A New Companion To Herman Melville (Wyn Kelley, Christopher Ohge)

A New Companion to Herman Melville
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A N E W C O M P A N I O N T O
HERMAN MELVILLE
EDI T ED BY
WYN KELLEY AND CHRISTOPHER OHGE
This edition first published 2022
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kelley, Wyn, editor. | Ohge, Christopher, editor.
Title: A New Companion to Herman Melville / edited by Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2022. |
Series: Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021021123 (print) | LCCN 2021021124 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119668503 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781119668527 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119668534 (epub) | ISBN 9781119668565 (obook)
Subjects: LCSH: Melville, Herman, 1819-1891--Criticism and interpretation.
Classification: LCC PS2387.C66 2021 (print) | LCC PS2387 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/013--dc24
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021123
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021124
Cover images: © Matthew Kish

Cover design: Wiley
Set in 10.5/12.5pt Garmond3LTStd by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India
Christopher Ohge dedicates this work to Michael C. Ohge (1958–2010), who always encouraged
his literary and philosophical interests, and who introduced him to computers and electronics at
a young age.
Wyn Kelley dedicates this work to the Melville Society Cultural Project, whose vital synergy has
nourished her research and teaching over many years and to whom she owes love and gratitude.
Contents
Contributorsxi
Acknowledgmentsxix
Introduction 1
Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge
Part I Lives9
1 Melville the Life: Accident, Coincidence, and Adjacency 11

John Bryant
2 Melville’s Twentieth-Century Revivals 23
Maki Sadahiro
3 Melville’s Twenty-First Century Lives: Reception and Criticism 36
Brian Yothers
Part II Works53
4 Typee and Omoo55

Mary K. Bercaw Edwards
5 Melville’s Mardi: “A Certain Something Unmanageable” 66
Timothy Marr
6 Discipline and Pleasure in Redburn and White-Jacket 78
Édouard Marsoin
7 Moby-Dick 91
Geoffrey Sanborn
ftoc.indd 7 04-08-2022 20:32:24

viii Contents
8 Spiritualism in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities 102

Hannah Lauren Murray
9 Refugee, Exile, Alien: Israel Potter’s Migrant Turns 113
Rodrigo Lazo
10 In Other Worlds: Mystery and Method in The Piazza Tales123
Christopher Sten
11 Art of the Scam: The Confidence-Man134
Caitlin Smith
12 Lyric Anonymity in Battle-Pieces147
Tony McGowan
13 Re-writing the Holy Land Narrative Tradition: Clarel as Poetic Pilgrimage 160
Jonathan A. Cook
14 “The Fair Poet’s Name”: Late Poems 171
Peter Riley
15 Melville’s “Ragged Edges”: Billy Budd, Sailor and the Arts of Incompletion 184
John Wenke
Part III Texts, Print Culture, and Digital Technologies 197
16 “A Widow with Her Husband Alive!”: Gender, Collaboration, and Melville Studies 199
Adam Fales and Jordan Alexander Stein
17 Melville’s Cervantes 212
Rosa Angélica Martínez
18 Melville’s Shakespeare: Survivors and Stepmothers 224
David Greven
19 Melville’s Milton: Of the Devil’s Party and Knows It 236
Justina Torrance
20 Genre, Race, and the Printed Book 248
Katie McGettigan
21 Melville and Periodical Culture 261
Graham Thompson
22 Mediating Babo 272
Robert K. Wallace
23 Books and Marginalia, Real and Virtual 283
Steven Olsen-Smith
Contents ix
24 Counting (on) Melville: Moby-Dick, Computational Literary Studies,

and Dictionary-Based Readings 297
Dennis Mischke
25 Digital Melville: Computation and Dead-Reckoning 313
Christopher Ohge
Part IV Circuits and Systems 329
26 Transatlantic Crossings 331

Edward Sugden
27 Holy Dread: Taboo in Typee and “The Whiteness of the Whale” 341
Alex Calder
28 Melville’s “Spanish”: Geopolitics and Language in a Continental Writer 352
Emilio Irigoyen
29 The Pequod as Middle Passage: Melville’s Meditation on the “Long” Shipwreck 362
Michael E. Sawyer
30 Melville’s Spectral Mutinies 373
Lenora Warren
31 Religion and Secularity 383
Dawn Coleman
32 Ruthless, Radical Democracy 399
Jennifer Greiman
33 Melville and Masculinity 410
Ellen Weinauer
34 Melville and Philosophy: Will, Agency, and “Natural Justice” 422
Michael Jonik
35 Tawny Savages and Blank-Looking Girls: Melville, Capitalism,
and Racialized Labor 436
Ivy G. Wilson
Part V The Natural World 445
36 Ocean 447
Richard J. King
37 Verdure 460
Tom Nurmi
x Contents
38 Anatomy 472
Jennifer J. Baker
39 A “Mute Wooing”: Animism in Pierre485
Pilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph James Savarese
Part VI Symposium I: Art and Adaptation 497
40 Art and Illustration 499

Matt Kish
41 Anthologizing Moby-Dick; or, Classifying a Chaos 506
Kylan Rice and Elizabeth Schultz
42 On Ekphrasis 512
Dan Beachy-Quick
43 Melville in Film Adaptation: The Lives and Deaths of Pip 519
Jaime Campomar
Part VII Symposium II: Teaching, Learning, and Public Engagement 527
44 “Of Whales in Paint”: Melville in the High School Classroom 529

Jeffrey Markham
45 Diversity, Reading Publics, and the Community College 535
James Noel
46 Teaching Melville Through the Lens of Popular Culture 541
Martina Pfeiler
47 Visualizing Melville: A Museum Exhibition Perspective 550
Michael P. Dyer
Index 559
Contributors
Jennifer J. Baker is Associate Professor of English at New York University, where she special-
izes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, culture, and intellectual history.
She is the author of Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early
America (2005) and a member of the Melville Society Cultural Project. In 2019, she co-organized
the 12th International Melville Conference in New York City to commemorate the bicentennial
of Melville’s birth. She is currently writing a book on Romanticism and the life sciences in the
mid-nineteenth-century United States.
Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator, author of a book of poems based on Moby-
Dick, and a literary reverie on the same, Spell (2004) and A Whaler’s Dictionary (2008), respec-
tively. His most recent publications are Arrows (2020), a collection of poems, and Stone-Garlan
(2020), a translation from the ancient Greek lyric tradition. His work has recently been long-
listed for the National Book Award in Poetry, and has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan,
and Guggenheim Foundations. He teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a University
Distinguished Teaching Scholar.
Mary K. Bercaw Edwards is Professor of English and Director of Maritime Studies at the
University of Connecticut. She is the author of Melville’s Sources (1987), Cannibal Old Me: Spoken
Sources in Melville’s Early Works (2009), and Sailor Talk: Labor, Utterance, and Meaning (2021). A
Coast Guard-licensed captain, she has 58,000 miles at sea, all under sail.
John Bryant, Professor Emeritus of English at Hofstra University, is the author of A Companion
to Melville Studies (1986), Melville and Repose (1993), The Fluid Text (2002), Melville Unfolding
(2008), and over seventy articles on Melville, related nineteenth-century writers, scholarly edit-
ing, and digital scholarship. He is the founding editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies
and has published print editions of Typee, The Confidence-Man, Melville’s Tales, Poems, and Other
Writings, and the Longman Critical Edition of Moby-Dick. He is founder and director of the
online critical archive and scholarly edition Melville Electronic Library (MEL) as well as the founder
xii Contributors
and former director of Hofstra University’s Digital Research Center. In 2015, he received the
Distinguished Editor Award given by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ). He is
the author of Herman Melville: A Half Known Life, vols. 1 and 2 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020).
Alex Calder teaches at the University of Auckland. He has published many essays on Melville
and is the author of The Settler’s Plot (2011). He is currently at work on a literary and cultural
history of taboo.
Jaime Campomar is a PhD candidate at the George Washington University’s English
Department. His research interests lie in nineteenth-century US Literature, Textual Studies,
Adaptation Studies, and Film Studies. His ongoing dissertation research focuses on the use of
ekphrasis in the screenplay drafts for John Huston’s movie Moby Dick and its impact on represen-
tations of race and disability on screen.
Dawn Coleman is Associate Professor of English and affiliate faculty in Religious Studies at the
University of Tennessee. She is the author of Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel (2013)
and has served as book review editor for Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies and as a contrib-
uting scholar for Melville’s Marginalia Online.
Jonathan A. Cook is an independent scholar living in Sterling, Virginia. He is the author of
Satirical Apocalypse: An Anatomy of Melville’s “The Confidence-Man” (1996); Inscrutable Malice:
Theodicy, Eschatology, and the Biblical Sources of “Moby-Dick” (2012); and co-editor of Melville and
Religion (2016). He is the creator of the annotated bibliography on “The Bible and American
Literature” in the online Oxford Bibliographies series and has published numerous articles on
Melville and other nineteenth-century American writers.
Michael P. Dyer is Curator of Maritime History at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. He
earned a Bachelor of Arts in American History from York College of Pennsylvania, and a Master of
Arts in American Studies from Penn State Harrisburg. He has studied at Mystic Seaport Museum,
and was the inaugural USA Gallery Fellow at the Australian National Maritime Museum in 2008.
From 1993 to 2001 he was Curator of Maritime History and Librarian at the Kendall Whaling
Museum in Sharon, Massachusetts. He has authored two books, “O’er the Wide and Tractless Sea”:
Original Art of the Yankee Whale Hunt (2017); and George Gale: A Sea-nurtured Artist (2019).
Adam Fales is a PhD student at the University of Chicago. He is co-author with Jordan
Alexander Stein of an essay on Elizabeth Melville and her literary labor.
Jennifer Greiman is Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University; she is the author
of Democracy’s Spectacle: Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing (2010) and the
co-editor, with Paul Stasi, of The Last Western: Deadwood and the End of American Empire (2013).
Selections from her current book project, Melville’s Ruthless Democracy, have appeared in The New
Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and
Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies.
David Greven is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and publishes in
nineteenth-century American literature and Film Studies. His books include Intimate Violence:
Hitchcock, Sex, and Queer Theory (2017) and The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and the
Politics of Gender (2012). His current book project is called All the Devils Are Here: Literary Influence
and American Romanticism.
Contributors xiii
Emilio Irigoyen is Professor of European and North American Literature at the Universidad de
la República in Uruguay. He has published a book and essays in Spanish on comparative litera-
ture and theater. In English, he has published an essay on Israel Potter in Leviathan: A Journal of
Melville Studies, and has co-edited a special issue of the journal on Melville and Spanish America
(2021).
Michael Jonik teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature and contempo-
rary critical theory at the University of Sussex (UK). His most recent monograph is Herman
Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (2018), and he has published essays on Berkeley, Emerson,
Thoreau, Melville, Dickinson, William James, Hawthorne and Spenser, Henry James and Joseph
Conrad, and Charles Olson. He is editing The New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson,
The Oxford Handbook to Herman Melville (with Jennifer Greiman), and a new Oxford World
Classics edition of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd and Selected Tales. He is a founding member of The
British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA), and Reviews and Special
Issues editor for Textual Practice.
Wyn Kelley is Senior Lecturer in Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
author of Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (1996), Herman
Melville: An Introduction (2008), and, with Henry Jenkins, Reading in a Participatory Culture:
Re-Mixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom (2013). Formerly Associate Editor of Leviathan: A
Journal of Melville Studies (2000-2011), she is currently Associate Director of the Melville Electronic
Library.
Richard J. King is visiting Associate Professor in maritime literature and history at the Sea
Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and the author of Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A
Natural History of Moby-Dick (2019).
Matt Kish is a self-taught artist and a public librarian. He lives in Ohio with his wife, their frog,
and far too many books. When not illustrating books, he works in Collection Development at a
large public library.
Rodrigo Lazo is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of
California, Irvine, where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century American literature and
LatinX studies. Lazo’s most recent book is Letters from Filadelfia: Early Latino Literature and the
Trans-American Elite (2020). His articles about Herman Melville have appeared in the journal
Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and in the collections Melville in Context (2018), Frederick
Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation (2008), and Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on
Moby-Dick (2006).
Jeffrey Markham has taught English at New Trier High School, in Illinois, for twenty-
seven years and has explored Moby-Dick in a variety of classroom contexts. He presented his work
at the 12th International Melville Society Conference in New York City and at Robert K.
Wallace’s “Moby Comes to Covington” at Northern Kentucky University. Additionally, he has
contributed to Melville’s Marginalia Online and the Melville Electronic Library, and he attended the
2018 NEH Melville Summer Teaching Institute in New Bedford, where he also has taken part
in eight Moby-Dick Marathons.
xiv Contributors
Timothy Marr is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. His book The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (2006) explores how Islamic ori-
entalism became an important transnational resource for early American global imaginings
including Melville’s literary art. He is a co-editor of Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick
(2006, paperback 2010) and has published on Melville in The Historical Guide to Herman Melville,
Melville and Women, Melville “Among the Nations,” The New Cambridge Companion to Herman
Melville, and Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. He serves as an executive member of the
Melville Society Cultural Project and has helped to direct two NEH-funded Institutes on
Melville and the World of Whaling in the Digital Age.
Édouard Marsoin is Lecturer in English at Université de Paris. His research focuses on the rep-
resentations and problematizations of pleasure and jouissance in Melville’s fiction and nineteenth-
century US literature. He is the author of a book—Melville et l’usage des plaisirs (2019)—and
several articles on Melville published in journals such as Textual Practice, Leviathan: A Journal of
Melville Studies, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. He also edited a special
issue of the Revue française d’études américaines (2021) devoted to American pleasures in the
nineteenth century.
Rosa Angélica Martínez is Assistant Professor of English at California State University,
Sacramento, where she received an Outstanding Teaching Award for her courses on Melville and
Cervantes. She presented her research at the 12th International Melville Society Conference at
New York University. She is also a published poet.
Pilar Martínez Benedí teaches English and American Literature at the University of L’Aquila,
in Italy. She is the author of The Insuperability of Sensation: Indagini letterarie tra mente, corpo e affect,
on literature and embodied cognition.
Katie McGettigan is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of
London. She is the author of Herman Melville: Modernity and the Material Text (2017), and her
essays on Melville have appeared in Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural
Relations and Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies.
Tony McGowan is Associate Professor of English at West Point, and serves as a contributing
scholar at both the Melville Electronic Library and Melville’s Marginalia Online. In 2019 he co-
chaired Melville’s Origins, The 12th International Melville Society Conference. He is co-editing an
international collection of essays titled American Studies Over Seas.
Dennis Mischke is the lead coordinator of the Ada Lovelace Center for Digital Humanities at
the Free University of Berlin. Previously he was the research coordinator for digital humanities
and research fellow at the University of Potsdam. He holds a PhD in American Studies from the
Ruhr-University Bochum and degrees in Media Studies and Cognitive Science. His publications
include: “The Cosmopolitics of Trust––Herman Melville and the Long Global Century” (forth-
coming); with Alex Dunst, “The Challenge and Promise of Digital American Studies”; and
“Underwriting Cosmopolitanism: Insurance, Slavery and Confidence Games in Herman
Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’ and The Confidence-Man.”
Contributors xv
Hannah Lauren Murray is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Liverpool. Her
recent monograph Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction (2021) examines fluid and precarious
whiteness from Charles Brockden Brown to Frank J. Webb. She has previously published in The
Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (2020) and The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden
Brown (2019), and she sits on the steering committee for the British Association of Nineteenth-
Century Americanists.
James Noel is an English Professor and Dean of English and Equity Pedagogy at Diablo Valley
College in California and teaches composition as well as literature classes. In addition to his work
on classroom and pedagogical techniques, his research centers on nineteenth-century literature,
cultural memory, postcolonial literature and theory, contemporary American fiction, and trauma
studies.
Tom Nurmi is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at the Norwegian University
of Science and Technology. His work examines the intersections between literature and environ-
mental science in nineteenth-century America, and his first book Magnificient Decay: Melville and
Ecology was published in 2020.
Christopher Ohge is Senior Lecturer in Digital Approaches to Literature at the School of
Advanced Study, University of London. He also serves as Associate Director of the Melville
Electronic Library and as an associate editor of Melville’s Marginalia Online, and previously served
as an associate editor at the Mark Twain Papers & Project at the University of California, Berkeley.
The author of the book Publishing Scholarly Editions: Archives, Computing, and Experience (2021), he
has published other work in Essays in Criticism, Textual Cultures, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville
Studies, The Mark Twain Annual, American Literary History, Scholarly Editing, and in several edited
collections.
Steven Olsen-Smith is Professor of English at Boise State University and the General Editor of
Melville’s Marginalia Online. He is a past president of the Melville Society, and he has held visiting
appointments as the Holland H. Coors Endowed Chair at the United States Air Force Academy.
He has edited the documentary collection Melville in His Own Time (2015), and his research on
Melville’s reading and sources has appeared in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies and Harvard
Library Bulletin, among other journals and resources.
Martina Pfeiler currently holds a senior research position at the University of Vienna. She has
taught American Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund, and at Radboud
University. She is the author of two books on U.S. poetry and several articles, including on
Melville. In 2017 she received her venia legendi with a thesis titled Ahab in Love. The Creative
Reception of Moby-Dick in Popular Culture (in preparation for publication).
Kylan Rice is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he
studies gemology in relation to nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s poetry. His scholar-
ship has appeared in Arizona Quarterly, CR: The New Centennial Review, Leviathan: A Journal of
Melville Studies, and Women’s Studies. His creative writing has been published in Denver Quarterly,
Tupelo Quarterly, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of Incryptions (2021) and co-editor
of After Moby-Dick: An Anthology of New Poetry (2019).
xvi Contributors
Peter Riley is Associate Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Durham University. He is the author
of Against Vocation: Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry (2019) and
Strandings: Confessions of a Whale Scavenger (2022).
Maki Sadahiro is Associate Professor of English at Meiji Gakuin University. Her publication
includes “Thoreau’s Ontology of ‘We’: Friendship in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”
in Thoreau in the 21st Century Perspectives from Japan (2017) and “Fin-de-Siècle British Socialism
and A Prelude to the Melville Revival” in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies (2020).
Geoffrey Sanborn is the Henry S. Poler ‘59 Presidential Teaching Professor of English at
Amherst College. He is the author of The Value of Herman Melville (2018), Plagiarama! William
Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions (2016), Whipscars and Tattoos: The Last of the Mohicans,
Moby-Dick, and the Maori (2011), and The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a
Postcolonial Reader (1998).
Ralph James Savarese is the author of two books of prose, Reasonable People and See It Feelingly,
and three books of poetry, Republican Fathers, When This Is Over, and Someone Falls Overboard. He
is a winner of the Melville Society’s Hennig Cohen Prize. He teaches at Grinnell College.
Michael E. Sawyer is Associate Professor of African American Literature and Critical and
Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author
of two monographs, An Africana Philosophy of Temporality: Homo Liminalis (2018) and Black
Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X (2020) and a member of the Editorial Board of
Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon. His research is multidisciplinary and focuses on what can be
broadly understood as the radical potentiality of various modes of expression. He is working on
a new book project titled The Door of Return: An Africana Phenomenology of Black(ness).
Elizabeth Schultz retired from the University of Kansas in 2001 as a professor of English as well
as a Distinguished Professor of Humanities. During her thirty-four years at KU, Beth developed
a diversity of courses not only as chair of the Humanities Program, but also in the English
Department in the American short story, African American literature, American women’s liter-
ature, Herman Melville, and ecological writing. She received several university-wide teaching
awards, and following her retirement, through two Fulbright awards, she taught American lit-
erature in both Japan and China. Her numerous publications focus on African American fiction,
American women’s writing, Melville, and Moby-Dick, with her best-known work, “Unpainted to
the Last”: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art (1995), reflecting her commitment to
both Melville and interdisciplinary study.
Caitlin Smith earned her PhD from the University of Notre Dame. Her dissertation focused on
representations of doubt in early American autobiography and autofiction. She is currently a
postdoctoral researcher at Heidelberg University, investigating the relationship between histori-
cism, skepticism, and apocalypticism in early American Holy Land literature.
Jordan Alexander Stein teaches in the English Department and the Comparative Literature
Program at Fordham University. He is co-author with Adam Fales of an essay on Elizabeth
Melville and her literary labor.
Contributors xvii
Christopher Sten is Emeritus Professor of English at George Washington University; author of

The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel (1996) and Sounding the Whale
(1996); editor of Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts (1993); and co-editor of “Whole Oceans
Away”: Melville and the Pacific (2007) and “This Mighty Convulsion”: Whitman and Melville Write
the Civil War (2019). He is a past President and Executive Secretary of the Melville Society and
a founding member of the Melville Society Cultural Project.
Edward Sugden is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at King’s College London. His first
book Emergent Worlds (2018) argued that literature of the nineteenth century “remembered”
worlds that failed to come to pass. He is currently writing a trade biography of Moby-Dick.
Graham Thompson is Professor of American Literature at the University of Nottingham. He
is the author of several books including, most recently, Herman Melville: Among the Magazines
(2018).
Justina Torrance is a PhD candidate in religion at Harvard University. She is completing a dis-
sertation on Herman Melville and William James concerning literature’s influence on percep-
tion, ethical formation, and politics.
Robert K. Wallace is Regents Professor at Northern Kentucky University. He is author of Jane
Austen and Mozart (1983), Emily Brontë and Beethoven (1986), Melville and Turner (1992), Frank
Stella’s Moby-Dick (2001), Douglass and Melville (2005), and Heggie and Scheer’s Moby-Dick (2013).
He is currently writing a book on Frederick Douglass and Cincinnati Antislavery and creating a
digital site for Melville’s Print Collection Online. Wallace has published essays and curated exhibi-
tions on a variety of subjects in Literature and the Arts. He is a former president of the Melville
Society and a founding member of the Melville Society Cultural Project in New Bedford.
Lenora Warren is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell
University. Her work focuses on the intersections between political rhetoric and literary produc-
tion during the age of abolition with a particular emphasis on the poetics of resistance. Her book,
Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection, 1789-1886, was released by Rutgers University
Press in 2019. Her work has also appeared in Readex Report and Atlantic Studies. In addition to
ongoing work on race and resistance in the work of Herman Melville, she is currently at work on
a book tentatively titled Fugitive Joy: Rethinking Resistance in the Work of Phillis Wheatley.
Ellen Weinauer is the Dean of the Honors College and Associate Professor of English at the
University of Maine. She has published widely in nineteenth-century American literature, with
special attention to gothic tropes and themes in such writers as Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass,
and Elizabeth Stoddard. Her essay, “Hawthorne and Race,” appeared in the first Blackwell
Companion to Herman Melville.
John Wenke teaches literature and writing at Salisbury University. He is the author of Melville’s
Muse: Literary Creation and the Forms of Philosophical Fiction as well as many essays and chapters on
Melville’s life and works. His books include J.D. Salinger: A Study of the Short Fiction and The
Critical List: Stories. He has also published numerous creative non-fiction essays. He is currently
completing final revisions of a book-length study entitled “American Proteus: Providence, Self-
Fashioning and the Creation of Charles Brockden Brown.”
xviii Contributors
Ivy G. Wilson is Associate Professor of English and Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern
University. He is the author of Specters of Democracy (2011) and co-editor, with Dana Luciano, of
Unsettled States (2014), as well as numerous articles on African American Studies and nineteenth-
century US literary studies. He also serves on the editorial board of Leviathan: A Journal of
Melville Studies.
Brian Yothers is the Frances Spatz Leighton Endowed Distinguished Professor of English at the
University of Texas at El Paso and the Editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. His books
include Sacred Uncertainty: Religious Difference and the Shape of Melville’s Career (2015), Melville’s
Mirrors: Literary Criticism and America’s Most Elusive Author (2011; paperback 2019), and Visionary
of the Word: Melville and Religion (2017), which he co-edited with Jonathan A. Cook. He has also
edited Billy Budd, Sailor: Critical Insights (2017) and the Broadview editions of The Piazza Tales
(2018) and Benito Cereno (2019).
Acknowledgments
This book began officially on the bicentenary of Melville’s birth—August 1, 2019—when we

invited the authors who contributed to this volume. We owe our deepest gratitude to these
far-flung, immensely gifted, passionate, and patient writers who have lent their energies to a
pandemic-era book.
We thank Rebecca Harkin of Blackwell Publishing for inviting us into the project, Nicole
Allen of the Wiley Blackwell Humanities Editorial Team who launched it, and Samantha
Hartley, Liz Wingett, and the Wiley production team for their wise guidance through its
different stages.
We thank Samuel Otter, who offered invaluable advice during the planning phase, and John
Bryant and Steven Olsen-Smith, who provided inspiration and guidance. We are immensely
grateful to MIT’s Literature section for leave time that enabled Wyn Kelley to complete the first
round of editing.
Wyn Kelley also thanks Dale Peterson for sustaining love and understanding. Christopher
Ohge thanks Clare Lees and Jane Winters for their professional support throughout. He also
thanks Jillian Saucier for love and support.
Introduction
Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge
In the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville (2006), Wyn Kelley framed this American
author as a Global Melville. While further demonstrating Melville’s global reach, this New
Companion, with co-editor Christopher Ohge, focuses on a Fluid Melville, engaging with new
topics, technologies, and approaches that have enhanced the way we read Melville going into the
future. Readership of Melville’s works has grown since the first edition. Samuel Otter, erstwhile
editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, states that, “when I served on the editorial board
of American Literature, I was told that they received more submissions on Melville than on any
other author” (1). Since the bicentennial celebrations of Melville’s birth in 2019, there has been
an outpouring of international conferences (New York, Paris, Lisbon, to name a few), as well as
of new or forthcoming papers, articles, and books, with titles on Melville and religion, philos-
ophy, science, poetry, technology, and biography. Exciting developments at the Melville Electronic
Library (MEL) and Melville’s Marginalia Online (MMO) place digital editing and archives at the
cutting edge of critical approaches to Melville. Melville continues to be featured on university
and high school reading lists, and the Teachers’ Summer Institute on “Moby-Dick and the World
of Whaling in the Digital Age,” first offered in 2018 at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in
New Bedford, MA, received new funding in 2021 from the National Endowment for the
Humanities.
These developments have called for significant changes in the New Companion to Herman
Melville, starting with the idea that a single editor can manage the vast outpouring of new schol-
arship on Melville. Christopher Ohge brings experience in digital approaches to literature, par-
ticularly textual editing, philosophies of reading, and text analysis. Although many writers from
the first edition reappear, fresh recruits have expanded the original roster. We see Melville as a
vital force inside and outside of academia: this collection includes not only established, mid-
career, and early career Melville scholars, but also those in teaching, arts, and museums. We
A New Companion to Herman Melville. Edited by Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge.
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
2 Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge
feature writers crossing boundaries between material and digital, critical and aesthetic, scholarly
criticism and public engagement. Several writers hail from various parts of the globe outside of
North America, from Japan and New Zealand to Germany, Great Britain, and Uruguay. All
chapters are original to this edition; for easy reference, Wiley-Blackwell has archived the first
volume at the Wiley Online Library, where chapters for this volume will also be available for
download.
With Director John Bryant, Ohge and Kelley serve as Associate Directors of MEL, which
works in consultation with MMO, edited by Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C.
Marnon. This volume bears the imprint of MEL’s fluid theory of text, with its attention to dif-
ferent stages of a text as it migrates from draft manuscripts through various print editions, mul-
timedia adaptations, and digital interfaces. It also takes inspiration from MMO’s bibliographic
rigor and use of visualization technology, as well as its critical attention to the role of Melville’s
reading in his creative process. This framing concept of fluid-text oeuvres or corpora has fruitful
implications for innovative critical engagement.
This Companion emphasizes praxis, taking as its inspiration Sir Philip Sidney’s idea in “The
Defense of Poesy” (c. 1580) that “It is not Gnosis, but Praxis is the fruit” of teaching (39). Sidney
goes on to emphasize that “the inward light each mind has in itself is as good as a philosopher’s
book.” Literature can move readers to virtuous action, something which rings true for Melville,
the committed autodidact and adventurer for whom “a whale-ship was my Yale College and my
Harvard” (MD 112). This volume is intended to offer a variety of tools for reading and writing
about not just Melville but also other authors. What critical, technological, and aesthetic prac-
tices can be employed to read Melville? This framework reflects a skills-based model for human-
ities teaching and research that transcends rigid distinctions that often alienate communities
that could be receptive. At the same time, it highlights the ways Melville was himself concerned
with the utility of tools within fluid circuits of meaning, and how those ideas are embodied,
enacted, and mediated.
The structure of this volume, then, reflects a fluid logic in Melville’s life, work, themes, and
influences, and one that does not come without some resistance. The editors see fluid-text
theory and practice as a matter of pragmatism, not ideology. As Emerson says in “Politics,”
“society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres, but any particle may suddenly become the
centre of the movement and compel the system to gyrate around it”––and that the soul is
“running out threads of relation through every thing, fluid and solid, material and elemental,”
like an endogenous plant (Essays: Second Series 217; Representative Men and Women 321). Nature
itself is fluid, yet “it is volatile,” too (Nature 54). Several authors in this volume extend
Emerson’s botanical metaphor to Melville. Melville was also particularly attuned to the anxiety
of fluidity––not only its volatility but its potential for uncertainty, suggesting gains and losses.
Such skepticism shows in Melville’s lively annotation to Emerson’s statement in “Spiritual
Laws” that “The good, compared to the evil which he sees, is his own good to his own evil,” to
which Melville responded, “To annihilate all this nonsense read the sermon on the mount, and
consider what it implies” (Essays: First Series 133; MMO). Cornel West once applauded Gayl
Jones’s comparing literature to the inherent fluidity and democratic energy of jazz: “The writ-
er’s attempt to imply or reproduce musical rhythm can take the form of jazz-like flexibility and
fluidity in prose rhythms” (200). Melville always brings us back to earth, with a sympathy for
real, observable suffering and injustice, yet he also exercises the craft of writing as a high
expression of fluidity.
Introduction 3
Another important source of energy is revision––experiencing not only Melville’s revisions of

his works but also readers’ revised understandings of his works. In that respect, we adopt Bryant’s
notion in The Fluid Text that textual fluidity “necessarily heightens a reader’s awareness of the
instability (fluidity) of democratic life”––constituting a sharpening of intellectual skills “to forge
more supple relations between [readers’] dynamic past and dynamic now” (113, 140). This
volume, then, is particularly indebted to 1) textual and archival studies, as well as theories of
reading that expand thinking about Melville’s writing process before and beyond print publica-
tion through material and digital artifacts; 2) situating Melville’s work in diverse and changing
twenty-first-century bodies of knowledge, whether environmental, political, artistic, or digital;
and 3) recognizing contributions of critics and scholars coming from a wide range of perspectives
and putting them in dialogue with each other. Many chapters also address meanings of Melville
that intersect with issues of class, religion, race, gender, and sexuality.
An opening section, “Lives,” presents varied representations of Melville’s life and literary or
critical afterlives. John Bryant, author of the recent biography Herman Melville: A Half Known
Life (2021), reflects on the contingent processes by which life events pass through consciousness
and emerge on the page, challenging conventions of biography or autobiography as holistic nar-
ratives. Thinking about Melville’s critical reputation, Maki Sadahiro proposes multiple revivals
of his work in the decades after his death, threading together different transatlantic scenes of
critical reception that enrich the history of what he meant to readers. Brian Yothers expands the
reach of his Melville’s Mirrors (2011), a comprehensive review of twentieth-century criticism,
with an illuminating panorama of twenty-first-century trends in Melville scholarship.
The section on Melville’s “Works” (arranged chronologically by publication dates) refreshes
readings of his novels, stories, and poems. Mary K. Bercaw Edwards’s chapter on Typee (1846) and
Omoo (1847) presents Melville’s first novels as spectacular interventions into literary culture, artful
meditations on storytelling, and audacious borrowings from published authors, sailors, and
Polynesian raconteurs alike. Reviewing the history of critical approaches to one of Melville’s lesser-
read and often misunderstood novels, Mardi (1849), Timothy Marr recovers its brilliance and
animates the novel’s intense and radical engagement with politics, philosophy, and creativity
itself. In Édouard Marsoin’s chapter, the novels Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), some-
times viewed as concessions to a popular market, expose critical questions about power, discipline,
and hierarchy, here arising from the sailors’ daily allowance of grog. Geoffrey Sanborn offers a new
kind of starting point for the contemporary reader’s encounter with Moby-Dick (1851), surren-
dering to the novel’s incantatory rhythms and craft, exploring the artistry of its underappreciated
sections, and suggesting a model that might influence the reader to avoid rigid reading habits that
can foster bias and racism. Situating Melville’s Pierre (1852) in the world of mid-nineteenth-cen-
tury spiritualism, Hannah Murray reads Pierre’s sister-consort Isabel as a medium through whom
the novel views American myths and masculinities with deep and corrosive skepticism.
In the period that followed on this extended run of novels, Melville tried out what were, for
him, new forms—shorter fiction and poetry. Among them the short novel Israel Potter (1855)
emerges, in Rodrigo Lazo’s apt phrase, as a form of migrant literature, a meditation on refugees,
aliens, and exiles. Christopher Sten examines Melville’s next publication, The Piazza Tales (1856),
as a radical experiment with different literary forms and styles that shape stories of human
pain, suffering, and oppression. Caitlin Smith explains that one of Melville’s most elusive works,
The Confidence-Man (1857), illustrates a cultural crisis over trust—in institutional as well as
textual authority—that threatens the fragile structures holding societies together.
Melville’s poems are no less ripe for new considerations. In a critical departure from expecta-
tions that national epic foreground a patriotic persona, Tony McGowan presents Melville’s poetic
narrative of the Civil War, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), as told by a deliberately
anonymous observer. Jonathan A. Cook places Melville’s Clarel: A Poem and a Pilgrimage in the
Holy Land (1876) in the context of nineteenth-century and earlier literary pilgrimages to the
Levant to uncover this work’s vigorous rethinking of faith traditions and its dynamic engage-
ment with literary predecessors. Examining poems published or collected near the end of
Melville’s life—John Marr, and Other Sailors (1888), Timoleon, ETC (1891), “Weeds and Wildings”
(unpublished)—Peter Riley considers Melville’s turn away from poetic ambition toward quo-
tidian human experiences that challenge lyric aspirations. Billy Budd, often viewed as a literary
climax or coda in Melville’s oeuvre, provocatively resists completion itself, as John Wenke’s anal-
ysis of Melville’s extensive manuscript revisions attests.
Moving from considerations of Melville’s “Lives” and “Works,” the next section addresses
“Texts, Print Culture, and Digital Technologies” and reflects on textual studies and intertextu-
ality in a number of frameworks. Adam Fales and Jordan Stein consider the implications of criti-
cal erasures of Melville’s literary collaborators, especially his wife Elizabeth Shaw Melville. If
their study reveals unsuspected co-authors of Melville’s works, succeeding essays offer fresh read-
ings of what are traditionally understood as literary sources and allusions. Rosa Martinez sug-
gests the stimulus of Cervantes’ Don Quixote and of Melville’s encounter with Spanish language
and literature, as shown in his marginalia in Cervantes’ books in his poetry and manuscript revi-
sions. David Greven uncovers new dimensions of gender and sexuality, and the figures of the
orphan and the stepmother, in Melville’s reading of Shakespeare. And Justina Torrance uses
Melville’s marginalia in his copy of Milton’s works to assess their shared thinking, even kinship,
on matters of religious heresy.
Another cluster of chapters in this section focuses on book history and print culture, situating
Melville in a world of different forms of media. Katie McGettigan connects Melville’s engage-
ment with material texts printed in black and white to his response to the potent symbolism and
social challenge of Black bodies in white spaces. Graham Thompson shows Melville’s lifelong
indebtedness to a rich transatlantic culture of magazine and periodical publication in the
nineteenth century. Robert K. Wallace considers how Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1855) was
mediated, first by its source in Amasa Delano’s Narrative of Voyages and Travels (1817), then by
Greg Grandin’s history of the same events in Empire of Necessity (2014), and artist Matt Kish’s
notebook rendering of the story with illustrations in Benito Cereno Recopied (2018).
A third group in this section employs digital approaches to analyze Melville’s texts. Steven
Olsen-Smith, general editor of Melville’s Marginalia Online, updates the story of Melville’s
personal library, and of the books he owned and annotated, or borrowed and consulted, as first
catalogued by Merton M. Sealts, Jr., in the mid-twentieth century and currently maintained at
MMO. Dennis Mischke surveys the promises of computational literary studies and demonstrates
the use of semantic dictionaries for reading Moby-Dick. Like Mischke, Christopher Ohge comple-
ments computer-assisted reading with traditional “close reading” methods, drawing on archival
and editorial scholarship undertaken with MMO and MEL data to understand Melville’s reck-
oning with computation as both philosophical and practical inquiries. Chapters in this section
all demonstrate the affordances of using textual studies, archival research, and digital methods to
study Melville.
Introduction 5
With “Circuits and Systems,” the volume turns to Melville’s travels through various
geographical, imaginary, and philosophical realms. Edward Sugden considers the significance of
Melville’s transatlantic journeys, his lifetime of transatlantic reading and writing, as well as his
appreciation for crossings and cross-currents as powerful metaphors. Alex Calder examines
alternate cross-currents in South Pacific cultures with his close study of tapu, or Melville’s
“taboo,” which functions in different ways in Typee and Moby-Dick. Charting Melville’s travels
through the Southern Hemisphere, Emilio Irigoyen regards his encounters with the loose con-
cept of “Spanish” South America as challenging Anglocentric imperialism in language and
culture. Michael E. Sawyer presents the voyage of the Pequod within the context of Western and
Africana philosophy as Melville’s symbolic “shipwreck,” encompassing both the Middle Passage
from Africa to the Americas as well as its static counterpart, the Southern plantation. In a reading
of Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd, Lenora Warren points to the spectral nature of ship-
board mutinies in different seas, and how their taking place offstage or with ambiguous out-
comes signals Melville’s shifting considerations of revolutionary violence.
Other chapters in this section show Melville traveling through systems of faith, politics,
gender, agency, race, and capitalism. Dawn Coleman charts Melville’s sustained study of world
religions, reflecting on what he learned from nineteenth-century religious skepticism and in the
experience of religious affects—wonder and intimacy. Jennifer Greiman, identifying the many
contradictions of democracy, suggests that Melville found meaning in its lack of grounding, and
its continuing demand for creative social commitment amidst constant change. Returning to
Melville’s magazine sketches, Ellen Weinauer shows him adapting plots and themes from
so-called domestic fiction to challenge legal and literary fictions of antebellum masculinity.
Ranging from Typee to Billy Budd, Michael Jonik addresses Melville’s central concern with will,
agency, and justice in the face of fate, determinism, or oppressive social conditions as a meditation
on what it means to act. Ivy G. Wilson uses C. L. R. James’s Marxist reading of Melville to illu-
minate issues of factory labor and class oppression in Moby-Dick and “The Paradise of Bachelors
and the Tartarus of Maids.”
A section on “The Natural World” gives special consideration to systems of scientific and
environmental thought in Melville’s time. Richard J. King surveys nineteenth-century
knowledge of oceanography and marine life and shows the importance of blue ecocriticism as a
framework for Melville’s fiction. Turning attention to the green world of Melville’s narratives,
Tom Nurmi explores many dimensions of his encounters with verdure and botanical diversity.
Jennifer Baker takes up complex histories of science to make sense of Melville’s preoccupation
with anatomy and scientific integrity. And Pilar Martínez Benedi and Ralph James Savarese
explore Melville’s appreciation in Pierre for neurodiverse understandings of natural and human
worlds growing out of nineteenth-century animism and reaching into contemporary understand-
ings of autism and Alzheimer’s.
The last two sections of the volume demonstrate Melville’s appeal to a wide range of readers
outside the academy or straddling it and other worlds. These sections take the form of symposia,
or round-table-style conversation-pieces, one on the arts and the second on public spaces for
encountering or teaching Melville’s work. We intended for these pieces to be ruminative,
creative, concise, and suggestive of the ways that Melville inspires diverse audiences in profound
ways.
The section “Art and Adaptation” begins with artist Matt Kish, featured on this book’s
cover and in Robert K. Wallace’s chapter on “Mediating Babo,” here talking about his first
Melville-related project, an online illustration-a-day that became a book, Moby-Dick in Pictures:

One Drawing for Every Page. Kylan Rice and Elizabeth Schultz offer complementary perspec-
tives on their anthology of poems inspired by Moby-Dick. One of the poets in their collection,
Dan Beachy-Quick, provides a poet’s definition of ekphrasis, demonstrated with poetic lines of
his own. And Jaime Campomar investigates film adaptation by analyzing Ray Bradbury’s con-
tributions to the screenplay of John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956) and arguing that the script’s
late revisions serve as a guide to Hollywood conventions for representing heroism, masculinity,
and race.
The second symposium, on “Teaching, Learning, and Public Engagement,” starts with the
work of Jeffrey Markham, who teaches at New Trier High School in Illinois and has engaged
meaningfully with Matt Kish’s book and Robert K. Wallace’s ideas for teaching with art. James
Noel teaches at Diablo Valley College in California and writes about how a publisher’s ill-con-
ceived campaign to introduce supposedly diverse editions of classic American texts faced criti-
cism at his racially diverse campus. Martina Pfeiler investigates the role of early film adaptations
of Melville’s work in feeding a vigorous popular culture that sustains his reputation today.
Michael P. Dyer ends the volume with a discussion of curatorial methods and choices that
informed his exhibit at the New Bedford Whaling Museum of art and artifacts relating to
Moby-Dick.
With a wide range of perspectives from many contexts and methodological approaches, this
volume reflects the openness, plasticity, and fluidity of texts and communications in the digital
age. It takes inspiration from Melville’s vision in Mardi, in which the narrator imagines a com-
panionable congress of authors and sages from the past: “No custom is strange; no creed is
absurd; no foe, but who will in the end prove a friend. … [G]rim Dante [shall] 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” (M 13). In this symposium of views, some in this collection would
not ordinarily appear together; some might even fundamentally disagree with each other; but
this Companion intends to highlight current perspectives in the field, the classroom, and the
culture. More than that, it celebrates pluralism and praxis, a reading practice in which “all hands
should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content” (MD 6)––a form, too, of action-oriented
scholarship in a time when action is necessary.
Works Cited
Bryant, John. The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and ———. Representative Men and Women, in The Portable
Editing for Book and Screen. Michigan UP, 2002. Emerson, pp. 309–445.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays: First Series, 4th ed. Jones, Gayl. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African
Munroe, 1847. Melville’s copy available at MMO. American Literature. Harvard UP, 1991.
———. Essays: Second Series, 3rd ed. Munroe, 1844. Otter, Samuel. “From the Mast-Head.” Leviathan: A
Melville’s copy available at MMO. Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, March 2019,
———. Nature. The Portable Emerson. edited by Jeffrey S. pp. 1–3.
Cramer. Penguin, 2014, pp. 17–54. Sidney, Philip. An Apologie for Poetrie (1595), edited by
Edward Arber. Alex. Murray & Son, 1868.
Introduction 7
Texts and Abbreviations for this Volume
Unless otherwise noted, references to PT he Piazza Tales and Uncollected

T
Melville’s works come from The Writings of Prose
Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford, CM The Confidence-Man
Hershel Parker, G. Thomas Tanselle et al in PP Published Poems
15 volumes, Northwestern UP and the C Clarel
Newberry Library, 1968–2017. BB Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other
Abbreviations for Melville’s works are as Uncompleted Writings
follows: Corr Correspondence
T Typee J Journals
O Omoo
Other scholarly works that are often cited:
M Mardi
Bercaw (Edwards), Mary K. Melville’s Sources.
R Redburn
Northwestern UP, 1987.
WJ White-Jacket
MMO: Melville’s Marginalia Online, edited
MD Moby-Dick
by Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and
P Pierre
Dennis C. Marnon. http://melvillesmarginalia.
IP Israel Potter
org/2006–present.
Part I
Lives
1
Melville the Life: Accident, Coincidence,
and Adjacency
John Bryant
You might expect an essay titled “Melville the Life” to offer a biographical sketch. Granted, the
crucial moments in this writer’s life would be easy to list: his childhood in Manhattan and move to
Albany in 1830, his father’s death when Herman was twelve, his schooling and summers farming
in Pittsfield, the relocation to Lansingburgh; his debating, dating, acting on stage, and voyage to
Liverpool in 1839, which is the basis for Redburn; the trip to Galena and his bohemian month in
New York City, which gave us parts of Pierre; his years whaling and jumping ship in Nuku Hiva;
his mutiny, incarceration, and beachcombing in Tahiti, and his shop keeping in Honolulu, all of
which gave us Typee, Omoo, Mardi, and Moby-Dick; his stint in the Navy that shaped White-Jacket,
his return home, writing of Typee, and oldest brother’s death; his furious production of fiction in a
ten-year span, his further travels and reinvention of himself as a professional poet; his faltering
marriage, loss of both sons, and twenty years in the New York Custom House; his late-life return
to fiction, and his death, leaving behind hundreds of leaves of unpublished poetry and prose. We
could track these moments in a chronology of Melville’s life, and yet leave out a great deal.
Melville biography measures the growth of a single consciousness as it works through the
trauma of history: political, familial, professional. It addresses past crimes of grandparents and
present enterprises of uncles as well as the ambitions and talents of mother, siblings, and cousins.
But it also asks how Melville’s consciousness grew in relation to experiences with African
Americans, Native Americans, and Polynesians, as well as sea-workers, office-workers, and
field-workers. How did Melville’s empathies for the dispossessed contribute to a need to write,
which, for him, was always an unstoppable engine of self-knowing, which invariably brought
him to the “peculiar emotion” (J 50) of human consciousness itself.1 Then, too, how did Melville
1
Throughout his writings, Melville uses variants of the phrase “peculiar emotion” (including “stranger and stronger,”
“special,” and “queer” emotion) in relation to his notion of consciousness. See Bryant Melville vol. 2, p. 858.
12 John Bryant
come to discover this strangeness in “other beings than man”—in nonhuman life and otherness,
in the “universal cannibalism of the sea,” in the “delirious throb at the center of the All”—for if
consciousness also transcends in the “All,” how is it so alien?2 A biography also asks what kinds
of writing evolved to give form to thought. Melville absorbed and pilfered from Moses to
Matthew, from John of Revelation to Shakespeare, from Milton to Byron; he admired contempo-
raries like Scott and Cooper, Poe and Dickens, but could not emulate their “‘other’ way” (Corr
191).3 How, then, did he find his own “way” of writing: comic, tragic, cosmopolitan, pictur-
esque, sexual and wordy, transcendent yet materialist, always giving voice to “peculiar emotion,”
always retreating into voicelessness, treading the “marge” (PT 242) between symbolism and the
modern. How does such an aesthetic grow out of history, culture, and a life?
The problem is not only to determine the parameters of Melville’s growth but also to practice
biographical and critical approaches that model new and convincing ways of interpreting
Melville. Often, literary biographers dismiss an author’s imaginative writings as evidence of a
life; their role, it is assumed, is to chronicle, not interpret. Instead, biographical criticism treats
writing and written works as life events so that textual patterns can reveal the interoperability of
acts of the imagination and external circumstances. Fundamental to Melville biography is the
sense of place—in his life and writing—and this reveals a sensibility enacted in three modes:
accident, coincidence, and adjacency.
Accidental Tragedy: The Third Man

