Fabricating ideology: clothing, culture, and colonialism in Melville's 'Typee.' - Herman Melville

Criticism, Spring, 1998 by S.X. Goudie

During the time Tommo, the narrator of Herman Melville's Typee, is stranded in the interior of a Marquesan island, his movement is hampered by a badly swollen leg. Thus his role changes from mobile explorer to static observer, from the ship-borne representative of mercantile capitalism to the land-bound captive of "primitive" culture. His passivity combined with his narrative digressions against colonialism suggest that Tommo has become what Mary Louise Pratt has called "the non-hero of an anti-conquest," a sentimentalized figure "positioned at the center of a discursive field [and] constructed as a non-interventionist European presence" but whose fetishization of reciprocity betrays the imperialism at the heart of his enterprise.(1) Armed with bolts of cotton and bricks of tobacco that he hopes will allow him "to purchase the good will of the natives,"(2) Tommo soon finds himself enmeshed in a social system seemingly indifferent to commodity exchange, a system that he cannot read or interpret adequately.

Indeed, his first encounter with these natives involves "throw[ing] the cotton cloth around their shoulders, giving them to understand that it was theirs" (85), an act resembling ensnarement rather than barter. The "gift" of clothing buys neither good will nor accurate information. Instead, Tommo is led to what he believes is the cannibal settlement he wishes to avoid. Once there, he offers a chief a token from his stock of goods, but the chief "quietly rejected the proffered gift, and, without speaking, motioned ... [Tommo] to return it to its place" (87). Nonetheless, an exchange is inaugurated--a linguistic exchange in which Tommo is at a distinct disadvantage, having been renamed involuntarily, but which he interprets as a gesture of reciprocity, believing that an "exchange of names is equivalent to a ratification of goodwill and amity among these simple people" (88-89).

Tommo's real payment, however, comes not through his halting sallies into Marquesan conversation, but through offering his body as gratification for Marquesan curiosity. He and his companion Toby remove their rain-soaked clothes, exposing "the whiteness of [their] limbs" to the scrutiny of their hosts, who "felt [their] skin, much in the same way that a silk mercer would handle a remarkably fine piece of satin" (90). The colonizer has become colonized, the imperialist gaze ricocheting back on itself. Further, Tommo has become commodified, has been pacified by being maneuvered into a passive position, and has become textualized insofar as he functions as a discursive surface open for reading. That his skin replaces the textiles he carries for trade suggests potential reversals of colonialist values on economic, intersubjective, and hermeneutic levels. Such reversals shift power from "enlightened individuals" (167) to "child[ren] of nature" (104), a shift represented by images of infantilism.(3) Tommo is held as if he were "a struggling child in a dentist's chair" (97) while his leg is being treated, he is fed "as if [he] were an infant" (106), and he is undressed and bathed as if he were "a froward, inexperienced child" (108). He is as helpless as the "`crack' god of the island," "the baby god" Moa Artua, whom a Typee priest "strips ... of his tapa and red cloth, ... laying him in a state of nudity" (198-99) only to reclothe it, fondle it, and wait for it to talk. And just as Tommo fails to understand the priest's divestitures and the god's words, he and his comrade Toby are perplexed by their first Typeean encounters, "vainly ... [using] signs and gestures ... like the deaf and dumb alphabet incarnated" (97).

Tommo's initial contacts with the Typees, then, inaugurate not only his increasingly antiheroic helplessness but also the semiotics of clothing threaded throughout Typee. Clothing and fashion, I wish to argue, create in this textilic text a parallel discourse through which we can follow Tommo's difficulties with signification and his own placement within signifying constructs.(4) Roland Barthes's assertion that fashion and literature are arbitrary "homeostatic systems" signifying "nothing" but their own signifying powers certainly applies to Tommo's perception of Typee dress;(5) in a climate in which clothing has little to do with protection and in a culture that condones nakedness, apparel's discursive function is foregrounded, as when the warrior Marheyo appropriates Tommo's shoes and wears them around his neck. Since Tommo has previously interpreted the preservation of his shoes as an index to native veneration of his possessions, their resituation provokes a display of linguistic power, in the form of heavy-handed irony, that reveals interpretive surrender: "In the gala costume of the tasteful Marheyo, these calfskin pendants ever after formed the most striking feature" (169). As Clifford Geertz reminds us, "aesthetic" semiotic systems like clothing, color, and scarification "are ideationally connected to the society in which they are found, [as] primary documents ... that seek--or for which people seek--a meaningful place in a repertoire of other documents."(6) When the seeker comes from outside the society he wishes to decipher, "a meaningful place" can imply recognition of a problematic intersubjectivity as well as cross-cultural hermeneutic ability.(7) For Tommo, decoding alien semiotics mandates a resituation in the interstices between imperialist and non-imperialist ideologies. This positioning threatens the ethnocentric premises with which the protagonist struggles by opening the possibility for cultural hybridity, a concept I am using to account for the ruptures and mergers that Tommo records of European, American, and Polynesian cultures.(8) Moreover, to the extent that Typee mediates and is mediated by cultural transformations provoked by Euro-American imperialism and colonialism, it becomes a "textually" hybrid production, exhibiting tensions between stylized language and linguistic heterogeneity, between narrative control and narrative instability, and between formal limitations and rhetorical complexity.(9)