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.
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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
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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 the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture.”4 [original emphasis] This is indeed what Melville tries to show in his first two novels, namely that America is as much influenced by the cultures they try to civilize and convert, as well as showing – though indirectly – that these people’s customs and national history are as valuable as the American. He “always affirms the inter-connectedness of civilization and savagery, and in so doing he gently mocks the ruling ethos of the mission civilatrice.”5 [original emphasis] Instead of portraying the Marquesas Islanders (in Typee) and the Tahitians (in Omoo) as uncivilized savages only, he actually shows that they have good traits as well – positive characteristics that most Western people do not seem to have got. This is evidently not what his contemporary readers wanted to read, and I argue that it is something that a lot of literary critics nowadays appear to overlook, i.e. they only focus on Melville’s critique, namely the condemnation of the missionaries and the negative accounts of the cannibals and the heathens, rather than the underlying critique on civilization and American society instead. This paper, on the other hand, will analyse both the positive and the negative descriptions of other races and emphasise the discrepancies. I will also briefly touch upon the subject of Melville’s contemporary reviews. Even though Higgins and Parker have published an extensive work, which combines most of the contemporary reviews of Melville’s novels – i.e. all those reviews they were able to find – there does not appear to have been written a lot about what these reviews may tell us about Melville’s books and how they may have influenced Melville – a lack of research the editors of this work acknowledge as well.6
2 Robert T. Tally, Jr., “‘Spaces That before Were Blank’: Truth and Narrative Form in Melville’s South Seas Cartography,” Pacific Coast Philology 42.2 (2007): 186. 3 Juniper Ellis, “Melville’s Literary Cartographies of the South Seas,” The Massachusetts Review 1 (1997): 10. 4 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 1-2. 5 Tally, “‘Spaces That before Were Blank,’” 186. 6 Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, introduction to The Contemporary Reviews, by Herman Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xxiv. 7
2. Methodology
For this paper I have based myself mainly on Melville’s first two novels and Hershel Parker’s works. Parker is undoubtedly the most important Melville connoisseur and his books and articles are therefore indispensable for anyone who wants to work on one of Melville’s narratives or poems. Moreover, since Typee and Omoo are based on some of Melville’s own experiences as a sailor, it was necessary to get to know Melville the sailor – in contrast to Melville the author. Parker’s extensive biography – of which I have read the first part only, since this deals with Melville’s years at sea and his initial years as a writer – is the most complete and reliable source in order to become “familiar” with the former Melville. There are evidently other biographies – for example by Leon Howard7 and Charlotte E. Keyes8 – but these are not as extensive and certainly not as recent – Howard’s biography dates from 1951. What struck me the most about some of the secondary sources I consulted, was the fact that they did not live up to the expectations I had set after having read the introduction. I encountered more than one article that initially promised to thoroughly examine Melville’s travel stories, but that eventually ended up merely referring to other articles or that barely cited any of his works. Moreover, a lot of these articles tread more on the historical background of Melville’s works instead of working with the texts an sich. It is for these reasons that I have decided to write a close analysis of Typee and Omoo. Accordingly, I make quite a lot of references to both novels – and less so to secondary sources – because I believe a lot of what is said in these books have been disregarded or only briefly looked upon. Lastly, I have repeatedly used Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before The Mast in comparison to Typee and Omoo, both because it is a travelogue that dates from the 19th-century – just as Melville’s works – and because it has to some extent influenced Melville’s life experiences and writings. This comparison particularly shows that Melville was strongly influenced by the genre conventions of the 19th-century, i.e. that his early travel narratives resemble other adventure stories and travelogues, but it also makes clear that Melville’s opinions were not as nuanced as other writers’ – in other words, he was not as careful with his religious and political opinions as he should have been – which eventually caused his writing career to come to a sudden end.
7 Leon Howard, Herman Melville: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California press, 1951). 8 Charlotte E. Keyes, High On the Mainmast: A Biography of Herman Melville (New Haven: College & University Press, 1966). 8
3. The Fictionalised “Unvarnished Truth”
Herman Melville was a sailor; that is a well-known fact. It should therefore not come as a surprise that his travel stories contain a lot of biographical references, even though these novels are to a large extent also fictionalised. So why did a man with such an amount of personal knowledge about travelling rely on other stories and secondary sources and use them as intertexts in his own novels? It is clear that one must make a distinction between Melville the sailor and Melville the author. However, even though it is also a well-known fact that he used other stories, which he incorporated in his own books, this was actually not that uncommon at the time: “Borrowings from other travel texts, acknowledged or otherwise, are a conventional constituent of travel narrative. Compilation is part of the making of a travel book,”9 which makes the travel story as a whole more complete and more true – far more than the observations of a single person can achieve on their own. Even though Melville indeed did so as well, for similar reasons, it actually caused him quite some problems.
3.1. Blurry Distinctions
Travel-narratives were a common genre in the 19th century, one of the reasons being that “[t]he authority of the explorer […] depended substantially on the writing of a narrative of travel, either first or second hand.”10 There must therefore have been quite a lot of travel stories – or at least travellers who wanted their story published – so Melville’s first novel might never have been published if he had not been able to offer his British publisher John Murray something renewing, namely a travel story that was set in the Marquesas Islands, a region that had barely been written about. Melville incorporated pieces of other travel stories – literally copying them – into his own works, so as to make them more truthful and less fictionalised. Nevertheless, this actually augments the problem of fictionalisation: by mixing up different texts with tales that he has heard during his own travels as well as stories of his own imagination, loosely based on actual experiences, the division between fact and fiction becomes rather blurred. This might not seem a problem in the 21st century, but it certainly was at the time: “The issue of the book’s authenticity quickly emerged […] The book’s questionable authenticity had caused Melville problems from the time he first tried to publish it [Typee],” because his American editors
9 Janet Giltrow, “Speaking Out: Travel and Structure in Herman Melville’s Early Narratives,” American Literature 52.1 (1980): 20. 10 Felix Driver, “Distance and Disturbance: Travel, Exploration and Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 14 (2004): 77. 9
“rejected it on the grounds that ‘it was impossible that it could be true and therefore was without real value.’”11 His English publisher, John Murray, “for the sake of his ‘Home and Colonial Library,’ needed to silence the critics who doubted both Melville’s identity and the veracity of his account”12 and had therefore “pestered him for ‘documentary evidence’ that he had been in the Marquesas,”13 which experiences formed the basis for Typee. This evidence must have been easily produced – he had been in the Marquesas and among the Typees – but documents of the ships Melville had boarded would also have shown that he had stayed in Typee Valley for 3 weeks instead of the 4 months he refers to in his novel. To be published in Murray’s The Home and Colonial Library Series was therefore both an advantage and a disadvantage: a novel published in a series was already more prestigious because people subscribed to it, but Murray had also ties with the Royal Navy, so to have him publish Melville’s novels added legitimacy to his travel stories. On the other hand, Murray had a reputation to keep up and could not afford to publish anything that was fictional and therefore wanted to be “reassured that the adventurer and the writer of the adventure [Typee] were identical”14 before he would publish the book, and Leon Howard even claims that Murray himself had “‘insisted’ that Melville make ‘additions and changes’ of a documentary nature.”15 However, according to Parker, “[i]t seems less likely that these additional chapters had been demanded by Murray,”16 and far more probable that Melville made these changes out of his own free will and because he knew Murray might be sceptical about the truthfulness of his book. The latter is probably the main reason that “[e]ven before Murray made any decision on the manuscript,” which had been brought to London by his brother Gansevoort, “Melville had begun adding to it, eking out his own recollections with material he plundered from other travelers’ published accounts of their visits to the South Seas,”17 thus clearly and purposefully blurring the division between truth and imagination – particularly because he did not know to what extent the stories he based himself on and copied into his own novels might have been fictional themselves. In other words, “[f]rom Typee onward Melville deliberately deceived readers by presenting other people’s observations as his own.”18 Moreover, from the start he also seems to condemn other people’s writings as
11 Higgins and Parker, introduction, x. 12 Jasper Schelstraete, “The Atlantic Between Them: Dickens, Melville, and Nationality in the Transatlantic Market” (PhD diss., University of Ghent, 2014), 77. 13 Higgins and Parker, introduction, xiii. 14 Hershel Parker, “Evidences for ‘Late Insertions’ in Melville’s Works,” Studies in the Novel 7.3 (1975): 410. 15 Parker, “Evidences for ‘Late Insertions,’” 410. 16 Parker, “Evidences for ‘Late Insertions,’” 411. 17 Higgins and Parker, introduction, x. 18 Higgins and Parker, introduction, xi. 10 superficial and based on other people’s experiences instead of their own, for example in the following excerpt: “These learned tourists generally obtain the greater part of their information from the retired old South-Sea rovers […] A natural desire to make himself of consequence in the eyes of the strangers, prompts him to lay claim to a much greater knowledge […] than he actually possesses.”19 Melville could of course not be any more hypocrite, since Typee and Omoo were largely based on the stories he had heard on board of the ships he had travelled on. He also questions some of the things he read on Paganism because the author had remained at one of the Marquesas islands for only two weeks,20 which is of course but a week less than Melville’s own stay among the Typees. Melville may condemn his fellow seamen for the spinning of tough yarns21 as much as he can, he cannot deny the fact that he was himself known to be a good and popular storyteller on the ships he boarded,22 and he even admits in the preface to Typee that stories such as told in this novel were often “‘spun as a yarn,’” “notwithstanding the familiarity of sailors with all sorts of curious adventure.”23 Even though he claims but a page further that he is committed to telling the truth only, he has actually summed up pretty well what his novels consist of: several travel and adventure stories that are intertwined and enhanced by the author’s imagination. Even long before he started writing Typee, he had already begun thinking about how to tell this narrative and especially how to make it more interesting and extraordinary when he was entertaining his fellow shipmates with his stories. In other words, “he had to decide how much of the truth he would tell and how he would tell it,”24 and “[a]nyone he met later, ashore or afloat, […] did not have to hear the rather tame story of how Melville actually left the island, but one dramatic version or another of what settled into shape as the ending of Typee.”25 One good consequence of this storytelling aboard these ships was the interaction with his audience: they could make inquiries, tell him they questioned his experiences or show him which parts of his story they liked or disliked. This might be the cause of Typee’s success, in contrast to most of his other works: the story had already been tested, revised and approved. Probably Melville did not become an author because of what he had experienced during his travels, but because it was an important part of a seaman’s life – telling stories killed time,
19 Herman Melville, Typee (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 170. 20 Melville, Typee, 170. 21 Melville, Typee, 170. 22 See Hershel Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography. Volume I, 1819-1851 (London: Johns Hopkins, 1996), 265- 266. 23 Melville, Typee, 1. 24 Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography, 265. 25 Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography, 231. 11 particularly during night-watch – and his fellow shipmates’ enthusiasm might have made him realise that he was actually very good at it. Every new crew Melville became a part of seemed more eager to listen to his extraordinary stories, through which they themselves could learn something about other cultures.26 They in return “must have offered Melville stories of their own that he may later have drawn on in ways now irrecoverable.”27 In Omoo, a fellow shipmate exclaims the following when he sees Tommo: “‘Ay, Typee, my king of the cannibals, is it you!’”28 It is likely that Melville has really experienced such an event – or even more than once – since Parker claims that others were already creating stories about him as well.29 He must have felt quite confident and deemed his fellow shipmates inferior for their lack of similar experiences. At any rate, he did not abstain from adding extraordinary things to his stories, especially sexual things, which must have annoyed those shipmates who thought they had experienced something exceptional with the island maidens themselves. These were the stories that were definitely the ones the ships’ crews wanted to hear about most and it must have bothered Melville that these were exactly the parts that his publishers asked to change or omit and that caused offense among critics and readers alike for being too sensual.
3.2. Borrowings and Plagiarism
Melville clearly looks down upon some of the authors of other travel stories, because he believes they have based their tales on those of others and that such a writer “knows just the sort of information wanted, and furnishes it to any extent,”30 but this account actually sums up what he has done himself. The problem was that Melville continued to claim that Typee was entirely based on fact, though, and could not cope with critics that doubted this, perhaps because he felt detected for having done something wrong, which, of course, he had: “Despite – or perhaps because of – several degrees of duplicity in his presenting the book as ‘unvarnished truth,’ Melville was outraged by reviewers’ claims that parts of the book were inventions.”31 He could, of course, very easily prove that some of these parts were not inventions, by showing the books which he had plagiarised and refer to the authors’ legitimacy, but he would probably then have ruined his own reputation forever. It seems that, to avoid these kind of reviewers’ claims in the future, he therefore included the following sentence in the preface to Omoo: “[A]
26 Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography, 231. 27 Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography, 231. 28 Melville, Omoo, 4. 29 Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography, 229. 30 Melville, Typee, 170. 31 Higgins and Parker, introduction, x. 12 strict adherence to the facts has, of course, been scrupulously observed; and in some instances it has even been deemed advisable to quote previous voyagers in corroboration of what is offered as the fruit of the author’s own observations,”32 and he also admits that “collateral information has been obtained from the oldest books of South Sea voyages and also from the ‘Polynesian Researches’ of Ellis.”33 Just like in Typee Melville actually “distances himself from controversy, relying largely upon criticism advanced by these prior authors,”34 but whereas he initially did not name his “sources,” he does so in Omoo. Throughout the novel, references are made to other works, which bibliographical information is given by means of footnotes. In other words, it seems Melville tried to show his readers and reviewers alike that what he is telling is the actual truth. Nevertheless, it seems likely that he still committed plagiarism. The reappearance of Toby – aka Richard Tobias Greene – his companion in Typee, abated the fact-or-fiction debate to a large extent. However, Toby himself never contradicted the duration of their stay among the Typees nor some of the extraordinary events that occurred during their journey, since it was “not in his interest to quibble about details” and therefore “confirmed Typee as far as his own participation was concerned,” which he did by means of an open letter to Melville in 1846,35 and “never disputed any of those details through his long life.”36 Moreover, since he gave his own account of the events to the Commercial Advertiser37 – through which the reader finally knows what had happened to Toby and why he had never returned to Melville (or “Tommo” as the Typees call him) – Greene had probably also earned some money because of the success of Typee. Regardless of Melville’s plagiarism and the question whether what Greene himself has written about the events in the Typee Valley, in contrast to his later works, Typee is actually “true in much of its substance and grand items.” It is certainly not the “unvarnished truth,” but “truth a good deal varnished” nonetheless.38
3.3. Obvious Mistakes and Understandable Critique
It is strange that no contemporary reader ever questioned some of the obvious mistakes Melville has made. In Typee, for example, Melville “inaccurately places the Typee and Happar valleys
32 Melville, Omoo, v-vi. 33 Melville, Omoo, vi. 34 Ellis, “Melville’s Literary Cartographies,” 18. 35 Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography, 217. 36 Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography, 214. 37 Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography, 217. 38 Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography, 214. 13 in the northwest quadrant of the island”39 on the map that was included in the first English and American editions of the novel, even though Melville probably consulted a map that had positioned these places correctly. In Omoo, he is at times downright inconsistent, though. At a certain point, an account is given of Melville’s companion Doctor Long Ghost, who appears to be “unable to swim,”40 but later on he is described to be happily swimming and splashing about.41 This seems but a minor mistake, but it is a mistake nonetheless and proves that Melville has given his friend either the ability or disability to swim as it best suits the story and not because he was actually capable or not to do so. Another example of a similar contradiction is the influence of the missionaries. In Chapter 44, the narrator blames the missionaries for having made the Tahitians lazy: instead of making their own clothes, tools and domestic utensils as they had always done before the arrival of these foreigners, they are now dependent on European resources, because their quality is superior to anything the natives can make themselves.42 The fishermen of the Valley of Martair – where Tommo and Doctor Long Ghost work as farmers – on the other hand are described to have given themselves up “to all manner of lazy wickedness,” since they are secluded “from the ministrations of the missionaries.”43 These inconsistencies did not seem to bother Melville’s readers, though, nor are these the parts that made them question whether these novels were fact or fiction or whether Melville was sincere when he either hailed or scolded the influences of the missionaries. Nevertheless, the question whether Typee was fact or fiction was an issue from the start and seemed for the critics to be as important as, if not even more important than, the literary value and the style of the novel, and it certainly was for his first British publisher, John Murray, who eventually did not want to publish Melville anymore because of the questionable factuality of Typee and Omoo and Mardi’s absolute transition to fiction.44 Of course, the content of the novel is intertwined with this question, particularly because Melville claimed to be telling the “unvarnished truth” from the very beginning, and some people probably hoped that the questionable behaviour of the missionaries was merely fiction. Indeed, some critics concluded that Typee’s “accounts of missionary behavior and of French imperialism in the South Pacific were not reliable, owing to ‘the spirit of fiction’ in which the whole book was written.”45 The
39 John Bryant, introduction to Typee. A Peep at Polynesian Life, by Herman Melville (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), xxxviii. 40 Melville, Omoo, 149. 41 Melville, Omoo, 236. 42 Melville, Omoo, 177. 43 Melville, Omoo, 191. 44 Schelstraete, “The Atlantic Between Them,” 80. 45 Higgins and Parker, introduction, x. 14 book was quite simply considered to be dangerous according to many of its first readers and it “so angered the religious establishment that Melville’s American publisher forced him to reissue Typee in an expurgated revised edition. Melville’s first book, then, was a censored book.”46 A couple of years after its first publication, Melville again made some revisions, which turned Typee into a “new, expurgated, yet also enhanced edition” – among other additions it included “The Story of Toby” – but “England did not follow suit,”47 except for Toby’s story. This led to two different versions of the book, a revised American one and one for Great Britain, which still consisted of the original anticolonial passages and one could therefore indeed say that “Melville was perhaps better suited for a British than an American audience,”48 or at least at the beginning of his literary career. Be that as it may, it led to two different but true versions of Typee, which dissimilarities also show how easy it was for Melville to reimagine his story and add new things to it. Furthermore, “The Story of Toby,” which is introduced in Typee as “A sequel to Typee by the author of that work,”49 i.e. by Melville himself, is actually a second- hand account of what happened after and how Toby had escaped. This could of course have given Melville ample opportunity to make changes and to perfectly fit in this story with the whole of Typee. It is therefore probable that the events depicted in this chapter are far from being the actual ones.
