Bloom’s Modern Critical Views

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 Bloom’s Modern Critical Views

Herman Melville
New Edition

Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Editorial Consultant, John Wenke

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Herman Melville—New Edition

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Herman Melville / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed.
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 Contents

Editor’s Note vii

Introduction 1
Harold Bloom

Towards “Bartleby the Scrivener” 13

Milton R. Stern

Melville’s Problematic “Being” 39

Sanford E. Marovitz

Reenvisioning America: Melville’s “Benito Cereno” 57

Sandra A. Zagarell

Allegory and Breakdown in The Confidence-Man:

Melville’s Comedy of Doubt 77
John Bryant

“The Author at the Time”: Tommo and

Melville’s Self-Discovery in Typee 93
Bryan C. Short

Melville and the Woman’s Story 113

Nancy Fredricks

“To Tell Over Again the Story Just Told”:

The Composition of Melville’s Redburn 127
Stephen Mathewson
vi Contents

Israel Potter: Melville’s “Citizen of the Universe” 135

Bill Christopherson

Disquieting Encounters: Male Intrusions/

Female Realms in Melville 151
Judith Hiltner

Narrative Self-Fashioning
and the Play of Possibility 167
John Wenke

Whose Book Is Moby-Dick? 185

Merton M. Sealts, Jr.

Naples and HMS Bellipotent:

Melville on the Police State 201
Stanton Garner

Naturalist Psychology in Billy Budd 211

Thomas Hove

We Are Family: Melville’s Pierre 227

Cindy Weinstein

Discipline and the Lash in Melville’s White-Jacket 249

Peter Bellis

Chronology 265

Contributors 267

Bibliography 271

Acknowledgments 275

Index 277
 Editor’s Note

My introduction begins with a reading of “The Bell-Tower” in The Piazza

Tales, and then moves to some of the visionary centers of Moby-Dick, par-
ticularly Chapter 119, “The Candles,” and Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of
the Whale.”
Milton R. Stern perspectivizes the uncannily Kafkan parable of “Bar-
tleby the Scrivener,” finding in Bartelby a coming-together of several fictive
selves a customary Melvillian praxis.
The problem of Being—Neoplatonic, Spinozan, Coleridgean, Emerso-
nian—is shown as haunting Meville and his Moby-Dick, in an erudite essay
by Sanford E. Marovitz.
An extraordinary tale, “Benito Cereno,” is characterized by Sandra A.
Zagarell as a crucial testimony to our inability to divide exploration from
colonization, “free enterprise from slavery, profit from plunder.”
A very problematic work, The Confidence-Man, receives illuminating ob-
servations from John Bryant, after which Bryan C. Short praises Typee as a
complex and energetic first novel.
Nancy Fredricks traces Melville’s attempts, after the very masculine
Moby-Dick, to portray women characters for a partly feminine audience.
Redburn is studied by Stephen Mathewson as an autobiographical nar-
rative, while Israel Potter is found by Bill Christopherson to be Melville’s
most compassionate book.
Judith Hiltner subtly traces a pattern of male intrusion into realms of
female suffering in a number of Melvillean texts, after which the plenitude
of Mardi is explored by John Wenke.
Whether the prime protagonist of Moby-Dick is Ishmael, Captain Ahab,
or the White Whale is judiciously weighed by Merton M. Sealts, Jr., while
Stanton Garner interestingly presents Melville’s strong reaction to the police
state of Bourbon Naples, a repulsion that helped contribute to Billy Budd.

vii
viii Harold Bloom

The psychological weavings of Billy Budd are followed by Thomas Hove,

after which Melville’s maddening (to me) Pierre is bravely confronted by
Cindy Weinstein.
In this volume’s final essay, Peter Bellis takes us into the harsh world of
White-Jacket, where the cat-o’-nine tails dominates.
 H arold B loom

Introduction

her m a n me lv il l e (1819 –1891)

M elville’s The Piazza Tales was published in 1856, five years after
Moby-Dick. Two of the six tales—“Bartleby, The Scrivener” and “Benito
Cereno”—are commonly and rightly accepted among Melville’s stron-
gest works, together with Moby-Dick and (rather more tenuously) The
Confidence-Man and Billy Budd, Sailor. Two others—“The Encantadas,
or Enchanted Isles” and “The Bell-Tower”—seem to me even better,
being equal to the best moments in Moby-Dick. Two of the The Piazza
Tales are relative trif les: “The Piazza” and “The Lightning-Rod Man.”
A volume of novellas with four near-masterpieces is an extraordinary
achievement, but particularly poignant if, like Melville, you had lost
your reading public after the early success of Typee and Omoo, the more
equivocal reception of Mardi, and the return to a wider audience with
Redburn and even more with White Jacket. Moby-Dick today is, together
with Leaves of Grass and Huckleberry Finn, one of the three candidates
for our national epic, but like Leaves of Grass it found at first only the
one great reader (Hawthorne for Melville, Emerson for Whitman) and
almost no popular response. What was left of Melville’s early audience
was killed off by the dreadful Pierre, a year after Moby-Dick, and despite
various modern salvage attempts Pierre certainly is unreadable, in the
old-fashioned sense of that now critically abused word. You just cannot
get through it, unless you badly want and need to do so.


 Harold Bloom

The best of The Piazza Tales show the post-Pierre Melville writing for
himself, possibly Hawthorne, and a few strangers. Himself the sole support of
wife, four children, mother and several sisters, Melville was generally in debt
from at least 1855 on, and Hawthorne and Richard Henry Dana, though they
tried, could not get the author of Pierre appointed to a consulate. In the late
1850s, the tormented and shy Melville attempted the lecture circuit, but as he
was neither a pulpit-pounder like Henry Ward Beecher, nor a preternaturally
eloquent sage like Ralph Waldo Emerson, he failed rather badly. Unhappily
married, mother-ridden, an apparent literary failure; the author of The Piazza
Tales writes out of the depths. Steeped, as were Carlyle and Ruskin, in the
King James Bible, Melville no more believed in the Bible than did Carlyle
and Ruskin. But even as Moby-Dick found its legitimate and overwhelming
precursors in the Bible, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, so do The Piazza
Tales. Melville’s rejection of Biblical theology, his almost Gnostic distrust of
nature and history alike, finds powerful expression in The Piazza Tales, as it
did throughout all his later fictional prose and his verse.

II

“The Bell-Tower” is a tale of only fifteen pages but it has such resonance and
strength that each rereading gives me the sense that I have experienced a
superb short novel. Bannadonna, “the great mechanician, the unblest found-
ling,” seeking to conquer a larger liberty, like Prometheus, instead extended
the empire of necessity. His great Bell-Tower, intended to be the noblest in
Italy, survives only as “a stone pine,” a “black massed stump.” It is the new
tower of Babel:

Like Babel’s, its base was laid in a high hour of renovated earth,
following the second deluge, when the waters of the Dark Ages
had dried up, and once more the green appeared. No wonder that,
after so long and deep submersion, the jubilant expectation of the
race should, as with Noah’s sons, soar into Shinar aspiration.
In firm resolve, no man in Europe at that period went beyond
Bannadonna. Enriched through commerce with the Levant, the
state in which he lived voted to have the noblest Bell-Tower in
Italy. His repute assigned him to be architect.
Stone by Stone, month by month, the tower rose. Higher,
higher; snail-like in pace, but torch or rocket in its pride.
After the masons would depart, the builder, standing alone
upon its ever-ascending summit, at close of every day saw that
he overtopped still higher walls and trees. He would tarry till
a late hour there, wrapped in schemes of other and still loftier
 Introduction 

piles. Those who of saints’ days thronged the spot—hanging

to the rude poles of scaffolding, like sailors on yards, or bees
on boughs, unmindful of lime and dust, and falling chips of
stone—their homage not the less inspirited him to self-esteem.
At length the holiday of the Tower came. To the sound of
viols, the climax-stone slowly rose in air, and, amid that firing
of ordnance, was laid by Bannadonna’s hands upon the final
course. Then mounting it, he stood erect, alone, with folded
arms; gazing upon the white summits of blue inland Alps, and
whiter crests of bluer Alps off-shore—sights invisible from the
plain. Invisible, too, from thence was that eye he turned below,
when, like the cannon booms, came up to him the people’s
combustion of applause.
That which stirred them so was, seeing with what serenity
the builder stood three hundred feet in air, upon an unrailed
perch. This none but he durst do. But his periodic standing
upon the pile, in each stage of its growth—such discipline had
its last result.

We recognize Captain Ahab in Bannadonna, though Ahab has his hu-

manities, and the great mechanician lacks all pathos. Ahab plays out an aveng-
er’s tragedy, but Bannadonna’s purpose lacks any motivation except pride. His
pride presumably is related to the novelist’s, and the black stump that is the
sole remnant of the Bell-Tower might as well be Pierre, little as Melville would
have welcomed such an identification. The sexual mortification of the image is
palpable, yet adds little to the comprehensiveness of what will become Banna-
donna’s doom, since that necessarily is enacted as a ritual of castration anyway.
Melville’s Prometheans, Ahab and Bannadonna, have an overtly Gnostic quar-
rel with the heavens. Melville’s narratives, at their strongest, know implicitly
what Kafka asserted with rare explicitness in his great parable:

The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens.
Doubtless that is so, but it proves nothing against the heavens for
the heavens signify simply: the impossibility of crows.

In Melville, the heavens signify simply: the impossibility of Ahab and of

Bannadonna. Ahab is a hunter and not a builder, but to destroy Moby-Dick
or to build the Bell-Tower would be to pile up the Tower of Babel and get
away with it:

If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without

ascending it, the work would have been permitted.
 Harold Bloom

Kafka’s aphorism would be an apt title for Melville’s story, with Ban-
nadonna who has built his tower partly in order to ascend it and to stand
“three hundred feet in air, upon an unrailed perch.” Kafka could have told
Bannadonna that a labyrinth underground would have been better, though of
course that too would not have been permitted, since the heavens would have
regarded it as the pit of Babel:

What are you building?—I want to dig a subterranean passage.

Some progress must be made. My station up there is much too
high.
We are digging the pit of Babel.

Bannadonna is closest to the most extraordinary of the Kafkan parables

concerning the Tower, in which a scholar maintains that the Great Wall of
China “alone would provide for the first time in the history of mankind a
secure foundation for the new Tower of Babel. First the wall, therefore, and
then the tower.” The final sentence of “The Great Wall and the Tower of
Babel” could have impressed Melville as the best possible commentary upon
Bannadonna-Melville, both in his project and his fate:

There were many wild ideas in people’s heads at that time—this

scholar’s book is only one example—perhaps simply because so many
were trying to join forces as far as they could for the achievement
of a single aim. Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as
the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to
tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall,
the bonds and its very self.

The fall of Bannadonna commences with the casting of the great bell:

The unleashed metals bayed like hounds. The workmen shrunk.

Through their fright, fatal harm to the bell was dreaded. Fearless as
Shadrach, Bannadonna, rushing through the glow, smote the chief
culprit with his ponderous ladle. From the smitten part, a splinter
was dashed into the seething mass, and at once was melted in.

That single blemish is evidently Melville’s personal allegory for whatever

sense of guilt, in his own pained judgment, flawed his own achievement, even
in Moby-Dick. More interesting is Bannadonna’s creation of a kind of golem
or Frankensteinean monster, charmingly called Haman, doubtless in tribute
to the villain of the Book of Esther. Haman, intended to be the bell-ringer,
 Introduction 

is meant also: “as a partial type of an ulterior creature,” a titanic helot who
would be called Talus, like the rather sinister iron man who wields an iron
flail against the rebellious Irish in the savage Book V of Spenser’s The Faerie
Queene. But Talus is never created; Haman is quite enough to immolate the
ambitious artist, Bannadonna:

And so, for the interval, he was oblivious of his creature; which,
not oblivious of him, and true to its creation, and true to its heedful
winding up, left its post precisely at the given moment; along its
well-oiled route, slid noiselessly towards its mark; and aiming at
the hand of Una, to ring one clangorous note, dully smote the
intervening brain of Bannadonna, turned backwards to it; the
manacled arms then instantly upspringing to their hovering poise.
The falling body clogged the thing’s return; so there it stood, still
impending over Bannadonna, as if whispering some post-mortem
terror. The chisel lay dropped from the hand, but beside the hand;
the oil-flask spilled across the iron track.

Which of his own works destroyed Melville? Juxtapose the story’s delib-
erately Addisonian or Johnsonian conclusion with the remarkable stanza in
Hart Crane’s “The Broken Tower” that it helped inspire, and perhaps a hint
emerges, since Crane was a superb interpreter of Melville:

So the blind slave obeyed its blinder lord; but, in obedience, slew
him. So the creator was killed by the creature. So the bell was too
heavy for the tower. So that bell’s main weakness was where man’s
blood had flawed it. And so pride went before the fall.

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;

And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals . . . And I, their sexton slave!

Crane is both Bannadonna and Haman, a complex fate darker even than
Melville’s, who certainly had represented himself as Bannadonna. The Bell-
Tower of Bannadonna perhaps was Pierre but more likely Moby-Dick itself,
Melville’s “long-scattered score / of broken intervals” even as The Bridge was
Hart Crane’s. This is hardly to suggest that Haman is Captain Ahab. Yet
Melville’s “wicked book,” as he called Moby-Dick in a famous letter to Haw-
thorne, indeed may have slain something vital in its author, if only in his
retrospective consciousness.
 Harold Bloom

III

“Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?,” God’s taunting question to
Job, can be said to be answered, by Captain Ahab, with a “Yes!” in thunder.
Job’s God wins, Ahab loses, and the great white Leviathan swims away,
harpooned yet towing Ahab with him. But Ahab’s extraordinary last speech
denies that Moby-Dick is the conqueror:

I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear
thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou
untracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and
haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,—death-glorious ship!
must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last
fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on
lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost
grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye
bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled
comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but
unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s
heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.
Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since
neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing
thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the
spear!

Beyond the allusions—Shakespearean, Miltonic, Byronic—what rings

out here is Melville’s own grand self-echoing, which is of Father Mapple’s
sermon as it concludes:

He drooped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting
his face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried
out with a heavenly enthusiasm,—“But oh! shipmates! on the
starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the
top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the
main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him—a far,
far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and
commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable
self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when
the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath
him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and
kills, brns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under
the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,—top-gallant delight is
 Introduction 

to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God,
and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the
waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never
shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and
deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say
with his final breath—O Father!—chiefly known to me by Thy
rod—mortal or immortal here I die. I have striven to be Thine,
more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I
leave eternity to Thee, for what is man that he should live out the
lifetime of his God?”

Father Mapple’s intensity moves from “a sure delight, and higher the
top of that delight” through “a far, far upward, and inward delight” on to
“Delight,—top-gallant delight is to him,” heaven’s patriot. Ahab’s equal but
antithetical intensity proceeds from “unsurrendered spires of mine” through
“my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief ” to end in “top this one piled
comber of my death.” After which the Pequod goes down with Tashtego ham-
mering a hawk to the mainmast, an emblem not of being “only a patriot to
heaven” but rather of a Satanic dragging of “a living part of heaven along
with her.” Admirable as Father Mapple is, Ahab is certainly the hero, more
Promethean than Satanic, and we need not conclude (as so many critics do)
that Melville chooses Mapple’s stance over Ahab’s. William Faulkner, in
1927, asserted that the book he most wished he had written was Moby-Dick,
and called Ahab’s fate “a sort of Golgotha of the heart become immutable as
bronze in the sonority of its plunging ruin,” characteristically adding: “There’s
a death for a man, now.”
As Faulkner implied, there is a dark sense in which Ahab intends his
Golgotha, like Christ’s, to be a vicarious atonement for all of staggering Ad-
am’s woes. When Melville famously wrote to Hawthorne: “I have written a
wicked book,” he was probably quite serious. The common reader does not
come to love Ahab, and yet there is a serious disproportion between that
reader’s awe of, and admiration for, Ahab, and the moral dismissal of the
monomaniacal hero by many scholarly critics. Ahab seems to provoke aca-
demic critics rather more even than Milton’s Satan does. Ishmael, presumably
speaking for Melville, consistently emphasizes Ahab’s greatness. And so does
Ahab himself, as when he confronts the corposants or St. Elmo’s fire, in the
superb Chapter 119, “The Candles”:

Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian
once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee,
that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit,
and I know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love
 Harold Bloom

nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but
kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy
speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake
life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In
the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here.
Though but a point at best; whensoe’er I came; wheresoe’er I go;
yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and
feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in
thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy
highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest
navies of full-freighted worlds, there’s that in here that still
remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest
me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.

If Ahab has a religion, it is Persian or rather Parsee, and so Zoroastrian.

But Melville has not written a Zoroastrian hymn to the benign light for
Ahab to chant. Ahab’s invocation is clearly Gnostic in spirit and in substance,
since the light is hailed as being both ambiguous and ambivalent. Ahab him-
self knows that the clear spirit of clear fire is not from the Alien God but
from the Demiurge, and he seems to divide the Demiurge into both the
“lowest form of love” and the “highest . . . mere supernal power.” Against this
dialectical or even self-contradictory spirit, Ahab sets himself as personality
rather than as moral character: “In the midst of the personified impersonal,
a personality stands here.” As a personality, Ahab confronts “the personified
impersonal,” which he astonishingly names as his father, and defies, as know-
ing less than he, Ahab, knows:

I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it
wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind;
but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes.
Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would
not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls
ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and
rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will
I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness;
but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! The
javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh,
thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art
but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what
hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater.
Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegun.
I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou
 Introduction 

omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou

clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness
mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do
dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial,
thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief.
Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up,
and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I bum with thee; would fain be
welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!

The Gnosticism here is explicit and unmistakeable, since “some unsuffus-

ing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all
thy creativeness mechanical” is certainly what the Gnostics called the true or
alien God, but off from our cosmos. But who is Ahab’s sweet mother”? Ahab
scarcely recognizes a benign aspect of our cosmos, so that his mother, in Gnos-
tic terms, must be the original abyss, preceding the Demiurge’s false creation.
But, as Melville knew, that motherly abyss, in Gnosticism, is also the forefather
or Alien God. Echoing the Gnostics’ savage reading of the opening of Gen-
esis, Ahab insinuates that his father, the Demiurge, begat him upon the true
God, or abyss, his mother. Rebelling (though equivocally) against his father,
Ahab proudly asserts his mother’s knowledge of origins against his father’s
ignorance. When Ahab cries out that he wishes to be welded with his father,
we rightly should flinch, because hat is the book’s true wickedness. Ahab, like
Bannadonna, like Melville himself, desires to be one with the Demiurge.

IV

The visionary center of Moby-Dick, and so of all Melville, as critics always

lave recognized, is Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” It is
Ishmael’s meditation, and not Ahab’s, and yet how far is it from Ahab?
Ishmael is himself half a Gnostic:

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in

love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

Closer to Carlyle than to Emerson, this extraordinary sentence is he

prelude to the final paragraph of Ishmael’s reverie:

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and
learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more
strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is
at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the
10 Harold Bloom

very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the
intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless
voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from
behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the
white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence
whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and
at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons
that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide
landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which
we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural
philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely
emblazoning—the worst tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea,
and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of
young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent
in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified
Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover
nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed
further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces
every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains
white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon
matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own
blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before
us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to
wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched
infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that
wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the
Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

Ishmael’s “visible absence of color” becomes the trope of whiteness, “a

dumb blankness,” similar to its descendant in the beach-scene of Wallace
Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn”:

Here, being visible is being white,

Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment
Of an extremist in an exercise . . .
The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach.
The long lines of it grow longer, emptier,
A darkness gathers though it does not fall.

And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.

The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.
 Introduction 11

Melville and Stevens alike shrink from “a colorless, all-color of atheism,”

not because they are theists, but precisely because they both believe in and
fear the Demiurge. When Ishmael cries out: “Wonder ye then at the fiery
hunt?”, he refutes all those critics, moral and psychoanalytic, who condemn
Ahab as being immoral or insane. It was Melville, after all, who wrote two
memorable quatrains, in the mode of Blake, which he entitled “Fragments of
a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century”:

Found a family, build a state,

The pledged event is still the same:
Matter in end will never abate
His ancient brutal claim.

Indolence is heaven’s ally here,

And energy the child of hell:
The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear,
But brims the poisoned well

There the Gnosticism is overt, and we are left a little cold, since even
an heretical doctrine strikes us as tendentious, as having too clear a design
upon us. Perhaps “The Bell-Tower” is a touch tendentious also. Moby-Dick,
despite its uneven rhetoric, despite its excessive debt to Shakespeare, Milton
and Byron, is anything but tendentious. It remains the darker half of our
national epic, complementing Leaves of Grass and Huckleberry Finn, works of
more balance certainly, but they do not surpass or eclipse Melville’s version
of darkness visible.
 M ilton R . S tern

Towards “Bartleby the Scrivener”

W hen Ishmael asserted that the changefulness of life ‘requires a strong

decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it,’ he was
offering a jocular way to handle the shock and horror that accompany the
discovery of our human oneness in our common, mortal victimization by
the conditions of life. “Bartleby the Scrivener” is a tale of that discovery, not
by seafarers in the vastness of natural force and space, but by landlubbers in
claustral immurement.
Some critics are tempted to find stoic heroism in the pallid law-office
clerk and to dismiss the lawyer-narrator as merely a wicked victimizer. Other
critics more wisely sense a more complex connection between the two men.
When I follow the lead offered by a view of Bartleby as stoic hero, I find that
treating the tale as an example of Bartleby’s stoicism results in oversimplifica-
tions and dead ends that do not account for tone and imagery. The insistence
on stoicism is negatively useful because it leads to the conclusion that Mel-
ville was playing with other, deeper aspects of victimization than grinning
and bearing it. Attempts to heroine Bartleby with ideological particularity
diminish the dimensions of this perennially fascinating tale, so central among
Melville’s works. All such attempts seem to arise from the readers’ desires
to identify and secure Melville within their own rather than his contexts. A

The Stoic Strain in American Literature, edited by Duane J. Macmillan (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1979): pp. 19–41. © 1979 University of Toronto Press.

13
14 Milton R. Stern

review of “Bartleby” criticism is a useful approach to critical caveats which

define the directions that future readings might usefully take.
Melville made mirrors. No other writer in English since Shakespeare
has assumed so many protean shapes, and so invitingly, for his readers. “Bar-
tleby” especially is one of the weird pieces in which readers find whatever they
came to seek. The ideological possibilities of “Bartleby” are enormous: the seer
of psychiatric, political, literary, metaphysical, or religious positions is sure to
find in the tale a paradigm for his own advocacy. So, a critic reading critics
becomes like Ishmael contemplating water as the mirror of the self: ‘And
still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not
grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and
was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans.
It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.’
What image could be more tormenting and mild than that of the tormenting,
mild Bartleby? The critical literature concerning “Bartleby” exposes the pro-
cess of interpretative criticism as very often a narcissistic operation in which
each reader sees the tale as a mirror of the Gestalt within his own mind.
But the story itself is a fixed thing; it undergoes no more revision by
Melville. Though each reader shifts it, unlike water it does not shift itself.
Some Gestalts fix more of the story’s details than do others. If much criticism
is foolish, not all criticism is useless. And each critic knows that although he
too will find the key to it all in a version of his own vision, there are priorities
of value to be found in a criticism of the criticism; some visions are better
than others.
The political Gestalt of Leo Marx’s “Melville’s Parable of the Walls,”1
for instance, remains a valuable mirroring because it illuminates more details
within the story than does a set of literary parallels like Egbert S. Oliver’s
“A Second Look at ‘Bartleby,’” 2 which sees the pallid scrivener as a type of
Thoreau. When we move beyond the story to the references the criticism
furnishes, Marx provides a more usably wide focus: his Gestalt expands rather
than contracts the area within which the story exists. For all its gratuitous
contumaciousness, an essay like Kingsley Widmer’s “‘ Bartleby’ and Nihilistic
Resistance”3 fixes many more details in a brilliantly suggestive and useful mir-
ror than does the pendantically narrow angle of vision of works like Mario L.
D’Avanzo’s “Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ and Carlyle,”4 which, in effect, makes Car-
lyle the ghostwriter of “Bartleby.”
When George Bluestone commented on the making of his film out of
the tale, he provided pertinent caveats for critics precisely because he had to
specify details in order to recreate them in another medium, and therefore
had to examine closely the components of his own Gestalt. His activities
led him quickly to a concentration on what was usable for translation, and
this process led him, in turn, to an important conclusion about the puzzling
 Towards “Bartleby the Scrivener” 15

scrivener: one cannot specify in event, in historical of literary parallel, or in

psycho-biography, exactly what made Bartleby the way he was. Bluestone
realized that his film would lose power if it attempted to show the cause
of Bartleby’s depression precisely because in this area Melville provided no
usable details. The film would have to centre on what Melville did provide,
which was the effect of whatever it was that turned Bartleby into Bartleby:
‘To explain the malaise is to explain it away.’5 In accounting for the criticism
available to him it 1962, when he made the film, Bluestone summed up his
findings as follows: ‘Critics, have seen . . . [“Bartleby”] as a tale (1) of exor-
cism, in which Bartleby figures as surrogate for Melville, the artist protesting
the killing demands of hack work; (2) of psychosis, a classic case of depres-
sion, or catatonic schizophrenia,6 with overtones of homosexuality; (3) of the
alter ego, Bartleby as a projection of the death-urge in the Lawyer, a kind of
early ‘Secret Sharer’; (4) of social criticism, a critique of industrial America
symbolized by an implacable Wall Street. Certainly there are overtones of
all these.7 There is, however, another category at least as important as any
that Bluestone has listed, and that is the Gestalt in which the tale is seen as
a metaphysical treatise in which man is a homeless wanderer in a universe of
indifference, meaninglessness, and absence of moral point or purpose. This
last critical vision often merges with Bluestone’s first and fourth categories,
and provides one of the few general areas of critical agreement.
When we look at the criticism that appeared up to the time of Donald
M. Fiene’s bibliography,8 which includes work published through 1965, and
add to it a few pieces published later, we become aware that the “Bartleby”
mirror attracts and reflects more water-gazers in certain areas than in oth-
ers.9 When many disparate individuals begin to fix the tale into one or two
dominant shapes, and especially when those shapes encompass and account
for the greatest number of details in the tale, the cumulative effect is to make
criticism a useful act as it incrementally defines areas of agreement and, more
important, the areas that are problematical and require more and new atten-
tion. Accumulated criticism spotlights the points at which we must try to
shift our own Gestalts and begin anew with a basic experience of the details
in question.
Those who see Bartleby as a type of the writer living in but alienated
by a heartless bourgeois society join at many points with those who see the
tale as a metaphysical and psychological examination of the terrible loneli-
ness that results from a vision of the universe as empty of meaning: Bartleby
becomes the typal figure who repudiates established society, its shallow vision
of human experience, and its concomitant easy beliefs. For both groups of
readers the lawyer and Bartleby represent conflicting opposites: the lawyer
represents the establishment, the unexamined life, the surface vision with its
facile hopes; and Bartleby is his rebellious, stoic victim. Depending upon the
16 Milton R. Stern

critic’s Gestalt, the lawyer represents (1) the selfish capitalist society; (2) the
repressive world of law and order; (3) the world of rationality, (3a) the world
of self-deceiving rationalization, (3b) the world of genteel consciousness; (4)
the world of orthodoxy; (5) the world of surfaces; (6) all of the above. Bartle-
by represents (1) the man who will no longer conform to the standards of the
capitalist world; (2) Christianity, or Christliness, or—sometimes—Christ; (3)
the unconscious, (3a) the hidden recognition of the world as meaningless
chaos, as the absurd, (3b) the lawyer’s conscience, (3c) the world of prefer-
ences, will, and revo­lution; (4) the stoic tragic view; (5) the defeated stoic
writer-artist-rebel; (6) the heroic stoic writer-artist-rebel; (7) the defeat of
the stoic human will; (8) the stoic triumph of human will; and (9) any of the
above that are not too obviously mutually contradictory.
Many of those who see Bartleby as a redemptive challenger of the lawyer
see him as a type of Christ,10 while those who see him as a passive or defeated
challenger may make him a type of the absurd itself.11 The view of him as
Christ is as much a catch-all as any other category, ranging from a rather rigid
and silly assertion that the lawyer is Jehovah, Bartleby is Christ, Turkey is
Michael, Nippers is Lucifer, and Ginger Nut—the poor little kid—is Raphael
(see John Gardner, note 9), to Bruce Franklin’s much more useful and sug-
gestive considerations of the mythic possibilities within the tale (see note 9).
It is also possible to see Bartleby as Christ, even though passive and defeated,
if one sees him as an ‘emasculated’ Christ (see William Stein, note 10). But
whether he is seen as active or passive, almost all critics agree that he typifies
the principle of non serviam in whatever world he is said to inhabit.12 The line
of logic leads critics from the non serviam relationship Bartleby maintains
with his employer to a speculation about Bartleby as a kind of doppelgänger
or, at least, a conscience for the lawyer. Here too there is a range of opinion,
from Bartleby as the embodiment of the principle of the English Court of
Chancery, ‘the Keeper of the King’s Conscience,’ to Bartleby as the lawyer’s
hidden death-wish.13
Three firm agreements emerge from the welter of hermeneutics, propae-
deutics, and ephemera. One is that Bartleby becomes the repudiator of the
civilization and vision that the lawyer stands for. The second is that Bartleby
cannot be defined except through a definition of the lawyer. The third is that
the lawyer, at least at the beginning of the story, is the bad guy. I delay discus-
sion of the first until I look at Bartleby a bit later in this essay. The second
should be obvious, by virtue of the narrative method, without any critical aids.
The third is fixed through a series of self-revelations that every critic who has
examined the lawyer has noted.
The revelations always cited are the lawyer’s ‘conviction that the easi-
est way of life is the best’; that he never suffers any real involvement in
his law cases to invade his peace; that he loves the ‘cool tranquillity’ of his
 Towards “Bartleby the Scrivener” 17

‘snug retreat’ as he does ‘a snug business among rich men’s bonds, and mort-
gages, and title-deads’; that he is considered to be an ‘eminently safe man’;
that he loves being associated with John Jacob Astor, that he loves Astor’s
name, which ‘hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto
bullion’; that he is proud that John Jacob Astor has named the lawyer’s two
grand points as prudence and method; that he is greedy about the Court of
Chancery and is upset only when easy income from the Master’s office is
denied him through dissolution of the court—that invades his peace if equity
and justice do not; that he uses people—his clerks—selfishly, putting up with
their vagaries not out of any really compassionate humanity but only out of
his sense that they are ‘most valuable’ to him; that he is concerned only with
the appearances of things and desires decorum and seemliness at all human
costs; that he tolerates Bartleby at first not out of real compassion or fraternal
feeling, but because to humour Bartleby ‘in his strange wilfullness, will cost
me little or nothing while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a
sweet morsel for my conscience’; that he betrays and abandons Bartleby while
mouthing pious and/or legalistic rationalizations for refusing responsibility
and running away. In short, the lawyer reveals in every way that he is a smug
and heartless man of small vision and hypocritical Christianity, that he is a
respectable, bourgeois cannibal, a conformist to all the surfaces, gentilities,
selfishnesses, and human enormities of established values, law, and order. He
is mindless of pain, soulless to real suffering, compassionless to any possible
vision that sees the establishment’s world as a lie. Whether he discloses his
consciousness as a factor of political, economic, social, metaphysical, or psy-
chological reality, he is a shallow and complacent man of easy optimism.
In detailing the lawyer there is critical agreement that the world he rules
dooms human activity to a walled-in (almost all critics, especially since Leo
Marx, have specified the imagery of the walls: that need not be done again)
round of alternating acquiescence and frustration (almost all critics have
noted the complementary ante- and post-meridian changes in the behaviour
and personalities of Turkey and Nippers: that need not be done again). People
struggle between desire and submission in the lawyer’s world—if Bartleby’s
opting-out is characterized by ‘I prefer not to,’ Turkey’s key phrase is ‘with
submission, sir’—and spend half their lives conforming to their lot and half
their lives raging against it. Yet, the established world is inhabited by people
whose very vision is walled-in for, despite their longings for freedom from
their hated rounds of monotonous sameness in which everything and ev-
eryone is a copy and a repetition, they uphold the system: what they aspire
to is the lawyer’s top-dog position in the walled-in world. The narrator is
interested only in containing and repressing the periods of resentment in
which people do not engage in profit-making labour for the boss, in which
they turn against the symbols of their monotonous lives (Turkey blots his
18 Milton R. Stern

papers in steaming fury, Nippers grinds his teeth and fights with his hated
desk), and in which people have no real individuality—no real names, but
only nicknames—but merely alternatingly duplicate each other with fits that
differentiate them only so that they reflect each other. The lawyer wants to see
all activity and appearances buttoned up into law, order, decorum, and profit-
able routine: everyone is to spend his life copying the law indeed. Whenever
the lawyer confronts Bartleby in a serious showdown, he buttons things up.
‘I buttoned up my coat, balanced myself, advanced slowly towards him . . . ’
‘What shall I do? I now said to myself, buttoning up my coat to the last but-
ton.’ The buttoning is itself an enactment of a contemporary slang phrase,
‘button up,’ meaning ‘shut up,’ ‘shape up.’ The phrase, like the action, is one of
repression, suppression, conformity.
If the walled-in workers yearn, like Nippers, ‘the truth of the matter was,
Nippers knew not what he wanted. Or, if he wanted anything, it was to be rid
of his scrivener’s table altogether.’ However, Nippers thinks that the way to
be rid of his table is by taking on even more of the same, by succeeding, like
the lawyer, by continuing the system, not by opting-out of or by destroying
it. His twin vices of ambition and indigestion (Turkey’s twin characteristics
are, similarly, submission and insolence), are indicators of his impatience with
how far he has come in a system in which he too wants to be a lawyer. His
ambition ‘was evinced by a certain impatience at the duties of a mere copyist,
an unwarrantable usurpation of strictly professional affairs, such as the origi-
nal drawing up of legal documents.’ Thus Turkey, also, when presented with a
token of status—fittingly, the lawyer’s cast-off coat ‘which buttoned straight
up from the knee to the neck’—becomes insolently and snobbishly restive not
with the world he lives in but merely with his position within it. And Ginger
Nut, the little son of a carter, also plays at being a lawyer with his little desk
in the corner. In sum, the ordinary population, in its fits and frustrations and
frenzies and alternations, acquiesces, with submission, sir, to the values of the
world epitomized by the lawyer. Melville’s metaphors for the populace, like
Shakespeare’s, never give us a picture of a revolutionary mass with class con-
sciousness despite several wistful critical attempts to find in Melville a major
literary neo-Marxian voice.
Given the nature of the world’s common inhabitants, the snug lawyer
becomes even more the enemy of human freedom when he blandly and civ-
illy views the inhabitants of his world not as people but in the way he first
views Bartleby—as ‘a valuable acquisition.’ Committing the unforgivable sin
of reducing people to things, he thinks that, like any acquisition, people can
be bought. Twice, while trying to get Bartleby out of his life, he gives him
money. Commercializing all human relations, he is yet smug enough to feel
that Bartleby’s ‘perverseness seemed ungrateful, considering the undeniable
good usage and indulgence he had received from me.’ He ‘trembled to think’ of
 Towards “Bartleby the Scrivener” 19

what might happen to his world if the implications of ‘prefer’ were to become
the basis of human conduct—button up, boy. Contemplating Bartleby’s in-
credible and fantastic plight, the lawyer allows ‘necessities connected with my
business’ to ‘tyrannize over all other considerations.’ He congratulates himself
that his assumptions about Bartleby’s departure will get rid of Bartleby in a
seemly and decorous way: he can do something that nags at his conscience,
but is satisfied as long as appearances and the status quo remain undisturbed.
He indulges in ‘sweet charity’s sake’ only as a guarantee of his own safety—he
continues to buy human beings and human actions. He is constantly con-
cerned that Bartleby is ‘scandalizing [his] professional reputation,’ and even
in the Tombs he tries to placate his conscience by attempting to talk Bartleby
into enjoying the sky and the grass—in prison. In sum, that is the case against
the lawyer-narrator, and up to this point almost all critics agree.14
A quantitative overview of the criticism suggests that this, too, is ground
that need not be gone over yet once more, and can be taken as a given in the tale.
But just beyond this agreement lies one of the rocks upon which criticism splits,
and that is the question of whether or not the narrator changes. Some see that
modifications must be made in the condemnation of the lawyer.15 Generally,
the arguments favouring the proposition that the lawyer undergoes a change of
vision insist (1) that there is no possibility of salvation for Bartleby, no matter
how great his lonely integrity may be, and that there is a possibility of salvation
for the narrator, whose increasingly pained awareness of what Bartleby might
be gives him a new sense of the connectedness of all humanity no matter how
smug and shallow he was at the beginning; (2) that when all is said and done,
it is a vast act of sentiment to see Bartleby as a rebel-hero only, for he effects
no rebellion. All he does is to commit an ultimate withdrawal. So, too, it is
dangerous to see Bartleby as stoic hero for, as we shall see, it is questionable at
best that there are positive moral values shoring up Bartleby’s bearing of his
burden and, in any event, Bartleby does not in any positive way indicate how
life may be borne. Just the opposite, in fact. But the narrator comes to feel the
agony of the world at last: Melville is as much the lawyer as he is Bartleby, and
to divide him into allegiance to only one aspect of himself is to oversimplify
Melville’s sense of reality by substituting a straw-man for the narrator who
actually exists in the story. (3) For all that is wrong with the lawyer, Bartleby,
finally, is socially irresponsible: he leads only towards death. All arguments
that would modify the agreement about the initial self-presentation of the
narrator depend upon the narrator’s sympathetic acts and thoughts concern-
ing Bartleby, upon the tone of the narratorial voice when the lawyer describes
the Tombs and murmurs, ‘with kings and counselors,’ upon the section pre-
senting the Dead Letters Office, and upon the tone of the narrator’s final cry,
‘Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!’
20 Milton R. Stern

Those who see the narrator as unredeemable and a total villain all deni-
grate as maudlin the lawyer’s feelings when he begins to react deeply to Bar-
tleby; they dismiss the epilogue as the ‘thick Victorianism’ of an attempt to
furnish a liberal ‘hard times’ explanation for Bartleby, and refuse to see the
narrator’s last cry as anything but ‘a last sentimental gesture.’16 It is significant,
for instance, that the most uncompromising view of the lawyer as villain not
only sees him as ‘incapable of moral regeneration’ but fails to deal with or
even mention the narrator’s final cry.17 The Dead Letters epilogue is seen sud-
denly and somehow as ‘Melville’s’ rather than as the narrator’s, for to attribute
sensitivity and pained compassion to the narrator would ruin the thesis of
unmixed villainy. In fact, all views of the narrator as unchanging villain sweep
away every instance in which Melville makes the narrator’s villainy problem-
atical without ever distinguishing in terms of tone between the narrator’s
moments of smugness and his moments of pain.
Well, I find that there is no arguing about tone. If there is any one aspect
of literary art that is crucial to comprehension it is tone, and of all aspects
of art it is the one most encysted by the Gestalt in which the reader sees
the parts. As just one more critic I can only assert that a quick juxtaposition
of parts will establish tone. Read the opening passages through the Turkey
and Nippers episodes. Then immediately read the entire Sunday morning se-
quence detailing the narrator’s ‘overpowering stinging melancholy’ as distinct
from the mere sentimentality of ‘a not unpleasant sadness’ and his consequent
Melvillean awareness of human fraternity in mortal woe. Then read the epi-
sode in the Tombs. Then read the epilogue. The juxtaposition must—should—
create at least a sense of uneasiness in the critics who assert that the narrator
never changes. There is, I submit, a palpable shift in Melville’s presentation of
the narrator, and it is discernible at the crucial episode—almost exactly half way
through the story—of the narrator’s Sunday morning visit to his office. Up to
that moment Melville has the narrator disclose only those self-revelatory
ironies and pseudo-sympathies that destroy the lawyer’s assumed image.
He is indeed the bad guy. But for the remaining half of the story Melville
has the narrator vacillate between continued self-exposing hypocrisy and
puzzled concern and pain, with the power of the sympathetic passages—the
Tombs, the epilogue—gaining ascendency over the others. The nature of the
narrator’s consciousness begins to change. Does he still worry about being
scandalized? Does he still try to explain Bartleby away? Is he still self-seeking
and self-protective? Does he still fly into a rage? Does he still try to evade
Bartleby? Of course. That is the truth. It is nothing but the truth. But it is
not the whole truth. In the first half of the story there are no expressions of
pain (astonishment, outrage, anger, and bewilderment, yes, but not the pain
of his own deepest self ’s contact with Bartleby) or of confusion deeper than
those of the law office proprieties. The last half of the story is full of them,
 Towards “Bartleby the Scrivener” 21

including among them such awarenesses as the fact that ‘I might give alms
to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and
his soul I could not reach.’ It is the narrator, after all, who becomes aware
of Bartleby as ‘alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of wreck in the
mid-Atlantic.’ Continuing to act the hypocritical burgher, nevertheless, the
narrator now has his consciousness focused on the knowledge that he has to
wrench himself, almost in tears, ‘from him whom I had so longed to be rid
of.’ Nowhere in the first half is there a physico-psychic jolt of current run-
ning between the narrator and Bartleby as there is in the death scene in the
Tombs. And in the context of the Tombs the grub-man, fittingly named Mr.
Cutlets in the original Putnam’s version, makes even the lawyer’s attempt to
cheer Bartleby by pointing to grass and sky less a matter of blind smugness
than one of pathetic failure. (Food as a pervasive motif in “Bartleby” should
be the subject of a short critical essay, for the story is filled with instances
of food and feeding. The negative relationship of oral gratification to total
separation is a psychological rendition of the central question of nourishment
and sustenance for human hope, for the ability of the human spirit to bear
consciousness and pain and still live and remain human.) The narrator’s reply
to the grub-man, ‘With kings and counselors,’ draws the clear and distinct
distance in insight, sympathy, and pain between the lawyer and the grub-man.
At the beginning the lawyer was to Bartleby as the grub-man now is to the
lawyer. One can refuse to recognize a meaningful change in the lawyer only
by refusing to recognize that the second half of the story does prepare for an
undeniable difference between the lawyer and the grub-man. Were there no
change there could be no difference between the lawyer and the grub-man,
for Mr. Cutlets is but a meaty, mindless, and relatively moneyless version of
what the lawyer was at the beginning. Mr. Cutlets is an official grub inhabit-
ing the same world of grubby morality that the lawyer’s walled-in office does,
and he can no more supply sustenance for Bartleby than can the lifeless bust
of Cicero in the lawyer’s office—the Cicero, no doubt, of De officiis. Yet, at the
end of the story the difference between the grub-man and the narrator is a
qualitative difference, not a mere difference in manner and education, but a
difference in insight and sympathy, which is exactly what is denied by an un-
mixed view of the narrator. Even before the midpoint of the tale the narrator
is not unmixed in his given qualities. Consider the following passage:

He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner,

properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian, then; but no; he never
eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts. My mind
then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the
human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts. Ginger-nuts
are so called, because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar
22 Milton R. Stern

constituents, and the final flavoring one. Now, what was ginger?
A hot, spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger,
then, had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should
have none.

This passage can be and has been fitted into ideologies that polemicize
against the narrator. Yet all such critical ingenuity always misses one hum-
ble, simple, tonal, surface fact: the passage is mildly funny. The narrator has
a sense of humour. The presentation of the clerks discloses an observer with
a sense of humour that makes his paternalistic relationship to their vagaries
not totally and solely a matter of selfish exploitation. Scattered throughout
the tale on either side of the midpoint are small instances of humour which
create the expectation that this same smug narrator might yet be a man
with enough sensibilities to recognize a connection with Bartleby. As that
metaphysical wanderer-narrator, Ishmael, from the very beginning is hint-
ingly given qualities which will enable him to see the Ahab he admiringly
repudiates as an extended aspect of his own human identity, so too that pru-
dentially selfish lawyer-narrator from the very beginning is hintingly given
qualities which will enable him to see that the Bartleby he will compassion-
ately leave is inextricably interrelated with his own human identity. Surely
there is a tonal difference not only between the narrator and the grub-man
but also between the lawyer and all the other inhabitants and landlords and
lawyers who do not for a moment see Bartleby as anything but a nuisance
to be got rid of. The difference between the lawyer and the successors to
his chambers is scanted or ignored by critics who fix the narrator as a single
moral quantity, and for the same reasons that make them miss the intermit-
tent humour of the tale.18
But, as I say, the tonal aspect of change in the lawyer cannot be argued:
either you hear it or you do not. Rather, I would open a question which seems
to me quite pertinent. Why has there been so much commentary on “Bar-
tleby”? Why so much varied and fascinated response beyond the agreement
about the preliminary characterization of the lawyer and of Bartleby as his
opponent? Clearly one answer must be that there is something about the tale
that creates Melvillean nuance; something about this story must offer ambigu-
ity and multiplicities of meaning. But what is the effect of a rigid definition of
the lawyer as unmixed villain? The effect is to remove ambiguity, multiplicity,
and subtlety by reducing the story to a simple tale of good versus evil (defined
by whatever Gestalt). Problems of meaning remain in the superimposition of
Gestalts upon the story and in conflicts between Gestalts—lots of room for
explicators still—but moral ambiguity, moral evaluation is removed as a prob-
lem. And is not that problem precisely the central one that remains to puzzle
the reader and itch in his mind? Remove shiftings of moral evaluations, and
 Towards “Bartleby the Scrivener” 23

all that is left is the working out of equivalents to hang around the lawyer and
Bartleby—which is what, I think, accounts for so much critical cleverness and
narrowness in much of the criticism of “Bartleby.” To see the lawyer as a fixed
value is to remove him as a source of that itch that engages the reader in the
first place and that the spate of criticism undeniably announces. And to re-
move the narrator as a source is to be quite tricky indeed, not only because the
narrator is the only source of information we have about Bartleby but also be-
cause the narrator is the only continuing source of response to Bartleby. To fix
the narrator is to place the burden for all the creation of multiple meaning in
the story on Bartleby alone. Yet, why do all readers come away from the story
with the impression that in the narrator they have met a person—whether
they scorn him or not—and that in Bartleby they have met—what?—a qual-
ity? And embodied in a repetitious cadaver, at that?
There is in this question a serious matter that must be met, but which
is all but unmentioned in “Bartleby” criticism, and that is the matter of types
of characterization. It is neither accidental nor insignificant that all critics
confront the story by characterizing the narrator in social, political, religious,
and economic, as well as moral, terms, and by characterizing Bartleby in typal
or mythic terms. Furthermore, all readers come away from the story with the
sense that it is weird. The sense of weirdness is a result of the same factor that
accounts for the ways in which critics characterize the lawyer and Bartleby.
That is, the lawyer and Bartleby are characters from two distinctly different
modes of fiction. The narrator comes from a recognizable world and can be
measured in terms of that world: he is the kind of character who inhabits
the province of realistic fiction. Bartleby, however, in every way inhabits a
world other than the narrator’s. He comes from the province of allegori-
cal fiction, or romantic fiction, or both. The narrator is a human character;
Bartleby is a metaphor. The narrator is sociologically explicable; Bartleby is
no more sociologically explicable than is Ahab. The vehicle for the realistic
character is verisimilitude; the lawyer, like his clerks, is given human, peculiar
characteristics by which he is recognized, and the verisimilitude of character-
izing human peculiarities is the vehicle for individuation, regardless of pur-
pose—sentiment, rebellion, reportage—in realistic fiction. The narrator and
his clerks come from the fiction of a writer like Dickens. But the vehicle for
the allegorical character is typalism. Bartleby is given metaphoric weightings
by which he is recognized, mysterious qualities independent of verisimilitude
or realistic statistication. He comes from the fiction of a writer like Bunyan
turned into Kafka—the emblematic quality of characterization remains, but
all the rubrics have been erased from the labels for which the character is
beast of burden. The science-fiction and gothic impingement of alien worlds
gives “Bartleby” its weirdness. One does not expect the preternatural or the
preternaturalistic to be accommodated into simultaneous existence with the
24 Milton R. Stern

realistic or the naturalistic. It is the calm intrusion of one world into another
that gives “Bartleby” its Kafkan tones and makes it seem so very modern in
its techniques and surfaces. In terms of action within the recognizable or
naturalistic or Dickensian world the realistic character has dynamic dimen-
sions: his fate and his character may both change along with his insights and
experiences. But the inhabitant of the typal world is fixed. In speech, action,
and possibility Bartleby as character is as rigidly fixed as a corpse. In the prob-
lem of moral evaluation, when the question is, what should the character
do? Bartleby offers the narrator no world in which to do anything. He offers
only the possibility of becoming like Bartleby, which is to say the possibility
of leaving altogether the world of reality as it is defined for characterization
within the demands of realistic fiction. The very nature of the differences in
fictive worlds, fictive methods, and fictive characterization suggests that if
either of the characters may undergo change, it is the lawyer, not Bartleby. I
submit that in relation to Bartleby, it is the narrator who is not the fixed value.
Nor, I should add, does this suggestion make a freak of “Bartleby the Scriv-
ener” within the canon of Melville’s works. The mixing of characters from
different worlds of fictive mode is a constant Melvillean technique and always
accounts for the element of weirdness in his fiction. For instance, is not the
magnificently created sense of displacement, discontinuity of worlds, and dis-
proportion in the confrontations between Ahab and Starbuck attributable to
the fact that they are confrontations between a raging myth and a man from
Nantucket, Massachusetts? And Melville’s typal characters are disconnected
from the humanity of verisimilitude and the world of its realities. What is
Ahab’s past? A hint from Elijah. And as for Bartleby, there is only an un-
certain rumour about the Dead Letters Office. Consistently and pervasively
Melville’s typal characters are not of woman born, have no dimensions taken
from realistic fiction’s world of verisimilitude. They are characters without a
past and without social measurements.19
In fact, what do we know of Bartleby? Only what the lawyer tells us, and
he warns us from the very beginning that Bartleby does not inhabit the same
dimensions as other scriveners, about whom he could write some amusing
and sentimental vignettes. ‘While of other law-copyists I might write the
complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no
materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man . . . Bartleby
was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the
original sources, and in his case, those are very small. What my own aston-
ished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague
report, which will appear in the sequel.’ The appropriate question to ask, since
Melville obviously knew he would furnish no sudden world of verisimilitude
out of Bartleby’s past, is why Melville chose to add the ‘sequel’ about the Dead
 Towards “Bartleby the Scrivener” 25

Letter Office; and in order to answer that question it becomes necessary to

ask what it is we know of Bartleby without the epilogue.
Here again, the body of criticism gives us a solid agreement: Bartleby
is the isolato who has come to the nadir of pallid despair in which all things
are equal (‘I am not particular’) and all things are pointless (‘I prefer not to’).
The ordinary world that demands reasonableness is seen by Bartleby to be a
dead end of meaninglessness that mocks all attempts to copy a non-existent
law and order (‘At present I prefer not to be a little reasonable’). There is at
least this much preliminary bedrock of agreement. The criticism divides on
the identification and evaluation of Bartleby. To some he is entirely heroic;
to some he is mixed in his qualities. As is to be expected, those critics who
see the lawyer as all villainous tend to see Bartleby as all good; those critics
who see the lawyer as a changing quality tend to see unchanging Bartleby as
a quality demanding a mixed response. If we are to be thrown on Bartleby
as the sole source of ambiguity and multiplicity, we find that the criticism
provides ample evidence that we cannot settle on a fixed response to him.
Readers who conclude that Bartleby is the type of the hero, the rebel of what-
ever—art, nihilism, Christian morality, political honesty, metaphysical aware-
ness—never satisfactorily handle those hard stumbling-blocks of facts which
are the specifics whereby Bartleby is shown to us.
Would we have him stand as a life-principle, a rebellion against claus-
trophobic immurement in the dehumanizing world of the respectable lawyer?
Would we have him the representative of true Christianity, true art, or the
true revolution in his nay-saying to the mechanical world of law-copyists?
To do so goes beyond the basic recognition that Bartleby prefers not to par-
ticipate in any activity whatsoever; to do so assigns meanings to him that are
not verifiable in the actual facts of the story. Because Melville is so heavily in-
volved in metaphysical ideas, because Melville makes mirrors, the temptation
is great to assign meanings out of the Gestalt of the critic, but to do that is
to reduce criticism to a game of filling in the blanks: the lawyer equals —— ;
Bartleby equals —— . But when we look at the specific details through which
Bartleby is in fact presented, it becomes a bit difficult to turn our impression
of a pallid, sick, corpse-like, motionless, silent fixed being into the life-prin-
ciple or the humanity-principle or the rebel-principle or the reality-principle
or an active body of moral principles. What are the specific terms that actu-
ally present Bartleby? In this long short story the catalogue surprisingly is
not so long that the salient facts cannot be listed conveniently; and when the
concrete instances are precisely isolated, they become quite instructive in the
revelation of what is repeated.
Bartleby’s movements are most often accompanied by the word ‘gliding,’
and his voice is most often described as ‘mild.’ He is ‘pallidly neat, pitiably
respectable, incurably forlorn’; ‘he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically’; his
26 Milton R. Stern

face is ‘leanly composed; his gray eye dimly calm’; he has absolutely no ‘agi-
tation, uneasiness, anger, or impertinence,’ nor is there ‘anything ordinarily
human about him’; his corner is called a ‘hermitage’ (four times); he is ‘gentle’
or totally silent; he appears ‘like a very ghost’; he is ‘a pale young scrivener’; he
is characterized by ‘his steadiness, his freedom from all dissipation, his inces-
sant industry (except when [in a] . . . standing revery . . . ) , his great stillness,
his unalterableness of demeanor’; his is a ‘lean visage’; he is an ‘apparition’; he
has a ‘cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance’; he is ‘eminently decorous’; he
will not be seen in dishabille and would not ‘by any singular occupation vio-
late the proprieties’ of Sunday; although he has very few belongings, he owns
a blacking box and brush to keep his shoes shined; although he does not care
for money (he does not touch the conscience money twice given him by the
narrator), he frugally saves his salary and keeps it knotted in a handkerchief
‘bank’ hidden in the recesses of his desk; he has no interest in or apparent
need for food or drink; he has a ‘pale form’ that appears as though ‘laid out,
among uncaring strangers, in its shivering winding-sheet’; he is ‘thin and pale’
with an air of ‘pallid haughtiness’; his tones are ‘mildly cadaverous’; he ‘would
prefer to be left alone here’; ‘he seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe
[like] . . . a bit of wreck in the mid-Atlantic’; his triumph over the narrator is
a ‘cadaverous triumph’; he becomes both totally silent and totally motionless;
he ‘silently acquiesced’ in ‘his pale, unmoving way’; and he is ‘prone to a pallid
hopelessness.’
It will not do to object that these are only the narrator’s vision of Bar-
tleby, for everything we know about Bartleby is given through the narrator’s
vision, regardless of the meanings we would affix to Bartleby. Melville could
have chosen to give us, through the narrator, other kinds of details for con-
stant repetition, but he did not. What he did choose to give was a repetition
of details that result in two major categories of impression. One is that of a
silent, motionless, emaciated, pale, cadaverous negativism and withdrawal, a
suggestion of the implacable stubbornness of a corpse, of death itself. The
other is that of a mechanically industrious, mild, and seemly respectability.
Just as the details that present the narrator begin to change at that crucial
Sunday morning mid-point of the story, so they change for Bartleby, too.
On the Tuesday following that Sunday Bartleby announces, ‘I have given up
copying’ and abandons his industry altogether. From that moment the details
of presentation begin to emphasize the characteristics of silence, motionless-
ness, and death much more than those of respectability. In short, just as the
narrator’s responses begin to be mixed with anguish and sympathy, Bartleby’s
characteristics begin to be associated with total withdrawal and extinction.
It is also important to note that from the mid-point on, the lawyer’s
strange sense of private connection with Bartleby also intensifies. ‘I never feel
so private as when I know you are here,’ he says, thinking of Bartleby. The
 Towards “Bartleby the Scrivener” 27

lawyer discovers that it is Bartleby who mysteriously has the unaccounted-for

key to his private chambers. The lawyer has to tear himself away from the
Bartleby he had longed to be rid of. And, finally, when the lawyer touches
the hand of Bartleby’s foetally curled corpse, ‘a tingling ran up my arm and
down my spine to my feet.’ Melville has the lawyer supply ample hints that
Bartleby has an essential, interior, and intimate connection with him. When
one considers that up to the mid-point the lawyer was smugly, snugly, and
actively respectable and that Bartleby was pallidly, forlornly, and mechanically
respectable, there is an opening for speculation about Bartleby as an inver-
sion, or at least a version, of the narrator. And after the mid-point the more
the narrator becomes agonizingly aware of his connection with Bartleby, yet
fails to give up his way of life, the more Bartleby repudiates him (‘I know
you, and I want nothing to say to you’), and retreats into suicide by refusing
any of the food of this world. It is as though the lawyer came to learn that in
seeing the repressed and negativistic Bartleby he saw himself, the logical, or
at least spiritual extension of his very life which offers neither nourishment
nor hope for everything within us that is buttoned up beneath the surfaces of
conventional acquiescence to forms and values. It is just this possibility that
leads some critics to contend that the narrator is changeless, unredeemed,
and unredeemable: he does not, after all, give up his life when confronted
with the apparition of Bartleby. But when religious or political meanings are
affixed to Bartleby, the nagging questions fail to disappear. If Bartleby is the
narrator’s conscience or the spirit of true Christianity, why should he tend
more towards death, isolation, withdrawal, and silence than towards strength,
activity, and expression, as the narrator becomes increasingly tortured by the
pain of sympathy? If Bartleby is the spirit of rebellion against the culture that
is, why should he droop, fail, and withdraw just as the narrator becomes aware
in anguish of a strange kind of justice in Bartleby’s existence—just as the nar-
rator finds he cannot rationalize Bartleby away with charges of vagrancy or
any other charges?
I am convinced that the explications that tend towards a one-to-one
identification of Bartleby and the critic’s political or religious Gestalt fail and
will continue to fail to satisfy the logic, the psychological demands, that the
story sets up. On the level of metaphysical points of view, there is, at least,
a general basic agreement in the critical canon. As the narrator, at least at
first, represents the materialistic world of hypocritical and blind bourgeois
selfishness, Bartleby is the woebegone representative of a view of existence
that denies all the shallow rationality and expectations of predictability, pur-
pose, law, and meaning that the comfortably mindless and selfish commercial
world self-justifyingly assumes to be the nature of the universe: God’s in his
heaven and all’s right with the world. On this level there is general agreement
that the lawyer, at least at the beginning, and Bartleby are the conflicting
28 Milton R. Stern

and obverse sides of human vision and human experience. If one is a vision
of orthodox optimism and institutionalized belonging, the other is a vision
of existential absurdity, the vision of the outcast stranger. This vision reduces
to absurd meaninglessness all the activities of the lawyer’s institutionalized
world. On the level of metaphysical vision the psychological expectations are
satisfied: as there are no alternatives in the institutionalized world for Bar-
tleby’s vision and no point in any kind of action on his part, pallid and silent
withdrawal follows.
But when we parallel the level of metaphysical vision with the tempting
levels of politics, the psycho-logics are not satisfied. On this level the narra-
tor is the capitalist boss who exploits those who work for him, denying them
full human existence and identity; Bartleby is the nay-sayer who refuses to
copy the law-and-order of the narrator’s world any longer. But on this level
the story must remain psychologically frustrating, especially because there is
certainly enough material that ‘fits.’ One might expect the fury of an Ahab
or the activity of a Joe Hill or even the unaware, protesting dissoluteness of
the Lumpenproletariat, but hardly the ghost of a motionless cadaver. The fic-
tive mode from which Bartleby characterologically comes is not that which
satisfies in any way the demands of realistic fiction. On this level “Bartleby”
criticism becomes confused about the difference between the victim and the
victim-rebel. Even if Bartleby were to be seen as victim only, what the story
would then need would be something like a Hurstwood, or a Clyde Griffiths,
but what we have is—Bartleby. And, on the political level, the story certainly
does not psychologically support the view of Bartleby as rebel-hero if the type
of pure victim is to be abandoned.
The same is true of the view of Bartleby as hero-artist. One might think
of Joyce’s silence, exile, and cunning as fitting Bartleby, but the ‘fit’ squeezes a
bit with the cunning, and it does not take too much thinking before one runs
into equally tight fits with the differences between Joyce’s—or even Stephen
Dedalus’s—silence and exile and Bartleby’s. Again, if Bartleby is to be ‘the
artist,’ he is victim rather than victim-hero-rebel, closer to Kafka’s hunger
artist than to Dedalus. And, even at that, unlike the hunger artist Bartleby
has no art of his own (he is himself either a mail-clerk or a copyist) that is
sacrificed: abstemiousness is certainly not treated in Melville’s story as it is in
Kafka’s. All that one can say is that Bartleby finds no food for his sustenance
or values worth copying in the established world—and we are back to the one
area of agreement, which is on the level of metaphysical vision, and which
cannot really be specified in a one-to-one relationship to ‘the artist.’
And if the ideologies of Christianity replace those of politics or artistic
identity as the something further that is to parallel the level of metaphysi-
cal vision, psychological expectations run into further difficulty in the basic
question of why Bartleby should choose suicide just as he has begun to make
 Towards “Bartleby the Scrivener” 29

some meaningful impact upon the lawyer. What the specifics of the story and
the inflexibly unrelenting characterology of Bartleby suggest in tandem with
the strengths and weaknesses of critical commentary is either that there is no
really useful particular level with which to parallel the level of metaphysical
vision, or that if there is, the fruitful directions are to be found in the psycho-
logics rather than the political logic or Christian logic of the critic’s Gestalt.
What remains, I suggest, for “Bartleby” criticism that will not be merely an-
other repetition of what has already been said too often is not a one-to-one
connection between Bartleby and a clinical category of psychopathology, but
an exploration of psychological theory concerning various aspects of the self,
theory that will provide a parallel to the metaphysical connections between
the lawyer and Bartleby as somehow interrelated beings.
The matter of the epilogue bears strongly upon my view of approaches
to “Bartleby.” For those who see no change in the narrator the epilogue is
unsatisfactory because it creates too sympathetic a perspective for the narra-
tor to possess; or, alternatively, the epilogue becomes one more irony in which
Melville creates a merely sentimental perspective with which to establish the
narrator’s shallowness. In fact, the epilogue does sound like any number of
sentimental pieces in the gift-book and periodical literature of the nineteenth
century. But even if one were to isolate a ‘Dead Letters Office’ tradition in
sentimental literature, the basic question would still remain: how does Mel-
ville use it? The fact of the tradition is much less important than its function
within this tale, especially when one is cognizant of the fact that in Pierre,
written only a little more than a year before the writing of “Bartleby,” Melville
had used various elements of the popular sentimental literary tradition for
very unpopular and unsentimental reasons. Let us consider the epilogue for a
moment from the point of view of the writer rather than from the desire for
interpretation.
What were Melville’s necessities by the time he came to the epilogue?
He had promised the epilogue at the very beginning of the story, when he
obviously had the entire tale clearly in mind. One thing is certain: by the end
of the tale Melville has not ‘explained’ Bartleby. He had planned, from the
very beginning of the first installment, not to say what happened to Bartleby
to make him that way. But what could he say to answer this question? What
events could he invent which would be horrible enough? And suppose he
invented something truly hideous enough so that the character of Bartleby
himself were not simply maudlin. In that event, the details of the destruction
of all hope, all meaning, and all purpose—all life itself—would demand the
writing of another story, something like the day-to-day to day-to-day incre-
mental buildup of the horrors of an Auschwitz, or some other hell. But that
was not the story Melville had in mind, and the story he told was the story
he wanted to tell. All he could do was suggest, and merely suggest at that, a
30 Milton R. Stern

vision of some sort that would hint at universal possibilities of dead hopes,
closed lives, pointless endeavours, and missed connections. Moreover, he had
to avoid a hint so lurid that it would shift the emotional emphasis, dragging
the weight of the story and the reader’s attention from all that had preceded
the epilogue to the epilogue itself. Consciously or not, Melville was evidently
aware that a hint that really tried to account for Bartleby’s life would defeat
the very purpose it was there for: to prevent a shift of the reader’s engagement
to a demand for seeing more. The mild, brief universal so lightly hinted about
the affairs of mortal men, the Dead Letter[s] Office, says, in effect, ‘there is
no more.’ That is, the uncertain rumour about the Dead Letters Office at
once universalizes Bartleby and keeps the focus exactly where Melville wants
it—on the effect of Bartleby’s condition, not on the cause of it.
Bartleby as a victim of the established world also comes to seem a vic-
tim of existence itself, and this, I think, is at the centre of what I take to be
Melville’s purpose—a speculation not about stoicism but about victimiza-
tion. In much of his fiction he is anguished by victimization, compassionate
with it, fascinated by it, and yet he also finds that in inexplicable ways the
victim acquiesces in his victimization and intensifies the process. It is to ask
the question, ‘What else could Bartleby do?’ Neither the universe nor the
established world of the lawyer allowed him any alternatives. He could only
assume his victimization and accept the death that is the consequence of it in
his uncompromisingly honest view of a world empty of real alternatives—and
thereby expose the nature of the world. But if the lawyer is to be attacked as
the dehumanized organization man, is not Bartleby presented as dehuman-
ized both explicitly and implicitly throughout the story, saying to the life
around him, ‘I prefer not to live it’?
My contention is that if one is willing to accept the facts of the story’s
characterization rather than attempt to fit those facts into an ideology, one
has to conclude that Melville found not only heartbreak and terror in hu-
man victimization but also something mysteriously acquiescent and repelling
about the dehumanized victim. The human possibilities for inhumanity con-
struct rationalizations for the perverse desire to barbarize the victim precisely
because of his passive victimization: the smug narrator burns to be rebelled
against in order to justify his own sense of separation from the victim: the
bastard is getting what he deserves. I suggest that Melville’s psychological
insights are too keen, when he puts them in the lawyer’s mind that crucial
Sunday morning, to dismiss them as merely more instances of the lawyer’s
selfishness—especially since those insights occur, as they do, in the context of
the true melancholy that the narrator, deeply shaken for the first time in his
life, experiences for the first time in his life. ‘My first emotions,’ he says, ‘had
been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as
the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew in my imagination, did that same
 Towards “Bartleby the Scrivener” 31

melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so ter-
rible, too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our
best affections; but, in special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err
who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of
the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedy-
ing excessive and organic ill’ [italics added]. The lawyer’s naked glimpse of
Bartleby is as though one could imagine the anachronistic possibility of the
good, Christian, prudent, American businessman doing a thriving, profitable
business with the Nazis and suddenly becoming soul-shakingly aware of the
death-camps at Auschwitz. The lawyer’s speech is partly self-defensive. But it
also expresses the horror that goes beyond a defence of one’s self in shallow
selfishness and becomes a fearful revulsion that includes the victim—take it
away, make it not be. Yet what could the victim do but be? Either he must
be, in the face of the observer’s desperate desire for him to go away, not to
be, or he himself must also prefer not to be. The first choice can only increase
the observer’s shock and horror; the second can only increase the observer’s
guilt and remorse because of his own psychological complicity in the victim’s
death. The more Bartleby preferred not to, the more the lawyer wished him
to vacate the premises. The intimate, interior oneness of Bartleby and lawyer
must be contemplated in the intricate and complex context of victimization.
But once a consideration is admitted into evidence, it cannot be used
by the prosecution only. If we ask the question, but what else could he do?
we must be willing to apply it to the lawyer as well. In the longest and most
intelligent attack on the narrator and defence of Bartleby as hero, Kingsley
Widmer (see note 3) concludes that the ‘narrator never . . . changes his view
and way of life.’ It is a charge that subsumes within it the many narrower, less
thoughtful, and less suggestive attacks on the lawyer and defences of Bartleby.
But in terms of Bartleby as the only alternative to the lawyer, what, indeed,
could the lawyer do? To apply equal sanctions to Bartleby and narrator is to
create no contest. As metaphor Bartleby simply is not subject to the kinds of
reality that are inevitable for the lawyer, who is derived from realistic charac-
terology. Arguing from his own political and philosophical Gestalt, Widmer
asserts that because culture is the product of the inhuman lawyer’s world and
serves only to civilize that world’s enormities, against which Bartleby rebels,
it is a sign of the dehumanizing failure of meliorism. As the lawyer’s culture is
a lie in human terms, culture up to the total revolution of Bartleby is to be re-
pudiated. Bartleby’s nay-saying unto death is the truly revolutionary response.
In sum, not only is the present to be put to death as a sacrifice to a metaphor
of the liberated future, but so is the past as well. (Is it not fitting that Bartleby,
who is heroic to Widmer, and who has no emulative present, is a man with no
past?) But to me there is a familiar Melvillism in the fact that, being totally
committed to his vision and thus isolating himself from all connections with
32 Milton R. Stern

the shallow lee-shore present, Bartleby in his monomania leads not to full life
in the future but pallidly to death. It is clear to me that if Melville does not
condone the culture of is, neither does he advocate a destruction of was. Not,
at least, the multiple Melville, the mirror-maker, that we know in the totality
of his works. One cannot make the corpselike Bartleby a sign of life without
wrenching that cadaver out of Melville’s presentation of him and into the
polemics of one’s own Gestalt.
Widmer’s charge is extra-literary, for, like all strong art, “Bartleby the
Scrivener” leads strong readers beyond the literary fact itself, and Widmer is
justified in stepping beyond. In my disagreement with his view I wish simply
to meet him on his own grounds. True, within the story itself, one can find
instances to rebut the charge against the narrator. One instance that is always
either slighted or virtually ignored in attacks on the narrator is the moment in
which he does offer to open his life to Bartleby, to support him, to stay with
him, and to assume responsibility for him: “‘Bartleby,’ said I, in the kindest
tone I could assume under such exciting circumstances, “will you go home
with me now—not to my office, but my dwelling—and remain there till
we can conclude upon some convenient arrangement for you at our leisure?
Come, let us start now, right away.”’ At this point it is more than clear that
were Bartleby to accompany the narrator, he would never leave for ‘some con-
venient arrangement’ elsewhere. The narrator offers no less than a lifelong ‘ar-
rangement.’ And he does not offer gradualism either; the delays, assumptions,
and illusions are gone: ‘Come, let us start now, right away.’ But even with
this evidence those who wish to simplify the story into a totalistic choice of
Bartleby-hero versus narrator-villain can argue that the lawyer wishes only to
get Bartleby out of the public building and into his private home—as though
the connection between public and private, outer and inner, were not the es-
sence of the connection in victimization between the lawyer and Bartleby in
the first place.
So we return to the question, what else could the narrator do? What life
could the narrator change to, other than Bartleby’s? And again Melville gives
us no alternatives other than the lawyer and Bartleby. With this inescapable
given, then, let us abandon the evidences within the story for a moment and
step outside it with Widmer to the arguments beyond. Widmer identifies
the true essence of humanity as nihilism, ‘that simply recurrent human real-
ity—the vital desire to angrily negate [sic] things as they are’ (Widmer, p.
128). It is significant that Widmer feels it necessary to intrude that word ‘an-
grily,’ for it provides the human and psychologically necessary dimension that
the characterologically typal Bartleby most patently lacks. But, given Wid-
mer’s premise, the story ‘reveals the confession of a decent, prudent, rational
“liberal” who finds in his chambers of consciousness the incomprehensible,
the perverse, irrational demon of denial, and of his own denied humanity’
 Towards “Bartleby the Scrivener” 33

(Widmer, p. 119). ‘The attempt to wryly force [sic] benevolent American

rationalism to an awareness of our forlorn and walled-in humanity provides
the larger purpose of the tale’ (Widmer, p. 120). But if we must assume that
the spirit of denial is deeply human, must we assume, then, that it is the only
deep or true humanity, much less the total essence of humanity, as Widmer
assumes? Is not the need for self-deception as human as the desire for de-
nial? Is not the conscious as real as the unconscious? Is not the invention of
predictable meaning as human as the nihilistic response to the revelation of
cosmic absurdity? By what fiats may critics assume, like that man of assump-
tions, the lawyer, total categories of the really human and the falsely human
in human behaviour and in human history and in human perception? What
is true is that we wish to identify as human what affirms life rather than what
denies it, what enlarges personality rather than what claustrophobically walls
it in. It is also true that as a repressive principle the narrator in the first half of
the tale is dehumanizing. But can the denials of Bartleby really be held up as
a model of what affirms life and enlarges personality? For Widmer Bartleby
becomes ‘a small wan Ahab’ who ‘defiantly butts all . . . blind walls’ (Wid-
mer, pp. 106–107). Thus Bartleby becomes an ‘abstract personification of the
attorney’s own humanity’ (Widmer, p. 107), as though, again, the principle of
defiance were the totality subsumed under the category ‘human.’ Will, prefer-
ence, in and of itself, and not rationality—certainly not rationality—becomes
the true human characteristic. The true morality, therefore, is the demonic,
not the common morality. ‘The scrivener provides the human completion, the
rage [and here again, significantly, is Widmer’s response to the demands of
psycho-logic and he invents for Bartleby a characteristic of which Bartleby
is, in fact, completely devoid] to the restraint, the covert rebellion to the con-
viction that “the easiest way of life is the best,” the assertion of human pref-
erences against depersonalized assumptions, and the melancholy pessimism
to balance the bland optimism’ (Widmer, pp. 112–113, italics added). For
Widmer anything less than Bartleby’s willingness to go to death in his deni-
als of the present points away from the true morality on the other side of the
nihilistic revolution and is merely meliorism. Again, there is nothing the nar-
rator can do short of becoming Bartleby. But the good world on the other side
of Bartleby’s pallid and unvarying negations comes from Widmer’s Gestalt,
not from Melville’s story. For not only is Bartleby no small, wan Ahab, he is
the complementary opposite of Ahab, and offers none of the Ahabian rage
that Widmer consequently has to supply for him. Moreover, the imputation
to Melville of millennial views of history is most strange in the context of
invoking Ahab’s spirit. For surely if Melville saw anything in that context, it
was Ahab’s murderous miscalculations about the possibilities of experience.
If our context is Melville’s rather than Widmer’s Gestalt, what we have
is not the total rebel ushering in the ultimate revolution, but the endless,
34 Milton R. Stern

indeterminate continuations of history, as repetitive and as illuminating of

human limitation as the great shroud of the sea that rolls on as it did five
thousand years ago. The totalistic critical view makes demands and mean-
ings that entirely subvert and are deaf to the despairing tone of the tale as
well as to its indeterminateness.
It is precisely at the point of turning everyone into Bartleby, which for
Widmer would be the salvation of the revolution accomplished, that Melville
draws back—the same Melville who looks askance at romantic and nihilistic
versions of history and the human essence; the same Melville who says that
if oysters and champagne are the foods of the body, get you your oysters and
champagne; the same Melville who warmly sees the inescapable necessity of
the lee shore for all that is kindly to our mortalities even as he urges Bulking-
ton to keep the open independence of his soul’s sea from the lee shore’s law-
yer-like slavish and shallow copy-assumptions; the same Melville who would
repudiate the mast-head visions in order to ameliorate the ship’s course with
the first hint of the hitching tiller; the same Melville who has Ishmael learn
that man must eventually learn to lower or at least shift his conceit of at-
tainable felicity. He is, to the point, the same Melville who leaves the stage
to the lawyer, not to Bartleby. Because he is the Melville who is so gnarledly
aware that the only operable human actuality is the despised and limited
now trapped between absolutes of infinity and eternity, he draws back from
the absolutist prescriptions of totalistic literary criticism that would have the
world go even unto death for salvation in the future. He will not annihilate
the limited human existence within mortal history, the source of realistic fic-
tion, for the triumph of the absolute quality of typalism, even when heroic.
Much less does he do so for idea, the bloodless universal, the pallid metaphor.
In “Bartleby” the problems of fictive characterization are the problems of
metaphysics and psychology. If Edwards on the will and Priestly on necessity,
if Locke and Paley are not justifications of necessity that Melville accepts,
the deathlessness of the white whale and the deathfulness of Bartleby are. I
take it that the real agony of the story comes from Melville’s seeing that man
must smash the surfaces of respectable and established vision to become fully
human, but that if, in doing so, truth turn out to be the frozen absurd or the
new vision become the monomania of totalistic defiance, man is plunged into
even more deadly and deathly dehumanization. Both Bartleby and the lawyer
are victims of human limitation; both suffer dehumanizations, and “Bartleby”
is indeed a speculation about the process of victimization. The cosmic truth
kills. The comfortable lies blind us and destroy our hearts that should be en-
larged by woe. Both the defiant vision and the lee shore are needed, both are
inescapable, and to wake from the world of one into the world of the other
is mortal despair, overpowering, stinging melancholy. It is this impingement
 Towards “Bartleby the Scrivener” 35

of worlds that is Melville’s constant technique in mingling the characters of

different fictive modes to suggest his view of the dilemma of men.

Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!

Perhaps it is a deep knowledge that one possible corollary of the total revolu-
tion is generational suicide—that as a possibility at least as much as the good
world that is supposed to lie beyond the revolution of total negation—that
continues to make the masses, who desire nothing so much as a secured
present, the despair of the total revolutionaries. I do not mean for a moment
that Melville endorses the status quo he presents in the narrator’s world. I
do mean that through his vision of Bartleby the narrator is awakened to the
perception of vulnerable nakedness and woe that makes us all monkey-rope
brothers. Paradoxically it is ‘revolutionary’ Bartleby, not the narrator, who is
the one-dimensional man.
When I called “Bartleby” a speculation, I meant just that. To see it as a
polemic rather than as a query is to substitute the Gestalt of the critic for the
Gestalt of the story. To reduce the narrator to a fixed moral quantity is to deny
the extent to which the story continues to nag and itch after you have read
all the criticism that affixes weightings, labels, answers, to what Melville cre-
ated as lasting question marks. To insist upon ideological equivalents for the
details of the story is to lose the suppleness and openness of the story, which
is, I think, why critiques of the story always seem to be so much more rigid
than the tale itself. To fix an ideology upon this tale is to substitute a desire
for a satisfying quod erat demonstrandum in place of the continuing perturba-
tion left by the tale, and which is a mark of its particular art. The substitution
of polemical answers for Melville’s questions is merely to discover the face in
the mirror20—it is, finally, to substitute the lesser imagination behind fixed
quantities for the greater imagination behind the tale. The paradox, as I see
it, is that the critics who dismiss the narrator as merely smug and bad in his
narrow solipsism are guilty of exactly the same sin of which they indict him.
I suggest that as a speculation about human victimization “Bartleby the
Scrivener” is a despairing recognition that neither the lee-shore life nor the
truth-piercing total vision that repudiates it provides adequate sustenance for
our hungry humanity. Yet, a glimpse of the victim’s woe can become the woe
that is wisdom, and, given that, a man is on his way to becoming human even
in his only present world, for that world will never be the same to him again.
Perhaps that is the birth of revolution. (I suspect, in my memory of his works,
that Melville would say, ‘No, no—that is the unending revolution.’) When I
say, then, that we can declare a blessed moratorium on saying certain kinds
of things about Bartleby and the narrator, I do not mean that we can declare
a moratorium on speculations that continue to explore the story both within
36 Milton R. Stern

and beyond itself. All readers provide that ‘beyond’ out of their own times and
visions and will continue to know the headache of trying to explore the story
in that beyond. On errands of contemplation art speeds to—contemplation,
and leaves is—ah, Melville! ah readers!—with our own dead letters offices.
And with kings and counsellors.