In “The Chase, Third Day” in Moby-Dick (Ch. 135, 497), Ahab steers closer to the now motion-
less, “strangely oblivious” white whale, who seems exhausted by the exertion of the chase but is
perhaps waiting for his prey to catch up. As he nears, Ahab darts his harpoon; Moby Dick “spas-
modically” rolls, canting but not capsizing the whaleboat. Ahab clings to the gunwale as the
tipped boat rights itself. However,
three of the oarsmen … were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instant two of them clutched the
gunwale again, and rising to its level on a combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again;
the third man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming.4
Melville deftly evokes the simultaneity of these events: the dart, the spasm, the canting boat, the
gunwale, the clutch, the accommodating wave, the captain saved (for now), the two returning
oarsmen, the third left behind “afloat and swimming.” Consider the energy put into rendering
the particulars of an accident. We have seen this bumping from the boat before, with Pip, but
Melville draws no explicit connection.
2
All references to Moby-Dick are from the Longman Critical Edition, edited by John Bryant and Haskell Springer, and
are identified by chapter and page numbers. For “other beings,” see Ch. 79, 311; for “universal cannibalism,” see Ch.
58, 248; and for “delirious throb,” see Ch. 87, 343, also R 66.
3
For recent scholarship on Melville’s reading and allusions, see Brian Yothers’s essay in this collection, “Melville’s
Twenty-First Century Lives: Reception and Criticism,” and the Search Catalog at Melville’s Marginalia Online
(melvillesmarginalia.org).
4
See also, Moby-Dick, at the Melville Electronic Library. Portions of this essay are derived from Bryant, Melville, vol. 2,
Chs. 67–68.
Melville the Life: Accident, Coincidence, and Adjacency 13
In the Epilogue, a few pages later, Ishmael identifies himself as the “third man helplessly
dropping astern” (500). It has “so chanced” that he was saved by Queequeg’s coffin-life-buoy,
which, also by chance, surfaces out of the maelstrom. Though Ishmael says “the Fates ordained”
his survival, we reckon that our narrator has “escaped alone to tell” his tale only by accident. This
ending suggests that if we are to comprehend Melville’s tragedy, we must as well comprehend
the role accident plays in Ahab’s tragic demise and Ishmael’s random survival.
In one form or another, accident appears seventeen times in Moby-Dick, from the “unrecorded
accidents” involving New Bedford whalers (Ch. 7, 50) who have perished at sea to the numerous
“unimaginable accidents of the fishery” (Ch. 87, 346) replayed strategically throughout the nar-
rative. Ishmael and Queequeg, two men of different races and classes, are thrown randomly
together in bed and wake up “married” (Ch. 10, 63); Tashtego slips into the head of a sperm
whale, which plunges into the sea, and he is saved, through Queequeg’s comic “obstetrics” (Ch.
78, 309); by whim Queequeg thinks he is dying and has a coffin made (Ch. 110); by chance he
gets well, and the coffin is converted into a life buoy, which by chance saves Ishmael (Epilogue).
Other accidents are more traumatic. Recall Ishmael’s “First Lowering” (Ch. 48) when an evening
squall swamps his whaleboat and leaves his shipmates for dead, only to be rescued by the Pequod,
which inadvertently capsizes the swamped boat. The industrial accident in “The Grand Armada”
(Ch. 87) is more harrowing: a loosened cutting spade, attached by a tangled line to a panicked
and flailing whale, slices through the air, mutilating mothers and nursing cubs. Accidentally,
serenity becomes chaos.
Ahab’s life is bracketed by accident: a whale bites off his leg; when Ahab later hunts down that
whale, he is garroted by a freak looping of the whale line, his body disappearing in an instant.
Readers invariably puzzle over this swift departure, and for good reason. Driven by ambition and
revenge, Ahab is finally undone not by his obsessions but by a technical mishap; his demise is
not materially connected to his tragic blindness. His tragedy begins and ends by accident. But
how do you make a tragedy out of accidents?
For Ahab, life has no accidents: his wound, his Lear-like obsession, his revenge, the Macbethean
predictions of his demise, and his scientific hunt of the white whale in the vast Pacific are all
foreordained by forces he willfully defies. For Starbuck, Ahab’s unfortunate wounding by a
“dumb brute” motivated by “blindest instinct” was purely accidental (Ch. 36, 159). These two
character-driven perspectives substantiate the novel’s fundamental plot-debate over whether
existence is determined by fate or accident. To sustain this debate in his democratic tragedy,
Melville weaves “unimaginable accidents” (Ch. 87, 346) throughout his narrative to make
accident seem as plausibly fated as the fate of character.
Here, then, is the dilemma a writer faces. Tragedy is ripest when characters are intentionally
complicit in their undoing. But because accidents are by definition unintentional, accidental
actions diminish the tragic effect. Granted, accidents are horrible: a storm swamps your boat, the
ship capsizes your boat, a line snaps and a whale’s head plunges with you into the sea, a whale
bites off your leg, or you get bumped from your boat. Accidents are surely consequential, deadly,
and sad, but, in terms of a plausible narrative, they are not, strictly speaking, “tragic.” Since
Ahab wills the events that put his tragedy on course, we expect his blindness to cause his death.
Instead, he dies by accident, which, at the last minute, puzzles the reader. Why risk puzzling
readers? Is Moby-Dick, then, a flawed tragedy? Not really: Melville simply refused to write a
Greek tragedy. (He would explore that option in Billy Budd.) An accidental tragedy like Moby-
Dick works only to the degree that readers recognize that the universe itself is accidental, that it
14 John Bryant
has its own wayward logic, that given an accidental universe, accidents will probably happen and
by necessity, and that the trauma of accident inflects character. Accordingly, Melville’s challenge
was to show how accident is as integral to what is tragic as it is to our lives.
Ahab is not fated to fall so much because of his arrogance, blindness, ambition, revenge, or any
of the expected causes of a tragic hero’s fall. Nor is the deeper cause of these flaws located in the
accident of the material wound he suffers. He falls because, in the logic of trauma, he necessarily
replays the accident that maimed him by obsessively and reiteratively jeopardizing himself and
crew. The crew—think of alcoholic Perth, racially abusive Stubb, slipping Tashtego, lunatic
Pip—follows him because they, too, have been traumatized—in their former lives, in their rela-
tions to each other, in their perilous workplace, in their abandonments at sea—they, too, are
castaways in an indifferent, accidental universe. And how does biography bring us closer to
understanding this writer’s dilemma?
One of my goals in writing Herman Melville: A Half Known Life is to link the centrality of
accident and trauma in Melville’s writings to traumas in his life, not only the obvious loss of his
father but also the more everyday traumas of having to survive adolescence, sibling rivalries, con-
flicts with mother, uncles, cousins, and the tumults of race, sexuality, and economy in a precar-
ious democracy. Given, then, the pattern of accident woven into the fabric of Moby-Dick, it is fair
to ask whether a young man we may call “Herman,” in taking himself to sea, actually experi-
enced or witnessed the whaling accidents that landed in his novel; and, if he did, we must further
ask how the older man, who in becoming the writer we call “Melville,” transformed those life
experiences into the fictional replaying of accidents in his writing.
In this regard, Moby-Dick is biographically challenging. Although Melville’s early works—
Typee, Omoo, Redburn, and White-Jacket—are autobiographical, Moby-Dick is a purposeful departure
from them in almost all formal, aesthetic, and philosophical ways, so that even though the novel
is based on the most dangerous work experience in Melville’s life, and although the book is rid-
dled with verifiable whaling facts, we cannot naïvely assume that vivid details—the swamping
of a boat, the flailing of a cutting spade, the bumping from a boat—are autobiographical. That
said, neither should we dismiss them as pure invention. Rather we must be open to the likelihood
that all literary invention is necessarily informed in some way by the contingencies of experience
and the probabilities of accident. The problem for the biographer is how to extract what is crit-
ically useful from Melville’s whaling experience for the broader interpretation of Moby-Dick.
Which brings us to “crazy-witty” Pip (Ch. 99, 385).
The most memorable accident in Moby-Dick befalls the cabin boy Pip in “The Castaway” (Ch.
93, 366). The adolescent African American normally keeps to the ship, but when Ahab assigns
him to Stubb’s whaleboat, suddenly he must perform the work of men. Inexperienced, he leaps
into the sea when a harpooned whale inadvertently bumps his boat. Tangled in the harpoon’s line
and lashed to the side of the boat, Pip is strangled as the whale surges forward. After some ruth-
less deliberation over what to do for the choking boy, Stubb reluctantly cuts the line so that “the
whale was lost and Pip was saved.” Later, Stubb warns Pip to “Stick to the boat,” adding “We
can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would,
Pip, in Alabama.” The trauma of whaling is compounded by the trauma of racism.
Stubb later repents of the racist joke, but his careless commodification of Pip inaugurates the
boy’s madness. When, in a second lowering, the same accident recurs––and this time, as
promised, Pip is left floating alone to die––his alienation is completed. Almost drowning, he
envisions a “primal” underwater world; he sees the origins of all creation and “God’s foot upon
the treadle of the loom,” and because of his immersion into “invisible spheres … formed in
fright,” he appears in the visible sphere of the crew to be insane (Ch. 93, 367 and Ch. 42, 184).
In the final third of the novel, Melville transforms the “brilliancy” of Pip’s blackness into inscru-
table expressions of the strange consciousness of a mystic visionary (Ch. 93, 365). Pip’s manic
rambling lures Ahab toward sanity, but Ahab will not abandon his quest, and Pip fails to prevent
the tragic hero’s demise.
Pip is one of Melville’s most moving inventions, artfully weaving race and metaphysics into
the fabric of his accidental tragedy. An invention; but, nevertheless, Pip’s leap is based on an
actual accident that occurred during Herman’s time on board his first whaling ship Acushnet. The
event is not recorded in any logbook or other official whaling document, news item, or letter but
comes to us as a marginal annotation in a copy of the 1851 British version of Moby-Dick titled
The Whale. Melville had presented the three-volume edition as a keepsake to his Acushnet ship-
mate Henry Hubbard, who had visited the author in Pittsfield around 1853, two years after the
publication of Moby-Dick. The volumes stayed in the Hubbard family library until their emer-
gence in 1977 (“The Hubbard Copy of The Whale,” in NN MD 1005–20).
Herman and Henry had shipped out of Fairhaven together in January 1841; they became
watchmates and fast friends. Herman jumped ship after eighteen months; Henry completed the
ship’s four-year voyage in 1845. During their 1853 visit, the two reminisced about the Acushnet,
and afterward, Melville also composed his “Acushnet Crew Memorandum,” a list of their ship-
mates and what befell them. The memorandum tells us that the two former shipmates had much
to discuss. The copy of The Whale that Melville presented to Hubbard on that day is equally
revealing of what seems to have transpired in their conversation. Chances are Hubbard never read
Melville’s novel; nevertheless, the presentation copy contains one annotation, inscribed by
Hubbard in pencil; it is curious evidence of Hubbard’s connection to his friend who had become
a famous author. On the page in “The Castaway,” where Pip’s first leap occurs, Hubbard wrote:
“Pip—Backus—his real name. I was in the boat at the time he made the leap overboard” (NN
MD 1006, 1008 fig. 2). Hubbard’s eyewitness account confirms that Melville did not fully
invent Pip’s leap; he based it on a real event and person.
The singularity of this notation in the Hubbard Whale also suggests that, during their visit
together, Melville inquired about Backus, brought up the subject of Pip, and opened Volume 3
to “The Castaway” to show Henry Hubbard where their Black shipmate’s traumatic leap was put
into words. Backus’s leap was an important memory for both, vivid enough for Melville to retell
it in Moby-Dick and to share the chapter with his old friend. We can also infer that Herman did
not witness Backus’s leap personally but heard of it secondhand from Henry, during a subsequent
night watch together. In this scenario, the information filtered through Henry is replayed in
three adjacent places in Herman’s mind: the Pacific of 1841–1842, the fiction of “The Castaway”
of 1851, and the visit of 1853.
Little is disclosed in Hubbard’s annotation about Backus: Was he tangled in the line or left
behind? If tangled, was Stubb’s racial wisecrack one that Stubb’s prototype John Hall actually
made at the time? Or was it a quip circulated by the crew? Or invented by Melville, giving the
event a racial context? Once rescued from the accident, did Backus suffer, as does Pip, a mental
breakdown or some other crisis of masculinity regarding his putative cowardice or worthless-
ness? Whaling documents offer no answers, but some details are enough to get us thinking.
Because he does not appear in the Acushnet’s original crew list, the seaman John Backus may have
signed on at the ship’s first Pacific mooring in the Bay of Santa, Peru, in June 1841 (Heflin 72).
16 John Bryant
In his “Acushnet Crew Memorandum,” Melville discloses the news, given to him by Hubbard,
that the “little black” later jumped ship at San Francisco, well after Melville’s own Marquesan
desertion in July 1842 (NN MD 1002–3). Melville’s note confirms Backus’s race and size but
says nothing about his age, brilliance, or mental state. Chances are Backus was not a cabin boy
but a young Black seaman, smaller than any of the Acushnet’s three other, older Black men, who
like Herman, were among the tallest in the crew. To whatever degree the races mingled in the
forecastle, rigging, and whaleboats, white Herman and Black Backus spent a year together in the
Pacific, in close quarters.
The biographical revelations regarding John Backus, first recorded in the 1988 Northwestern-
Newberry edition of Moby-Dick, add to the material evidence of the presence of African Americans
in Melville’s workplaces. From them, we can infer more about his growing empathy for dispos-
sessed peoples, or what I call Melville’s black consciousness.5 However, Backus’s leap from his
whaleboat seems only incidental to the role that accident plays in Melville’s plotting of his acci-
dental tragedy. The pattern of accidents in Moby-Dick suggests that Melville had experienced
enough “unimaginable accidents in the fishery” to inspire his fiction and leave it at that, with no
need to locate his inventions in biographical specifics. What benefit to interpretation arises,
then, from knowing that African American John Backus was bumped from a boat? The answer
has less to do with finding a source for Pip than with how Melville revised Backus in Moby-Dick
and how he replayed the accident in a writing process that resulted in a symbol of race, capitalism,
and democracy, and of Melville himself. But to see more clearly the critical relevance of this focus
on Melville’s creative acts, we need to shift gears from accident to coincidence.
Coincidence and Tragedy: The Third Man Replayed

At first, coincidence might seem to be much different from accident. Is not a coincidence nothing
more than two or more accidents happening at the same time? Even so, one compelling difference
brings us back to Melville’s abiding concern for the nature of human consciousness. Whereas
accidents are immediately identifiable as mishaps regardless of participants, a coincidence exists
only when its participants become mutually aware of the accidence of circumstance as a shared
experience; it exists because of a sudden, fortuitous mutual consciousness. That awareness is an
unsettling “peculiar emotion.” A moment in Melville’s second book Omoo (1847) clarifies.
Omoo picks up where Typee leaves off with a matter-of-factness that belies the first book’s melo-
dramatic conclusion. In Omoo’s opening, the rescued protagonist says nothing about his harrow-
ing escape from Typee warriors that has put him on board the Julia. Instead, he notices two
sailors on deck, both of whom he has met before—a young man from Liverpool, an old man from
Rio—and he digresses on “the curious coincidences which often befall the sailor”:
And here we were again:—years had rolled by, many a league of ocean had been traversed, and we
were thrown together under circumstances which almost made me doubt my own existence.
(O 6)
5
Throughout this chapter, I capitalize Black to refer to specific individuals of African descent, including the African
Daggoo and African American Pip, but use the lower-case in “black consciousness” to indicate that Melville’s empathy
to inhabit specific individuals of color gestures toward a general human condition of dispossession.
Curious enough is how three men, briefly acquainted on separate ships, docked in separate
Atlantic ports, might happen upon each other on board a third ship, moored off a remote island
in the vast Pacific.
The marvel of these details and their irrelevance to the opening storyline of Omoo suggests
that the coincidence is not an invention but the remembrance of an actual life event of 1842
intruding into Melville’s 1847 narrative. You might compare the “circumstances” of this coin-
cidence to three motes of dust vibrating on the surface tension of a glass of water, bumping each
other separately, then a year later bumping again but this time all together. And if humans
were mindless motes governed solely by random vibrations, this comparison would pertain.
But we are conscious motes, and our awareness of time, place, self, and otherness makes the
accidental coming together of three men seem more like the sudden, memorable, unexpected
consciousness of a shared identity. But the peculiarity of this collectivity of coincidence is not
what Melville recalls. Rather, the effect of the coincidence is that it has “almost made me doubt
my own existence.” The momentary recognition has taken him out of his insulated subjectivity
into a broader human consciousness that briefly unites him with two other men from separate
worlds, and yet Melville’s third-man protagonist in Omoo shrinks from this awareness: it shakes
his belief in himself.
This sudden conflict of consciousnesses—self and other—and the recoil into self-doubt
(a form of nonexistence) is what Melville, in a more exultant mood, would call a “shock of recog-
nition” (“Hawthorne and His Mosses,” PT, 249). But in Omoo, the shock of coincidence is the
discovery of an apparently threatening similitude that in pulling time, place, and mind together
heightens our self-consciousness toward self-annihilation. A “peculiar emotion” indeed, and
Melville’s permitting it to intrude into his narrative—his allowing a biographical moment to
invade his fiction—prompts us to consider the role of coincidence as a rhetorical strategy, one
that Melville uses more effectively in Moby-Dick.
In a travel narrative like Omoo, the coincidence of three acquainted sailors, from different
worlds, landing on the same boat, in the vast Pacific is a perfectly suitable opening for a book
that makes every effort to instantiate the Robinson-Crusoe-like randomness of a picaresque. But
paradoxically, in crafting an accidental tragedy like Moby-Dick, Melville must steer clear of coin-
cidence, or seem to. The dilemma is that while accident can be familiarized so that readers will
accept the accident of Ahab’s death as a plausible example of an accidental universe, the plausi-
bility and necessity of Ahab’s tragic, trauma-induced obsession is diminished if we take Ahab’s
finding of Moby Dick—a single mote in a vast ocean—to be just coincidental.
Melville labors famously to discount such coincidences by bringing whaling facts into his
fiction. He demonstrates that whales have regular feeding grounds, that they migrate seasonally
and predictably from one to another, that they have idiosyncratic spouts, markings, scars, even
old harpoons embedded in their flesh that make them readily identifiable, and that they dive and
surface like clockwork. Not only does Melville’s use of these facts render whaling and sea life in
his narrative more realistically than you might expect from a novel misleadingly labeled by
critics as “romantic,” but they also validate the reasoning behind Ahab’s reasoned pursuit and
thereby enhance the credibility, not madness, of his tragic quest. Thus, in Moby-Dick, Melville
minimizes coincidence, even though in other works—we can add Redburn, Israel Potter, and The
Confidence-Man to Omoo—coincidence plays significant roles. That said, Melville’s avoidance of
coincidence is not entirely complete in Moby-Dick. Which brings us back to Pip, Backus, and
biographical criticism.
18 John Bryant
What is most coincidental in Moby-Dick, Melville sedulously conceals. It is the coincidence of

three accidents, involving three men bumped from three different boats, at three different times:
Pip, Ishmael, and Ahab. Throughout the narrative, these three figures barely interact on stage:
Pip and Ahab connect only at the end; Ishmael only observes and never connects. But they expe-
rience a similitude of event. Pip is first to be bumped; Ishmael is the unnamed “third man”
bumped on the final day of the Chase; and Ahab is not so much bumped as taken off his boat,
tangled up in a fouled line just like Pip. Ishmael—the novel’s binding consciousness who rou-
tinely exposes hidden commonalities between humans and whales—is oddly silent on this
particular similitude. Given the explicit identification of other “unimaginable accidents”
throughout Moby-Dick, the bumping from a boat, though common enough, is the least remarked
of accidental occurrences. Additionally, in “The Line” (Ch. 60), Ishmael explains the peril of the
whizzing whale line and the consequences of its being poorly coiled in the tub, preparing us for
Pip’s near-death strangulation and Ahab’s death by “hemp” (Ch. 117, 437), some thirty and sixty
chapters later, respectively. Leap and line make as potent a symbol as whiteness and whale. But
after “The Line,” Ishmael refrains from further digression on its meaning; the symbol lies dormant
within the plot of Melville’s accidental tragedy. While Pip and Ahab act out their common “mad-
ness” in stagey dialogue, Ishmael’s link to them—his own bumping from a boat—is so tangential
in the final scenes of mayhem and only obliquely explained in the Epilogue that readers must
re-read the previous chapter to find that, like Pip and Ahab, Ishmael has been bumped; he is the
third man who “was dropped astern.” Why does Melville spend so much energy in concealing the
coincidental bumping from the boat of these three memorable characters?
By having readers re-read in order to identify Ishmael as this “third man” bumped, the text
has them enact the same kind of sudden discovery of similitude that is inherent in coincidence;
the text produces a “shock of recognition” that, through readers, Ishmael, Pip, and Ahab have a
shared consciousness, and that the coincidence of events happening to them is itself symbolic of
an ungraspable fourth identity that transcends all three. It says, without saying it: we are wrapped
in lines and rapped by existence; we are self-aware and rave (Pip), erupt (Ahab), and meditate
(Ishmael) over the indifference of the universe and the certainty of our nonexistence. In this view,
the rhetorical strategy is to engage readers more actively in the apperception of a symbol of the
simultaneity of consciousness and annihilation.
Granted, this reading experience of Melville’s rhetorical strategy can happen without recourse
to biographical criticism. That said, biography alters the reader’s experience of the text and aug-
ments interpretation. Recognizing, for instance, how coincidence as an event was powerful
enough to intrude into Omoo as an idea opens up Melville’s way of writing fact into his fictions.
The added vector of identity linking Melville to the diminutive Black sailor John Backus
uncovers more fully Melville’s strategy of concealment, his crafting of symbol out of self, and his
making of Pip. More than a point of common recollection, the story of Backus was a moment of
bonding for Melville and Hubbard, and the emotional energy of that moment points to how
Melville might have transformed Backus into Pip when, in the spring and summer of 1851, he
completed his novel.
How Melville transformed Backus into Pip is only one of many developmental moments in
Melville’s evolving black consciousness. We cannot ignore any white writer’s presumption in
writing of and for any character of color, especially since such presumptions have historically
perpetuated invidious stereotyping and allowed more seemingly benign stereotyping to pass
uncritically. In addressing the matter of racial appropriation, Toni Morrison argues that while
“There is no escape from racially inflected language,” writers of all colors are obliged “to unhob-
ble the imagination from the demands of that language” (Morrison 13, 38). Melville’s writings
contain racial inflections, and they would be equally hobbled in representing antebellum life if
they lacked them. They give visibility to Black, underclass, ethnic, and disabled characters that
were, again in Morrison’s words, “invisible” in most nineteenth-century literature. Melville’s
inflections of “racially inflected language” are deeply personal and yet rhetorically strategic, and
his invention of Pip is a remarkable “unhobbling” of the imagination from racist stereotyping,
made all the more remarkable when put into a biographical context.
To understand how Melville transformed John Backus into Pip, we should consider the
problem of infantilization when a white writer converts an actual Black man into a fictional boy.
The problem is complicated by the fact that whaling ships did not routinely enlist cabin boys—
such body servants and waiters were more often found on naval craft—nor were cabin boys nec-
essarily Black. Melville’s first whaling ship Acushnet had no cabin boy, and its three original
African American sailors were grown men. The ship’s cook was the 38-year-old William Maiden.
The two others were experienced “seamen”—Thomas Johnson and Enoch Read—both in their
twenties. Like Melville, who was about 5′9′′, these three Black sailors were among the tallest
aboard the Acushnet. John Backus joined the crew a year after the ship sailed out of Fairhaven,
and probably to fill a space created when 5′4′′ boatsteerer David Smith deserted in Santa, Peru.
If Backus replaced Smith, he did a man’s job regardless of his size. Why turn the Black man into
a Black boy?
Whereas the Acushnet had no cabin boy, the Pequod has two. In addition to Black Pip is “the
white waiter” Dough-Boy (Ch. 34, 149). Though Dough-Boy is a steward, not a cabin boy, he
seems equally adolescent and, like Pip, much younger than the rest of the crew, also subservient,
always fearful, and small enough to be snatched up by Daggoo and bodily thrust into a wooden
trencher. Ishmael calls him a “match” for Pip, in size and age if not color and character. Together
Dough-Boy and Pip are a racialized diptych, and the white lad is found wanting. Dough-Boy is
indolent and dull, unlike the vibrant and ebullient Pip. Dough-Boy is an irregular spear-carrier
in the first half of Moby-Dick who vanishes from the action. Pip, however, becomes a black thread
sinuating the remaining narrative.
Dough-Boy is comic relief and might have been originally destined for some kind of soul-
changing bump, instead of Pip. But at some point, Melville dumped rather than bumped white
Dough-Boy, and rather than retroactively substituting Pip for Dough-Boy in the first half of the
novel, Melville let the white waiter stay on, and he appears, as does Bulkington (another figure
who famously disappears in Moby-Dick), to be what Harrison Hayford calls an “unnecessary
duplicate.” Whether Dough-Boy and Pip are an intended or accidental couple, the biracial pair-
ing represents a departure from Black stereotyping.6 But this strategy of the racial diptych could
be just as easily realized with adult sailors—as in fact we find with the nobly indifferent African
Daggoo and nervy white Flask—without creating an improbable set of cabin boys, contrary to
whaling practice and the realities of the Acushnet crew. Why Melville turned Backus into Pip has
as much to do with age and identity as race.
6
Melville may have drawn upon Black and white schoolmates Pompey and Neddy Mellish in Cornelius Mathews’s Big
Abel and Little Manhattan (1845).
20 John Bryant
Turning the adult Black Backus into young adolescent Pip clearly risks racist infantilization,
but Melville’s efforts to establish sympathy for Pip’s vulnerability early on in the racial brawl of
“Midnight, Forecastle” (Ch. 40) give the character far more dramatic, indeed tragic freight than
the older, larger, more mature Black figures in the Pequod’s crew. The “strange sweetness” of Pip’s
later “lunacy” (Ch. 110, 419) further ages his character, giving him preternatural insight and
prophetic power regarding Black and white relations that go beyond adult meditations. Pip’s
role as a wise child pushes the boy beyond white and Black stereotyping. Moreover, making Pip
not just a child but a young adolescent—about twelve or thirteen—puts him at Melville’s age
when his father, Allan Melvill, died. Pip’s youthful vulnerability, sane insight, and mad prophecy
required the voice of a boy younger than white Dough-Boy, and a voice inflected by the threat of
death and madness, expressing the trauma of dispossession: Melville would seem to have chosen
a Black version of himself.
Another conversion—the changing of John Backus’s name—says more about the risks of racial
appropriation and Melville’s choices in rendering Pip. Backus’s last name is likely a slave name
derived from “Bacchus,” the Roman god of wine, fertility, theater, and madness. Coincidentally,
the name would perfectly suit Pip’s musicality, joy, theatricality, and “crazy-witty” wisdom; or
perhaps too well. Melville did not take this easy option, probably because he wanted to avoid
using the names of real people in his fiction. Moreover, its evocation of Jim Crow minstrelsy
would have distracted from Pip’s brilliancy. He chose to nickname his cabin boy “Pippin,” abbre-
viated to “Pip,” which instead denotes both a seed and an attractive, admired person.
Appropriating Black Backus, converting him into a boy, changing his name, making him
over in Melville’s self-image of a fatherless orphan, giving Pip words and rhythms of Black
speech but steering clear of Jim Crow minstrelsy: this is the risky business of a white writer
crafting hidden humanities shared between himself and the vulnerable and traumatized Black
Pip. Melville’s choices in revising Backus into Pip reveal his inner urgency to identify with a
black consciousness of dispossession and yet to steer clear of presuming to inhabit a particular
Black life. Nevertheless, from these external biographical facts and internal revision facts, we
can discern a concealment of identity among Black orphan Pip, white orphan Ishmael, and the
orphaned third man Herman Melville, playing out the trauma of his early adolescent father-
loss. Exercising our ability to read a text both biographically and aesthetically shows how
Melville used writing to unfold his black consciousness and “unhobble” his imagination from
the constraints of racism.
Our decades-old resistance to biographical criticism would have us dismiss an interpretation
that finds meaning in Melville’s demonstrable insertion of himself into Pip, not so much for its
speculation as for the assumption that the facts regarding John Backus’s race, age, and leap, as
well as Melville’s transformation of Backus to Pip, are extraneous to the text of Moby-Dick.
Texts, it is presumed, have meaning independent of the life that made them. Our notions of a
writer’s life should not dictate interpretation. But studying the intersection between life and
text—placing written works in their biographical context—nevertheless deepens as it sharpens
our practice of historicism—by which I mean the interpenetration of individual and culture in
the study of imaginative writing—and it better enables us to discern the dynamics of appropri-
ation and invention. In short, biographical criticism enables new ways of reading a text
historically.
Adjacency: Place, Mind, and Symbol

Let me conclude with a thought on “adjacency” in biographical criticism—its focus on place and
its utility in addressing the connections between life events and the writing process. The term
reveals certain precincts of Melville’s creativity, his remarkable leap, let’s say, from concrete
places and events (a seaman jumping into the Pacific) to immaterial symbol (a merging of self,
other, reader, and “All”).
As we have seen, the basic parameters of accident and coincidence, which are recorded phe-
nomena in Melville’s life, also shape a historicist interpretation of an evolving consciousness
evident in Melville’s writing. Adjacency enables us to imagine how dispersed places associated
with accident and coincidence, which exist in external experience, are brought to internal
proximity in mind. In this regard, adjacency is a mental, perhaps even neurological, condition,
a function of memory and the less comprehensible mechanisms out of which symbols are con-
structed. How is it that a writer made inexplicably fatherless at age twelve witnesses in young
manhood at first or second hand a shipmate leap into the sea and in certain later acts of writing
transforms these facts of life into a symbolic affinity between himself, a Black cabin boy, and an
angry captain-father? Somehow, either in the neurons and glia of the brain or in some associative
process of mind these factors of self, shipmate, father; of bumping, leaping, strangulation; of
orphan, race, and dispossession stand adjacent to one another. Whether this adjacency is the
result of traumas that place them all in proximity in some unique sector of the brain where the
need to write is located, or whether some associational mechanism stimulated by the writing
process seeks out randomly dispersed but similarly coded memories and links them together
simulating what seems to us an adjacency: These questions take us beyond biography and criti-
cism into the mechanics of creativity. Perhaps we must leave it to neurologists to consider how
trauma, memory, and symbol interact. For now, adjacency seems a good enough model for find-
ing useful critical correspondences between life experiences and the writing of imaginative
works.
Concrete evidence of the mental processes of adjacency recur in Melville’s travel journals where
place often evokes place. For instance, in his January 3, 1857 entry, Melville describes the interior
of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. He writes: “At one moment seeming in the Mammoth Cave.
Subterranean gorges, &c. Then as in mines, under the sea. The stooping & doubling. I shudder
at [the] idea of ancient Egyptians. It was in these pyramids that was conceived the idea of
Jehovah” (J 75). At the very least, the biographer in me exults over this entry because it offers
the only evidence we have that Melville visited Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave during his 1840 trip
home from Galena, Illinois. The literary critic exults because the “shudder” Melville feels inside
the pyramid is the “peculiar emotion” of adjacency. It is a physical manifestation of an inner
“shock of recognition” that connects place to place with the invention of monotheism, an idea
that would not emerge until decades later in the 1891 poem “The Great Pyramid,” where the
name of “Jehovah” has been transformed into the symbolic “I AM” (PP 315–16).
The biographer-critic in me marvels at the journal entry’s ramble among displaced places. “At
one moment,” we are “stooping & doubling” in Mammoth Cave, and standing in galleries over-
looking the cave’s “Subterranean gorges, &c.,” which triggers the unexpected invention of
undersea mines, which in turn are associated with Egypt, pyramids, and God all in one “shud-
der.” Melville’s manuscript meditation on nature and art in “The Great Pyramid” extends these
22 John Bryant
associations in ways yet to be assessed. Suffice it to say, journal and poem record an evolving
consciousness whose identifiable “places” constitute an adjacency in mind of claustrophobia, fear,
desire, god hunger, and self-awareness.
Consider, again, the contrived coincidence of Pip, Ishmael, and Ahab being bumped from
their boats, at three different places and times; and yet the conscious shock in our discovery of
their similitude, via the added news of John Backus’s leap, urges us to look for connections, and
a meaning emerges that feels like a symbol of identity. The implication is that “at one moment”
in his creative process, Melville placed a version of himself beside the versions of the real Backus
and fictional Pip; they became adjacent in his mind. Perhaps, too, the mental work expended in
this process of adjacency excites another place in mind associated with an aesthetic notion of “the
tragic.” Perhaps, in fact, there are no places in mind, only communicative energies. As a critical
term, “Adjacency” will not explain why places, times, and events come together in mind. For
now, it is a useful trope for imagining how personal experience, the aesthetics of symbol, and the
making of tragedy interoperate. Surely, a digital mapping of the real spaces in time that Melville
experienced linked to textual places in marginalia, journal entries, novels, and poems will
someday visualize the networks of Melville’s adjacencies to assist the study of the intersections of
life, neurology, neurodiversity, and literary interpretation and to help explain this phenomenon
in writers and readers alike.
Biographical criticism brings life events, memory, and creative process into interpretation.
What connects these places in the mind is the evolving consciousness of the writer living a life.
Biography is forbidden territory in traditional criticism, but territory worth exploring. As
literary, cultural, and digital scholars seek new ways to integrate biography and interpretation in
the analysis of texts, critics need not become biographers themselves to perform such analysis.
Indeed, all of the biographical materials used in this chapter have been hiding in plain sight for
decades, readily available to readers, and waiting for critical use. Like any form of practical criti-
cism, biographical criticism takes practice. For me, accident, coincidence, and adjacency are
useful coordinates for the mapping of Melville’s creative consciousness. But this exercise is only
one approach to biographical criticism. Regardless of approach, our common critical goal is how
to integrate the fragments of life and text in our interpretations of writer, writing, and culture.
Works Cited
Bryant, John. Herman Melville: A Half Known Life. 2 vols. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick, edited by John Bryant and
Wiley-Blackwell, 2020. Haskell Springer. Longman Critical Edition, Pearson
Hayford, Harrison. “Unnecessary Duplicates: A Key to Education, 2007.
the Writing of Moby-Dick.” 1978. rpt. in Melville’s Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick, edited by John Bryant,
Prisoners. Northwestern UP, 2003, pp. 39–63. Wyn Kelley, Christopher Ohge, and Haskell Springer,
Heflin, Wilson. Melville’s Whaling Years, edited by Mary Melville Electronic Library. https://melville.
K. Bercaw Edwards and Thomas Farel Heffernan. electroniclibrary.org/editions.html. 2019–2021.
Vanderbilt UP, 2004. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark. Harvard UP, 1992.
2
Melville’s Twentieth-Century Revivals
Maki Sadahiro
Herman Melville’s reception offers an extreme example of how unstable literary reputations can
be.1 He became famous with the publication of his first book Typee (1846), but by the end of his
life, in 1891, he had sunk into near oblivion. However, the centenary of his birth in 1919
occasioned his return to prominence in American literature. The author’s sudden, seemingly
miraculous rebound on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1920s is generally referred to as the
Melville Revival. At Carl Van Doren’s urging, the American critic Raymond Weaver, then an
instructor at Columbia University, published a two-page biographical essay on Melville in The
Nation and completed the first modern, full-length biography, Herman Melville: Mariner and
Mystic (1921).2 The result was an outpouring of interest in the author among general readers and
critics alike. With the publication of Lewis Mumford’s Herman Melville (1929), commissioned by
the Literary Guild, Melville obtained a solid footing in American literary history.
Across the Atlantic, British literary circles marked the author’s centenary with comparable
enthusiasm. In 1920, Moby-Dick was published as an Oxford World Classics volume with an
introduction by Viola Meynell, who contrasted the novel favorably with Typee and Omoo.3 The
Oxford University Press brand legitimized Moby-Dick as a classic, and the reasonably priced
edition was widely disseminated among lower- and middle-class readers, who were keen to
fashion themselves as consumers of high culture. Within two years, the twelve-volume complete
1
Brian Yothers’s Melville’s Mirrors offers a thorough view of the reception of Melville’s work.
2
Weaver was often criticized for his ignorance of Melville’s later works, but he planned a second book. See
Dunlap-Smith.
3
Janet Floyd resituates Melville’s position in Victorian traditions through her analysis of Meynell’s intervention in the
Melville revival (61–64).
24 Maki Sadahiro
works of Melville, the London Constable edition (1922–1924), enabled readers to access
Melville’s minor works. D. H. Lawrence devoted two chapters to Melville in his Studies in
Classic American Literature (1923), and John Freeman wrote another biography, Herman Melville
(1925), as the first volume of the new Macmillan English Men of Letters series. The Melville
craze even expanded its scope beyond the English-speaking world. In 1927, Moby-Dick was
translated into German, Finnish, and French, and by the end of the 1920s, it was published in
Holland, Hungary, and also (albeit in abridged versions) in Germany, Finland, France, and
Poland (Phelps xiv). Previously known from Van Doren’s two-page entry in the Cambridge
History of American Literature (1917–1921) as a minor writer and contemporary of James
Fenimore Cooper, Melville had risen to occupy an important position in the world canon within
a remarkably short time.
What led to this transatlantic revival in the 1920s, and what was its effect on subsequent
Melville scholarship? In 1931, a scholarly journal launched just two years earlier, American
Literature, carried an article by O. W. Riegel titled “Anatomy of Melville’s Fame.” In it Riegel
charges contemporary critics with having a monolithic understanding of the author’s fame that
betrays their ignorance of Melville’s reception history. “The extraordinary enthusiasm for Herman
Melville in recent years among persons who had not previously heard of him has led to two erro-
neous conclusions: first, that Melville’s contemporaries were blind to the significance of his
work, and second, that until the beginning of the revival of the last decade Melville was com-
pletely forgotten” (195). As Riegel points out, there had in fact been an earlier Melville revival
in Britain in the mid-1880s, with Robert Buchanan and Henry Salt as its chief advocates (198).
Was Riegel’s assessment of the 1920s revival—as a moment of collective amnesia about Melville’s
previous reception—an accurate one? Or was this revival more complicated, emerging from
processes of collaboration, negotiation, and antagonism carried out through transatlantic and
transtemporal literary exchanges?
This chapter considers the complex genealogy of Melville scholarship and reception from the
perspective of the dynamic relationships between different Melville revivals. The small-scale
British revival in the late nineteenth century and the 1920s revival on both sides of the Atlantic,
while usually discussed as separate and unrelated phenomena, are treated here as interrelated
moments in the history of Melville reception. The nineteenth-century response to Melville,
inflected by British socialism, did not simply disappear, to be later replaced with completely
different responses by other readers and critics; rather, the earlier British revival was still legible
within the rediscovery of Melville on the other side of the Atlantic several decades later. The
“Young American” critics of the 1920s, such as Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford, shared
some of the ethical principles and aesthetic criteria that had motivated nineteenth-century
British socialist critics, and Mumford’s view of Melville as occupying a place in a pantheon that
included Thoreau and Whitman was in tune with the British socialist revivalists’ perspective. By
the 1930s, the Young American critics were no longer fashionable, and succeeding generations,
inflected by New Critical methodology and an objective approach, defined themselves against
their “subjective” and “imaginative” predecessors (Spark 238). Nevertheless, after the 1920s
revival had begun to be dismissed and even denounced by later critics, its residual impact was
still discernible in the “American Renaissance” of the 1940s, prompted by the work of F. O.
Matthiessen.
Melville’s Twentieth-Century Revivals 25
Melville’s Americanization and Its Discontents

In the 1920s American literature had arrived at a liminal moment in which it was turning away
from British literary traditions and becoming a discrete academic discipline. Ideological con-
flicts about the status of American literature both fueled and were fueled by the Melville revival,
and British critics in particular challenged the underpinnings of this latest literary craze. Sir
Philip Gibbs, in John O’London’s Weekly, complained that the revival was a “new cult” or even a
kind of “conspiracy” (qtd. in “Under the Spell of Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’” 35). Michael Sadleir,
who had himself ignited the revival through the publication of the Constable edition, detected
a postcolonial mentality lurking behind the formation of the literary canon: “To Poe … American
aesthetic nationalism clung—and now clings by habit—with a tenacity that has led inevitably
to an over-valuation of his quality. Already the same thing, and for the same reasons, is happen-
ing to Herman Melville” (“Literary Reputations” 297). Drawing an analogy with the support
Scottish writers found among their country’s artists and writers, he observed that in the case of
American writers, “their works tend uniformly to have an inflated value alike in terms of critical
reputation and of money” (297). The sudden “over-valuation” of Melville was in Sadleir’s
estimation a cultural construction resulting from “the national pride of some intensely nation-
alist but artistically unproductive community” (297).
American cultural endorsement undoubtedly contributed to the revival, which was informed
by a sense of rivalry with the British literary world. As Kermit Vanderbilt argues, the institu-
tionalization of American literary studies was well underway in the 1920s. Supported by the
founding of the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association in 1925 and
the launch of professional journals such as New England Quarterly in 1928 and American Literature
in 1929, American literature was transformed from an “inferior knowledge” product taught only
in women’s seminaries and regional public universities in the West into part of an officially rec-
ognized academic core curriculum at research universities in the East, such as Johns Hopkins
(Renker 24). During this period, American authors and critics began to disregard British views
of American literature and to minimize its Anglo-Saxon connections (Vanderbilt 271). Melville’s
canonical status was encouraged within the institutionalization of an independent American lit-
erature, a process Melville had sought to solidify himself with the publication in 1850 of
“Hawthorne and His Mosses,” a piece, incidentally, to which he did not sign his name.
It would be wrong, however, to reduce the American Melville revival to a simple story about
the American literary world turning its back on the British. In fact, in some respects the revival
reflected American literature’s dependence on the British literary establishment. As the fervent
exchanges over the status of American literature suggest, Melville critics, both academic and
nonacademic, needed the framework of canon formation that British critics could provide. On
the one hand, American critics felt uncomfortable with the idea of the British discovering an
American masterpiece. Philip Hale of the Springfield Republican, for instance, opined that
“Americans should be ashamed of the fact that an English house is the first to reprint all of
Melville’s prose writings” (October 20, 1922, 20). On the other hand, American critics were
happy to authenticate the quality of Melville’s work by pointing to the attention it had received
by such reputable British journals as the Nation and Athenaeum. They were also quick to mention
that Melville exerted an enormous impact on British maritime writers, such as William Clark
Russell, J. M. Barrie, John Masefield, and Robert Louis Stevenson. An article titled “The
Rediscovery of Melville” in the Chicago Daily News ( January 11, 1922) proudly noted, “English
26 Maki Sadahiro
criticism has just scored another so-called discovery in American literature.” With tongue in
cheek, it then suggested that “in judging home writers collegiate critics [should] keep their eyes
abroad” (8). But as important as this direct, contemporary dialogue was, the revival was also a
convergence of multiple tributaries of earlier revivals of the 1880s on both sides of the Atlantic.
The British Socialist Melville Revival and Its Heritage

The late nineteenth-century British Melville revival encompassed several overlapping groups,
including the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artist-writers and their peers, adherents of the
Christian socialist working-men’s movement, as well as Fabian socialists (Parker, “Historical
Note” 735). Though seemingly diverse, this revival was, for the most part, tied to a broader
movement of socialism in Britain. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century,
numerous groups consciously organized themselves around a notion of socialism, invoking a
term that had been in disuse since the collapse of the Owenite movement of the 1830s–1840s
(Bevir 14, 15). This socialist revival was still new, and boundaries between the groups were
porous, with members moving from one group to another or affiliating themselves with several
socialist groups at once (Harris 68). Some of the British socialist revivalists, such as Robert
Buchanan (1841–1901), Henry Salt, Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, Ernest Rhys, and
William Morris, were Fabians or had Fabian connections, and others were influenced by the
Fabians’ forebears, the Fellowship of the New Life. Melville’s works were circulated among sev-
eral of these socialist groups. Henry Salt, a central figure of the early Melville revival, for in-
stance, first heard of Melville through Bertram Dobell, a bookseller and literary critic who
helped James Thomson publish City of Dreadful Night (1880) and introduced Melville’s works to
his socialist friends, thus creating a wide literary network spanning from London to Leicester
(Parker, “Historical Note” 739).
Situating this Melville revival among larger efforts to incorporate American literature within
a socialist program provides some clarity. As Mark Bevir observes, middle-class British activists
derived their ethos from American Romanticism and acquired characteristics distinguished from
that movement’s continental counterparts (878). Whitman and Thoreau in particular were fre-
quently discussed in numerous socialist journals, including Seed-Time, the journal of the
Fellowship of the New Life; Keir Hardie’s the Labour Leader; and Labour Prophet, the paper of the
Labour Church. The British activists saw themselves as inheritors of American Romanticism’s
“spiritual immanentism” and “frontier individualism” (Bevir 879), and they nurtured a belief in
social change based on the ethical transformation of the individual. Placing spiritual principles
at the core of socialism discursively extended the scope of the movement to encompass not only
socioeconomic understructures but also various connected movements such as anti-colonialism,
sex reform, vegetarianism, mysticism, and aestheticism (Gandhi 8–9). Salt’s Humanitarian
League exemplified the ethical socialists’ holistic approach to social problems. Within this
humanitarian and potentially anti-colonial reform project, American writers who were neglected
in their home country, which was still culturally dominated by Britain, captured the socialists’
attention. Melville was one such writer, albeit hardly the most prominent. Salt discussed the
possibility of publishing Typee as a volume in the Camelot series of the working-class-oriented
publisher Walter Scott Company, but this plan was aborted because John Murray owned the
English rights (Sadahiro 41–45). If it is true that “Thoreau’s productions [would not have been]
widely known in Britain” without their having been published in the Camelot series (“Thoreau”
314), the failure to publish Melville’s works in the series undoubtedly undercut his appeal to
lower-class readers, perhaps preventing the socialist Melville revival from reaching its full
potential.
The British socialist revival of Melville faded at the end of the nineteenth century and was
largely forgotten until the 1920s. This was when the prominent pro-Labour literary journal the
Nation and Athenaeum provided a stage for the British Melville revival in its “Letters to the
Editor” column, which became a site of discussion about Melville’s British connections. One of
these columns featured a letter from H. C. Sotheran, who on cataloging William Michael
Rosetti’s books discovered James Thomson’s article comparing Melville to Walt Whitman (213).
On another occasion, James Billson (1858–1932), one of Melville’s most enthusiastic British
followers posted an admiring letter to Melville thirty years earlier (396–97) and made his entire
correspondence with Melville available to readers (“Some Melville Letters” 712–13). These
letters are a valuable indicator of the nature and scope of the highly networked Melville fandom
among nineteenth-century groups such as the Pre-Raphaelites, supporters of the Working-Men’s
College, and British Whitman advocates. Nevertheless, the editors of the Nation and Athenaeum
exerted no further efforts to explore the first Melville revival, despite the fact that some of them
(e.g., John Middleton Murray and Leonard Woolf) were nominally Fabians. Woolf, for instance,
commented on Melville’s distinctly American qualities but was himself more a modernist than
a nineteenth-century socialist inheritor of Thoreau and Melville’s American Romanticism (688).
H. M. Tomlinson, the journal’s main editor, also failed to recognize the socialist strain in the
earlier British Melville revival, despite his knowledge of Thoreau’s and Whitman’s popularity
among working-class people. He argued that Whitman, like Thoreau, freed working-class
readers “from the repellent materialism of their age and from the bondage of learning’s formal-
ities,” but he had no explanation for why Moby-Dick had been overlooked: this was a “mystery of
the human mind” (621). The nineteenth-century British socialist revival of Melville seems to
have left few traces among British socialists of the 1920s, partly due to changes in socialist prin-
ciples from the 1880s to the 1920s. While British socialists from the previous century empha-
sized the aesthetic over the economic, believing that the transformation of the individual through
simple, healthy, and beautiful living would ameliorate class struggles, their twentieth-century
counterparts divided into factions that pursued different agendas, whether Marxian proletarian
solidarity or Fabian collectivism (Yeo 123–26). Would it be accurate, then, to understand the
nineteenth-century British Melville revival as a sporadic, local movement that exerted no
influence on the 1920s revival?
The answer to this question seems to lie with the Young American critics of the 1920s, who
appear to have derived their ideals of civic participation and organic craftsmanship from the first
wave of British socialists. It may seem counterintuitive to argue that these critics found their
roots among their British connections, given the Young Americans’ centrality in the postwar
debate about how American culture was distinct from British traditions. Despite their nation-
alism, however, some of these critics consciously worked through the legacy of British socialism,
and few more so than Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford. In his early career Brooks inter-
acted with British socialist novelists, such as H. G. Wells, and taught at the Workers’ Educational
Association at South Norwood in London, where he discovered workers’ “zeal for literature in
and for itself” and solidified his view of literature as a driver of social change (Vitelli 36).
Although Brooks’s writings on Melville were desultory and limited in number, they called
28 Maki Sadahiro
attention to Melville’s reception in Britain (e.g., his 1918 manifesto “On Creating a Usable
Past”) and demonstrated his interest in the author over time (e.g., his 1947 The Times of Melville
and Whitman). In a similar vein, Mumford’s aesthetic was affected “by various Fabian, romantic,
and distributist currents of the turn-of-the-century English left” (Blake 191). Without directly
imitating the British socialist movement of the late nineteenth century, these critics appear to
have been fully conditioned by it.
The next generation of critics largely dismissed the work of Brooks and Mumford, shifting to
more scholarly, analytical, and fact-based approaches, including source studies by students of
Stanley T. Williams at Yale (Marovitz 521–23). Anthologies began to dominate academic pub-
lications, resulting in a change to Melville’s image as not only a novelist but also a writer of short
stories that could be read using the tools of New Criticism (Matthewson 252). Mumford’s inten-
tional amateurism, along with his interdisciplinary and holistic attempts at organic synthesis of
knowledge, were opposed by academic specialists who came to dominate American higher edu-
cation (Lewis 100). Recently, Eric Aronoff, in Composing Cultures (2013), has helped to defend
these early Melville studies against the criticism that they were merely “imaginative” and
“subjective” by resituating the Young American critics—along with Weaver—in the context of
American anthropology’s emergence in academia. Aronoff argues that their aesthetic of cultural
wholeness was stimulated by contemporary intellectual ferment in the modern field of
anthropology, led by Edward Sapir. The axis of culture had shifted from value to form, and from
Arnoldian cultural hierarchy of high and low to a more relative and pluralistic culture as “a
whole way of life” (24–25). The interdisciplinary and seemingly nonacademic orientation of the
Young American critics’ aesthetic was an expression of this central academic issue of the 1920s.
The Young American critics’ aesthetic principle of wholeness, with its British origins, nonethe-
less points to a genealogy of the 1920s Melville revival that diverges from the path of academia-
centered canon formation. Seeking out the possibilities buried in the past that neither World War
I nor modern materialism could erase, Brooks argued in “On Creating a Usable Past” that “an
entire scheme of ideas and tendencies” of the American past survived on British soil (339). Melville
occupied a place at the heart of Brooks’s cultural renewal project as a representative of an American
past that had left a trace in Britain, and he pointed to enduring parallels between the two coun-
tries: “English men will ask you why we Americans have so neglected Herman Melville that there
is no biography of him” (340). Not only had he found the object of his analysis in the context of
transatlantic literary exchanges, but he had also found his methodological model in Britain. More
than anything, the principle of organic wholeness was an important aspect of his transatlanticism.
As Casey Blake points out, “Brooks grafted the spiritual rhetoric of Fabianism … onto the anti-
modernist radicalism he gleaned from reading Tolstoy, Ruskin, and most of all Morris” (107).
Brooks wrote explicitly that “Our Awakeners” among America’s intellectuals must be found not
within but from without. In particular, Morris’s ethos of craftsmanship gave Brooks a model of
cultural synthesis of manual and intellectual labor and enabled him to find an American equivalent:
“Why has no one been able to embrace our American life in those dynamic personal terms with
which Morris embraced the life of England? … Instead of a Morris we have had a Whitman”
(Brooks, “Our Awakeners” 240). Like Whitman’s poetry, Melville’s Moby-Dick displayed supreme
“craftsmanship,” in which “the subjective and objective elements in his mind approach some sort
of equilibrium” (Brooks, Emerson and Others 197, 174). Brooks followed British socialist thinkers
of the previous generation, thus traversing a middle way between Anglophilia and Anglophobic
Americanism without being subject to either of them.
Brooks perceived a similarity of purpose that linked America’s national literature and the ear-
lier British socialists, who expressed a desire for organic social change and the need to address
some of the same challenges. Chris Waters argues that British middle-class socialists in the
nineteenth century failed to develop an extensive alternative culture due to their inability to
synthesize the discrepancy between what socialists believed should be distributed to workers as
culture and what workers themselves regarded as their own culture (2). Similarly, from the 1920s
onward, Brooks came close to “a denial of any need for popular participation in a democratic
project” and took on the role of regenerating American culture for a select group, thereby cre-
ating “a literary caste” (Blake 234). Later in life, however, he returned to a theme of cultural
synthesis in The Times of Melville and Whitman and articulated a topic that he was not able to
delve into in the 1920s: Melville’s working-class readership. He referred to the British socialist
revival of American writers by noting that Whitman “had for years only a handful of readers,
while he was recognized in England in influential circles like those that proved so faithful to
Melville also” (252–53). Continuing, Brooks stated: “In their sympathy with all ordinary life
and common occupations, together with their feeling of brotherhood for all rough workers,
James Thomson observed that the two were much alike, as they were alike in their sense of gran-
deur and beauty; and Whitman and Melville were also associated in the mind of the writer
Robert Buchanan, when he visited the United States in 1885” (252). As the English writers for
whom Whitman was a “prophet and a teacher, a counsellor and guide,” Brooks named the
Rosettis, John Addison Symonds, Carpenter, and Stevenson. Most of them were more enthusi-
astic about Whitman than Melville, so it seems unlikely that Brooks had any extensive knowledge
of the British socialist Melville revivals that centered on Salt and Billson. Still, this is a rare ref-
erence to the socialist networks that inaugurated the revival in Britain. A transatlantic kinship
based on discrepancies between middle-class and working-class socialists might have inspired
American socialists to join their earlier British counterparts in recapturing Whitman and
Melville; as Brooks says, “knowing that others have desired the things we desire and have
encountered the same obstacles” can bring about a “sense of brotherhood in effort and in aspira-
tion” (“On Creating a Usable Past” 341).
Participatory Culture in Lewis Mumford’s Biography

