Understanding “Prostitutes” in the World of Herman Melville

Herman Melville, the renowned 19th-century American author of Moby-Dick, often explored themes of exoticism, cultural encounter, and human nature in his early South Seas narratives, Typee and Omoo. Within these semi-autobiographical tales, depictions of Polynesian women and their perceived sexual availability became a significant, and often controversial, element. The term “prostitutes” in relation to Melville primarily arises from critical discussions and historical context surrounding these portrayals. This analysis delves into the characters, the realities of cross-cultural contact in the Pacific, the author’s perspective, and the ongoing scholarly debate about exploitation, representation, and colonialism inherent in these texts. We’ll move beyond simplistic labels to understand the complex social and sexual dynamics Melville observed and participated in.

Who were the women labeled as “prostitutes” in Melville’s South Seas narratives?

In Melville’s Typee and Omoo, the women perceived as “prostitutes” are primarily young Polynesian women encountered by the sailor-narrators (Tommo and the unnamed narrator, respectively) during their time in the Marquesas and Tahiti. These are not characters explicitly named as professional sex workers within the narratives themselves. Rather, the label arises from the narrators’ descriptions of sexual encounters that appear transactional or culturally unfamiliar, and from the historical context of frequent sexual barter between visiting sailors and island women. Key figures include Fayaway in Typee (Tommo’s companion), Kory-Kory’s female relatives, and numerous unnamed women in Tahiti described as readily available for liaisons, often in exchange for small goods like trinkets, tobacco, or cloth.

What was the nature of the relationships described?

The relationships depicted are complex and ambiguous. Melville’s narrators often portray them through a lens of exotic romance and freely offered affection (“Ardent spirits… and more ardent fair ones”). However, a closer reading reveals elements of transaction and power imbalance. Encounters frequently involve the exchange of Western goods for sexual favors. While Melville romanticizes figures like Fayaway, describing her innocence and beauty, the underlying dynamic reflects the economic and cultural pressures on Polynesian societies disrupted by European contact. Sailors possessed desirable manufactured goods; women, sometimes directed by male relatives or driven by curiosity and economic need, engaged in sexual barter. Melville himself acknowledges this transactional aspect, though he often veils it in lyrical prose.

Were these women professional prostitutes in the Western sense?

Applying the Western concept of “professional prostitute” to these Polynesian women is largely anachronistic and culturally inaccurate. Pre-contact Polynesian societies had different norms regarding sexuality, hospitality, and gift exchange. Sexual relations could be more fluid and less tied to concepts of sin or commercial transaction than in 19th-century Puritanical America. However, the arrival of Europeans, particularly whalers and naval vessels, drastically altered these dynamics. The demand from sailors created a *de facto* market for sex. While not operating within brothels or under formal pimps in the way familiar to Western ports, many women did engage in repeated transactional sex with sailors as a means of acquiring scarce goods. Melville’s narratives capture this nascent, culturally hybrid form of sexual commerce born from colonial encounter, rather than depicting an established indigenous profession.

What was the historical context of sexuality and contact in the Pacific during Melville’s time?

The early to mid-19th century Pacific was a crucible of cultural collision. European and American ships (whalers, traders, naval vessels) arrived in islands like Tahiti and the Marquesas, bringing diseases, weapons, alcohol, and Christianity, profoundly disrupting indigenous societies. Sailors, often starved of female company for months or years, sought sexual encounters. Polynesian cultures, with different attitudes towards sexuality, hospitality, and reciprocity, interacted with these desires. Concepts like “tayo” (friend/comrade) in Tahiti could involve sexual hospitality. However, the sheer scale of contact and the sailors’ demand, coupled with the devastating impact of disease and social breakdown (depleting traditional food sources and social structures), pushed many interactions towards a more explicitly transactional model. Missionaries fiercely condemned these practices, labeling the women “prostitutes,” while sailors and beachcombers like Melville often viewed them through a mix of exotic fascination and opportunism.

How did diseases and social disruption contribute?

Devastating epidemics of introduced diseases (smallpox, influenza, venereal diseases) caused catastrophic population decline in Polynesia. This led to social fragmentation, the collapse of traditional authority, and economic desperation. With populations decimated and traditional ways of life undermined, engaging in sexual barter with sailors became a survival strategy for many women and their families. Access to European goods (metal tools, cloth, firearms) became increasingly important. Melville witnessed these societies in crisis, and the apparent “availability” of women he describes cannot be separated from this context of demographic collapse and cultural upheaval. The women weren’t necessarily “fallen” in a Western moral sense; they were navigating a world shattered by contact.

What role did missionaries play in labeling?

