“[R]eaders who are sick at heart”: Melville’s Typee and the Expansion Controversy

After James Fenimore Cooper’s rise to celebrity status in the 1820s, there emerged in the United States a burgeoning literary West in which Anglo-American triumphalism and U.S. identity were persistently conflated. At the same time, however, writers of the western frontier also tended to interweave counter-imperial, dissenting rhetorics into their narratives; especially as the United States moved closer to war with Mexico in 1846, their works increasingly ventriloquized the nation’s widespread anxiety over Indian Removal, slavery, and expansionism’s threat to the character of a nation founded upon republican, anti-imperialist principles. While critics have long noted the impact of such expansion-related issues on Herman Melville’s writings from the late 1840s through the beginning of the 1850s,¹ less attention has been paid to how those writings resonate with ideological contestations that freighted the nation’s literary and political discourse at the height of Manifest Destiny. This essay briefly discusses Melville’s first and most commercially-successful book, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), in the context of conflicts bred by the practical dilemmas and moral transgressions endemic to the United States’ expansionist program. More specifically, focusing on Typee’s provocative treatment of the dynamic between Anglo-Europeans and the racial and international Other, I suggest that the explosive response the book evoked among American reviewers, as well as the wide popularity it attained almost immediately after its publication, arose from its participation in struggle between ideologies of conquest and counter-imperial impulses.

Though set in the South Pacific Isles, Typee’s structural and thematic elements rendered it largely representative of the antebellum American literary West.² The idea of the West carried explicitly international connotations in the public imagination at the time of Melville’s writing; as Howard Doughty argued in his 1962 biography of Francis Parkman, there obtained a “shared experience” between the United States’ expansionist program and “the whole expansionist phase of European culture, as its ‘radiation’ on a world-wide scale brought it into contact—usually destructive—with cultures of a different nature and induced a more searching scrutiny of its own values.”³ The West’s international associations were further heightened by aggressive expansionists who made their case by raising the specter of European powers encroaching on a vulnerable American frontier. As Robert Johannsen has noted in light of the runup to the United States’ invasion of Mexico, many in the American press had for years been reporting “plans to place a European prince on a Mexican throne [. . .] Europe’s monarch’s, it was charged, had embarked on a course designed to thwart the natural growth of the United States and frustrate its democratic nation.”⁴ Justification for Indian Removal, too, had often framed the policy as a necessary means of checking European aggression on the North American continent; throughout his presidency, Andrew Jackson promoted and defended his Indian Removal policies less through anti-Indian rhetoric, than by appealing to Americans’ fear of European imperialism.⁵

From the standpoint of literary convention, moreover, Melville’s treatment of Polynesia reverberated with contemporaneous engagements with the American West. Indeed, through the organizing motif of a civilized white man sojourning among untamed landscapes and peoples whose conquest his presence portends, Melville’s book traded in one of the frontier writing genre’s most familiar plot devices; and Typee further mirrored generic convention by ultimately dismissing the “savage” lifestyle as an unviable alternative to the Anglo-European civilizational model that Tommo, the narrator, represents. As Lucy Maddox has noted, Tommo’s warrant that the Typee are fated to annihilation echoed George Catlin’s widely-read treatment of the “Indian question” in Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians (1841). While Melville and Caitlin were in “general agreement about Anglo-European misconceptions of the ‘savage’ other,” each of these two books nevertheless advanced the notion that “uncivilized people are immediately contaminated and degraded by contact with white civilization.”⁶

While Typee forecloses the possibility of a sustained and peaceful coexistence between the drastically different cultural...