"Portentous Somethings": Melville's Typee and the Language of Captivity

Abstract

IN the social contracts at work in Herman Melville's fiction, man is born in chains and is everywhere in chains. That captivity is an obsession of Melville's is manifest in the theme's centrality to the construction of his first novel, Typee. Through Tommo, Typee's narrator, Melville dramatizes the search for a way of talking about the inescapable fact of captivity, the fact that continuously mocks the American paeans to independence so widespread during Melville's lifetime. What Typee initiates for Melville is an authorial quest, sustained throughout his fiction, to measure man's desire to be free against the forces that conspire to keep him captive. Typee plays off a long-standing tradition of American captivity narratives. As a narrative form in which civilized white man symbolically and sanguinarily encounters the dark, savage other, the genre has special relevance for the Melville of Typee. The Puritan captivity narratives were the first of the genre, exemplary tales of piety and providence. Captivity among the Indians tested the captor's faith in God and culminated, ideally, in a spiritual revitalization inspiring to the rest of the community. The Puritans' particular fear that their Indian captors would force them to participate in cannibalistic rituals is a phobia that Tommo echoes throughout Typee. With Cotton Mather, the captivity narrative grew more explicitly propagandistic, as it both sanctioned and incited hatred of the French and Indians. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, captivity narratives became increasingly fictionalized and sensationalized. The genre remained a