Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life

The act of cannibalism, according to Tommo, is a moral transgression. It is a major element of what distinguishes Europeans and Americans from the inhabitants of the South Pacific islands. Languages, ethnicity, and other differences may abound, but the act of cannibalism is the major point of diversion between the colonized and the colonizers, at least in the minds of colonizers. From the opening chapters of the novel, Tommo views cannibalism as the defining trait of the Typees and their neighbors. He fears these supposed cannibals because they commit acts that he finds abhorrent. In all interactions with them, whether trekking through the woods or trading goods, Tommo cannot completely forget about the threat of cannibalism. The consumption of human flesh is a moral boundary that he cannot cross and that, through constant repetition, he uses to construct the ideological differences between Westerners and islanders, between himself and the others, between colonizers and the colonized. Cannibalism becomes the symbolic boundary between societies. Those who engage in it are, in Tommo’s view, in fundamental opposition to those who do not. Separate from the moral, religious, and ethical dimensions of cannibalism, the physical act itself symbolically divides societies into the known and the unknown.