Like Brooks, Mumford sought an antidote to America’s industrialization and cultural disjunction
through the formation of an organic relationship with the nation’s cultural heritage. He found in
Melville an exemplary case of the ability to reconcile the disparities in the modern American
psyche: “Moby Dick thus brings together the two dissevered halves of the modern world and the
modern self,” that is, “its positive, practical, scientific, externalized self” and “its imaginative,
ideal half” (Mumford, Herman Melville 193). In his belief in the possibility of creating an organic
whole in art and in life, Mumford, like Brooks, revealed his kinship with nineteenth-century
British radicalism. Once he had experienced a centralized state during World War I, Mumford
distanced himself from the statist program of the socialist left’s orthodox Marxism. He wrote
that it was “a great cultural misdemeanor” and “heresy to the good” that “the National Utopia,
in its extension as imperialism, sought to make the spiritual community restricted and the
temporal community universal” (Mumford, The Story of Utopias 233). By the same token, as his
critique of Edward Bellamy’s technocratic Fabian utopia in Looking Backward (1888) indicates,
30 Maki Sadahiro
neither did he accept the Fabians’ collectivist socialism, which envisioned a near monopolistic
form of control over society rather than the spiritual immanentism that characterized nine-
teenth-century Fabianism (Mumford, The Story of Utopias 169). However, his anti-state and anti-
bureaucratic positions did not necessarily make him anti-socialist. The form of socialism that
attracted Mumford was what Stephen Yeo has called “associationism,” a cooperative practice that
emphasized pluralism and the individual’s voluntary associations within a larger collectivity
(89–90). Mumford’s work with the Regional Planning Association of America, beginning in
1923, which supported the development of communities that could unite the best elements of
rural and urban life, was an updated version of Ebenezer Howard’s 1899 garden city project in
Letchworth, one of the early achievements of associationists. Mumford’s methodology for cre-
ating a cultural history also shared common elements with associationism, which Yeo somewhat
ironically described as “more of a hoped-for socialism, a not-yet as well as a has-been socialism”
(75). To attain a holistic vision of social betterment, he provoked questions about the validity of
various attempts at reform without offering practical answers to social problems.
Mumford was more interested in “essential human qualities” than “industrial reorganization,”
as were Brooks and also William Morris (Mumford, The Story of Utopias 173). Mumford’s convic-
tion, derived from Morris, that “the chief dignity of man lies not in what he consumes but in
what he creates,” is nowhere more fully explored than in his Melville biography (The Story of
Utopias 173). Whereas Brooks found such a fortunate synthesis “only once and once only” in
Moby-Dick as “our sole epic,” Mumford found it in Melville’s entire oeuvre, from his earliest work
to his unpublished sketches and posthumous Billy Budd (Brooks, Emerson and Others 205). For
Mumford, the artwork was far from being an autonomous object; rather, the work’s craftsman-
ship was inseparable from the author’s craft: “in a greater degree, Herman Melville’s life and
work were one” (Herman Melville 4). Just as Moby-Dick achieved an artistic synthesis, Melville’s
personality served as a symbolic manifestation of wholeness, or more precisely, a movement
toward wholeness. As John Bryant also suggests in Chapter 1 of this Companion (“Melville the
Life (1819–1891): Accident, Coincidence, and Adjacency”), Melville’s life could not be reduced
to the existence of a sailor or adventurer because “the totality of living” amounted to an ongoing
process rather than a static condition. As Mumford writes: “Melville was not primarily a sailor;
he was not an adventurer; he was a man sailing, a man adventuring, a man thinking, proving in
his early manhood that a whole and healthy life may involve many functions, without sacrificing
its wholeness and health to any one of them” (366).
Melville’s art and life provided Mumford with an opportunity to consider the basic methodo-
logical problem of life-writing. Mumford was aware that his biography of Melville also inter-
sected with criticism, intellectual and cultural history, and fiction, and he reconstructed Melville’s
life through letters and journals frequently without using quotation marks to distinguish
Melville’s words from his own. This merging of historical author and biographer was an approach
with which Archibald MacLeish took issue in his review: “Nothing has been more destructive of
artistic dignity, nothing has more muddily hidden the true nature of works of art, than the criti-
cism which explains it all from the inside or from the outside or from before or from behind”
(183). It is no surprise that MacLeish, an imagist poet who shared the high modernists’ aesthetic
of “impersonality,” was uncomfortable with Mumford’s bold interjections of himself into
Melville’s life and works, as if he were the author of a play in which Melville appeared: “(Enter
Herman Melville, in a green overcoat, with polite manners, and a wary reticence underneath his
appearance of rank conviviality)” (Mumford, Herman Melville 119). Mumford’s idiosyncratic
intervention went against the grain of most 1920s interpretations of Moby-Dick, which treated
Ahab as the novel’s lone artist figure. For Mumford, Ishmael embodied both the artist and
America: “It is Ahab and the Parsee, the European and the Asiatic, who carry the pursuit to its
ultimate end—while a single American survived to tell the tale!” (182). Setting aside the
strangeness of casting Ahab as “the European,” Mumford’s intention was to identify himself with
Ishmael as the American narrator who emerged from past conflicts fully committed to a model
of Atlantic civilization where the United States and Europe remained tightly enmeshed. Without
sharing the modernist insistence on the work of art as an organic whole and the need for scholarly
detachment from the object of analysis, Mumford incorporated himself into the novel, trans-
forming it into a lived experience.
Mumford’s life-writing as a symbolic manifestation of participatory culture may have been
modeled on medieval religious processions, where “the spectators were also communicants and
participants; they engaged in the spectacle, watching it from within, not from without; or rather,
feeling it from within, acting in unison, not dismembered beings, reduced to a single specialized
role” (Mumford, The Culture of Cities 64). Only through involvement can individual and collective
potentialities be actualized. Casey Blake calls Mumford’s orientation “a romantic pragmatism”
to indicate that his analyses remained provisional and left various possibilities open for future
readings. “Each man will read into Moby Dick the drama of his own experience and that of his
contemporaries,” Mumford wrote (194). As long as “the book is not an answer, but a clue that
must be carried further and worked out,” the critic’s participatory interpretation will never
establish a definite truth but instead remain in a process of recreating and refashioning a
democratic and intellectual community of amateur readers (Mumford, Herman Melville 194–95).
Such a view of a reading community anticipates the twenty-first-century Melville studies that
Brian Yothers discusses in Chapter 3 of this Companion, a community that flourishes through
active participation both inside and outside academia.
Regional Melville, Communal Melville, and American Melville

Joseph Wood Krutch criticized Mumford’s biography for scaling Melville down to a regional
writer and making him “more truly a part of the Golden Day of New England than he really is”
(561). It is true that Mumford was in tune with his contemporaries in the American regional
movement (such as John Dewey and Charles Horton Cooley) as well as the British socialist envi-
ronmentalists, and he believed that societies would instinctively control their growth and sprawl
to avoid causing divisions between culture and society (Casillo 99–101). Mumford viewed such
a community as central to the life and work of Melville, whose heritage and work united him
with “a provincial society” that “achieves a certain balance and continuity by a restricted
development” (Herman Melville 9). Far from scaling Melville down, however, Mumford’s organi-
cist environmentalism departed radically from a nostalgic desire for a premodern static
community and paved the way for the Melville revival to be a principal concern of the American
Renaissance.
Mumford’s distinct environmentalism becomes clearer in comparison with the regionalist
Melville revival. Although largely forgotten, the New England Melville boom coexisted with
Mumford’s rediscovery of Melville during the 1920s. As far as New England newspapers were
concerned, Melville’s regional fame never declined at all, even though Barrett Wendell, an
32 Maki Sadahiro
authority on American literary studies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
placed Melville among writers of the “Middle States,” excluding Melville from what he termed
the “Renaissance of New England” (229–30). The evaluation of Melville as a New England
author could be traced back to J. E. A. Smith’s biography, which was first published serially in
the Pittsfield Evening Journal between 1891 and 1892, under the title of “Herman Melville. A
Great Pittsfield Author.” Steven Olsen-Smith notes that this biography offers a “rebuttal to the
dominant narrative of Melville’s notoriety and reclusiveness in Pittsfield,” especially at the late
stage of his career (171).
A historian of New England as well as a friend of Melville’s neighbor Sarah Morewood, Smith
emphasized Melville’s references to the region’s localities not only in his short stories but also in
“Town-Ho’s Story” in Moby-Dick, concluding that “almost all of his later works have a touch of
Berkshire in them” (134). He did not see Melville’s career after Pierre as in any way a failure and
described it rather in terms of upward movement. Melville was invited to become “a contributor
to Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, then the best periodical of its class—or of any class in America—
and one of the best in the world” (134). Rather than strike the tragic tone often associated with
Melville’s later career, Smith points out that Melville “appeared to enjoy the hearty welcome
which [society] gave him,” in New York and elsewhere, giving the lie to his depiction by “some
of the New York newspaper writers” as “a man who had just been the recluse and almost misan-
thrope” (139). A descendant of Revolutionary War heroes on both sides, as well as the son-in-law
of a chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Melville was “a great Pittsfield
author and one whose world-wide fame is a part of that of the town” (149).
In the 1920s, New England newspapers continued to feature portraits of Melville as a local
luminary. More than 100 articles in total in the Springfield Republican and Boston Herald men-
tioned his name, treating him as a local celebrity comparable to Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell
Holmes. As Scott Norsworthy notes on the website Melvilliana, Philip Hale’s column “As the
World Wags” in the Boston Herald paved the way for the Melville revival in the 1920s by making
Melville’s name known to his audience and introducing his works, from Typee and The Confidence-
Man to his short stories. The Herald proudly noted that Hale’s column caused “a local boom”
(“Classics” 11) and reasonably claimed that Hale “deserves a share of the credit” for the “Herman
Melville vogue” (“Books” 9). In addition to influencing maritime writers such as Bliss Perry and
Frederick O’Brien, Melville appeared frequently in reference to whaling topics, such as the decline
of the New England whaling industry (“Norway, Not Nantucket” 10) and the threat of whale
extinction (Dole 52). Readers were also encouraged to visit Stockbridge and Pittsfield to engage
in so-called nostalgia tourism, communing with the irretrievable past associated with regional
literary figures such as Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Melville (“Local Literary Pilgrimages” 27).
In comparison to the regionalism reflected in Smith’s biography and local journalism,
Mumford’s regionalism was more rhetorical than geographical in nature and more oriented
toward the future than the past. Based on his assessment of Patrick Geddes’s philosophy of “life
insurgent,” in which a life was “marked not merely by adjustment to the environment, but by
insurgence against the environment,” he imagined an organic community that comes into being
only as participants reflect on, resist, or even run away from it (Mumford, Technics and Civilization
319). A stable environment enabled Mumford to respond creatively, perhaps even with aversion.
After his elaborate discussion of how New York was still a provincial town in Melville’s youth,
Mumford noted that New York “taught him to be discontented with New York” (21).
Mumford’s major contribution to American literary history as well as to Melville studies lies
in his discovery of the principle of the “life insurgent” in other writers of the so-called American
Renaissance. Known today as the predecessor to F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941),
The Golden Day provided him with a template for discussing “the organic society with shared
values and the union between labor and culture” (xv).4
As Matthiessen would later do, Mumford sought to establish an American tradition by
expanding his scope to cover both New England and New York. He also sought to trace the
origin not of the New England mind, but of the “American mind,” borne out of the European
Renaissance and the disintegration of Europe’s medieval culture. Mumford located such a protest
tradition within rather than outside the regional network: “the American scene was a challenge;
and men rose to it” (Mumford, The Golden Day 92). Even if they were “outcasts,” they were also
individuals who shared their experience and moved on eagerly with it. Thus “they stood between
two worlds” (92). In Mumford’s argument that “the critical examination of men, creeds, and
institutions” was “the vital core of Protestantism,” Protestantism did not mean ignoring society;
rather, the static nature of that society induced a creative energy in citizens to revolt against it.
Mumford was not alone in seeing Melville in revolt. In Main Currents in American Thought
(1927), Vernon Parrington posited a view of Melville as a “rebellious transcendentalist” (250).
And yet, Mumford’s literary scope was closer to that of the British radicals who appreciated
American radicals as their allies than it was to American leftist critics. Rather than championing
Emerson and Hawthorne, he championed “outcast” authors—Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman.
He singled out “Whitman with his carpentering and his nursing” and “Thoreau with his pencil-
making and gardening” as Melville’s “brothers,” in both art and life, who were capable of
harmonizing intellectual and manual labor, theory and practice, into the totality of living
(Mumford, Herman Melville 366).
Conclusion
The nineteenth-century British Melville revival, an aborted project led by socialists, neither
disappeared nor reemerged in a revised form among British critics in the 1920s. Instead, its ideas
were transmitted through Morrisian associationism to the Young American critics. The revived
British socialists had seen themselves and their own social and artistic ideals reflected in
Whitman, Thoreau, and Melville. For their part, the Young American critics’ resistance to both
the academic establishment and the industrial division of labor inspired them to find common-
ality and legitimacy among their earlier British counterparts. The 1920s Melville revival in both
countries eventually became a cultural community, constructed not through Anglo-American
assimilations but through contestations, dialogue, and mutual influences across time and space.
4
Even though later critics took issue with American Renaissance as “a work of parochial sameness” that represented the
view of a restricted elite, excluding its analysis of racial, sexual, and cultural differences (Dolan 48), it nevertheless
helped to rehabilitate the socialist and revolutionary strain of the 1920s Melville revival.
34 Maki Sadahiro
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1921, pp. 396–97. Dick.’” Springfield Republican, 9 March 1924, p. 35.
———. “Some Melville Letters.” Nation and Athenaeum, Hale, Philip. “As the World Wags.” Boston Herald, 20
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The New England Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 1, 1928, to Herman Melville, edited by Wyn Kelley. Blackwell,
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Reprinted in The Early Lives of Melville:
3
Melville’s Twenty-First Century Lives:
Reception and Criticism
Brian Yothers
The question of reception has never been a side-show in Melville studies: from the Melville
Revival of the 1920s on, scholars, critics, and theorists have been fascinated by the question of
how a body of work that had faded into the background of United States literary history during
the life of its author and in the years immediately following his death could become a cornerstone
of American literature in the early twentieth century. How could such an important author’s rep-
utation be lost to many readers, and how can we explain the velocity of its recovery? This matter
of reception has proved to be as fraught at the start of the 2020s as it was in the 1920s.
One salutary reminder of how vexed the history of Melville’s reception has been since Melville
himself was in his early thirties appeared in early 2020 in a formidably researched blog post,
“Moby-Dick Widely Praised in 1851–2,” by Scott Norsworthy, who undertook the task of
providing precise numbers for how many reviews of Moby-Dick were negative, how many were
positive, and how many were mixed in the two years immediately following its publication. As
Norsworthy pointed out, the belief that Moby-Dick was subject to universal or nearly universal
obloquy upon its publication and that it never received recognition during Melville’s lifetime is
one of the more durable commonplaces in Melville studies, even as it has been repeatedly ques-
tioned and modified by attentive students of Melville’s reception. Using emoji as a rough and
whimsical means of categorizing reviews of Moby-Dick, Norsworthy pointed out that in fact, in
1851–1852, 75 of 111 reviews of Moby-Dick were positive and only 20 were negative, while
Norsworthy characterized 16 of the reviews as mixed.
Norsworthy’s post captures a number of important realities in Melville studies at the start of
the twenty-first century. First, hoary platitudes about Melville’s work and reception continue to
appear in American literary studies, from broad generalizations about the failure of Moby-Dick
Melville’s Twenty-First Century Lives: Reception and Criticism 37
among Melville’s contemporaries to facile judgments regarding the aesthetic shortcomings of his
poetry relative to his prose. Such platitudes appear with yet more frequency when Melville is
invoked by public intellectuals and journalists to respond to the perceived cultural needs of the
moment (thanks to John Bryant for making this point in correspondence). Second, much of the
most interesting scholarship in Melville studies calls into question what we all think we know
about Melville, from recoveries of his poetry and less well-known magazine fiction to revalua-
tions of his views on race, religious belief, sexuality, and art, and not excluding the revaluation
of his biography and reception. Third, much valuable digital scholarship has been produced by
independent scholars, including Norsworthy himself, as well as by scholars currently housed in
universities. Melville scholarship has continued to thrive in the early twenty-first century, across
institutional contexts and a wide range of disciplinary, theoretical, critical, and archival
approaches. Melville’s lives continue to multiply well over a century after his death and a century
after the first Melville Revival.
Melville Biography and Textual Studies

One way in which scholarship provides us with new lives for Melville is through biography.
When I wrote my book-length study of Melville’s critical reception, Melville’s Mirrors (2011), to
which this essay may serve as a supplement, I was struck by the crucial role that biographical and
textual studies had played in advancing the interpretation of Melville’s works. One might sus-
pect that the topic of Melville biography would have been exhausted by the early twenty-first
century, especially after the publication of Hershel Parker’s enormous two-volume Herman
Melville: A Biography in 1996 and 2002. In fact, the early twenty-first century has seen elegant
and streamlined Melville biographies by Andrew Delbanco (2005) and Kevin J. Hayes (2017),
with volumes of bulk and ambition similar to Parker’s written by John Bryant being published
in 2020. Parker himself followed up his own massive biographical efforts with a substantial
volume devoted to the history and nature of Melville biography, Melville Biography: An Inside
Narrative (2013). Perhaps not surprisingly, given the strong views that Parker has expressed on
the work of his predecessors and contemporaries over the course of his career, he featured both
insightful reflection on the process of writing biography and sharply worded critiques of biogra-
phers and critics with whom Parker disagreed. Although some readers are likely to be non-
plussed by Parker’s criticisms, the book also contributes a valuable understanding of the process
of researching and writing biography from a scholar who has devoted his career to this very pro-
cess. John Bryant’s work delves deeply into Melville’s life in the context of consciousness, aes-
thetics, and trauma while drawing bold conclusions about matters of race and sexuality that go
beyond previous investigations of Melville’s life and work. A compelling statement of Bryant’s
method appears in Chapter 1 of this Companion.
An important element within Melville biography, as Parker and Bryant in particular have
both acknowledged, and as Scott Norsworthy’s Melvilliana blog illustrates, is the contribution of
independent scholars who have pursued research into specific dimensions of Melville’s life or
career. John Gretchko has been another influential scholar in the world of Melville biography
who has worked outside of academia and who has shed light on aspects of Melville’s personal,
family, and financial history that many other scholars have ignored. Warren Broderick has like-
wise delved into Melville’s life, finances, and publishing context, and has identified important
38 Brian Yothers
source material for Melville’s work. Aimery Dunlap-Smith has been an important contributor to
our knowledge about Raymond Weaver and the Melville Revival of the 1920s. Dennis Marnon,
a librarian at Harvard University, has also contributed substantially to our knowledge of
Melville’s sources. The impulse to dig up new sources has informed important work by prolific
academics as well: Zachary Turpin has published his important work thus far as a graduate stu-
dent and then as a tenure-track faculty member. Turpin has found evidence related to Melville’s
lost manuscripts (2016) and explored Melville’s surprisingly vibrant relationship to the disci-
pline of mathematics in the nineteenth century (2015).
Two monuments of textual scholarship appeared in the early twenty-first century, both contrib-
uting substantially to the revaluation of Melville’s poetry: the Northwestern-Newberry Published
Poems (2009) and the Northwestern-Newberry Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Uncompleted Writings
(2017). These volumes made Melville’s poetry more readily available to scholars than it had been
before, and the second of the two volumes in particular raised the editorial standards of the available
versions of Melville’s uncollected poetry from his later years considerably. The early twenty-first
century also saw a rich array of new editions that contextualized Melville’s works: Hershel Parker’s
third Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (2019), which offered an especially expansive overview
of Melville’s cultural afterlife in essays by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Wyn Kelley, and Timothy Marr;
Robert S. Levine and Cindy Weinstein’s Norton Critical Edition of Pierre (2017); Parker and Mark
Niemeyer’s second Norton Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man; Michael J. Everton’s Broadview
Edition of Billy Budd (2017); and Brian Yothers’s Broadview Editions of The Piazza Tales (2018) and
Benito Cereno (2019). John Bryant’s editorial work from the 1990s and early 2000s, including a
Modern Library edition of Melville’s Tales, Poems, and Other Writings (2001), the Longman Critical
Edition of Moby-Dick (2007), and the Penguin edition of Typee (1996) reflected his theoretical work
on a fluid-text approach to editing that he developed in Melville Unfolding (2008) and The Fluid Text
(2002). These works, discussed in more length in Melville’s Mirrors, provide an important model for
more recent editorial interventions. Bryant’s work on the Melville Electronic Library and Steven Olsen-
Smith’s work on Melville’s Marginalia Online, discussed below in this essay and elsewhere in this
volume, offer future extensions for the scope of textual scholarship.
Steven Olsen-Smith’s Melville in His Own Time (2015) showed that investigations into
Melville’s life could be substantially enhanced by understanding how Melville interacted with
his contemporaries, and offered a rich array of resources that will likely continue to invigorate
future studies. Another powerful example of the contextual strand in Melville scholarship has
been the discussion of Melville’s work in relation to the lives and cultural production of sailors,
and Mary K. Bercaw Edwards’s book Cannibal Old Me (2009) and her 2017 essay on “Performing
the Sailor in Billy Budd” contributed to furthering our understanding of how Melville fits with
the practices of sailors in the nineteenth century. Jennifer Schell’s “A Bold and Hardy Race of
Men”: The Lives and Literature of American Whalemen (2013) likewise situates Melville in the midst
of the culture of American sailors.
Ecology and Natural Philosophy

Given the intense attention that we often give to what Melville says about us, we can easily lose
track of all the ways that Melville’s literary production is not about us as human beings. From
Melville’s lengthy reflections on whales in Moby-Dick to his obsession with tortoises in “The
Encantadas,” Melville is consistently concerned with the many varieties of creatures who share
the planet, and he frequently considers the effect that human beings have on the environment.
Given the anxieties surrounding catastrophic climate change and mass extinction in the early
years of the twenty-first century, it is no surprise that scholars have approached this dimension
of Melville’s work with increased and increasing fervor. One of the broadest considerations of the
relation of Melville’s philosophical thought to scientific questions appeared in Maurice S. Lee’s
Uncertain Chances (2011), where Lee considered chance and doubt in relation to both mathematical
probability and religious belief, bringing Moby-Dick, Pierre, and “Bartleby” into conversation
with Poe, Dickinson, Douglass, and Thoreau on matters of chance, probability, and skepticism
and finding in Melville’s religious uncertainty a parallel to Poe’s explorations of epistemology.
Michael Jonik has offered one of the most substantial readings of Melville’s work from the
standpoint of posthumanism, suggesting that Melville’s treatments of the nonhuman world
“have prompted many to rethink the categories of the human, the personal and the individual,
and to see them as not only traversed but indeed construed by a variety of inhuman forces” (11).
Jonik examined Melville’s work across the 1850s—Moby-Dick, Pierre, “The Encantadas,” and The
Confidence-Man—before closing with readings of the inhuman in Melville’s long poem Clarel and
his posthumous novella Billy Budd. Geoffrey Sanborn has offered similar observations on
Melville’s interest in the nonhuman world in his essay “Melville and the Non-Human World,”
which emphasized the range of connections that Melville makes between human beings and ani-
mals and plants, including in frequently neglected works such as “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” Eileen
McGinnis has connected Melville’s interest in the nonhuman world with his long-standing fas-
cination with the work of Charles Darwin, arguing in an essay on Clarel and “The Encantadas”
that Melville’s response to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) in Clarel (1876) was
consistent with a long-term interest in Darwin’s earlier work, linking up with his dialogue with
Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) in “The Encantadas.” Jennifer Schell (2014) and Timothy
Sweet (2018) have offered powerful discussions of Melville’s relevance to a time in which the
extinction of species has become a central narrative.
Melville’s interest in scientific discovery thus appears as an important component of his
broader interest in the nonhuman world across his career, an issue Meredith Farmer addressed in
her essay on Melville’s connection, via the Albany Academy, with Joseph Henry, one of the most
influential scientists of the nineteenth century. Geography as well as biology and physics con-
tributed to Melville’s literary imagination, as Hester Blum’s work on Arctic exploration in
“Melville in the Arctic” has shown, and for Blum as well, Melville pushes us to recognize the
conceptual limits of the human.
Some of the most ambitious treatments of Melville’s interaction with the nonhuman world
have appeared in book-length studies devoted to Melville’s representations of whales, notably
Philip Hoare’s Leviathan, Or the Whale (2008) and Richard J. King’s Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural
History of Moby-Dick (2019). Both refocused readerly attention on the degree to which Moby-
Dick is truly about whales rather than being an anthropocentric text that simply uses whales as
a backdrop, and King’s study supplemented his argument with lavish and telling illustrations
drawn from natural history. Colin Dayan addressed Melville’s relationship to animal life in
“Melville’s Creatures, or Seeing Otherwise” (2014) with a powerful statement of ecological
protest.
Whether defined as ecological, post-human, or some combination of the two concepts,
Melville’s interest in the world beyond human beings and in undermining human egotism and
40 Brian Yothers
solipsism have been the subject of much energetic study in recent years, with the result that
readings that focus solely on human interactions in Melville’s work have become significantly
less common than those that embrace a wider vision. The lives of creatures in the nonhuman
world intersect with Melville’s, a realization that seems evident once it has been pointed out, but
which too often hovered in the background of earlier studies.
Sex, Gender, and the Body in Melville’s Work and Life

Melville’s sexuality has long been a subject of intense scrutiny and speculation for biographers
and critics alike. Speculation about Melville’s sexuality is far from new (critics going back to
Newton Arvin and beyond pointed out Melville’s apparent desire for other men, and Robert K.
Martin, James Creech, and Joseph Allen Boone wrote extensively on the subject in the late 1980s
and early 1990s). But attention to Melville’s sexuality has become especially nuanced in the last
two decades. In one striking example of the development in studies of Melville sexuality, Michael
Snediker’s “Melville and Queerness without Character” (2013) showed how this suspicion of
character as a stable entity pervades Melville’s fiction from Typee (1846) to The Confidence-Man
(1857).
Christopher Looby has struck similar notes related to the transition from investigations of
Melville as a potentially gay writer in the vein of Martin, Boone, and Creech to discussions of
Melville’s treatment of sexuality based in queer theory. His essay “Strange Sensations: Sex and
Aesthetics in ‘The Counterpane’” (2011), considered how Ishmael and Queequeg’s encounter in the
early chapters of Moby-Dick can be read in a way that brings together matters of aesthetics and of
sexuality, rather than keeping the two at arm’s length. Indeed, considerations of sexuality in
Melville studies in the past decade have tended in precisely this direction: bringing sexuality into
dialogue with broader theoretical and critical questions, rather than approaching sexuality as an
entirely distinct strand in Melville studies.
David Greven’s ample contributions to this strand within Melville studies have traced evi-
dence of love and desire among men from Redburn early in Melville’s career to Billy Budd at the
end of Melville’s life in such articles as “Men and Women and Men” (2018), “In the Name of the
Father: Billy Budd and the Critics from the Melville Revival to Cold War America” (2017), and
“American Shudders: Race, Representation, and Sodomy in Redburn” (2014). Greven fit his
reading of Redburn into a wider reading of gender and sexuality across nineteenth-century US
literature in his 2016 study Gender Protest and Same Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature.
Rasmus Simonsen offered a sophisticated reading of Melville’s “I and My Chimney” that
combined daring readings of Melville’s sexuality with careful aesthetic analysis in “Melville’s
Chimney” (2015), while Christian Reed, like Greven, found an important thread for under-
standing Melville’s sexuality in Redburn in his 2015 essay “The Bachelor and the Orphan.”
Natasha Hurley’s Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel (2018) extended the
treatment of sexuality in Melville criticism with a reading of Typee informed by Charles Warren
Stoddard’s South Sea Idyls that identifies Melville’s first novel as an originary moment in the
modern representation of sexuality. One of the most ambitious attempts to reimagine the role
of gender in Melville’s life and work appeared in 2019 in an article coauthored by Jordan Stein
and Adam Fales that argued that Melville studies could be reoriented in its entirety if Melville
scholars would attend more closely to the ways in which Elizabeth Shaw Melville shaped the
now-familiar narrative of Melville’s career, both through her editorial interventions and
through her preservation of Herman’s manuscripts. Matthew Knip followed a similar bio-
graphical impulse in a pair of essays that shed substantial light on the relationship between
Melville’s sexuality and that of sailors with “Homosocial Desire and Melville’s Imaginary”
(2016) and “Melville’s Queer Hauntology” (2020), both of which considered what Philip van
Buskirk’s erotic journals teach us about both the sexuality of sailors and Melville’s own repre-
sentations of sexuality. As with Stein and Fales, Knip showed how theory and the archive
could coalesce around questions of sexuality and gender identity. In a piece that will likely
contribute substantially to our understanding of Billy Budd, Édouard Marsoin’s “Billy Budd:
The Eromenos Has to Die” (2020) has offered a reading of Melville’s novella rooted in the long
history of gender and sexuality, calling upon classical Greek understandings of sexuality to
show how Melville’s writing was shaped by a major redefinition of same-sex desire in the late
nineteenth century.
Cosmopolitan Melville
Marsoin’s example is suggestive of another major strand in Melville studies in the early twenty-
first century. One way in which Melville scholarship has come full circle since the earliest days
of his critical reception is the recognition of Melville as a figure at home in the world, and not
just a chapter in American literature. Early figures in the Melville Revival of the 1920s like
Raymond Weaver and John Freeman found Melville to be as much a peer of Dante and Cervantes
as of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain, and more recent scholarship has stressed the ways
in which Melville’s cosmopolitanism goes beyond mere membership in the circle of widely
revered authors in world literature.
Melville has traditionally been characterized as an American author, but until recently, there
has been relatively little pressure placed on what the word “American” might mean in describing
an author who, although he was born and died and lived most of his life in the northeastern
United States, had many of his most formative experiences on journeys that took him around
the continent of South America and surrounding islands, and who writes extensively throughout
his career about the Americas, not just about the United States. Wyn Kelley’s discussion of
Melville’s representations of Brazil in “‘Empire in her Eyes’” (2020) illustrates the range of
Melville’s interests in the Lusophone as well as Hispanophone and Anglophone Americas.
Rodrigo Lazo has contributed repeatedly to our understanding of Melville as a writer of the
Americas as well as one who wrote from and about the United States in essays such as “Dons
and Cholos” (2018) and “Israel Potter Deported” (2020). Nicholas Spengler’s “Tracking Melville’s
‘Dog-King’” (2019) and Emilio Irigoyen’s “Form and Exile in Israel Potter” have also contrib-
uted to defining Melville’s version of America more broadly than the national boundaries of the
United States. Paul Giles’s 2011 study The Global Remapping of American Literature put this
strand of Melville studies in a broader context by showing how Melville is central to the global
impulse in American literature. Dennis Mischke offered a suggestive reading of how this cos-
mopolitan strand in Melville scholarship could illuminate the long history of race, slavery, and
capitalism in the Atlantic world in “Underwriting Cosmopolitanisms” (2018), while Anna
Brickhouse’s “Earthquake and Whale” (2018) spans the Americas in its consideration of natural
catastrophe.
42 Brian Yothers
A particularly stimulating development in recent scholarship has been the exploration of

translations of Melville around the world, and some of the most fascinating recent scholarship on
translation has addressed the cultural and religious negotiations involved in translating Melville
into Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew. Jeffrey Einboden’s rich multilingual work in Nineteenth-Century
US Literature in Middle Eastern Languages (2013) and “Billy’s Rendering of the Matter” (2017) has
addressed translations of Moby-Dick and Billy Budd into all three of these languages, showing
how the linguistic negotiations involved in these translations also open new windows into
Melville’s work. Leyli Jamali’s “Herman Melville in Iran” (2018) has offered a compelling over-
view of Melville’s various afterlives in Farsi, and Amirhossein Vafa’s “Call me Fedallah” (2014)
has argued how Moby-Dick can be reimagined from a critical perspective grounded in Melville’s
Middle Eastern reception. Melville’s reception and influence in Japan continues to be the subject
of considerable creative and critical exploration, as Karen Tei Yamashita’s “Call Me Ishimuru”
(2016) illustrates.
Political Melville: Race, Violence, and Law

Melville’s paradoxical relationship to the political sphere continues to tantalize his readers. Was
Melville a political quietist? A youthful radical who aged into conservatism? A moderate on the
subject of slavery, or an abolitionist beneath the surface? All these arguments have been made in
recent years regarding the political implications of Melville’s works. Considerations of the
political Melville have concentrated on his views of race and slavery, war and violence, and the
nature and authority of law, with a particular focus on economic questions associated with
poverty and inequality.
Building on Toni Morrison’s insights into the role of blackness in American literature from
Playing in the Dark (1992), Christopher Freeburg’s Melville and the Idea of Blackness (2012)
suggested a reading of how race shaped Melville’s career across the first half of the 1850s, with
chapters that considered Moby-Dick, Pierre, “Benito Cereno,” and “The Encantadas.” If for
Freeburg “Melville’s blackness signals the agonizing and volatile challenges of fully mastering
oneself or other people” (xi), Ivy G. Wilson’s Specters of Democracy (2011) discussed Melville’s
treatment of blackness in “Benito Cereno” in relation to the use of space by Babo and those who
had been enslaved on the San Dominick. Both Freeburg and Wilson built on major earlier state-
ments on Melville’s treatment of race and slavery by Eric Sundquist in To Wake the Nations (1993)
and Sterling Stuckey in African Culture and Melville’s Art (2009).
Greg Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity (2015) offered one of the most thorough readings of
race, economics, and religion in “Benito Cereno” ever attempted. Grandin used Melville’s short
story as the crux of a wide-ranging exploration of New World slavery and the interactions of
Christianity and Islam in the Atlantic world, all within the context of the development of global
capitalism. Grandin’s study has quickly emerged as an essential reference point for consider-
ations of Melville and race. In a less broadly contextualized but more bracingly counter-intuitive
work, Brian R. Pellar’s Moby-Dick and Melville’s Anti-Slavery Allegory (2017) claimed that
Melville wrote Moby-Dick as an anti-slavery allegory, disguising the underlying meaning of the
book to accommodate the moderate views of his father-in-law Lemuel Shaw. Spencer Tricker’s
“‘Five Dusky Phantoms’: Gothic Form and Cosmopolitan Shipwreck in Melville’s Moby-Dick”
(2018) emphasized that the racialization of Fedallah and the Malay sailors in Ahab’s phantom
crew can be read as a criticism of US imperial activity in the Pacific. Lenora Warren’s Fire on the
Water (2019) connected Billy Budd to the history of physical resistance to slavery on the seas.
Capital punishment has been a recurring topic in political readings of Melville, notably in the
work of H. Bruce Franklin and John Cyril Barton. Barton’s Literary Executions (2014) included a
compelling discussion of Melville’s treatment of military justice from White-Jacket to Billy Budd,
a topic Barton revisited in his 2017 essay “Conflicts of Law in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd.”
Both essays built on H. Bruce Franklin’s 1997 essay “Billy Budd and Capital Punishment: A Tale
of Three Centuries.” Colin Dayan contributed to the body of research on law and literature in
Melville studies in “Bartleby’s Screen,” an essay that showed how “Bartleby” is shaped by nine-
teenth-century American property law and ultimately by the applications of such law to the
practice of slavery.
Jason Frank’s collection A Political Companion to Herman Melville (2013) offered a cross-section
of issues associated with race, law, and authority, some of them by scholars who publish regularly
on Melville in the field of literary scholarship, like Michael Jonik (“Melville’s Permanent
Riotocracy”) and many by political scientists and philosophers. The collection highlighted the
predominance of discussions of Melville’s early responses to imperialism and the legal and ethical
issues raised by his short fiction, especially “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and Billy Budd, but it
also included a reading of Melville’s Civil War poetry by Roger Berkowitz, “Melville’s War
Poetry and the Human Form,” which astutely connected Battle-Pieces to Melville’s developing
vision of war that culminated in Billy Budd. Jennifer Greiman’s Democracy’s Spectacle: Sovereignty
and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing (2010), offered exceptionally keen insights into
Melville’s contribution to how nineteenth-century American writers imagined democracy. That
politics could also shape Melville’s reception history became apparent in Maki Sadahiro’s 2020
essay “Fin-de-Siècle British Socialism and a Prelude to the Melville Revival,” where Sadahiro
probed the significance of Fabian socialists’ engagement with Melville’s work. An extended ver-
sion of this important work appears in Chapter 2 of this Companion.
The Civil War and Melville’s response to it have complicated our understanding of the political
and racial dimensions of Melville’s work considerably. The opening decades of the twenty-first
century have seen substantial attention to Melville’s treatment of the Civil War. Randall Fuller’s
From Battlefields Rising (2011), a broadly framed study of Civil War literature, concluded with an
incisive reading of Melville’s “The Scout Toward Aldie.” Cody Marrs also offered important
insight into Melville’s connections with Civil War literature more broadly construed in his study
Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War (2015), which extended his earlier
work on Clarel and Battle-Pieces, notably in his essay “A Wayward Art” (2010), which called
attention to the cyclical view of history expressed in Battle-Pieces.
The widest-ranging treatment of Melville and the Civil War appeared in “This Mighty
Convulsion”: Whitman and Melville Write the Civil War, edited by Christopher Sten and Tyler
Hoffman (2019). The volume was divided, as its title suggests, between Whitman and Melville,
but the contributions on Melville are quite significant. Notably, Christopher Ohge offered the
most ambitious extant reading of one of Melville’s best-known poems “The House-top,” calling
into question earlier readings of the poem by Stanton Garner, among others, who saw the poem
as reflecting a conservative Northern consensus or an exercise in dramatic irony. The volume as
a whole indicated that Melville stands on par with Whitman as one of the two major American
Civil War poets and highlighted the pivotal role that the war had in Melville’s personal life and
artistic development.
44 Brian Yothers
Melville and Philosophy, Religion, and the Secular

Among the most consistent strands in Melville scholarship has been the perennial debate about
the nature of his religious convictions or lack thereof. By the middle of the twentieth century,
Melville’s trajectory from blasphemous rebel in Moby-Dick to reconciled believer in Billy Budd
had become a commonplace narrative, only to be challenged by critics like Lawrance Thompson,
who believed that Melville’s work had never lost its skeptical edge. If the question of whether
Billy Budd represents a “testament of acceptance” or a “testament of irony” or whether Nathaniel
Hawthorne was right that Melville could “neither believe nor rest comfortably in unbelief” may
seem rather old-fashioned, the religious implications of Melville’s work continues to be the sub-
ject of lively discussion. John Lardas Modern, for example, offered a reading of Moby-Dick as a
way station in the development of secularism in the United States in his 2011 study Secularism
in Antebellum America. Brian Yothers’s 2019 essay “Melville after Secularism” expanded on the
interplay of the secular and religious in Melville. Visionary of the Word (2017), edited by Jonathan
A. Cook and Brian Yothers, offered a wide range of essays dealing with religious and theological
issues that captured much of the ferment in the field of Melville and religion in the early twenty-
first century.
Jonathan A. Cook’s Inscrutable Malice (2013) offered the most extensive reading of Melville’s
biblical sources for Moby-Dick extant. Combining rigorous close reading with deep contextual
research, Cook showed that the biblical book of Job could provide a map for Melville’s themes
and structure in Moby-Dick throughout the entire narrative. Dawn Coleman’s Preaching and the
Rise of the American Novel (2013) placed Melville in the midst of one of the most important genres
in nineteenth-century literary and religious culture, that of the sermon, bringing up to date and
contextualizing R. P. Blackmur’s observation that the sermon was always crucial to Melville’s
literary aesthetics.
Coleman also found considerable evidence of influence of the Unitarian belief system that
both Allan Melvill, Herman’s father, and Elizabeth Shaw Melville, Herman’s wife, embraced.
Examining the Melville family’s copy of the writings of the eminent Unitarian minister
William Ellery Channing, Coleman found that Herman Melville was much more deeply
engaged by Channing’s Unitarianism than had previously been thought. Coleman published
work on this subject in a series of essays: the Critical Introduction to The Works of William
Ellery Channing at Melville’s Marginalia Online, “Melville and the Unitarian Conscience”
(2017), and “Mahomet’s Gospel and Other Revelations: Discovering Melville’s Hand in
Channing’s Works” (2015).
Likewise curious about Melville’s Unitarianism, Brian Yothers’s Sacred Uncertainty (2015)
explored Melville’s relationship to a range of nineteenth-century US religious options both inside
and outside of the Protestant milieu in which Melville grew up. Daniel Herman made the coun-
terintuitive but provocative claim in Zen and the White Whale (2014) that Melville tells an essen-
tially Buddhist story in his most famous novel, and that Moby-Dick represents the apex of
Buddhist influence in Melville’s career, overshadowing the later references that he makes to
Buddhism in such texts as Timoleon and “Rammon.”
The religious implications of Melville’s late poetry provide an important theme for Martin
Kevorkian’s study Writing beyond Prophecy (2012), which focused on Melville’s late poetry in the
portion devoted to Melville, and Kevorkian offered a compelling reading of the religious lan-
guage and imagery in Weeds and Wildings in his contribution to Visionary of the Word. Jonathan
Cook provided one of the most expansive contributions to the scholarship on the transatlantic
religious roots of Clarel in recent years with his reading of the poem in Visionary of the Word
tracing the history of the faith-doubt crisis in Victorian literature.
Paul Hurh’s American Terror (2015) demonstrated how Melville’s relation to Calvinist theology
and Gothic literature places him in an American literary tradition capacious enough to include
Jonathan Edwards and Edgar Allan Poe. Hurh identified the affective features of terror and dread
in Moby-Dick and The Piazza Tales, showing the continuities of these features with Jonathan
Edwards and early Calvinist preaching through Poe and the American Gothic. David Faflik’s
2018 study Melville and the Question of Meaning offered a reading of Melville’s body of work that
drew in both political/nationalist and religious/philosophical considerations, tracking the role of
wordplay in nineteenth-century popular culture, cultural studies approaches to Melville’s fiction,
and the relationship between Melville’s fiction and film. Laura López Peña’s Beyond the Walls:
Being with Each Other in Herman Melville’s Clarel (2017), presented one of the most extensive read-
ings ever of Melville’s long poem Clarel, engaging theology, philosophy, and aesthetics.
Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz’s edited collection “Handsomely Done”: Aesthetics, Politics, and Media
After Melville (2019) brought comparative range and philosophical rigor to its consideration of
Melville’s major works from the 1850s and Billy Budd. Hoffman-Schwartz’s volume included
essays from specialists in comparative literature, philosophy, and media studies that examined
Moby-Dick and Melville’s short fiction in relation to political philosophy, film, and adaptations
and translations of Melville’s work across multiple languages. As the volume suggested, Melville’s
ideas are nearly always in conversation with images, both in his own work and in the responses
it has inspired.
Two major collections focused specifically on Melville’s interactions with philosophy, Branka
Arsić and K. L. Evans’s Melville’s Philosophies (2017) and Corey McCall and Tom Nurmi’s Melville
among the Philosophers (2017). The essays in these volumes ranged across epistemological, ethical,
and aesthetic questions, and they showed that Melville’s immersion in the true, the good, and
the beautiful went beyond his concern with theological matters. K. L. Evans’s One Foot in the
Finite: Melville’s Realism Reclaimed (2017) offered perhaps the most extensive single-author
reading of Melville on philosophical matters in the early twenty-first century.
Melville, Aesthetics, and the Arts

Two notable essays in Melville’s Philosophies, Samuel Otter’s “Melville, Poetry, Prints” and Elisa
Tamarkin’s “A Final Appearance with Elihu Vedder: Melville’s Visions,” address how Melville’s
poetry was shaped by his interest in visual artists among his contemporaries and by his collection
of prints, both suggesting that aesthetics must be central to any consideration of Melville’s inter-
actions with philosophy. Otter revisited the issue of visual aesthetics in his substantial 2019
essay, “Melville’s Style,” which suggested that a deeper immersion in the visual qualities of
Melville’s work can guide us into a more profound understanding of his literary aesthetics.
Geoffrey Sanborn’s The Value of Herman Melville (2018) provided a deep narrative of the aesthetic
development of Melville’s work across his career, and Katie McGettigan’s stunningly wide-ranging
study Herman Melville, Modernity, and the Material Text (2017) traces how the visual, the
philosophical, and literary interpenetrate through Melville’s career, from Typee through his major
fiction and on to Clarel and Billy Budd.
46 Brian Yothers
Indeed, some of the most stimulating scholarship of this millennium has dealt with both
Melville’s own response to the visual arts and music in his work and the responses of visual art-
ists and musicians to Melville’s work. The two figures who have been most closely associated
with this emergence of the arts in Melville criticism are Elizabeth Schultz and Robert K.
Wallace, each of whom has written substantial books and articles on Melville and the visual arts.
In the last decade of the twentieth century, Wallace wrote the most ambitious study of a visual
artist’s influence on Melville, Melville and Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright (1992), and several
years after Wallace’s study appeared, Schultz published Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and
Twentieth-Century American Art (1995). Wallace has also been particularly influential in pro-
moting and examining the responses that musicians have had to Melville’s work. In particular,
he is the author of the most substantial study of Jake Heggie’s operatic version of Moby-Dick
extant, Heggie and Scheer’s Moby-Dick: A Grand Opera (2013). Schultz and Wallace have made
major contributions to our understanding of Melville’s relationship to the visual arts in the early
twenty-first century: Schultz’s 2019 essay “The New Art of Moby-Dick” is the most substantial
treatment of Melville and contemporary art outside of Unpainted to the Last, and it contains a
glorious array of color plates from twenty-first century artists that Schultz reads with consum-
mate skill and eloquence. Wallace’s work on both Melville’s own collection of prints (“From
Ancient Rome to Modern Italy,” 2013) and the work by contemporary artists in the Melville
Society Archive (“Word and Shapes on Paper,” 2020) also provides rich insight into Melville’s
response to the visual arts and visual artists’ responses to him, as does Dawn Coleman’s “Whales
in Cincinnati” (2017), a discussion of an exhibition of the work of Matt Kish and Robert del
Tredici, organized by Wallace.
Melville’s poetry, and poetry inspired by Melville, has been a similar locus for aesthetic reflec-
tion. In 2013, Melville as Poet: The Art of “Pulsed Life,” edited by Sanford E. Marovitz, offered a
constellation of essays that illustrated the range of critical investigation of Melville’s poetry. The
volume included significant discussions of Battle-Pieces by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and Dennis
Berthold, Clarel by Robert K. Wallace, Peter Riley, and Gordon Poole, John Marr and Other
Sailors, by A. Robert Lee, Melville’s uncollected verse by Wyn Kelley, and Melville’s hybrid com-
binations of prose and verse by Robert Sandberg, among others. More recently, Elizabeth Renker’s
Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866–1900 (2018) placed Melville’s poetry in a more central
position in the development of late nineteenth-century American poetry than it is typically
granted, showing that Melville can be read as a significant figure in the development of realist
modes of poetic expression in the United States.
Public, Pedagogical, and Digital Melville

