Typee is Melville's "preface to his brief against civilization", to use Charles Anderson's phrase, which he was later to present more comprehensively and devastatingly in Moby-Dick, Pierre, and in fact in most of his later fiction. As Anderson's use of the word 'preface' suggests, in Typee Melville explores the consequences and ideological implications of capitalism and imperialism, without the apparent depth of subtlety and complexity of his later work. The absence of a fully realized radical critique could be blamed on Melville's position within colonial discourse, particularly as evidenced by his choice of literary genre (the travel story), but such a simplistic analysis fails to fully appreciate Melville's complex negotiation and interrogation of his position within both discourse and genre.
In Typee Melville is aware of his own implication in the imperialist-capitalist project that he wishes to critique yet is optimistic about the possibility of transcending his imperial subjectivity and, at the very least, of evading personal responsibility for the destruction that Europeans are causing and will continue to cause in the South Seas. This paper argues that Melville attempts to do so through a subversive misprision of one of the central literary genres of colonialist discourse, the travel story. Unfortunately, however, although Melville does provide a powerful critique of European behaviour in the South Seas in particular, and of European civilization in general, Typee ultimately works toward the reification of the consciousness of the imperial subject through its internalization of colonialist discourse, and as a result the text's anti-imperial critique is simply imbricated with imperial hegemony. In fact, the very nature of the critique reproduces the very conditions and assumptions that it is attempting to subvert. Typee, then, this paper argues, is the ambiguous story of Melville's ultimately unsuccessful attempt to subvert European civilization through a self-conscious participation in colonialist discourse, particularly through an often parodic and ironic (re)writing of travel narrative.
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