[In the following essay, Beauchamp examines the use and development of the Noble Savage as a literary device, highlighting the use of the Noble Savage in the writings of Montaigne and Melville.]

From his inception, the Noble Savage has served as a weapon in ideological warfare, a convenient stick figure with which to beat civilized man over his corrupt head. As early as the first Christian century, Tacitus was belaboring his fellow Romans with the image of the simple, brave, virtuous Germani living like noble Stoics all in the wilds beyond the Rhine, their moral excellence held up as a rebuke to the decadent, dishonest, immoral civilization along the Tiber. This tendentious pattern persists in Western history, recrudescing, with appropriate variations, in the works of Montaigne and Bartolomé de Las Casas, Rousseau and Diderot, in Chateaubriand's Atala and Byron's The Island and the great efflorescence of Romantic primitivism that followed. The Noble Savage survives yet today in the pose of the Noble Madman, whose putative insanity ironically reveals the true and greater madness of the “sane” world—that motif celebrated in such cult favorites as Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Philippe de Broca's film The King of Hearts.¹ For at least two millennia, then, the Noble Savage has figured centrally in a continuing Kulturkampf that pits Nature against Art, the spontaneous virtue of the primitive against the studied deceit of the civilized.²

The nobility of the savages, however, seems to increase in inverse ratio to the commentator's distance from them, so that stay-at-home Europeans could foist upon the indigenes of the Americas, in the first flush of discovery, whatever manners and morals it was thought meet for them to have. The precision of their ethnology may be gauged by John of Holywood's 1498 description of the natives encountered by Columbus as “blue in colour and with square heads.”³ Dryden's Indians, while physiologically less bizarre, are no less fanciful a construct—

Guiltless men, that dance away their time,
Fresh as their groves and happy as their clime.

This image of idyllic innocence that impressed itself upon the European imagination originated in the accounts of such early voyagers as Vespucci and Verrazano, or of Arthur Barlowe, member of the first Roanoke expedition, who wrote of finding the inhabitants there “most gentle, louing and faithfull, void of all guile, and treason, and such as liued after the manner of the golden age.”⁴ But the realities of Indian life were never as important as the myth, whose purpose and appeal have been well summarized by Franklin L. Baumer:

The European's images of non-European man are not primarily if at all descriptions of real people, but rather projections of his own nostalgia and feeling of inadequacy. They are judgments of himself and his history. The outsider … is held up as a model of what he (the European) had been in happier days, or of what he would like to be or perhaps could be once again.⁵

Yet the Noble Savage was not without detractors. Shakespeare inverted him into Caliban; the Catholic Church wanted to convict him of Original Sin; Dr. Johnson found him a humbug; and Voltaire alternately mocks him in Le Mondain and, reacting against Rousseau's projection, pronounces him a slander on mankind.⁶ But perhaps the most telling criticism concerned a fearful lapse on the part of the actual savages from whom the bon sauvage was fashioned: for the brutal truth seemed to be that the natives of these new and exotic lands ate one another upon festive occasion, a practice much held against them by Europeans long accustomed to blander fare. In his man-eating aspect, the New World native appeared more sinister than noble, certainly not a model for emulation.⁷ Thus proponents of an idealized primitive had either to ignore or extenuate this unfortunate proclivity of real-life primitives.

One unflinching exception, however, was Montaigne, whose classic treatment of the Noble Savage motif is entitled, of course, “Of the Cannibals.” Another exception—and the one I shall want primarily to focus on—was Herman Melville, whose first novel, Typee, rings a paean in praise of a cannibal culture. Both of these writers not only acknowledge candidly the cannibalistic nature of their subjects, but argue, in keeping with the tendentious tradition sketched above, that even in this regard the Noble Savage is morally superior to his civilized counterpart.

Montaigne's essay catalogs the usual virtues attributed to the unspoiled savage, at the expense of the writer's own race, moment, and milieu. Among the cannibals of Brazil, Montaigne claims, are to be found “the perfect religion, the perfect government, the perfect and accomplished manners in all things.”

