Nature Voices in Herman Melville’s Typee: The Cocoa-Nut Trees

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the representation of cocoa-nut trees in Herman Melville’s Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846). With the rise of adverse effects of environmental crisis and climate change, calls for action on environment due to its status quo have attracted scholarly attention including the study of literature in lights of environmental humanities. Furthermore, writers have used nature with its diverse elements to contribute into the thematic and narrative structure of their writing. In specific, this study attempts through a close reading of Typee to analyze the cocoa-nut imagery from an ecocritical perspective. It also argues that the narrator’s perception of the cocoa-nut tree has changed over time as a result of his interaction as a white American sailor with the islanders themselves. In other words, the cocoa-nut trees with their multifaceted symbolic representations provide a commentary on the sociopolitical and historical context of the text and reveal the narrator’s endeavors to understand his identity as a 19th century white sailor within non-white and non-Western context. In short, Melville’s Typee centralizes the function of cocoa-nut trees in terms of their textual and contextual significance.