No t e s
1. Sewanee Review, 61 (1953): 602–627. This essay is one of the earliest
and most comprehensive of the many articles that see “Bartleby” as a story of the
worker, particularly the literary worker, within the entrapments of a capitalistic,
commercialized society.
2. College English, 6 (1945): 431–439. In the criticism that deals with literary
parallels, Oliver’s is one of the most engaging examples, which is why I choose it to
stand for a genre which, it seems to me, tends to lead to its own closed, walled-in
world as far as ‘opening up’ a piece of literature is concerned.
3. Chapter 4 of The Ways of Nihilism: Herman Melville’s Short Novels (California
State Colleges Publications, 1970), pp. 91–125. Widmer’s Gestalt is one of ‘new left’
nihilism, deriving strongly from Marcuse, especially from One Dimensional Man.
Bartleby emerges as the nihilistic hero who refuses to participate in the lawyer’s
inhuman and philosophically blind world and thereby demonically points toward
the true revolution beyond middle-class ‘liberal’ rationality.
4. In “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Melville Annual 1965 Symposium, edited by
Howard P. Vincent (Kent State University Press, 1966), pp. 113–139.
5. ‘“Bartleby”: The Tale, the Film” in Vincent, ed., p. 47.
6. The psychologist-critic, Henry A. Murray, says that there is no psychiatric
category for Bartleby. ‘Bartleby is unprecedented, an invention of Melville’s creative
spirit, the author’s gift to psychology, a mythic figure who deserves a category in his
own name: “Bartleby and I,’” in Vincent, ed., p. 23.
7. In Vincent, ed., p. 49.
8. A Bibliography of Criticism of “Bartleby the Scrivener,” in Vincent, ed., pp.
140–190, esp. pp. 151–190.
9. If we adopt the necessary luxury of detached hindsight and impose
approximately a ten-year hiatus between ourselves and the twenty-year development
of “Bartleby” scholarship up to the beginning of the past decade, we can derive a
chronological overview from a survey of some selected critics who see the tale as
a parable of Melville himself and/or of the artist generally. These include, among
others, Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (New York, 1929; rev. 1962), pp. 162–164;
Alexander Eliot, ‘Melville and “Bartleby,”’ Furioso, 3 (1947), 11–21; Willard Thorp,
‘Herman Melville,’ Literary History of the United States, ed. R. E. Spiller, et al.
(New York, 1948; rev. 1955), I, 463; Richard Chase, Herman Melville: A Critical
Study (New York, 1949), pp. 143–193, 267, 280; also Chase’s ‘Introduction,’ Selected
Tales and Poems of Herman Melville (New York, 1950), pp. vii-viii; Newton Arvin,
Herman Melville (New York, 1950), pp. 242–244; Eugene Current-Garcia and R.
W. Patrick, eds., ‘Introduction’ and note, American Short Stories (Chicago, 1952),
pp. xxiv, 109–110; Marx, n. 1 above; Norris Merchant, ‘The Artist and Society in
Melville,’ Views, 4:3 (University of Louisville, 1957), pp. 56–57; Harry Levin, The
Power of Blackness (New York, 1958), pp. 187–188; Jean-Jacques Mayoux, Melville,
 Towards “Bartleby the Scrivener” 37

translated by John Ashberry (New York, 1960), pp. 111–112, 158–186; Norman E.
Hoyle, Melville as a Magazinist (Duke University Press, 1960), pp. 85–86, 89–94,
102; Hugh W. Hetherington, Melville’s Reviewers (University of North Carolina
Press, 1960), pp. 265–276; J. J. Boies, ‘Existential Nihilism and Herman Melville,’
Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, 50 (1960): 307–320;
Marvin Felheim, ‘Meaning and Structure in “Bartleby,” ’ College English, 23 (1962):
369–370, 375–376; John Gardner, ‘“Bartleby”: Art and Social Commitment,’
Philogical Quarterly, 43 (1964): 87–98; Murray (see n. 6 above), pp. 3–24; and
D’Avanzo (see n. 4 above). For a view of “Bartleby” as a tale of existential alienation,
isolation, or negation, some of the many essays to consult are F. O. Marthiessen,
American Renaissance (New York, 1941), p. 493; R. E. Watters, ‘Melville’s Isolatos,’
PMLA, 60 (1945): 1138–1148; Alfred Kazin, ‘Ishmael in His Academic Heaven,’
The New Yorker, 24 (12 February, 1949): 84–89; Newton Arvin, Herman Melville
(New York, 1950), pp. 242–244; Jack Ludwig and Richard Poirier, ‘Instructor’s
Manual,’ Stories: British and American (Boston, 1953), pp. 6–8; Merlin Bowen,
The Long Encounter (Chicago, 1960), pp. 133–134; William M. Gibson, ‘Herman
Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” ’Die Neueren Sprachen, 9
(1960): 107–116; James E. Miller Jr., A Reader’s Guide to Herman Melville (New York,
1962), pp. 13, 160–161; Roy R. Male, Types of Short Fiction (Belmont, California
1962), pp. 438–439; Joseph Schiffman, ed., Three Shorter Novels of Herman Melville
(New York, 1962), pp. 229, 235–237; Maurice Friedman, Problematical Rebel (New
York, 1963), pp. 77–98; Norman Springer, ‘“Bartleby” and the Terror of Limitation,’
PMLA, 80 (1965): 410–418; John Haag, ‘“Bartleby”—in for the Camera,’ in Vincent,
ed. pp. 55–63; Maurice Friedman, ‘“Bartleby” and the Modern Exile,’ in Vincent,
ed. pp. 64–81; Marjorie Dow, ‘The Attorney and the Scrivener,’ in Vincent, ed., pp.
94–103; Peter E. Firchow, ‘“Bartleby”: Man and Metaphor,’ Studies in Short Fiction,
5 (1968): 342–348; and Kingsley Widmer, see n. 3 above, as well as ‘The Negative
Affirmation: Melville’s “Bartleby,”’ Modern Fiction Studies, 8 (1962): 276–86.
10. Among several who assign a Christly role to Bartleby are Chase (see n.
9 above); Nathalia Wright, Melville’s Use of the Bible (Duke University Press, 1949),
p. 128; G. A. Knox, ‘Communication and Communion in Melville,’ Renascence,
9 (1956): 26–31; Bowen (see n. 9 above); H. Bruce Franklin, The Wake of the Gods
(Stanford University Press, 1963), pp. 126–136, 150–153, 188–190, 205–206;
Gardner (see n. 9 above); and William Bysshe Stein, in Vincent, ed., pp. 104–112.
11. See Robert D. Spector, ‘Melville’s “Bartleby” and the Absurd,’ Nineteenth
Century Fiction, 16 (1960): 175–177; and Firchow, n. 9 above.
12. See also Stanley Edgar Hyman, ‘Melville the Scrivener,’ New Mexico
Quarterly, 23 (1953): 381–415; and Richard Harter Fogle, ‘Melville’s “Bartleby”:
Absolutism, Predestination, and Free Will,’ Tulane Studies in English, 4 (1954):
125–135.
13. For the first, see Herbert F. Smith, ‘Melville’s Master in Chancery
and His Recalcitrant Clerk,’ American Quarterly, 17 (1965): 734–741. The main
difficulty with Smith’s thesis is that Melville most decidedly does not introduce
the New York Court of Chancery in the context to which Smith wrenches it. For
one thing, Bartleby refuses to engage in chancery work, the addition of which to
his regular business causes the lawyer to hire Bartleby in the first place. Chancery
in “Bartleby” is used not as a model for ideal conscience but exactly as Dickens had
used it in Bleak House. If one considers the dates of composition and publication of
“Bartleby,” the model provided by Dickens becomes extremely visible. Bleak House
38 Milton R. Stern

was serialized from March 1852 to September 1853. It was shipped to and read in
the United States in ‘parts,’ the last of which was a double installment. It was well
known to Melville and his audience. It was reviewed in Putnam’s in November 1853,
the same issue in which the first installment of “Bartleby” appeared. For Bartleby as
death-wish, see Mordecai Marcus, ‘Melville’s “Bartleby” as a Psychological Double,’
College English, 23 (1962): 365–368.
14. For one of the rare exceptions, see Patricia Lacy, ‘The Agatha Theme in
Melville’s Stories,’ University of Texas Studies in English, 35 (1956): 96–105. Lacy
sees the narrator as sympathetic and a voice for Melville, and sees Bartleby as the
long-suffering humanity exemplified in the Agatha letter to Hawthorne, in Cock-a-
Doodle-Doo! and in the sketch of Hunilla, the Chola widow, in The Encantadas.
15. In addition to Lacy, some representative points of view may be found in
Marx (see n. 1 above); Chase (see n8 above); Robert L. Gale, ‘“Bartleby”—Melville’s
Father-in-Law’ Anneli Instituto Universitario Orientate, Sczione Germanica, 5
(1962): 57–72; and F. W. Davidson, ‘“Bartleby”: A Few Observations,’ Emerson
Society Quarterly, no. 27 (1962): 25–32.
16. Widmer, p. 118.
17. Stein (see n. 10), pp. 104–112.
18. I am indebted for some of these observations to Irving Cummings of the
University of Connecticut and Frank Hodgins of the University of Illinois. When
Hodgins’s long-awaited study of psychology and American literature appears, it will
contain the kind of reading I call for in this essay.
19. R. H. Broadhead’s Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago, 1976)
contains an excellent discussion of this problem. See esp. pp. 11–12.
20. I cannot resist the appositeness of Melville’s warning in Moby-Dick. That
book cautions repeatedly that because value and meaning are a projection of human
perceptions, humans must be careful not to identify those values and meanings as
objective, external realities, for all we discover is ourselves. The ‘mild,’ ‘tormenting’
Bartleby is a critical face seen in the mirror, into which some critics fall, thinking
they are catching THE ungraspable phantom of single meaning. Ishmael warns that
‘still deeper’ is ‘the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not
grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was
drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the
image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.’
 S anford E . M arovitz

Melville’s Problematic “Being”

S hortly after reading The House of the Seven Gables early in 1851, Melville
wrote to Hawthorne what is now one of the most familiar of his letters in
praise of the romance. He followed his commendation with profound obser-
vations on Hawthorne’s tragic insights as an artist and on his sense of auton-
omy, even defiance, with respect to those who would in any way restrict his
independence. As has often been recognized by critics, Melville appears to
have had his own artistic ideals in mind at least as much as Hawthorne’s
while writing this letter, just as he had been probing his own motives in
“reviewing” Hawthorne’s Mosses the previous year for Duyckinck’s Literary
World. That he envisioned his own image behind Hawthorne’s as he wrote
to his friend of still less than a year is strikingly apparent in his shift within a
few sentences from the third person to the first, from reference to “the tragi-
calness of human thought” and “intense feeling of the visable [sic] truth” in
“this man’s” “recorded mind” to the hypothesis that although select “Powers
[may] choose to withhold certain secrets,” they can nevertheless not “impair
my sovereignty in myself ” nor “make me tributary.”1
Although the thrust of Melville’s letter is clear, despite the confusion in
person, certain passages are not; highly suggestive, they nevertheless remain
ambiguous and at times even cryptic. One in particular is worth close con-
sideration largely because of its ambiguity in that it testifies to the author’s

ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Volume 28, Number 1 (1982): pp. 11–13. ©
1982 Sanford E. Marovitz.

39
40 Sanford E. Marovitz

ambivalence over the foundation of religious and philosophical Truth as he

struggled with the “Whale” “in his flurry” (L, pp. 128–129; June 1?, 1851)
and moved toward the completion of Moby-Dick. In this passage, which con-
cludes the long middle paragraph of his letter, Melville wrote:

But it is this Being of the matter; there lies the knot with which we
choke ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon
you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam. Yes, that
word is the hangman. Take God out of the dictionary, and you
would have Him in the street. 2

It is especially the word “Being,” which Melville capitalized and under-

scored—“the puzzle of puzzles,” as Whitman would call it a few years
later3—that warrants specific attention. What did he mean by it—for there
is a range of possibilities—in the immediate context of the letter? Also, how
do suggested definitions comport with ideas presented elsewhere in Melville’s
work, especially in Moby-Dick and Pierre? Correspondences between his
ideas on the nature of Being and those from a multitude of likely philo-
sophical sources from which he drew—from Plato and the Neoplatonists
through Coleridge and Emerson—evince the extent to which his mind was
first opened, then thrown into turmoil by the intellectual nourishment he
absorbed during his formative period as a writer. Variously stimulated, frus-
trated, and disgusted by diverse and often conflicting viewpoints, Melville
employed the word Being ambivalently, manifesting his confusion when the
moral and religious Truths he longed to accept conflicted with the empirical
truths that belied them.
Melville may have been applying that word in either a substantive sense
(as a noun) or an active sense (as a participle), for in context it connotes
both. He was unquestionably familiar, either directly or indirectly, with both
philosophical uses of the term. At first, a reader of Melville’s letter is strongly
tempted to accept his use of the word Being as substance, or principle, because
each of the three italicized words in the sentence which follows it appears to
be in apposition, and all three are substantive: “Me, a God, a Nature.” More-
over, his reference to “a God” in that sentence is probably tied to “God” and
“Him” in the second sentence after it, and these latter two words are also
substantive. “Being,” then, appears to be a general term that subsumes the
others.
Is there anything outside of those remarks to Hawthorne which sup-
ports the notion of Being here as principle? Possibly. There is, for one thing,
a letter Melville wrote to Duyckinck about two years earlier, in the spring of
1849, informing him that he had recently purchased a set of Pierre Bayle’s
Dictionary and that he expected to “go to sleep on them thro’ the summer,
 Melville’s Problematic “Being” 41

with the Phaedon in one hand & Tom Brown[e] in the other” (L, pp. 83–84;
April 5, 1849). Although he may have been too busy writing Redburn and
White-Jacket during that spring and summer to become drowsy over Browne,
Bayle, and Plato, evidence abounds that he had read all three well before
sending The Whale to press, soon after his letter to Hawthorne was writ-
ten. Particularly relevant in the letter to Duyckinck is that all three of those
writers looked upon Being as one or more principles of existence. According
to Merton Sealts, Plato was the most important of Melville’s ancient philo-
sophical sources.4 That he was reading the Phaedo at this time is especially
noteworthy because in that dialogue “more than elsewhere, Plato preaches
withdrawal from the world. . . . The theory of ideas here assumes its most
transcendental aspect,” the Rev. Lewis Campbell writes, and “a long step is
made in the direction of pure idealism.”5 It is precisely this withdrawal into
the ideal that Melville is deriding in Moby-Dick when Tashtego, baling sper-
maceti from the case, falls into the severed head of a sperm whale which
throbs and heaves with the Indian’s struggles “as if that moment seized with
some momentous idea.”6 Shortly before the accident, which almost proves
fatal to the harpooner, Ishmael ponders over the suspended “Platonian” head
(M-D, p. 284), with its eyes, one on either side of the vast skull, “effectually
divided” and “surround[ed] each by a circle of profound darkness” (M-D, p.
279), as if the ideal world of the one side and the shadow world of the other
were eternally removed from one another and beyond hope of reconciliation.
This “Platonian” head, with its broad placid brow and an expression “born of
a speculative indifference as to death” (M-D, p. 284)—like that of Socrates in
the Phaedo as the moment of his own death approaches—is metaphorically
conjoined to “Plato’s honey head” (M-D, p. 290), which entraps the unwary
with the seductive sweetness of its thought. In the next year, it would also tie
in with the expansive brow and cool disposition of Plotinus Plinlimmon in
Pierre, though the tone of Melville’s irony then will have become consider-
ably darker and more caustic.
Tashtego’s fall into the “Platonian” head recalls Ishmael’s earlier admo-
nition to “young Platonists” (M-D, p. 139), that they need beware of los-
ing themselves in a reverie over “that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading
mankind and nature” lest they return with a misstep to the cold, mechani-
cally indifferent material world of “Descartian vortices” and drop into the
sea, “no more to rise for ever” (M-D, p. 140). In this passage, Melville may
have been responding less directly to Plato and his pantheistic disciples than
to Thomas Carlyle, whose Sartor Resartus he had borrowed from Duyckinck
in 1850. Time and all things affected by it are but shadows, Carlyle wrote;
“only . . . Time-shadows . . . are perishable; . . . the real Being of whatever was,
and whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and forever.”7 Earlier, in the
whaleman’s chapel, Ishmael, echoing Socrates in the Phaedo (Sealts, diss. p. 50),
42 Sanford E. Marovitz

affirmed this belief when he said, “Methinks my body is but the lees of my bet-
ter being” (M-D, p. 41), but now, with a fall from the masthead in his mind, he
seems to be implying that the “young Platonist” who drop into the sea will
remain there forever—presumably Being and all. Ahab, on the other hand,
retains his Socratic /Carlylean view throughout, asserting on the second day
of the chase that nothing earthly can affect him “in his own proper and inac-
cessible being” (M-D, p. 458). The quest for ultimate Reality beyond time
is addressed comprehensively and ambivalently, of course, throughout both
Moby-Dick, one of the central issues of which is Ahab’s quest for immortality
while locked into a temporal world, and with increasing skepticism in Pierre,
where the principal moral dilemmas are presented and discussed metaphori-
cally in terms of time—specifically the chronometrical/horological conflict in
Plinlimmon’s pamphlet.
The conflicts are resolved in the idea traced by Arthur Lovejoy as “the
Great Chain of Being.” Describing the theoretical background that led to the
development of that idea, Lovejoy distinguishes the two antithetical concep-
tions of God held by the Western world historically under the influence of
Platonism; these two conceptions are identified as one God of two aspects.
First is the absolute and other-worldly aspect, which is perfect and self-
contained, beyond time, space, and human comprehension; the other is that
of the contingent Being, which is this-worldly, creative, generative, depen-
dent upon all other forms of existence for its own fulfillment, and within the
order of time and space. Values based on the first aspect conformed with the
notion of a transcendent spirit to emulate, adore, or obey and an afterlife to
anticipate, whereas values based on the second were in keeping with the con-
tingent, generative nature of the God—that is, they were based on a love of
the world and its possibilities within which divine meaning could be found.
Lovejoy points out, further, that this distinction evolved as a result of two
completely different ideas of what constituted the Good. With respect to the
absolute and self-contained aspect of God, the Good necessarily means that
what is all-perfect can make neither itself nor anything else better than it is;
nor can anything new be created for a better existence because everything is
already perfect. On the other hand, for the creative aspect of God, the Good
requires continuous generation and emanation for, the self-fulfillment of di-
vine potentiality.8 Both aspects originated with Plato in his distinction be-
tween two kinds of supernal existence: universal, essential Ideas, which were
“eternal objects of pure thought”; and individual Souls, which were “everlast-
ing conscious and thinking beings.” Although the two fundamentally dif-
ferent concepts would seem to be irreconcilable, Lovejoy believes that Plato
probably unified them at their highest point (p. 48). Later they would be
more definitely and systematically related by Plotinus.
 Melville’s Problematic “Being” 43

When one thinks of Platonic philosophy, one’s mind usually turns first
to the ideal theory, and it is this aspect of Plato’s thought that most directly
influenced Melville in his writing. While at work on Mardi he was becoming
acquainted with Plato and Platonism in the Taylor-Sydenham translation of
Plato, in Thomas Taylor’s translation of Proclus’ On the Theology of Plato, and
possibly in one or more of Taylor’s translations of Plotinus.9
Although the basic ideas of the great chain of being were initially formu-
lated by Plato and developed to some extent by Aristotle—who established a
continuum of categories among the diverse forms of being he recognized—the
grand concept was not fully fashioned until Plotinus and his disciples added
the principle of gradation to the continuum and thus applied a scale of evalua-
tion upon all of existence from the highest to the lowest. According to Merton
Sealts, Melville may well have read Taylor’s introduction to Select Works of Plo-
tinus, in a footnote to which Taylor provided a clear and extensive exposition
of the chain metaphor, thus showing to what a great extent the idea still held
currency early in the nineteenth century. Taylor’s description of the chain
graphically reveals the extremely important social implications of the concept
as well as the philosophical ones:

In every class of beings in the universe . . . there is a first, a

middle, and a last, in order that the progression of things may
form one unbroken chain, originating from deity, and terminating
in matter. In consequence of this connection, one [small] part of
the human species naturally coalesces, through transcendency,
with beings of an order superior to man; another [larger] part,
through diminution, unites with the brutal species; and a third
part [“a countless multitude”], which subsists as the connecting
medium between the other two, possesses those properties which
characterize human nature in a manner not exceeding but exactly
commensurate to the condition of humanity. . . . In consequence of
this beautiful gradation, the most subordinate part of mankind are
only to be benefited by good rulers, laws, and customs, through
which they become peaceable members of the communities in
which they live. . . . Hence the present efforts to enlighten by
education the lowest class of mankind is an attempt to break the
golden chain of beings, to disorganise society, and to render the
vulgar dissatisfied with the servile situations in which God and
nature intended them to be placed. In short, it is an attempt . . . to
subvert all order [and] introduce anarchy.10

Even if Melville did not see this striking passage in Taylor, with its feu-
dalistic implications, he certainly would have been familiar with the angel
44 Sanford E. Marovitz

Raphael’s depiction to Adam of the chain in which the concept of emanation

is clearly derived from Plotinus, and which just as clearly anticipates Emer-
son’s “subtle chain of countless rings,” the opening lines of his epigraph to the
1849 edition of Nature. Raphael says, in the fifth book of Paradise Lost:

O Adam, one Almightie is, from whom

All things proceed, and up to him return,
. . . created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all,
Indu’d with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and in things that live, of life. [V. 469–474]

And in his reading of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, possibly during

the summer of 1849, Melville found, “there is in this Universe a Staire, or
manifest Scale of creatures, rising not disorderly, or in confusion, but with a
comely method and proportion. . . .”11Moreover, Melville would have recog-
nized that, like Taylor, Browne believed that “to remove one rung from the
Scale of Nature were to dismantle the entire scheme, and abrogate order.”12
Finally, Melville surely read Ulysses’ well-known monologue on “degree”
in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, in which the crafty, Ithacan tells his
compatriots:

O! when degree is shak’d,

Which is the ladder to all high designs,
The enterprise is sick. . . .
. ........................................................
Take but degree away. . . .
And, hark! what discord follows; . . .
. ........................................................
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, a universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce a universal prey,
And last eat up himself. . . . 13

Although Ishmael replaces the wolf with the shark, the basic concept and the
imagery that clothes it correspond to much in Moby-Dick, including one of
the most directly and obviously related appearances of the gradation concept
in that novel, Ishmael’s classification of the crew of the Pequod, from the
“grand, ungodly, god-like” Ahab to Pip (M-D, p. 76), whom the narrator
calls “the most insignificant of the Pequod ’s crew” (M-D, p. 344). Particularly
 Melville’s Problematic “Being” 45

relevant are the chapters entitled “Knights and Squires,” “The Specksynder,”
and, most especially, “The Cabin-table,” in which the Caucasian officers’
dining protocol according to rank is described and followed by the sharply
contrasting behavior, or as Ishmael phrases it, “the almost frantic democracy
of those inferior fellows” (M-D, p. 133), the three non-Caucasian harpoon-
ers. This “almost frantic democracy,” represented by, again in Ishmael’s
words, “the periodical tumultuous visitations of these three savages” (M-D,
p. 133), manifests the subversion and abrogation of order, the discord and
“universal wolf ” feared by Taylor, Browne, and Shakespeare’s Ulysses when
anomalies occur in the chain of Being. Between “Knights and Squires”
and “The Specksynder” five chapters intervene, four of which—“Ahab,”
“Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb,” “The Pipe,” and “Queen Mab”—emphasize
Ahab’s omnipotence on the Pequod. Ishmael describes him in “The Pipe,”
for example, as seated on a stool fashioned of whale ivory and asks how he
could sit there “without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For
a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans
was Ahab” (M-D, p. 114). The fifth chapter of that group is “Cetology,” in
which Ishmael attempts to categorize “the constituents of a chaos” (M-D, p.
117) by classifying the whales, nominally according to size but also accord-
ing to value with respect to the quality and quantity of oil as well as to the
availability of the various species. All of these nine chapters from 26 to 34
reflect the conceptual scheme of the chain of Being.
That cosmological chain is predicated, of course, upon the existence of
one original Being, a benign cause or creator of everything including itself,
and whoever bolds to another principle—a principle of evil—on equal foot-
ing with the first cannot accept the Platonic cosmology in either the original
form or in its diversified development. If a thinking person with a will to be-
lieve cannot accept one of the many variations of the argument alleging that
God created evil for the sake of ultimate good, he is left, then, with limited
alternatives: to accept the principle of evil as a reality, to take existentially the
empirical world for what it is and nothing more, to seek the nature of exis-
tence with the eye and ear of a skeptic, or to turn inward and brood over the
inscrutability of one’s own relation to the cosmos, a turn which often has very
dark and even deadly results.
Pulled toward the latter two of these choices, Melville found confir-
mation of his contradictory inclination toward both faith and doubt in the
Historical and Critical Dictionary of Pierre Bayle.14 In her superb study of
Melville’s use of Bayle, Millicent Bell indicates that Melville was particularly
attracted to the portraits of Zoroaster—whose universe required the existence
of two sovereign beings, one Good and the other Evil—and of Pyrrho, the
skeptic, a contemporary of Alexander who denied knowledge of absolutes al-
together and asserted that all we can know even of things themselves is “some
46 Sanford E. Marovitz

relations they have to one another” (p. 648). Bayle despised the pantheism
of Spinoza, “whose ‘absurd and monstrous hypothesis’ it was,” he said, “that
‘there is one Being and one Nature, and that Being produces in itself and by
an immanent action, whatever goes by the name of creatures’” (Bell, p. 628).
Melville’s skeptical outlook on the alleged benignity of nature led him to fol-
low Bayle’s line of thought and to satirize Spinoza in conjunction with Plato,
for Ishmael hypothesizes that the placidity and speculative indifference of the
sperm whale, evident in the physiognomy of its severed head, gives him the
aspect not only of a “Platonian, [but one] who might have taken up Spinoza
in his latter years” (M-D, p. 284).
Whereas in Pierre, Melville would have his hero tell Isabel that “Virtue
and Vice are trash,”15 shadows in a dream, both before and after that novel he
gave those moral qualities a more positive state of existence and made them
more distinct—even approaching absolutism at times with regard to evil— by
personifying them. Although Fedallah, for example, may be seen as a mani-
festation of a Jungian shadow figure or an alter ego in a psychological reading,
on a moral level he represents both Satanism and the Zoroastrian principle
of evil which Melville found in Bayle, but which is also, though to a lesser
extent, embodied in the character of Ahab. Just as it would be naive to assert
that the evil element in the monomaniacal captain was derived from a single
source, so would it be equally foolish to suggest that it is attributable to one
“tragic flaw” in a colossal mortal being—pride, defiance, heresy, alienation,
the seeking after forbidden knowledge, the lust for vengeance, or whatever.
Clearly, however, the over-application of intellect to matters better suited for
sympathetic or spiritual openness underlies much of Ahab’s evil quest, an
intellectual journey that carries him, in Coleridge’s phrase, beyond the point
of “morbid excess.”16 Though Fedallah says little to him during the course of
the novel, his cryptic prophecies and evil beckoning give Ahab “reasonable”
cause to move ever onward to his quest and ever deeper into what Emerson
in “The Sphinx” called “the pit of the Dragon.”17 The Devil, of course, as well
as being the arch-liar, is the arch-reasoner; Hawthorne’s Young Goodman
Brown learns that to his dismay in a tale which much impressed Melville.
Momentarily Brown has his doubts as he walks through the forest, but his
smiling companion of the ophidian staff tells him, “Let us walk on, neverthe-
less, reasoning as we go, and if I convince thee not, thou shalt turn back.”18
Indeed, the convincing devil here makes an excellent confidence-man.
In the heavens as Milton describes them, there is no need of such rea-
soning, for pure love, acceptance, willingness to serve, and desire to obey char-
acterize the attitude of the angels toward the Lord. When Melville, on his
way to England in 1849, sat up late on the second night out, talking with his
new friend, George Adler, about “‘Fixed Fate, Free will, foreknowledge abso-
lute’ &c,”19 he was carrying on a pastime of the fallen angels, not the heavenly
 Melville’s Problematic “Being” 47

ones. After Satan has left Pandaemonium on his evil mission, some of the
fallen angels who remain behind sit apart philosophizing over

Fixt Fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,

And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.
Of good and evil much they argu’d then,
Of happiness and final misery,
Passion and Apathie, and glory and shame,
Vain wisdom all, and false Philosophic:
Yet with a pleasing sorcerie could charm
Pain for a while or anguish, and excite
Fallacious hope, or arm th’ obdured brest
With stubborn patience as with triple steel. [II, 560–569]

Ultimately Melville’s profound questioning with no hope of satisfactory

answers inevitably led to despair, only occasionally ameliorated by brief
periods of satisfaction or even elation. But the doubts were imperious. As
early as 1851, his own uncertainty is reflected in his fiction through Ahab’s
comment to Starbuck, “Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond” (M-D, p.
144), which directly echoes a passage in his letter to Hawthorne suggesting,
“perhaps, after all, there is no secret” (L, p. 125; April? 16?, 1851).
The skepticism becomes certainty in Pierre, where it approaches sac-
rilege as the narrator describes his young hero’s rapid awakening to disillu-
sionment: “By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we
come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the
lid—and no body is there!—appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of a man!”
(P, p. 285). But Melville goes further in Pierre than his ostensible rejection
of spiritual Being; as Twain was to do half a century later, he treats it with
sarcastic scorn. In Paradise Lost he had read God’s words to His son explain-
ing His nature as “uncircumscrib’d” divinity: “I am who fill / Infinitude, nor
vacuous the space” (VII, 168–170), and he played upon this description when
exposing Pierre’s mockery of religious faith. Awaiting Lucy’s arrival at the
Church of the Apostles, Pierre is bitter over everything that has gone wrong:
a “vague, fearful feeling stole into him, that, rail as all atheists will, there is a
mysterious, inscrutable divineness in the world—a God—a Being positively
present everywhere;—nay, He is now in this room; the air did part when I
here sat down. I displaced the Spirit then—condensed it a little off from this
spot” (P, p. 317). Of this incident William Braswell pointedly remarks, “Dis-
placement of the Holy Ghost by a human rump is hardly the sort of humor
that one finds in an author wholly reverent toward the Deity.”20 That, of
course, is an understatement. Pierre ultimately commits suicide as a result
of his overwhelming rage, defiance, and disillusionment, and by the time
48 Sanford E. Marovitz

Melville had completed his seventh novel, he had already entered what was
to become the darkest period of his life.
If Melville could be specific in his reference to Being as a universal pres-
ence—as he was in Pierre—he could also, even in the same novel, suggest
that divinity was to be found more in energy than in principle. Isabel, for
example, explains to Pierre, “I had been taught no God—I thanked the bright
human summer, and the joyful human sun in the sky [for the kindness of an
old woman] . . . and I would sometimes steal away into the beautiful grass,
and worship the kind summer and the sun” (P, p. 123). Here Isabel partially
reflects Hawthorne’s portrait of Hester Prynne, who is no nature worship-
per but who does lack divine guidance though she dwells in a Puritan com-
munity; her love for Dimmesdale, she reminds him, “had a consecration of
its own,”21 which suggests her finding sanctity in energy and action rather
than in principle, a quality that characterizes Isabel as well. Moreover, if there
is a clear implication of Being as substance in Melville’s letter of 1851 to
Hawthorne, through its proximity to nouns in apparent apposition, there is
also in that letter a possible confirmation of its connoting activity, by virtue
of its correspondence with the word “exists” several sentences above. In that
passage, Melville asserts that the absolutely fearless man “declares himself a
sovereign nature (in himself ) amid the powers of heaven, hell, and earth. He
may perish; but so long as he exists he insists upon treating with all Powers
upon an equal basis” (L, pp. 124–125; April?, 16?, 1851; my emphasis). Here
it seems that the defiant “Nay sayer” is sovereign by virtue of his existence
alone, or in other words, his being a nature in himself.
Where might Melville have found this application of the term? One
of the most likely places is Coleridge’s Biographic Literaria, which he is
known to have read early in 1848. Furthermore, his profound interest in
the writing of Coleridge was maintained through the next few highly cru-
cial years of his career.
For example, when he discussed with George Adler “Fixed Fate, Free
will,” and so forth, he had Coleridge as well as Milton in mind. In his jour-
nal entry for the following day, Melville wrote that Adler’s “philosophy is
Coleridgean: he accepts the Scriptures as divine, & yet leaves himself free
to inquire into Nature. . . . He believes that there are things out of God and
independent of him,—things that would have existed were there no God,”
such as mathematical facts.
Hence Melville was familiar with the theological and philosophical
thought of Coleridge at least two and a half years before he wrote to Haw-
thorne of sovereign natures and Being early in 1851. Although Melville’s
journal entry specifies a nominal God when referring to Adler’s “Coleridgean”
philosophy, Owen Barfield succinctly notes that Coleridge’s faith “was a
Christianity of energy, or . . . of the energeia of the Pauline Epistles; a doctrine
 Melville’s Problematic “Being” 49

of the sovereign independence and initiative of the human spirit.”22 Indeed, a

climactic passage from Coleridge’s Theory of Life (1848) so clearly anticipates
Melville’s phrasing as well as thought in his assertion of autonomous man
that it is difficult to believe he was not himself familiar with that essay by
the time he wrote to Hawthorne in 1851. “Porphyrigeniti sumus!,” Coleridge
wrote, explaining,

In Man the centripetal and individualizing tendency of all

Nature is itself concentred and individualized—he is a revelation
of Nature! Henceforward, he is referred to himself, delivered up
to his own charge; and he who stands the most on himself, and
stands the firmest, is the truest, because the most individual, Man.
In social and political life this acme is inter-dependence; in moral
life it is independence; in intellectual life it is genius. 23

Melville’s introduction to the prose of the British romantic, however, more

than likely came through not The Theory of Life but the Biographia, which
is more philosophically and aesthetically than theologically oriented, and in
the twelfth chapter of which Coleridge, who uses the word in both senses, is
distinctly emphasizing the nature of Being. He writes, for instance, that phi-
losophy is the search for Truth, and “Truth is the correlative of Being; . . . both
are ab initio, identical and co-inherent; . . . intelligence and being are recipro-
cally each other’s substrate.”24 Again, anticipating Emerson’s Yankee brand
of transcendentalism, he describes philosophy as the “science of BEING
altogether” (111, 335), a union of the speculative with the practical. Finally
and most explicitly, Coleridge indicates that he is investigating an absolute
principle of knowing (“cognoscendi”), not of being (“essendi”), for, he says, to
seek the principle of being would mean that “philosophy would pass into
religion, and religion become inclusive of philosophy. We begin with the I
KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed
from the SELF, in order to lose and find all self in GOD” (111, 348). Here
he concludes with the basically Spinozan idea that generated Pierre Bayle’s
derision of pantheism, though unlike Spinoza, Coleridge found Self in a
God of love rather than in an emotionally detached universal divinity.
With this implicit reference to Spinoza, however, Coleridge was in step
with the Germanic philosophy of his time. Several Coleridgean scholars have
shown that he drew heavily from post-Renaissance British and European
philosophy as well as from that of his German contemporaries in attempting
to construct a system of his own. Lovejoy points out that as the two aspects
of the dual God—other-worldly and this-worldly—broke apart in the eigh-
teenth century, God began to be identified with Nature in its progenitive-
ness, its fecundity, and its variety; by the end of the century, God was being
50 Sanford E. Marovitz

thought of as an evolutionary and self-realizing life-force in Nature instead of

as a source of emanation and creation (pp. 316–318). In Friedrich Schelling,
both sides of God remain, but the first is only a vestige, and the second, the
evolutionary life-force, is predominant. For Schelling, God is necessarily self-
actualizing, consistently “becoming,” and thus achieving His “Being” through
that process (Lovejoy, p. 318).
The debt of Coleridge to Schelling in the Biographia is substantial, and
one would be hard put not to say that Melville’s was, also, had Melville been
able to read German. Evidently, what he may have derived from Schelling
came largely through Coleridge, for no little of the German pantheist’s
thought may be found in the Biographia, sometimes translated verbatim, and
certain echoes which appear in Melville’s fiction are little short of astonish-
ing;25 clearly, they document the dynamic effects of the Zeitgeist upon the
fertile literary mind. The correspondences between Schelling’s Of Human
Freedom (1809) and Moby-Dick provide a case in point. Not only elements of
the thought but at times even the images are similar. In that tract, Schelling
explains in very complex and paradoxical language the manner in which cos-
mic or­der and reason have been created from chaos and unreason; although
disorder was then submerged, a residue remains below. Schelling depicts this
with images of light and darkness—what would be for Melville “love” and
“fright”—showing how man’s conceit (which Melville might have personified
in Ahab) is disruptive: “Without . . . preceeding [sic] gloom, creation would
have no reality; darkness is its necessary heritage. Only God—the Existent
himself—dwells in pure light; for he alone is self-born. Man’s conceit op-
poses this origin from the depths and even seeks out moral reasons against
it.”26 Schelling describes the “primal longing” that eventuates in the creation
of the cosmos as a longing which “moves in anticipation like a surging, bil-
lowing sea” (p. 35). Later he distinguishes between universal and individual
Will, indicating that in combination they seem self-contradictory; whereas
the universal Will strives for union, the ego longs for autonomy and freedom.
In describing their seeming opposition, Schelling anticipates Melville’s well-
known image which concludes chapter 58—“Brit.” According to Schelling,
“The terror of life drives man out of the center in which he was created; for
being the lucid and pure essence of all will[,]” this is consuming fire for each
particular will; in order to be able to live in it man must mortify all egotism,
which almost makes necessary the attempt to leave it and to enter the pe-
riphery in order to seek peace for his selfhood there (p. 59). In a similar vein,
Ishmael asks his readers to ponder over the “eternal war” in existence since
the world began:

Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most
docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you
 Melville’s Problematic “Being” 51

not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this

appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man
there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed
by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not
off from that isle, thou canst never return!

Again the “consuming fire” for each particular will presages the auto-
consumptive Ahab: “the very light of life which shines in the depths of
darkness in every single man is fanned in the simmer into a consuming
fire” (p. 70).
In his Stuttgart Private Lectures of the following year, 1810, Schelling
might have provided the philosophical framework for Melville’s ambiguous
letter of 1851, praising the autonomous individual. Schelling wrote that “since
man occupies a middle place between the non-being [that is, “unawakened-
ness”] of nature and the absolute Being, God, he is free from both. He is free
from God through having an independent root in nature; free from nature
through the fact that the divine is awakened [only] in him, that which in the
midst of nature is above nature. One may call the former, man’s own (natural)
aspect through which he is an individual, a personal being; the latter may
be called his divine aspect.”27 Embracing such a philosophy of liberation, a
man could be a colossus, a demi-god—a Taji, let us say, or an Ahab. “I almost
believe,” wrote Friedrich Schlegel, in keeping with the same idea, “that a wise
self-limitation and moderation of the mind is not more necessary to man
than the inward, ever restless, almost voracious, participation in all life, and
a certain feeling of the sanctity . . . of an abounding fullness.”28 From here it
is but a short step to an ebullient Melville approaching the climax of his first
risky romance: “better to sink in boundless deeps, than float on vulgar shoals;
and give me, ye gods, an utter wreck, if wreck I do.”29 This is the dynamic Be-
ing in Melville which pressed him onward and provided the motivating force
behind the pilgrimage of Clarel, the Being which persistently reminded him
of his mortality in a universe where immortality was but a word.
Not only in his fiction but also in his letters of the early 1850’s Mel-
ville betrays his deep brooding over the problem of increasing age—and at
the time he was not much beyond thirty. Among many examples, two stand
out, as much for their context as their content. Responding exuberantly to
Hawthorne’s letter praising Moby-Dick, Melville acknowledged the “panthe-
istic” feeling he had enjoyed while reading it: “your heart beat in my ribs and
mine in yours, and both in God’s,” he wrote. A moment later on an Emerso-
nian tack, he asked, “Lord, when shall we be done growing?” and ended the
paragraph optimistically: “Leviathan is not the biggest fish;—I have heard
of Krakens.” But after only a few lines his mood has become melancholy:
“Lord, when shall we be done changing? Ah! it’s a long stage, and no inn in
52 Sanford E. Marovitz

sight, and night coming, and the body cold. . . . Knowing you persuades me
more than the Bible of our immortality” (L, pp. 142–143; November 17?,
1851). Two months later he wrote to Sophia, pleased that she had recog-
nized a certain allegorical significance, in Moby-Dick and telling her, with ex-
traordinary myopia for Melville, that his next book —Pierre—will be “a rural
bowl of milk,” that he hopes the children are content, and that her husband’s
writing is deserving of abundant praise; suddenly he turns once more to the
theme of mortality, though with a touch of whimsy in the tone: “Life is a
long Dardenelles [sic] . . . the shores whereof are bright with flowers, which
we want to pluck, but the bank is too high; & so we float on & on, hoping
to come to a landing-place at last—but swoop! we launch into the great sea!”
(L, pp. 145–147; January 8, 1852). Even in his more light-hearted moments
the chronic sense of mortality seems to him irrepressibly like a steady bass
rhythm in his consciousness, and it effects at times inexplicable changes of
mood. Gradually the theme became more prevalent in his fiction, as may be
seen in the number of aging protagonists and narrators who people his short
stories of the 1850’s.
The sharp contrasts of mood evident in Melville’s letters exemplify a con-
stant theme in Emerson’s essays—that everything is subject to change but the
intrinsic permanence of the universal soul. “Our moods do not believe in each
other,” Emerson wrote and, as if anticipating Melville’s letter to Hawthorne
of a decade later added, “I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.”30 But
for him, such inconsistency was merely a matter of mood, something readily
transcended in a man of character. For Melville, however, it was not so simple.
Like Emerson, Melville was well aware of the apparent incongruity between
the two worlds of Descartes, that of the “cogito ergo sum” and that of the vorti-
ces (Ishmael’s “universal thump” in an entirely mechanistic and material cos-
mos). But whereas Descartes could find a way to unify them in, strange to say,
the human pineal gland, and Emerson could see them merge in the context
of nature or the metaphor of the circle, Melville found them irreconcilable.
Unlike Emerson, in “Circles,” who said that although “We grizzle every day.
. . . old age ought not to creep on a human mind [because] . . . every moment
is new” (p. 189), Melville could not satisfactorily reconcile the chronometrical
with the horological in terms of life and death any more than he could do so
with respect to heavenly and earthly mortality.
This fundamental difference between them cannot be disregarded, of
course, though it has too often led readers to overlook equally important
correspondences in their thought.31 That Melville was highly impressed with
Emerson upon first hearing him speak is very clear from his letter to Evert
Duyckinck of early 1849; he wrote, “Say what they will, he’s a great man”
(L, p. 77; February 24, 1849). That his next letter, only a week later, is more
restrained can be attributed more to his confidant’s attitude than to a genu-
 Melville’s Problematic “Being” 53

ine change of view on Melville’s part. “Nay,” he begins, “I do not oscillate in

Emerson’s rainbow”; instead, he says, he prefers intellectual autonomy; nev-
ertheless, he acknowledges that Emerson “is more than a brilliant fellow, . .
. an uncommon man”; and he implies further that Emerson is a “thought-
diver” worthy of admiration despite his presumptuousness (L, pp. 78–79;
March 3, 1849). This partial disclaimer was quickly sent after his earlier
letter of unqualified praise had drawn an immediate rejoinder from Duyck-
inck, who charged Emerson with aloofness. Why? In fact, Duyckinck had
never held much affection for Emerson, and during the late 1840’s he was
especially irritated with the Transcendentalist, who persistently refused to ac-
cept his invitation to contribute a collection of essays or verse to Wiley and
Putnam, for whom he was editing the “Library of American Books.” (He had
been especially anxious to acquire publication rights to Representative Men.)32
Melville paid homage to Duyckinck’s sarcastic criticism but still found much
to admire in Emerson, though he could never hold faith in Transcendental
optimism and would occasionally subject it to caustic satire in later years.
And yet the very existence of that satire strongly implies that something
in Emersonian thought continued to remain alive for Melville.33 Why else, in
the late 1850’s, for example, did it warrant such extensive attention as he gave it
in The Confidence-Man? Although perhaps she goes too far in making her point,
Nina Baym touches upon the issue when she proposes that Melville was prob-
ably closer to Emerson than to Hawthorne in his writing because of Melville’s
overriding concern with side moral content of his work.34 Indeed, all three writ-
ers show a profound underlying consideration of truth and faith. “We are natu-
ral believers,” Emerson wrote in “Montaigne” (IV, 170); and in “Experience,”
the great fact in history is not what man believes about the soul, “but the uni-
versal impulse to believe” at all in some Ideal, some spiritual power (III, 74–75).
Melville was not immune to this impulse. When he traveled to England and
the Continent late in 1849, he made it a point to see churches and cathedrals of
all sizes, kinds, and ages—and not for their art and architecture alone, for while
overseas he spent most of his Sundays at church often attending more than one
full service in a day and commenting upon the sermons in his journals. When
he returned to England in 1856, Hawthorne testified to the pres­ence of this
“impulse to believe” in Melville, and the whole of Clarel documents his contin-
uous exploration for a ground on which to base it—a Sacred Ground of Being,
as it were. Emerson points out that although the “First Cause” has been called
many different things through the ages, it “refuses to be named.” “In our more
correct writing,” he says, “we give to this generalization the name of Being.”35
Melville never ascertained the truth of this Being; like Rolfe in Clarel, he felt
“cut off ” from faith, sensing “all the depths of Being moan, / Though luminous
on every hand” (II, xxi, 94–97). Truth for him, well before the writing of Clarel,
was no longer simply elusive, but worse; it was silent.
54 Sanford E. Marovitz

Early in 1877, less than a year after the publication of Clarel, he wrote to
John C. Hoadley, the husband of his sister Catherine, “Life is so short, and so
ridiculous and irrational . . . that one knows not what to make of it, unless—well,
finish the sentence for yourself ” (L, 260; March 31, 1877)—unless, in other
words, there is nothing to be made of it at all. Like Clarel himself near the end
of the journey, with no understanding of the mortal world, Melville asks, how
can one expect to comprehend “that alleged, which is afar?”36 Ultimately, Shake-
speare’s Lafeu, in All’s Well That Ends Well, seems effectively to express Melville’s
philosophy of Being from the beginning of his career as a romancer to the end of
his life; he triple marked these revealing lines in his edition of Shakespeare:

They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons,
to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless.
Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves
into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an
unknown fear. [II, iii, 1–6]

At the end Melville submitted not to fear but to life and doubt; then as
always, however, one feels, if Billy Budd is a fair indication, his submission
was not without reservations.

No t e s

An earlier version of this paper was presented at a meeting of the Melville

Society, Houston, Texas, on December 29, 1980. I wish to express my appreciation
here to Professor Merton M. Sealts Jr., for his care in reading and generously
commenting upon that original version.
1. The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H.
Gilman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), pp. 124–125; letter dated April?
16?, 1851; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by L, followed by page number
(s) and date of letter.
2. L., p. 125; April? 16?, 1851. Some textual uncertainty exists regarding the
quoted passage in that the original letter, which has never been found, may not have
been transcribed correctly by Julian Hawthorne. Nevertheless, his text is the earliest
one available. A question may be raised, however, as to how far one should or can
reasonably go in attempting to grasp the significance of this oddly phrased passage
of questionable authenticity. In response, it may be suggested, first, that such a
question would probably be raised chiefly because of the unexpected and somewhat
cryptic phrasing. Second, Melville was evidently writing rapidly and in a highly
charged emotional state as he drafted this personal letter to a friend and confidant
whose mind he believed to be in intimate rapport with his own. Surely, he could
assume that Hawthorne would catch his meaning readily enough.
Finally, the two alternate readings proposed by Davis and Gilman do not
significantly change the meaning of the phrase in context (L. p. 125 n. 6); the principal
word—“Being”—to which Melville redirects our attention again two sentences later
 Melville’s Problematic “Being” 55

(with reference to “that word”) is the same in all three. Melville is addressing here
the fundamental difference between an ideal substance, divinity, or spiritual energy
underlying existence and man’s verbalization of the same. On the one hand, with
Emerson, he resents the conversion of the living God to a mere word in the dictionary;
on the other, very unlike Emerson, he believes that to assume he or any other human
being—is himself divine would lead one toward self-destruction, for such a conviction
would be too much for a sane mortal to bear. Unless it can be demonstrated that Julian
Hawthorne grossly misread or purposely altered the original text of the letter, there
is no sound reason to doubt that the present phrasing in the Davis-Gilman edition
conveys at least a good sense of Melville’s intended meaning as well as his ambivalence
over the whole matter of divinity in relation to human existence—especially his own.
  3. “Song of Myself,” section 26, II. 609–610, Leaves of Grass: A Textual
Variorum of the Printed Poems, ed. Sculley Bradley et al. (New York: New York
University Press, 1980), I, 38.
  4. Sealts, “Herman Melville’s Reading in Ancient Philosophy,” Diss. Yale,
1942, pp. 35, 120–122, 192. For a rewarding discussion of Melville’s link to Platonic
thought, especially with respect to Moby-Dick, also see Michael E. Levin, “Ahab
as Socratic Philosopher: The Myth of the Cave Inverted,” American Transcendental
Quarterly, No. 41 (Winter 1979), pp. 61–73.
  5. Campbell, “Plato,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (1910–1911), XXI,
814–815.
  6. Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1967), p. 288; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by M-D and page
number(s).
  7. The Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. H. D. Traill (1896; rpt. New York: AMS
Press, 1969), I, 209.
  8. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936; rpt. New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1960), pp. 82–83, 316–317.
  9. Merton M. Sealts, Jr., has made a detailed study of Melville’s knowledge
of and response to Plato and his successors among philosophical idealists, including
a consideration of previous scholarship. See “Melville’s ‘Neoplatonical Originals,’”
MLN, 67 (1952), 80, and “Melville and the Platonic Tradition,” in his Pursuing
Melville, 1940–1980: Chapters and Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1982), pp. 278–336. I am especially indebted here to Prof. Sealts for making available
to me details and observations from the latter essay prior to its publication.
10. Thomas Taylor, ed. and trans., “Introduction” to Select Works of Plotinus,
ed. G. R. S. Mead (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1914), pp. lxix–lxx, n. 1.
11. The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber &
Faber, 1964) I, 43.
12. C. A. Patrides, ed., Introduction to Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works
(Harmonds­worth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 27.
13. I, iii, 101–103, 110, 119–124. Evidently, Melville liked to think of himself
as reading Shakespeare in the manner of “philosophers” rather than as do “those
mistaken souls” who regard him as “a mere man of Richard-the-Third humps, and
Macbeth daggers” (“Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in M-D, p. 541).
14. Millicent Bell, “Pierre Bayle and Moby-Dick,” PMLA, 66 (1951),
628–629.
15. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G.
Thomas Tan­selle, The Writings (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University
56 Sanford E. Marovitz

Press and Newberry Library, 1971), pp. 273-274; hereafter cited parenthetically in
the text by P and page number(s).
16. Leon Howard now believes that Melville may have been familiar with
Coleridge’s phrase as applied to Hamlet prior to completing Moby-Dick; see Tom
Quirk, “More on the Composition of Moby-Dick: Leon Howard Shows Us Ahab’s
Leg,” Melville Society Extracts, No. 46 (May 1981), p. 6.
17. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1903), IX, 23, I. 75; hereafter this edition is cited parenthetically in the text by
volume and page number.
18. Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse, ed. William Charvat et al.
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), p. 76.
19. Melville, Journal of a Visit to London and the Continent . . . 1849–1850, ed.
Eleanor Melville Metcalf (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), p. 5; entry
dated October 13, 1849.
20. Braswell, Melville’s Religious Thought (1943; rpt. New York: Pageant
Books, 1959), p. 71.
21. The Scarlet Letter (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1971), p. 195.
22. Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (London: Oxford University
Press, 1971), p. 8; Barfield’s emphasis.
23. The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. [W. G. T.] Shedd (New
York: Harper & Brothers, 1853), I, 412.
24. Biographic Literaria . . . , in Complete Works, III, 249.
25. Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (London: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 24–26; ch. 1 passim.
26. Friedrich Wilhelm, Joseph Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature
of Human Freedom trans. and ed. James Gutmann (Chicago: Open Court Publishing
Co., 1936), p. 34.
27. Quoted by Gutmann, ed., “Introduction” to Schelling, p. xliii.
28. Quoted and translated by Lovejoy, pp. 304–305, from Ueber die Philosophic:
An Dorothea, in Athenaeum, II, 1, 15–16 (as cited by Lovejoy, p. 370, n. 29).
29. Mardi and A Voyage Thither, ed., Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and
G. Thomas Tanselle, The Writings (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University
Press and Newberry Library, 1970), p. 557.
30. “Circles,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R.
Ferguson et al. (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap of Harvard University
Press, 1971– ), II, 182.
31. Nevertheless, the association of Melville with Emerson’s thought and
writing has been widely studied. A recent comprehensive and convincing account
appears in Merton M. Sealts, Jr., “Melville and Emerson’s Rainbow,” ESQ, 26
(1980), 53–78.
32. See Emerson’s letters to Duyckinck and Rusk’s annotations in The Letters
of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press,
1939), III, 296–297, 301–302, 307–308, 308 n. 108.
33. Sealts, “Melville and Emerson’s Rainbow,” pp. 63, 69–71.
34. Baym, “Melville’s Quarrel with Fiction,” PMLA, 94 (1979), 914.
35. “Experience,” III, 73; according to Sealts, Melville may well have read
“Experience” early in 1849 (“Melville and Emerson’s Rainbow,” p. 63).
36. Clarel, ed. Walter E. Bezanson (New York: Hendricks House, 1960), IV,
iii, 118.
 S andra A . Z agarell

Reenvisioning America:
Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

“H ow unlike we are made!” thinks Amasa Delano, the American

captain of Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” about the weak and sickly
Spanish captain Benito Cereno.1 Through national and racial appellations,
Delano constantly marks differences between himself and others. He per-
ceives the black slaves aboard the Spanish ship the San Dominick as animals;
he so frequently labels Cereno “the Spaniard” that the epithet comes to
imply indelible and tainted national characteristics; he thinks himself pos-
sessed of superior energy and decisiveness that emanate from his privileged
nationality. Delano’s smugness is characteristic of the prevailing American
political and cultural climate of the 1850’s, for Melville was writing at a
time when many Americans insisted on their country’s superiority and saw
its destiny as historically unique. In 1854–1855, when he composed “Benito
Cereno,”2 such feelings were taking political expression in the doctrine of
Manifest Destiny and the Young America movement, which had just had
their heyday, in the American Party and Know-Nothingism, which were at
their peak, and in the glorification of the revolutionary fathers, who were
viewed as having freed America from a decadent Europe.3
In “Benito Cereno,” Melville challenges his countrymen’s Delano-like
sense of superiority by showing how very like other nations America was. In
fact, he turns inside out some of nineteenth-century America’s most cherished

ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Volume 30, Number 4 (1984): pp. 245–259. ©
1984 Sandra A. Zagarell.

57
58 Sandra A. Zagarell

visions of itself by portraying the country not as an historical clean slate but
as the unwitting perpetuator of forms of commercialism, colonialism, and
slavery that began centuries earlier in the Old World from which Delano
holds himself disdainfully aloof. In a painstaking anatomy of the mind of
the American captain, he lays bare the elaborate ideology by means of which
Americans denied the historical implications of such practices, and he pres-
ents slavery and the rationalizations that justified it not simply as discrete
phenomena but as powerful synecdoches for economic activities and cultural
disjunctions that threatened the country’s stability at every level. In short,
“Benito Cereno” implicitly portrays the United States as a nation—to borrow
from a description of the San Dominick—whose “every inch of ground” was
“mined into honey-combs” (p. 138). Like Pierre, it attacks American values
and institutions; like Israel Potter it revises Americans’ sense of their own his-
tory; and it does so, this essay argues, by destabilizing a range of cultural con-
ventions from Americans’ self-proclaimed benevolence to their unconscious
authoritarianism.
Critics have long been interested in the historicity of “Benito Cereno,”
many of them focusing on issues connected with slavery in the Old World
and the New.4 Recent studies have expanded the scope of that interest, see-
ing the novella as comprising a broad reenvisioning of antebellum America.
Michael Paul Rogin’s Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman
Melville, while interpreting the novella in terms of slavery, sees it as a sort of
meditation on contemporary political theory, a realization that neither preva-
lent model of race relations, not the natural rights argument of Abolitionists
nor the paternalism favored by slaveholders and their apologists, provided a
safe and peaceful way out of the violent conflict that, as Melville saw, slavery
would soon produce. While Rogin demonstrates Melville’s concern with both
the character of American society and with the ways Americans conceptual-
ized that character, Allan Moore Emery in “‘Benito Cereno’ and Manifest
Destiny” establishes a hitherto unrecognized historical frame of reference,
American expansionism, and demonstrates how “Benito Cereno” exposes
with almost allegorical precision both the expansionist, anti-Catholic, An-
glo-Saxonist mentality of America in the 1850’s and the ironic fact that this
expansionism mirrored the earlier colonialism of the very country—Spain—
whose New World presence was being contested.5 The fruitfulness of each of
these very different readings attests to how stubbornly “Benito Cereno” resists
being keyed to any single historical referent.6 The present study—which is
indebted to the many critics who have demonstrated the extent and historic-
ity of Melville’s indictment of slavery—profits especially from Emery’s re-
newed attention to historical context and Rogin’s focus on Melville as a kind
of social theorist, and it attempts to extend these arguments by showing that
 Reenvisioning America 59

the novella contains a keen analysis of the cultural dimensions of the ways
social systems are interpreted.
In particular, this paper maintains that in “Benito Cereno” Melville
subjects a panoply of American cultural codes and assumptions to intense
critical pressure in order to expose gaps in his countrymen’s knowledge and
characteristic modes of thought. If his vision is radical, his approach is wide-
ranging. The portrayal of Amasa Delano, to be considered in the first section,
is, as most readers assume, that of a representative northerner, but it is at
once denser and more dynamic than has been realized. Elaborating a com-
plex ideology, it also dramatizes the epistemological fancy footwork Delano
must perform in order not to understand what is amiss on the San Dominick,
and it ominously doubles Delano’s ideology with that of the Spanish captain,
Benito Cereno. In elucidating the means by which Melville structures his
portrait of Delano, this section explores one level on which “Benito Cereno”
discloses what Americans did not know, why they did not know it, and the
potential consequences of that ignorance.
The second section examines a more theoretical aspect of Melville’s cri-
tique in “Benito Cereno,” its presentation of the extensive cultural discon-
tinuities that prevail under an unstable social order. In presenting Delano’s
ideology with a situation it cannot explain—the slaves’ revolt and subsequent
pretense of enslavement—Melville reveals that the conventions whose fixity
men like Delano take for granted are actually exceedingly fluid. In social or-
ders built on inequity, disempowered groups like the black slaves convert such
conventions into unspoken languages of dissent and, when possible, insurrec-
tion. This section focuses on Melville’s explication of the multivalent inde-
terminacy of these conventions. The last section addresses Melville’s indirect
but powerful effort to destabilize the existing social order by undermining
the sort of authority on which it rests. This section attempts, first, to establish
how Melville links accession to social-cultural authority with incapacity for
independent, clear-sighted interpretation.7 For different reasons, none of the
characters, black or white, can genuinely resist the hierarchical social system
that circumscribes him, and therefore none can achieve the kind of disinter-
ested analysis that “Benito Cereno” itself accomplishes. Finally, a compari-
son of “Benito Cereno” with its source, the eleventh chapter of the historical
Amasa Delano’s Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and South-
ern Hemispheres, illustrates how Melville’s composition of the novella itself
amounted to a symbolic dismantling of the kind of authority which perpetu-
ates hierarchical social systems. Melville revises the Narrative to put Delano,
and America, in a context that damns the American system; he also reverses
the real Delano’s portrait of himself as moral innocent, recasting him as a
minor originator of the self-celebrating hypocrisy that allowed Americans to
think themselves historically unique.
60 Sandra A. Zagarell

I
Through the thought processes of Amasa Delano, Melville critiques north-
ern antebellum thought by letting it speak for itself. Delano’s sentimental
racism, which prevents him from perceiving the blacks’ hatred of slavery,
and his expansionist mentality and chauvinism8 are only two of his ideolo-
gy’s many components: the code of gentility, debased romanticism, and sen-
sational melodrama are developed with equal care. In fact, Delano’s ideology
is meticulously keyed to Melville’s America, each aspect being drawn from
specific motifs and linguistic registers prominent in contemporary culture.
Charity and courtesy, predominant among Delano’s values, were cen-
tral to Victorian America’s emphasis on gentility. From first to last, and in
sharp contrast to Melville’s other captains, Delano judges acts and gestures
in accordance with how they measure on a scale of politeness. This code is
conspicuously irrelevant to the situation he actually faces, and his persistent
faith in it obscures the real problem by preventing him from seeing clues
as clues. Critical though Delano is of Cereno’s apparent indifference to all
the routines of ship life and to the arrival of an American rescuer, he labels
such behavior “unfriendly,” quickly ascribes Cereno’s attitude “in charity” to
ill health, and soon thereafter castigates himself for not exercising “charity
enough” in making allowances for the Spanish captain (p. 63). After being
subjected to a highly suspicious cross-examination about security measures
on his own ship, he leaves the suddenly taciturn Cereno alone because he is
“unwilling to appear uncivil even to incivility itself ” (p. 80). Because he values
gentility, he is fooled by the crude parody enacted by the steward Francesco,
whose excessive shuffling and bowing cause Babo to look “askance” (p. 105),
and declares himself pleased with the man’s “nods, and bows, and smiles; a
king indeed—the king of kind hearts and polite fellows” (p. 106). Even at the
end of a day filled with doubts about Cereno’s motives, Delano is gratified
to discover the Spanish captain recovering from an anguished silence, which
the American thinks merely a “recent discourtesy,” and to hear his own name
“courteously sounded” as Cereno advances toward him; in consequence, he
“self-reproachfully” dismisses his suspicions on the grounds that Cereno had
not “meant to offend” (p. 116).
Like the code of gentility, Delano’s chauvinism undercuts his ability to
discover what is amiss on the San Dominick and to analyze his suspicions
about Cereno. Embroidering upon the epithet “Spaniard” to explain the
captain on the basis of national characteristics, he thinks Cereno afflicted
with “Spanish spite” when he appears to have mistreated Babo (p. 105).
When Delano’s suspicions about a plot against him multiply, he comforts
himself with the chauvinistic thought that “as a nation . . . these Spaniards
are all an odd set; the very word Spaniard has a curious, conspirator, Guy-
Fawkish twang to it” (p. 94). Likewise, his racism, identified by most critics
 Reenvisioning America 61

as a northern variety,9 usually surfaces when he is confronted by something

unsettling. It too functions as an epistemological smoke screen, dispelling his
suspicions by reaffirming his comfortable ideology about the blacks’ docile in-
feriority. He assuages his anxieties by envisioning all blacks as “odd-looking”
and sees the oakum pickers, who are disguised figures of authority, as “bed-
ridden old knitting women” (p. 82); he perceives a black mother as a “dam”
nursing her “wide-awake faun” (p. 87). When Babo shaves Cereno, Delano
has what he terms an “antic conceit” (p. 101) that the black is an executioner,
then quickly takes refuge in the platitudes of racism. Attributing the black’s
seditious use of the Spanish flag as a barber’s cloth to his love of color, Delano
lays his own fears to rest once more (p. 102).
Delano also sometimes indulges in a debased romanticism, the clos-
est he comes to a conscious philosophy. This romanticism—reminiscent of
Melville’s double parody of Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence”
and of American Transcendentalism in “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!”10—is linked
to Delano’s racism, enabling him also to view blacks as noble savages. Delano
revises the romantic view of the child as the father of the man: he thinks the
(white) man enjoys heavenly protection because he was once a child. When
his fears of being murdered mount, he calms himself with the thought that
because he was formerly a boy, “little Jack of the Beach,” “some one above”
will shield him from harm (p. 92). Such complacency culminates in his late
declaration to Cereno about the uselessness of drawing conclusions from
their experiences, because “the past is passed . . . yon bright sun has forgotten
it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.”11
Whereas Emerson invokes nature partly as a medium through which the
individual is transported beyond personal and social mediocrity, Delano does
so to avoid the responsibility of understanding human experience. Emerson’s
“liv[ing] in nature in the present, above time” degenerates into an escape from
time, history, and inquiry.12
Despite its multiple components, Delano’s ideology finally fails him,
forcing him, however reluctantly, to modify his complacent interpretation of
the San Dominick as a ship in distress with the darker view of it as a pirate
ship with Cereno masquerading as a legitimate captain.13 The theme of pi-
racy, which dominated antebellum sea fiction in such an influential novel
as Cooper’s The Red Rover, had become popularized and sentimentalized by
the 1840’s.14 It is a sensationalist tale that Delano produces; he “had heard of
[tales of pirates]—and now, as stories, they recurred” (p. 81). He imagines a
lurid scenario in which, “[o]n heart-broken pretense of entreating a cup of
cold water, fiends in human form had got into lonely dwellings, nor retired
until a dark deed has been done,” and recalls tales of Malay pirates who lure
unsuspecting seamen aboard ships that look empty, while beneath the decks
“prowled a hundred spears with yellow arms ready to upthrust them through
62 Sandra A. Zagarell

the mats” (p. 81). These fantasies relieve him of the need to think inductively,
for personally threatening though they are, they do not admit of any signifi-
cant threat to the social order. Moreover, Delano’s sensationalist explanation
of the San Dominick as a pirate ship complements his sentimental racism: not
only are both informed by cliché, but the two are also interchangeable. When
Delano finally discovers the true nature of the blacks’ position, he shifts ef-
fortlessly from sentimentalizing them to brutalizing them as monsters, “flour-
ishing hatchets and knives, in ferocious piratical revolt” (p. 119).
Because they filter out information which could challenge his ideology,
Delano’s modes of perception keep his faith in the social order intact. The con-
tent of his ideology, moreover, actively supports that order. All its parts have
a common denominator, a belief in that unequal distribution of power which
“Benito Cereno” shows as perilously unstable. Thus genteel regard for proper
conduct, the racist justification of the subordination of blacks to whites, chau-
vinistic assumptions about the inferiority of other nations, the pseudo-roman-
tic insistence on the natural order of present arrangements, and even the melo-
dramatic scenario in which a sickly white captain controls a crew composed of
a few renegade whites and an enormous supporting cast of blacks, all depend
on a stable social hierarchy. Delano quite openly advocates such hierarchy. He
assumes that “good order” should prevail in “armies, navies, cities, families, in
nature herself ” (p. 61) and defines that order in terms of the absolute authority
of those at the top. As in so many of Melville’s works, “the top” is symbolized
by the ship’s captain, in whom, as Delano thinks approvingly, is “lodged a dic-
tatorship beyond which, while at sea, there is no earthly appeal” (p. 63).
The American’s complacent piety and smug compassion, then, overlie a
vigorous dedication to the personal exercise of authority: he tells Cereno by
way of example how, in order to maintain discipline, he relentlessly kept his
crew busy “thrumming mats for my cabin” during a three-day storm when
survival seemed impossible (p. 71). As Rogin points out, the rhetoric of pa-
ternal relations characterized nineteenth-century American public discourse
about the organizations of institutions like the navy, the asylum, and the edu-
cational system;15 along these lines, Delano thinks of his ship, with its “quiet
orderliness,” as a “comfortable family of a crew” (p. 64). The authoritarianism
underlying this family model becomes apparent when he observes the con-
trasting “noisy confusion” of the San Dominick. Noting the troublesome char-
acter of “living freight,” he attributes the blacks’ unruliness to the absence of
“the unfriendly arm of the mate, . . . [of ] stern superior officers” (pp. 64–65).
His plan to reestablish order by withdrawing Cereno’s command and placing
his own surrogate, his second mate, in charge until Cereno is well enough to
be “restored to authority” (p. 83) indicates just how important the hierarchy
of command is to him: to depose another captain, however gently and tem-
porarily, is to assume that the proper wielding of authority takes precedence
 Reenvisioning America 63

over considerations of national sovereignty or private ownership of a vessel.

Uppermost for Delano is a strong-minded devotion to preserving a highly
vertical institutional organization.
If “Benito Cereno” lays American ideological limitations bare in Amasa
Delano, it also undermines notions of American uniqueness by depicting
Delano as parallel to the foreigner Cereno in many regards. Each man is a
cultural type—the hearty Yankee Delano is balanced by the effete Spaniard.16
“[B]rother captain[s]” (p. 61), both are merchants, engaging in free trade in
economies dependent on slavery.17 Each is also an established representa-
tive of the social order: Cereno belongs to “one of the most enterprising and
extensive mercantile families” in South America (p. 77), while the historical
Delano is from a prominent New England family whose descendants would
eventually include Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Most important, placed in a
situation which could throw their beliefs into disarray, they exhibit equal fer-
vor in preserving their ideologies and their commitments to social order.
Cereno’s “foreign” ideology has clear parallels in Delano’s American be-
liefs; their values are strikingly similar. When the Spaniard finally speaks in his
own voice, in the deposition and in the third section of the novella, he echoes
Delano’s racism and morality. The American articulates racial differences as a
matter of “species” (p. 90); Cereno divides the San Dominick’s population into
“men” and “negroes” (p. 124). Each man embraces a rigid, absolutist morality,
Delano operating according to “certain general notions which, while discon-
necting pain and abashment from virtue, invariably link them with vice” (p.
86) and Cereno making a similarly fixed distinction between the blacks, with
their “malign machinations and deceptions” and his own position as “an in-
nocent . . . the most pitiable of all men” (p. 139). Even more fundamentally, by
juxtaposing Cereno’s deposition, the second section of “Benito Cereno,” with
Delano’s interpretations of events in the first, Melville emphasizes that for
each captain, the “story” of “Benito Cereno” is an interpretation shaped and
structured by ideology.
Cereno’s narrative is more obviously ideological than is Delano’s in-
terpretation. Cereno’s voice is almost never personal: primarily expressed
through his deposition, it is a voice sanctioned by, and sanctioning, the Span-
ish legal system. His narrative, a declaration “against the negroes of the ship
San Dominick” (p. 124), serves the express purpose of perpetuating slavery.
Despite its seeming neutrality of tone and its apparent factuality, it is a sharp-
ly limited account of what Cereno has witnessed, and its limits are set by
unquestioned assumptions. The deposition accepts as synonymous the legal-
ity and the moral rightness of the whites’ ownership of and trade in blacks.
Thus it presents the statistics of the case—names, ages, status of whites and
blacks—in scrupulous detail, as though the facts speak for themselves, and
speak for the innocence of the white owner, Aranda, and his entourage of
64 Sandra A. Zagarell

clerks and cousins, and against the large group of slaves whose labor supports
them. Although the narrative fails to connect its stated facts about the slaves
with their revolt, it shows that Aranda’s slaves epitomize the atrocities their
race has suffered since the commencement of black slavery, for this group
includes “raw” blacks and mulattos, old men, young men, a black chieftain,
mothers and children, all uprooted, all massed together. Nor does Cereno
ever question how this miscellany developed the resources to forge itself into
a disciplined, purposeful organization. Even the deposition’s ennumerative
syntax, which Melville preserved from the original, discourages the recog-
nition of causal connections among the events it details and thus serves to
preserve the social order, not to inquire why it has failed.
The human results of this repression are manifested in Cereno’s final
mystification of the figure of Babo. Placing Babo in a metaphysical category,
“the negro,” which conflates racial and moral connotations, Cereno haunts
himself with the slave. When he faints under the court’s pressure to confront
the black, his swoon is a double avoidance: fainting in fear, he is also faint-
ing to escape having to explain “the negro” institutionally or historically, as
“Benito Cereno” itself does. Because he chooses to mystify rather than clarify,
Cereno exemplifies the price of this self-elected incapacity. Retreating fur-
ther, first into silence, then into death, he becomes the victim of his ideology
by remaining its spokesman.

II
In contrast to the whites, the blacks have no ideology; they are simply
opposed to the social order. “Benito Cereno” incorporates their stance into
the stunning depiction of the instability of any culture emanating from a
fluctuating social order. The novella demonstrates that the hierarchy and
the characteristics of both race and gender, thought to be natural by ante-
bellum Americans, are merely conventions; it also implies that all culture is
a human creation, subject to change and frequently unstable.18 The novella
pivots upon a major reversal in racial relations, the blacks’ inversion of the
usual master-slave conditions. Presenting blacks as enslavers, whites as
slaves, it goes beyond challenging the slave system’s literal hegemony, as an
actual slave revolt like the Nat Turner rebellion did, to show racial charac-
teristics as cultural constructs. Not only does the intelligence of the blacks
turn prevalent white supremacy on its head, as Karcher and others have
noted, but the doublings between Cereno and Babo demonstrate that racial
dominance is a matter of circumstance. Approximately the same age, one
the former captain of the ship, the other former captain of the slaves turned
leader of the ship, Babo and Cereno encircle each other in a perpetual
embrace in which ruler plays ruled, ruled plays ruler, and from which racial
authority emerges as a question of context only.
 Reenvisioning America 65

By playing on the intense physical contact between Babo and Cere-

no, Melville also dramatizes gender as a cultural convention. Readers have
sometimes detected a homoerotic coloring to Delano’s perceptions of the two
men,19 but grounded as it is in a reversal of power, the relationship actually
reveals the literal instability of gender. In cultures where the status of women
is low, subordinated people are often feminized in order to perpetuate and
to justify their inferiority. “Benito Cereno” frequently refers to nineteenth-
century America’s version of this practice, which blended feminization and
domestication, as in the observation, made from Delano’s perspective, that
“most negroes” are peculiarly fitted for “vocations about one’s person” because
they are “natural valets and hair-dressers” (pp. 100–101). When the blacks
reverse power relations, forcing the whites into captivity, they impose on the
white leader, Cereno, feminine attributes like those conventionally imposed
on them. They emasculate the former master, forcing him to wear an empty
scabbard, “artificially stiffened” (p. 140), and feminize him by casting him in
a powerless role which often renders him speechless, sickened, and swoon-
ing—a parody of the fragile, genteel lady. Cereno evinces the consequences of
his emasculation by responding as though he has been raped. Indeed, his in-
ability to face Babo after the normal order has been restored resembles many
rape victims’ inability to name or confront their assailants.
Melville goes beyond portraying race and gender as cultural constructs,
moreover, to suggest that all meaning in his readers’ world derives from con-
vention, and that meaning itself is therefore unfixed. In the blacks’ revolt,
Melville may represent his increasing sense of the fluidity of meaning which,
as Nina Baym has pointed out, was a ground for profound despair.20 He may
also have seen this fluidity to result from the essential instability of a so-
cial order based on a highly unequal distribution of power. “Benito Cereno”
suggests that even under normal circumstances, at least in a slave society,
conventional ideologies like Delano’s remain coherent only at the price of
vast oversimplification. In reality, mutability prevails. Even artifacts are cul-
tural markers lacking inherent properties. This contingency is half-apparent
to Delano, who muses that the San Dominick’s rusty main-chains are “more
fit for the ship’s present business,” transporting slaves, than for its original
purposes as a war vessel (p. 89). Once the slaves’ revolt has demonstrated the
instability of the social order, many other artifacts also acquire new functions.
Tar is no longer just a preservative but a medium by which the blacks degrade
and punish recalcitrant white sailors (pp. 85, 136). Hatchets—presumably
to have been used by slaves in clearing land for cultivation—become weap-
ons against the whites; the whites’ sealing-spears are also transformed into
weapons.
Even more dramatically, unexceptional parts of the cultural fabric
emerge as unspoken languages which encode mutually exclusive meanings,
66 Sandra A. Zagarell

some of them seditious. Babo’s properly slave-like ministrations to Cereno

appear solicitous to Delano but communicate veiled threats to Cereno; Cere-
no’s moments of faintness betoken ill health to Delano, passive resistance to
Babo.21 Clothing is a particularly mutable form of visual language. Babo’s near-
nakedness projects the image of a submissive, powerless servant, but it also
potently signifies his power and intelligence in appropriating the connotations
of the rags which inscribe his former subjugation. Cereno’s elaborate apparel is
a traditional sign of status and the intricacy of protocol in Spain’s colonial gov-
ernment—Delano thinks his “toilette . . . not beyond the style of the day among
South Americans of his class” (pp. 68–69)—as well as a token of the wealth
derived from an economy dependent on slavery. In his present circumstances,
however, his adornment also bespeaks the blacks’ ability to convert these tradi-
tional signs into the means of deceiving one white while degrading another.
Meaning within a culture ultimately rests on a consensus. When basic op-
position to the social order prevails, as it is bound to in a slave society, the lack
of such consensus produces radically divergent assumptions about meaning and
communication. Those who are privileged, like Delano, will simply assume—
as Delano does—that their culture is stable and determinate; disempowered
groups such as black slaves will be alert to and intent on exploiting every am-
biguity. “Benito Cereno” not only reveals cultural markers such as gestures and
clothes to be heavily laden codes of communication, but it shows the blacks’
genius in disrupting the meaning of such markers. They so increase the normal
ambiguity of gestures, for example, that they seem on the verge of reversing
commonly accepted meanings altogether. Thus Francesco’s smiles and bows
appeal to Delano, mock Cereno, and signal pleasure in their shared masquer-
ade to Babo; Atufal appears strategically as a shackled slave to calm Delano,
alarm Cereno, and support Babo. And Babo’s every smile threatens Cereno
while reassuring Delano on one level and the other blacks on quite another.
After he cuts Cereno while shaving him, Babo’s body language becomes strik-
ingly multivalent. As he directs the Spaniard to answer questions about the San
Dominick’s difficulties, “his face was turned half round, so as to be alike visible to
the Spaniard and the American, and seemed, by its expression, to hint, that he
was desirous, by getting his master to go on with the conversation, considerately
to withdraw his attention from the recent annoying accident” (p. 103). Babo’s
single gesture conveys consideration to Delano, menace and malice to Cereno;
on another level, it communicates to the reader Babo’s extraordinary skill at
appropriating and subverting all the nuances of the traditional role of the black
body servant. More generally, his practices also cast new light on the double
signification frequently employed by American slaves, “puttin’ on ole Massa.”
Being in a position of unusual power, Babo can pitch his gestures to three dif-
ferent readings at once. If this slave’s silent communication comprises a richer
 Reenvisioning America 67

language than Delano’s spoken platitudes, it also implies that a slaveholding

society is a minefield of reversed meanings and unuttered languages.