Those people are wild, just as we call wild the fruits that Nature has produced by herself and in her normal course; whereas really it is those that we have changed artificially and led astray from the common order, that we should rather call wild. The former retain alive and vigorous their genuine, their most useful and natural, virtues and properties, which we have debased in the latter in adapting them to gratify our corrupted taste.⁸

Indeed, Montaigne finds the society of the cannibals superior not only to European realities, but even to the venerated utopian ideations bequeathed from antiquity—Lycurgus' Sparta (in Plutarch's idealized redaction) and Plato's Republic. “It seems to me,” Montaigne continues, “that what we actually see in these nations surpasses not only all the pictures in which poets have idealized the golden age and all their inventions in imagining a happy state of man, but also the conceptions and the very desire of philosophy. They could not imagine a naturalness so pure and simple as we see by experience” (p. 153). How far beneath the cannibals' level of perfection Montaigne contends, would even Plato have found “the republic he imagined!” Higher praise than this for the Noble Savage would be hard to come by (particularly in the Renaissance) and it serves as perhaps the quintessential statement of primitivism as an ideal.

But Montaigne then turns to the matter of cannibalism itself, describing in some detail the ritual manner in which prisoners of war are sacrificed: “This done, they roast and eat him in common, and send some pieces to their absent friends” (p. 155). Though Montaigne does not endorse such a mode of celebrating military victory, still, he argues, the practice of the cannibals proves less reprehensible than those of civilized Europeans.

I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of such acts, but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling, in roasting a man bit by bit, in having him bitten and mangled by dogs and swine (as we have not only read but seen within fresh memory, not among ancient enemies, but among neighbors and fellow citizens, and what is worse, on the pretext of piety and religion), than in roasting and eating him after he is dead. … we may well call these people barbarians, in respect to the rules of reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.

(pp. 155-56)

The strategy underlying this juxtaposition of the alien (cannibalism) and the accepted (public torture and execution) is designed to force the reader to adopt a different perspective on his own assumptions, to look anew at the barbarities of his own society to which custom has insensitized him. It constitutes an attempt, that is, to induce revulsion at the familiar, or at least a reevaluation of it, by comparison with the strange. Something like this strategy operates, mutatis mutandis, in such works as More's Utopia, Swift's Gulliver's Travels (recall Gulliver's bland recital of European enormities to the King of the Brobdingnags, through whose horrified eyes we suddenly see ourselves reflected), Voltaire's Micromègas, and that great body of modern science fiction that confronts the known world with the unknown, the quotidian with the amazing. The comparison, of course, always implies judgment, a judgment in which clear-eyed “reason” prevails over arbitrary custom and which thrusts the reader into a new angle of vision. Thus, in Montaigne's instance, the accepted taboo against consuming human flesh is revealed as a far lesser evil than torturing and maiming it, which practice repelled his contemporaries precious little.

In his celebration of the Noble Savage, then, Montaigne adopts the extreme stance of defending even his cannibalism, at least by comparison, turning even this “barbarity” to account in his critique of European civilization. I want now to examine Melville's parallel technique in Typee, that first in a lifelong series of works that reveals a continuing fascination with primitivism in all its modes.⁹

In a letter to Hawthorne, Melville lamented that, if he were to be remembered by posterity, it would be only as “a man who lived among the cannibals”—a reference to the notoriety he achieved upon publication of Typee. In his own lifetime, none of his other works ever again enjoyed such a popular success; but the vagaries of literary history proved this prediction, of course, wrong. Typee no longer figures significantly in his reputation and receives only modest attention even from most Melville critics. But, besides being a work of intrinsic interest and inventiveness as fiction-autobiography-anthropology-travelogue, it also forms a significant episode in the unfolding cultural saga of the Noble Savage, comparable to, say, Diderot's Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville or the Tahitian paintings of Gauguin, which, like Typee, are set in the South Seas rather than America.

