ABSTRACT
A certain Idealism is buried, deep but not beyond excavation, in the wondrous redundancies of Melville’s Mardi—already prefigured in the dialectic of “the absolute and the natural” that elevates Typee and Omoo from semi-prurient travel narrative to original philosophic inquiry. A mysterious and very white maiden named Yillah, descended however indirectly from the tragedy of Captain Cook, has been destined by the South Sea Pagans to be a human sacrifice, in the interest, one presumes, of future fertility. Violently rescued by a roving mariner who names himself a demigod, she services for a time his own need for sex-with-a-theory; but then she vanishes, leaving him with just the theory, namely, that she was the perfect object of pure desire. And when he names her the “blue-eyed One,” we more than suspect that Plotinus has been shockingly eroticized. And that, murdering a Priest of Paganism, our roving protagonist has but transferred “the woman” from one insane myth into another. Ontological Epithalamion, whether Lizzie Shaw would get it or not.