Protestant missionaries, particularly in Tahiti, were appalled by the sexual practices they observed between sailors and island women. Driven by their own strict Victorian morals, they vigorously condemned these encounters as prostitution and sin. They actively worked to suppress traditional dances, clothing (or lack thereof), and sexual customs, imposing Western Christian values. Their writings and sermons consistently used terms like “prostitution,” “licentiousness,” and “depravity” to describe the behavior, shaping the perception of these women both locally and back in Europe and America. Melville, critical of missionary hypocrisy and cultural destruction, often portrays them satirically in Omoo, but the missionaries’ framing significantly influenced how these encounters were understood and labeled by outsiders.

How does Melville portray these women and the encounters?

Melville’s portrayal is deeply ambivalent and layered. On one level, particularly in Typee, he employs a Romantic idealization. Women like Fayaway are depicted as embodiments of natural innocence, beauty, and sexual freedom, living in an apparent Edenic paradise (“the Polynesian nymphs…”). He contrasts their perceived openness and lack of guile with the artificiality and repression of “civilized” society. The encounters are often described as mutually pleasurable and freely entered into. However, beneath this idyllic surface, Melville also subtly acknowledges the transactional nature. He describes the exchange of goods, the eagerness of some women for trinkets, and the sailors’ clear exploitation of the situation. In Omoo, the tone is often more cynical and satirical, showing the seamier side of beachcomber life in Tahiti, including drunkenness, disease, and more overtly mercenary encounters. Melville both participates in the exotic fantasy and provides glimpses of its exploitative reality.

Is there evidence of critique within Melville’s writing?

Yes, though often nuanced. Melville critiques the destructive impact of European contact through his portrayal of the missionaries’ cultural arrogance and the sailors’ often brutish behavior. He shows how the introduction of diseases and alcohol ravages the islands. While enjoying the sexual opportunities himself (through his narrators), he doesn’t shy away from showing the negative consequences: the spread of venereal disease (“the insidious scourge”), the demoralization, and the erosion of traditional culture. His famous description of Queen Pomare’s court in Omoo as a grotesque mix of native and European decay implicitly criticizes the corrupting influence. Furthermore, the very act of leaving the “paradise” of Typee valley, driven partly by fear of being tattooed and perhaps a deeper unease with the implications of his situation, suggests a recognition that the idyll was unsustainable and morally complex.

How does Melville’s perspective compare to contemporary views?

Melville was somewhat more sympathetic and critical than many of his contemporaries. While he shared the common sailor’s view of the Pacific as a place of sexual opportunity, his narratives go beyond simple titillation. He attempted (however imperfectly through his Western lens) to understand and describe Polynesian culture on its own terms, contrasting it favorably with Western hypocrisy in some aspects. His critique of missionaries was sharp and unusual for popular travel literature of the time. However, he still operated within the dominant colonial mindset. His portrayals, even when romanticized, objectified the women and often reinforced the “noble savage” or “dusky maiden” stereotypes prevalent in 19th-century exoticism. He didn’t fundamentally challenge the power dynamics of colonialism that created the conditions for exploitation.

How have feminist and postcolonial scholars interpreted these portrayals?

Feminist and postcolonial scholarship has subjected Melville’s depictions of Polynesian women to rigorous critical analysis, largely moving beyond the romanticized view. Key interpretations include:

• Objectification and the Male Gaze: Critics argue Melville’s narrators consistently view the women through a sexualized, exoticizing lens, reducing them to objects of desire and symbols of a primitive “paradise” for male consumption. Their voices, perspectives, and agency are largely absent.
• Complicity in Colonial Exploitation: Scholars see Melville’s narrators, and by extension Melville himself, as participating in the sexual economy enabled by colonial power imbalances. Their enjoyment of the women’s “availability” reinforces the exploitation, even as he critiques other aspects of contact.
• Reinforcing Stereotypes: The portrayals are seen as perpetuating harmful stereotypes of the sexually available “Pacific Belle” or “Dusky Maiden,” which have long been used to justify colonial control and exoticize non-Western women.
• Silencing Indigenous Experience: The narratives focus on the sailors’ experiences and perceptions, silencing the actual lived experiences, motivations, and potential suffering of the Polynesian women involved in these encounters. The label “prostitute” itself is seen as a colonial imposition.
• Ambivalence as Symptom: The noted ambivalence in Melville’s portrayal is interpreted not just as literary complexity but as a reflection of his own conflicted position as both a beneficiary and a critic of the colonial system.

Scholars like Carolyn Karcher and Samuel Otter have been instrumental in these critical re-readings, highlighting the power dynamics and violence (symbolic and sometimes literal) underlying the seemingly idyllic encounters.

What is the legacy of Melville’s depictions of sexuality in the Pacific?