For by the mid-nineteenth century, when Typee was published (1846), America was no longer exotic enough to sustain the Noble Savage; the locale for the paradise of primitivism had perforce been pushed yet farther west, into the remote islands of the South Pacific. America had, in fact, now been all but entirely drawn into the orbit of that European civilization whose cultural imperialism imperiled the Edenic simplicity of this new race of, brown rather than red, Noble Savages. And Melville, or Tommo as he styles his persona-narrator in Typee, is conscious of bearing all the baggage of a cultural condition as complex, as “artificial,” as corrupting as any borne by Augustan Roman or Renaissance Frenchman.¹⁰ America, in short, was civilized enough now to feel the sting of comparison with the Noble Savage; and Melville, both in Typee and even more so in its sequel, Omoo, lays on the lash with a vengeance.

It is commonplace to set Typee down in the tradition of Rousseau, whether or not Melville, at the time of its composition, had read Rousseau.¹¹ But the more interesting question, for my purposes, is whether or not he knew “Of the Cannibals.” Leon Howard informs us that Melville purchased an edition of Montaigne in 1848 (on January 18, to be exact¹²) but this is two years after the completion of Typee. Subsequently, Montaigne became something of a touchstone for Melville: to have a character familiar with Montaigne was to reveal something significant about him. Thus White-Jacket intends a considerable compliment to the sailor Nord when he says that “he seized the right meaning of Montaigne.” The protagonist in “I and My Chimney,” who prizes old and solid things, admires Montaigne; and in Billy Budd Captain Vere prefers “unconventional writers like Montaigne, who free from cant and convention, honestly and in the spirit of common sense philosophize upon realities.” None of these references specifies any particular essays—though it is not probable that “Of the Cannibals” would have been a great favorite of Captain Vere—and, of course, they all postdate Typee; still, it would seem likely that, if Melville knew any Montaigne at all, when he recollected the Marquesas in tranquillity, he would have known that essay, the most famous, thanks largely to Shakespeare's borrowing for The Tempest, of them all. In any case, I do not want so much to stress indebtedness here as to develop the similarity of treatment of the Noble Savage by the two writers, particularly in their defense of cannibalism.¹³

Melville of course had the advantage over Montaigne of having encountered his savages in their quite handsome flesh: as a deserter from the whaling ship Acushnet, he had spent several weeks, not, however, Tommo's four months, in Typee Valley.¹⁴ His experience is artistically refracted in the dual perspective on the Typees. “There is the perspective of the story proper,” notes William Ellery Sedgwick, “or of the events at the time they happened; and there is the broader perspective of the book as a whole, in which the events of the story and their circumstances are seen at a distance of four years across all the light and shadow of Melville's experience in the interim.”¹⁵ While actually confined among the natives, that is, Melville-Tommo is simultaneously (or alternately) charmed by and fearful of them; he reiterates, to a degree finally quite tiresome, the sense of dread and despair that periodically overwhelms him. The source of his anguish is the Typees' reputation as ferocious cannibals: in short, Tommo fears that, despite their immediate hospitality, they may at any time decide to eat him. It is, no doubt, more difficult to consider dispassionately the pros and cons of cannibalism when standing in the shadow of the bloody calabash than when sitting comfortably in one's study in the château of S. Michel de Montaigne or Lansingburgh, N.Y. But removed from any personal danger of ending up in the trencher, and through the haze of romantic nostalgia, Melville can afford a more spacious, a more speculative view. “In the murky moral obliquities of the civilization to which he had come home,” Sedgwick continues, “the island valley of Typee shone brighter and brighter.”¹⁶ The second perspective, the retrospective, now takes over, and from this vantage point those fears for his own safety that seemed so paramount at the time are submerged, forgotten in the grand enterprise of ethnological comparison and philosophical speculation. From this second perspective, then, Melville views the Typees with the eyes of Montaigne and their valley assumes the aspect of a primitive paradise.