III
The assumption in “Benito Cereno” that culture and ideology are imperiled
human creations extends with equally destabilizing results to Americans’
attitudes toward authority. Not only laying bare the authoritarianism of a
Delano, the novella also implies that Americans accede to authority on all
levels, from the literal authority of public officials and public records to the
more abstract, even more powerfully culture-shaping authority which inheres
in standard versions of the country’s origins and values. Such accession bears
heavily on the country’s present and future, for unquestioning acceptance
of authority discourages disinterested interpretation. Interpretation is part
of the process of producing a literal or metaphoric text, and these texts—
Cereno’s deposition, the blacks’ masquerade, the real Delano’s Narrative,
Melville’s novella—are instrumental in perpetuating or modifying social
structures. This conception of authority anticipates twentieth-century asso-
ciations between authority and authorship; it is also distinctly political. The
white captains accept all institutionalized authority because of their privi-
leged status; though the blacks contest such authority, taking advantage of
the instability of existing cultural codes, the literal power of the social order
denies them the possibility of true creative achievement.
The backbone of the ideologies which limit the white captains’ inter-
pretations is the equation of authority with meaning. For both men, the of-
ficial truth is the complete truth. When Delano boards the San Dominick,
he encounters a “shadowy tableau” that seems “unreal” (p. 59) and in need
of interpretation, but he sees only the need to get the facts, “details” (p. 65).
Taking for granted that “the best account would, doubtless, be given by the
captain” (p. 65)—the proper authority—he seeks out Cereno. When Cereno
finally gives all the details that Delano seeks, he does so in as authoritative
a mode as the American could possibly desire, speaking under oath and be-
fore the Spanish king’s councilor. “Benito Cereno” of course, repudiates such
modes of interpretation: after Cereno’s testimony is given, the narrator even
asserts that “If the Deposition have served as the key to fit into the lock of
the complications which precede it, then . . . the San Dominick’s hull lies open
today” (p. 138). By allying themselves with the authority they serve, embody,
and perpetuate, Delano and Cereno have ceded to that authority control of
their own capacity to interpret. Rather than unlock the complications of the
actual events on the San Dominick, rather than face the multivalent mean-
ings of the symbols of lock and key to which the narrator also alludes here,
they will turn out documents like Cereno’s deposition—and Delano’s Narra-
tive—which dutifully enshrine the status quo.
68 Sandra A. Zagarell

So heavy is the weight of social authority that conscious interpreters

must also always take it into account. They, however, can question the author-
ity which upholds the existing order, turning it against itself through illicit
acts of creative rewriting. In one sense, as commentators have suggested, both
Melville and Babo perform these acts,22 Melville rewriting Chapter Eleven
of Delano’s Narrative, Babo attempting to refashion a socio-cultural script
which embodies the social order. Indeed, Babo’s consummate artistry appears
to grant him stunning success. Readers have often remarked on how the no-
vella’s theatricality reproduces the slave system in order to destroy it. With its
tableaux, its stark images, the ominous symmetry of the four oakum pickers
and the six hatchet-sharpeners, “Benito Cereno” looks forward uncannily to
the subversive metamorphoses of Black Arts agitation-propaganda dramas
such as Amiri Baraka’s “Slave Ship.” Babo is brilliant as the impressario of
the San Dominick’s drama because he can read through the white authorities
and therefore thwart their objective of sustaining slavery. Yet he can achieve
no authority on his own terms. As a social actor, he essentially perpetuates
the slave system; he destroys the authority of the whites only to claim the
same authority for himself, unleashing terror and murder likened to those of
the Inquisition, while his later plan to pirate Delano’s ship would entangle
him in an economic web which ties free enterprise to slavery. His script, too,
duplicates rather than goes beyond the old order—it is, for all its grandeur,
only a masquerade. Melville makes clear that Babo can produce no genuinely
new rewritings of the old script because he is completely circumscribed by the
slave system. Slavery prevails so thoroughly in South America that the blacks
are afraid to venture on shore for desperately needed water; moreover, though
they recognize that their only chance for freedom lies in getting to a “negro
country” (p. 126), their choice, Senegal is—in a detail Melville added to his
source—a country where blacks enslave blacks.
All of the novella’s characters are, then, claustrally restricted by pre-
existing authority. Discourse within “Benito Cereno,” with its echoes and
tautologies, reflects this entrapment,23 as do the images of chains and knots,
the recurring motifs of becalmed ships and becalmed minds, the many types
of doubling. The central symbol of the stern-piece explicates the levels of
this confinement. The “shield-like” “oval,” “intricately carved with the arms
of Castile and Leon,” is decorated with mythological figures, the central
pair consisting of a masked figure whose foot grinds the “prostrate neck of a
writhing figure, likewise masked” (p. 58). The stern-piece distills the essence
of the social structure. All the characters literally or figuratively play the
roles of both victors and victims. No other roles are structurally possible. The
antiquity of the stern-piece, moreover, bespeaks the longevity of the social
relations it depicts, for though the might of Castile and Leon had dimin-
ished by 1799, when “Benito Cereno” takes place, its characters continue to
 Reenvisioning America 69

enact the traditional historic parts. That Delano finally and most conspicu-
ously assumes the posture of victor, clutching the unconscious Cereno and
grinding the “prostrate” Babo with his foot (p. 118), suggests that Americans
are the latest to inherit this social structure. Finally, the medallion’s status as a
heraldic device reflects on the functions of official art: as a synecdoche of the
social order which predates the characters, it prescribes the roles they must
play. The social system becomes, in effect, a text which writes the characters.
All of them are inside it, imprisoned within its oval. No one, not even Babo,
can rewrite it.
In contrast, Melville himself, as an author, inherits a tangible, literal
document, not a social script. Delano’s Narrative purports to be a representa-
tion of certain historical events, but it is, as Melville recognizes, an interpre-
tation, open to reinterpretation. While he must reckon with its authority, he
can transform such reckoning into recreation. Taking off from Moby-Dick’s
playful spoofing of its authorities, he enters into a subversive dialogue with
Delano’s Narrative which furthers the project he had undertaken in Israel
Potter: he turns an historical document reflective of America’s sense of iden-
tity on its head. In both pieces he also specifically undermines the authority
of American forefathers, though “Benito Cereno” attacks a minor progeni-
tor rather than such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and John Paul Jones;
Delano’s ancestor, Phillipe de la Noye, came to America in 1621, and both
Delano and his father fought in the Revolutionary War.24 Highlighting the
gaps in Delano’s Narrative and playing on its unacknowledged inconsisten-
cies, Melville indicts Delano as a minor author of the Americanism which
was straightjacketing his contemporaries.
The major hiatus in the original Delano’s Narrative is its lack of historical
consciousness; its author was given instead to reflecting on the transcultural,
transhistorical traits common to all humanity.25 This same lack was implicit
in the assumption of many of the country’s founders that America’s connec-
tion with Europe had been contractual, not organically historical. It was also
shared by Melville’s contemporaries, whose sense of history was consonant
with their belief that they were superior to the rest of the Western world; as
George B. Forgie and others have suggested, they were inclined to foreshorten
America’s past by imagining the founding fathers as their first ancestors.26 For
many, their greatest tie to Europe consisted in freeing themselves from it.
Melville rebukes the ahistoricism of his source and of his contemporaries by
weaving into his text a rich tapestry of historical allusion and analogy which
challenges the idea of America’s uniqueness. It specifies unsettling similari-
ties between the Old and New Worlds and locates America’s history within
a general expansionist trend among Western nations that began with the first
great European marriage between commerce and the sea in Venice.
70 Sandra A. Zagarell

Melville’s framework far exceeds the Spanish-American connection

critics have reconstructed.27 Embellishing Delano’s Narrative by blending
expansive analogies with compressed symbols, Melville fuses mercantilism,
free enterprise, and the slave trade. The novella’s comparisons range through-
out modern Western history, often pivoting, as if in warning, on the rebel-
liousness of subordinated populations.28 At the same time, the Spanish slave
ship—rechristened the San Dominick to allude to the slaves’ revolts in Santo
Domingo—becomes a condensation of this revisionary history. A “Spanish
merchantman,” the San Dominick is a “very large, and, in its time, a very fine
vessel, such as in those days were at intervals encountered along that main;
sometimes superseded Acapulco treasure-ships, or retired frigates of the Span-
ish king’s navy, which, like superannuated Italian palaces, still, under a decline
of masters, preserved signs of former state” (p. 57). The reference to Acapulco
treasure calls attention to the raiding parties transported by the Spanish ships
that followed on Columbus’ discovery of the New World; the paralleling of the
Conquistadores’ ships with the vessels of a naval fleet famous for its bellicosity
connects Spain’s aggressive posture in the Old and New Worlds. General-
izing the example of Spain, the capping comparison to superannuated Italian
palaces, later expanded through a reference to the ship’s “Venetian-looking
balustrade,” specifically links the Spanish empire with the Italian city-state
where early modern mercantilism flourished, while the San Dominick’s con-
cealed slave revolt warns of a continuing cycle of violent enmity.
By reconstructing Delano’s Narrative to accommodate this historical
vision, Melville implicitly indicts Delano as an ironically fit ancestor for a
country which preferred to regard slavery within its borders as an ahistori-
cal institution peculiar to one of its regions. He also mines inconsistencies
in Delano’s text to subject Delano to a witty, historically resonant character
assassination.29 The historical Delano had been stung by the “misery and in-
gratitude” he had suffered at the hands of the “very persons to whom [he]
had rendered the greatest services”—particularly the real Cereno, who, by
besmirching his character, had treacherously tried to avoid recompensing him
for saving the Spanish ship.30 Chapter Eleven of Delano’s Narrative is in a
sense its author’s character reference for himself. He carefully presents him-
self as an honorable and blameless man. At pains to establish his rectitude, he
corroborates his version of events by including numerous testimonies to his
disinterested goodness, among them his own letters to the Spanish king’s em-
issaries insisting that “the services rendered off the island of St. Maria were
from pure motives of humanity” (p. 528, repeated in substance, p. 529) and
two versions of the Chilean Tribunal’s official recommendation that the king
be informed of his “generous and benevolent conduct” in succoring Cereno
(pp. 526, 527). In his own deposition, which he also includes, Delano re-
ports himself to have woven humanitarian appeals into the monetary pitch
 Reenvisioning America 71

he made to his crew when encouraging them to retake the Spanish ship: he
told them, he says, that they could return half the value of the ship to Cereno
“as a present” and reminded them of the suffering of the Spaniards still on
board (pp. 509–510).
Melville reformulates the terms of this presentation so as to expose
Delano’s self-interest. Eliminating all documents praising Delano except
Cereno’s ideologically biased deposition, Melville also discredits Delano’s
claims to disinterest and subtly reduces his motives to the sheer, unacknowl-
edged drive for profit. In “Benito Cereno,” the sailors are urged to recapture
the San Dominick by being told only that they stand to gain a good part of
the “ship and her cargo, including some gold and silver . . . worth more than
a thousand doubloons” (p. 120). Taking off on the real Delano’s protestations
that he is an innocent, Melville’s Delano holds himself above slavery—“Ah,
this slavery breeds ugly passions in man,” he thinks (p. 105)—while his drive
for profit actually implicates him in the slave trade. The “cargo” his crew
is to liberate includes one hundred and sixty slaves—Melville doubled his
source’s figures—and the American stands to gain from their sale.31
Far beyond this reversal of Delano’s character, Melville reinterprets
the Narrative to show that Delano’s pursuit of profit implicates him in ille-
gitimate as well as legitimate economic activities. Without acknowledging
it, the historical Delano revealed a significant blurring of such boundaries.
He reported that he had trouble with his crew because many were escaped
convicts. The real Cereno exploited Delano’s use—however unwilling—of
sailors who were outlaws: Cereno got testimony from some of them “to
injure [Delano’s] character,” including, an offended Delano reports, their
affirmation that “I was a pirate” (p. 511). Melville plays with this accusation
of piracy most adroitly. Aside from being one of the ideological categories
Delano uses to stereotype others, it becomes emblematic of his economic
activities. Although Melville ironically makes his Delano fear that Cereno
may be a pirate, the novella strongly hints that it is Delano himself who
is a pirate, or very like one—just as the real Cereno claimed. Changing
Delano’s ship from the Yankee-sounding Perseverance to the Bachelor’s De-
light, the name of the ship of buccaneer William Ambrose Cowely,32 is
only the most obvious aspect of Melville’s indictment. In order to flesh out
the accusation, he plays on the real Delano’s failure fully to separate legiti-
mate free enterprise from illegal activities. Persuaded by his men not to go
after the San Dominick himself, Melville’s Delano has the attack headed by
a surrogate, his chief mate. This man, we are told, “had been a privateer’s-
man” (p. 120). Melville may be referring obliquely to the fact that Delano
himself served on the privateer Mars during the Revolutionary War. In any
case, since privateering is legalized piracy in time of war, Melville suggests
guilt by association to establish a definite tie between the American cap-
72 Sandra A. Zagarell

tain and the practice of piracy. He also expands this association between
the honest trader and his ex-privateer mate to show that the boundaries
separating national histories are as indistinct as the boundaries supposedly
separating types of illegal activity. Leading Delano’s men in their attack
on the San Dominick, Melville’s mate cries, “Follow your leader.” Literally,
the cry is in response to seeing the ship’s hull, with this epithet chalked
beneath Aranda’s bleached skeleton. Contextually, its echoes connect the
New World conclusively with the Old. “Leader” refers to Aranda, whose
death will be avenged, but also to Columbus, whose figure his skeleton
replaces, to Babo, who led the slaves’ revolt and caused the words to be
chalked, to the mate himself, who leads the American crew, and to the
captain he represents. In the traditions Melville’s Delano carries forward,
exploration is inseparable from colonization, free enterprise from slavery,
profit from plunder.
Because Melville’s reversals of Delano’s Narrative are apparent only
through close study of a fairly obscure source, it may seem that he delib-
erately concealed his reenvisionment rather than offering it as an instance
of creative reinterpretation. Yet “Benito Cereno” is more deliberately acces-
sible than many of Melville’s other tales, for even without knowing Delano’s
text, those who read Melville as closely as Melville read Delano could profit
from his challenge. Indeed, Melville explicitly proffers his reinterpretation to
his contemporaries in the final passage of “Benito Cereno”: Babo’s severed
head looks out over a plaza toward the church “in whose vaults slept then, as
now, the recovered bones of Aranda” and toward the monastery where Benito
Cereno, in dying, “did indeed follow his leader” (p. 140, emphasis added). By
echoing the earlier appearances of this resonant phrase, this last sentence
once more connects Old and New Worlds, blacks and whites; the reference to
the present, the only reference in the entire novella, openly includes antebel-
lum America in the novella’s vision. Focusing on three characters who have
all been victors and victims in the social structure framed by the stern-piece,
“Benito Cereno” also faintly but clearly sounds the possibility for change.
The grim fates of these three characters are given some closure by being past,
while the conspicuous absence of Amasa Delano raises the possibility that
his descendants might still avoid the fate of blindly following the lead of
the Old World. If, like Melville rather than his characters, they queried their
culture-bound encoding of texts of social and racial roles, if they queried their
inadequate histories and hierarchical ideologies, they might at last sever the
chains that bind their interpretations of their world to the authority of an old,
unjust, unstable order. Only by seeing how like the Old World they had made
their own, “Benito Cereno” suggests, could they genuinely begin to ask how
the New World could, indeed, be made “new.”
 Reenvisioning America 73

No t e s
1. Herman Melville, Piazza Tales, edited by Egbert S. Oliver (New York:
Hendricks House, Farrar Straus, 1948), p. 73; hereafter cited parenthetically in the
text.
2. Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Pursuing Melville, 1940–1980 (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1982), pp. 230–231, documents the probable composition of
“Benito Cereno” during the winter of 1854–1855.
3. Allan Moore Emery, “‘Benito Cereno’ and Manifest Destiny,” Nineteenth-
Century Fiction, 39 (1984): 48–68, addresses the issues of Manifest Destiny and
Know-Nothingism but places the novella exclusively in the context of the United
States’ expansionist desires with regard to Latin America. I am indebted to this
discussion, but I maintain that “Benito Cereno” refers to a much broader political
and cultural climate; moreover, I find that, directly and indirectly, slavery is, as
earlier critics recognized, central to the novella.
4. Among the many critics who have seen “Benito Cereno” as a cautionary
work, I have found the following particularly useful: Jean Fagin Yellin, “Black
Masks: Melville’s Benito Cereno,” American Quarterly, 22 (1970): 678–689; Joyce
Adler, “Melville’s Benito Cereno: Slavery and Violence in the Americas,” Science and
Society, 38 (1974): 19–48; and Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land:
Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana
State University Press, 1980). More generally, Eric J. Sundquist, “Suspense and
Tautology in ‘Benito Cereno’” Glyph 8, Johns Hopkins Textual Studies (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 101–126, connects the novella’s context,
a social order poised on the verge of conflict yet keeping conflict at bay, with its
pattern of suspense and tautology. Allan Moore Emery, “The Topicality of Depravity
in ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Literature, 55 (1983): 316–331, summarizes earlier
work on the novella’s references to slavery and reads it as the portrayal of universal
human depravity, black and white. Barbara J. Baines, “Ritualized Cannibalism in
‘Benito Cereno,’” ESQ, 30 (1984): 163–169, interprets cannibalism as a “central
event and metaphor” by means of which Melville portrays slavery as an institution
that consumes white master and black slave, body and soul. Marianne DeKoven,
“History as Suppressed Referent in Modernist Fiction,” ELH, 15 (1984), 137–152,
sees “Benito Cereno” as a work which, though making little explicit reference to the
historical reality of slavery, contains powerfully oblique historical political referents.
Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1977), pp. 292–320, gives an excellent account of Melville’s general opposition to
contemporary American culture.
5. Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983); Emery, “‘Benito Cereno’ and Manifest Destiny.”
6. DeKoven makes the important point that the novella’s historical referents
are indirect. While DeKoven links the novella solely to slavery, her method—
elucidating how “Benito Cereno” inscribes its historical framework through allusion,
imagery, and diction—underscores the fact that many readers have reduced its
figures of speech, which are not usually one-dimensional, to markers for colonial
Spain and/or the slaveholding United States.
7. For an important discussion of other aspects of authority, including
its connection with authorship, see Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and
Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), especially Chapter Three, “The Novel
74 Sandra A. Zagarell

as Beginning Intention.” Said argues that in novels authority, or invention, is

inseparable from molestation, or constraint, that texts always both assert and usurp
their own authority.
  8. Karcher, for instance, reads the novella primarily as “an exploration of the
white racist mind and how it reacts in the face of a slave insurrection” (p. 128). Emery,
“‘Benito Cereno’ and Manifest Destiny,” sees Delano as Melville’s exemplification of
American expansionist attitudes toward Latin America. He points out that Delano’s
“Anglo-Saxonism” causes him to stereotype Cereno as a certain kind of Spaniard but
finds Delano’s prejudices tangential to Melville’s purpose of indicting Americans for
following Spain in becoming dogmatically imperialist (pp. 61–63).
  9. Karcher, however, feels that Delano often exhibits the language of the
southern apologist for slavery (p. 132).
10. See, for example, Edward H. Rosenberry, Melville and the Comic Spirit
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1955), p. 163; and R. Bruce Bickley,
Jr., The Method of Melville’s Short Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1975), pp. 58–59 and 62–66.
11. P. 139. Compare pp. 113, 115, where Delano finds solace in a parodic
conversion of romanticism into cliché. Cereno’s black spirits become a natural
phenomenon: the “foul mood was now at its depths, as the fair wind was at its
heights” (p. 113).
12. “Self-Reliance” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited
by Alfred R. Ferguson et al. (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Belknap of Harvard
University Press, 1971), II: 39.
13. See p. 77 for the first instance, pp. 81, 90, 92, 115, 117 for later ones.
14. Thomas Philbrick, James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American
Sea Fiction (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1961), especially pp.
116–203. Rogin, pp. 3–11, discusses connections between piracy and slavery and
analyzes Melville’s references to Cooper’s novel in Delano’s piracy fantasies; his
focus, however, is on antebellum distinctions between (illegitimate) piracy and
(legitimate) slavery.
15. Rogin, p. 22. In an interesting alternative reading, Emery, “‘Benito
Cereno’ and Manifest Destiny,” pp. 52–54, sees the American’s plan to take over
the Spanish ship as a mirroring of Americans’ conviction that their Anglo-Saxon
energy would succeed in bringing order to Latin America where Spain’s enervation
had brought only disaster.
16. H. Bruce Franklin, The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology (California:
Stanford University Press, 1963), examines the parallels between Cereno and
William Sterling’s portrayal of the Spanish monarch Charles V in Cloister Life of the
Emperor Charles the Fifth (pp. 136–152); Karcher identifies in Cereno the stereotype
of the effete southern plantation owner (p. 136).
17. Adler notes the economic similarity between the two (p. 45); Karcher
identifies the ideological, unanalytic nature of Cereno’s deposition (p. 135).
18. I am indebted here to Rogin’s view that in portraying the master-slave
relation in terms of a charade, “Benito Cereno” reveals that the bond between the
two, regarded as “natural” by apologists for slavery, is a social construct (pp. 208–
220). Emery, “The Topicality of Depravity in ‘Benito Cereno,’” argues that Melville
challenges cultural assumptions about blacks and whites, men and women, for the
moral purpose of exposing universal human depravity.
 Reenvisioning America 75

19. See, for instance, Harold Beaver’s comment in his edition of Billy Budd,
Sailor, and Other Stories, (Middlesex, U.K. & New York: Penguin Books, 1970), pp.
33–34. While Delano may feminize the blacks, as Beaver, Karcher (p. 134), and
others have suggested, Melville also shows that the blacks likewise deny Cereno
status. I am indebted to Lauren Shohet, “Discovering Oppression in Melville’s
Benito Cereno,” unpublished paper written for American Romanticism, Oberlin
College, 1983, for noticing that the blacks emasculate Cereno, whose response is
similar to a rape victim’s.
20. Baym, “Melville’s Quarrel with Fiction,” PMLA, 94 (1979): 910, maintains
that “Melville’s Emerson-derived notion of language [proceeded] from a divine
Author or Namer,” and his “loss of belief in an Absolute entailed the loss not only of
truth in the universe but also of coherence and meaning in language.”
21. In an interesting reading, DeKoven sees the “false appearances” of the
blacks ‘masquerading as proper slaves’ to contain “the actual truth of the social
order”: its despotism and irrationality, and its destructiveness of whites as well as
blacks (see pp. 139–143).
22. Adler associates the playwright Babo with the poet Melville (p. 491).
Sundquist sees Babo and the narrator as silent figures who carry out “plots” and
express their authority over Cereno and Delano, respectively, with razor-sharp
rituals (pp. 111, 119).
23. See Sundquist, especially p. 116, on this discourse.
24. John D. Wade, “Delano, Amasa,” DAB (1934).
25. Delano reflected that “virtue and vice, happiness and misery, are much
more similarly distributed to nations than those are permitted to suppose who have
never been from home” (quoted in Wade, p. 217).
26. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of
Lincoln and His America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), especially pp. 3–54;
Rogin, pp. 33–41.
27. Franklin was among the first to establish Melville’s careful evocation of
Spanish history. Among more recent researchers, Gloria Horsely-Meacham, “The
Monastic Slaver: Image and Meaning in ‘Benito Cereno,’” New England Quarterly,
56 (1983): 262–266, develops connections between the American slave trade, the
Church, and the campaign for Christian dominion.
28. The novella’s first extended simile establishes a resemblance between the
half-shadowed slave ship and a “Lima intriguante’s one sinister eye peering across
the Plaza from the Indian loop-hole of her dusk saya-y-manta” (p. 56); the last
comparison suggests that the wounds the whites inflict on the blacks as they retake
the slave ship are like “those shaven ones of the English at Preston Pans, made by
the poled scythes of the Highlanders” (p. 122). In between, comparisons are made
between Cereno and the tyrannical James I of England (p. 103): North Americans
forcing slave women to bear their children and Spanish planters’ similar treatment of
enslaved Indians (p. 106); Delano’s sailors, as they fight the blacks, and “troopers in
the saddle” (p. 122); the blacks’ hatchets and the weapons of Indians and woodsmen
(p. 121); the San Dominick and a decaying Italian palace (pp. 58, 88).
29. Despite a confusion between Ledyard and Mungo Park, Melville similarly
discredits the authority of both as sources of information about Africa. In a passage
adapted by Park, Ledyard, in his Proceedings of the Association for Promoting the
Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, described the generosity of African women;
Melville indicates Ledyard’s inaccuracy by stressing how fiercely the women oppose
76 Sandra A. Zagarell

the whites. He also exposes Ledyard’s celebration of the black women’s hospitality
as a useful rationalization for their enslavement, for Delano takes special pleasure in
thinking that the female slaves on the San Dominick might be the same women who
were so gracious to Ledyard. See Emery, “The Topicality of Depravity in ‘Benito
Cereno,’” for a discussion that summarizes earlier work on Melville’s emendation
of these sources and contains new information on his adaptations of material in
Harper’s and Putnam’s.
30. All citations are to Amasa Delano, Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the
Northern and Southern Hemispheres (Boston, 1817), Chapter Eleven, reprinted in
Horace Scudder, “Melville’s Benito Cereno and Captain Delano’s Voyages,” PMLA,
43 (1928): 502–532; here 513.
31. These textual associations between New England merchants and Spanish
slave traders are rooted in facts of which Adler gives a concise account (p. 38).
32. Beaver, p. 435.
 J ohn B ryant

Allegory and Breakdown in The Confidence-Man:

Melville’s Comedy of Doubt

T 1
he reviewer for the London Illustrated Times did not much care for The
Confidence-Man; in fact, it nauseated him. He did not know what the book
meant, and, worse, he could not tell what it was—a “novel, comedy, collec-
tion of dialogues, repertory of anecdotes, or whatever it is.” A colleague at
the Westminster Review was able to locate a meaning in the book’s appar-
ent theme (“the gullibility of the great Republic”), but he would have had
to agree with the Illustrated Times that Melville’s work was, indeed, “a sad
jumble.”1 The assessment has proved prophetic, for recent critics have still
not reached a consensus on “whatever it is.” The Confidence-Man has been
labelled allegory, “new novel,” comedy, picaresque, satire, romance, and even
“picaresque satiric romance.”2 As might be expected, Melville offers few
clues in untangling the jumble. At the end of Chapter 14, for instance, his
narrator announces that he will “pass from the comedy of thought to that
of action,”3 suggesting that the book comprises, in the broadest sense, both
didactic and mimetic forms. How these modes blend and what effect they
have on readers are questions scholars are only beginning to address.
The modern critical impulse has been to read The Confidence-Man di-
dactically as either a social, religious, or philosophical commentary. And the
notion that Melville wrote an allegory or satire remains deeply embedded in
the scholarly community, even to the degree that general studies of allegory

Philological Quarterly, Volume 65 (Winter 1986): pp. 113–130. ©1986 University of Iowa.

77
78 John Bryant

have used the book as a crucial example.4 Although the case for allegory is
strong, it seems in some sense to be a reading of last resort stemming from an
obdurate text that refuses to yield anything truly mimetic or novelistic. Foster,
for instance, observes that “the surface story is an aimless string of episodes,
without tension, suspense, variation in pace, or climax.” But when seen as an
allegory, “when the allegory surfaces,” the book becomes “as formal as a fugue
[and] richly patterned.” As a “cipher” to be “decoded,” it is “tight, ingenious,
and rational.”5 Foster’s orientation has persisted. Parker calls The Confidence-
Man a “consistent” and “carefully structured allegory” with the Devil as the
title character.6 And recently, less satanic, more elaborate allegorical readings
correlate the fiction’s seemingly haphazard development of plot and character
to the growth of abstract human consciousness.7 For these readers, then, the
entire novel is clearly “a comedy of thought.”
But the didactic approach, in which a fiction develops along the lines of
an external argument or idea rather than the probable and necessary forces
inherent in human action, does not account for the novel’s full effect.8 To
begin with, its unreliable narrator, not usually found in allegory, seems to
abdicate any responsibility for interpreting motives or guiding the reader
through events. As a result, Melville’s argument seems to disintegrate for lack
of a resolute voice, and readers must float between “maybe yes, maybe no”; it
all becomes a “carefully-constructed muddle,” according to Lawrence Buell.9
Moreover, as the novel progresses into its second half, social satire diminishes
and our involvement in a human comedy expands; the allegorical opening
yields a mimetic end.
The difference between these two halves is as dramatic as the broad
disparity exemplified in the mute who opens the novel and the cosmopolitan
who puts it to rest. Clearly an allegorical figure, the colorless mute (emblem-
atic of ineffectual Christianity) engages our emotions only at a minimum.
The colorful and talkative cosmopolite, Frank Goodman, however, excites
deeper sympathies. A flesh and blood character with dubious motives seek-
ing confidence for either positive or malicious ends, he arouses our anxieties
and to use Wayne Booth’s words, “force[s] the reader into thought about his
own moral dilemma.”10 To the degree, then, that Goodman’s story awakens
us to our “own moral dilemma” of faith, The Confidence-Man is as mimetic
as it is didactic. Ultimately, Melville’s novel cannot be confidently classified
as strictly a didactic comedy of thought or a mimetic comedy of action; it is
somehow both.
Melville’s blending of comic thought and action begins as early as
Chapter 14 in which Melville uses his digression on fiction to enhance the
audience’s involvement in the action. The merchant Roberts, who has been
diddled twice already, and a Mr. Truman, who is about to diddle him again,
stand poised, champagne in hand, when the simple merchant suddenly sees
 Allegory and Breakdown 79

the truth and calls off all bets. As the two principals remain frozen on stage
with lines of pain and wonder etched on their brows, Melville discusses the
ramifications of “the queer, unaccountable caprices of [Roberts’s] natural
heart” (p. 68). The chapter, therefore, interrupts the climactic backfiring of a
confidence game: the effect is twofold. On the one hand, Melville is telling
his readers how to read, or more specifically, how we may empathize with
Roberts. The merchant’s inconsistency derives from a “natural heart.” If our
hearts, too, are “natural,” we must know his dilemma well. The digression is
also a “delay tactic” intensifying suspense by forestalling the resolution of vital
questions that have grown out of the action. Will Roberts clarify the nature
of his doubt, expose Truman, and provide useful warnings for future victims
of larceny (the reader included)? Will Truman reveal his motives or fabri-
cate a cover up? Is confidence, we finally ask, merely a wine-induced fantasy?
Melville’s interruption heightens action and thought. It is as suspenseful as it
is idea bound, as mimetic as it is didactic.
This mixing of modes, sustained throughout Melville’s larger drama, is
best understood in the context of the evolving interrelationship of text and
reader. In earlier days, Melville encouraged readers to become what Wolfgang
Iser calls “partners in a process of communication.”11 When, for instance,
Sophia Hawthorne found a “subtile significance” in Moby-Dick’s spirit spout
image, the author replied with emphasis that he did not “mean it.” The cre-
ation was hers: “You . . . see more things, . . . and by the same process, refine
all you see, so that they are . . . things which while you think you but humbly
discover them, you do in fact create them. . . .”12 Reading (seeing and refining)
is an act of creation, a sharing in, indeed completion of, the author’s dynamic
creative process. Ishmael proclaims as much in his familiar declaration of in-
dependence from aesthetic completion: “. . . grand [erections], true ones, ever
leave the copestone to posterity.”13 Posterity’s readers, more than the writer,
supply the copestone of coherence to a fiction like Moby-Dick.
But this symbiotic partnership between text and reader erodes almost
entirely in The Confidence-Man. Although Melville seems to invite us to cre-
ate “subtile significances,” especially with the procession of confidence men
and victims in the first half of the novel, the reader’s ability to “allegorize”
confidently seems thwarted by the end of the work. The confidence man
may be God, Devil, or Man, or any two, or all three. Eventually the reader’s
mind short circuits. Just as Melville’s sentences frequently collapse under the
weight of too many nested subordinations, we are left confounded and con-
fused. In Chapter 18, for instance, a chorus of three gentlemen interrupts the
drama with their confusion: is the herb doctor a knave, fool, original genius,
or all three, or perhaps an agent for the pope? All three perspectives are mere
“suspicions.” And if “True knowledge comes but by suspicion or revelation”
and if it is a “wise” man who waits for suspicions to “ripen into knowledge,”
80 John Bryant

our chorus of three must wait indefinitely for their deliverance from doubt,
for their “triangular duel” ends “with but a triangular result” (p. 92). There is
no ripeness here, nor “True knowledge.” Melville then does not invite us to
supply a “copestone” to this fiction. We are not partners with his text; like the
chorus, we are its victims.14 It seems clear, though, that Melville’s point is that
we share in the confusion. This, however, is risky business for a dramatist.
Indeed, unrelieved doubt or confusion is generally taken as a fatal flaw in
both didactic and mimetic fictions. To be sure, defenders of allegory such as
Angus Fletcher have convincingly demonstrated the form’s capacity for fluid-
ity and ambivalence in conveying “the action of the mind.” But despite this
potential for ambiguity, allegory’s ultimate function is to purge doubt: it “‘car-
ries off ’ the threat of ambivalent feelings.” Moreover, “its enigmas show . . . an
obsessive battling with doubt. It does not accept the world of experience and
senses; it thrives on their overthrow, replacing them with ideas.”15 Unrelieved
doubt is equally problematic in mimetic fiction. As Booth observes, a certain
consequence of the kind of unreliable or “inconscient” narrator Melville uses
is that the author may be misunderstood.16 The fate of irony is misreading and
audience alienation. But this is a risk Melville was willing to take. In Chapter
14 he argues that while nature is inconsistent, “experience is the only guide,”
and that, by logical extension, fiction is an experience that can guide us only
to the degree that its “twistings” (no matter how confusing) parallel nature’s.
Thus, by inflicting upon his reader triple-layered suspicions and refusing to
supply a trigonometry that will triangulate “True knowledge,” Melville en-
gages us in a process of doubt that mimics life. In short, its fictive confusion
has a moral function. It only remains, then, to show how the author combines
the didactic and mimetic modes in creating this complex reading experience.

2
The Confidence-Man clearly possesses the trappings of allegorical plot,
character, and setting. It works within a highly schematized time frame,
moving from sunrise to midnight with sunset occurring just as the cosmo-
politan enters precisely half way into the action. The aptly named steamboat
Fidele falls into the narrenschiff tradition; it is a ship of fools, a microcosm
of humanity.17 The title character (a protean, supernatural figure typical of
allegory) bears allegorical names such as Goodman, Truman, and Noble.
He is what Fletcher would call a “daemonic agent” or half human, half
divine character “possessed” by a single idea and “act[ing] free of the usual
moral restraints, even when he is acting morally. . . .” Moreover, Goodman
engages in both Quest and Battle, the “radically reductive” patterns of action
found in allegory, for his search for confidence progresses from one philo-
sophical “debate” or “Socratic dialogue” to another.18
 Allegory and Breakdown 81

Fletcher observes that allegories display rhythmic, ritualistic plots (such

as the pattern of repeated shipwrecks in Gulliver’s Travels) and what he calls
the “fractionated” character.19 Briefly, the allegorical hero generates one or
more doubles of himself, and the repeated actions of these “fractionated” or
“partial characters” enhance both the rhythm and symmetry of the plot, which
accordingly engender in the reader expectations of allegory. Fletcher’s ritual-
ized patterns occur in the first half of The Confidence-Man but are sedulously
thwarted in the second, leaving readers vaguely suspicious of the author’s
reliability and confused as to the final shape of Melville’s apparent allegory. A
well-known problem in the novel, the failure of Black Guinea’s prophetic list
of confidence men to be fully realized, illustrates the point.
Melville begins “fractionating” in Chapter 3 when he has Black Guinea
list eight “ge’mmen” who will vouch for his integrity. As the novel progresses
through the first half, each gentleman appears in the order in which he is
listed, and each, of course, is clearly an “avatar” or “fraction” of the confidence
man. But, as readers of The Confidence-Man know, the list of “fractionated”
characters breaks down upon the cosmopolitan’s entrance. Two of the pre-
dicted confidence men, one in a “yaller west” another in a “wiolet robe,” seem
not to appear. Scholars have tried to account for this lapse noting that if the
colors were interchanged the resultant “wiolet west” might refer to Charlie
Noble and the “yaller robe” to a minor figure in the last scene or even (be-
cause he wears a traveling robe) to the cosmopolitan Frank Goodman. But if
the men in Black Guinea’s list are, in fact, the serial guises of one “daemonic
agent,” and if (through a rational emending of the text) Noble were admit-
ted to that list, and if Goodman is, as many assume, the confidence man par
excellence, Goodman and Noble’s crucial encounter (chs. 25–35) would be
logically impossible. Two “avatars” cannot occupy one stage at the same time.
Even if the Devil could pull off this trick, it seems unlikely that he would
waste his time trying to talk himself into having a drink or giving himself a
loan. Given the problems of Black Guinea’s list, the allegory becomes dra-
matically absurd.20
In the final analysis, the non-fulfillment of Black Guinea’s list leads to
an arrhythmic, asymmetric, and necessarily incomplete allegory. Whereas six
confidence men in the first half of the novel follow each other in almost
ritualized rhythm, only one suspected confidence man, the cosmopolitan, oc-
cupies the stage in the slower paced second half. H. Bruce Franklin notes a
number of crucial differences between Goodman and his allegorical prede-
cessors, intimating that the cosmopolitan may not be an operator at all. He
takes no money, but, in fact, gives away two shillings; he exposes a confidence
man, Charlie Noble; he grows in stature as the novel progresses.21 By reason
of Goodman’s departure from the anticipated allegorical mold, the entrance
of this cosmopolitan seems to work against allegorical plot symmetry and
82 John Bryant

form. The failure of Black Guinea’s list is only one of many recurring patterns
of breakdown in Melville’s allegory. Here I shall note nine other broken pat-
terns contained within an overall two-part structure.
Readers rarely fail to recognize that Melville’s text is divided into two
sections. The first half includes six confidence men (seven, if you count the
mute) who engage in eighteen interactions with fourteen minor characters
while the second half follows one man, the cosmopolitan, through five en-
counters with five interlocutors. Whereas the first half leaps rapidly from one
episode to the next, each spotlighting a single confidence man, the second
half creeps through extended dialogues on friendship and confidence. To ac-
centuate the bifurcation, Melville sets the first half mostly outdoors and in
sunlight and the second indoors and in darkness from sunset to midnight.
The two halves, then, are as distinct as the many and the one, outside and in,
day and night. Clearly, the text asks us to play one half against the other. The
first encourages the reader to formulate empirical judgments on the nature
of confidence men, and the second carefully disintegrates our confidence in
those judgments. Melville’s one-two punch, then, is itself a confidence game
complete with set-up and sting.
Each half of the novel is organized upon a single, dramatically compel-
ling question. In the first we ask “What is a confidence man?” This is a rela-
tively easy problem to solve: one merely observes. Here, Melville pre-sents a
complex but comprehensible world of knaves and fools; our task is to gather
information about that world. The reader discerns clear patterns of behavior
which when consolidated constitute a distinct syndrome of larcenous activity.
By the time we reach the sixth Mississippi operator, the Philosophical Intel-
ligence Officer, we have had our fill of pious pretenders, genial panhandlers,
and enthusiastic faith healers. We know a confidence man when we see one.
In the first half, then, Melville educates us to survive in the self-contained,
allegorical world of confidence men. Like the three gentlemen in Chapter
18, we are bemused by our suspicions but relatively secure in the knowledge
Melville has created and passed along. “True knowledge” of the confidence
man’s motives may not be possible, but our suspicions about his larceny ap-
proach certitude, for as each of the six confidence men enters, his behavior
corresponds to and confirms the larcenous activity of his predecessors. Even
the narrator’s use of irony and circuitous phrasing contributes to this process
of familiarization. In a way, Melville conditions us to respond to certain signs
that identify the confidence man. Although the world he portrays is duplici-
tous, even “triangular,” it appears to be knowable and the reader is trained to
understand that world.
If the first half establishes a reliable set of correspondences earmarking
the confidence man’s allegorical identity, and if the reader is conditioned to
recognize those signs, the second half challenges the reader’s newly acquired
 Allegory and Breakdown 83

knave-detecting ability. The second overwhelming question that propels us to

the end of the novel is whether Goodman is, in fact, a confidence man. Given
our conditioning, the solution should be easy. But ultimately, our training
fails us. As Goodman moves from scene to scene, our early expectations of
nabbing yet another diddler dissolve. The signals of larceny are only partially
transmitted. The effect upon the reader, then, is not so much confusion as
tension over the issue of when Goodman will somehow slip and reveal his
duplicity. But solid evidence never arrives, and the suspense grows until the
last, dim, anti-climactic scene. Our failure to identify Goodman conclusively
as a confidence man forces us to reconsider our expectations, or in a more
radical mental leap, to doubt the efficacy of Melville’s early signals and the
validity of such correspondences in general.
Nine patterns of behavior (both ritualized and aesthetic) recur through-
out the first half of the novel and condition the reader’s responses to the sec-
ond half. Three of these patterns bear directly upon the characteristics of the
confidence men. To begin with the most obvious, a confidence man reveals
his true identity when he (1) initiates a confidence game. Such fishy proposi-
tions as the appeal to charity, the bogus stock deal, and the herbal panacea
were as familiar to Melville’s first readers as they are to us today. Once a
character plays a game, his guilt is confirmed, and by this yardstick there is
little doubt that Black Guinea, Ringman, the man in gray, Truman, the herb
doctor, and the PIO man are all con artists. Equally suspicious although less
conclusive is (2) a character’s shape shifting ability. Like any actor, a confidence
man assumes many roles and is an excellent rhetorician who molds himself
and his arguments to fit the needs of a particular audience.22 A third pattern
of behavior is that the six confidence men (3) adopt the benevolent mask of
a simpleton (Black Guinea, PIO man), enthusiast (man in gray, herb doctor),
or genialist (Truman).
Three more patterns hint that the confidence men are in cahoots with
one another. Melville first of all links his characters primarily through (4) an
elaborate network of set-ups; that is, one knave prepares a potential victim to
be duped by another.23 In the same vein, a confidence man will acknowledge
the existence of other confidence men or (5) confirm their good will or verac-
ity.24 Furthermore, Melville uses (6) physical resemblances and spatial linkages
to suggest a conspiracy.25
In addition to these six characteristic patterns, we find three distinct
patterns in the narrator’s treatment of the confidence men. A well-known
pattern is (7) the dual imagery used in describing the sometimes angelic
(mute, herb doctor) sometimes satanic (PIO man) confidence men. More-
over, Melville often introduces a new confidence man with a new chapter
that begins with (8) the dialogue of one or two unidentified speakers. Chapter
19 is a case in point:
84 John Bryant

“Mexico? Molino del Rey? Resaca de la Palma?”

“Resaca de la Tombs.”

Not until the middle of the chapter do we fully understand that the second
speaker’s bitter response to the herb doctor refers to its (the soldier of for-
tune’s) crippling incarceration in New York’s municipal prison and not to any
wound received during the Mexican War. Melville’s use of dialogue gener-
ates a complex reading experience which forces us to suspend judgment, read
on, re-read, and re-evaluate. His refusal to identify speakers makes it dif-
ficult to distinguish the confidence man’s words from his victim’s. In a way,
the process engages us in an excursion through the intricacies of acquiring
knowledge.26 Finally, when Melville does identify speakers, he often refers
to them as either (9) “the stranger” or “the other.” For the most part, this subtle
stylistic pattern is reserved exclusively for the confidence men.27 These nine
features are part of the confidence man’s talisman. But in the second half of
the novel, the identifying emblem fails us; the allegory breaks down, and we
must move from a confident didactic mode into doubt.

“who in thunder are you?”

The speaker is Pitch, a skeptical Missourian, now moved to truculence by a

series of confidence games. What has happened to him has happened before;
it is all a recurring dream. Just as Roberts has been set up and stung by Black
Guinea then Ringman then Truman, Pitch has endured the serial onslaught
of the herb doctor and the PIO man. Now, too, the reader anticipates the
arrival of “Jeremy Diddler No. 3.” Thus, it is with equal vehemence that the
reader asks along with Pitch, “who in thunder are you” (p. 132) when Frank
Goodman, the genial cosmopolitan, enters the stage.
For Pitch, the issue is clear: Goodman is “another of them”: a “meta-
physical scamp” (p. 136). And the reader, conditioned to recognize a confi-
dence man’s patterns of larceny, readily concurs. Goodman first appears as an
unidentified speaker (pattern 8). Like those before him, his faceless rhetoric
precedes any physical or moral description. With “philanthropical pipe” in
hand, he quickly assumes the role of a genialist (pattern 3), inveighs against
too much “soberness,” and invites Pitch “to tipple a little” (p. 134). In this
regard, Goodman bears a strong physical resemblance (pattern 6) to another
genialist, the ruddy-faced confidence man Mr. Truman. Moreover, his genial-
ity takes on a satanic flavor (pattern 7), for he loves man so much that he
could eat the “racy creature” (p. 133). Finally, like Melville’s confidence men,
 Allegory and Breakdown 85

Goodman is referred to as “stranger” and “the other” (pattern 9) five times

throughout the scene (pp. 131, 136, 138).
On the other hand, the cosmopolitan does not appear on Black Guinea’s
list, nor is he “set up” (pattern 4) by any other earlier confidence man. He does
not himself “set up” other potential victims, nor does he “confirm” (pattern 5)
other confidence men. Thoroughly uncharacteristic of his predecessors are his
denial of knowing another confidence man, the herb doctor (p. 136), and his
disparagement of the PIO man’s ill-fitting coat (p. 133). Goodman does not
seem to be a part of any conspiracy of confidence men, nor does he attempt
any confidence games. In fact, he is a miserable specimen of con artistry. He
openly confesses himself an eavesdropper (p. 133), admits to perpetrating a
“little stratagem” (p. 135) against Pitch, and revels in play acting (p. 133). Fi-
nally, Goodman, who eschews “Irony, and Satire” (p. 136), is himself the vic-
tim of Pitch’s ironic wordplay. When the cosmopolitan states his preference
for Diogenes’ sociable misanthropy over Timon’s antisocial behavior, Pitch
purposefully misconstrues the point, salutes Goodman as a fellow misan-
thrope, and exits triumphantly. Goodman, then, plays the dupe; his presumed
victim, the knave.
In all, Goodman’s first scene leaves us confused. He follows some of the
behavior patterns perfectly, some ambiguously, and some not at all. Our expec-
tations thwarted, we slowly grow to entertain the possibility that Goodman is
not a diddler but a true believer in man, seeking friendship or merely human
interaction amidst a boat load of untrusting souls. As Goodman progresses
through his remaining scenes, Melville’s novel acquires a new and forceful
coherence. No longer a series of disjointed episodes, the comedy becomes
unified by our search for the evidence that will prove or disprove Goodman’s
alleged infidelity. But at this juncture our thinking is so strongly set against
Goodman that Melville’s ambiguous signals only introduce a passing doubt.
Goodman’s next encounter enhances our admiration for the cosmopolitan.
The ten chapters of well-modulated dialogue with Charlie Noble “should”
reveal Goodman to be a confidence man. But, in fact, we quickly perceive that
Noble is our “operator” and the cosmopolitan his intended victim. Here, the
comedy revolves around Noble’s ineptitude and Goodman’s ability to “con the
con man.” Noble fits many of the most damning patterns of larceny. He at-
tempts to “fuddle” Frank (p. 174) by plying him with wine and cigars while re-
fraining himself from the narcotics (pattern 1). He professes geniality (pattern
3), but, like his false teeth which are too good to be true, he harbors uncharita-
ble moods. Having just eaten a “diabolic ragout” (p. 169), he is associated with
the Devil (pattern 7) and is as well a shapeshifter (pattern 2) comparable to
“Cadmus glid[ing] into the snake” (p. 180). But the most intriguing evidence
against Noble is that he is referred to as “stranger” or “the other” more often
than any other single character in the book (29 times), while the cosmopolitan,
86 John Bryant

who has told Pitch that “No man is a stranger,” is never in this scene called
“stranger” and only twice called “the other” (pp. 142 and 163).
In contrast, Goodman exhibits few, if any, of these questionable traits
and grows from an apparent simpleton to a sage humorist. Charlie Noble’s
opening gambit is to gain Goodman’s esteem by inviting a vicious comparison
between Pitch and the barbarous Indian hater, Moredock. By reducing the
surly Pitch to Moredock’s level, he hopes to validate his own geniality. But the
cosmopolitan denies the existence of such depravity, calls Moredock a fiction,
and warns Noble against his “one-sided” view of man (p. 175). Normally, such
naivete would only make Charlie’s game easier, but Frank’s good nature has
a sting to it. As a “genial misanthrope,” Goodman uses his benevolence both
to subsume and conceal a deeper awareness of iniquity. For him, humor is “so
blessed a thing” that it can “neutralize” the “sting” of a “wicked thought” (pp.
163–164). By containing his misanthropy within a philanthropic heart, he can
acknowledge the likes of Noble and even fight back. This balanced sensibility
allows Goodman his genial aspirations while it guards him against duplicity. It
is a “saving grace” indicating moral as well as intellectual superiority. By asking
Noble, then, for the very loan that Noble was intending to extract from Good-
man, our cosmopolitan beats the confidence man at his own game, vanquishes
false wit, and gives us a small taste of “genial misanthropy.”
How is the reader to take this frank, good man? His dramatic growth as
a character necessarily subverts the criteria we have come to rely upon for dis-
cerning the confidence man. His “air of necromancy” rather than being sinis-
ter is amusing, even attractive. He seems to be a different order of operator, “a
new kind of monster,” a victim who fights back and succeeds where Roberts
and Pitch have failed. And yet Goodman’s ability to play Noble’s game must
give us pause. How well and to what end can a genial misanthrope repress his
misanthropy? Will he use his “wisdom” to guard against the likes of Noble
or is he capable himself of Indian crimes? If we invert his genial pipe, will
we find a tomahawk? Such lingering doubts typify the reader’s response to
the second half of Melville’s novel. When Goodman fails to conform in lock
step to his predecessors, we must “see” the character in new light, “refine” our
expectations, and “create” a new understanding of his role. On to a fresh start,
the reader warily anticipates who in thunder Goodman might be.

“Egbert, this . . . is, like all of us, a stranger” (p. 197).

The speaker is Mark Winsome; Egbert, his disciple; and “this” is Goodman
himself. Winsome has observed Noble and hopes to warn the cosmopolitan
of the obvious: Noble is a “Mississippi operator” (p. 196). And yet this mystic
 Allegory and Breakdown 87

philosopher, a cross between “a Yankee peddler and a Tartar priest” (p. 189),
appears to be a satanic operator himself (pattern 7). He admits, for instance,
to a curious desire to “change personalities” with a rattlesnake (p. 190). He is
a “metaphysical merman” (p. 191) whose “tempting” discourse “bewitch[es]”
Goodman (p. 193). And as with Noble, he (not Goodman) is referred to
repeatedly (19 times) as “stranger” and “the other.”
Winsome and Goodman are precise opposites. One is cool and tran-
scendental, the other warmly genial; one a stranger, the other “nowhere a
stranger.”28 Despite the evidence against Winsome he is, in fact, too dis-
interested to be the confidence man he seems to be. Once establishing his
doctrine of universal estrangement, he leaves all further discussion to Eg-
bert who reenacts with Goodman the scene in which Frank asks Charlie
for a loan. Egbert will be Charlie, and Frank will play himself. In the psy-
chodrama that follows, Frank/Frank resorts to numerous rhetorical ploys to
get Charlie/Egbert to surrender. He creates a common heritage for the two
(they are, he imagines, boyhood and college chums). He portrays himself
as a business associate, a personal friend in need, and finally as a “fellow-
being.” But Charlie/Egbert will not budge from his maddening argument
that a friend in need is no friend at all: “no man drops pennies into the hat
of a friend. . . . If you turn beggar, . . . I turn stranger” (p. 223). In this play
within a play, Goodman is a humanist and dramatist, taking many parts,
each a projection of himself; he explores a full spectrum of human vicis-
situdes and desires. His histrionics deepen his humanity. Egbert, however,
is only a spokesman of another man’s one-sided principle. Goodman fails
to win his point, drops his masks, and leaves enraged. Both defeat and rage
are uncharacteristic of those confidence men we have already met. Indeed, it
is the confidence man’s victims who often stalk off in anger. Goodman, the
victim of a harsh philosophy, has played his part for real. Egbert has only
played a game (pattern 1).
This is Goodman’s darkest hour. His humor and humanism have failed
to dissolve stony distrust or enlighten blind orthodoxy. But out of his many
defeats, Goodman has gained the reader’s sympathy. More of a knave killer
than a knave, he has not fulfilled the behavior patterns that would label him a
confidence man. In fact, he has become the victim or intended victim of vari-
ous game players who bear more of a resemblance to earlier operators than he.
Moreover, his suspiciously simple-minded faith in man has evolved into the
more pragmatic notion of genial misanthropy. But, sadly, this sagacity is more
effective as a safeguard against diddlers (Noble) than as a means for winning
friends (Egbert). He is as ineffectual as the mute who opens the novel. But
the novel is not over.
Thus far, in applying our understanding of confidence men to Good-
man, we have moved from the reasonable suspicion that he is a confidence
88 John Bryant

man to a willingness to accept the cosmopolitan as another Roberts or Pitch.

But at the eleventh hour, when Goodman greets the barber, Melville turns
the table. Suddenly, the larcenous signals return. Chapter 42 begins with an
unidentified speaker (later revealed to be Goodman) whose form might rep-
resent either an angel or the devil. By shifting point of view, Melville now
refers to Goodman as “the stranger” and “the other” (pp. 225, 226, 229). Once
the good-natured humorist, he is now the false wit quibbling, as would the
PIO man or Noble, that a man’s wig is not a sign of falsity, for it is genuinely
“his” hair in that he has purchased it. But most damning, of course, is that he
finally plays a confidence game. Insuring the barber against “a certain loss”
if he removes his “No Trust” sign, Goodman leaves without paying for his
shave. Rarely does an insurer become the cause of his insuree’s first claim.
In “shaving” the barber, the cosmopolitan reveals his duplicity. But the
sudden reversal does not prove that Goodman is a diddler. Goodman has
not, in fact, broken his contract. Paradoxically, his request for credit is the
necessary “burning” that allows the contract to become binding and for the
barber then to exercise the necessary human emotion of confidence. Thus,
an irresolvable, comic question remains: Will Goodman make good on the
“certain loss” he has perpetrated? Will he pay the debt or redeem the loss?
The barber knows; he replaces his sign. The reader, however, amused by the
barber’s absurd business predicament and bemused by the larger human di-
lemma it provokes, continues to doubt. Thus, all of Melville’s episodes—the
early introduction to the confidence man’s varied patterns of behavior and the
later inspection of the cosmopolitan in the light of that pathology—lead the
reader to the final, anti-climactically comic scene in which “True knowledge”
of Goodman’s identity should, with certainty, be revealed, but is not.
Goodman rushes below decks to the gentlemen’s cabin where passen-
gers sleep fitfully beneath a dying, smoky lamp. “Dispens[ing] a sort of morn-
ing” in this dark “place full of strangers,” the ebullient cosmopolitan him-
self harbors “a disturbing doubt” (pp. 241, 240, 242). The barber has quoted
scriptures which condone distrust, and which consequently erode Goodman’s
argument for confidence in man. By chance, an old man points out that be-
cause the lines are from the Apocrypha, they lack validity and true wisdom.
Goodman’s relief is expressed as an apparent rejection of “wisdom” altogether:
“What an ugly thing wisdom must be! Give me the folly that dimples the
cheek, say I, rather than the wisdom that curdles the blood” (p. 243). At this
point, readers are left to endure a final round of their own “disturbing doubts”
about the cosmopolitan’s character. Why should the barber’s appeal to a mi-
nor scriptural citation bother Goodman? If he is a confidence man, he should
have no problem arguing around the quotation. If he is a genuine seeker of
confidence, his sudden doubt would seem to belie his earlier expressions of
rock-bed faith. His equally precipitous relief over the lines’ apocryphal source
 Allegory and Breakdown 89

seems naive, for the damaging bit of wisdom would be no less wise because
of its source. In fact, the cosmopolitan has typically argued from “experience”
not “authority”; hence, he seems, here, to be out of character. The reader is
left with yet another “triangular” conclusion: (1) Goodman’s worry is an act,
more histrionics to lure more victims; and yet (2) with no victims in sight at
this late hour, these histrionics seem genuine; his own faith, having withstood
the “curdling” onslaughts of Pitch, Noble, Winsome, and Egbert, has finally,
sadly, begun to erode; and yet (3) his quick recovery suggests he may be a
pious, “dimpled” booby, utterly naive in his view of the world. Is Goodman a
knave, fool, or “quite an original”? The matter seems past knowing.
But Goodman’s apparent rejection of “ugly” wisdom (seen in the con-
text of his notion of the genial misanthrope) takes on deeper meaning. His
words resonate with the mediating language of the man with a weed: “there
is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness,
either, no more than sorrow is” (p. 24). In Moby-Dick, Ishmael uses the same
cadences to perform a similar triangulation: “There is a wisdom that is woe;
but there is a woe that is madness” (MD, p. 355). In The Confidence-Man,
Melville replays these chords but in a comic key. Goodness and sorrow can
be tempered without greenness or madness. Thus, to survive in “a place full
of strangers,” one must combine folly and wisdom in such a way as to steer
clear of what is too naive (greenness) and that which is too wise (disintegra-
tive madness).
Our “disturbing doubt” about Goodman’s motive is never resolved. When
the old man asks the way to his stateroom, the cosmopolitan offers assistance:
“I have indifferent eyes, and will show you” (p. 251). Are these the eyes of a
balanced wisdom that can penetrate darkness, or are they the optics of a knave
who spares no victim? What “may follow of this Masquerade,” however, is not
as important as what has happened to the reader. We have experienced the
breakdown of an allegory and the failure of an empirical process. But the dis-
integration has proved instructive. We have found patterns of iniquity keyed
to a larger pattern of allegory which we assume will be sustained throughout
the novel; we have been forced to revise our assumptions when Goodman fails
to conform to those allegorical requisites; and having once revised, we have
learned (ironically) that our original suspicions are perhaps (but only perhaps)
correct. By having us adopt, challenge, and finally reject a set of assumptions
about the nature of confidence men, the comedy thwarts our understandably
human desire to discover “True knowledge.” Ineluctably, Melville’s willful cre-
ation and negation of norms pushes us beyond authority and certitude into a
world of perpetual questioning. As Melville puts it in Chapter 14, fiction is
like a “true delineation” of old Boston; it should show us “the twistings of the
town.” It may be said, then, that fiction succeeds only in the degree to which
it makes the reader twist. In reading The Confidence-Man, we are made to
90 John Bryant

live the kinds of philosophical inconsistencies of human nature that Melville’s

characters merely project. We play them “to the life” (p. 181). Melville subverts
easy allegorical correlations by thrusting us into an action that engages our
sympathies. Finally, the mixture of didactic and mimetic modes exercises those
necessary twistings of doubt that help us achieve the full ripeness of being or
what Ishmael calls “manhood’s pondering repose of If ” (MA, p. 406).29

No t e s

  1. Watson G. Branch, Melville: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge &

Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 380 and 385.
  2. These positions are argued, respectively, in the following critiques:
Hershel Parker, “The Metaphysics of Indian-hating,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction,
18 (September, 1963): 165–173; Christopher W. Sten, “The Dialogue of Crisis
in The Confidence-Man: Melville’s ‘New Novel,’” Studies in the Novel, 6 (Summer
1974): 165–185; Lawrence Buell, “The Last Word on The Confidence-Man?” Illinois
Quarterly, 35 (November 1972): 15–29; John Seelye, Melville: The Ironic Diagram
(Northwestern University Press, 1970); Elizabeth S. Foster, Introduction, The
Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (New York: Hendricks House, 1954); Michael
Davitt Bell, The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation
(University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Daniel Hoffman, Form and Fable in
American Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 311.
  3. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel
Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Northwestern University Press and The Newberry
Library, 1984), p. 71. Subsequent parenthetical references are to this text.
  4. Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (Oxford University
Press, 1966); and Stephen A. Barney, Allegories of History, Allegories of Love
(Hamden, Conn.: Shoestring Press, 1979).
  5. Foster, pp. xci, xviii, xlvi.
  6. Parker, pp. 324 and 322.
  7. Honig, p. 84, and Barney, p. 158.
  8. Sheldon Sacks elaborates this distinction between the mimetic and
didactic in his discussion of satire, apologue and represented actions in Fiction and
the Shape of Belief: A Study of Henry Fielding, with Glances at Swift, Johnson, and
Richardson (University of California Press, 1964), pp. 1–69. See also R. S. Crane,
The Languages of Criticism and the Structure Poetry (U. of Toronto Press, 1953), pp.
122–123; and Bainard Cowan, Exiled Waters: Moby-Dick and the Crisis of Allegory
(Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p. 30.
  9. Buell, p. 20. John G. Cawelti argues a similar position in “Some Notes on
the Structure of The Confidence-Man,” American Literature, 29 (November, 1957):
278–288. Finding clear, normative values amidst such ambiguities are Walter Dubler,
“Theme and Structure in Melville’s The Confidence-Man,” American Literature, 33
(November 1961): 307–319, and Merlin Bowen, “Tactics of Indirection in Melville’s
The Confidence-Man,” Studies in the Novel, 1 (Winter 1969): 401–420.
10. The Rhetoric of Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 293.
11. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 54.
 Allegory and Breakdown 91

12. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, eds., The Letters of Herman
Melville (Yale University Press, 1960), p. 146.
13. Moby-Dick (New York: Norton, 1967), pp. 127–128.
14. R. W. B. Lewis was one of the first to call Melville’s narrator a confidence
man. See “Afterword,” The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (New York: Signet,
1964). See also Edgar A. Dryden, Melville’s Thematics of Form: The Great Art of
Telling the Truth (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968).
15. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Cornell University
Press, 1964), pp. 278, 343, 322.
16. Booth, p. 378.
17. Edward Rosenberry, “Melville’s Ship of Fools,” PMLA, 75 (December
1960): 604–608.
18. Fletcher, pp. 68 and 151. Warwick Wadlington also likens the con man
to Socrates. See The Confidence Game in American Literature (Princeton University
Press, 1975), p. 19.
19. Fletcher, pp. 172, 190, and 195.
20. Black Guinea’s list may be explained away as incomplete due to authorial
oversights (See Watson G. Branch, “The Genesis, Composition, and Structure of
The Confidence-Man,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 28 [March, 1973]: 432). But if
Melville intended a “consistent allegory” keyed to a single list established early in
the narrative, this would be a major blunder indeed, suggesting that Melville did
not check back to Chapter 3 or the kind of detail he had followed so faithfully with
his previous con men. It is just as logical to assume that the flaw is a printer’s error
undetected by the author who, according to the Northwestern-Newberry editors,
did not supervise proofs (p. 313). Or perhaps this well-known inconsistency reveals
an author who had grown away from or lost interest in his initial allegorical schema.
Perhaps, too, as I argue here, Melville allowed the “error” to signal a pattern of the
allegorical breakdown that eventually dominates the novel’s second half.
21. Others arguing for the cosmopolitan’s distinctive nature include Franklin
(p. 164) and Buell (pp. 15–29). See also Philip Drew, “Appearance and Reality in
Melville’s The Confidence-Man,” ELH, 31 (December 1964): 442; and, in particular,
Elizabeth Keyser, “‘Quite an Original’: The Cosmopolitan in The Confidence-Man,”
TSLL, 15 (Summer 1973): 279. Most recently, Tom Quirk has found Goodman to
be the culmination of the “evolving significances” of the confidence man figure in
Melville’s imagination (Melville’s Confidence Man: From Knave to Knight [University
of Missouri Press, 1982], pp. 11 and 17).
22. Ringman, for instance, moves from amiable to serious with the troubled
merchant Roberts (p. 21) and returns to heightened sociability with the shallow
collegian (CM, p. 25). The same pattern occurs with the man in gray (pp. 38 and
43) and Truman (p. 64).
23. Black Guinea sets Roberts up for Ringman and the Episcopalian for the
man in gray (p. 19). Ringman sets up Roberts and the collegian for Truman (p. 22),
who in turn sets the miser up for the herb doctor (p. 74).
24. Ringman vouches for Black Guinea to Roberts (p. 19): Truman assures the
collegian of the man in gray and Ringman’s good nature; the man in gray (we learn
from Roberts) has confirmed Ringman (p. 59); and the PIO man tells Pitch that
the herb doctor looks “like a very mild Christian sort of person” (p. 115). The man
in gray confirms Black Guinea to the Episcopalian (p. 29); the herb doctor confirms
92 John Bryant

the man in gray to the passengers (p. 90), Black Guinea to the soldier of fortune (p.
99), and Truman to the miser (p. 102).
25. The early confidence men are invariably associated with the ship’s forward
section where the mute sleeps, Black Guinea performs, and Ringman first appears.
Ringman, Truman, and the PIO man are associated with the gang plank, and along
with the mute are said to come from the East.
26. Similar openings occur in Chapters 4, 5, 6, 9, 21, and 22.
27. Parenthetical notations after each character indicate the number of times
that character is referred to as “the stranger” or “the other,” respectively, Mute (8, 0)
Ringman (9, 1), Man in Gray (4, 1), Truman (6, 6), Herb Doctor (1, 3), PIO Man (1,
8), Cosmopolitan (5, 9), Noble (14, 15), Winsome (17, 3), and Egbert (1, 0).
28. Although Melville does not use this phrase, which is Noah Webster’s
primary definition of “Cosmopolite,” his almost excessive use of “stranger,” especially
in the latter half of the novel, suggests his familiarity with the dictionary entry.
Melville owned the 1846 edition of An American Dictionary of the English Language
(See John Bryant, “‘Nowhere a Stranger’: Melville and Cosmopolitanism,” Nineteenth-
Century Fiction, 39 [December 1984]: 275–291).
29. I would like to thank the Institute for Arts and Humanistic Studies at
The Pennsylvania State University for providing funds that allowed me time to
write this essay.
 B ryan C . S hort

“The Author at the Time”: Tommo and Melville’s

Self-Discovery in Typee

There are some things related in the narrative which will be sure to appear
strange, or perhaps entirely incomprehensible, to the reader; but they
cannot appear more so to him than they did to the author at the time.1

O ne prominent, ongoing trend in Typee criticism focuses attention on the

thematics of cross-cultural contact and other social concerns in the novel.2
Another views it as the representation of gathered forces in Melville’s pre-
literary life.3 From the beginning Typee has transcended the inconsistent
application of conventional literary forms noted by Melville’s own family4 to
command respect on the basis of a vigorous and seemingly unguarded social
and psychological perspicacity. Thus Tommo has often been taken either as
representing Melville’s earlier self—“the author at the time”—or else Western
culture in general. Sometimes the two are combined, as in E. H. Miller’s
characterization of him as “child in cannibal land.”5 Such approaches, reveal-
ing as they are, turn attention away from what I shall argue to be the central
experience narrated in Typee, the compelling tale of Melville’s self-discovery
as a writer. This perspective mediates between extrinsic approaches and the
accomplishments of such intrinsically oriented treatments as those of Stern
and Dryden;6 it clarifies a number of the inconsistencies in Tommo’s narrative
standpoint and the thematics of the novel, and it offers a new insight into the
importance, both for Typee and for Melville, of style.

Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Volume. 31, Number. 3 (Fall 1989): pp. 386–405. ©
1989 University of Texas Press.

93
94 Bryan C. Short

Three well-known factors shaped Melville’s experience of Typee. First,

he came to the novel, in Newton Arvin’s words, “not after long and conscious
preparation, but with a kind of inadvertence.”7 Second, as evidenced by re-
sponses to the novel beginning with its publisher John Murray and climaxing
in Charles R. Anderson’s Melvlle in the South Seas, its truth claims are com-
plex and debatable.8 Third, the success of Typee hangs largely on Melville’s
style: both Murray and a reviewer for the London John Bull wondered that
a sailor could write so well (286); other reviewers praised the work as “so
graceful, so graphic,” “brilliantly colored,” and “lightly but vigorously writ-
ten.”9 These factors determine the manner in which Melville’s self-discovery
as an author informs Typee. Melville’s inexperience explains the contradictory
blend of truth and fancy in the novel: in order to legitimate his authorship,
he concurrently privileges and denies his preliterary past.10 This ambivalence
toward the sources of his authority as a storyteller initiates a dialectic which
both figures and realizes the emergence of his narrative voice out of the back-
ground of his early experiences. “The author at the time” is a trope possible
only in a preface that looks with hindsight on the finished novel as well as
on Tommo’s adventures and that thus unifies the double narrative perspective
noted by critics.11 It announces Melville’s emergent confidence in the power
of an effective literary style to resolve his ambivalent feelings and the complex
of thematic oppositions that they generate. Tommo is not an “author” “at the
time” of his experiences, but Melville’s style pxxermits him to read authorial
functionality back into the plot and incidents of the tale.12 Thus, the operation
of style on theme in Typee reveals the meaning for Melville’s career of both
the blend of sympathy and ethnocentrism in Tommo’s attitudes toward the
natives and of his at times headlong and at times dilatory movement toward
final denial of their claims on his feelings.13
The preface of Typee documents Melville’s impulse to attribute the cha-
risma of his text to the experiences of a preliterary past. “Sailors are the only
class of men who now-a-days see anything like stirring adventure,” it asserts;
a tale which has excited the “warmest sympathies of the author’s shipmates”
can thus “scarcely fail to interest” ordinary readers (xiii). On the other hand,
Melville rapidly tires of his status as a man who lived among cannibals and in
1848 praises Mardi as a “real romance” unsullied by the “dull common places”
of his earlier work. He eagerly trades “the unvarnished truth” (xiv) for “that
play of freedom & invention accorded only to the Romancer & poet.”14 Typee
holds out the claim of verisimilitude against a rapidly surfacing impulse to
deny the value of an earlier life that Melville associates with the creative free-
dom of romance, with authorship rather than seamanship.
The conflict between experience and romance, adventuresome past and
literary present, gives Typee its basic thematic opposition, clearly reflected
in Tommo. On the one hand, by braving the perils and charms of Typee
 “The Author at the Time” 95

Valley, Tommo effectively represents the background of objective experience

against which Melville defines the imaginative freedom of romance. This side
of Tommo draws heavily on Richard Henry Dana, Jr., in his role as narrator of
Two Years before the Mast (1840), a book which, Melville later wrote to Dana,
made him feel “tied & welded to you by a sort of Siamese link of affection-
ate sympathy” (Letters, 106). On the other hand, a different Tommo gives
experience a subjective coloring, the force of which has been well outlined
by Dryden.15 Tommo’s narrative subjectivity draws on an equally important
source, Poe’s Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1838).16 Both Tommo and Pym
avow an exorbitant love of adventure, undergo figurative death and rebirth,
confront the terrors of cannibalism, and register numerous sensations of the
sort to which Dana’s unflappable persona seems immune.
The conflict in Tommo’s narrative standpoint mirrors Melville’s own
conflicting views of the fictional process. Dana’s narrator submits calmly to
circumstances; his responses give interest but not direction to the plot of Two
Years before the Mast. At one point, lowered off a sheer cliff, he reports, “I
could see nothing below me but the sea and rocks upon which it broke, and
a few gulls flying in mid-air. I got down, in safety, pretty well covered with
dirt; and for my pains was told, ‘What a d—d fool you were to risk your life
for half a dozen hides.’”17 His account, utterly believable, conveys little sense
of “that play of freedom and invention” to which Melville aspires. Pym, in a
similar situation, falls victim to his own unfettered imagination:

At length arrived that crisis of fancy, so fearful in all similar cases,

the crisis in which we begin to anticipate the feelings with which we
shall fall—to picture to ourselves the sickness, and dizziness, and the
last struggle. . . . And now I found these fancies creating their own
realities, . . . in the next my whole soul was pervaded with a longing
to fall; a desire, a yearning, a passion utterly uncontrollable.18

Pym’s fancies do not simply color experience but create “their own reali-
ties.” As a result, Pym cannot trust himself; his horror of cannibalism is not
of being eaten but of becoming a cannibal. His narrative crosses the line
between romance and phantasmagoria.
Descending into Typee valley, Tommo controls his vertigo by shutting
out the immediate sensations on which his imagination, unlike Pym’s, seems
to depend: “My brain grew dizzy with the idea of the frightful risk I had
just run, and I involuntarily closed my eyes to shut out the view of the depth
beneath me” (61). Similarly, Tommo balances Pym’s compulsive adventurous-
ness against Dana’s prim desire for home. However, where Dana fears time
lost from his Boston future, Tommo, having no clear future, fears only entrap-
ment in a repeated past:
96 Bryan C. Short

There is scarcely anything when a man is in difficulties that he

is more disposed to look on with abhorrence than a right-about
retrograde movement—a systematic going over of the already
trodden ground; and especially if he has a love of adventure, such
a course appears indescribably repulsive. (54)

Tommo’s anxiety vis-à-vis the past makes him a fitting vehicle for Melville’s
ambivalence toward the sources of his own literary authority. The progress
of his life continually bows to Melville’s search for persuasiveness, for the
grounds of belief in his own verbal creativity; and his mix of the characteris-
tics of Dana and Pym keeps Melville’s contrasting impulses in suspension.
Tommo’s controlled imagination and fear of the past blur the line between
native and “civilized” culture. The threat of entrapment in Typee Valley
echoes the prior threat of an interminable sea voyage; indeed the basic nature
of Tommo’s responses is determined before he reaches land; the Edenic
harmony of valley life duplicates the experience of sailing for the Marquesas
during which the lazy felicity brought on by sun, waves, teeming ocean life,
and the all-encompassing blue of sea and sky calls forth some of Melville’s
most transcendental prose. What finally attracts about the sea is exactly that
quality that Melville as author and Tommo as narrator must escape—its
silence: “But the most impressive feature of the scene was the almost upbro-
ken silence that reigned over sky and water” (10). The charms of the sea are
mute and, under its spell, language is foreclosed; one hesitates to intrude on
the quietude, and one cannot read without falling asleep. In order to break
into voice, Melville must imagine a mediate realm, Typee Valley, where the
charms of inarticulate experience and linguistic authority coexist.
Typee Valley, in contrast to the sea, offers little indigenous animal life,
shows the scars of age-old paths and ruins, and is colored a pervasive green
that, as has been noted, betokens not timelessness but decay.19 In order to
cast his valley experiences in a romantic light, Tommo exag­gerates vague and
groundless dangers:20

In looking back to this period, and calling to remembrance the

numberless proofs of kindness and respect which I received from
the natives of the valley, I can scarcely understand how it was that,
in the midst of so many consolatory circumstances, my mind should
still have been consumed by the most dismal forebodings. (118)

Without both Tommo’s “most dismal forebodings” and the contrasting

Edenic cast which he gives to his surroundings, Typee Valley would lose
the suggestiveness that raises it above Tommo’s earlier maritime experiences
as a source of inspiration. Typee Valley is organized by Melville in order to
 “The Author at the Time” 97

provide a theater for the exercise of a literary imagination calculated to save

him from a shipboard identity that undercuts his power of articulation.
Typee history and society also reveal a contradictory structure: Melville
allows the reader to imagine that the Typees are largely innocent of contact
with whites; still only the Typees’ elaborately sophisticated response to Eu-
ropean culture preserves them from it—they remain constantly alert to the
movements of the French in Nukuheva Bay and carefully cultivate xenopho-
bia. Typee life is characterized not by natural innocence but rather by numer-
ous systems of articulation and differentiation—by talk and taboo—which
Tommo only superficially acknowledges.
While ignoring the historical circumstances of the Typees in order to
present them as innocent children of nature, Tommo takes the further step
of imposing on them a romance history. In his eyes their charm lies partly
in the doom that hangs over them: they are the last unsullied tribe; Hawaii,
Tahiti, even Nukuheva, have fallen into hopeless corruption. Typee’s timeless-
ness and peace exist in a fragile, fleeting moment poised between an endless
natural past and an imminent, hopeless future. Tommo views corruption as
an absolute state of being; he projects onto the culture of the islanders an
imaginary gulf between innocence and degradation. Intensely aware of and
indignant over results, he remains blind to processes, to his own corrupting
influence.21 Tommo’s blindness creates a further stage for his own “play of
freedom and invention”; Typee society is charmed because it is timeless, and
timeless because Tommo “closes his eyes” to change and causality during his
stay—as if “involuntarily” to “shut out the view” of the cultural movement in
which he participates.
The pattern of relationships informing Tommo’s responses, the state of
nature and life in Typee Valley, and the sense of history in the work can be
summarized as follows: a situation claimed as a source of coherent authority in
Tommo’s narrative turns out to be self-contradictory; the novel, in order to tell
Tommo’s tale, imposes a series of imaginary gaps—between past and present,
art and experience, sea and valley, “civilization” and primitivism, corruption
and innocence—which clear a space for “freedom and invention” manifested
in the operation of Melville’s style. Tommo’s “consciousness of self,” noted by
Stern, and the concomitant “progressive unfolding of the self ” mentioned by
Dryden22 turn out to be ruses of fiction dependent on Melville’s assertion of
authorship. By sustaining the thematic oppositions in Typee, Melville justi-
fies the overriding, synthetic power which style comes to accrue in the novel,
and thus the undeniable proof of his own authorial identity. What Tommo
seeks to escape from is Melville’s own entrapment in a mute and impotent
past. That escape can never be realized because its ongoing enactment figures
Melville’s emergence into authorship, and his emergence dominates the work.
Tommo cannot grow because he tropes, on the one hand, the need for growth
98 Bryan C. Short

on Melville’s part and, on the other hand, the achieved growth indicated by
the existence of his story; he is not “the author at the time” but a vehicle by
which “the author at the time” can be incarnated in the operation of style;
thus he remains a static and dichotomous figure.
Tommo’s surprise at the happiness of Typee Valley life simulates Mel-
ville’s surprise at finding himself suddenly wielding the authority of a master-
ful style. To be in charge of such a style makes its earlier lack equally surpris-
ing. A phenomenological gap opens between Melville’s vocal and voiceless
selves, a gulf that inspires his sense of wonder and delight in being a writer.
Typee images the preliterary self of its author in terms of a regression that can
only be spoken figuratively, an authority in words emerging out of that which
is prior to words (his experience of the sea), an image of growth possible only
if, like the figures on Keats’s urn, willfully and gracefully frozen. In Typee,
Melville’s style comes to mediate the contradictions of the fictional world.
The textual history of the work gives a unique insight into Melville’s growing
identification with an authority residing in the powers of literary voicing.
Typee was published first in London and almost simultaneously in New
York. Between the American copyright date of 17 March 1846 and August of
that year, Melville prepared a second American edition, incorporating Toby’s
story and making numerous excisions. Melville’s letters suggest the excisions
to have been made in response to his American publisher’s objections over
antimissionary sentiment and certain “sea freedoms” in the first edition (Let-
ters, 39). However, several factors suggest that the excisions reflect Melville’s
own growing authorial identity. First, Melville’s letters express the opinion
that the excisions give the book “a unity . . . which it wanted before” (Letters,
39). Second, many of the removed passages bear only minimally on the pub-
lisher’s ostensible objections. Third, comparison of the original and excised
editions with Melville’s sources and with the newly discovered manuscript
pages in the New York Public Library shows a continuous trend of develop-
ment toward the “play of freedom and invention” of which Melville wrote in
regard to Mardi. Finally, Melville made no move to restore any of the excised
material in later editions during his lifetime.
The excisions have the effect of simplifying both the language and the
world of Typee, and of giving freer play to Melville’s dominant style. In many
of the excised passages, Melville speaks with an aggressive wit backed up by
hindsight, the citing of sources, or historical data not immediately relevant to
Tommo’s adventures. The passages are often strong and delightful, and mod-
ern readers tend to prefer the first edition; still, these segments draw attention
away from Tommo’s half-innocence and the essential contradictions in his
situation. Interestingly, the manuscript pages show the first edition to ben-
efit from corresponding “purifications of style,” excision of numerous colorful
 “The Author at the Time” 99

metaphors and allusions, and softening of tone. Once they become widely
available, many readers will undoubtedly prefer them to the first edition.
Melville’s excisions weigh particularly heavily on the first four chapters,
which are reduced by about half in the second American edition. The first
chapter loses its famous “Oh! ye state-room sailors” passage and two humor-
ous incidents: the natives’ curious disrobing of a missionary’s wife and the
embarrassment of the French over the public display of “her own sweet form”
by Mowanna’s consort. The history of French occupation of the islands in
chapter 3 vanishes entirely. Chapter 4 loses a disquisition on the brutalization
of the natives by European violence, a description of Tior, and a meditation
on the relative happiness of native and civilized humankind. With the exci-
sions disappears all reference to the genuine, historical world of the islands
and the aggressive play of Melville’s satire—directed in turn against genteel
voyagers, the French, missionaries, civilization, and the childish immodesty
of the natives. Between the two editions, the beginning of the novel chang-
es from a rhapsodic history, Voltairean in its witty superiority of tone, to a
much more unified account of supposedly personal experiences. The story of
Tommo’s arrival at Nukuheva, immediate escape, life among the Typees, and
rescue by the Julia leaves little time for his learning about the French presence
in the islands so prominent in the removed material. Excision of the incident
involving Mowanna’s consort cancels a humorous treatment of the theme of
tattooing which makes overt the similarity between native and sailor. Re-
moval of the “state-room sailors” passage dispels an early belligerence out of
tune with Tommo’s narrative personality in the rest of the work.
Melville’s excisions deemphasize the historical world within which the
narrative takes place, leaving a more uniform sense of the timelessness and
innocence of Typee life. As T. Walter Herbert concludes, “Revisions of Typee
had the effect of rendering the work more ‘romantic.’”23 They blur, on the one
hand, the sharpness of Melville’s contrasts between civilization and savagery
and, on the other, the moralistic indignation of the narrative voice. The sec-
ond American edition permits Tommo’s experiences to speak more on their
own terms; comparisons between European and Typee emerge from the con-
text of happenings in the tale rather than seeming laid on ex post facto. The
narrative voice of the second American edition is left to seek the meaning of
observed events without reference to a library of sources. A similar effect can
be attributed to the omission in the first edition of a number of biblical, clas-
sical, and literary allusions and a degree of humorous elaboration, notable, for
example, in the description of Kory-Kory’s speech at the end of chapter 14,
which enliven Melville’s manuscript. As Melville moves from manuscript to
printed text, excisions significantly outnumber additions, a further indication
of his sharpening focus. In numerous places he softens his references to the
Typees, referring to them, for example, as men rather than as savages.
100 Bryan C. Short

The key distinction between Typee and earlier treatments of native life
in the Marquesas—such as those of Stewart, Porter, Langsdorff, and El-
lis—is the degree of intimacy with the islanders that it evokes. The history
of Melville’s text demonstrates his growing willingness to, on the one hand,
romanticize the natives and, on the other hand, bring Tommo into closer
contact with them. As the dual effects of romance and immediacy become
more pronounced, the conflict between them (and in Tommo’s responses) is
heightened, leaving a more serious task for the narrative voice. Tommo’s con-
tact with the Typees produces a weight of detail potentially inimical to “that
play of freedom and invention accorded only to the Romancer and poet,” yet
it threatens Tommo’s supposed objectivity. Thus, the problematic structure
of Tommo’s involvement, amplified by successive versions of the text, results
from Melville’s calculated departure from the models available to him—a
departure that shows itself to be even more extraordinary under the light of
stylistic analysis.
As mentioned above, one of the chief effects of Melville’s emphasis on
the closeness of Tommo’s involvement in a romanticized native world is the
sense of timelessness that tints Typee Valley. Interestingly, the uncertain tem-
porality of Tommo’s own experiences is a fact that Melville finds important
enough to justify in the preface. No Robinson Crusoe, Tommo counts the
days only when he expects Toby to return with help. The obverse side of Tom-
mo’s attenuated time sense is the heightened spatialization of experience in
which he participates. Spatialization, as Joseph Frank defines it,24 operates in
Typee to create a theater for the operation of style. The timelessness of Tom-
mo’s life, once Toby leaves and Tommo’s leg begins to heal, brings to a halt
the progress of the narrative from Tommo’s entry into the head of the valley
toward his ultimate escape by sea at the narrative’s far end. Timelessness also
puts out of play his sense of the causal processes by which the Typees adjust
to European encroachment, his own included. In rhetorical terms it signals
a move from a metaphorical to a metonymic perspective,25 from a system of
external comparisons to associations justified by contiguity within a uniform,
static field. As Tommo loses his compulsion to escape, he wanders the val-
ley, inescapably enfolded in a closed, undifferentiated space, “nothing but a
labyrinth of foot-paths twisting and turning among the thickets without end”
(194); and yet he continually encounters new sources of wonder—ruins, idols,
natural phenomena, structures, activities—included with little regard to the
temporal movement of plot.
Tommo’s entrapment within a timeless, nonprogressive, metonymic
world focuses attention on the visual quality of his experiences—their in-
congruousness, beauty, or shock value—apart from their meaning in relation
to external systems of value. This focus is clear in regard to the theme of tat-
tooing. Scholars have pointed out that the Typees are tattooed with marks of
 “The Author at the Time” 101

their own status and that Tommo must avoid being inscribed with a native
identity envisioned, like the bars etched across Kory-Kory’s face, as a prison.26
Yet Tommo is willing to have his arms tattooed, an act which would signal,
in the same metaphoric terms, acceptance of the identity of a sailor—equally
threatening to Melville’s authorial selfhood. Tommo must remain free from
tattoos, from metaphorical determination, because the unspecified nature of
his identity is figuratively crucial to Typee. Tattooing, like the operation of a
literary style, is “so beautifying an operation” (219) which has the ability to fix
the essential identity of something by working on its surface. Melville does
not exercise his authority by giving Typee the powerful underlying drive or
symbolic architecture of a Mardi or Moby-Dick; instead he takes individual
scenes and events and colors them vividly. The central sections of the novel
present a series of intensely visual tableaux that could be rearranged without
loss. Tommo himself often becomes one of the figures within such a tableau,
as when he reclines among bathing “nymphs,” sails on the lake with Fayaway,
or dresses for a native gala. Tommo’s relationships with the natives are pre-
sented in the same visual, spatialized, metonymic terms as the world of the
valley: a description of native music can lead by association into an account
of Tommo delighting the Typees by singing a sea chanty; a sense of kinship
with Marheyo is built up out of bits of description of his incessant, happy,
aimless movements near the mat where Tommo lies. Tommo’s intimacy with
the natives is predominantly picturesque; Melville’s descriptive style makes
that intimacy seem much more profound.
Melville’s style draws its power from a variety of techniques not nor-
mally associated with description—the main reason, I believe, for his style’s
synthetic power. These techniques, although on one level evocative of a de-
fensiveness vis-à-vis the pure, mute nature of experience, become in Melville’s
hands the tools for a rapacious linguistic appropriation of it. Unlike Poe, who
turns inward and thereby loses the face of reality in his narrative, Melville
fills his descriptions with a teeming world of obliquely associated detail. His
style turns frequently on a visual hyperbole that annexes sensation to voice.
Consider the beginning of the novel as it remains in the second American
edition:

Six months at sea! Yes, reader, as I live, six months out of sight of
land; cruising after the sperm-whale beneath the scorching sun of
the Line, and tossed on the billows of the wide-rolling Pacific—the
sky above, the sea around, and nothing else! Weeks and weeks ago
our fresh provisions were all exhausted. There is not a sweet potatoe
left; not a single yam. Those glorious bunches of bananas which
once decorated our stern and quarter-deck have, alas, disappeared!
and the delicious oranges which hung suspended from our tops and
102 Bryan C. Short

stays—they, too, are gone! Yes, they are all departed, and there is
nothing left us but salt-horse and sea-biscuit.
Oh! for a refreshing glimpse of one blade of grass—for a snuff
at the fragrance of a handful of loamy earth! Is there nothing fresh
around us? Is there no green thing to be seen? Yes, the inside of
our bulwarks is painted green; but what a vile and sickly hue it is,
as if nothing bearing even the semblance of verdure could flourish
this weary way from land. Even the bark that once clung to the
wood we use for fuel has been gnawed off and devoured by the
captain’s pig; and so long ago, too, that the pig himself has in turn
been devoured. (3–4)

Rarely has a novel opened with such an exuberant rhapsody on the subject of
that which is no longer present. The passage, rather than paining the reader
with a vision of the privation experienced on the voyage, eulogizes the rich-
ness of fare seemingly available on a South Sea cruise; the prose overwhelms
the reader with the pure joy of describing. Hyperbole has the effect of draw-
ing attention to the telling rather than the message; it suggests the imagina-
tive vigor of a mind capable of marshaling any amount of detail, of spinning
a chain of associated signifiers that might stretch on indefinitely no matter
what the limits of actual experience. The privation experienced by the sail-
ors is represented by a fictional plenitude that evokes an imaginary sensual
world, a world of gustatory relish that preempts the thematics of feasting
in the valley. Melville’s humorous longing for the sacrifice of Pedro, the
captain’s rooster, as both Clark and Tolchin have noted, 27 combined with the
reference to “heathenish rites and human sacrifice” (5), introduces later fears as
a by-product of the voicing of freely associated images. Before we know it,
Melville’s narrative voice has, characteristically, enfolded many of the issues
that will later determine Tommo’s responses to the natives. That they will
prove to be just like the sailors, like Tommo himself, and cannibalize their
prisoner out of hunger or exuberance is a possibility, despite his own tabooed
status, which Tommo can never dispel from his mind.
The beginning of Typee displays another of Melville’s techniques, what
can be called promiscuous apostrophe. He begins by addressing the reader
directly, fades into soliloquy, and in subsequent paragraphs addresses the
rooster, another sailor, and the “poor old ship” itself. The impression created is
of a voice ready to fix on any imaginable auditor. The world of Typee gets per-
sonified, made immediate, by being talked to or by being talked—to someone.
Even when Melville is not employing direct address, his style has the power
to make its current topic take on an air of momentary intimacy between
author and reader. Melville’s dissertations on the distinction between primi-
tive and civilized life almost always have a mediating quality which, under
 “The Author at the Time” 103

the pennant of voicing—the placing of the fictional world in a close relation

to the act of its articulation—bridges the gaps seemingly emphasized. Fre-
quently the gaps bridged are temporal; what was “so long ago” is made current
or projected into a near future: “but courage, old lass, I hope to see thee soon
within a biscuit’s toss of the merry land” (5).
The mediating nature of Melville’s style is clear in the famous passage in
which Kory-Kory lights a fire. Tommo signals the start of his tableau by an-
nouncing to the reader that, because the act “was entirely different from what
I had ever seen,” he will describe it. He then shifts to the present tense, as if, in
spite of his generalizations, he were addressing a scene taking place right in front
of him. As Kory-Kory speeds up, Melville’s style becomes more vivid, concrete
and hyperbolic, but such phrases as “amazing rapidity” and “this is the critical
stage of the operation” maintain the presence of an auditor in the description.
In the final sentences, Melville’s vocal force comes to reside in two strong meta-
phors, the second of which has been anticipated earlier in the passage:

His hands still retain their hold of the smaller stick, which
is pressed convulsively against the further end of the channel
among the fine powder there accumulated, as if he had just
pierced through and through some little viper that was wriggling
and struggling to escape from his clutches. The next moment a
delicate wreath of smoke curls spirally into the air, the heap of
dusty particles glows with fire, and Kory-Kory almost breathless,
dismounts from his steed. (111)

The point is not that the metaphorical structure of the passage makes it
an allegory of masturbation—a theory reinforced by the intimate tone but
complicated by the existence of additional comparisons between Kory-
Kory and both a locomotive and a steamship that appear in the manuscript
pages. Melville’s metaphor of the viper is so unusual, indeed catachrestic,
and yet visually pointed, that it breaks down the structure of external refer-
ence which the subsequent native-civilized comparisons seem to produce.
Because of the violence of the viper image, the physical impact of the pas-
sage refuses to rest within the con­fines of an easy humor. In the manuscript
Melville ends his suggestion for a “college of vestals,” to keep valley fires
lit, with a rather abstract sentence making it clear that the “special difficul-
ties” mentioned in conjunction with this scheme refer to the lack of virgins
among native women. In revising, he decided to give the subject a more
serious and pointed treatment. At stake is the outlay of “good temper,” “toil,”
and “anxiety” and a process undertaken for the purpose of lighting Tommo’s
pipe takes on the weight of duties that would drive a “European artisan”
“to his wits’ end.” The coloring given by the viper image is picked up, as
104 Bryan C. Short

