11- ] American Literature
Herman Melville 1819 – 1891
Herman
Melville was an American writer of novels, short stories and poems. He is best
known for the novel Moby-Dick and a romantic account of his experiences in
Polynesian life, Typee. His whaling novel, Moby-Dick is often spoken of as ‘the
great American novel’ ’vying with Scott Fitgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Mark
Twain’s Huckleberry Finn for that title.
Herman
Melville ( August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short
story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known
works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his
experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published
novella. Although his reputation was not high at the time of his death, the
1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival, and
Moby-Dick grew to be considered one of the great American novels.
Melville
was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death
in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a
common sailor on a merchant ship and then on the whaler Acushnet, but he jumped
ship in the Marquesas Islands. Typee, his first book, and its sequel, Omoo
(1847), were travel-adventures based on his encounters with the peoples of the
islands. Their success gave him the financial security to marry Elizabeth Shaw,
the daughter of the Boston jurist Lemuel Shaw. Mardi (1849), a romance-adventure
and his first book not based on his own experience, was not well received.
Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both tales based on his experience as a
well-born young man at sea, were given respectable reviews, but did not sell
well enough to support his expanding family.
Melville's
growing literary ambition showed in Moby-Dick (1851), which took nearly a year
and a half to write, but it did not find an audience, and critics scorned his
psychological novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852). From 1853 to 1856,
Melville published short fiction in magazines, including "Benito
Cereno" and "Bartleby, the Scrivener". In 1857, he traveled to
England, toured the Near East, and published his last work of prose, The
Confidence-Man (1857). He moved to New York in 1863, eventually taking a
position as a United States customs inspector.
From
that point, Melville focused his creative powers on poetry. Battle-Pieces and
Aspects of the War (1866) was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of
the American Civil War. In 1867, his eldest child Malcolm died at home from a
self-inflicted gunshot. Melville's metaphysical epic Clarel: A Poem and
Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was published in 1876. In 1886, his other son
Stanwix died of apparent tuberculosis, and Melville retired. During his last
years, he privately published two volumes of poetry, and left one volume
unpublished. The novella Billy Budd was left unfinished at his death, but was
published posthumously in 1924. Melville died from cardiovascular disease in 1891.
Upon
his return, Melville regaled his family and friends with his adventurous tales
and romantic experiences, and they urged him to put them into writing. Melville
completed Typee, his first book, in the summer of 1845 while living in Troy,
New York. His brother Gansevoort found a publisher for it in London, where it
was published in February 1846 by John Murray in his travel adventure series.
It became an overnight bestseller in England, then in New York, when it was
published on March 17 by Wiley & Putnam.
1845–1850:
Successful writer
In
the narrative, Melville likely extended the period of time he had spent on the
island and also incorporated material from source books he had assembled.
Milder calls Typee "an appealing mixture of adventure, anecdote, ethnography,
and social criticism presented with a genial latitudinarianism that gave
novelty to a South Sea idyll at once erotically suggestive and romantically
chaste".
An
unsigned review in the Salem Advertiser written by Nathaniel Hawthorne called
the book a "skilfully managed" narrative by an author with "that
freedom of view ... which renders him tolerant of codes of morals that may be
little in accordance with our own". Hawthorne continued:
This
book is lightly but vigorously written; and we are acquainted with no work that
gives a freer and more effective picture of barbarian life, in that
unadulterated state of which there are now so few specimens remaining. The
gentleness of disposition that seems akin to the delicious climate, is shown in
contrast with the traits of savage fierceness...He has that freedom of view—it
would be too harsh to call it laxity of principle—which renders him tolerant of
codes of morals that may be little in accordance with our own, a spirit proper
enough to a young and adventurous sailor, and which makes his book the more
wholesome to our staid landsmen.
1850–1851:
Hawthorne and Moby-Dick
The
earliest surviving mention of Moby-Dick is from a May 1, 1850, letter in which
Melville told fellow sea author Richard Henry Dana Jr. "I am half way in
the work." In June, he described the book to his English publisher as
"a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern
Sperm Whale Fisheries," and promised it would be done by the fall.[92] The
original manuscript has not survived. That summer, Melville read Thomas
Carlyle, borrowing copies of Sartor Resartus (1833–34) and On Heroes,
Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History (1841) from the library of his friend
Evert Duyckinck. These readings proved significant, occurring as Melville
radically transformed his initial plan for the novel over the next several
months, conceiving what Delbanco described in 2005 as "the most ambitious
book ever conceived by an American writer".
