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

Criticism, Spring, 1998 by S.X. Goudie

At times, Tommo almost maps out such a space in the Typee Valley, but his need to retailor the Marquesans' clothes, refashion their discourse, and alter their culture through aesthetic distortions and wilful misreadings prevents him from doing so successfully. And when he leaves the valley, the difficulty of keeping the "distinct" in harmonious and reciprocal equilibrium becomes overwhelming: as he approaches the "English" whaleboat upon which he will escape the island, he reports that "the shouts of the crowd upon the beach were distinctly audible, and in the blended confusion of sounds I almost fancied I could distinguish the voices of my own countrymen" (275). Tommo seems to have experienced the power of taboo as Freud posited it, the power "of exciting men's ambivalence and tempting them to transgress the prohibition it names."(25) He has been tempted by cultural hybridity, but he has not fallen (or ascended) into its charmed space. Once out of the valley, he reenters the capitalist value system with a vengeance, distributing material commodities (including cotton cloth) as exchange for his departure,(26) and viciously slashing a pursuing Marquesan with a boat hook. Nonetheless, the antiheroic non-conquest of alterity and the stimulating temptations of tabooed hybridity have left their trace.

A few years later, Tommo revisits Nukuheva Bay aboard an American man-o'-war. His change from merchant ship to military vessel suggests that the role of antihero of the non-quest has been left behind with his bolts of calico and the shoes confiscated by Marheyo. But just as he may have given up his non-interventionist illusion, he may have abandoned the myth of reciprocity that underpinned it. He relates an incident that shows how native peoples are clearly on the short end of all colonial bargains and, moreover, that resistance from the third space marked by cultural hybridity is possible and, perhaps, desirable. Tommo now functions as the detached observer, the "self-effacing producer of information ... associated with ... the bureaucratic state" instead of as the sentimental, experiential subject.(27) Nonetheless, his decision to include the incident and the complex tone he employs to report it suggest, if not complete approval, at least a distinctly un-naive awareness of colonial complexities.

The American fleet's arrival is greeted by a French military entourage and a welcoming group that includes a deposed native monarch --now colonialist puppet--and his wife. Both islanders have been, as the narrator suggests, "corrupted by ... commerce with Europeans" (24), a corruption readable in their appearance and which Tommo decodes in parodic terms:

His majesty was arrayed in a magnificent military uniform,

stiff with gold lace and embroidery, while his shaven crown

was concealed by a huge chapeau bras, waving with ostrich

plumes. There was one slight blemish, however, in his appearance.

A broad patch of tattooing stretched completely

across his face, in a line with his eyes, making him look as if