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by Maxine Kirsten Magtoto
Herman Melville’s 19th-century novel, “Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life”, is a self-reflection on Western culture, as well as the Western moralities that dominated social culture during Melville’s time. Tommo, the protagonist, is shown throughout the text to both admire and fear islanders’ physical forms and open sexuality. Sexual rebellion foregrounds the novel with emphasis on the idea of a decadent, ‘savage’ paradise as a contendor of American imperialism. In exploring homoeroticism and cultural deviance, the writings of Typee operate on the intersection of queer and colonial history: Melville critiques Western religious and political superiority and reprimands Western imperialist movements in the South Pacific. This essay argues that the themes of queerness in Typee are intentional and systematic, portrayed in the characters Toby, Fayaway, and Marnoo, whose relationships with Tommo embody both the realization of his dissatisfaction with Western colonial ambitions, as well as the crises of moral character that come along with it. Ultimately, Tommo’s interpersonal relationships and surrender to his own self-imposed restraint are symbolic of queer struggles against ‘moral’ society, reflect how collective prejudices distort social identities, and comment on how desire meets fear in contemplations of abject morality.
The concepts of exoticism and eroticism are conflated in “Typee”, and serve to paint the Polynesian people as fantastical, desirable, and distant. In “Beloved Savages and Other Outsiders”, Kelvin Ray Beliele explores the travel writings of Melville alongside similar authors of his time–Bayard Taylor and Charles Warren Stoddard– and delineates their common goal to rebel against American ideas of religious and moral superiority. Beliele notes: “Beyond what seems to be cultural unrest, these writers are also experimenting with the definitions and boundaries of literary genres […] When they shift [these boundaries], they most clearly express their objection to the Western paradigm.” (Beliele) Nineteenth-century travel writers often wrote of experiencing “exotic” pleasures that were atypical and taboo– illegal or immoral– to the general American reader. As a result, writers like Melville often acted as translators, decrypting taboo issues to the general audience, but are expected to write circumspectly to avoid social reprimand. (Beliele) However, Beliele also notes that despite American censorship during the nineteenth-century, these male writers “knew that the sexuality of non-American non-white males could find safe and socially condoned expression in the travel narrative as a descriptive of the other.” (Beliele) In other words, the distance of fiction allows Melville to write on experiences that would otherwise be unacceptable in reality.
The French Marquesas, the focal location of the book, is immediately established as an erotic, heterosexual paradise, a hiden haven separate from the civilized world of the Western sailors. Melville paints images of naked, unsuspecting Marquesan women swimming up to the ship, the Dolly (a name which, in itself, indicates both youthfulness and femininity) and welcoming the sailors to satisfy “the unholy passions of the crew and their unlimited gratification.” (Melville 20) The sailors perceive these women as “mermaids” and “nymphs”: that is, exotic, mythic beings assimilable to their own Western culture. Simultaneously, their erotic welcome and open sexuality overwhelms the Marquesas and threatens to unlock previously repressed moralities within the sailors. The exoticism of the Marquesas paint it as inherently subversive and directly opposing the conventions of Western gender roles and sexual conscience that built American society.
Alternatively, Tommo’s descriptions of ship life paint it as a homosocial environment that taps into a different realm of sexuality– one that eroticizes masculinity and the male form. Prior to jumping ship, Tommo makes a pact with Toby, a shipmate who also wishes to explore the Marquesas, with the two men marking their connection with a “affectionate wedding of palms” (Melville 26) before jumping ship. In sealing their commitment to one another in terms of a nuptial agreement, Toby is the first male painted in a homosexual light– Tommo’s impression of him is one of admiration and affection: he describes Toby’s “naturally dark complexion” and “jetty locks of hair” (Melville 32) as well as his “remarkably prepossessing exterior” (Melville 40) and a certain “congeniality of sentiment”. (Melville 41) Toby sparks Tommo’s realization of his queer desire, and enables Tommo to delve deeper into this desire amongst the sexually liberal Typees.
