Image from Wikimedia Commons.
by Liam Skeoch
Strategic interests, both economic and geopolitical, drove the colonial mission in the South Seas, but the notion that the island-dwelling Indigenous peoples of the Pacific would benefit from ‘enlightenment’ in temporal and spiritual matters justified this mission and impassioned its proponents. In his semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical work, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), Herman Melville (1819–1891) critiques this colonial mission by way of calling into question the ostensible advantages of this burgeoning ‘enlightenment.’ He does this by (mostly) framing the Typee as maintaining an idyllic society whose citizens do not require enlightenment: they are happier and, in a meaningful sense, live closer to God than their ‘civilized’ visitors. Conversely, he emphasizes the unnatural living, the impiety, and the brutality of these would-be civilizers. Lending particular strength to his religious critique, Melville draws both implicit and explicit comparisons between the Typee valley and the Garden of Eden, framing the irony of a Christian civilizing mission that in fact corrupts an Edenic society. Taken seriously, the argument articulated by Melville’s protagonist and fictive persona, Tommo, renders this Christian mission sacrilegious; and yet, given his ultimate conclusions, we might question just how seriously Tommo—or, for that matter, the author himself—takes that argument.
Tommo describes the Typee as a naturally virtuous and orderly people:
So pure and upright were they in all the relations of life, […] I was soon led to exclaim in amazement: “Are these the ferocious savages […] of whom I have heard such frightful tales! [sic] They deal more kindly with each other, and are more humane, than many who study essays on virtue and benevolence, and who repeat every night that beautiful prayer breathed first by the lips of the divine and gentle Jesus.” (Melville 203)
He also lauds their character of fellowship and unity, reporting that they had no “difference of opinion upon any subject whatever. They all thought and acted alike” (Melville 203). Their virtue is attributed to “an inherent principle of honesty and charity towards each other, […] this universally diffused perception of what is just and noble” (Melville 201), and Tommo recounts leaving their territory with “a higher estimate of human nature than [he] had ever before entertained” (Melville 203). If it is true that the Typee are naturally good and live happily absent the “statute-book” (Melville 203) of civilization, then the colonial sentiment that they need to be ‘civilized’ is rendered highly questionable. But Melville’s argument runs deeper: he frames the colonial mission as in fact an anti-Christian endeavour through Edenic analogy. The very first Typee Tommo encounters are a couple resembling Adam and Eve: “[t]hey were a boy and girl, slender and graceful, and completely naked” (68). The valley they inhabit is verdant and abundant in tropical trees carrying bread-fruit and coconuts, not unlike Eden, where “[t]he Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food” (Gen. 2.9 NIV); this is where God told Adam, “[y]ou are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge” (Gen. 2.16–17 NIV)—the foreshadowing of a fatal enlightenment. Within their valley, the Typee live leisurely and luxuriously, which Melville then explicitly compares to Eden:
The penalty of the Fall presses very lightly upon the valley of Typee [….] I scarcely saw any piece of work performed there which caused the sweat to stand upon a single brow. As for digging and delving for a livelihood, the thing is altogether unknown. Nature has planted the bread-fruit and the banana, and […] the idle savage stretches forth his hand, and satisfies his appetite. (Melville 195)
Only after the ‘Fall of Man’ is Adam condemned by God to work the ground “[b]y the sweat of [his] brow” (Gen. 3.19 NIV), a labour Melville suggests the Typee are exempt from. Figuratively, and according to this framing, the Typee have yet to fall: they still live in Eden. If this is so, not only do they live happily and in harmonious order with one another, but the Typee are also living closer to God than their Christian civilizers, in a society resembling His original, intended order. By forcing the Typee to depart from this order, it seems plausible that these Christians are negating the will of the very God they purport to represent in their Pacific crusade.
