James Michener demonstrated his understanding
of the idealized feminine in his novel, Hawaii,
“…and as the palms toward the shore dipped toward the lagoon,
Hoxworth Hale had a strikingly clear intuition:
‘From now on whenever I think of a woman, in the abstract…
of womanliness, that is… I’ll see this brown-skinned Bora Bora girl,
her sarong loosely about her hips, working coconut and humming
softly in the shadowy sunlight. Has she been here, under these
breadfruit trees, all these last empty years?’
And he had a second intuition: that during the forthcoming even
emptier years, she would still be there, a haunting vision of
the other half of life, the womanliness, the caretaking symbol,
the majestic, lovely, receptive other half.”