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“I Was an American – Thank Heaven!” Race and Culture As a Mirror of American Society in Herman Melville’S Early Travel Narratives

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“I Was an American – Thank Heaven!” Race and Culture As a Mirror of American Society in Herman Melville’S Early Travel Narratives Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy “I Was an American – Thank Heaven!” Race and Culture as a Mirror of American Society in Herman Melville’s Early Travel Narratives Paper submitted in partial Supervisor: fulfillment of the requirements Dr. Jasper Schelstraete for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: English- German” by Femke Boone 2015-2016 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Jasper Schelstraete, for having answered all my questions and particularly for having provided me with secondary sources that I would otherwise not have been able to consult. He has sent me articles because he thought they might help me, not necessarily because I had asked for them. Furthermore, more than once he was able to clear something up in just a couple of sentences which would otherwise have taken me quite some time to research. In this way he has made the process of writing this master dissertation much easier and faster. In other words, his in-depth knowledge of Melville’s life and works was indispensable. Last but not least, his enthusiasm was encouraging and has motivated me over the past couple of months. 3 Table of Contents 1. Introduction...............................................................................................................5 2. Methodology.............................................................................................................7 3. The Fictionalised “Unvarnished Truth”....................................................................8 3.1. Blurry Distinctions.............................................................................................8 3.2. Borrowings and Plagiarism..............................................................................11 3.3. Obvious Mistakes and Understandable Critique..............................................12 4. Melville’s Struggles with His Contemporaries.......................................................15 4.1. Different National Interests and Their Desire for Alterations..........................15 4.2. Literary Conventions and the Public’s Expectations........................................17 4.2.1. Rules and Disappointments.....................................................................17 4.2.2. Genre Categorization...............................................................................20 4.2.3. Travels End..............................................................................................21 4.3.The Actual Truth...............................................................................................22 4.4. Religious Critique.............................................................................................24 5. Reality Call: the Missionaries..................................................................................27 5.1.The Truth about the Missions............................................................................27 5.2. Superficialities.................................................................................................28 5.3. From Subtle To Direct Attacks........................................................................29 6. Religion...................................................................................................................31 6.1. Insincerity.........................................................................................................31 6.2. Marriage Arrangements....................................................................................32 6.3. Idols..................................................................................................................33 6.4. Christian Superiority........................................................................................34 7. On Civilization........................................................................................................35 7.1. National Differences........................................................................................35 7.2. Contradictions..................................................................................................36 8. Unable to Adjust......................................................................................................38 9. Moby-Dick...............................................................................................................42 9.1. Appearances and Prejudices.............................................................................42 9.2. Language..........................................................................................................45 10. “Benito Cereno”......................................................................................................47 10.1. Stereotypes: Questioned and Reinstated.........................................................47 4 10.2. Possessive Desires..........................................................................................49 10.3. Cheerfulness: Genuine or Superficial.............................................................50 10.4. Inferior yet Superior........................................................................................52 11. Notions of Superiority.............................................................................................54 11.1. Australian Inferiority......................................................................................55 11.2. Authority Issues..............................................................................................57 11.3. Western Inferiority.........................................................................................59 12.4. Tommo’s Inferiority.......................................................................................61 12. Literary and Real-Life Influences............................................................................64 13. Conclusion..............................................................................................................67 14. Works Cited.............................................................................................................69 (25767 words) 5 1. Introduction Nearly at the end of Herman Melville’s second novel, Omoo, the narrator exclaims the following: “I was an American – thank heaven.”1 This statement could have become one of the most iconic sentences in American literature were it not that Melville’s early travel stories have been overshadowed by his recently more acknowledged works – i.e. from the 20th-century Melville revival onwards – such as Moby-Dick and Pierre. Moreover, even though Typee and Omoo, his first two novels, have been researched a number of times, a lot of this research could have been, I believe, more thorough. It is for this reason that I have decided to do a close analysis of both Typee and Omoo and more specifically to investigate to what extent these novels tell us something about 19th-century American attitudes towards other races. These “races” are to a large extent those that Melville refers to in Typee and Omoo, but also include Native Americans, people of colour, Australians and Europeans; in short, all people that Melville has at one point deemed inferior for some reason. I argue that Melville, as he has made clear in the last chapter of Omoo, is proud of his national inheritance and that, even though he certainly discovers some flaws, he considers the Americans to be the best race that roams the Earth and more particularly that civilizing other races is a necessary and worthy cause. By often giving rather negative accounts of other nations’ customs, Melville is able to indirectly honour American culture, and especially to elevate himself above the people that he deems inferior. Melville is a man of contradictions, though. His literary career alone gives ample proof of this: initially exciting all lovers of adventure stories, promising them a series of travel narratives that are based on his personal experiences, he nonetheless turns to a more philosophical writing style from his third book onwards. But Herman Melville’s contradictory nature becomes most manifest in the way he describes other cultures, i.e. on the one hand admiring their way of living and praising their behaviour, while looking down upon their lack of civilization and true Christian beliefs on the other. It should therefore not come as a surprise that Melville’s writings did not lead to only positive images of American society. On the contrary, as often as America – and he himself as an American – is depicted in positive terms, it is also apparent that there is still a lot of room for improvement and that other races’ way of living should not be instantly dismissed as inferior but that one should have a critical point of view towards both one’s own and other societies’ cultures. In other words, “more often than not (at least in the South Pacific narratives) [he] uses the foreign or the exotic to criticize 1 Herman Melville, Omoo (Mineola: Dover, 2000), 296. 6 mainstream America or Europe,”2 and “presents an as-yet unexamined model of the Pacific Islands to produce his meditation upon white civilization.”3 Melville thus debunks several prejudices over the course of his writing career, whereas others stubbornly remain. Even though Edward Said’s Orientalism mainly touches upon European perspectives of the “Orient,” i.e. the other (and mainly the East), I believe that what he argues can also be applied to American society in regard to other cultures: “[T]he Orient has helped to define Europe (or
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