From
August 4 to 12, 1850, the Melvilles, Sarah Morewood, Duyckinck, Oliver Wendell
Holmes, and other literary figures from New York and Boston came to Pittsfield
to enjoy a period of parties, picnics, dinners, and the like. Nathaniel
Hawthorne and his publisher James T. Fields joined the group while Hawthorne's
wife stayed at home to look after the children. On one picnic outing organized
by Duyckinck, Hawthorne and Melville sought shelter from the rain together and
had a deep, private conversation. Melville had been given a copy of Hawthorne's
short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse, though he had not yet read it.
Melville then avidly read it and wrote a review, "Hawthorne and His
Mosses," which appeared in two installments, on August 17 and 24, in The
Literary World. Melville wrote that these stories revealed a dark side to
Hawthorne, "shrouded in blackness, ten times black". He repeatedly
compared Hawthorne to Shakespeare, and urged that "men not very much
inferior to Shakespeare are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio."
The critic Walter Bezanson finds the essay "so deeply related to
Melville's imaginative and intellectual world while writing Moby-Dick"
that it could be regarded as a virtual preface and should be "everybody's
prime piece of contextual reading".Later that summer, Duyckinck sent
Hawthorne copies of Melville's three most recent books. Hawthorne read them, as
he wrote to Duyckinck on August 29 that Melville in Redburn and White-Jacket
put the reality "more unflinchingly" before his reader than any
writer, and he thought Mardi was "a rich book, with depths here and there
that compel a man to swim for his life". But he cautioned, "It is so
good that one scarcely pardons the writer for not having brooded long over it,
so as to make it a great deal better".
Robertson-Lorant
writes that Melville was "infatuated with Hawthorne's intellect,
captivated by his artistry, and charmed by his elusive personality," but
"the friendship meant something different to each of them," with
Hawthorne offering Melville "the kind of intellectual stimulation he
needed". They may have been "natural allies and friends," yet
they were also "fifteen years apart in age and temperamentally quite
different" and Hawthorne "found Melville's manic intensity exhausting
at times".[105] Bezanson identifies "sexual excitement" in all
the ten letters Melville wrote to the older man.[106] In the essay on
Hawthorne's Mosses, Melville wrote: "I feel that this Hawthorne has
dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I
contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots
into the hot soil of my Southern soul." Melville dedicated his book to
Hawthorne: "In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is
inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne".
On
October 18, 1851, The Whale was published in Britain in three volumes, and on
November 14 Moby-Dick appeared in the United States as a single volume. In
between these dates, on October 22, 1851, the Melvilles' second child, Stanwix,
was born.[107] In December, Hawthorne told Duyckinck, "What a book
Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his
preceding ones."[108] Unlike other contemporaneous reviewers of Melville,
Hawthorne had seen the uniqueness of Melville's new novel and acknowledged it.
In early December 1852, Melville visited the Hawthornes in Concord and
discussed the idea of the "Agatha" story he had talked of with
Hawthorne. This was the last contact between the two writers before Melville
visited Hawthorne in Liverpool four years later when Hawthorne had relocated to
England.[109]
1852–1857:
Unsuccessful writer
After
having borrowed three thousand dollars from his father-in-law in September 1850
to buy a 160-acre farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Melville had high hopes
that his next book would please the public and restore his finances. In April
1851 he told his British publisher, Richard Bentley, that his new book had
"unquestionable novelty" and was calculated to have wide appeal with
elements of romance and mystery.[110] In fact, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities was
heavily psychological, though drawing on the conventions of the romance, and
difficult in style. It was not well received. The New York Day Book published a
venomous attack on September 8, 1852, headlined "HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY".
The item, offered as a news story, reported, A critical friend, who read Melville's last book, Ambiguities,
between two steamboat accidents, told us that it appeared to be composed of the
ravings and reveries of a madman. We were somewhat startled at the remark, but
still more at learning, a few days after, that Melville was really supposed to
be deranged, and that his friends were taking measures to place him under
treatment. We hope one of the earliest precautions will be to keep him
stringently secluded from pen and ink.