46 John Bryant, introduction, xi. 47 Bryant, introduction, xxviii. 48 Bryant, introduction, xxviii. 49 Melville, Typee, 259. 15
4. Melville’s Struggles with His Contemporaries
Even though a lot of people tend to forget that Melville has written more than just Moby-Dick – mostly people that do not study English literature that is – the contents section of Herman Melville. The Contemporary Reviews already makes clear how thoroughly reviewed Melville’s first novels – particularly Omoo – were and how the number of reviews dropped over the course of his later works. Moby-Dick was not nearly as much reviewed as Typee and was certainly not received as well. The first couple of lines of the introduction to Herman Melville. The Contemporary Reviews also show that what other people thought about his books meant a great deal to Melville: “Herman Melville collected and scrutinized the reviews of his books, especially in his early career, when he commented on them frequently in his letters and in his first journal.”50 Of course, every author writes in order to amuse his readers and please the reviewers, but since Melville was forced to revise the American edition of Typee, which meant his readers and editors were not amused enough to take his book such as it was, he probably based himself to a large extent on contemporary reviews in order to get to know the desires of his reading public and to find out what he should accordingly change about Typee. In other words, “[f]rom the start, his reviews […] frequently […] influenced the nature of the next book he wrote.”51 Nevertheless, even though Melville cared a lot about these reviews – initially, at least – he eventually did not let his writing style nor his novels’ subjects get influenced by the critics and public anymore, but instead just wrote what he wanted to write.
4.1. Different National Interests and Their Desire for Alterations
Since Moby-Dick had been badly reviewed, Melville decided to satirize “his reviewers in a section he added to one of his major works, Pierre.”52 This “revenge” eventually did him not much good: Pierre was not received very well, which is quite the understatement. Even though Melville’s writings were influenced by his reviews, and therefore to some extent by his readers’ literary desires, his novels continually fared less well and his reviews became worse, up to the point when he gave up prose for poetry and became literary obscure.53 Perhaps if he had stuck to his initial ideas of what a good book consists of, he would have remained as popular as after
50 Higgins and Parker, introduction, ix. 51 Higgins and Parker, introduction, ix. 52 Higgins and Parker, introduction, ix. 53 Bryant, introduction, i. 16 the publication of Typee and Omoo.54 “The ensuing Melville Revival of the 1920s assured the author of the literary recognition he failed to receive during his lifetime.”55 It seems that in satirising his reviewers in Pierre, Melville was tired of the influence these critics had on his writing, his reputation and therefore on his income and personal life as well. Oscar Wilde was of the opinion that it is far better to be talked about, even badly, than to not be talked about at all, but Melville would probably not have agreed. Eventually, he must have given up caring for his reviews and revising his books accordingly, since his second English publisher Bentley – or one of his associates – had started to do this instead. They had “excised or modified most passages that might be considered blasphemous or otherwise irreverent […] or sexually suggestive. As a result, British reviewers of The Whale had little cause to complain about the ‘sneers at revealed religion’ or the ‘irreverence or profane jesting’ that frequently offended American reviewers of Moby-Dick.”56 Bentley was not the first British publisher to suggest changes, though: Murray was willing to publish Typee only on condition that he could make “a few slight omissions”57 such as “the description of the dances of the Marquesan girls which Murray expurgated as too sensual,”58 a chapter which he stubbornly included in his next book, though, because Melville argues that the dances of the Marquesas Islanders and those of the Tahitians resemble one another anyway.59 This not only shows that Melville did not like his books to be revised – which Murray and Bentley undoubtedly considered for the better – but also that he did not much care for facts after all: enticing descriptions were much more important for him and he could easily make use of the same reports in other contexts. The fact that his British publishers demanded changes and made these themselves as well, probably contributed to the American and British reviewers’ difference in attitude towards Melville’s novels: England “was always more hospitable to Melville than his own country.”60 Nevertheless, his British publishers could no longer forgive some of the outrageous themes he discussed in his later works either and however bad the American reviews of Pierre were, at least the book got published in this country. Bentley on the other hand “refused to publish Pierre unless Melville allowed him to ‘make or have made by judicious literary friend’ such alterations as were ‘absolutely necessary’ if the book was to be ‘properly appreciated’ in England. […]
54 His popularity may not be overestimated, though: Richard Henry Dana’s travelogue Two Years Before the Mast, for example, was much more popular at the time. 55 Bryant, introduction, i. 56 Higgins and Parker, introduction, xvii. 57 Parker, “Evidences for ‘Late Insertions,’” 412. 58 Parker, “Evidences for ‘Late Insertions,’” 412. 59 Parker, “Evidences for ‘Late Insertions,’” 422. 60 Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (New York: Grove press, 1955), back cover. 17
Melville evidently declined Bentley’s terms, with the result that the book was not published in England.”61 It seems as if Melville wrote for himself and his own notion of genius only and preferred not being published to conforming to his publisher’s – and readers’ – desires. At first he might have been “somewhat reconciled to the expurgation[s] because some of the omitted material had not formed part of his original plan,” in other words, he could at least “tell himself that the whole process of expurgation was moving the book [Typee] back toward the simpler story he had first written, before he began expanding it with sourcebooks,”62 which must have flattered his own creativity. These continuous requests for changes again show his inaptitude at understanding what his reading public desired, though. The fact that it was mainly the second- hand additions that were omitted must have eventually also led him to consider whether he actually needed them. This may also explain why he initially wrote according to the conventions of the time – his books therefore strongly resembling other travel stories – and why he eventually ended up writing novels that were unprecedented at the time. Only from the Melville Revival of the 1920s onwards did people appreciate his nerve and creativity, but even then, his own country seemed at first less enthusiastic about him than the British: “By the time the American Raymond Weaver published his biography Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (1921), the Melville revival in England was an achieved fact. Literary Americans scrambled to catch up with the British admirers.”63
4.2. Literary Conventions and the Public’s Expectations 4.2.1. Rules and Disappointments
The reviews and especially the fact-or-fiction debate made Melville reconsider the initial plans for his 3rd book and aroused his wish to show the public another writing style.64 Moreover, he seemed to have given up the desire to please his readers and critics: “From delighting his readers with racy anecdotes of South Sea vagabondizing, Melville had shifted to delighting himself with a multiplicity of learned allusions and recondite speculations […] in apparent disregard of any potential audience.”65 [my emphasis] Unfortunately, the readers were indeed not delighted with Mardi, but instead disappointed at such an unexpected turn in the author’s writing career: Melville gave no “indication of understanding how severely he might affront the goodwill of many readers, admirers of Typee and Omoo, who would take up the new book expecting to be
61 Higgins and Parker, introduction, xix. 62 Parker, “Evidence for ‘Late Insertions,’” 422. 63 Nina Baym, editor, The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 8th ed. (New York: Norton, 2012), 1440. 64 Higgins and Parker, introduction, xiii. 65 Higgins and Parker, introduction, xiii. 18 entertained with South Sea adventures and find their expectations dazzlingly rewarded.”66 Thinking that he could be a popular and admired writer without having to respect his audience’s wishes and take his reviews in consideration – some of them were so bad that he probably did not deem them worthy of his deliberation – he turned his back on his readers and critics and this way caused his own downfall. He obviously did not stop to think that he was, as a beginning author and already the cause of sundry critique, not in the position to change the style and subject of his novels and become a somewhat experimental writer. A reoccurring critique for Moby-Dick for example is illustrated in the following quote: “Some British reviewers […] objected to Melville’s violation of literary conventions […] and (since the third volume lacked the ‘Epilogue’) several complained of his violation of the commonsense rule that first-person narrators should survive the events they depict.”67 Present-day conventions allow – and even encourage – contemporary authors to experiment, in strong contrast to the rules to which 19th- century authors like Melville had to submit. All the things that a writer at that time had to reckon with left not much opportunity for literary inventions, i.e. novels that differed (much) from the 19th-century literary norms. This is most probably the reason why Moby-Dick was shunned and Typee generally praised by contemporary reviews, whereas barely anyone reads the latter anymore and The Whale is nowadays hailed as Melville’s masterpiece. This phenomenon can be linked to research on schema theory, especially by that of Guy Cook.68 He argues that literariness depends on the amount of schema disruptions and schema refreshments, i.e. to what extent a reader’s schema of a certain literary genre is challenged. According to Cook, in other words, a book can only be considered a work of literature if it does something fundamentally new and distances itself from other literary works. This definition may be applied to contemporary Western literature but was certainly not the 19th-century practice, on the contrary: travel stories and travelogues were mainly schema reinforcing, i.e. confirming existing schemata – or “conventions” – regarding these kind of stories. “If a text reinforces the reader’s schemata, the world it projects will be perceived as conventional, familiar, realistic and so on. If a text disrupts and refreshes the reader’s schemata, the world it projects will be perceived as deviant, unconventional, alternative, and so on.”69 Melville played with these distinctions as well: the personal narrative form, such as Typee and Omoo are, “is designed to bring modern, ‘cvilized’ readers into contact with the remotely foreign culture, and
66 Higgins and Parker, introduction, xiv. 67 Higgins and Parker, introduction, xvii. 68 See Elena Semino, “Schema Theory and the Analysis of Text Worlds in Poetry,” Language and Literature 4.2 (1995): 85-88. 69 Semino, “Schema Theory and Text Worlds in Poetry,” 87. 19 this may be accomplished through analogy, by gesturing towards what the readers already know in order to show them the significant differences of that which is unknown or unfamiliar.”70 A time in which literary Realism had its heyday was not suitable for Melville’s later, unconventional works, but expected novels to conform to a certain set of rules. In other words, most travel stories of the time resembled one another, as did Typee – and Omoo to a large extent as well – and this was what was expected from an author who committed himself to this kind of genre. A book such as Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast is considered to be barely readable in this day and age; at the time of publication, on the other hand, it was widely praised and much more popular than any of Melville’s books, which were to some extent influenced by Dana’s, to whom he wrote a letter declaring his positive feelings towards the novel, and which probably made him want to embark on a voyage around Cape Horn himself.71 In the Athenaeum edition of February 21st for example, Typee is described as thrilling because of its “minute investigation,”72 a sentiment one would nowadays certainly not ascribe to such a characteristic. Cannibalism, one of the Typees’ main attributes and which is continually referred to throughout Typee, might be considered to add to the suspense of the novel and lead to some interesting scenes – which is indeed the case. Nevertheless, this kind of excitement seems not to have been appreciated at the time of publication. The New York Morning News for example concludes its review with the following statement: “It [Typee] is full of entertainment and enjoyment – in spite of the cannibalism.”73 One would assume that readers read travel stories – Typee is particularly praised for its depiction of other races – precisely because of these kind of events, which they would most likely never experience themselves, but it seems they have a strong aversion to such depictions. Writers such as Richard Dana Jr. and Melville himself must have known about this, since they both refer to these scenes in their preface as well as promising the reader that they have tried to not go into too much detail of these gruesome events. Dana, for example, seems sorry for some of the incidents that occur in his book and apologises to the reader beforehand: “I have been obliged occasionally to use strong and coarse expressions, and in some instances to give scenes which may be painful to nice feelings; but I have very carefully avoided doing so.”74 So even though Dana claims to have tried to describe all the struggles and
70 Tally, “‘Spaces That before Were Blank,’” 186. 71 Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography, 181. 72 Herman Melville, The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4. 73 Melville, The Contemporary Reviews, 21. 74 Richard Henry Dana and Thomas L. Philbrick, Two Years Before the Mast and Other Voyages: Two Years Before the Mast; To Cuba and Back; Journal of a Voyage Round the World, 1859-1860 (New York: Library of America, 2005), 4. 20 delights of a seaman’s life, it seems that, in the end, the reading public remains the most important factor when writing a book. Both authors, however, also write they are convinced these depictions are necessary and would harm the truthfulness of the book when omitted. These literary conventions were probably a stronghold to some extent, but they may also have caused quite a lot of frustrations.