Treatments of the Noble Savage tend to have a certain substantive sameness about them, so that parallels could be drawn between Typee and any number of other works in that tradition; but the substantive parallels with “Of the Cannibals” are unusually precise, given the greater expansiveness of the novel over the essay as vehicles. Montaigne, for instance, says of his cannibals that their “whole day is spent in dancing.” Melville, too, presents a picture of the native girls, “like a band of olive-colored Sylphides,” engaged in dancing, a beautifully erotic scene “almost too much for a quiet, sober-minded, modest young man like myself” (p. 152), but more importantly Montaigne's statement could serve as a synechdoche for the whole of Typeean life, a languid, graceful ritual of ludic innocence: “There seemed to be no cares, griefs, troubles, or vexations, in all Typee. The hours tripped along as gaily as the laughing couples down a country dance” (p. 126).

Montaigne's natives are said to “live in a country with a very pleasant and temperate climate, so that according to my witnesses it is rare to see a sick man there; and they have assured me that they never saw one palsied, bleary-eyed, toothless, or bent with age” (p. 153). Agreeable and temperate seem adjectives too mild for Melville's island, where “the penalty of the Fall presses very lightly”:

I scarcely saw any piece of work performed there which caused the sweat to stand upon a single brow. As for digging and delving for a livelihood, the thing is altogether unknown. Nature has planted the bread-fruit and the banana, and in her own good time she brings them to maturity, when the idle savage stretches forth his hand, and satisfies his appetite.

(p. 195)

Here we have a profluence of Nature scarce to be found anywhere outside Schlaraffia or Cockaigne, where the rivers run wine and the mountains are made of pastry. And, if Montaigne's savages suffer few fleshly ills, Melville's approach the condition of immortals:

In beauty of form they surpassed anything I had ever seen. Not a single instance of natural deformity was observable. … But their physical excellence did not merely consist in an exemption from these evils; nearly every individual of their number might have been taken for a sculptor's model.

(p. 180)

The men are “of lofty stature,” one and all, and the women “uncommonly diminutive”; even the graybeards keep their teeth, which among the Typees are “far more beautiful than ivory itself.” Like Montaigne, but even more so, Melville is at pains to point out, at every opportunity, the superiority of savage characteristics or practices over civilized ones, so that having described the physical fitness and beauty of the Typees, he must hammer home his moral: “When I remembered that these islanders derived no advantage from dress, but appeared in all the naked simplicity of nature, I could not avoid comparing them with the fine gentlemen and dandies who promenade such unexceptionable figures in our frequented thoroughfares. Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden,—what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!” (pp. 180-81). And, of course, civilized women come off no better when compared to the natural, nubile Eves of the Marquesan Eden.

Simplicity is the hallmark, here as elsewhere, of the Noble Savage, a natural chastity that shames all civilization's entangling sophistications. The passage from Montaigne that Shakespeare appropriates for Gonzalo is indeed a veritable litany of negation, all that the cannibal nation, wisely, knows not of:

no sort of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name for a magistrate or for political superiority, no custom of servitude, no riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupations but leisure ones, no care for any but common kinship, no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of wine or wheat. The very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, belittling, pardon—unheard of.

(p. 153)

This checklist of simplification could be taken almost as a précis of Typee culture, with every item in it echoed in Melville's account. Some we have already seen, and two further examples must suffice to make the point. “No name of magistrate”:

During the time I lived among the Typees, no one was ever put upon his trial for any offence against the public. To all appearances there were no courts of law. … In short, there were no legal provisions whatever for the well-being and the conservation of society, the enlightened end of civilized legislation. And yet everything went on in the valley with a harmony and smoothness unparalleled, I will venture to assert, in the most select, refined, and pious associations of mortals in Christendom.

(p. 200)

“No respect of kindred but in common”:

The natives appeared to form one household, whose members were bound together by the ties of strong affection. The love of kindred I did not so much perceive, for it seemed blended in the general love; and where all were treated as brothers and sisters, it was hard to tell who were actually related to each other by blood.

(p. 204)

In short, Melville has dilated Montaigne's sketch of the bon sauvage into a full-blown, exhaustively detailed portrait, but in all essential respects he adheres faithfully to that original model as an exampler of primitive perfection.