1857–1876:
Poet
In
1864, Melville visited the Virginia battlefields of the American Civil
War.[126] After the war, he published Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War
(1866), a collection of 72 poems that has been described as "a polyphonic
verse journal of the conflict". The work did not do well commercially—of
the print run of 1,260 copies, 300 were sent as review copies, and 551 copies
were sold—and reviewers did not realize that Melville had purposely avoided the
ostentatious diction and fine writing that were in fashion, choosing to be
concise and spare.
Writing style
General narrative style
Melville's
writing style shows both consistencies and enormous changes throughout the
years. His development "had been abnormally postponed, and when it came,
it came with a rush and a force that had the menace of quick exhaustion in
it". As early as "Fragments from a Writing Desk", written when
Melville was 20, scholar Sealts sees "a number of elements that anticipate
Melville's later writing, especially his characteristic habit of abundant
literary allusion". Typee and Omoo were documentary adventures that called
for a division of the narrative in short chapters. Such compact organization
bears the risk of fragmentation when applied to a lengthy work such as Mardi,
but with Redburn and White Jacket, Melville turned the short chapter into a
concentrated narrative.
Some
chapters of Moby-Dick are no more than two pages in standard editions, and an
extreme example is Chapter 122, consisting of a single paragraph of 36 words.
The skillful handling of chapters in Moby-Dick is one of the most fully
developed Melvillean signatures, and is a measure of his masterly writing
style. Individual chapters have become "a touchstone for appreciation of
Melville's art and for explanation" of his themes. In contrast, the
chapters in Pierre, called Books, are divided into short-numbered sections,
seemingly an "odd formal compromise" between Melville's natural
length and his purpose to write a regular romance that called for longer
chapters. As satirical elements were introduced, the chapter arrangement
restores "some degree of organization and pace from the chaos".The
usual chapter unit then reappears for Israel Potter, The Confidence-Man and
even Clarel, but only becomes "a vital part in the whole creative
achievement" again in the juxtaposition of accents and of topics in Billy
Budd.
Newton
Arvin points out that only superficially the books after Mardi seem as if
Melville's writing went back to the vein of his first two books. In reality,
his movement "was not a retrograde but a spiral one", and while
Redburn and White Jacket may lack the spontaneous, youthful charm of his first
two books, they are "denser in substance, richer in feeling, tauter, more
complex, more connotative in texture and imagery". The rhythm of the prose
in Omoo "achieves little more than easiness; the language is almost
neutral and without idiosyncrasy", while Redburn shows an improved ability
in narrative, which fuses imagery and emotion.
Melville's
early works were "increasingly baroque" in style, and with Moby-Dick
Melville's vocabulary had grown superabundant. Walter Bezanson calls it an
"immensely varied style". According to critic Warner Berthoff, three
characteristic uses of language can be recognized. First, the exaggerated
repetition of words, as in the series "pitiable", "pity",
"pitied", and "piteous" (Ch. 81, "The Pequod Meets the
Virgin"). A second typical device is the use of unusual adjective-noun
combinations, as in "concentrating brow" and "immaculate
manliness" (Ch. 26, "Knights and Squires"). A third
characteristic is the presence of a participial modifier to emphasize and to
reinforce the already established expectations of the reader, as the words
"preluding" and "foreshadowing" ("so still and subdued
and yet somehow preluding was all the scene ..." "In this
foreshadowing interval ..
After
his use of hyphenated compounds in Pierre, Melville's writing gives Berthoff
the impression of becoming less exploratory and less provocative in his choices
of words and phrases. Instead of providing a lead "into possible meanings
and openings-out of the material in hand," the vocabulary now served
"to crystallize governing impressions," the diction no longer
attracted attention to itself, except as an effort at exact definition. The
language, Berthoff continues, reflects a "controlling intelligence, of
right judgment and completed understanding". The sense of free inquiry and
exploration that infused his earlier writing and accounted for its "rare
force and expansiveness," tended to give way to "static
enumeration". By comparison to the verbal music and kinetic energy of
Moby-Dick, Melville's subsequent writings seem "relatively muted, even
withheld" in his later works.