4.2.2. Genre Categorization
A problem that is closely linked to Melville’s experimentations and his faulty advertising of Typee as the “unvarnished truth” – in other words “[w]hat Melville offered a publisher was seldom quite what he labelled it in his letters”75 – is the categorization of his novels and its different genres and themes: “Just as the question of whether Typee was fact or fiction troubled his English publisher and some reviewers, so the problem of how to classify his books would frequently vex reviewers during the remainder of his literary career.”76 Readers at the time wanted to know what to expect from a novel – in other words, genre specification was common as well as necessary – and were annoyed when their expectations were not granted, such as happened with Mardi. Just as the publication of Typee gave him the title of “the ‘man who lived among the cannibals,’”77 a title which he eventually began to hate because it clung to him for the rest of his days, so the categorization of his novels restricted his possibilities of experimentation and impeded the success of novels like Mardi and his accomplishment as an author of works other than travel stories: “The popular success of Typee and his next book, Omoo […] established him in reviewers’ minds as a writer of lively narratives of adventure, a label that dogged him through the rest of his career.”78 Highly philosophical novels like Pierre and Moby-Dick were therefore not done for an author like Melville, who had gained his (initial) success with easily readable travel stories. A letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne shows that he simply could not go back to the time in which he wrote “uncomplicated narratives of adventure,” though: “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, – it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.”79 [original emphasis]
75 Higgins and Parker, introduction, xi. 76 Higgins and Parker, introduction, xi. 77 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1427. 78 Higgins and Parker, introduction, xi. 79 Higgins and Parker, introduction, xvii. 21
4.2.3. Travels End
Even though some people cannot stand staying long at the same place, travelling is generally only temporary, and when one embarks on an adventure, such as Melville the sailor did, one assumes – at least, if everything goes to plan, which did not happen all that often at the time – that one will eventually return to one’s homeland, and one’s own culture for that matter. Although Tommo continually reiterates the pleasures and happiness he experiences among the Typees, he also refers to the desire to go home and lead his civilized life again every couple of pages. As Janet Giltrow rightfully explains, “[t]o stay in Typee would interrupt fatally the sequence of travel, to leave the journey forever incomplete and the traveller stranded.”80 Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake, which tells the post-apocalyptic story of someone who believes he is the last man on earth, even seems to suggest that travel writing is something universal, even if it might seem purposeless, and that all those who record these kind of experiences assume someone will eventually take notice of them: “Or castaways on desert islands, keeping their journals day by tedious day. [...] But even a castaway assumes a future reader, someone who'll come along later and find his bones and his ledger, and learn his fate.”81 Melville thus inscribes himself into a long-standing tradition and the endings of his travel stories reinstate the purpose of travelling as well as travel-narrative convention: “[T]he formalities of the travel writer’s literary mode themselves indicate the outcome of the traveller’s experience. Whatever the dangers may have been along the way, the traveller is home now. This message is conveyed […] even in the first chapter.”82 Contemporary readers might not even have wondered whether Tommo would ever get tattooed or not – a fear which the main character repeatedly refers to – simply because the author of Typee is still able to live among his fellow American citizens, which would not have been the case if he had altered his appearance in such a way: “The importunate tattooist arouses not just the fear of defacement but also the horror of complete absorption into the foreign milieu, the attendant loss of will and identity, and, most important, the abandonment of hope for return to America.”83 This is indeed what is reiterated throughout the novel, namely that Tommo intends on making it back to his home-country and can therefore not chance to be tattooed, which would evidently make him an outcast in America. Tommo does not merely go away, though, but runs off in a kind of heroical way: “Rather than inventing for Tommo a sentimental departure full of longing and regret, Melville has him
80 Giltrow, “Travel and Structure in Herman Melville’s Early Narratives,” 27. 81 Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London: Virago Press, 2012), 45. 82 Giltrow, “Travel and Structure in Herman Melville’s Early Narratives,” 30. 83 Giltrow, “Travel and Structure in Herman Melville’s Early Narratives,” 28. 22 skedaddle the moment he gets the chance. We are left in Tommo’s dust objecting to his violent retreat and callous betrayal of his island family.”84 “We” must certainly refer to Bryant’s contemporary readers and not those of Melville, who might very well understand why he preferred fighting his way out of the Typee Valley in order to finally get home again, over staying in this Eden-like place that is inhabited by uncivilized cannibals. Moreover, a 19th- century reader must have anticipated Tommo’s departure and the events in Typee should be seen in the light of this expected ending. Everything the main character experiences adds up to this event and his decision to get away as soon as possible never budges. Every form of delight is therefore undercut by his aversion of the Typees’ cannibalism and “uncivilized,” yet peaceful way of living, as to explain why he cannot stay at such a place, to give reasons for his eventual, and rather sudden, escape, because such an escape must eventually happen in order for Typee, as a travel story, to make sense and to have got a purpose. The endings of bibliographical travel stories such as these were inevitably known from page one onwards, because how could these books have been written if the narrator had not survived? In other words, “we need go no further than the occasion of the travel genre itself to rationalize Tommo’s desire to get out of this place [Typee]. Homecoming is the proper dénouement in travel writing: Typee is not a goal, only a stage in a round-trip. Tommo’s destination is his original point of departure – America.”85 As mentioned before, contemporary British readers were irritated by the ending of Moby-Dick, because this edition did not include the Epilogue, which made it look as if the narrator did not return home safely. This way, the whole purpose of a travel story is defeated, because the intention of travelling is to go back where one started off.
4.3. The Actual Truth
The fact that Melville wanted – and has – turned away from writing “ordinary” travel stories and that he instead desired to become one of the great authors of the 19th-century, who invested themselves in writing allegorical, philosophical – and according to Melville, true – novels, becomes apparent in the following citation. He read Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) and wrote a belated review in which he expressed his thoughts about the challenges facing American writers. [...] Melville, in praising Hawthorne’s achievements, honored what he believed infused the book he was writing: dark ‘Shakespearean’ truths about human nature
84 Bryant, introduction, x. 85 Giltrow, “Travel and Structure in Herman Melville’s Early Narratives,” 26. 23
and the universe that, ‘in this world of lies,’ can be told ‘covertly’ and 'by snatches.’86 Since Melville is comparing the positive traits of his friend’s novel with his own work-in- progress, he must have been convinced that, if Hawthorne had achieved to write a successful philosophical novel, he would surely be able to do a similar thing. His “obsession with the truth […] led him to abandon personal narrative in favor of a form that enabled him to produce a more comprehensive, and therefore truer, picture. […] [H]e found that the representational form was not adequate to his task. Such works failed to deliver the whole truth, which for Melville means that they failed to be true at all.”87 In other words, it seems as if Melville considered a philosophical novel such as Moby-Dick, which is entirely fictional, to be truer of life and more “educational” than the (semi-)biographical Typee and Omoo. At the beginning of his writing career, he had invested so much time in convincing both his readers and his publishers – and perhaps even himself – in proving that Typee and Omoo were completely based on fact, just to denounce these kind of narratives entirely a couple of years later, deciding that he should instead produce works like Mardi, in which he “presented travel (as he would in Moby-Dick) as a philosophical journey.”88 It must have vexed him that it appeared the public – and his publishers – thought he could not write the bestsellers Hawthorne wrote, but that he should have stuck to writing travel stories instead, books which Nathaniel Hawthorne had praised as well.89 Although he apparently condemned the lying human race, his stories actually contributed to this, and he indeed seems to believe this is the only way one can write a novel. “There is compelling textual and biographical evidence that Melville wrote the book [Moby-Dick] in stages, radically altering his conception of the novel from a relatively straightforward whaling narrative to something that aspired to be a ‘Gospels in this century’ (as he termed the novel in an 1851 letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne).”90 In other words, Melville had tried to write something that the public and his publishers had asked for for quite some time – he desperately wanted to make a novel that would appeal to the public, since he required money and his literary career needed a boost – but it seems that, in the end, he was simply not able to do the thing that he was once praised for and that was desired of him. But even though it had been made clear to him that this style of writing did not appeal to the public, from his third novel onwards Melville’s desire to prove that he
86 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1425. 87 Tally, “‘Spaces That before Were Blank,’” 181-82. 88 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1425. 89 Melville, The Contemporary Reviews, 22. 90 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1425. 24 could be more than a writer of “ordinary” travelogues, seems not abatable. So “instead of supplying his publisher with yet another commercially promising tale of a Polynesian adventure, Melville attempted to elevate the travel-narrative genre to the level of spiritual and political allegory,”91 because he could no longer cope with the thought that he was not telling the whole truth of the South Pacific, but just snippets of it: “[P]ersonal experience inevitably provides erroneous or misleading information,” because one is only relating one’s own experiences. “One’s knowledge must remain incomplete, and therefore untrustworthy,”92 which is the reason “Melville turned away from the personal narrative form with Mardi.”93 No longer claiming that he was telling the “unvarnished truth” – the genre that his public and publishers alike desired and expected – he decides to throw his audience’s desire in the wind and to focus on conveying philosophical, more universal truths, what he eventually considered to be the actual truth and the only one worth writing about.
4.4. Religious Critique
It is striking that in Typee the rather bad accounts given of the missionaries and of “civilized” societies, which are moreover quite extensive, are often eventually undermined by some notions of understanding and forgiveness on the narrator’s part. The same happens with regard to the Typee people, although the other way around: the Typees and their ways of peaceful living are often described as far superior to those of “civilized” countries, which citizens are burdened by laws and money. Nevertheless, after these long philosophical ramblings, the narrator eventually seems to conclude that the Typees still are and remain mere savages, unsophisticated, uncivilized people and especially cannibals. They will therefore always be inferior to “the white man.” One asks oneself whether these revisions, so immediate after the initial contradictory statements, were added in a later, revised edition because of the negative reviews of these parts of the novel. Especially the American critics were offended by these passages, which hailed the Typee way of living and looked down on that of his fellow citizens. Some critics “decided that Melville out of personal bias had wilfully exaggerated the happy state of the Typees and grossly misrepresented the Protestant missionaries.”94 These representations, by a lot of critics and readers considered as faulty, led to even more trouble for Melville after the publication of Omoo: “[t]he book’s extensive exposé of the behavior of Christian missionaries drew still more
91 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1425. 92 Tally, “‘Spaces That before Were Blank,’” 188. 93 Tally, “‘Spaces That before Were Blank,’” 191. 94 Higgins and Parker, introduction, x. 25 vociferous attacks than Typee had faced.”95 These critiques would eventually even lead to his downfall, more evidence that a lot of reviewers were more interested in the fact-or-fiction issue and the religious statements in Melville’s books than in his novels as literary works of art: “The moral objections to Typee (at first only a minor element amid the general praise) multiplied after the publication of Omoo, setting the stage for the ultimate condemnation on religious grounds of two of his greatest books, Moby-Dick and Pierre.”96 The condemnation of the missionaries and the praise for other races were two themes that Melville did not want to subject to the public’s desire, though. If he had, he might have been shunned far less, but he might not have succeeded in writing another book either. It was, bluntly said, his conviction. Even when Melville’s literary career was as good as over and he was forced to write anonymously and for modest rates, he still “in works like [...] 'Benito Cereno,' took on such vexing issues of antebellum culture as racial and gender inequities, the social transformations caused by emerging industrial capitalism, and slavery. Some critics regard these works as among Melville's most socially progressive writings.”97 However, “[i]n these enigmatic fictions, Melville seems more intent on exploring and engaging the ideological discourses of his time than on arguing for any particular reforms.”98 – in other words, he is more interested in writing a good work of fiction than trying to bring about change in society. This attitude is also present in Typee and Omoo, in which he clearly tries to convince his readers to have a more nuanced and liberal view of other races, but in which he is nevertheless never truly able to form a strong opinion and stick to it. “For instance, although there may be no shrewder investigation of white racism and the evils of slavery in 'Benito Cereno' (1855), which partly entraps readers in the stereotypical racist assumption of the sea captain Amasa Delano, the novella is not an obvious attack on slavery as such, and it was ignored by the abolitionist press.”99 The fact that there is no “obvious attack on slavery,” even though indirectly there is, can be compared with Melville's conviction that one can only tell things “covertly.” Melville thus found himself in a difficult situation, which was typical of the Zeitgeist: if he said clearly what he thought about certain institutions – such as the missionaries and slavery – which he did in Typee and Omoo, he was condemned for having too strong and faulty an opinion; if, on the other hand, he tried to convey these beliefs in a more subtle fashion, no one appeared to take notice of them. Once
95 Higgins and Parker, introduction, x. 96 Higgins and Parker, introduction, xii. 97 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1426. 98 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1426. 99 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1426. 26 more Melville's writings simply do not seem to have been ready for the time he was living in and the travel-narrative conventions were both a stronghold as well as an impediment.
27
5. Reality Call: the Missionaries
One cannot get around the question why people continued to travel even though the other cultures are depicted so badly, sometimes even with revulsion – Tommo’s references to the Typees’ cannibalism is such an example. Although these other ways of living are deemed inferior, it seems that for travellers and readers of travel stories alike it is still a necessary escape from one’s own society. Furthermore, they must also enjoy the feeling of superiority, which reaffirms their (relatively) better place in the world as part of a (more) civilized society. Melville’s increasing sympathy for and approval of people whom the Americans and Britons generally deemed much inferior must have annoyed his contemporary readers. They did not want to be lectured on the bad influences and terrible consequences of the missionaries, but wanted to hear them praised – a definite sign that their culture was superior and capable of improving others. The fact that Melville claims the Tahitians to be off worse since the arrival of the missionaries and foreigners in general, seems to show that America and Europe are in fact inferior to these people and could learn something from them instead of the other way around.
5.1. The Truth about the Missions
In Omoo, Melville spends two chapters – chapters 48 and 49 – on the missionaries and its consequences. The name of the former already indicates that he is interested in the facts: “Tahiti as it is.” It seems that in other travel stories, Tahiti must not have been depicted as it truly is, i.e. probably more positive, because of the missionaries’ work: “I merely desire to set forth things as they actually exist.”100 Although he claims that he means “no harm to the missionaries and their cause,”101 he definitely sheds a rather bad light on them. He also includes references to authors who have handled on the same subject – and are according to Melville “good and unbiassed [sic] men”102 – either because he feels these will strengthen his own claims or perhaps because he fears the reviewers that criticised the parts concerning the missionaries in Typee would otherwise again accuse him of faulty and exaggerated claims regarding this topic. However it may be, he certainly doubts whether the missionaries and foreigners in general have brought about any improvements for these islanders. Even though he claims to abstain himself from any conclusions of his own, it is clear what he wants the reader to deduct from these
100 Melville, Omoo, 171. 101 Melville, Omoo, 171. 102 Melville, Omoo, 175. 28
“facts”: “A few very brief extracts will enable the reader to mark for himself what progressive improvement, if any, has taken place.”103 [my emphasis] That these people themselves often feel like they are off worse after the arrival of the missionaries is exemplified by the following excerpt of a Pawnee Chief's speech (which was given at an 1822 conference): “There was a time when we did not know the whites – our wants were then fewer than they are now. They were always within our controul [sic] - we had then seen nothing which we could not get.”104 This can be compared with the first couple of paragraphs of Chapter 44 in Omoo, which describe how the Tahitians have become dependent on European wares – which were evidently unknown to them before the arrival of the missionaries – and who are consequently living a “wretched and destitute mode of life,”105 since they are generally not able to provide themselves with these superior objects. In other words, the Native Americans are deprived of their natural resources and the Tahitians indirectly of their ability to make do with what their islands’ nature gives them.
