Profound Science and Elegant Literature. Stephanie P. Browner
uniform” and a “huge chapeau” with “waving ostrich plumes.” Devoted to expressing the “gaiety of their national taste,” the “tailors of the fleet” have given particular attention to the Queen’s “adornment.” She wears a “gaudy tissue of scarlet cloth, trimmed with yellow silk” and a “fanciful turban of purple velvet, figured with silver sprigs, and surmounted by a tuft of variegated feathers” (7-8).
As it turns out, the French effort is for naught. Haute couture cannot conceal the primitive body. The King’s chapeau does not hide the “broad patch of tattooing stretched completely across his face,” and fine silk cannot conceal the “spiral tattooing” on the Queen’s legs. Haute couture also cannot curb the primitive’s love of flesh. When the Queen spies “an old salt, whose bare arms and feet, and exposed breast were covered with as many inscriptions in India ink as the lid of an Egyptian sarcophagus” she pulls open his shirt, rolls up his trousers, and hangs “over the fellow, caressing him, and expressing her delight in a variety of wild exclamations and gestures.” To demonstrate further her appreciation, she “bent forward for a moment, and turning sharply round, threw up the skirts of her mantle, and revealed a sight from which the aghast Frenchmen retreated precipitately” (8).
As a narrative device, the occasional glimpse of skin makes Melville’s Peep at Polynesian Life a titillating striptease. In these opening accounts of nakedness, we know from the beginning that there will be a climactic disrobing, and the teasing delay of gratification serves as verbal fore-play. This is particularly true in the second account. We know the Queen is not shy of “exhibiting her charms,” and so the reader may savor Melville’s elaborate descriptions of French costume even while awaiting the Queen’s nakedness. There is, in fact, throughout the book a coy delight in describing risque or disturbing somatic spectacles (even the remains of a cannibal feast) in formal, modest, and circuitous language. Thus the humor in the second account of disrobing depends not only upon the contrast between a French love of fabric and a native preference for tattoos, but also upon a playful disconnect when refined language is used to describe a primitive, childlike scene in which “I’ll show you mine since I’ve seen yours” is the operative principle. In short, Melville begins his account of life on a Pacific Island by plunging his readers into a carnivalesque world in which high and low mix irreverently. French finery is flung off so that a Queen can show her tattooed backside, a gentle missionary woman is stripped naked, and highbrow, literary language is used to recount “low” events.
Attentive to Melville’s high style and his somatic interests, Richard Brodhead rightly notes that for Melville “the literary” was not necessarily “in opposition to unrepressed bodily life.”5 But Melville’s interest in the tensions between the high culture of literary language and the low world of naked bodies is not only about expanding highbrow aesthetics to include representations of bodily life. It is about challenging a political order in which corporeality serves as a marker of people and cultures deemed uncivilized, unrefined, less rational and more physical. Melville’s carnivalesque challenges middle-class decorum and the implicit class hierarchy that accompanies it. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White explain, “bourgeois democracy emerged with a class which, whilst indeed progressive in its best political aspirations, had encoded in its manners, morals and imaginative writings, in its body, bearing and taste, a subliminal elitism.”6 The two scenes of nakedness that open Typee reject refinement and bourgeois embarrassment and disgust with things somatic.
The politics of nakedness were not lost on Melville’s U.S. publisher. Typee appeared in England in February 1842 and in the United States in March. A second U.S. edition, entitled the “Revised Edition,” appeared four months later. Both U.S. editions, supervised by John Wiley of Wiley and Putnam, were bowdlerized.7 In the first U.S. edition, probably a rush-job, deletions and changes are few but pointed, with four of the five coming in the first seventeen pages. Two of these are aimed at the accounts of disrobing in Chapter 1. Melville’s jab at religion in his editorializing on the missionary dame’s response to being stripped must have worried Wiley. He deleted the ironic suggestion that more religion would have made her more tolerant of being exposed, changing “not sufficiently evangelized to endure this” to “could not endure this.” In the account of the Queen of Nukuheva’s display of her tattooed backside, the first American version deletes “threw up the skirts of her mantle.” Wiley also excised a reference to the “unholy passions of the crew and their unlimited gratification,” a change that required resetting ten lines.
The extensive changes made with the “Revised” edition (the only version readily available until the Melville revival of the 1920s) have the same intent as the changes made in the first U.S. edition; they delete or minimize Melville’s references to somatic pleasures. In the Revised Edition, the “naked houris” become the “lovely houris,” and Typee damsels “anoint my body with a fragrant oil” instead of “my whole body with a fragrant oil.” Wiley also deleted references to Tommo’s burning cheeks and his “bashful timidity” when he takes his first river bath, and he deleted Melville’s ironic observation that it was “foreign benefactors” who introduced venereal disease to the islands. A chapter explaining the open, casual sexual relations among the Typees was also heavily edited. Perhaps most dramatic, though, was Wiley’s editing of accounts of nakedness. He deleted in their entirety both accounts of nakedness in Chapter 1, and he also excised an account in Chapter 4 of a French admiral wearing a richly decorated frock coat and laced chapeau-bras while he attempts to persuade a naked Tior King to give away his people’s independence. In all three instances, expurgation of references to naked bodies serves a more basic goal—minimizing Melville’s critiques of missions and imperialism.
On one level, the transgression in both tales of nakedness is fairly direct. To be stripped is to be violated, and most readers, even liberal readers inclined to question the value of evangelism, surely wince at the image of a gentle Christian dame being stripped by suspicious natives. The Queen’s bare skin is less obviously transgressive. She is not Western, she disrobes herself, and she is not embarrassed by nakedness. And if her nakedness insults those around her, we might easily forgive her act as naive rather than aggressive. But the tale emphasizes the transgressive nature of her act. If Melville had reported on the Queen’s nakedness as part of a larger ethnographic account of naked islanders, then the scene might be read as respectable, scientific reporting. But the account is not offered as a contribution to scientific understanding of native customs. Flipping up one’s skirt during a formal affair with Western men is a gesture that is sexually bold and even pornographic, at least to Westerners. When the Frenchmen flee, we understand that the “sight”—her backside—has violated their deep sense of the privacy and shame of the naked body. According to Western etiquette, gentle dames should not be stripped and queens should not display their rumps.
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