I just finished Typee and enjoyed the book a great deal (I'm 38, male, and love reading for general education and enjoyment). A few months ago, I made a noble attempt to wade through Moby Dick (I jumped to the last chapter after about a quarter of the book) and I was curious to see if "early Melville" was any easier.
Typee is billed as both an adventure novel and as shocking anthropology. I found Typee well written, but a bit dense with long, detailed, descriptions about trees, landscapes, etc. that don't apply to characters, nor plot (and did put me to sleep). These long passages make it hard for me to call this an adventure novel, but this style seems to be standard fair when reading early American adventure novels (like "Last of the Mohicans" by J. F. Cooper).
Reading Typee in 1997 doesn't produce the same moral outrage as it did when it was first published in 1846. But, looking for Melville's cultural observations and comparisons was a great part of what made Typee so very enjoyable. So, for me, it is isn't the adventure that makes the book worth reading, but the author's, and my own, observations and comparisons of different lifestyles.
While reading Melville's observations on a primitive culture, I began to marvel at the his ability to transcend his culture and to describe the vastly different culture he had experienced. In Typee he writes about everything from eating raw fish, primitive idol worship, polyandry (multiple husband) marriages, and cannibalism, all without the negative judgment or superiority one might expect from an American in 1847. I must admire the observer when, discussing cannibalism, he writes: "But here, Truth, who loves to be centrally located, is again found between two extremes;..." When reading Melville's cultural observations he inspired me to keep an open mind.
I also enjoyed Melville's comparisons between the island culture and his home culture. It is great fun to read Melville's comparison of the stress free, non-capitalistic islanders and the debtors prisons of America. It is unique to see that Melville was able to say maybe his culture isn't the best and that western influence might not be the best influence. He writes early in the book: "Thrice happy are they who, inhabiting some yet undiscovered island in the midst of the ocean, have never been brought into contaminating contact with the white man."
But my greatest pleasure, when reading Typee, was in making comparisons between the changes in American culture since the books publication and today. To a buttoned-up, victorian society the descriptions of island women dressed only in tropical flowers must have been a mind bender indeed. However, to our post-flower child generation these descriptions seem tame. When Melville states: "The varied dances of the Marquesan girls are beautiful in the extreme, but there is an abandoned voluptuousness in their character which I dare not describe." it is hard to believe that he could describe something that our current generation hasn't seen in the movies (and with a PG-13 rating!).
In conclusion, I encourage you to read Typee. I think it is an enjoyable book and today's readers can find the value of the book without having to get someone else to explain it to you. In addition, I believe that everyone can finish it and thereby allow you to proudly claim that you have indeed read Melville. And, once you have finished a "classic" and been able to see its value, you can begin to understand the common thread that caused your American Literature professor to label Melville, together with F. Scott Fiztgerald and Jack Kerouac, as one of the observers of American society. I am now off to read "The Great Gatsby" and "On the Road."
- Anthony J. Godwin
p.s. Did you know that Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick, but that Moby Dick never wrote him back!