5.2. Superficialities
Melville understands the discrepancy between what he portrays in Omoo – and what he has depicted in Typee – and what the American and British citizens assume is going on on these islands: “[H]ow comes it to differ so widely from impression of others at home?”106 He concludes that these others do not speak of the “heathens” that have been converted because of the deep understanding and sympathy they have got for Christianity, but of those that “have in any way been induced to abandon idolatry and conform to certain outward observances,”107 in other words, they have only superficially converted to Christianity. Moreover, the words that previously referred to pagan customs have simply been recycled: “‘Taboo Day’; the very word formerly expressing the sacredness of their pagan observances now proclaiming the sanctity of the Christian Sabbath.”108 This shows how purposeless and insincere these conversions actually are. Furthermore, according to Melville the islanders were not induced to abandon these practices because of the missionaries, but because they wanted to and had done so “some time previous to the arrival of the first missionaries.”109 The islanders are thus praised for their own decision to move away from their previous, pagan beliefs and the missionaries for something
103 Melville, Omoo, 173. 104 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 356. 105 Melville, Omoo, 177. 106 Melville, Omoo, 175. 107 Melville, Omoo, 175. 108 Melville, Omoo, 164. 109 Melville, Omoo, 172. 29 they had absolutely nothing to do with. These voluntary acts were also the only customs that stuck. Melville trusts that the beliefs and practices that were forced upon them, on the other hand, will soon be entirely abandoned again: “Even in one or two instances […] where the natives have impulsively burned their idols, and rushed to the waters of baptism, the very suddenness of the change has but indicated its unsoundness.”110 Melville continually contrasts the Typees with what he has heard and read about them, namely that they are savages and fearless cannibals, with what he sees right in front of him: peaceful people that have not done him nor Toby – as far as he knows – any harm. He must eventually conclude that the accounts of this people, which were given in other travel stories, were incorrect and tries to explain this: The strict honesty which the inhabitants of nearly all the Polynesian Islands manifest towards each other, is in striking contrast with the thieving propensities some of them evince in their intercourse with foreigners. […] This consideration, while it serves to reconcile an apparent contradiction in the moral character of the islanders, should in some measure alter that low opinion of it which the reader of South Sea voyages is too apt to form.111 However, despite the fact that he contradicts the generally-accepted cannibal nature of the Typees, he is never able to entirely sever his bonds with his home country and its culture, nor with the stories about the awful deeds the Typees’ are assumed to have done to numerous foreigners and other tribes.
5.3. From Subtle To Direct Attacks
One can definitely observe a decline of the subtlety with which Melville describes the works of the missionaries. In his first book, Typee, he certainly hints at its bad influences and the fact that they are not as noteworthy as the people in his home country suppose them to be, but he is often not attacking them directly – and when he does, he immediately afterwards shows his sympathy for their mission and its difficulties nonetheless. Instead, he questions them in a sort of hypothetical and cautious way, as if he tries to show that he might very well be wrong himself, for example in the following excerpt: “I should certainly be led to suppose that they had exaggerated the evils of Paganism, in order to enhance the merit of their own disinterested labors.”112 By using words such as “should” and “suppose,” it appears as if he tries to be quite
110 Melville, Omoo, 175. 111 Melville, Typee, 201. 112 Melville, Typee, 169. 30 careful in how to touch upon this subject; he might very well know that this topic might bring him into trouble if he did not do so. Indeed, it is the main critique that is given of Typee and as he augments the severity with which he handles on this subject, the critiques become more severe as well, up to the point that his books are scandalised for his condemnation of the missionaries and Christianity in general. Pierre is probably the strongest example of such a novel: “[T]he themes he chose to deal with in Pierre were dangerous ones, unlikely to appeal to a wide audience – ideas […] about the unchristianity of conventional Christians and, worse, the impracticability of Christianity.”113 Whether Melville has discovered more of religion and its influences since he wrote his first novel or whether he just could no longer abstain from depicting these consequences as he believes them to truly be – in contrast with how they are portrayed in most other books – it certainly did not do his literary career any good. Moreover, since the critics reviewed his later works so badly, they were hardly read anymore – or even published for that matter – so it seems unlikely that his condemnation of religion actually accomplished anything, except for the literary works of art that were appreciated only after his death.
113 Higgins and Parker, introduction, xviii. 31
6. Religion
A 19th-century writer was at the time expected to contribute to a positive image of Christianity, but by now it should have become clear that Melville was not interested in such a cause; he was, on the other hand, interested in the truth. Even though his later works were generally dismissed because of his condemnation of Christianity, this chapter will again show that Melville was – initially at least – still wondering whether this religion was for the better or the worse. In other words, Christianity was also a subject of which he gives both positive and negative accounts of in Typee and Omoo and of which he does not seem able to give a clear, unalterable opinion – yet.
6.1. Insincerity
The episode in which the deceased members of the Julia’s crew – of which Tommo is a part at the beginning of Omoo – get thrown overboard shows how slight their Christian belief actually is: “Some additional ceremony, however, was now insisted upon, and a Bible was called for. But none was to be had, not even a Prayer Book.”114 This can be compared with the way Richard Dana and his fellow seamen regard the Sabbath. Even though they complain for not being able to worship the Lord when they are not allowed to take the day off, they actually consider Sunday to be merely a means to lie about and do nothing: “If there is anything that irritates sailors and makes them feel hardly used, it is being deprived of their Sabbath. Not that they would always, or indeed generally, spend it religiously, but it is their only day of rest.”115 The Americans might not be good Christians, but it seems the Europeans are even more insincere: “The Easter holydays are kept up on shore during three days; and being a Catholic vessel, the [Spanish] crew had the advantage of them. For two successive days [...] we saw these fellows going ashore in the morning, and coming off again at night, in high spirits. So much for being Protestants.”116 One would evidently expect more of a country that has a strong religious history, but it seems the Spaniards are as hypocrite as any other Western nation. Dana even claims that American captains actually prefer nonbelievers, since they do not try to profit from these kind of holidays: “Yankees can't afford the time to be Catholics. American ship- masters get nearly three weeks more labor out of their crews, in the course of a year, than the masters of vessels from Catholic countries. Yankees don't keep Christmas, and ship-masters at
114 Melville, Omoo, 40. 115 Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 71. 116 Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 129. 32 sea never know when Thanksgiving comes, so Jack has no festival at all.”117 This only comes to show that, even though they deem other races inferior for being heathenish, they actually do not care much for religion themselves. According to Dana “Christian” “in the sailor’s vocabulary means civilized,”118 which would be considered positive in contrast to more savage people and their practices, yet they themselves cannot be regarded as true Christians and therefore not as truly civilized either. Nevertheless, one of Dana’s fellow seamen complains about seeing too many non-Christians during his travels around Cape Horn. It seems as if they want to stick to their Christian customs not only to profit from them, but also to give themselves a feeling of superiority.
6.2. Marriage Arrangements
In The Financier, a novel that is set in the late 19th century, the main character complains about the American custom of being faithful to his or her partner, and does not comprehend why such a practice has ever come into being.119 The narrator, who also seems to object to such a life style, eventually blames Christianity: “It is a curious fact that by some subtlety of logic in the Christian world, it has come to be believed that there can be no love outside the conventional process of courtship and marriage. One life, one love, is the Christian idea […]. Pagan thought held no such belief.”120 Indeed, in Melville’s first novel it is told that “[a] regular system of polygamy exists among the islanders,” and that Tommo has got “more than one reason to believe that tedious courtships are unknown in the valley of Typee.”121 Nevertheless, there still appears to be some kind of system and rules attached to these practices: it is not the men who have more than one wife, but the women who have several husbands. Tommo believes such a system would never work in Western countries, simply because the men are not as amiable and forbearing. This is not the only reason why the Typees’ marital practices exalt those of America and Europe, though: instead of having to stay with one’s partner for the rest of one’s life, not only for religious reasons, but also because the law and societal customs often forbid it, Typees are able to divorce – if one can in this case call it that – which “produce[s] no unhappiness”122 like it does among their Western equivalents. They are “preceded by no bickerings; for the simple reason, that an ill-used wife or a hen-pecked husband is not obliged to file a bill in
117 Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 129. 118 Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 69. 119 Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 133-34. 120 Dreiser, The Financier, 145. 121 Melville, Typee, 191. 122 Melville, Typee, 191. 33
Chancery to obtain a divorce.”123 Since one is not forced to choose one’s partner wisely – because one will not have to live with him or her until death do them part – “the matrimonial yoke sits easily and lightly, and a Typee wife lives on very pleasant and sociable terms with her husbands.”124 Again, the Western model is questioned and more than one American author seems eager to see it replaced by another, more liberal one.
6.3. Idols
In Moby-Dick, the wooden idol of one of the Pequod’s harpooners – the coloured Queequeg – is merely referred to as “the little devil,”125 a description that would certainly cause some commotion if it were applied to a Christian figure. The way this idol is treated, is also quite different from any Christian behaviour, though. Just like the Typees,126 Queequeg initially tries to soothe the idol and then handles it rather roughly when he is done with it or does not get what he had hoped for: “At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego pocket as carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock.”127 If a Christian had treated a statue of, say, Jesus with the same manner, it would certainly have caused some offense. The Typees and Queequeg are thus described as rather hypocritically handling the object they idolize, which must have shocked Melville's contemporaries as well as made them ridicule these people even more, but it also shows how little they are bound by religious laws: “I am inclined to believe, that the islanders in the Pacific have no fixed and definite ideas whatever on the subject of religion. […] In truth, the Typees, so far as their actions evince, submitted to no laws human or divine – always excepting the thrice mysterious taboo.”128 In other words, they abide by the laws, which are set to them by their priests and the general notion of “Taboo,” but these rules do not seem to hinder their way of living, but can be adapted to their needs and desires. They are thus far more liberal than the tribes that are depicted in Omoo, who are subjected to the European religions. This shows once more that the missionaries have brought about as much bad as good things among those people they have tried to convert.
123 Melville, Typee, 191-92. 124 Melville, Typee, 192. 125 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1453. 126 Melville, Typee, 175-79. 127 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1453. 128 Melville, Typee, 177. 34
6.4. Christian Superiority
Although Tommo admires the Typees’ way of living, which is not replete with worries about money and societal conventions – religious or otherwise – he eventually gives in to what his readers expect of him, namely proof that he is in fact a good Christian. This shows in Omoo in the way he portrays himself, i.e. “a quiet, sober-minded, modest young man”129 who does not get involved in fights but tries to subdue those of others, who is devoutly religious, respectful towards the Islanders and a skilled seaman, among other positive characteristics.130 The following excerpt of Typee also makes clear that Tommo deems himself – as well as the rest of the Christian world – religiously superior: In truth, I regard the Typees as a back-slidden generation. They are sunk in religious sloth, and require a spiritual revival. A long prosperity of bread-fruit and cocoa- nuts has rendered them remiss in the performance of their higher obligations. The wood-rot malady is spreading among the idols – the fruit upon their altars is becoming offensive – the temples themselves need re-thatching – the tattooed clergy are altogether too light-hearted and lazy – and their flocks are going astray.131 First of all, it seems strange to claim a spiritual revival is needed, since the Typees have lived like this since the very beginning; there is simply nothing that could be revived other than making their religion more Western-like. Moreover, these people do not need any more religious rules, because they would not help them in their daily life. In the description of the clergy, though, which are portrayed as fraudulent and trying to hush the tribe’s members by making them believe that they – the soldier-priests – can communicate with their gods, it becomes clear that Melville sees some parallels with Western priests. He must believe that these people are becoming degraded in a similar way as the Europeans and Americans, which do not care about religious beliefs the way they used to, and which are not the high-esteemed countries they used to be anymore either. For Melville the religious business of the Typees is obviously a slippery slope. Just like Dana – Melville was of course accustomed to the sailor’s vocabulary – he associates Christianity with civilization and, despite all the positive traits of the Typees and the advantages of living in such a secluded way, civilization remains humanity’s ultimate goal.
129 Melville, Omoo, 152. 130 Parker, however, claims Melville was actually but a regular seaman who was not worthy of much attention on the ships he sailed with but for his talent of telling extraordinary stories. See Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography, 231. 131 Melville, Typee, 179. 35
7. On Civilization
Similar to religion, civilization is an important topic in both Typee and Omoo. The Marquesas Islanders’ and Tahitians’ characteristics are continually compared to the advantages – and disadvantages – of civilization. Even though Melville has certainly got a lot of doubts regarding the Western desire to try to civilize the rest of the world, he never truly condemns civilization, probably because he is so very accustomed to it himself. Tommo’s lameness in Typee and his resulting longing for a decent doctor already show the contrast between the two worlds, and which one of those he deems superior. His homesickness, too, is a constant reminder that he yearns to go back to civilization, even though in America he will be submitted to problems such as authority, money and societal conventions again. This chapter focuses on the different opinions Melville held towards civilization and how the general lack of civilization in the South Seas tells us something about Tommo’s – and more generally the Western – feeling of superiority.
7.1. National Differences
In Chapter 27 – which bears the title “The social Condition and general Character of the Typees” – Melville writes the following: Civilization does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she has not even her full share of them. They flourish in greater abundance and attain greater strength among many barbarous people. The hospitality of the wild Arab, the courage of the North American Indian, and the faithful friendships of some of the Polynesian nations, far surpass any thing of a similar kind among the polished communities of Europe.132 Melville does not say “Europe and America,” though, which might suggest he regards the American communities more civilized than those in Europe. It is also striking that this part of the novel has got the subtitle “Jealousy of Europeans,” not of any other part of the world, and that the Europeans indeed should not have such a high self-esteem, but that other races should be envied and learned from instead. Moreover, in Omoo, he suggests that the American missionaries are superior to the English: “[W]hile the influence of the English missionaries at Tahiti has tended to so great a diminution of the regal dignity there, that of the American missionaries at the Sandwich Islands has been purposely exerted to bring about a contrary result.”133 Omoo discusses Melville’s travels in Tahiti, while his experiences on the Sandwich
132 Melville, Typee, 203. 133 Melville, Omoo, 288-89. 36
Islands are written down in Typee. Indeed, even though the Typees are generally regarded as savages and uncivilized, the way they live is generally portrayed by means of far better terms than the tribes he describes in Omoo, and despite his homesickness and lameness, he is more happy among the former than in any of the clans he encounters in Tahiti. The latter are often referred to as “semi-civilized,” and this is probably the reason why he does not long for home as much – a feeling that is quite possibly augmented by the fact that he knows he can go away whenever he pleases instead of being a kind of captive among the Typees – but these people are also less hospitable and he fears them more than he did the Typees, because they are more accustomed with his laws and money system and are closely connected with the missionaries and their bad influences. One can conclude that Melville probably did not consider America to be more civilized than Europe, since their missionaries did not much improve the degree of civilization on the Sandwich Islands, whereas the English missionaries caused the inhabitants of Tahiti to become “semi-civilized.” Nevertheless, both in Typee and in Omoo, civilization is generally regarded rather negatively, namely as a reason for the degradation of humanity. So even though America might not be as civilized as England, Melville still deems the former – and especially himself – more superior.