Melville's
paragraphing in his best work Berthoff considers to be the virtuous result of
"compactness of form and free assembling of unanticipated further
data", such as when the mysterious sperm whale is compared with Exodus's
invisibility of God's face in the final paragraph of Chapter 86 ("The
Tail").Over time Melville's paragraphs became shorter as his sentences
grew longer, until he arrived at the "one-sentence paragraphing
characteristic of his later prose".Berthoff points to the opening chapter
of The Confidence-Man for an example, as it counts fifteen paragraphs, seven of
which consist of only one elaborate sentence, and four that have only two
sentences. The use of similar technique in Billy Budd contributes in large
part, Berthoff says, to its "remarkable narrative economy".
Style
and literary allusion
In
Nathalia Wright's view, Melville's sentences generally have a looseness of
structure, easy to use for devices as catalogue and allusion, parallel and
refrain, proverb and allegory. The length of his clauses may vary greatly, but the
narrative style of writing in Pierre and The Confidence-Man is there to convey
feeling, not thought. Unlike Henry James, who was an innovator of sentence
ordering to render the subtlest nuances in thought, Melville made few such
innovations. His domain is the mainstream of English prose, with its rhythm and
simplicity influenced by the King James Bible. Another important characteristic
of Melville's writing style is in its echoes and overtones. Melville's
imitation of certain distinct styles is responsible for this. His three most
important sources, in order, are the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton. Direct
quotation from any of the sources is slight; only one sixth of his Biblical
allusions can be qualified as such because Melville adapts Biblical usage to
his own narrated textual requirements of clarifying his plot.
The
Biblical elements in Melville's style can be divided into three categories. In
the first, allusion is more within the narrative rather than formal quotation.
Several preferred Biblical allusions appear repeatedly throughout his body of
work, taking on the nature of refrains. Examples are the injunctions to be 'as
wise as serpents and as harmless as doves,' 'death on a pale horse,' 'the man
of sorrows', the 'many mansions of heaven;' proverbs 'as the hairs on our heads
are numbered,' 'pride goes before a fall,' 'the wages of sin is death;' adverbs
and pronouns as 'verily, whoso, forasmuch as; phrases as come to pass,
children's children, the fat of the land, vanity of vanities, outer darkness,
the apple of his eye, Ancient of Days, the rose of Sharon.'Second, there are
paraphrases of individual and combined verses. Redburn's "Thou shalt not
lay stripes upon these Roman citizens" makes use of language of the Ten
Commandments in Ex.20 and Pierre's inquiry of Lucy: "Loveth she me with
the love past all understanding?" combines John 21:15–17, and Philippians
4:7.[e] Third, certain Hebraisms are used, such as a succession of genitives
("all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob"),
the cognate accusative ("I dreamed a dream", "Liverpool was
created with the Creation"), and the parallel ("Closer home does it
go than a rammer; and fighting with steel is a play without ever an
interlude"). This passage from Redburn shows how these ways of alluding
interlock and result in a texture of Biblical language though there is very
little direct quotation:
The
other world beyond this, which was longed for by the devout before Columbus'
time, was found in the New; and the deep-sea land, that first struck these
soundings, brought up the soil of Earth's Paradise. Not a Paradise then, or
now; but to be made so at God's good pleasure,[f] and in the fulness and
mellowness of time.[g] The seed is sown, and the harvest must come; and our
children's children,[h] on the world's jubilee morning, shall all go with their
sickles to the reaping. Then shall the curse of Babel be revoked,[i] a new
Pentecost come, and the language they shall speak shall be the language of
Britain.[j] Frenchmen, and Danes, and Scots; and the dwellers on the shores of
the Mediterranean,[k] and in the regions round about;[l] Italians, and Indians,
and Moors; there shall appear unto them cloven tongues as of fire.[m]
— The
American melting pot described in Redburn's Biblical language, with Nathalia
Wright's glosses.[166]
In
addition to this, Melville successfully imitates three Biblical strains: the
apocalyptic, the prophetic and the sermonic narrative tone of writing. Melville
sustains the apocalyptic tone of anxiety and foreboding for a whole chapter of
Mardi. The prophetic strain is expressed by Melville in Moby-Dick, most notably
in Father Mapple's sermon. The tradition of the Psalms is imitated at length by
Melville in The Confidence-Man.
