Colonialist Ideology in Melville’s Typee

Abstract

This dissertation concentrates on a critical study of Herman Melville’s Typee in an attempt to explore the presence of colonialist ideology that assumes the superb status of the Whites over non-whites in term of race, civilization, ethnicity and so on. This paper basically focuses upon underlying psychic patterns, behaviors and manners of the white protagonist and narrator named Tommo, who, as a product of white cultural background, expresses his colonialist attitude by representing everything non-white as ‘other’, 'inferior' and ‘marginal’. Tommo appears sympathetic towards the natives (the Typees) at times, however, when he feels the danger of loosing his Euro-American cultural identity, he discards them and returns back to Home. Such Eurocentric, ethnocentric and racist attitudes and biases are the sole products of colonialist ideology shared by Melville and externalized through the protagonist, Tommo, in Typee.