True, Melville grasped, as Montaigne, of course, could not, that a complexity of a different sort existed in savage society, a subtle, intricate network of proscriptions that arranged much of their life. The paradox that Polynesia, equated in the popular imagination (then as now) with unrestrained “natural” freedom, should have provided us with the inhibitory term taboo (that which is forbidden, unlawful) did not escape Melville's attention, and he devotes some of the most fascinating pages of Typee to pondering the inexplicable labyrinth of the primitive's social code. Still, for all that, the image of the Typees that emerges remains consonant with Montaigne's paradigm, an image, in the epigram of Seneca he cites, of “Men newly come from the hands of the gods”: simple, honest, free and carefree—above all, uncomplicated, natural. It is as if in Typee Valley Swift's Houyhnhnms had assumed a human shape and upright carriage, fantasy made flesh.

But the praise of the natural simplicity of the Noble Savage, to reiterate the point, is intended always to damn the artificial complexities of ignoble civilization: constant contrasts are thus an instrinsic part of Melville's technique. And cannibalism proves the crucial contrast for him as for Montaigne. Here their similarity is the most pronounced. To demonstrate the parallel, and to give the full flavor of Melville's modus operandi throughout Typee, it will be necessary to quote a passage of considerable length:

As I extended my wanderings in the valley and grew more familiar with the habits of its inmates, I was fain to confess that, despite the disadvantages of his condition, the Polynesian savage, surrounded by all the luxurious provisions of nature, enjoyed an infinitely happier, though certainly a less intellectual existence, than the self-complacent European. …

… the voluptuous Indian, with every desire supplied, whom Providence has bountifully provided with all the sources of pure and natural enjoyment, and from whom are removed so many of the ills and pains of life—what has he to desire at the hands of Civilization? She may “cultivate his mind,”—may “elevate his thoughts,”—these I believe are the established phrases—but will he be the happier? Let the once smiling and populous Hawaiian islands, with their now diseased, starving, and dying natives, answer the question. …

In a primitive state of society, the enjoyments of life, though few and simple, are spread over a great extent, and are unalloyed; but Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve;—the heart burnings, the jealousies, the social rivalries, the family dissensions, and the thousand self-inflicted discomforts of refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human misery, are unknown among these unsophisticated people.

But it will be urged that these shocking unprincipled wretches are cannibals. Very true; and a rather bad trait in their character it must be allowed. But they are such only when they seek to gratify the passion of revenge upon their enemies; and I ask whether the mere eating of human flesh so very far exceeds in barbarity that custom which only a few years since was practised in enlightened England:—a convicted traitor, perhaps a man found guilty of honesty, patriotism, and suchlike heinous crimes, had his head lopped off with a huge axe, his bowels dragged out and thrown into a fire; while his body, carved into four quarters, was with his head exposed upon pikes, and permitted to rot and fester among the public haunts of men!

(pp. 124-25)

To this point, Melville's defense of the cannibals exactly parallels Montaigne's own: both, that is, represent public execution and dismemberment, as practiced in civilized society, as an evil as great as cannibalism; indeed, the rhetorical weight of both vivid accounts makes the European practice appear a greater evil. But Melville again elaborates the invidious comparison by adducing additional instances of civilized savagery, in a manner and tone that suggest a Swiftean savae indignato:

The fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.

(p. 125)

Inevitably this passage must call to mind the judgment pronounced on Western man by the King of the Brobdingnags: “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” To the cold eye of reason, that is, the cannibalism of the savage seems like an innocent enough diversion when contrasted with the enormities perpetrated in and by civilized states.¹⁷

But Melville is not done yet: he next proffers, with an inverse sort of patriotism, a peculiarly American horror to weigh in the scale against man-eating—imprisonment:

To destroy our malefactors piece-meal, drying up in their veins, drop by drop, the blood we are too chicken-hearted to shed by a single blow which would at once put a period to their sufferings, is deemed to be infinitely preferable to the old-fashioned punishment of gibbeting—much less annoying to the victim, and more in accordance with the refined spirit of the age; and yet how feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population.