In
1849, Melville acquired an edition of Shakespeare's works printed in a font
large enough for his tired eyes,[168][169] which led to a deeper study of
Shakespeare that greatly influenced the style of his next book, Moby-Dick
(1851). The critic F. O. Matthiessen found that the language of Shakespeare far
surpasses other influences upon the book, in that it inspired Melville to
discover his own full strength. On almost every page, debts to Shakespeare can
be discovered. The "mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying
nothing" at the end of "Cetology" (Ch. 32) echo the famous
phrase in Macbeth: "Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/ Signifying
nothing". Ahab's first extended speech to the crew, in the
"Quarter-Deck" (Ch. 36) is practically blank verse and so is Ahab's
soliloquy at the beginning of "Sunset" (Ch. 37):'I leave a white and
turbid wake;/ Pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail./ The envious billows
sidelong swell to whelm/ My track; let them; but first I pass.'Through
Shakespeare, Melville infused Moby-Dick with a power of expression he had not
previously expressed. Reading Shakespeare had been "a catalytic
agent" for Melville, one that transformed his writing from merely
reporting to "the expression of profound natural forces". The extent
to which Melville assimilated Shakespeare is evident in the description of
Ahab, Matthiessen continues, which ends in language that seems Shakespearean
yet is no imitation: 'Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be
plucked from the skies and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied
air!' The imaginative richness of the final phrase seems particularly
Shakespearean, "but its two key words appear only once each in the
plays...and to neither of these usages is Melville indebted for his fresh
combination". Melville's diction depended upon no source, and his prose is
not based on anybody else's verse but on an awareness of "speech
rhythm".
Melville's
mastering of Shakespeare, Matthiessen finds, supplied him with verbal resources
that enabled him to create dramatic language through three essential
techniques. First, the use of verbs of action creates a sense of movement and
meaning. The effective tension caused by the contrast of "thou launchest
navies of full-freighted worlds" and "there's that in here that still
remains indifferent" in "The Candles" (Ch. 119) makes the last
clause lead to a "compulsion to strike the breast," which suggests
"how thoroughly the drama has come to inhere in the words;" Second,
Melville took advantage of the Shakespearean energy of verbal compounds, as in
"full-freighted". Third, Melville employed the device of making one
part of speech act as another, for example, 'earthquake' as an adjective, or
turning an adjective into a noun, as in "placeless".
Melville's
style, in Nathalia Wright's analysis, seamlessly flows over into theme, because
all these borrowings have an artistic purpose, which is to suggest an
appearance "larger and more significant than life" for characters and
themes that are in fact unremarkable. The allusions suggest that beyond the
world of appearances another world exists, one that influences this world, and
where ultimate truth can be found. Moreover, the ancient background thus
suggested for Melville's narratives – ancient allusions being next in number to
the Biblical ones – invests them with a sense of timelessness.
Critical
reception
Melville's
financial success as a writer during his lifetime was not great, relative to
his posthumous success; over his entire lifetime Melville's writings earned him
just over $10,000 (equivalent to $254,469 in 2021).[179] Melville's travelogues
based on voyages to the South Seas and stories based on his time in the
merchant marine and navy led to some initial success, but his popularity
declined dramatically afterwards. By 1876, all of his books were out of
print.[180] He was viewed as a minor figure in American literature in the later
years of his life and during the years immediately after his death.
Poetry
Melville
did not publish poetry until his late thirties, with Battle-Pieces (1866), and did
not receive recognition as a poet until well into the 20th century. But he
wrote predominantly poetry for about 25 years, twice as long as his prose
career. The three novels of the 1850s that Melville worked on most seriously to
present his philosophical explorations, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence
Man, seem to make the step to philosophical poetry a natural one rather than
simply a consequence of commercial failure. Since he turned to poetry as a
meditative practice, his poetic style, even more than most Victorian poets, was
not marked by linguistic play or melodic considerations.
Early
critics were not sympathetic. Henry Chapin, in his introduction to John Marr
and Other Poems (1922), one of the earlier selections of Melville's poetry,
said Melville's verse is "of an amateurish and uneven quality" but in
it "that loveable freshness of personality, which his philosophical
dejection never quenched, is everywhere in evidence," in "the voice
of a true poet". The poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren became a
champion of Melville as a great American poet and issued a selection of
Melville's poetry in 1971 prefaced by an admiring critical essay. In the 1990s
critic Lawrence Buell argued that Melville "is justly said to be
nineteenth-century America's leading poet after Whitman and Dickinson."
and Helen Vendler remarked of Clarel: "What it cost Melville to write this
poem makes us pause, reading it. Alone, it is enough to win him, as a poet,
what he called 'the belated funeral flower of fame'." Some critics now
place him as the first modernist poet in the United States while others assert
that his work more strongly suggests what today would be a postmodern view.
