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Typee is American writer Herman Melville's first novel, based on his actual experiences after having jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. Extremely popular at the time of its initial publication, it provoked disbelief among its readers until the events it described were corroborated by Melville's fellow castaway, Richard T. Greene, who appears in the story as the character Toby. While the book is factually based, Melville exercised his artistic license so much that Typee is properly considered a work of fiction: the three week stay on which he based his story is extended in the narrative to four months, and he drew extensively on contemporary accounts by Pacific explorers to add cultural detail to what might otherwise have been a straightforward story of escape, capture and re-escape.

Critical opinion on Typee is divided. Scholars have traditionally focused attention on Melville's treatment of race, and the narrator Tommo's portrayal of his hosts as noble savages, but there is considerable disagreement as to what extent the values, attitudes and beliefs expressed are Melville's own, and whether Typee reinforces or challenges racist assessments of Pacific culture. The issue of class also plays an important role, albeit largely subliminated, with Tommo struggling to assert his identity as a member of the working class in a society where work, in the modern capitalist sense, is unknown.

In the final analysis, it is certain that Typee delineates a crisis of identity, whether racial or economic: much as he enjoys his sojourn, Tommo is terrified of being permanently absorbed into native society. Much attention has been given to Tommo's fears that he will become a victim of cannibalism, although this fear runs in the face of much evidence (he is not, after all, eaten). Melville does claim, however, to have caught the natives eating an inhabitant of one of the neighboring valleys on the island. The natives who have captured Melville reassure him that he will not be eaten, although he does state that he believes that the only thing preventing him from being eaten is an infection in his leg, for which his friend Toby is allowed to leave in search of a cure, so Melville can be healed and then eaten. Polynesian cannibals euphemistically referred to human beings as long pig when cooked.

Typee is one of the first and arguably the most intelligent contemporary account of Western and Polynesian cultural interaction in the nineteenth century Pacific, and provided many later writers with the themes and images that came to symbolise the Pacific experience: cannibalism, cultural absorption, colonialism, exoticism, eroticism, natural plenty and beauty, and a perceived simplicity of native lifestyle, desires and motives.

The very first volume published in the Library of America was a single volume containing Typee, Omoo, and Mardi. It was published on May 6, 1982.

References

1. Editor's Introduction by Ernest Rhys, in Typee, A Narrative of the Marquesas Islands, by Herman Melville, Everyman's Library 1907/1949

External links

• Typee at Project Gutenberg
• Free audiobook from LibriVox
• Typee Fluid Text Edition at the University of Virginia Press
• Typeset PDF ebook of Typee and other Melville novels optimized for printing, plus extensive Melville reading list

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