(p. 125)

If, in the previous paragraph, Melville spoke in the tones of Swift, here he anticipates many of our contemporary commentators (Michel Foucault, say) in condemning this mode of punishment as more barbaric than the crime: a surprisingly “modern” stance in an age that viewed prisons as a philanthropic alternative to the whip and the branding iron.

Finally, were this not enough, Melville concludes his defense of the cannibals with a sly peroration worthy of Mark Twain:

The term “Savage” is, I conceive, often misapplied, and indeed when I consider the vices, cruelties, and enormities of every kind that spring up in the tainted atmosphere of a feverish civilization, I am inclined to think that so far as the relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or five Marquesan Islanders sent to the United States as Missionaries might be quite useful as an equal number of Americans despatched to the Islands in a similar capacity.

(pp. 125-26)

Despite, then, the greater expansiveness of his apology for cannibalism, the wider scope of his comparison and range of his rhetorical voices, Melville is true to the technique of Montaigne throughout, in showing the sins of the Noble Savage to be venial, those of civilized man mortal. His comparisons, like Montaigne's, are an attempt to force the reader into a reevaluation of his own accustomed mores, into a reassessment of what is truly savage and truly civil. The onus of barbarism is thereby shifted, and the defense of cannibalism becomes, in the end, an attack on those who are guilty of much worse. “Wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull the mote out of thine eye, and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast the beam out of thine own eye.”

One final parallel between Typee and “Of the Cannibals” deserves comment. Near the end of his essay, Montaigne notes that three men of this cannibal nation had journeyed to the court of the King of France, “ignorant of the price they will pay some day, in loss of repose and happiness, for gaining knowledge of the corruptions of this side of the ocean; ignorant also of the fact that of this intercourse will come their ruin (which I suppose is already well advanced …)” (p. 158). This passage adumbrates the burden of most later treatments of the Noble Savage, which foresee his paradisiacal haunts hopelessly vulnerable to the corrupting encroachments of civilization. The destruction of cultural innocence is a staple, if not a cliché, of much nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, informing works as varied, in all other ways, as Twain's Connecticut Yankee, Faulkner's The Bear, and Aldous Huxley's Island. But nowhere is this theme sounded with greater urgency than in Typee, which, despite its sometimes sophomoric humor, is pervaded with a plangent melancholy: over the book, as over the island, looms the lengthening shadow of the warship, the missionary and the sewing machine. Awaiting the Marquesas, Melville knows, is the fate of the Sandwich Islands, where “the natives had been civilized into draught horses, and evangelized into beasts of burden. … They have been literally broken into the traces and are harnessed to the vehicles of their spiritual instructors like so many dumb brutes!” (p. 196). “Ill-fated people!” Melville laments, anticipating this same end for his graceful Typees:

I shudder when I think of the change a few years will produce in their paradisiacal abode; and probably when the most destructive vices, and the worst attendances on civilization, shall have driven all peace and happiness from the valley, the magnanimous French will proclaim to the world that the Marquesas Islands have been converted to Christianity! … Heaven help the “Isles of the Sea!”

(p. 195)

The high-sounding claims of civilization and Christianity, he realized, are often only the camouflage for cultural imperialism and economic exploitation. “The Anglo-Saxon hive have extirpated Paganism from the greater part of the North American continent,” he grimly notes; “but with it they have likewise extirpated the greater portion of the Red race” (p. 195). And for the brown race civilization is almost as disastrous:

Among the islands of Polynesia, no sooner are the images overturned, the temples demolished, and the idolators converted into nominal Christians, than disease, vice, and premature death make their appearance. The depopulated land is then recruited from the rapacious hordes of enlightened individuals who settle themselves within its borders, and clamorously announce the progress of the Truth. Neat villas, trim gardens, shaven lawns, spires, and cupolas arise, while the poor savage soon finds himself an interloper in the country of his fathers, and that too on the very site of the hut where he was born. The spontaneous fruits of the earth, which God in his wisdom had ordained for the support of the indolent natives, remorselessly seized upon and appropriated by the stranger, are devoured before the eyes of the starving inhabitants, or sent on board the numerous vessels which now touch at their shores.