Apart from these descriptions, however, their relationship is not explained in any depth: little is known about Toby, and he is largely portrayed as a mysterious stranger from home. While Toby’s companionship reassures Tommo of the culture he belongs to once they reach the Marquesas and are greeted by the islanders, the two share very limited emotional and physical intimacy. However, Toby’s secrecy gives him allure– he has no past, and does not reveal details of his life. His name is an alias, “for his real name he would never tell us.” (Melville 31) A wanderer, he has committed his life to vagabond pursuits of destiny, “rambling over the world as if pursued by some mysterious fate they cannot possibly elude” (Melville 32). According to Beliele, Toby’s limitless moving and rambling is linked to an “uncontrolled sexuality”, noting the likelihood that Melville’s referring to Toby as a ‘rover’ “includes at least an association with a free sensuality.” As a wanderer, Toby is no longer concerned with values of “home” and domestic values, and he is free from limited visions of masculinity and sexuality.
Toby plays a critical role in establishing Tommo’s subversive conceptions of sexuality and morality as the narrative progresses, and his presence serves as an explicit reminder that they do not fully belong anywhere they run to– not with the Typees, not aboard the ship with their crewmates, and not the Western society they ultimately rejoin. Toby is a liminal figure: a midway point between a close minded American society, the homosocial but isolated world of the ship, and the freely erotic islands, if also a midway point between conventional conceptions of gender and queerness. In “Elasticity of Mind in Herman Melville’s Typee: A Quest for Individuation and Voice”, Linda Sheeley notes that “the rigid, masculine world,” symbolized as images of “tough reeds” and “steely canes” (Melville 35) attempts to thwart Tommo’s attempt to escape from convention– to trade his learned masculinity for the freedom of the erotic, feminine landscape. (Sheeley) Toby acts as a guide to the weighted, intersectional ponderings of Typee– into the idea of queerness, and how queerness comes to be recognized in institutions that either refuse to acknowledge it, or simply lack a name for it.
A marked shift in the narrative can be seen once Tommo meets Fayaway, a young Polynesian woman who represents a temptation for Tommo to join this culture. Fayaway’s social role within the community is defined and stable, and as a woman, remains a conventional choice for Tommo’s desires. He marks this desire by taking the risk to ask for special permission to take her out on a canoe, a transgression of cultural norms. However, she remains largely idealized, mysterious, and without any inner life. Tommo notes that “gazing into the depths of her strange blue eyes, when she was in a contemplative mood, they seemed most placid and unfathomable.” (Melville 105) Tommo’s infatuation with Fayaway is not genuine– she is more a vague characterization of femininity than someone specific: she has no dialogue, and she never speaks; he looks into her eyes but doesn’t truly see her. She is virtually silent, barely human, and somewhat unreal, and is sexually available but not fully present. As a woman, Fayaway’s silence and overwhelming lack of presence reinforce the idea of queerness as a moral, logical, and social battle. Fayaway’s femininity makes her outspokenness almost expected, and marks her as a symbol of innocence, purity, and spirituality. In contrast, queerness, embodied in Tommo’s lacklustre relationship with Fayaway, stands for guilt, temptation, lust, sin– akin to vice. This frame affirms Fayaway’s position as a symbol of traditional custom and repression, whereas Tommo’s queerness is a symbol of instinct and the subsconsious, of unfulfilled desires and fundamental struggles between civilized society and primal human instinct.
