Whipscars and Tattoos: The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick and the Maori

• Published in: Journal of American studies Vol. 46; no. 1
• Main Authors: NELSON, DANA D, Sanborn, Geoffrey
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01.02.2012
• Subjects: American literature; Cooper, James Fenimore (1789-1851); Melville, Herman (1819-1891); Polynesian languages
• ISSN: 0021-8758; 1469-5154
• DOI: 10.1017/S0021875811001757

While he concentrates on two novels and two Maoris, Te Ara and Te Pehi Kupe, his analysis resonates with early nineteenth-century cultural and literary studies more broadly, and suggests new approaches to a range of topic in that period - masculinity, settler colonization, race relations and the interrelation of literature and politics. For the Europeans and American who admired them, the key features of the Maori were their independence, as expressed in the fierceness of their pride, and their intelligence, as expressed in their aptitude for the mechanical and agricultural arts ... to the white men who were drawn to them, it was as if Maori men, and Maori rangitira in particular, were the incarnations of a vitality and forcefulness that had receded with the progress of refinement. [...]Melville's growing awareness of the Maori influences his post-Typee understanding of tattooing, which in Moby-Dick, Sanborn argues, becomes a "special category of signs" that manifests "the presence of great power and worth."