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The riddle of human development, long the province of analytical psychological studies, has been for a longer time still the concern of the artist. Presumably today's artist can, by making use of scientific psychological knowledge, easily symbolize the conflicts and tensions in personalities. This does not mean, however, that pre-Freudian artists erred in their use of symbols in describing psychological states. On the contrary, as is well known, Freud formulated many of his early hypotheses on the basis of material contained in literary works. What it does mean is that today's writer is perhaps more deliberate in his use of symbols and it is interesting, therefore, to examine a pre-Freudian literary work which is a neat, but unconscious, symbolic representation of a psychological process.
Herman Melville's first novel, Typee, published in 1845, belongs to the great stream of 19th century romanticism which had turned inward to conduct researches into the self. As Lionel Trilling has pointed out in The Liberal Imagination, Freud and the Romantics shared a common ground in their “perception of the hidden element of human nature and of the opposition between the hidden and the visible.” (1) Once the main thread of the story in Typee is extracted from the mass of physical and social descriptions and from the diatribes hurled at civilization, the opposition between the “hidden” and the “visible” becomes quite clear.
D. H. Lawrence has described Typee as a sort of “birth-myth” and, also, as something of the Oedipus myth. Actually it is both, for basically they are the same thing, as Otto Rank has shown. Behind the Oedipus saga, Rank