony, it topped all musicals, winning seven awards...
...Shortly after she finishes her letter to Charlie, she thinks again about what life in the states would be like versus what life would be like with Emile and his daughters...
...At the same time he has also taken advantage of the situation in which he finds himself...
...In tears, she realizes there is no comparison...
...His disdain for easy moralizing, his sense that racial progress often depends on personal intuition and self-interest, rather than grand statements of conscience, have never been more needed...
...We learn that back home in Arkansas, there is a boyfriend, Charlie Benedict, who is 4-F (therefore, not draftable) and hopes to marry Nellie at the end of the war...
...In Michener's Tales of the South Pacific, as in the play, the most compelling story centers on the romance between Nellie Forbush, a young nurse from Arkansas, and Emile De Becque, a self-exiled Frenchman living on the South Pacific island now occupied by American troops battling the Japanese...
...But what makes Michener's approach to racial prejudice so relevant for today is that he was much more willing than Rodgers and Hammerstein were in their music to acknowledge racism's depth and resistance to ideological solutions...
...But Nellie does not, after all, come full circle...
...We don't get a definitive answer to that question from Michener...
...It is at this point that Emile's biracial children become an important part of the story, and Nellie's character is tested...
...But those changes are also a reason for us, in the midst of the most racialized presidential campaign since 1964, to look more closely at Michener's writing...
...In Michener's Tales, the American and European whites who bear the burden of ending racism are highly flawed avatars of change who never fully articulate the transformations they must go through if they are to shed their old ways of thinking...
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...He doesn't show Nellie reflecting on her past with any depth...
...She has reverted to her old self...
...Her entire Arkansas upbringing made it impossible for her to deny the teaching of her youth," Michener writes...
...Michener's Nellie may be inexperienced, but she is calculating when it comes to marriage, and until she commits herself to Emile, she doesn't hesitate to use the language of old-fashioned Southern racism...
...He knows that he cannot write his mother or the Bryn Mawr girl whom he expects to marry about his South Pacific experiences, but when he has to choose between social convention and Liat, it is no contest...
...Through him they saw a chance of rearing fine daughters, half white, and they eagerly took that chance," an American naval officer explains to Nellie...
...You've got to be taught before it's too late . . . . To hate all the people your relatives hate," the song points out in its concluding stanza...
...De Becque is in the South Pacific because he killed the local bully in the town outside of Marseilles, DISSENT / Fall 2008 n 85 NOTEBOOK where he grew up, but his exile from his native France has not humbled him...
...A nigger," Nellie thinks to herself when she learns his story...
...What, except horror at the thought of spending the rest of her life living like her mother and having children with Charlie, has NOTEBOOK changed Nellie...
...But Nellie is so dismissive of Charlie and Arkansas that picking up where she left off before the war began does not seem like an option for her...
...The story ends with Bill thinking he has been a good guy for telling the truth about his marriage and Nellie being happy that she hasn't slept with someone who cannot promise her a future...
...He had nigger children...
...Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...
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...It is not surprising that Nellie, who comes from Otolousa, Arkansas, and has joined the Navy because "I want to see what the world is like" is impressed with Emile when she first meets him...
...But the most serious praise for New York City's Lincoln Center revival stems from the way it deals with race...
...In his new life he has lived like a king and created a plantation that he proudly values at more than a hundred thousand dollars...
...There she hears him singing "Au clair de la lune," with his daughters, and we last see her entering Emile's house, adding "her uncertain treble to the chorus...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...Nellie falls for Emile almost as quickly as she fell for Bill, and when he tells her that he is not married, it takes her just a few days to decide that she will marry him...
...There she almost has an affair with Bill Harbison, a handsome naval ensign, whom all the nurses find attractive...
...At a time when the Supreme Court's historic Brown v. Board of Education outlawing the doctrine of "separate but equal" in the nation's public schools was still five years away, the happy ending of South Pacific was far from conventional...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate page...