In contrast to the paradisial life of the Typee, Melville depicts the ‘civilized life’ as an unnatural, painful, and violent one. ‘Civilized man’ cannot sustain himself on the fruits of nature, bask in the warm sun, nor frolic in secluded streams—there is work to be done! His is a world of money, envy, laws, expectations, and endless toil; indeed, his society does not value Tommo’s life so much as what he can produce. Tommo’s voyage through the Pacific is itself motivated by this fundamentally transactional condition. Life aboard his whaling ship is related to be miserable and profoundly unnatural, a voyage east of Eden: “[o]h! for a refreshing glimpse of one blade of grass—for a snuff at the fragrance of the gloomy earth! Is there nothing fresh around us? […] Yes, the inside of our bulwarks is painted green; but what a vile and sickly hue it is […]” (Melville 3–4): Tommo is nauseated by the artificiality of a mock Eden. And while the Typee enjoy fruit in abundance, the crew of the Dolly are deprived of all fresh provisions and subsist on salted meats and biscuits (Melville 3). All these pains are further aggravated by the captain’s inhumane and tyrannical leadership, providing insufficient rations and substandard treatment for the ill (Melville 21). Why, then, did Tommo undertake this miserable journey in the first place? Probably for the principal reason that Melville himself became a sailor: for “[m]oney! That ‘root of all evil’ ” (Melville 126). After all, money is for most such men the supreme object of their lives. But besides his endless toiling, the ‘civilized man’ is also described as capable of violence and cruelty on a scale unknown to the Marquesan native: “the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars […] [is] enough […] to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth” (Melville 125). Because he concerns himself with ambitions that carry him beyond his essential needs, this ‘civilized man’ undertakes a myriad of evil endeavours, like the colonial project itself—an endeavour “the object of which [was] to ameliorate the spiritual condition of the Polynesians, but whose end has almost invariably been to accomplish their temporal destruction!” (Melville 195). And when this mission succeeds and the Polynesians have been subjugated, they are inducted into the laborious machine and “are told by their benefactors to work and earn their support by the sweat of their brows!” (Melville 196)—and thus, they too at last find themselves cast East of Eden.
Again, Melville evokes biblical imagery to frame his argument, but how might ‘civilized man’ be understood within Melville’s Edenic analogy? In one sense, he resembles a fallen Adam. When Adam eats the fruit of knowledge, his leisurely existence is irrevocably turned laborious: “God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground” (Gen. 3.23 NIV). ‘Civilized man,’ in his endless pursuit of enlightenment, similarly relinquishes simple pleasures for endless toil. In another sense, however, ‘civilized man’ can be understood as the serpent, a corrupting influence on the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific. When he encounters these benighted Polynesians, the serpent of enlightenment introduces them to the ostensible advantages of civilized modernity: textiles and tobacco, rifles and trifles. With these tantalizing morsels, and often after flexing his artillery (like the French, whose gunships have taken the place of an earlier American expeditionary force in Nuku Hiva), he coerces the islanders to substitute their natural virtue for his own civilized vice. They are initially naïve to Tommo’s observation that “[c]ivilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve” (Melville 124), and by allowing themselves to be civilized, they “fold to their bosoms the vipers whose sting is destined to poison all their joys; and the instinctive feeling of love within their breasts is soon converted into the bitterest hate” (Melville 26). Under the yoke of their new condition, they work the land by the sweat of their brows for foreign masters, now completely divorced from their Edenic contentment. So, by Melville’s framing, the civilized man is Adam, having left the Garden of Eden long ago and now returning to burn it down; but also, he is the serpent who, by coercion, seduces the islanders to share in his civilized life of ceaseless labour and bottomless discontent. If Melville’s account is accepted, how could any Christian condone the mission in the South Seas, understanding that its objectives are so perverse, and that its proponents are serpentine? Its grounding in the story of Eden makes Melville’s Typee a striking refutation from the inside of the Christian justification for colonialism.