Melville comes to realize that the intimacy of visual detail in the passage
prevents the use of a cooler or more condescendingly humorous tone.
In “Kory-Kory strikes a light a la Typee,” Melville begins with a para-
graph of colorful, present-tense description in which an unusual image cre-
ates a swerve in tone and reference; he then moves to a paragraph of under-
stated humor containing his suggestion for a “college of vestals”; finally he
compares European with island life in a way that reflects the disconcerting
note introduced by the viper image. The entire passage mediates themati-
cally between the two societies as it integrates three distinct and character-
istic temporal modes—present-tense immediate (“Kory-Kory goes to work
quite leisurely . . .”), retrospective reflection (“had I possessed a sufficient
intimacy with the language to have conveyed my ideas upon the subject, I
should certainly have suggested . . .”), and generalized commentary (“What
a striking evidence does this operation furnish . . .”). Melville’s style draws
together the “striking evidence” of the third paragraph—which discusses
relative obligations faced by native and European—with the initial motive
for the passage: “often he was obliged to strike a light for the occasion.” The
“intimacy with the language” that Tommo lacks in the second paragraph
evokes the extraordinary physical intimacy of the preceding passages, in
which Tommo’s body is rubbed down with “aka” by the native girls. The
various aspects of the whole scene come together in an act of address where
visual content, speaking voice, and audience intermix and cohere closely in
an integrated yet complex locutionary act.
The mediatory nature of Melville’s voice in “Kory-Kory strikes a light
a la Typee” critically involves the handling of time in the passage. Melville
deliberately elides the distinctions between the time of the event and the time
of writing about it. The fact that the prose relates associatively—metonymi-
cally—to its context helps; the passage is presented as a contiguous part of
the prior domestic scene, a natural prelude to musings on family obligations.
It has no determinate temporal position. The same use of style to shape the
timeless time sense of Typee appears in bolder outline in a later passage:

For hours and hours during the warmest part of the day I lay
upon my mat, and while those around me were nearly all dozing
away in careless ease, I remained awake, gloomily pondering
over the fate which it appeared now idle for me to resist. When I
thought of the loved friends who were thousands and thousands of
miles from the savage island in which I was held a captive, when
I reflected that my dreadful fate would for ever be concealed from
them, and that with hope deferred they might continue to await
my return long after my inanimate form had blended with the dust
of the valley—I could not repress a shudder of anguish.
 “The Author at the Time” 105

How vividly is impressed upon my mind every minute feature

of the scene which met my view during those long days of suffering
and sorrow! . . .
Just beyond the pi-pi, and disposed in a triangle before the
entrance of the house, were three magnificent bread-fruit trees.
At this moment I can recal to my mind their slender shafts,
and the graceful inequalities of their bark, on which my eye was
accustomed to dwell day after day in the midst of my solitary
musings. It is strange how inanimate objects will twine themselves
into our affections, especially in the hour of affliction. Even now,
amidst all the bustle and stir of the proud and busy city in which
I am dwelling, the image of those three trees seems to come as
vividly before my eyes as if they were actually present, and I still
feel the soothing quiet pleasure which I then had in watching hour
after hour their topmost boughs waving gracefully in the breeze.
(243–244)

This passage so clearly presages a host of others in Melville’s later works

—Redburn’s memories of his model ship, Ishmael’s commentary on the
“Counterpane” experience, the memorable, damned tortoises of The
Encantadas—that it deserves careful attention. It is the only passage in Typee
where Tommo suggests a past (loved friends) prior to his experiences on ship
or the future circumstances of his life (“the proud and busy city in which I
am dwelling”). It dramatically oversteps the temporal boundaries of the rest
of the novel, but it does so in a way that specifies the novel’s temporality. 28
At the beginning of the passage, Tommo places himself in exactly the
position that he imagines the Typees to be in—suspended between an inde-
terminate innocent past and an endless, hopeless future. His anguish derives
not from fear of approaching events, of which he has no sense, but rather
fear of silence—that his “dreadful fate would for ever be concealed.” As with
the novel itself, the gap between past and future is a theater for imaginatively
articulated experience: “How vividly is impressed upon my mind every min-
ute feature of the scene which met my view during those long days of suffer-
ing and sorrow” (243). Here the present tense indicates the time of writing
or reflection, so the whole experience is projected forward to a moment that
replaces the original point of sensation: “at this moment I can recal. . . .” This
instant then opens out further into a sense of the process of the author’s
continuing life: “Even now, amidst all the bustle and stir . . . , the image of
those trees seems to come as vividly before my eyes. . . .” The memory of im-
ages from Tommo’s tale, inspired by a state of mind brought on in turn by a
memory of “loved friends,” gives time and substance to Melville’s authorial
personality. The passage presents an indeterminate fictional moment that in-
106 Bryan C. Short

volves a looking back that enables a looking forward, both perspectives out-
side the fictional bounds of the novel, both therefore aspects of voice rather
than theme. The same figure lies hidden behind the assertion, “I can never
forget . . .” which opens the description of the sea in the second chapter and
which Melville repeats throughout Typee—for example, in the final line of
chapter 6 (40), twice in chapter 7 (45, 46), and three times in the final chapter
(248 twice, 252). In this case the moment of telling is eclipsed by a going
back—remembering—which goes endlessly forward—never to be forgotten.
The backward and forward movement of time in Typee corresponds to
the trope of metalepsis which, in the intertextual analysis of Harold Bloom,
permits a poem to imagine itself as prior to, enfolding, and misreading,
its own precursor.29 In Typee it enables the existence of “the author at the
time”—a consciousness free to range beyond the boundaries of the work and
thus beyond the limits of its own existence as figured by Tommo. “The author
at the time” is an author who appropriates time to voicing. Metalepsis tends
to show up throughout Melville’s writings wherever the substance of autho-
rial identity, the relation between author and materials, and the imaginative
generation of discourse are in question. It integrates theme and style, content
and form, in a way that sets Typee apart from both its nonfiction sources and
earlier sea novels from Defoe through Marryat; it is precisely the narrative
function that Poe fails to control in attempting to get Pym’s story told.
The mediating or synthetic nature of Melville’s style is enabled by its key
functional qualities: metonymy, the proleptic enfolding or preempting of the-
matic materials, hyperbole, apostrophe, catachresis, and metalepsis. The ending
of Typee resolves its contradictions through the achieved powers of style and
realizes Melville’s emergence from silence into his particular, compelling voice.
The final chapter begins by canceling the sense of timelessness outlined above;
in returning Tommo to time, it also returns him to the portentous silence
mentioned in Melville’s early description of the sea: “Nearly three weeks had
elapsed since the second visit of Marnoo, and it must have been more than
four months since I entered the valley, when one day about noon, and whilst
everything was in profound silence. . . .” (245). Melville establishes directly that
Tommo’s escape must come by way of return to the sea, a sea which for the
moment suspends its power to suffocate Tommo’s sense of self:

Having been prohibited from approaching the sea during the

whole of my stay in the valley, I had always associated with it
the idea of escape. Toby too—if indeed he had ever voluntarily
deserted me—must have effected his flight by the sea; and now
that I was drawing near to it myself, I indulged in hopes which I
had never felt before. (246)
 “The Author at the Time” 107

“Hopes which I had never felt before” repeats the metalepsis responsible for
the enabling timelessness of Typee Valley—now attached to the idea of the
sea. At issue is the ability, in escaping from the island, to avoid a relapse
into the world of silence, muteness, which it supplanted. Tommo is, at this
point, still trapped in the Typee world of static space and corresponding
articulation, and his progress toward the beach is agonizingly delayed by a
throng of gesturing, talking, shouting, and arguing islanders. Finally, his
own “eloquence of gesture” prevails on the otherwise hostile Mow-Mow to
permit him to struggle onward, now with no help from his surrogate family.
Within the world of the valley, Tommo can only gesture, not speak, and
he exists under a pseudonym which as much indicates a lack of identity as
a created one. Gesture must give way to real articulation, to the projection
of an authorship which Tommo can never genuinely figure, before he will
be free to go.
At this point, in a mirror image of the process by which the contradictions
in the thematic world of Typee were earlier seen to open a space for articulation,
the talk of the natives divides to open a space for Tommo’s escape:

To my surprise I was suffered to proceed alone, all the natives

remaining in front of the house, and engaging in earnest
conversation, which every moment became more loud and
vehement; and to my unspeakable delight I perceived that some
difference of opinion had arisen between them; that two parties,
in short, were formed, and consequently that in their divided
counsels there was some chance of my deliverance. (248)

Immediately after this passage, Marheyo, with an expression that Tommo

says he “shall never forget,” articulates, on behalf of the mute Tommo, the
space between the “divided counsels” of the natives by pronounc­ing the
words “home” and “mother” to him. Six lines later, Tommo nears the sea:

Never shall I forget the extacy I felt when I first heard the roar of
the surf breaking upon the beach. Before long I saw the flashing
billows themselves through the opening between the trees. Oh
glorious sight and sound of ocean! with what rapture did I hail
you as familiar friends! By this time the shouts of the crowd upon
the beach were distinctly audible, and in the blended confusion of
sounds I almost fancied I could distinguish the voices of my own
countrymen. (248)

Marheyo’s words give way to the noise of the surf and the voices on the
beach: the babble of the arguing natives conflicts and blends with sounds
108 Bryan C. Short

that Tommo can understand. It is another experience that he can “never for-
get”; the metaleptic device that has informed the suspended time of the val-
ley now relates Tommo to the sea, which, in the guise of “familiar friends,”
echoes the “loved friends” of Tommo’s musings in the valley. By evoking the
figure that permits authorial transcendence of the fictional time in Typee,
the waves momentarily transcend their own threatening past. The “opening
between the trees” yields in the next paragraph to “the open space between
the groves and the sea” (249). Tommo’s escape is staged in the in-between
space of the beach, an image that will retain its significance for Melville
even to the “Pebbles” which end John Marr and Other Sailors:

But Orm from the schools to the beaches strays,

And, finding a Conch hoar with time, he delays
And reverent lifts it to ear.
That Voice, pitched in far monotone,
Shall it swerve? Shall it deviate ever?30

Tommo, bounced between images of transcendence and suppression in time,

fears that he has arrived “too late” when again the available space is occupied
by a mark of enabling articulation—the sound of his “own name shouted out
by a voice from the midst of the crowd” (249).
It is, of course, “Tom,” not “Tommo,” that he hears (unless, as Wither-
ington has suggested, that too is a pseudonym),31 since Karakoee would not
have known his native name, and the word prompts Tommo to two crucial
acts: he recognizes and he remembers. A page later, after the “detestable word
‘Roo-ne’” threatens to take over the theater of articulation opened by the “op-
posing counsels” of the natives on the beach, a second reference to Tommo’s
ability to remember leads into the exertion of all his strength in plunging
toward Karakoee, who now stands “to the waist in the surf.” Tommo’s success
is signaled by Fayaway, who is rendered “speechless” with sorrow and im-
mediately described as “retired from the edge of the water.” The other natives
may follow Tommo “into the water,” but the power of those who are key in-
gredients in the romance world of Typee Valley ends at the shore. Mow-Mow
is the only recognizable native who swims after the boat, and his “ferocious
expression” at being defeated is the final thing of which Tommo says “never
shall I forget” (252).
The entry of the natives into the water in pursuit of Tommo elides, once
and for all, the valley-sea distinction that Melville has pretended to maintain
throughout. He is able to give up such an important locus of vocal enablement
because the distinction bows, in the final moments of the story, to another
more central to Melville’s later works—being afloat as opposed to being im-
mersed. The natives would overturn Tommo’s boat; to be swamped in the sea
 “The Author at the Time” 109

is the last threat of residence in Typee Valley; it signals the allegiance which
the realms share in figuring the dangers of the past, experience, and silence
to the emergence of Melville’s authorial identity. The natives, unaccountably
more formidable in the water than on land, usher into Melville’s fiction the
fear of immersion associated with the end of Mardi, with White-Jacket’s
plunge, and with the tragedy of Pip in Moby-Dick.
It is not, of course, “Tommo” who is pulled on board the Julia, since that
appellation has not appeared in the novel since he has heard “my own name”
shouted by Karakoee. “Tom” (the real name is not crucial) now represents a
narrative voice that mediates between Melville and Tommo, and he tells us
that “on reaching the ‘Julia’ I was lifted over the side, and my strange appear-
ance and remarkable adventure occasioned the liveliest interest” (252–253).
His phrase echoes the assertion of the preface that the narrator’s story “could
scarcely fail to interest those who are less familiar than the sailor with a life of
adventure.” The echoed language constitutes a final metaleptic figure which
permits the end and beginning of the book to evoke each other and complete
its narrative circle. The circle is closed not by Tommo’s adventures but by
the “interest” displayed by auditors in the accomplished tale. Melville’s new
narrative persona never takes substantial form, for to do so would be for him
to traduce the allegorical focus of the work. On one level, then, nothing has
been solved; Tommo faces another problematic sea voyage. On another level,
everything has been solved, for Melville’s simulacrum has discovered his voice.
The tale does not end; it tails off into an appendix, a sequel, the story of Toby,
another sequel, Omoo, and Melville’s subsequent literary career, a career dur-
ing the entire scope of which his strong sense of authorial identity and his
strong style never leave him. Melville’s self-discovery in Typee carries the force
of a conversion experience, an inconceivable but undeniable election; Typee is
the first in a series of instances in which voicing and salvation interweave to
produce a texture of thematic and formal concerns characteristic of Melville’s
fictional method. It is hard to imagine a first novel that does more to enable
the mature, complex, and durable creative energy of its author.

No t e s

1. Herman Melville, Typee, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G.

Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and
Newberry Library, 1968), xiv. Subsequent references to Typee will be cited from
this edition in the text. I would like to thank the Northern Arizona University
Organized Research Committee for supporting the writing of this article.
2. See James Duban, Melville’s Major Fiction: Politics, Theology, and Imagination
(De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983) 3–11; John Wenke, “Melville’s
Typee: A Tale of Two Worlds,” in Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s –“Typee,”
ed. Milton R. Stern (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 250–258; T. Walter Herbert, Jr.,
110 Bryan C. Short

Marquesas Encounters: Melville and the Meaning of Civilization (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1980); 149–191; A. N. Kaul, “Herman Melville: The New-World
Voyageur,” in The American Vision: Actual and Ideal Society in Nineteenth-Century
Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 222–235; Charles R. Anderson,
Melville in the South Seas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 69–195.
  3. See Neal L. Tolchin, Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of
Herman Melville (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) 36–58; Michael Paul
Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York:
Knopf, 1983) 43–49; Edwin Haviland Miller, Melville (New York: Braziller, 1975)
118–135; Lawrance Thompson, Melville’s Quarrel with God (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1952), 43–55.
  4. Tolchin, 36.
  5. Miller, Melville, 118.
  6. Milton R. Stern, The Fine-Hammered Steel of Herman Melville (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1957) 29–65; Edgar A. Dryden, Melville’s Thematics of
Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1968), 37–46.
  7. Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York: William Sloane, 1950), 77.
  8. On Murray’s suspicions, see Leon Howard, Historical Note, in Typee, 279;
Anderson (191) concludes that Melville could have written Typee without having
visited the Marquesas.
  9. Hugh W. Hetherington, Melville’s Reviewers: British and American, 1846–
1891 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 24, 25, 33.
10. William B. Dillingham (An Artist in the Rigging: The Early Works of
Herman Melville [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972], 24) explores the theme
of the “irrecoverable” past in Typee; Rowland A. Sherrill (The Prophetic Melville:
Experience, Transcendence, and Tragedy [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979],
7–32) discusses the “retrospective narrator” of the work.
11. Dillingham, 11–12. A summary of treatments of the theme appears in 12n.
12. For a theoretical treatment of authorial functionality see Michel Foucault,
“What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F.
Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1977), 113–138.
13. Herbert (153–180) discusses at length the contradictions and tensions
centering on Tommo’s view of the natives. Cf. Duban’s (9n) suggested revision of
Herbert’s outlook.
14. The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H.
Gilman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 70. Subsequent references to
Letters will appear in the text.
15. Dryden, Melville’s Thematics of Form, 38–46.
16. Mary K. Bercaw, Melville’s Sources (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1987), 110. Also see Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and
Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), 21.
17. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years before the Mast (1912; rpt. London:
Dent, 1972), 169.
18. Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America,
1984), 1170.
19. Stern, Fine-Hammered Steel, 61.
 “The Author at the Time” 111

20. Rogin concludes that “there is no evidence that the Typeeans actually plan
to eat Tommo” (47).
21. See Stern, Fine-Hammered Steel, 40, and Dryden, 45, on Tommo’s
corrupting effects on the Typees.
22. Milton R. Stern, “Typee,” in Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s “Typee,”
139; Dryden, 37.
23. Herbert, 189.
24. Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1963). Frank summarizes the effects of spatialization on narrative as follows:
“For the duration of the scene, at least, the time-flow of the narrative is halted;
attention is fixed on the interplay of relationships within the immobilized time-
area” (15); “past and present are apprehended spatially, locked in a timeless unity
that, while it may accentuate surface differences, eliminates any feeling of sequence
by the very act of juxtaposition” (59).
25. Charles Feidelson, Jr. (Symbolism and American Literature [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1953], 165) sees the “topography” of Typee as
“metaphoric.” Focus on the metonymic nature of Tommo’s valley experiences has
the effect of replacing Feidelson’s symbolic perspective with a view of figurative
processes in the novel corresponding more closely to Paul de Man’s notion of
“allegory” developed in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight, 2d
ed. (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–228.
26. Stern, Fine-Hammered Steel, 59.
27. Michael Clark, “Melville’s Typee: Fact, Fiction, and Esthetics,” in Critical
Essays on Herman Melville’s –“Typee,” 219; Tolchin, 47.
28. John Samson (“The Dynamics of History and Fiction in Melville’s Typee,”
American Quarterly 36 [1984]: 276–290, esp. 289) sees in this passage a “typical
Wordsworthian motif.” He argues that “Tommo’s intimations of immortality can
at this point come only through recollection of his ‘childhood’ in Typee.” Samson
relates the combined retrospective and teleological temporality of Melville’s
description to the “transcendent, spiritual meaning” which Tommo gives to events
rather than to the mediating power of style.
29. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press,
1975), 102–103; see also Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay on Method,
trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1980), 234–237.
30. Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Douglas Robillard (New Haven, Conn.:
College and University Press, 1976), 203.
31. Paul Witherington, “The Art of Melville’s Typee,” Arizona Quarterly 26
(1970): 136–150, esp. 144.
 N ancy F redricks

Melville and the Woman’s Story

O ne way to understand the change in direction that Herman Melville’s

work took in the 1850s is to consider his writing from Moby-Dick through
The Piazza Tales in relation to the increasing involvement of women in
reading, writing, and publishing. For feminists and traditional critics
alike, Melville’s Moby-Dick represents a bastion of masculinist aesthet-
ics where women are as out of place as Aunt Charity’s ginger beer on
the Pequod. Long used to buttress theories of American literature that
valorize male bonding and the romantic quest into the wilderness away
from home and mother, Moby-Dick is an exemplary text for its generic
representation from a male perspective of the segregation of the sexes
in nineteenth-century America.1 Melville himself apparently thought of
Moby-Dick as a man’s book and wrote to one of his female friends, Sara
Moorehead, to dissuade her from reading it for fear of offending her
feminine sensibilities:

Dont you buy it—dont even read it, when it does come out,
because it is by no means the sort of book for you. It is not a
piece of fine, feminine, Spitalfield silk—but is of the horrible
texture of a fabric that should be woven of ship’s cables and
hausers. 2

Studies in American Fiction, Volume 19 (1991): pp. 41–54. © 1991 Northeastern University.

113
114 Nancy Fredricks

When Sophia Hawthorne wrote to Melville praising the book, his response
was one of astonishment:

I have hunted up the finest Bath I could find, gilt-edged and

stamped, whereon to inscribe my humble acknowledgement of
your highly flattering letter of the 29th of Dec:—It really amazed
me that you should find any satisfaction in that book. It is true
that some men have said they were pleased with it but you are the
only woman—for as a general thing, women have small taste for
the sea.3

“Next time,” Melville tells Sophia, he shall not send her a “bowl of salt
water. . . . The next chalice I shall commend, will be a rural bowl of milk.”
He then inquires politely about the state of her “domestic affairs.”4
Melville’s remarks to these women suggest that he was working un-
der certain gender-determined notions of genre. If genres represent mini-
subcultures with their own values, languages, and epistemologies,5 then it
seems understandable that in a period characterized by relatively separate
spheres for men and women there would be associated with each sphere
types of works that best reflect that group’s immediate concerns. Melville
had been working most of his career with a predominantly male audience
in mind. In the six novels leading up to and including Moby-Dick—sea
adventures all—women appear as either obstacles to the male romantic
quest or as the distant and unattainable object of that quest. Pierre, which
Melville referred to generically as a “regular romance,” marks a definite
shift away from the man’s world of the sea adventure to the land-locked
domestic world of women.6 In Pierre, Melville finally gives his female
characters articulation7 and begins to face, on a generic level, the challenge
that the female community presented to male writers like himself who
had excluded them for too long. If women barely make it to the margin of
Moby-Dick, the woman as artist takes center stage in Pierre.
Pierre, for many readers, represents Melville’s “Waterloo.” One cannot
help but wonder what could have led Melville, at the height of his creative
powers, to plunge into the alien territory of the domestic romance. By follow-
ing Moby-Dick with Pierre, he may have been trying to grant equal time to
two competing myths of his day.8 After pursuing the romantic quest into the
wilderness to its limits in Moby-Dick, it seems that Melville decided to turn
to its generic “opposite,” the domestic romance, and take that to its limits also.
Possibly Melville (who was nothing if not artistically ambitious) wanted to
capture the totality of his world and knew he could not hope to do it with the
Pequod alone as his setting. The familiar trope of the “ship as world,” which
had served Melville well for years, tended to exclude the female half of the
 Melville and the Woman’s Story 115

population. The setting of Pierre provides Melville with the opportunity to

explore the world of women excluded from his earlier works and to address
a nineteenth-century female audience largely concerned with domesticity,
Christianity, and the position of women in society.
Considered in this light, Moby-Dick and Pierre appear to form a giant,
gender-determined literary diptych. The diptych structure serves Melville as
a formal means to represent the totality of his world while at the same time
inscribing the gesture of gender exclusion. Melville uses diptychs to represent
sexual and economic polarization and exclusion in several pieces of short fic-
tion written immediately after Pierre: “Two Temples,” “Poor Man’s Pudding
and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” and “The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus
of Maids.” His method in these stories is to juxtapose two separately set tales
told by the same first-person narrator. “The Paradise of Bachelors and The
Tartarus of Maids” provides the clearest example of Melville’s feminism and
affords a vantage from which to read, retrospectively, the gender-determined
relation between Moby-Dick and Pierre. On the surface, this short story can
be read as a celebration of the homoerotic joys of bachelorhood and, perhaps,
as an example of Melville’s alleged misogyny. But as the more careful read-
ers of Melville’s alleged “racist” texts have demonstrated, Melville likes to
set ideological traps to catch the reader in his or her own social prejudices.
The methods used by Carolyn L. Karcher in her readings of Melville’s texts
dealing with racial oppression in Shadow Over the Promised Land need to be
applied to his texts about sexual oppression as well.9 As Jane Mushabac has
written, “Melville had always been profoundly attuned to the condition of
slavery implicit in the human condition; it was only a matter of time before
he noticed that women as well as men were slaves.”10
The gendered juxtaposition in “The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tar-
tarus of Maids” illustrates not only the exclusion of women but their constitu-
tive status in capitalistic, patriarchal society. Their exploitation is presented as
inseparable from issues of sexuality, economic power, and representation. The
“blank looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly
folding blank paper” must surrender their reproductive power (the factory
only employs maids) in the production of paper that the wealthy bachelor
lawyers (in the first tale) will inscribe with the language of money.11 Melville’s
use of the diptych structure implies that the extravagant lifestyle of the lawyer
bachelors is linked to—even depends upon—the deprivation of the oppressed
maids at work in the paper factory.
Melville certainly deserves more credit than he has gotten for address-
ing the concerns of women readers.12 He is often judged guilty by associa-
tion with Hawthorne, whose notorious remarks about “that damned mob
of scribbling women” seem to have attached themselves to Melville as well.
Jane Tompkins, for example, claims that Melville together with Hawthorne
116 Nancy Fredricks

“hated” the popular and critical success of “their sentimental rivals.”13 In con-
trast to Hawthorne, who fled to Europe expressing disgust with the women
writers he believed were edging him out of a writer’s living, Melville weath-
ered the storm and even appears to have made a bid for position in the chang-
ing market with Pierre. Surprisingly, Hawthorne’s derogatory remarks about
women writers have done little to damage his reputation among male and
female readers today who admire his strong female characters. Melville, on
the other hand, has been neglected by feminist critics, presumably because of
his “inability” to move beyond stereotypes to present realistic, fully developed,
strong, and positive female characters.
In the “Agatha” letters written to Hawthorne after Melville completed
Pierre, Melville appears to be going through a crisis of confidence concern-
ing his ability to represent female characters. He seems especially conscious
of this literary “shortcoming” in comparison to Hawthorne, whom he urges
to write a story based on information Melville had collected about a woman
named Agatha. This woman witnesses the shipwreck of her husband and
nurses him back to health only to see him off again. She waits in vain for a
letter from him. While she waits the rest of her life for his return, he marries
and raises a family in another port.14 It seems for the first time in Melville’s
life, his imagination and sympathy are engaged more with the woman left on
shore than the sailor at sea. He pesters Hawthorne to write the woman’s story
because, he says, it is in Hawthorne’s “vein.” Hawthorne finally loses patience
with his friend and tells him to write it himself.15 It is not clear whether
Melville ever did write Agatha’s story.16 A variant of the tale appears in “The
Encantadas” in the story of Hunilla, the Chola woman and turtle hunter who
witnesses the drowning of her husband and survives alone for years on a re-
mote, uninhabited island.17
Perhaps Melville’s feminism has often been overlooked because he does
not generally represent strong middle-class women triumphing over adver-
sity in a man’s world, the kind of woman in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, the
one book by a woman writer that won Hawthorne’s praise.18 Except for Hu-
nilla (the Chola widow in “The Encantadas” ), most of the strong women in
Melville’s work, like Hautia in Mardi and Mrs. Glendinning in Pierre, are
oppressors like the “strong” man, Ahab. Through these “strong” women, Mel-
ville explores the darker side of women’s political powerlessness that leads in
Pierre’s mother’s case, for example, to excessive control over domestic affairs.
Mrs. Glendinning rules supreme over her maternal domain with the church,
in the figure of the ineffectual Rev. Falsgrave, at her side, an illustration of
the strategic alliance that Ann Douglas has documented and critiqued in
The Feminization of American Culture.19 Melville’s representation of the darker
side of family life in Pierre has led one feminist historian, Mary Ryan, to
praise him in her book The Empire of Mother as his period’s “most insightful
 Melville and the Woman’s Story 117

critic of ante-bellum domesticity.”20 While Ryan gives Melville credit for his
cultural awareness, she and other less generous critics place undue emphasis
on Pierre’s negativity, emphasis that has led to the conclusion that Melville
hated sentimentalism.
On the contrary: “I stand for the heart,” Melville wrote to Hawthorne,
declaring his allegiance in language that echoes Pierre’s enthusiastic rhetoric.21
Pierre is a book about righteousness and the transforming power of love, in
sentiment comparable to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, minus the dogmatic optimism.22
In Pierre, Melville explores his deeply ambivalent feelings about Christianity.
On the one hand, he is attracted to that embodiment of all love, the Sermon
on the Mount; on the other hand, he despairs at the abyss separating the ideal
and the practical in this “mammonish” world. It is a distortion to reduce this
ambivalence to purely negative parody, just as it is a mistake to reduce Pierre
to a cynical and mean-spirited attack on the female reading public.
Melville’s interest seems to lie primarily in representing women who
may very well be strong but who, unlike the Ruth Halls and Fanny Ferns of
this world, remain oppressed and excluded by social forces. His texts about
women need to be treated in the context of the popular generic tradition
that David S. Reynolds has identified as “the literature of misery.”23 Like
Isabel’s tale in Pierre, and like the story of the factory workers in “The Tarta-
rus of Maids,” the “literature of misery” tends to focus on the struggles of the
impoverished and unrepresented working class, particularly women factory
workers and seamstresses. The problem for Melville as a writer is how to rep-
resent the unrepresentability of these women, their marginal yet constitutive
status in capitalistic, patriarchal society. Excluded from Moby-Dick and “The
Paradise of Bachelors,” these women are elevated by Melville to a position
of “equality” as the focus of the second half of the diptych, Pierre and “The
Tartarus of Maids,” respectively. With the creation of Isabel, his first central
female character, Melville begins to explore in depth the subversive power
of the excluded feminine. Pierre may be named for a male character, but the
moving force in the book is certainly Isabel. Her initial shriek initiates a chain
of events that ultimately pulls all around her to destruction. Her power is not
merely negative, however. It is Isabel, Melville writes, who awakens Pierre to
the “darker though truer aspect of things.”24 For this alone, she deserves to be
ranked among Melville’s heroines.
Melville may have found help in dealing with these issues from the texts
by women writers that he was reading at the time. Melville purchased Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein while in London before writing Moby-Dick.25 The ob-
vious parallels between Victor Frankenstein and Ahab suggest that Melville
not only read Shelley’s book but that he drew heavily on her portrait of the
monomaniacal Victor in creating Ahab. In his next writing project, Pierre,
Melville may have adopted the extremely effective strategy in Frankenstein of
118 Nancy Fredricks

interrupting the flow of the narrative with a detailed story told in first person
by one oppressed and excluded from the previously dominant discourse. Isa-
bel’s story of her life in Pierre—her extreme loneliness, her awakening sense
of self, her struggle to learn to read and write, her search for links with oth-
ers—reads like the creature’s story in Frankenstein. Isabel is the sympathetic
monster as woman. When Melville decided to present Isabel as a musician
and singer, he may also have had in mind another influential book he had
purchased in London along with Frankenstein, Mme. de Stael’s Corinne.26
These apparent attempts by Melville to reach out to the female reading
public of his time were a dismal failure. Perhaps the book’s scathing critique
of the American class structure told from the point of view of those exploited
and excluded, the impoverished servant class, together with the prominent
theme of incest cut the book off from the appreciation of the more genteel,
middle-class audience. The highly wrought and densely allusive language may
have cut it off as well from the under-educated lower classes. Furthermore,
Melville’s language in Pierre is exceedingly artificial at a time when the domi-
nant aesthetic is beginning to shift towards realism. As Josephine Donovan
and Judith Fetterly have recently demonstrated, this shift towards realism
in American literature was being spearheaded by women writers associated
with the local-color movement like Caroline Kirkland, Alice Carey, and Rose
Terry Cooke, to name a few. 27 According to Donovan, these women writers
were tapping a “centuries old tradition of women’s literary realism opposed
to sentimental romance,”28 a tradition aligned with philosophical empiricism
and novelistic critiques of romance aesthetics.
In two short stories written after Pierre, “I and My Chimney” and “The
Piazza,” Melville explored the generic tension between realist and romance
aesthetics in terms of gender.29 In “I and My Chimney,” the chimney func-
tions not only as a phallic metaphor but as a metaphor for Melville’s art of
the sublime, as best exemplified in Moby-Dick. The wife and daughters of the
narrator conspire against him to bring down his beloved old chimney, which
the narrator compares to the pyramids and to a whale, two of Melville’s fa-
vorite images of the sublime. The women object to the chimney’s centralized
position from which it dominates the rest of the house like an aristocratic
ruler. They wish to tear it down to clear the way for a “grand entrance-hall.”30
As things stand now with the chimney, writes Melville, “almost every room,
like a philosophical system, was in itself an entry, or passage-way to other
rooms, and systems of rooms” and in “going through the house, you seem to
be forever going somewhere, and getting nowhere.”31
The arguments between the narrator and the women of the house echo
debates beginning to surface in the press over the relevance of an aesthetic
based on the romance form. Many American women writers were champion-
ing realism as an antidote to the excesses of the romance.32 Solidly middle class
 Melville and the Woman’s Story 119

and pragmatic, their writing is characterized by a no-nonsense attitude toward

reality, emphasis on ordinary people in ordinary settings, simplified language,
focus on regionalisms, and a skeptical attitude towards romanticizing. In com-
parison to the work of these women realists, Melville’s writing, with its obscure
metaphysics, dense literary allusions, and elaborately figurative language, must
have seemed as old-fashioned as the narrator’s smokey old chimney.
Although Melville, like the narrator in “I and My Chimney,” was not
about to give up on his way of writing, he did reflect on the limits of
his aesthetic in the title piece to his only published collection of short
stories, The Piazza Tales (1857). “The Piazza” reads as a retrospective of
Melville’s writing career. Drawing on the popular genre of the landscape
sketch, Melville lays out a literary map of aesthetic ground covered in the
author’s artistic quest for the sublime. The unnamed first-person narrator
tells a story of an “inland voyage to fairy-land. A true voyage; but take it all
in all, interesting as if invented.”33 This quest leads to an encounter with a
woman, named Marianna, who bears a resemblance to the figure of Isabel
in Pierre. Both are impoverished orphans living with their “brother” on the
margins of society.34
“The Piazza” begins with the narrator’s tribute to the natural scenery
around his farmhouse and his decision to build a piazza or porch from which
to view the countryside. After much deliberation he rejects neighborly advice
and chooses to build his piazza on the north side facing the sublime Mount
Greylock (the mountain to which Melville dedicated Pierre and which he
thought “very like a whale”). While gazing at the mountain one day, he spots
a shining light and thinks to himself, “Fairies there.”35 After an undisclosed
illness confines him to his bed for a while, the narrator grows so sensitive that
he finds himself disgusted by the beauty immediately surrounding his piazza.
He looks closely at the flowers creeping up his post and sees

millions of strange, cankerous worms, which, feeding upon those

blossoms, so shared their blessed hue, as to make it unblessed
evermore—worms, whose germs had doubtless lurked in the very
bulb which, so hopefully, I had planted. 36

The narrator feels the need for a cure and decides to launch his “yawl,”37 in
search of the source of light shining from the mountain top. Nourished by
his readings in the romance tradition, he dreams of finding his fairy queen
there, or at least some glad mountain girl, to ease his weariness.
This story, as critics Richard S. Moore, Helmbrecht Breining, and
Klaus Poenicke have convincingly demonstrated, represents an autobio-
graphical journey through the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime
of nineteenth-century aesthetics.38 After the narrator rejects the beauty of
120 Nancy Fredricks

the carefully cultivated countryside surrounding his piazza because it merely

masks an underlying disease, he begins a quest for the sublime hoping to find
his Una, or one truth. He travels up the picturesque mountainside where he
discovers souvenirs of man’s failed attempt to conquer nature: an “old saw-
mill, bound down and hushed with vines,” a huge block that someone had
tried to split but that still contains the “wedges yet rusted in their holes,” and
finally “apples from a long neglected tree that now taste of the ground.”39 He
then reaches the sublime summit:

No fence was seen, no inclosure. Near by—ferns, ferns,

ferns; further—woods, woods, woods; beyond—mountains,
mountains, mountains; then—sky, sky, sky. Turned out in aerial
commons, pasture for the mountain moon. Nature, and but
nature, house and all.40

The house he finds on the summit is dilapidated, its north side (the same side
as the narrator’s piazza) “doorless and windowless, the clapboards, innocent
of paint.”41 Instead of meeting his “Una,” “Titania,” or at least “some glad
mountain-girl,”42 the narrator finds Marianna, an orphaned young woman
who has taken up residence on the mountain along with her brother in this
abandoned cottage. Here she works sewing by the only paned window, while
her brother cuts wood and burns coal on the other side of the mountain most
of the day and night. When the narrator speaks of her house as “gilded” (as
it has appeared to him from his piazza below), she sharply contradicts him
and paints for him a bleak picture in realistic detail of her daily struggle for
existence. When she tells him of the sun that shines through the window
nearly blinding her at her work, of the flies and the wasps, the rotting roof,
and the chimney that fills with snow in the winter, he can only comment
inappropriately, “yours are strange fancies, Marianna.” “They but reflect the
things,” she responds.43 When the narrator suggests that she walk outside
to break up the monotony, she tells him that the outdoors lures her not, for
being alone by the hearth is better than being alone by a rock. Inside she has
her familiar world of shadows to keep her company, shadows she knows by
the names she has given them.
Several critics who see Marianna’s shadow reading as evidence of her
insanity focus their interpretations of this story on the narrator’s disappoint-
ment at discovering that his hoped-for “fairy queen” is nothing but a poor,
mad woman, defeated rather than uplifted by her sublime surroundings. In
the interpretation of Marianna lies Melville’s ideological trap. Seeing Mari-
anna solely as “possibly demented” or “nearly crushed and extinguished in
her humanity” reveals sexist and classist prejudices.44 “No doubt you think,”
Marianna says to the narrator,
 Melville and the Woman’s Story 121

that, living so lonesome here, knowing nothing, hearing nothing—

little, at least, but sound of thunder and the fall of trees—never
reading, seldom speaking, yet ever wakeful, this is what gives me
my strange thoughts—for so you call them—this weariness and
wakefulness together.45

The reader knows, however (and perhaps senses), that the narrator—who
knows a lot and reads a lot and who calls her thoughts “strange”—experiences
the same symptoms of weariness and wakefulness, symptoms that drove him
to her house in the first place to seek a cure.46 With this identity between the
two characters established, the differences that remain appear determined by
social, economic, and biological factors.
Rather than interpret Marianna as a “victim” of her sublime environ-
ment who reveals the “lie” of sublime aesthetics,47 perhaps she is a victim of a
socio-economic system that has forced her, much like Frankenstein’s monster
among the caves of ice, to seek the only dwelling “man does not grudge.”48
The negative determining factors in Marianna’s life seem to be overwhelming
considering her poverty, her lack of education, her harsh environment, her
loneliness, her gender, her work. Yet to reduce her completely to the status of
a “victim” is to deny her any power of self-determination. If she is seen only as
“insane,” her dignity as a human being is negated. Surely there is something
to admire in this young woman who strives to make a life for herself along
with her brother under such adverse circumstance. Furthermore, Marianna
possesses the power to render the narrator “mute” on two occasions.49 For
Melville, who wrote in Pierre “silence is the only Voice of our God,” Marian-
na’s power to silence the narrator deserves respect.50
Rosemary Kenny comes closest among the critics to granting Mari-
anna the dignity she deserves. Drawing on allusions in the story to Plato’s
allegory of the cave, she recognizes an artist in the poor woman. Kenny
concludes that through the figure of Marianna, Melville is parodying the
lesser, “mimetic” artist who, in the Platonic sense, takes shadows for the
real things.51 Kenny’s characterization of Marianna as a realist artist is
useful, but Melville allows this character a dignity beyond parody. It is not
the realist artist that Melville is critiquing in his curious twist on Plato’s al-
legory of the cave but the hierarchical dimension of Platonic thought itself.
The narrator in “The Piazza” scales the heights in search of “Una,”52 the
one truth, and finds at the top of the mountain not the shining light of one
truth but a cave-like dwelling in which sits a woman, chained to her work,
blinded by the sun, reading shadows on the wall. When Marianna says to
the narrator, whom she sees looking out the window at the ground, “You
watch the cloud,” he “corrects” her (as she had earlier “corrected” him about
the “gilding” of her house), “No, a shadow; a cloud’s, no doubt—though I
122 Nancy Fredricks

cannot see,” he says, making the “proper” Platonic hierarchical distinctions

between appearance and reality, shadow and thing, distinctions that she is
either unable or unwilling to make.53
Instead of finding the one truth, Una, the narrator finds himself en-
gaged in an unsettling dialogue that reveals the limits of two points of
view: Marianna’s “realist” empiricism (which refuses to make distinctions
between shadows and things-in-themselves, phenomena and noumena)
and the narrator’s “romantic” idealism. The story juxtaposes, without reso-
lution, these two perspectives. On a textual level, the narrator’s elaborate,
richly allusive prose with its dominant trope of personification mediating
all the descriptions of nature through imagery drawn from the span of the
western cultural tradition, stands in sharp contrast to the stark details of
Marianna’s story of her struggle to survive on the frontier of nature and
culture in this inhospitably sublime setting. Melville does not dismiss or
condescend to Marianna’s point of view. If Marianna is “deluded” about
“reality,” she is no more so than the narrator is. She may appear to lack flex-
ibility of perspective (in keeping with her empiricism) when she refuses to
accept the possibility that her roof appears “gilded” from a distance like his
appears to her; on the other hand, she may be simply rejecting his figura-
tive use of the word “gilded” as an aestheticized misrepresentation of her
economic condition and, in that sense, a lie.
During their brief encounter, Melville focuses on two hop vines outside
the window that serve as a figure for the irreducible difference between these
two perspectives. The vines, in climbing their separate poles and “gaining
their tip-ends, would have then joined over in an upward clasp, but the baf-
fled shoots, groping awhile in empty air, trailed back whence they sprung.”54
While these two perspectives are not able to come together, there is a sense
in which the two characters are linked through their opposition. Just as the
narrator gazes longingly up at her house, she gazes down at his. They both
suffer from “wakeful weariness,” a condition that neither religion nor drugs
(“prayer” or the “fresh hop pillow”) has been able to relieve.55 The narrator had
hoped that by gazing on the “queen of fairies at her fairy-window” or at least
“some glad mountain-girl,” he would be able to “cure” his weariness.56 She
shares the same hope about meeting the inhabitant of the “marble” house (his
house) she sees in the distance, at least that is what she tells him. Perhaps she
has already guessed where the narrator comes from and is mocking his quest
when she says to him,

“Oh, if I could but once get to yonder house, and but look upon
whoever the happy being is that lives there! A foolish thought: why
do I think it? Is it that I live so lonesome, and know nothing?”
 Melville and the Woman’s Story 123

He cannot help but recognize himself in her words and is compelled to

admit
“I, too, know nothing; and, therefore, cannot answer; but, for your
sake, Marianna, well could wish that I were that happy one of the
happy house you dream you see; for then you would behold him
now, and, as you say, this weariness might leave you.”57

The narrator may be trying to preserve her “illusions,” as some critics have
suggested.58 On the other hand, Marianna may just be testing his mettle to
see if he will reveal himself. In the end, he witholds his identity from her.
He listens to her story but reveals nothing about himself.
Swearing off all future trips to “fairyland,” the narrator retreats to the
comforts of his middle-class existence where from his piazza, his “box-royal,”
the “scenery is magical—the illusion so complete.”59 It appears that one of
the effects of his encounter with Marianna is a shift away from the dominant
pictorial trope of the opening sequence to the dramatic trope at the end,
perhaps an indication of respect for the autonomy of Marianna’s voice. From
the deck of his piazza, he listens to the song of “Madam Meadow Lark,” his
own “prima donna.” And “drinking in her sunrise note, which, Memnon-
like, seems struck from the golden window, how far from me the weary face
behind it,” he says. The narrator succeeds in appropriating Marianna for the
moment through his personification of the singing bird, his art-servant, but
only while the sun shines on the stage of his “amphitheatre.” “Every night,”
he tells the reader,

when the curtain falls, truth comes in with darkness. No light

shows from the mountain. To and fro I walk the piazza deck,
haunted by Marianna’s face, and many as real a story.60

Marianna’s face and her “real” story ultimately resist appropriation as objects
of the narrator’s romantic quest for the ideal and, in doing so, they reveal the
limits of both sublime and realist aesthetics. For the reader, the character
of Marianna can also be said to resist appropriation as an object of inter-
pretation. In contrast to the narrator, she reveals much of her personal life
yet remains inexplicable. She can appear in various lights as clever, strong,
condescending, naive, pitiful, admirable, ordinary, a fake, a fairy queen,
a sorceress, an artist; the list seems endless. Through this indeterminacy,
Melville preserves the possibility of his female character’s freedom and dig-
nity while giving the reader the opportunity to experience freedom in facing
the limits of the power of representation.
124 Nancy Fredricks

No t e s

  1. For a reading of Melville’s critique of the “ideological structures of

gender, class, and race underlying the male bond,” see Robyn Wiegman, “Melville’s
Geography of Gender,” ALH, 1 (1989): 735–753.
  2. The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H.
Gilman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), p. 138; see the letter of December
9, 1851.
  3. Letters, pp. 145–146 ( January 8, 1852).
  4. Letters, p. 146.
  5. For an exposition of this concept of genre, see Rosalie L. Colie’s The
Resources of Kind: Genre Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973).
  6. In a letter to his publisher, Richard Bentley, Melville writes that his new
book (Pierre) possesses “unquestionable novelty, as regards my former ones” and treats
“of utterly new scenes & characters.” He assures Bentley that it is “very much more
calculated for popularity than anything you have yet published of mine—being a
regular romance, with a mysterious plot to it, & stirring passions at work, and with-
all, representing a new and elevated aspect of American life.” See Letters, p. 150.
  7. Melville’s inarticulate early female characters include the mute woman in
“Fragments from a Writing Desk, No. 2,” Fayaway in Typee, Yillah in Mardi. All
represent love objects of the hero.
  8. These two competing myths Leslie Fiedler has identified as “Home as
Heaven” and “Home as Hell” in his What Was Literature?: Class Culture and Mass
Society (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), p. 145.
  9. See Carolyn L. Karcher’s Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race and
Violence in Melville’s America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980),
p. xii.
10. See Jane Mushabac, Melville’s Humor: A Critical Study (Hamden: Archon
Books, 1981), p. 149.
11. The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford,
Alma A. MacDougal, G. Thomas Tanselle, and others (Evanston and Chicago:
Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987), p. 328.
12. In 1986, the Melville Society attempted to redress the problem by
publishing papers on “Women in Melville’s Art” delivered during the Modern
Language Association conference. See Melville Society Extracts, 65 (1986): 2–16.
13. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American
Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), p. 148. See also Joyce
W. Warren’s introduction to Ruth Hall and Other Writings (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1986), p. xxxvi.
14. See Letters, pp. 154–161.
15. The Agatha letters were written during the time when Hawthorne was
trying to distance himself from Melville. Perhaps Melville’s apparent identification
with Agatha results from his own feelings of being abandoned by the one he tried
to force to write her story.
16. Hershel Parker, during the 1988 Melville session of the Northeast Modern
Language Association, cited evidence to suggest that Melville did indeed write
Agatha’s story but that the story has not yet been found.
 Melville and the Woman’s Story 125

17. Hunilla’s character inspired Melville to write “Humanity, thou strong

thing, I worship thee, not in the laurelled victor, but in this vanquished one.” See
Piazza, p. 157.
18. Hawthorne, after reading Ruth Hall, amended his previous remark about
the “damned mob of scribbling women.” He wrote that Fanny Fern “writes as if the
devil was in her; and that is the only condition under which a woman ever writes
anything worth reading. Generally women write like emasculated men, and are
only distinguished from male authors by the greater feebleness and folly; but when
they throw off the restraints of decency, and come before the public stark naked,
as it were; then their books are sure to possess character and value.” The Letters
of Hawthorne to William Ticknor, 1851–1869, ed. C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr. (Newark:
Carteret Book Club, Inc., 1972), I: 78.
19. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf,
1977).
20. Mary Ryan, The Empire of Mother: American Writing and Domesticity, 1830–
1860 (New York: Institute for Research in History and Haworth Press, 1982), p. 126.
21. See Letters, p. 129.
22. Admittedly, the omission of an ultimately optimistic view makes for a world
of difference between the two books. Unlike Stowe, Melville, in Pierre, is interested
in the limits of the sentimental and melodramatic vision (as he was interested in the
limits to the romantic quest in Moby-Dick). This interest in limits, however, does not
preclude an earnest attachment on Melville’s part to melodramatic rhetoric.
23. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive
Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988), pp.
352–353.
24. Herman Melville, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, ed. by Henry A. Murray (New
York: Hendricks House, 1949), p. 94.
25. See Jay Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville,
1819–1891 (New York: Gordian Press, 1969), I: 351.
26. See Log, p. 351.
27. See Judith Fetterly’s “Introduction” to Provisions: A Reader from 19th-
Century American Woman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 10.
28. Donovan traces the tradition as far back as the work of Christine de Pisan.
See Josephine Donovan, New England Local Color Literature: A Woman’s Tradition
(New York: Ungar, 1983), p. 3.
29. See Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New
York: Methuen, 1987), for an exploration of the gendered implications of this
aesthetic tension.
30. Piazza, p. 360.
31. Piazza, p. 364.
32. See Fetterly, Provisions, pp. 10–11.
33. Piazza, p. 4.
34. Both are also identified with music. Melville, in his attempt to represent
the unrepresentability of Isabel, personifies her as the spirit of music. The narrator
of “The Piazza” tries to do the same with Marianna when he identifies her with a
singing bird he hears from his piazza (p. 12). Marianna, by contrast, resists, in the
end, any such appropriation by a literary device.
35. Piazza, p. 5.
36. Piazza, p. 6.
126 Nancy Fredricks

37. Piazza, p. 6.
38. See Helmbrecht Breinig, “The Destruction of Fairyland: Melville’s
“Piazza” in the Tradition of the American Imagination,” ELH, 35 (1968): 254–283;
Klaus Poenicke, “A View from the Piazza: Herman Melville and the Legacy of the
European Sublime,” Comparative Literature Studies, 4 (1967): 267–281; Richard S.
Moore, That Cunning Alphabet: Melville’s Aesthetics of Nature (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1982).
39. Piazza, p. 7.
40. Piazza, p. 8.
41. Piazza, p. 8.
42. Piazza, pp. 8, 5.
43. Piazza, p. 10.
44. See Moore, p. 2, and Poenicke, p. 267.
45. Piazza, p. 11.
46. The narrator also reads shadows. See Piazza, p. 5.
47. See Poenicke, p. 273.
48. Victor discovers the creature among the glacial caverns on the top of the
mountain. See Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the new Prometheus (New York: New
American Library, 1965), p. 96.
49. Piazza, pp. 9, 10.
50. See Pierre, where Melville also wrote “all profound things, and emotions
of things are preceded and attended by Silence” (p. 284).
51. Rosemary Austin Kenny, “Melville’s Short Fiction; A Methodology of
Unknowing,” Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1980. Cited by Merton M.
Sealts, Jr. in Pursuing Melville 1940–1980: Chapters and Essays (Madison: University
of Wisconsin, 1982), p. 326. Marvin Fisher, in Going Under: Melville’s Short Fiction
and the American 1850’s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), also
recognizes in the story allusions to Plato’s allegory of the cave (p. 25). Fisher focuses
on the disillusionment of the narrator and grants little, if any, power and autonomy
to the figure of Marianna. See pp. 26–27.
52. Piazza, p. 8.
53. Piazza, p. 10.
54. Piazza, p. 12.
55. Piazza, p. 12.
56. Piazza, p. 6.
57. Piazza, p. 12.
58. See Fisher, p. 26.
59. Piazza, p. 12.
60. Piazza, p. 12.
 S tephen M athewson

“To Tell Over Again the Story Just Told”:

The Composition of Melville’s Redburn

I n 1849, Melville feverishly and rather joylessly wrote Redburn, the

first of two books he would complete during that summer in an effort to
atone for the financial failure of Mardi. He wrote to his English publisher
Richard Bentley that he had “enlarged” Redburn, “somewhat to the size
of Omoo—perhaps it may be a trifle larger.”1 Melville frequently relied
upon sources while composing; for example, he enlarged his early work by
incorporating exploration and travel narratives into his stories of South Seas
adventure. In Redburn, however, he expanded his narrative by replicating his
own story. The first third of the narrative, the outward-bound voyage from
New York to Liverpool, is ingeniously repeated on the return voyage, and
the Liverpool section in the middle of the narrative has repeated clusters of
three chapters within itself. Apparently, the hurried pace at which Melville
wrote Redburn precluded much creativity and compelled him to borrow, as
it were, from himself.
On 5 June 1849, Melville complained to Bentley about the reviews of
Mardi and mentioned his initial plans for Redburn. Addressing his practical
reasons for writing a book with “no metaphysics, no conic-sections, nothing
but cakes & ale,” he elaborates: “In size the book will be perhaps a frac-
tion smaller than Typee; will be printed here by the Harpers, & ready for
them two or three months hence, or before. I value the English Copyright

ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Volume 37, Number 4 (1991): pp. 311–320. ©
1991 ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance.

127
128 Stephen Mathewson

at one hundred & fifty pounds, and think it would be wise to put it forth in
a manner, admitting of a popular circulation.” Melville wrote Redburn, then,
to make money from a popular audience, “those who read simply for amuse-
ment” (L, 86).
The conditions under which Melville wrote his tale of “cakes & ale”
in June and July of 1849 were far from ideal. Living in his house were two
newborn children—his own son, Malcolm, and Allan Melville’s daughter,
Maria—and other relatives as well. Melville stayed in New York City the
entire summer, giving up his customary August vacation to work, and, despite
the very crowded household, was kept indoors because of an epidemic of
blue cholera that infected the city from the middle of May until the first of
August.2 Under these oppressive conditions, both physical and economic, he
composed Redburn in less than two months.
On 20 July 1849, at the plague’s height, Melville wrote to Bentley about
the novel’s progress: “[it] is now going thro’ the press, & I think I shall be able to
send it to you in the course of three weeks or so.” He also accepted Bentley’s of-
fer of one hundred pounds for the book, fifty less than asked for. Melville must
have been disappointed, especially since the reasons for enlarging Redburn were
economic; the more volumes “got up” in Bentley’s style, the more money paid
in advance (L, 88). By the end of the summer, Melville had written Redburn as
well as White-Jacket, becoming “a tired and somewhat bitter man.”3
Still the question remains: how did Melville expand Redburn from a
book “a fraction smaller than ‘Typee’” to a book “somewhat . . . the size of
Omoo—perhaps . . . a trifle larger”? Chapters, characters and scenes already
appearing in the first section of the book (the voyage to Liverpool) are re-
cycled in the third section (the return voyage to New York). In addition, the
book’s middle (Liverpool) section is enlarged through the repetition of key
scenes. Since he had little time for imaginative invention that summer, Mel-
ville recast what he had already written into the latter portions of the book.

1
Melville repeats leave-takings and sailings in the initial land chapters, an
indication that he had a hard time getting his novel out to sea in June.
Redburn leaves home and sails down the Hudson River to New York City,
doubling these actions when he takes leave of the Joneses, a substitute
family for his own, and sails from New York City on the Highlander. In
chapter 4, “How He Disposed of His Fowling-Piece,” Redburn goes to two
different pawnbrokers to dispose of his gun, retracing his steps to the first
pawnbroker. He says, “My best plan then seemed to be, to go right back to
the curly-headed pawnbroker, and take up with my first offer.”4 Redburn,
though, receives two dollars and a half for his gun rather than the initially
 “To Tell Over Again . . .” 129

offered three. Later, while writing Moby-Dick, Melville would encounter the
same problem getting his book started.
Harrison Hayford has argued that in Moby-Dick “it takes not one but
two chapters to do the narrative job of getting Ishmael started out to see the
watery part of the world on his first whaling voyage,” noting that Ishmael
does not sail from the first port he comes to, but the second, thus staying
at two separate inns and going to bed twice at the second inn.5 The same
observation applies to Redburn because he, too, sails from his second port.
Like Ishmael, Redburn signs aboard his ship in two separate scenes: the day
before the Highlander sails when he “put[s] down” his “name and beat[s] a
retreat” (19), and again when one of the ship’s mates asks if he has signed on
as “a tailor” (24). In Redburn, Melville had the same problems beginning his
narrative that he would have in Moby-Dick, and in both cases he solved the
problem by means of duplication. 6
While Redburn is in Liverpool, repetition abounds: Melville reuses his
own material, and also introduces another source, the guidebook The Picture of
Liverpool; he then repeats what he writes about the guidebook to further en-
large this middle section of the novel. Here Max the Dutchman serves as an
emblem for Melville’s method. Forgetting that the Dutchman is a bachelor
(79), Melville writes that he has wives performing similar functions in the
different ports: “Liverpool, away from the docks, was very much such a place
as New York” (202). In chapter 27, “He Gets a Peep at Ireland, and at Last
Arrives in Liverpool,” Redburn sees a woman come aboard the Highlander
when it docks in Liverpool. Carrying clean clothes for Max, Sally (his Liver-
pool wife) exchanges “her bundle of clean clothes for a bundle of soiled ones,
and this was precisely what the New York wife had done for Max, not thirty
days previous” (128). This is an appropriate opening to the Liverpool section,
for here the repetitious composition patterns really begin.
Clearly, Redburn’s reason for sailing to Liverpool is to retrace the ex-
periences of his father’s visit to that city by following his father’s guidebook.
Melville employs the guidebook framework in a very sophisticated way, jux-
taposing Redburn’s and the book’s descriptions of Liverpool to expand the
section in its first two chapters, 30 and 31. Whether congruous or incongru-
ous, what Redburn finds while walking the streets of Liverpool he finds in
the guidebook. In chapter 30, “Redburn Grows Intolerably Flat and Stupid
over Some Outlandish Old Guide-Books,” Melville repeats The Picture of
Liverpool verbatim, undercutting his own method when he has the narrator
exclaim, “I will not quote thee, old Morocco . . . I should be charged with
swelling out my volume by plagiarizing from a guide-book—the most vulgar
and ignominious of thefts!” (150). Melville, however, continues his method
of self-plagiarism in the next chapter, “With His Prosy Old Guide-Book, He
Takes a Prosy Stroll through the Town.” In effect, Melville spells out how his
130 Stephen Mathewson

strategy works in this chapter: “having my guide-book in my pocket, I drew

it forth to compare notes” (152). Redburn finds in “Old Morocco” that a fort
should be where he stands, but he sees a tavern which stands only in name,
“The Old Fort Tavern,” for what he reads in the guidebook.
The same compositional pattern appears in the next chapter: Redburn
reads the guidebook, sees the existing surroundings, and finally compares his
perception to the text. Attempting to follow his father’s path, he searches for
his father’s hotel, the Riddough, and finds his way into the Merchant’s Ex-
change quadrangle. He relates what he has read in the guidebook about the
Town Hall, describes what he sees in the square, and then compares what he
sees with the guidebook, noting such points of difference as the statue of “Lord
Nelson expiring in the arms of Victory” (155). After contemplating the statue,
Redburn gets tossed out of a reading room, an action paralleled in another
ejection scene in chapter 42, “His Adventure with the Cross Old Gentleman.”
Eventually he learns that the Riddough Hotel has been pulled down and con-
cludes that “the thing that had guided the father, could not guide the son,”
since guidebooks are “the least reliable books in all literature” (157).
Though Redburn finds guidebooks unreliable, Melville found them both
reliable and helpful when composing rapidly, for he returns to the guidebook
and to the same compositional pattern. Redburn uses the book to search for
the “Old Docks,” and later, in chapter 36 (“The Old Church of St. Nicholas,
and the Dead-House”), to supply facts about the old church. In each instance
he follows the same pattern of reading, seeing, and comparing. Having Red-
burn read The Picture of Liverpool achieves the same end as plagiarizing it:
Melville is “swelling out” his “volume” by using the book in two ways while
writing. His use of the guidebook resembles Carlo’s accordion playing: he
expands the Liverpool section by pulling on his compositional accordion, the
guidebook, unfolding a scene that might have been presented from a single
point of view into one he can present from at least three perspectives.
The search for the old docks leads to a similar pattern of composition.
Chapter 32, “The Docks,” describes the area around the Liverpool docks and
sets up topic-by-topic descriptions that follow in the next three chapters: chap-
ter 33 (“The Salt-Droghers, and German Emigrant Ships”), chapter 34 (“The
Irrawaddy”), and chapter 35 (“Galliots, Coast-of-Guinea-Man, and Floating
Chapel”). Melville then repeats this pattern. Chapter 37, “What Redburn Saw
in Launcelott’s-Hey,” introduces the topic of the poor, the human waste of
nineteenth-century industrial England. Looking down into a cellar in Launce-
lott’s-Hey, Redburn sees, “crouching in nameless squalor, with her head bowed
over . . . the figure of what had been a woman. Her blue arms folded to her
livid bosom two shrunken things like children, that leaned toward her, one on
each side” (180). The huddled woman and her children resemble the struggling
forms Redburn saw earlier at the base of Nelson’s statue:
 “To Tell Over Again . . .” 131

At uniform intervals round the base of the pedestal, four

naked figures in chains, somewhat larger than life, are seated
in various attitudes of humiliation and despair. One has his leg
recklessly thrown over his knee, and his head bowed over, as if
he had given up all hope of ever feeling better. Another has his
head buried in despondency, and no doubt looks mournfully out
of his eyes, but as his face was averted at the time, I could not
catch the expression. (155)

Functioning like “The Docks,” chapter 37 provides compositional mate-

rial for Melville. He addresses the topic of the poor in chapter 38 (“The
Dock-Wall Beggars”), chapter 39 (“The Boole-Alleys of the Town”), and
chapter 40 (“Placards, Brass-Jewelers, Truck-Horses, and Steamers”). Again
Melville hints at his method in these two sets of chapters when he writes
in chapter 40, “As I wish to group together what fell under my observation
concerning the Liverpool docks, and the scenes roundabout, I will try to
throw into this chapter various minor things that I recall” (192).
The central chapter in the Liverpool section (37, “What Redburn Saw
in Launcelott’s-Hey”) Melville rewrites in the New York voyage section in
chapter 58, “Though the Highlander Puts into No Harbor As Yet; She Here
and There Leaves Many of Her Passengers Behind.” He recasts the potent de-
scription of the poverty seen in Launcelott’s-Hey when depicting Redburn’s
descent into the ship’s hold on the way back to New York: “In every corner,
the females were huddled together, weeping and lamenting; children were
asking for bread from their mothers, who had none to give” (287). Melville’s
method characterizes, in a sense, the famine and disease on the ship: “But
as the dying departed, the places of two of them were filled in the rolls of
humanity, by the birth of two infants, whom the plague, panic, and gale had
hurried into the world before their time. The first cry of one of these infants,
was almost simultaneous with the splash of its father’s body in the sea” (289).
The social criticism Melville begins when describing the poor in Liverpool
he repeats with force when he dwells upon the conditions the Irish emigrants
suffer on the Highlander, conditions worse than those they escape.

2
The largest pattern of repetition shows Melville finishing the narrative by
using what he had written in the first voyage section. The principal charac-
ters on each trip, Redburn on the outward voyage and Harry Bolton on the
return voyage, are very much alike. To begin with, they physically resemble
each other. Redburn says, “I was young and handsome,” and later he calls
Bolton “handsome” (58, 216). Melville’s handsome sailors also have similar
backgrounds: Redburn’s father died when he was young and Bolton, too, “was
132 Stephen Mathewson

early left an orphan” (217). Both are fallen gentlemen with no financial means,
Redburn’s fortune collapsing with his father’s bankruptcy and death and
Bolton’s through gambling, which strips him of his “last sovereign” (217). And
we read in chapter 56, “Under the Lee of the Long-Boat, Redburn and Harry
Hold Confidential Communion,” that Redburn “could sympathize with one in
similar circumstances,” discussing with Bolton their “common affairs” (279).
As Bolton’s reasons for sailing resemble Redburn’s, so do the circum-
stances surrounding his going to sea. Bolton finds that the sea has “a dash of
romance in it” (218) which is like the “strange, romantic charm” Redburn feels
when dreaming of the sea, reading ship advertisements in the New York City
newspapers (3). Both are broke, and Bolton’s selling of his vests for money to
buy sailor’s gear resembles Redburn’s pawning of his gun for the same pur-
pose. Their signings-on are very similar, as is Captain Riga’s behavior in each.
In chapter 3, “He Arrives in Town,” Mr. Jones aids Redburn in signing-on the
Highlander, with Captain Riga playing the role of a “fine funny gentleman”
(16). Bolton’s signing-on in chapter 44 parallels Redburn’s so plainly that
Melville writes that Redburn “perceived in the captain’s face that same bland,
benevolent, and bewitchingly merry expression, that had so charmed, but de-
ceived me, when, with Mr. Jones, I had first accosted him in the cabin” (219).
In their signings-on, both Redburn and Bolton are forced off the ship, not
able to stay onboard until the ship sails: Redburn spends a miserable night in
rainy New York City, and Bolton, with Redburn, spends “A Mysterious Night
in London” in chapter 46.
Not only do Redburn’s and Bolton’s port experiences match but their sea
experiences do so as well. In chapter 14, “He Contemplates Making a Social
Call on the Captain in His Cabin,” Redburn dresses to present himself to the
“gentlemanly” Captain Riga: “I put on a white shirt in place of my red one,
and got into a pair of cloth trowsers instead of my duck ones, and put on my
new pumps, and then carefully brushing my shooting-jacket, I put that on
over all, so that upon the whole, I made quite a genteel figure” (68). On deck
the ship’s crew ridicules Redburn’s appearance, asking him if he “was dress-
ing to go ashore,” which elicits laughter and shouting (68–69). This scene is
substantially repeated in chapter 50, “Harry Bolton At Sea,” in which “this
Bury blade” Bolton comes “on deck in a brocaded dressing-gown, embroi-
dered slippers, and tasseled smoking-cap, to stand his morning watch” (253).
The crew mocks Bolton’s dress, but not in such a lighthearted manner as in
Redburn’s case. A mate cries, “Who’s that Chinese mandarin?” The mocking
continues, the sailors hating Bolton and his mahogany wardrobe chest. In
each scene of mockery the sailor Jackson plays the same role. He asks Bolton
“to lift up the lower hem of his trowsers, to test the color of his calves” (254),
much as he had derided Redburn “with a hideous grin”: “‘Let him go, let him
go, men—he’s a nice boy. Let him go; the captain has some nuts and raisins
 “To Tell Over Again . . .” 133

for him’” (69). Thus, despite superficial changes, the Bolton scene is clearly a
rewriting of the Redburn scene.
Melville also mirrors Redburn’s first experience going aloft in the rig-
ging in Bolton’s similar experience. As in the dressing scenes, the outcomes
differ: Redburn’s scene leads to the crew’s acceptance and Bolton’s to their
further rejection. In chapter 16, “At Dead of Night He Is Sent Up to Loose
the Main-Skysail,” Max the Dutchman tells Redburn to go aloft in the rig-
ging. “Holding on might and main to the mast,” Redburn reflects, “I seemed
all alone; treading the midnight clouds; and every second, expected to find
myself falling—falling—­falling, as I have felt when the nightmare has been
on me” (78). He overcomes his fears and completes his task, then descends
and receives “something like a compliment from Max the Dutchman” (79).
In the Harry Bolton chapter, Melville recasts Redburn’s trial in the rigging,
but to very different thematic ends. Like Redburn, Bolton is ordered aloft and
forced to climb the rigging; like Redburn he experiences fear: “he stopped
short, and looked down from the top. Fatal glance! it unstrung his every fi-
ber; and I saw him reel, and clutch the shrouds, till the mate shouted out
for him not to squeeze the tar out of the ropes” (256). Like Jackson in the
clothing scenes, Max the Dutchman serves parallel functions when Redburn
and Bolton climb the rigging. While Max orders Redburn aloft, he literally
butts Bolton up: “Max went up the rigging hand over hand, and brought his
red head with a bump against the base of Harry’s back” (256). Bolton, after
unreeving the sail, returns to the deck “pale as death, with bloodshot eyes, and
every limb quivering” (257). Unlike Redburn, who is approved by the crew,
Bolton again earns “jibes and jeers” (257). The going aloft and clothing scenes
repeat, but so does the pattern of acceptance and rejection. In each Bolton
scene the end result is the same: the crew rejects him.
Another pattern concerns Jackson, who is ill during each passage. In
chapter 12, “He Gives Some Account of One of His Shipmates Called Jack-
son,” Melville writes that Jackson “was being consumed by an incurable mal-
ady” (58), and in chapter 55, “Drawing Nigh to the Last Scene in Jackson’s
Career,” the sailor has a “malady which had long fastened its fangs in his
flesh” (275). This illness leads to his spectacular death in a fall from the ship’s
rigging, an enactment of the fear Redburn and Bolton share. Jackson’s death
also recalls the drunken sailors’ deaths onboard the Highlander which inaugu-
rate each voyage. Chapter 48, “A Living Corpse,” repeats chapter 10, “He is
Very Much Frightened; the Sailors Abuse Him; and He Becomes Miserable
and Forlorn.” Melville writes in chapter 48, “it was destined that our depar-
ture from the English Strand, should be marked by a tragical event, akin to
the sudden end of the suicide, which had so strongly impressed me on quit-
ting the American shore” (243). One of the three drunks brought onboard,
Miguel Saveda, spontaneously combusts and is then thrown overboard. As
134 Stephen Mathewson

Melville indicates, this chapter is “akin” to chapter 10, in which a drunken

sailor brought on the ship commits suicide by leaping into the sea, “raging
mad with the delirium tremens” (50). Also in each chapter, Jackson strikes
fear into the heart of Redburn: Jackson’s remarks about each drunk’s death
freeze Redburn’s “blood” and make his “soul stand still” (246).
Rather than create new material to complete Redburn, then, Melville used
what he had already written to enlarge the book. He fashioned his text in this
manner for economic reasons: faster composition meant faster financial return
for both Redburn and White-Jacket. Yet in spite of his haste, Melville knew
he had written a good novel. “I have not repressed myself much,” he wrote of
Redburn to Lemuel Shaw on 6 October 1849 (L, 92), but he despised the novel
for the economic state it was meant to remedy, hence his comment to Evert
Duyckinck in a letter from London, 14 December 1849, about “beggarly ‘Red-
burn’” (L, 95). The narrative fittingly ends with Bolton and Redburn cheated
out of their wages by Captain Riga: like Melville after Mardi, they are again
broke, repeating the financial states that prompted their sailings.

No t e s
1. Melville to Richard Bentley, New York, 20 July 1849, The Letters of Herman
Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1960), 88; hereafter cited parenthetically as L, with page number.
2. Leon Howard, Herman Melville: A Biography (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1951), 134.
3. Howard, Herman Melville, 134.
4. Redburn: His First Voyage, ed. Harrison Hayford et. al, vol. 4 of The Writings
of Herman Melville (Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The
Newberry Library, 1969), 22; hereafter cited parenthetically by page number only.
5. Harrison Hayford, “Unnecessary Duplicates: A Key to the Writing of
Moby-Dick,” in New Perspectives on Melville, ed. Faith Pullin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1978), 128, 129.
6. Hayford asserts that in Moby-Dick “duplicates breed duplicates”
(“Unnecessary Duplicates,” 129). His purpose, however, is to show “Melville’s
shifting intentions for some of the central characters in Moby-Dick” (128). Thus he
argues that the pattern of duplicates arising in Moby-Dick signals that “the larger
process in which Melville was engaged at this point was a multiple reassignment of
roles among four of his central characters” (144). Though Redburn and Moby-Dick
share duplicate beginnings, the pattern of repetition that arises in Redburn results
from Melville’s hurried writing process and not from the reassignment of characters’
roles that Hayford finds in Moby-Dick.
 B ill C hristopherson

Israel Potter: Melville’s

“Citizen of the Universe”

“But who is this ere singing, leaning, yarn-spinning chap?”

—Herman Melville, Israel Potter

I f there was ever a moment when Herman Melville stood a chance of

recouping the readership he had lost by publishing Moby-Dick and Pierre,
it may have been with the release, in 1855, of Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of
Exile. Written at the height of his powers (just after “The Encantadas” and
before “Benito Cereno”), this historical romance is based on the ghostwrit-
ten autobiography of Revolutionary War veteran Israel R. Potter, whose
career as a patriot soldier was thwarted by captivity, poverty, and prolonged
exile in England. Israel Potter is, among other things, a good read, from
its wry send-up of Benjamin Franklin to its rendition of the famous naval
battle between the Serapis and the Bon Homme Richard to its pungent images
of eighteenth-century London. Lest the pace flag, Melville imports two
Revolutionary War celebrities—Ethan Allen and John Paul Jones—into his
tale and improvises, sometimes wildly, sometimes waggishly, on the adven-
ture sequences. Gaudy yet grounded in history, humorous yet insightful,
the swashbuckling Israel Potter seems as if it should have been the popular
success that had been eluding its author since Typee and Omoo. Yet despite
favorable reviews, the novel never quite took off (in fact, it was eclipsed by
another Revolutionary War romance, Kate Aylesford: A Story of the Refugees,

Studies in American Fiction, Volume 21 (1993): pp. 21–35. © 1993 Northeastern University.

135
136 Bill Christopherson

released by Melville’s own publisher, Putnam). More surprising still, not

even the strip-mining of Melville’s oeuvre by twentieth-century critics has
managed to reclaim what may be Melville’s least read book.
Critics who have addressed Israel Potter have generally faulted it on
one of two grounds. Lewis Mumford, Warner Berthoff and Newton Arvin
have found it diffuse, “impromptu to the point of negligence,” “hardly more
than a heap of sketches”—in short, a victim of its episodic format.1 George
Henry Lewes, Charles Feidelson Jr., and F. O. Matthiessen, meanwhile, have
criticized the book’s conclusion (Potter’s exile) for its vagueness, nihilism, “la-
bored” symbolism, and failure adequately to represent a key part of Israel’s
history (his destitution in London).2 Matthiessen, pressing the issue farthest,
scores the book’s “slurred” climax as a failure of will on Melville’s part. The
author’s over-identification with his protagonist, claims Matthiessen, sub-
verted his artistic purpose.
This second criticism surprises. Moby-Dick and Pierre are nothing if not
testimonies to a writer who faces up to the implications of a tale, whether
that means killing off an entire cast of characters save one or grappling with
themes such as atheism and incest. And as to Berthoff ’s and others’ felt lack
of a unifying organization (“Israel Potter gives an impression of exceptional
imaginative power scattering its effects more or less at random”—Berthoff,
p. 59), the table of contents alone reveals a comprehensive structural prin-
ciple that belies the charge of “impromptu” execution. “Israel in the Lion’s
Den,” “Samson among the Philistines,” “Israel’s Flight Towards the Wilder-
ness,” “Israel in Egypt”: such chapter headings, absent in Melville’s source
(Henry Trumbull’s Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter), sug-
gest a figural, or typological, scheme overarching this saga.3 Melville seems
to have framed the novel on his culture’s premise that its history and destiny
postfigured that of the Biblical Israel; that Americans were a chosen people,
brought out of captivity, blessed by God and appointed to a divine spiritual
and historical mission. But why should Melville have conceived his historical
romance in such figural terms? Even more fundamentally, what was Melville’s
aim in adapting Israel Potter?
His aim, suggested contemporary French critic Emile Montégut, was to
portray America’s penchant for mythologizing her own history: “Israel Potter
. . . représente le caractère américain au moment où il était en formation.”4
Montégut’s approach has been updated by recent critics like Arnold Ramp-
ersad, who argues that Melville’s “aim . . . is the illumination of the dark,
violent side of the American body.”5 Alexander Keyssar concurs, suggesting
that the novel depicts an America that celebrates its heroes while ignoring
social realities.6 Kenny Jackson, taking a similar tack, suggests that “from the
opening lines of the Dedication to the Bunker Hill Monument to the closing
 Israel Potter 137

lines of the novel, Melville finds fault with American values as he presents a
penetrating study of American attitudes.” Jackson elaborates:

In order to present his growing concern for the America which

was to come, Melville selected three popular folk heroes who
represented various phases of the American experience. Yet there
is in the novel a suggested antagonism toward some of these
heroes.
. . . The novel is an indictment against that part of America which
could not distinguish between a popular hero and a true patriot.7

Jackson’s highlighting of the book’s concern with the national self is, like
Montégut’s, Rampersad’s and Keyssar’s, on target. Surely America’s identity
is Melville’s subject—one he pursues, however, beyond the scope of patriotic
sentiment, social justice, or even the contemporary mindset, examining it in
light of America’s most fundamental, Biblical myth of divine selection. Yet
to say so is to be brought up short by the book’s pessimism, for Israel Potter
seems at last, as Feidelson notes, to be a wanderer whose “life accretes no
meaning” (p. 183). Unless, of course, Israel Potter holds up America’s self-
assumed Election as an ironic frame. Unless, that is, Melville’s purpose is to
scrutinize America’s actual identity while deposing her inflated self-image.
If these are his intentions, Israel Potter is a triumph, not a failure, of will and
art—a fiction that pursues its themes to their conclusion, demythologizing
America and mythologizing modern man in its stead.

•••
The figural tapestry Melville weaves in Israel Potter identifies America with
the Biblical Israel in part by converting America’s war heroes into Biblical
types.8 Ben Franklin is a contemporary Jacob, in whom “the diplomatist and
the shepherd are blended” (p. 46). John Paul Jones, “like young David of old,
. . . beard[s] the British giant” (p. 95). The captured Ethan Allen is a Yankee
Samson among Philistines; he even courts the role, allowing an “adorable
Delilah” to shear a lock of his hair for a kiss (pp. 142, 145). Israel Potter,
meanwhile, analogue and amalgam of all the above, is what his name suggests:
a one-man recapitulation of Old Testament history. Captured at the outset by
a British frigate, he is remanded in irons to the brig, where he languishes for a
month “like Jonah in the belly of the whale” (p. 15). Escaping into the coun-
tryside, he sheds his English garments for a ditcher’s coat of many colors (p. 19).
Shortly thereafter, he is befriended by an “Abrahamic gentleman” (p. 27) from
whom he unwillingly parts. Forced to labor in the king’s garden, Israel refuses,
like Daniel, to kowtow, only to gain the king’s respect and friendship—and
thus is preserved, as it were, in the den of the British Lion.
138 Bill Christopherson

This motley allegory fades during the battle sequences—although Israel

becomes, at one point, immured in a cell for what seems to him like “all the
prophetic days and years of Daniel” (p. 71), and participates, later on, in a fiery
sea battle likened to the destruction of Gomorrah (p. 130). But following the
war episodes, it vigorously resumes. Such chapter headings as “Israel’s Flight
Towards the Wilderness” and “Israel in Egypt” prophesy Israel Potter’s luck-
less and persecuted wandering through England and his sojourn in London,
the smoky “desert” in which Potter, “our Wandering Jew”—blessed, eventu-
ally, with a son, “the spared Benjamin of his old age”—abides forty years be-
fore repatriating to “the Promised Land, . . . far Canaan beyond the sea” (pp.
165–166). By this time Israel Potter has subsumed his Biblical analogues, has
become their apotheosis: a Yankee Christ, “the bescarred bearer of a cross,”
whose repatriation is “less a return than a resurrection” (pp. 167–168).
One could understand Melville’s deciding to season his tale, as it were,
with such allusions in order to enhance its cultural appeal. After all, America’s
seventeenth-century founders had asserted the divine nature of their enter-
prise in proclaiming New England the site of the New Jerusalem, God’s City
on a Hill. The exegetes of the Puritan theocracy had literalized the conceit with
countless Biblical parallels, inventing an unprecedented rhetorical framework
to define and justify their errand. Ursula Brumm and Sacvan Bercovitch have
shown both the extent to which New England perceived its history and mis-
sion typologically and the extent to which Old Testament types survived in
the rhetoric of the republic.9
Why Melville chose to feature this rhetoric, though—to make it the
structural framework for his novel—is another question, one whose answer is
bound up with the author’s attitude toward his subject. For several chapters
Melville displays a sort of bemused ambivalence toward America. Aware of
both the myth and the reality, he adopts the temporary strategy of letting
America’s textbook heroes diffract her paradoxes, the typological backdrop
quietly magnifying their deeds and confirming their significance. Midway
through the book, however, the ironies attending his subject begin to over-
whelm his story, resisting even the exorcism of burlesque. And as these ironies
intensify, ironies the typological backdrop foreshortens, Melville’s fascination
with America’s paradoxes dwindles, overshadowed first by a growing skepti-
cism and then by universal questions of human worth.
Melville, for all intents, begins Israel Potter by embracing a romanti-
cized America at face value. The New England of chapter one, page one, is
a cross between “heaven” and classical paradise. To be sure, Melville peo-
ples it with charcoal burners and maple-sugar boilers. But it is essentially a
mythic world inhabited by mythic folk. In his opening portrait of Eastern
Massachusetts, birthplace of his hero and of the American Revolution,
Melville cites New England’s stone walls, those “herculean undertakings”
 Israel Potter 139

at which “the very Titans seemed to have been at work,” as an index to

the temper of the men of the Revolutionary era. Mixing mythologies with
abandon, Melville continues:

To this day the best stone-wall builders, as the best wood-

choppers, come from those solitary mountain towns; a tall,
athletic and hardy race, unerring with the axe as the Indian with
the tomahawk; at stone-rolling, patient as Sisyphus, powerful as
Samson (pp. 4–5).

Not only divine favor but the whole legacy of Western civilization seems
to have cross-fertilized this mist-covered Arcadia and engendered these
mythical Americans.10
Almost at once, however, the picture darkens. Like the woman before
the mirror, whose portrait is simultaneously a grinning skull, the New Eng-
land summer yields to its counterpart, during which

the mountains are left bleak and sere. Solitude settles down upon
them in drizzling mists. The traveller is beset, at perilous turns,
by dense masses of fog. . . . As he warily picks his way . . . he sees
some ghost-like object looming through the mist at the roadside;
and wending towards it, beholds a rude white stone, uncouthly
inscribed, marking the spot where, some fifty or sixty years ago,
some farmer was upset in his wood-sled, and perished beneath the
load (p. 6).

Such two-sidedness—sometimes comic, sometimes tragic—seems for

Melville to characterize both the landscape and its people.
Melville’s patriots are all, in fact, paradoxes. Ben Franklin is a “practical
magian in linsey woolsey” (p. 47), a “Machiavelli in tents” in whom “a polished
Italian tact gleam[s] under an air of Arcadian unaffectedness” (p. 46). Ethan
Allen characterizes himself, rather comically, as “a meek-hearted Christian”
among Turks (p. 145), although, to the English ladies who have come to stare,
he looks the reverse: “an Ottoman,” albeit one who “talks like a beau in a par-
lor” (p. 145). John Paul Jones, meanwhile—poet and outlaw, rake and ruler,
gentleman and savage, overgrown infant and enfant terrible—presents a still
more pronounced paradox. Israel first glimpses him pursuing a chambermaid
up a staircase. Seconds later this same John Paul Jones bursts on the scene,
an incensed patriot demanding ships and endorsement. “When Israel now
perceived him again,” writes Melville, “he seemed, while momentarily hid-
den, to have undergone a complete transformation” (p. 56). Perhaps the most
telling image of John Paul Jones is his tattooed arm, decorated with “large,
140 Bill Christopherson

intertwisted cyphers . . . such as [are] seen only on thoroughbred savages” (p.

62), but which he conceals beneath the lace and ruffles of his Parisian coat-
sleeve. Melville sees this “barbarian in broadcloth” (p. 63) as quintessentially
American:

Intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless

ambition, civilized in externals but a savage at heart, America is,
or may yet be, the Paul Jones of nations (p. 120).