In contrast to Tommo’s shallow relationship with Fayaway, Melville describes Tommo as sharing a much more specific intimacy with Kory-Kory, his designated attendant on the island. Unlike Fayaway, who is praised for her beauty, Tommo perceives Kory-Kory as a physically abject, almost offensively grotesque individual. However, while Fayaway is more explicitly sexualized, Tommo’s interactions with Kory-Kory are a more genuine realization of the sexual desires he is feeling on this island. After Toby has disappeared, Kory-Kory becomes the most frequent male figure in Tommo’s life. They share a moment of sexual intimacy, wherein Kory-Kory “produces light à la Typee”. (Melville 118) Kory-Kory can be seen as a foil to Fayaway in this way, as despite Tommo’s more explicit attraction to her, she is not written with the same nuanced conviction. Female characters largely remain in the background, and appear in three ways: as disarming sirens whose main task is to lead men into disgrace, as compromised and lacking wholeness of character, or both. In the case of Kory-Kory and Fayaway, however, the latter appears almost to indirectly echo and reinforce the maleness of the former, while she herself is subdued. Fayaway constitutes an emasculating suggestion for Tommo to reinterpret his own maleness. Tommo’s struggle against masculinity is thus twofold: coming from the male-dominated culture of maritime imperial conquest, masculinity represents a culture Tommo wishes to reject, but also a concept that he wishes to redefine for himself. Tommo’s experiences with Kory-Kory represent the moral ponderings that can occur without the threat of his past looming over him, as well as the impulses of conventional sexual values.
Marquesan society is not without its own restrictions and moral abstractions. Throughout the text, Tommo struggles to understand the concept of ‘taboo’. Tabooness is a social divider, separating the elite from the commoner, male from female, the sacred from profane, but also acts as a means of binding culture and creating shared identity. It is deeply woven into the religious, political, and social structures of the Polynesians. While Tommo does not fully understand the taboo, the existence of strict social rules in a seemingly pre-contact culture reveals the limitations behind Western conceptions of civilization. Tommo thus realizes that Western civilization “does not engross all the virtues of humanity; she has not even her full share of them.” (Melville 159) The taboo reflects how collective thinking distorts individual identity, both in Western society, as well as in the Marquesas.
Tommo begins to understand his own identity as taboo following Toby’s departure. Soon after, the Typees’ intention to prevent Tommo’s return to civilization grows increasingly more apparent. Tommo’s “dismal forebodings” begin to overwhelm his thinking: “Gradually I lost all knowledge of the regular recurrence of the days of the week, and sank insensibly into that kind of apathy which ensues after some violent outbreak of despair” (Melville 123).” As he gives up hope, Tommo no longer experiences time according to its willful Western march. A distinctly Polynesian mindset emerges in Tommo as he breaks free of his crisis and taps into a more flexible and forthcoming consciousness: “I began to experience an elasticity of mind which placed me beyond the reach of those dismal forebodings. .. . I gave myself up to the passing hour” (Melville 123-124). While the Typees have not formed any consistent conceptions of time, their lives are attuned to the changes of the present moment, and they are more in tune with their consciousness as a result. To Sheeley, this “elasticity of mind” offers Tommo a “model for resolving personal and narrative struggles that lead to his later, mature voice.” (Sheeley) Tommo’s evolving relationship with himself– both as a white man navigating through Typee society, and a queer man struggling with his own consciousness, making his quest for individuation all the more complex.
No character in the text embodies Tommo’s struggle and fascination with the taboo as amply as Marnoo. Marnoo, a Polynesian vagabond with the unique permission to travel freely between the different tribes, immediately situates himself as an ‘other’. He is a liminal and flexible political actor, and unlike other Polynesians, he has been immersed in Western culture, and was able to return to his homeland. Tommo’s fascination with him is intellectually erotic: he describes Marnoo’s physical features as combining Polynesian charms with classical Western beauty, going so far as to describe him as a “Polynesian Apollo” (Melville 135). Marnoo’s disposition is sexually ambiguous and androgynous: “His cheek was of a feminine softness” and “Had the belle of the season, in the pride of her beauty and power, been cut in a place of public resort by some supercilious exquisite, she could not have felt greater indignation than I did at this unexpected slight” (Melville 136) signalling Marnoo’s cultural androgyny: both Polynesian, or primitive, and Western, or civilized, all at once. These references to classic Greek thought ennoble Marnoo, and empower a narrative of queer love. Tommo’s strong reaction to his androgyny marks the peak of his confusion with his own queerness. In Western moral standards, non-conformity was unacceptable, anarchic, and almost destructive. Yet Marnoo is shown as someone who Tommo desires, wishes to copy, and is utterly confounded by– he is an unreachable ideal. This fascination is only made stronger as Marnoo ignores Tommo: “But without deigning to notice the civility, or even the mere incontrovertible fact of my existence, the stranger passed on, utterly regardless of me.” (Melville 136). Confronted with the handsome Marnoo’s indifference, Tommo’s queerness becomes more complex, intertwining with ideas of cross-cultural desire, visions of the cosmopolitan cohabitation between differing identities and cultural groups, and a destruction of classifications previously thought to be natural and invulnerable.