(pp. 195-96)

Melville's sketch of colonialism thus offers eloquent vindication of Montaigne's insight that knowledge of “this side of the world” would cost the Noble Savage dear and that intercourse with it would prove his ruin. If Typee represented Eden, or the closest thing left to it, then, for Melville, civilization was the forbidden tree and its missionaries a species of serpents force-feeding its fruits to the guileless innocents. Adam's curse lurked just around the corner.¹⁸

The vogue of the Noble Savage per se has largely passed, though the impulse that animated the convention remains strong to this day. And certainly the cultural condition against which the Noble Savage was quondamly posed grows ever more desperate and cries out for the sort of critique provided by the myth of a primitive utopia, free of our sins against nature and common sense. Though the Noble Savage motif is obviously simplistic in its idealization of the primitive and shopworn through long and indiscriminate use, still it can stir us, when we will let it, to serious reflection about the state of civilized life: it suggests other, better worlds elsewhere that we can contemplate to our profit. Clearly Montaigne and Melville intended to provoke such contemplation. Furthermore, by adopting the extreme stance of defending what seemed to be indefensible in primitive life, cannibalism, both evidently sought to shock us into certain recognitions about our own, worse, moral failings, to subvert our smug sense of superiority and shame us by comparison to a race of pagans that proves to be our betters.

One passage in Typee epitomizes the whole of this endeavor, encapsulating both its technique and philosophy, and provides a fitting tribute to the corrective efficacy of the Noble Savage, cannibal though he be:

Civilization does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she has not even her full share of them. They flourish in greater abundance and attain greater strength among many barbarous people. The hospitality of the wild Arab, the courage of the North American Indian, and the faithful friendships of some of the Polynesian nations, far surpass any thing of a similar kind among the polished communities of Europe. If truth and justice, and the better principles of our nature, cannot exist unless enforced by the statute-book, how are we to account for the social condition of the Typees? So pure and upright were they in all the relations of life, that entering their valley, as I did, under the most erroneous impressions of their character, I was soon led to exclaim in amazement: “Are these the ferocious savages, the blood-thirsty cannibals of whom I have heard such frightful tales! They deal more kindly with each other, and are more humane, than many who study essays on virtue and benevolence, and who repeat every night that beautiful prayer breathed first by the lips of the divine and gentle Jesus.” I will frankly declare, that after passing a few weeks in this valley of the Marquesas, I formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had ever before entertained. But alas! since then I have been one of the crew of a man-of-war, and the pent-up wickedness of five hundred men has nearly overturned all my previous theories.

(pp. 202-03)

Obviously the work of a young man and marked by numerous immaturities, Typee nevertheless includes perceptions that remained valid for Melville throughout his artistic life. In the more profound context of Moby-Dick, the essential message of Typee is restated through the experience of Queequeg, who entered the civilized world “that he might haply gain the power of enlightening his untutored countrymen”:

… he was actuated by a profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still happier than they were; and more than that, still better than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father's heathens. … Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.

(Ch. 12)

Notes

1. Cf. Leslie Fiedler, “The New Mutants,” in Collected Essays (New York: Stein and Day, 1971), II, 398: “It is finally insanity, then, that the futurists learn to admire and emulate, quite as they learn to pursue vision instead of learning, hallucination rather than logic. The schizophrenic replaces the sage as their ideal, their new culture hero.” In The Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein and Day, 1968), Fiedler notes that in Kesey's Chief Bromden the Red Man and the Madman figure are united as the new Noble Savage figure. See pp. 169-87.

2. For a somewhat extreme statement of the ideological uses of the Noble Savage, see Hayden White, “The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish,” in Fredi Chiappelli, ed., First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), I, 121-35. See also Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea,” in The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), pp. 3-38; and Wilcomb E. Washburn, “The Clash of Morality in the American Forest,” in Chiappelli, I, 335-50, for a sensible examination of the debate on the supposed virtues of the primitives. The standard general discussion of the didactic import of primitivism remains Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935). Hoxie Neale Fairchild, The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928), though dismissed by most critics as superficial, contains a wealth of valuable information on its subject.