Melville’s adroit portraits of Ben Franklin, John Paul Jones, and Ethan
Allen, for all their wit, hint perceptively at other American traits: “laby-
rinth-minded” plain-spokenness (a trait Melville ascribes to Franklin and
his spiritual compatriots, Jacob and Thomas Hobbes, p. 46); authoritarian
propensity (“My God, why was I not born a Czar!” shouts John Paul Jones
at one point, infuriated at “this shilly-shallying timidity called prudence,”
p. 57); morbid reverence for the dollar (“Never joke at funerals, or during
business transactions,” chides a poker-faced Ben Franklin, p. 43); protean
versatility and jack-of-all-tradesmanship (Franklin, in this respect the “type
and genius of his land,” was “everything but a poet,” p. 48); sensuous appe-
tite—present even when disguised (all three heroes are ladies’ men, the sev-
enty-two-year-old Dr. Franklin being “the caressed favorite of the highest
born beauties of the Court,” p. 48); and the “western spirit” (Melville says of
Ethan Allen: “His spirit was essentially western; and herein is his peculiar
Americanism; for the western spirit is, or will yet be [for no other is, or can
be], the true American one,” p. 149).
Melville’s tone thus far is that of an amused observer intrigued by the
puzzle America, in the persons of such eccentric heroes, presents. But de-
spite the prevailing comedy, a tragic potential inheres in many of his char-
acterizations. The “western spirit,” for example, as Israel’s eventual ill-fated
repatriation suggests, may partake as much of naive self-delusion as of heroic
enterprise. Likewise an America that is the “Paul Jones of nations” may prove
as vicious and amoral as it is gallant and fearless—as Melville not only sug-
gests in the passage cited above, but later shows. An America, meanwhile,
whose “genius” is metamorphosis runs the attendant risk of self-lessness. The
most dramatic example, perhaps, of such dormant irony is John Paul Jones’s
jaunty characterization of himself as an “untrammelled citizen and sailor of
the universe” (p. 56). The nineteenth-century American was, in a sense, pre-
cisely that, since America was still undefined, still in the process of becom-
ing—hence heir to an identity that, like her people, must finally comprise the
world’s influences, rather than those of any one people or culture. John Paul
Jones’s brow, we are told, gleamed with “the consciousness of possessing a
character as yet unfathomed” (p. 63). Yet to be “unfathomed,” a “sailor of the
 Israel Potter 141

universe,” can be as ambiguous a blessing as it is an identity, as Israel’s history

demonstrates.
These cameo portraits of the patriots generate insight as well as interest,
then, and provide vehicles for Melville’s more abstract characterization of a
people. But beyond a point, their extraordinariness limits their usefulness as
indices. So Melville’s attention devolves finally on Israel Potter, who com-
bines many of their traits. Israel is shrewd and brave, devoted and proud: in
a word, as illustrious as his celebrated acquaintances. Like Ethan Allen, he
is captured, baited and harassed by the British, yet remains, in his own way,
defiant. Like Paul Jones, Israel goes to sea young, takes over a ship, and defies
an enemy crowd single-handedly, combining grace with daring and civility
with savagery in the process. Like Franklin, he serves as a foreign emissary,
albeit a secret one; displays a “labyrinth-minded” plain-spokenness on more
than one occasion; and even writes a book—whose practical instructiveness,
we suspect, might rival some of Poor Richard’s sardonic apothegms.
Israel is, in short, the prototypical American: revolutionary, roustabout,
and Yankee peddler rolled into one—and christened with a Puritan name to
boot. Yet for all his valor and accomplishments, this composite patriot and
figural patriarch dies an unknown soldier. And while his history rings truer
for his anonymity, we are hard put to cipher its meaning. What are we to
make of this cultural antihero whose trials, unlike the Biblical Israel’s, lead
not to redemption, reward, self-definition, or fulfillment, but to obscurity? It
is as if the Biblical Daniel had survived the lion’s den only to die a derelict in
Babylon.
Nor is Israel’s obscurity just luckless coincidence. Rather it suggests an
identity vacuum. Israel’s career consists largely of his changing clothes (every
ten pages, it seems), losing himself in one crowd or another, sailing under
different flags and figuratively dying and being reborn. A forerunner of the
Confidence Man,11 his guises include those of beggar, scarecrow and ghost.
Melville capitalizes on such occasions for comic relief, but Israel’s career is
finally tragic, not comic. Like the marginal characters and nonentities he
impersonates, Israel seems somehow insubstantial—a fast-talking figment,
stopped time and again by the question, “Who are you?”
Melville’s treatment of Israel’s elusive identity verges on obsession in the
“Shuttle” episode. “Who the deuce are you?” demands the British officer-of-
the-deck when Israel materializes unexpectedly on the foredeck of his ship
after a skirmish. (Israel has prematurely climbed aboard, and must now feign
membership in the crew or be discovered for an enemy.) “Who are you? . . .
What’s your name? Are you down in the ship’s books, or at all in the records
of nature?” Israel’s outrageous song-and-dance reply (“My name, sir, is Peter
Perkins. . . . It might be, sir, . . . that seeing I shipped under the effects of liquor,
I might, out of absent-mindedness like, have given in some other person’s name
142 Bill Christopherson

instead of my own,” p. 137) buys him time and saves his life. But he is peremp-
torily tagged a “ghost” and a “phantom” (p. 139) and the jape resonates as a
cultural caricature—America as a poseur, albeit a feisty and inventive one.12
The morbid tone the book assumes from this point on lends support to
such a reading. What is not immediately apparent, though, is why Melville’s
essentially good-humored fascination with America’s paradoxes lapses into
caricature. The key to his souring attitude lies in the episode describing the
face-off between the Bon Homme Richard and the Serapis, the sequence pre-
ceding “The Shuttle.” Prior to this point, the grimmer ironies of his subject
have simmered harmlessly, the typological ground inconspicuously enriching
the tale’s texture and adding dimension to the heroes’ exploits. But during
this battle sequence, the ironies erupt; figure and ground come into conflict;
history, as it were, subverts typology.a
In the preceding chapters Britain has figured as Babylon, the oppressor
nation—hence, for instance, the chapter entitled “Israel in the Lion’s Den,” in
which Israel is unmasked, then befriended by King George III. The Serapis-
Richard sequence, however, explodes this typology. The battle is introduced
portentously: “there would seem to be something singularly indicatory in this
engagement. It may involve at once a type, a parallel, and a prophecy” (p.
120). The parallel is disturbing enough: that America, “civilized in externals
but a savage at heart, may well be the Paul Jones of nations” (p. 120). But the
type, let alone the prophecy, shocks. Instead of a victimized American “Israel”
being delivered from Babylon (from the British Lion) Melville presents the
battle as a maritime version of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Af-
ter limning the fire blazing in the rigging of both ships, he writes:

A few hours after sunrise the Richard was deserted for the
Serapis and other vessels of the squadron of Paul. About ten
o’clock the Richard, gorged with slaughter, wallowed heavily, gave
a long roll, and, blasted by tornadoes of sulphur, slowly sank, like
Gomorrah, out of sight (p. 130).

The Richard, Paul Jones’s ship, sinks “like Gomorrah.” (The dramatic irony
of the phrase is even clearer for the fact that Jones has earlier vowed to
“rain down on wicked England like fire on Sodom,” p. 56). This image of
England and America as mutually wicked cities of the plain jars our expec-
tations and deposes America’s sanctimonious self-image.
Melville justifies his renegade typology with frequent reminders that,
unlike the Biblical Israel, America is fighting her own kin: “it seemed more an
intestine feud, than a fight between strangers. Or, rather, it was as if Siamese
Twins, oblivious of their fraternal bond, should rage in unnatural fight” (p.
125). He likewise links the antagonists through formal parallels and similes,13
 Israel Potter 143

so that “the belligerents [seem] . . . a co-partnership and joint-stock com-

bustion-company” (p. 126) and become, at last, “confounded . . . in one chaos
of devastation” (p. 120). Both literal and figurative kin to “wicked England” (p.
56), America, with her guise of Election, seems sorely deluded. These ironies are
compounded by the savagery her warriors display during the fight.
Until now, Paul Jones has distinguished himself not only by his daring,
but by his humanity, as in his torching of the English ship at Whitehaven:

Not a splinter was made, not a drop of blood spilled throughout

the affair. The intentional harmlessness of the result, as to human
life, was only equalled by the desperate courage of the deed. It
formed, doubtless, one feature of the compassionate contempt of
Paul towards the town, that he took such paternal care of their
lives and limbs (p. 104).

But in the Serapis encounter there appears a feral and fanatical Paul Jones,
his bared sword-arm “cabalistically terrific as the charmed standard of
Satan” (p. 126), meting destruction. Moreover, Israel, who earlier forbore,
on principle, to harm the British king, is now shown dropping a grenade
into a hatchway “with such faultless precision” that “more than twenty men
were instantly killed: nearly forty wounded” (p. 127). In light of such atroci-
ties, Melville seems unable to indulge partisan hurrahs. America, the figural
Israel, seems to be just one more warring tribe.
Its pedestal fractured, the republic becomes less an engaging paradox
than a pathological schizophrenic. One minute a raging lion, the next a “poor,
persecuted fellow” (p. 138), America/Israel with its quick-change artistry less
dazzles than disturbs. Hence the extensive, if abortive, cross-examining Israel
undergoes in the following chapter—as if Melville, exasperated by his elusive
subject, sought to extort some straight answers by giving his protean hero the
third degree.
The Serapis-Richard episode signals another important change in the
narrative. Henceforth the very notion of national identity begins to evaporate,
to seem irrelevant in the face of a larger paradox. Both sides’ ruthlessness es-
tablished, Melville, after quoting the casualty figures, ends the chapter:

In view of this battle one may ask—What separates the

enlightened man from the savage? Is civilization a thing distinct,
or is it an advanced stage of barbarism? (p. 130).

The Serapis-Richard encounter adumbrates a broader, more cynical view of

man than Melville has articulated so far—one he will develop, then leaven
in the remaining chapters.
144 Bill Christopherson

•••
So Melville’s attempts to unravel the American character net him both
more and less than he bargained for. His insight into America’s capacity for
self-delusion horrifies especially, although, as he later intimates, America
has no monopoly on self-deceit. But in the wake of the Serapis and Shuttle
chapters, the national identity, though more inscrutable than ever, becomes
less consumingly important. It is as if Melville realizes, two-thirds of the way
through his book, that to scrutinize America’s mercurial surface is futile, and
to scrutinize its deep self is nothing less than to scrutinize humankind’s. This
last insight, a corollary of the Serapis episode, is perhaps the book’s most pro-
found revelation. If America, its self-styled Election notwithstanding, is not
special, then it is like other nations: selfish, brutal, disappointingly human.
And though this revelation seems at first to appall, Melville derives from it a
more profound sympathy, a new typology—indeed, a new testament.
The ironic similarities between England and America that first be-
come plain in the Serapis-Richard episode are echoed by various rhetorical
ploys elsewhere in the book. Melville, for instance, uses the word “lion”—a
popular characterization of England (“the British Lion”)—to characterize
America’s prototypes Ethan Allen and Israel Potter (pp. 102, 143). Likewise
the name Richard—as in Ben Franklin’s “Poor Richard,” and John Paul
Jones’ ship, the Bon Homme Richard—also recalls England’s Richard the
Lion-hearted—who, according to Melville’s narrator, is the spiritual sire
of Ethan Allen (149). So too the image of England as a “wilderness” and
London as a “desert” (p. 161) counterpoints Ben Franklin’s map of the New
World, on which the then-uncharted America is labeled “DESERT” (p.
38). Melville bolsters these rhetorical devices with formal parallels, playing
off Israel/America’s anonymity against that of London’s masses and rein-
voking New England’s mists in old England’s fogs and industrial palls. And
just in case these strategies fail, he dramatizes his irony in the Ethan Al-
len digression, introducing Allen as a “wild beast” (p. 144) among civilized
Englishmen and then, in the following chapter, putting the shoe on the
other hoof by relating the monstrous treatment accorded the captive Allen
by the British, and concluding, “when among wild beasts, if they menace
you, be a wild beast” (p. 150).
These ironies deprecate not only America’s myth of Election, but any
nation’s less-than-severe self-appraisal. Humanity, in short, usurps America’s
role as preeminent paradox. Following the chapter spotlighting Allen, Mel-
ville begins to lace his prose with observations that cut across national lines to
depict a universal sordidness:

It is among nations as among individuals: imputed indigence

provokes oppression and scorn; but that same indigence being
 Israel Potter 145

risen to opulence, receives a politic consideration even from its

former insulters (p. 151).

Israel’s sojourn in England continues this trend, Melville signifying Israel’s

tribulations over and above those commonly associated with national,
wealth, and class distinctions. At one point Israel, upon learning that his
whole crew is in danger of impressment, leaves the British ship he has suc-
cessfully infiltrated and flees inland, “hunted by the thought, that whether
as an Englishman, or whether as an American, he would, if caught, be now
equally subject to enslavement” (p. 152). Shortly thereafter Israel, clad again
in beggar’s rags, becomes one of a throng of existential brickmakers to whom
“men and bricks were equally of clay. ‘What signifies who we be—dukes or
ditchers?’ thought the moulders; ‘all is vanity and clay. . . . Kings as clowns
are codgers—who ain’t a nobody?’” (pp. 155, 157).
By now, the despair of Melville’s vision frightens. Like Lot’s wife, who
looked once too often, Melville seems overcome, immobilized by the desolation
he has glimpsed and by the seeming apocalypse at hand. He describes London:

As in eclipses, the sun was hidden; the air darkened; the whole
dull, dismayed aspect of things, as if some neighboring volcano,
belching its premonitory smoke, were about to whelm the great
town, as Herculaneum and Pompeii, or the Cities of the Plain.
And as they had been upturned in terror towards the mountain, all
faces were more or less snowed, or spotted with soot. Nor marble,
nor flesh, nor the sad spirit of man, may in this cindery City of Dis
abide white (pp. 159–160).

Charles Feidelson, Jr. rightly notes the nihilism informing these final pages
and captured in the image of London Bridge, over which “that hereditary
crowd—gulf-stream of humanity . . . has never ceased pouring, like an
endless shoal of herring” (p. 158). The phantom metaphor earlier applied
to Israel/America recurs, universalized, in Melville’s portrait of these
multitudes who “one after the other, . . . drifted by, uninvoked ghosts in
Hades” (p. 160). By now, no “disguises,” national or otherwise, suffice; no
one escapes sordid anonymity. All are ghosts; bricks in a wall; herrings in
a shoal.
With America deposed and its importance subsumed, Melville’s labori-
ously woven figural tapestry threatens to become a white elephant. Yet rather
than scuttle or revise his typological framework, Melville intensifies it. The final
chapters—“Israel’s Flight Towards the Wilderness,” “Israel in Egypt”—further
typify Israel’s sojourn in England, although there is little left to tell of his ad-
ventures. If anything, Melville overworks his motif, dallying too explicitly in
146 Bill Christopherson

calling his hero “poor Israel! Well-named—bondsman in the English Egypt”

(p. 157), and disposing of him with the comment that “encouraged by the ex-
odus of the lost tribes of soldiers, Israel returned to chair-bottoming” (p. 163).
Heavy-handed or not, however, these chapters perform their narrative task,
which is both to set the stage for Israel’s final “deliverance” into America, the
Promised Land, and to detail the figural ground anew in relation to Israel’s
dawning messianic identity. Melville’s figuralism in these final chapters acts
both as an ironic foil and a reconstituted metaphor. These closing chapters
detailing Israel’s decline and destitution represent not so much a “slurred cli-
max”14 as a prelude to the final irony of Israel’s repatriation. By revitalizing
expectations of an Exodus, a deliverance into Canaan, Melville’s reactivated
typology foreshortens the downward spiral of Israel’s career.
For the American typology Melville borrows was nothing less than the
spiritual backbone to a colony, a nation, a people whose City on a Hill was,
from the outset, an experiment in brinksmanship. At Massachusetts’s founding,
and then during the Indian wars and the collapse of Cromwell’s Protectorate,
and later still during the decline of the New England theocracy, and again dur-
ing the Revolution, the rhetoric of Election enabled America to survive against
enormous odds and to progress, convinced that its very trials, like the Biblical
Israel’s, were proof of its divine destiny. By identifying its mission with Old
Testament Israel’s, New England—and later the republic—both fortified itself
against the wilderness it had chosen to inhabit and transformed that wilderness
into an oasis. The premise of this rhetorical posture was, of course, the notion of
a God who chastises to purify and who has made a covenant with His people
that will not be broken. But what if the nation’s hardships were to prove to be
nothing more than the vicissitudes all nations undergo? What if her trials in
the wilderness were never to end? What if the covenant were a fiction, and no
redemption was to follow? What if Canaan itself were to prove a desert? What,
in short, if Israel were to be forgotten?
This, quite literally, is what happens. The implicit time of deliverance
having come and gone (as the subtitle—“His Fifty Years of Exile”—hints),
Israel arrives in “the Promised Land” only to find himself, as always, a strang-
er. After almost being run over by a patriotic float in procession (it is July
4th when he disembarks in Boston), the best Israel can manage is to glimpse
his father’s homestead and the crumbling remains of the ancient hearth. Re-
demption, grace, reward, all elude him. Even his rightful pension is denied
him. Unwelcomed and unremembered, he dies shortly after writing “a little
book, the record of his fortunes” (p. 169).
And so Israel-as-America-as-Latter-Day-Israel perishes in the desert,
and his testament with him. But the figural grid, active until the end, forces
his fate into relief and intensifies the melodrama of his homecoming. Mel-
ville’s irony is as perfect as it is painful, a hand passing slowly and repeatedly
 Israel Potter 147

through the pillar of fire that was at once the figment and forestay of the
American imagination in its adopted wilderness.
But if, in Israel Potter, “Israel” is deposed, “Potter” is not. The tension be-
tween Election and obscurity embodied in the protagonist’s name from the
start undercuts the American myth, but mythologizes man in its stead.15 This
is the second, non-ironic function of the typology Melville resurrects in the
closing chapters: to elevate humanity in spite of its apparent worthlessness and
abandonment. This time the figure of Israel captive in Egypt typifies not Amer-
ica as British colony, but Everyman as figurative exile in an alien world.
Hence Israel’s identification as the “Wandering Jew,” for if Israel has an
abiding identity, it is that of Exile and Wanderer (p. 165). Hence too his final
transformation into a Christ figure, the “bescarred bearer of a cross” (p. 167).
Melville, as it were, transfigures his “ghost,” makes of him not only a prophet,
but a priest and mock king—merging his identity, in the Dedication, with
that of “His Highness,” the Bunker Hill Monument (p. vii). Hence, finally,
Melville’s empathy for London’s masses of “tormented humanity” (p. 159),
and his sympathy in portraying the brickmakers and allegorizing the bricks.
(Variously burned according to their placement in the kiln, they suggest that
human life is a trial by fire, fatal to some but strengthening to others enabled
by their circumstance to withstand the furnace’s heat.) Melville’s final chap-
ters eulogize “the unupholstered corpse of the beggar”: “man, ‘poor player,’”
who “succeeds better in life’s tragedy than comedy” (pp. 161, 160).
This sympathetic, humanist perspective was not unique to Israel Potter.
It informs much of Melville’s short fiction of 1853–1855. The narrator of
“The Tartarus of Maids,” for example, identifies with the pale-faced drudges
laboring in a paper mill. Likewise the narrator of “Bartleby, the Scrivener,”
meditating on Bartleby’s pathetic death, envisions the dead letters it had once
been Bartleby’s job to sort (“pardon for those who died despairing; hope for
those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unre-
lieved calamities”), then concludes, “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”16
The same sentiment—expressed, as in Israel Potter, through adapted
gospel motifs—underpins “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” and “The Encantadas.”
In “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” a dejected debtor takes heart from a trumpeting
rooster and his owner, a struggling but indomitable wood-sawyer. Melville
develops the story as an ironic Easter fable in which not resurrection but
death prevails (the wood-sawyer, his ailing wife and children, and finally his
rooster all expire in a tragicomic chain reaction). Yet, perhaps because death
comes as a blessing if not a crown for these souls who endured so stoically, the
Easter text Melville adverts to (“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where
is thy victory?” [p. 288]) takes on a new, if less mystical, grandeur, even as the
crowing cock, instead of shaming the doubting and dispirited narrator as its
148 Bill Christopherson

Biblical ancestor had shamed Christ-denying Peter, fills him with human
pride and a glorious insolence.
But perhaps the work closest to Israel Potter in tone and trope is “The
Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles.” At the heart of this fiction is the tale of the
Chola Widow, Hunilla, who, with her husband and brother, journeys to the
Galápagos Islands to collect tortoise oil. The captain they contract to bring
them back betrays his promise. Brother and husband both drown before Hu-
nilla’s eyes when their catamaran breaks apart on the reef, and before Hunilla
is rescued by the narrator and his crew, a whaling crew discovers her plight,
rapes her and abandons her. Melville’s portrait pays reverential tribute to this
quintessential victim: “humanity, thou strong thing,” Melville writes, “I wor-
ship thee, not in the laurelled victor, but in this vanquished one” (p. 157). His
closing image transforms the widow into a latterday Christ: “the last seen of
lone Hunilla she was passing into Payta town, riding upon a small gray ass;
and before her on the ass’s shoulders, she eyed the jointed workings of the
beast’s armorial cross” (p. 162).
What sets the humanist gospel of Israel Potter apart, though, is precisely
the typological context in which the tale is couched, and which Melville so
radically debunks and transforms. The island universe of “The Encantadas,”
which is the same Galápagos Islands Darwin studied as a crucible of evo-
lutionary pressures, is from the start a wasteland of burnt cinders and rep-
tiles in which natural selection determines all, a postlapsarian world in which
“naught else abides . . . but unkept promises of joy” (p. 153). The universe
of Israel Potter, by contrast, is America, a New World Canaan whose fertile
soil and thriving culture lend credence to its divine aspirations. Once this
promised land becomes, as it were, untransfigured, and all the world stands
revealed as a kiln, a desert, the sense of spiritual collapse is overwhelming. The
gospel of love that Melville extracts is the more remarkable for this implosion
of faith that precedes it.
Potter’s field, not Canaan, may be man’s portion. But Israel Potter, Mel-
ville’s most compassionate book, dignifies the funeral and makes of Potter’s
Field a designated resting place (Potter bestowing his name, in effect, on ob-
scure plots the world over). Dedicated to a monument, Israel Potter is itself
a monument; invoking the Bible, it is itself a bible. It is a monument, how-
ever, not to an American myth, but to the human condition; a bible, not of a
people, but for all people.

No t e s

1. Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929), p.

167; Warner Berthoff, The Example of Melville (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
 Israel Potter 149

1962), p. 69; Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York: William Sloane, 1950),
p. 245.
  2. George Henry Lewes, review of Israel Potter in The Leader (May 5, 1855),
428; Charles Feidelson Jr., Symbolism in American Literature (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1953), p. 183; F. O. Manhiessen, The American Renaissance (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), p. 491.
  3. Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel
Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle, vol. 8 of The Writings of Herman Melville, gen. eds.
Hayford et al. (Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern Univ. and Newberry Library,
1982), pp. ix, x; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
  4. Emile Montégut, review of Israel Potter, Revue des deux mondes ( July 1,
1855), 7.
  5. Arnold Rampersad, Melville’s Israel Potter: A Pilgrimage and Progress
(Bowling Green: Bowling Green Univ. Press, 1969), p. 101.
  6. Alexander Keyssar, Melville’s Israel Potter: Reflections on the American
Dream (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), p. 24.
  7. Kenny Jackson, “Israel Potter: Melville’s ‘4th of July Story,’” CLAD, 9
(1963), 197–198, 204.
  8. Nathalia Wright has catalogued the Israel motif in Melville’s Use of the
Bible (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1949). Other critics—notably Edgar A. Dryden
in Melville’s Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1968)—have noted the irony of such Biblical analogues in
Israel Potter but have not related the motif to America’s typological self-image (pp.
143–1­44). Dryden observes merely that “unlike the Biblical figures with whom he
is so often associated, [Israel’s] physical pain and suffering is no preparation for
spiritual cleansing and rebirth” (p. 145).
  9. Ursula Brumm, American Thought and Religious Typology (New Brunswick:
Rutgers Univ. Press, 1970); Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American
Self (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), and The American Jeremiad (Madison:
Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
10. As Robert Zaller astutely notes, Melville’s New Englanders may have
been ironically conceived from the outset, the Titans, Sisyphus, and Samson all
being “classic heroes of futility.” See “Melville and the Myth of Revolution,” SIR,
15 (1976), 608.
11. Michael P. Rogin sees this comparison as a contrast. See Subversive
Genealogy: Politics and Art in Herman Melville (New York: Knopf, 1982), p. 230.
12. For a comprehensive discussion of Israel’s non-identity, see John Seelye,
Melville: The Ironic Diagram (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1970).
13. Both ships, for instance, suffer the unhelpful approach and retreat of their
own consorts. The two ships are depicted, meanwhile, as “a hawk and a crow” (p.
123), and as opposite sides of the same faulted land mass (p. 125). Indeed, Melville’s
establishing shot of “that bewildering intertanglement of all the yards and anchors
of the two ships” (p. 120) signals the extent of their indistinguishability. “The two
vessels were as two houses, through whose party-wall doors have been cut; one
family (the Guelphs) occupying the whole lower story; another (the Ghibelines) the
whole upper story” (p. 126).
14. Matthiessen, p. 491.
15. Ray B. Browne also stresses this apotheosis of the common man in “Israel
Potter: Metamorphosis of Superman,” in Frontiers of American Culture, ed. Ray B.
150 Bill Christopherson

Browne et al. (Lafayette: Purdue Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 89–98. But for Browne,
Israel Potter is a sort of Jacksonian-democratic deposition of our heroes and gods,
a paean to equality and to “America . . . the hope of humanity” (p. 96). Such a
nationalistic reading collapses under the irony of Potter’s homecoming and death.
Melville eschews chauvinistic considerations, so that at the close Potter is less a
democratic hero than a bedraggled but deified “citizen of the universe.”
16. The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford,
Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle et al., vol. 9 of The Writings of Herman
Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. and Newberry Library, 1987),
1). 45; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
 J udith H iltner

Disquieting Encounters: Male Intrusions/

Female Realms in Melville

I n the second sketch of “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of

Maids,” Melville’s male narrator visits an isolated paper mill that employs
only women “operatives,” and his penetration into the center of appropriated
female energy is depicted as a shocking experience that renders him faint
and temporarily incapacitated. Using imagery that suggests the violation
of a sacred taboo, he compares the effects of what he has witnessed in the
factory to the suffering of Actæon, mauled by bloodhounds for viewing the
naked Artemis. The narrator records no personal interaction with any of
the women after his initial encounters with two pale and miserable workers
outside the dormitories; after first faltering at each confrontation, he forc-
ibly dismisses the second woman with the desperate cry, “[I]s there no man
about?” He can enter the scene of female labor and survive the experience
intact only when the encounter is mediated by the “dark-complexioned,”
fur-wrapped “Old Bach” and the young “Cupid.”1
Scenes in which a male curiously observes or intrudes upon a female
realm recur in Melville as dramatic and psychically charged experiences:
Tommo disrupts a circle of women tappa makers in Typee; Ishmael, on one of
the Pequod’s whaleboats, penetrates a school of female whales, some nursing,
some in labor; Pierre interrupts a sewing society; the “Encantadas” narrator
observes the scene of Hunilla’s fruitless labors; the curious narrator of “Poor

ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Volume 40, Number 2 (1994): pp. 91–111. © 1994
ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance.

151
152 Judith Hiltner

Man’s Pudding” imposes upon Martha Coulter’s wash day; Captain Dela-
no intrudes upon a slave mother nursing her child in “Benito Cereno”; and
the “Piazza” narrator startles Marianna at her sewing. In all of these scenes,
the male intruder encounters women engaged in some form of labor in the
broadest sense; their energies, at the point of his arrival, are channelled into
physical or mental activities, though the “work” may be peripheral to Mel-
ville’s main focus. This pattern reinforces a persistent patriarchal association
between the female body and a tireless, unstoppable machine—a frequently
appalling organic dynamo that operates independently of male influence. The
scenes, however, are distinguished by the nature of the realm invaded; some
of Melville’s observers intrude upon a place of communal female activity, and
others upon an individual woman’s private domain. The individual encounters
specify and even exacerbate the psychological malaise pervading the com-
munal scenes, and telling parallels emerge between the observers’ reactions in
both types of encounters.
In Typee and Moby-Dick, intruder scenes are treated humorously or as a
source of psychic solace for the male. Even in these early texts, however, the
narrator perceives that he is entering a strange and alien world—a world that
threatens him with a sense of confinement. Frequently in such scenes, the
intrusion represents a violation or is otherwise disruptive. In later works, Mel-
ville raises increasing doubts about the male’s comprehension or interpretation
of what he has observed. The observer is generally rendered faint and speech-
less, and his intuitive perception of the scene’s implications fuels a growing
urgency to resist its effects upon his psyche, to escape in order to remain in-
tact. Increasingly the women are engaged in activities unrelated to their natu-
ral gifts or desires, their energies appropriated by forces from which they are
alienated. In some of Melville’s texts, the male observer/intruder scene enjoys
a temporary and unstable status as a protest against class distinction and labor
oppression, but soon the political or social indictment is absorbed into literary
and aesthetic tensions, or into an exploration of more abstract psychological
and metaphysical ambiguities. At the same time, the description of the female
realm becomes less realistic, more grotesque and allegorical—a movement that
helps to subvert the thrust of the social critique.2
The differences in these scenes of male intrusion upon female realms
suggest a transition in Melville’s assessment of the male’s ability to absorb
and interpret female experience. The scenes raise interesting questions about
the male writer’s ability to depict female energies without sliding into strat-
egies of detachment; they also trace Melville’s rapidly altering associations
with the term “natural.” Changes in the male intruder scene may effectively
be assessed by noting striking similarities and telling differences between the
“Tartarus” narrative (1855) and an earlier example, Tommo’s unsettling of the
Typee tappa makers (1846).3 Because the natural abundance of the Typee
 Disquieting Encounters 153

Valley satisfies nearly all the necessities of the natives, scarcely any physical
exertion is required in Typee, but it is primarily women who perform what-
ever is demanded, particularly the preparation of breadfruit and the making
of tappa cloth. The “only industrious person in . . . the valley” is Kory-Kory’s
mother, Tinor, who spends her time actively engaged in household crafts and
tasks. Tommo suggests that though largely unnecessary, work is joy for Tinor,
a natural, rhythmic expression of her abundant energies: she seems to work
“from some irresistible impulse; her limbs continually swaying to and fro, as
if there were some indefatigable engine concealed within her body which
[keeps] her in perpetual motion.”4 In the later “Tartarus” scene, this “indefati-
gable engine” with which woman’s body continues to be associated becomes
an externalized machine of torture that joylessly enslaves by “metallic neces-
sity” and “unbudging fatality” (PT, 333).
Tommo’s realistic description of tappa making reveals that the procedure
curiously reverses the process of papermaking in Tartarus, which is described
as an allegorical reenactment of gestation and birth. In the paper mill, the
“woolly-looking,” “albuminous” fluid is rendered increasingly thick and vis-
cous as it moves along the mechanical rollers, until it finally hardens into solid
sheets of foolscap (PT, 331–332). In tappa making, on the other hand, the
initially solid raw material (tree branch fiber) is softened and decomposed by
being soaked in water. It is stretched and gently beaten into a thin, malleable
substance, until its final formlessness as silky cloth (Typee, 147–148).
The reader observes other curious parallels and disturbing differences
between the two procedures, as the natural process of tappa making is con-
verted into the mechanical oppression of Tartarus. Both processes involve
imprinting: The fine grooves in the mallet used to beat the tree fiber in tappa
making account for the “corduroy sort of stripes” visible in the final cloth
(Typee, 147). In Tartarus, the workers themselves, having become identified
with the inanimate product of their labor, are printed upon; the wires used for
lining the paper appear in one young woman’s “ruled and wrinkled” forehead,
and the image of the workers’ pale faces, in the narrator’s haunting vision, is
imprinted on the pulp passing through the mechanical rollers (PT, 328, 334).
Occasionally the Typee women will add vegetable dye to color their cloth,
but they prefer the “natural tint” of “dazzling whiteness” rendered by drying
and bleaching the sheets in the sun (Typee, 148). By contrast, the whiteness
of the final product in Tartarus is not “dazzling.” The narrator repeatedly sees
a reflection of the foolscap in the dull pallor and “sheet-white” faces of the
women, and the rose dye of the tinted paper comes from draining the blood
of the operatives: “I looked from the rosy paper to the pallid cheek, but said
nothing” (PT, 330, 328). Finally, the mallets used to thin out the fibers in
tappa making produce at every stroke a musical ringing sound, and when the
narrator approaches from a distance, he hears in the simultaneous striking
154 Judith Hiltner

of several mallets a lovely harmony. How far from “the sharp shriek of the
tormented steel” that makes the narrator’s “unaccustomed blood” curdle in
Tartarus (PT, 330).
The tappa making house is located in a secluded portion of the Typee
Valley, but it is far more accessible than the route to Tartarus. As the entire
novel persuades us, the intimate domain of the female is more easily pen-
etrated in the pagan South Seas than in Protestant midcentury America. And
because the house is more accessible and familiar, it appears less threatening
to the male observer. Tommo has witnessed women making tappa numerous
times during his visit and has even “handled the bark in all the various stages
of its preparation.” In the scene the narrator recounts, the women hardly pro-
test his appearance; they chat with him “gaily” before resuming their work.
Only when he “carelessly” picks up some of the bark and “unconsciously”
picks it apart do they begin to shriek. The sense of violation perceived by the
narrator is reinforced by his allusion to the Roman warriors’ rape of Sabine
women. When the tappa makers’ bosoms swell and they point at him in hor-
ror, Tommo assumes that some “venomous reptile” must be concealed in the
bark he holds and so examines it more closely, triggering even more desperate
screams from the women. Alarmed, he is about to bolt the scene, as the Tarta-
rus narrator does several times during his visit. But Tommo’s fear is assuaged
by the explanatory cry “Taboo,” as the Typee women, unlike those in Tartarus,
are empowered to speak to the male observer. Tommo later learns that this
particular cloth, “destined” for women’s head wear, is taboo to male touch at
every stage of its production (Typee, 221–222).
In this text, the narrator gradually associates the intricate system of ta-
boo with oppressive restrictions that undermine the freedom he had begun
to relish after first yielding to Typee life and repressing his urgent desire to
escape. He begins to see the taboo system as “strange,” “complex,” and ul-
timately incomprehensible, even to foreigners who live in Typee for years
and master the language (Typee, 221). But as other readers have suggested,
Tommo never seriously attempts to understand it; he insists upon breaking
taboo dictates whenever he can persuade male authority figures to yield to
his demands.5 Even in a relative paradise, then, a place of easier intercourse
between men and women, masculine assertion and masculine incomprehen-
sion result in violation of a female realm. Moreover, the narrator’s impression
of the Typee taboo system as an “inexplicable” and “all-controlling power”
whose effects “pervad[e] the most important as well as the minutest transac-
tions of 1ife” (Typee, 221) persists after his return from the South Seas. The
system is in part projected upon the female gender, and most particularly
upon the woman’s body, inevitably controlling the male’s encounters within
the feminine realm.
 Disquieting Encounters 155

The “Tartarus” narrative of 1855 intensifies the bleaker hints of the earli-
er tappa scene and petrifies them into inexorable “necessity.” Male and female
exist in realms so separate that no communication can occur; the complexi-
ties and periodic rhythms of the female body are ossified into a steel machine
that is inscrutable and oppressively relentless. Female figures are abstract and
voiceless. The identification of female anatomy with the inchoate, raw forces
of nature renders both equally subject to appropriation by a male-engendered
and male-controlled technology. And as the narrative suggests, this imper-
sonal and metallic reification accounts for the seemingly sensitive narrator’s
inability to endure the scene without mitigating male company and, ulti-
mately, his need to flee it.
Inevitably, the biological allegory circumscribes Melville’s laboring
women, a circumscription that has generated modern debate over whether
the story is primarily about human bondage to technology or to the female
reproductive machine.6 As Michael Paul Rogin notes, Melville’s pallid “waifs”
bear little resemblance to the actual factory women of Lowell, Massachusetts,
“who wrote letters and verse, and organized to protest their regimentation.”
According to Rogin, “Melville ignores such autonomous subjects, who gained
individual voices in the course of their collective struggle.”7 In “Tartarus,”
women’s economic and social plight has been soldered to a male vision of
their anatomy, rendering their predicament irresolvable. And it is this “un-
budging fatality” that severs the male narrator’s sympathy with the female
laborers. Repeatedly in Melville’s stories throughout this period, his narra-
tors express the futility of sympathy and compassion when the object of pity
is beyond help.8 The “Bartleby” narrator, for example, concluding that the
scrivener is a victim of an “innate and incurable disorder,” says that “when
at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effective succor, common
sense bids the soul be rid of it” (PT, 29). Similarly, the narrator of “Poor Man’s
Pudding,” overwhelmed by what he perceives as the irremediable condition
of Martha Coulter, argues that he can “stay no longer to hear of sorrows for
which the sincerest sympathies could give no adequate relief ” (PT, 295). “The
Tartarus of Maids,” then, suggests how the problematic circumscription of
female possibility by physiological allegory can accommodate male surrender
to the “hopelessness” of women’s social and economic oppression.
The “Tartarus” observer’s threatening identification of female energies
with nature’s primal, inexorable forces is reinforced by the hyperbolic gyne-
cological imagery he uses to recount his difficult journey through the nar-
row “Mad Maid’s Bellows’-pipe” to the “Dungeon” of a hollow in which the
mill is situated (PT, 323–325). But a far more positive association between
female energies and natural forces had been rendered several years earlier in
Moby-Dick (1851). Ishmael’s encounter with nursing mother whales at the
center of “The Grand Armada” (chap. 87) identifies maternal labor with an
156 Judith Hiltner

omphalic core of nature that is pacific and loving—an identification parodi-

cally subverted in “Benito Cereno” (1855) by Captain Delano’s impression of
a nursing slave mother aboard the San Dominick. In Moby-Dick, the passage
into the maternal scene recalls Tommo and Toby’s entry into the Typee Val-
ley (chap. 9); “glid[ing] between two whales into the innermost heart of the
shoal” is metaphorically linked with sliding down a “mountain torrent . . .
into a serene valley lake.”9 Just as Tommo is struck by the lack of apocryphal
violence during his residence among the allegedly brutal Typees (Typee, 128),
so Ishmael tells us that at the inner heart of the shoal, “the storms in the
roaring glens between the outermost whales [are] heard, but not felt” (MD,
386–387). And just as Tommo feels oppressed by the mountainous enclosure
that locks him into the valley, so Ishmael notes that the dense concentration
of whales guarding the inner circle forms a “living wall that hem[s] [them]
in,” affording “no possible chance of escape” (MD, 387).
In the center of the shoal, baby whales, innocent of the harpoon, nuzzle
against Ishmael’s boat, just as the females of Nukuheva, “[u]nsophisticated
and confiding,” first swim to the Dolly to welcome their western exploiters
(Typee, 14–15).10 The narrator of Moby-Dick gazes beneath the surface, where
the baby whales are sporting, into a deeper and “still stranger” world of nurs-
ing mothers, who eye the mariners suspiciously, while the newborn infants
gaze away in blissful reminiscence of the womb, referred to, significantly, as
“foreign parts.” The tranquillity of the scene, however, is suddenly shattered by
the harpooner’s screams, echoing those of the Typee tappa makers. Queequeg
has mistaken the umbilical cord of a newly born whale for a harpoon line and
is alarmed that mother and cub have been lanced. The narrator explains that
such violations frequently occur in the chaos of the chase; the whale line may
get entangled with an umbilical cord, trapping an infant (MD, 387–388).
Once again, masculine penetration into a strange and hitherto unfamiliar
world violates a sacred taboo.
In this scene the intruder is not compelled to flee, but he does instantly
repress the image of violation. Ishmael turns, without transition, from pictur-
ing the trapped cub to an allegorical parallel between this external scene of
peace in the center of turbulence and the tranquillity that he experiences deep
within his own soul, even in the midst of life’s “tornadoe[s].” He marvels that
he can still “disport” himself in “mute calm” deep down in this “inland” realm
while “planets of unwaning woe revolve around [him]” (MD, 389). In the ab-
stract association between this peaceful feminine realm and an “insular Tahiti”
within his own being, the narrator demystifies the world of female “strange-
ness” by absorbing it into himself, a process in which he seems to repress,
temporarily, the knowledge of its vulnerability to his own aggressive impulses.
However, his latent hostility toward this domain, which he associates with
a landed spot in the midst of tempestuous ocean, continues throughout the
 Disquieting Encounters 157

novel. Repeatedly, Ishmael insists that all noble and “earnest thinking” is an
effort to remain free of the “treacherous, slavish shore” (MD, 107).
This violation of the female realm and the narrator’s spontaneous re-
pression of the crime in order to promote his own psychic gratification is
reiterated in Ishmael’s cavalier footnote, after he speaks of viewing the “sub-
tlest secrets of the seas” and “young Leviathan amours in the deep.” His note
explains that frequently the harpooner’s lance inadvertently pierces a nursing
whale’s breasts, the “pouring milk and blood . . . discolor[ing] the sea for rods.”
The lurid picture is followed by the observation, delivered with seemingly cal-
lous cupidity, that the milk has been sampled by men, and as it is remarkably
“sweet and rich,” “might do well with strawberries” (MD, 388). The transi-
tion dissolves the butchery of the maternal breast into an image of male oral
gratification.
This unstable linking of maternal energies with some benign core of
nature to provide psychic solace for the male is exploded in the later “Benito
Cereno,” when Captain Delano stumbles upon a slave woman, lying beneath
the bulwarks nursing her infant. Just as Ishmael’s whaleboat is engulfed in
chaos before entering the tranquil inner core of the shoal, Delano’s mind is
spinning in currents of confusion before he encounters this “pleasant sort of
sunny sight; quite sociable, too” (PT, 73). The suspicions that he has begun
to entertain regarding the true state of affairs aboard the San Dominick are
contaminating his optimistic assumptions about humanity, beneficent provi-
dence, and the harmony of nature. But his alarms are dispelled at the sight
of the woman nursing, just as his anxieties repeatedly are quelled whenever
he sees other slaves dutifully engaged in shipboard labors, which they execute
with such natural grace and alacrity (PT, 83). The animal imagery of a “dam”
nursing her “wide-awake fawn,” who reaches for the nipple with his “two
paws,” recalls the nursing whales in Moby-Dick. Noticing her observer, the
woman at first “start[s] up . . . facing Captain Delano,” as if she initially feels
violated at being caught in such a vulnerable pose; but then she immediately
collects herself and assumes an air of nonchalance. She sweeps up her child
as if transported by maternal rapture and covers him with kisses. The effect
of the gesture is not wasted upon Delano, who is pleased and soothed by
what he perceives as “naked nature . . . pure tenderness and love,” mirroring
Ishmael’s “Leviathan amours in the deep.” “These natural sights” reinforce the
captain’s earlier observations of the tenderness of the slave women aboard,
“insensibly deepen[ing] his confidence and case” (PT, 73).
The woman’s transported gesture is, of course, merely another act in the
histrionic tour de force masterminded by Babo. In fact, when Delano first ap-
proaches her the mother is sound asleep, oblivious to the nursing child, who
awakens her only with his “vexatious half-grunt” (PT, 73). Her loving embrace
of the infant, which so tranquilizes Delano, is part of the scenario orchestrated
158 Judith Hiltner

to allay the white captain’s suspicions. The deposition that concludes the nar-
rative suggests that Delano has made no contact with the real nature of the
women whose loving tenderness so eased his fears. Throughout the revolt and
execution of the Spaniards, the women allegedly “sang melancholy songs” de-
signed to intensify the violence of the slaughter; and had the male slaves not re-
strained them, they would have insisted on torturing their white captors before
killing them (PT, 112). In this scene, Melville seems intent on deconstructing
the association between female energy and a “natural” realm of tranquillity, cut-
ting off a source of psychic support for the masculine ego.
Pierre (1851), the exceptional male intruder in Melville, demonstrates
an unmitigated and defenseless openness to the female realm when he inter-
rupts the two Miss Pennies’ sewing circle and first gazes upon Isabel’s face.
He does not repress the implications of the encounter, nor does he view it in
a way that gratifies his own ego. Incapable of resisting its powerful effects,
he sinks into the scene instead of fleeing it. Melville begins the episode by
linking the intrusion to aristocratic social control. According to his mother,
Pierre tends “to be a little impatient . . . of these sewing scenes,” but she insists
that he accompany her to survey the wives and daughters of the Glendenning
estate’s tenant farmers, the “pretty . . . dames and girls” over whom he “shall
one day be lord.”11 Her seemingly innocent promise that he will witness “a
rare display of rural red and white” ominously recalls the blood and milk spill-
ing from the harpooned whale’s breast, an image that also anticipates the rosy
sheets and pale cheeks in the paper mill.
In this scene, Pierre apparently violates some taboo the moment he en-
ters the “room full of [female] faces.” As soon as one of the elderly seam-
stresses welcomes him by name, the tranquillity and concentration of the
busy circle is shattered by a “sudden, long-drawn, unearthly girlish shriek,”
echoing the screams of the tappa makers and Queequeg’s cry in Moby-Dick.
But in this scene the violating lance is cast in the opposite direction: “[T]he
sudden shriek seem[s] to split its way clean through [Pierre’s] heart, and leave
a yawning gap there,” suggesting an irreversible psychic effect. Bewildered,
Pierre first clutches his mother’s arm, just as the “Tartarus” narrator clings
to “Old Bach,” but he recovers his self-possession and begins to circulate
among the women, chatting with them, although far more self-consciously
than Tommo among the tappa makers (Pierre, 45).
The narrator emphasizes Pierre’s profound embarrassment, cloaked by
his air of uneasy assurance. Although future lord of the manor, he is victim-
ized by the rigid sexual and class bifurcation of his environment; the women
blush and he stammers. Pierre’s awkwardness anticipates the far more op-
pressive uneasiness of Melville’s later intruder in “Poor Man’s Pudding,” who,
curious about how the poor really live, imposes himself upon a humble ten-
ant wife but is unprepared to absorb what he discovers. Melville reinforces
 Disquieting Encounters 159

Pierre’s class consciousness by referring to the women with generic peasant

names in the plural; the “Betties, Jennies, Nellies . . . who [skim] the cream,
and ma[k]e the butter of the fat farms of Saddle Meadows” are valued solely
for their ability to enhance the wealth of the estate by converting its rich re-
sources into marketable products. But Pierre’s uneasiness is intensified by his
sensitivity to their sexual power, as he curiously feels himself pierced by their
gaze: “[T]here he stood, target for the transfixing glances of those ambushed
archers of the eye” (Pierre, 46).
When Pierre’s gaze finally falls upon Isabel, his blush turns to pallor.
Melville’s imagery suggests a powerful force about to erupt from her seem-
ingly placid form as she sits steadily sewing. The velvet border around her
neck contracts and expands “as though some choked, violent thing were risen
up there within from the warming region of her heart.” She betrays her ef-
forts to suppress its release by occasional furtive glances, until “yielding to the
irresistible climax of her concealed emotion, . . . she lifts her whole marvelous
countenance” and fixes her gaze “unreservedly” upon Pierre’s face. For the first
time in Melville’s intrusion scenes, the male focuses intently upon the face of
an individual woman who returns his gaze. He sees an image of “Anguish . . .
contend[ing] with Beauty” (Pierre, 46–47).
Absorbed, Pierre feels no impulse to flee; instead he “surrender[s]” him-
self entirely to an “incomprehensible curiosity” and attempts to move nearer
to Isabel, longing to hear her voice, some “audible syllable,” some words that
might make intelligible her ineffable attraction. But his efforts are arrested
by his mother’s voice calling him away. On the carriage ride home he real-
izes that “never in his whole existence ha[s] he been so profoundly stirred”;
Isabel’s face has triggered emotions that take hold of “the deepest roots and
subtlest fibres of his being,” suggesting both a sexual and spiritual awakening,
as well as an unprecedented penetration into his unconscious: “[S]o much
the more that it was so subterranean in him, so much the more did he feel
its weird inscrutableness” (Pierre, 47–49). For the first time in Melville’s male
intruder scenes, the observer yields entirely to the strange influences that trig-
ger his unconscious energies instead of repressing them, fainting, or resorting
to cavalier ego defenses. He is also the last to surrender so completely. The
scene suggests what becomes a pattern in the remaining intrusion scenes in
Melville’s fiction: a “sliding” from social critique of class and labor exploita-
tion to an exploration of the effects of the female on the male psyche. But
as numerous critics observe, the rest of the novel traces Pierre’s hopeless en-
deavor to channel the conflicts that Isabel’s gaze has awakened into intel-
lectual abstractions and ultimately into a work of art, a project that involves
the psychic and physical banishment and petrifaction of the human influence
that inspired it.12
160 Judith Hiltner

Male intrusion scenes after Pierre continue to render vividly the wom-
an’s power to evoke male empathy and pity, as well as a haunting sense of his
complicity with the seemingly inexorable forces responsible for her plight.
Significantly, except for “Tartarus,” the later scenes focus on encounters with
individuals, who are more difficult to objectify than groups of women; but like
“Tartarus,” they dramatize the observers’ various strategies for evading the
threatening effects of the experience, as if Melville’s narrators were refining
techniques for resisting the influence to which Pierre succumbs. In these later
intrusion scenes, Melville depicts the woman with increasing detachment,
implying that the male is incapable of reaching or accurately reading her.
In “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs” (1854), Melville at-
tempts to expose the faulty reasoning employed to rationalize poverty and to
reconcile the destitute to their own condition. But following the pattern of
the Pierre scene, the ostensible critique of class and labor oppression in this
episode is overshadowed by the male observer’s personal struggle to survive
the powerful psychic effects of his encounter with an anguished woman, a
pattern repeated in “Tartarus.” The narrator sets out to test the sanguine con-
viction of his wealthy host Blandmour that nature bountifully satisfies all the
needs of the poor. He calls upon humble tenant farmers, startling Martha
Coulter as she quits her washtub in order to prepare the midday meal. This
meal is a sacred one for Martha, the only time during the day that she can
spend with her laboring husband. The narrator attributes her embarrassment
upon his arrival to his fine dress, oblivious to her uneasiness about being im-
posed upon by a male stranger. But the reader senses the genuine source of her
dismay when her husband stands “stock-still” and turns toward her “inquir-
ingly” upon arriving home to find a male visitor (PT, 291, 293). His response
is understandable if, as one critic argues, Martha already is prostituting herself
to their landlord, Squire Teamster, in order to make ends meet.13 The narrator
is struck by her paleness, which he attributes to the penetrating dampness of
the cottage and also to a “more secret cause,” her visible pregnancy. But there
is some other “fathomless heart-trouble” he cannot penetrate (PT, 291).
While he gains all the evidence he needs to explode Blandmour’s phi-
losophy, during the dinner scene the narrator’s curiosity about the life of the
poor degenerates from mild discomfort into loathing. Throughout the meal
he finds himself unable to swallow their moldy pork and unsavory rice, but the
most unpalatable part of the experience is his private interview with Martha
after her husband leaves. As she begins to tell him the painful facts of her life,
particularly about the death of her children, the narrator resorts to strategies
of resistance, including the specious argument that “[w]hen a companion’s
heart of itself overflows, the best one can do is to do nothing.” We sense some
struggle as he attempts to avoid sympathetic engagement, first plunging a
spoonful of pudding into his mouth to keep from responding,14 and then
 Disquieting Encounters 161

finally mastering the impulse by proclaiming that he can “stay no longer to

hear of sorrows for which his sincerest sympathies [can] give no adequate
relief.” He is able to exert an uneasy mastery as voyeur but not as auditor of
Martha’s story. He flees and purges his guilt in a subsequent indictment of
the wealthy Blandmour for presuming to understand the plight of the poor
(PT, 295, 296).
In “The Piazza” (1856), a disquieting encounter with the female pro-
vokes more than guilt or feelings of inadequacy in confronting irremediable
sorrow; the threat that Marianna poses is metaphysical. The encounter in this
story is triggered solely by the observer’s psychic malaise, and in the female
realm he enters, physical energies have been absorbed entirely by the mind. It
is neither the awesome intricacies of the female body nor Marianna’s isolation
and economic duress, but her accommodation to an appalling epistemological
void that ultimately spurs the narrator’s flight.
The narrator’s spiritual angst prompts his voyage to “fairy-land” and his
fantasy that an encounter with the female who presides there—“the queen
of fairies [or] at any rate, some glad mountain-girl”—will provide solace for
his discontent, an illusion bolstered by literary associations. The intruder’s
appearance startles the woman, as in Melville’s earlier scenes, and triggers
an unlikely association: “She shyly started, like some Tahiti girl, secreted for
a sacrifice, first catching sight . . . of Captain Cook” (PT, 6, 8–9). Though as
Edgar A. Dryden notes, Marianna “is obviously no Fayaway” who will yield
graciously and sensuously to the stranger’s violation of a taboo that he cannot
understand,15 she is sacrificed by the narrator, at least figuratively. Like the
intruders in “The Tartarus of Maids” and “Poor Man’s Pudding,” this narra-
tor is unprepared to witness the expenditure of relentless but fruitless female
energy. The unstoppable machine to which the factory women are pinioned in
“Tartarus” operates as inexorably in “fairy-land,” but it has been severed from
the body in order to appropriate the mind. Marianna is condemned to a life
of “[t]hinking, thinking—a wheel [she] cannot stop; pure want of sleep it is
that turns it.” Deprived of active physical or reproductive labor and engaged
in endless sewing, “dull woman’s work—sitting, sitting, restless sitting,” she
channels her energy into a ceaseless mental engine (PT, 12).
Marianna’s substitution of shadows for things suggests that she, like the
narrator, has severed her sense impressions from any connection to an “objec-
tive” reality, making from them a world of her own. A passing shadow of a
cloud becomes a dog she has never seen, just as for the narrator a “strawberry
mole” on the hillside becomes Una’s cottage in fairy-land (PT, 4, 8). But un-
like the narrator, Marianna admits that the status of her associations may be
purely subjective. When she gazes down the mountainside from her chair by
the window, “the white” that shines out against the blue of the fields becomes
the home of some “happy being.” But even she considers the association a
162 Judith Hiltner

“foolish thought” born of loneliness. Her mental images have as little chance
of connecting to any substantial reality as the two hop vines that, “baffled” in
their efforts to clasp, grope in “empty air” and fall “back from whence they
sprung” (PT, 9, 12). It is her unresisting acceptance of the human psyche’s in-
ability to connect to any “reality” beyond its own ego-sustaining projections
that appalls the narrator, who cannot tolerate the exposure of his own subjec-
tive illusions.16 His refusal to shatter her fantasy about the “happy being” who
lives down the mountainside is prompted, not by compassion, but by his own
psychic resistance to the truth with which she forever haunts him.
The tale concludes with the narrator’s retreat into illusion; he will main-
tain his view of fairy-land from a distance. As Pierre discovers, the solace
of aesthetic detachment is shattered when one penetrates the “Delectable
Mountain” too deeply (Pierre, 342–346). The observer realizes that his de-
tached perspective is artificial; his piazza chair is a theater box, and the lovely
performance is merely his own composition that conceals the “weary face
behind it.” Only when night falls, dimming the stage lights, is he haunted
by a return of the repressed: the “truth [that] comes in with darkness . . .
Marianna’s face, and many as real a story” (PT, 12).
This final distancing of the anguished female through strategies of aes-
thetic detachment had been anticipated two years earlier in “Sketch Eighth” of
“The Encantadas” (1854), in the observer’s response to the weary Hunilla. In
the narrator’s rendering of her story, the adventurous labor of tortoise collect-
ing on an unpopulated island is a source of joy for Hunilla and her husband
and brother, despite the hard work. But adventure turns to soulless drudgery
after she loses the men she loves; she digs her husband’s grave, then spends
monotonous days fruitlessly searching for her brother’s corpse and gathering
sea fowl eggs and small tortoises for her own survival (PT, 152–157).
From the moment he first encounters her, the narrator struggles with
his alleged inability to depict Hunilla adequately and to convey her misery.
In Israel Potter, written within months of this story, the narrator resists pro-
viding the painful details of Israel’s forty-year servitude in London, arguing
that “just as extreme suffering, without hope, is intolerable to the victim,
so, to others, is its depiction, without some corresponding delusive mitiga-
tion.”17 Realistic depiction of pain repels the reader, while sentimentality, as
Melville insists in Pierre, falsifies the reality. As numerous critics observe,
Melville had begun to doubt the writer’s ability to convey truth in anyway
that is “readable.”18 We witness the aesthetic struggle in “The Encantadas”
when the narrator refuses to describe the “two unnamed events” that befell
Hunilla during her isolated labors (PT, 158). Most readers have assumed
that Hunilla was raped by passing seamen, drawing upon the narrator’s in-
direct hints, which even he compares to “sporting with the heart of him who
reads,” like a cat dallying with a lizard before devouring it (PT, 156). The
 Disquieting Encounters 163

narrator’s unwillingness to report the facts resonates with his strategies for
distancing Hunilla from himself and the reader throughout the episode.
The observer never hears Hunilla’s story from her own lips, since she
speaks a “strange language” that must be translated by an intermediary. The
narrator explains that he would like to present her to the reader as a work of
art, since “crayons, tracing softly [her] melancholy lines, would best depict the
mournful image of the dark-damasked Chola widow” (PT, 152). Throughout
the sketch, he attempts to render Hunilla’s real experience inaccessible, just as
unknowable as the life of the model who poses for the chair portrait in Pierre
(Pierre, 197, 353). The narrator tells us that in his encounter with Hunilla, he
sees only her “soul’s lid, and the strange ciphers thereon engraved,” that “all
within” is withheld. But the actual agents of concealment must be his own
strained repression and narrative detachment from her emotions, since he
withholds facts that Hunilla must have divulged. Despite his insistence that
her “pride’s timidity” kept her from revealing her strongest emotions, the nar-
rator records the release of her passionate grief: “[She] struggled as against
the writhed coilings of a snake, and cringing suddenly, leaped up, repeating in
impassioned pain, ‘I buried him, my life, my soul!’” (PT, 155). It is the narra-
tor, in fact, who represses Hunilla’s grief. He reports that she buried her hus-
band with “half-unconscious automatic motions,” an account that could not
come from Hunilla herself (PT, 155). Nor is it likely that she would describe
the deaths of her husband and brother with the imagery of aesthetic detach-
ment that the narrator employs: “Death in a silent picture . . . [s]o instant was
the scene, so trance-like in its mild pictorial effect . . . that Hunilla gazed and
gazed, nor raised a finger or a wail” (PT, 154). He focuses upon her “Spanish
and Indian grief, which would not visibly lament,” and sees “nature’s pride
subduing nature’s torture.” While Marianna’s and Martha’s unlocking of the
“soul’s lid” spurs the narrators’ flight, Hunilla’s enforced silence enables the
narrator in this case to continue sketching her portrait until she rides out of
sight (PT, 162).
In Pierre, Isabel’s grief ultimately triggers the abstract intellectual strug-
gle that painfully, slowly, but inexorably dissolves her role in the protagonist’s
drama; but in “The Encantadas,” the woman’s painful story is repressed al-
together through strategies of narrative detachment, enabling the observer
to appropriate her from the start as a symbol for his own abstract theme. In
his rendering, Hunilla represents faithful humanity deserted by the faithless
heavens, a suggestion reiterated in the narrator’s allusions to the vain ritu-
als of her “Romish faith” and her “crucifix worn featureless, like an ancient
graven knocker long plied in vain” (PT, 155, 161). The sequence of male
intrusion scenes in Melville traces a similar pattern of exposure, suppres-
sion, and consequent abstraction. Melville moves his intruder figure from
the experience of violating a realm perceived as sacred and alien, through a
164 Judith Hiltner

devastating openness to its influence, and finally to the mastery of strategies

for psychic and aesthetic detachment. This sequence of episodes suggests a
pattern of evasion of the feminine on the part of Melville’s male characters,
triggered by combined feelings of fear and guilt. The fear appears to be rooted
in the threat of confinement, arrest, and ego dissolution—the same threats
that prompted Melville’s first intrusive observer, Tommo, to flee the bower
of the Typees. All of the female domains in these episodes are enveloped in
images of enclosure (with the possible exception of Norfolk Island in “The
Encantadas,” although it too is enclosed by miles of ocean that Hunilla can-
not traverse). The fear of ego dissolution is exacerbated by an unsettling per-
ception that the female body is energized by forces that are vital, relentless,
impersonal, and indifferent to human will or desire—as awesome, sacred, and
alien as nature herself. Finally, the women in Melville’s later stories appear to
provoke dread by their accommodation to conditions that strike the observer
as philosophically intolerable.
The narratives suggest two sources of the intruders’ guilt: a haunting
sense of complicity with the forces that victimize or oppress women and a
more deeply rooted, less conscious suspicion that male penetration of the
female domain is, by definition, an act of aggression. In stories like “Tartarus,”
where the narrator is a client who profits from the cheap envelopes produced
by the factory women, or in “Poor Man’s Pudding,” where he is a curious
aristocrat hosted by a wealthy landlord, the grounds for complicity and guilt
are self-evident. The voyeurs are compelled to evade recognition of their own
contributions, however indirect, to the seemingly irremediable anguish that
they encounter. But because in almost all of these scenes the male intrusions
are unsolicited and uninvited by the women, who are preoccupied with ac-
tivities and concerns that exclude men, the reader may suspect that merely to
enter is to intrude, and that to penetrate is to violate.
To what extent does Melville identify with the guilt and fear that moti-
vates his characters, or to what extent does he subject their anxious evasions to
authorial critique and irony? The recurrence of motifs described in these eight
scenes, in stories that, according to most critics, vary in degree and extent of
authorial distance, suggests that Melville is vividly dramatizing the full range
of gender anxieties rooted in his own experience in mid-nineteenth-century
American culture, and especially in female-dominated households. He appears
equally illuminating in his display of the range of ego defenses unconsciously
triggered by these anxieties.

No t e s

1. Herman Melville, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,”

in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford et al.,
 Disquieting Encounters 165

vol. 9 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern

University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987), 326–330. All references to prose
in The Piazza Tales are hereafter cited parenthetically as PT.
2. David S. Reynolds argues that Melville’s increasingly sensational and
grotesque assaults on his narrators is a strategy that furthers his “bitter aim of
attacking America’s Conventional culture.” The grotesque represents his transition
from traditional reform literature to the “suprapolitical literary realm in which he
uses popular sensational imagery to assault the staidly Conventional” (Beneath the
American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination on the Age of Emerson and Melville
[Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988], 292–294). This discussion in part
explores some of the unsettling implications of increasing aesthetic detachment
inherent in Melville’s depiction of male encounters within the female realm.
3. Even though I am tracing the development of a motif in Melville over time,
I do not discuss the eight intrusion scenes in the order of publication. Instead, my
organization is designed to highlight comparisons and contrasts that I consider most
significant for my thesis. As the discussion will indicate, I see distinctions between
intrusion scenes written before Pierre and those written after, although there are
continuities throughout the eight. I first analyze two pairs of thematically related
scenes, each juxtaposing one scene from the earlier and one from the later group.
Then I discuss the pivotal scene from Pierre and comment upon scenes in three
stories published later.
4. Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, ed. Harrison Hayford,
Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, vol. 1 of The Writings of Herman Melville
(Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library,
1968), 85; hereafter cited parenthetically as Typee.
5. See, for example, Mitchell Breitwieser, “False Sympathy in Melville’s
Typee,” American Quarterly 34 (1982): 408.
6. Two recent articles represent the divergent implications that the allegory
has suggested to critics. Philip Young argues that the female anatomy/gestation
imagery of the papermaking process, read in the context of Melville’s own concerns
regarding birth control, explodes the claim that the story has anything to do with
“the enslavement of females to mills and factories” (“The Machine in Tartarus:
Melville’s Inferno,” American Literature 63 [1991]: 223). For Robyn Wiegman, on
the other hand, the papermaking machine, which is fertilized by an albuminous
fluid flowing from testicular vats, represents not the female body alone but
heterosexuality. In this reading, the male appropriates the female body for both
biological and economic re-production (“Melville’s Geography of Gender,” American
Literary History 1 [1989]: 743–744).
7. Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman
Melville (New York: Knopf, 1983), 205.
8. In some of Melville’s tales that do not primarily involve encounters with
women (e.g., “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!”),
the narrator or protagonist similarly appears to repress, retreat from, or evade the
darker implications of suffering, despair, or incomprehensibility in others. The
response is not gender determined; rather, it appears to be gender intensified.
(Many readers, however, have identified what they consider distinctively “feminine”
qualities in both Bartleby and Cereno.)
9. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford,
Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, vol. 6 of The Writings of Herman Melville
166 Judith Hiltner

(Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library,
1988), 386; hereafter cited parenthetically as MD.
10. Laurie Robertson-Lorant associates the nuzzling whales with the
“amphibious young creatures” with whom Tommo plays in the Typee lagoon
(“Melville’s Embrace of the Invisible Woman,” Centennial Review 34 [1990]: 401).
But unlike the lagoon episode, where the Typee maidens control the sensuous
encounter, both “The Grand Armada” and the Dolly scenes terminate in imagery of
violation on the part of the male intruder.
11. Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford,
Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, vol. 7 of The Writings of Herman Melville
(Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library,
1971), 45; hereafter cited parenthetically as Pierre.
12. See, for example, Kris Lakey, “The Despotic Victim: Gender and
Imagination in Pierre,” ATQ, n.s., 4 (1990): 67–76; and Leland S. Person Jr., Aesthetic
Headaches: Women and a Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1988), 70–87.
13. Beryl Rowland, “Sitting Up with a Corpse: Malthus according to Melville
in ‘Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,’” Journal of American Studies 6
(1972): 76–78.
14. The narrator’s impulse toward orality, in order to repress the scene of
female suffering, parallels Ishmael’s fantasy of strawberries and cream, which
obscures the harpooned breast of the nursing whale. I would like to acknowledge my
colleague, Maire Mullins, for calling my attention to this association.
15. Edgar A. Dryden, “From the Piazza to the Enchanted Isles: Melville’s
Textual Rovings,” in After Strange Texts: The Role of Theory in the Study of Literature,
ed. Gregory S. Jay and David L. Miller (University: University of Alabama Press,
1985), 57.
16. Nancy Fredricks argues that Marianna’s “realist” empiricism is juxtaposed
to the narrator’s “romantic” idealism (“Melville and the Woman’s Story,” Studies in
American Fiction 19 [1991]: 50). The fact that Marianna’s sense impressions are more
real to her than any abstractions they may signify supports this observation. But
Melville, I would argue, suggests that the things she does not literally perceive, such
as the shaggy dog Tray or the “happy being” down the mountainside, become for her,
as for the idealist, the most significant entities in life. The starkness of her vision
lies in the fact that she, unlike the idealist, entertains no confidence regarding their
ontological status. Fredricks notes that “[i]f Marianna is ‘deluded’ about ‘reality,’
she is no more so than the narrator is” (50), but Melville wants to insist that, unlike
Marianna, the narrator will not acknowledge the implications and extent of his
delusion.
17. Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, ed. Harrison
Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, vol. 8 of The Writings of Herman
Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry
Library, 1982), 161.
18. See, for example, Nina Baym, “Melville’s Quarrel with Fiction,” PMLA
94 (1979): 909–923.
 J ohn W enke

Narrative Self-Fashioning
and the Play of Possibility

And though essaying but a sportive sail, I was driven from my course,
by a blast resistless.
—Mardi

A s he “wrote right on; and so doing, got deeper and deeper into himself”
(Mardi 595), Melville became more confident of his purpose and less toler-
ant of any impingement on his designs. Irked by Murray’s continuing suspi-
cion that Herman Melville was “an imposter shade” and fixed on the right
“determinations” of his self-vaunted instinct, Melville informed Murray of a
design to be “blunt.” Melville’s third work would “in downright earnest [be] a
‘Romance of Polynisian Adventure’—But why this? The truth is, Sir, that the
reiterated imputation of being a romancer in disguise has at last pricked me into
a resolution to show those who may take any interest in the matter, that a real
romance of mine is no Typee or Omoo, & is made of different stuff altogether”
(Correspondence 105–106, Melville’s emphasis). Melville was intent upon engag-
ing “that play of freedom & invention accorded only to the Romancer & poet,”
thereby mining Polynesia’s “rich poetical material.” In explaining his artistic
evolution, Melville registered “invincible distaste” for his “narrative of facts”:

Well: proceeding in my narrative of facts I began to feel an

invincible distaste for the same; & a longing to plume my pinions

Melville’s Muse: Literary Creation and the Forms of Philosophical Fiction (Kent: Ohio State
University Press, 1995): pp. 27–46. © 1995 The Kent State University Press.

167
168 John Wenke

for a flight, & felt irked, cramped & fettered by plodding along
with dull common places. . . . My romance I assure you is no dish
water nor its model borrowed from the Circulating Library. . . .
It opens like a true narrative . . . & the romance & poetry of the
thing thence grow continually, till it becomes a story wild enough
I assure you & with a meaning too. (106)1

Even in this “blunt” manifesto, Melville fails to do justice to the extremity

of Mardi’s departure. It does not, for example, open like a “true narrative.”
Rather, from the earliest chapters, Melville’s “play of freedom & inven-
tion” issues in the narrator’s wild, rhapsodic speculations. From the outset
the overreaching philosophical self appears full-blown: the narrator takes
center stage, decries his boredom, and vents his disgust with the everyday
commonplace actualities of ship and crew. The way of the Arcturion was “a
weary one . . . Never before had the ocean appeared so monotonous; thank
fate, never since” (4). Because of his education, the narrator is estranged
from the crew; his “occasional polysyllable . . . [and] remote, unguarded
allusions to Belles-Lettres affairs” (14) make the narrator a learned outcast.
Accepting his isolation, he repays the favor by dismissing the “flat rep-
etitions of long-drawn yarns. . . . Staler than stale ale.” He eschews “Bill
Marvel’s stories” and “Ned Ballad’s songs” (5). Melville projects his own
impatience with high-sea adventure yarns into a narrator who distinctly
defines his aspirations in terms of intellectual fulfillment. If Tommo in
Typee deserts the Dolly because his belly is not satisfied, then the narrator
of Mardi resolves to desert the Arcturion because his mind is malnourished.
Even the captain, a fine nautical man in all respects, cannot “talk sentiment
or philosophy.” Nor can his shipmates “page [him] a quotation from Burton
on Blue Devils” (5). No one on board is “precisely to [his] mind” (4).
Like Ahab in Moby-Dick, the narrator redefines the purpose of the voy-
age. While not heaped and tasked by the inscrutable malignity of brute forces,
the narrator of Mardi is impelled by ennui to figure himself as an explorer on
the high seas of consciousness and erudition. In a “willful mood” (7) he climbs
the masthead, and in a passage that prefigures Ishmael’s masthead reverie in
Moby-Dick, the narrator divorces himself from the day-to-day concerns of
life at sea. If “The Mast-Head” examines the death-dealing incompatibility
between workaday actuality and mystical meditation, especially as the slip of
an inch can bring one to plunge into “Descartian vortices” (Moby-Dick 158–
159), then the “Foot-in-Stirrup” chapter of Mardi examines the exhilarating
attraction of the mystical world of mind, especially insofar as the visionary
lure provides an experiential displacement of the same old song of social con-
texts. In his frenzied vision, the narrator spins the materials of the ensuing
fiction. His romantic vision counterpoints the forecastle yarns. The source of
 Narrative Self-Fashioning 169

the succeeding tale is to be found more in mind than in extrinsic fact. In crav-
ing a world of expansive consciousness, he imagines a “dream-land” (Mardi 7)
located on the magical margins of mind. Somewhere to the west, “loosely laid
down upon the charts” (Mardi 7), this imaginary space displaces his present
tedium. He imagines what the ship could never give him—a new, unexplored
world exotic enough to engage, if not satisfy, his voracious appetite for the
unknown.
Significantly, this visionary world ranges into view through a series of
exotic images:

In the distance what visions were spread! The entire western

horizon high piled with gold and crimson clouds; airy arches,
domes, and minarets; as if the yellow, Moorish sun were setting
behind some vast Alhambra. Vistas seemed leading to worlds
beyond. To and fro, and all over the towers of this Nineveh in
the sky, flew troops of birds. Watching them long, one crossed
my sight, flew through a low arch, and was lost to view. My spirit
must have sailed in with it; for directly, as in a trance, came upon
me the cadence of mild billows laving a beach of shells, the waving
of boughs, and the voices of maidens, and the lulled beatings of my
own dissolved heart, all blended together. (7–8)

As in the “Time and Temples” chapter, the moment of imagined transcen-

dence is depicted through the Platonic image of a bird. Here the “low arch”
through which the bird flies separates two competing experiential realms
and two competing forms of narrative. The narrator’s spirit soars with the
bird, creating the spiritual imperative that will lead the body to follow. As in
Rabelais’s travelogue, one gets the sense in Mardi that new worlds are being
spun out of the mind. Indeed, the narrator’s visionary trance manifests how
ideas determine not merely the exotic nature of place but the perimeters of
behavior. Here Melville presents the creative moment of transfer. The quo-
tidian is left behind, and the narrator figuratively loses hold, though he does
not tumble into the Cartesian swirl but instead lifts into poetic rapture. For
the narrator, the desire for philosophic vent cannot be dissociated from the
mind-moving medium of poetic invention. What is most crucial here—and
what will serve Melville in multiple ways not only in Mardi but in Moby-
Dick, Pierre, The Confidence-Man, and Clarel—is the self-defining and self-
realizing reach of the narrator’s play of mind. His visionary experience both
displaces the quotidian and imbues him with the psychological authority
to pursue a life dedicated to his adventurous muse. The power of intuition
makes pictures in the seer’s mind. In this masthead moment, such visionary
manifestations are peculiarly without foundation. Nevertheless, the vision
170 John Wenke

supplies the narrator’s imperative to desert, though each momentous step

away from historical context creates its own ironic entanglement: he leaves
a doomed ship but feels guilt; later he rescues the mysterious maiden Yillah
but commits murder to do so; and, subsequently, Yillah’s disappearance
binds him as both pursuer and pursued.
The lesson deriving from the narrator’s vision is clear: the imperatives
of the starved philosophical self can only be answered by the narrator’s at-
tempt to estrange himself from his personal, cultural, and historical past.
Even though this leap into romance leads frequently to the spinning out of
tedious abstractions, Melville’s great discovery in Mardi resides in the fiction-
al possibilities inherent in the dramatization of ideas. Melville’s career-long
alternating expression or repression of this urge becomes a means for measur-
ing his standing with the book-buying public. What Melville called Mardi’s
“metaphysical ingredients (for want of a better term)” did in fact repel his au-
dience. This was followed by his conscious, though not complete, suppression
of “metaphysics . . . [and] conic‑sections” in favor of “cakes & ale” in Redburn,
which allowed him to recapture the confidence of reviewers and readers (Cor-
respondence 131–132). Similarly, following the commercial disaster of Pierre,
Melville’s success as, for the most part, an anonymous author in the relatively
lucrative periodical market derived from his ability to contain his materials
within the acceptable generic confines of sketch and tale.2 In Mardi, Melville
had trouble with his readers largely because he was trying to invent his own
form: he sought to adapt the conventions of the exotic romantic voyage of
search and discovery to the cause of metaphysical improvisation and satirical
anatomy. In the resulting hybrid form—a compendium of competing if not
self-defeating intentions—action and character were either subservient to, or
representations of, the narrator’s effusive, unfolding consciousness. Mardi’s
action essentially provides the excuse or point of departure for presenting the
narrator’s experience of his own consciousness, a concern that Melville suc-
cessfully balances throughout Moby-Dick, especially in Ishmael’s presentation
of the cetology material as basis for analogy and symbol.
The early chapters of Mardi most fully depict the narrator’s experience of
consciousness as he confronts extreme physical situations. On the masthead,
his elevated perspective and isolation lead him to mystical visions. Twice the
narrator must contend with an oppressive meteorological condition, a calm
at sea. While the narrator is still on the Arcturion, the calm induces a wildly
skeptical flurry of thought; later adrift with Jarl in an open boat, the narrator
meditates briefly on the relationship between objective and subjective frames
of reference. As with the scene on the masthead, Melville uses these set pieces
to explore the metaphysical implications of the narrator’s circumstance. Each
scene demonstrates the presentation of actions that exist solely to showcase
the narrator’s cogitations. Melville thus elevates the flux of consciousness itself
 Narrative Self-Fashioning 171

to a principle of narrative self-fashioning; these moments offer extensions of

his earlier preoccupation with Tommo’s limitations of perspective in Typee,
and they point ahead to Ishmael’s inquisitive excursions in Moby-Dick and to
the narrator’s verbal gymnastics in The Confidence-Man.
A chapter in Mardi, “A Calm,” succinctly dramatizes the fusion of the
narrator’s intellectual aspiration and the author’s aesthetic experimentation.
The dullness of workaday life at sea (and for Melville the banality of the travel
narrative) stand in direct opposition to the possibilities for pursuing wild,
speculative vistas (and for Melville the profundity of writing Truth). A calm
at sea provides the quintessential intensification of all that the narrator most
abhors. Its vacuity diametrically opposes his intellectual ferment. The calm
appears as a static meteorological counterpoint to the involuted world of psy-
chological flux. The physical locale ironically stirs a whirl of thought; the calm
“unsettles his mind; tempts him to recant his belief in the eternal fitness of
things; in short, almost makes an infidel of him” (9). In this suspended state,
the narrator grows “madly skeptical” and begins to doubt his senses. In the
face of the blank sea, he thinks of “Priestley on Necessity” and seeks the solace
of philosophical determinism. Such a posture, however, is of no avail to the
skeptic. He knows that the thing to do is to endure the calm; but he cannot
bring himself to accept such a compromise. Indeed, the play of mind feeds
on itself, frustrating the thinker with repeated admissions of his unacceptable
impotence. This scene presents the first self-conscious expression in Melville’s
work of the tangled relationship between skepticism and stoicism, on the
one hand, and the opposing psychological imperative to pursue a condition
of absolute felicity, on the other. The calm functions as a foil for Melville to
engage the complex he most wishes to consider: the metaphysical implication
of an oppressive moment.
The second “trying-out” of the calm extends Melville’s interest with
placing his center of narrative consciousness in the experiential context of
sheer vacancy and existential blankness. After deserting the ship, the narra-
tor and Jarl become caught in the doldrums, an area conspicuously missing
what Sir Thomas Browne calls “flux and reflux,” the ebb and flow of process
(20, 78–79). Here the natural world lacks gradation, distinction, dynamism:
“Every thing was fused into the calm: sky, air, water, and all. Not a fish was to
be seen. The silence was that of a vacuum. No vitality lurked in the air. And
this inert blending and brooding of all things seemed gray chaos in concep-
tion” (48). Figuratively, the calm threatens the life of the intellect. Melville’s
fusion of fiction and philosophy depends not on “inert blending” but on an
active interpenetration of extrinsic and cognitive realms. And that is what the
narrator attempts as the tale develops: he takes an experiential dead end and
brings it to intellectual life. The calm may originally be “gray chaos in concep-
tion,” but the thinking mind re-forms such recalcitrant material and uses it
172 John Wenke

to focus Mardi’s central concern: the revelation of the thinking mind, now in
solipsistic isolation, later in a dialogue of projected intellectual abstractions.
What animates these two scenes, and provides unity not of execution
but of purpose, is Melville’s commitment to rendering the active play of in-
telligence. The narrating mind comes to know itself in the act of forging re-
lationships that seem true or valid in the moment. In Typee such a process is
implicit in Tommo’s engagement with epistemological quandaries; the mys-
tery surrounding Tommo’s condition provides the basis of action and medita-
tion. In Mardi the mind’s very process of thinking constitutes the generative
force of action. In Mardi’s paradigmatic scenes, the narrator’s experience of
a particular phenomenon suggests possibilities for thought, possibilities for
reaction. As the scene changes, the thinker’s very engagement with a new set
of circumstances displaces the previous moment of insight. With these scenes
on the calm, Melville has it both ways, for the encounter with nothingness
is in itself an experience that stirs thought. Though there is a danger that the
calm, by its very inertness, may never deliver the thinker to the next moment,
a calm at sea partakes of an encompassing meteorological process and will
eventually pass.
Nevertheless, Melville’s interest in dramatizing the narrator’s response
to vacancy highlights the symbiotic relationship between phenomena and
consciousness, with the preeminent focus on reaction over action. Later in
the narrative, Taji’s very phrase, “the world of mind” (557), suggests what has
been implicitly true all along: there exists a vital link between object and sub-
ject, between the world of phenomena and the realm of perception.3 Behind
this strategy is the desire to make knowledge of the self through knowledge
of the world the locus of interest. At stake here is Melville’s ongoing attempt,
first fully dramatized in Mardi, to present as an explicit fictional subject the
protean qualities of human conscious­ness, with the distinct expectation that
the formulation of one moment might be undone by the next. Melville’s ab-
solutists—among them Taji, Ahab, Pierre, Celio, Mortmain, Ungar, and pos-
sibly, Vere—become dangerous precisely because they refuse to adjust, or re-
formulate, the relation of subject to the changing world of objects. For Taji to
insist that he must regain Yillah or for Ahab to insist that the White Whale
has one fixed signification is for both men to preempt the potential valid-
ity of future experiences and future perceptions. Their kind of consciousness
can be characterized as “inert blending” (Mardi 48). They eschew the chal-
lenge of what Redburn calls “a moving world” (157), in which the “flux and
reflux” of experience presents repeated possibilities for reseeing the world and
reconstituting the self. In Mardi the two depictions of the calm at sea, then,
allow Melville to explore the reciprocity between phenomena and epistemol-
ogy, brute fact and the pursuit of self-knowledge. The treatments of the calm
are, in fact, early renderings of the epistemological centers of Moby-Dick—the
 Narrative Self-Fashioning 173

“story of Narcissus” and “The Doubloon” chapter (5, 430–435). Any perception is
one version of a multitude of self-reflecting configurations. The horror is that no
further reading may be possible unless the world resumes its protean condition.
Early in Mardi, then, Melville was experimenting with developing tech-
niques that would allow him to marry fiction and metaphysics. As we have
seen, the narrator’s trance on the masthead and the two renderings of a calm
provide set pieces in which psychological reaction takes precedence over the
complexities of the action itself. In fact, these scenes are bereft of dramatic ac-
tivity, for instead Melville focuses on the mind’s capacity to create meaning or,
better yet, to create the speculative form within which meaning takes shape.
Central is the critical intelligence responding to impressions from the human
eye. For Melville the world is alive with teasing, though shifting and perhaps
unknowable, signification; without the assurance of transcendental benefi-
cence, the perceiver is loosed into a realm of perceptual “flux and reflux.”
The outgrowth of using narrative as a vehicle for rendering conciousness
leads Melville to make consciousness itself the source of dialectic. In the early
sequences of Mardi, Melville develops two distinctly identifiable narrative
voices that stand in dialectical tension. The narrator oscillates between speak-
ing as a fraternal genialist and a solipsistic isolationist. Prior to the narrator’s
loss of Yillah, both voices appear intermittently. A moment’s mood tends to
determine one’s perceptions; one’s reading subsequently informs behavior.
While the narrator’s fraternal strain, which links him to communal life in a
historical and social context, appears in his highly selective federation with
Jarl, his solipsistic strain, which reflects anticommunal life in an ahistorical ab-
solutistic context, becomes manifest in his bitter estrangement from ship life.
The narrator’s genial voice celebrates the unifying nature of humor and
verbal play. At one point the narrator, gushing effusively over the amiable side
of a shark, brings his meditation to a joyous close: “Now hate is a thankless
thing. So, let us only hate hatred; and once give love play, we will fall in love
with a unicorn” (41). The narrator also engages in a whimsical display of learn-
ing. Commenting on Jarl’s grave demeanor, the narrator reflects, “But how
account for the Skyeman’s gravity? Surely, it was based upon no philosophic
taciturnity; he was nothing of an idealist; an aerial architect; a constructor of
flying buttresses” (36). Later the narrator forces a comparison between Jarl
and Bishop Berkeley, thereby debunking an idealist who also keeps a matter-
of-fact eye on the main chance: “[H]onest Jarl was nevertheless exceedingly
downright and practical in all hints and proceedings concerning [the ship].
Wherein, he resembled my Right Reverend friend, Bishop Berkeley—truly,
one of your lords spiritual—who, metaphysically speaking, holding all objects
to be mere optical delusions, was, notwithstanding, extremely matter-of-fact
in all matters touching matter itself ” (63).
174 John Wenke

The narrator is at other times given to visionary and self-isolating ful-

minations. Related to his solipsism is the desire to assert his will and thereby
dominate others. He takes control of the Parki and turns Jarl, Samoa, and
Annatoo into subservient crew members. He speaks in the

mild, firm tone of a superior; being anxious, at once to assume

the unquestioned supremacy. . . . Our course determined, and the
command of the vessel tacitly yielded up to myself, the next thing
done was to put every thing in order. . . . I felt no little importance
upon thus assuming for the first time in my life, the command of a
vessel at sea. The novel circumstances of the case only augmented
this feeling . . . I was owner, as well as commander of the craft I
sailed. (96–97)