However, despite achieving balance between differing cultures, no Typee is as detached from Typee society as Marnoo. Tommo’s attraction to Marnoo comes in part due to his body being “free from the least blemish of tattooing.” (Melville 220) Much of Marnoo’s beauty comes from his light, unmarked skin, or in more concise terms, his whiteness. According to Beliele, Marnoo is close to being European– unlike the other Typees, Marnoo has lived amongst white people and knows English. Marnoo’s flexibility is both repulsive and beautiful to Tommo: “Yet there are instances where a person having ratified friendly relations with some individual […] whose inmates are at war with his own, […] venture with impunity […] where, under other circumstances he would have been treated as an enemy.” (Melville 222) Tommo and Marnoo are both ambassadors: clandestine actors that escape collective oppression, but run the risk of losing a sense of identity or belonging. To be an ambassador is to only temporarily accept the values of a foreign culture, and in Tommo’s case, temporarily accept his captive state. Beliele notes, “the traditional captivity narrative consistently positions the captor as an alien, with no empathy or attempt at understanding extended […]” (Beliele) In contrast to this narrative, Tommo is temporarily capable of looking past cultural barriers to recognize the individuality of the Typee people. However, Marnoo’s appearance is a reminder of Tommo’s tabooness, and a reminder of his inability to revert to a state prior to his transition to taboo. Sheeley further notes that Marnoo is the culminating symbol of Tommo’s learnings on the island: while Fayaway and Kory-Kory “represent extreme representations of the cultural and gender spectrum—she the ultra-feminine and he the perversely feminine,” both are unable to fully get through to Tommo by being “either non-literate, or unintelligible and untrustworthy.” (Sheeley) Marnoo, alternatively, both in speech and in liminal quality of character, mirrors Tommo’s idealization for his own quest– to understand his queerness, and to discover his inner individuation and truth.
Marnoo’s appearance marks the climax of Tommo’s story, where he is on the verge of being in the middle of two extremes: being partially assimilated but mostly invisible. Later on during his stay, the natives grow increasingly adamant that he get a tattoo– a mark of deeper involvement within the community. Tommo exclaims, “Not a day passed but I was persecuted by the solicitations of some of the natives to subject myself to the odious operation of tattooing” (Melville 231). Polynesian tattoos betray Western sensibilities and moralities, and are not so much a marker of individual choice as they are commitment to the Typee collective. Yet Tommo fears the need to conform anywhere: he is portrayed as desiring escape from both the Sailors and the Typees, at the beginning and end of the text, respectfully, but never fully settling in either place. Toby and Marnoo are almost counterparts for one another– as wanderers that fail to be fully safe where they are, they mark the beginning and the end of Tommo’s journey of self-discovery. Whether aboard a ship and constrained by his duty to aid imperial efforts, or on an island constrained by cultural barriers and physical ailments, his interactions have left Tommo in a position of physical and spiritual compromise, with Tommo’s anxieties ultimately winning. So long as he is unable to commit to a culture, Tommo has barred himself from any kind of personal autonomy, a kind of self-imposed un-freedom.