7.2. Contradictions
In Chapter 26 it becomes clear that Tommo foresees a rather negative future for the Typees: “Ill-fated people! I shudder when I think of the change a few years will produce in their paradisaical [sic] abode […] the magnanimous French will proclaim to the world that the Marquesas Islands have been converted to Christianity! and this the Catholic world will doubtless consider as a glorious event.”134 That Tommo regards such an “evolution” as something superficial is exemplified when he sarcastically proclaims the following: “But what matters all this? [i.e. the negative consequences of civilization] Behold the glorious result! – The abominations of Paganism have given way to the pure rites of the Christian worship, – the ignorant savage has been supplanted by the refined European!”135 Hereafter, an account is given of something he has seen in Honolulu, which he ascribes to the missionaries that had recently established civilization: one of the missionaries’ wives’ conduct towards the islanders is described as being truly abominable. Instead of professing Christian ideals, she illustrates the exact opposite by turning the natives into her slaves and flogs them as she sees fit. Moreover, the missionaries and all members of their families are described to be dressed anything but
134 Melville, Typee, 195. 135 Melville, Typee, 196. 37 modestly, and the natives seem to be afraid of them rather than admiring.136 It is for these reasons that Tommo expresses the following statement: “Let the savages be civilized, but civilize them with benefits, and not with evils; and let heathenism be destroyed, but not by destroying the heathen,”137 for example through hard physical labour. In spite of all these negative accounts, Melville still tries to reduce the dreadfulness of these consequences. He still seems to believe the missionaries and their desire to civilize these people are a good cause, as well as, unfortunately, established by humans: “[A]lthough the object in view be the achievement of much good, that agency may nevertheless be productive of evil. In short, missionary undertaking, however it may be blessed of Heaven, is in itself but human; and subject, like everything else, to errors and abuses.”138 So even though he concludes from all that he has seen during his travels that “[t]here is something decidedly wrong in the practical operations of the Sandwich Islands Mission,”139 he is still convinced that civilization is something that every person should be a part of, probably because he could never imagine to not be a part of it anymore; to have to stay among the Typees, subject himself to the “Taboo,” be deprived of all Western luxuries forever, and so on. In other words, “Melville’s criticism of the missionaries, even in the unexpurgated text, extends only to individual abuse of power, and not to the ‘civilizing’ process itself. […] [H]e does not quarrel with the idea of bringing Christianity, technology, or trade to the local inhabitants,”140 even though this might eventually put an end to these inhabitants’ peaceful lives.
136 Melville, Omoo, 154. 137 Melville, Typee, 195. 138 Melville, Typee, 197. 139 Melville, Typee, 198. 140 Ellis, “Melville’s Literary Cartographies,” 18. 38
8. Unable to Adjust
Despite all the positive accounts that Melville gives of the South Sea Islanders in both Typee and Omoo, Tommo is never able to even slightly become one of them by means of behaviour or appearances, nor does he ever really try to adjust himself to these other races’ way of living. In the end, he always deems himself superior and therefore sees no reason why he should change his demeanour or general attitudes towards other cultures. No small amount of excuses is given, though; the main character seems always able to justify his actions or to account for some inaptitude or other. Tommo did not do any active duty aboard the Julia, owing to his lameness,141 which only miraculously seems to heal when he deserts ship. “[T]he continual happiness, which so far as I was able to judge appeared to prevail in the valley, sprung principally from […] the mere buoyant sense of a healthful physical existence. And indeed in this particular the Typees had ample reason to felicitate themselves, for sickness was almost unknown.”142 This is in strong contrast with his own physique: Tommo suffers from lameness during most of the novel, which indirectly shows he does not belong among these healthy people. At the end of Typee, his lameness reaches its height, which makes Tommo the more convinced he needs to get back to the world of doctors and modern medicines as soon as possible. Aboard the Julia, sickness is no light matter either: the captain is on the verge of dying and a large percentage of the crew is ill as well – two of which eventually die and who are unceremoniously thrown overboard. Among the Typees, on the other hand, deaths seem to be rather rare: “During my stay in the valley […] none of its inmates were so accommodating as to die and be buried.”143 This seems quite detached and Melville has actually spent but a short period of time with these people, but it nonetheless shows a strong contrast with the crew of the Julia, and their funeral rites were definitely more respectful. John Bryant argues that like Typee’s main character, “we are also defined by our attempts to resolve those conflicts [between God, state and nature], to find that in-between mental territory where order and yet full freedom can abide, where Tommo’s loathing of the familiar West but fear of the unfamiliar heart of darkness can compound into one, then dissolve, and then give birth to a broader cosmopolitan acceptance.”144 To me, this seems a bit exaggerated and the “we” he refers to are certainly 20th-century readers and not contemporaries
141 Melville, Omoo, 32. 142 Melville, Typee, 127. 143 Melville, Typee, 193. 144 Bryant, introduction, ix. 39 of Melville, who would not have accepted nor believed in this “broader cosmopolitan acceptance,” especially since Tommo’s approval of many of the Typees characteristics was the main point of critique at the time of publication; 19th-century readers surely did not understand why an American would hate his national inheritance or would want to try to unite it with the way the Typees live. Indeed, only a couple of lines further on, Bryant explains that Melville’s attempt has failed, “not because of the reader’s reluctance to follow Melville into heathenism, savagism, and cannibalism, but because Melville himself gets cold feet. He resists his own liberalism and doubts his skepticism; he runs back to ‘Home’ and ‘Mother’ (248).”145 Once more Bryant cannot but refer to his own contemporaries – Melville’s critics did certainly not follow him into heathenism but objected to it – but it makes clear that both then and now, the union between one’s own and alien cultures is not as simple, neither for the author, nor for the reader. In other words, this quote also shows that Melville was still strongly inscribed in the American way of thinking and did probably not believe in this “broader cosmopolitan acceptance” himself. Even though he might be more sympathetic towards the Tahitians and far less so to his fellow seamen – who would have been considered the civilized ones at the time – the social and cultural gap between these two races has been increased as well, as if to show that there is no uniting possible. “Tommo can argue for Typee’s edenic benevolence, even live it, but, unlike the more accepting Ishmael, he will not commit to it. he will not become a Typee,” which also shows in the fact that he will not have himself tattooed. Robert Martin argues that this is exactly the reason Tommo and Toby desire to escape, but other than Tommo, Toby is “in any case a free spirit,”146 able to get away from Typee Valley and move on with his life shortly after his arrival, whereas Tommo must still “learn to rove.”147 In other words, “Tommo’s escape, although partly motivated by fear, is also a sign of his refusal to be ‘typed,’ to become a Typee.”148 Tommo, on the other hand, only seems willing to fight his way out at the end of the novel – even though he is as lame as he was when Toby ventured to escape with the excuse of finding a doctor for his companion. This is in strong contrast with the main character of Omoo, who is able to flee from every irksome experience he encounters; even his promise to the Yankee farmers to work there for at least several months does not seem binding whatsoever.
145 Bryant, introduction, x. 146 Robert K. Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 29. 147 Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger, 29. 148 Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger, 29. 40
However, even though it is clear that Tommo will never succumb to the Typees’ paradisiac way of living, he envies them nonetheless. In other words, “[h]e desires an assimilation with the Polynesian Other but fears the loss of his own native culture.”149 Indeed, the further on in his literary career, the more the main characters of Melville’s books are able to accept the racial other instead of condemning him from the start – an example of this is “Benito Cereno” – and of identifying with the other, which for example happens in Moby-Dick when Ishmael puts on the coloured harpooner’s frock, looks in the mirror and sees the other instead of himself. Initially he was interested in seeing and experiencing this – otherwise, he would not have put on the harpooner’s “mat” in the first place – but eventually it merely terrifies him: “I put it on to try it. […] I went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck.”150 He seemed willing enough to put himself into the harpooner’s shoes – or in this case, in his “mat” – but similar to Tommo’s aversion to tattoos and the thought of having to live with such an altered body for the rest of his life, because “what would other people think,” Ishmael does not like the sight of himself when he resembles something that does not conform to American society’s standards. Tommo’s lack of adjustment is most strongly exemplified by his aversion of the natives' tattoos. Not only does the thought of being tattooed himself apparently makes him gag, but he also continually mocks the natives' tattoos, which clearly offends the Typees, who, on noticing his revulsion, “showed some symptoms of displeasure.”151 I am therefore not convinced that Tommo ever truly desires an “assimilation with the Polynesian Other,” since he remains sceptical about them throughout the novel, does not seem to be able to understand their traditions, or even wants to: even though he very well knows the Typee women cannot come near a canoe because it is Taboo, he simply cannot accept this rule and does not give up until he has got one of them, Fayaway, together with him in a canoe, despite the scorn of his protector Kory-Kory, who considered his proposition “as something too monstrous to be thought of. It not only shocked their established notions of propriety, but was at variance with all their religious ordinances.”152 It is clear that Taboo is regarded as something that should not be meddled with and one would expect that a stranger like Tommo, who has been fed and has received shelter because of the Typees’ mere goodwill, would certainly accept this instead of
149 Bryant, introduction, x. 150 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1451. 151 Melville, Typee, 219. 152 Melville, Typee, 132. 41 disrespecting their religious laws: “[A]lthough the ‘taboo’ was a ticklish thing to meddle with, I determined to test its capabilities of resisting an attack.”153 It seems as if he is merely laughing at them and their culture and eventually even goes so far as to condemn this female restriction as a lack of civilisation: “[I]t was high time the islanders should be taught a little gallantry, and I trust the example I set them may produce beneficial effects.”154 Even though he disapproves of the way foreigners in general have tried to civilize these people, change their traditions and their peaceful way of living, in other words to make them resemble themselves and their Western culture, he actually does so himself. He calls his triumph “Fayaway’s emancipation,”155 pretending as if this tribe is still in a state of pre-Enlightenment and he is the important, civilized, white man that is going to tutor them. In this respect, even though he probably feels himself above the missionaries’ behaviour, his own demeanour is actually not that different: “Some of your good chiefs, as they are called (missionaries,) have proposed to send some of their good people among us to change our habits, to make us work and live like the white people.”156 This could be compared with how Tommo behaves towards the Typees, i.e. he tries to alter their ways of living and make them resemble his instead of trying to adapt himself. In not a single part of either Typee or Omoo does he consider changing his own demeanour or does he truly envy those that have: even though he admirers the people that have been able to throw over all ties with civilization, this admiration and the comprehension of their motifs is never long-lasting. Whatever he experiences, he knows it is only temporary and his goal, namely returning to his home-country, is unalterable.
153 Melville, Typee, 132. 154 Melville, Typee, 133. 155 Melville, Typee, 133. 156 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 354. 42
9. Moby-Dick
In this paper I could not refrain from saying something about Melville’s best known work; only a small section of it will be discussed, though, i.e. chapter three: The Spouter-Inn. In this part of the novel, the narrator, Ishmael, arrives at said inn and is offered no other option but to sleep in the same bed with a black harpooner by the name of Queequeg, who will also embark on the Pequod. This chapter shows how Ishmael, just like Tommo, tries to make sense of the stereotypes that exist concerning people of colour and how he tries to fight these as he keeps telling himself that this harpooner may very well be a decent, kind guy despite the fact that he sells heads – but he fails miserably most of the time.
9.1. Appearances and Prejudices
Even before he has heard anything about his future bedpartner, Ishmael thinks the following: “I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this ‘dark complexioned’ harpooneer.”157 He could not help feeling this way, but does nonetheless, because of the prejudices that he has grown accustomed to. After he has had some time to reconsider the situation – and particularly having to admit that he has got no other choice but to sleep next to Queequeg – Ishmael convinces himself that he should give the man a chance: “I began to think that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices against this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I'll wait awhile; he must be dropping in before long. I'll have a good look at him then, and perhaps we may become jolly good bedfellows after all – there's no telling.”158 At last Queequeg arrives and Ishmael is obviously shocked by the man’s looks, which lead him immediately to believe that he cannot be a decent person: “good heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It was of a dark, purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large, blackish looking squares. Yes, it's just as I thought, he's a terrible bedfellow.”159 A bit further on, however, the main character is already trying to let go of these first impressions and their ensuing prejudices, as he is now of the following opinion: “And what is it, thought I, after all! It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin.”160 The way Ishmael constantly changes his mind about Queequeg can be compared with how Tommo continually alters his opinion of the Typees with every new experience. That these narrators struggle to accept the fact that unpleasant looks and a decent moral character can be combined, as well as good and
157 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1447. 158 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1449. 159 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1451. 160 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1452. 43 bad characteristics, says more about them than about the people they condemn for being other than the Western norm: it not only demonstrates that they feel more superior, more as one should be and look like according to Western society, but especially how simple-minded they are. Whatever the Typees do to show Tommo and Toby that they will not do them any harm save hope that they will become a part of their community, Tommo will not accept that this community is more than what he is convinced it is: uncivilized, not conforming to modern Western standards, not enjoying any of the luxuries that are available in America. In Typee and Omoo, there are a lot of lengthy descriptions of other people's looks, which are often directly linked to some moral characteristic or other, and Queequeg’s appearance even seems to be inspired by one of the characters in Typee, Kory-Kory, who is described as having a similar hairdo: “His head was carefully shaven, with the exception of two circular spots, about the size of a dollar, near the top of the cranium, where the hair […] was twisted up in two prominent knots, that gave him the appearance of being decorated with a pair of horns.”161 Tommo is obviously offended by these looks – Kory-Kory is according to him “a hideous object to look upon”162 – particularly the fact that he seems to resemble a devil. This reaction is not much different than the one Ishmael has got after he has closely observed Queequeg: “There was no hair on his head – none to speak of at least – nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. Had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner.”163 However, despite the way Kory-Kory’s appearance is being described, Tommo also admits he is “the most devoted and best natured serving-man in the world,”164 which shows one can certainly not judge a book by its cover and that physiognomy was no study Melville gave a lot of credit to after all. Even though some people’s unpreferable looks are associated with moral degradation, others prove such a relation is not necessarily always the case. Indeed, Queequeg also appears to be a most kind person and all of Ishmael’s fears seem to have been unnecessary: “‘You gettee in,’ he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and throwing the clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a civil but a really kind and charitable way. [...] For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal.”165 Tommo even goes so far as to apologise to his servant for what he has said about his appearances, ascribing this record of them to the fact he had never seen such a sight before:
161 Melville, Typee, 83. 162 Melville, Typee, 83. 163 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1452. 164 Melville, Typee, 83. 165 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1454. 44
“[I]t seems really heartless in me to write thus of the poor islander, when I owe perhaps to his unremitting attentions the very existence I now enjoy. Kory-Kory, I mean thee no harm in what I say in regard to thy outward adornings; but they were a little curious to my unaccustomed sight, and therefore I dilate upon them.”166 The following quote from Moby-Dick probably also applies to the way Tommo must have felt when he first met Kory-Kory: “Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night.”167 Melville’s point in Typee is “that no tribe (read nation) is ever good or evil; each has its peculiar customs that may seem evil to those who do not understand them.”168 In other words, one should not deem any nation inferior or superior on the basis of certain prejudices or first impressions. The Typees have proved to be kind people, even though everyone claimed them to be ferocious cannibals; and although Queequeg’s appearances frighten Ishmael, the former actually does not mean anyone any harm whatsoever. Tommo is certainly not able to put aside all the stereotypes he has grown accustomed to, but Ishmael, on the other hand, is able to conclude the chapter as follows: “[T]he man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him,”169 signifying that indeed every culture has got its own customs and may look unfamiliar and therefore frightening to someone who is not part of that culture. This should not mean, however, that one should give in to one’s initial feelings – and possibly the desire to run away from the “other.” Frightened of Kory-Kory Tommo probably was not, but he does admit that he thought the fellow extremely ugly-looking because he was not used to such a sight and could not account for the use and meaning of his tattoos, beard and hairdo. Nevertheless, he cannot refrain from comparing the Typees with the images he has got of similar tribes: “I thought that for a sojourn among cannibals, no man [Kory-Kory] could have well made a more agreeable one.”170 In other words, Tommo will not put them in a higher esteem than what he believes they are: cannibals. For Tommo, this one characteristic seems to define them and is a flaw that he simply cannot ignore, even though they continually prove throughout the novel that they are so much more than mere savages. So in the end, the point that Melville according to Martin tries to make, is lost among Tommo’s fear of getting eaten and his desire to get back home.