However, Melville’s case is not presented so cohesively within Typee as it has been here: his argument is complicated by Tommo’s vacillating sympathies for the colonial agenda. Tommo posits that the Typee require a religious resurgence: “[i]n truth, I regard the Typees as a backslidden 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” (Melville 179). It seems to follow from this sentiment that the Typee would do well to have their spirituality “revived” by Christian missionaries, who could shake them out of their decadence and remind them of the significance of their “higher obligations.” Later, he says, “[l]et the savages be civilized, but civilize them with benefits, and not with evils; and let heathenism be destroyed, but not the heathen” (Melville 195). If Tommo accepted his ownargument, that “[c]ivilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve” (Melville 124), he would see that there is no civilization with only benefits and without evils, and thus could not advocate for this civilizing mission in any capacity. Except he does. Evidently, Melville, no less than Tommo, is irresolute.
We might account for these inconsistencies by once more returning to Eden. Essential to the tragedy of the Fall is its irreversibility: after eating the fruit of knowledge, Adam and Eve experienced an irreversible psychological change—their blissful ignorance gave way to a dreadful sensibility and self-awareness (Gen. 3.7 NIV). As punishment, God cast them from the garden, and “placed on the east side of the Garden […] cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way” (Gen. 3.24 NIV)—and man was thus forbidden to return to Eden forever. The Fall can be read allegorically with respect to ‘civilized man’ who, like Adam and Eve, underwent a kind of pyrrhic ‘enlightenment’ and became productive but restless by psychology, unable to return to the “indolent” life (Melville 196). Tommo’s is the psychology of ‘civilized man’: his voyage is motivated by money, the respect accorded to someone who works, and civilization’s other prizes. But could Tommo (and Melville himself) not settle for less, like the “indolent” Typee? Could he not leave society behind him and live a simple life on nature’s provisions? No, he could not, because civilization has made its imprint on him: he is discontented unless he is doing something, or progressing—even without satisfaction—towards some goal which he may never see realized. Tommo would remain a stranger among the Typee if he lived with them for a million years: they understand life in fundamentally different ways, and their respective visions could never be reconciled. As a result, even after having witnessed the joys of Typee life, Tommo feels alienated among them. Reflecting on his isolation and time spent birdwatching, he says: “the sight of these birds, generally the ministers of gladness, always oppressed me with melancholy. As in their dumb beauty they hovered by me […] I was almost inclined to fancy that they knew they were gazing upon a stranger, and that they commiserated his fate” (Melville 216). Commiserable indeed: Tommo is a hostage spectator to a utopia into which he will never integrate. Perhaps these birds in their “dumb beauty” can be understood to symbolically represent Tommo’s idea of the blissfully ignorant Typee, among whom he will always feel an outsider. Regardless, the tensions in Melville’s argument now stand to be resolved. It seems plausible that he calls for the destruction of heathenism, in spite of his own testimony and contention against the colonial project, because he, like Tommo, belongs to the civilized condition—he, like Tommo, cannot ever embrace the uncivilized life. He has fallen out of Eden, and an angel born of his own cultural background and psychology bars his re-entry.
Melville’s argument, notwithstanding its inconsistencies, is extremely powerful. By emphasizing that the Typee society resembles the first and most godly order, and that Christian missionaries and “rapacious hordes of enlightened individuals” (Melville 195) threaten to bring this order to ruin, he denies the colonial mission in the Pacific its Christian grounding and instead frames it as heresy. But despite the strength of his argument, there is much in Typee that lends reasonable doubt as to whether Melville is convinced of this anti-colonial position at all, made most evident when Tommo calls for the destruction of heathenism. This inconsistency is best resolved through the very same Edenic framing Melville relies on to make his case: he cannot return to Eden even as a witness to its perfection, because Eden can never be reclaimed once relinquished. Seen in this light, Melville’s ambivalence is not a contradiction but a complication, consistent with his argument, and reflecting a mind that, while open to new experiences and novel thoughts, was challenged nonetheless to disentangle itself from the clinging webs of cultural inheritance.
Works Cited
The Bible. New International Version, Zondervan, 2011.
Melville, Herman. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. Penguin Classics, 1984.