Peeping at Melville's Typee: Thoreau's Contact with "Dusky and Unexplored Nature"

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

—Henry David Thoreau

Writing in his Journal in 1846, Henry David Thoreau describes a moment that rings with potent anticipation. It is his first of three trips to Maine, and his party is traveling upriver in a boat they call a "batteau," bound for Ktaadn. Having crossed North Twin Lake by moonlight and made camp on the far shore, they're now sleeping beneath their overturned boats, waking in turns to tend their log fire. Thoreau, rising alone sometime after midnight, rambles along the lakeshore in the dark, imagining the wilderness ahead and the wildlife that he might see there, his mind racing.¹ This passage foreshadows the scene at the summit in "Ktaadn," when Thoreau would encounter a material wildness that he'd never anticipated, but, interestingly, this promise of new, wilder experiences to come doesn't last.

When dawn breaks, the party prepares for another day of travel, and the text's focus suddenly shifts. Without explanation, Thoreau turns to consider Melville's first book, the recently published travel narrative, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846):

And we soon had launched and loaded our boat and were off again before breakfast.

Our appearance excited no bustle amid the surrounding hills as I read that when a ships boat approaches the bay o Typee one of the Marquesan isles the news is shouted from man to man—from the tops of cocoanut trees up the valley 8 or 9 miles, and soon its whole population is on the stir—stripping off the husks from Cocoa nuts—throwing down bread fruit—and preparing leafen baskets in which to carry them to the beach to sell. The young warrior may be seen polishing his spear and the maiden adorning her person for the occasion.

I cannot help but be affected by the very fine—the slight but positive relation of the inhabitants of some remote isle of the Pacific to the mysterious white mariner. It is a barely recognised fact to the natives—that he exists and has his home far away somewhere and is glad to buy their fresh fruits with his superfluous commodities.

(J, 315–16)

Such a turn is unexpected in this otherwise mostly unswerving account of Thoreau's trip to Maine, a draft of what will become the essay "Ktaadn."² Thoreau had read Melville's Typee, the American Revised edition, sometime in the late summer of 1846, and it left a trace not only in the Journal but also in the published versions of "Ktaadn" (1848), A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), and Walden (1854).³ Why, though, turn to Typee when the promise for new experiences, for a vivid taste of the North Maine Woods, looms so large? Why turn to a novel that Thoreau's contemporaries considered somewhat scandalous? Further, what is the relationship between Typee and Thoreau's epiphany near the summit of "Ktaadn," the famous "Contact!" scene?

This essay addresses this striking shift from Maine to the Marquesas to the globe, from a party of white American travelers in Abenaki country, to white mariners in the Pacific, to a global network of cultural relations. Highlighting what Thoreau first seemingly elides—Typee's playful eroticism and thinly veiled interest in the homoerotic—I argue that Thoreau's use of Melville reflects an ongoing process of reimagining relationality and contact, in this case between a crew of bachelor sailors and a cast of mostly naked women. By surveying Thoreau's various drafts and literary projects, my analysis performs what John Bryant calls "fluid text" reading, wherein a text exists in multiple versions across space and time, each one reflecting various degrees of authorial, editorial, social, and cultural influence.⁴ In this case, "Ktaadn" gathers steam in the Journal in 1846 and appears in the Union Magazine of Literature and Art in 1848, but in a truly "fluid" fashion it trickles and drips into Thoreau's other work as...