166 Melville, Typee, 83. 167 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1452. 168 Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger, 31. 169 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1454. 170 Melville, Typee, 123. 45
9.2. Language
Language is evidently an important aspect of every literary text, since it is the medium by which the story is conveyed. When one analyses Typee and Omoo, though – especially when one compares both novels with one another – it becomes clear that, just like in a poem, no word is chosen for its superficial meaning only, i.e. they express a deeper meaning as well. Not only the use of a particular word such as “savage” but also the lack of it conveys a lot of meaning. In Typee, the islanders are continually referred to as wild, uncivilized cannibals, whereas these words can barely be found in Omoo, where the word “semi-savages”171 or the phrase “partially civilized”172 pops up now and then, a small but nevertheless significant improvement. A similar attitude can be found in Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast as well: the language of the Sandwich Islanders is referred to by words such as “outlandish hallooing” and “bawling”173 as if they are acting like wild animals and as if their “outlandish tongue”174 is subordinate to that of Dana and his fellow seamen, never considering that their own language might very well sound as gibberish-like as that of the Islanders and always expecting these people to be able to speak English. Particularly in Omoo, meeting a foreigner who is accustomed with English is described as an amazing event, but this actually happens quite a few times, whereas Doctor Long Ghost’s knowledge of foreign languages is as abominable at the end of the story as it was at the start. This indirectly shows that the natives are far more apt – and therefore far smarter – than Melville and his fellow seamen, which are described as dumb and miserable drunkards often enough. Before Ishmael comes to understand that Queequeg is actually a nice guy, he gives in to his fear and the prejudices, though. As the harpooner undresses, the narrator notices that “these covered parts of him were checkered with the same squares as his face; his back, too, was all over the same dark squares.”175 This immediately leads him to conclude the following: “It was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it. A peddler of heads too – perhaps the heads of his own brothers. He might take a fancy to mine – heavens look at that tomahawk.”176 Everything Ishmael has heard of Queequeg so far and everything he now sees only adds up to his belief that the harpooner cannot be a preferable
171 For example in Melville, Omoo, 239. 172 Melville, Omoo, 178. 173 Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 58. 174 Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 56. 175 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1452. 176 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1452. 46 bedpartner whatsoever. Before, the narrator referred to Queequeg as “he” or “the harpooneer,” but from this moment onwards, he thinks of him as a savage only and alludes to him as “cannibal,” “pagan,” “heathen,” “wild,” “unnatural,” “infernal,” and “savage” instead. More than once Tommo condemns those people who use the word “savage”177 despite the fact that he uses this term repeatedly himself, both in his initial and his later works. Furthermore, the translations that are given of the Typees’ utterances are rather odd: instead of translating them into the English, full-sentence equivalents, the reader is merely given some phrases, i.e. the general meaning of what the Typees’ are saying, such as “fish come,”178 “eat plenty, ah! sleep very good,”179 or “‘Terrible fellows those Happars! – devour an amazing quantity of men! – ah, shocking bad!’”180 Their language therefore seems somewhat infantile and deficient. Moreover, mostly 2- or 3-word sentences are given, never long utterances. This seems to be a reoccurring way to refer to other races’ languages, though: Morin argues this also happened in most 19th-century female travelogues’ accounts of Native Americans: “[N]one of the travellers here directly quoted a conversation with an indigenous woman or man – they appear as speakers of only sentence fragments (single words or phrases).”181 In Omoo, on the other hand, the translations are much closer to correct English, i.e. the verbs are conjugated and complete sentences are given.182 Whether Melville had decided to show some more respect towards the South Sea Islanders or whether it annoyed his readers that the translations were rather distasteful, one can certainly notice a decline in faulty translations if one compares Typee with Omoo.
177 For example in Melville, Typee, 27. 178 Melville, Typee, 207. 179 Melville, Typee, 88. 180 Melville, Typee, 102. 181 Karen M. Morin, “British Women Travellers and Constructions of Racial Difference across the Nineteenth- Century American West,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23.3 (1998): 325. 182 For example in Melville, Omoo, 241. 47
10. “Benito Cereno”
This chapter will discuss Melville’s short story “Benito Cereno” in some more depth and show how the main character – Captain Amasa Delano – also seems torn apart between what he wants to believe because of his good-naturedness, and what he has learned to believe over the years, i.e. the prejudices that were part of American culture, particularly regarding other races, such as Indians and slaves. It also becomes clear that Delano’s character and its consequences are examples of a popular type of fiction at the time – and a genre in which Melville had invested himself – namely “dramas of benevolence gone awry,” of which “The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade […] was his most sustained meditation on charity and deception.”183 Indeed, “Benito Cereno” does not only voice arguments against slavery, but also claims that coloured people are not to be trusted and that they may very easily misuse one’s good nature and charity. Just like most of his other works, Melville did not completely invent the plot of this narrative himself, but reinvented an already existing story and added some elements in order to make it more extraordinary. Being an “omnivorous sampler of books as well as a profound and patient reader,”184 he must have encountered Delano’s writings at some point in time and since it was published quite a couple of years ago, Melville must have decided the time was right to rewrite this tale. Accordingly, he “based his plot on a few narrative pages in ch. 18 of Captain Amasa Delano’s Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817). Melville’s ‘disposition’ near the end of Benito Cereno is roughly half from Delano's much longer section of documents, half his own writing.”185
10.1. Stereotypes: Questioned and Reinstated
The narrator is given sundry hints that there is something wrong on the ship which he has boarded, namely Benito Cereno’s San Dominick, and more particularly with Don Benito’s black servant, but Amasa Delano will not give in to these suspicions and envies Benito for having such an obedient, trustful attendant, as well as a good friend. At the end of the story it appears that the American was wrong after all and that the people of colour on board the Spanish ship had rioted and murdered most of the white seamen. The former are subsequently portrayed as vicious and will be punished according to the American law system, so it seems as if the Western stereotypes were not merely invented and based on superstitions, but should not be
183 Susan M. Ryan, “Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence,” American Literary History 12.4 (2000): 686. 184 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1440. 185 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1526. 48 doubted, because doing so almost meant the end for the main character and his crew as well. Accordingly, Captain Delano is deeply disappointed by his own intuitions and good- naturedness, as by the crimes the people of colour have committed, and it seems likely that he will not soon trust any coloured person again. In spite of these feelings, the story still tries to evoke the reader’s understanding, though indirectly. This strongly resembles Typee, which superficially condemns as well as hails the Marquesan tribes, but mostly wants the reader to question his or her own prejudices and indisputable belief in other people’s travel stories and their depictions of the “other.” Captain Delano is described as an American of “a singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man.”186 Throughout the story it becomes indeed clear that despite “repeated incentives,” sundry evidences that something is wrong aboard the San Dominick, Amasa Delano does not and will not recognise them: when an aged sailor gives him a knot “[f]or some one else to undo,”187 i.e. for someone to reinstate the natural order on the San Dominick – the slaves dominated by the whites instead of the other way around – the American stands with both “knot in hand, and knot in head,”188 and this for most of the story. He continually misreads Benito Cereno’s servant’s actions and expressions and turns them around so as to put the servant, Babo, in a good light. The narrator therefore questions whether these characteristics are preferable at this day and age, since he clearly believes humans can often not be trusted: “Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine.”189 The answer to this question is of course clear at the end of the story: even though Delano’s good-naturedness can be admired, this characteristic also makes him naive, and he indeed appears to lack other traits that might have made up for this flaw. Moreover, more than once he questions his instincts, i.e. he wonders whether Don Benito can be trusted since he acts rather comically, but his trust in the European, which is instated by society, eventually always wins over. By the end of the novel, society’s established stereotypes appear indeed to be the ones Delano should have trusted from the beginning. This also seems true for the slave Francesco, who Delano believes is a good man, but who actually wanted to kill him. According to general belief at that time, “when a
186 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1526. 187 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1550. 188 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1526. 189 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1526. 49 mulatto has a regular European face, look out for him; he is a devil;” but one of the other slaves, Atufal, on the other hand, “nods, and bows, and smiles, a king, indeed – the king of kind hearts and polite fellows.”190 This behaviour is of course but superficial, as both Francesco and Atufal are plotting to kill the American, which reinstates the stereotype. Furthermore, Delano believes these good manners are the result of Francesco’s white man’s genes: “it were strange indeed, and not very creditable to us white-skins, if a little of our blood mixed in with the African’s, should, far from improving the latter's quality, have the sad effect of pouring vitriolic acid into black broth; improving the hue, perhaps, but not the wholesomeness.”191 Just like the missionaries that are described in Typee and Omoo, Delano is convinced that European and American influences can only ameliorate other races and cultures, both their morals as well as their looks. The Typees are claimed to be superior to other “uncivilized” races, because, according to Tommo, their appearances resemble that of the Europeans: “The distinguishing characteristic of the Marquesan islanders […] is the European cast of their features – a peculiarity seldom observable among other uncivilized people. Many of their faces present a profile classically beautiful, and in the valley of Typee, I saw several who […] were in every respect models of beauty.”192 Even though Tommo obviously praises their looks, he is still able to laud his own features as well. In other words, Melville always seems to find a way to include some proof of his own superiority, though indirectly, even when he refers to other races. However, despite the fact that these European characteristics are connected with some positive traits of civilization, not only the narrators of Typee and Omoo, but also the fact that Francesco eventually appears to actually be a merciless killer, prove that such influences are not always for the better.
10.2. Possessive Desires
When Delano wonders about Babo, who the former thinks shows affection towards his master193 and whose performances are of an affectionate, almost fraternal fashion,194 he probably does not realise he is both misinterpreting what he sees, as well as being rather racist by concluding that Babo belongs to a stereotypical group of people of colour: “the negro [has gained] the repute of making the most pleasing body servant in the world; one, too, whom a master need be on no stiffly superior terms with, but may treat with familiar trust; less a servant
190 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1560. 191 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1560. 192 Melville, Typee, 184. 193 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1530. 194 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1531. 50 than a devoted companion.”195 This is all wishful thinking, of course. Delano is such a good person, he sincerely hopes there can be an excellent amiable bond between servant and master, in which the former is not treated as merely a tool, but eventually the text seems to show that such a relationship cannot exist. Nevertheless, Delano actually treats Babo as an object himself when he offers to buy him.196 Babo appears to be offended, the American wrongly thinks because he does not want to be parted from his master, but he must actually be tired of being treated as a mere commodity. Moreover, Captain Delano tells Don Benito that he envies him for having such a friend – a slave he cannot call him;197 but Babo actually self-identifies as being a slave – “‘a black man’s slave was Babo, who now is the white’s’”198 – showing that his condition has not improved since he has been imported and that Delano should not glorify his situation, but accept that the white man is no better than the black regarding how they treat their inferiors. Delano’s desire for such a transaction also shows a high degree of power and a self- evidence that he can simply buy the things he wants to possess. The following argumentation of The Confidence-Man therefore also applies on “Benito Cereno”: “Antebellum charity texts, from the conventional to the radical, revealed that benevolent projects were always in some sense about power and its pleasures – the power to give or to withhold, to identify the needy and the deserving, to alter the distribution of comfort and pain within American society.”199 So even though Captain Delano’s offer to buy Babo seems kind enough, he actually shows he wants to possess him and use him for himself, because he obviously envies Benito Cereno and thinks it but normal that someone like he himself should own a similar trustful servant.
10.3. Cheerfulness: Genuine or Superficial
Captain Delano obviously regrets that the servant and his fellow bondsmen are not trustworthy; he personified the need to keep believing in a person that has got so much against him, i.e. prejudices about slaves and people of colour in general, but this belief has become meaningless by the end of the story. Furthermore, the reason for the slaves’ revolt is never questioned – Don Benito seems to think they did it merely because they are evil people. All of this might indeed shed a negative light on the story and its purpose for abolition movements, were it not that there are quite a couple of instances, in which Delano shows his aversion to slavery – which “breeds
195 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1531. 196 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1545. 197 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1535. 198 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1539. 199 Ryan, “Misgivings,” 706. 51 ugly passions in man”200 – and his genuine sympathy for people of colour, for whom he has got a “weakness.”201 Furthermore, even though Delano would have given the more expensive food he has brought with him to “the whites alone, and in chief Don Benito,”202 probably because this was the common thing to do, he is pleased when the Spaniard objects to this, which again shows the American’s kindness and unreservedness. When Babo starts to cut his master’s hair, a whole page is devoted to describing why it is but natural that some people prefer “the negroes” to their own kin: “like most men of a good, blithe heart, Captain Delano took to negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs.”203 A similar account is given by Dana when he describes his feelings towards the Sandwich Islanders: “[B]y whatever names they might be called, they were the most interesting, intelligent, and kind- hearted people that I ever fell in with. I felt a positive attachment for almost all of them.”204 Dana, however, tries to fully understand these people and likes them the better for what they have suffered at the hands of foreigners such as himself and his fellow crew members. Captain Delano, on the other hand, despite the fact that the slaves are described as cheerful people, never questions whether this might not be an act, in other words, whether they are truly happy or just pretending in order to fool themselves – and in this case also Amasa Delano. Contrary to Dana, the captain of the Bachelor’s Delight sees what he wants to see instead of imagining what it must feel like to slave day and night and be at the mercy of other people. Like I said, the cheerfulness of the slaves aboard the San Dominick is probably insincere, a way to trick Captain Delano. The Typees, on the other hand, are being admired for the “perpetual hilarity reining through the whole extent of the vale.”205 That they are probably the ones that are indeed truly happy can be ascribed to their lack of concerns instead of trying to forget about them through laughter and songs like the slaves do: “There seemed to be no cares, griefs, troubles, or vexations, in all Typee. The hours tripped along as gaily as the laughing couples down a country dance.”206 Melville concludes that they are free from any restlessness of the mind because they do not know the concept of money, “[t]hat ‘root of all evil’ was not to be found in the valley.”207 Tommo does not seem to be unstrained by this monetary system, even though he has found himself at a place far away from that. Probably he knows his journey
200 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1559. 201 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1556. 202 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1553. 203 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1556. 204 Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 139. 205 Melville, Typee, 126. 206 Melville, Typee, 126. 207 Melville, Typee, 126. 52 will eventually end, like a journey at that time was supposed to, and despite the positive traits of Typee Valley, he has set his mind on going back to America, where he will again be a part of this money business. He either did not want to submit to the blissful absence of financial concerns because he knew he would have to cope with them again sooner or later – and then it might be even harder if he had become used to not having these kind of problems – or he might not want to let go of this bond with the civilized world to which he still belongs. Moreover, if he ever wanted to go back to America and live a decent life over there, he needed money. This issue might therefore have been omnipresent at all times, even when he was residing in Typee Valley.
