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

Criticism, Spring, 1998 by S.X. Goudie

Typee presents a narrator speaking in analepses and prolepses, in prefaces and sequels and appendices, in passages under erasure, in layered genres and literary conventions, in Marquesan vocabulary translated and untranslated, in direct discourse and indirect discourse and dialogue, in parody and hyperbole and reportorial language--a heteroglossic textual equivalent of the hybrid figures controlling the narrative.(34) In turn, Tommo controls these figures by monopolizing what Edward Said has termed "the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging," the power that sews together "culture" and "imperialism."(35) Typee itself becomes a textilic space protected from the threat of "pollution" that hybridity poses to what Paul Gilroy identifies as "overintegrated conceptions of culture which present immutable, ethnic differences as an absolute break in the histories and experiences" of the dominant and the dominated.(36)

Tommo's inability to emulate these figures' transcultural values, instead of totalizing the text's hybridity and repeating the hegemonies they challenge,(37) indicates the fissures among what Terry Eagleton has termed "general ideology," "authorial ideology," and "aesthetic ideology.(38) The general ideology providing the ground for Typee is the value system sustaining mid-nineteenth-century expansionist capitalism in the United States, one that includes belief in Western man's civilizing and proselytizing missions, in racial hierarchies, and in private property and the work ethic that helps amass it. That Melville's authorial ideology challenges these values is consistently evident in Typee, often most overtly in the sections omitted for publication of the American Revised Edition; thus modes of material production supersede authorial ideology, consumption cannibalizing and thereby reconstituting the text.(39) What is less clear is the extent to which Tommo's ideology challenges these values. Breitwieser claims that Melville recognizes Tommo's shortcomings and lays bare the self-interest and complicity underlying Tommo's diatribes against a colonialism conceived in distinctly bipolar terms.(40) Instead, by concentrating on parts of the text's aesthetic ideology--its multivalent semiotics of clothing in particular but also its privileging of the third space created by cultural hybridity, its constitutive narrative devices, its polyglossic affinities--I have argued that Typee problematizes ideological constructs and Tommo's place within them. It creates a third space of textual ambivalence, occupied territory for heroes and antiheroes, blank pages for inscribing "cunning artifices" of intersubjectivity dressed in the empire's new clothes, an exchange point between self and other where the myth of reciprocity fades.(41)

Notes

I am especially grateful to Sam Otter and Deborah Baker Wyrick, each of whom offered perceptive and patient readings of various drafts of this essay, and considerable advice and support during its final revision.