3. Quoted in Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1959), p. 4.

4. David B. Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, 1584-1590 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1955), I, 108.

5. Foreword to Henri Baudet, Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Man, trans. Elizabeth Wentholt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. vii. Baudet's study is most significant on this subject. See also Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World; American Culture: The Formative Years (New York: The Viking Press, 1964), pp. 10-13; and Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 36-46.

6. On the position of the Church on American natives, see Lewis Hanke, “The Theological Significance of the Discovery of America,” in Chiappelli, I, 363-74. Johnson's lifelong opposition to the concept of the Noble Savage is discussed in Fairchild, pp. 327-38. Voltaire's position is far more complicated and ambiguous: for a comprehensive treatment of his attitude toward primitivism, see R.S. Ridgway, Voltaire and Sensibility (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1973), pp. 55-84. Also for Voltaire's use of the theme I am developing in this essay, see Emily H. Patterson, “Swift, Voltaire, and the Cannibals,” Enlightenment Essays, 6, No. 2 (Summer 1975), 3-12.

7. See Jones, pp. 50-61; and Earl Miner, “The Wild Man Through the Looking Glass,” in Dudley and Novak, pp. 87-94. The Spaniards used the charge of cannibalism as an excuse for enslaving many Indian tribes that did not in fact practice it. See Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, p. 131.

8. Michel de Montaigne, Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), p. 152. Page references to this edition are given parenthetically in the text.

9. Discussions of Melville's primitivism are numerous, but almost invariably center on Moby-Dick, while scanting Typee: see, for example, Ray B. West, Jr., “Primitivism in Melville,” Prairie Schooner. 30 (1956), 369-85. For my purposes, the most relevant discussion of Melville's attitude toward the primitive is Louise K. Barnett, The Ignoble Savage: American Literary Racism, 1790-1890 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), pp. 166-84.

10. On this point, see D.H. Lawrence's pioneering essay on Typee in Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923).

11. See, for instance, Charles R. Anderson, Melville in the South Seas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), p. 178; and Lawrence Thompson, Melville's Quarrel with God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), p. 47.

12. Herman Melville: A Biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1951), p. 115.

13. As far as I have been able to discover, only one writer has noted the relationship between the two works—Raymond Weaver, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (New York: George H. Doran, 1921), pp. 204-05. But Weaver offers only a breezy condescending comment that encompasses Rousseau and Chateaubriand as well. Marx, p. 283, claims that “the garden” of Typee “very nearly fulfills Gonzalo's requirements for a model plantation.” He then cites the speech from The Tempest, but does not speculate on Melville's familiarity with its source.

14. Anderson, pp. 179-95, has made the most intensive attempt to sort out what is “fact” and what is “fiction” in Typee. See also Leon Howard's “Historical Note,” in the standard edition of Typee (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1968), pp. 291-93. All quotations from the novel are taken from this edition, with page references provided parenthetically in the text.

15. Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1944), p. 24. The fullest and most sophisticated treatment of the dual perspective in Typee is William B. Dillingham. An Artist in the Rigging: The Early Work of Herman Melville (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972), Chapter 2 (“Typee: Adversity Recollected in Tranquility”). In my discussion, I stress for obvious reasons, the second—retrospective—stratum of the novel.

16. Sedgwick, p. 25.

17. Melville employs this same technique more than once in Moby-Dick. See, for instance, his fulmination against the decadence of the Western palate and the cruelty that feeds it: “Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Feejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Feejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras” (Ch. 65).

18. In 1907, when Jack London, who had read Typee as a boy and vowed that he too would someday visit the enchanted Marquesas Islands, sailed the Snark into the bay at Nuku Hiva, he did indeed find Melville's paradise sadly fallen. The tribes had been decimated by exploitation and the white man's diseases. See A. Grove Day, Jack London in the South Seas (New York: Four Winds Press, 1971), pp. 97-103.