Nothing has spoken more powerfully to Melville’s continuing cultural and critical centrality
than the way in which he continues to be visible in public platforms, even as he retains a place
of honor in university literature classrooms. George Cotkin’s Dive Deeper (2012) has provided
an extensive mapping of the ways in which Melville, and specifically Moby-Dick, continues to
appear in popular culture. Important work has also been directed toward Melville and peda-
gogy in recent years, notably Wyn Kelley and Henry Jenkins’s collection Reading in a
Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom (2013), which emphasizes how
Moby-Dick can contribute to the study of literary culture and media in the classroom, and also
in Kelley’s essay “Melville by Design” (2018). The Melville Electronic Library (MEL), under the
direction of John Bryant and associate directors Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge, is truly
Melvillean in its scope and ambition. MEL includes electronic scholarly editions of Melville’s
works that seek to extend what is possible in print venues, both in terms of annotation, as in
the case of Moby-Dick, and in terms of acknowledging what Bryant has called the “fluid text”:
the unfinalized quality of many of Melville’s works, most notably Billy Budd, which was left
uncompleted in manuscript form at the time of his death, and Typee, for which we have manu-
script fragments as well as significant differences among the editions. Discussions of work with
the MEL edition of Billy Budd, including Ohge’s “Melville Incomplete” (2019), Kelley’s “‘This
Matter of Writing’: Melville and the Manuscript Page” (2017), and Bryant’s “How Billy Grew
Black and Beautiful: Versions of Melville in the Digital Age” (2014), all offer compelling
visions of how digital approaches to Melville, manuscript studies, and pedagogical approaches
coalesce into critical insights.
Melville’s own rejections of the formal constraints of the traditional novel seem to find echoes
in the array of digital projects that have emerged over the past two decades. The most fully real-
ized of these projects is Melville’s Marginalia Online, overseen by General Editor Steven Olsen-
Smith, Associate General Editor Peter Norberg, and Bibliographical Editor Dennis Marnon. The
strength of MMO is that it does one thing, and it does it extraordinarily well: the site has gath-
ered digitized versions of Melville’s books and provided thorough documentary and critical notes
along with commentary on vexed issues, and it has done so by creating a site that works across
the range of desktop and mobile platforms that scholars, students, and the public use now. A
Melville scholar wishing to show a colleague, a student, or a friend an image of, for example, the
excised page bottom from the end of the book of Revelation in Melville’s personal copy of The
New Testament and the Book of Psalms need only pull out a smartphone in order to do so. MMO also
features an up-to-date list of all books Melville is known to have owned, borrowed, and con-
sulted, enhancing the pioneering bibliographic work of Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (1948–1950,
1966, and 1988), in a digital format that can adapt to new discoveries. The work carried out by
the scholars at MMO has resulted in print publications and regular special sections devoted to
“Melville’s Hand” in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. A 2018 special issue of Leviathan,
edited by Steven Olsen-Smith and Christopher Ohge, offered insights into Melville’s reading of
Milton, Homer, and Shakespeare, in addition to general insights about the methodologies of
computational text analysis for authorial reading.
The range, diversity, and complexity of the critical response to Melville in the first two decades
of the twenty-first century suggest that his work occupies a special place in American literary
studies and continues to be central to the narratives that shape United States literary history. If
anything, the fact that literary studies have become increasingly de-centered in relation to class,
race, gender, nationality, and disciplinary boundaries has spurred even more energetic investiga-
tions of the ways in which, from his earliest works to the end of his career, Melville asked his
readers to question conventional categories. If the Melville we now know seems less closely asso-
ciated with whiteness, conventional oppositions of faith and doubt in a mainstream WASP ver-
sion of Protestantism, US nationalism, and heterosexuality, he has come to seem more
representative of the version of the United States that has emerged in the twenty-first century. If
early Melville scholars such as Raymond Weaver saw Melville as a prophet of sorts, they likely
could not have anticipated the ways in which his voice has continued to address and challenge a
changing world.
48 Brian Yothers
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Part II
Works
4
Typee and Omoo
Mary K. Bercaw Edwards
Typee
Typee has been read as travel narrative, captivity narrative, philosophical quest to make sense of
the civilized world, “green” interpretation of the environmental and cultural values embedded
in the text, and in myriad other ways. Ruth Blair reminds us that to “ignore the book’s ground-
ing in Pacific experience is to perpetuate in one way or another [Melville’s friend and editor
Evert] Duyckinck’s exoticism” (xix). One thing Melville’s first book is not, however, is strict
autobiography. In Typee, Melville draws on his own experiences in the South Pacific, but he also
ransacks written sources. The joy of plunder and the liberating sense of possibility it engenders
allows Melville to mesh his work with different discourses and genres with a fluidity that is one
of the work’s great strengths. Bursting the bonds of strict classification, Melville ponders both
practical questions, such as how to descend the side of a steep ravine by clinging to the roots of
trees, and existential ones.
Melville arrived at the South Pacific island of Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas on July 4, 1842.
He had left Fairhaven, Massachusetts, aboard the whaleship Acushnet on January 3, 1841. Those
eighteen months at sea convinced Melville that he no longer wanted any part of a whaleman’s
life. During shore leave, he ran away, as did four other sailors. The Acushnet practiced a ruse and
headed out to sea on July 11, only to slip back into port on July 13 and recover three of the
deserters. But Melville and his friend Richard Tobias Greene successfully escaped.
Desertion was common among nineteenth-century whalemen. With an average age of nine-
teen, few were married and even fewer had children, so their absconding generally did not cause
any loved ones to suffer. They left for many reasons—harsh captains, poor leadership, lack of
whales, the temptations of shore—but the most common was inadequate food. Yet after a few
56 Mary K. Bercaw Edwards
weeks ashore, beachcombers, as such deserters were called, often signed aboard other ships. In
shore communities speaking different languages and with different customs, they felt isolated
and longed to return to their home countries and to food they recognized. Seafaring labor in the
mid-nineteenth-century South Pacific was fluid, and whaleships seldom, if ever, returned to
their home ports with the same crews with which they had sailed.
As ethnohistorian Greg Dening has argued, when Melville crossed the beach on Nuku Hiva,
he landed at “no pristine beach. The sands were a jumble of footsteps. The beach was a much
negotiated space.” For Dening, the beach is not only literal but also a metaphor of encounter.
Dening adds: “The beach was divided over what the intrusion of so many strangers meant and
what it did to native life, and how it was to be managed, if not controlled” (Beach Crossings 95).
How Melville negotiated the Nuku Hivan beach has been long debated. There are several bays
on the south coast of Nuku Hiva. Each bay has deep valleys stretching inland from its shores, and
each valley was the home of a distinct group. Westernmost is Haka’ui Bay, home of the Tai’oa
people (Melville’s “Tior”). To the east, Taioha’e Bay (called Nukuheva Bay by Melville) is the
home of the Teii people (Melville’s “Taeeh”). It was in this bay that the Acushnet anchored in
1842. Furthest east is the much larger Comptroller’s Bay with its four inlets. The two closer
inlets lead to Ha’apa’a (Melville’s “Happar”) while the larger inlet further to the east leads to
Taipivai, home of the Taipi (Melville’s “Typee”).
The only extant documentation for Melville’s time on Nuku Hiva is an affidavit that Valentine
Pease, Jr., master of the Acushnet, filed with Vice-Commercial Agent John B. Stetson noting the
desertion of Melville and Greene on July 9, 1842, and the British consular record noting
Melville’s addition to the crew of the Australian whaleship Lucy Ann on August 9, 1842. How
Melville spent the month between is unrecorded in letters or journals. The story that we have in
Typee is one he perfected in the remaining two years he spent at sea before returning to Boston in
October of 1844 and publishing the book in 1846.
Melville writes in the Preface to Typee that the recorded incidents “have often served, when
‘spun as a yarn,’ not only to relieve the weariness of many a night-watch at sea, but to excite the
warmest sympathies of the author’s shipmates” (T xiii). He had over two years in the largely oral
world of the ship to perfect his storytelling. The average mid-nineteenth-century whaling voy-
age lasted between two and five years. Even literate sailors had little material to read, and story-
telling thrived. In his classic essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin makes the connection
between mariners and storytellers explicit. “Traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way
the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.” Traces of the storytellers and of the labor
they perform are inseparable from their tales. Benjamin writes:
The storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work—the rural, the maritime, and the
urban—is itself an artisan form of communication, as it were. It does not aim to convey the pure
essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in
order to bring it out of him again. (91–92; emphasis added)
John Murray, Melville’s British publisher, was concerned about the very aspects of Melville’s text
that Benjamin praises. Murray rejected “the taint of fiction” in Melville’s manuscript (qtd in
Leyda Log I:200), which Murray published with the title Narrative of a Four Months’ Residence among
Typee and Omoo 57
the Natives of a Valley of the Marquesas Islands, and requested additions and revisions. Yet it is that
very storytelling that initially made Melville’s work so popular and that has caused it to endure.
The story that Melville tells in Typee is shaped not only by his time on Nuku Hiva but also by
the public perception of the South Pacific as the home of cannibals. Typee is part of a long trajec-
tory of cannibal talk that stretches from The Histories of Herodotus (circa 440 BCE), a foundational
text in Western literature, forward through the nineteenth century to Armstrong Sperry’s
Newbery Medal-winning Call It Courage (1940) and on to Disney’s widely popular animated
feature “Moana” (2016). Writers’—and readers’—investments in cannibal stories speak to
Westerners’ assumptions about the South Pacific and the role they need the Other to fulfill.
These desires and presuppositions have been cultivated by a long ethnographic and literary tra-
dition. In part as a means to justify violence against racial and ethnic Others, Westerners
described the native people they encountered as “cannibals”: savages who violated central norms
of humanity. Cannibalism, like incest or necrophilia, is a boundary beyond which we cannot
stray and remain fully human. Those who do eat people are monstrous: animals, savages, witches,
nonhumans. The term “cannibal” has been applied to almost all peoples at one time or another.
As the borders of the world known to Europeans were pushed back, the identification of the
anthropophagi, or man-eaters, changed. What remains consistent is that those labeled cannibals
were on the fringes of the world known to those doing the labeling. In the mid-nineteenth
century, the accusation of cannibalism was centered in the South Pacific; today it centers on the
island of New Guinea. Early European explorers expected to find cannibals in the South Pacific,
and they were simultaneously attracted to and repelled by that notion—as were the readers of
their narratives.
The discourse of cannibalism that pervaded both accounts of early contact and later writing,
whether fiction or nonfiction, is consistently exaggerated. For one human being to eat another is
so unthinkable and repulsive that the talk about it must be extravagant. Absurdity, black humor,
intimations that something is too horrible to describe, and an atmosphere of foreboding are
characteristic elements in the discourse.
As they sail along the Nuku Hivan coast in Typee, Ned the sailor tells the protagonist Tommo,
“There—there’s Typee. Oh, the bloody cannibals, what a meal they’d make of us” (25).
Simultaneously menacing and extravagant, Ned’s statement has the same dark jocularity found
in one of Melville’s written sources, Georg H. von Langsdorff’s Voyages and Travels in Various Parts
of the World (1813). Cannibal nations, Langsdorff tells us:
not only eat the prisoners they take in war, but their own wives and children; they even buy and sell
human flesh publicly. To them are we indebted for the information that white men are finer fla-
voured than negroes, and that Englishmen are preferable to Frenchmen. Farther, the flesh of young
girls and women, particularly of new-born children, far exceeds in delicacy that of the finest youths,
or grown men. Finally, they tell us that the inside of the hand and sole of the foot are the nicest parts
of the human body. (141)
Langsdorff’s discussion of cannibalism is not drenched in horror but in a macabre playful judi-
ciousness that veers into the absurd. Melville achieves the same tone when Ned adds to Tommo
that the Typees “don’t like sailor’s flesh, it’s too salt” (26). Concentrating on the preference for
Englishmen over Frenchmen and for landsmen over sailors does not humanize the islanders, but
rather it transmutes their representation by the introduction of absurdity.
Melville drew primarily on three written sources for Typee: Langsdorff, Charles S. Stewart’s A
Visit to the South Seas in the US Ship Vincennes (1831), and David Porter’s Journal of a Cruise Made
to the Pacific Ocean (1815, 1822). It was from Porter that he got not only the spelling of the
“Typee” people but also their reputation for savagery. Porter arrived at Nuku Hiva in October of
1813 aboard the American warship Essex, accompanied by three British prizes captured during
the War of 1812. He meant to careen and provision his ships in Taioha’e Bay. With over 300 men
and four ships to provision, however, he soon found the resources of the bay insufficient, and he
sought food from the neighboring tribes. When the Taipi refused, Porter attacked. His men were
routed on the first day: this solitary defeat by an Aboriginal tribe caused Porter to stress the
ferocity of the Taipi in his account of the battle. As Dening writes, “By being Porter’s enemy the
Taipi became a savage, treacherous, sullen group of warriors whose ferocity was a compliment to
those who defeated them” (Islands 28). Incensed by his loss, in a horrific act of violence, Porter
gathered two hundred of his men the next day and laid waste to the Taipi valley, burning ten
villages, destroying breadfruit trees, and killing and wounding great numbers of the Taipi
(Porter [1822] 2:103).
Melville claims not only that the Typee are “reputed the most ferocious in the South Seas”
(170), but that their “very name is a frightful one; for the word ‘Typee’ in the Marquesan dialect
signifies a lover of human flesh” (24). Although Blair, among others, points out that this is not
true (323n36), the terror of their reputation as cannibals suffuses Melville’s book. Is it any
wonder, then, that Melville places his protagonist in the Typee valley?
Tommo’s fear of being eaten drives the plot of Typee. Yet the book is also a story of reversals.
Tommo and his companion Toby (loosely based on Greene) hope to escape to the valley of the
Happars. After five torturous days transiting the mountains of Nuku Hiva and descending into
one of its valleys, Tommo and Toby must ascertain in which valley they have landed: “Typee or
Happar? A frightful death at the hands of the fiercest of cannibals, or a kindly reception from a
gentler race of savages? Which?” (66). When Tommo and Toby discover that they are indeed
among the Typees, they are astounded by the Edenic qualities of the valley and its people. Bathed
in kindness, surrounded by beauty and laughter, Tommo questions his Western assumptions
about civilization vs. savagery, Christianity vs. paganism, humanity vs. inhumanity. Tommo has
hurt his leg during the mountain traverse, and Toby leaves the valley to seek aid for him.
Tommo’s leg serves as a barometer in the story: when Tommo is afraid, it swells and throbs; when
he is relaxed and at peace, it is fine. Intriguingly, although Tommo’s leg seems purely meta-
phoric, Melville in fact did hurt his leg in some unspecified way on Nuku Hiva as he was treated
by the resident English surgeon, Dr. Francis Johnstone, during his later incarceration in Tahiti
(Heflin, 165, 168, 280n47, 282n84).
Tommo’s leg swells up again at the end of Typee as his fears of being eaten reemerge. After a
battle between the Typees and Happars, he steals a look inside a covered canoe, and his “eyes fell
upon the disordered members of a human skeleton, the bones still fresh with moisture, and with
particles of flesh clinging to them here and there!” (238). Tommo instantly, unquestioningly—
and without ocular evidence—believes the body has been cannibalized. He determines to leave
the Typee valley. As with so many South Pacific narratives, Tommo never actually witnesses the
eating of human flesh. Anthropologists William Arens and Gananath Obeyesekere maintain that
Typee and Omoo 59
few, if any, undisputed first-person accounts of cannibalism exist, but the talk of cannibalism was
still widespread.
Tommo’s view of the dead body closely follows his stumbling upon an old man having his
tattoos touched up by Karky, the island tattoo artist. Such tattooing was done with shark’s teeth,
and the artist’s very name, with its sharp “k” and long “ar” sounds, suggests the ties between
tattooing, sharks, and being eaten. Yet it is tattooing’s indelibility that is most appalling.
Tommo recoils at Karky’s invitation to be tattooed, “Horrified at the bare thought of being ren-
dered hideous for life” (218). Samuel Otter argues that it is not the fear of being eaten that truly
terrifies Tommo, but the fear of being inked: “far more troubling to Melville is the prospect that
Tommo will be incorporated in native systems in a more enduring sense: not through metabo-
lism but through inscription” (10). That horror surfaces again in Omoo when the crew of the Julia
encounter Lem Hardy, an Englishman who has a shark tattooed on his forehead.
Some of us gazed upon this man with a feeling akin to horror, no ways abated when informed that
he had voluntarily submitted to this embellishment of his countenance. What an impress! Far worse
than Cain’s—his was perhaps a wrinkle, or a freckle, which some of our modern cosmetics might
have effaced; but the blue shark was a mark indelible, which all the waters of Abana and Pharpar,
rivers of Damascus, could never wash out. (O 27)
Melville’s abhorrence at the indelible marking of the inviolate human body runs through all his
works: tattooing in Typee and Omoo, flogging in White-Jacket, the loss of Ahab’s leg in Moby-Dick,
even Billy’s speech impediment in Billy Budd.
The ending of Typee is extravagant, darkly comic, and savage. When Tommo first meets
Mehevi, the principal chief of the Typees, Mehevi has a “rigidity of aspect under which I abso-
lutely quailed” (71). He assumes this impenetrable mask-like countenance whenever he is angry.
Mehevi is so angry with Tommo near the end of the book that he essentially transforms into
Mow-Mow, a character who does not appear until Chapter 32. Mow-Mow is the most ferocious
of the Typees, one who indulges offstage in a cannibalistic feast. Yet he is just too ferocious. Not
only does he have only one eye, but his face is also “hideously tattooed” (236) and his cheek has
been pierced by a spear. Tommo first feels his presence before he sees him. Tommo is being
pressed backward “when I felt a heavy hand laid upon my shoulder, and turning round, encoun-
tered the bulky form of Mow-Mow, a one-eyed chief, who had just detached himself from the
crowd below” (236). Mow-Mow appears like a specter, a felt presence, before Tommo is presented
with the revulsion of his deformed face, as repellant as Freddy Kreuger’s burned face in the horror
film A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). The mask-like countenances of Mehevi and Mow-Mow
lend credence to their identity as cannibals; the lack of humanity in their faces supports the belief
that they are capable of crossing the boundaries of humanity to total savagery. Tommo’s percep-
tion of the islanders’ inhumanity also leads to his practicing savagery upon them. The Typees do
not want Tommo to leave, and they chase him as he departs in the whaleboat of an English ship
(presumably the Julia). As Mow-Mow nears the whaleboat, Tommo, “with a true aim, and exert-
ing all [his] strength … dashed the boat-hook at him. It struck him just below the throat, and
forced him downwards.” One of the other islanders “seized the gunwale, but the knives of our
rowers so mauled his wrists that he was forced to quit his hold” (252).
The ending of Typee has elicited many diverse readings. John Bryant contends that the primal
self-awareness and skepticism that Tommo acquires fails him, at the end, “not because of the
reader’s reluctance to follow Melville into heathenism, savagism, and cannibalism, but because
Melville gets cold feet. He resists his own liberalism and doubts his skepticism; he runs back to
‘Home’ and ‘Mother’” (x).
For Geoffrey Sanborn, “the ending of the book exposes the intensity of Melville’s commitment
to white ‘civilization,’ a commitment he can neither explain nor justify” (“Motive” 368). Otter
argues that “Typee begins as Melville’s ‘Of Cannibalism’ [a reference to Michel de Montaigne’s
1580 essay] and, despite the anxious reversion to anthropophagy, ends as his ‘Of Tattooing.’ In
the shift from literal to figurative decomposition as the primal fear of the Western sojourner in
the Pacific, we see the conventional anxieties about loss of identity … refocused on the body’s
surface, rather than viscera… . Confined in the skin, identity becomes more vulnerable” (48).
These quotations suggest that the narrative concludes in a scene of failure, anxiety, and fear. If
Melville is writing out of distrust of the very “civilization” his narrator is committed to return-
ing to, how does Melville manage that dilemma? In writing Typee, Melville borrowed from mul-
tiple sources, discourses, myths, and actual experiences. His later revisions of the original
manuscript as well as the extensive cutting done by the British editor, Henry Milton, give the
text a fluidity that allows its author a certain freedom, a wide margin, for his shape-shifting per-
sona. (On Henry Milton and his editing of Typee, see my “Fanny Trollope’s Nephew.”) Such flu-
idity and shape-shifting continue in Omoo and lift both texts from the imprisonment of reading
them only as a commentary on civilization vs. nature.
Omoo
When Melville signed on the small Australian whaleship Lucy Ann as an able seaman on August
9, 1842, he joined a ship torn by dissent. The Lucy Ann was inadequately officered. It carried four
whaleboats, but had only one mate, James German, two illiterate boatsteerers, and a newly
shipped boatsteerer who soon turned against the captain. A whaleship carrying four whaleboats
would usually carry four mates (or boatheaders) and four boatsteerers (or harpooneers). Shortly
after departing Nuku Hiva, the captain became ill, and German headed for Tahiti, where the
captain was put ashore. In an effort to prevent desertion while yet staying close to the captain,
the Lucy Ann left port and sailed back and forth off Papeete harbor. The fraught ambiguity of
staying at sea without searching for whales aboard a captainless vessel eventually led to ten men
refusing duty. These ten men were held on the French frigate La Reine Blanche; they were then
taken to a Tahitian “calaboose” (jail). Melville joined the mutineers in their confinement ashore.
Roughly three weeks later, in October 1842, Melville escaped to the neighboring island of
Eimeo (now Moorea). Melville’s passage on the Lucy Ann, the mutiny, and his incarceration pro-
vide the structure for the first part of his second book, Omoo, published a year after Typee in 1847.
Melville wandered the island of Eimeo until November 1842, when he joined the Nantucket
whaleship Charles and Henry. He may have signed on as boatsteerer; Captain John B. Coleman,
Jr., wrote the ship’s owners on November 2, 1842: “I have discharged one boat steerer here one
that I shipt at Paita [Peru] and am going to ship another to morrow” (Coleman). No evidence
has surfaced to prove without doubt that the boatsteerer shipped on November 3 was Melville,
but the timing works. Signed on for the length of the passage, Melville spent five months aboard
the Charles and Henry before departing in Lahaina, Maui.
Typee and Omoo 61
The British consular records of the revolt aboard the Lucy Ann were transferred from Papeete
to the Mitchell Library in Sydney, Australia, in 1935 and partially printed by Ida Leeson in
1940. In his second book we once again see Melville’s preference for storytelling. Although the
account of the revolt on the Julia in Omoo closely follows the revolt on the Lucy Ann—which
Wilson Heflin calls “this most fully documented portion of Melville’s whaling career” (163–
64)—the story is still fictionalized. As one example of how, in Benjamin’s words quoted above,
the “[t]races of the storyteller cling to the story,” the only reference to German’s intemperance in
the consular records appears next to a list of names in Acting English Consul Charles B. Wilson’s
notes: “Mr. German not fit to take charge for continually [sic] drunkenness” (“Revolt” 316). Yet
the recurring intemperance of the homophonic John Jermin in Omoo precipitates a great deal of
trouble, including the fight between Sydney Ben and Bembo. Aboard the Lucy Ann, Benbow
Byrne had struck James Watts when Watts contemptuously replies, “Ask my arse,” to Byrne’s
request to haul down the fore tack (“Revolt” 326). The fault is not fully German’s nor Byrne’s,
however, but is largely due to Captain Henry Ventom’s incompetence and poor leadership. Seven
men, including the second mate, deserted at the Marquesan island of Tahuata (called Santa
Christina by Europeans). After recruiting sailors, including Melville, at Nuku Hiva, Ventom set
to sea with a first mate, no second mate, and Byrne listed as “acting third mate” (“Revolt” 325).
By giving Byrne such an inadequate title, Ventom undermined his authority over the crew.
Melville heightens the fight in Omoo by making Bembo a “not yet civilized” Maori who speaks
little English and is regarded as a cannibal by the sailors and Sydney Ben “a runaway Ticket-of-
Leave” convict (71, 87). Bembo’s anger is demoniac. In his fury at being dragged off Sydney Ben, he
tries to drive the Julia on to the reef and would have succeeded without the intervention of the pro-
tagonist. The quarrel aboard the Lucy Ann is mild in comparison, but both accounts raise questions
of leadership, and Omoo adds the element of race. Sydney Ben feels justified in disobeying Bembo
because of Bembo’s race as well as his diminished authority. Indeed, Sydney Ben casts “some illiberal
reflections on the Mowree’s [Bembo’s] maternal origin, which the latter had been long enough
among sailors to understand as in the highest degree offensive” (87). The lack of leadership caused
by the mate’s drunkenness and the ill captain’s remaining ashore exacerbates these racial tensions.
Melville and John B. Troy, “the erstwhile embezzling steward of the Lucy Ann” (Heflin 169),
were recruited to slip away from the Tahitian calaboose and cross over to Eimeo to serve as field-
laborers. That part of Omoo in which the protagonist and his comrade Doctor Long Ghost grow
potatoes alongside an Englishman and an American appears absurd or contrived, but it is in fact
based on Melville’s own experience, as Heflin conjectured and Rita K. Gollin confirmed (Heflin
283n96). The reportorial voice of the newspaper memoir that identifies the potato-growers,
however, is far different from Melville’s. Melville’s tone transforms the text from autobiograph-
ical narrative to irony.
Melville’s tone in Omoo is ironic and comic, foreshadowing those of John Steinbeck, Jack
Kerouac, and Bob Dylan. It is much like the tone of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945), Kerouac’s
On the Road (1957), or Dylan’s interactions with interviewers, especially as seen in the Martin
Scorsese documentary, “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan” (2005). In all of these, the protagonist
is an outsider. Doctor Long Ghost and the narrator of Omoo create a circle outside of the bounds
of society—just as the bums of Cannery Row do, just as Neal Cassady and Sal Paradise do, just
as Dylan and the other musicians do. They use their own code. However, the reader can step
across the lines of society and join them. In its ironic narrative tone, Omoo is different from Mark
Twain’s outwardly similar Huckleberry Finn (1884). Twain, too, skewers the absurdity of
conventional society, but Huck is a naif who still struggles with socialized stereotypes, while the
narrator of Omoo has a detachment that Huck cannot have. Melville’s narrator is a beachcomber,
by very definition an outsider. Huck is of the riverscape, but Melville’s beachcombers are never
of the islands or even the established colonial powers. Like the bums of Cannery Row, the narra-
tor and Doctor Long Ghost form a masculine world that is not part of nor does it have a stake in
society. The mocking tone with which the narrator and Doctor Long Ghost interact with those
around them, while at sea, incarcerated in a Tahitian jail, or wandering the island of Eimeo,
shares with the reader their ironic perspective on society.
Just as Melville lengthened his four weeks ashore on Nuku Hiva into four months in Typee, so
Melville stretched his nineteen days on Eimeo into two months in Omoo (Heflin 170). And just
as Langsdorff, Porter, and Stewart had served as written sources for Typee, so Melville delved into
other books to enrich his narrative in Omoo, especially the second edition of William Ellis’s
Polynesian Researches, during a Residence of Nearly Eight Years in the Society and Sandwich Islands
(1833). Harrison Hayford notes of Melville’s use of Ellis:
Melville fastened upon the pages of Ellis, and Ellis proved to be a bounteous guide, if not philoso-
pher and friend. Not once did Melville cite Ellis as his authority: he simply set down Ellis’s
information without credit, or claimed it as his own observation, or credited it to a native infor-
mant—to “Captain Bob,” or “Tonoi,” for example. Little reverence as Melville paid him, Ellis was
his historian, geographer, botanist, anthropologist, dictionary of native words common and proper,
and even his eyes and ears. Although Melville claimed that in the Calabooza (Ch. 33) he had “a fine
opportunity of making observations” on the condition of the natives, it was Ellis who observed for
him their diseases, physique, size, color, and preference of dark skin to sickly European white.
Melville inserted such details in a lump as his own “observations”; but similar information in the
pages of Ellis soon suggested whole chapters of Omoo with only a slight infusion of memories.(xxv)
Melville uses a similar opportunistic technique in all his early works, even drawing on The Penny
Cyclopædia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1833–1843) for the descriptions of
beards in chapters 84 and 85 of White-Jacket and whales in chapter 32 of Moby-Dick.
In Polynesian Researches, Ellis denies responsibility for the death and disease that followed in
the wake of European arrival in the islands. Despite his argument that such destruction comes
from the licentiousness of sailors and natives combined, the natives blamed the missionaries in a
passage seized upon by Melville. Ellis writes:
The ravages of diseases originating in licentiousness, or nurtured by the vicious habits of the people,
and those first brought among them by European vessels, appeared to be fast hastening the total
desolation of Tahiti. The survivors of such as were carried off by these means, feeling the incipient
effects of disease themselves, and beholding their relatives languishing under maladies of foreign
origin, inflicted, as they supposed, by the God of the foreigners, were led to view the missionaries as
in some degree the cause of their suffering; and frequently not only rejected their message, but
charged them with being the authors of their misery, by praying against them to their God. When
the missionaries spoke to them on the subject of religion, the deformed and diseased were sometimes
brought out and ranged before them, as evidences of the efficacy of their prayers, and the destructive
power of their God. The feelings of the people on this subject were frequently so strong, and their
language so violent, that the missionaries have been obliged to hasten from places where they had
intended to address the people. (2:63–64)
Typee and Omoo 63
Such a quotation lies behind Melville’s powerful passage regarding this sense of betrayal. He
writes in Omoo:
Distracted with their sufferings, they brought forth their sick before the missionaries, when they
were preaching, and cried out, “Lies, lies! you tell us of salvation; and, behold, we are dying. We
want no other salvation, than to live in this world. Where are there any saved through your speech?
Pomaree [the Tahitian king Pomare II] is dead; and we are all dying with your cursed diseases.
When will you give over?” (191)
The cultural dislocation and suffering caused by European presence and hegemony in the South
Pacific provide an ever-present subtext in Omoo.
Melville’s work is an appalling vision of what the missionaries have done to the islanders and
their culture. In the South Pacific, linguistic and cultural misunderstanding could lead to war,
death, and corpses. The following wrenching story, which occurred in Tonga, illustrates what
happens when the islanders take literally the missionaries’ injunction to make war upon the
heathen.
After the sack and massacre of Huli [Hule on the Tongan island of Tongatapu, January 25, 1837]
the bodies of some of the dead were taken inside the Wesleyan Mission premises and stacked up
there for inspection by the missionaries. The missionaries asked why the corpses were brought into
their yard, and the natives replied by asking “was it not by your instructions that we made war upon
the heathen?” “We have brought the corpses here that you may know how obedient we have been.”
The missionary said “We do not wish the corpses to be brought here,” and asked the natives to
remove them; when the natives again asked “Was it our wish to kill our relatives and friends?” “Was
it not at your advice, and suggestion, and instigation that we did so?” (Anon. History of Tonga)
The missionaries will not accept responsibility for the destruction they have caused. Yet their
sermons and the reciting of biblical passages from Isaiah and the Psalms could be perceived as
having instigated the bloody war that followed.
Especially in two central chapters of Omoo—Chapter 48, “Tahiti as It Is,” and Chapter 49,
“Same Subject Continued”—Melville excoriates the missionaries’ actions. “Doubtless,” he
writes, “in thus denationalizing the Tahitians, as it were, the missionaries were prompted by a
sincere desire for good; but the effect has been lamentable” (183). The missionaries have taken
away much of the islanders’ culture and replaced it with nothing.
The suffering caused by Europeans is seen even in something as mundane as the mosquito.
When Doctor Long Ghost and the protagonist, then known as Peter and Paul respectively, flee
the mosquito-ridden house where they are attempting to sleep, Paul tells a story, “rife among the
natives” (215), of how mosquitoes came to the Tahitian islands. His story echoes the accidental
introduction of the larvae of the Culex mosquito into Hawai’i in 1826 when a foreign ship
dumped a barrel of water in the wetlands surrounding Lahaina, Maui. However, Paul makes the
introduction of insect pests a deliberate act of violence.
One night, [the aggrieved whaling captain] towed a rotten old water-cask ashore, and left it in a
neglected Taro patch, where the ground was warm and moist. Hence the musquitoes.
I tried my best to learn the name of this man: and hereby do what I can to hand it down to
posterity. It was Coleman—Nathan Coleman. The ship belonged to Nantucket.
When tormented by the musquitoes, I found much relief in coupling the word “Coleman” with
another of one syllable, and pronouncing them together energetically. (215)
The name Nathan Coleman is apocryphal; even the name of the ship that unwittingly intro-
duced mosquitoes to Hawai’i is unknown.
Typee and Omoo

Typee is Melville’s first book, but it is not juvenilia. He is already using a technique he used the
rest of his life, that of taking often dull written sources and kindling them into incandescence.
While the fact that Melville borrowed much of his information from other writers has long been
known, the evidence that he may have boldly claimed this material as his own experience in his
first two books sheds a new and vivid light on his development as a writer. As T. S. Eliot asserts
in The Sacred Wood, “One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets
imitate; mature poets steal” (Eliot 125). The idea of Melville lustily lifting large chunks of text
from Langsdorff, Porter, Stewart, and Ellis and then brazenly claiming them as his own in the
face of doubt by publishers and reviewers offers an intriguing look at the early heights of ambi-
tion and imagination that he achieved. As John Dryden wrote of Ben Jonson, “He invades
Authours like a Monarch, and what would be theft in other Poets, is onely victory in him”
(Dryden 57).
Typee is not simply a novel of adventure, nor a romance, nor a captivity narrative. Omoo is not
simply a protest work, nor an autobiography, nor a picaresque novel, nor a diatribe against the
missionaries (Sten, 19, 41). While all these elements and more are present, Melville’s storytelling
voice fluidly combines and juxtaposes them, transforming them into literature.
Works Cited
Anonymous. Manuscript History of Tonga. Australian ———. “Introduction.” Herman Melville, Omoo, edited by
National University, Canberra, Australia. Quoted in Mary K. Bercaw Edwards. Penguin, 2007, pp. xi–xxxv.
Niel Gunson, Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries Blair, Ruth. “‘Introduction’ and ‘Explanatory Notes.’”
in the South Seas 1797–1860. Oxford UP, 1978, p. 298. Herman Melville, Typee, edited by Ruth Blair. Oxford
Arens, William. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and UP, 1996, pp. vii–xli, 318–35.
Anthropophagy. Oxford UP, 1979. British Consular Records of the Revolt aboard the Lucy
Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Ann. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South
Works of Nikolai Leskov.” 1936. Illuminations, Wales, Sydney, Australia. Reprinted as “Revolt
translated by Harry Zohn, edited by Hannah Arendt. Documents,” edited by Harrison Hayford. Herman
1955. Schocken Books, 2007, pp. 83–109. Melville, Omoo, edited by Harrison Hayford and
Bercaw Edwards, Mary K. Cannibal Old Me: Spoken Sources Walter Blair. Hendricks House, 1969, pp. 309–39.
in Melville’s Early Works. Kent State UP, 2009. Bryant, John. “Introduction.” Herman Melville, Typee,
———. [Mary K. Madison.] “Fanny Trollope’s Nephew edited by John Bryant. Penguin, 1996, pp. ix–xxxii.
Edits Typee.” Melville Society Extracts, vol. 39, September
1979, p. 15.
Typee and Omoo 65
Certificate of John Stetson, Lahaina, June 2, 1843. New Langsdorff, Georg H. von. Voyages and Travels in Various
Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, Parts of the World during the Years 1803, 1804, 1805,
Massachusetts. 1806, and 1807. London: Henry Colburn, 1813.
Coleman, John B., Jr. Letter to Charles G. and Henry Leeson, Ida. “The Mutiny on the Lucy Ann.” Philological
Coffin, November 2, 1842. Collection 154, Nantucket Quarterly, vol. 19, October 1940, pp. 370–79.
Historical Association, Nantucket, Massachusetts. Leyda, Jay. The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman
Dening, Greg. Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Melville 1819–1891. 2 vols. Harcourt, Brace, 1951.
Cultures, and Self. U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Obeyesekere, Gananath. Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating
———. Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas. U of
Marquesas 1774–1880. UP of Hawaii, 1980. California P, 2005.
Dryden, John. “An Essay of Dramatick Poesie.” Prose Otter, Samuel. Melville’s Anatomies. U of California P,
1668–1691, edited by Samuel Holt Monk. The Works of 1999.
John Dryden, vol. 17. U of California P, 1971, pp. Porter, David. Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean.
23–81. New York: Wiley and Halsted, 1822. Revised version
Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “Philip Massinger.” 1920. The of 1815 edition.
Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. Alfred A. Sanborn, Geoffrey. “The Motive for Metaphor: Typee,
Knopf, 1921, pp. 112–30. Omoo, and Mardi.” A Companion to Herman Melville,
Ellis, William. Polynesian Researches, during a Residence of edited by Wyn Kelley. Blackwell, 2006, pp. 365–77.
Nearly Eight Years in the Society and Sandwich Islands. ———. The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making
2nd ed. New York: J. & J. Harper, 1833. of a Postcolonial Reader. Duke UP, 1998.
Hayford, Harrison. “Editors’ Introduction.” Herman Sten, Christopher. The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville
Melville, Omoo, edited by Harrison Hayford and and the Poetics of the Novel. Kent State UP, 1996.
Walter Blair. Hendricks House, 1969, pp. xvii–lii. Stewart, Charles S. A Visit to the South Seas, in the U. S.
Heflin, Wilson. Herman Melville’s Whaling Years, edited Ship Vincennes, during the Years 1829 and 1830. New
by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and Thomas Farel York: John P. Haven, 1831.
Heffernan. Vanderbilt UP, 2004.
5
Melville’s Mardi: “A Certain Something
Unmanageable”
Timothy Marr
Hug the shore, naught new is seen.

(M 556)
You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the Truth in.

