In the first phase of his career, the extended fiction from Typee (1846) through Pierre (1852), Melville is fascinated with “race.” This fascination animates his literary practice, fueling his rhetorical excess and provoking questions about identity and intersubjectivity that he pursues across his texts. Melville inquires into the science and politics of “race,” the constitution and the boundaries of human bodies, and the deep structures of identity. In a remarkable series of texts excessively linking bodies, discourse, and ideology, Melville examines the ways in which human bodies have become written and overwritten with racial meaning.

Melville offers neither a transcendent critique nor a symptomatic recapitulation of racial beliefs. In his fiction, he insists that this is a false choice and that racial assumptions, presumptions, and investments are not so portable or divestible. In Melville's representations, individuals think and feel the strange and often destructive ways they do not because they are benighted or deluded, but because their responses have a history, give definition, fulfill needs. Melville is critical but does not claim, or rather comes to realize that he cannot sustain, the privilege of an outsider's position. Rather than dismiss contemporary beliefs about race, nation, and self, he acknowledges his attractions to those beliefs and examines their sources and sway. He provides an inside sense of the power of racial ideology, its satisfactions and incarcerations. Melville both inhabits and manipulates contemporary racial discourse, giving a material sense of its structures and functions.