Melville
revival and Melville studies
The
centennial of Melville's birth in 1919 coincided with a renewed interest in his
writings known as the Melville revival where his work experienced a significant
critical reassessment. The renewed appreciation began in 1917 with Carl Van
Doren's article on Melville in a standard history of American literature. Van
Doren also encouraged Raymond Weaver, who wrote the author's first full-length
biography, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (1921). Discovering the
unfinished manuscript of Billy Budd, among papers shown to him by Melville's
granddaughter, Weaver edited it and published it in a new collected edition of
Melville's works. Other works that helped fan the flames for Melville were Carl
Van Doren's The American Novel (1921), D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic
American Literature (1923), Carl Van Vechten's essay in The Double Dealer
(1922), and Lewis Mumford's biography Herman Melville (1929).
In
1945, The Melville Society was founded, a non-profit organization dedicated to
the study of Melville's life and works. Between 1969 and 2003 it published 125
issues of Melville Society Extracts, which are now freely available on the
society's website. Since 1999 it has published Leviathan: A Journal of Melville
Studies, currently three issues a year, published by Johns Hopkins University
Press.
The
postwar scholars tended to think that Weaver, Harvard psychologist Henry
Murray, and Mumford favored Freudian interpretations that read Melville's
fiction as autobiography; exaggerated his suffering in the family; and inferred
a homosexual attachment to Hawthorne. They saw a different arc to Melville's
writing career. The first biographers saw a tragic withdrawal after the cold
critical reception for his prose works and largely dismissed his poetry. A new
view emerged of Melville's turn to poetry as a conscious choice that placed him
among the most important American poets. Other post-war studies, however,
continued the broad imaginative and interpretive style; Charles Olson's Call Me
Ishmael (1947) presented Ahab as a Shakespearean tragic hero, and Newton
Arvin's critical biography, Herman Melville (1950), won the National Book Award
for non-fiction in 1951.
In
the 1960s, Harrison Hayford organized an alliance between Northwestern
University Press and the Newberry Library, with backing from the Modern
Language Association and funding from the National Endowment for the
Humanities, to edit and publish reliable critical texts of Melville's complete
works, including unpublished poems, journals, and correspondence. The first
volume of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville
was published in 1968 and the last in the fall of 2017. The aim of the editors
was to present a text "as close as possible to the author's intention as
surviving evidence permits". The volumes have extensive appendices, including
textual variants from each of the editions published in Melville's lifetime, an
historical note on the publishing history and critical reception, and related
documents. Because the texts were prepared with financial support from the
United States Department of Education, no royalties are charged, and they have
been widely reprinted.[194] Hershel Parker published his two-volume Herman
Melville: A Biography, in 1996 and 2002, based on extensive original research
and his involvement as editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Melville edition.
Gender
studies
Melville
only gradually attracted the pioneering scholars of women's studies, gender,
and sexuality in the 1970s and 1980s. Though some held that he hardly portrayed
women at all, others saw the few women in his works as traditional figures
representing, or even attacking, nineteenth-century gentility, sentimentality,
and conventional morality. Melville's preference for sea-going tales that
involved almost only males has been of interest to scholars in men's studies
and especially gay and queer studies.[197] Melville was remarkably open in his
exploration of sexuality of all sorts. Alvin Sandberg said that the short story
"The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" offers "an
exploration of impotency, a portrayal of a man retreating to an all-male
childhood to avoid confrontation with sexual manhood," from which the
narrator engages in "congenial" digressions in heterogeneity.[198] In
line with this view, Warren Rosenberg argues the homosocial "Paradise of Bachelors"
is "blind to what is real and painful in the world, and thus are [sic]
superficial and sterile".[199]
David
Harley Serlin observes in the second half of Melville's diptych, "The
Tartarus of Maids", the narrator gives voice to the oppressed women he
observes:
As
other scholars have noted, the "slave" image here has two clear
connotations. One describes the exploitation of the women's physical labor, and
the other describes the exploitation of the women's reproductive organs. Of
course, as models of women's oppression, the two are clearly intertwined.
