Abstract:
In this paper, I read the whiteness and masculinity of Herman Melville’s narrator
in Typee (1846), arguing that Tommo’s white hegemonic masculine identity is dependent not
only on notions of homophobia and racism, but on a specific settler/native narrative unique to the
American colonial experience. I interpret the narrator’s depiction of a forlorn rooster named
Pedro ekphrastically, as a frame narrative indicating his own unreliability as narrator whose
dependency on the discursivity of the settle/native binary present in the American captivity
narrative that relies on notions of indigenous primitivity for propagation. When Tommo finds
himself disabled and disempowered in ways similar to Pedro, he leverages the discourses of
imperial imaginaries to bolster his own authority and belonging. The subsequent uncertainty that
follows the narrator’s application of this particular American narrative unsettles the reality of the
empire/masculinity relationship, revealing the underlying frailty of American exceptionalism.
