Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1997

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

George B. Hutchinson

Committee Members

Michael A. Lofaro, Charles J. Maland, F. Stanley Lusby

Abstract

Herman Melville launched his writing career with his first novel Typee, published in 1846 by John Murray in London and by Wiley & Putnam in New York. Less than five months after Typee was originally published in the United States, it was republished by Wiley & Putnam in a revised, expurgated edition. The expurgations of the American Revised Edition removed the thirty-six pages of material that embodied Melville's critique of the activities of the Protestant missionaries in the South Seas and the detrimental effects of their relations with the natives.

Melville boldly challenged the fervid assumptions of Manifest Destiny and the millennial expectations of Protestant evangelicalism. In the absence of primary documents, Melville scholars have logically speculated that John Wiley's decision to expurgate Typee derived from his own sensibilities as a Protestant evangelical Christian and his astute business sense of how to create a wider reading audience for the novel by appeasing offended religious readers. However, archival research into John Wiley's personal life has brought to light new facts and documents, and shows that when Typee was published, the reality of the historical moment was quite complex. Wiley's professional options were constrained by his need to conform to priorities in his personal life and to the expectations of prominent, devout individuals from his personal social circle, and these factors, rather than simply an attempt to foster greater sales of the novel, motivated his decision to bring out a revised edition of Typee.

The identity is established of the author of the first negative review of Typee published in the New York Evangelist of 9 April 1846. Moreover, the reviewer's relationship to John Wiley, his qualifications and his likely motives as a reviewer are studied to demonstrate, albeit through provocative circumstantial evidence, that the reviewer may well have had a much larger impact upon the Revised Edition than that provided simply by writing the first negative review of Melville's first book. He may have actually participated in expurgating the novel. Thus, the dissertation sheds significant new light on the launching of Melville's career and the publication history of Typee, and proposes a potentially fruitful hypothesis for future Melville scholarship regarding Typee's publication in the Revised Edition.

The Introduction describes the methodology of the study and an overview of the project. Chapter One reconstructs the larger cultural context of American ideals of the mid- 1840s and more particularly the Protestant evangelical ethos animating the missionary movement in the South Seas and throughout the world. Chapter Two summarizes the publication history of the first British and American editions of Typee and analyzes the reception of Typee, especially the Evangelist review. Chapter Three examines relationships, events and circumstances in John Wiley's personal life, identifies the Evangelist reviewer, and discusses his potential influence on the expurgation of Typee. Chapter Four explores the impact of the Typee expurgations on some of the compositional strategies in Omoo, Melville's next novel, and surveys the potency of the legacy of John Wiley on Melville's subsequent career in his "earnest desire" to present the truth in his fiction.

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