The legacy of Melville’s depictions is multifaceted and enduring:

• Shaping Western Perceptions: Typee and Omoo were enormously popular and influential. They significantly shaped Western (particularly American) perceptions of the Pacific as a place of exotic sensuality, “free love,” and available women, fueling the “South Seas Paradise” myth that persists in popular culture.
• Literary Precedent: Melville established a powerful literary template for depicting cross-cultural sexual encounter and the “exotic other” that influenced subsequent writers, from Robert Louis Stevenson to James Michener and beyond, often replicating similar problematic tropes.
• Fodder for Critical Debate: The complexity and ambiguity of Melville’s portrayals have made them a rich, if contested, ground for literary and cultural criticism, particularly concerning colonialism, gender, race, and representation. They remain central texts in postcolonial and feminist studies.
• Highlighting Cultural Misunderstanding: The narratives serve as historical documents illustrating the profound cultural misunderstandings and clashes surrounding sexuality during the era of Pacific contact, demonstrating how Western labels like “prostitute” were imposed on very different social practices.
• Reflecting Authorial Complicity: Melville’s work stands as a complex artifact of its time, showcasing both the potential for critique of colonialism and the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of fully escaping the colonial mindset and its inherent exploitations, even for a sympathetic observer. His personal participation, as narrated, forces a confrontation with this complicity.

Can we separate the author from the narrator regarding these encounters?

This is a central question in Melville studies. The narrators of Typee and Omoo (Tommo and the unnamed “Omoo”) are fictionalized versions of Melville’s younger self, based on his own experiences as a sailor in the Marquesas and Tahiti. While there is significant autobiographical basis, the narratives are literary constructs:

• Artistic Shaping: Melville selected, embellished, and shaped events for dramatic effect, humor, satire, and thematic resonance. The portrayal of encounters is filtered through this artistic lens.
• Narrative Persona: The narrators have distinct personalities – Tommo is more anxious and conflicted; the “Omoo” narrator is more cynical and detached. Their perspectives color the descriptions of the women and events.
• Authorial Distance: Melville, writing years later with greater experience and maturity, infused the narratives with irony and critique that might not be present in the immediate reactions of his younger self. The unease Tommo feels in Typee valley, for instance, can be read as Melville’s later critical perspective seeping into the narrative.
• Complicity Question: Regardless of the narrator’s persona, Melville chose to include and often sensationalize these encounters. He profited from their exotic appeal. This suggests a level of authorial complicity in perpetuating the very dynamics he sometimes critiques. Separating the author entirely from the narrator’s actions and perspectives in these specific texts is difficult; the narratives represent Melville’s *literary presentation* of his experiences and observations.

Ultimately, we read the *texts* Melville wrote. While informed by biography, our critical analysis focuses on the narrative voice he constructed and the cultural work the texts perform, including their portrayal of Polynesian women and sexuality.

How should modern readers approach these complex and problematic portrayals?

Engaging with Melville’s depictions of Polynesian women and sexuality requires a nuanced and critical approach:

• Acknowledge the Context: Understand the historical realities of the 1840s Pacific, the devastating impact of contact, the sailors’ world, and the Victorian mindset Melville was writing from and for. Avoid imposing purely modern sensibilities without historical grounding.
• Recognize the Ambiguity: Resist simplistic readings. Appreciate the genuine literary artistry and the complex layers of meaning – the romanticism, the critique, the participation, the unease.
• Center Critical Lenses: Actively employ feminist and postcolonial perspectives. Question the narrative voice: Who is speaking? Whose perspective is centered? Whose is silenced? What power dynamics are at play? How are stereotypes reinforced or challenged?
• Listen to Indigenous Voices: Seek out scholarship and perspectives from Polynesian scholars and communities to understand how these portrayals resonate and impact indigenous identities and histories. Understand the limitations of Melville’s (and his narrators’) outsider perspective.
• Separate “Observation” from “Endorsement”: Distinguish between Melville *describing* a historical reality (transactional sex in the contact zone) and Melville *endorsing* or *uncritically celebrating* it. His texts often contain both elements.
• Value the Texts as Historical Documents: Read them as valuable, if deeply flawed, records of a pivotal moment of cultural collision, revealing Western attitudes, fantasies, and hypocrisies regarding race, gender, and empire.
• Engage in Dialogue: Discuss the problematic aspects openly. Don’t dismiss the texts because of their flaws, but grapple with them critically as part of understanding both Melville’s genius and the enduring legacy of colonialism in literature.

Reading Melville’s South Seas narratives today isn’t about condoning the perspectives within them, but about understanding their complexity, their historical significance, their literary power, and their role in shaping – and reflecting – problematic cultural narratives that we still contend with. The figure of the Polynesian woman in his work, whether romanticized Fayaway or the transactional encounters in Tahiti, remains a potent and challenging symbol demanding critical engagement.