(“Hawthorne and His Mosses,” PT 246)
That which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?
(Ecclesiastes 7:2)
When planning his 1857 lecture on the South Seas, Melville faced the challenge of how to com-
press an ocean covering half the planet into a one-hour lecture. “A haze of obscurity hangs over
the Pacific,” Melville averred: “One is puzzled where to choose a topic from so vast a storehouse”
in which islands are “thick as stars in the Milky Way” (PT 765). Melville refuses to reprise his
adventures in the Pacific but rather tantalizes with cunning glimpses. “He was constantly telling
that he must omit much that he would like to say,” reported one audience member (PT 765).
Melville’s evasive approach contrasts strikingly with the volubility of his ten works of prose
fiction published in the previous thirteen years, including the extraordinary experimentation of
his third book, Mardi and a Voyage Thither (1849). Among these, Mardi is a pivotal and necessary
work for charting Melville’s literary explorations through and beyond the Pacific, that mighty
ocean “that makes all coasts one bay to it” (MD 483) that he, more than any other American
writer, put on the literary map.
When writing Mardi at the end of his twenties, Melville was at the high-water mark of his
arrival as a writer. He had just published two commercially successful books (Typee [1846] and
Omoo [1847]), married the daughter of the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, and moved to New
Melville’s Mardi: “A Certain Something Unmanageable” 67
York City. When he changed his British publisher from John Murray to Richard Bentley, he was
considered quite a catch. Melville was paid the largest advance he ever received, and Mardi was
published as an expensive three-volume set suited for circulating libraries, a privilege afforded to
professional novelists like Charles Dickens and James Fenimore Cooper.
However, Mardi realized little material success and launched instead a long process of indebt-
edness, borrowing, and unpopularity that eventually doomed Melville’s fiction-writing career.
Just as Typee and Omoo did not match the non-fictional adventures of Murray’s Home and Colonial
Library, Mardi did not fit Bentley’s frame for either novel or romance. Martha Jones, who
reviewed the unfinished manuscript for Bentley and was probably Mardi’s first reader outside
Melville’s family, wrote that “the work does not turn out to be what [the reader] had a right to
expect,” announcing: “‘Here’s too little dinner, and too much dessert’” (Horth, 233, 231). From
its inception, readers have been confounded by the dynamic vortices of Mardi. Many readers cel-
ebrate its prodigious genius, while others criticize its prodigal excess, and some do both. For
example, a contemporary London review acknowledges that the book “exhibit[s] the most
extraordinary power and fancy … every line is original, strange, and outlandish,” yet concludes
that “we have turned the book over, like a dog might a jellyfish, without being able to make it
out, for the life of us” (Higgins and Parker, 205–6). Another overwhelmed reader felt he had
been “taken bodily, and immersed into the fathomless sea of Allegory, from which we have just
emerged, gasping for breath” (Branch 184). Nathaniel Hawthorne saw Mardi as a treacherous
whirlpool “with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life,” a “rich” rhapsody
that was “so good that one scarcely pardons the writer for not having brooded long over it, so as
to make it a great deal better” (Letter to Duyckinck, August 29, 1850).1
Carl Van Doren, a Columbia University professor who helped to formulate the canon of
American Literature that revived Melville’s reputation after World War I, called Mardi “cer-
tainly one of the strangest, maddest books ever composed by an American” (1: 321–22). In the
next generation, F. O. Matthiessen, who worked to establish that canon with Melville at its core,
called Mardi “a sourcebook for plenitude,” full of “spontaneous improvisations,” with enough
references “to make the catalogue of a library” (377, 388, 384). Many Melvilleans since have tes-
tified to the vital status of Mardi in Melville’s career. Milton Stern deemed it “the central book
in a study of Melville’s thematic development” (25). Richard Brodhead saw that in Mardi “almost
every image central to his major work is present here in embryonic form,” commending it as the
book “in which Melville’s genius rejoices most unabashedly and unreservedly in its own powers”
(“Creating the Creative” 48, 46, 52).
Mardi’s importance notwithstanding, the book is still a challenge to digest and remains a
loose fish in Melville studies—“fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it” (MD 396).
William Dillingham calls Mardi “a confusing roundhouse of mirrors” in whose eddies “charac-
ters and places become echoes and reflections of one another” (105, 124). Critics have elaborated
on Mardi’s enigmas attempting to find the key to its design. For example, John Seelye and
J. Michael Sears interpret Mardi’s spheres and circles, and Maxine Moore and Brett Zimmerman
its astrological zodiacs. Michael C. Berthold examines its encircling forms of captivity, and
H. Bruce Franklin calls it a “textbook of comparative mythology” (Wake 17). Despite Melville’s
1
Newton Arvin commented on Mardi’s “precipitateness and prematurity” (80), and Richard Brodhead puzzled how it
could “combine so much obvious care and conscious craft with such temporariness and tentativeness” (“Polysensuum”
234).
68 Timothy Marr
assertion that “Time, which is the solver of all riddles, will solve ‘Mardi,’” its perplexing circle(s)
will never be squared, partly because Melville never began with a plan, and partly because
Mardi’s extravagant scopes and scales express his daring disposition to try and “evolve the
inscrutable” (Corr 130; M 352).
Much of the critical heritage of Mardi scholarship has been dedicated to tracing its genres,
styles, allusions, and influences. Merrell Davis, the scholar who first delved Mardi’s depths in his
1947 Yale dissertation (later published as Melville’s Mardi: A Chartless Voyage), found in it three
different books: a realistic narrative beginning, a romantic interlude, and an allegorical travel-
ogue-satire. This charting of Mardi’s structure does not encompass its generic variety which
includes picaresque adventure, gothic imagination, romantic fantasy, effusive rhapsody, dialog-
ical symposium, philosophical disquisition, lyrical paeans, sardonic iconoclasm, epigrammatic
enunciation, and mystical confabulation. Scholars have examined Melville’s use of cliché, hyper-
bole, paradox, the grotesque, allegory, anatomy, and satire. Much critical ink has flowed tracing
his literary sources, ranging from Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, Rabelais, Jonathan Swift,
Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Lord Byron, Dante, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle,
Sir William Jones, the Bible’s Wisdom Books, and the Book of Mormon.2
This chapter proposes no new key to unlocking the puzzle of Mardi. Nevertheless, the task of
measuring its imagination raises two suggestive questions that guide its inquiry. First, Melville
composed Mardi during the fifteen months between his marriage to Elizabeth Shaw and the
birth of their son, Malcolm. Can we see Mardi as Melville’s literary gestation, issuing forth his
own creative authority? Second, how would Herman Melville and Mardi be remembered if its
author had perished, presumably along with his protagonist Taji, and the book had stood as
Melville’s final literary testament, rather than being a transitional act to the rest of his writing
career? This chapter will examine some modes of Mardi that Melville developed to free his
literary voice and generate his genius, informed by letters he penned about its composition and
reception. First, Melville globalizes the province of the Pacific by transposing Asian history as a
figurative ground for his watery world. Second, despite Mardi’s reputation for abstract allegory,
Melville draws upon the revolutionary rhetoric of 1848 to register a powerful social criticism of
tyranny and injustice. Third, Melville dissolves singular first-person narration to spawn a
progeny of narrative voices to multiply his intersubjective process of creativity, liberating the
scope of his imagination across time in ways he would carry forward in works as disparate as
Moby-Dick (1851) and his 18,000-line poem, Clarel (1876).
Mardi, like Moby-Dick, or The Whale—Melville’s only other book of fiction that shares its
bulk—is at once a book, a quest, and even more of an imagined world. Melville’s first letter to
Murray in October 1947 promises a continuation of “South Sea Adventure,” asserting that he
had only begun to “feel my hand” and planned to “enter into scenes altogether new” (Corr
98–99). The setting of Mardi begins and ends with an “endless sea” (38, 654) in the “most unfre-
quented and least known portion” of the Pacific (7). By his Jonah-like jettisoning of his sailor-
narrator (and his taciturn “chummy” Jarl [15]) there at midnight, Melville launches a fugitive
excursion that convulsively sprawls through the Pacific to engender the new worlds of
Mardi/Mardi—through what Harold Beaver called its “resolute drift” and “mystery of universal
digression” (30, 34). With neither map nor quadrant, Melville’s “chartless voyage” (M 556)
forces him to extemporize his bearings from the natural world, innovate out of his own rhetorical
2
To cite but two good examples, see Grey and Hadfield.
resources, and eventually invent from within his own creative demiurge. This audacious inven-
tiveness enacts oceanic escape as a vital freedom that breeds an effusive process of world-making.
Mardi expounds Melville’s titanic attempt to enact a radical liberty of the “world of mind” (557)
that combines a declaration of independence, a discovery of new geographies, a protestant revolt
against religious hegemony, and even an Adamic naming of fresh creation.
Melville initially employs the rambling description in Mardi that is so appealing in Typee and
Omoo. Many contemporary readers were most attracted by the opening section of the book in
which Melville’s narrator abandons the Arcturion by stealing a whaleboat, sails through calms
and storms, and encounters the derelict ship Parki. They found great power in Melville’s natural
census of the material and biological wonders of the ocean. But Melville soon takes flight to more
remote modes of narration. He announces the “bold aim” of Mardi’s “new attractions” in his New
Year’s Day letter to Murray in 1848, claiming that it “combines in one cluster all that is romantic,
whimsical & poetic in Polynisia” [sic] (Corr 100). That Melville’s assertion to Murray in March
that “its authentic” was crossed out and replaced with “it shall have the right stuff in it” (Corr
105) substantiates what Charles Feidelson called its “voyage away from verisimilitude” (166).
A major innovation of Melville’s unfolding evaluation of Mardi as “different stuff altogether”
(Corr 106) is that he transforms his common sailor-narrator, whom readers of Typee and Omoo had
felt was more educated than they expected, into a heroic explorer-genius. Melville allies his
literary excursions in Mardi with such colossal quests as the Norse sagas, Columbus’s “discov-
eries,” Gulliver’s Travels, and the United States Exploring Expedition to the Pacific under Charles
Wilkes, whose five-volume account was published as Melville was returning from the South
Seas. Melville also promotes his narrator’s authority by presenting his Pacific and Mardian adven-
tures as marvelous oriental undertakings, transposing them onto legendary Asian adventures of
Cyrus the Great, Xerxes the Great, Alexander the Great, Bernard Mandeville, Marco Polo, Baron
Munchausen, and Sinbad.
Swift’s adventurer in Gulliver’s Travels had asserted that geographers of Europe were wrong in
supposing there was only ocean between Japan and California, arguing that “there must be a
Balance of Earth to counterpoise the great Continent of Tartary” (88). Melville literarily fills this
ground by overlapping his narrator’s ocean journey west onto a grand escapade into Asian
territory and mystery. The titles of some early chapters—“Foot in Stirrup” (Chapter 1), “Seats
secure and Portmanteaus packed” (Chapter 5), and “They arrange their Canopies and Lounges…”
(Chapter 10)—ironically position the castaways’ migrations as the elegant forays of chivalrous
nobility. Absconding with the whaleboat is compared with “a dashing young Janizary running
off with a sultana from the Grand Turk’s seraglio” (20). Sunrise is compared with the appearance
of “a distant horseman” to “a wayfarer in Sahara” (38), storms appear like Mamelukes (116),
waves as Parthians (366), and clouds as Huns and Scythians (116). A shovel-nose shark is named
“Tamerlane” (54), the swordfish’s bill is “aromatic … like the ancient caliphs” (105), and the
so-called Algerine porpoises are called “atrocious Turks” (42). Melville exalts his narrator as
Sesostris the Pharoah (14), the Ottoman Grand Turk (64), and Alexander the Great (97). The
narrator’s companions in the first part of Mardi are all similarly placed in oriental guise. Jarl is
compared to the Vizier Mustapha (64) and Belshazzar (64), Samoa to turbaned El Cid (66),
Belisarius (75–115 passim), and Bucephalus (97), and his vexatious wife Annatoo to a Calmuc
Tartar (75–100 passim). The first chapter ends with a masthead vision of the sunset clouds of the
western horizon as “airy arches, domes, and minarets; as if the yellow, Moorish sun were setting
behind some vast Alhambra” (8), a revelation that is exorbitantly magnified in the book’s final
70 Timothy Marr
apotheosis of heaven as “all that in the wildest hour of ecstasy, rapt fancy paints in bright Auroras
upon the soul’s wide, boundless Orient” (630).
These freelancing allusions evolve into full-blown fabulation as the “many islands” denoted by
the name Polynesia dissolve into the archipelagic phantasmagoria of Mardi. Taji’s assumed name
means “crown” in Arabic and Persian, and he conflates his party with “strolling divinities” and
himself—like Captain Cook—as a demigod from the sun (166). Melville figuratively shapes the
canoe that ferries Taji’s entourage around Mardi as a sea elephant with a royal canopied Howdah
(199, 200, 265). Melville’s Magian majesty is intimated by the fact that Alexander fought
against such war elephants during his invasions of Asia, where he encountered between Media
and Persia a people the ancient historians called Mardi, a word that means manhood in the
Persian language.3
Mardi’s episodic incoherence, cosmological sweep, and transhistorical scope continue to unfold
as Melville bears forth new books inside its own cover. Melville later presented the fruits of his
literary quest as superior to the “sumptuous” gems piled before a “Sophi” (Savafi, or Persian
ruler) in a poem he published the year he died: “For me, to grapple from Art’s deep / One drip-
ping trophy!” (1891, “In a Garret,” PP 275). These deeper resonances recall Melville’s letter to
Murray in March, 1848, a document that Walter Bezanson calls Melville’s “virtual declaration of
independence” (176). Melville confesses that with an “incurable distaste,” he “felt irked, cramped
& fettered by plodding along with dull common places.” Possessed by “a longing to plume my
pinions for a flight,” Melville had soared “heart & soul” into a full-fledged “Romance” with
“downright” and “earnest ardor.” Melville celebrates his need for a “play of freedom & invention”
to create a “wild” story “made up of different stuff altogether” (Corr 106–107). Melville radically
transforms his aspiration—to have his romance taken as a “verity” as he wrote in Mardi’s preface
(M xvii)—by requesting not to have its cover page cite him as the author of Typee and Omoo, “to
separate ‘Mardi’ as much as possible from those books” (Corr 115).
Mardi’s reputation for being allegorical, philosophical, and difficult has obscured the tren-
chant social criticism embedded in its imagined worlds. In Typee, Melville criticized the “civi-
lized white man” as “the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth,” who enacts what he
called in his South Seas lecture “those brutal and cruel vices which disgust even savages with our
manners, while they turn an earthly paradise into a pandemonium” (T 125; PT 420). That lec-
ture recounts how whites ransacked the “virgin freshness of these unviolated wastes,” earning
from the islanders an “almost instinctive hate” (PT 415). Melville’s satire in Mardi universalizes
what he later called in Israel Potter “the primeval savageness which ever slumbers in human kind,
civilized or uncivilized” (IP 62). Taji’s arrogation of the status of white demigod inaugurates the
imposition of sin in the Pacific Eden that ultimately leaves him, like Ahab, “damned in the
midst of Paradise” (MD 167). In this mode of innate depravity, the global romance of Tartary
becomes transformed into the hellish underworld of Tartarus.
Even the fantasy of romance between Taji and Yillah is precipitated by and premised upon
violent acts of appropriation enacted by white imperialism in the Pacific. (See also Katie
McGettigan’s essay on race and the printed book in Chapter 20 of this Companion). Samoa and
3
Nathalia Wright argues in her introduction to Mardi that “the chief cultural imagistic configuration in Mardi is a
superimposition … of the topography and history of central and southwest Asia, the alleged cradle of the human race”
(x). For Melville’s engagement with Asia and the Orient, see Finkelstein and Marr.
Aleema, Mardi’s first Polynesian characters, are both haunted by traumatic violence they experi-
enced with Euro-American ships. Samoa is known as the Upoluan after his home island, a place
where the Wilkes Expedition had burned villages in the name of justice. He lost an arm defend-
ing the Parki from an attack by treacherous Spanish Cholos (“half-breeds” [69]) after they had
lured away and murdered the four whites on board (69). Melville relates Samoa’s tall tale of how
he (literally) single-handedly fought off these “devils” (71). Samoa’s traumatic revenge leads him
to project upon Taji and Jarl “the ridicule, which as a barbarian among whites, he himself had so
often experienced” (181).
Taji’s violent killing of Aleema is the culmination of the cycles of cruelty that characterized
intercultural encounters between Western nations and Pacific Islands. When Taji first unfolds a
roll of cotton on which is printed hundreds of sailors ascending the rigging, Aleema is troubled
by “a ferocious expression, as if something terrific was connected with the reminiscence” (132).
Taji’s subsequent murder of this priest exemplifies the impulsive violence of colonizing imperi-
alism. Taji’s “mad deed” (140) when he is “bent” (131) upon rescuing Yillah is reflected in trun-
cated syntax that reduces the agency of his supposed heroism to the passive role his rage compels
him to play (“hotly I swore” [131], “my cutlass made a quick lunge” [133]).
Taji’s murder thus reenacts the bloodshed that constitutes the “credible history” (153) of
Yillah’s fate. White sailors landed on Aleema’s island of Amma declaring themselves to be gods
and then slew three natives after they allegedly stole a canoe. In revenge, Aleema’s people slaugh-
tered all the whites except Yillah, who had come with her mother on the ship. Seeking propiti-
ation, Aleema prepared Yillah to be sacrificed at the temple of Apo by inventing myths that
deprived her of “the remotest conception of her own origin” (153). Yet Taji, even before he
knows this history, replicates Aleema’s crime by seducing Yillah with his own lies, playing the
race card (“Am I not white like yourself? … Am I brown like the dusky Aleema?”[142]), and
alleging that they grew up together in Oroolia, the Island of Delights. Exposed to Taji’s decep-
tions, Yillah lapses into despondency, experiencing “the extinguishment in her heart of the
notion of her own spirituality” (159). She is doomed by all to remain a perpetual captive, ethe-
realized into an insubstantial Spenserian nymph, a postlapsarian embodiment of irretrievable
racial innocence.
Taji is implicated as an intruder participating in the violent contamination of the Pacific by
the “demoralizing associations of modern civilization” (PT 779). The grieving and raging sons
of Aleema, seeking retribution for their sire (“we rave and raven for you; and your white heart we
will have” [308]), become aligned with Taji’s own guilt when they murder Jarl and Samoa. In
Mardi, Melville both criticizes the “fancied superiority” (WJ 277) of white arrogance while also
exposing his own complicity in effacing Islander cultures and myths. The narrative’s imperial
appropriation of Polynesia universalizes the pretension of Taji’s own authority. This move derac-
inates Mardi from its Polynesian roots, adumbrating the failure of Melville’s attempt at having
“tried his hand” and “bungled” writing a Hawaiian legend (Blair 230). Ten years later, Melville
acknowledges the injustice of depriving islanders of their language in colonial schools. “‘Are
they to give up all that binds them together as a nation or race, their language?’” Melville lec-
tured, “‘Then they are indeed blotted out as a people’” (PT 420). In Mardi, Melville can go no
further than to displace such cultural devastation onto the white figure of Yillah.4
4
Paul Lyons challenges Melvilleans to address this “disjunction” between a Melville who champions human rights and
an “author whose terms of critique of colonialism reinscribe its assumptions” (“‘That wall’” 17; “Global Melville” 65).
72 Timothy Marr
Melville’s scathing criticism of heartless exploitation continues during his forays through the
imaginary glades of Mardi’s isles. Mardi participates in the republican uproar against the elitism
of European monarchy that expanded into a revolutionary movement in 1848. Hidden amidst
the apparent carefree beauty of King Media’s island of Odo lie lairs of serfs and war-captives so
brutalized into forced labor that their discarded bones mix with shells on the beach. The earth
itself materially manifests the igneous underside of doom where, compounded beneath the sur-
face of the Pacific paradise, lie the Tartarean “sad secrets” of evil injustice. King Klanko forces
his “scourged slaves” to toil in pits near the rumbling of the “volcano’s bowels”: “[a]nd daily his
slaves’ bones are brought above ground, mixed with the metal masses” (611). The poet Yoomy’s
vision of the California gold rush, just being reported as Melville was completing Mardi, depicts
it as murderous hell where “thousands delve in quicksands; and, sudden, sink in graves of their
own making: with gold dust mingling their own ashes” (547). Residents of Maramma, Mardi’s
allegorical representation of the earthly power of the Church, suffer under a pontiff “who
possess[es] the power of quenching a human life with a wish” (334) and are forbidden to grow
food. Sacrificial gifts must be imported and “thousands perish beneath the altars, groaning with
offerings that might relieve them” (625). Poisonous trees and slimy mandrakes thrive in the hol-
lows of Maramma’s “fertile waste” along with snakes, bats, and ravens, as “vampires, fixed on
slumbering lizards, fanned the sultry air” (330–31).5
Near the end of the book, Melville deepens his political critique by grounding his Mardian
excursion in recognizable countries where his spokesmen chastise class exploitation in Britain
and racial slavery in the US South. Melville’s depiction of Dominora (United Kingdom) reveals
dark exploitation under the surface of ravishing plenty, a theme he would take up in greater
depth in Israel Potter. The heartlessness of early industrialism (also depicted in his sketch “The
Tartarus of Maids”) is evoked by the pathetic starvation of the underclass—represented by the
abuse of a “haggard old reaper” and “mournful maidens” by aristocratic “Lord Primo” (478). The
entourage also travels to the “extreme” south of Vivenza (United States) where Melville borrows
in Chapter 162 the generic features of British travel narratives about the southern states to con-
demn the inhumanity of slavery as a malevolent “sin” as foul as the “crater-pool of hell; [that]
puts out the sun at noon [and] parches all fertility” (534). Melville deploys his Mardian latitudi-
narianism to render the US south, and its treatment of the “tribe of Hamo” (i.e. enslaved Africans,
513), as a “curs’d dominion” of decay (533). Melville both globalizes and estranges the south’s
imperial politics by figuring cotton as the “taro” plant and overseer’s whips as “thongs” (532).
The seeding of slavery amid the land of liberty represents a natural wrong that embodies how
good and evil are braided into the very fabric of human nature, rendering American republicans
into barbarians.
Elizabeth S. Foster attests how Melville’s writing of Mardi “stirred up demonic powers within
him and gave him more than an inkling of his own genius” as “his very being was ringing with
the voices of the great dead” (qtd M, 657, 662). The swelling of Melville’s ambition and the
flourishing of his creativity is played out through expanding scales of aggrandizement. Yet while
the first part of Mardi exalts the imperial authority of Taji (see Dimock 42–75), at a key point
Taji’s authority dissipates, as his subsuming guilt and the disappearance of Yillah deflate his
5
Some of the most recent Mardi criticism explores how Melville anchors his idealism in material substances. For
example, see Tom Nurmi, “Mineral Melville,” and Michael Jonik, “Melville, Mardi, and Materialism.”
divinity, “dwarfing [him] down to a mortal” (159). Taji is only resurrected again at the very end
but to “abdicate” “his own soul’s emperor” (654).
In lieu of the singular narration that characterized his fiction up to this point, Melville births
a cacophony of multiple personalities and perspectives that embodies a major mode of his literary
art. Samoa, as “the expounder of all things heathenish and obscure” (172), initiates Mardi’s first
flights of imagination, producing a mixing of species, spaces, sequences, and subjectivities that
radically broadens its narrative ambit. Melville devises multiple Mardian mouthpieces to ven-
triloquize his learning and dramatize his convivial improvisations. Their frank disquisitions,
extemporaneous and at times delirious, displace the trio of Taji, Jarl, and Samoa. In their place
Melville invents four key spokesmen who deliver his meditations and mediations: Yoomi, a poet
(more Persian than Whitmanian); Media, a despot-king developing into a democrat; Mohi, a
chronicler of history and myth; and Babbalanja, a philosopher-sage. The confluence of their dia-
logical voices overwhelms Taji, who, like Ishmael in Moby-Dick, settles silently into a background
witness during their loquacious circuit through Mardi.
Examining the most crucial and garrulous of the avatars in this symposium reveals insights
into the layers of Melville’s creative praxis. Babbalanja is “a man of mystical aspect, habited in a
voluminous robe…learned in Mardian lore” (197), with a “cyclopaediatic nature” who most
embodies Melville’s philosophical musings. Babbalanja repurposes a Hindu and Buddhist fable
of nine blind men confronting an elephant to focus instead on an enormous banyan tree that has
a “thousand boughs striking into the earth … as so many gigantic trunks.” These seekers pursue
a reward for solving the riddle of which root was the original tree, and each displays himself to
be a fool by selecting, changing, and fighting over their choices. The final verdict that “The tree
is too much for us all” (357) also expresses the critical incoherence of Mardi’s expansive rhizom-
atic forms. Babbalanja’s characterization of the story as a “polysensuum”—a set of multiplicities
that John Seelye calls “a spectrum of contrasting attitudes” (32)—encapsulates the overlapping
levels of perception, voice, influence, and meaning that are integral to the primal achievement of
Melville’s experimentation, as he tracks what Babbalanja calls the “world of wonders insphered
within the spontaneous consciousness” (352).
Melville ramifies his narration even more deeply by imbuing Babbalanja himself with the
voices of different personas that gush up within him. The most prominent at the outset is
Bardianna, an ancient author of the “immortal” Ponderings (and an allusion to Shakespeare
as Bard), whose adages inform Babbalanja’s expositions. Although Babbalanja is criticized by
his companions as a “monger of maxims” (281) who relates the “everlasting pratings” (397)
of others, he is empowered by Melville to perform the intersubjective and transhistorical
nature of genius. Babbalanja testifies that “we are full of ghosts and spirits” (593–94) and “in
one life-time we live a hundred lives” (457). As the colloquy continues, Babbalanja’s discourse
is also at times overwhelmed by the unprompted ravings of a demon named Azzageddi, who
possesses him as a “mysterious indweller” (430) and “inscrutable stranger” (457). The wag-
ging of Azzageddi’s tongue intrudes excess and gibberish into Babbalanja’s philosophizing,
forcing his auditors to demand that the imp be gagged and pushed back down within. At one
point, when Media cannot determine whether it is Babbalanja, Bardianna, or Azageddi who
is speaking, Babbalanja responds “All three: is it not a pleasant concert?” “For aught I know,”
he confesses, “I may be somebody else” (456), diffusing the ebullient fecundity of Mardi’s
narrator that “I am full with a thousand souls” (367) and “every thought is a soul of some
poet, hero, sage” (594).
74 Timothy Marr
The orchestral crescendo of voices even within one of Mardi’s multiple narrators echoes how
Melville riffed and reveled in spontaneous creativity. These personalities evoke generative dae-
mons that allow Melville to intimate more frankly the convolution of the divine and the devilish
(the “seraph” and the “shark” [40]) in what he later called the “clogged terrestrial humanities”
(P 299). The unfolding powers of Melville’s exalted afflatus enflamed his tongue with the heart’s
inspired effusions. Melville intemperately wrote to Murray that “instincts are prophetic, & better
than acquired wisdom” (Corr 106). Melville later confessed to Hawthorne that his “profoundest
sense of being” was a tranquil contentedness premised on “irresponsibility; but without licentious
inclination” (Corr 212). This instinctual irresponsibility instigated an oracular freedom that
shared the brash elements of madness. Melville wrote to Duyckinck about a mutual friend who
had gone mad soon after Mardi was published, affirming that “in all of us lodges the same fuel to
light that same fire,” under whose energies “we are irresponsible & riot like gods without fear of
fate” (Corr 128). Some of Melville’s contemporary readers responded to Mardi’s unfolding narra-
tion by viewing it as a rambling form of reckless raving. Yet such free expression delivered some
of the rapt richness of Mardi’s wonders. When walking along the phosphorescent surf, Babbalanja
experiences an astonishing vision that represents the most cosmic journey in all of Melville’s
fiction. A star descends in the form of a feathery angel with veins of vivid light that undulates
around him and inquires what wisdom he has learned. He replies, “In things mysterious, to seek
no more; but rest content, with knowing naught but Love,” and this humility earns him an exor-
bitant outing under her wings. They travel beyond “distant fleets of worlds” until reaching a
point where “all our firmament seemed one nebula” where the worlds “hived … in swarms” (633).
Melville’s quest to liberate the “metaphysics of genius” (559) eventually abandons even
Babbalanja, leaving the impenitent Taji to be the “unreturning wanderer” that prefigures
Ishmael (654). But first Melville invents one more ancient author who amplifies these manifold
subjectivities as the fullest embodiment of his creative process. Chapter 180 features a colloquy,
led by Babbalanja and Azzageddi, of the life of the thinker Lombardo and his “curious” and
“crazy” work Koztanza, viewed by scholars as embodying Melville’s own sporadic creation of
Mardi. The “full heart” of Lombardo’s genius was riled into ambition by the necessity of “pro-
curing his yams” (592). Ruled by his “crowned and sceptered instinct” (597), and a brilliance
that is “calm, content, in consciousness of power,” Lombardo commits himself to “a fierce, can-
nibal delight in the grief that shrieks to multiply itself” (594). As a “resolute traveler” with
“brains … round as globes,” Lombardo exults “‘I have created the creative’” (595, 593). Though
his “piecemeal” (600) Koztanza “lacks cohesion [and] is wild, unconnected, all episode” (597),
Lombardo demands that his readers “marvel more at our primal chaos than at the round world
thus emerging” (599). Lombardo calls Koztanza his “child of many prayers” (601), the descrip-
tion that Melville’s sister Augusta writes to Melville’s expecting wife, Elizabeth, to celebrate the
parturition of Mardi’s last proof sheets (Corr 114).
Mardi’s literary chaos, like Koztanza, faced the ire and ridicule of critics, and Melville defended
his wayward creation in letters after its publication. To his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, Melville
compared the unfavorable reviews of Mardi to the lashings of persecution—being “cut into” and
“burnt by the common hangman”—rationalizing these attacks as “essential to the building up
of any permanent reputation” (Corr 130). To Richard Bentley, Melville called these criticisms
“compliments” and refused to admit that he had fired his best literary shot in a direction that
was “unwise” or “indiscreet.” He declared that writers like him “always have a certain something
unmanageable in us, that bids us do this or that, and be done it must—hit or miss” (Corr 132).
When departing for London in October, after writing both Redburn and White-Jacket in the six
months after Mardi’s release (“two jobs … done for money”), Melville confessed to his father-in-law
his “earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to ‘fail’” (Corr 138–39), the fate of
what he called in Mardi “the imminent peril of being honest” (M 349).
Nevertheless, Melville continued to reckon Mardi as an artistic success, apprising it as an
unappreciated rarity. Melville brought back several copies of the three-volume Bentley edition
with uncut leaves with him when he returned from England in February 1850. He presented one
to Evert Duykinck, hoping that it might find “refuge” on his shelves as “almost everywhere else
[it] has been driven forth like a wild, mystic Mormon into shelterless exile.” On one level, he
belittles Mardi as an “exotic” aloe that might never flower and suggests that Duyckinck tie it up
with parchment “from some old Arabic M.S.S. on Astrology” and seal it with a Sphinx (Corr
154). Melville’s 1876 centenary poem, “The American Aloe on Exhibition,” personified the trib-
ulation of this lonely plant being “account[ed] a weed,” as it exclaims in resignation, “Let be the
dearth that kept me back” (BB 103). Nevertheless, by planting Mardi in Duykinck’s library—
the source of many of the literary works he borrowed and that influenced Mardi (such as Rabelais,
Dante, Montaigne, Browne, and Burton), Melville conserved it for posterity, claiming that its
“grain” was “remarkably strong” and might flourish in “goodly harvests that ripen late” (Corr
133). Here too the comparison with Lombardo’s Koztanza is germane. Melville continued vainly
to believe that the “special end” (M 602) of Mardi was “predestinated” (Corr 149) and not “in
vain” (Corr 132)—and that “Time” (Corr 130) would resuscitate and resurrect it, echoing
Lombardo’s hope that “‘Somewhere Mardi has a mighty heart—that struck, all the isles shall
resound!’” (M 600).
Lacking the buoyancy and anchor of Ishmael’s fuller experience (and Melville’s material
ballast) in Moby-Dick, Taji, Yillah, and the sailors on the Arcturion (as later do those on the
Pequod), are all whelmed in the whirlpool at the center of Melville’s Mardian maelstrom. The
vanity of Taji’s fathomless quest is dramatized by the vortex in which is the only home of Yillah
(a name that Finkelstein suggests is an invocation to Allah [204–5]). Melville also figured this
inundation as the fate of his experiment with Mardi, writing “a hollow purse makes the poet
sink—witness ‘Mardi’” (Corr 149). Melville might also be presciently alluding to the destiny of
Mardi when referring to the logbook of the abandoned ship Parki that Annatoo throws into the
waves: “Doubtless, this is the fate of many other ponderous tomes, sinking quickly and pro-
foundly” (M 94). Melville’s confession in Chapter 169. “Sailing On,” that his narrator could only
“grope where land was none” and “the golden haven was not gained” leaves only the supposed
solace of immanent shipwreck: “better to sink in boundless deeps, than float on vulgar shoals”
(557). The abyss of the ocean diving further down than Everest reaches high intimates “the
ungraspable phantom of life” of the myth of Narcissus that Melville called in Moby-Dick “the key
to it all” (MD 5).
It is this profound understanding that might help inform Melville’s acknowledgment to
Duyckinck from London that “Had I not written & published Mardi, I would not be as wise as I
am now, or may be” (Corr 149). The brief appearance of the character Bulkington in Moby-Dick
might just represent Melville’s strange elegy to the wisdom he learned by writing Mardi.
Bulkington’s voluminous name and his status as a “demigod” signify that he is much weightier
than his silent role as “sleeping partner” (MD 16) with a six-inch chapter for a grave. Might
Bulkington have jettisoned himself from Ahab’s tyranny the way that Tommo in Typee did, and
following Taji, in the middle of the ocean? Bulkington’s landless “apotheosis” (reprised at the
76 Timothy Marr
end of Melville’s career after the body of Billy Budd sinks in the ocean)—epitomizing “the
intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of the sea” where “better it is to perish
in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee”—aligns with Taji’s ongoing
quest in Mardi. Moby-Dick’s wisdom that “those far mysteries we dream of … either lead us on
in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed” (MD 106–7, 237) affirms “the soul’s wild aspira-
tions after things unseen” in Mardi (650). Bulkington celebrates what H. Bruce Franklin found
expressed in Mardi, and what Melville was in the process of embodying in Ahab: “the glorious-
ness of the man who will not be safe, a Byronic, romantic, satanic, Titanic kind of gloriousness”
(“Introduction” xi).
When the historian Mohi asked Babbalanja how best to perpetuate his name, the sage
responded that it should be carved on a stone and sunk in the sea: “for the unseen foundations of
the deep are more enduring than the palpable tops of the mountains” (211). “The Lee Shore”
chapter of Moby-Dick testifies to the submerged potential of Mardi by questioning “Is all this
agony so vain?” and acknowledging that “Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable”
(MD 106–7). Melville mapped the flaws of Mardi onto Babbalanja’s interpretation of Lombardo’s
Koztanza. “[W]hile so much slaving merits that thou should’st not die,” Melville wrote, “it has
not been intense, prolonged enough, for the high meed of immortality” (600). Mardi is a book-
in-progress in transit as “A Voyage Thither” (its subtitle), “a poor scrawled copy of something
within, which, do what he would, he could not completely transfer” (601). “Thank God it was
off my hands,” Melville wrote in a letter to Evert Duyckinck the month that Mardi was pub-
lished, as it was “an affair of mine” that he “dread[ed] to look at” (Corr 128). By composing
Mardi, Melville came to grasp Solomon’s teaching that “all is vanity” because there was “nothing
new under the sun.” The quest for wisdom was a pursuit of the wind that led to madness and
folly, therefore, paradoxically, “every wise man knows himself to be a fool” (Book of Ecclesiastes,
M 46). The wonderful vanity of Mardi is that Melville imagined his inventive creativity might
touch, and provoke, the inspiration of wisdom. By recognizing that “fiery yearnings their own
future make” (557), Melville generated fertile “germ-dramas” (616) for the pregnant career that
ensued in Mardi’s wake.
Works Cited
Arvin, Newton. “Melville’s Mardi.” American Quarterly, Blair, Ruth. “Melville and Hawaii: Reflections on a New
vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 1950, pp. 71–81. Melville Letter.” Studies in the American Renaissance,
Beaver, Harold. “Mardi: A Sum of Inconsistencies.” 1995, pp. 229–50.
Herman Melville: Reassessments, edited by A. Robert Lee. Branch, Watson, editor. Melville: The Critical Heritage.
Vision, 1984, pp. 28–40. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974.
Berthold, Michael C. “‘Born-free-and Equal’: Benign Cliché Brodhead, Richard. “Polysensuum: Hawthorne, Melville,
and Narrative Imperialism in Melville’s Mardi.” Studies and the Form of the Novel.” 1972. Yale University,
in the Novel, vol. 25, no. 1, Spring 1993, pp. 16–27. PhD dissertation.
Bezanson, Walter. “Moby-Dick: Document, Drama, ———. “Mardi: Creating the Creative.” New Perspectives
Dream.” A Companion to Melville Studies, edited by John on Melville, edited by Faith Pullin. Edinburgh UP,
Bryant. Greenwood Press, 1986, pp. 169–210. 1978, pp. 29–53.
Davis, Merrell R. “Herman Melville’s Mardi: The Jonik, Michael. “Melville, Mardi, and Materialism.” The
Biography of a Book.” 1947. Yale University, PhD New Melville Studies, edited by Cody Marrs. Cambridge
dissertation. UP, 2019, pp. 169–85.
———. Melville’s Mardi A Chartless Voyage. Yale UP, Lyons, Paul. “‘That Wall, Shoved Near’: Reflections on
1952. Melville Studies vis-a-vis the Pacific.” Leviathan:
Dillingham, William. An Artist in the Rigging: The Early A Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2003,
Work of Herman Melville. U of Georgia P, 1972. pp. 16–17.
Dimock, Wai Chee. Empire for Liberty: Melville and the ———. “Global Melville.” A Companion to Herman
Poetics of Individualism. Princeton UP, 1991. Melville, edited by Wyn Kelley. Blackwell, 2006, pp.
Feidelson, Charles. Symbolism and American Literature. 52–67.
U of Chicago P, 1953. Marr, Timothy. The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism.
Finkelstein, Dorothee Metlitsky. Melville’s Orienda. Yale Cambridge UP, 2006.
UP, 1961. Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression
Foster, Elizabeth S. “Historical Note,” Mardi and A in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Oxford UP, 1968.
Voyage Thither. Northwestern UP and The Newberry Moore, Maxine. The Lonely Game: Melville, Mardi, and the
Library, 1970, pp. 657–81. Almanac. U of Missouri P, 1975.
Franklin, H. Bruce. The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Nurmi, Tom. “Mineral Melville.” J19: The Journal of
Mythology. Stanford UP, 1963, pp. 17–52. Nineteenth-Century Americanists, vol. 7, no. 1, Spring
———. “Introduction.” Mardi, by Herman Melville. 2019, pp. 155–83.
Capricorn, 1964, pp. v–xi. Sears, J. Michael. “Melville’s Mardi: One Book or Three?” Studies
Grey, Robin. The Complicity of Imagination: The American in the Novel, vol. 10, no. 4, Winter 1978, pp. 411–19.
Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth- Seelye, John. Melville: The Ironic Diagram. Northwestern
Century English Culture. Cambridge UP, 1997, pp. UP, 1970, pp. 29–43.
144–212. Stern, Milton. The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville.
Hadfield, Andrew. “Mardi and Spenser’s Wandering U of Illinois P, 1957.
Allegory.” Textual Practice, vol. 34, no. 7, July 2020, Swift, Jonathan. The Writings of Jonathan Swift, edited by
pp. 1207–25. Robert A. Greenberg and William Bowman Piper.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Letter to Evert Duyckinck.” 29 Norton, 1973.
August 1850, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Letter_ Van Doren, Carl. The Cambridge History of American
to_the_editor_of_the_Literary_Review Literature. 3 vols, edited by William Peterfield Trent,
Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker, eds. Herman Melville: et al., G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917.
The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge UP, 1995. Wright, Nathalia. “Introduction.” Mardi, by Herman
Horth, Lynn. “Richard Bentley’s Place in Melville’s Melville. Hendricks House, 1990, pp. xii–xxiv.
Literary Career.” Studies in the American Renaissance, Zimmerman, Brett. Herman Melville: Stargazer. McGill-
1992, pp. 229–45. Queen’s UP, 1998, pp. 29–42.
6
Discipline and Pleasure in Redburn
and White-Jacket
Édouard Marsoin
It has become common to quote Melville’s somewhat derogatory comments regarding Redburn:
His First Voyage (1849) and White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850), which he called
“two jobs, … done for money” and, in the case of Redburn, a prosaic and unambitious one, with
“no metaphysics, no conic-sections, nothing but cakes & ale” (Corr 138, 132). However, in
addition to suggesting a focus on pleasurable matters, including alcohol, the phrase “cakes & ale”
conceals a Shakespearian allusion—a quote from Twelfth Night (2.3) which Melville marked in
his copy of Shakespeare (274)—and thus reveals a dynamic literary quality. Similarly, both
Redburn and White-Jacket evince greater complexity than meets the eye, and a significant amount
of literary scholarship has sought to reevaluate their sophisticated, often remarkably perceptive,
and sometimes ambivalent grappling with issues such as immigration, nation, race, sexuality,
and discipline.
Critics agree to consider them as (incomplete) bildungsromane, in which both characters-narra-
tors are initiated into the pains and pleasures of life on board ships. Redburn, published in 1849,
tells the story of Wellingborough Redburn, an impoverished young man who decides to try his
luck at sea and comes to experience the harsh reality of life on board a Liverpool-bound merchant
vessel, The Highlander, which confounds his original romantic expectations. Published only one
year later, White-Jacket describes in forceful and at times polemical detail “the world in a
man-of-war,” the USS Neversink, and the rigors of the American Navy. The two novels are based
on Melville’s experiences on the St. Lawrence in 1839 and the USS United States in 1843–1844
(Parker 144–51, 261–88). In that respect, they also belong to the genre of sea narratives, which,
as Hester Blum has noted, traditionally foreground their truthful and realistic description of sea
labor, as opposed to the romantic tradition of James Fenimore Cooper’s sea romances, for example
(39, 86–87). This generic identity inscribes them in the literary legacy of Richard Henry Dana
Jr.’s Two Years before the Mast (1840), an author whom White-Jacket calls his “friend” (WJ 99).
Discipline and Pleasure in Redburn and White-Jacket 79
“Work and hardship,” Dana wrote in his concluding chapter, are “the true light in which a
sailor’s life is to be viewed” (347). However, even though suffering does prevail in a common
sailor’s life, it is not entirely deprived of pleasure: “a sailor’s life is at best but a mixture of a little
good with much evil, and a little pleasure with much pain” (37). Samuel Leech, the author of
Thirty Years from Home; or, A Voice from the Main Deck (1843)—another source for White-Jacket—
also included pleasures in the description of his life as a seaman: “Should the reader take the
trouble to read the following chapters, he will learn the mishaps, hardships, pleasures and suc-
cesses that befell me there” (33).
Both Redburn and White-Jacket question the categories of good and evil, pleasure and pain on
board. If critics have traditionally focused on suffering in both novels, and more specifically on
the connections between discipline and pain in White-Jacket, it is clear that their narratives also
foreground the centrality of pleasure in disciplinary practices and discourses. Indeed, as Foucault
has argued: “in discipline, punishment is only one element of a double system: gratification-
punishment” (Discipline 180). The first part of this dual “mechanism of discipline” on board
(BB 67), gratification, has been somewhat overlooked.
Cesare Casarino and Peter Bellis have proposed readings of discipline in White-Jacket based on
Foucault’s formulation. Bellis has described it as a hybrid system conflating archaic spectacles of
physical punishments, such as flogging, with modern surveillance. Captain Claret’s power on
board is absolute and panoptical: “When he stands on his Quarter-deck at sea, he absolutely
commands as far as eye can reach” (WJ 23). This commanding position makes the ship similar
to a prison—“a sort of sea-Newgate” (176)—where surveillance is generalized: “Almost every
inch is occupied; almost every inch is in plain sight; and almost every inch is continually being
visited and explored” (41). However, if sailors are constantly watched by officers—White-Jacket
uses the phrase “argus-eyed police” (178), which remarkably encapsulates the idea of panoptic
surveillance through the reference to Argus, the hundred-eyed giant in Greek mythology who
was also known as Panoptes—sailors themselves can also be “argus-eyed.” In a second occurrence
of the phrase, “some argus-eyed shipmate” (306) is in charge of watching for officers whilst his
shipmates indulge in gambling. This episode exemplifies how a sophisticated ensemble of micro-
powers and counter-powers operates on board: sailors are surveilled and surveil back.
As Foucault has argued, any disciplinary mechanism entails reactions and resistance. Following
this logic, this chapter will first focus on how sailors’ pleasures are limited and regulated by naval
discipline—primarily in White-Jacket—before turning to the way they are also produced, dis-
seminated, and multiplied in both Redburn and White-Jacket. On board, no pleasure is innocent:
all pleasures are political, and even biopolitical, since they are part and parcel of the strictly
policed “life” of sailors, the regulations of which turn the sailor population into an organized
body, as White-Jacket notes: “Were it not for these regulations a man-of-war’s crew would be
nothing but a mob” (9). The regulations of sailors’ lives are thus a perfect example of what
Foucault calls biopower and biopolitics, which is to say, the political administration and supervi-
sion of the lives of populations through regulatory controls and discourses (Sexuality 137–41). On
board, the systematic policing of sailors’ lives and bodies targets one of their pleasures in
particular: alcohol. Its consumption is regulated by collective disciplinary practices enforced by
captains, and also temperance discourses meant to reform individual behaviors. Redburn and
White-Jacket describe, discuss, and unsettle these regulations.
80 Édouard Marsoin
Regulations of Pleasures
In White-Jacket, Captain Claret’s power relies upon his sovereign good pleasure: “in most of these
matters between man and man, the Captain, instead of being a magistrate, dispensing what the
law promulgates, is an absolute ruler, making and unmaking law as he pleases” (144; emphasis
added). In particular, he can decree which leisurely activities are permitted for sailors: for in-
stance, checkers (after he was bullied into granting this right), or physical fights: “Among other
diversions at present licensed by authority in the Neversink, were those of single-stick, sparring,
hammer-and-anvil, and head-bumping. All these were under the direct patronage of the Captain”
(274). In truth, these diversions are meant to satisfy his taste for violent spectacles rather than
afford sailors any real pleasure.
Some of the pleasures allowed to sailors have a disciplinary function, such as the regular and
regulated allocations of butter and cheese twice a week (59), and most importantly of “tots” of
“grog”—rations of rum—twice a day. Small, but capital pleasures. In the American Navy,
White-Jacket reports, “the law allows one gill of spirits per day to every seaman,” delivered in
two portions (53). This practice was historically important and controversial on board American
ships: as Redburn mentions, by the mid-nineteenth century it had disappeared from mer-
chantmen such as the Highlander, thanks to the alliance of the “parsimony of ship-owners” with
the “pious efforts of Temperance Societies” (R 139). And as the narrator of Omoo notes, it had also
disappeared from American whalemen, contrary to Australian ones (O 48). Dana deemed that
“the temperance reform is the best thing that ever was undertaken for the sailor; but when the
grog is taken from him, he ought to have something in its place,” such as “a pot of coffee or
chocolate,” instead of the suppression of grog being “in most vessels, a mere saving to the owners”
(292). In The Confidence-Man, the cosmopolitan echoes such a criticism when he quotes “an irre-
ligious Parisian wit” who derides ship-owners looking for profit and “cutting off the spirit ration
without giving its equivalent” (CM 164).
On board a man-of-war like the Neversink, the distribution of grog serves a specific biopoliti-
cal, controlling purpose: “It is [the sailors’] great ‘prospect in life.’ Take away their grog, and life
possesses no further charms for them” (53). The allocation of grog thus has an impact upon both
their bodies (relying on and feeding their addiction) and their representations (nourishing their
prospects and expectations of gratification). As a correlate effect, the suppression of this gratifi-
cation becomes punitive: “It is one of the most common punishments for very trivial offences in
the Navy, to ‘stop’ a seaman’s grog for a day or a week. And as most seamen so cling to their grog,
the loss of it is generally deemed by them a very serious penalty” (140). The principle of punish-
ment here is not the imposition of pain (contrary to flogging) but the suppression of pleasure.
Men can choose to forgo their grog for money (they are then called “Temperance men—the
sailors who do not draw their government ration of grog, but take the money for it,” 179), but
in this case, it cannot be suppressed, and flogging becomes the only option left for punishment.
As a consequence, some will rather accept their ration so that it can be suppressed in case of
offence. In that regard, these regulations are, for White-Jacket, a “most serious obstacle to the
cause of temperance in the Navy” (140). However, as he explains, they are crucial to the Navy
itself: “It is hardly to be doubted, that the controlling inducement which keeps many men in the
Navy, is the unbounded confidence they have in the ability of the United States government to
supply them, regularly and unfailingly, with their daily allowance of this beverage” (53; emphasis
added). The allocation of tots in a man-of-war’s disciplinary system therefore has multiple, major
biopolitical effects on sailors’ lives, and ensures the Navy’s capacity to man its ships.
Other forms of enjoyment allotted to sailors have a disciplinary function. In the chapter enti-
tled “Theatricals in a Man-of-War,” a play is performed to celebrate the Fourth of July, as a sub-
stitute for the shortage of grog on board. The play is a simulacrum of liberty that reasserts
control over the crew after a temporary “delirium of delight” (94): “It is good to shake off, now
and then, this iron yoke round our necks,” says White-Jacket, but soon “after having once per-
mitted us sailors to be a little noisy, in a harmless way—somewhat merrily turbulent” (95), offi-
cers “shipped their quarter-deck faces again”—“an old man-of-war’s phrase, expressive of the facility
with which a sea-officer falls back upon all the severity of his dignity, after a temporary suspension
of it” (95). The pleasurable, cathartic effect of the play ultimately serves the reinforcement of
discipline. Similarly, “skylarking”—during which “for a time the wonted discipline [is] broken
through”—is, to echo Bakhtin, a carnival of “perfect license” that produces the same “effect upon
the men” as an “extra allowance of ‘grog’” (WJ 102).1 The comparison to “grog” signals a similar
disciplinary use of pleasure, and “once again the officers shipped their quarter-deck faces” (103).
Such practices—“theatricals,” “skylarking,” or days of “Liberty” given to sailors while the
Neversink lies in the bay of Rio—compare to the slave “holidays” as described in The Narrative of
the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). Samuel Otter (50–100) and Jeannine Marie DeLombard have
discussed the (debatable) analogy in White-Jacket between enslaved Black people and white
sailors, particularly in the flogging scenes (WJ 137–38, 141–42).2 The biopolitical regulation of
their pleasures is another similarity between their respective conditions. As Douglass explains:
“The days between Christmas and New Year’s day are allowed as holidays. … This time we
regarded as our own, by the grace of our masters; and we therefore used or abused it nearly as we
pleased” (66). However, the pleasures of the enslaved (“playing ball, wrestling, running foot-
races, fiddling, dancing, and drinking whisky”) are actually “part and parcel” of a disciplinary
strategy enacted by slaveholders, and used as “safety-valves” to ensure subjection:
From what I know of the effect of these holidays upon the slave, I believe them to be among the most
effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection. … These
holidays serve as conductors, or safety-valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity. …
The holidays are part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrong, and inhumanity of slavery. … [The
slaveholders’] object seems to be, to disgust their slaves with freedom, by plunging them into the
lowest depths of dissipation. For instance, the slaveholders not only like to see the slave drink of his
own accord, but will adopt various plans to make him drunk.
(66–67)
For the enslaved as for sailors, the temporary permission of excess is a perverse biopolitical regu-
lation, which proceeds from what White-Jacket describes as “mere politic dictates” (225).
Drunkenness and dissipation are not so much individual vices (however deplorable they are for
White-Jacket) but rather the effect of collective regulations. Douglass suspects the slaveholders’
1
Carnival, for Bakhtin, is a time and place of uninhibited license and temporary suspension of hierarchical ranks (10).
2
For DeLombard, Melville ultimately rejects this analogy (57) and the “rhetorical conflation of (white) citizen-sailor
and (black) slave” (61).
82 Édouard Marsoin
ulterior motive of seeking to “disgust their slaves with freedom,” while White-Jacket notes that
“the lamentable effects of suddenly and completely releasing ‘the people’ of a man-of-war from
arbitrary discipline” show that “to such, ‘liberty,’ at first, must be administered in small and
moderate quantities, increasing with the patient’s capacity to make good use of it” (227).
However, this disciplinary strategy is in fact primarily effective as a way to justify the very lim-
itation of liberty.3
At the end of the novel, White-Jacket rejects the disciplinary use of pleasures on board when
he grandiloquently objects to smoking in “the Galley, or Cookery” (386). Smoking is only per-
mitted in “this place and these hours”:
A sumptuary edict, truly, that deprived White-Jacket, for one, of a luxury to which he had long been
attached. For how can the mystical motives, the capricious impulses of a luxurious smoker go and
come at the beck of a Commodore’s command? No! when I smoke, be it because of my sovereign good
pleasure I choose so to do, though at so unseasonable an hour that I send round the town for a brasier
of coals. What! smoke by a sun-dial? Smoke on compulsion? Make a trade, a business, a vile recurring
calling of smoking?
(387; emphasis added)
He thereby stands against the “tyranny” of pleasure regulations—“preserve me from a tyranny