10.4. Inferior yet Superior
Even though the American clearly likes people of colour and questions Don Benito’s conduct several times but never the good nature of the slaves, just like Tommo captain Delano is nonetheless susceptible to the prejudices that he has probably known for all his life. The most striking example of this influence is the following line of thought: “[C]ould then Don Benito be any way in complicity with the blacks? But they were too stupid. Besides, who ever heard of a white so far renegade as to apostatize from his very species almost, by leaguing in against it with negroes?”208 This is a truly mean account of people of colour and clearly shows Delano considers them to be his inferiors. Just like in Typee, however, these people’s lack of civilization is also praised and envied: “[L]ike most uncivilized women, they [the negresses] seemed at once tender of heart and tough of constitution; equally ready to die for their infants or fight for them. Unsophisticated as leopardesses; loving as doves. Ah! thought Captain Delano, these perhaps are some of the very women whom Ledyard saw in Africa, and gave such a noble account of.”209 These traits are considered to be positive “side-effects” of their uncivilized nature, traits that most American and European women appear to no longer have: they are homely, probably do not know how to fight, are not as close to nature and its needs anymore, but live under the strains that money and society bring. In other words, these slaves’ instincts and manners are actually observed “not without a mixture of admiration.”210 “Stupid” therefore also refers to their being more natural, uneducated and uncivilized, a state to which people like Rousseau would have happily returned to, but of which they know there is no going back to anymore. Even though Tommo found himself in a place in which he was surrounded by people
208 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1549. 209 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1547-48. 210 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1538. 53 that still lived in a pre-enlightened world, he could not return to such a state himself either, something of which he was proud of but also regretted. The slaves aboard the San Dominick are in a way superior to the whites: not only have they been able to overthrow the ship’s crew, but they also managed to mislead the American captain. The latter is not a difficult target, though, since he seems not very good at understanding something is wrong, for example in the following excerpt: “The Spaniard’s [Don Benito] manner, too, conveyed a sort of sour and gloomy disdain, which he seemed at no pains to disguise. But this the American in charity ascribed to the harassing effects of sickness.”211 [my emphasis]. It is strange Melville depicts this American as such a good-natured but naive person; this is certainly not how his captain and fellow seamen are portrayed in Typee. Even though this story seems a rather negative account of both the American and the Europeans, who obviously lack the ability to handle a slave ship, the Americans are eventually able to do something the Spaniards could not, i.e. putting down the slaves’ riot.
211 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1531. 54
11. Notions of Superiority
Similar to what Dickens has done in his American Notes, i.e. putting the Americans and their cities generally in a rather negative light in order to exalt his own, British feeling of superiority,212 Melville gives some pessimistic accounts of other races, not only of such as the Typees, but also of the Julia’s Australian crew, so as to elevate his personal conduct and that of the Americans – and to some extent the Europeans – in general. “These descriptions of ‘primitive’ life illustrate the textual necessity for establishing a position against which the writers can define themselves as civilized.”213 In other words, the “other” is used in order to reflect on one’s own culture and therefore the “other” tells us as much about us as it does about itself. Even though “the American understanding of the Orient will [indeed] seem considerably less dense”214 than does the European – probably because the Americans themselves have been considered to be “others” often as well – Melville nevertheless inscribes himself into the tradition of portraying other cultures negatively in order to make the contemporary reader feel better about him- or herself, which was expected of him to some extent. So despite the fact that Melville might at times seem very positive about other cultures, this is actually a common strategy in travel-narratives: “[T]he writer appears to place value on the primitive, yet simultaneously codes white culture as superior. To the reform-minded traveller, […] ‘white’ characteristics […] signal that reform is possible, while primitiveness and crudity signal that reform is necessary.”215 Nevertheless, “[t]he passages also indicate a willingness to criticize, or at least to appraise, the policies and actions of US government.”216 Ellis seems convinced that Melville deems the Typees and Tahitians as truly inferior and American culture as the one that should rule the world. However, when she argues that “Melville depicts Tahitians as helpless and overwhelmed victims”217 and uses this as proof for her claim that Melville is racist, she seems to forget the underlying message Melville, I believe, wanted to convey, namely that these people are indeed victims and that something should be done about it.
212 Jasper Schelstraete, “Transatlantic Identity: The UK-US ‘Special Relationship’” (guest lecture at Ghent University, Ghent, February 19, 2016). 213 Morin, “British Women Travellers,” 320. 214 Said, Orientalism, 2. 215 Morin, “British Women Travellers,” 320. 216 Morin, “British Women Travellers,” 320-21. 217 Ellis, “Melville’s Literary Cartographies,” 19. 55
11.1. Australian Inferiority
From Santa, during his first year of whaling, i.e. 1841, Melville wrote his brother Gansevoort the following: “‘The fact of his being one of a crew so much superior in morale and early advantages to the ordinary run of whaling crews affords him constant gratification.’”218 Parker strongly doubts whether these men were indeed as superior as Melville claimed them to be. In Typee he at any rate does not seem to have many moral objections regarding the ship’s crew, but this is in strong contrast with the crew he portrays in Omoo, which he describes as uneducated, primitive men, for example in the following excerpt: “[I]t is almost incredible, the light in which many sailors regard these naked heathens. They hardly consider them human. But is a curious fact, that the more ignorant and degraded men are, the more contemptuously they look upon those whom they deem their inferiors.”219 In Omoo, it is made clear fairly often that these “heathens” are the ones that should be admired, not the ship’s crew. However, since both the ship and most of its members are Australian – a fact that is reiterated throughout the novel – it seems that, for the narrator, this origin alone is cause enough to regard these men as inferior to himself. He and his friend, Doctor Long Ghost, are the only people aboard the Julia who appear to be smart enough to play a game of chess; the rest of the crew, on the other hand, are utterly dumbfounded when they see them at it and therefore “came to the conclusion that we [Tommo and the doctor] must be a couple of necromancers.”220 Some degree of intelligence is certainly needed if one wants to play chess properly, but in this scene the crew are generally depicted as complete idiots. The sentence “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”221 – which refers to Ishmael’s coloured bedpartner Queequeg – is probably one of Melville's most iconic one-liners and an opinion that is also indirectly expressed in Omoo. Not one of the crew’s members can abstain from liquor and they seem only motivated to work when some form of alcohol – Pisco – is daily offered to them and that keeps them, to some extent at least, from mutinying: “[T]here was something else, which, in the estimation of the men, made up for all deficiencies; and that was the regular allowance of Pisco.”222 When they at last touch upon land and a great part of the crew deserts, the mate even tries to convince them to stay by “enumerating the casks still remaining untapped in the Julia’s wooden cellar,”223 which shows
218 Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography, 193. 219 Melville, Omoo, 21. 220 Melville, Omoo, 33. 221 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1454. 222 Melville, Omoo, 10. 223 Melville, Omoo, 79. 56 what high esteem alcohol is held in among these men. In contrast to Sydney whalemen, “American whalemen in the Pacific never think of carrying spirits as a ration; and aboard of most of them, it is never served out even in times of the greatest hardships.”224 Melville obviously grabs every chance to show these men are inferior to himself and the reason can be redirected to the fact that they are not American. It should not come as a surprise then that he is also the only one who does hardly ever seem to be consuming alcohol. The French, too, seem unable to resist alcohol’s temptation: “The French sailors and marines […] were reported to be infuriated with liquor.”225 It thus appears that it is only the Americans who have got a certain degree of self-control and who are not controlled by the desire for spirits. For the sick Australians, on the other hand, even bottles of medicine are considered to be precious items as they might contain some form of liquor. For this reason, they are looked upon with both contempt and pity by the only seemingly respectful person that is in their midst, namely Tommo. Under the influence of this spirit more than one fight occurs. Even the doctor – Doctor Long Ghost – a learned and presumably civilized man, is repeatedly portrayed as a drunkard, a womanizer and one who regularly gets into a fight. No one drinks more than the mate, John Jermin, though: “At all times he was more or less under the influence of it,”226 and “he generally saw things double.”227 A fight is therefore never far away what the mate is concerned. Instead of the intuitive peacefulness of the Typees, getting at one another’s throat has become “a sort of instinct”228 for him. At one point, Jermin loses a fight and complains with the captain, who promises his opponent will be flogged. However, “[n]othing more ever came of this,”229 in other words, both the fight and its consequences are quickly put aside until the next disagreement takes place – which is most probably the following day anyway – and it starts all over again. Even though Jermin tries to discipline everyone – the captain having no authority whatsoever – and the crew is bound by some sailors’ rules and mutual understandings, there is no order on the ship and the captain very well knows most of them will desert from the moment the ship touches land – which is exactly what happens. They do not seem too prone on working anyway: “The watch were asleep. With one foot resting on the rudder, even the man at the helm nodded, and the mate himself, with arms folded, was leaning against the capstan.”230 They would rather
224 Melville, Omoo, 43-44. 225 Melville, Omoo, 115. 226 Melville, Omoo, 7. 227 Melville, Omoo, 55. 228 Melville, Omoo, 13. 229 Melville, Omoo, 15. 230 Melville, Omoo, 28-29. 57 just lie about and leave the ship at its own command or desert it altogether and thus subject their fellow seamen to the ensuing struggles than to do what they are supposed to do and avoid the ship from sinking. Melville also remarks that the stories he has heard of shipwrecked ships often recurred to him, “especially, as from the absence of discipline […] the watches at night were careless in the extreme.”231 So even though all hands are needed in order to get anything done on the ship and to keep it sailing safely – at a certain point the ship indeed almost hits something – the crew will not yield. This is in strong contrast with the Typees, who, although they have got no laws or court to obey to, lead a peaceful and organised life, respect one another and do not even squabble: “During my whole stay on the island I never witnessed a single quarrel, nor any thing that in the slightest degree approached even to a dispute.”232 That a member of their tribe would not do as he was expected to do, i.e. for the greater good of the tribe, is unthinkable for them. In other words, “[t]hey all thought and acted alike,”233 which can hardly be said of the crew of the Julia.
11.2. Authority Issues
The lack of a justice system is unthinkable for the narrator of Typee; how such a community does not crumble apart, Tommo cannot understand. For him, civilization and all that he holds dear is firmly connected with courts of law, what he calls “the enlightened end of civilized legislation.”234 Ergo, the Typees can certainly not be enlightened nor admired for the absence of such a system, can they? This, at least, is how Tommo reasons: “How are we to explain this enigma? These islanders were heathens! savages! ay, cannibals! and how came they, without the aid of established law, to exhibit, in so eminent a degree, that social order which is the greatest blessing and highest pride of the social state?”235 Tommo seeks an explanation for the Typees’ peaceful behaviour and eventually contributes it to their nature. His tight bonds with his home country continually show through as well as his inability to understand these people and their way of living. Even though John Bryant argues that Melville is merely laughing at the people at home, i.e. “a sarcasm registering our pious overreaction to alien cultures,”236 an overreaction that I think is indeed something he wants to condemn – certainly after having lived
231 Melville, Omoo, 31. 232 Melville, Typee, 204. 233 Melville, Omoo, 203. 234 Melville, Typee, 200. 235 Melville, Typee, 200. 236 Bryant, introduction, ix. 58 among the Typees for nearly a month and seeing that such a reaction is based on nothing but superstitions – I am also of the opinion that one should not underestimate the constant references to his homesickness as well as the indecisiveness of his statements, nor the degree of fictionalisation. “Like most precolonial islanders, the Taipis formed a tribal society of families and clans controlled by chieftains and priests. This was by no means the open, free and propertyless society Melville envisions in Typee.”237 It is indeed probable that Melville had little notion of these structures, because he barely understood the Typees’ language,238 but he might also have been omitting these facts, thus making it seem as if the Typees were these happy, worriless people that surely need to be envied, in order to criticise Western societies more effectively: “His half-lived, half-imagined Typee is a critique of America’s social defiencies and the inhumanities of capitalism.”239 On the other hand, Melville tuts at the amount of time the Typees spend sleeping and fooling around, and are hardly ever reported doing something productive – even though he and Toby never do anything themselves – yet Bryant argues that “[c]hiefs maintained power by ensuring clan cohesion and by providing work;”240 in other words, the Typees and other tribes were not nearly as lazy as Melville describes them to be. It seems as if he sought something to put them in a bad light, but that would not harm the Eden-like image of the Typee valley and their peaceful way of living. Even though Melville’s writing has strongly evolved throughout his literary career, I believe there is a connection between his first and his last novel: “In the mid-1880s a poem he was working on about a British sailor led him to compose a fictional narrative that was left nearly finished at Melville's death as Billy Budd, Sailor, his final study of the tense and ambiguous conflicts between the individual and various forms of authority.”241 These forms of authority seem to be absent in Typee, a place that Melville has dreamt up because he probably desired it. A place that was so very different from the one he spent most of his life in, i.e. America; far away from money issues, the struggles of finding and keeping a job and the scorn of society. Just like his occupation with religion and critics, which also represent authority to some extent, Melville nearly always includes some form of critique on these instances of power.
237 Bryant, introduction, xvii. 238 Bryant, introduction, xvii. 239 Bryant, introduction, xviii. 240 Bryant, introduction, xvii. 241 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1427. 59
11.3. Western Inferiority
One could ask oneself whether the Typees have got no laws because there are no crimes, or the other way around. They do not appear to have any word for “virtue” and Melville seems to think this is a good thing: “The assertion was unfounded; but were it otherwise, it might be met by stating that their language is almost entirely destitute of terms to express the delightful ideas conveyed by our endless catalogue of civilized crimes.”242 These people simply do not know what it means to do something that is against the law – other than their Taboo – and are not led to believe that some of the awful things they do are actually legitimate, like Melville apparently believes the Americans do. It seems crimes only exist when laws are commissioned, probably because only then misconduct gets labelled as such. One could compare this with the behaviour regarding the missionaries and heathens’ conversions, which I talked about in chapter 5: Melville argues, because they are forced upon these people, they will not stick, whereas the things they do voluntarily are maintained forever, and asks himself the following: “If truth and justice, and the better principles of nature, cannot exist unless enforced by the statute-book, how are we to account for the social condition of the Typees?”243 The answer is of course quite plain – the Typees seem more superior than Melville and his fellow countrymen – but is never given. Even though he continues to praise these people for their moral virtues and kindness, wonders at the discrepancy between what he has read about them and what they actually appear to be, and admits he “formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had ever before entertained,”244 thus indeed deeming them more superior than all the human beings he has encountered before, he eventually undermines all these statements by assuming that he must have become insane to some extent, influenced by the Typees’ savage behaviour, and during his stay among them certainly have been changed for the worse: “But alas! […] I have been one of the crew of a man-of-war, and the pent-up wickedness of five hundred men has nearly overturned all my previous theories.”245 [my emphasis] Nearly, but not completely. He still clings to the stereotypes that he has been familiar with for his entire life. Moreover, he reinforces these stereotypes by portraying these Islanders as wicked and “man-of-war,” but in contrast to the crew of the Julia, the Typees actually hardly ever fight – never with their own people and only occasionally with other tribes. Nevertheless, Melville is of the opinion that “if
242 Melville, Typee, 126. 243 Melville, Typee, 203. 244 Melville, Typee, 203. 245 Melville, Typee, 203. 60 our evil passions must find vent” – he is obviously convinced that every human being has got these – it is far better to expend them on strangers and aliens, than in the bosom of the community in which we dwell. In many polished countries civil contentions, as well as domestic enmities, are prevalent, at the same time that the most atrocious foreign wars are waged. How much less guilty, then, are our islanders [the Typees], who of these three sins are only chargeable with one, and that the least criminal!246 The inhabitants of these “polished countries,” on the other hand, can be accused of all three sins. This description can also be compared with the negative account Charlotte Smith gives of London and British society in general in her novel The Old Manor House, which was first published in 1793 and tells the story of a young boy by the name of Orlando: “Orlando [...] resolved upon visiting all those receptacles of misery in London where poverty is punished by loss of liberty, and where, in a land eminent for its humanity, many thousands either perish, or are rendered by confinement and desperation unfit to return to society.”247 So even though America seems outwardly the “land of freedom and opportunity,” it actually resembles the country and the ideals that it tried to get away from, i.e. Great Britain. Just like its former mother country, America is replete with contradictions and hypocrisy, which are actually part of the country’s legal foundations, i.e. the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. While fighting in America as part of the British army, Orlando encounters some Indians who do gruesome things in the name of the King of England, slaughtering other Indian tribes and American armies alike, having been made promises that the English will most likely not keep, and Orlando, “the young unhardened Englishman shuddered with horror […] blushed for his country!”248 The Indians finally realise that the English have indeed broken their promises and therefore decide to kill all English soldiers, but one of the Indians, Wolf-hunter, saves Orlando’s life and eventually becomes a good friend of his. Despite Wolf-hunter’s hatred towards the English, which might be called justified, he has persuaded his chief to spare Orlando’s life, healed his head wound, gave him food and shelter as well as a place in this community. Orlando gladly accepted this place, but even though he stayed there for several months, learned their language and tried to teach the Indians, he feels incomplete, not only because he misses his lover, but also because he feels he cannot talk to these people on a higher
246 Melville, Typee, 205. 247 Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House (Ontaria: Broadview Press, 2005), 441. 248 Smith, The Old Manor House, 365. 61 level, for example about his religion, and he eventually decides to return to England, in spite of all the bad things he now connects with his home country: “In this resolution he set out to go back the way he came; but mortified that such brutish inhospitality as what he had just experienced could exist in British bosoms, and lamenting that there were Englishmen less humane than the rude savages of the wilds of America.”249 Dana, too, puts other races in a higher esteem than his fellow countrymen: “Their customs and manner of treating one another, show a simple, primitive generosity, which is truly delightful; and which is often a reproach to our own people. Whatever one has, they all have. Money, food, clothes, they share with one another.”250 Tommo and Toby appear to think it is but normal that they are given food and shelter, but it seems very unlikely that they would have done a similar thing if the roles had been reversed. In Omoo he describes that the Tahitians “coming down to the shore have several times been fired at by trading schooners passing through their narrow channels; and this too as a mere amusement on the part of the ruffians,”251 meaning that these so-called civilized sailors are actually but heartless brutes and that the Islanders have got every reason to hate “the white man.” The Typees have told Tommo and his companion of similar experiences with foreigners, yet they are able to put aside their grudge against these people and welcome the two Americans with open arms, whereas Tommo and Toby keep on reminding themselves that this is a cannibalistic tribe that should not be trusted and whom they do not owe anything. In other words, the Typees – as well as most of the Tahitians and the Indian in The Old Manor House – are superior regarding their high degree of hospitality and their capability to forgive those people who have done them wrong in the past. This could surely be considered naive, but it also makes Dana and Melville put these people in a somewhat higher esteem.