In Mardi, Melville does not maintain anything approaching consistency

of voice. Instead, these conflicting voices help him to extend the possibilities
of fictional form, especially as the genialist or the solipsist come to suggest
metaphysical qualities of consciousness. Exemplifying this are two parallel
narrative excursions—articulations of the genialist and the solipsist, respec-
tively—each dealing with states of existence outside the diachronic movement
of the narrative. In each instance, the narrator employs the allusive catalog to
show his relationship to the great thinkers of the past.4 In both cases Melville
uses the present tense to separate his materials from the ongoing retrospec-
tive narrative. In the chapter “A King for a Comrade,” the narrator presents
a vision of a congenial afterlife. The contrasting case occurs in the “Dreams”
chapter, where the solipsistic narrator, by now named Taji, suffers miserably
in a prison. The scene could only take place sometime after the narrative con-
cludes with Taji being chased “over an endless sea” (654).
In a fascinating passage in “A King for a Comrade,” which echoes ele-
ments of style and theme in Religio Medici, the genial narrator seeks to merge
(rather than dissociate) the immediate time-bound world of sense experience
with the exotic, rhapsodic world of transcendent thought. Rather than try-
ing to escape the commonplace, the narrator takes the strange and invests it
with the homely and familiar. In effect he personalizes an imagined afterlife.5
The narrator’s meditation on Jarl’s ancestry and the interrelationship among
mortals culminates with a densely allusive vision of a federated and congenial
afterlife, replete with cameo appearances by many of the great dead:

All of us have monarchs and sages for kinsmen; nay, angels and
archangels for cousins. . . . Thus all generations are blended: and
heaven and earth of one kin. . . . All things form but one whole; the
universe a Judea, and God Jehovah its head. Then no more let us
 Narrative Self-Fashioning 175

start with affright. In a theocracy, what is to fear? . . . No custom is

strange; no creed is absurd; no foe, but who will in the end prove a
friend. In heaven, at last, our good, old, white-haired father Adam
will greet all alike, and sociality forever prevail. Christian shall join
hands between Gentile and Jew; grim Dante forget his Infernos,
and shake sides with fat Rabelais; and monk Luther, over a flagon
of old nectar, talk over old times with Pope Leo. . . . Then shall the
Stagirite and Kant be forgotten, and another folio than theirs be
turned over for wisdom; even the folio now spread with horoscopes
as yet undeciphered, the heaven of heavens on high. (12–13)

This vision of a happy afterlife finds an experiential counterpoint in the

“Dreams” chapter. “Dreams” is a digressive chapter that functions as a set-
piece divorced from the ongoing action. By offering a self-portrait of Taji,
“Dreams” succinctly presents the culmination of Melville’s use of the solip-
sistic, absolutistic voice in Mardi. Taji’s self-exhaustion has derived explic-
itly from his overindulgence in philosophical speculation. The unrestricted
search for truth, which initiated his flight from the Arcturion, not only leaves
him physically imprisoned but psychologically wasted. Indeed, Melville’s first
philosophical narrative demonstrates the danger of the unimpeded meta-
physical quest, a danger emphatically reinforced in Moby-Dick and Pierre.
Taji’s extreme dedication to learning comes at the expense of his relationship
to the limited, but life-sustaining, domain of social contexts. Whirled by the
hyperactive flights of his soul, the megalomaniac Taji experiences panoramic
vistas that paradoxically become self-restricting:

And my soul sinks down to the depths, and soars to the skies;
and comet-like reels on through such boundless expanses, that
methinks all the worlds are my kin, and I invoke them to stay in
their course. Yet, like a mighty three-decker, towing argosies by
scores, I tremble, gasp, and strain in my flight, and fain would cast
off the cables that hamper. (367)

Falling prey to the competing claims of contentious, unintegrated voices,

Taji journeys into the world of mind and gains access to many nations, times,
places, and authors.6 Consequently, he not only “reels on through such bound-
less expanses” but comes to identify with the sources of all knowledge. He be-
comes, as it were, lost in an intellectual vortex. “[F]ull with a thousand souls,”
Taji struggles with a library of voices. The theater of the mind engages in an
endless, self-defeating drama of dialectic. It is here that Melville’s use of the
allusive catalog becomes more than a technique for learned display, a means
of evoking a litany of ideational contexts, for here Melville dramatizes the
176 John Wenke

debilitating psychological effects of the solipsistic and absolutistic intellectual

pursuit. Taji winds up talking interminably to himself in a grim repetition of
ruminative thought. Such broad knowledge becomes in itself the imprisoning
force. Taji consorts with Homer, Anacreon, Hafiz, Shakespeare, Ossian, Mil-
ton, and Petrarch. In his mind “St. Paul . . . argues the doubts of Montaigne;
Julian the Apostate cross-questions Augustine; and Thomas-a-Kempis un-
rolls his old black letters for all to decipher” (367). His play of mind includes
such figures as Zeno, Democritus, Pyrrho, Plato, Proclus, Verulam, Zoroaster,
Virgil, and Sidney. Taji’s “memory is a life beyond birth; my memory, my library
of the Vatican, its alcoves all endless perspectives” (367–368). In this remarkable
chapter Melville reveals that Taji’s mind has become self-restrictive, his intel-
lectual absolutism self-exhausting. His mental growth, while perhaps stunning
in its allusive reach, succeeds finally in accentuating Taji’s estrangement from
other human beings. Total immersion in the “Vatican” of knowledge severs him
from social experience.
Melville’s congenial and solipsistic narrative voices reflect polarized at-
tributes of being. In the two cases just examined, the narrator constructs a
world that mirrors his informing psychological disposition. His vision of the
afterlife depicts a socially democratizing world in which great differences in
viewpoint become the prelude to an all-encompassing communalism. Taji’s
imprisonment in “Dreams” derives from a paradoxically willed necessity. He
becomes the victim of what he most longed to be: “My cheek blanches white
while I write; I start at the scratch of my pen; my own mad brood of eagles de-
vours me; fain would I unsay this audacity; but an iron-mailed hand clenches
mine in a vice, and prints down every letter in my spite” (368).
Throughout his career, Melville refined his ability to bring into dialecti-
cal relationship characters that can be identified through voices and visions
that are, on the one hand, genial and relativistic and, on the other, solipsistic
and absolutistic. The narrative voices of Mardi prefigure the more finely real-
ized conflicts in voice and vision that are later expressed in Ishmael and Ahab,
young Pierre (with Lucy) and the older Pierre (with Isabel), the lawyer and
Bartleby, Claret and Nathan, Rolfe and Ungar. Through these distinct voices,
Melville makes character, perception, and behavior sources for dialectic. In
“Bartleby, the Scrivener,” for example, the mystery underlying Bartleby’s nay-
saying absolutism releases in the lawyer a nagging series of interpretations, no
one of which answers, any one of which conducts him to the next unsatisfying
attempt.7
While Melville’s experiments in Mardi with the ideational play of pos-
sibility and the dramatization of competing voices can certainly be viewed
as part of the emerging intellectual process that later generates Ishmael and
Ahab, we are nevertheless closer to Melville’s creative rhythms in Mardi if we
see these voices as emerging from spontaneous, unintegrated impulses seeking
 Narrative Self-Fashioning 177

expression in narrative form. The competing voices are attempts to drama-

tize distinctly philosophical moods. In Mardi, Melville grafts philosophical
aspirations to his tried technique of the first-person narrative, persistently
accommodating philosophical concerns to the demands of his plot. Whereas
in the early sequences of Mardi the narrator inhabits a state of psychological
free fall between the demands of geniality and solipsism, Melville moves the
plot to the moment at which the two voices will no longer be reflected in the
narrator’s diachronic rendering of events.
In presenting Mardi’s major dramatic action—the discovery and rescue
of Yillah—Melville allows his narrator to undergo a self-generated and self-
fashioned ontological revolution that estranges him from the social world
and its rhetoric of fraternal interactions. In repudiating his historical past, the
narrator aspires to cosmic status. Melville’s presentation of the Yillah episodes
can be seen as the means whereby he brings his first absolutist into full figure.
If the narrator’s boredom on the Arcturion launches his philosophical quest
and Taji’s incarceration in “Dreams” stands as a para­doxically never-ending
ending of this process, then the irreversible moment of ontological, intellec-
tual, and rhetorical transfer begins when the narrator meets the high priest
Aleema, who is conducting the mysterious Yillah toward sacrificial death. The
narrator intervenes, kills Aleema, and rescues the maiden.
The creation of Yillah marks a crucial moment in Melville’s career. The
figure of Yillah fuses a host of literal and symbolic attributes. Merrell R. Davis
links Yillah’s literary antecedents with La Motte-Fouqué’s Undine, Moore’s
Lily, Von Hardenberg’s Mathilde, Southey’s Oneiza, Coleridge’s Geraldine,
Keats’s Lamia, and also the enchanting fays of medieval legend (75–76).
With her “reminiscences of her shadowy isle” (158), Yillah represents the
Platonic realm of the soul’s preexistence (Sealts, “Platonic Tradition” 291).
Yillah can also be seen as an all-alluring ideal, a symbol of the Absolute, a
sign of primordial perfection—once enjoyed, now regained, soon to be lost.
This reading of Yillah’s symbolic attributes, however reflective of Mel-
ville’s expansive learning, tends to make her little more than an abstract lure
for the four questers to pursue. What tends to be overlooked, and what char-
acterizes Melville’s fictionalization of the philosophical ideal in Yillah and
later in Moby Dick and Isabel, is that these romantic, religious, and philo-
sophical entities have no intrinsic supernatural qualities whatsoever. The ideal
attributes of Yillah, Moby Dick, and Isabel generate explicitly from stories
told by human beings on the hunt for mythic patterns that will explain the
unusual and mysterious. Yillah’s tale of deific origin, for example, derives
from Aleema’s religious contexts; Moby Dick’s putative ubiquity in time and
space evolves from the fertile speculations of superstitious mariners; Isabel’s
legend falls from her own lips. Quite possibly a lunatic, Isabel gives narrative
form to images of her shadowy past. Her controlling desire is to regain the
178 John Wenke

figure of a lost father through entanglements with a supposed half brother. In

Mardi, Yillah believes Aleema’s stories; she relates these tales to the narrator,
who not only seconds but embellishes them, writing himself into the script
of her biographical delusions. Thanks to Aleema’s sons, we discover that the
biological and historical creature yclept Yillah is the daughter of adventuring
missionaries of European descent who were slaughtered by islanders after
these missionaries slew three suspected thieves (307–308). Aleema, however,
obliterates her cultural origins. All she has left are vague memories of Taji’s
language and the creation myth imposed on her by Aleema.
Yillah purports to be “more than mortal, a maiden from Oroolia, the
Island of Delights.” One day, she became entangled in a vine and transformed
into a flower, her “conscious soul folded up in the transparent petals” (137).
In due time, the blossom found its way to Aleema, who “by a spell” returned
Yillah to maiden form. According to Aleema, the exiled spirit was then called
home to Oroolia. She was to travel there by way of the vortex at Tedaidee.
Significantly, in Aleema’s tale Melville draws on Platonic and Cartesian com-
plexes, bringing them directly into collision. On the one hand Yillah symbol-
izes the ideal, the Absolute, the ethereal soul cast temporarily into earthly
form; on the other, Yillah’s fate is prefigured by the “whirlpool” (138). She
must plunge into the vortex and thus be purged of mortal qualities. Accord-
ing to Aleema, Yillah would “follow thy bird” and enter the “vortex on the
coast of Tedaidee” (157). Melville links Yillah not only to the Platonic image
of the soul’s preexistence but also to the Platonic figure that depicts the soul’s
transcendence. As the bird enters the whirlpool, Platonic and Cartesian, ideal
and material entities collide. Like the young Platonist on the masthead in
Moby-Dick, who hovers over “Descartian vortices” (159), Yillah stands to be
killed by the brute facts of material existence.
The narrator originally sees Yillah as a poor manipulated victim. He “was
almost persuaded that the luckless maiden was some beautiful maniac” (137).
At the same time he has no trouble seeing Aleema as a fiction-making char-
latan who acts for “ulterior purposes connected with . . . sacerdotal supremacy”
(139). Not only does the narrator understand that Yillah’s metaphysical identity
was applied from without, but he clearly recognizes that this fiction under-
mines her essential humanity. As the narrator points out, the Aleemas of the
world kidnap infants and

craftily delude them, as they grow up, into the wildest conceits.
Thus wrought upon, their pupils almost lose their humanity in
the constant indulgence of seraphic imaginings. . . . Beguiled with
some fairy tale about revisiting the islands of Paradise, they are led
to the secret sacrifice, and perish unknown to their kindred. (139)
 Narrative Self-Fashioning 179

Put simply, the narrator comprehends fully the extent to which Yillah fell
victim to a religious confidence game. Her deliverance could be accom-
plished, the narrator realizes, by weaning her from the fiction of godliness.
And he has every opportunity to restore her to herself. Yillah has distant
recollections of her native tongue: “She started, and bending over, listened
intently, as if to the first faint echo of something dimly remembered. . . .
[W]ith much earnestness, she signed to me to address her as before” (137).
Later, the narrator reports, “Often she entreated me to repeat over and over
again certain syllables of my language” (152). In an instinctual attempt to
recapture her lost identity, Yillah pronounces these words “even as if recall-
ing sounds long forgotten.” Instead of telling her the historical facts of her
past—“she had not the remotest conception of her real origin” (153)—the
narrator appropriates and extends Aleema’s fiction:

In relating her story, the maiden frequently interrupted it with

questions concerning myself.—Whence I came: being white,
from Oroolia? Whither I was going: to Amma? And what had
happened to Aleema? For she had been dismayed at the fray,
though knowing not what it could mean. . . . These questions for
the time I endeavored to evade; only inducing her to fancy me some
gentle demi-god, that had come over the sea from her own fabulous
Oroolia. And all this she must verily have believed. For whom, like
me, ere this could she have beheld? Still fixed she her eyes upon me
strangely, and hung upon the accents of my voice. (140)

When the narrator fashions a fiction of their past acquaintance, Melville

is again drawing on the Platonic notion of knowledge as reminiscence of pri-
mordial spiritual unity. The narrator tells her, “Those little spirits in your eyes
have seen me before. They mimic me now as they sport in their lakes. All the
past a dim blank? Think of the time when we ran up and down in our arbor,
where the green vines grew over the great ribs of the stranded whale” (143).
Using distinctly Platonic figures, the narrator identifies her as “the substance
of this spiritual image, . . . the earthly semblance of that sweet vision, that
haunted my earliest thoughts” (158). Just as they were married, so should they
now marry.
The narrator, however, realizes that this fictionalized, metaphysical kin-
ship is inimical to his desire for earthly, physical love. He finds himself in a
quandary: how can he continue to impose his self-deifying fiction while at
the same time leading her to love him with the repressed passion of her bur-
ied human nature? He wants Yillah to think of him as a fellow god, but to do
so might also “teach her to regard him as some frigid stranger from the Arctic
Zone, what sympathy could she have for him? and hence, what peace of mind,
180 John Wenke

having no one else to cling to?” (142). This dilemma characterizes Melville’s
metaphysical questers: self-identification with the Absolute freezes the emo-
tions and destroys human sym­pathy. To what limits, then, should the narra-
tor carry the fiction? And what are the contingencies of becoming trapped
within the deific terms of his self-dramatization? At first, Yillah “had wildly
believed, that the nameless affinities between us, were owing to our having in
times gone by dwelt together in the same ethereal region. But thoughts like
these were fast dying out” (158). She begins to look into his human eyes and
listen to the sound of his human voice. Falling in love would demythify their
divine status; but in order to enhance his stature, the narrator feels he must
“prop my failing divinity; though it was I myself who had undermined it. . . .
I perceived myself thus dwarfing down to a mortal” (159).
In adopting the identity of Taji, a demigod from the sun, the narrator
effectively renounces his place among fellow mortals. Like Yillah’s fabled dei-
fication, the fictional status of demigod generates from self-serving impera-
tives. Its fundamental purpose is to magnify the self, thus providing ontologi-
cal warrant for his claim to special privilege. As revealed on the Arcturion, the
narrator essentially longs for an idealized state (7–8). Consequently, his fic-
tion making with Yillah serves his narcissistic self-love. He does not so much
love Yillah the maiden as he loves the concept of a fit companion for his
invented god-self. In Mardi, Melville does not directly engage the tensions
between the demands of Taji’s absolutistic yearnings and his sensual compul-
sions. Instead, he dissociates the romance and philosophical plots into ele-
ments of his quest saga. The missing Yillah becomes no more than a lost ideal;
the moral and sexual contingencies of Taji’s rescue of Yillah erupt only when
Aleema’s avenging sons and Hautia’s seductive heralds occasionally appear.
As a character, Taji virtually disappears. The play of philosophical rumina-
tion no longer has its center in the tension between his genial and solipsistic
voices. In effect, the disappearance of Yillah completes Taji’s estrangement
from the realm of commonplace experience—a process that began with his
boredom on the Arcturion.
Since mythic Yillah reflects a narcissistic projection of Taji’s deific aspi-
rations, and his physical love is inimical to his desire for transcendent status,
then Yillah’s disappearance eradicates Taji’s place in the narrative. For Taji,
to have lost Yillah is to have lost the capacity for presenting himself through
the tension between two voices and two modes of existence. The congenial
voice, figuratively speaking, becomes lost in the vortex that presumably swal-
lows flesh-and-blood Yillah. In the post-Yillah chapters, Taji never engages
his companions in their seemingly endless discourses. Seldom do his com-
panions speak to him. With the unpredictability of a spirit rapper, he makes
long declamatory speeches in the interpolated digressions. As a third-person
 Narrative Self-Fashioning 181

narrator he records the conversations of his companions, every now and then
duly noting that Yillah is not to be found.
Having eschewed the social axis, Taji finds himself condemned to solip-
sism; he then adopts the appropriate rhetorical mode of soliloquy. In his most
self-revealing monologue, “Sailing On,” Taji sums up the uncompromising
single-mindedness of the absolute idealist:

Oh, reader, list! I’ve chartless voyaged. With compass and the
lead, we had not found these Mardian Isles. Those who boldly
launch, cast off all cables; and turning from the common breeze,
that’s fair for all, with their own breath, fill their own sails. Hug
the shore, naught new is seen. . . .
And though essaying but a sportive sail, I was driven from my
course, by a blast resistless; and ill-provided, young, and bowed
to the brunt of things before my prime, still fly before the gale.
(556–557)

In this moment of reflexivity, Taji depicts his “bold quest” both in terms of
his protean compositional method and his attending intellectual exhaus-
tion:

But this new world here sought, is stranger far than his, who
stretched his vans from Palos. It is the world of mind; wherein
the wanderer may gaze round, with more of wonder than Balboa’s
band roving through the golden Aztec glades.
But fiery yearnings their own phantom-future make, and deem
it present. So, if after all these fearful, fainting trances, the verdict
be, the golden haven was not gained;—yet, in bold quest thereof,
better to sink in boundless deeps, than float on vulgar shoals; and
give me, ye gods, an utter wreck, if wreck I do. (557)

This passage specifically points ahead both to “The Lee Shore” chapter of
Moby-Dick and to the more extreme megalomaniacal rants of Ahab and
Pierre.
In Mardi, however, Melville’s interest is focused more on exploring “the
world of mind” than on depicting the “utter wreck” of the Promethean quester.
Ironically, except in the digressions, Taji reveals very little of what he discov-
ers on his sallies through intellectual space. Given the fact that his actions
and thoughts have the same focus—regaining Yillah—Melville must invent
a strategy whereby the narrator’s futile quest can impel Melville’s preoccupa-
tion with intellectual play, improvisation, and dialectic. Though Taji has one
thing on his mind, Melville has many. Melville displaces Taji as the center of
182 John Wenke

consciousness and focuses his ideational concerns through the questers—four

characters who represent four distinctly adumbrated modes of knowledge
and being: Media is Political Authority; Babbalanja is Philosophy; Yoomy is
Poetry; Mohi is History. Each character speaks for his own special interest.
Wrangling over abstract issues as they encounter a multitude of allegorical
contexts, Taji’s four companions allow Melville to explore the “chartless . .
. world of mind” (556–557). The narrative’s dramatic action thus provides a
series of counterpoints to the dead-end issue of Yillah’s discovery. The journey
through Mardi, ostensibly a quest for the maiden, provides both form and
forum through which Melville can try out narrative techniques capable of
containing his speculations.

No t e s

1. In New England Literary Culture, Buell identifies the centrality of romantic

art to be not in an ideology of the self-deification of the artist but in a notion of
the artist as iconoclastic transformer of existing literary structures, what Buell
calls “form breaking”: “Romanticism . . . starts with a destructive, ground-clearing
impulse that easily moves from the level of mere protest against received forms to
the level of an anti-aesthetic impulse of protest against the constraints of art itself ”
(70). The terms of Buell’s discourse clarify the nature of Melville’s drive to dissociate
himself from the narrative form wherein he achieved initial success. In protesting
against the limits of the travel narrative, Melville plunged into philosophical
romance, which is synonymous in his view with artistic freedom and invention.
His pursuit of Truth within this iconoclastic aesthetic, then, must not be seen as
representing a search for the practicability of staid, conservative platitudes of mid-
nineteenth-century Christian moralism. Truth seemed for Melville to encompass
whatever one found after diving beneath the surfaces of quotidian formulations.
Truth came to be grounded in dark, possibly nihilistic, formulations that related
to the human domain of instinct, compulsion, vent, and irrationality. Buell goes
on to describe the way the iconoclastic artistic impulse emerges: “This impulse
is manifested in two principal ways: first, in celebrations of the creative process,
as opposed to the aesthetic product, the ‘poetic’ being located in the realm of
experience rather than in the artifact; and second, in Romantic irony, the systematic
breaking of the poetic illusion in order to call attention to it as artifice” (70). In the
first instance, Melville celebrates the creative process not in terms of the narrator’s
actions but in the ranging play of his reactions. Mardi’s opening sequences, as will
be argued, are generally devoid of dramatic activity. In the second case, which is not
explicitly within the limits of this study, Melville’s political satire reflects Buell’s
notion of romantic irony.
2. For Melville’s view that great literary artists write in a kind of doublespeak—
to popular tastes and, simultaneously, to a deeper reader—see “Hawthorne and His
Mosses” (Piazza Tales 244–245).
3. Melville’s concern in Mardi with the interpenetration of subject and object
places him at the center of Romantic attempts to link the self with the world of
experience. In Biographic Literaria, Coleridge discusses the basic Socratic dictum,
 Narrative Self-Fashioning 183

KNOW THYSELF! . . . And this at once practically and speculatively. For as

philosophy is neither a science of the reason or the understanding only, nor
merely a science of morals, but the science of BEING altogether, its primary
ground can be neither merely speculative nor merely practical, but both in one.
All knowledge rests on the coincidence of an object with a subject. (162–163)

For discussions of related issues, see Cascardi; Greenberg; and Chai

308–312.
4. The allusive catalog serves Melville well in Mardi and in subsequent works.
This technique allows him to combine learned reference with the dialectical play
of competing positions. It is a favored technique of Plato, Rabelais, Sir Thomas
Browne, and Burton. See Wenke, “Ontological Heroics” 569–570, for a discussion
of how invoked names tend to function for Melville as synoptic metaphors, which
resonate with associational possibilities.
5. In the 1(?) June 1851 letter to Hawthorne, Melville pens a similarly
speculative scenario about a congenial afterlife:

It is a rainy morning; so I am indoors, and all work suspended. I feel cheerfully

disposed, and therefore I write a little bluely. Would the Gin were here! If
ever, my dear Hawthorne, in the eternal times that are to come, you and I
shall sit down in Paradise, in some little shady corner by ourselves, and if we
shall by any means be able to smuggle a basket of champagne there (I won’t
believe in a Temperance Heaven), and if we shall then cross our celestial legs
in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our glasses and our
heads together, till both musically ring in concert,—then, O my dear fellow-
mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all the things manifold which
now so distress us,—when all the earth shall be but a reminiscence, yea, its
final dissolution an antiquity. Then shall songs be composed as when wars are
over. . . . [Y]es, let us look forward to such things. Let us swear that, though
now we sweat, yet it is because of the dry heat which is indispensable to the
nourishment of the vine which is to bear the grapes that are to give us the
champagne hereafter. (191–192)

6. A passage in Burton might well be a direct source for the technique, ideas,
and characterization in “Dreams.” Burton uses the allusive catalog, but unlike
Melville, he celebrates study as a means to exorcise melancholy. Burton’s passage is
an inversion of Melville’s exposition. Burton writes:

Seneca prefers Zeno and Chrysippus . . . before any Prince or General of an

Army; and Orontius the Mathematician so far admires Archimedes, that he
calls him a petty God, more than a man; and well he might, for ought I see,
if you respect fame or worth, Pindar of Thebes is as much renowned for his
Poems, as Epaminondas, Pelopidas, Hercules, or Bacchus, his fellow citizens,
for their warlike actions . . . the delight is it which I aim at; so great pleasure,
such sweet content, there is in study. . . . Sir Thomas Bodley . . . brake out into
that noble speech: If I were not a King, I would be an University man; and if
it were so that I must be a prisoner, if I might have my wish, I would desire
to have no other prison than that Library, and to be chained together with so
many good Authors and dead Masters. (457)
184 John Wenke

Burton goes on to offer a caution that Taji could well have observed:

Whosoever he is . . . that is overrun with solitariness . . . I can prescribe him

no better remedy than this of study, to compose himself to the learning
of some art or science. Provided always that his malady proceed not from
overmuch study, for in such cases he adds fuel to the fire, and nothing can be
more pernicious; let him take heed he do not overstretch his wits, and make a
skeleton of himself. (458–459)

7. See Stern, “Towards ‘Bartleby’” for a discerning overview of the story’s

unresolved critical complexes.

Wor k s Ci t e d
Melville, Herman, Correspondence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press/Newberry
Library, 1993. Vol. 14 of The Writings of Herman Melville, Ed. Lynn Horth. 15 vols.
to date, 1968– .
——— . Mardi and A Voyage Thither. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press/Newberry
Library, 1970. Vol. 3 of The Writings of Herman Melville, Ed. Harrison Hayford,
Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. 15 vols. to date, 1968– .
———. Moby-Dick: or, The Whale. Ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York:
Norton, 1967.
Sealts, Merton M., Jr. “Herman Melville’s Reading in Ancient Philosophy.” Diss. Yale
University, 1942.
 M erton M . S ealts , J r .

Whose Book Is Moby-Dick?

I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.

—Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, [17?] November 1851

D uring the early years of the Melville Revival, which began in this
country in the aftermath of World War I, roughly a hundred years after
Melville’s birth in 1819, there was much discussion of Moby-Dick as a
rediscovered masterpiece. But then as now, many people merely talked
about the book instead of actually reading it. When Harold Ross founded
the New Yorker magazine in 1925, according to James Thurber in The Years
with Ross (1959), he was “unembarrassed by his ignorance of the great
novels of any country,” including his own. One day, Thurber reports, “he
stuck his head into the checking department of the magazine . . . to ask
‘Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?”’1 But whether or not they’ve ever
read the book, most literate Americans today know that it was Ahab who
pursued the White Whale and are also well aware of another character
in Moby-Dick: the one who speaks that memorable opening line, “Call
me Ishmael.”
Whose book, then, is Moby-Dick? Should we award it to the title
character, the invincible whale himself? Or to Captain Ahab, who dooms
his ship and crew in his desperate quest to slay the monster who had
reaped away his leg? or to narrator Ishmael, the one human survivor of the

Beyond the Classroom: Essays on American Authors (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1996): pp. 175–188. ©1996 Curators of the University of Missouri.

185
186 Merton M. Sealts, Jr.

inevitable catastrophe, who alone escapes to tell the story? Since the book
was first published in 1851 the question has been posed repeatedly, but
the answers to it, as we shall see, have been various indeed. For the entire
book is like that gold doubloon, the coin of great value that Ahab nailed to
his ship’s mainmast, promising it as a reward to the first man who should
sight the White Whale. Witness these words of Ahab: “this round gold is
but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician’s glass, to each
and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self ” (chap. 99,
“The Doubloon,” 431). So with the book—and so too with its principal
characters. All of them mirror back the reader and whatever he or she has
brought to the experience of reading.
But Melville’s contemporaries saw little of themselves in either the
characters or the book, despite all that he had put into it for those pos-
sessing eyes to see. Like two other innovative literary works of the 1850s
in America, Thoreau’s Walden and Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Herman
Melville’s Moby-Dick had to wait the better part of a century for the read-
ership that we now think it deserves. What each of the three writers had to
say in these works and the unique way in which he said it seemed somehow
foreign to their contemporaries, who had other ideas about what literary
productions should be and do. We see a similar divergence in our own day
between popular taste and the groundbreaking work of new artists in vari-
ous media, not only in poetry and prose but also in music and painting,
or in architecture and interior design. Indeed, every creative artist, if he is
“great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste
by which he is to be enjoyed.” So Wordsworth, speaking from experience,
put it as long ago as 1815, for he and Coleridge as innovators in poetry had
faced the same problem in England since publishing their Lyrical Ballads
in 1798.2
Different as they are in both subject matter and form from the poetry
of Wordsworth and from one another, Walden, “Song of Myself,” and Moby-
Dick as innovative works have much in common with the pervasive Romantic
spirit that had animated European art and literature long before its influence
was felt on this side of the Atlantic, but they also draw on experience that
we recognize immediately as uniquely American. Like much Romantic art,
moreover, they are intensely subjective in character. Each of the three employs
what Wayne Booth has called a “dramatized narrator,” an “I” who not only
tells the reader about events of the past but also addresses him directly in the
narrative present, as in the opening paragraphs of Walden: “In most books,
the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to
egotism, is the main difference. . . . I should not talk so much about myself if
there were any body else whom I knew as well.”3 Here are the first three lines
of “Song of Myself ”:
 Whose Book Is Moby-Dick? 187

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.4

And here too are the familiar opening lines of chapter 1 of Moby-Dick, also
addressed directly to the reader—to “you”: “Call me Ishmael. Some years
ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my
purse, and nothing in particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would
sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of
driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation” (3).
Again in Romantic fashion, each of the three works proceeds to take
both the “I” and the reader into nature and the open air: with Thoreau to “the
shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts,” there to transact what he
calls some private business; with Whitman “to the bank by the wood,” there
to “loafe and invite my soul”; with Melville’s Ishmael, again “waterward”—
since “as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever”—and
ultimately to sea, motivated chiefly by “the overwhelming idea of the great
whale himself,” for “only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully in-
vested whale be truly and livingly found out” (4, 7, 454).
To speak now about Melville’s book in particular, are we to read it as a
story both by and about its narrator, like Walden, or is it about what Ishmael
calls “the fully invested whale”—specifically the title character, though Moby
Dick himself does not appear until the third chapter from the end? Or is it
really about still another character, one linked both to Moby Dick and to Ish-
mael—Captain Ahab? Ahab, that “grand, ungodly, god-like man,” as Captain
Peleg describes him to Ishmael (79), makes his entrance only after Melville
has given us a hundred pages of Ishmael’s story, but he seemingly domi-
nates the action thereafter. Is it then Ahab’s book, or the Whale’s, or narrator
Ishmael’s? Contemporary reviewers first raised these questions; twentieth-
century readers have raised them again.
On the evidence of the original titles, The Whale in the first English edi-
tion of 1851 and Moby-Dick; or, The Whale in the first American, a reader might
well infer that Melville himself thought of whales and especially of one White
Whale—Moby Dick—as central to the book. As a persuasive twentieth-century
reader put it in 1966, Melville presents Moby Dick as “the crown and consum-
mation of the imperial breed of whales”; moreover, “the logic of the book as a
whole works to give whales in general, and him in particular, a mythic and heroic
stature. He gains this stature only by having whalers and whaling share it; but
because they do, he gains it more triumphantly. . . . Moby Dick is, in the most
relevant sense, the book’s protagonist.”5
At first hearing you may be inclined to agree with this eloquent state-
ment and say that the book is indeed Moby Dick’s. But before you go that far,
188 Merton M. Sealts, Jr.

consider as well these differing opinions from three other twentieth-century

essays, also by readers of the 1960s:

Second Reader: “I say ‘Call me an Ishmaelite’ because I assume

that this is primarily Ishmael’s book. The drama of Ahab and
the whale is most significant when seen in relation to Ishmael
experiencing that drama. . . . Ahab never would (nor could) have
written this book; Ishmael does (and must).”6

Third Reader: “But this is not Ishmael’s story. He is a delightful

narrator in the beginning, and for a time at sea plays the role
admirably, but when Melville becomes truly engrossed in telling
the story of Ahab, he pushes Ishmael aside and gives insights
denied his first-person narrator.” 7

Fourth Reader: “But is Ahab then the ‘hero’ of Moby Dick? To

answer with an unqualified affirmative is to neglect just half of
the book. For if it is the tragedy of Captain Ahab, it is also the
novel of Ishmael.”8

On a purely literal level, one must grant, Ahab certainly couldn’t have
written such a book, if only because it describes his own death, and Ishmael
does indeed disappear from our view in later chapters when Ahab comes to
the fore and at last encounters Moby Dick. The narrative as we have it gives
readers not only “insights” but also basic information that sailor Ishmael could
not conceivably have obtained aboard the Pequod: for example, Ahab’s state-
ments either in his private soliloquies or in exchanges with Stubb, Starbuck,
and Pip that no other member of the crew would have easily overheard. To
the question “Whose book is Moby-Dick?” there is still no generally accepted
answer among those who variously name the White Whale, Ishmael, or Ahab
as its principal figure. Moreover, there has been further disagreement over the
genre and form of Moby-Dick: can a book be considered aesthetically unified
if it is at once “the tragedy of Captain Ahab,” “the novel of Ishmael,” and what
one early reviewer called it, a “Whaliad”9—meaning a prose epic treating
learnedly and exhaustively, or exhaustingly, of whales and whaling?

i
For an indication of how and when these associated questions first arose,
let us begin with a glance at aspects of the nineteenth-century response
to Moby-Dick. None of the three principal figures—Ishmael, Ahab, and
the White Whale—attracted many readers to the book during Melville’s
lifetime—to his deep disappointment, as we know, for he had composed
 Whose Book Is Moby-Dick? 189

Moby-Dick with the sense that a literary masterwork might well be tak-
ing form under his hand. The initial reviews had been mixed. Even those
British critics who had high praise for some attributes of the book were
troubled nevertheless by what they considered its faults of style and struc-
ture: for example, they noted that Melville did not consistently maintain
Ishmael’s first-person point of view and, since the London edition did not
include the Epilogue, they complained that the book offered no explanation
of Ishmael’s survival after the sinking of the Pequod; how, they asked, could
he be alive to tell his story?
The first American reviewers were less concerned with such technical
matters, partly because the first New York edition not only provided the Epi-
logue but also carried “Etymology” and the “Extracts” on whales and whal-
ing at the beginning of the narrative rather than at the end, where they had
appeared in the earlier London edition. But Americans too were uncertain
about how to classify the new work, and several of them objected to its gener-
al tone. One leading journal, the New York Literary World, published by Mel-
ville’s friends Evert and George Duyckinck, dealt with it as “two if not three
books . . . rolled into one.” Their two-part review praised Melville’s “brilliantly
illustrated” account of the great Sperm Whale and identified Moby Dick as
his “hero,” going on to express reservations about both the characterization of
Ahab and the prominence given Ishmael and his inveterate philosophizing.10
To the Duyckincks, Ahab’s story seemed melodramatic rather than tragic,
and with other American critics of the 1850s they considered Ishmael’s spec-
ulations to he shockingly irreverent. Melville, wrote a representative critic in
1857, should give over his “metaphysical and morbid meditations” and return
to the vein of Typee and Omoo, the books of adventure that had so pleased the
public a decade earlier.11
With the decline of the whaling industry in later years of the centu-
ry, when petroleum, natural gas, and electricity in turn replaced whale-oil in
American and European households, interest in books about whales and whal-
ing declined as well. But a small band of admirers in England kept Melville’s
name alive there, and with the conclusion of World War I a new generation
of American readers found that Moby-Dick, along with Walden and “Song of
Myself,” was speaking to them in a way that most nineteenth-century readers
had simply failed to understand and enjoy. By 1951, the book’s centennial year,
Moby-Dick had become a standard work on American college reading lists and
a subject for proliferating critical and scholarly study.

ii
The one twentieth-century work that in effect legitimated an aes-
thetic approach to Melville and his American contemporaries was F. O.
Matthiessen’s American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson
190 Merton M. Sealts, Jr.

and Whitman, first published in 1941.12 Other scholars writing during the
1950s and 1960s significantly broadened the context of both research and
teaching by relating the work of our nineteenth-century authors to the
Romantic and symbolist movements in both America and Europe. One
example is Morse Peckham, a theorist of Romanticism who dealt with
Melville and Moby-Dick in terms of the perennial Romantic themes;13
another is Charles Feidelson, whose Symbolism and American Literature (1953)
traced the affiliations of American writers not only with their European
predecessors but with their modern heirs and successors as well.14
These studies and others like them had a remarkable effect on ways of
reading Moby-Dick. Where some commentators since the 1850s had seen
the book as a structural hybrid, an uneasy juxtaposition of epic and essay,
or of novel and tragedy, that failed to conform to the accepted rules of any
one literary genre, others writing in the spirit of Matthiessen and Peckham
were now praising it as a highly successful example of Romantic art, creating
its own form not mechanically, after some existing model, but organically—
again like Walden and “Song of Myself.” As Ishmael puts it at the beginning
of chapter 63, “Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs.
So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters” (289). And as Walter Bezanson
remarked in his “Moby-Dick: Work of Art,” a landmark essay first read as a
lecture in the centennial year of 1951, “Organic form is not a particular form
but a structural principle. In Moby-Dick this principle would seem to be a pe-
culiar quality of making and unmaking itself as it goes. . . . Ishmael’s narrative
is always in process and in all but the most literal sense remains unfinished.
For the good reader the experience of Moby-Dick is a participation in the act
of creation.”15
The approach to Moby-Dick represented by Bezanson’s essay brought
with it a reconsideration of two of the interrelated issues under discussion
here: whether or not the book has a unified structure and whom to iden-
tify as its central character. During the early stages of the Melville revival
the usual emphasis of both readers and critics was clearly on Ahab and his
struggle with the whale, with lesser regard for Ishmael and what were often
objected to as his philosophical “digressions.” Interpreters as late as the 1940s
tended to see the opposition between Ahab and Moby Dick in allegorical
terms, praising Ahab as a self-reliant, Promethean individual confronting in
Moby Dick the embodiment of all the forces of evil—physical or metaphysi-
cal—that beset oppressed humanity. For Melville, wrote one representative
commentator, “the essence of the world is a dualism between good and evil,”
and man’s appointed role is “to fight evil without compromise and without
respite.” So Ahab is fated “to spend his life pursuing Moby Dick, knowing
that the master of the Pequod could never conquer the whale. In the end Ahab
saved his soul, maintained inviolate his personal integrity by going down in
 Whose Book Is Moby-Dick? 191

unconquered defeat while Moby Dick swam on for other Ahabs to pursue.
Ahab was the personification of Melville’s philosophy of individualism.”16
Much can be said for such a reading, as for most serious approaches to
any complex book, but there are also other factors to be considered. What, for
instance, are we to make of a monomaniac captain, repeatedly denominated
as “crazy” or “mad,” and his willful dedication of his ship and her crew to the
fulfillment of his private quest for what his chief mate calls “vengeance on a
dumb brute” (163)? Isn’t Melville offering an implied criticism of self-reliant
individualism—perhaps of capitalist entrepreneurs generally—rather than an
endorsement? Even so, Ishmael’s admiration of the man informs the portrait
he is essaying. As a “tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitable-
ness in its fullest sweep and direst swing,” he must acknowledge that Ahab
lacks “all outward majestical trappings and housings.” Therefore, “what shall
be grand” in the resulting portrait “must needs be plucked at from the skies,
and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!” (148).
Melville’s presentation of Ahab through Ishmael’s words shows him as
a commanding figure of tragic stature, flawed by “fatal pride” (519) yet not
incapable of compassion, as we see in his treatment of Pip and even of Star-
buck; he is no mere cardboard “personification.” As Leon Howard wrote as
long ago as 1950, when critics were beginning to deal with the book in a more
searching and understanding way, “It was the author’s emotional sympathy”
for Ahab as “a character of whom he intellectually disapproved which gave
Moby Dick much of its ambiguity and dramatic intensity.”17
In the newer readings of Moby-Dick the White Whale emerged as more
than that fixed allegorical embodiment of pure evil which Ahab persisted in
seeing; instead, critics after the 1950s came to write of the whale’s function
in the overall structure of the book as that of a dynamic and ever-changing
symbol, a cynosure that gradually accumulates not only meaning but multiple
significance. From “Etymology” and “Extracts” through what Howard Vin-
cent called its “cetological center”18 to its concluding Epilogue, the book is
filled with the lore of whales and whaling, showing how whales have figured
in time and place over the centuries, how they appear not only to artists and
scientists but to men actually risking their lives in the whale fishery. As a
former whaleman, Melville well knew that “the only mode in which you can
derive even a tolerable idea of [the whale’s] living contour, is by going a whal-
ing yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove
and sunk by him” (264).
As Ishmael revealed at the outset, “the overwhelming idea of the great
whale” had been a leading motive for his own decision to go a whaling. But as
his narrative progresses we learn with him how Captain Ahab had projected
his rage and hate upon one particular White Whale, and we begin to under-
stand as well how Ishmael came first to share and later to distance himself
192 Merton M. Sealts, Jr.

from Ahab’s obsession. And in due course, as initiated readers we are at last
prepared to confront Moby Dick himself, in all his magnitude and surpassing
beauty:

Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa
clinging to his graceful horns . . . ; not Jove, not that great majesty
Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely
swam. . . . No wonder there had been some among the hunters who
namelessly transported and allured by all that serenity, had ventured
to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of
tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh whale! Thou glidest on, to
all who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same
way thou may’st have bejuggled and destroyed before. (548)

However any one critic may view Moby Dick—as “the deepest blood being
of the white race,” in the words of D. H. Lawrence, or the Freudian super-
ego, as Henry A. Murray suggested,19 or Deity, or Death, or Nature, or
the universe itself, to cite some other interpretations—there is likely to be
no more agreement about his ultimate meaning than there was among the
crews aboard the various ships we as readers encounter in the nine gams
of the Pequod. “Shall we ever identify Moby Dick?” Harry Levin once
asked. “Yes,” he answered—“when we have sprinkled salt on the tail of the
Absolute; but not before.”20

iii
During the 1950s, while critics were still thinking of Ahab as Melville’s
protagonist confronting his antagonist in Moby Dick, Bezanson and other
scholars had also begun to write of Ishmael and his point of view as the
unifying center of the story. Although there was minimal reference to Moby-
Dick in Wayne Booth’s influential book of 1961, The Rhetoric of Fiction,21
Booth’s work inspired others to undertake a close examination of the techni-
cal aspects of Melville’s fiction—notably his use of narrative point of view
and his employment of dramatized narrators. With Moby-Dick in particular
this approach of course involved a reappraisal of Ishmael’s role.
Bezanson had already distinguished between the younger Ishmael who
had once sailed aboard the Pequod and the older Ishmael who is telling his
story; in 1962 Warner Berthoff in The Example of Melville—the best book to
date on Melville as a literary craftsman—demonstrated how artfully Melville
used Ishmael first to set the nautical scene and then to prepare its for both
Ahab and the whale. As Berthoff explained, Ishmael conducts us as readers
through “four distinct ‘worlds.’” We meet him first in the world of “the dry
land, or at least the thronged edges of it: New York, New Bedford, Nantucket.”
 Whose Book Is Moby-Dick? 193

Next, Melville and Ishmael take us aboard the Pequod, herself “a virtual city
of the races and talents of men,” and there, through a great opening-out, into
“the non-human world of the sea and the indifferent elements.” Then at last
we are prepared to enter “the final, furthest ‘world’ set out in Moby Dick,” one
that “communicates to men only in signs, portents, and equivocal omens, and
seems intelligible only to madmen like Ahab and Pip.”22
Into the fourth of these worlds, the realm beyond physical nature, it
is fair to add that Melville himself could never have conducted us direct-
ly. Instead, speaking by indirection—first through Ishmael’s voice and later
through Ahab’s—he “craftily says, or sometimes insinuates,” what would be
“all but madness” for an author to utter or even to hint to us “in his own prop-
er character.” So Melville himself had once written of Shakespeare, at the very
time when Moby-Dick was taking form; so Emily Dickinson would enjoin us
to “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant— / Success in Circuit lies.”23 Even as
truth-teller Ishmael is leading us out of our everyday world into the world of
ships and the sea, where at last we meet Ahab and ultimately Moby Dick, he
is at the same time securing for Melville the needed aesthetic distance from
those two antagonists that as their creator he had to establish and maintain.
When any writer becomes “identified with the objects of [his] horror
or compassion,” as in our own century Scott Fitzgerald would declare in The
Crack-Up, the result, as Fitzgerald had learned, to his own cost, is “the death
of accomplishment.”24 An author who fails to guard against such identifica-
tion risks artistic disaster, and perhaps a psychological crisis as well—witness
Melville in his next book, Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852), where there is no
Ishmael to stand between him and his title character: reviewers unanimously
condemned Pierre, and some readers and critics even questioned its author’s
sanity. In Moby-Dick, by contrast, Ishmael as intervening narrator had provid-
ed Melville with essential insulation, as Nick Carraway would do for Fitzger-
ald in The Great Gatsby and Marlow for Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness,
each narrator distancing the creator from his creation. Were there no Ishmael
in Moby-Dick, we may feel sure, Melville would never have been able to give
us his protagonist and antagonist—or to purge himself of his own pity and
terror by doing so. That is why he could say, with relief, to Hawthorne, “I have
written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb” (Correspondence, 212).

iv
Ishmael’s dual role as narrator and as actor has been profitably explored by
several critics since Bezanson distinguished between “the enfolding sensibility
. . . , the hand that writes the tale, the imagination through which all mat-
ters of the book pass,” and that “young man of whom, among others, narrator
Ishmael tells us in his story.” The older narrator looking back upon his younger
self had been a feature of Melville’s earlier works, the differences between the
194 Merton M. Sealts, Jr.

two growing sharper in Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), the imme-
diate predecessors of Moby-Dick. Now in a fully dramatized Ishmael, we
witness “the narrator’s unfolding sensibility,” Bezanson observed. “Whereas
forecastle Ishmael drops in and out of the narrative . . . , the Ishmael voice
is there every moment.”25
The fullest exploration of “the Ishmael voice” is Paul Brodtkorb’s “phe-
nomenological reading” of the book, Ishmael’s White World (1965), which pre-
supposes that narrator Ishmael is not only “the vessel that contains the book,”
but “in a major sense he is the book.”26 In 1961 Glauco Cambon had written
of Ishmael as “the artist in the act of telling us, and struggling to understand,
his crucial experience”;27 in 1970 Barry A. Marks further pointed out that like
other “retrospective narrators” in Thoreau and Whitman, Ishmael is in fact
presenting two stories simultaneously: one, his “past-time story,” is about his
recollected experience that is now over and done; the other, his “writing-time
story,” is about experience still in progress—an ongoing story of “a narrator’s
telling about his past.”28
Like speakers in Thoreau and Whitman, Ishmael too addresses his
reader directly; he frequently pauses in his narration to consider the larger
implications for the narrative present of something in the past that he had
just described or related. “Yes, there is death in this business of whaling,” he
remarks after telling of the memorial tablets in Father Mapple’s chapel (37).
Again, in concluding his chapter on “The Line,” he observes that “All men
live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but
it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize
the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life” (281). And at the end of “The Try-
Works” he specifically warns the reader: “Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest
it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is
woe; but there is a woe that is madness” (425).
As for his ongoing story, Ishmael makes us fully aware of the chal-
lenge facing “a whale author like me” who is presently engaged in “writing
of this Leviathan” and earnestly striving “to produce a mighty book” on such
“a mighty theme” (456). So daunting an enterprise, he contends, demands “a
careful disorderliness” as “the true method” (361). “I promise nothing com-
plete,” he tells us in his chapter on “Cetology”; he holds the typical Romantic
view that “any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very rea-
son infallibly be faulty. . . . God keep me from ever completing anything. This
whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught” (136, 145).
Concerning Ishmael’s several departures from his original first-person
point of view, that unconventional practice that so troubled nineteenth-
century reviewers and twentieth-century formalist critics as well, and other
instances of what have been called “formal discontinuities” in Moby-Dick,
Cambon has argued that Ishmael’s supposed disappearance from the story
 Whose Book Is Moby-Dick? 195

is a legitimate rhetorical device that has its parallels both in the classical poets
and historians and in twentieth-century fiction. Thus Ishmael’s “imaginative
reconstruction” of the other characters anticipates what Quentin Compson
was to do in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, where “memory modulates into
imagination,” and where once again the reader “share[s] the experience of
creation in progress.”29

v
Emphasis on Ishmael as narrator rather than actor—and on Ishmael-like
observers in contemporary American criticism, fiction, and intellectual
life generally—has dismayed other commentators. “Ahab and the whale do
not appear in our novels,” one of them complained in 1959; “we write only
about Ishmael.”30 A decade later, in the midst of the campus activism of the
late 1960s, an angry black contributor to Partisan Review blasted narrator
Ishmael as “the precursor of the modern white liberal-intellectual” that
he found infesting American universities. If Ishmael were really an active
“character” in the story, according to Cecil Brown, he “would have repelled
Ahab”!31
More recently, historicist and contextualist critics of Moby-Dick have
indeed been shifting their focus from Ishmael back to Ahab, at the same
time exploring what they see as the book’s political implications rather than
the cetological, metaphysical, and literary elements that variously engaged
their predecessors. Meanwhile, scholars investigating the origins and textual
development of the book have once again cast doubt on its artistic unity,
citing a panoply of minor inconsistencies in Melville’s text and even sug-
gesting “unnecessary duplicates” among his characters.32 Such instances of
apparent disunity in the book can of course be cited against Bezanson and
other champions of organic form—a concept which its opponents in an age
of deconstruction dismiss as a convenient mask for hiding both minor and
major artistic failings.33
To the degree that the Ishmaels of this world overshadow its Ahabs
and White Whales, the anti-Ishmaelites do indeed have a point. But it also
seems fair to say that in the last analysis the book is not the story of any
one or even two of its characters. The only feasible way to Ahab and at last
to the White Whale is through Ishmael, Melville’s necessary surrogate and
the reader’s veritable guide, philosopher, and friend; and all three figures are
equally indispensable to the author, to his book, and to its readers. As for the
question of unity or disunity, the real test comes in the very act of responsive
reading. In Brodtkorb’s words, “literary unity is in the mental set of the reader
as much as in the literary work,”34 and in the case of Moby-Dick that “mental
set” is powerfully influenced and shaped by Ishmael—favorably so, as for Be-
zanson and his followers, or unfavorably, as for Cecil Brown.
196 Merton M. Sealts, Jr.

For further guidance from Ishmael himself, consider his distinctions in

chapter 89 between Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, based on “the laws and regula-
tions of the whale fishery” with respect to harpooned whales:

I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.

II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest
catch it. (395–396)

Whose book, then, is this much-hunted Loose-Fish? It cannot he just

Ahab’s, or the whale’s, or Ishmael’s, nor is it entirely Melville’s, since you
and I as individual readers have genuine claims of our own as well. “There
is then creative reading, as well as creative writing,” as Emerson long ago
observed,35 and modern critics such as Bezanson and Cambon have applied
his idea to Moby-Dick. “For the good reader,” Bezanson told us, “the expe-
rience of Moby-Dick is a participation in the act of creation.” In Cambon’s
phrasing, such a reader “will share the experience of creation in progress”—
the same experience that Barry Marks has illustrated for us in Melville along
with Thoreau and Whitman.
Once you as reader share that experience, then you have indeed made fast
to Moby-Dick, and in a real sense it has become your book—your Fast-Fish, as I
feel it to be very much mine. But if this comment sounds like an endorsement
of what is now called reader-response criticism, we must nevertheless remem-
ber that there is a reciprocal corollary: Melville, reaching out through Ishmael
as his surrogate, has at the same time figuratively harpooned us as his readers,
making us fast to his book and therefore belonging to it. As narrator Ishmael,
once again turning directly to each of us, pointedly asks, “What are you, reader,
but a Loose-Fish, and a Fast-Fish, too?” (398).
At the conclusion of Moby-Dick, the fated Pequod has been lost—lost
with all her crew save one. Protagonist Ahab has met his lonely death on
lonely life, while the White Whale, his invincible antagonist, swims on victo-
rious. It is Ishmael, survivor of the Pequod’s wreck, who escapes alone to tell
their story. And by addressing us indirectly through Ishmael’s omnipresent
voice, Melville himself persuades us, like the authors of Walden and “Song of
Myself,” to assume what he has assumed in this mighty book and to celebrate,
with him and with Ishmael, its mighty theme.

No t e s

1. James Thurber, The Years with Ross (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), 77.
2. William Wordsworth, “Essay Supplementary to Preface (1815),” in
Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed. Nowell C. Smith (London: Humphrey Milford,
1905), 195. Wordsworth credited the idea to Coleridge.
 Whose Book Is Moby-Dick? 197

  3. Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1971), 3.
  4. Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”: The First (1855) Edition, ed. Malcolm
Cowley (New York: Viking Press, 1959), 25.
  5. Vincent Buckley, “The White Whale as Hero,” Critical Review (Melbourne)
no. 9 (1966): 12.
  6. Gordon Roper, “On Teaching Moby-Dick,” Emerson Society Quarterly no.
28, pt. 3: Melville Supplement (1962): 2, 3.
  7. William Braswell, “The Main Theme of Moby-Dick,” Emerson Society
Quarterly no. 28, pt. 3: Melville Supplement (1962): 16–17.
  8. John Halverson, “The Shadow in Moby-Dick,” American Quarterly 15 (Fall
1963): 444.
  9. New York Daily Tribune, quoted in Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford,
eds., Moby-Dick as Doubloon: Essays and Extracts (1851–1970) (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1970), 47. Moby-Dick as Doubloon, as its editors remark, “contains most of
the best and some of the worst that has been written about Moby-Dick” through
1970 (xv). A full listing of reviews and criticism through 1960 will be found in Brian
Higgins, Herman Melville: An Annotated Bibliography, 1846–1930, and Herman
Melville: A Reference Guide, 1931–1960 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979, 1987).
10. See Moby-Dick as Doubloon, 50–51, 35, or the Norton Moby-Dick, 613–
615. For other contemporary identifications of the Whale as “hero,” see Moby-Dick
as Doubloon, 24, 39, 56, and 61. Another reviewer chose Ahab (11) and still others
named Ishmael, or Melville (4, 53, 85, 87); for Ishmael, see also Hershel Parker,
“Five Reviews Not in Moby-Dick as Doubloon,” English Language Notes 9 (March
1972): 183.
11. Fitz-James O’Brien, “Our Authors and Authorship: Melville and Curtis,”
Putnam’s Monthly Magazine 9 (April 1857): 390.
12. F O. Matthiesse, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of
Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941).
13. See in particular Morse Peckham, “Toward a Theory of Romanticism,”
PMLA 66 (March 1951): 5–23; R. P. Adams, “Romanticism and the American
Renaissance,” American Literature 23 (January 1952): 419–432; and Morse Peckham,
“Hawthorne and Melville as European Authors,” in Melville and Hawthorne in the
Berkshires, ed. Howard P. Vincent (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1968),
42–62. In the last essay cited, pp. 58–59, Peckham surveys “the great Romantic
themes” as they appear in Moby-Dick, suggesting that by 1851 “Melville had
absorbed . . . all stages of Romanticism up to his own time, and had presented them
in Moby-Dick in inextricable confusion.” This is the reason, he speculates, that “the
interpretation of Moby-Dick is so difficult and why in all probability it will never be
understood with clarity or agreement.”
14. Charles Feidelson, Jr., Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1953). Feidelson observes that mid-nineteenth-century
American writers “inherited the basic problem of romanticism: the vindication of
imaginative thought in a world grown abstract and material . . . ; their solution . .
. is closer to modern notions of symbolic reality than to romantic egoism” (4). He
credits Edmund Wilson as the first critic to note their affinity with “the symbolist
aesthetic that produced modern literature.”
15. Walter E. Bezanson, “Moby-Dick: Work of Art,” in Tyrus Hillway
and Luther S. Mansfield, eds., Moby-Dick: Centennial Essays (Dallas: Southern
198 Merton M. Sealts, Jr.

Methodist University Press, 1953), 56. Bezanson’s essay is reprinted in part in the
Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 651–671, and in The Merrill Studies in Moby-Dick,
comp. Howard P. Vincent (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1969), 87–103.
16. Ralph H. Gabriel, The Course ofAmerican Democratic Thought: An Intellectual
History since 1815 (New York: Ronald Press, 1940), 74. For other representative
comments which regard Moby Dick as symbolizing evil, see Yvor Winters, “Herman
Melville and the Problems of Moral Navigation” (1938), reprinted in his In Defense
of Reason (New York: Swallow Press and William Morrow and Co., 1947), 201: “the
chief symbol and spirit of evil”; Henry Alonzo Myers, “The Meaning of Moby Dick,”
in his Tragedy: A View of Life (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1956), 77: “the
white whale of evil.”
17. Introduction to Moby Dick in the Modern Library Edition (New York:
The Modern Library, 1950), xiii.
18. See Howard P. Vincent, The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1949), part IV.
19. D. H. Lawrence, “Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’ ” (1923), and Henry
A. Murray, “In Nomine Diaboli” (1951), as reprinted in Vincent, Merrill Studies in
Moby-Dick, 50, 61.
20. Harry Levin, Symbolism and Fiction (1956), quoted in Moby-Dick as
Doubloon, 265.
21. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1961). Booth’s book was immediately influential, especially among younger
scholars. John Bryant, Melville Dissertations, 1924–1980: An Annotated Bibliography
and Subject Index (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), singled out “the shift
to rhetorical criticism, narrative, and point of view” as perhaps the most significant
trend among dissertators of the 1960s (xvii).
22. Warner Berthoff, The Example of Melville (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1962), 79–86 passim.
23. Melville in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850), as reprinted in “The
Piazza Tales” and Other Prose Pieces 1839–1860, 244; Dickinson in Complete Poems,
ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 506 (no. 1129).
24. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Pasting It Together” (1936), as reprinted in The
Crack-Up (1945), ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1956), 81.
25. Bezanson, “Moby-Dick: Work of Art,” 36, 41.
26. Paul Brodtkorb, Jr., Ishmael’s White World: A Phenomenological Reading of
“Moby-Dick,” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 4.
27. Glauco Cambon, “Ishmael and the Problem of Formal Discontinuities in
Moby Dick,” Modern Language Notes 76 (June 1961): 523.
28. Barry A. Marks, “Retrospective Narrative in Nineteenth Century
American Literature,” College English 31 (January 1970): 366–367. This neglected
essay, which is especially valuable for classroom teachers and is well worth the
attention of literary critics as well, contains a provocative analysis of the “two stories”
that Ishmael tells in Moby-Dick. According to Marks,

The shape, and finally the meaning also, stems from the fact that Ishmael’s
changing manner of narration is more than mere aimlessness; rather it is a
significantly patterned search for efficacious speech. . . . The writing-time
story of the retrospective narrative parallels the essential shape and meaning
 Whose Book Is Moby-Dick? 199

of its related past-time story. The narrative present is a metaphoric or mimetic

version of the narrative past. . . .
The writing-time story is a means of showing directly and immediately
meanings which the author despairs of being able to communicate by
conventional language and literary forms. (374)

29. Cambon, “Ishmael and the Problem of Formal Discontinuities,” 523.

30. Robert Hazel, speaking at the December 1959 meeting of the Modern
Language Association of America.
31. Cecil M. Brown, “The White Whale,” Partisan Review 36 (1969): 459,
457. “The white whale” in Brown’s view “is none other than you, Ishmael—the
white, disembodied, overliterate, boring, snobbish, insipid, jew-bastard, nigger-
lover, effete, mediocre, assistant-professor type, liberal” (454).
32. See Harrison Hayford, “Unnecessary Duplicates: A Key to the Writing
of Moby-Dick,” in Faith Pullin, ed., New Perspectives on Melville (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press; Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1978),
128–161, and “Discussions of Adopted Readings” in the Northwestern-Newberry
Moby-Dick, 809–906 passim.
After beginning Moby-Dick with high hopes for its success, Melville finished
writing it only under great difficulties, complaining to Hawthorne of his “ditcher’s
work” with the book and his fear that all his books were “botches” (Correspondence,
212, 191). Although some present-day critics profess to discuss Moby-Dick as a
virtually seamless narrative web—one, Paul Brodtkorb, going so far as to charge
Ishmael rather than Melville himself with the “mistakes and inconsistencies”
observable in the narrative (Ishmael’s White World, 4–5, 7)—others such as Hayford
have taken such occurrences as possible clues to the compositional history of the book.
For a succinct review of various theories concerning its genesis and development, see
section 5 of Historical Note, Northwestern-Newberry edition, 648–659.
33. In 1951, the centennial year of Moby-Dick’s publication, when Walter
Bezanson first described the book as a work of organic art, James Benziger
remarked that “modern organic critics use their theory to check the pretensions of
the biographical and historical critics,” adding that any theory must be “applied with
judgment”; see his “Organic Unity: Leibniz to Coleridge,” PMLA 66 (March 1951):
48. His caution is applicable today, now that successive generations of historically
minded critics have reacted in turn against the organicists.
34. Brodtkorb, Ishmael’s White World, 4.
35. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Nature, Addresses,
and Lectures, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson and Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, Belknap Press, 1971), 58.

Wor k Ci t e d

The Writings of Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G.
Thomas Tanselle, 15 vols. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and
the Newberry Library, 1968– ).
 S tanton G arner

Naples and HMS Bellipotent:

Melville on the Police State

H erman Melville’s visit to Naples from February 18 to February 24,

1857, affected him deeply. It was an epiphany: he saw there, for the first
time, a tyranny in which, in contrast to most of Europe, a population was
still being held in thrall by an unenlightened monarch whose reign depend-
ed upon subjugation by a large and alien soldiery, subversion by informers,
and wholesale imprisonments of citizens only suspected of disloyalty. While
another man might have dismissed this revelation as a regrettable local
phenomenon, Melville, whose imagination tended instead toward global
synthesis, saw the police state of Naples as a type which may recur in any
era of human existence and in any human community. Thus, the repres-
sion of the citizen of Naples was the potential repression of every man, and
for this reason it is echoed in a number of Melville’s later works. It is the
purpose of this essay to show how, after attempting to speak of it in several
poems about Naples, Melville made forceful, tragic, and final use of it in
Billy Budd, Sailor.
At the time of his arrival, the city was ruled by “Bomba,” or Ferdinand
V, the latest in a dynasty of Bourbon monarchs whose rule had provoked
repeated insurrections. It had been less than nine years since the last great
uprising, when royal cannon had fired into the streets and Sicilian troops
and Swiss mercenaries had attacked civilian barricades on the streets and

Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, Volume 1, Number 2 (1999): pp. 53–61. © 1999
Blackwell Publishing.

201
202 Stanton Garner

had swept through shops and homes, massacring citizens and throwing men,
women, and children out of windows.1 Visiting the city in its aftermath,
future British prime minister William Gladstone, learning that there were
20,000 political prisoners held indiscriminately in cells with the basest of fel-
ons, condemned the regime publicly.2 In the three months prior to Melville’s
arrival, Baron Francesco Bentivegna and some others had been executed for
participating in a Sicilian conspiracy to establish a united, republican Italy,
and during a military drill in Naples an infantryman had broken ranks in an
attempt to impale the king on his bayonet. In obedience to “the fourth degree
of public example,” the soldier had been tortured and executed, both in public
view. In addition, a powder magazine on a military pier had exploded and a
frigate had blown up in the harbor, though the authorities were unable to link
these events directly to subversion. Both the British and French governments
had become so disgusted with the royal barbarity that they had broken off
diplomatic relations and deployed warships lest their citizens in Naples be
endangered.3
In his journal, Melville noted the ominous military presence: “Palace—
soldiers—music—clang of arms all over city. Burst of troops from archway
Cannon posted inwards,” and, later, “Military continually about streets.”4 His
remarks about the oppressive political climate end with that: much of the rest
of the journal entries record his investigations of fabled sites in the area, as
he dared the fates by descending into the crater of Vesuvius and as he walked
through a grotto at Posillipo, which, he might have imagined (especially since
his guide told him that it was the entrance to the “Infernal regions”) was
Virgil’s model for the passage to the Underworld into which Aeneas had
ventured. As a coda to his journal entries, before he left for Rome he jotted
down some notes for future literary use:

enumerate the mementoes of the remorselessness of Nature—

ravages of war &c.—burned city. Solfatara &c.—Now, one would
think if any modern city were here built &c, they would be sober
in view of these things. But no. Gayest city in the world. No
equipages flash like these; no beauties so haughty. No cavaliers so
proud, no palaces so sumptuous. &c. &c.—Apt representation of
that heedlessness, benignly ordained, of man which prevents him
one generation from learning from a past.—“Let us eat, drink &
be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Such seems the lesson learned by
the Neapolitans from their scenery. (NN Journals 105)

But when he did write about Naples—two poems unpublished in his life-
time “Naples in the Time of Bomba” and “At the Hostelry” (since paired
under the title “Marquis de Grandvin”) and another poem, “Pausilippo (In
 Naples and HMS Bellipotent 203

the Time of Bomba)” published in Timoleon (1891)—he wrote instead about

the police state there.5
“Naples in the Time of Bomba” is a versified carriage ride through Na-
ples and its environs by the narrator, Jack Gentian, in which some of Mel-
ville’s own experiences are compressed into a single day. As the tour proceeds,
the familiar Melville drama of darkness subverting light is played out. Naples
appears to be a paradise of light, a place of ineffable beauty and joy inhabited
by friendly, cheerful, colorful, free-spirited inhabitants who respond to his
gesture of friendship with a merry ovation. Gentian is encouraged to doubt
the stories he heard in England of Neapolitan oppression, but soon the dark-
ness reveals itself in a city fortress where the cannon “seem trained / Less to
beat alien foemen off / Than awe the town. ‘Rabble!’ they said, / Or in dumb
threatening seemed to say, / ‘Revolt, and we will rake your lanes!’” (Poems 342)
and where the portals daily spew forth thousands of soldiers “To threaten,
intimidate, and cow” (343). Was the apparent joy of the citizens “mirth’s true
elation? / Or even in some a patched despair, / Bravery in tatters debonair, /
True devil-may-care dilapidation” (Poems 344)? Does the human heart pros-
per here, or is it a victim of the tyrant’s oppression? After all, he muses, the
Church provides a succession of festive holidays the year around.
One answer is provided by a rose thrust upon Gentian by a local “Peri.”6
A symbolic emissary of the light (a “festive flower”), the rose encourages an
optimistic belief in a natural, unrepressed humanity—quite likely, what Mel-
ville meant by the “heart”—but it itself is afflicted by manifestations of the
dark as they recur. The next such manifestation appears on Gentian’s visit to
Pausilippo (as Melville spelled it in the poem) where he seeks what the an-
cient Greek settlers had promised he would find there, “ease to pain.” But the
sight of Vesuvius, set between Pompeii and Herculaneum, both of which had
been buried in its famed eruption, reminds him that periodically Nature ex-
hibits a seeming malice of its own over which men have no power, as he later
indicated by a subterranean eruption in his Civil War poem “The Apparition”
(Poems 102). The people of Naples, he decides, live between a “Bomb-King” on
the one hand, and on the other Vesuvius, which, as a result of ages of its own
bomb-throwing, has made the area a “Vined urn of ashes, bed on bed” (350).
Melville expands the point about the Bomb-King in “Pausilippo,” an
excerpt from “Naples in the Time of Bomba” which he eventually recast into
an independent poem. Visiting the hill, a narrator encounters a bard, Sil-
vio, with his daughter.7 Silvio is not old, but he is pallid, “bleached through
strange immurement long.” He has been a victim of “Clandestine arrest
abrupt by night; / The sole conjectural cause / The yearning in a patriot ode
/ Construed as treason; trial none; / Prolonged captivity profound; / Vain
liberation late” (Poems 243). Unmanned by his long imprisonment, he is a
voiceless bard who plays his harp but cannot sing: his daughter must supply
204 Stanton Garner

the voice that suffering has stilled. In the face of this reminder of tyranny,
Pausilippo provides no soothing balm for the visitor. As Melville had said of
his own encounter with the hill, “At Posilipo found not the cessation which
the name expresses” (NN Journals 102).
Back in the city with a juggler and a tumbler to delight him, Gentian’s
thoughts are drawn to the dark past of Naples. However, it is a history re-
shaped in Melville’s imagination to emphasize that darkness. Gentian thinks
first of the Angevin Queen Joanna I, who was suspected of complicity in
her husband’s 1345 strangulation at an inland city well north of Naples. In
the poem, the murder is fictionalized by relocating it to the shore of Naples
and suspicion becomes certainty as Joanna weaves an (apocryphal) noose of
“three strands of silk and gold” with which to hang her Andrea (Poems 353).8
Then Gentian’s thoughts move on to an exemplary wife who was herself a
victim, the Roman Agrippina, “The truest woman that ever wed” (359). The
wife of Germanicus, she had responded to his murder in 19 AD by shaming
the perpetrator into suicide, but was ten years later exiled by the apprehensive
emperor Tiberius to what is now Ventone, an island over the horizon from
Naples, where she starved to death. In the poem, however, her place of exile is
so situated that she could “gaze on Naples’ sunny bay,” though Melville may
or may not have been aware of the geographical error. Confronted with these
thoughts, the rose complains, “Ah, let time’s present time suffice, / No Past
pertains to Paradise” (355), and reminds him that her bloom will fade.
Despite an offer of red ripe tomatoes (“love-apples”) from a songstress
peddler, Gentian’s somber thoughts persist, taking him back to July 7, 1647,
when the Neapolitan populace, led by the legendary young fisherman Ma-
saniello, rose in protest against the wrongs of the Spanish viceregency, es-
pecially its crushing taxes on fruit and flour, the food of the poor. Gentian
remembers that the battle-painter Aniello Falcone and his sometime pu-
pil, Salvator Rosa, took part in the uprising. Barricades were erected, blood
was shed, and, as the rebellion began to spread to the outlying territories,
the viceroy surrendered, pardoning the rebels, granting the citizens some
rights, and removing some of the taxes. Some days later, Masaniello was
assassinated and his head, impaled on a pike, was carried to the delighted
viceroy. Again, Melville may not have known that neither Rosa nor Falcone
participated in the uprising, since that was a persistent historical error.9 Still,
it was an uplifting idea, that art and freedom are allies, even if only in the
poem. Gentian responds to the recollection by ruing that the uprising was as
bloody as was the tyranny from which it sought redress.
It is interesting that, although Gentian speaks of Naples’s “Red after-
years” (the “red” of continued and futile struggle against tyranny, one imag-
ines) he abbreviates his mention of the brief experiment, of 1799, in citi-
zen government known as the Parthenopean Republic and the subsequent
 Naples and HMS Bellipotent 205

hanging of Admiral Prince Caracciolo, which has been cited as a source of

Billy Budd.10 One might have expected that this brief and ill-fated attempt at
popular rule would have excited Melville’s sympathy, and that he would have
regarded its tragic suppression by the king and the summary execution of the
gallant Caracciolo by Admiral Nelson with disapproval. Instead, according to
the poem, the Republic was invalidated because of its sponsorship by French
republican invaders, who brought with them “The Terror,” symbolized by the
“Carmagnole” (a French revolutionary costume). Instead of a blow struck for
freedom, Gentian sees it as a period of the “cannibal hymn” and “Mad song
and dance,” “Hell’s cornucopia crammed with crime!” (Poems 357). Of the
general European Revolution of 1848, which had its inception in this king-
dom, there is not a word. Like Melville a stoic, Gentian clearly disapproves of
violence, however noble its aim.
Returning to the Naples of the present, the darkness persists as Gen-
tian’s tour takes him through civilians outside a fence watching soldiers within
“With eye-lids squeezed, yet letting out / A flame as of quick lightning thin.”
The soldiers, in turn, glance distrustfully back at the citizens. Then, as a boy
wanderer sings to a crowd gathered in a street, a blind man, who may be one
of Bomba’s agents in disguise, listens, as do a pair of bystanders, a Jesuit and
a lawyer. These, too, are suspect: the lawyer is “A useful man to lawless pow-
er, / Expert to legalise the wrong” (360). Next another contingent of troops
marches down the street, led by a miles glorioso drum-major, a caricature of
Bomba’s tyranny:

Arch whiskerando and gigantic

A grandiose magnifico antic
Tossing his truncheon in the van.
A hifalutin exaggeration,
Barbaric in his bearskin shako,
Of bullying Bomba’s puffed elation
And blood-and-thunder proclamation,
A braggadocio Bourbon-Draco! (Poems 363)

Gentian’s description is the kind of burlesque that Lord Shaftesbury had

identified as the most appropriate artistic response to tyranny, a response also
employed by the boy-singer who, after the parade has passed, sings mock-
ingly of both the soldiers and the king. An alarmed citizen hastens to warn
him of the risk of imprisonment, not for “patriots only, plotters deemed, / But
talkers, rhymesters, every kind / Of indiscreetly innocent mind.”11
Gentian’s final view of Naples in chains comes when a robed priest and
his entourage pass through the crowd bearing the communion host to the
bedside of a dying parishioner. The reverent citizens fall silent and kneel in
206 Stanton Garner

what, in his journal, Melville had called “Romish superstition.” Despite his ear-
lier satisfaction with the ample calendar of religious festivities, Gentian muses
in prose that the Church is more effective in bringing a “semi-insurgent popu-
lace to their knees” (Poems 365) than is all of the military might of the monarch.
With this, the rose expires and Gentian’s tour has ended. But in a later note, he
celebrates the fall of Naples to the liberator Garibaldi, the rose returned in the
person of the Red Shirt, who, on September 7, 1860, arrived alone to proclaim
the freedom of the city. In memory of Garibaldi, Gentian proclaims that “down
time’s aisle, mid clarions clear / Pale glory walks by valor’s bier” (367) only to
regret, in an “After-Piece,” that his poem had ended with the catafalque rather
than the rose.
“At the Hostelry” is an imaginary symposium in which an assortment
of painters of various nationalities and of various eras meet at Delmonico’s,
in Melville’s time an opulent New York City restaurant and banquet house,
to discuss their art. There the narrator, the Marquis de Grandvin, uses the oc-
casion to amplify the portrait of Garibaldi, who was “knightly” despite living
in a paladin age,” and to compare him to El Cid. This modern knight was
heroic in ending the tyranny in Naples without bloodshed: “he the hero was
a sword / Whereto at whiles Cavour was guard. / The point described a fiery
arc, / A swerve of wrist ordained the mark. Wise statesman, a ruling star /
Made peace itself subserve the war” (Poems 314). In retrospect, the Marquis
also remarks on the role of the church in supporting the rule of “the preda-
tory band / Of shyster-princes.” Italy, he says, was “Nigh paralysed, by cowls
misguided” (315).

•••
Melville’s experience in Naples, and the poems he wrote about it, echo in his
later works, as early as his Civil War poems dealing with civilians victim-
ized by military imperatives, the Southerners at Vicksburg and Charleston
and along the line of Sherman’s march and the Northern draft rioters of
New York, and as late as ‘Timoleon,’ which deals directly with tyrannous
rule. But their influence on Billy Budd, Sailor is particularly strong. In terms
of the title character, it would be difficult to find a more apt model than
Masaniello, the low-born blond youth who leapt from the obscurity of the
Neapolitan fishery to the unquestioned leadership of the 1647 Neapolitan
uprising with no greater qualification than his charisma. He was a cyno-
sure, indeed, but, like Billy, Masaniello paid with his life for his role as
a Handsome Sailor. Furthermore, Melville’s depiction of Bomba’s Naples-
world is strongly suggestive of the world-ship Bellipotent. Like Naples, the
man-of-war is characterized by its ubiquitous cannon, its military guards,
and its government by a less barbarous, but equally unforgiving, tyranny,
while the omnipresent danger of informers on the Naples streets is paralleled
 Naples and HMS Bellipotent 207

by the wires of underground influence that are strung through Captain

Vere’s crew. The daily terror of the Neapolitans is echoed in the terror that
seizes young Billy when he first witnesses a flogging and realizes that the
threat of the cat-o’-nine-tails hangs constantly over “the people,” and the
caution through which the inhabitants of Bomba’s streets survive is echoed
by the wariness of the Dansker, who, after an adulthood of shipboard sub-
mission, dares not speak frankly to the young sailor, even when, by doing
so, he might save him.
Another salient similarity can be found in the suggested complicity of
the lawyers and clergy in the Naples police state. There are no lawyers in Billy
Budd, but the law proves to be, nevertheless, a deadly instrument for exacting
a punishment which is not adjudicated but is pronounced by Captain Vere
before Billy’s court-martial is even convened—a way to “legalise the wrong.”
But it is the role of religion which is the most telling.
From the time of Billy’s impressment into the man-of-war world until
the events following his execution, religion abets the military rule on the
world-ship—parodying Christ’s Beatitudes, Lieutenant Ratcliffe blesses the
warship’s guns as “peacemakers.”12 Again, in a notorious disquisition, the nar-
rator remarks that the ship’s chaplain “indirectly subserves the purpose at-
tested by the cannon” and “lends the sanction of the religion of the meek to
that which practically is the abrogation of everything but brute Force” (BB
122). This passive complicity becomes active when the sailors react to Billy’s
burial at sea with “encroachment” (127), only to be subdued by a call to battle-
stations, where they stand under the watchful eyes of the sworded officers
listening to sacred music from the ship’s band and a religious service. With
that, the men are “toned by music and religious rites subserving the discipline
and purposes of war” (128).
The same point is made symbolically in chapter three of Billy Budd, in the
allusion to the mutiny at Spithead and the Nore, that brilliantly-executed up-
rising that first brought a soupçon of recognition by the British admiralty of the
humanity of the navy’s seamen. There, with a flag invented by Melville for the
purpose,13 the sailors remove symbols of church and state (a cross and a British
“union”) which had been superimposed on a red field, thus liberating the heart
color of Jack Gentian’s rose and of Garibaldi’s shirt. The narrator refers to that
red as “the enemy’s red meteor of unbridled and unbounded revolt” (BB 54),
but that is a red herring, so to speak: since Britain’s enemy, revolutionary France,
was symbolized by a tricolor flag rather than a red one, the only remaining en-
emy is the sailors who defied entrenched tyranny in order to gain a pathetically
small modicum of decent treatment. Some readers may give little importance
to the dehumanizing effect of the alliance of government and religion in feudal
times, but the American founders understood it perfectly when they demanded
the separation of the two, and certainly Melville did.
208 Stanton Garner

The complex process through which Melville toyed with elements of

two existing naval ensigns until he had created one of his own which allowed
him to attach new symbolic meanings to the union and the cross, on one
hand, and a solid red background, on the other, is, again, an example of irony
deployed to expose tyranny. To refashion established, harmless symbols into
a new one with a subversive meaning is the essence of protest against the
police state and its almost unassailable structure. In Benito Cereno, as John
Bryant points out, Melville had “the need to retreat within unstable narrative
ironies because his nation could not bear plain speaking” (Melville and Repose
48) Not the least of those ironies is another flag conversion, in which tyranny
bleeds a Spanish flag of its reds and its heraldic animal life, thus anticipating
the heraldic swap in Billy Budd by three and a half decades. 14
But, it might be argued, what Melville experienced and wrote about
much earlier in life is irrelevant to Billy Budd. In the long, exhausting, and
indecisive division of opinion about that work, those who defend the actions
of Captain Vere on the ground that his highest duty was to preserve order
on his ship, and that it was necessary to sacrifice Billy to that end, do so in
defiance of the fact that, taken all in all, Melville’s earlier works defend the
common seaman (the common man) against the tyrannies of his captains
(those in authority over him). They explain that incongruity by claiming that
during the intervening years his views underwent a complete reversal: that in
his last years he came to believe that society must be governed rigidly accord-
ing to immutable “forms, measured forms” (BB 128) by leaders who preserve
those forms.
But the Naples poems refute that idea. Considering the impact that
Melville’s visit had on him, it is quite possible that he began writing about his
experiences there soon after the end of his trip, when he turned his attention
to poetry. It is especially suggestive, in relation to “At the Hostelry,” that he
began lecturing on art then.15 Whether or not he began the poems before the
Civil War by the mid-1870s, when he worked on prose sketches to accom-
pany them, “he had already composed [the Naples poems], at least in part.”16
At that time, he had ample opportunity to revise the poems he had written
earlier to reflect any change of heart that he might have experienced. We
know that he took up the poems again as late as mid-1882, after Garibaldi
died, but his eulogy of the Red Shirt, introduced then, would have given
Captain Vere no comfort. Sealts believes that he went back to “Hostelry”
and “Bomba” again in 1890 (“Burgundy Club Sketches” 79), when he ex-
cerpted “Pausilippo,” but in that poem Silvio still suffers the blight of his
dungeon years, and still Posillipo is powerless to hear him. It may be that
Melville finally abandoned the Naples poems because what he had to say in
them had already been incorporated in Billy Budd.17
 Naples and HMS Bellipotent 209

Billy did not know who his parents were, but Billy Budd, Sailor was not
an orphan: it was a legitimate child of Melville’s earlier works and attitudes.
They track his thinking and his art through the years, showing us continuing
similarities in situations, symbols, and concerns in a way that nothing else
can: the cannon with which the French fleet threatens the natives of Nuku
Hiva are the same cannon that White Jacket hopes will never be turned in-
board, the same cannon that roll through the streets of New York during the
draft riots, and the same “peacemakers” between which Billy Budd is shackled
awaiting execution. Naples is Naples, but it is also the Bellipotent. Prepared
with the lessons which Melville’s lifetime of composition teaches, we are in a
strong position to understand one of his most opaque and seemingly contra-
dictory works and to avoid misleading speculation about Melville’s aberrant
state of mind as he wrote it.