— Serlin
(1995)
In
the end Serlin says that the narrator is never fully able to come to terms with
the contrasting masculine and feminine modalities.
Issues
of sexuality have been observed in other works as well. Rosenberg notes Taji,
in Mardi, and the protagonist in Pierre "think they are saving young
'maidens in distress' (Yillah and Isabel) out of the purest of reasons but both
are also conscious of a lurking sexual motive". When Taji kills the old priest
holding Yillah captive, he says,
[R]emorse
smote me hard; and like lightning I asked myself whether the death deed I had
done was sprung of virtuous motive, the rescuing of a captive from thrall, or
whether beneath the pretense I had engaged in this fatal affray for some other
selfish purpose, the companionship of a beautiful maid.[201]
In
Pierre, the motive of the protagonist's sacrifice for Isabel is admitted:
"womanly beauty and not womanly ugliness invited him to champion the
right". Rosenberg argues,
This
awareness of a double motive haunts both books and ultimately destroys their
protagonists who would not fully acknowledge the dark underside of their
idealism. The epistemological quest and the transcendental quest for love and
belief are consequently sullied by the erotic.
Rosenberg
says that Melville fully explores the theme of sexuality in his major epic
poem, Clarel. When the narrator is separated from Ruth, with whom he has fallen
in love, he is free to explore other sexual (and religious) possibilities
before deciding at the end of the poem to participate in the ritualistic order
represented by marriage. In the course of the poem, "he considers every
form of sexual orientation – celibacy, homosexuality, hedonism, and
heterosexuality – raising the same kinds of questions as when he considers
Islam or Democracy".
Some
passages and sections of Melville's works demonstrate his willingness to
address all forms of sexuality, including the homoerotic, in his works.
Commonly noted examples from Moby-Dick are the "marriage bed" episode
involving Ishmael and Queequeg, who sleep with their arms wrapped around each
other (Chapter 4, "The Counterpane" and Chapter 10, "A Bosom
Friend"); and the "Squeeze of the Hand" (Chapter 94) describing
the camaraderie of sailors' extracting spermaceti from a dead whale. Clarel
recognizes the homoerotic potential of its eponymous protagonist, including, in
a fairly explicit passage, an erection provoked by the figure of a male
interlocutor, Lyonesse . In addition, Rosenberg notes that Billy Budd's
physical attractiveness is described in quasi-feminine terms: "As the
Handsome Sailor, Billy Budd's position aboard the seventy-four was something
analogous to that of a rustic beauty transplanted from the provinces and brought
into competition with the highborn dames of the court".
Law
and literature
Melville
has been useful in the field of law and literature. The chapter "Fast-Fish
and Loose-Fish" in Moby-Dick, for instance, challenges concepts of
property rights. In Billy Budd, a handsome and popular young sailor strikes and
inadvertently kills the ship's master-at-arms.[204] The ship's captain
immediately convenes a court-martial at which he urges the court to convict and
sentence Billy to death. Critics debate Melville's intention. Some see the
contradiction between unbending legalism and malleable moral principles. Other
critics have argued that the captain manipulated and misrepresented the
applicable laws.
Themes
Melville's
work often touched on themes of communicative expression and the pursuit of the
absolute among illusions. As early as 1839, in the juvenile sketch
"Fragments from a Writing Desk", Melville explores a problem that
would reappear in the short stories "Bartleby" (1853) and
"Benito Cereno" (1855): the impossibility to find common ground for
mutual communication. The sketch centers on the protagonist and a mute lady,
leading scholar Sealts to observe: "Melville's deep concern with
expression and communication evidently began early in his career".
According
to scholar Nathalia Wright, Melville's characters are all preoccupied by the
same intense, superhuman and eternal quest for "the absolute amidst its
relative manifestations," an enterprise central to the Melville canon:
"All Melville's plots describe this pursuit, and all his themes represent
the delicate and shifting relationship between its truth and its
illusion". It is not clear, however, what the moral and metaphysical
implications of this quest are, because Melville did not distinguish between
these two aspects. Throughout his life Melville struggled with and gave shape
to the same set of epistemological doubts and the metaphysical issues these
doubts engendered. An obsession for the limits of knowledge led to the question
of God's existence and nature, the indifference of the universe, and the
problem of evil.
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