like this,” he exclaims (387)—and asserts instead his “sovereign good pleasure” whilst relin-
quishing the pleasure of smoking. His subjectifying reaction is an act of resistance and self-asser-
tion within the oppressive framework of pleasure regulations: “so abhorrent was this sumptuary
law that I altogether abandoned the luxury rather than enslave it to a time and a place” (387;
emphasis added). White-Jacket ain’t a “slave.”
In both Redburn and White-Jacket, other sailors, by contrast, may take less absolute or more
morally debatable measures, but, despite the disciplinary system on board and the seemingly
deterministic fate of alcohol addiction, they also paradoxically manage to gain some degree of
liberty and subjectivation through the tactics they use to multiply their pleasures.
Disseminations of Pleasures
In the face of pleasure regulations, Foucault’s mechanism—according to which regulations
trigger opposition, production, and dissemination of alternative, unlicensed pleasures—unfolds.
Sailors seek to negotiate the constraints of their living conditions and thus create and multiply
their pleasures.
In Redburn, a shortage of tobacco on board leads them to “hit upon an ingenious device … to
allay the severity of the depression under which they languished. Ropes were unstranded, and
the yarns picked apart; and, cut up into small bits, were used as a substitute for the weed” (272;
emphasis added). Sailors create a new pleasure out of old ropes, and the text poetically turns these
ropes into a synesthetic material that combines tobacco, food and drink, touch, taste and smell:
“Old ropes were preferred; especially those which had … contracted an epicurean dampness,
3
As DeLombard argues, a “similar treatment” between sailors and the enslaved is “irreducible to equivalent status”
(62). Even when treated as enslaved, a sailor is not enslaved.
making still richer their ancient, cheese-like flavor,” and their “hidden and aromatic ‘heart’” is
“exceedingly agreeable to the touch; diffuses a pungent odor, as of an old dusty bottle of Port”
(272). This sensual, aesthetic object even tends toward the erotic, “an object which no man, who
enjoys his dinners, could refrain from hanging over, and caressing” (272; emphasis added).
Similarly, in White-Jacket, the shortage of grog leads sailors to use “Eau-de-Cologne” as a substi-
tute: “With brown sugar … and hot water begged from the galley-cooks, the men made all
manner of punches, toddies, and cocktails, letting fall therein a small drop of tar, like a bit of
brown toast, by way of imparting a flavor” (55). Here again, sailors create their (alcoholic)
pleasures.
Sailors’ pleasures can be communal and shared: during “theatricals” and “skylarking” in
White-Jacket, or in moments of collective enjoyment in Redburn, such as the comical scenes of the
jealous “little pale-faced English tailor” and his “coquette” of a wife (R 265), the “deck-tub per-
formances” of the O’Regan twins (in which “the sailors took great pleasure,” 268), or the
delightful music of Carlo’s “fine old organ” (250). However, their pleasures can also be “distinc-
tive”—which is to say, expressive and constitutive of social differences (Bourdieu 491)—and
separate seamen into factions and classes. In Redburn, Wellingborough, himself the son of a gen-
tleman, is glad to enjoy the socially distinctive pleasure of Harry Bolton’s company: “charmed
with his appearance, and all eagerness to enjoy the society of this incontrovertible son of a gen-
tleman—a kind of pleasure so long debarred [him]” (216–17). In White-Jacket, under the tyran-
nical rule of the captain’s good pleasure, the common people are divided into ranks that enjoy
specific pleasures. The main-top society is the best illustration of this phenomenon: isolated
from the main deck, it creates its own space of (mainly aesthetic) pleasures, which includes
reading, polite conversation, and poetry.4 White-Jacket stresses these “rare times in that top”
(15) as well as the enjoyment of poetry “shared with certain select friends” (41). For him, not all
pleasures are acceptable: naïve pleasures such as Landless’s, limited to “rum and tobacco,” make
him a “fellow without shame,” “dead to the least dignity of manhood,” while other man-of-
war’s-men of higher “moral sensitiveness,” such as Jack Chase, “almost redeemed all the rest”
(384–85). Not all sailors’ pleasures are equal or equally respectable.
As opposed to the valorized, elevated pleasures of the main-top, the restrictions of the daily
tots of rum give rise to the development of hidden, forbidden pleasures smuggled on board. The
space of smuggling is situated in the few unwatched and unoccupied inches of the panoptic ship
(since “almost every inch is occupied” [WJ 41; emphasis added]). Smuggling alcohol takes place
at the risk of physical suffering—since it is, along with inebriation, the main cause of flogging
(177)—to multiply escapist, alcoholic pleasures. White-Jacket, while condemning the
master-at-arms’ smuggling operations (“a complicated system of underhand villainy” [184]),
cannot help expressing curiosity toward him (“he was a man to study and digest; so, upon a little
reflection, I was not displeased at his presence” [185]) as well as a certain admiration for the
skills he and his aides have acquired in the detection of gambling: “the mysteries of man-of-war
vice are wonderful” (308). For White-Jacket, who enjoys studying the sailors’ numerous tactics
of unlicensed enjoyment (involving alcohol smuggling or gambling), the vitality of vice is an
object of epistemological fascination.
4
Dana refers to a similar distinctive “enjoyment” he derived from reading Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830):
“It was far too good for a sailor” (176).
84 Édouard Marsoin
Other pleasures smuggled on board (the ship and the text) are of a sexual nature: the sexual
pleasures (and pains) of “these wooden-walled Gomorrahs of the deep” (WJ 376). From mastur-
bation to sodomy and the possibility of rape, they are referenced without being made entirely
explicit, and disseminated in the ragged edges of the narration through multiple innuendoes,
such as this allusion to a midshipman “who was apt to indulge at times in undignified familiar-
ities with some of the men” (216), and preteritions, for instance when White-Jacket explains
that from “close confinement … arise other evils, so direful that they will hardly bear even so
much as an allusion” (375). The name of one of the seamen, “Shakings,” could also hint at sex
between men, since “shaking” was a slang term used by sailors for pederasty, according to
Matthew Knip (398). For Knip, Melville’s narrative stance is ambivalent, paying lip-service to
the condemnation of sodomy as a vice on the one hand, while hinting at pleasurable transgres-
sions on the other hand (362, 397–98).
Both novels thus underline the contextual possibilities of pleasures and pains, open or secret,
moral or immoral. Both are also concerned with the contextual fabrication of evil and depravity.5
For Redburn, sailors are “not villains who loved wickedness for the sake of it” but are rather
made so by “hardships, and neglect, and ill-usage” (47). Even Jackson’s “wickedness seemed to
spring from his woe” (105). Similarly, for White-Jacket, “depravity in the oppressed” is the
“effect” of “oppression” (142): “most of the sailor iniquities practiced therein are indirectly to be
ascribed to the morally debasing effects of the unjust, despotic, and degrading laws under which
the man-of-war’s-man lives” (304; emphasis added). He makes clear that the moral is (bio)
political. As a result, when Redburn stresses again the circumstantial quality of sailors’ depravity
(due to the lack of beneficial influences on board and the sudden relaxation of all discipline on
shore) and declares, “the bad things of their condition come under the head of those chronic evils
which can only be ameliorated, it would seem, by ameliorating the moral organization of all civ-
ilization” (R 138), what we should read instead of “moral” is “political” or even “biopolitical”
organization. In Billy Budd, the narrator makes a similar point when he asserts that “less often
than with landsmen do [sailors’] vices, so called, partake of crookedness of heart, seeming less to
proceed from viciousness than exuberance of vitality after long constraint” (BB 10).6 He thus
describes a population whose bodies and “vitality” are confined and constrained by regulatory
apparatuses: the very definition of “biopolitics.”
In Redburn and White-Jacket, the moral and the (bio)political are also connected in the narra-
tors’ stances regarding alcohol. To be sure, in numerous instances, both deplore the “terrific dis-
sipation” (R 32) and drunkenness of sailors, or describe the Navy as “the asylum for all drunkards”
(WJ 54). However, alluding to and turning against the temperance novels of the period, their
discourse on alcohol is more complex than it seems: the direct, moral condemnation of “the ever-
devilish god of grog” (WJ 176, 390) becomes nuanced by the ambivalent narratives of Redburn
and White-Jacket themselves.
5
This is another similarity between Melville and Douglass: their acute understanding of the way a “system” (the
“system” of slavery, as Douglass calls it, or the disciplinary system on board ships) has a transformational impact on the
individual characters of both the oppressed and the oppressors.
6
In Billy Budd, the sailors’ contextual vices contrast with the “innate,” “natural depravity” of Claggart (BB 28–29),
whose similarities with Jackson have often been noted. This complicates Melville’s interrogation of the nature of evil,
recurring throughout his oeuvre.
Intemperate Novels
In the mid-nineteenth century, temperance discourses aimed to check the US population’s alco-
holic compulsions not only for the sake of the individual citizen, but also for the economic,
social, and (bio)political sake of the Republic.7 The US temperance movement rose to promi-
nence after the foundation of the American Temperance Society in 1826 and the Washingtonian
Temperance Society in 1840. It gave rise to the literary genre of temperance novels—of which
the best-known examples today are Walt Whitman’s Franklin Evans (1842) or T. S. Arthur’s Ten
Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There (1854)—and to the narrative archetype of “the
drunkard narrative” (Parsons 1–17). These narratives believed in their power to reform people’s
behaviors and regulate their alcoholic pleasures. Temperance concerns were also common in sea
narratives: Dana and Leech often foreground their pro-temperance views. The originality of
Melville’s treatment of temperance motifs in Redburn and White-Jacket lies in the way the two
novels’ moral didacticism is unsettled by the dynamics of the text: instead of expressing a clear
condemnation of alcohol as the root of all evil, their problematization of alcohol consumption is
part and parcel of a refined textual dynamic that offsets alcohol’s most damnable effects against
more celebratory passages.
Redburn indirectly questions the reformatory power of literature in the oft-quoted passage in
which he declares that guidebooks are “the least reliable books in all literature; and nearly all
literature, in one sense, is made up of guide-books” (157). If guidebooks are unreliable, the moral
content of books understood as moral guidebooks—a common simile in temperance novels, as in
Whitman’s Franklin Evans: “As works of fiction have often been made the vehicle of morality, I
have adopted the novel experiment of making one of the sort a messenger of the cause of
Temperance” (111)—is equally unstable. White-Jacket also questions the possibility of reform
through literature when the narrator mentions the young Surgeon’s mate whose “Quixotism” has
not been cured but worsened by his reading of Don Quixote (228).
Instead, both Redburn and White-Jacket are, as White-Jacket explains regarding man-of-wars,
“full of strange contradictions” (390) in their description of alcohol. They navigate between
opposite stances which are never peremptorily fixed, and fruitfully dramatize “strange contradic-
tions” between what the narrators sometimes say and what their narratives actually perform. This
ambivalent and dynamic tension between occasional admonishments and celebratory passages
stands in stark contrast with the consistent and monolithic moral condemnation of alcohol
voiced by temperance novels, from which Melville, all the while, borrows key motifs.8
At the beginning of Redburn, Wellingborough explains being a member of both a “Juvenile
Total Abstinence Association” (42) and an “Anti-Smoking Society” (46), which hints that these
associations often specifically targeted young people (Rosenthal 518). Later on, numerous tem-
perance motifs appear throughout his narrative: a woman killed by a drunken Spanish sailor
7
On the biopolitics of reform movements, see Tompkins 5–6.
8
This textual phenomenon is, to a degree, related to what David S. Reynolds calls “dark temperance”: temperance
motifs that are more titillating than dissuasive (Beneath the American Renaissance 68–69). On temperance literature in
the mid-nineteenth-century US, see also his “Black Cats and Delirium Tremens,” which dedicates a few pages to
Melville (35–40). Nicholas O. Warner (155–78) and Corey Evan Thompson have studied representations of alcohol in
Melville’s fiction. Both, however, tend to exaggerate Melville’s supposed authorial intentions.
86 Édouard Marsoin
(190), the spontaneous combustion of a dead-drunk sailor (244), the micro temperance narrative
of Handsome Mary in Liverpool, battered by her drunken husband (131). In White-Jacket, the
narrator alludes to Hawthorne’s temperance tale “A Rill from the Town-Pump” (283), and uses
descriptive topoi of drunkard tales when he notes the “haggard cheek and sunken eye” (241) of
Mandeville, before telling his intemperate life story: “brandy had been his bane” (242).
Some of these motifs receive a narrative treatment that unsettles their meaning: for instance,
the scene in which Redburn breaches his temperance pledge and has his first sip of alcohol. The
pledge is a key motif of temperance novels, as in Franklin Evans, whose narrator has “an abiding
faith in the ability to reform, through the Glorious Temperance Pledge” (55). In a proleptic
comment, Redburn notes that “the evil effect of breaking one’s bond upon any occasion what-
ever, was witnessed in the present case; for it insidiously opened the way to subsequent breaches
of it, which though very slight, yet carried no apology with them” (44). This passage echoes the
way temperance novels dramatize the first sip of alcohol as the first step of a descent into the hell
of drunkenness. In Franklin Evans, the narrator recalls how his friend Colby initiated him to the
“fatal pleasure” of drink and analeptically comments: “I tremble now as I look back upon the
results which have sprung from the conduct of that single night, as from one seed of evil” (28).
In Redburn, however, these “subsequent breaches” are scenes of sheer alcoholic enjoyment.
Wellingborough first shares food, tobacco, and ale with a jolly bachelor skipper in Liverpool, “an
old ruby of a fellow”—though his conscience eventually smites him for “thus freely indulging in
the pleasures of the table” (168)—then exchanges “pleasant sympathies” with English “rustics”
in an inn where he seems to forget all about his temperate youth: he leaves “exhilarated” by “the
ale [he] had drunk,” and even praises it as “fine old ale; yes, English ale, ale brewed in England!”
(211–12). This celebration contrasts with Leech’s stern condemnation of English ale in a section
of Thirty Years from Home entitled “Beer, a Hindrance to the Temperance Cause.” He describes
English taverns as crowded with “the laboring classes, who were spending their hard-earned
pence, for foaming tankards of English ale, the favorite beverage of John Bull, and one of the
greatest hindrances to the progress of the temperance cause in that country” (Thirty Years 296).
By contrast, Redburn’s progress is rather an initiation to pleasure, in which he remains master of
his sovereign good pleasure, than a descent into hell.
Another central motif in temperance literature, delirium tremens, receives an equally ambiva-
lent treatment. Delirium tremens appears in both Redburn—in which a sailor suffers from it and
jumps overboard (55), while Wellingborough later reads a book on this topic (86)—and White-
Jacket, where White-Jacket reports a sailor’s view upon this risk:
Tell him that the delirium tremens and the mania-a-potu lie in ambush for drunkards, he will say to
you, “Let them bear down upon me, then, before the wind; anything that smacks of life is better than
to feel Davy Jones’s chest-lid on your nose.” He is reckless as an avalanche; and though his fall destroy
himself and others, yet a ruinous commotion is better than being frozen fast in unendurable solitudes.
No wonder, then, that he goes all lengths to procure the thing he craves; no wonder that he pays the
most exorbitant prices, breaks through all law, and braves the ignominious lash itself, rather than be
deprived of his stimulus.
(176–77)
In this passage, the narrator cedes the floor to a generic sailor, whose retort, imaginatively
reported in direct speech, explains his desire for alcohol. It is not simply a celebration of a
dangerous vice, but a type of personal wisdom, a paradoxical panegyric that is suffused with
biblical culture, for its image of the “smack” of life as “better” than the “feel” of death echoes
Ecclesiastes (9:4): “For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is
better than a dead lion,” and Saint Paul (2 Co. 2:16): “To the one we are the savour of death unto
death; and to the other the savour of life unto life.” The narrator does not express moral judgment
or disagreement, but instead provides an open space for the expression and potential under-
standing (“no wonder”) of the sailor’s desire for vitality unbound. The amoral, risky, avalanche-
like movement of lively, pleasurable affects is deemed more valuable than a deadly, “frozen”
fixedness.
In addition, this passage echoes the Eau-de-Cologne drunken scene, which also turns upon its
head a traditional temperance motif: the “stench” of drunkenness is transfigured into the “Sabæan
odors” of perfume. White-Jacket regrets this humorous and odoriferous scene—“the whole
frigate smelled like a lady’s toilet; the very tar-buckets were fragrant; and from the mouth of
many a grim, grizzled old quarter-gunner came the most fragrant of breaths” (55)—when it
comes to an end: “alas!” he exclaims (56).9 This poetic transmutation of perfume into alcohol and
alcohol into perfume, conflating taste and smell (the smack of life), is reinforced by a meliorative,
celebratory intertext which runs counter to the intertext of temperance literature. Indeed, the
narrator quotes Paradise Lost to conclude this scene of drunken beauty: “For many a league, /
Cheered with the grateful smell, old Ocean smiled” (56). The original passage in Milton describes
the “purer air” of Paradise, which “to the heart inspires / Vernal delight and joy” and recalls the
“Sabean Odours from the spicy shore / Of Araby the blest,” enjoyed by “them who sail / Beyond
the Cape of Hope” (Paradise Lost 4.153–67, 110). Even Satan is “pleased” by these “odorous
sweets.” Through Melville’s intertextual use of what Barthes would call a “paradisiac text”
(Pleasure 8), alcohol thus becomes, in a literal and literary way, the central motif of a beautiful
and delightful scene.
Finally, a tale of two drunkards—Captain Claret and Mad Jack—is emblematic of Melville’s
nuanced literary reworking of the drunkard narrative in White-Jacket. Captain Claret is a hypo-
crite whose “personal abhorrence of smuggling and drunkenness” (183) cannot cover his own
addiction to the bottle, suggested by his very name and its humorous genealogy: “he did like his
glass of Madeira uncommonly well, and was an undoubted descendant from the hero of the
Battle of the Brandywine” (172). The second main drunkard on board is Mad Jack, whose alco-
holic “vice” is “inveterate” (34). A crucial and most meaningful difference between them is
foregrounded in a passage where the Neversink is caught in a gale (110–12). Captain Claret and
Mad Jack have opposite views as to how to deal with it: the captain is in favor of “scudding” while
Mad Jack advocates for “running up into the wind’s eye.” In this “manhood-testing conjuncture”—a
phrase that recalls the essential (dis)connection between drunkenness and effective masculinity
for the temperance movement and temperance literature (Parsons 53–74)—the Captain fails
miserably: “And though this is only a surmise, nevertheless, as having some knowledge of brandy
and mankind, White-Jacket will venture to state that, had Captain Claret been an out-and-out
temperance man, he would never have given that most imprudent order to hard up the helm”
(WJ 111). As opposed to Claret, Mad Jack is able to prevent his alcoholic propensities from
endangering the ship:
9
In Moby-Dick, the description of ambergris operates a similar transmutation from stench to fragrancy: its “faint stream
of perfume” emerges from a “tide of bad smells” issued from a whale’s corpse (407).
88 Édouard Marsoin
It has been said that Mad Jack himself was a lover of strong drink. So he was. But here we only see
the virtue of being placed in a station constantly demanding a cool head and steady nerves, and the
misfortune of filling a post that does not at all times demand these qualities. So exact and methodical
in most things was the discipline of the frigate, that, to a certain extent, Captain Claret was exempted
from personal interposition in many of its current events, and thereby, perhaps, was he lulled into
security, under the enticing lee of his decanter.
But as for Mad Jack, he must stand his regular watches, and pace the quarter-deck at night, and
keep a sharp eye to windward. Hence, at sea, Mad Jack tried to make a point of keeping sober,
though in very fine weather he was sometimes betrayed into a glass too many … . But with Cape
Horn before him, he took the temperance pledge outright, till that perilous promontory should be
far astern.
(111–12)
The narrator offers here a typology of drunkards that is more refined than what traditional
temperance narratives typically suggest: Captain Claret, the only person on board who is not
subjected to any regulation, fails his masculinity and professional capability test, while Mad Jack
shows he can control his intemperance in times of peril and take a “temperance pledge” that is
adapted to context. Here again, it is one’s distinct situation (or “station”) on board that can
explain how the pleasures of the bottle are acceptable or unacceptable, innocuous or truly dan-
gerous.10 The drunkard is not dangerous by nature, but by degree. As the narrator noted in his
initial portrait of Mad Jack: “He drinks. And so do we all” (34). Mad Jack’s circumstantial
pledge echoes Redburn’s remark, when he first breaks his temperance pledge, that such pledges
should include provisions in cases of absolute necessity: “I would advise temperance people to
attend to this matter in the future” (42). Though humorous, this comment points to the same
lesson: a temperance pledge does not need to be absolute, but rather should recognize some
degree of flexibility toward alcoholic pleasures, which are not absolutely immoral or depraved or
dangerous per se, but context-dependent and circumstantial.
In White-Jacket, the narrator mentions the unintentional effect of some of his comparisons: he
fears that “unwittingly” he may have “ennobled, by grand historical comparisons,” the
master-at-arms (284). A similar effect is true regarding the description of alcohol on board. In
both Redburn and White-Jacket, no definitive moralizing conclusion regarding the vices and vir-
tues of alcoholic pleasures can be drawn, as opposed to Leech’s absolute position, for example,
when he praises “the bright star of temperance” and describes the transformational impact a
“Lecture on Temperance” had on him: “This discourse fell like light on some dark opaque, it
illuminated my understanding, disturbed my conscience” (Thirty Years 282). By contrast, light
and darkness, good and evil, are not so clear-cut in Melville’s novels: instead of describing them
as metaphysical, innate characteristics, Redburn and White-Jacket sophisticatedly describe the
contextual, deterministic mechanisms from which they stem. The “life” and “vitality” of sailors
are enmeshed in biopolitical, disciplinary forms—policing practices and temperance discourses—
that seek to regulate their pleasures but also produce perverse effects: their vitality overflows
these circumscriptions. This overflow, in itself, is neither moral or immoral, good or bad. It is,
in fact, somewhat admirable.
10
Later, White-Jacket notes that Captain Claret’s character is, like the common sailor’s, dependent upon usages on
board: “What he was, the usages of the Navy had made him” (367).
That is precisely why Redburn and White-Jacket are not mere “jobs”: reworking and compli-
cating the codes of sea narratives and temperance narratives, overflowing from what their fic-
tional narrators sometimes seem to say, they acquire the literary merit of dramatizing unsuspected
resources and capabilities of enjoyment beyond preconceived moralizing postures. In the passage
from Twelfth Night that Melville quoted to describe Redburn, Sir Toby the “merry man” attacks
Malvolio the “puritan” and asserts his right to pleasure: “Dost thou think, because thou art vir-
tuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” (Twelfth Night 274). Similarly, in a complex and
nuanced manner, Redburn and White-Jacket raise the questions of the possibility and the right to
pleasure in the sailors’ strictly regulated life aboard ships. In that respect, they are indeed intem-
perate novels.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Knip, Matthew. “Homosocial Desire and Erotic
Helene Iswolsky. Indiana UP, 1984. Communitas in Melville’s Imaginary: The Evidence of
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Van Buskirk.” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century
Richard Miller. Hill and Wang, 1975. American Literature and Culture, vol. 62, no. 2, 2016,
Bellis, Peter. “Discipline and the Lash in Melville’s pp. 355–414.
White-Jacket.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, Leech, Samuel. Thirty Years from Home; or, A Voice from the
vol. 7, no. 2, 2005, pp. 25–40. Main Deck: Being the Experience of Samuel Leech Who Was
Blum, Hester. The View from the Masthead: Maritime for Six Years in the British and American Navies. Boston:
Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives. U Tappan, Whittemore & Mason, 1843.
of North Carolina P, 2008. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Oxford UP, 2005.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Otter, Samuel. Melville’s Anatomies. U of California P, 1999.
Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography, Vol. 1,
Harvard UP, 1984. 1819–1851. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
Casarino, Cesare. Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad Parsons, Elaine Frantz. Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards
in Crisis. U of Minnesota P, 2002. and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United
Dana, Richard Henry, Jr. Two Years before the Mast and States. Johns Hopkins UP, 2003.
Other Voyages. Library of America, 2005. Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The
DeLombard, Jeannine Marie. “White-Jacket: Telling Who Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville.
Is—and Aint—a Slave.” The New Cambridge Companion Knopf, 1988.
to Herman Melville, edited by Robert S. Levine. ———. “Black Cats and Delirium Tremens: Temperance
Cambridge UP, 2014, pp. 51–67. and the American Renaissance.” The Serpent in the Cup:
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Temperance in American Literature, edited by David S.
Douglass, an American Slave. Autobiographies. Library of Reynolds and Debra J. Rosenthal. U of Massachusetts
America, 1994. P, 1997, pp. 22–59.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Rosenthal, Debra J. “Temperance Novels and Moral
Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Vintage Books, Reform.” The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol.
1991. 5, The American Novel to 1870, edited by J. Gerald
———. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Kennedy and Leland S. Person. Oxford UP, 2014, pp.
Translated by Robert Hurley. Pantheon Books, 1978. 517–31.
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Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night or What You Will. Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies
The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare. Boston: in the 19th Century. New York UP, 2012.
Hilliard, Gray, 1837. Melville’s copy available on Warner, Nicholas O. Spirits of America: Intoxication in
Melville’s Marginalia Online, edited by Steven Olsen- Nineteenth-Century American Literature. U of Oklahoma
Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. Marnon. P, 1997.
Thompson, Corey Evan. Alcohol in the Writings of Herman Whitman, Walt. Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale
Melville: “The Ever-Devilish God of Grog.” McFarland, of the Times, edited by Christopher Castiglia and Glenn
2015. Hendler. Duke UP, 2007.
7
Moby-Dick
Geoffrey Sanborn
I heard a story once about a professor who, after having taught Moby-Dick for many years, real-
ized that he had never actually taught Moby-Dick, understood as a text that extends from the
word “Etymology” to the word “FINIS.” He had, instead, taught teachable selections from Moby-
Dick, selections that could be boiled down to wisdom-statements with academic currency. Most
of the selections, moreover, had come from just 20 of the book’s 135 chapters (here is my rough
guess as to what those chapters were: “Loomings”; “The Spouter-Inn”; “A Bosom Friend”; “The
Lee Shore”; “Knights and Squires”; “Ahab”; “The Mast-Head”; “The Quarter-Deck”; “Moby
Dick”; “The Whiteness of the Whale”; “Fast Fish and Loose Fish”; “The Castaway”; “A Squeeze
of the Hand”; “The Try-Works”; “The Doubloon”; “A Bower in the Arsacides”; “The Carpenter”;
“The Candles”; “The Symphony”; and “The Chase—Third Day”). Not long afterwards, the pro-
fessor offered a graduate seminar on Moby-Dick whose aim was to expand the frame, to extend the
students’ readings of the novel beyond those sacralized chapters and passages. According to my
friend, who was a student in that course, one of the classes focused primarily on “Midnight
Aloft—Thunder and Lightning,” which consists of thirty-six words spoken by Tashtego on the
main-top. What my friend remembered most vividly from that day was the sense of excitement
in the room, an excitement that derived not from that chapter’s arresting magnificence but from
the way in which it could be made to serve as a kind of passageway, enabling one to crawl from
a Moby-Dick one knows too well toward a Moby-Dick one hardly knows at all.
When people say that there is nothing left to say about Moby-Dick, they are saying that there
are no new meanings to be found in it, no fresh conceptual vantage-points to be discovered. But
reading for meaning—seeking the meaning of certain ambiguous passages, seeking the mega-
meaning of the work as a whole—has never been the only kind of reading that is available to us.
One of our most important alternatives to it is immersive reading—reading that continuously
92 Geoffrey Sanborn
gathers new and heterogeneous elements into itself, that keeps arriving at and departing from a
state of relative comprehension. Immersive reading can turn not-yet-knowing into a fruitful
condition; it can make it possible to sense things that cannot be sensed by other means.1 At a
moment when extractive, exegetical readings do indeed seem to be providing diminishing
returns, perhaps we should grant ourselves, when reading Moby-Dick, more freedom to “devolve
consciousness into a heightened unconsciousness,” as the psychoanalytic theorist Christopher
Bollas puts it (16). We should not exclude knowledge-claims—they are probably impossible to
exclude, anyway—but neither should we grant them an automatic priority.
Here is an example of a “heightened unconsciousness” response to a text, taken from Melville’s
marginalia in Thomas Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale. As the digital facsimile of
Beale’s Natural History shows, Melville scored and marked with an x the following sentence: “And
when the rich amber-coloured store was placed below in the sure hold, then up ran the busy mar-
iners, and stretched upon the yards with willing hands the whitened sails, and heaved with
urgent hope for kindly gales to waft them to their homes” (Beale 358). In the bottom margin of
the page, Melville placed another x and wrote, “Sort of a ground-swell in this sentence”
(“Marginalia”). What he seems to have meant is that after an opening clause in which the stressed
phrases diminish in length (“rich amber-coloured store,” “placed below,” “sure hold”), there is a
surge of energy (“then up ran the busy mariners”) that, like a vast ground-swell, is prolonged,
both by a pair of verbs describing the sailors’ actions (“and stretched … and heaved”) and by a
pair of showy phrases in iambic tetrameter (“with willing hands the whitened sails … with
urgent hope for kindly gales”), before subsiding into a dreamy expectation: “to waft them to their
homes.” Melville’s marginal comment is, quite obviously, neither a summary nor an interpreta-
tion of what Beale is saying. It is, instead, a record of an association, a bringing-into-conscious-
ness of a dreamlike transition from the feel of the sentence to the feel of an ocean’s slow heaving.
In what follows, I want to suggest that this style of reading can make an enormous difference
when brought to bear on Moby-Dick. I want to suggest, as well, that Moby-Dick can be an active
partner in this process, insofar as Melville repeatedly attempts to draw his readers into the kinds
of states that I have been describing. Finally, I want to suggest that our prolonged experience of
those states—which can be part of our orientations towards many things other than books—can
make it possible to know, immersively, certain things that we could not have known otherwise.
If we prioritize Moby-Dick’s “message-carrying air” (MD 450) over any one message in particular,
if we pause over the atmospheres that make its interrelationships possible, we may be able to
begin thinking about Moby-Dick in ways that surprise us at least a little, that seem to emerge, at
least in part, from processes we do not entirely control, from places not entirely our own.
*
The most obvious way of heightening one’s unconscious response to Moby-Dick is by reading in
ways that are attuned to rhythm and melody. For example, if I am reading “Merry Christmas,”
in which the Pequod sets sail, I might sense something aesthetically striking about a sentence
where Ishmael expresses his hopes for the voyage: “Spite of this frigid winter night in the bois-
terous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there was yet, it then seemed to me, many
a pleasant haven in store; and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the
1
For other examples of this general approach, which has antecedents in pragmatism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis,
see Billington, Bruns, Davis, and Felski.
Moby-Dick 93
spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer” (104). In addition to mentally summa-

rizing the sentence’s gist and moving forward, I might carry its feel with me; it might accom-
pany me through the rest of the book like a song that has gotten stuck in my head. This is what
it sounds like to me:
Spite of this FRIGid WINter NIGHT in the BOIsterous AtLANtic,

spite of my WET FEET and WETter JACKet,
there was YET, it THEN seemed to ME, many a PLEAsant HAven in STORE;
and MEADS and GLADES so eTERnally VERnal,
that the GRASS shot UP by the SPRING, unTRODden, unWILTed,
reMAINS at midSUMmer.
The tightly packed stresses in the first two lines create a tension that is lessened in the third
line, where the meter changes and slows. Then, after the semicolon, the wet, cold reality gives
way to an elaborately green fantasy, in which “the spring” eternally shoots up grass in an
untouched haven. Spite of reality, there is yet imagination, the sentence tells me—and at the
same time, on the lower frequencies, it sort of sings something to me, something like, “spite of
woodenness, there are yet expressive styles,” styles that can lend force and duration to whatever
one is imagining.
In “The First Lowering,” I might get stuck on this sentence: “The wind increased to a howl;
the waves dashed their bucklers together; the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around
us like a white fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning, immortal in these
jaws of death!” (225). The first two clauses and the beginning of the third communicate the feel
of the scene, mainly through their intensifying verbs (“increased” … “dashed” … “roared, forked,
and crackled”). Then a tagged-on simile—“like a white fire upon the prairie”—morphs into an
extended vision of the sailors burning without being consumed, a vision so vivid that it virtually
leaves the ocean storm behind. Something about that short-short-long structure might recall,
from somewhere in me, other sentences of its kind, such as the following sentence from
“Nantucket,” which consists of four lengthening phrases followed by a short-short-long burst:
They first caught crabs and quahogs in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mack-
erel; more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at last, launching a navy of
great ships on the sea, explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round
it; peeped in at Behring’s Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting war with the might-
iest animated mass that has survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous!
(64)
The rhetorical flourishes of that final burst (“ALL … ALL … EVerLASTing WAR … MIGHTiest
ANimated MASS … MOST MONstrous and MOST MOUNtainous!”) might resonate with the
dramatic winding-up of a sentence in “The Pequod Meets the Virgin”—
As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and
as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its
depths; what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the UTmost
MONster of the SEAS was WRITHing and WRENCHing in AGony!
(356)
94 Geoffrey Sanborn
—or the very differently paced flourish at the end of a sentence in “Wheelbarrow”:
Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-
wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while from others came a sound of car-
penters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that
new cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second
ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye.
(60)
Eventually, the feelings that are induced in me by those kinds of sentences might begin to give
rise to thoughts. At a certain point, I might begin to think that identities and relationships
depend on energization, that energization depends on access to transformative structures, and
that many of Melville’s sentences are structures of this kind. My attention might then turn to the
middles of those sentences, where language is being used in a kind of self-priming way, to hold
open, by dilatory means (“carpenters and coopers … fires and forges”) a space in which something
new might emerge. In a heightened-unconscious way, I might begin to think about how the
non-semantic aspects of writing influence the development of ideas, or about how writing feels
its way toward “a lucky point of view” (271), from which one glimpses something one does not
even know one is seeking. And then I might sense an analogy between the structure of these
sentences and the structure of many of Moby-Dick’s chapters, which start prosaically, make the
most of themselves, and then rise to an intellectual/aesthetic climax (“Brit,” “The Battering
Ram,” “The Honor and Glory of Whaling,” etc.). I might begin to think that the book is not so
much a continuous narrative as it is a modular project, in which the aim is to start plainly, get
into a state of maximized creative susceptibility to details, and then showcase what the energized
mind can make of things.
Another way of stimulating a heightened-unconscious experience of the book is, as I sug-
gested earlier, by responding to the book’s own cues. As is well known, there are several passages
in the book in which Ishmael builds into his account of individuality an unaccountable psychic
dimension (“The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft
by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick?” [187]; “And though, doubtless, some at least of
the imaginative impressions about to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few
perhaps were entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be able to recall them
now” [192].) But there are also other passages, often much lengthier, in which unconscious
processes are not so much indicated as enacted. The best example, I think, is the entirety of
Chapter 57, “Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in
Stars.” Coming on the heels of a pair of chapters entitled “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales”
and “Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes,”
Chapter 57 might seem to be, from a plot-and-character-based perspective, almost insultingly
irrelevant—the supplement of a supplement of a supplement. Its title promises nothing more
than a fanciful survey of whale-image sites and its opening paragraph, which sets us on Tower-
Hill in London, where “a crippled beggar (or kedger, as the sailors say), [is] holding a painted
board before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg” (269), virtually mocks
the idea of narrative continuity.
But from that essentially random starting point—the whale-painting on the beggar’s
board—something incredible grows. In the next paragraph, Ishmael drifts associatively into
Moby-Dick 95
sailors’ “lively sketches of whales” on whale-teeth (269), the “dentistical-looking implements”

they sometimes use (269–70), and the jackknives that they mostly rely on. Art with jackknives
seems to require contextualization, so he spends three paragraphs on the extraordinary patience
that sailors develop after a long time away from home, which, when combined with a weak-
ening of one’s allegiances to authorities, can give rise to artworks of “miraculous intricacy”
(270)—almost as intricate as what native Hawaiian artists, with a similarly “savage” patience
and independence, can generate out of sharks’ teeth and pieces of wood. Then there are wooden
whales in forecastles, brass whales used as knockers on country-house doors, and sheet-iron
whales used as church-weathervanes. And then—things are beginning to get dreamy now—
there are those images of whales that may be glimpsed in the massive rocks “strewn in fantastic
groupings” at the bases of cliffs, rocks “partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks
against them in a surf of green surges” (270). And images of whales that may be seen in passing
on the “undulating ridges” of mountains (271). And “great whales in the starry heavens, and
boats in pursuit of them.” And I have boarded a constellation-ship, Ishmael tells us, “and
joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the
Flying Fish.” “Would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies,” he cries, “to see
whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal
sight!” (271).
The chapter, which ends there, is obviously another manifestation of the modular project I
have just sketched out, in which descriptions are metonymically extended until at some strange
moment one is transported elsewhere. What makes it special, I think, is that it brings forward
the hard-to-grasp movement in chapters—or paragraphs, or sentences—of this kind. Beginning
from nowhere in particular, just an out-of-the-way scene that he has retrieved from his memory
or drawn from his imagination, Ishmael moves from paint as a medium of whale portraiture into
a range of different media—whale-teeth, whalebones, wood, brass, and sheet-iron. But then
something that is only like an artwork, the momentarily fancied shape of a whale in a group of
large stones, is included in the list. If one goes along with that paragraph, into the “bony, ribby
regions” (270) where such rock formations may be seen, one goes along, at least for the first time,
without knowing why. The next paragraph, on the momentarily fancied shapes of whales on
mountainsides, takes it further, making it clear that the categorical logic has expanded beyond
painting, etching, carving, and metalwork, but still not making it clear why. It is never clear, in
fact; all we ever know is that we started somewhere and ended up somewhere else, and that we
got there by means of a chain of associations. Just as there is a ground-swell in Beale’s sentence,
so is there a kind of wave in Melville’s chapter, rising to its crest in the paragraphs on the stars.
Why is there no criticism on “Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone;
in Mountains; in Stars”?2 Maybe it is because critics have thought that the elements of Moby-
Dick are only significant if there is something to say about them, and that there is nothing to say
about forays like these, forays that foreground little more than the freedom of the associative
movement that links them. As I have been arguing, however, “saying about” is not always the
best or most appropriate literary-critical methodology. In this chapter in particular, but also
Moby-Dick as a whole, I feel invited into a process of “saying by means of”—perceiving and
2
All I have been able to find are isolated phrases and sentences from the chapter, extracted for the sake of making a
separate point.
96 Geoffrey Sanborn
thinking freshly from within the moment-to-moment process of reading, and then speaking on
the basis of those perceptions and thoughts. As the critic Elizabeth Savage argues in an essay on
teaching Moby-Dick, the pedagogical approach that is most consonant with the book itself is to
encourage students
to live with the book, which after all is hardly plot driven, over a long period of time so that they
are conscious of the ways their personal lives, their other classes and other forms of work, and the
other texts in the course participate in their reading process and are constantly building and remod-
eling their understanding as they get to know the book. In short, I teach the book not so students
will see that it transcends time and differences but so that they will see that it includes them.
(96)
The book “really requires a different reading practice,” she writes elsewhere in the essay, “one
that surrenders to its impossible abundance and honors its purposeful uncertainty” (95).3
How might a critic evoke that “impossible abundance” and “purposeful uncertainty”? One
might consider certain chapters in their entirety, as I just did. Or one might experiment with
ways of evoking an abundance-and-uncertainty-generating motion in a paragraph or a series of
paragraphs. Here, for instance, is a run of three paragraphs from “Does the Whale’s Magnitude
Diminish?—Will He Perish?”, stripped of everything but the words and phrases indicating the
direction of a new argumentative move: “But you must look at this matter in every light. Though
… and though … and though … yet … Whereas … Nor … in consequence … Because … so
that … And … because … hence … For … and if … then … Furthermore … And … so … But
… But though … yet …” (460–62). Or one might reproduce sentences or passages in ways that
make it easier to track various types of motion:
Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little distance,
vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in the billows; and at the same time
slowly revolving his whole spindled body; so that when
his vast wrinkled forehead rose
—some twenty or more feet out of the water—
the now rising swells,
with all their confluent waves,
dazzlingly broke against it;
vindictively tossing their shivered spray still higher into the air. (550)
The sentence’s five adverb-verb combinations (“ripplingly withdrawing, “vertically thrusting,”