11.4.Tommo’s Inferiority
Just like in Omoo, in more than one section of Typee it becomes clear that the Typees have been mistreated by Melville’s fellow countrymen, among others, and that, even though he is one of these foreigners himself, he actually hopes that no white man should ever intrude into these people. In Chapter 27, Melville writes that “[b]y many a legendary tale of violence and wrong, as well as by events which have passed before their eyes, these people have been taught to look upon white men with abhorrence. The cruel invasion of their country by Porter has alone furnished them with ample provocation;” and in Chapter 28 he admits he can sympathize with
249 Smith, The Old Manor House, 396. 250 Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 140-41. 251 Melville, Omoo, 21. 62 the Typee warrior who tries to “hold at bay the intruding European.”252 The Typees nevertheless welcomed Tommo and Toby most kindly, gave them food, clothed them and shared their pipes, whilst the two Americans were not expected to do anything but lay back and relax. Then how come a person like Melville can look down on tribes, such as the Typees, that do not grow their own crops, but instead let nature run its course? Moreover, a man that has tried himself to farm and gave up after a full half day, preferring to sleep and complain about the pains in his back and to profit from the Yankee brothers that fed and paid him, even when he was not doing anything but napping. In fact, he is neither good at farming, nor at firing a gun – which shows when he goes hunting with Doctor Long Ghost and the Yankee brothers – but the Doctor and his fellow farmers certainly do not do a better job at shooting the wild boars themselves.253 Even though the Typees generally regard Tommo as someone to be admired, a person who is better skilled and knows more of the world than they do, this image is at a certain point undermined by his lack of skill with a fire weapon. One of the Typees’ chiefs, Mehevi, asks him whether he can repair a broken musket, but Tommo must evidently admit he is not able to do such a thing, which leads Mehevi to regard him as “some inferior sort of white man, who after all did not know much more than a Typee.”254 Tommo tries to make him understand that he is not capable of fixing the gun, because the task is too difficult for most Americans and because he lacks the requiring tools anyway, but Mehevi is not satisfied with these excuses. Not many of Melville’s fellow countrymen would indeed have been able to mend the firearm, but Tommo actually never shows any aptitude for anything other than making pop-guns.255 It is but understandable, then, that when Mehevi finally tries to put Tommo at work and discovers that he is not able to do the task that has been appointed to him, Mehevi wonders about the foreigner’s professed superiority. Tommo continues to believe the Typees’ intellect is far below that of his own, though. He recounts for example that “there occurred but two or three instances where the natives applied to me with the view of availing themselves of my superior information,”256 but he deems these questions too “ludicrous” to repeat them. However, he himself must entirely depend on these people for food and water, since his short adventure in the wilderness with Toby clearly proved he is unable to provide for himself. But to return to the subject of the boar hunting. When the hogs are finally down, it is the natives that need to carry them back, not because the Yankees and their employees feel
252 Melville, Typee, 204. 253 Melville, Omoo, 207-9. 254 Melville, Typee, 185. 255 Melville, Typee, 145. 256 Melville, Typee, 120. 63 themselves too good to do such a thing – or at least, not only – but because they simply cannot do it: “The cattle were so small that a stout native could walk off with an entire quarter; brushing through thickets, and descending rocks without an apparent effort; though, to tell the truth, no white man present could have done the thing with any ease.”257 Since one of the animals is black, for which reason the natives do not want to carry it, they are “obliged to leave it,”258 because they are evidently not able to carry it. This shows the natives are superior on more than one level, but Melville has obviously tried to prove he has got other – though mostly invented – skills to make up for these deficiencies. For example, even though he makes it appear in Omoo as if he is an excellent seaman and that Doctor Long Ghost and he himself play an important part in the event of the Julia’s insurrection, portraying themselves as the only two decent men who are able to control the other deserters, Parker259 actually argues that Melville was but an ordinary seaman and that he had not got much to say during the mutiny.
257 Melville, Omoo, 209. 258 Melville, Omoo, 209. 259 Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography, 224-26. 64
12. Literary and Real-Life Influences
As is mentioned before, Melville moves to and fro between his different opinions. Perhaps he could simply not let go of his national inheritance and its stereotypes or maybe he thought his book might not be published if he praised too much those people that so many others seemed to disrespect. I think, however, that he just did not consider any of his statements to be the absolute truth, because truth, he explains, “who loves to be centrally located,” is actually “found between the two extremes.”260 It is probable that he was also confused by the different sources he consulted and of which he continually claims that they contradict what he has experienced himself. Could he trust these over those people who had travelled so much more than he had, though? Instead of giving credit to these authors, which he has probably copied into Typee anyway, he ignores them and laughs at the “popular fictions” he knows people are accustomed to.261 In “Benito Cereno” as well, a reference is made to an extraordinary story that was apparently popular at the time, but which the American considers to be a mere fantasy, one of the tales that were told by seamen to kill time: “[A]mong the Malay pirates, it was no unusual thing to lure ships after them into their treacherous harbors, or entice boarders from a declared enemy at sea, by the spectacle of thinly manned or vacant decks, beneath which prowled a hundred spears with yellow arms ready to upthrust them through the mats. Not that Captain Delano had entirely credited such things.”262 In other words, Melville wanted to exalt his novels above the popular travel-narrative genre, which he debunks in Typee by ironically referring to adventure stories in the following lines: “I recommend all adventurous youths who abandon vessels in romantic islands during the rainy season to provide themselves with umbrellas.”263 Toby and he, when struggling to find food and protect themselves from the rain, are far from having the good time that some of the main characters of other travel stories appear to have. Of course Melville exaggerates the conditions that he and his companion found themselves in, in order to make the story more exciting. The mocking manner with which he mentions other travel stories in Typee is nonetheless in strong contrast with the way Melville treats these acclaimed authors and the books he used as a basis for Omoo: he shows a lot of respect for them and refers to them directly. Possibly he knew that people might be more familiar with the stories about Tahihi and about Tahiti in general – whereas there had been written hardly anything about the Marquesas Islands – and he
260 Melville, Typee, 205. 261 Melville, Typee, 205. 262 Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1544. 263 Melville, Typee, 48. 65 might not have wanted to run the risk of getting caught committing plagiarism. However, the respect he shows in Omoo is also in alignment with how he felt towards these seafarers in real live: Melville was uncommonly susceptible to experiencing extraordinary, almost reverential emotions on seeing men, or even reading about men, who had endured one particular strange life experience – in this case, American men who were going about their ordinary, respectable lives after having, in their pasts, experienced fabulous adventures, endured extremes of human suffering, and survived by eating or even murdering and then eating human beings. These white Americans had been, in their time, as cannibalistic as the natives of the Marquesas Islands, and Melville regarded them not with contempt and dread but with respect verging on awe.264 Reading stories about English men who had experienced similar events would probably not have caused such an effect on Melville, because he would never be an Englishman, and probably never wanted to become one. By creating extraordinary stories of which he himself was the main character must have felt wonderful for him and brought him closer to these American men. Moreover, most of the stories that were told about these men – even though they had most likely been enhanced a great deal by all those who had told them over the years – were not written down and Melville must have felt sorry for them or at least seen this as a great opportunity for his own plans of becoming a writer. One man that was talked about – and that Melville admired immensely because he met the conditions of the American men who had experienced something extraordinary as no other – was Owen Chase, the captain of the Essex, of whose stories different versions were inevitably told.265 After encountering a shoal of whales and going shipwrecked, Chase and the other survivors had to make do with the flesh of the men that had not outlived the event. Because of the different versions – and probably also because of his own imagination and admiration – “[i]n all of Melville’s life he is not known to have so intricately tangled up so much misapprehension and misinformation as he did about Owen Chase.”266 Fact is, however, that his story influenced him greatly throughout his years of travel story writing and on whose experiences he based quite a lot of the events depicted in his novels and the incidents he claims to have underwent himself.267
264 Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography, 199. 265 Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography, 194. 266 Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography, 197. 267 Parker, Herman Melville. A Biography, 197-98. 66
Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast also shows that its author is strongly influenced by his predecessors, even though he tried to set his novel apart from other travel stories. In the first chapter, Dana explains that his book is not meant to be entertaining, but was supposed to have got a social cause, i.e. improving the social status of seamen.268 He believes there are too many extraordinary stories that are set at sea and foreign coasts, which barely constitute any truth, and Dana has made it his mission to write and publish a novel that describes how such a journey truly looks and feels like. Nevertheless, it quickly becomes clear that he himself is also affected by these extraordinary, fictional travel stories, such as Robinson Crusoe, which both confirm his expectations and enhance his experiences when he arrives at foreign shores, previously unknown to him but for the books he has read: “I did then, and have ever since, felt an attachment for that island [...] It was partly, no doubt, from its having been the first land that I had seen since leaving home, and still more from the associations which every one has connected with it in their childhood from reading Robinson Crusoe.”269 Even though both Dana and Melville consider these stories to be inferior to their own, because they do not hold any truth, it is obvious that these tales are actually an important part of the American literary canon and that they are influenced and inspired by them. In Omoo, a description is given of a native of Hannamanoo by the name of Wymontoo; since this name is considered to be too difficult, the men propose to call him “Sunday,”270 which is the day he joined the Julia’s crew. This is, of course, a clear reference to Robinson Crusoe’s friend Friday and again clearly shows how well known this book was among sailors. Just like Melville has got a knack for looking down on other cultures – even though he admits these can be envied for several reasons as well – he also deems some of his fellow authors of travel-narratives inferior, in spite of trying to be part of this group of popular writers. In a later stage of his literary career, Melville truly considered these kind of stories unworthy, since they did not consist of any higher, philosophical truths. Initially, however, he inscribed himself in the same travel-narrative tradition and used similar conventions.
268 Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 3-4. 269 Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 44. 270 Melville, Omoo, 29. 67
13. Conclusion
I have attempted to make a close analysis of both Typee and Omoo, as well as referring to Moby- Dick, “Benito Cereno” and Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, in order to show how Melville has used 19th-century travel-narrative conventions to reflect on his own, American culture and to contrast it with that of others. A lot of research has concluded that Melville mainly looks down on other races, as well as unsubtly attacking Christianity and the missionaries – something that has caused his writing career to come to an early end. This paper, on the other hand, has argued that Melville not only hints that other races might very well be superior to Western society – in some aspects at least – but also that he shows some understanding regarding the missions and their cause, i.e. the desire to bring the Enlightenment to those people who could be considered uncivilized. There is, of course, a difference between Melville’s early and later works, particularly the degree of subtlety with which he critics instances of power, such as the missionaries and American society, of which he was, to some extent, a victim himself. He could neither cope with the American monetary system or completely subdue himself to all his nation’s societal customs, nor was he able to completely throw over his prejudices and alter his manners to such an extent that he could fully assimilate with the “other,” i.e. any of the South Sea tribes that he has encountered during his travels at sea. Nevertheless, Melville’s (early) travel narratives also show how closely interconnected American culture is with that of “others,” such as coloured people, Europeans, Indians and so on. Because of the Americans’ and Britons’ desire to colonise and convert the rest of the world – in other words to influence these other cultures and make them more European- or American- like – Western cultures actually get influenced as well. Not only do they get acquainted with new resources, but also with new points of view and alternative ways of living. By portraying other cultures – even when he does not explicitly give any moral judgements – Melville makes his readers familiar with the “other” and might make them question their own prejudices and perspectives on American culture and life in general. In other words, the “other” is used as a means to reflect critically on his own culture, even though in Typee and Omoo this is mostly done indirectly. Moreover, this paper has tried to show that such critique does not necessarily lead to a truly negative or positive image of Western society, nor of any of the South Sea Islanders’ way of living, but that Tommo finds himself in the in-between: he both envies the South Sea Islanders and portrays his own behaviour and beliefs as exalted above those of other races. This paper has thus emphasised that Melville lacks the ability to make up his mind in Typee, Omoo, the third chapter of Moby-Dick and “Benito Cereno”: the main characters’ 68 opinions change with every new experience and struggle to decide which side of civilization they are on. They never fully condemn the missionaries and their cause, give both advantages and disadvantages of a pre-enlightened way of living, feel sorry for those people who are on the verge of getting civilized and simultaneously cannot imagine to not be able to return to American society ever again. Religion, money issues, authority…they are important subjects in all of these works, as well as in Melville’s personal life, but also the topics that he apparently could not always make clear judgements about, particularly in his early narratives. Parker’s research, particularly Melville’s biography and The Contemporary Reviews, has shed some light on Melville’s personal life and shown how he was initially strongly influenced by literary conventions and his contemporary critics. Melville’s desire to step away from personal travel narratives from his third book onwards, instead writing more philosophical – and to his belief, truer – novels, has eventually made him literary obscure. As he has repeatedly told Hawthorne, he could no longer write works which he considered to be unworthy, because they did not consist of universal truths, i.e. the “ordinary” travel stories that had initially made him so successful, but that also impeded his desire for experimentations. Only from the 1920s Melville Revival onwards have his novels – and poetry – earned the respect and been given the attention that they lacked during his lifetime. Nevertheless, I believe his early travel narratives, i.e. Typee and Omoo, still require some more in-depth analysis. This paper has tried to focus on the texts an sich – as well as referring to the social context – something which, in my opinion, has not been done enough in the past. I hope Melville’s early works will get some more attention over the next couple of years, that others will notice the discrepancies between how he depicts his own culture and those of other nations, and that they will make more nuanced conclusions, just like I have ventured to do.
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