...Nellie takes the opposite course, and the show ends on an optimistic note, with her and Emile deciding to marry...
...2)Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...Joe Cable, whom Michener portrays as a brave soldier, struggles all too briefly with his prejudices...
...But in Michener's book, Nellie, too, comes across as very different from the innocent heroine portrayed in Oscar Hammerstein's lyrics as a "cockeyed optimist" and as "corny as Kansas in August...
...As the play's long, original run shows, they chose wisely in filling in many of the holes Michener left open to interpretation...
...And please remember that we can't consider articles unless they're accompanied by a cover letter and stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...She rushes out of her room and orders the guard on duty to drive her to Emile's house...
...I lived as I could...
...The situation is too much for Nellie to bear, and in the next scene in the book, we see her writing to Charlie Benedict in Otolousa to say that she will marry him...
...I N TALES, we first encounter Nellie in a story called "An Officer and a Gentleman...
...To Our Contributors A few suggestions: (1)Be sure to keep a copy of your manuscript...
...THE EDITORS DISSENT / Fall 2008 n 87...
...She is enchanted not only with his European sophistication but with his beautiful house surrounded by azaleas, hibiscus, and hydrangeas...
...She didn't give a damn if she never saw another strange place the rest of her life...
...We will not consider manuscripts submitted simultaneously to several publications...
...And when asked by Nellie about his many children, he tells her, "I have no apologies...
...Through a combination of irony and satire, the song insists that prejudice is a cultural phenomenon...
...By the time we get to "Our Heroine," in 86 n DISSENT / Fall 2008 which Nellie meets Emile, two weeks have passed since her relationship with Harbison ended, and Nellie seems unchanged...
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...Joe fails to meet the challenge posed by the song before he is killed in battle...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc.—they're the author's responsibility...
...Emile, in contrast to Charlie and Bill, presents Nellie with a world unlike any she has known...
...It is a view of racial entitlement that Emile does not dispute...
...Michener's Emile De Becque is a much more substantial figure than Cable, but despite his sophistication, he is a flawed character when it comes to questions of race...
...The praise is well deserved for a play that in 1949 was far ahead of its time, but critics have failed to give sufficient credit to the person most responsible for the intelligence behind South Pacific—James Michener, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 Tales of the South Pacific provided Rodgers and Hammerstein with their story...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...There were no white women in this area...
...SMALL WONDER then that the creators of South Pacific carefully edited the stories they adapted from Michener...
...Emile De Becque, not satisfied with Javanese and Tonkinese women, had also lived with a Polynesian...
...When it opened on April 7, 1949, Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier in baseball just two years before, and Harry Truman's executive order integrating the armed services was not even a year old...
...When asked at a party how he got the natives he employs to be such efficient servants, he replies without a moment's thought that he is being patronizing, "I am patient with them...
...If she married him, they would be her step daughters...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...In the play, Nellie's prejudices, as well as those of Marine Lieutenant Joe Cable, a Princeton graduate from a proper Philadelphia family who falls in love with Liat, the daughter of "Bloody Mary," a Tonkinese woman, are dealt with in the song "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught...
...Joe allows Bloody Mary to arrange for Liat to marry a rich French planter whom she does not love, and as he is about to leave her and go off to battle, all he can tell himself is, "It's good to be back in the swing...
...I came out here as a young man...
...He was a powerful man, and women were plentiful...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...Nellie and the middle-aged Emile are people of very different backgrounds, but the biggest obstacle to their relationship is Nellie's revulsion over the fact that Emile has fathered biracial children...
...NICOLAUS MILLS, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America's Coming of Age as a Superpower...
...She wanted Otolousa and its familiar streets...
...Unlike the Emile of South Pacific, who has two biracial children, Michener's Emile has had eight children by Javanese, Polynesian, and Tonkinese women...
Vol. 55 • September 2008 • No. 4
