earticle

영어

This study aims to explore how Herman Melville’s early travel writings, Typee (1846) and its sequel, Omoo (1847), on the one hand, contribute to the consolidation of American national identity as democratic people and, at the same time, appeal to contemporary colonialist impulse, focusing on his usage of two contradictory conceptions—the ‘Noble Savage’ and the ‘Ignoble Savage’—in representing the natives of the South Seas. First, this study investigates in what way Melville’s seemingly sympathetic portrayals of the aboriginal people in the South Seas are employed not only to criticize the imperial decadence, but to ingest and appropriate the virtues of so-called the “Noble Savage” as republican virtues. This study would uncover that the strategy of white Americans’ association with the natives along with primitivism undeniably plays the significant role in forging national selfhood as democratic people of freedom, innocence, and simplicity, while negating European corrupt civilization and imperialism. Next, focusing attention on Tommo’s racially-charged colonialist usage of the rhetoric of the ‘Ignoble Savage’ which regards the natives as the animalistic, threatening Other, this study inquires how the previous association with the natives is in turn, or simultaneously, disapproved as a negative way of constructing American identity as civilized people. This study would allow us to comprehend Melville’s self-contradictory association and dissociation with the natives in his early novels are imbricated in a complex way concerning the matter of establishing national consciousness of the United States predicated on nationalism, and are not safely removed as well from his contemporary impulses and ideas of colonialism.