Strange Romanticism: Herman Melville’s Typee (1846)

ABSTRACT

In Typee (1846), Herman Melville presents a fictionalized version of his real experience of jumping ship and living with the Tai Pī people on the island of Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas. Melville categorizes Typee as a “strange and romantic” adventure. Many critics have echoed this label, “Romantic,” due to Melville’s revival of an idealized image of South Seas society. Others align Typee’s Romanticism directly with strangeness, which is both an important theme and a formal characteristic of Typee. Melville’s own experience of cultural estrangement enables him to show some sympathy for indigenous people, while his paratexts act as estranging devices. He reworks and reinterprets Romantic-period writings on the Pacific, most notably David Porter’s Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean (1815). I situate Typee as a continuation of the “very long Romanticism” that David Simpson claims emerges in what he calls the era’s “stranger syndrome.” Melville’s Romanticism lies in his refusal either to domesticate or totalize the Tai Pī, which results in an ambiguous portrayal that estranges the reader by challenging the uniqueness of Western culture.

Notes

1 For further discussion of Stevenson’s and Poe’s paratexts, see my “‘The Garb of Fiction’: Edgar Allan Poe’s Notes for The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)” and “Footnotes to History: Marginalizing Polynesia in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Song of Rahéro and The Feast of Famine (1890).”