As a captive on both land and ship, Tommo’s explorations with sexuality ultimately lead him to ponder his spiritual beliefs and feelings. Tommo’s constant instability throughout the text can ultimately be linked to his “anxious desire to speak the unvarnished truth” (Melville 26): be it truth about himself, of the culture he was raised in, or the culture he was now immersed in. Unfortunately, he never finds these truths. While he denigrates the motives of Europeans in the South Pacific, and contemplates whether civilization does more harm than good to the “Polynesian savage,” he realizes that the natives’ decadence comes with a cost. In his praise and fascination with the virtuous Typees, Tommo remarks that they are “not free from the guilt of cannibalism” (Melville 205), the ultimate taboo. The truth of what makes up a truly ‘moral’ and upright culture is centrally located between the two extremes of these cultures: a ‘civilized’ culture, guided by law, with strict, often repressive, expectations of moral character; and a ‘pre-civilization’ culture, guided by human instinct, that Tommo will never fully understand, be it due to communication restrictions or his inability to surmise his identity struggles.
Tommo’s quest ultimately comments on how desire meets fear in the face of abject morality, and the nature of exploring the self amidst a background of intolerance, uncertainty, and prejudice. In her doctoral thesis, “Resisting the Vortex: Abjection in the Early Works of Herman Melville,” Jennifer Wing discusses how Tommo’s fear of abjection– the state of being cast off from moral and social society– comes from his own fear to confront his own mortality and consciousness, particularly, “his own physical, sexualized body.” (Wing) Queerness did not exist during Melville’s time, and “the sense of anachronism seems […] too strong” to readily describe his story as intentionally queer. (Beliele) However, this only strengthens the case of Tommo’s queerness being perceived as something abject, mysterious, and dangerous: Melville himself lacked a name for it. (Wing) Homosexuality is often coupled with cannibalism, the ultimate taboo, as something forbidden but implicitly occurring in the foreground. Cannibalism is a universal, uniting fear, symbolic of the consumption and losing of self as morality and truth become tangled into one another. Allusions to both queerness and cannibalism “almost always implied a loss of control over the body” (Sheeley) and these losses of control, subsequently, imply “a compromise of the self and a disintegration of identity.” (Sheeley) What Tommo fears in his own queerness is similar to his fear in cannibalism– a loss of control, and the prospect of establishing a self in alignment with forbidden sexualities and cultural acts. This is aptly represented in Tommo’s companions: Toby, representing Tommo’s initial impressions of the Marquesas, mentions cannibalism frequently. Fayaway, safety in the tribe, represents Tommo’s comforts, and cannibalism is largely forgotten. Marnoo reminds Tommo of the reality of the situation, with Tommo remembering his own otherness and the threat that he faces. This all manifests in Tommo’s escape– from cannibalism, self-realization, and the queerness of it all.
Melville’s skillful characterizations and narrative techniques underpin the development of a political statement, explored through sexuality, religion, and cultural attitudes. “Typee: A Peep Into Polynesian Life” is a greater narrative of the queer person not just as a sexual outsider, but as emotionally and intellectually stratified. Queerness is a nuanced condition– it is both an embodiment of cultural struggle, as well as an outlet for desire, individuation, and a voice. Tommo’s final escape from the Marquesan islands marks his surrender not only of his queerness, but of himself, to the spirit of convention. This conclusion underlines Melville’s pessimistic view of being queer in the nineteenth-century: that queerness, unable to thrive under oppressive conditions, can only be explored by detaching from reality. In following Tommo’s journey from cruise ship member to islander, from barely recognizing to fully fearing his own queerness, the text analyses imperial ambitions, forecasts the social damage that imperialists can bring, and offers discourse on the religious and moral beliefs that dominate the West.
Works Cited
Beliele, Kelvin Ray. “Beloved Savages and Other Outsiders: Genre and Gender Transgressions in the Travel Writings of Herman Melville, Bayard Taylor, and Charles Warren Stoddard.” University of New Mexico Theses and Dissertations, 27 Aug. 2009, pp. 1–200.
Sheeley, Linda T. “Elasticity of Mind in Herman Melville’s Typee: A Quest for Individuation and Voice.” University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh Theses, Clinical Papers, and Field Projects , Dec. 2011, pp. 1–128.
Wing, Jennifer Mary. “Resisting the Vortex: Abjection in the Early Works of Herman Melville .” ScholarWorks at Georgia State University, 21 Apr. 2008, pp. 1–216.