“slowly revolving,” “dazzlingly broke,” “vindictively tossing”) evoke a partially anonymized
world of motions and modes. In the sentence’s midst, a pair of opposed actions (whale up, waves
up) gives rise to an implicit analogy (calling the spray “shivered” evokes a jouster’s shivered
lance) which gives rise to another analogy, another sudden, exploratory motion: “So, in a gale, the
3
I am not saying that everything written on Moby-Dick is equally valid. I do think, however, that if readers’ responses
come out of a dialectical and open-ended engagement with Moby-Dick, there is always a basic value to them. If readers
come toward the book and allow the book to come toward them, if a reciprocally transformative interaction is underway,
then there is always somewhere to start from, something to build on.
Moby-Dick 97
but half baffled Channel billows only recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to
overleap its summit with their scud” (550–51). Although the sentence’s motion is mostly in the
verbs, it is also in the outriding adverbs, which draw us toward the qualities of the actions; in the
paralleling, which compresses the actions toward simultaneity and near-identity; and in the
analogies, which unexpectedly project us into what Melville calls, in Mardi, “the world of mind”
(M 557).
Or one could cite a series of sentences whose motions echo and extend the motions that are
being described:
In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and higher, and disentangling itself
from the azure, at last gleamed before our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glis-
tening for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose, and silently gleamed.
(275)
But suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger
than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then
there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the
undiscoverable bottom.
(549)
Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in
a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale.
(569)
In sentences like these, the twists and turns do not read like after-the-fact constructions; they
read, instead, like high-intensity efforts to keep up with the unfolding of the scenes in his imag-
ination—to catch their quickly passing aspects, however approximately, and find a place for
them in a relatively coherent moving form. This is, I think, the main thing that Melville is try-
ing to do in Moby-Dick; it is at the very least the activity to which he is devoting most of his
energies. I feel it in the motion-following sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and chapter-sequences;
in the soliloquies, where the motion that is being followed is the motion of thought; in the con-
viviality and lexical resourcefulness of Ishmael’s comments to the reader; and in all of the pas-
sages in which Ishmael begins to “rise and swell with [his] subject, though it may seem but an
ordinary one” (456). “Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals,” he writes in
“The Fossil Whale.” “Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends,
hold my arms!” (456).
*
But what happens to the historical and political dimensions of Moby-Dick if the reader is
immersed in the experience of its “message-carrying air”? What happens to the message in a
book in which transition and mediation are so prominently on display? Objections like these are
not as unanswerable as they may seem. The book’s historical and political concerns do not go
away if one sinks more deeply into the reading experience, and neither do the historical and
political concerns of the immersed reader. One continues to perceive and think about those
aspects of human experience; one simply perceives and thinks with more of one’s self. Only in
98 Geoffrey Sanborn
certain states of being, after all, is it possible to have access to a wide range of what one knows or
to think freely past the thought that one is currently having. A book that promotes those states
of being is at least potentially a book that helps us think more generatively about whatever we
are most moved to think about.
But Moby-Dick does more than that. Because it is so attuned and receptive to unconscious
activities, and because its cast of characters is so racially diverse, it provides us with an especially
rich opportunity to think through the complex relationship between race, racism, and the uncon-
scious. One of the best examples of this is a passage in “The Spouter-Inn” in which Ishmael sees
the face of his bedmate-to-be and notices “stains of some sort or other” (21). “At first I knew not
what to make of this,” he says,
but soon an inkling of the truth occurred to me. I remembered a story of a white man—a whaleman
too—who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them. I concluded that this har-
pooneer, in the course of his distant voyages, must have met with a similar adventure. And what is
it, thought I, after all! It’s only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin. But then, what
to make of his unearthly complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about, and completely
independent of the squares of tattooing. To be sure, it might be nothing but a good coat of tropical
tanning; but I never heard of a hot sun’s tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one. However,
I had never been in the South Seas; and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary effects
upon the skin. Now, while all these ideas were passing through me like lightning, this harpooneer
never noticed me at all.
(21)
Ishmael is not consciously linking thought to thought; ideas are passing through him at light-
ning speed. It is like a revved up, paranoid version of the masthead-stander’s thinking process,
in which “the blending cadence of waves with thoughts” makes “every dimly-discovered,
uprising fin of some undiscernible form” seem like “the embodiment of those elusive thoughts
that only people the soul by continually flitting through it” (159). The overflowing of thought
is conveyed here, as elsewhere, by a barrage of verbal redirections: “At first I knew not what to
make of this; but soon…. And what is it, thought I, after all!… But then, what to make of….
To be sure … but…. However … and perhaps….” It is also conveyed by the way in which his
mind works on its materials. The first of those materials is an item from an internal cultural
storage facility: a story of a white man being tattooed by “the cannibals” (“cannibal” was at that
time a racial slur applied to and resented by Pacific islanders) (Sanborn 129). Troubled by his
initial “what to make of this” feeling, Ishmael resolves it by means of that anecdote, which
enables him to conclude that the person before him is the white victim of non-white aggressors.
But immediately after thinking that tattooing is not a blemish on one’s character, insofar as “a
man can be honest in any sort of skin,” he starts puzzling over the harpooner’s “unearthly com-
plexion,” trying to figure out what to make of that. Potential racial difference leads to rapid,
unwilled thinking that draws on the mental contents that are most ready-to-hand, that have the
strongest cultural ratification, which is why encounters of this kind so often stimulate racist
thoughts. But it also leads, in this case, to a curiosity, a desire to construe, that continues to
operate even after a conclusion has been reached. What Melville invites us to be interested in
here is not any one racist or anti-racist thought in particular, but the uncertainty-generating
movement of a white American’s consciousness in the midst of a racially charged encounter.
Moby-Dick 99
In “The Spouter-Inn” as a whole, Melville’s major suggestion is that any white person in a
white supremacist culture is permanently susceptible to racist thoughts, images, narratives,
words, phrases, fantasies, desires, and dreams. But in the ensuing chapter, “The Counterpane,”
the minor suggestion of “The Spouter-Inn”—that the prolongation of the “what to make of this”
feeling works against the psychic establishment of racism—gets more play. No longer fearing
Queequeg and, at the moment of awakening, no longer even remembering that he is in the bed,
Ishmael gradually finds himself conscious of the fact that Queequeg is hugging him with one
arm “in the most loving and affectionate manner” (25). Queequeg is still asleep, and so Ishmael
does not move. Immobile, comfortable (“You had almost thought I had been his wife” [25]), and
not very far removed from dreaming, a very differently paced mental action begins. “I well
remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me,” he tells us, adding that “whether it
was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle” (25). Waking in the middle of the night,
one night when he was a child, he had felt a hand placed in his own. “My arm hung over the
counterpane,” he writes,
and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed
closely seated by my bed-side. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most
awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one single
inch, the horrid spell would be broken.
(26)
Being in Queequeg’s “bridegroom clasp” is like that, he says, minus the fear (26). It is like being
under a non-horrid spell, a spell that simply drifts away once “all the past night’s events soberly
recurred, one by one, in fixed reality” (26).
There is, in one sense, nearly no action in the opening section of “The Counterpane”—Ishmael
begins to awaken, feels the pressure of Queequeg’s arm over him, is momentarily confused, and
then fully awakens. Psychically and stylistically, however, a lot is going on. There are rhythm-
driven sentences that delay the arrival of a final formulation:
The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-coloured squares and triangles; and this
arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which
were of one precise shade—owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and
shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times—this same arm of his, I say, looked for
all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt.
(25)
There is an extended analogy that takes on a life of its own, out of what seems to be a sheer love
of fictional elaboration (“And it was so light too; the sun shining in at the window, and a great
rattling of coaches in the streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the house” [26]). There are
blurred appearances (“I could hardly tell [the arm] from the quilt, they so blended their hues
together” [25]), sudden changes (“I opened my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was now wrapped
in outer darkness” [26]), and permanently inexplicable events (“for days and weeks and months
afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery” [26]). And there is,
eventually, a confusingly partial application of the analogy to the original situation: “Now, take
away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the supernatural hand in mine were very similar,
100 Geoffrey Sanborn
in their strangeness, to those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg’s pagan arm
thrown round me” (26). What to make of this? It is hard to say. All we can say for sure, I think,
is that Ishmael’s experience of Queequeg is intensifying his unconscious activity and that this
activity leads him, again and again, past resolution to reagitation. By putting reified notions
about racial difference into communication with less familiar perceptions and thoughts, the
movement in such passages opens up a space in which things can turn out differently, in which
everything can happen at least a little bit anew. In that space, nothing has to go on being what it
has historically been; nothing can go on being what it has historically been. It is the “green, life-
restless” matrix of destruction and creation (450), and this—maybe—is the key to it all.
“Been rereading Moby-Dick again and appreciating for the first time what a truly good time
Melville was having when he wrote it,” the novelist and musician Ralph Ellison wrote to Albert
Murray in 1957. “Some of it is quite funny and all of it is pervaded by the spirit of play, like real
jazz sounds when a master is manipulating it. The thing’s full of riffs, man; no wonder the book
wasn’t understood in its own time” (494).4 The spirit of play, of green life-restlessness, is the
moving force in some of the best and least known parts of Moby-Dick. It is also the force by means
of which all of the book’s elements are projected into a melodic, rhythmic form, the force that
serves as the means of continuously saying what can never be finally said. In each of the book’s
riff-like sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, something moves, something that is related to what
moves in Ishmael when he and his shipmates are squeezing globules of sperm, what moves in
Ahab when he thinks about everything that he has done, and what moves in the whale when he
turns to face the Pequod and begins swimming toward its bows. It is a new spirit of activity that
takes unanticipated forms. It does not mount “to that lonely, wind-swept plateau in whose rare-
fied air only the finest imaginations can breathe,” as Lewis Mumford once wrote of Moby-Dick
(212). It stays down here; it moves in anyone who is willing and able to let it move in them; and
it is never very far removed from ordinary pleasures—from having, as Ellison puts it, “a truly
good time.”5
Works Cited
Beale, Thomas. The Natural History of the Sperm Whale. Davis, Philip. Reading and the Reader. Oxford UP, 2013.
London: Van Voorst, 1839. Ellison, Ralph. The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, edited
Billington, Josie. Is Literature Healthy? Oxford UP, 2016. by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner. Random
Bollas, Christopher. Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious House, 2019.
Experience. Hill and Wang, 1995. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.
Bruns, Cristina Vischer. Why Literature? The Value of ———. The Limits of Critique. U of Chicago P, 2015.
Literary Reading and What It Means for Teaching. Melville, Herman. “Melville’s Marginalia in Thomas
Continuum, 2011. Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale.” In
4
Many thanks to Matt Tierney for bringing this letter to my attention.
5
I want to thank the many Melville critics I have met and worked with over the years, each of whom has helped to
shape what I have written on him: the list includes Hester Blum, John Bryant, Alex Calder, Chris Castiglia, Michael
Colacurcio, Dawn Coleman, Pete Coviello, Theo Davis, Wai Chee Dimock, Jennifer Doyle, Elizabeth Duquette, Mary
K. Bercaw Edwards, Christopher Freeburg, Jennifer Greiman, Wyn Kelley, Maurice Lee, Robert Levine, Chris Looby,
Stacey Margolis, Dana Nelson, Marianne Noble, Steven Olsen-Smith, Samuel Otter, Gillian Silverman, Michael
Snediker, Eric Sundquist, Elisa Tamarkin, Matt Tierney, Michael Warner, Cindy Weinstein, and Ivy Wilson.
Moby-Dick 101
Melville’s Marginalia Online. Edited by Steven Olsen- Sanborn, Geoffrey. The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the
Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. Marnon. http:// Making of a Postcolonial Reader. Duke UP, 1998.
melvillesmarginalia.org. Accessed 27 June 2020. Savage, Elizabeth. “What We Talk around When We
Mumford, Lewis. “The Significance of Herman Melville.” Talk about the Dick.” Feminist Teacher, vol. 21, 2011,
The New Republic, 10 October 1928, pp. 212–14. pp. 91–109.
8
Spiritualism in Pierre; or, The
Ambiguities
Hannah Lauren Murray
If you had read the review pages of American newspapers and magazines in 1852, you would
have assumed that Pierre; or, The Ambiguities was not worth reading. After the previous success of
his sea-based novels, the New York Herald declared: “Mr Melville has written himself out”
(Higgins and Parker 419). Numerous reviews panned Melville’s novel of familial and self-de-
struction, including George Washington Peck exclaiming in the American Whig Review that
Pierre was “a bad book! Affected in dialect, unnatural in conception, repulsive in plot, and inar-
tistic in construction.” The Boston Post reflected that “the amount of utter trash in the volumes
is almost infinite—trash of conception, execution, dialogue and sentiment” (441, 419–20). A
few countering voices appeared in the summer in smaller venues, with the Hartford Courant
calling the novel “very exciting” and the Albany Argus claiming Pierre “startles one with delight”
(420, 433). For those with the Harper Collins Kraken edition of the novel today, this excitement
is heightened by Maurice Sendak’s bold eroticized illustrations, featuring Pierre in a skin-tight
blue leotard and bright red cape, joyously embracing others and contemplating unspeakable ter-
rors (Melville 42, 194). Written in “passages of bewildering intensity,” Pierre presses against the
reader with relationships that are too close, emotions that are too overwrought, and writing that
is too dense (Higgins and Parker 436). No reader can have a passive or ambivalent response to
Pierre—it is a text that provokes fascination, ridicule, repulsion.
After the commercial failure of Moby-Dick, Melville wanted to write a popular novel. He then
published a psychological gothic drama of an incestuous relationship between Pierre Glendinning
and his half-sister Isabel Banford, and of the undoing of the autonomous young male citizen in
the antebellum United States. Recent criticism has tended to focus on Pierre’s failed articulation
of national manhood in his tortured relationship with property and authorship, and his inability
to escape the family, as indexed through his attachment to and possession of Isabel (Clymer;
Rifkin; Kelley; Weiser). On publication, the novel’s reviewers found the portrayal of Isabel
Spiritualism in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities 103
strangest of all, with the Washington New Era unsure if she were “ridiculously sublime or sub-
limely ridiculous” (Higgins and Parker 427).
Less has been written about Isabel as a figure of loss rather than melodrama; nevertheless, the
dependent and socially excluded young woman anchors Pierre. In the first half of the novel, her
mystical guitar song entrances Pierre and propels his radical reinvention of self and family.
Conversing with the guitar possessed by her mother’s spirit, Isabel’s inexplicable performance
illustrates a phenomenon that Americans were increasingly familiar with in the early 1850s:
spiritualism. Melville’s framing of Isabel as a spiritualist medium encapsulates the tension in the
novel between agency and passivity, autonomy and dependency.
Situating Isabel within the early spiritualist movement invokes mediums that transgress the
threshold between life and death by claiming to channel the voices of the dead. Melville would
go on to mock spiritualism in “The Apple-Tree Table” (1856), but four years earlier, in Pierre, he
presented mediumship as an opportunity to explore alternative means of communication for
those on the thresholds of society. In Pierre, Isabel inhabits a social and spiritual limbo, and she
narrates a deprived and excluded upbringing disconnected from her own history and identity.
Born into a world of silence without interpersonal connections, socially dead Isabel is denied
genealogical ties and a sense of self. In its imbrication with progressive social movements, spiri-
tualism proposed nonnormative intimacies, a radical merging of identities, the overturning of
hierarchies, and the paradoxical possibility of claiming agency through the loss of autonomy.
Through a form of séance Isabel gives voice to her and her mother’s joint story of abandonment
and exclusion.
In Pierre’s reaction to Isabel’s story and séance, his conception of the upstanding citizen unravels.
His new sense of self as a young man is contingent on both Isabel’s dependence on him as a pro-
vider and carer and on disavowing his own father’s legacy. In a world where identities can merge
and people can become others, Pierre subsumes Isabel in order to shore up his own new sense of
autonomy, as he seeks to divorce himself from patrilineal inheritance by becoming the paternal
figure himself. Desiring unity with Isabel, Pierre collapses familial relationships in order to turn
his half-sister into his wife and legitimize her place in the Glendinning family. At the same time,
he strikes out as an autonomous young man, seeking authorship as a means of self-making. In
Pierre’s failure to remodel familial relations and his career, Melville presents a pessimistic vision of
young male citizenship stuck between inheritance and independence in the early United States.
Hershel Parker makes a case for excluding the authorship “subplot” from the novel, arguing that
Melville added these strands later in a deliberate attempt to create a failed novel and to attack the
unkind literary marketplace (Melville xi). However, Pierre’s changing conception of authorship is
a necessary component because it is inextricably linked to his new perception of the world after he
encounters Isabel and experiences the transcendental communicative power of her séance.
Isabel appears as if from beyond the grave. The poor orphaned seamstress with “dark, olive
cheek” and cascading hair first emerges at the Miss Pennies’ sewing circle that Pierre and his
mother Mary attend (P 46). After haunting Pierre with a piercing shriek upon seeing him, she
tells him through a letter and a spoken narrative that she is his father’s illegitimate daughter.
Similar to Poe’s dying and undying women and the Brontës’ imprisoned heroines, Melville’s
Isabel adds another trapped suffering woman to the transatlantic Gothic canon.1 Isabel is both a
1
Evert Duyckinck reviewed Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in The Literary World. Parker suggests that Melville
translated Duyckinck’s comments on the “hideous inhumanities” of Wuthering Heights into the “horrible and inscrutable
humanities” of Isabel’s gothic childhood (Parker 55–56; P 122).
104 Hannah Lauren Murray
“suffocated” cadaver with a “deathlike beauty” and a supernatural figure who “wholly soared out
of the realms of mortalness” (112, 142). In her narrative in Books VI and VIII, Isabel’s broken
memories of her nightmarish upbringing emphasize the indeterminacy of her mortal and social
status. She spends her youth trapped in a gothic, dilapidated “wild dark house” surrounded by
“ghostly pines” that she fears will “reach out their grim arms to snatch into their horrid shadows,”
before she is moved into an inhumane asylum (114).
As if in a dream sequence, Isabel’s narrative jumps and cuts in time and space as she grapples
with her loss of memory—“the stupor, and the torpor, and the blankness, and the dimness, and
the vacant whirlingness of the bewilderingness” (122). The blankness in Isabel’s memory corre-
sponds to the pervading silence of her upbringing (for more on the neurodiverse aspects of Isabel,
see Pilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph James Savarese’s Chapter 39 in this Companion, “A ‘Mute
Wooing’: Animism and Neurodiversity in Pierre”). The gothic house––possibly in America, pos-
sibly France––is “dumb as death” because the old man and woman with whom she lives never
speak to her (115). Without speech and the interpersonal connections that come with it, Isabel
cannot understand the world around her. In their silence, the man and the woman assume the
same inscrutable forms as the motionless green foundation stones that trap Isabel in the night-
marish house. When she says of the couple, “I knew not whence they came, or what cause they
had for being there,” she records a lack of comprehension of her own place in the world as well
(116). In silence, Isabel is an unformed self. Without the voices of the past, “No name; no
scrawled or written thing; no book … no one memorial speaking of its former occupants,” Isabel
has no place in the world (115). Orphaned through the death of her French Revolution refugee
mother and her father’s abandonment, she is lost to history, and history is lost to her.
Isabel’s incomprehension of language and initial inability to vocalize her suffering encapsulate
her lack of place within a family structure, and her loss of identity. Isabel struggles with verbal
expression throughout the text. Her feelings overwhelm her ability to verbalize her experience;
some things must remain nameless and unexpressed. For example, Isabel refuses to name one of her
childhood dwellings as an asylum, saying, “That word has never passed my lips, even now, when I
hear the word, I run from it” (121). Narrating life in the asylum, Isabel records inmates expressing
themselves through “hand-clappings, shrieks, howls, laughter, blessings, prayers, oaths, hymns,
and all audible confusions” (120). One inhabitant simply repeats “Broken, broken, broken,” while
others “could not, or would not speak, or had forgotten how to speak” (120). In this space of exile
and disownment, language is insufficient to testify to suffering and marginalization.
In her overwrought narrative, Isabel breaks down language into its smallest components,
questioning the very meaning of words. For example, the word “father” does not carry any
familial significance for her because she has been cut off from normative ideas of family. When
she does meet Glendinning Sr. on his visits to the nightmare house, she interprets “father” to
mean “general love and endearment—little or nothing more,” with no connection to paternity,
genealogy, or inheritance (145). Isabel manipulates language in her attempts to express her
marginality. Before she gives her spoken narrative, Isabel attempts to write, but in her letter to
Pierre she likewise struggles with expression, admitting “I knew not how to write to thee, nor
what to say to thee; and so, behold again how I rave.” She exclaims, “—Oh, my brother, my
dear, dear Pierre,—help me, fly to me; see I perish without thee;—pity, pity,—here I freeze in
the wide, wide world;—no father, no mother, no sister, no brother, no living thing in the fair
form of humanity, that holds me dear.” In the fragmentation and repetition—as if she were
speaking through the paper—Isabel’s overwhelming outpouring of emotion cannot be contained
on the page. Imbued with her broken physical voice, the letter appears to be bleeding when the
ink stained by her tears blurs and runs down the page in a “strange and reddish hue” (64).
When narrative is inaccessible or insufficient in Pierre, music replaces it as a mode of express-
ing suffering, exclusion, and marginalization. Isabel finds her voice in the séance, in which she
channels her mother’s spirit through an enchanted guitar, claiming, “the guitar was speaking to
me, the guitar was singing to me, murmuring, and singing to me … the guitar was human.”
Isabel says of her story, “for not in words can it be spoken” and instructs Pierre during each visit
to listen to her song (125, 126). The mother-guitar inexplicably responds to Isabel’s calls:
“Mother—mother—mother!”
Again, after a preluding silence, the guitar as magically responded before; the sparks quivered
along its strings; and again Pierre felt as in the immediate presence of the spirit.
“Shall I, mother?—Art thou ready? Wilt thou tell me?—Now? Now?”
These words were lowly and sweetly murmured in the same way with the word mother, being
changefully varied in their modulations, till at the last now, the magical guitar again responded;
and the girl swiftly drew it to her beneath her dark tent of hair … Pierre felt himself surrounded
by ten thousand sprites and gnomes, and his whole soul was swayed and tossed by supernatural
tides; and again he heard the wondrous, rebounding, chanted words:
“Mystery! Mystery!
Mystery of Isabel!
Mystery! Mystery!
Isabel and Mystery!
Mystery!”
(150)
A dark-haired, dark-eyed young woman in a trance-like state, Isabel’s appearance fits the
image of female mediums in the 1850s, notably the Fox sisters. In March 1848, Rochester teen-
agers, Margaret and Katherine Fox claimed to have communicated with a local dead man through
a series of knocks and raps. By 1850, the sisters were on tour and demonstrating their powers to
the public, attracting writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant (Braude
201). Progressing beyond raps, mediums channeled loved ones and celebrity spirits through
writing, speaking, dancing, and music. The enchanted guitar was a recurring motif of spiritu-
alist writings, as mediums recorded occurrences of spirits playing the instrument to astounded
observers. For example, Eliab Capron’s October 1850 journal from the Fox house records a guitar
“played by unseen hands, and played so exquisitely too, that it seemed more like far distant
music to one just aroused from midnight slumbers, than the music of an instrument a few feet
from us” (Capron and Barron 73).2
2
Capron and Barron’s Explanation and History of the Mysterious Communion with Spirits was reviewed in the 16 March
1850 Literary World on the same page where Melville reviewed a new edition of Cooper’s The Red Rover (“Bad Spirits on
the Tap” 276). A comic visit to the Fox sisters at Barnum’s Hotel featured in the 6 July 1850 edition of the periodical
(“The ‘Spirits’ in Town”).
At the same time as the fever for spiritualism gripped the Northeast and started to spread
West, Melville was intrigued by the Shaker communities near his Arrowhead home. Visiting the
Shaker community in Hancock, Massachusetts twice in summer 1850, Melville soon after read a
Shaker pamphlet describing the members singing “melodious and heavenly songs” and over-
come by “involuntary operations of singing and dancing” as they channeled spirits (Sealts 105;
A Summary View of the Millennial Church 88). As in a Shaker dance, Isabel “swayed to and fro with
a like abandonment, and suddenness, and wantonness,” lost in the music of the possessed guitar
and her inscrutable lyrics (P 126). The medium and the Shaker inhabit a liminal position, strad-
dling the boundaries of life and death and exposing that border to be permeable as communica-
tion crosses between the material world and the afterlife. In her grappling with language, Isabel
stumbles on the philosophical question of where life and the afterlife divide, asking “What was
it to be dead? What is it to be living? Wherein is the difference between the words Death and
Life? Had I ever been dead? Was I living?” (124). Mediums claimed to channel not only the
spirits of loved ones through possessed speech, instruments, and automatic writing, but also the
spirits of celebrity ghosts, including recently deceased presidents and global historical figures,
while some spiritualist circles witnessed their members speaking in tongues. If true, the dead’s
possession of the medium suggested a dangerous fluidity or “polymorphousness” of identity
across lines of race, religion, class, and gender (Brooks 21). At spiritualist séances a successful
medium surrendered control of their body to fully allow the deceased to enter and control them.
In channeling messages from beyond the grave, the medium had to become a passive vessel and
lose their personal autonomy. As one member of a Philadelphia spiritualist circle wrote in 1851,
“the person to be prepared must give up all self-control, all resistance, and resign himself to the
entire direction and control of the spirits” (A History of the Recent Developments in Spiritual
Manifestations 11). Such submission shows in Isabel’s trance-like state as she moves back and
forth involuntarily; she loses herself to the power of her mother’s spirit—it is not clear whether
the “rebounding, chanted words” are Isabel speaking as herself, ventriloquizing her mother, or if
the mother-guitar itself has gained a voice (P 150).
Melville presents Isabel’s mediumship as an opportunity for communication, in particular for
young women whom spiritualists viewed as the most “plausible” vessel for channeling spirits.
Ann Braude quotes one 1850s medium who professed, “the characteristics [of the medium] will
be feminine––negative and passive”: using an electromagnetic framing, women were viewed as
receptive and waiting to be charged or filled by a spirit (Braude 23). Yet spiritualists overturned
hierarchies; they “denounced the authority of churches over believers, of governments over citi-
zens, of doctors over patients, of masters over slaves, and most of all, men over women” (56). If
an individual could access and speak higher truths, then no one could control another and no
man could control a woman. As a result, spiritualists spoke in their trances and reflections in
favor of radical movements such as abolitionism and marriage reform. Female spiritualists para-
doxically employed passivity to claim agency, taking on the equivalent of preaching roles denied
to them in traditional Christian denominations. Isabel’s spiritualist performance is radical in
that her murmuring, singing, and playing give voice to both her and her mother’s stories of
suffering and marginalization; her mediumship effectively communicates a collective as well as
individual trauma. However, in her wantonness she does not claim agency or autonomy as female
mediums did but instead asks for ownership. Isabel tells Pierre of her “immense longings for
some one of my blood to know me, and to own me,” and asks, “tell me, by loving me, by owning
me, publicly or secretly,––tell me, doth it involve any vital hurt to thee?” (P 158, 159). Here
“own” means to acknowledge, but it carries a dual meaning of ownership. Isabel’s pathetic
performance is an attempt to convince Pierre to not only claim but also possess his newfound
sister and rescue her from her current life of genealogical and social loss.
In her séance, Isabel demonstrates to Pierre the possibility of two souls becoming one. In
giving up herself she paradoxically wields an “extraordinary physical magnetism” that draws
him in (151). Whereas spiritualism involved the passivity of a medium to a spiritual agent,
Pierre himself is shaped by its cousin, mesmerism, in which one’s will was controlled by a human
agent. Mesmerism, or animal magnetism, was well established as a para-scientific endeavor by
mid-century, and became increasingly connected to exploitation and manipulation, with race,
gender, and class implications in directing magnetic fluids in another’s body. As Emily Ogden
writes, “part of animal magnetism’s appeal was that it could bring enchantment over to the cause
of management” (Ogden 95). Charles Poyen––who brought mesmerism to the United States in
the mid-1830s––pursued mesmeric practice to prevent slave rebellions on Guadeloupean sugar
plantations before transferring to an industrial setting in the Northeast of the United States.
There, the susceptible subject widened from the enslaved man or woman to the white factory
worker. On his 1836 speaking tour, Poyen attracted the attention of the Lowell Mill owners in
Massachusetts, who sought to create pliable and productive workers. Young white women were
viewed as the most passive group, sharing with the enslaved both a weaker will and a “primitive
remnant” of the pre-Enlightenment––in other words, a receptiveness to taking in the thoughts
and experiences of others and a desire to believe in the seemingly ethereal power of magnetism
(Ogden 17). For example, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) exposes
mesmerism as a threat to young women. Mesmerizer Holgrave is tempted by the exploitative
possibilities of controlling and manipulating the passive Phoebe Pyncheon. Concentrating his
glance on drowsy Phoebe, Holgrave is aware that with “one wave of his hand and a corresponding
effort of his will, he could complete his mastery over Phoebe’s yet free and virgin spirit” and will
her to “live only in his thoughts and emotions” (Hawthorne 212, 211). Holgrave is seduced by
the opportunity to direct “a young girl’s destiny” and establish his own autonomy and self-mas-
tery by “acquiring empire over the human spirit” of another. In this sexualized encounter,
Hawthorne positions mesmerism as a threat against autonomy and an abuse of existing social
dominance.
In Pierre, these gender roles are reversed, as Pierre is the one under Isabel’s “extraordinary atmo-
spheric spell” (P 151). The séance emphasizes what Pierre has felt since his first encounter with
Isabel. Her mysterious voice and powerful story irrevocably change Pierre and alter his perception
of the world. From his first encounter with Isabel, he is transfixed. Her “long-drawn, unearthly,
girlish shriek” causes an emotional reaction framed through touch (45). Isabel’s voice “split its
way clean through his heart” and has “taken hold of the deepest roots and subtlest fibres of his
being” (48). In her musical spirit performance Isabel conjures an intensely charged supernatural
environment. In these synesthetic moments, Pierre mirrors Isabel’s physical movements psycho-
logically, feeling “swayed and tossed” by her cries (151). Entranced by her song, Pierre becomes
vaguely sensible of a certain still more marvelous power in the girl over himself and his most interior
thoughts and motions;—a power so hovering upon the confines of the invisible world, that it
seemed more inclined that way than this;—a power which not only seemed irresistibly to draw him
toward Isabel, but to draw him away from another quarter … Often, in after-times with her, did he
recall this first magnetic night, and would seem to see that she then had bound him to her by an
extraordinary atmospheric spell—both physical and spiritual—which henceforth it had become

