SOURCE: Beauchamp, Gorman. “Montaigne, Melville, and the Cannibals”. Arizona Quarterly 37, no. 4 (winter 1981): 293-309.

In the following essay, Beauchamp examines the use and development of the Noble Savage as a literary device, highlighting the use of the Noble Savage in the writings of Montaigne and Melville.

From his inception, the Noble Savage has served as a weapon in ideological warfare, a convenient stick figure with which to beat civilized man over his corrupt head. As early as the first Christian century, Tacitus was belaboring his fellow Romans with the image of the simple, brave, virtuous Germani living like noble Stoics all in the wilds beyond the Rhine, their moral excellence held up as a rebuke to the decadent, dishonest, immoral civilization along the Tiber. This tendentious pattern persists in Western history, recrudescing, with appropriate variations, in the works of Montaigne and Bartolomé de Las Casas, Rousseau and Diderot, in...