No t e s

1. Pietro Colletta, History of the Kingdom of Naples, 1734–1825, with suppl.,

1825–1856, trans. S. Horner, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. Constable, 1858), 2: 548–552.
2. Lacey Collision-Morley, Naples Through the Centuries (London: Methuen,
1925), p. 163.
3. Gordon Poole, “Naples in the Time of Melville: Italian Politics 1857,”
Melville Society Extracts, no. 105 (June 1996), 8–9. I am indebted to Professor Poole
for sharing with me his extensive knowledge of Naples and Melville’s relationship to
the city, and for guarding me, to the extent possible, from historical error.
4. Herman Melville, Journals, ed. Howard C. Horth, Lynn Horsford,
Harrison Hayford, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern
University Press and The Newberry Library, 1989), pp. 101 and 103. Hereafter cited
as NN Journals.
5. Herman Melville, Collected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Howard P. Vincent
(Chicago: Hendricks House, 1947), p. 311. Hereafter cited as Poems. There is no
generally accepted text or title of the two unpublished poems. A recent, impressive
edition (of all three poems) is At the Hostelry and Naples in the Time of Bomba, ed.
Gordon Poole (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1989), which includes
valuable annotations and textual notes. Hereafter cited as Hostelry and Naples.
6. In Persian lore, a fairy of a sort; in this case, a sprite-like, very beautiful
woman.
7. According to Gordon Poole, this is Silvio Pellico (1789–1854), an author
who was imprisoned for ten years (Hostelry and Naples, p. 90).
8. An invention. Collison-Morley states that Andrea was strangled (not
hanged) with a silken (but not gold) cord, then thrown out of a window (49).
W. C. Stafford and Charles Ball, Italy Illustrated: A Complete History of the
Past and Present Condition of the Italian States, 2 vols., vol. 1 (London: London
Printing and Publishing Co., 1860–1861), 1:156, admit that Giovanna might
have consented to an assassination plot hatched by her Neapolitan courtiers, but
Collison-Morley claims that she was shocked by the crime and retreated to the
castle, where her son was born.
210 Stanton Garner

  9. Luigi Antonio Lanzi, The History of Painting in Italy, from the Period of the
Revival of the Fine Arts to the End of the Eighteenth Century, trans. Thomas Roscoe,
6 vols. (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1828), 2:421, states confidently that
Falcone formed the “Band of Death,” made up of fellow-artists, which “committed
the most revolting and sanguinary excesses” and was protected by the Spanish
painter Spagnoletto (Giuseppe Ribera). Other English-language sources available
to Melville list the soldier-painters (Alfred de Reumont, The Carafas of Maddaloni:
Naples under Spanish Dominion [London: Bohn, 18541, p. 332], and give a detailed
account of Rosa’s activities (Lady [Sydney] [Owenson] Morgan, Life and Times of
Salvator Rosa, 2 vols. [London: Colburn, 1824], 1:383–389, and 2:5). However,
Collison-Morley speaks for modern scholarship when she says that the “Band
of Death” and the participation of Falcone and Rosa “appears to be altogether
mythical” (113).
10. Kay S. House, “Francesco Caracciolo, Fenimore Cooper and Bully Budd,”
Studi Americani (Rome), no. 19–20 (1976), 83–100.
11. Poems 365. Shaftesbury’s formulation, as transmitted through the
American critic William A. Jones, is discussed in John Bryant, Melville and Repose:
The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993), p. 48.
12. Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton
M. Sealts, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 48. Hereafter cited
as BB.
13. Stanton Garner, “Fraud as Fact in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd,” San José
Studies, 4 (May, 1978): 88–91.
14. Stanton Garner, “A Vexillogical Key to Melville’s Attitude Toward
Slavery,” unpublished paper, Melville Society meeting (New York, December,
1978).
15. In November, 1859, Melville borrowed the Lanzi history from Evert
Duyckinck. See Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville’s Reading, rev. (Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press, 1988), p. 192.
16. Merton M Sealts, Jr., “Melville’s Burgundy Club Sketches,” Pursuing
Melville, 1940–1980 (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 78.
17. Poole reports that even after he had removed “Pausilippo” for inclusion in
Timoleon, Melville continued work on “Naples—the Time of Bomba” (“Manuscript
and Transmissions,” p. xliv).
 T homas H ove

Naturalist Psychology in
Billy Budd

O ne of the most important cultural debates of the late nineteenth century

was the status of morality in the wake of Darwinism and other naturalist
accounts of human development. If Darwin’s theories were correct, many
Victorian moralists worried, there might be no strong foundation for tra-
ditional Christian values like altruism and benevolence.1 According to tra-
ditional Christianity’s dualist view of human nature as a mix of pure spirit
and corrupt matter, these values were justified by their location in the higher
realm of the spirit. Instances of human error and evil could be blamed on the
limitations our bodily existence puts on our spiritual aims. Melville explored
the ethical problems of this dualist view most thoroughly in Pierre (1852):
“Pierre, though charged with the fire of all divineness, his containing thing
was made of clay.”2 Even though his other fictions of the 1850s foreground
various cognitive and ethical impasses of dualism, it would take several
decades for him to entertain a naturalist outlook disassociated from cynical
and pessimistic characters like the Fiddle passengers in The Confidence-Man
(1857) and Margoth in Clarel (1876).
In Billy Budd, Melville explores a naturalist view of action more thor-
oughly and sympathetically than in any of his previous works.3 In doing so, he
challenges the traditional dualist metaphysics of the person and the absolut-
ist normative framework it supports. Billy Budd manifests a post-Darwinian

Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, Volume 5, Number 2 (2003): pp. 51–65. Copyright
© 2003 Melville Society.

211
212 Thomas Hove

philosophical tendency to rank passions not according to a dualist hierarchy

of pure spirit and corrupt matter but according to a pragmatic sense of what
actions are appropriate for achieving a goal within a specific situation. Ac-
cording to this naturalist ethics, deeming what’s appropriate depends not on
some accurate perception of truth but rather on interpretations of situations
that can guide human energies toward desired ends. Although the narra-
tor of Billy Budd suggests that we can never directly perceive these energies,
and although he characterizes thought as a latecomer on the scene of action,
he nevertheless affirms intelligence’s efforts to understand action’s laws and
mechanisms. Such efforts are most apparent in his speculations on the origins
and mechanisms of Claggart’s antipathy toward Billy.
Analyzing Billy Budd from a naturalist standpoint offers several theoreti-
cal and interpretive advantages over readings that either insist upon a corre-
spondence theory of knowledge or reaffirm traditional dualist ethics. Readings
that try to resolve the novel’s cognitive and ethical problems tend to assume
that accurate assessment of a character’s motivations will allow us to attribute
determinate moral or political positions to the text. This obsession with both
epistemological and ethical certainty appears even in deconstructive readings,
which emphasize how the novel’s historical and normative claims fail to live
up to standards of absolute certainty. But if we reject these standards as inap-
propriate remnants of a dualist metaphysics, we can begin to place the novel
in the intellectual context of late nineteenth-century efforts to reconceive mo-
rality from a materialist standpoint. In addition, to get around the impasses
that have plagued ethical and political interpretations of Billy Budd, we can
reject the assumption that the text itself strives for certainty, and we can avoid
measuring the text’s ethical and political content up against external norma-
tive frameworks like Christian altruism or Marxist anti-authoritarianism.4
To list other advantages of an epistemologically modest and ethically neutral
reading strategy: it enables us to take fuller account of the variety of impulses
that motivate characters’ actions; it cautions us against assigning too great a
role to rational self-control in the normative conclusions we might draw from
the text; it avoids the conceptual impasses typical of mind-body, spirit-matter,
idea-sensation dualism; and it offers a method for ranking motivations and
actions according to naturalist values like health and appropriateness rather
than absolutist values like good and evil, truth and falsehood.

Ethics without Spirit, Knowledge without Representation

Ever since the 1920s, Melville scholarship has commented on the ambigui-
ties permeating the portraits of Billy, Claggart, and Vere.5 But naturalist
theories of action can help us read Billy Budd in a way that does not simply
reiterate the obvious fact that these ambiguities complicate our knowledge
of the characters’ motivations and our judgments of their actions. Instead,
 Naturalist Psychology in Billy Budd 213

we can follow the lead of pragmatist and Nietzschean action theories,

which take these conditions of uncertainty as a given, thereby sidestepping
epistemological questions that have no answers and no necessary relation to
motivation and action. As in the psychological explorations of his younger
American contemporaries William James and John Dewey, Melville’s natu-
ralistic picture of human existence attempts to reconceive traditional moral
values from within a materialist metaphysics. Although it pays tribute to
Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark,” Billy Budd does not reproduce Hawthorne’s
Romantic, dualist assumption that one kind of motivation comes from
corrupt material sources and a different, “higher” kind comes from pure
spiritual sources.6
Although Melville initially shared this dualist metaphysics of the per-
son, he wrote Billy Budd after decades of public debate over the ethical im-
plications of Darwinism and naturalism. Like many of his Victorian contem-
poraries, Melville tries to preserve a place within naturalism for ethical values
formerly justified by their association with a higher realm of spirit. But like
every ethical theorist who has tackled this problem up to the present day,
he fails to supply a satisfactory alternative justification.7 Instead, the modest
goal he and other naturalist thinkers manage to achieve is to challenge the
reductive tendencies of traditional dualism and crude materialism. Melville
issues these antireductive challenges through thick, polyvalent descriptions of
motivation, and through a narrative technique that manifests circumspection,
self-correction, tentativeness, and ambivalence.
Scholarly commentary on Billy Budd tends to treat these techniques as
demonstrating the impossibility of attaining certainty about motivation. But
the text invites us to disregard the assumption which underlies much of this
commentary—that knowledge must consist of representational accuracy.8 If
we read Melville’s descriptions of motivation from a pragmatic rather than
an absolutist or even a radically skeptical perspective, we can set aside episte-
mological and normative debates that will always remain unresolved. Ques-
tions about the “essential” moral natures of Billy, Claggart, and Vere cannot
be resolved because they assume habits of absolutist ethical thought that the
text tries to get past. Rather than read the text as a challenge to discern moral
reality behind deceptive and ambiguous appearances, we can take up its in-
vitation to extrapolate from its speculations on the link between physiology
and psychology. Significantly, these speculations make no pretensions to ac-
curate representation of the sources and laws of motivation and action. One
of Nietzsche’s unpublished notebook entries offers an apt justification for this
epistemologically modest orientation:

In the tremendous multiplicity of what happens within an organism,

the part we become conscious of is merely a little corner; and the
214 Thomas Hove

rest of the totality of what happens gives the lie to the little scrap of
‘virtue’, ‘selflessness’ and similar fictions in a perfectly radical way.
We do well to study our organism in its perfect immorality.9

Although Melville’s skeptical narrator would agree with these observations,

neither his nor Nietzsche’s assumptions about the human organism’s “perfect
immorality” can make better claims to objectivity than the traditional “fic-
tions” they challenge. In proposing an amoral study of human motivation,
however, their shared aim is to open up speculations about human action to
possibilities excluded from traditional dualist views.
The naturalist psychology of Billy Budd lies in the narrator’s tendency to
describe motivation and action with terminology borrowed from physics and
mechanics. He often labels characters’ motivations as different kinds of “en-
ergies.” This vague label can refer to a variety of phenomena: e.g., impulses,
passions, emotions, habits, virtues. For each character, the narrator specifies
one or two energies that serve as primary motivational forces: Billy is driven
by unself-conscious exuberance; Claggart, by envy and antipathy; Vere, by
military custom and an urgent fear of mutiny. Dualist morality would treat
each of these energies as a blind force that overpowers the conscious, spiritual,
“better” part of one’s nature. But Melville’s metaphysics of the person does
not privilege particular kinds of energy over others—except to the extent that
some of them are more appropriate than others in certain situations and for
certain ends.
By lacing this purported “inside narrative” with so much uncertainty,
the narrator suggests that normative judgments cannot ground themselves in
an accurate perception of human psychology and social situations. Like Ni-
etzsche and the pragmatists, he rejects the view that knowledge must reflect,
represent, or correspond with the world “out there” beyond our minds. As in
his famous remark that “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its
ragged edges,”10 he pre-empts the concern for epistemological certainty by
having his narrator foreground his cognitive tools of tentative speculation,
self-correction, and an openness to a variety of viewpoints. Accordingly, we
can read his narrative technique as aiming at a goal other than the represen-
tational accuracy emphasized in both conventional and deconstructive read-
ings. In a brilliant instance of the latter, citing the narrator’s admission that
he cannot “hit” Claggart’s portrait, Barbara Johnson wonders, “how reliable
can a description be if it does not hit its object?”11 But as the narrator’s con-
stantly shifting frames-of-reference suggest, reliable representation is not the
only purpose of description. Instead, descriptions can provide understanding
of action even when they cannot lay claim to representational accuracy. Like
Melville’s younger contemporaries William James and John Dewey, we need
to jettison the hope that accounts of action can provide us with a “reliable”
 Naturalist Psychology in Billy Budd 215

picture of moral existence that might help us “accurately” judge action. Nev-
ertheless, the narrator’s analytical efforts in Billy Budd suggest that accounts
of action can provide tools for the tentative assessment of past and present
action, and the possible control of future action.

Elements of Naturalist Motivation

Rather than normative ethical and political judgments, the narrator assesses
energies according to their situational appropriateness.12 His choice of stan-
dards for judging their appropriateness depends on the evaluative framework
he brings to bear on the characters’ actions viewed as adaptations to their
environments. By including multiple frames of reference within his descrip-
tions of the characters, the narrator highlights the inevitable plurality of
overdetermined motivations relevant to a given action. Billy’s exuberance
competes with his prudent fear of punishment; Claggart’s envy competes
with his admiration of Billy’s goodness; Vere’s fear of mutiny competes
with his compassion for Billy. Avoiding dualism, the narrator does not rank
these competing motivations according to a hierarchy of greater and lesser
degrees of spirituality or materiality. Nor does he insist on the ontological
difference and superiority of motivations originating in the realm of spirit.
To be sure, he does speculate about the positive and negative effects certain
energies may have on the mind, soul, body, and society at large. But he does
so according to pragmatic considerations of health, proper functioning, and
goal achievement rather than normative considerations of right and wrong.
From the narrator’s descriptions, we can formulate the following picture
of moral existence on board the Bellipotent. He classifies the characters’ mo-
tivations as different kinds of energies that manifest themselves in their tem-
peraments and actions. The temperaments of Billy, Claggart, and Vere differ
because they possess varying combinations of energies in varying amounts.
In addition, as a substitute for dualist notions of good and evil, the narrator
refers to two contrasting poles of motivation. On one hand, there is “natural
virtue,” which he associates with Billy and describes as a positive, expansive
vitality: “a virtue went out of him, sugaring the sour ones” (BB 47). On the
other hand, there is “natural depravity,” which he associates with Claggart and
describes as an “unreciprocated malice” that opposes natural virtue’s positive
vitality and sometimes even seeks to destroy it (80). Setting aside the more
complicated case of Vere, we can use this materialist formula to make sense of
the interactions between Billy and Claggart, which are determined primarily
by these conflicting energies of depravity and vitality.
In dramatizing this formula, Melville exposes a crucial problem at the
heart of normative frameworks that rely on the notion of a pure spirit. Tra-
ditionally, the spirit is the source of thought, which commands the body to
carry out its higher laws by means of action. In contrast to this view, the
216 Thomas Hove

interactions between Billy and Claggart illustrate the utter subordination of

thought to action. What occurs between Billy and Claggart is like a chemical
reaction. Rather than produce a chemical bond, Claggart’s and Billy’s “na-
tures” react to each other like sodium and water. Billy’s vitality is expansive,
and it emanates positive influences on anything in its path that does not
obstruct it. But Claggart’s depravity is destructive, and it happens, for no
apparent reason, to single out Billy as its “special object” of destruction (76).
Each man’s vital or depraved energies lie beyond thought’s conscious control.
To make sense of this conflict, the narrator does not rely on dualism’s notions
of motivation and action. Instead, he portrays action as an interplay of rival
but ontologically similar energies.
This view of action bears striking affinities not only to Nietzsche’s theo-
ries of action but to those of the young John Dewey. Around the time Mel-
ville was writing Billy Budd, Dewey was beginning to work out his refutation
of the dualist psychology of action. Dewey rejected the model of “reflex ac-
tion” as a series of disjointed arcs consisting of physical stimulus, followed by
mental idea, followed by physical response. Instead, taking his lead from Wil-
liam James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890), Dewey’s seminal essay “The
Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (1896) portrays action as “one uninter-
rupted, continuous redistribution of mass in motion. In the physical process,
as physical, there is nothing which can be set off as stimulus, nothing which
reacts, and nothing which is response. There is just a change in the system of
tensions.”13 But this materialist view of action raises the following question: if
there is no spirit that stimulates action, and if action consists of nothing but a
redistribution of tensions within matter, what is the role of thought?
Instead of mirroring the world, thought in Billy Budd entails the ex post
facto interpretation and indirect regulation of human energies. While the
narrator knows that he cannot pretend to representational accuracy in his ac-
counts of Billy’s and Claggart’s conflicting energies, he nevertheless attempts
his own interpretations of their actions. These interpretations reflect his efforts
to arrive at a new understanding of action in light of the challenges posed by
this story of “certain phenomenal men” (BB 75). This endeavor is most ap-
parent in the blend of emotional and physiological terminology he uses to
describe motivation and action. Although he associates “vitality” mainly with
Billy, both Billy’s and Claggart’s bodies function as vessels for particular kinds
of vitality. In Claggart’s case, vitality takes the form of “depravity”—specifi-
cally, his self-destructive envy. But Claggart’s envy is not just self-destructive.
It also seeks to eradicate the external objects of its antipathy, even if the ef-
fort to do so destroys its human host in the process. By contrast, the narrator
usually refers to Billy’s vitality as “exuberance.” While his exuberance is not
necessarily destructive, it can burst forth at tragically inopportune moments
and destroy whatever lies in its path.
 Naturalist Psychology in Billy Budd 217

The narrator describes Billy and Claggart acting under the sway of these
forces in a neutrally scientific rather than a normative tone. When he does use
terms like “good” and “evil,” their sense is not normative but figurative. He al-
ludes to moralistic hierarchies, but he uses moral terms and concepts without
their traditional implications, of judgment according to absolute standards.14
This is not to say that he leaves normative standards out of his descriptions
altogether, for he obviously uses morally inflected words like “innocence” and
“evil” to describe Billy and Claggart. But the narrative’s standards of virtue are
more Aristotelian and pragmatic than absolutist. They appeal to health, ap-
propriateness, and the proper functioning of organisms in their environment
rather than pure values existing in a spiritual realm above and apart from
bodily existence.
In addition to contrasting two kinds of vitality in his descriptions of Bil-
ly and Claggart (exuberance and depravity), the narrator contrasts two kinds
of virtue. Each virtue has its relative advantages and disadvantages, and the
narrator assesses these advantages according to their situational function and
the interpretive frame that defines that function. First, there is “conventional”
virtue, which is derived from civilized custom but can often lead to hypocrisy.
It can even foster something like Claggart’s natural depravity: “Civilization,
especially of the austerer sort, is auspicious to [depravity]. It folds itself in the
mantle of respectability” (BB 75). This conventional virtue works at cross pur-
poses to the second kind of virtue, which the narrator labels “unsophisticated”
virtue. Unsophisticated virtue has little to do with natural depravity and more
to do with something like Billy’s natural exuberance or vitality. It expresses
itself through actions that appear to be “frank manifestations in accordance
with natural law” (52).
The narrator also classifies circumstantial forces that either help or
hinder these different types of virtue. In cases where civilized life cannot
tolerate manifestations of unsophisticated virtue, “custom” appears in the
form of acquired habits that restrain natural exuberance for the purpose
of social order. Two obvious forms of customary restraint are morality and
law. But the most prominent form it takes in the narrative is military dis-
cipline, which the narrator describes as capable of being internalized as in-
stinct: “True martial discipline long continued superinduces in average man
a sort of impulse whose operation at the official word of command much
resembles in its promptitude the effect of an instinct” (BB 127). Ironically,
custom and conventional virtue foster depravity better than they tolerate
exuberance. This neutral, psycho-social equation of forces begins to explain
why an exuberant nature like Billy’s cannot function properly in a situation
ruled by military discipline and law. Contrary to certain critical traditions,
Melville does not describe this situation moralistically. Billy is not an inno-
cent victim of corrupt social practices. Instead, to use naturalist terminology
218 Thomas Hove

characteristic of pragmatist normativity, he is an organism maladapted to his

environment.
To place Billy’s and Claggart’s motivations within a meaningful frame
of reference, the narrator alludes to Judeo-Christian tradition. While this is
obvious enough, Melville deploys the morally loaded terms of religious tradi-
tion in a contrastive rather than an absolutist sense. As Robert Milder notes
about Melville’s use of Christian imagery in the late stages of writing, “the
language functions more as a resonant gloss on characters and events than as
symbols within an articulated religious parable.”15 When the narrator intro-
duces Billy and Claggart, he uses Christian imagery to portray them as two
extremes of human vitality and depravity. He describes Billy as a prelapsarian
Adam not to mark him as a moral innocent but to emphasize how his exuber-
ance is not impeded by rational self-consciousness: “By his original constitu-
tion aided by the co-operating influences of his lot, Billy in many respects
was little more than a sort of upright barbarian, much such perhaps as Adam
presumably might have been ere the urbane Serpent wriggled himself into
his company” (BB 52). As for the serpent in this story, “something such as
one was Claggart, in whom was the mania of an evil nature, not engendered
by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living, but born with
him and innate, in short ‘a depravity according to nature’” (76). In spite of
this morally essentialist rhetoric, Melville characteristically allows ambigui-
ties to creep into the portraits of both men. Several commentators including
Johnson in “Melville’s Fist” have pointed out that these ambiguities force us
to question the traditional reading of Billy and Claggart as moral opposites.
More significantly, though, they force us to question the appropriateness of
using moralistic terms like “good” and “evil” to characterize their motivations
and actions in the first place.

Indirection, Antireductionism, and the Evasion of Epistemology

The descriptions of Claggart in Chapters 8, 10, 11, and 12 epitomize the
link between Melville’s naturalist view of motivation and his indirect nar-
rative technique.16 The narrators’ skeptical, self-questioning speculations
about Claggart’s motivations reflect Melville’s unwillingness to affirm
reductive conclusions that presume to represent what “really” happens
between Claggart and Billy. The narrator begins his psychological inves-
tigations with a skeptical examination of the evidence available to him.
Second, he supplements this skepticism with tentative speculations about
Claggart’s nature. At this point, he attempts to synthesize these speculations
with his preexisting assumptions about the laws of human nature. Third, he
subjects his new speculations to further skepticism. Finally, he appeals to
circumstance and settles upon a comparatively modest claim about Claggart
that cannot be reasonably doubted. But this modest claim still fails to resolve
 Naturalist Psychology in Billy Budd 219

his confusion about the source of Claggart’s intense antipathy toward Billy.
This narrative technique suggests that the sources of action cannot be
inferred with any degree of completeness or accuracy. Instead of striving
for epistemological certainty, the narrator’s speculations reflect his ongoing
attempt to understand energies that must always lie beyond his cognitive
grasp—in this case, vitality and depravity. This perpetually incomplete,
experimental pursuit of understanding resembles what Dewey would later
call “intelligence” in moral inquiry:

intelligence treats events as moving, as fraught with possibilities,

not as ended, final. In forecasting their possibilities, the distinction
between better and worse arises. Human desire and ability
cooperates with this or that natural force according as this or that
eventuality is judged better. We do not use the present to control
the future. We use the foresight of the future to refine and expand
present activity.17

Through a close analysis of the narrator’s attempts to understand Claggart’s

antipathy toward Billy, we can begin to see what this view of narrative tech-
nique as the “intelligent” analysis of action entails.
Before conjecturing anything specific about Claggart’s motivations, the
narrator acknowledges the impossibility of making his portrait correspond
with the man himself. He sidesteps this epistemological concern by admit-
ting that his descriptions cannot reproduce Claggart according to standards
of representational accuracy: “his portrait I essay, but shall never hit it” (BB
64). In addition, the contradictory rumors about Claggart’s past history make
the narrator’s efforts to pin him down even more difficult. Yet he offers the
following conjectures anyway. Like Billy and Vere, Claggart seems to come
from a noble background. He may, for example, be a chevalier “keeping incog”
(64). But such rumors are trivial historical by-paths, not significant enough to
interrupt the narrator’s more pressing inquiry into Claggart’s nature. In spite
of his doubts about achieving certainty, the narrator’s attempts to explain
Claggart affirm the importance of reaching some sort of understanding of
another person’s motivations. Since understanding cannot achieve the type
of certainty aimed at in the correspondence theory of knowledge, it needs a
different goal.
Setting aside the goal of representational accuracy, the narrator aims at
interpretive consistency. If his goal in “essaying” this portrait is a better un-
derstanding of human action, he can at least strive for an understanding that
is theoretically consistent with his preexisting assumptions about the laws of
action, i.e., its differing degrees and kinds of “virtue” and “vitality.” One in-
sight about Claggart’s nature can be gleaned from his overly enthusiastic zeal
220 Thomas Hove

in the role of master-at-arms. His enthusiasm on the job can be attributed

to a prudent conformity with “conventional” virtue. This insight, however, is
not consistent with Claggart’s behavior after the antipathy toward Billy pos-
sesses him. From that point on, Claggart’s behavior conforms less and less to
the narrator’s standards of conventional virtue. Instead of maintaining order,
Claggart sows chaos and destruction. This destructive impulse is hinted at in
the rumors that Claggart had been a criminal before his impressment, one
of those “drafts culled direct from the jails” (BB 66). A prudent historian,
the narrator points out that the people most likely to credit these shadowy
rumors are the sailors who fear and resent Claggart’s “official rattan” (65). But
he also admits that these rumors are partially supported by the definite, albeit
circumstantial, fact of Claggart’s impressment. At this point in his descrip-
tion, the narrator’s return to concrete fact indicates that he is not a radical
skeptic when it comes to understanding motivation. At the very least, this fact
sheds some light on the mystery of Claggart, for his having been impressed
lends plausibility to the vague impression of his criminality. But a contin-
gent circumstance like impressment does not fully explain the intensity of
Claggart’s perversity and “spontaneous” antipathy. Accordingly, the narrator
sets aside these reflections on circumstance and returns to speculations about
Claggart’s nature.
These metaphysical speculations further bear out the narrator’s doubts
about dualist notions of action. Strictly speaking, Claggart is not entirely evil,
and he certainly cannot be said to consciously “will” evil. He suffers from
natural depravity, but he also possesses impulses that could be called naturally
virtuous. Claggart’s “elemental evil” is simply a more powerful kind of en-
ergy than his relatively low degree of natural virtue. He can appreciate Billy’s
natural vitality (particularly when it expresses itself in Billy’s exuberance), but
he cannot emulate that vitality in his own actions. This is a naturalist way of
reading Claggart as “apprehending the good, but powerless to be it.” Most
tragically for Claggart, his natural depravity threatens to destroy him: “a na-
ture like Claggart’s, surcharged with energy as such natures almost invariably
are, what recourse is left to it but to recoil upon itself and, like the scorpion
for which the Creator alone is responsible, act out to the end the part allotted
it” (BB 78). If we evaluate Claggart from a naturalist-pragmatic rather than a
dualist-absolutist standpoint, what makes him tragic is not some inner con-
flict between a lesser spiritual good and a more powerful bodily evil. Instead,
his tragedy lies in a distribution of energies that threatens his physical and
psychological well-being, and in his unfortunate placement within a situa-
tion that brings forth these harmful energies. Like Billy, he is an organism
maladapted to a hostile environment. But what makes Claggart’s case of mal-
adaptation more dire is that this environment consists of not only his social
circumstances but his own body.
 Naturalist Psychology in Billy Budd 221

Claggart’s case shows Melville returning to the problem he and Haw-

thorne wrestled with in their earlier fiction—the dilemma of being pulled in
opposite directions by competing impulses that are equally compelling yet,
from a normative standpoint, seem qualitatively different. Melville’s early
works typically contrast the spiritually pure impulses of the “heart” with the
calculating interests of the “head.” But Melville’s idea of the heart in Billy
Budd differs from that earlier view of it as the seat of our better, higher, spiri-
tual natures. In his portraits of Claggart, Melville complicates this view by
suggesting that the heart can also be the source of depravity and malice—not
a unitary source of good but rather something heterogeneous in nature. This
different view of the heart corresponds with a naturalist theory of action, one
that does not postulate higher spiritual sources that motivate good action
from some divine chamber of the heart. In Claggart’s case, his heart seems to
consist of “natural depravity,” not because he is evil but because he has such a
small amount of the energy Melville labels “natural virtue.” Trying to account
for his apparent perversity, the narrator “invents” a reason or two to explain
Claggart’s antipathy toward Billy. As usual, his method of explanation is ten-
tative, and he tries not to founder in the “deadly space between” his own mind
and Claggart’s mind. Again, he suspects that the effort to represent Claggart’s
mind accurately will lead him into an epistemological bottomless pit. For this
reason, the task of understanding rather than representing Claggart “is best
done by indirection” (74).18
To understand Claggart’s antipathy, the narrator entertains two specu-
lations about its origins: the “romantic” theory and the “realistic” theory. Ac-
cording to the romantic theory, Claggart may have known Billy in a differ-
ent walk of life, and he may still harbor a grudge against him for some past
offense. But, plausible as this theory may be, the narrator immediately rules
it out because it supplies yet another trivial, circumstantial explanation that
does not satisfy him. Even though he knows he cannot achieve certainty, he
wants to base his understanding on available facts that he cannot reasonably
doubt.19 According to the “realistic” theory, Claggart feels his antipathy to-
ward Billy for the perverse reason that Billy is innocent: “For what can more
partake of the mysterious than an antipathy spontaneous and profound such
as is evoked in certain exceptional mortals by the mere aspect of some other
mortal, however harmless he may be, if not called forth by this very harm-
lessness itself?” (BB 74). Manifesting his antireductive habits of thinking, the
narrator claims that this theory is particularly realistic because it is charged
with “mysterious” elements similar to those in Gothic romance. Truth, he
suggests, must be stranger than “romance” because the truth never admits of
easy explanations—especially when the phenomenon in question is human
motivation. This conflation of mystery with psychological “fact” becomes the
primary ground for the narrator’s understanding of the interactions between
222 Thomas Hove

Billy and Claggart. This understanding has no firm basis in historical evi-
dence, but it does an adequate job of satisfying the narrator’s expectations of
psychological consistency.

Forms of Self-Control
One important element to add to this portrait of Claggart is the psychologi-
cal capacity of self-control. In keeping with the novel’s anti-representational
approach, “self-control” does not refer to some discrete capacity actually
existing in the mind. Instead, the narrator treats it as yet another energy
competing with, but ontologically similar to, other physiological energies
like vitality, exuberance, and depravity. In contrast to Billy and Claggart,
Captain Vere has a highly developed capacity for self-control. Although he
too is susceptible to involuntary impulses, he can exercise the restraint char-
acteristic of “conventional” virtue more successfully: “At the presentation to
him then of some minor matter interrupting the current of his thoughts, he
would show more or less irascibility; but instantly he would control it” (BB
61). Even in his descriptions of Vere, the narrator subordinates thought to
action: self-conscious control comes only after an act has begun. For exam-
ple, when Claggart approaches Vere to insinuate Billy’s mutinous intentions,
“a peculiar expression” produced by a “vaguely repellent distaste” comes over
Vere’s face as soon as he senses Claggart’s presence (91). Even though Vere
momentarily succumbs to this impulse, he is able to control it as soon as
he becomes conscious of its outward manifestation. Incidents such as this
demonstrate that Vere does not essentially differ from Billy or Claggart, for
his “nature” is equally driven by involuntary impulse. With respect to self-
control, Vere’s nature differs from theirs only in his greater ability to restrain
the expression of impulse. (Vere’s exclamation “Struck dead by an angel of
God! Yet the angel must hang!” [101] is a notable exception.) Furthermore,
Vere’s restraint is not the instantaneous exertion of some special mental
faculty but rather the cumulative consequence of habits instilled by military
training and social conditioning.
While Claggart shares Vere’s ability to maintain a socially respectable
exterior, his self-control arises from a different source and performs a differ-
ent function. To distinguish Claggart’s self-control from Vere’s, the narrator
describes it as arising not from a concern for military decorum but rather
from his depravity’s self-preservational need to conceal itself. Both forms of
self-control are the by-products of unconscious habit. But while Vere’s habit
is the product of military training, Claggart’s is the product of his depravity’s
struggle for survival. As the narrator points out, “An uncommon prudence
is habitual with the subtler depravity, for it has everything to hide” (BB 80).
Claggart’s depravity acts like a hostile parasite, and its self-protective pru-
dence merely conceals the destructive energies that consume its unfortunate
 Naturalist Psychology in Billy Budd 223

human host. The most vivid contrast between Claggart’s and Vere’s forms
of self-control appears in Claggart’s reactions to Billy. In contrast to Vere’s
relatively strong self-control, Claggart’s cannot fully master the antipathy he
feels whenever he encounters Billy. Most significantly, in the pivotal soup-
spilling incident, once Claggart notices it was Billy who spilled the soup, his
antipathy betrays itself in an “involuntary smile, or rather grimace.” Although
Claggart soon tames this outward manifestation, his tardy self-control fails to
maintain concealment:

Meantime [Claggart], resuming his path, must have momentarily

worn some expression less guarded than that of the bitter smile,
usurping the face from the heart—some distorting expression
perhaps, for a drummer-boy heedlessly frolicking along from the
opposite direction and chancing to come into light collision with
his person was strangely disconcerted by his aspect. (72–73)

As this incident illustrates, Claggart’s body acts before he is even conscious

of its doing so. His unguarded expression “usurps the face from the heart,”
and his habits of self-control kick in too late to stop this socially inappropri-
ate betrayal of depravity.
In this and similar instances, most notably Billy’s fatal blow to Claggart’s
forehead, the narrator questions the role of conscious, deliberate thought in
theories of action. His point, however, is not to affirm fatalism but rather
to achieve a coherent understanding of action that might serve as a tool for
the intelligent channeling and regulation of energies. In rejecting both dual-
ism and deterministic materialism, Melville does not fall back on traditional
moral absolutism. Instead, he fashions a contrastive ranking of energies that
takes account of determinism but allows for the possibility of ethical judg-
ment. As William James proposed around the time Melville was writing Billy
Budd, “The physiological study of mental conditions is the most powerful ally
of hortatory ethics.”20 Melville’s attitude toward Claggart’s depravity is obvi-
ous enough: he sees it as utterly harmful and self-destructive. But since he
also understands it as something beyond Claggart’s control, he avoids moral-
istically portraying Claggart as an “evil” person. Instead, his characterizations
attempt to naturalize ethics by basing moral judgments on the appropriate
expression of human energies in particular situations.
In its portrayals of motivation as both unknowable and heterogeneous,
Melville’s narrative technique attempts to get around the impasses that dual-
ist frameworks of moral evaluation run up against. Such frameworks rely on
the possibility of epistemological certainty, whether the object of that cer-
tainty is an identifiably pure or corrupt motivation, or a projected outcome
that a particular action is intended to produce in a direct cause-effect relation.
224 Thomas Hove

But in spite of the uncertainties that surround ethical judgment in Billy Budd,
and contrary to the tone of even deconstructionist readings, the novel insists
that uncertainty does not render efforts to understand motivation and ac-
tion pointless. To be sure, Melville shows how uncertainty complicates moral
evaluation, and how it can contribute to tragic outcomes like Claggart’s and
Billy’s deaths. But the indirect narrative technique in Billy Budd suggests that
moral judgments need not depend on the cognitive ideal of representational
accuracy that dualist normative frameworks aim at. New avenues for assess-
ing the theoretical and cultural backgrounds and implications of Billy Budd
might be opened up by further internal and contextual examinations of Mel-
ville’s late works in relation to post-Darwinian theories of action.21 We still
have much to mine from Melville’s ambiguities, and naturalist approaches to
psychology and the theory of action might allow us to get beyond the con-
ceptual and normative impasses those ambiguities expose.

No t e s

1. For a broad philosophical discussion of this crisis of Victorian ethics, see

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989),
393–418.
2. Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford,
Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern
University Press and The Newberry Library, 1971), 107.
3. For a different account of Melville’s turn to naturalism, see Milton R.
Stern, The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville (1957; Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1968).
4. Christian and anti-Christian readings of the novel abound, but a recent,
well-known Marxist reading is Brook Thomas. “Billy Budd and the Judgment of
Silence” in Literature and Ideology, ed. Harry R. Garvin. (Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 1982), 51–78.
5. A recent, succinct summary of the traditions of critical response to Billy Budd
appears in Lee Yearle; “Heroic Virtue in America: Aristotle, Aquinas, and Melville’s
Billy Budd,” in The Greeks and Us: Essays in Honor of Arthur W. H. Adkins, ed. Robert
B. Louden and Paul Schollmeier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 70–73.
Yearley lists five typical ways of reading the narrative, and his classifications rely heavily
on the 1962 overview of scholarship in the “Perspectives for Criticism” section of the
Hayford-Seahs edition. For other useful overviews, see Introduction to Critical Essays
on Melville’s “Billy Budd, Sailor,” ed. Robert Milder (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989), 1–21;
and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., “Innocence and Infamy: Billy Budd, Sailor” in A Companion
to Melville Studies, ed. John Bryant (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 421–424.
6. Hawthorne himself shows signs of abandoning this assumption by the time
he became a full-fledged novelist, for example in the final chapters of The Scarlet
Letter (1850) that emphasize the various passions, impulses, tastes, and habits of
Hester and Dimmesdale rather than their obedience to so-called higher principles.
 Naturalist Psychology in Billy Budd 225

  7. The most ambitious recent attempt to establish new grounds for normative
justification is the work of Jurgen Habermas, especially The Theory of Communicative
Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (1981; Boston: Beacon Press, 1984; 1987).
  8. For a philosophical history and critique of this correspondence theory
of knowledge, see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1979).
  9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rudiger Bitmer,
trans. Kate Sturge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Notebook 11
[83], 214.
10. Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative, ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton M.
Sealts, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 128. Hereafter cited as BB.
11. Barbara Johnson, “Melville’s Fist” in The Critical Difference (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 92.
12. For a sophisticated materialist reading that assesses these energies
according to a metaphysical schema Melville would have encountered in the work
of Balzac, see Leon Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 210–241.
13. John Dewey, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” in The Philosophy of
John Dewey, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 142.
On the historical and cultural background of this essay, see Robert B. Westbrook, John
Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 65–71.
14. For a different but insightful treatment of absolute morality in Billy Budd,
see Wendell Glick, “Expediency and Absolute Morality in Billy Budd,” PMLA
68 (March 1953): 103–110. Glick argues that Billy represents absolute morality
and therefore cannot survive in a political system based on “social expediency”
(103–104). This is similar to the brief comments on Billy Budd in Hannah Arendt’s
On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), pp. 83–88. Both accounts, however,
accept the traditional dualist distinction between absolute morality on one hand and
worldly expediency (Glick) or politics (Arendt) on the other.
15. Robert Milder, “Old Man Melville: The Rose and the Cross,” in New
Essays on Billy Budd, ed. Donald Yannella (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 100.
16. For the compositional genesis of this indirect narrative technique, as well as
its philosophical and interpretive implications, see John Wenke, “Melville’s Indirection:
Billy Budd, the Genetic Text, and the ‘Deadly Space Between’” in New Essays on Billy
Budd, ed. Donald Yannella (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 114–144.
17. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (1922), in The Middle Works,
1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1988), 215.
18. Also see Johnson’s and Wenke’s treatments of the process of indirection.
19. This method of inquiry resembles the “scientific” method famously defined
in C. S. Peirce’s essay of 1877 “The Fixation of Belief ” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1,
ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1992), 109–123.
20. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt,
1890), 128.
21. For a brief but wide-ranging sociological overview of theories of action
since the Victorian era, see Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, “What Is Agency?”
American Journal of Sociology 103 (January 1998): 962–1023.
 C indy W einstein

We Are Family:
Melville’s Pierre

D espite the fact that, today, Melville’s reputation and readership is

greater than those of Caroline Lee Hentz’s or Mary Jane Holmes’s, two
very popular antebellum writers, and despite Pierre’s harangues against “the
countless tribes of common novels,” Pierre was (and is) desperate to be one
of them.1 On the most practical level, Melville wanted to write a popu-
lar novel that would make money. On a more theoretical level, “common
novels” begin with absent parents who leave their children alone, a condi-
tion to which Pierre aspires. Although the separation between parents and
children is painful and often inexplicable—why can’t Ellen Montgomery
in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World go with her mother and father?
What takes Gerty’s father in Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter so
long to find her?—these young girls become women. They develop precisely
because they have been freed from their biological parents. Gerty and Ellen
grow, they learn, they live. If we can use Pierre as counter-factual evidence,
we find that Pierre shrivels up, deludes himself into thinking he’s learned
something about “the all-comprehending round of things” (NN Pierre 111),
and dies. Why the difference?
One decisive reason is that the plots of many sentimental novels
depend upon their protagonists’ ability to create new affections based on
choice, allowing the scope of the novel to extend beyond the limitations of

Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, Volume 7, Number 1 (2005): pp. 19–40. Copyright
© 2005 Melville Society.

227
228 Cindy Weinstein

consanguinity. By contrast, Pierre tries and fails to generate voluntary rela-

tions, painfully constricting the novel to a world of “blood relation” (NN Pierre
218). For some critics, Pierre’s inability to be a sentimental novel registers
Melville’s own success as an author of novels not plagued by the ideological
and characterological problems of sentimental fictions, undoubtedly a con-
clusion Melville would have been happy to embrace. But Melville’s relation to
sentimental novels is more complicated than this scenario suggests. One look
at the novel and its critical reception reveals that there is enough evidence to
prove that Pierre is as much a sentimental novel as it is not, and both posi-
tions are, paradoxically, correct. Because Pierre is neither a sentimental novel
nor an anti-sentimental novel, and yet both, I would like to approach the text
from a slightly different vantage point to argue that the story Pierre offers us
is a pre-history of the sentimental novel. Pierre is the story that takes place
before most sentimental novels begin, and this pre-condition helps to explain
not only why a sentimental protagonist like Gerty might be happier not being
enmeshed in a biological family but also the necessity of the family’s absence.
At Pierre’s end, there is no alternative to the family; there is no Gerty-figure
with which to start. Pierre, Isabel, and Lucy are dead, taking with them the
nightmare of consanguinity, which is the nightmare of Pierre. Pierre conducts
an archeology of the sentimental novel; it lays bare the novel’s foundations,
and in the process, destroys it. But Why?2
All of the children in Pierre seek to embrace an ideal of choice only to
find that biology, indeed incest, awaits them. The novel thus begins to attack
itself because the only available choices are negations of relation. But even
the negations become attestations of consanguinity. Children choose not to
have parents, and parents choose to disown children, thus setting the stage
for a reconstitution of family based on choice, but the “unimpairable blood-
relation” (NN Pierre 224) survives. This survival kills Pierre, the character and
the novel. Unlike Ellen’s or Gerty’s recovery, Pierre’s is not from the loss of
parental relation, but a failed recovery from never having lost them. From
Pierre’s point of view, most sentimental protagonists are in the enviable posi-
tion of having lost their parents. They begin (or quickly become) free from
parental ties, whereas Pierre must divest himself of all “kith and kin” (89).
They get to choose new parental figures, whereas Pierre can only disown his.
Pierre’s story is one where mothers refuse to go away and die, where fathers
won’t leave town, even though they are dead. Pierre/Pierre cannot get started
because he will not be orphaned, left alone, forced to choose a new, unrelated
family. All that remains for him to do is destroy the consanguineous bonds
that destroy him. If Ellen thinks that reunification with her mother is her ut-
most desire, Pierre reveals it to be the child’s worst nightmare. What is most
outrageous about Pierre is its utter assault on the parent/child relation, and
 We Are Family 229

the novel’s (not so) underlying contention that a dead or disowned parent is
better than any parent at all.
Pierre reveals Melville’s understanding of the radical origins of senti-
mental novels, which is to say that without the biological family in shards,
such novels cannot work, and as much as protagonists mourn the family’s
wreckage, their very lives depend upon it. Sentimental novels cannot ex-
ist without this destructive donnee; that donnee is itself Pierre’s story, but
paradoxically, Melville’s novel can barely exist with it. As a text bent on its
own self-destruction, Pierre admirably succeeds. This essay explores how it
succeeds: I begin with Pierre’s experimentalism, in which repetition is the
constitutive though self-canceling principle, and conclude with its social
experimentalism, which makes chosen affection the foundational, though
unrealizable, principle of the family. Chosen love in the world of Pierre is
impossible because virtually everyone in Pierre is related to everyone else;
all attempts to get outside of consanguinity only reproduce it.

“And but beginningly as it were”

Pierre can barely begin, or, more precisely, it begins again and again. There is
the novel’s bizarre opening, the story of Isabel’s origins, the history of Pierre’s
friendship with his cousin, Glendinning Stanley, the account of Pierre’s author-
ship, and Plinlimmon’s pamphlet. Both the plot and language of Pierre can be
said to begin only “as it were,” as it strives to conjoin the narrative continuity
of the word “and” with the narrative suspension of the word “but.” The begin-
nings of the novel promise the start of a narrative, which is then blocked.3
Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book captures the novel’s negative reception, and
goes a step further in “imitation of [Melville]’s style”: “in the insignificant sig-
nificances of that deftly-stealing and wonderfully-serpentining melodiousness,
we have found an infinite, unbounded, inexpressible mysteriousness of noth-
ingness” (NN Pierre 313). If some antebellum reviewers responded to Melville’s
“long brain-muddling, soul-bewildering ambiguity” (308) by parodying it,
more recent critics, such as Eric Sundquist, have focused on the significance
of parody itself: “no one can fail to be struck by Pierre’s insanely pastoralized
opening.”4 This insane opening situates Pierre and Pierre in a temporal zone
which immobilizes both novel and character: characters “suppose it is after-
noon” because time is never certain; they “swiftly pause,” and they are “stilly”
(NN Pierre 3, 25, 60, 178).
Time is on the narrator’s mind in Pierre’s first chapter, as he remarks
upon the strange resemblance between Mrs. Glendinning and Pierre, sug-
gesting that “the mother seemed to have long stood still in her beauty,” while
the son “almost advanced himself to that mature stand-point in Time” (NN
Pierre 5). Time is at a stand point in Saddle Meadows, where “Not a flower
stirs; the trees forget to wave; the grass itself seems to have ceased to grow”
230 Cindy Weinstein

(3) as virtually everything exists in a “half-unconscious” state. Although the

narrator meditates upon these oddities of time, his narrative is not immune to
them. The degree to which Pierre’s language stalls, gets obstructed, and repeats
itself suggests that the “trance-like aspect” of Saddle Meadows is something
with which virtually every character, including the narrator, must contend.
Words pile up without accreting meaning and prose has difficulty getting
out of its own way. We read the dialogue and inner thoughts of characters
who use the same words over and over again, such as Lucy’s initial greet-
ing to Pierre, “‘Pierre;—bright Pierre!—Pierre!’” (4), or Mrs. Glendinning’s
soliloquy in which she refers to the docility of Pierre and Lucy no less than
eight times in one paragraph. The characters’ penchant (or compulsion) for
repetition is also reflected in the narrative voice. The narrator refers to Pierre’s
grandfather as “grand old Pierre” five times in a single paragraph, repeating the
name and its epithets as if “he” were an insufficient mode of designation: “‘I keep
Christmas with my horses,’ said grand old Pierre. This grand ole Pierre always
rose at sunrise” (30). Such verbal excess (pleonasm) signals not only the grandi-
osity of Pierre’s grandfather but Pierre’s diminishment. The more room taken up
by the grandfather—on the page, in the psyche, in Saddle Meadows—the less
room for Pierre. Words and their variants are repeated, such as “descended” (7, 9,
17) “endless descendedness” (9), “blood-descent” (10), “far-descended” (11), “de-
scending” (12), and “double-revolutionary descent” (20), or the title of Book IX,
“More Light, and the Gloom of That Light. More Gloom, and the Light of That
Gloom” (165). The words that are Pierre act like the novel’s characters, incapable
of doing much more than repeating, mirroring, or descending from themselves.
Just as individual words get in each other’s way, so too the narrative
of Pierre is constantly bumping into itself. The narrator repeats descriptions,
ideas, and passages while calling attention to those repetitions, and has dif-
ficulty restraining its foreshadowing, as if his narrative can only either cir-
cle around itself or lurch forward, unable to find a stable, temporal rhythm
through which to tell its story. As early as section three of the opening chapter,
the narrator repeats himself, “it has been said that the beautiful country round
about Pierre appealed to very proud memories” (NN Pierre 8). At the start of
section four, he asserts, “we poetically establish the richly aristocratic condi-
tion of Master Pierre Glendinning, for whom we have before claimed some
special family distinction” (12). He then alludes to Pierre’s grandfather as “the
same grandfather several times herein-before mentioned” (13) and concludes
the section with a phrase from its second paragraph, “we shall yet see again, I
say, whether Fate hath not just a little bit of a word or two to say in this world”
(14). The narrative is made up of obstructions to itself, as evidenced in this
quotation from section four: “In conclusion, do not blame me if I here make
repetition, and do verbally quote my own words in saying that it had been the
choice fate of Pierre to have been born and bred in the country” (13). This
 We Are Family 231

passage offers itself as a conclusion—as if the narrative has progressed from

point A to point B—when the passage is, in fact, a citation from section two,
a kind of self-quotation indicating that the narrative has circled back upon
itself. But the narrator is not hiding that fact, because this “conclusion” refers
to its status as a moment in an earlier part of the text. The sentence acknowl-
edges itself as an act of tautology, or citationality, through italics and with the
phrase, “do verbally quote my own words in saying.” The sentence is a conclu-
sion only insofar as it occurs last in a series of repetitions. To put the point a
bit differently, the conclusion and the origin are distinguishable not because
of some substantive difference between them, but because of a temporal one.
The conclusion is the origin repeated a bit later.5
The opening chapter even has trouble maintaining this temporal dis-
tinction, as the narrator seems unable to tell the origins of Pierre/Pierre with-
out giving away his/its ending. The constant use of foreshadowing supplies
another indication of the bizarre rhythms of life in Saddle Meadows—time
grinds to a halt, repeats itself in a discursive stutter, lurches ahead—as well as
the narrative that represents that life. The foreshadowing begins right away,
as in this example where the narrator describes Pierre’s “romantic filial” love
for his mother: “but as yet the fair river had not borne its waves to those side-
ways repelling rocks, where it was thenceforth destined to be forever divided
into two unmixing streams” (NN Pierre 5). Almost every paragraph ends in a
similar fashion: “Pierre glide[d] toward maturity, thoughtless of that period
of remorseless insight, when all these delicate warmths should seem frigid to
him, and he should madly demand more ardent fires”.6 This is foreshadowing
taken to such an extreme so as to become a mockery of itself. The fictional
device meant to hint at the text’s future ends up competing with the narra-
tion of the text’s present tense and divulging its outcome: “Now Pierre stands
on this noble pedestal; we shall see if he keeps that fine footing” (12). The
foreshadowing accretes so intensely, so quickly, that one cannot help but
conclude that the narrator is either having an ordinate amount of difficul-
ty restraining himself from disclosing Pierre’s misfortunes or, more likely
given the narrator’s hostility toward his main character, has no interest in
self-restraint. Either way, the results are the same; Pierre barely begins and
it is over, and both happen at virtually the same time.

“But not thus . . . yet so like”

Melville’s novel self-destructs in a variety of ways—language coagulates,
plots unravel, and characters die—so as to insure the impossibility of family
reunification. The specific goal is the disintegration of anything remotely
representing a family, including not only the bonds of consanguinity and
the relations that are entered into by choice, but even the words on the page.
The novel’s experimental language not only calls attention to the fact that
232 Cindy Weinstein

words have roots from which variations descend as in a philological family

tree but exemplifies how those roots entangle, even strangle, the production
of new words which cannot escape their “hereditary syllables” (NN Pierre
287). Pierre is laced with passages such as “in the minutest moment momen-
tous things are irrevocably done” (83) or “not that at present all these things
did thus present themselves to Pierre” (106), or Isabel’s farm-house with “its
ancient roof a bed of brightest mosses; its north front (from the north the
moss-wind blows), also moss-incrusted” (110). The words, like the charac-
ters, are related, which is tantamount to a death sentence in Pierre.
The logic and language of the biological family finds its way into the
very fabric of the narrative as kinship provides an especially powerful and cor-
rosive discourse through which the narrator describes his characters’ thoughts
as well as his own. In “Retrospective,” the narrator says this about Pierre’s
memory of his father’s death-bed words, “‘My daughter! my daughter! . . .
God! God!’”: “into Pierre’s awe-stricken, childish soul, there entered a kin-
dred, though still more nebulous conceit” (NN Pierre 71). At the very moment
that the text begins to engage the issue of Isabel’s paternity and potential
biological relation with Pierre, the word “kindred” appears as if to settle the
question. Later, when Pierre jealously meditates upon Lucy’s alleged affection
for his cousin, Glendinning Stanley, the narrator again uses the language of
kinship not only to describe the content of Pierre’s thoughts, which seems
logical enough given the subject matter under consideration, but the very way
they come into being: “Many commingled emotions combined to provoke
this storm. But chief of all was something strangely akin to that indefinable
detestation which one feels for any imposter who has dared to assume one’s
own name and aspect in any equivocal or dishonorable affair; an emotion
greatly intensified if this impostor . . . be almost the personal duplicate of the
man whose identity he assumes” (289). The narrator painstakingly charts the
mental development of Pierre’s outraged sense that an act of substitution has
taken place whereby the cousins’ “peculiar family resemblance” (288) has fos-
tered a willingness on Lucy’s part to accept Glen, Pierre’s “kinsman” (289), as
her paramour, and had made Glen “almost seem Pierre himself—what Pierre
had once been to Lucy.”
These reflections on Glen’s “blood propinquity” illustrate how Pierre
experiences kinship as the annihilation of his identity. To “possess a strong
related similitude” (NN Pierre 288) to someone else is the first step towards
death, which is why the language of Pierre is, quite literally, so defensive-
ly and aggressively self-referential—“self-same” (34–35), “self-willed” (41,
199), “in me myself ” (65), “self-suggested” (178, 316), “in himself absolutely”
(244), “self-supposed” (294)—as if the self could remain safe only by being
unrelated to anything but itself, by being its only point of reference. This
“self-conceit” (136) is a dreadful miscalculation for the simple reason that
 We Are Family 233

people do exist in relation to each other and for the more complex reason that
as soon as they try to cut off those relations, to “own no earthly kith or kin”
(89), they, hydra-like, multiply. It is only a matter of time until Pierre divides
in order to establish a principle of relation, even if it is only to himself. “He
himself ” (63, 173) becomes “he himself, as it were” (289) or “the seeming
semblance of himself ” (289). Pierre’s attempt to “spurn and rend all mortal
bonds” (106) only necessitates that a new site of “correlativeness” (85) be pro-
duced, and that is, of course, his self.
The final point to make about the passage is its use of the term “akin”
to characterize Pierre’s meditations. As in the first example, where the word
“kindred” describes the thought process at the same time as it insinuates the
reality of Isabel’s sisterly claims, here Pierre’s fantasies of Lucy’s alleged inca-
pacity to distinguish between him and Glen are written so as to confirm that
lack of distinction. Pierre’s thoughts, then, are akin to an analogy produced by
the narrator, which means that the experience of losing himself to Glen gets
reproduced in Pierre’s relation to the narrator. As critics have observed, the
narrator wildly vacillates between cudgeling Pierre for his naivete and sym-
pathizing with his pain. Sometimes the distance between them is clear; more
often, it is not. What makes this relationship so hard to untangle is that in
exploring a young man’s attempt to make himself by unmaking his relations
with others, the narrator uses the language of kinship to describe the process;
and this use of kinship language has the effect of undoing Pierre’s attempts
to strike out on his own; it recreates a family drama in the narrator’s relation
with Pierre. Here, the narrator reflects upon Pierre’s feelings about Lucy’s
“unearthly evanescence” by positing a set of possibilities not considered by
Pierre: “Not into young Pierre’s heart did there then come the thought, that
as the glory of the rose endures but for a day, so the full bloom of girlish airi-
ness and bewitchingness, passes from the earth almost as soon” (58). The nar-
rator establishes this analogy as his and not Pierre’s, but the distance between
them collapses. “Pierre’s thought was different from this, and yet somehow
akin to it” (58).6
Moments like this, in which difference is asserted only to be absorbed
by what in another context is called “catching likenesses” (NN Pierre 330),
pervade the text: “But not thus, altogether, was it now with Pierre; yet so like,
in some points, that the above true warning may not misplacedly stand” (70);
and of Pierre’s father, Isabel says, “His face was wonderful to me. Something
strangely like it, and yet again unlike it, I had seen before . . . But one day,
looking into the smooth water behind the house, there I saw the likeness—
something strangely like, and yet unlike, the likeness of his face” (124). No
one, including the narrator, is capable of sustaining the difference between
difference and similitude. The recognition of difference, which often is reg-
istered through the use of analogies, dissipates so as to validate the primacy
234 Cindy Weinstein

of “unmistakeable likeness” (351).7 Analogies in Pierre work (or do not) like

foreshadowing. They are undone by their inability to withstand the pressure
of the difference upon which they are found. If foreshadowing implies tem-
poral disjunction in the act of bringing the future into the present, in Pierre
the effect of introducing the future is the destruction of the past. Similarly, if
analogies imply likeness on the conceptual level even as they are founded on
conceptual difference, here the effect of introducing similarity is the evacua-
tion of difference. Both devices operate dysfunctionally and, in doing so, assist
in the demise of the biological family.
The narrator thwarts Pierre’s attempts to find a haven from the heart-
less world of family by linguistically arresting him in the discourse of kinship.
But it seems perfectly logical in this novel of ubiquitous consanguinity that
the narrator gets caught, too. He cannot withstand the perverse principle of
“related love” (NN Pierre 189) that governs Pierre, and even though phrases
such as, “but ignorant of these further insights” (60) or “so at least he thought”
(93), work to accentuate the difference between his knowledge and Pierre’s,
the fact is that they arrive at the same temporal and conceptual place. This
is registered by the prolonged use of the present tense in later sections of
the novel and by the fact that, whereas early in the novel the narrator could
confidently point to Pierre’s “ignorance at this time of the ideas concerning
the reciprocity and partnership of Folly and Sense” (167), by the novel’s end
“Pierre saw the everlasting elusiveness of Truth; the universal lurking insin-
cerity of even the greatest and purest written thoughts” (339). Like Pierre and
his mother, like Pierre and Isabel, like Pierre and Lucy, Pierre and the narra-
tor merge. They must because this is the inevitable consequence of relations
in this novel.
Which is why Pierre has to be an author. Although critics have ques-
tioned the plausibility of Pierre’s writerly disposition, the logic of “linked
correspondence” (NN Pierre 36) makes it impossible for him to be anything
else.8 The narrator, however, does anticipate the reader’s potential surprise
upon learning of Pierre’s authorial aspirations in a passage which features just
about every peculiarity of the novel’s narrative voice: “in the earlier chapters
of this volume, it has somewhere been passingly intimated, that Pierre was
not only a reader of the poets and other fine writers, but likewise—and what
is a very different thing from the other—a thorough allegorical understander
of them, a profound emotional sympathizer with them” (244). The narrator
alludes to an earlier section of the novel; he deploys the terms “likewise” and
“different,” as if they did not contradict each other, and he (likewise) com-
bines “but” with “and,” as if those conjunctions operated similarly.
In the opening of Book XVII, “Young America in Literature,” the nar-
rator offers a statement about his own method of writing. The desire to re-
nounce the psychic pressure of kinship, even as it provides the very terms of
 We Are Family 235

that renunciation, binds narrator and protagonist: “Among the various con-
flicting modes of writing history, there would seem to be two grand practical
distinctions. . . . By the one mode, all contemporaneous circumstances, facts,
and events must be set down contemporaneously; by the other, they are only
to be set down as the general stream of the narrative shall dictate; for matters
which are kindred in time, may be very irrelative in themselves. I elect neither
of these; I am careless of either; both are well enough in their way; I write
precisely as I please” (NN Pierre 244). Time is very much on the narrator’s
mind, especially how his narrative intentionally scorns “various conflicting
modes” of writing, which he separates into two narrative categories. The first
narrates events synchronically, the second diachronically. With much bravado,
the narrator refuses both, electing instead the “careless” mode. Such careless-
ness, however, is the only narrative mode that the story permits. To write “con-
temporaneously . . . [or] as the general stream of the narrative shall dictate” is
to be capable of sustaining the difference between events that happen at the
same time and those that do not. Not only is the narrator telling a story about
the inability to keep those differences intact, as the first chapter of Pierre so
insistently demonstrates, but the narrator is losing that ability as well.
When Pierre becomes an author, the reader begins to sense that the nar-
rator is falling victim to “this age-neutralizing Pierre” (NN Pierre 264), as if
the neutralization which the narrator had earlier parodied is now neutralizing
him. “I write precisely as I please” might be read as the narrator’s attempt to
declare his independence from conventional modes of writing and from writ-
ers, such as Pierre, just as the text is about to plunge both narrator and Pierre
into one of its most profound “entanglements” (191). As critics have pointed
out, it is often difficult to distinguish between Pierre’s tortured book and
Pierre, the book we are reading. The narrator writes: “It is impossible to talk or
to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open; the Invulner-
able Knight wears his visor down” (259). Ironically, the narrator’s assertion of
an independent writing style could just as easily be Pierre’s, who writes “care-
less” sentences such as “Now I drop all humorous or indifferent disguises, and
all philosophical pretensions. . . . Away, ye chattering apes of a sophomorean
Spinoza and Plato, who once didst all but delude me that the night was day,
and pain only a tickle” (302). It is no surprise when Book XVIII, “Pierre, as a
Juvenile Author,” hurls us back to the beginning: “It is true, as I long before
said, that Nature at Saddle Meadows had very early been as a benediction
to Pierre” (257). We have begun again, only now the strangulating effects of
Saddle Meadows’ temporality and its regime of “mutual reflections” (4) have
caught up with the narrator as “the ineffable correlativeness” (85) of relation-
ships in the novel comes closer to home.9
Thus, Pierre’s authorial identity is doing to the narrator what Pierre’s
fictitious marriage to Isabel does to Pierre; to “eternally entangle him in a
236 Cindy Weinstein

fictitious alliance which though in reality but a web of air yet in effect would
prove a wall of iron” (NN Pierre 175). Like Pierre, who “most carefully and
most tenderly egg[s]” Isabel (189), the narrator “preambillically examines
[Pierre] a little further” (260). As so often happens with words in the novel,
the narrator’s “preamble” (260) has become “preambillical”; instead of matur-
ing as the narrative progresses, Pierre is becoming “a little toddler” (296), a
“baby toddler” (305) who is preumbillicaly (a pun Melville must have found
irresistible) connected to the narrator. Just when Pierre imagines himself to
“be not only his own Alpha and Omega, but to be distinctly all the inter-
mediate gradations” (261), the narrator turns Pierre into an utter depen-
dent, discursively producing a parental relation between himself and Pierre.
Throughout, the narrator has tried to keep himself separate from these corre-
lations by adopting a weirdly aggressive stance toward his protagonist, which
now becomes all the more important to maintain as the distinctions between
them threaten to dissolve. He derides Pierre’s youthful compositions as “the
veriest common-place” (257), and even when he applauds Pierre’s efforts to
write “his deep book” (305), he keeps his temporal and experiential distance
by revealing the gap between his knowledge about the writing process and
the “young” (244) Pierre’s “immature” (282) and “juvenile” (257) attempts.
“While Pierre was thinking that he was entirely transplanted into a new and
wonderful element of Beauty and Power, he was, in fact, but in one of the
stages of the transition” (283). Or, “yet now, forsooth, because Pierre began to
see through the first superficiality of the world, he fondly weens he has come
to the unlayered substance” (285). Foreshadowing like this is familiar, but
here the foreshadowing has everything to do with the status of the narrator
vis a vis Pierre, rather than, say, the impending demise of Pierre and Lucy’s
relationship or the potential appearance of a sister for Pierre.
In what might be the text’s definitive paradox, the narrator tries to sepa-
rate himself from Pierre through the language of relatedness. The method-
ological statement with which Book XVII begins reveals that Pierre’s di-
lemma is the narrator’s: “for matters which are kindred in time, may be very
irrelative in themselves” (NN Pierre 244). Yes, events that take place at the
same time may be not be related, “may be very irrelative,” but the fact is that
something is always “kindred,” at least temporally. This concession speaks
volumes, both because the narrator is preoccupied with the breakdown and
stabilization of discrete temporal frames and because his desire to maintain
a theory of “irrelativity” is voiced in the language of kinship. The conceptu-
alization of the narrative method of Pierre assumes the verbal lineaments of
family. And because all things akin in Pierre must die (and because all things
must become akin), the loathing and aggression that once was directed so
clearly at the “pellucid and merry romance” (305) of sentimental fiction, now
turns inward, as Pierre loathes and destroys itself.10
 We Are Family 237

“I love my kind”
Early in the novel, Lucy is reunited with her brothers. Her exclamation,
“my darling brothers!” is reiterated and extended by Pierre’s, “my darling
brothers and sister!” (NN Pierre 29). In the verbal act of translating his
potential brothers-in-law into brothers, Pierre cannot maintain an exoga-
mous connection with Lucy. In a world where even horses “were a sort of
family cousins to Pierre” (21), Pierre cannot love someone to whom he is not
related. Thus, when Isabel appears and declares herself his sister, he must
believe her because he loves her; his capacity for loving her depends upon his
ability to identify his feelings as signs of “our related love” (189). All love,
like all language, is related. Thus, Lucy and Pierre’s initial encounter, as
well as the narrator’s description of it, is a virtuoso mirroring performance
of emotions and words: “As heart rings to heart those voices rang . . . the
two stood silently but ardently eying each other, beholding mutual reflec-
tions of a boundless admiration and love” (4). The “mutual reflections” of
the characters reflect themselves in the repetition of words. “With Lucy’s
hand in his, and feeling, softly feeling of its soft tinglingness; he seemed
as one placed in linked correspondence with the summer lightnings; and
by sweet shock on shock, receiving intimating foretastes of the etherealest
delights of earth” (36). Like those “mutual reflections,” Pierre’s experience of
“linked correspondence” is registered in the narrator’s description, as words
and their sounds reverberate. No wonder he wants to “spurn and rend all
mortal bonds” (106).
Pierre’s attempted destruction of family ties—“cast-out Pierre hath no
paternity”—perhaps leaves him “free to do his own self-will” (NN Pierre 199).
But “his own self-will,” surely a desperate description of self-sufficiency that
marks its own insufficiency, nonetheless wills itself a family in the form of
Isabel, Delly, and eventually Lucy. In fact, when Lucy writes to Pierre in New
York, requesting “to re-tie myself to thee” (309), Pierre not only accepts her
“angelical” (311) offer without hesitation, but embraces her suggestion that
there may be “some indirect cousinship” (311) between them. His decision
to “spurn and rend all mortal bonds” leaves him pleasantly vulnerable, if not
more willing than ever to be bound.
That Pierre’s bond of choice is an incestuous relationship with his (pos-
sibly) half-sister gave antebellum readers pause. To make matters even more
bizarre, Pierre insists on protecting his mother from the hypothetical knowl-
edge of her husband’s pre-marital sexual transgression by announcing that
Isabel is his wife; that is, not his sister. In their more benign moments, Mel-
ville’s reviewers were puzzled; in their more aggressive moments, they were
outraged. Especially fulsome was his treatment of incest: “when he strikes
with an impious, though, happily weak hand, at the very foundations of soci-
ety, we feel it our duty to tear off the veil with which he has thought to soften
238 Cindy Weinstein

the hideous features of the idea, and warn the public against the reception of
such atrocious doctrines” (317). Such atrocious doctrines were, however, not
solely a feature of Melville’s novel. They were standard fare in the antebellum
debate about family reform, and it is to this context that I want to turn in
order to indicate the ways in which Pierre both engages in and undermines
the reformist critique. The fact is that while the home was being crowned as
“the sanctuary of all that is most sacred in humanity,” to quote E. H. Chapin’s
Duties of Young Women (1848), that same sanctuary was condemned as the
source of “apathy and intellectual death.” Celebrations of marital relations
are ubiquitous, as in William Alcott’s The Young Wife, or Duties of Woman in
the Marriage Relation (1837), where he imagines domestic bliss to be when
“your souls seem to be but one,” but so are indictments, such as T. L. Nichols
and Mrs. Mary S. Gove Nichols’s Marriage: Its History, Character, and Results:
“Running through many families are secret amours. Children are born of
these, the parents die, and the marriage of half-brothers and sisters is always
possible, and doubtless of frequent occurrence.” A startlingly but appropriate
epigraph for Pierre.11
Melville (and Pierre) are not alone in pursuing new types of community,
Melville’s comic representation of utopian life in “The Church of the Apostles”
reveals his familiarity and impatience with experiments such as Brook Farm,
New Harmony, or Oneida. In an 1843 article, “The Consociate Family Life,”
English progressive Charles Lane offers this description of the “pure reform
principles” practiced at Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands: “Shall I sip tea or coffee?
The inquiry may be.—No. Abstain from all ardents, as from alcohol drinks.
Shall I consume pork, beef, or mutton? Not if you value health or life. . . . Shall
I warm my bathing water? Not if cheerfulness is valuable. Shall I clothe in
many garments? Not if purity is aimed at.”12 Supporters of such “insane het-
erodoxical notions about the economy of the body” (NN Pierre 299) are easy
targets for Melville. One group of reformers, though, seems to have piqued
Melville’s interest, and that is the Shakers, whose villages in Hancock and
Lebanon, Massachusetts he visited no less than five times in a two year pe-
riod. Intriguing are the possible connections between Shaker dances and “the
hair-shrouded form of Isabel [which] swayed to and fro with a like abandon-
ment, and suddenness, and wantonness” (126). I am, however, less interested in
correlating specific Shaker ritual with characters in Pierre, than with reading
Pierre’s desire and failure to destroy the ties of consanguinity in relation to
reformers of the period who share both the desire and the failure.13
When Pierre, “the young enthusiast” (NN Pierre 175) decides to “gospel-
ize the world anew” (273), he goes to the Church of the Apostles, a half-way
house for New York City radicals. Because families are few and fragmented
in the Church, the building perfectly accommodates Pierre’s domestic experi-
ments, which “take no terms from the common world, but do make terms
 We Are Family 239

to it, and grind thy fierce rights out of it!” (160). Plotinus Plinlimmon, guid-
ing spirit of the Church, “seemed to have no family or blood ties of any sort”
(290), and Charlie Millthorpe, Pierre’s childhood friend, sings the praises of
non-consanguinity: “The great men are all bachelors, you know. Their family
is the universe” (281). Pierre believes this too because if everyone is related to
everyone else, then there is no such thing as incest or, more precisely, everyone is
always committing incest (“by heaven, but marriage is an impious thing” [58]).
Incest is not against the law; “it is the law” (274). In instructing Isabel to “call
me brother no more. . . . I am Pierre and thou Isabel, wide brother and sister in
the common humanity” (273), Pierre seems to be suggesting that the difference
between incestuous and exogamous love can be dispensed with by replacing the
term “brother” with “wide brother in the common humanity.” If this is what it
means to “take no terms from the common world,” he is in trouble.
In fact, characters in Pierre treat consanguineous relations as if they
could be assumed and dispensed with at will, as if brothers and sisters, par-
ents and children could choose or disown one another. Virtually every char-
acter of Pierre’s generation, from the ignominious Delly, whose “own parents
want her not” (NN Pierre 163) to the angelic Lucy, whose mother declares,
“I forever cast thee off . . . I shall instruct thy brothers to disown thee” (329),
are renounced by their parents. Mrs. Glendinning, the character most com-
mitted to biological kinship is keenest to destroy it when she learns of Pierre’s
betrayal: “He bears my name—Glendinning. I will disown it; were it like
this dress, I would tear my name off from me, and burn it till it shriveled
to a crisp!” (193). Pages later, Pierre declares his sovereignty from his name
in a passage that echoes his mother’s words. While committing his father’s
portrait to the “crackling, clamorous flames” (198), he proclaims, “Cast-out
Pierre hath no paternity, and no past” (199). Characters are forever choosing
to have or to disown biological relationships, as if these were choices to be
made; as if relations that are freely entered into cannot, by definition of being
chosen, be incestuous. But of course, they are. In Pierre, virtually all relations
are not only chosen, but they are always incestuous. The only choice one has
is whether the relationship is chosen to be biological or is biological, whether
incest is committed knowingly or unknowingly.
Pierre’s domestic experiment follows a trajectory from utopian commu-
nity to communal disintegration that is familiar to the student of antebellum
reform. Like John Humphrey Noyes’s Perfectionists, Pierre’s followers worship
him and “the manly enthusiast cause of his heart” (167). Like Noyes, who
both regarded “the whole Associate as one family, and all children as the
children of the family” while striving “to get [their] freedom from any claims
of kindred, etc.,” Pierre’s community is organized according to blood rela-
tions in a world desperate to be free of them. And like Noyes who developed
a theory of sexuality whereby men refrained from ejaculating during sexual
240 Cindy Weinstein

intercourse so that “there is no risk of conception without intention,” Pierre

muses, “from nothing proceeds nothing, Isabel! How can one sin in a dream?”
(274).14 And like Pierre, leaders such as Noyes, Shaker founder Mother Anne
Lee, and Mormon Joseph Smith were accused of rape and incest. Critics
warned, “Stop these Shakers from creeping about, like the Serpent of old,
destroying many a fair Eden of domestic happiness.” The Mormon practice
of polygamy would have resonated for readers of Pierre; moreover, Reverend
Hubbard Eastman’s 1849 attack on Noyes—“Monogamy is the true basis
of all Democratic institutions. . . . If that root is rendered corrupt, the whole
fabric of society becomes polluted”—could easily find its way into reviews
of Pierre: “[Perfectionism] not only contemplates a complete annihilation of
the conjugal relations, but it designs to sever the ties of consanguinity, and
its ultimate object is to make a clean sweep of all the social relations!” These
attacks on alternative family arrangements confirm that if, as Michael Rogin
claims, “Pierre assaulted the family,” he was not alone.15
However, as much as Pierre is a scathing analysis of the biological fam-
ily, it also scathingly analyzes attempts to reform it. Unlike the ideal and
expanding communities imagined by reformers, where persons decide that
“the[ir] neighbor is most truly our brother,—nay, more than brother, he is our
other self,” Pierre’s world of choice (“I will no more have a father” [NN Pierre
87]) is one of contraction (“I own myself a brother of the clod” [302]).16 The
Church of the Apostles contains the experiment in reform and its inevitably
disastrous consequences; inevitable because the family Pierre chooses repro-
duces the one he inherited. Every time Pierre rejects the language and logic
of blood—“Call me brother no more! How knowest thou I am thy brother?”
(273)—he re-embraces it. He laments the “unrelated hands that were hired”
to attend to his dead mother “whose heart had been broken by the related
hands of her son” (286). At the very moment that Pierre declares that he
“will not own a mortal parent” (106), he pleads, “bind me in bonds I can not
break” (107). Those bonds assume the form of a new family, with himself
as the brother / husband, and Isabel as the sister / wife, Lucy as the “very
strange cousin” (313) whom Pierre looks upon “with an expression illy befit-
ting their singular and so-supposed merely cousinly relation” (337). Lucy, in
fact, declares Pierre to be the principle of family itself: “thou art my mother
and my brothers and all the world and all heaven and all the universe to me”
(311). Like Pierre, who in the very act of renouncing family, produces another
one, reformers desirous of challenging conventional domestic relations, ended
up replicating them, whether in Alcott’s “consociate” family at Fruitlands,
“Mother” Anne Lee, “Father” William Lee (the brother with whom she was
accused of committing incest), and the “brethren” and “sisters” of the Shaker
“families.” If their aim was the elimination of conventional family arrange-
ments, to “engage collectively . . . as children of one family,” to quote Owenite
 We Are Family 241

Frances Wright, Pierre’s experiment suggests that reformers did little more
than justify and, in some cases, institutionalize the incestuous impulses within
the biological family.17 Pierre thus takes up the challenge issued by reformers
like T. L. Nichols and his wife, Mrs. Mary S. Gove Nichols, who complained
in their 1854 book, Marriage: Its History, Character, and Results, that “now a
woman can have no brother, unless he is born such,” (Nichols 369), and imag-
ines a world where brothers are not born but made only to discover that the
making turns the “fictitious title” into “the absent reality” (7). Pierre literalizes
the familial metaphors governing reform efforts and reveals the “nameless”
and “latent” feelings, code words for incest in Pierre, at the center both of the
biological family and attempts to reform it.
The language of voluntary bonds pervades the novel, as if the ideal fam-
ily could be organized around love not blood, only to reveal the “blood rela-
tion” (NN Pierre 218) that motivates all of its characters’ choices. If consan-
guinity can be destroyed, it can also be produced. Both actions depend upon
viewing blood as if it were a matter of choice, a matter of a speech act, the
only difference being whether one wants to disown or choose it. Thus, Pierre’s
announcement that “aunts, uncles, cousins innumerable [are] dead hence-
forth to me” (196) is theoretically no different from his conversation with his
mother where he says, “Mother, stay!—yes do, sister” (96) or his claim that
Lucy is “some pretty aunt or cousin” (309). Pierre conjures those relations
into being as swiftly as he rejects them, and how he names those relations is
crucial. The strain between Pierre and his mother is twice registered by their
disagreement about what to call each other, “sister me not, now Pierre, I am
thy mother” (95) and “why don’t you call me brother Pierre?” (130). Even Isa-
bel, who concedes that “the word father only seemed a word of general love
and endearment to me . . . it did not seem to involve any claims of any sort,
one way or the other,” learns how powerful the words denoting consanguinity
are, as well as the claims that go along with them. She calls attention to the
designation: “yes, Pierre, Isabel calls thee her brother—her brother,” and as if
that weren’t enough to make the relation stick, she adds, “Dearest Pierre, my
brother, my own father’s child! . . . Oh, sweetest of words . . . Oh, my brother!”
(64). To call someone a brother or a sister is to make that person “thy related
brother” (192) or “my best sister” (191), which is the penultimate step to com-
mitting incest. But the choice is a sham—one only ever chooses to make
someone a brother or sister or cousin who already is one.
The proof is that Pierre is never tempted by Delly, who, like Charlie, sig-
nifies a principle of difference with which the novel ultimately cannot or will
not come to terms. The distance between Pierre and Delly remains surpris-
ingly consistent for a novel that thrives on the disintegration of boundaries.
Never does it cross Pierre’s mind to call her sister or cousin.18 It is in a con-
versation with Delly that Pierre attempts to stabilize the sexual vertigo into
242 Cindy Weinstein

which the narrative has descended. Pierre announces, “my cousin Miss Tartan
is coming here to live with us” to which the panicked Delly replies, “Good
heavens!—coming here?—your cousin?—Miss Tartan?” Sensing her confu-
sion, Pierre restates the fact of Lucy’s imminent appearance and redefines
their relation, “My cousin,—mind, my cousin, Miss Tartan, is coming to live
with us.” Having nailed down that relation, they turn to Isabel and Pierre’s
and the confirmation of that bond. Delly asks Pierre, “does Mrs. Glendin-
din—does my mistress know this?” and he replies, “My wife knows all” (NN
Pierre 320).
The dialogue takes a familiar turn when Pierre asks Delly, “How is my
wife, now?”:

Again startled by the peculiar emphasis placed on the magical

word wife, Delly, who had long before this, been occasionally
struck with the infrequency of his using that term; she looked at
him perplexedly, and said half-unconsciously—
“Your wife, sir?”
“Ay, is she not?”
“God grant that she be—Oh, ‘tis most cruel to ask that of poor,
poor Delly, sir.”
“Tut for thy tears! Never deny it again then!—I swear to
heaven, she is!” (321)

This exchange makes clear that just as Pierre’s sexual radar fails to pick up
Delly because of her non-consanguinity, Delly never imagines that Pierre’s
relationship with Isabel is anything but what they have presented themselves
as being—husband and wife in “secret marriage” (202). It is both odd and
entirely proper that Delly, herself an unmarried woman who has an affair
with a married man, becomes the standard bearer of conventional notions of
sexuality, which is to say that she remains outside of the incestuous menage
a trois comprised of Pierre, Isabel, and Lucy.
In fact, Delly’s conversation with Pierre follows an exchange between
Pierre and Isabel that demonstrates just how unhinged relationships and the
words designating them have become. Upon receiving Lucy’s letter inform-
ing him of her arrival, Pierre informs Isabel that “some pretty young aunt
or cousin” is on her way. Lucy’s position as cousin, however, troubles Isabel
because “that is not wholly out of the degree,” by which she means that be-
ing a cousin does not keep Lucy safe from Pierre’s affections. Of course not.
Being a cousin, even “a very strange cousin . . . almost a nun in her notions”
(NN Pierre 313), guarantees Pierre’s ardor. The inability of Pierre or Isabel to
control the meaning of their words (and the “wild” passions behind them)
becomes palpably obvious as he instructs her not to “have any sisterly jealousy
 We Are Family 243

then, my sister,” to which she inquires, “would it be well, if I slept with her,
my brother?” (314).
The destabilization of the terms designating the biological family be-
gins the process of destroying it. Relentlessly, the language suggests feelings
that are not only suspect, but if and when acted upon, illegal. The narrator
muses, “much that goes to make up the deliciousness of a wife already lies in
the sister” (NN Pierre 7). Similarly, Pierre’s “romantic filial” (5) relationship
with his mother tantalizes him with the possibility that his mother is not
really his mother. But the speech act of calling a mother a sister, or a son a
brother, has grave consequences. Not calling people by their proper designa-
tions has the effect of making a person incapable of knowing the difference
between a mother and a sister, a brother and a husband, a cousin and the girl
next door. As the narrator says, a “fictitious title” (7), a “fictitious alliance”
(175), even (and especially) a “fictitious wife” (180) may as well be real. A
“nominal conversion of a sister into a wife” (177) is a conversion. There is no
such thing as “empty nominalness” (192). Pierre is a novel in which what you
call someone is what they are, which is why, when Pierre “assume[s] before
the world that by secret rites Pierre Glendinning was already become the
husband of Isabel Banford” (173), it is irrelevant whether or not they have
actually committed incest. The speech act has made it so. The power to des-
ignate the desired relation to someone through a speech act represents both
the possibility of individual free will and the moment of its self-destruction
because the novel’s logic of ubiquitous consanguinity requires that the only
available names designate kinship—and so the promise of freedom turns into
its nightmare.19 Pierre and his mother can call each other anything they want,
and they choose brother and sister; Pierre can name Lucy anything he wants,
and he chooses cousin. Pierre is a novel whose protagonist is determined to
destroy consanguinity, but whose every move proliferates it.
For every consanguineous relation spurned by Pierre, another one, which
combines the attractions of “voluntary election [and] blood propinquity” (NN
Pierre 288), takes its place. As much as Pierre, and the “too much generous
blood in his heart” (222), wants to destroy the “blood relation” (218), it refuses
to go away. Blood permeates the text, whether it be the “blood-red” (92) sun-
rise of Saddle Meadows or the “the blood-shedding times” (75) of the French
Revolution. Pierre’s mother, upon suspecting him of leaving Lucy, declares,
“I feel my blood chemically changing in me” (131), and Pierre, in thinking
about the “unproven fact of Isabel’s sisterhood,” notes that “his very blood
seemed to flow through all his arteries with unwonted subtileness, when he
thought that the same tide flowed through the mystic veins of Isabel” (139).
Isabel’s fateful letter to Pierre, in which she declares their relatedness, is blot-
ted with tears that “assume a strange and reddish hue—as if blood and not
tears had dropped upon the sheet” (64–65). The only way to end this regime
244 Cindy Weinstein

of consanguinity is to “let out all thy Glendinning blood and then sew up the
vile remainder” (239). Blood functions as a metonymy for the family relations
which persist in spite of the novel’s continuous bloodletting as the “black
vein” (358) is opened and “the dark vein’s burst” (362). But there’s always
more. Even when “spatterings of his own kindred blood were upon the pave-
ment” (360) as Glen’s body lies prone, the novel ends with “more relations
coming” (361) to see the bodies of Pierre, Lucy, and Isabel.20

“It is the law.”

