ABSTRACT
When early in Typee Herman Melville’s Tommo stood aback, stunned by the “licentiousness” of the “swimming nymphs” rushing to meet his ship as it arrived at Nukuheva harbor, his dismayed reaction is marked by the assumption of a priggish Yankee persona that was common for a nineteenth-century New England character. Melville’s presentation of Tommo was, of course, a calculated move. As a young writer working to gain a foothold in the literary marketplace, Melville showed a keen recognition of the cultural work inherent to his writing on two distinct fronts. On one hand, he was appealing to the prim attitudes towards sexuality and miscegenation held by his nineteenth-century readers. On the other, he was articulating the appealing “consumable otherness” that has popularized tales of adventure and travel to distant locales throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Titillating his readers with vivid descriptions of native women whose “jet black tresses stream[ed] over their shoulders,” he nonetheless watched this “savage vivacity”1 from afar to emphasize his reserved adherence to socially mandated prudence. Though most Americans would not become fully aware of the decimation wrought upon native islanders by foreign sailors and traders until later in the century, Melville’s readers were at least privy to knowledge of the temptations presented by these interactions with native women. His depiction of Tommo allows a conveniently dualistic vision that quietly licenses both forms of conquest: sexual and colonial. With a collective wink, American society could ignore these offenses by sailors who had spent many months at sea. Moreover, such seemingly “immoral” and “corrupting” relationships were socially sanctioned because of the secondary racial status given to South Pacific Islanders and because of their clearly heterosexual nature.