Isabel exists outside of the law. Had she been protected by it, perhaps she
would know if she had lived in a place “five, six, perhaps, seven years” (NN
Pierre 119), or if events took place when she was “nine, ten, or eleven years”
(122). Perhaps she would know the difference between “Virtue and Vice”
(274). It is precisely her place outside of the law that produces her unstable
sense of time and her inability to distinguish between moral categories. And
if these attractions were not enough for Pierre (in addition to her “wonder-
fully beautiful ear” [119]), her complete incomprehension of the meanings
and consequences of consanguinity seals his commitment to and desire for
her, thus sending him into an incestuous free-fall.
At issue here is not just Isabel as the object of Pierre’s desire but also
Isabel’s relation to the objects of her desire. The incest taboo means nothing
to her: because the only distinction she is capable of making is a “general
feeling of my humanness among the inhumanities” (NN Pierre 123), any re-
lation with a human being would be incestuous. Her perspective undercuts
the raison d’etre of the incest taboo, for it makes incest itself something that
everyone does; it therefore frees Pierre from the constraints of the law against
it. As much as Pierre wants Isabel, then, he also wants Isabel’s relation to the
terms that signify consanguinity. When she tells him, “I called the woman
mother” (123) and “the word father only seemed a word of general love and
endearment to me . . . it did not seem to involve any claims of any sort” (145),
she has no idea what claims or constraints are incumbent upon the person
with whom one has that relation. To “seem not of woman born” (114) is the
condition in which Isabel exists and to which Pierre aspires because with it
comes the inability to distinguish virtue from vice, or, for that matter, ex-
ogamy from endogamy.
But this knowledge, once possessed, cannot be forgotten. “It is the law,”
Pierre tells Isabel when she asks him to define virtue and vice. In response to
her query, he claims that these words have no meaning, declaring them both
to be “nothing” (NN Pierre 274). Unable to dissolve the law, Pierre chooses
the dissolution of himself, Isabel, Lucy, and the world. Isabel will believe vir-
tually anything Pierre tells her about these words, but rather than giving her
his vision, he turns the world and words into a meaningless dream. Pierre’s
 We Are Family 245

opportunity to “gospelize the world anew” (273) has come and gone because
he has to keep at bay the full import of having committed incest with the
woman he believes is his sister. The law, however, with its “ink unobliterable
as the sea” (11) and its “wax . . . inexorable [as] bars and bolts” (224) refuses to
be wiped out by Pierre’s nihilism.
The tangibility of the law is confirmed by the fact that when Pierre
visualizes Lucy’s brother, Frederic, murdering him, Pierre also hears a jury
declaring his guilt: “if such a brother stab his foe at his own mother’s table, all
people and all juries would bear him out, accounting everything allowable to
a noble soul made mad by a sweet sister’s shame caused by a damned seducer”
(NN Pierre 336). This passage is telling for several reasons, not least of which
is that Pierre, “thoroughly alive to the supernaturalism of that mad frothing
hate which a spirited brother forks forth at the insulter of a sister’s honor,”
imagines the scenario as “if he were actually in the position which Frederic so
vividly fancied to be his” (336). For a moment, the terms “brother and sister”
have been stabilized, giving Pierre a glimpse into the legal implications of his
behavior; but Pierre’s imaginative appropriation of Frederic’s position also
begins to corrode the signifying coherence of those terms as the correspon-
dences between Pierre and Frederic unfold. If Pierre is himself and Frederic,
at once seducer and defender of the seduced, the only option is that both die,
which is exactly the conclusion Pierre reaches: “murder . . . seemed the one
only congenial sequel to such a desperate career” (337).
Living with three women who would die for him, Pierre feels “utterly
without sympathy from any thing divine, human, brute, or vegetable” (NN
Pierre 338). How is it that sympathy, the key affect of the sentimental novel,
has no place in Pierre? At its most basic, sympathy in Melville’s text requires
a recognition of difference; more specifically, the precondition for sympathy
is that there are other people in the world who are not you. Pierre cannot
achieve even this most elementary recognition. Every aspect of the novel—
the narrative voice, the temporal frame, the words on the page—seems unable
to sustain alterity. The only principle the novel can endorse is consanguinity,
a principle that is finally and ironically the very antithesis of sympathy. Cri-
tiques of sentimental fiction frequently begin with an argument about how
sympathy is limited because it is based on the notion that sympathy depends
upon the twinned principles of identification and consanguinity. But what
Pierre, with its polarization of blood and sympathy, demonstrates by negative
example is that sentimental novels succeed precisely because of their decou-
pling of sympathy and blood, sympathy and similarity. Sympathy flourishes
because of, not in spite of the fact that, chosen relations have replaced consan-
guinity. Pierre/Pierre escapes the “endless descendedness” (9) of its characters
and words by destroying himself/itself. Virtually everyone dies, except two
characters whose fates are deemed irrelevant given their lack of blood relation
246 Cindy Weinstein

to the main characters and to each other. They are Delly and Charlie, who
possess the singular characteristic of being strangers in a book of “ineffable
correlativeness” (85). Although both have skewed views of marriage—Delly, a
fallen women, Charlie, a devoted bachelor—they survive, bearing with them
the possibility of a sentimental novel to come.21

No t e s
1. Herman Melville, Pierre, or The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel
Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University
Press and The Newberry Library, 1971), 141. Hereafter cited as NN Pierre in the text.
2. Richard Brodhead makes a similar point about Melville’s complicated relation
to the genre of the sentimental novel: “The odd combination of straightforwardness
and secret mockery inherent in his handling of the style, characters, and
characteristic situations of sentimental romance is evidence of his ambivalence, his
desire both to make use of this genre and to assert his independence from it.” The
distortedness and chaos of Pierre are productions of a tension, present from the first
and explosive at the end between the author and the literary form he has chosen to
work in Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1973), 164. For a reading of Pierre in relation to sensational fiction, see Sheila Post-
Lauria’s Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the Marketplace (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1996).
3. Samuel Otter notes a similar effect, describing the novel as “filled with
structures that entice and recede,” in Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999), 244.
4. Eric J. Sundquist, Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-
Century American Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1979), 150.
5. Other examples include: “It has been said, that always when Pierre would seek
solitude in its material shelter and walled isolation, then the closet communicating with
his chamber was his elected haunt” (NN Pierre 86); “Wonderful, indeed, we repeat it,
was the electrical insight which Pierre now had into the character of his mother” (90);
“In the earlier chapters of this volume, it has been passingly intimated” (244).
6. The narrator uses this device in his description of Pierre’s correspondence
with Glen about the New York house: “Now, if it were not conscious considerations
like the really benevolent or neutral ones first mentioned above, it was certainly
something akin to them” (223). My argument is indebted to Wai Chee Dimock’s
point that “a figure of difference is impossible in Pierre,” which “affirm[s] a world
of likeness, a world of kinship and only kinship” (Empire for Liberty: Melville and
the Poetics of Individualism [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989], 173). Also
influential has been Gillian Brown’s analysis of the novel’s “aesthetics of incest” in
relation to antebellum theories of individualism (Domestic Individualism: Imagining
Self in Nineteenth-Century America [Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990], 152). In contrast to Dimock’s and Brown’s focus, I adopt a more formalist
perspective and examine how the very grammar of the text struggles with this
principle of kinship.
7. As Plinlimmon puts it, “by their very contradictions they are made to
correspond” (NN Pierre 212). The text calls attention to its bizarre use of analogies
 We Are Family 247

when Pierre offers the following comment on Isabel’s hand: “But hard and small, it
by an opposite analogy hints of the soft capacious heart that made the hand so hard
with heavenly submission to thy most undeserved and martyred lot” (154).
  8. See Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, “The Flawed Grandeur of
Melville’s Pierre,” in New Perspectives on Melville, ed. Faith Pullin (Kent State
University Press, 1978): 162–196. Elizabeth Renker similarly notes the difficulties
in separating the narrative voice from Pierre’s, although she explores this through
the novel’s tropes of vision; see Strike through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene
of Writing (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 24–48.
  9. At this point in the novel, not only have the distinctions between the
narrator and Pierre become blurred almost beyond recognition, but Melville, too,
appears to have fallen victim to the novel’s relentless logic of “seeming semblance”
(289) and “catching likenesses” (330). Thus, when the narrator tells us that Pierre
“seems to have directly plagiarized from his own experiences, to fill out the mood
of his apparent author-hero, Vivia” (302), we recognize that passages from Pierre,
especially those having to do with the composition and reception of Pierre’s work,
have been plagiarized from Melville’s own authorial experiences. “Corporations
have no souls” (302) is one particularly illustrative example of Melville collapsing
into Pierre. Clearly, Pierre has less reason to be thinking about corporations than
Melville, whose negotiations with Harper’s for the publication of the novel were
proving difficult, indeed. Unlike his earlier dealings, this contract didn’t provide the
financial and psychological boost he had been anticipating. According to Hershel
Parker, the fact that the Harper’s contract “stipulate[d] that for the first 1,190
copies sold . . . the author was to receive no royalties,” may have “enforced upon the
realization that he might have to abandon the hope of earning a living as a writer”
(“Why Pierre Went Wrong,” Studies in the Novel 8 [1976]: 12–13). This realization is
precisely Pierre’s once he receives the note from the publishing firm of Steel, Flint &
Asbestos labeling him “a swindler” and demanding that he pay the “bill for printing
thus far, and also for our cash advances” (356). These difficult negotiations seem
to be propelling Melville toward a collapse of the distinctions between himself, his
narrator, and protagonist.
10. See Wyn Kelley’s, “Pierre’s Domestic Ambiguities,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998): 91–113.
11. E. H. Chapin, Duties of Young Women (Boston: George W. Briggs, 1850),
169; William A. Alcott, The Young Wife, or Duties of Woman in the Marriage Relation
(New York: Arno, 1972), 58; T. L. Nichols and Mrs. Mary S. Gove Nichols,
Marriage: Its History, Character, And Results; Its Sanctities and Its Profanities; Its Science
and Its Facts. Demonstrating Its Influence, as a Civilized Institution, On The Happiness
of the Individual and the Progress of the Race (New York: T. L. Nichols, 1854), 325.
12. Charles Lane, “The Consociate Family Life,” The New Age and Concordium
Gazette 1 (1843): 120.
13. See Merton M. Sealts, Jr., “Melville and the Shakers,” in Studies in
Bibliography 2 (1949): 105–114.
14. John Humphrey Noyes, Bible Communism: A Compilation from the Annual
Reports and Other Publications of the Oneida Association and Its Branches; Presenting, in
Connection with Their History, a Summary View of Their Religious and Social Theories
(Brooklyn: Office of the Circular, 1853), 13, 17, 50.
248 Cindy Weinstein

15. Hubbard Eastman, Noyesism Unveiled: A History of the Sect Self-Styled

Perfectionists; with a Summary View of Their Leading Doctrines (Brattleboro: B. D.
Harris and Co., 1849), 117; Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics
and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Knopf, 1983), 160.
16. Parke Godwin, A Popular View of the Doctrines of Charles Fourier (New
York: J. S. Redfield, 1844). 28.
17. Frances Wright, Course of Popular Lectures, as Delivered by Frances Wright
(New York: Office of the Free Enquirer, 1829), 45. Myra Jehlen argues that it is
both Pierre’s and Melville’s inability to produce a social, familial, or novelistic order
different from the one they have inherited that leads to Pierre’s (and Pierre’s) tragic
ending. She concludes that “[Reform] emerges in Melville’s novel as a fatally missing
term” American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent [Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1986], 204). My reading, by contrast, insists that reform is
very much at the novel’s center, quite explicitly in chapters such as “Young America
in Literature” and “The Church of the Apostles,” which Brodhead has identified as
“enormously expand[ing] Melville’s book’s frame of reference” (182).
18. Other reasons may help explain Pierre’s attitude toward Delly, including her
class affiliation (although she and Isabel may share this) and the fact of her adultery.
19. Marc Shell writes, “Between perfect liberty and death, which the
optimistic American revolutionary Patrick Henry set forth as comedic alternatives,
there is, tragically, no essential difference—as probably there was not for Melville
himself ” (Children of the Earth: Literature, Politics and Nationhood [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993], 16).
20. Through a close reading of the scene in which Pierre’s hand is blackened
at the Black Swan Inn, Robert S. Levine intriguingly links the presence of blood and
other moments of racialized discourse in the novel with anti-slavery accounts of the
miscegenated origins of American society and Western culture in general. In tracing
the obsessive interest in racial mixture and purification, Levine is careful to note that
Melville “points more generally to the ultimate reality of miscegenated (and unknown)
genealogies rather than offering some specific ‘proof ’ of Pierre’s ‘black’ blood” (“Pierre’s
Blackened Hand,” in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 1 [1999]: 34–35). It seems
entirely correct to argue that the ubiquitous presence of blood has to do with the matter
of race, but I believe that this is only one among many of Pierre’s anxieties regarding
blood. Black or white, consanguinity must be destroyed.
21. I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint
an adapted version of Chapter Six from Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and
Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004).
 P eter B ellis

Discipline and the Lash in

Melville’s White-Jacket

I n his 1975 study, Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault speaks of an early
nineteenth-century transition between two different concepts of “penal-
ity”—from one regime based on the spectacular display of physical punish-
ment to another founded on incarceration, surveillance, and control. The
former is publicly enacted on the body and is epitomized by public torture
and execution; the latter is withdrawn from public view and relocated within
the disciplinary structures of school, factory, and prison.1
In White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War, published in 1850, Her-
man Melville depicts a shipboard world in which Foucault’s two systems op-
erate not in opposition but in an uneasy tandem. One strand of Melville’s
book, its narrative thread, condemns the arbitrary and brutal punishment in-
flicted by autocratic captains. But another more descriptive aspect considers
the frigate in quite different terms, as a rigidly determined system based on
mechanistic discipline and spatial organization.2
My interest here is not primarily in Foucault’s model for its own sake,
or in a test of its applicability to the antebellum American Navy. Rather, it is
in the way that Foucault’s categories intersect with and highlight other divi-
sions: first, the structural split within Melville’s text and, second, a larger fault
line in the political discourse of his time. Written in the midst of campaigns
for naval reform, White-Jacket registers and responds to the changing forms

Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, Volume 7, Number 2 (2005): pp. 25–40. Copyright
© 2005 Melville Society.

249
250 Peter Bellis

of shipboard power in two contrasting ways. Its narrative uses the rhetoric of
American democracy and egalitarianism in a forceful attack on corporal pun-
ishment, but its descriptive survey of the ship, as a space governed by disci-
pline and surveillance, lacks that critical edge. The book’s inability to confront
such disciplinary power is symptomatic, I would suggest, of an increasing gap
between older kinds of political discourse and the forms of economic and so-
cial control that were emerging in the 1840s and 1850s.3 White-Jacket’s ideol-
ogy of Revolutionary republicanism, with its emphasis on the representation
and empowerment of individual citizens, cannot finally come to grips with
an order based on the management and control of groups and categories of
persons—be they blacks, whites, workers, or slaves.

The Lash
Foucault describes “a certain mechanism of power” that was enacted in pub-
lic punishments through the late eighteenth century (Discipline, 57). Under
this regime, the body was “the major target of penal repression,” displayed
and destroyed in public rituals of torture and execution (8):

in monarchical law, punishment is a ceremonial of sovereignty;

it uses the ritual marks of the vengeance that it applies to the
body of the condemned man; and it deploys before the eyes of
the spectators an effect of terror as intense as it is discontinuous,
irregular and always above its own laws, the physical presence of
the sovereign and his power. (130)

In breaking the law, the offender has “touched the very person of the
prince,” so punishment must be wrought upon his body in the most literal
of terms (49). Essential to such punishment is not just its publicity but its
theatricality, its demonstration or enactment of authority in the administra-
tion of violence.
This form of power was still very much in evidence aboard both the frig-
ate United States, on which Melville served, and the Neversink, his fictional
creation in White-Jacket. Under the US Navy’s Articles of War—passed by
Congress in 1800 and in effect (in revised form) until the mid-twentieth
century—authority was concentrated in the hands of a ship’s captain.4 Mel-
ville describes him as a virtually unlimited monarch, almost a despot, with
his power based on a monopoly of authorized violence aboard ship.5 “‘I allow
no man to fight on board here but myself. I do the fighting,’” Captain Claret
proclaims—and the first men flogged in the novel are indeed being punished
for taking part in an unsanctioned fight (NN WJ, 136, 134). The captain’s
rhetoric makes ship and men extensions of himself, absorbing them into his
own symbolic body. He regards the ship’s officers, Melville later notes, as
 Discipline and the Lash 251

“disintegrated parts of himself ” (217). Any disruption of the ship’s order thus
becomes a violation of the captain’s person.
The primary instrument and symbol of the captain’s power—his means
of taking “vengeance” for such violation—is the lash or “cat-o’-nine-tails.”
Only he can order a flogging, but he can do so “for nearly all degrees of trans-
gression,” depending simply on his mood (NN WJ, 139). All in all, there were
163 floggings aboard the United States during the fourteen months of Mel-
ville’s service in 1843–1844, seven in his first two days aboard, while the ship
was still in port.6 Men could be flogged for offenses ranging from “stealing
poultry” to “being lousy,” “spitting,” and “cursing the master at arms” (Valle,
80). Scourging serves as a deliberate, almost choreographed display of force;
with captain, officers, and accused all occupying fixed positions around the
base of the ship’s mainmast, all hands are “summoned” to “witness punish-
ment” as a spectacular performance.7
The most stylized and extended form of punishment is “flogging through
the fleet,” in which a portion of the sentence is carried out on board each of
several vessels, in order “to strike terror into the beholders” (NN WJ, 371). The
effect is to make punishment seem “inevitable” and the captain himself “om-
nipotent”; or, to use Foucault’s term, a “super-power” above the law itself.8
Even as the lash inscribes the captain’s authority on the body of the sea-
man, the ceremonial and public nature of the act reinforces other facets of the
ship’s power structure. First, the ritual aspect of the proceedings at “captain’s
mast” suggests the theatrical or performative elements characteristic of naval
life. In peacetime, a warship’s primary function would be to “show the flag” in
foreign ports, its drills and ceremonies designed to display hierarchical order
for its own sake.9 Such duties were also intended simply to keep the sailors
occupied—for while a frigate like the Neversink required a crew of more than
five hundred to man its guns in battle, as few as fifty would be needed to
operate the vessel on a daily basis (Valle, 15–16). Second, it thrusts into relief
the navy’s rigid class divisions, under which officers remain exempt from the
lash, while ordinary seamen (“the people”) live under its constant threat (NN
WJ, 146). The antebellum officer class remained thoroughly aristocratic in
outlook and temperament, “gentlemen” ostensibly above “personal malice,”
but prone to dueling amongst themselves and indulging in prolonged per-
sonal vendettas.10
Flogging has its legal underpinnings in the Articles of War, and they
are asserted in another ritual, the monthly reading of the Articles, for which
the crew are mustered around the capstan. Melville’s description conflates the
text with the violence it authorizes:

“Shall suffer death!” This was the burden of nearly every Article
read by the Captain’s clerk . . . “Shall suffer death!” The repeated
252 Peter Bellis

announcement falls on your ear like the unremitting discharge of

artillery . . . [like a] minute-gun . . . and it is a tougher morsel,
believe White-Jacket when he says it, than a forty-two-pound
cannon-ball. (NN WJ, 293)

Melville, or perhaps, the clerk, takes some liberties with the Articles here,
for he several times omits the modifying phrase “or other such punishment
as a court martial shall inflict.”11 But this chapter does convey the reality of
naval practice, since many commanders customarily administered floggings
immediately after the Articles were read (Valle, 81).
Melville’s attack on flogging and, less directly, on the Articles themselves,
is based on two assumptions: first, that history is progressive, and American
democratic institutions will necessarily displace English monarchical ones;
and second, that naval law should be continuous with, not distinct from, ci-
vilian law. He argues that “flogging in the navy . . . is utterly repugnant to the
spirit of our democratic institutions; indeed, that it involves a lingering trait
of the worst times of a barbarous feudal aristocracy” (NN WJ, 146).
White-Jacket’s history is, however, a selective one. For Melville, the au-
thority given by the Articles is autocratic and tyrannical, an “obsolete bar-
barism” that he traces back to the British navy of the Restoration (NN WJ,
282, 297–298). The Articles themselves, he says, are “opposed to the genius
of the American Constitution” (143). But in simply opposing the monarchi-
cal Articles to the Constitution, he deemphasizes the American Congress’s
repeated adoption of the British model (in 1775, 1797, and again in 1800),
mentioning it only in a footnote (298). Erased from the story is the Federal-
ist affirmation of class and partisan interests in the Articles, the reinscription
of class privilege into American democracy even within its first generation.12
An historical analysis of just this kind was offered in an article in the United
States Magazine and Democratic Review, part of a series that appeared as Mel-
ville was completing his manuscript, but his rhetoric depends upon a myth of
the Revolution as both democratic and egalitarian.13
Melville’s approach is also problematic when he invokes civilian law as a
model. Naval codes “should conform to the spirit of the political institutions
of the country,” he insists; otherwise, for the sailor, “our Revolution was in
vain; to him our Declaration of Independence is a lie” (NN WJ, 144). His fo-
cus is on Article XXXII, which leaves all unspecified crimes to “‘be punished
according to the laws and customs in such cases at sea’” (143). This is the one
that “above all other, puts the scourge into the hands of the captain,” he says:
it “leaves to his discretion to decide what things shall be considered crimes,
and what shall be the penalty; whether an accused person has been guilty of
actions by him declared to be crimes; and how, when, and where the penalty
shall be inflicted” (143–144). Melville’s objections to this Article are two-fold.
 Discipline and the Lash 253

First, in procedural terms, it makes the captain simultaneously “a legislator, as

well as a judge and an executive” (143). Second, instead of being universally
applied, it is “oppressive, and glaringly unequal in its operations,” reinforcing
the class hierarchy of the ship (146).
Melville goes back to Blackstone to argue for the equal application of
law to all citizens (145). But once again, he bypasses the actual choices made
by the Founding Fathers: the Constitution, in both Article II and the Fifth
Amendment, explicitly distinguishes between civilian and military jurispru-
dence, leaving the military under the jurisdiction of Congress and the execu-
tive, with no appeal to the judicial branch (Valle, 31–32). It would not be until
1950, and the adoption of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, that military
justice would be brought into alignment with civilian (Valle, 29).
If White-Jacket thus offers a falsely unified version of the founding gen-
erations, Melville also overlooks or downplays the sectional divisions of his
own time, divisions all too evident in Congressional debates on flogging. Sup-
port for abolition came overwhelmingly from the North, opposition primar-
ily from the South, suggesting a link to broader reforms such as anti-slavery
(Langley, 193). Melville glosses over the split, however, with a blend of Revo-
lutionary millennialism and Manifest Destiny: “we Americans are the pecu-
liar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of
the world. Seventy years ago we escaped from thrall . . . ” (NN WJ, 151).14
White-Jacket’s argumentative strategy here is quite different from those
of Melville’s sources and of the naval reform movement in general. A com-
mon approach—used by Richard Henry Dana, Jr., William McNally, and
others—was to compare oppressed white seamen to black slaves.15 Partici-
pants in Congressional debates spoke of an ongoing process of social and
humanitarian reform, often linking the abolition of flogging to the end of
the navy’s spirit ration, and even the abolition of slavery.16 “Why is it,” asked
Senator John Hale, “that, while humanity is lifting up her voice . . . for every
other class of the unfortunate and oppressed, the sailor alone shall be left . . .
as the only man, as the only creature that walks erect with the image of God
upon his countenance, that is still subjected to this degradation?”17
Melville, however, cites the analogy between flogging sailors and beat-
ing slaves only in passing, and does not place it at the center of his argument.
Instead, he repeatedly emphasizes the sailor’s identity as “an American-born
citizen, whose grandsire may have ennobled him by pouring out his blood at
Bunker Hill” (NN WJ, 146). (In so doing, he also disregards the high number
of foreign-born seamen in the Navy.) The tactic is, moreover, especially strik-
ing in the context of the House debate, for the Congressmen who invoked
Revolutionary precedents were generally doing so in support of flogging.18
Repeatedly, then, Melville builds his case on a double movement, in-
voking the Revolution as myth but eliding the post-Revolutionary period as
254 Peter Bellis

historical fact, sidestepping or displacing the historical realities of economic,

racial, and sectional difference. Captain Claret is enough like the vengeful ab-
solute monarch of Foucault’s model that the dramatic exercise of his power—
flogging—can be attacked using the language of egalitarian democracy. But
the result is a decided narrowing of focus. Unlike the author of the series in
the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, Melville targets only the
lash, and not the broader framework of the Articles as a whole.19 In the end,
he asks only for a fuller supervision of naval officers and their practices (NN
WJ, 231–232). And unlike Congressional reformers, he does not emphasize a
link between flogging and the more divisive issue of slavery.20
Melville’s revolutionary rhetoric may be a conservative strategy, a care-
fully modulated retreat from the antislavery position taken in Mardi, for ex-
ample.21 But it also suggests the limits of the republican tradition itself, in
which the common good depends upon the economic and political inde-
pendence of individual citizens, that independence forming the basis of civic
virtue.22 Such a discourse does enable Melville to speak on behalf of sailors
as individuals: the lash, after all, enforces the captain’s power by singling out
and marking the particularized body of the sailor. But by the 1850s, the extent
and meaning of citizenship itself was now at issue. Faced with the systematic
objectification and dehumanization Melville describes—of men both native
and foreign-born, white and black—egalitarian republicanism had begun to
founder. It might persist in ritual or ceremonial forms, or in conservative
or reactionary movements such as Know-Nothingism or “herrenvolk” work-
ing-class republicanism, but its progressive political force was spent.23 The
Declaration of Independence might be “the RING-BOLT to the chain of
your nation’s destiny,” Frederick Douglass acknowledged in 1852, but he went
on to describe antebellum republicanism as “flagrantly inconsistent,” an utter
“sham,” in its failure to respond to the slavery crisis.24

Discipline
There is, as I have noted, also a second order aboard the frigate, one that
both contrasts and dovetails with aristocratic privilege and public punish-
ment. It is not, however, an alternative political order, such as the one
Melville demands; rather, it is a system of physical confinement and regu-
lation according to function—in short, a version of Foucault’s disciplinary
enclosure. It is a regime that resists both a historicizing critique and the
terms of Melville’s Revolutionary ideology, for it is, in some ways, already
aligned with the goals of antebellum reform.
“[D]iscipline,” according to Foucault, “proceeds from the distribution of
individuals in space,” using several techniques: First, “Discipline sometimes
requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and
closed in upon itself ”; “disciplinary machinery” then divides up this space “on
 Discipline and the Lash 255

the principle of elementary location or partitioning . . . into functional sites”:

“Each individual has his own place; and each place its own individual” (Disci-
pline, 141, 143). Ultimately, “[i]n discipline, the elements are interchangeable.
. . . The unit is, therefore, neither the territory . . . nor the place . . . but the rank,
the place one occupies in a classification” (Discipline, 145). Activity is strictly
controlled, as time is regulated and bodily movement rigidly ordered, almost
mechanized (Discipline, 149–153, 164–165). In an earlier essay from the late
1960s, Foucault had described such an enclosed, “heterogeneous” space as a
“heterotopia,” and the ship as “the heterotopia par excellence.”25
Melville’s Neversink is indeed a virtually sealed space, which he repeat-
edly compares to a prison; it is “a sort of sea-Newgate, from which [the sailor]
can not escape,” except to the bottle (NN WJ, 176). As a result, the regulations
are most severe regarding “the smuggling of grog, and being found intoxi-
cated,” the most common of minor offenses throughout the fleet.26 But the
efforts of the master at arms to suppress smuggling are only the most extreme
examples of a generalized surveillance that covers almost every moment of
the seaman’s life: “No privacy can you have; hardly a moment’s seclusion. It
is almost a physical impossibility, that you can ever be alone,” Melville’s nar-
rator, laments; “[a]lmost every inch is occupied; almost every inch is in plain
sight; and almost every inch is continually being visited and explored” (NN
WJ, 35, 41).
This open and always visible space is also partitioned according to rank
and function. Under the naval rules and regulations of 1818, captains were
required to

examine and rate [the seamen] according to their abilities . . .

[and] without loss of time to make arrangements for quartering
the officers and men; distributing them to the guns, musketry,
rigging, &c.; to divide them into watches; make out his quarter,
station, and watch bills, with bills of the names of men stationed
at every gun; to muster and exercise them frequently. 27

Melville’s description adds specificity to the language of the regulations, but

remains consistent with them: “particular bands,” he says, are

assigned to the three tops, but in getting under weigh, or any other
proceeding requiring all hands, particular men of those bands are
assigned to each yard of the tops. . . . [E]very man of a frigate’s five-
hundred-strong, knows his own special place, and is infallibly found
there. He sees nothing else, attends to nothing else, and will stay
there till grim death or an epaulette orders him away. (NN WJ, 8)
256 Peter Bellis

Melville devotes a number of chapters to descriptions of the various sec-

tions of the vessel and the different groups of men assigned to each. This “end-
less subdivision of duties” is summed up for the sailor in a series of “numbers”:
“White-Jacket was given the number of his mess; then, his ship’s number, or
the number to which he must answer when the watch-roll is called; then,
the number of his hammock; then, the number of the gun to which he was
assigned; besides a variety of other numbers” (11). When, late in the novel,
White-Jacket is brought to the mast and directly threatened with a flogging,
it is for forgetting one of these numbers, and being out of place (277–278).
The heart of the Neversink’s spatio-temporal order is here, on

the uppermost deck, round about the main-mast, [which] is the

Police-office, Court-house, and yard of execution, where all cases
are lodged, causes tried, and punishment administered. . . . The
main-mast, moreover, is the only place where the sailor can hold
formal communication with the captain and officers. . . . [he] stands
there—generally with his hat off—waiting the pleasure of the officer
of the deck, to advance and communicate with him. (NN WJ, 131)

On the one hand, this is a space in which a sailor may speak to his superi-
ors, but it is also, as White-Jacket finds, the site of his most complete and
arbitrary silencing, for he cannot answer if a charge is brought against him
during the proceedings at “captain’s mast.” Officers and seamen may, for a
moment, share a physical space, but only so that the lines of authority can
be more sharply drawn.
If space is thus strictly controlled, so, too, is time: within the system of
four-hour watches, meals are served according to an arbitrary schedule, with
the sequence determined strictly according to rank (NN WJ, 30), and it is not
twelve o’clock until the captain orders “‘Make it so’” (23). The ship even has a
calendar of its own, as the days of the week are renamed by the sailors, accord-
ing to the meals served on each. Smoking among the men is limited to thirty
minutes after meals—a “sumptuary law” that leads White-Jacket to give up
his pipe entirely “rather than enslave it to a time and place” (387). Nothing, in
short, is allowed to “mar the uniformity of daily events” (84).
Chapter 18, “A Man-of-War Full as a Nut,” depicts the crew as an as-
sortment of varied tradesmen and skilled artisans, but such attributes are
erased or overwritten by the multiple classifications aboard ship. Their variety
of backgrounds and skills does not work to individuate or empower the sea-
men; it actually does the reverse, making any one among them easily replace-
able (NN WJ, 74). At several points in his survey, White-Jacket suggests that
a seaman’s character is, in fact, reshaped by his shipboard assignment and
duties: “[T]heir being so much among the guns is the very thing that makes
 Discipline and the Lash 257

a gunner’s gang so cross and quarrelsome,” for example (45), while “holders”
are “gloomy” (47), and ‘“steady-cooks’ . . . a narrow-minded set; with contract-
ed souls; imputable, no doubt, to their groveling duties” (47–48). Individual
temperament and agency are replaced by an identification through place and
function.
In any case, most sailors are little more than unskilled or semi-skilled
laborers, and this makes them potentially malleable and manipulable-reducible
to undifferentiated labor power. In the end, the men do become “interchange-
able,” as Foucault predicts—their pea coats make it impossible to tell one from
another when they are aloft in the darkness (120)—and the officers use them
like “checker-men,” or, during a race, as “make-weights” (173, 272).
There may or may not be a legal continuity between the ship and civil-
ian society, but there seems a clear parallel with the emerging disciplinary
orders of prison and factory: if Melville compares the ship to Sing-Sing and
Newgate prisons (174–176), he also likens it to a “market” or “manufactory”
(35). The frigate’s meticulous division of labor, along with strict supervision
to ensure speed, efficiency, and the maximum use of space, resembles what
Sean Wilentz has termed the “bastard artisan system” of antebellum man-
ufacturing unskilled younger workforce—a situation not unlike that in the
navy (Stott, 141). The Neversink may be a largely proto-industrial order, but
at those moments when the entire crew is mobilized (at “general quarters,”
for example), the ship does seem almost a single mechanism—“a machineless
factory” or “manufactory.”
There remains a gap between the intensity of wartime mobilization (or
drilling for it) and the sometimes purely theatrical aspects of the Neversink’s
peacetime cruise, with the pace of work diminishing when the ship reaches
harbor, but this, too, is reminiscent of the seasonal cycles of urban manufac-
turing. In any case, shipboard routines are designed to make activity as con-
stant and regular as possible. The decks are washed and “holy-stoned” each
day, and each man has a piece of “bright-work” to keep polished (NN WJ,
86–87, 171). And every ship prides herself on the speed and efficiency with
which its crew can handle her sails (193–197).
“The social state in a man-of-war” is ultimately, in Melville’s words, “a
system of cruel cogs and wheels,” more of a rationalized economic order than
one based on political representation or community (NN WJ, 373, 374–375).
The class divisions upheld by the Articles of the old order are not done away
with in the new; instead, the class antagonism between officers and men be-
comes “incurable” (208), a structural conflict that is both managed and rein-
forced by the disciplinary order of the ship.
Melville does not offer a direct attack on this regime, as he has against
flogging. For the power of this disciplinary order does not reside in a single
location or person, or even a particular practice, but is dispersed throughout
258 Peter Bellis

the systems and processes of the ship. There are thus no clear targets for a politi-
cally-based critique. Instead, he is content to note a number of sites or modes
of resistance among the men. Besides their recourse to drinking as a means of
escape, and the smuggling that follows from it, man-of-war’s-men are also, for
instance, inveterate gamblers. Games of uncertainty and chance are at the op-
posite pole from the regimentation of the ship, in which numbers and positions
are rationally ordered and predetermined. Out of the play of cards and dice
springs a counter order of a sort, a covert exchange of money and goods, and
the creation of networks of lookouts and spies, shadow doubles of those of the
master at arms, his assistants, and informers (NN WJ, 306–307).
Just as gambling is hidden below deck, in the dark margins of the vessel,
other activities such as reading, sewing, daydreaming, and checker-playing
emerge to fill marginal time, to “kill” it in personal or deliberately unproduc-
tive ways (NN WJ, 170–174). But such activities remain strictly limited, tol-
erated or co-opted by the officers as discipline requires. Sailors may dress up
and “promenade” along the gun deck, for instance, but only on the starboard
side, since the larboard is reserved for officers (83, 172). Fighting is allowed
only “under the direct patronage of the captain,” as a form of “‘play’” for his
entertainment (274, 276). And the exuberance of “skylarking” appears only
when ordered, during a frigid calm off Cape Horn (102–103).
The pervasiveness of physical regulation aboard ship is perhaps best il-
lustrated by what White-Jacket terms “the great Massacre of the Beards” (NN
WJ, 355). The sailors have sought to assert a degree of control over their bod-
ies; they give and receive tattoos, for example, as a chosen alternative to the
scars of the lash, and thus also as a form of resistance to naval discipline. As
the ship rounds Cape Horn and heads for home, they also begin to cultivate
their beards, as signs of both individuality and masculinity. Late in the cruise,
however, the Captain suddenly orders all hair cut short and whiskers trimmed
“‘according to the Navy regulations’” (357). If their beards are signs of the sail-
ors’ anticipation of a return to life outside the ship, the captain’s order insists
upon their continued enclosure within it, and their continued identification
by ranks and duties alone. Their initial response is a near mutiny; at last, how-
ever, all the men but one comply. The lone holdout, Ushant, the Captain of
the Forecastle, insists simply that “‘my beard is my own,’” a kind of property
inseparable from the self and beyond such regulation (365). At this moment,
the ship’s two structures of power converge: the captain tries to force Ushant
to comply by having him publicly flogged, and then by demoting and confin-
ing him to the brig (reducing both his rank and his spatial mobility) until the
ship reaches port.
This shift, from public punishment to private confinement, from the first
of Foucault’s models to the second, is precisely the one advocated by reformers
of the period, like the anonymous writer for the Democratic Review.28 Such a
 Discipline and the Lash 259

change did not immediately occur in naval practice, even after the abolition of
flogging in 1850; commanders continued to experiment with different forms
of bodily punishment—tattooing, branding, forcing sailors to wear signs
(Valle, 83). But the “Massacre of the Beards” makes clear that such reforms,
while humanitarian in one respect, served to further rather than to limit the
extension of shipboard discipline.
White-Jacket does not, then, suggest a neat transition between different
forms of penality; nor does it show a retrograde system being superseded by
a more enlightened and democratic one, as Melville’s rhetoric demands. In
both the novel and the antebellum navy, theatricalized physical punishment
continued to undergird the personal authority of the captain, even as the
space of the ship and the functions of the sailors became more fully rational-
ized and controlled. The progressive view of history that Melville invokes
against the Articles of War yields an equally undemocratic disciplinary re-
gime as their complement.
If Melville’s recourse to a mystified republicanism gives him only a lim-
ited basis for an attack on flogging, it offers no means of engagement with
this new disciplinary order. His continued allegiance to such rhetoric may
be strategic, part of a “job” “done for money,” but it may perhaps also reflect
a deeper psychological investment.29 Michael Rogin has suggested that both
White-Jacket and its predecessor, Redburn, describe their protagonists’ con-
frontation with class stratification in the wake of their loss of familial iden-
tity and inheritance.30 Melville himself seems to cling to the Revolutionary
tradition as his own paternal inheritance: he is the sailor whose “grandsire,”
Thomas Melville, fought at Bunker Hill.31 And in a letter of March 1849 to
Evert Duyckinck, he had insisted both that “we are all sons, grandsons, or
nephews or great-nephews of those who go before us” and that “the Declara-
tion of Independence makes a difference” (NN Correspondence, 121,122).
Melville’s relation to that ancestry becomes increasingly troubled (his
mother’s father, Peter Gansevoort, was both a war hero and a slave owner
[Robertson-Lorant, 3]), with his ambivalence surfacing clearly in Pierre and
Israel Potter. But in White-Jacket, those reservations have only begun to ap-
pear, as a sense of loss or diminishment, or even, at moments, an ironic dis-
tance from the patriarchs, and from Revolutionary ideology as well.
The momentum of the narrative line does, of course, lead toward an act
of rebellion in the scene in which White-Jacket himself is threatened with
the lash. He describes himself as about to act from “instinct,” to lunge toward
the Captain and sweep them both over the side: “The privilege, inborn and
inalienable, that every man has, of dying himself, and inflicting death upon
another, was not given to us without a purpose,” he says (NN WJ, 280). But
before he can choose between submission and revolt, a petty officer’s inter-
vention makes the question moot. White-Jacket’s resistance is not simply
260 Peter Bellis

erased, however. It is displaced and deferred, to return in an altered, twisted

form in the “Massacre of the Beards.” Here it is a father-figure, Ushant, the
“Nestor of the crew,” who refuses to have his “manly beard” taken off as the
Captain has ordered (360, 363), and is flogged for doing so. The son’s impulse
toward violent resistance is deflected onto a patriarch, who then passively suf-
fers in the son’s place; it is once more the Fathers’ Revolution, not the belated
son’s, lingering into the present only in severely diminished form.
In the end, though, it is naval discipline that mutes and recontains the
Revolutionary political tradition. Perhaps the best example of this comes on
July 4, when, rather than allowing the men a double ration of grog, Cap-
tain Claret gives them permission to put on “theatricals . . . to honor the
Fourth” (NN WJ, 90). “The people” as audience offer “uncontrollable bursts
of applause” when Jack Chase as “Percy Royal-Mast rescues fifteen oppressed
sailors from the watch-house, in the teeth of a posse of constables” (94). The
response to such a represented liberation is a “terrible . . . commotion,” in
which “all discipline seemed gone forever” (94). But the breakdown is only
temporary—and illusory. As David Suchoff notes, the play has been given “in
the same social space” in which floggings are administered, and “the same old
scene [is] enacted at the gangway” the next day.32 His performance as libera-
tor notwithstanding, Chase will later prove unable to prevent (or even speak
out against) the flogging of Ushant (NN WJ, 365).
In this context, terms such as “liberty” and “the people” take on an ironic
undertone. The crew is referred to as “the people,” but the phrase always ap-
pears in italics or quotation marks (NN WJ, 93–95, 213, 225). The term may
imply a political identity or authority, but seamen are stripped of such political
rights at the moment they join the ship. And the “liberty” Jack Chase seeks—
“‘we’ve struck for liberty, and liberty we’ll have! I’m your tribune, boys; I’m
your Rienzi’”(225)—is only twenty-four hours ashore. Back aboard the Nev-
ersink, the sailor’s reality remains one of constraint and disempowerment.
If Melville can be said to envision any alternative to the frigate’s disci-
plinary order, it is aloft, in the main-top. The foot of the main-mast may be
the symbolic center of the vessel, where its hierarchies are made visible, and
the captain’s authority exercised in public view. But directly above it hangs the
platform of the maintop—the post assigned to both White-Jacket and the
charismatic Chase. This is the one point aboard ship that Melville exempts
from the surveillance and control that enclose and dominate the remainder.
The “top,” by way of contrast, is a democratic, egalitarian space where speech-
es and judgments can be delivered unchecked: “‘there’s no law up aloft here,’”
proclaims one of White-Jacket’s companions, in the course of a “fierce . . .
republican” diatribe against monarchs and noblemen (NN WJ, 235– 236).
Larry J. Reynolds has described White-Jacket’s privileging of the
maintop as “anti-democratic” and elitist,33 but it may be as much an artisan
 Discipline and the Lash 261

republican vision as an aristocratic one. According to Sean Wilentz, the early

nineteenth century saw the development of a distinct form of republican ide-
ology among urban workers, one that blended democratic, libertarian ideals
with egalitarian cooperation and identified political citizenship with the eco-
nomic independence of skilled labor.34 By the late 1840s, such “mechanics”
were struggling with increasing difficulty to differentiate themselves from
unskilled workers and preserve their political identity (Wilentz, 95, 102).
Melville’s main-top-men are in many ways such a fraternity of experi-
enced workers, freed for a time from the regimentation of the deck below:
“we loaned ourselves to each other with all the freedom in the world,” White-
Jacket says (NN WJ, 15). Singing, for instance, may be forbidden while the
men are at work (sea chanteys could be a means of controlling the pace and
rhythm of work in the merchant service),35 but poetry and song are staples
of evenings aloft. So too are battle “yarns,” war stories told from a seaman’s
rather than an officer’s perspective (NN WJ, 311–321). The top becomes both
a communal space for free speech and a stage for spontaneous performance,
home to a fraternal order based upon shared labor and skill rather than an
official hierarchy.
If some shipboard assignments can shape a sailor’s character negatively,
White-Jacket claims that being a main-top-man has given him his “free,
broad, off-hand, bird’s-eye, and more than all, impartial” perspective—has,
in other words, made the book itself possible (NN WJ, 47). The assertion is,
however, ultimately self-defeating, for to make it, Melville’s narrator must
accept the shaping force of the Neversink’s disciplinary order.36 In the end,
White-Jacket’s freedom on the main-top is a wished-for exception to the
rule, while the rule remains intact. Melville ends the book by simply suspend-
ing his narrative, leaving the “main-top-men . . . aloft in the top . . . a brother-
band, hand in hand, all spliced together” (396). The maintop can only be a
“Pisgah,” offering an anticipated—or, more accurately, nostalgic—egalitarian
ideal (397).
Why such a visionary but evasive ending? The campaign to abolish flog-
ging was already nearing success before White-Jacket appeared, but Melville’s
democratic and legal arguments do not enable him to go further; they do
not give him a language adequate to respond to either the class issues or the
disciplinary processes on the decks below. How to reconcile The Declaration
of Independence with the realities of industrial capitalism? The language of
revolutionary citizenship and individual virtue is no longer sufficient to the
task, and, almost reluctantly, White-Jacket registers that exhaustion.
A year later, in Moby-Dick, Melville would return to the problem, de-
picting it in terms both starker and more complex. Ahab’s authoritarian and
theatrical command is, of course, explicitly based on public vengeance to be
exacted on the creature that has so directly “touched the very person of the
262 Peter Bellis

prince,” in Foucault’s phrase (Discipline, 49). But the captain’s pursuit is now
clearly in conflict with both Starbuck’s rational capitalism and the functioning
of the whale ship as factory. In this model, with the crew working for “lays”
or shares of the voyage’s profits, all become members of a “joint stock com-
pany,” a capitalist enterprise that is in turn quite different from the ecstatic
fraternity of “A Squeeze of the Hand” or the bond of friendship between
Ishmael and Queequeg. Unlike White-Jacket, Moby-Dick does not evade the
tragic consequences of such oppositions; but it, too closes with the conflicts
between democracy and authority, egalitarianism and capitalism, unresolved.

No t e s

  1. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage, 1979); hereafter cited as Discipline. In a later formulation, Foucault
substitutes for these two terms “a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government,
which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism
the apparatuses of security” (“Governmentality,” The Essential Foucault, ed. Paul
Rabinow and Nikolas Rose [New York: New Press, 2003], 243). Naval order,
however, seems better described by his earlier model, since it is based on the control
of the ship as a space more than of its a crew as a “population.”
  2. Samuel Otter terms this aspect of the text an “anatomy”; see his Melville’s
Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 4–6.
  3. In Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002), Cesare Casarino also contrasts Melville and
Foucault, as he locates White-Jacket within the genre of the nineteenth-century sea
narrative. For him, the genre registers the transition from mercantile to industrial
capitalism, and these two orders overlap aboard the Neversink (3–5). I would agree
that the problem of the emerging industrial order is broached in White-Jacket, but my
focus here will be on the inadequacy of Melville’s political discourse as a response
to it.
  4. James E. Valle, Rocks and Shoals: Order and Discipline in the Old Navy
1800–1861 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1980), 44, 76; Valle also quotes a
similar description given by Commodore David Porter in the 1830s (36).
  5. Herman Melville, White-Jacket: or The World in a Man-of-War, ed. Harrison
Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Northwestern University Press
and the Newberry Library: Evanston and Chicago, 1970), 23; hereafter cited as
NN WJ.
  6. Charles R. Anderson, Melville in the South Seas (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1939), 349. Valle describes the United States as “an acknowledged
‘hell ship’” during these years, and thus not really representative of the navy as a
whole (44).
  7. NN WJ, 134. See also Howard P. Vincent, The Tailoring of Melville’s White-
Jacket (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 91.
  8. NN WJ, 135, 301; Foucault, 57.
  9. See especially NN WJ, Ch. 39, “The Frigate in Harbor,” 160–163.
10. NN WJ, 222; Valle, 88. The class gulf between officers and men is
registered most clearly in Ch. 59, “A Man-of-War Button Divides Two Brothers.”
 Discipline and the Lash 263

11. As qtd. in Valle, 287.

12. Valle, 43; see also Harold Langley, Social Reform in the United States Navy,
1798–1862 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 138–139.
13. “Flogging in the Navy,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review
25.134 (August, 1849), 101.
14. Wai-Chee Dimock links this expansionist rhetoric to what she sees as
the “differential” and thus limited character of Jacksonian reform, but Melville’s
language, as I have suggested, may be idiosyncratic rather than representative in
this regard. See her Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 101.
15. See Vincent, 88–106; and Otter, 67–77.
16. See, for instance, the House debate of September 21, 1850. Congressional
Globe, 31st Congress, 1st Session, XIX, 1906; and Valle, 64.
17. February 12, 1849. Congressional Globe, 30th Congress, 2nd Session,
XVIII, 507.
18. Congressional Globe, 30th Congress, 2nd Session, XVIII, 511.
19. See in particular the fourth installment of the series, “Substitutes
Detailed,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 25.137 (November, 1849),
417–432.
20. The limits of Melville’s version of reform are noted by both Priscilla Allen
Zirker in “Evidence of the Slavery Dilemma in White-Jacket,” American Quarterly
18 (Fall, 1966): 477–492; and in John Samson, White Lies: Melville’s Narratives of
Facts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 128–172. Zirker links Melville’s
ambivalence to that of the Democratic Party in the late 1840s, while Samson
describes it as a Whig position on the issue.
21. See Ch. 162, “They Visit the Extreme South of Vivenza,” in Herman
Melville, Mardi: and a Voyage Thither, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and
G. Thomas Tanselle (Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library:
Evanston and Chicago, 1970).
22. The best known formulation of the republican ideal is J. G. A. Pocock’s.
See, for instance, his “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 3 (1972): 121; or the final chapter of his The Machiavellian
Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 506–552.
23. On the shift of republicanism to the level of cultural practice, see Jean
Baker, “From Belief into Culture: Republicanism in the Antebellum North,”
American Quarterly 37.4 (Autumn, 1985): 532–550; on Republicanism and the
Northern working class, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the
Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), 55–60, 80–87.
24. “What To the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” in The Oxford Frederick
Douglass Reader, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Oxford University Press,
1996), 112, 125, 126.
25. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16.1 (Spring
1986): 24, 27.
26. NN WJ, 177; Valle, 5.
27. Rules, Regulations, and Instructions, for the Naval Service of the United States
(Washington: E. de Krafft, 1818), 51.
28. See “Flogging in the Navy,” 97.
29. Letter of October 6, 1849, to Lemuel Shaw, Correspondence, ed. Lynn
Horth, Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and
264 Peter Bellis

Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1993), 138;
hereafter cited as NN Correspondence.
30. Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman
Melville (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 89.
31. See Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography (New York: Clarkson
Potter, 1996), 3; NN WJ, 146.
32. Critical Theory and the Novel: Mass Society and Cultural Criticism in Dickens,
Melville, and Kafka (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 107; NN
WJ, 95.
33. “Antidemocratic Emphasis in White-Jacket,” American Literature 48.1
(1976): 13–28.
34. Wilentz, 95, 102.
35. See Margaret S. Creighton, “Fraternity in the American Forecastle,
1830–1860,” New England Quarterly 63.4 (1990): 546–547.
36. John Bryant suggests that such a perspective gives the maintop the
privileged viewpoint of Foucault’s Panopticon—again, such an assertion of privilege
would reinforce rather than escape the order of the ship. See his “The Native Gazes:
Sexuality and Self-Colonization in Melville’s Typee,” Melville Among the Nations, ed.
Sanford E. Marovitz and A. C. Christodoulou (Kent, OH: Kent State University
Press, 2001), 256. In any case, White-Jacket seldom looks down onto the deck from
his position aloft; his gaze is most often directed up or out over the waves.
 Chronology

1819 Herman Melville (or Melvill) born on August 1 in New

York City, the third child of Allan Melville, an importer,
and Maria Gansevoort Melville.
1826 Melville attends the New York Male High School.
1830–1832 Allan Melville’s importing business fails, and he moves the
family to Albany. Herman becomes a student at the Albany
Academy until his father’s death in 1832. Then he works
at various jobs: a bank clerk, a helper on his brother’s farm
and an assistant in his brother’s fur factory and store.
1835–1838 Continues his education at various high schools; supplements
the family income by teaching.
1839 “Fragments from a Writing Desk” published May 4 and
May 18 in the Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser.
Melville works his way to Liverpool and back on the Saint
Lawrence, a merchant ship.
1841–1844 Melville leaves Fairhaven, Massachusetts as a sailor on the
whaler Acushnet, bound for the South Seas. Jumps ship in
the Marquesas Islands, where he lives among the natives
for about a month. After a series of adventures, travels
home as a passenger on the frigate United States.
1846 Publishes Typee. Brother Gansevoort dies.
1847 Publishes Omoo. Marries Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of
Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Boston.

265
266 Chronology

1847–1850 Melville tries to earn a living as a writer, producing

occasional articles and reviews. Makes acquaintance of
George and Evert Duyckinck, and other New York literary
figures.
1849 Publishes Mardi and Redburn. Travels to Europe. Son
Malcolm born.
1850 Publishes White-Jacket. Purchases Arrowhead, a farm
near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Begins his friendship with
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lives in nearby Lenox.
1851 Publishes Moby-Dick. Son Stanwix born.
1852 Publishes Pierre.
1853–1856 Daughter Elizabeth born. Writes stories and sketches for
Putnam’s Monthly Magazine and Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine.
1855 Publishes Israel Potter as a book, after serialization in
Putnam’s. Daughter Frances born.
1856 The Piazza Tales published. Melville travels to Europe and
the Near East for his health.
1857 The Confidence Man, which Melville has left with his
publisher before he began traveling, is finally published.
Melville returns to the United States.
1857–1860 Melville supports family by lectures on such topics as
“Statuary in Rome,” “The South Seas” and “Travelling.”
1863 Melville sells Arrowhead, and moves his family to New
York City.
1866 Publishes a collection of poems, Battle-Pieces and Aspects
of the War. Son Malcolm shoots himself; son Stanwix runs
away to sea.
1876 Publishes Clarel.
1886 Son Stanwix dies.
1888 John Marr and Other Sailors privately printed.
1891 Timoleon privately printed. Melville dies on September 28.
1924 First publication of Billy Budd.
 Contributors

HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale Uni-

versity. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959),
The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map
of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of
Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994),
and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection
(1996). The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom’s provoca-
tive theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their
predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the
Human (1998), a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why
(2000), Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002),
Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003), Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (2004),
and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005). In 1999, Professor Bloom
received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold
Medal for Criticism. He has also received the International Prize of Catalo-
nia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans Christian Andersen
Bicentennial Prize of Denmark.

Milton R. Stern is emeritus professor of English at the University of

Connecticut. A former editor of American Literature Survey, he has written
or edited five volumes on Melville, including The Fine Hammered Steel of
Herman Melville (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957).

Sanford E. Marovitz retired as professor of English at Kent State

University in 1991. With Clarence Ghodes he compiled the fifth edition of

267
268 Contributors

A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of the Literature of the U.S.A. (Durham,

N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984).

Sandra A. Zagarell is Donald R. Longman Professor of English at

Oberlin College. She was senior editor of The Heath Anthology of American
Literature, 4th edition. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).

John Bryant is professor of English at Hofstra University. He has writ-

ten extensively on Melville. His books include The Fluid Text: A Theory of
Revision and Editing for Book and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press, 2002); Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American
Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and .A Companion
to Melville Studies (Westport, C.T.: Greenwood Press, 1986). He is editor of
The Typee Manuscript Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies in the Melville
Electronic Library.

Bryan C. Short was professor of English at Northern Arizona Univer-

sity and treasurer of the Melville Society at the time of his death in 2003.
Between 1971 and his death, he wrote extensively about Melville.

Nancy Fredricks is author of Melville’s Art of Democracy (Athens:

University of Georgia Press, 1995).

Stephen Mathewson wrote his dissertation on Melville, “The

Canonical Whale: ‘Moby-Dick’ and American Literary History” (1990). He
has also written articles on Melville and the painter, Thomas Hudson.

Bill Chrisophersen is author of The Apparition in the Glass: Charles

Brockden Brown’s American Gothic (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1993).

Judith Hiltner is professor of English at St. Xavier University in

Chicago. She has written several scholarly articles on Melville, including
studies on Israel Potter and his short fiction.

John Wenke is professor of English at Salisbury State University. He

is author of Melville’s Muse: Literary Creation and the Forms of Philosophical
Fiction (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1995).

Merton M. Sealts, JR. was Henry A. Pochman Professor of Eng-

lish, emeritus, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Among his many
respected books on nineteenth-century literature is the Pursuing Melville,
1940–1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); Melville’s Read-
ing, revised and enlarged (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
 Contributors 269

1988); and Beyond the Classroom: Essays on American Authors (Columbia: Uni-
versity of Missouri Press, 1996). Professor Sealts died in 2000.

Stanton Garner is retired professor of English at the University of

Texas. He is secretary of the Melville Society and author of The Civil War
World of Herman Melville (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993).

Thomas Hove earned his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, Urbana;

his dissertation was “Ethical Ideals, Nonrational Forces: Melville’s Critique
of Morality” (1999). He has written articles on Toni Morrison, William
Gass, and Billy Budd.

Cindy Weinstein is professor of English at the California Institute of

Technology. Her books include Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-
Century American Literature (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2004) and The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in
Nineteenth Century American Fiction (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).

Peter Bellis is professor of English and department chair at the

University of Alabama, Birmingham. He has written No Mysteries Out of
Ourselves: Identity and Textual Form in the Novels of Herman Melville (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990) and Writing Revolution:
Aesthetics and Politics in Antebellum American Literature (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 2003).
 Bibliography

Bergmann, Johannes D., “Melville’s Tales,” in A Companion to Melville Studies,

edited by John Bryant (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 241–278.
Brodhead, Richard H., Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1976).
Bryant, John, Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Cook, Jonathan A., Satirical Apocalypse: An Anatomy of Melville’s The Confidence-
Man (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996).
Davis, Merrell R., Melville’s Mardi: A Chartless Voyage (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1952).
Detlaff, Shirley, “Ionian Form and Esau’s Waste: Melville’s View of Art in Clarel,”
American Literature, 54 (May 1982): 212–228.
Dillingham, William B., Melville and His Circle: The Last Years (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1996).
Dimock, Wai-chee, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
Finkelstein, Dorothee Metlitsky, Melville’s Orienda (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1961).
Garner, Stanton, The Civil War World of Herman Melville (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 1993).
Goldman, Stan, Melville’s Protest Theism: The Hidden and Silent God in Clarel
(Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993).

271
272 Bibliography

Hayford, Harrison, “‘Unnecessary Duplicates’: A Key to the Writing of Moby-

Dick,” in New Perspectives on Melville, edited by Faith Pullin (Kent, Ohio:
Kent State University Press, 1979), pp. 128–161.
Higgins, Brian, Herman Melville: A Reference Guide, 1931–1960 (Boston: G. K.
Hall, 1987).
Higgins and Hershel Parker, eds., Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Howard, Leon, Herman Melville: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1951).
Kenny, Vincent, “Clarel,” in A Companion to Melville Studies, edited by Bryant (New
York: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 375–406.
Lawrence, D. H., Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: T. Seltzer,
1923).
Levin, Michael E., “Ahab as Socratic Philosopher: The Myth of the Cave Inverted,”
American Transcendental Quarterly, 41 (Winter 1979): 61–73.
Leyda, Jay, ed., The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951; with supplement, New York: Gordian
Press, 1969).
Miller, Edwin Haviland, Herman Melville: A Biography (New York: Braziller,
1975).
Parker, Hershel, Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume I, 1819–1851 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
———. “Herman Melville’s The Isle of the Cross: A Survey and a Chronology,”
American Literature, 62 (March 1990): 1–16.
Post-Lauria, Sheila, Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the Marketplace (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1996).
Ricks, Beatrice, Herman Melville: A Reference Bibliography, 1900–1972, with Selected
Nineteenth-Century Materials (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1973).
Robertson-Lorant, Laurie, Melville, A Biography (New York: Clarkson N. Potter,
1996).
William H. Gilman, Melville’s Early Life and Redburn (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 1951).
Robillard, Douglas, Melville and the Visual Arts: Ionian Form, Venetian Tint (Kent,
Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997).
Samson, John, White Lies: Melville’s Narratives of Facts (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1989).
Schultz, Elizabeth A., Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century
American Art (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).
Sealts, Merton M. Jr., Melville’s Reading (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1988).
 Bibliography 273

Short, Bryan C., “Form as Vision in Herman Melville’s Clarel,” American Literature,
50 (January 1979): 553–569.
Shurr, William, The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet, 1857–1891 (Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 1972).
Sten, Christopher, The Weaver God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996).
———, ed., Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Uni-
versity Press, 1991).
Stern, Milton R., The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1957).
———. “Toward ‘Bartleby the Scrivener,’” in The Stoic Strain in American Literature,
edited by Duane J. Macmillan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979),
pp. 19–41.
Titus, David K., “Herman Melville at the Albany Academy,” Melville Society
Extracts, 42 (May 1980): 4–10.
Vargish, Thomas, “Gnostick Mythos in Moby-Dick,” PMLA, 81 (June 1966):
272–277.
Vincent, Howard P., The Tailoring of Melville’s White-Jacket (Evanston, Ill.: North-
western University Press, 1970).
———. The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948).
Wallace, Robert K., Melville & Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright (Athens: Univer-
sity of Georgia Press, 1992).
Wenke, John, Melville’s Muse: Literary Creation and the Forms of Philosophical Fiction
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1995).
Wright, Nathalia, Melville’s Use of the Bible (Durham: Duke University Press,
1949).
 Acknowledgments

Milton R. Stern, “Towards ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’”; The Stoic Strain in

American Literature, edited by Duane J. Macmillan (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1979): pp. 19–41. © 1979 University of Toronto Press. Reprinted
with permission of the publisher.

Sanford E. Marovitz, “Melville’s Problematic ‘Being’”; ESQ: A Journal of the

American Renaissance, Volume 28, Number 1 (1982): pp. 11–13. © 1982 Sanford
E. Marovitz. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Sandra A. Zagarell, “Reenvisioning America: Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’”; ESQ:

A Journal of the American Renaissance, Volume 30, Number 4 (1984): pp. 245–
259. © 1984 Sandra A. Zagarell. Reprinted with permission of the author.

John Bryant, “Allegory and Breakdown in The Confidence-Man: Melville’s

Comedy of Doubt”; Philological Quarterly, Volume 65 (Winter 1986): pp. 113–
130. © 1986 University of Iowa.

Bryan C. Short, “‘The Author at the Time’: Tommo and Melville’s Self-
discovery in Typee”; Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Volume 31,
Number 3 (Fall 1989): pp. 386–405. © 1989 University of Texas Press.

Nancy Fredricks, “Melville and the Woman’s Story”; Studies in American Fiction,
Volume 19 (1991): pp. 41–54. © 1991 Northeastern University.

275
276 Acknowledgments

Stephen Mathewson, “’To Tell Over Again the Story Just Told’: The Composition
of Melville’s Redburn”; ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Volume 37,
Number 4 (1991): pp. 311–320. © 1991 Washington State University.

Bill Christophersen, “Israel Potter: Melville’s ‘Citizen of the Universe’”; Studies in

American Fiction, Volume 21 (1993): pp. 21–35. © 1993 Northeastern University.

Judith Hiltner, “Disquieting Encounters: Male Intrusions/Female Realms in

Melville”; ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Volume 40, Number 2
(1994): pp. 91–111. © 1994 Washington State University.

John Wenke, “Mardi: Narrative Self-Fashioning and the Play of Possibility”;

Melville’s Muse: Literary Creation and the Forms of Philosophical Fiction (Kent,
Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1995): pp. 27–46. © 1995 Kent State
University Press.

Merton M. Sealts, Jr., “Whose Book Is Moby-Dick?”; Reprinted from

Beyond the Classroom: Essays on American Authors by Merton M. Sealts, Jr. by
permission of the University of Missouri Press. © 1996 by the Curators of the
University of Missouri.

Stanton Garner, “Naples and HMS Bellipotent: Melville on the Police State”;
Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, Volume 1, Number 2 (1999): pp. 53–61.
© 1999 Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission.

Thomas Hove, “Naturalist Psychology in Billy Budd ”; Leviathan: A Journal of

Melville Studies, Volume 5, Number 2 (2003): pp. 51–65. © 2003 Blackwell
Publishing. Reprinted with permission.

Cindy Weinstein, “We Are Family: Melville’s Pierre”; Leviathan: A Journal of

Melville Studies, Volume 7, Number 1 (2005): pp. 19–40. © 2005 Blackwell
Publishing. Reprinted with permission.

Peter Bellis, “Discipline and the Lash in Melville’s White-Jacket”; Leviathan:

A Journal of Melville Studies, Volume 7, Number 2 (2005): pp. 25–40. © 2005
Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission.
 Index

Absalom, Absalom!, 195 Artemis, 151

Actaeon, 151 “Articles of War,” 259
Adam, 44 Arvin, Newton, 94, 136
Adler, George, 46, 48 Astor, John Jacob, 17
Aeneas (character), 202 “At the Hostelry,” 202, 206, 208
Agatha letters, 116 Atufal (character), 66
Agrippina, 204 Augustine, 176
Ahab, 22–24, 33, 42, 44, 46–47, Auschwitz, 29, 31
50–51, 116–117, 168, 172, 176,
185, 187–191, 193, 195–196 Babo (character), 61, 64–66, 68–69,
Alcott, Bronson, 238, 240 72, 157
Alcott, William, 238 Bachelors Delight (ship), 71
Aleema (character), 177–178, 180 Baraka, Amiri, 68
Alexander, 45 Barfield, Owen, 48
Allen, Ethan, 135, 137, 139, 144 Bartleby (character), 13, 35, 155, 176
All’s Well That Ends Well, 54 Bartleby and Nihilistic Resistance, 14
altruism, 211 “Bartleby the Scrivener,” 13, 35, 147,
American Renaissance: Art and 155, 176
Expression in the Age of Emerson Battles
and Whitman, 190 Bunker Hill, 253, 259
American Revolution, 138, 146, 252 Charleston, 206
Anacreon, 176 Vicksburg, 206
Anderson, Charles R., 94 Bayle, Pierre, 40, 45
Andrea (character), 204 Baym, Nina, 53, 65
Annatoo (character), 174 Bell, Millicent, 45
anti-slavery, 253 Bellipotent (fictional ship), 206, 209,
“Apparition, The,” 203 215
Aranda (character), 63, 72 Bellis, Peter, 249
Arcturion (fictional ship), 168, 175, benevolence, 211
180 “Benito Cereno,” 60–70, 72, 135,
Aristotle, 43 152, 156–157, 208

277
278 Index

Bentivegna, Francesco, 202 Castile, 68

Bentley, Richard, 127 Celio (character), 172
Bercovitch, Sacvan, 138 Chapin, E. H., 238
Berkeley, Bishop, 173 Chase, Jack (character), 260
Berthoff, Warner, 136, 192 Chile, 70
Bezanson, Walter, 190, 192–193, Christ, Jesus, 16
195–196 Christianity, 17, 25, 27–28, 117,
Billy (character), 206–208, 211
212–223 Christopherson, Bill, 135
Billy Budd, Sailor, 54, 201, 205–209, “Church of the Apostles, The,” 47,
211, 224 238, 240
Biographic Literaria, 48 Cicero, 21
Birthmark, The, 213 “Circles,” 52
Blandmour (character), 160 Civil War, 206, 208
Bloom, Harold, 106 Claggart (character), 212–223
Bluestone, George, 14 Clarel, 51, 53, 169, 211
Bolton, Harry (character), Claret, Captain (character), 176, 254,
131–132 250, 260
Bon Homme Richard, 144 Clark, Michael, 102
Booth, Wayne, 186, 192 Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!, 61, 147
Braswell, William, 47 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 40, 46,
Breining, Helmbrecht, 119 48–49, 177, 186
Brodtkorb, Paul, 194–195 Columbus, Christopher, 70
Brook Farm, 238 Compson, Quentin, 195
Brown, Cecil, 195 Confidence-Man, The, 53, 89, 141,
Brown, Young Goodman (character), 169, 211
46 Congress, U.S., 250, 252
Browne, Thomas, 44, 171 Conrad, Joseph, 193
Brumm, Ursula, 138 “Consociate Family Life, The,”
Bryant, John, 208 238
Bunker Hill Monument, 147 Constitution, U.S., 252
Bunyan, John, 23 Cooke, Rose Terry, 118
Cooper, James Fenimore, 61
Cambon, Glauco, 194, 196 Corinne, 118
Campbell, Lewis, 41 Coulter, Martha (character), 152,
cannibalism, 93–95, 102 155, 160
Cape Horn, 258 Court of Chancery, 17
capitalism, 262 Cowely, William Ambrose, 71
Caracciolo, Prince, 205 Crack-Up, The, 193
Carey, Alice, 118 Cromwell’s Protectorate, 146
Carlo (character), 130 Crusoe, Robinson, 100
Carlyle, Thomas, 41 Cummin, Maria Susanna, 227
Carraway, Nick (character), 193 Cutlets, Mr. (character), 21
 Index 279

Dana Jr., Richard Henry, 95–96, 253 European Revolution of 1848, 205
Danker (character), 207 Example of Melville, The, 192
Darwin, Charles, 211
Darwinism, 211, 213 Falcone, Aniello, 204
D’Avanzo, Mario L., 14 Falsgrave, Rev. (character), 116
Davis, Merrell R., 177 Faulkner, William, 195
Declaration of Independence, 252, Fayaway (character), 101, 108
254, 259, 261 Fedallah, 46
Dedalus, Stephen, 28 Feidelson Jr., Charles, 136, 145, 190
Defoe, Daniel, 106 feminism, 116
Delano, Captain (character), 60–63, Feminization of American Culture,
65–72, 152, 156–157 The, 116
Delly (character), 237, 239, 241–242, Ferdinand V (Neapolitan king), 201
246 Fern, Fanny, 116
Delmonico’s (N.Y. restaurant), 206 Fetterly, Judith, 118
Democratic Review, 258 Fiene, Donald M., 15
Democritus, 176 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 193
Descartes, 52 flogging, 252
Dewey, John, 213–214, 216, 219 Forgie, George B., 69
Dickinson, Emily, 193 Foucault, Michel, 249, 254, 258, 262
Discipline and Punish, 249, 262
France, 207
Dolly (ship), 156, 168
Francesco (character), 66
Donovan, Josephine, 118
Frank, Joseph, 100
Douglas, Ann, 116
Frankenstein, Victor (character), 117
Douglass, Frederick, 254
Frankenstein, 117
Dryden, Edgar A., 93, 161
Franklin, Benjamin, 69, 135, 137,
Duties of Young Women, 238
139, 144
Duyckinck, Evert Augustus, 39–41,
Franklin, Bruce, 16
52–53, 134, 189, 259
Frederic (character), 245
Duyckinck, George, 189
Fredricks, Nancy, 113
Eastman, Hubbard, 240 Fruitlands, 238, 240
Egbert (character), 86–87, 89
El Cid, 206 Galápagos Islands, 148
Elijah, 24 gambling, 258
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 40, 44, 46, Gansevoort, Peter, 259
49, 52–53, 61, 196 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 206–208
Empire of Mother, The, 116 Garner, Stanton, 201
Encantadas, The, 105, 116, 135, 147, Gentian, Jack (character), 203–204,
151, 162–164 206–207
England, 145, 207 George III (English king), 142
Liverpool, 127, 130 Geraldine (character), 177
London, 117, 135, 138, 162 Germanicus, 204
Whitehaven, 143 Gerty (character), 227
280 Index

Ginger Nut (character), 18 Inquisition, 68

Gladstone, William, 202 Isabel (character), 48, 117, 119,
Glendinning, Mrs. (character), 116, 158–159, 163, 176–177, 228–229,
229, 239 233–235, 237–238, 240–244
God, 42, 48–51 Ishmael (character), 13–14, 22, 34,
Godey’s Magazine, 229 41, 44, 46, 89–90, 105, 129, 151,
Goodman, 87–89 155–156, 170–171, 176, 185,
Great Gatsby, The, 193 187–196, 262
Griffiths, Clyde, 28 Ishmael’s White World, 194
Israel Potter, 69, 135, 148, 162, 259
Hafiz, 176 Italy, 202
Hale, John, 253 Herculaneum, 203
Harper’s, 127 Naples, 201, 204–206, 209
Hautia (character), 116, 180 Pompeii, 203
Posillipo, 202
Hawaii, 97
Rome, 202
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 39–40, 46,
8, 51, 53, 115, 117, 193, 213, 221
Jackson (character), 133
Hawthorne, Sophia, 114
Jackson, Kenny, 136
Hayford, Harrison, 129
James, William, 213–214, 216
Heart of Darkness, 193 Jarl (character), 170–171, 173–174
Hentz, Caroline Lee, 227 Joanna (character), 204
Herbert, T. Walter, 99 Joanna I (Angevin queen), 204
Highlander (ship), 128, John Bull, 94
131 John Marr and Other Sailors, 108
Hiltner, Judith, 151 Johnson, Barbara, 214
Historical and Critical Dictionary Jones, John Paul, 69, 135, 137, 139–
(Bayle), 40, 45 140, 142, 144
Hoadley, Catherine, 54 Joyce, James, 28
Hoadley, John C., 54 Julia (fictional ship), 99, 109
Hobbes, Jacob, 140 Julian the Apostate, 176
Hobbes, Thomas, 140
Holmes, Mary Jane, 227 Kafka, Franz, 23, 28
Homer, 176 Karakoee (character), 108–109
House of the Seven Gables, The, 39 Karcher, Carolyn L., 64, 115
Hove, Thomas, 211 Kate Aylesford: A Story of the Refugees,
Howard, Leon, 191 135
Hudson River, 128 Keats, 177
humour, 22 Kenny, Rosemary, 121
Hunilla (character), 116, 148, 151, Keyssar, Alexander, 136
162–163 Kirkland, Caroline, 118
Know-Nothingism, 254
I and My Chimney, 118 Kory-Kory (character), 99, 101,
incest, 228, 237, 239–245 103–104, 153
 Index 281

Lady’s Book, 229 Masaniello, 204, 206

Lafeu (character), 54 Massachusetts, 24, 138, 146
Lamia (character), 177 Boston, 146
La Motte-Fouqué, Friedrich de, 177 Concord, 187
Lamplighter, The, 227 Hancock, 238
Lane, Charles, 238 Lebanon, 238
Lawrence, D. H., 192 Lowell, 155
Lee, Anne, 240 “Massacre of the Beards,” 259–260
Lee, William, 240 Mathewson, Stephen, 127
Leon, 68 Mathilde (character), 177
Levin, Harry, 192 Matthiessen, F. O., 136, 189
Lewes, George Henry, 136 Max the Dutchman (character), 129
McNally, William, 253
“Library of American Books,” 53
Melville, Anna, 128
Life and Remarkable Adventures of
Melville, Malcolm, 128
Israel R. Potter, The, 136
Melville, Maria, 128
Literary World, 39
Melville, Thomas, 259
Locke, John, 34
Melville Revival, 185
London Bridge, 145
Melville’s Bartleby and Carlyle, 14
Lovejoy, Arthur, 42
Melville’s Parable of the Walls, 14
Lucy (character), 47, 176, 230, 232–
Melvlle in the South Seas, 94
234, 236–237, 239–243, 228
Mexico
Lyrical Ballads, 186 Acapulco, 70
Milder, Robert, 218
Manifest Destiny, 253 millennialism, 253
Mapple, Father (character), 194 Miller, E. H., 93
Mardi, 43, 94, 98, 101, 109, 116, Millthorpe, Charlie (character), 239,
127, 134, 167–168, 170, 172–173, 241, 246
175–178, 180–181, 254 Milton, John, 46, 48, 176
Margoth (character), 211 misogyny, 115
Marheyo (character), 101, 107 Moby-Dick, 40–42, 44, 50–52, 69,
Marianna (character), 119, 120–121, 89, 101, 109, 113–114, 117–118,
123, 152, 161, 163 129, 135, 152, 155–158, 168, 170,
Marks, Barry A., 194 175, 178, 181, 185, 196, 261
Marlow (character), 193 Moby-Dick: Work of Art, 190
Marovitz, Sanford E., 39 Montaigne, Michel de, 176
Marquesas, 96, 100 “Montaigne,” 53
“Marquis de Grandvin,” 202 Montégut, Emile, 136
Marquis de Grandvin (character), 206 Montgomery, Ellen (character), 227
Marriage: Its History, Character, and Moore, Richard S., 119
Results, 238, 241 Moorehead, Sara, 113
Marryat, Federick, 106 morality, 211
Mars (ship), 71 Moredock (character), 86
Marx, Leo, 14, 17 Mormons, 240
282 Index

Mortmain (character), 172 Nukuheva Bay, 97, 99, 156

Mosses, 39 Nuku Hiva, 209
Mount Greylock, 119
Mow-Mow (character), 107–108 Of Human Freedom!, 50
Mowanna (character), 99 Oliver, Egbert S., 14
Mumford, Lewis, 136 Omoo, 109, 128, 135, 167, 189
Murray, Henry A., 192 Oneida, 238
Murray, John, 94 Oneiza (character), 177
Mushabac, Jane, 115 On the Theology of Plato, 43
Owenites, 240
Nantucket, 24, 193
“Naples in the Time of Bomba,”
Paley, William, 34
202–203
Pandaemonium, 47
Narcissus, 14, 173
Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, 95 Paradise Lost, 44, 47
Nathan (character), 176 Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus
naturalism, 213 of Maids, The, 115, 117, 151
Naturalist Psychology, 211, 224 Parki (ship), 174
Nature, 44 Parthenopean Republic, 204
Navy, U.S., 249 Partisan Review, 195
Nazis, 31 Paul, St., 176
Nelson, Horatio, 205 “Pausilippo (In the Time of
Neoplatonists, 40 Bomba),” 203, 208
Neversink (ship), 250–251, 255, 257, Peckham, Morse, 190
260–261 Pequod (ship), 44, 151, 188, 190,
New Bedford, 192 192–193, 196
New England, 138–139, 146 Perfectionists, 239
Newgate (prison), 257 Perseverance (ship), 71
New Harmony, 238 Petrarch, 176
New York, 127, 192 Phaedo, 41
draft riots, 128, 206 Piazza, The, 118, 121, 152, 161
city, 238
Piazza Tales, The, 113, 119
Public Library, 98
Picture of Liverpool, The, 129–130
New Yorker, The, 185
New York Literary World, 189 Pierre (character), 47, 158–160, 162,
Nichols, Mary S. Gove, 238, 172, 176, 227, 245
241 Pierre, or the Ambiguities, 29, 40–42,
Nichols, T. L., 238, 241 46–47, 52, 114–119, 121, 135,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 213, 216 162–163, 169–170, 175, 193, 211,
Nippers (character), 17, 20 227, 245, 259
Noble, 86–87, 89 Pip (character), 44, 188, 109, 191
Norfolk Island, 164 Pitch, 86, 88–89
Noye, Phillipe de la, 69 Plato, 40–43, 46, 121, 176
Noyes, John Humphrey, 239 Platonism, 42
 Index 283

Plinlimmon, Plotinus (character), 41, Reynolds, David S., 117

229, 239 Reynolds, Larry J., 260
Poe, Edgar Allan, 95, 101 Rhetoric of Fiction, The, 192
Poenicke, Klaus, 119 Richard the Lion-Hearted, 144
polygamy, 240 Riddough Hotel, 130
Polynesia, 167 Riga, 132, 134
Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Roberts, 86, 88
Crumbs, 115, 152, 155, 158, 160, Rogin, Michael Paul, 62, 155, 240,
164 259
Poor Richard, 144 Rolfe (character), 53, 176
Potter, Israel R. (character), 135, Roman Catholic Church, 206
138, 141, 143–146 Romanticism, 190
Principles of Psychology, The, 216 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 63
Proclus, 43, 176 Rosa, Salvator, 204
Prynne, Hester, 48 Ross, Harold, 185
psychology of action, 216 Ruth Hall, 116
punishment, 250, 262 Ryan, Mary, 116
Putnam’s, 21
Pym (character), 95–96
Saddle Meadows (fictional location),
Pyrrho, 45, 176
159, 229, 231, 235, 243
Sally (character), 129
Queequeg (character), 156, 158, 262
Samoa (character), 174
San Dominick (ship), 60–63, 65–68,
Rabelais, 169
70–71, 156
racial dominance, 64
racial oppression, 115 Santo Domingo, 70
racism, 60–62 Sartor Resartus, 41
Rampersad, Arnold, 136 Satan, 47
rape, 240 Satanism, 46
Raphael, 44 Saveda, Miguel (character), 133
Ratcliffe, 207 Schelling, Friedrich, 50–51
realism, 118 Sealts, Merton M. Jr., 41, 43, 185, 208
Redburn (character), 105, 128–129, Second Look at Bartleby, A, 14
131, 133–134, 172 Select Works of Plotinus, 43
Redburn, 41, 127, 134, 170, 194, 259 sentimental novels, 227, 229
Red Rover, The, 61 sentimental romance, 118
“Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology, Serapis (ship), 135, 142
The,” 216 Sermon on the Mount, 117
Religio Medici, 44, 174 sexuality, 239
Representative Men, 53 sexual oppression, 115
republicanism, 250, 259, 261 Shadow Over the Promised Land, 115
“Resolution and Independence,” 61 Shaftesbury, Lord, 205
Revolutionary War, 69, 71, 135 Shakers, 238, 240
284 Index

Shakespeare, William, 14, 18, 54, Taylor, Thomas, 43

176, 193 Teamster, Squire (character), 160
Shaw, Lemuel, 134 Theory of Life, 49
Shelley, Mary, 117 Thomas-a-Kempis, 176
Sherman, William Techumseh, 206 Thoreau, 14, 186, 194, 196
Short, Bryan C., 93 Thurber, James, 185
Sidney, 176 Tiberius, 204
Silvio (character), 203, 208 Timoleon, 203, 206
Sing-Sing (prison), 257 Tinor (character), 153
slavery, 64–66, 68, 70–72 Tior, 99
“Slave Ship,” 68 Toby (character), 100, 106, 109, 156
Smith, Joseph, 240 Tolchin, Neal L., 102
Socrates, 41 Tommo (character), 93, 109
“Song of Myself,” 186, 189, 196 Tommo, 151, 153–154, 156, 158, 164,
Southey, Robert, 177 168, 171
Spain, 66, 70 Tompkins, Jane, 115
“Sphinx, The,” 46 Transcendentalism, 53, 61
Spinoza, Baruch, 46, 49
Troilus and Cressida, 44
Spithead and the Nore (mutiny), 207
Trumbull, Henry, 136
Stael, Mme. de, 118
Turkey (character), 17, 20
Stanley, Glendinning (character),
Turner, Nat, 64
229, 232
Two Temples, 115
Starbuck (character), 24, 47, 188,
Two Years before the Mast, 95
191, 262
Typee, 93, 109, 127, 135, 151–152,
Stern, Milton R., 13, 93
167, 171–172, 189
stoicism, 13
Stubb, 188 Typee Valley, 95–97, 100, 107–109,
Stuttgart Private Lectures, 51 153–154, 156
Suchoff, David, 260
Sundquist, Eric, 229 Ulysses (character), 44
Sydenham, Floyer, 43 Una, 161
Symbolism and American Literature, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 117
190 Undine (character), 177
Ungar (character), 172, 176
taboo, 154, 156 Uniform Code of Military Justice, 253
Tahiti, 97, 156, 161 United States (ship), 250–251
Taji (character), 172, 175–178, United States Magazine and
180–181 Democratic Review, 252, 254
tappa, 153–154, 156, 158 Ushant (character), 260, 258
Tartan, Miss (character), 242 U.S. Navy’s Articles of War, 250
Tartarus of Maids, The, 115, 117, 147,
153–155, 161 Venice, 69
Tashtego, 41 Ventone, 204
 Index 285

Vere, 172, 207–208, 213–215, 219, Widmer, Kingsley, 14, 31, 33

222–223 Wilentz, Sean, 257, 261
Vere (character), 212 Winsome, Mark (character), 86, 89
Verulam, 176 Witherington, Paul, 108
Vesuvius, 202, 203 women, 113–114, 123
Vincent, Howard, 191 labor, 152
Virgil, 176, 202 male intrusions into their world
Voltaire, 99 151, 164
Von Hardenberg, Georg, 177 Wordsworth, 61, 186
World War I, 185, 189
Walden, 186, 189, 196
Wright, Frances, 241
Walden Pond, 187
Warner, Susan, 227
Years with Ross, The, 185
Weinstein, Cindy, 227
Wenke, John, 167 Yillah (character), 170, 172–173,
Whale, The, 187 177–181
White-Jacket (character), 109, 256, Young Wife, or Duties of Woman in the
258–261 Marriage Relation, The, 238
White-Jacket, 41, 128, 134, 194, 209,
249, 262 Zeno, 176
Whitman, Walt, 40, 186, 194, 196 Zoroaster, 176
Wide, Wide World, The, 227 Zoroastrianism, 46