impossible for him to break, but whose full potency he never recognized till long after he had
become habituated to its sway.
(150)
The powerless girl now has a “marvellous power” that, as with Holgrave, shapes and directs the
“most interior thoughts and motions.” Pierre’s response to her calls to be claimed, loved, and
possessed is outside consciousness: he cannot resist her, he is bound to her. In this moment,
Pierre loses his own autonomy, uniting with Isabel. However, unlike the exploitation in The
House of the Seven Gables, this mesmeric moment indicates how passivity can work as revelation.
In surrendering to Isabel’s magnetic pull and feeling inextricably connected to her, Pierre’s tem-
porary passivity catalyzes him to conceive a new autonomous masculinity that reshapes familial
structures and casts himself as a protector and provider.
The “infinite significancies” Pierre invests in Isabel’s shrieks, singing, and murmurs entirely
alter his perception of his place in the world (126). After reading her embodied letter—which
speaks to him not just in Isabel’s voice, but also reanimates his father’s mysterious dying cry “My
daughter! My daughter!”—his “whole previous moral being was overturned,” and he is aware,
through Isabel’s revelation, “that for him the fair structure of the world must, in some then
unknown way, be entirely rebuilded again, from the lower-most cornerstone up” (87). His long-
held belief that his father was a respectable gentleman is undone. Depicted through pure white
imagery, Pierre’s father represents an unattainably untainted ideal of antebellum citizenship.
A notable example is his shrine on the family estate. Within “stood the perfect marble form of
his departed father, without blemish, unclouded, snow-white, and serene, Pierre’s fond personi-
fication of perfect human goodness and virtue.” In his static stone form, the dead father repre-
sents the abstracted body of the ideal antebellum citizen; he retains his “reputation as a gentleman
and a Christian,” a devoted husband, and “virtuous father” (68, 69). Unchanging, he can only be
“uncorruptibly sainted in heaven” after being “so beautiful on earth” (69). However, after reading
Isabel’s letter, Pierre recognizes that the pure marble is a façade and that behind the perfect
statue are the “specks and flaws” in his father’s character that resulted in his adultery and aban-
donment of Isabel and her mother (68).
In his new perception of the world, Pierre’s resolve that the world must be “entirely rebuilded”
centers on remaking himself through a new social role. He disowns his late father—saying “I will
no more have a father”—by becoming him, refashioning himself as a fatherless independent
young man who owns and protects his own new dependent (87). He determines to rewrite family
history, sacrificing his respectability by abandoning his fiancée Lucy Tartan and foreclosing
Isabel’s illegitimacy within a new narrative of marriage. Pierre creates social relations that do not
exist in order to establish a familial ownership: Isabel turns from a stranger to a sister and then
a wife. This plan intends to remedy Isabel’s exclusion from her father’s inheritance by giving her
claim on the Glendinning name and its Saddle Meadows estate. In doing so he will rescue Isabel
from her menial wage labor and insert her into the True Woman’s respectable domestic economy
from which she has been excluded. Pierre becomes not only a husband to his half-sister, but also
a father, making up for Glendinning Sr.’s lack of financial and social care. As brother, husband,
and father, he will “own her boldly and lovingly” (170). The dual meaning of “own” indicates
how these roles can coexist; Pierre can publicly possess Isabel as his spousal dependent and
privately acknowledge his role as her brother, and in both roles he can serve as a replacement
father. Pierre’s marriage to Isabel compounds the collapsed and corrupt relations running
throughout the novel, in which blood relations are inescapable and confused as he often calls his
mother “sister” and Lucy “cousin.” This intra-family marriage turns Pierre into a father figure,
replacing Glendinning Sr. as benefactor and protector, but it simultaneously terminates the
genealogical line and thwarts the transferral of property between generations when Mrs.
Glendinning disowns Pierre and ends his inheritance.
The circumstances of Isabel’s birth that Pierre seeks to remedy also have racial connotations.
As scholars of Pierre have noted, the emergence in nineteenth-century US literature of natally
alienated, racially ambiguous offspring reflects abolitionist campaigns against the moral stain
of sexual violence and family corruption in the South.3Although Isabel’s racial heritage is
never explicitly revealed, she exists on the boundaries of whiteness in the early United States
as a poor, illegitimate, and immigrant woman. Her darkening marks out this socio-economic
exclusion. On blackness in Melville’s fiction, Christopher Freeburg contends, “Melville corre-
lates the social reality of racial difference with philosophical concerns about mastery: seizing
one’s destiny, amassing scientific or spiritual knowledge, and perfecting the self” (4). Blackened
characters, not just characters racialized as Black, provoke these reactions. For Pierre, his con-
ception of white male selfhood depends on the “mastery” of the less than white, socially
excluded Isabel. The “Nubian power” of Isabel’s eyes is a black marker of the dependency and
lack of property-in-oneself she experiences as a deprived woman outside society and family (P
145). Pierre sees this deprivation in Isabel’s story of abandonment, and in response to this
dark, socially powerless yet hypnotizing girl he positions her as a dependent who relies on him
for security and prosperity. Likewise, “disgraceful” and “ruined” Delly Ulver is afforded
Pierre’s protection due to her status on the borders of respectable whiteness as a poor unmar-
ried mother (96, 111). Disowned by her parents, Delly is another orphaned figure to whom
Pierre extends his paternal charity, taking it upon himself to rescue her from imminent
banishment.
Attempting to master Isabel, Delly and himself, Pierre bolsters his self-image as the model
white male citizen who cares and provides for his dependents and sees himself returning Isabel
to the family structure needed for her to fulfil her white gendered civic role. At the same time,
the discovery of his father’s adultery spurs Pierre to attempt to redefine himself as an independent,
self-made man in the city. However, this self-making is at odds with the urban marketplace he
encounters. Absconding to New York with Isabel and Delly, Pierre endeavors to forge his iden-
tity away from the market economy; this effort is exemplified in his dramatic change in attitude
toward writing. Just as he rewrites family history to construct a respectable narrative for Isabel,
Pierre’s self-making and autonomy are attached to writing itself—writing that becomes increas-
ingly divorced from the marketplace Pierre relies on after losing his inheritance. Pierre’s chang-
ing conception of authorship is inextricably linked to his new perception of the world after he
3
Jeffory Clymer states that Pierre “reprises the interracial incest plots that filled antislavery novels and stories.” Carolyn
Karcher and Robert S. Levine trace the presence of miscegenation in the novel to Pierre’s slaveowning grandfather.
Karcher argues the suggestion of Pierre’s blood relation to his grandfather’s horses represents “the illegitimate mulatto
children fathered by slaveholders,” which prefigures the warped familial relations through the novel. Levine contends
that the novel’s “miscegenated (and unknown) genealogies” extend beyond Isabel to Pierre himself, putting blackness
at the heart of the model antebellum family (Clymer 74; Karcher 101; Levine 23–24).
encounters Isabel. For Pierre, authorship transforms from a means of cultivating gentlemanly
accomplishment into a Romantic calling, while avoiding putting himself in the literary market-
place. Cutting himself off from his patrilineal inheritance, Pierre also disavows any literary
inheritance, seeking instead to forge a career where his writing is new and successful but he is
obscure and unknown.
Critics praise Pierre’s earlier works for their genteel taste, such as a “long and beautifully writ-
ten review” that claims “this writer is unquestionably a highly respectable youth.” He is happy
to supply sonnets for ladies’ scrapbooks and write pieces for magazine publication, such as “The
Tropical Summer,” that display his “Perfect Taste” (245). Once in New York, Pierre begins to see
authorship as a transcendental calling and a means of expressing higher truths. This self-
expression marks his complete autonomy and independence as an antebellum citizen. Pierre has
several moments of solitary contemplation, in which he examines his relationship with the
literary marketplace. He seeks to disengage from expectations of the professional writer, declining
invitations to speak in public and refusing to provide a daguerreotype because since “every body
has his portrait published, true distinction lies in not having yours published at all.” The idea
that everything—even artistic persona—is for sale in the city horrifies Pierre. In a radical
conversion, he detests his previous writing as “Trash! Dross! Dirt!” Viewing himself as an artist
following a higher calling, he commits himself to conveying the truth through literature. He
intends to “gospelize the world anew, and show them deeper secrets than the Apocalypse!—I
will write it, I will write it!” (254, 272, 273). In seeking an autonomy that rejects the popular
demands of the marketplace, his writing, like Isabel’s spiritualist song, seeks to transcend the
material world itself.
By finding an individual and authentic authorial voice, Pierre stakes a claim as a self-made—
or self-written—man. Uncomfortable with both his previous life as landed gentry and his new
independent life in the city, Pierre actively seeks to write himself as an autonomous man but one
who achieves more than financial reward for his labor. For Pierre, writing is his séance, a means
of accessing and communicating “new, or at least miserably neglected Truth to the world,”
including the “wondrous suggestiveness” of Isabel’s mystical guitar (283, 282). Like the medium,
Pierre does not want to be known for himself, but for the ideas that come through him, “the
primitive elementalizing of the strange stuff, which in the act of attempting that book, have
upheaved and upgushed in his soul” (304). However, in the scenes of writing in the New York
Apostles apartment, Pierre increasingly struggles to write anything that adequately expresses his
pursuit of higher truths. In his effort to write, his body is in turmoil; it unconsciously repels the
written page itself as “the pupils of his eyes rolled away from him in their own orbits” (341).
What Isabel’s narrative has demonstrated to Pierre and the reader is the insufficiency of the writ-
ten word. The further Pierre retreats into his own trance-like state—“suspended, motionless,
blank”—the more he sees “the everlasting elusiveness of truth, the universal lurking insincerity
of even the greatest and purest written thoughts” (341, 339). Haunting the text since Isabel’s
introduction, wordlessness prevails, until by the end of the novel Pierre can no longer express
himself. He cannot escape the genealogical mess he has created. By the end of the novel Isabel is
like Poe’s undying madwoman who haunts the male protagonist. Offering up her body parts—
“take out these eyes, and use them for glasses”—she moves away from the civic womanhood
Pierre has imagined for her and back towards the ostracized girl with no sense of self (349).
Contemplating the impossible situation of living with both Isabel and Lucy, who has left Saddle
Meadows to join them and further complicate the novel’s intimacies, Pierre retreats into silence.
He is ultimately left without language, his feelings “entirely untranslatable into any words that
can be used” (353). Pierre has reached a dead end as his modes of masculinity fail: as a self-
replicating father figure he has been unsuccessful at providing for his dependent; as an autono-
mous Romantic artist he has been unproductive in expressing higher truths.
In this weird and wild novel, the séance offers the possibility that for people on the limen,
their experiences could exist and be most powerfully expressed without traditional speech.
Likewise, Melville’s repetitive dense prose full of additional prefixes and suffixes encapsulates a
story and an atmosphere on the edges of expression. Rendering Isabel and her spiritual
performance as “ridiculously sublime,” Melville tantalizes readers with the possibility of losing
oneself to access spiritual unity (Higgins and Parker 427). An encroachment on the self-con-
tained self, spiritualism is attractive to Pierre because it bolsters his dual ideal of the young male
citizen—someone who consumes and protects their dependents but maintains their own
independence from patrilineal inheritance and marketplaces—two ideals that Pierre fails in his
genealogical and creative mess. The problem for Pierre, Melville, and his readers is not deep or
intense connections with others that spiritualism exemplifies, but how those connections are
acted upon and how those revelations can be put into print. In Pierre, Melville captures the
transcendental ability of the medium to voice the dead, and the looming failure of the author to
communicate with the living.
Works Cited
A History of the Recent Developments in Spiritual H., “The ‘Spirits’ in Town.” The Literary World, 6 July,
Manifestations, in the City of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: 1850, pp. 2–3.
G. S. Harris, 1851. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables.
“Bad Spirits on the Tap.” The Literary World, 16 Mar. Oxford World’s Classics; Oxford UP, 2009.
1850, p. 276. Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker, editors. Herman
Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Melville: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge UP,
Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. 2nd ed. Indiana 2010.
UP, 2001. Karcher, Carolyn. Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery,
Brooks, Daphne. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances Race and Violence in Melville’s America. Louisiana State
of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910. Duke UP, 2006. UP, 1980.
Capron, Eliab Wilkinson, and Henry D. Barron. Kelley, Wyn. “Pierre, Life History, and the Obscure.” The
Explanation and History of the Mysterious Communion New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, edited by
with Spirits: Comprehending the Rise and Progress of the Robert S. Levine. Cambridge UP, 2014, pp. 85–98.
Mysterious Noises in Western New York, Generally Received Levine, Robert S. “Pierre’s Blackened Hand.” Leviathan: A
as Spiritual Communications. Auburn: Capron and Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1999, pp. 23–44.
Barron, 1850. Melville, Herman. Pierre, or the Ambiguities, edited by
Clymer, Jeffory A. Family Money: Property, Race and Hershel Parker. Harper Collins, 1995.
Literature in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford UP, 2013. Ogden, Emily. Credulity: A Cultural History of US
Freeburg, Christopher. Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Mesmerism. U of Chicago P, 2018.
Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America. Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 2:
Cambridge UP, 2012. 1851–1891. Johns Hopkins UP, 2002.
Rifkin, Mark. Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday The United Society, A Summary View of the Millennial
Colonialism in the American Renaissance. U of Minnesota Church, or United Society of Believers, Commonly Called
P, 2014. Shakers. 2nd ed. Albany: C. Van. Benthuysen, 1848.
Sealts, Merton M., Jr. “Melville and the Shakers.” Studies Weiser, Karen. “Doubled Narratives of Orphanhood in
in Bibliography, vol. 2, 1949, pp. 105–14. Melville’s Pierre.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville
Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 2016, pp. 22–40.
9
Refugee, Exile, Alien:
Israel Potter’s Migrant Turns
Rodrigo Lazo
In 1865, the US publishing house of Theophilus Beasley Peterson (aka T. B. Peterson and
Brothers) pirated Herman Melville’s Israel Potter and printed the book’s main narrative word for
word under the title The Refugee. The pirated version’s title page billed the book as an adventure
tale and described Melville as “Author of ‘Typee,’ ‘Omoo,’ ‘The Two Captains,’ ‘The Man of the
World’ etc. etc.” Melville had not written the latter two, nor had he authorized this edition of
his book.1 It was not uncommon for printers to steal an author’s work in the nineteenth-century
United States or other countries, including England, and Melville’s objections got nowhere.
A decade after the appearance of The Refugee, he wrote a letter to a newspaper in which he dis-
avowed the edition: “I have never written any work by that title. In connection with that title
Peterson Brothers employ my name without authority, and notwithstanding a remonstrance
conveyed to them long ago” (qtd. in Turpin 10). Despite Melville’s protestation, the publishing
house’s decision to feature “refugee” in the title does suggest a powerful interpretation. What if
we consider Melville’s title character not as primarily a national subject—a veteran of the US
Revolutionary War who is ultimately denied a pension—but rather as someone living through
the effects that we associate with refugees: geographic displacement, extra-national living con-
ditions, and the necessity of being on the run? In other words, “refugee” captures the estrange-
ment in the life of Israel Potter as well as the textual roving of Israel Potter. Gesturing toward
several genres and escaping its own initial framing as biography, Israel Potter is a book about an
experience of forced migration.
1
The following year T. B. Peterson published a book titled “The Man of the World” by William North, an English
novelist who had published science fiction.
114 Rodrigo Lazo
Melville’s Israel Potter is a fictional narrative that uses as a source The Life and Remarkable
Adventures of Israel R. Potter (1824), a first-person account of an actual Revolutionary War soldier.
Melville’s version is not very faithful to the autobiographical account, using it as an opportunity
to develop his own telling of the story, which follows the titular character as he escapes from
home in Massachusetts at an early age and is drawn into the US Revolutionary War, including
fighting at Bunker Hill. The war then takes him to Europe, where he engages with a variety of
historical figures, including King George III, John Paul Jones, Ethan Allen, and Benjamin
Franklin. The bulk of the twenty-six chapters that make up the narrative is set between late
1775 and 1778, as Israel wanders through a series of escapades that include imprisonment by
English authorities, fighting in a major naval battle, and a secret mission for Franklin. In the
end, he settles in London, and it is only the last two chapters that are devoted to his decades of
exile, during which he becomes a laborer repairing chairs.
To say that Israel Potter is about a refugee is not necessarily at odds with Melville’s interests.
The narrative calls Israel Potter a “refugee” (24) in a chapter title, and we could say he is a war
refugee because the clash of armies sends him across the Atlantic and into a life on the run.2 This
book describes Israel as a refugee alongside “wanderer” (192) and “runaway rebel” (7). Many
scenes show Israel on the move, because of either his own decisions or historical contexts that
influence his direction (e.g. his experiences on the high seas during a revolutionary war). Israel
at times is more like a migrant (or refugee) trying to fit into a new location, or at least avoid
detection, rather than someone inside a national homeland.
T. B. Peterson emphasized the refugee associations not only by changing the book’s title but
also by deleting altogether Melville’s invocation of the US nation in the paratextual material of
the two authorized versions. The text first appeared in serialized form in 1854–1855 in Putnam’s
Monthly Magazine as “Israel Potter; or, Fifty Years of Exile.” Appended to the title was a sub-
heading offering a gloss: “A Fourth of July Story” (Melville, Putnam’s 66). The book version,
published in 1855 as Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, did not include the Fourth of July ref-
erence on the title page but did come with a dedication “To His Highness the Bunker-Hill
Monument.” That monumental inscription ridiculing the commemoration of an important
Revolutionary War battle has justifiably led readers to consider what this novel says about the
United States as a nation.
It is no surprise that a good number of critics have considered Israel Potter in relation to nation-
alist discourse, including the story’s forceful critique of the way a nation-state can treat its people
and particularly its soldiers.3 “Given the demythologizing strategies of the overall novel, one
might take the dedication as an ironic reminder of the nation’s failure to live up to the
Revolutionary ideals emblematized by the Monument, with the comically mock deference to a
royalist-sounding ‘His Highness’ suggesting a betrayal of republican principles,” Robert S.
Levine writes (x). The retelling of an autobiography by a Revolutionary War veteran would also
pull toward an emphasis on the book’s national connection. But Israel moves around so much
2
All page citations are from the Penguin Classics edition of Israel Potter, edited by Robert S. Levine.
3
John Hay, for example, considers the history of stunted construction of the Bunker Hill monument to argue that Israel
Potter “emphasizes gentle disillusionment (rather than harsh apostasy) regarding patriotic ideals” (197). Russ Castronovo
notes that “Israel enacts his American story in a prose whose religious and political overtones replay the national history
of revolution and liberation” (143).
Refugee, Exile, Alien: Israel Potter’s Migrant Turns 115
that the narrative prompts consideration of the migrant spirit in the mid-nineteenth century. As
is the case in Redburn (1849), Moby-Dick (1851), and other works, Melville’s fiction is often
driven by young men who leave home to escape certain circumstances (e.g. family limitations,
the hypos) and see the world.
It is also no surprise, then, that other critics have considered Israel Potter’s transnational dimen-
sions, as the narrative itself highlights important terms that veer away from a focus on one
nation: exile and refugee. In an article that emphasizes Melville’s “intertanglement” with
England and its writers, Paul Giles writes, “Wherever he goes and whichever country he affili-
ates himself with, Israel cannot seem to escape the condition of thralldom” (241). Still others
have noted Israel’s connection to the English working class at the end, prompting Carolyn L.
Karcher to argue that “questions of national identity and patriotism that loomed so large at the
outset appear utterly irrelevant” during the latter part of the book (104). In a very suggestive
reading, Bill Christophersen effectively shifts the terms of consideration from the biblical and
exceptionalist implications of a national tragedy about a fallen Promised Land (Israel) into a tale
about someone’s struggle to come home as he crosses numerous nations, or “Everyman as figura-
tive exile in an alien world” (32).
Before pursuing Israel Potter’s worldly engagement, it is important to pause and correct an oft-
repeated misconception about this book: that it somehow suffers from neglect in criticism. Colin
Dayan, for example, writes as recently as 2017: “Though written about—usually favorably—
when it was published in 1855, contemporary scholars of Melville have generally ignored Israel
Potter” (Dayan). In addition to critics already cited here, it is possible to find book chapters and
articles by Russ Castronovo, Edgar Dryden, Hester Blum, Jeffrey Insko, Peter Bellis, Carol
Colatrella, John Hay, and many others. While it is true that in the mid-twentieth century, Israel
Potter did not receive as much attention as other texts by Melville, the year 1969 saw the publi-
cation of monographs about the book by Arnold Rampersad and Alexander Keyssar. A recent
special issue of Leviathan was titled “New Approaches to Israel Potter,” and I note the new. Sure,
Israel Potter does not get as much attention as Moby-Dick, nor is it taught in classrooms as often
as Benito Cereno, but it is not as neglected as Mardi.
Part of the attraction is that Israel Potter pushes against the delimitations of national subjec-
tivity. Critics are just as likely to frame the book as a critique of national mythology and
ideology—to quote Christophersen, scrutinizing “America’s actual identity while deposing her
inflated self-image” (23)—as they are to emphasize that Israel Potter offers transnational connec-
tions as a result of his movement. He is said to undertake “adventure” (8), “travel” (13), “sailing”
(16), and “escape” (17). Israel is described as a “peddler in the wilderness” (10), “Wandering Jew”
(188), and “alien Israel” (186). The word alien appears again when he accidentally ends up on a
shuttle with English sailors and tries to fit into the crew, only to be viewed as someone who “had
somehow an alien sort of general look” (155, italics mine). The crew begins to interrogate “the
strange man before them” (155). The master-at-arms then issues a judgment: “He don’t seem to
belong anywhere” (159). Israel is also imprisoned in a place “appropriate to runaways” (24),
which is to say he repeatedly loses his footing and territory as a result of his movement or the
historical effects brought on by warships and the great men of the Revolution (e.g. when
Benjamin Franklin sends him on a mission from Paris to England).
The word alien operates in this text as an adjective, as opposed to the common usage today as
a noun referring to extra-terrestrial visitors or migrants/immigrants who enter the United States
without approved travel documents. Despite the different usage, the emphasis on alien Israel
116 Rodrigo Lazo
allows for a connection with today’s debates about how the US should respond to populations
seeking to settle in the country without legal sanction or applying for refugee status. From 2017
to 2021, the Trump administration enacted new rules making it more difficult for someone to
apply for asylum in the country, which raises questions about whether the United States is living
up to its historical commitment, not always consistently applied, to provide a haven for refugees
(Ahmed and Villegas).
Offering a nineteenth-century meditation on refugees and their treatment, Israel Potter presents
a Revolutionary War hero as a displaced person seeking asylum, if not formally, certainly as
someone on the run. Melville’s text reminds us that migrants and refugees are influenced by his-
torical circumstances as much, if not more than, by their individual decisions. Chapter 4, “Further
Wanderings of the Refugee, With Some Account of a Good Knight of Brentford Who Befriended
Him,” depicts a “cold, hungry, foot-sore” (22) Israel seeking “refuge in a barn” (24) as he makes
his way to London. Wearing a British navy shirt, Israel is apprehended by English soldiers and
“made a prisoner on the spot” (24), only to find “himself handcuffed and locked up in the Round
House of the place, a prison so called, appropriated to runaways, and those convicted of minor
offenses” (24). The tension here arises when a person on the move, viewed as alien in a new land
and seeking refuge, is confronted by a military state apparatus and apprehended. The migrant
spirit motivating Israel comes to a halt, as the text deploys carceral imagery (handcuffs, legal
charges, even a labyrinth). The use of “runaways” furthermore raises another context: the US slave
system prior to the Civil War. As critics have remarked, the Fugitive Slave Law of the Compromise
of 1850 offers a political context for Israel’s repeated escapes, and Levine notes the “striking
resemblances between Potter’s continual efforts to escape from imprisonment and accounts in
slave narratives of those runaway rebels’ efforts to make their escapes” (xxiv). Melville’s text also
pushes beyond the United States as the European setting of the action registers how local author-
ities across the Atlantic confine those who are, as a result of socio-political and personal condi-
tions, forced to flee home and find refuge.
For Israel, movement leads to a type of transiency, in part because the historical conditions of
war prevent him from fitting easily into the place where he goes. Early in the book, when he first
gets captured as a prisoner of war and taken to England, Israel is held aboard a ship “like Jonah
in the belly of the whale” (16), and then he escapes. This sequence captures the tension between
Israel’s desire for movement and the attempts by various types of authorities to apprehend and
hold him: “No sooner does Israel see his companions housed, than putting speed into his feet,
and letting grow all his wings, he starts like a deer. He runs four miles (so he afterwards affirmed)
without halting. He sped towards London; wisely deeming that once in that crowd detection
would be impossible” (16). As noted, he is incarcerated on his way to London. Like someone try-
ing to escape immigration authorities in today’s United States and United Kingdom, Israel is
constantly trying to avoid detection, changing outfits and directions to keep himself out of
detention. In many parts of the book, as other critics have pointed out, his outfits cloak whatever
part of his background he may be trying to hide. As he goes from one place to another, Israel
constantly changes clothes either to fit into a particular setting or disguise his identity, which
allows him to sail under both US and English flags.
Israel Potter takes up migratory experiences through a biographical portrait of someone crossing
continents and countries, concluding with an important critique of the US nation-state’s capri-
ciousness in excluding certain people from its governmental operations. Potter’s movement often
points toward the challenges presented by migration, whether forced by historical circumstances
or undertaken through the agency of an individual person. The book shows how throughout the
life of a migrant subject, individual decisions—such as the initial departure from home—to move
across geographic distances (and nations) are made in the context of historical circumstances. As I
have argued elsewhere, the conditions that Israel Potter faces at the end of the book—the refusal
of his pension and thus bureaucratic exclusion from the nation-state—resonate with the treatment
of minorities in the United States (including veterans) as a result of anti-immigrant discourse
(Lazo). Considering the way contemporary refugees and migrants are mistreated by the state as a
result of exclusionary discourse, we can see how the experience of migration strips Israel of his
national protections. As Hester Blum has argued, “As an American citizen unable to claim the
‘protection’ of his nation, whether at sea or on foreign shores, Potter discovers that his rights are
neither inalienable nor independent of the will of sovereign states” (117).
Israel Potter offers a forceful example of migration in fictional narrative. In 1952, C. L. R.
James, while incarcerated on Ellis Island, published a study of Melville’s fiction in which he
argued that Melville “painted a picture of the world in which we live” (3). In that spirit, I want
to position Israel Potter as a portrait of the struggles of migrants to escape persecution as they
attempt to settle in new countries. Melville’s literary emplotment prompts a historical dialogue
and throws into relief how conditions for people who find themselves migrating can be precar-
ious. By presenting a US national subject as a migrant, Melville calls attention to a variety of
difficulties confronted by someone who leaves home and enters a new national space without the
protections of civil government. These types of issues have been at the forefront of recent US
political discussions as they pertain to migrants and immigrants who do not have legal papers to
enter the country. In 1994, the agency then known as the US Immigration and Naturalization
Service began Operation Gatekeeper, a massive effort to curtail undocumented crossings along
the Southwest US border. The apprehension and detention of migrants gained momentum in
light of the homeland security apparatus created after the attacks on the World Trade Center of
September 11, 2001. As Robert T. Chase has argued, “The post 9/11 security environment
changed immigration practices to reflect the punitive pursuit of criminal justice” (9). Efforts to
prevent undocumented migration reached a rhetorical and symbolic apogee between 2016–2020
as the Trump administration called for the construction of a wall along the southern border and
tried to bring crossings to a halt with a series of tough measures that included separating chil-
dren from their parents. The result is that today’s migrant must battle against historical forces
that seek to prevent an easy transition into a new place where a person might live and work. In
that vein, although under much different historical circumstances, Israel Potter also grappled
with the weight of migration history in his wanderings.
Potter has much in common with today’s Latino/a/x laborers in the United States, especially
if we consider that his is a story about someone who leaves his home town and ends up migrating
to another country, where he lands a job as a gardener on the grounds of a retreat frequented by
King George the Third. That situation calls to mind the undocumented people working on
President Donald Trump’s golf course. One of those workers, Margarita Cruz, was quoted in the
New York Times saying that Trump “would come over and say hello, ask your name and how long
you had worked at the club. He would ask how you liked a rug, or a picture on the wall, things
like that” (Zaverri and Correal). While George the Third’s conversation with Israel is on more
weighty matters of battles and armies—“Were you at Bunker Hill?” the king asks (33)—the
hierarchical labor conditions related to care of upscale domestic grounds bring together
the “king” of the realm and workers keeping up the place. Israel does share with Latino gardeners
118 Rodrigo Lazo
the experiences of retaining connections to a home country, which he holds until his final days,
while settling into the English working class.
Scholars of transnationalism have discussed migrants whose experiences involve simultaneous
economic, familial, and social connections to more than one country.4 An excellent example of
transnational duality appears at the end of Chapter 1, when Israel’s life is summed up as, “This
little boy of the hills, born in sight of the sparkling Housatonic, was to linger out the best part
of his life a prisoner or a pauper upon the grimy banks of the Thames” (7). The “hills” here could
include Bunker Hill, which becomes one of the defining features of his life, but also the hills of
his home, which Israel has not relinquished at the end of the book. When we consider recent
immigration history in the United States, that line from Israel Potter prompts a consideration of
the many people from hills in Guatemala or Honduras who live parts of their lives under oppres-
sive labor conditions (as prisoners and paupers) while touching the banks of various rivers around
the United States. Andrew Taylor has written, “In its rejection of the monumental in favour of
the stylistic and ontological complexities of disruption, Israel Potter is a concentrated interrogation
of how the transatlantic space hollows out the shibboleths of literary and patriotic belonging”
(125). Part of that disruption involves a facile vision of national belonging.
The complexities of Israel’s experiences emerge not only in his movement but also in the
book’s generic instability. Melville challenges generic conventions by playing the non-fiction
elements of biography against the impressionistic quality of travel writing. As Hennig Cohen
has written, “The array of literary forms comprising Israel Potter, some of them well developed
and others inchoate, suggests Melville’s impatience with the limitations of literary form” (299).
The title promises to recount (and later fails to deliver on) his fifty years of exile, a biographical
overture; the dedication by a fictional “editor” to the Bunker Hill Monument opens with the
following: “Biography, in its purer form, confined to the ended lives of the true and brave, may
be held the fairest meed of human virtue—one given and received in entire disinterestedness…”
(Melville, Israel 1). But whatever Melville’s book may offer in terms of “disinterested” biograph-
ical account is undercut by the text’s discomfort with the factual events behind The Life and
Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter, prompting Peter Bellis to say that Melville turns “the
pamphlet’s first-person tale into a distanced and ironized third-person narrative and its
Revolutionary War hero into a decidedly antiheroic figure, alienated from and dispossessed by
history itself” (607). The drive of a narrative that is at times unpredictable unsettles the assump-
tions that history and biography can be written without artistic excursions.
The claim to biography is repeated and undercut in Chapter 1, in which “The Birthplace of
Israel” gestures toward biographical narrative only to open with a sentence that looks like
something out of a travel piece: “The traveler who at the present day is content to travel in the
good old Asiatic style, neither rushed along by a locomotive, nor dragged by a stage coach” (3).
In rhetoric, Asiatic style is not about travel but about oration and is also known as “grand style.”
Laurent Pernot explains, “This is a showy and recherché style, practiced by orators and writers
from Rhodes and Asia Minor (whence its name)” and could be, per Cicero, bombastic and filled
with word play and flair (81). In other words, the traveler addressed in the opening of Israel Potter
is not rushed but willing to circle a bit and take the interesting way toward a destination.
4
The literature on transnationalism and labor is considerable. For a pioneering study, see Basch et al. For a more recent
study of transnational labor from Mexico, see Deborah Cohen.
“Asiatic” would contrast with “Attic” style, which Pernot describes as marked by “clarity and
verbal exactitude” (117), which is to say, direct.
The reference to Asiatic style connects Israel’s migratory impetus to the narrative’s various
generic turns. Israel Potter is not on a locomotive going to a particular destination or even
“dragged by a stage-coach” but rather driven by elements of the picaresque and the Gothic, as
Israel moves from Paris to England and is entombed inside of a wall. Hennig Cohen sums it up
as follows: “Melville changes his genre almost as often as Israel changes his clothing and for
much the same reason—to provide a suitable guise for the occasion” (300–1). The introduction
of travel as one of the generic possibilities places Israel Potter alongside Melville’s periodical fic-
tions of the mid-1850s, including Benito Cereno and The Encantadas, which also show elements of
travel writing as they take readers to South America. While The Encantadas offers a tour of the
Galápagos islands with an emphasis on their interpretive instability, Benito Cereno opens with a
gray coast on the Pacific as foreshadowing the challenges faced by Amasa Delano, who is not
unlike a traveler trying to make sense of an unknown realm. In the case of Israel Potter, the
generic turns mirror the migrant spirit, which moves Israel from one destination to another as
the weight of historical circumstances pushes him in various directions. These turns are reflected
in changes in tone as the narrative moves toward the end: we go from the hopeful and adven-
turous experiences of migration to the more cynical experience of war and ultimately to the hard
labor and sadness of a life that passes.
The various turns of genre are not without connection to one of the book’s important terms:
exile. I noted above that Israel Potter fails to deliver on the second part of the title by passing
swiftly over the fifty years. But the final pages do bring readers in contact with exile as it moti-
vates his longing to return to his birthplace. Here exile is not a reference to a person (an exile) but
represents a situation in which Israel lived for a half century. For much of those fifty years, the
moveable and mutable Israel becomes a lower-class migrant laborer who must contend with
poverty. When he trades the dress of an English sailor for the tatters of “an old ditcher tottering
beneath the weight of a pick-axe” (21), Israel becomes “the very picture of poverty, toil and dis-
tress” (21). These clothes, we are told, are “suitable to that long career of destitution before him”
(21). And in a sentence that combines his migrant movement with hard labor, we are told that
he lived through “one brief career of adventurous wanderings; and then, forty torpid years of
pauperism” (21–22). If we take Israel’s life as representative of a type of migrant experience, we
are reminded that the physical migration from one country to another might be a brief episode
in someone’s life, an adventure that gives way to years of sedentary labor. Here again, Israel
prompts us to contemplate the experience of immigrants who settle into a life of labor.
What are we to make of Melville’s emphasis on exile? Exile implies a painful separation from
home. Edward Said has written that exile “is the unhealable rift forced between a human being
and a native place, between the self and its true home … [exile’s] essential sadness can never be
surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious,
even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the
crippling sorrow of estrangement” (173). Sadness emerges at the end of Israel Potter. In a recent
article, Emilio Irigoyen argues that “one significant way in which the story represents the expe-
rience of exile is by textually embodying the sense of suspension (in time) and of detour (in space)
often associated with it” (15). Irigoyen uses the suggestive term “moving stasis” to describe
Potter’s condition, and he relates this to form. In Irigoyen’s reading, the form of the text enacts
120 Rodrigo Lazo
a material example of the endless deferrals of the exile condition, the desire for a home that is
unattainable, and thus returns in the end as an absence.
Exile brings readers close to the heavy-handed gloss offered by T. B. Peterson: while not inter-
changeable, it does have resonance with refugee. In recent history, refugee has been associated with
the mass displacement of populations due to war, and a refugee may well experience that separa-
tion from a home country as a form of exile. Per the Oxford English Dictionary, refugee goes back
to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century usage in reference to Protestants who left France and
went to other countries, including England, to escape persecution. These French refugees were
associated with poverty, an experience that also comes to structure much of Potter’s life. As a
result of a life of toil, an elder Potter looks back at New England and gives himself up to “the
stir of tender but quenchless memories” (186). In other words, the experience of exile prompts a
wish to return to his starting point. In 1800, “back to New England our exile was called in his
soul” (186). Israel’s thoughts return to his early days, even imagining he hears Old Huckleberry,
his “mother’s favorite old pillion horse” (186).
Keeping in mind the temporality of this backward contemplation, the book enters a vision
driven by nostalgia. Nostalgia attempts to arrest a historical experience and moves toward the
apprehension of a past that is stuck in time. In the contemporary United States, many immigrants
have nostalgic longings that color their conception of a true home. Somewhere between the
might-have-been and actual condition is the desire for a comfortable return to what was. Israel
Potter speaks to such situations. Nostalgia falsely promises an unrealistic return, and Melville’s
diction does not idealize that experience. He describes it as hallucination: “Sometimes, when
incited by some little incident, however trivial in itself, thoughts of home would—either by grad-
ually working and working upon him, or else by an impetuous rush of recollection—overpower
him for a time to a sort of hallucination” (186). In an article that recalls the use of nostalgia in the
nineteenth century as a medical diagnosis related to slavery, Jonathan Schroeder notes that nos-
talgia was known to induce hallucinations that could lead to suicide. “In marked contrast to its
current status today, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and the Americas, the medical
concept of nostalgia was the only pathology that related exclusively to forced mobility,” Schroeder
writes. “It was solely used to diagnose sailors, soldiers, convicts, slaves, and other groups whose
labor forcibly separated them from home” (655). The occasions for Israel’s “returns of his boy-
hood’s sweeter days” (186) were the many episodes of financial hardship, extreme poverty and
even injury that he suffered, the latter causing “a prolongation of his exile” (184). Melville sug-
gests that migrant nostalgia is brought on by one’s being “In want and bitterness, pent in, per-
force, between dingy walls” (186). The appeal of hallucinatory thinking draws Israel back to the
United States at a point in life when he is old, a brother to the “white-haired old ocean” (189).
The nostalgic longing for that which cannot be recovered marks a change in tone at the end of Israel
Potter. The narrative begins with an upbeat tone, only to end in a downcast scene, a death without a
pension. In the opening we get “ample food for poetic reflection in the singular scenery … crests or
slopes of pastoral mountains, while far below, mapped out in its beauty, the valley of the Housatonic
lies endless along at your feet” (3). And then, we hear that “In fine clear June days, the bloom of these
mountains is beyond expression delightful” (5). The hopeful tone of the book’s opening makes one
wonder whether Israel went swimming at the beach during his sojourn into the Caribbean.
During the chapters involving Ben Franklin, John Paul Jones, and Squire Woodcock, the
book gets progressively darker. War generates the question: “Is civilization a thing distinct, or is
it an advanced stage of barbarism” (148). In the final chapter, Israel is left to suffer the indignity
of being denied a pension by the country for which he fought in the revolutionary era, and his
son has to tear him away from a “dismal, damp wood” (192). Israel is stunned, faced with the
uncanny realization that neither nostalgic vision nor hallucination (Irigoyen’s “moving stasis”)
can stand up to the changes of time.
At the end, the narrative turns away from the possibilities created by early adventurous wan-
dering. The story of a young man on the move jumping into transatlantic revolutionary encoun-
ters, changing and shifting as he goes along, gives way to the heaviness and tired limbs of old
age. “Few things remain” (192). If one is inspired to go back to an imagined place of origin, it is
likely that one will find “the roads had years before been changed” and “new orchards, planted
from other suckers, and in time grafted, throve on sunny slopes near by, where blackberries had
once been picked by the bushel” (191). Even with nostalgia as the driver, Israel cannot return to
something that resembles home.
We could say that the ending differs from the book Melville intended to write. Writing to
George Putnam in 1854 with 60 pages of the manuscript of “Israel Potter,” Melville says, “I
engage that the story shall contain nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious. There will be very
little reflective writing in it; nothing weighty. It is adventure. As for its interest, I shall try to
sustain that as well as I can” (Corr 265). Melville’s attempt to write a story with “nothing
weighty” is undone by a conclusion that situates Israel in a desolate setting.
As a wandering novel with a wandering character, Israel Potter pushes us to consider how migrant
subjects—like its titular veteran who was “repulsed in efforts, after a pension”—can be excluded
by “certain caprices of law” (192). Refugees, exiles, and migrants share an uprooting of the self and
the resulting turmoil that comes from moving across borders and nations. The types of challenges
faced by Israel anticipate conditions for migrants in the contemporary period, when nation-states
and local authorities preclude them from fitting into a new society. In Israel Potter, national
belonging is not guaranteed; even a decorated veteran can be turned away because bureaucrats and
immigration enforcement police do not see him as belonging to the nation. Israel calls attention to
the precarious existence of people who are forced to make their way to new places in response to
historical circumstances, and he is indeed a refugee who lives much of his life in exile.
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10
In Other Worlds: Mystery and Method
in The Piazza Tales
Christopher Sten
The Melville who turned to writing short stories in the early 1850s was a brilliantly resourceful
and imaginative writer with almost a decade of experience producing travel narratives (Typee,
Omoo, Redburn) and big, challenging novels (Mardi, Moby-Dick, Pierre). Like these earlier narra-
tives, the stories in The Piazza Tales are remarkably diverse—in subject, setting, point of view,
genre, even style. Every story seems to have been written by a different author. Considering
only the half dozen tales in this collection alone, not to mention the dozen or so others he
wrote during his magazine period, Melville demonstrates extraordinary range in his command
of the form in all its variety, from an imaginary voyage (“The Piazza”), a biography (“Bartleby,
the Scrivener”), and a slavery narrative (“Benito Cereno”), to a salesman story (“Lightning-Rod
Man”), travel sketches (“The Encantadas”), and a moral fable (“Bell-Tower”), and remarkable
creativity and intelligence as well in developing the themes, characters, and techniques of
these relatively brief narratives. All of the stories are fictionalized and self-contained, told by
narrators who are fabrications, at least in part, and based on types or historical figures (an
invalid, a lawyer, a ship captain, a cottage dweller, a traveler, a fabulist) that keep Melville’s
authorial voice at a distance. All are also marked by complexity, uncertainty, and the sort of
mystery that creates suspense while also leaving something for readers to work out for them-
selves about the story’s meaning.
All of the stories in The Piazza Tales, except “The Piazza” (which was a late addition), were
originally published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, where they were well-suited to its discerning,
cosmopolitan audience. All of them—including the light-hearted “Lightning-Rod Man”—are
examples of social critique and bear the marks of an astute, engaged social consciousness (and
conscience) on a range of issues: economic disparity and urban anonymity; class and the exploi-
tation of labor; race and the slave trade; capitalism; colonialism; and machine technology. As
124 Christopher Sten
such, they are also dramatic, sharply drawn stories of emotional frustration and bodily suffering—
of confinement, captivity, entrapment, or abuse—and of resistance, rebellion, or subterfuge in
response to oppressive conditions. Few if any of Melville’s characters can be said to triumph; few
if any are heroic. Some are transformed but not always to their benefit. Some change little or not
at all. Also the central characters in these stories—the narrator in “The Piazza,” the lawyer in
“Bartleby,” the American captain in “Benito Cereno,” the narrator in “The Lightning-Rod Man,”
the architect in “The Bell-Tower”—are male, middle-class, educated or professional, and white,
like most of Putnam’s readers.
“The Piazza” is a two-part tale, a sort of diptych like “The Paradise of Bachelors and the
Tartarus of Maids,” the first part serving as an introduction to the narrator, who has recently
moved from the city to a farm-house in the Berkshires, and the second part detailing the unlikely
event of his “inland voyage to fairy-land” (PT 4), when he imagines venturing to the top of a
distant mountain in search of the source of a mysterious light. The first part is framed, essen-
tially, in realistic terms and bears a strong resemblance to Melville’s own personal experience,
when he moved from New York City in October 1850 to the farmhouse he called “Arrowhead,”
where he wrote much of Moby-Dick, Pierre, Israel Potter, and many of his short stories, and where
he experienced painful rheumatism and sciatica periodically for several years. The longer, second
part of “The Piazza” is a daydream or fantasy, an imagined voyage undertaken in search of a
shadowy “queen of the fairies,” a voyage that calls to mind Taji’s allegorical search for the exotic
Yillah in Mardi. Here, however, the search is associated with Titania and A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, in whose story the narrator shows an obsessive interest, and the fantasist Don Quixote,
“that sagest sage that ever lived” (6).
The narrator of “The Piazza,” who by implication is the author or editor of all the tales in the
collection, is similar to Melville but clearly an artificial construct or persona—more relaxed and
cheerful, a dreamer and avid reader but one with a taste for allegories and romances (the Faerie
Queene and the plays of Shakespeare especially); a familiarity with the Bible; and a preoccupation
with Charlemagne. But unlike Melville himself, the narrator seems to live alone and to enjoy
more leisure time, reading and contemplating distant Mount Greylock, than Melville himself
experienced during years of feverish writing and hard physical labor on his farm. The sense of
leisure is consistent with references to the narrator being sick and bedridden, but inconsistent
with Melville’s own illness during much of the period of his residence at Arrowhead. Also, the
narrator’s explanation for his illness as something that starts with an earache, acquired while lying
on the ground while gazing at Greylock, is very different from the chronic condition Melville was
experiencing during this period. But his earache provides the excuse for the narrator to want a
piazza to be added to his new home. Although soon confined to a sickbed, he continues to want
a view of the out-of-doors, and of Mount Greylock especially. As Melville’s contemporary Harriet
Martineau had observed a few years earlier in Life in the Sickroom (1844), having a view of the
natural world outside one’s sickroom is always an issue with sick people. Through the combination
of his new piazza overlooking the mountains and the fact of his having become “so sensitive
through my illness” the narrator happens to catch a glimpse, one September morning, of “the
golden mountain-window” in the distance, the same “spot of radiance” (4) that had earlier mys-
tified him and that now inspires him to imagine: “Fairies there … once more; the queen of fairies
at her fairy-window; at any rate some glad mountain-girl; it will do me good, it will cure this
weariness, to look on her” (7). With this fresh perception, and in spite of the “ingrate peevishness
In Other Worlds: Mystery and Method in The Piazza Tales 125
of my weary convalescence” (6), he vows to go looking for her—whether faerie or mountain girl.
Melville here provides a remarkable instance of the link between illness and “heightened sensi-
tivity,” invalidism and vision that Martineau had attested to in Life in the Sickroom.
What such “heightened sensitivity” looks like in the narrator’s case is the subject of the second
part of “The Piazza,” where he appears to carry out his plan to search out the “queen of fairies”
through an imagined voyage to Mount Greylock. Although he claims to launch his “yawl” (one of
many signs of the narrator’s sailor past) and “push away for fairy-land—for rainbow’s end” (6), he
slips into a daydream in which he travels up the mountains and encounters, not the queen of
fairies, but a sad and lonely figure, suffering the trials of “sitting, sitting, restless sitting” while
performing “dull woman’s work” at her sewing desk (12). In the end, the second part of the tale
serves as an allegory about perspective and inspired artistic production, contrasting the story-
teller, a man of illness, intuition, leisure, and privilege, and the weary, hardworking young
woman whose “strange fancies” lead her to believe the narrator’s house, in the distance below her,
“‘looks so happy,’” only to admit she sometimes thinks, “‘I do but dream it is there’” (9–10). As
Marianna’s example suggests, “The Piazza” is ultimately a meditation on perspective and the
changes in perception and appreciation that can come with a change in point of view, a conclusion
the author represents dramatically when the narrator is shown looking down through Marianna’s
window at his home and suddenly realizes, “I hardly knew it, though I came from it” (9). This
moment is the pivot on which the story turns, when point of view and social vision come together
and the narrator discovers that this woman, whom he had wanted to be an incarnation of Una,
Spenser’s ideal of Womanhood in the Faerie Queene, is a lowly, sad, and weary seamstress instead.
When the narrator finally meets Marianna, this two-part story turns from romance back to
realism, and from the narrator’s personal story of illness and dreaming to the story of Marianna,
the quiet, lonely, long-suffering seamstress who turns out to be, like Bartleby, “a bit of wreck”
(32), but this time on Mount Greylock.
“Bartleby, the Scrivener” is Melville’s most enigmatic story. Despite much probing by gener-
ations of critics, the title character remains a mystery. We know his first name, his job in a Wall
Street law office, his preference for ginger nuts, but little more, because he is so withdrawn,
choosing to articulate, when pressed, only what he “prefers not” to do. Because he is so unrespon-
sive, critics have tended to see him as suffering from a mysterious illness—depression, autism,
schizophrenia, agoraphobia, and more. Whatever it is, his fellow copyists suffer, too, and take
turns displaying their dislike for their work as copyists, Nippers spending mornings wrestling
with his desk and Turkey becoming useless in the afternoon after medicating himself with “red
ink” lunches (16). Surely Bartleby suffers physically, as they do, from repeating the same move-
ments, maintaining the same posture, performing the same labor, hour after hour. Even the
lawyer recognizes that copying is “a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair” (20). But at
another level, as the lawyer finally comes to perceive, Bartleby’s unhappiness is a symptom of a
deeper malaise, something oppressive to his spirit or “soul.” After mounting frustration and sev-
eral fruitless attempts to accommodate Bartleby’s preferences or come to his aid, the lawyer has
an epiphany: “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” (29). Bartleby is like the young Idealist Emerson
described in his 1842 essay, “The Transcendentalist,” who is “striking work, and crying out for
somewhat worthy to do!” (98) Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, Melville seems to have mod-
eled the Scrivener after Emerson’s Transcendentalist.
However, despite strong parallels between the two, and the hints Emerson’s essay seems to
provide toward explaining something similar to Bartleby’s strange behavior, what ails the
Scrivener remains a mystery. Not only does he remain silent about his feelings and preferences,
but by limiting the Scrivener’s responses to saying what he would “prefer not” to do, Melville
suggests there are linguistic limitations to the Scrivener’s ability to communicate his pain, what-
ever its source. Indeed, as Elaine Scarry has written in The Body in Pain (1985), pain is beyond
language; it is inexpressible. By the same token, because pain is such a uniquely subjective expe-
rience, it is also hard for any one person to feel another person’s pain, hard even to believe in it.
This is as true of physical or bodily pain as it is of mental or spiritual pain, for the latter is also
felt somatically. The problem at the center of Melville’s story is that pain cannot be expressed or
communicated. As a consequence, the lawyer has very limited success in making Bartleby’s
character visible or “sensible” to the reader. The best he can do is to present “a few passages in
the life of Bartleby” (13) while relating his personal experience of the man, something he can do
in more detail. Thus, almost without trying, he does succeed in revealing his own character—
particularly in the early stages and then again, after he starts to change and come out of his shell.
For this reason, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” turns out to be as much the lawyer’s story as it is
Bartleby’s. In the early stages, he describes himself as a bachelor, comfortably ensconced in the
“snug retreat” of his Wall Street law office doing “a snug business among rich men’s bonds and
mortgages and title-deeds.” Happily devoting his life to the accumulation of wealth and securing
peace of mind, he avoids the “turbulence” of the courtroom on the theory that “the easiest way
of life is the best,” and confesses, “All who know me, consider me an eminently safe man” (and
thinks it a good thing) (14). Self-interested, self-protective, and self-satisfied, he seems to exem-
plify Emerson’s Materialist, who “insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and
the animal wants of man,” as described also in “The Transcendentalist” essay (93). Once he stops
simply tolerating Bartleby’s eccentric behavior, however, and begins to show curiosity and signs
of concern for him, he reveals an emerging pain of his own. Unbeknownst to the lawyer himself,
then, the story gradually transforms into a confession—a quiet, understated confession of his
having ultimately failed the Scrivener, despite his mostly ineffectual efforts to help him, but also
a confession of his having barely escaped the limited life of a self-satisfied bachelor by opening
himself emotionally to another human for the first time.
Later, during the middle stages of his transformation, the lawyer begins to show signs of curi-
osity about the Scrivener’s private life when he notices Bartleby never goes out for meals and
wonders how he manages. The clearest evidence of his turn-around seems to occur when he dis-
covers the Scrivener inhabiting his law offices on a weekend: “what miserable friendlessness and
loneliness are here revealed!” he says in a statement that speaks to his own condition as well. “His
poverty is great, but his solitude how horrible!” (27–28). Here he steps outside himself and
shows newfound sympathy for Bartleby, but still being self-interested and self-involved, even
these first tentative efforts at charity are tainted by his self-interest and pragmatism: “Poor fel-
low! thought I, he means no mischief. … He is useful to me. … Yes. Here I can cheaply purchase
a delicious self-approval. To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange willfulness, will cost
me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my
conscience” (23–24). While this complex moment indicates the first small opening of the law-
yer’s heart to a fellow human, the lawyer goes on to make additional, selfless efforts to come to
Bartleby’s aid, offering to bring him home with him and, later on, visiting him in the city’s
debtors’ prison, the Tombs. While these efforts prove insufficient or ineffectual, the lawyer’s
story of the Scrivener is a quiet admission of a modest personal transformation, an opening of his
heart, but also, and more importantly, a story of deep and lasting regret, as seen when he decides,
following the Scrivener’s demise, to memorialize him by relating “a few passages in the life” of
this “strangest” of scriveners (13). Without exactly acknowledging as much or making any
self-congratulatory claims, the lawyer’s self-portrait is a confession of his eleventh-hour discovery
of his own previously unrecognized and unacknowledged human pain, by a man whose life had
been an emotional void. Still, it is not a sentimental story, because, as the lawyer makes more and
more emphatic efforts to help the Scrivener, Bartleby pulls away more and more from the law-
yer’s efforts to help him. Although the lawyer’s final “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” may be sen-
timental, the lawyer’s awakening is not (45). Melville’s story is a quiet, tragicomic tale of the
power of sympathy and its limits.
Melville made many changes to the original source of “Benito Cereno,” the story of a slave ship
revolt off the coast of South America that he discovered in Amasa Delano’s A Narrative of Voyages
and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817). But none were more important than
his decision to withhold the facts of the rebellion and who was in charge of the ship until the end
of his narrative. The original Delano, who had come on board the slave ship to offer aid to a vessel
in distress, had reported these facts in the second paragraph of his Narrative, along with the fact
that the Africans had desperately attempted to kill Cereno as he tried to join Delano as he was
leaving the San Dominick. Melville made these changes in order to create an aura of mystery for
the reader about how the San Dominick came to be in such disrepair and its crew so starkly
depleted. But he did so to make it possible for the reader to experience the same sense of mystery
Delano had experienced originally, namely, without knowing what he was seeing. In hindsight,
it also seems clear Melville made these changes to create for the reader much the same traumatic
shock effect experienced by Delano when, in the story’s penultimate scene, he learns the truth
about who is really in charge of the San Dominick and also that the Africans made a last-ditch
effort to kill both Cereno and Delano before the two captains escaped to the Bachelor’s Delight.
For the reader, if not for Delano, the shock of this twin discovery has the potential to create not
simply a powerful dramatic effect, but also an epiphany that calls into question popular racist
assumptions about the inferior intelligence and docility of the Africans. For the plotting of their
takeover of the ship and on-the-spot construction of a sophisticated plan to deceive Delano
regarding who is in charge show remarkable intelligence and cunning on the Africans’ part, and
together suggest just how desperate they were to free themselves even at the cost of their lives.
In a related move, Melville made one other major change to Delano’s original narrative by
adding a new ending to the tale that brings together the Spanish and American captains for a
quiet conversation following the events of the court deposition and the gruesome legal punish-
ment of Babo and his fellow conspirators for their crimes. In this case, Melville introduced a very
different kind of mystery that can be summed up in Delano’s final question to the broken, dying
Cereno, “‘you are saved; what has cast such a shadow upon you?’,” to which Cereno replies
simply, “‘The negro.’” What do Delano’s question and Cereno’s answer imply about their respec-
tive views of “the negro” (116) and their assumptions about “the negro’s” inferior intelligence
and primitive animal nature, the principal justifications in the nineteenth century for enslaving
Africans? At the very least their final exchange reveals that, while Delano has been unaffected or
unmoved by the events he witnessed on the San Dominick, Cereno has been so profoundly altered,
mentally and physically, as to end up, at twenty-nine years of age, in a premature grave within
just a few months of the Lima court’s adjudication of the legal case against the Africans.
Melville altered Delano’s original story in other respects as well. He changed the date of the
historical incident of the mutiny from 1804 to 1799, bringing it closer to the time, in 1791,
when enslaved Africans, under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, seized power in Haiti;
and he altered the names of Cereno’s ship, from the Tryal to the San Dominick, further suggesting
parallels with the revolution in Haiti (earlier known as Santo Domingo), and Delano’s ship from
the Perseverance to the Bachelor’s Delight, thus calling attention to the inexperience or innocence
of its American captain, Delano. Melville made these changes, apparently, to emphasize that the
rebellion on the San Dominick was not an isolated incident but one in a series of slave insurrec-
tions in the New World, with the implication that there were lessons to be learned from them,
not the least of which was the fact that beneath the façade of enslaved Africans’ docility and sup-
posed acceptance of their lot there burned a powerful desire to be free and the intelligence and
determination to find a way when the opportunity presented itself.
In one important respect, Melville did not depart from Delano’s original narrative; he retained
the court deposition, where the horrifying details about the murder and mayhem, the drownings
and dismemberments that the Africans had committed during their takeover of the ship accu-
mulate to generate a “shock of recognition” (“Hawthorne and His Mosses,” PT 249) for the
reader about the fact that the Africans had not only violently seized control of the San Dominick
but also murdered and cast overboard several of its crew. The deposition’s legal report of the
brutal violence that occurred during and after the takeover of the San Dominick has the potential
to create a vicarious shock that mirrors Cereno’s own trauma in response to these same events,
events that include the brutal murder and flaying of the body of his boyhood friend Alejandro
Aranda, not long after the Africans’ rebellion, in preparation for mounting his skeleton on the
ship’s bow as a warning to Cereno and his depleted crew. It is these events, most of all, that
brought home to Cereno the horrors of the slave-trade and left him so emotionally broken and
traumatized that, just “three months after being dismissed by the court,” he went, “borne on the
bier,” to an early grave (117). Cereno’s broken spirit (mentioned once in Delano’s original account
but much emphasized throughout Melville’s story in his descriptions of Cereno’s “nervous,” “agi-
tated,” “unstrung” behavior) is possibly the most important of the revelations in the final scene
where the two captains meet for the last time, and speaks not only to the evils of slavery and the
slave-trade but also to Cereno’s transformative recognition that the men and women forced into
slavery are as human as himself (95, 86).
“The Lightning-Rod Man,” a funny one-act drama, is unique among the stories in The Piazza
Tales. More than a traveling salesman story, it is a comic performance piece that seems conceived
for the stage or burlesque theatre, where the two characters are total mysteries to one another and
readers are forced to draw their own conclusions about what is going on. Lacking an omniscient
narrator, the story is told from the point of view of the potential customer of the salesman, and
relies on interior monologue and dialogue between the two characters to provide context and
setting, descriptions of action, and hints about their personalities. From the beginning, the title
character takes on the conventionalized role of traveling salesman, with his impressive knowledge,
exaggerated reactions, and inflated claims about his product, and the narrator seems to perform
an equally conventionalized role as his clueless customer, who lacks such knowledge and makes
silly, ill-advised moves or assertions out of ignorance. Whereas their exchange starts out as a
game, there is an undercurrent of danger to the story, too, because the spectacular electrical
storm brewing in the background could do serious bodily harm. In the “terrific tempest” of this
storm, which the salesman breathlessly refers to as “this time of terror” (119–20), when a light-
ning rod might be just the thing needed to prevent injury or death, there is a real and urgent
need for him to test the truth-claims of the lightning-rod man who promises protection against
harm. However, when the salesman’s scare tactics threaten him with a horrible, grisly death from
a lightning strike, like that of a horse trapped in a burning barn, the narrator makes it clear his
adversary has crossed the line (124, emphasis added). The salesman’s egregious fear-mongering
triggers a violent reaction in the narrator that causes him to drop his mask and put an end to
their mutual charade by turning on the salesman and chasing him out of his house.
From the start, we do not know whether the lightning-rod man is an honest player. But given
how similar he is to the salesman figures in Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857), it seems rea-
sonable to suspect him, too, of being a performance artist, reacting in mock horror, for instance,
to the narrator’s show of ignorance about dangerous behaviors in a storm while the salesman
presents himself as a well-intentioned broker offering the insurance of a life-saving device to his
customer. Problematically, it soon becomes apparent the narrator is not being honest with the
salesman and instead is as knowledgeable about lightning as the salesman, even being as informed
as the salesman about the recent history of fatal lightning strikes in the United States and as far
away as Scotland. In Erving Goffman’s terms, he is enacting a persona or playing a role as a
greenhorn, an enthusiast of nature and nature’s spectacle but one who lacks scientific knowledge,
and he continues to play that role until he finally turns the tables on the salesman by challenging
his claims and drives him away in an explosion of comic violence and bodily threats. Much of the
humor comes from discovering that the typical or expected situation is reversed, and the narrator
is “playing” the lightning-rod man by pretending to be more innocent than he is, while setting
him up for rejection and defeat. On close inspection, the seemingly ignorant actions of the nar-
rator, such as his making a show of standing on his hearthstone when the salesman first comes
knocking at his door (only to be told this is exactly the wrong place to stand during a storm),
appear to be deliberate. Why does he make a point of specifying where he is standing? Is it an
innocuous detail or the first hint of a planned deception? Melville suggests he may be as knowl-
edgeable about the electrical phenomena and conductors as the salesman himself—or as Benjamin
Franklin, the original “The Lightning-Rod Man,” since the salesman’s scientific claims derive
almost wholly from Franklin’s Letters and Papers on Electricity (1751–1753), or so it seems.
(Melville read widely in The Works of Benjamin Franklin, edited by Jared Sparks (Boston, 1836–
1840), and other of Franklin’s sources in connection with his portrait of him in Israel Potter
(1854–1855), Melville’s Revolutionary War novel from this period, published serially in Putnam’s
Monthly Magazine.1) And how is it that he seems to know in advance that a lightning-rod
salesman is about to knock at his door? As he later intimates, he has learned from previous expe-
rience that storms are precisely when such salesmen make their appearances. “‘When the thunder
is roaring,’” he says knowingly, “‘you deem it an hour peculiarly favorable for producing impres-
sions favorable to your trade’” (121). Soon thereafter he begins to sound like a mix of novice and
aficionado about electrical phenomena, as he gradually takes on the doubter’s role, an apparent
contradiction that suggests a playful yet calculated performance. Ultimately, the story becomes
a nasty duel of wits, one in which the supposed expert and the innocent exchange places, with
1
See Walter E. Bezanson, “Historical Note,” in Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (Northwestern UP and the Newberry
Library, 1982), pp. 191–93.
the “innocent” exposing the salesman as a charlatan (who would collect money for “orders”
without supplying lightning rods) and running him off his property.
As their name implies, the islands portrayed in “The Encantadas” have a history as a group of
mysterious islands—distant, isolated, other-worldly. Removed almost 400 miles from South
America, which was itself something of a mystery for North Americans, the “Enchanted Isles”
had a reputation as being elusive or wandering and capable of casting a spell on anyone who set
foot on them, trapping them “Into most deadly daunger and distressed plight,” to quote
Melville’s opening epigraph from the Faerie Queene. Are the islands real? Can they be reliably
located on a map? Are their inhabitants, animal and human, deformed by mysterious powers and
held captive there? For a storyteller, the challenge is whether the islands’ elusive, seemingly
fantastic nature can be captured in words and shown to bear some relation to the known world.
One of Melville’s strategies for accomplishing this task is to describe the islands in a series of
“Sketches,” a technique that emphasizes the world of the islands is fragmentary and built up
piece by piece, as Deborah Harter explains in in her theoretical study, Bodies in Pieces: Fantastic
Narrative and the Poetics of the Fragment (1996), while also allowing them to be transformed, or
deformed, into something strange, and unexpected, possibly even something monstrous.
Another of Melville’s strategies is to write under a pseudonym, Salvador R. Tarnmoor, an ironic,
poetic, cosmopolitan figure and a careful observer, capable of seeing through the islands’ mys-
teries, as when he explains their apparent movements as the product of powerful currents. Like
the three authorities whom he claims to be the only eyewitnesses “worth mentioning” regarding
the Islands (Ambrose Cowley, James Colnett, and David Porter), he portrays himself as an “eye-
witness” who depends on his own knowledge, even when it contradicts these authorities, a point
he makes explicit in an elaborate Note at the end of Sketch Ninth, saying that if any readers
doubt the existence of such a crazy, “diabolical” creature as the Hermit Oberlus, they will find
confirmation in Porter, though without missing a beat, he confesses he has “added to Porter’s
facts accessory ones picked up in the Pacific from reliable sources; and where facts conflict,” he
admits (with a wink?) he has “naturally preferred his own authorities to Porter’s” (169–70).
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Galápagos Islands remained one of the least
known places on earth. Darwin, who visited there just a few years before Melville did and whose
Voyage of the Beagle (1839) Melville almost surely knew, explained why: they are so isolated and
remote as to provide a wholly insulated, unique environment for the development of unfamiliar
species of plants and animals, separate from but vaguely reminiscent of and parallel to their
cousins in the larger world outside. At the time when Darwin and Melville wrote, the Galápagos
Isles were the closest thing anyone had ever seen to a separate world, a world within the known
world, yet one to which observers can feel the tie. Melville posits the Isles as a test case, a little,
unknown world within the larger known world of Latin America and beyond, while reporting
back to his American readers about what had happened on these islands since the first records of
their discovery in the early sixteenth century by the Spanish bishop of Panama, Father Tomas de
Berlanga, in 1535, all with the objective of taking his measure of the colonial enterprise, in
miniature, and its aftermath in the Western Hemisphere—not as an historian working on a
broad canvas but as a landscape and portrait painter doing sketches on a small scale.
Ostensibly the first five Sketches explore what is known of the landscape, natural history, and
location of the islands, and what can be understood to be the distinctive operations of natural law
there. But at another level these initial sketches treat the tools of analysis and principles required
to engage in the kind of critique that Melville himself was undertaking in these stories: from the
awakening of the moral sense, in the discovery of “difference” and death, and the awakening of
the aesthetic imagination in the discovery of disfigurement, deformation, or deviance in Sketches
First and Second; then through the discovery of hierarchies of power—first among species, birds
and fishes at Rock Rodondo, then among social classes, which the narrator identifies in terms of
“thrones, princedoms, powers, dominating one above another in senatorial array” (135); and then
the equally important and related discovery of historical succession, first Spanish, then English
(another hierarchy of power, defined by nation-building and colonial expansion and contraction)
in Sketches Third and Fourth; and finally on to the recognition that all experience is culturally
mediated or subjective, and susceptible to the wars of nations—the War of 1812, in this case—
in Sketch Fifth.
The last five Sketches, in turn, explore five cultural models defined by race and gender, class
and nation, and five sets of characters representing various levels of alienation or entrapment
and these characters’ responses to the environmental and cultural challenges of life on the
Encantadas. These two worlds, the little one of the islands and the large one beyond, slowly
inch closer together over time as they become more familiar to one another, and begin, ever so
slightly, to merge, in history and in the popular imagination—a process Melville contributed
to in publishing “The Encantadas.” Without ever explicitly saying so, Melville seems to ask,
What do these several human portraits, slim and fragmented though they are, tell us about the
larger, Pacific world we live in, circa 1854? And what do they portend for those of us who are
outsiders? If Darwin had made an evolutionary discovery on the Galápagos Isles about the
larger world’s biological condition, what might Melville’s Sketches reveal about the condition,
politically and culturally, of the larger world of his readers? While focusing on just a handful
of figures—sea captains, buccaneers, renegade soldiers, a mixed-race Indian woman—Melville
made them representative figures who tell a larger human story shaped by issues of race and
gender, class and nation, that together recapitulates much of Latin America’s colonial and post-
colonial history through nearly the first half of the nineteenth century. What he showed his
readers was a fantastic world that was also a miniature of his own mixed world, where tyranny,
colonialism, and the will to power vied continually, in miniature, with the struggle for free-
dom, self-sufficiency, and hope—a blind sort of hope that is itself a force of nature, ageless, and
persistent as the Galápagos tortoise.
Melville’s most unusual story, “The Bell-Tower,” is a parable, and as such it is enigmatic and
mysterious—enigmatic about what it means and mysterious about the make-up of the “mon-
ster” or domino figure in the bell tower who kills his creator, the ambitious architect,
Bannadonna. Melville prefaces his tale with three epigraphs, the first referring to “negroes” (and
by implication, slavery), the others to the dangers of “high-living of ambition” (174) and the
perverse relation between liberty and necessity. Because the story is a parable, a genre that oper-
ates by indirection, it necessarily challenges us to find meaning in the parallel universe of our
own world. In this case, however, Melville does not exactly leave that meaning open to the
reader’s imagination or interpretation. Instead he suggests, in the very first epigraph, a parallel
between the monster’s seemingly accidental killing of Bannadonna, the creator of the creature
in “The Bell-Tower” and the “revenge” naturally sought by “negroes” who are enslaved: “Like
negroes, these powers own man sullenly; mindful of their higher master, while serving, plot
revenge” (174).
On the other hand, the mystery of the domino in the tower concerns the question of its
existential nature or make-up—is it a machine or human, or possibly some sui generis
combination of the two, a “monster”? And if one or the other or both together, what is its sig-
nificance, particularly its cultural significance? What function does it serve? Zakiya Hanafi, in
The Monster in the Machine, has observed that “monsters have always been considered highly
charged with meaning,” while Jeffrey Jerome Cohen takes the idea a step further in arguing
that the monster’s body is a “cultural body,” a construct, a projection born as “an embodiment
of a certain cultural moment” or crisis point in history. As such, the monster’s body may be
mysterious, but it “exists only to be read.” Bannadonna’s creation, his “experimental autom-
aton” (185), is defined by ambiguity and uncertainty: whether it is mechanical or human is a
question that grows in intensity as the story progresses to its inevitable end, when the town’s
mayor and his assistant seize the figure from the tower under cover of night and try to hide it
forever by burying it at sea.
From the beginning, Bannadonna’s work on his creation takes on the mystery of “the
forbidden.” Only after suspenseful buildup do we learn that he has been surreptitiously creating
not simply an “elaborate piece of sculpture, or statue,” but a mechanical man, a “pliant” figure
capable of stepping into the belfry “almost of itself” and striking the hours precisely at times
determined by its creator. The town’s “shrewd old blacksmith,” for example, “ventured the sus-
picion that it was but a living man” (176–77). Additional evidence of the life-like character of
the mysterious figure is seen when the chief magistrate and his associate climb the belfry to
inspect the “cloaked object,” only to discover it “seemed now to have changed its attitude.” No
longer erect or standing, it “seemed now seated upon some sort of frame or chair,” while near its
top they noticed the “web of the cloth” wrapped around it had been altered, “so as to form a sort
of woven grating,” as if to permit the figure to breathe (177). Such an incoherent, contradictory
figure is a disturbing and dangerous hybrid, “a form,” according to Cohen, that questions “binary
thinking” to the point of creating a crisis (6). The “crisis” embodied in Melville’s story, the crisis
of his time—which included slavery while also going beyond it—is the question of whether
machines were becoming more human, as they were made to take on more and more of the work
historically performed by men and women, while at the same time humans, particularly Africans
laboring on plantations in the Western Hemisphere, were being forced to perform like machines.
How terrible this latter possibility might be is suggested by the figure of the domino, who in
human form or the human aspect of its hybrid form, can be imagined to be a slave, so abused and
broken in spirit, yet so perfectly trained, as to take on the appearance and practical utility of a
machine—a version of Michel Foucault’s idea of highly trained or disciplined “docile bodies,” as
described in Discipline and Punish (1975). While Melville only glances at the methods Bannadonna
must have used to subjugate his man-machine (or enslaved person?) to the point of automatic
compliance with his wishes in striking the hours, we can intuit a good deal about them from his
creation’s abjection and mute compliance with his creator’s plan to have him do so, even if it
results in the death of Bannadonna himself. The irony of the latter’s death, in the end, is that he
has achieved such firm control over the domino’s body as to lead it to do not simply what he, its
creator, wishes but as he wishes. For in attempting to strike the hour while the “brain” of
Bannadonna happens to be in the way, the domino does not do precisely what Bannadonna
wishes, but he does perform precisely as he wishes—in spite of the deadly consequences to his
creator. Given the right conditions, the “revenge” of the machine will prove as inevitable and
deadly as the revenge of the “negroes” in a time of slavery.
Works Cited
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” ———. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior.
Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Doubleday, 1967.
Jerome Cohen. U of Minneapolis P, 1996, pp. 3–25. Hanafi, Zakiya. The Monster in the Machine: Magic,
Delano, Amasa. A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific
Northern and Southern Hemispheres. 1817. Reprinted in Revolution. Duke UP, 2000.
PT. Boston: Printed by E. G. House, pp. 809–47. Harter, Deborah A. Bodies in Pieces: Fantastic Narrative
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Transcendentalist.” Emerson’s and the Poetics of the Fragment. Stanford UP, 1996.
Prose and Poetry, edited by Joel Porte and Saundra Martineau, Harriet. Life in the Sickroom. Essays by an
Morris. W. W. Norton & Co., 2001, pp. 93–104. Invalid. 2nd ed. London: Edward Moxon, 1844.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and
Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Pantheon Books, Unmaking of the World. Oxford UP, 1985.
1975. Sten, Christopher W. “Bartleby the Transcendentalist:
Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Melville’s Dead Letter to Emerson.” Modern Language
Organization of Experience. Penguin, 1974. Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 1, March 1974, pp. 30–44.
11
Art of the Scam: The Confidence-Man
Caitlin Smith
Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man is a testy, many-sided novel that simultaneously attracts
and resists first-time readers. A resounding critical failure in its time, the novel baffled its nine-
teenth-century readers. An anonymous and ambivalent reviewer for The Republican praised it as
“the oddest, most unique, and the most ingenious thing he has yet done … but it seems to us
like the work of one not in love or sympathy with his kind” (Atkins, May 16, 1857). The London
Era famously pronounced the work, “A strange book, the object of which is difficult to detect,
unless it be to prove this wicked world still more full of wickedness than even the most gloomy
philosophers have supposed” (Atkins, May 17, 1857). “What would Mr. Melville have us learn
and believe from his book?” the London Era review complains, “That no one lives who acts up to
Christian principle? … [yet] the book is thoroughly original in plot. … The pictures, if dark in
satire, are full of wit and cleverness” (Atkins, May 17, 1857). Many nineteenth-century reviews
were simultaneously impressed and depressed, dazzled and baffled. Common themes in these
immediate reviews include praise for the ingenuity, originality, complexity, and experimen-
talism of the novel considered as a fictional art form—and a semi-outraged, concerned, or frus-
trated appraisal of the novel’s “dark” moral messaging. The Confidence-Man not only refuses to
take a clear, didactic stance, but also it cultivates a mood of distrust, doubt, and skepticism that
mainstream nineteenth-century readers found off-putting.
The Confidence-Man’s subsequent reception history reflects similar struggles to articulate what
the novel is about. As Maurice Lee points out, most Melville scholars agree that The Confidence-
Man is “crucial to the arc of his career,” and has even been called “his most perfect work,” but
literary critics repeatedly “associate it with the word problem” (Lee, “Skepticism” 113).
Contemporary readers encountering the work for the first time have difficulty locating a
politically relevant “moral”—or articulating why the novel moves (or fails to move) them.
Art of the Scam: The Confidence-Man 135
Shortly after the 2016 US Presidential election, The Confidence-Man enjoyed a short-lived burst
of popularity when, in an email to the New Yorker, Philip Roth remarked that “The relevant book
about Trump’s American forebear is Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, the darkly-pessimis-
tic, daringly inventive novel … that could just have well as been called ‘The Art of the Scam’”
(qtd. in Thurman). Roth’s comment triggered a flurry of thinkpieces, podcasts, and academic
blog posts, continuing into 2019. These pieces either sought to analyze Trump’s rhetorical suc-
cess through the lens of the novel, or to generate interest in the novel by demonstrating its his-
torical relevance to Trump, the most recent in a long series of American confidence-men. “This
is it, this is the novel that’s going to explain Donald Trump to me!” Jacob Weisberg predicts at
the beginning of Slate.com’s “Trumpcast” episode on the novel. These contemporary engagements
with the novel reveal troubles similar to those of its nineteenth-century readers. Weisberg admits
that the novel is “tough going,” “dense, complex,” and “lacks a coherent plot, but there’s still
material that’s pretty usable in the present” (Weisberg). The novel’s formal elements are almost
always framed as obstacles, barriers to accessing the “usable” content that can “explain Donald
Trump” to the reader. These responses and their comment sections reveal readerly frustration: “I
will try to read this,” one commenter remarks on a literary blog post, and the author replies,
“This novel is tough sledding. There’s a reason it wasn’t popular when it came out” (Bates).
The novel is frustrating and slippery, but not because it announces its unconcern with moral
or political commentary (as if these concerns could be bracketed away from other, separate realms
of “wit,” “entertainment,” “experimental form,” or “pure art”). Instead, it is frustrating because
it is deeply concerned with moral and political questions. The text consistently raises questions
such as, “What does ‘trust’ look like in a mass society?” (Chapter 5); “Where does racial preju-
dice come from?” (Chapter 26); and “Which financial decisions are morally responsible? How do
new financial systems change relational patterns of intimacy and friendship?” (Chapters 39–40).
Certain images, themes, and characters recur throughout the novel, slowly building through-
lines. For example, the text implies (but never outright proves beyond dispute) that there is a
single, messianic-or-devilish confidence-man assuming multiple guises. Similarly, the novel
returns again and again to a quandary highlighted by social, economic, and religious contexts
that were just emerging in 1856: the necessity of trust, or, in nineteenth-century parlance,
confidence. The book argues that American culture requires confidence in order to work—whether
“confidence” means trust in the performances of political institutions, optimism about state-
supported systems of fiat currency, a secularized faith in the abstract goodness of humanity, a
philosophical stance of trusting one’s senses enough to take action, trust in social systems (espe-
cially related to racial justice, debt, and marital disputes), or a personal trust in individual
strangers that is necessary to form groups. This confidence is essential for human flourishing, but
the act of having confidence exposes one to the dangers of being conned. How, then, can humans
have confidence when we all know that confidence-men are in our midst?
The more one reads The Confidence-Man, the harder it becomes to find “the object of the
book”—if that object is a clear analysis, lesson, or unified perspective. Tracing a nascent crisis of
trust, it poses more questions than it answers, provides no solutions, and undercuts itself con-
stantly. It elicits, anticipates, and consciously resists a readerly engagement that seeks answers
both on a thematic and formal level. Its moral and political commentary relies on an artful eli-
sion of multiple problems and discourses: philosophical skepticism, religious doubt, political
mistrust, economic pessimism, and social misanthropy. In the context of Melville’s literary
career, The Confidence-Man looks forward to his poetic epic Clarel, which builds on and
136 Caitlin Smith
extends the social problems caused by skepticism’s barriers to consensus-formation. Meanwhile,

its literary method relies on a canny evocation––and then destabilizing––of novelistic conven-
tions and critical readerly engagement. These dynamics open up the text to similar creative
readings—or productive misrecognitions—by contemporary readers who are intimately familiar
with the pleasure of recognizing and subverting novel conventions.
Reading The Confidence-Man

Why is The Confidence-Man so hard to read? Fundamentally, it invites but inhibits several ways
of reading that were emerging in the nineteenth century and remain common today. Compared
to Melville’s earlier works, The Confidence-Man is more interested in reader responses, audience
assumptions, and the unquestioned habits of interpretation in his nineteenth-century readers
than other, more successful nineteenth-century novels were. As Matt Seybold has argued, The
Confidence-Man anticipates not just nineteenth-century critiques of readers who struggled to
summarize the novel or find its center, but also the reactions of “modern scholars” who “feel the
need to decode” the novel as a riddle, puzzle, or allegory (Seybold 76). For example, characters in
the text depart from popular conventions of both realist and sentimental novels. Although the
novel is focused on characters’ dialogue (with almost no descriptions of landscapes or objects), it
has no clear protagonist. The full title—The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade—asks the reader to
look below masquerading surfaces for a single character, but the text stubbornly refuses to pro-
vide interiority (Seybold 77). The text is anti-sentimental in its handling of pain, grief, and
personal history. It does not cultivate empathy for any character, and repeatedly asks readers to
assess characters’ emotions as performances (Seybold 77). Melville’s handling of character and
emplotment in The Confidence-Man anticipates the reading habits of nineteenth-century
Transcendentalists with their ideas of selfhood and character. Like Melville’s short story “Benito
Cereno,” The Confidence-Man tricks its nineteenth-century readers by eliciting certain expecta-
tions and then eliding them. It does the same to twenty-first-century readers who try to “solve”
the novel by reading below its surfaces, searching for a final interpretation that will solve pres-
entist questions about authority, identity, performance, and trust.
The modern novel emerged in the eighteenth-century Anglophone world and rapidly usurped
poetry as the predominant written literary form of the nineteenth century, as Michael Schmidt
and other literary historians have demonstrated (see also Glazener). The Confidence-Man picks up
and defies conventions of the novel genre, experimenting with formal boundaries just as did
Melville’s earlier works. But, more than any of Melville’s previous works, The Confidence-Man is
hyper-aware of readers’ engagement and evaluation. Chapter 14, “Worth the Consideration of
Those to Whom it May Prove Worth Considering,” and Chapter 44 “In Which the Last Three
Words of the Last Chapter are Made the Text of Discourse, Which Will be Sure of Receiving
More or Less Attention from those Readers Who Do Not Skip It,” puncture the narrative flow
to reflect on how fiction is authored and criticized (Chapter 14), and how genre expectations
shape readerly responses (Chapter 44). Both chapters address a reader who expects to find a
realist or “psychological novel” (CM 71) and dislikes the work because it strays from their expec-
tations. Chapter 14 anticipates a critique still common today among readers: the characters seem
unrealistic. The text knows that “to some, it may raise a degree of surprise” that characters (like
the preceding chapter’s merchant) make unexpected decisions that seem out of character (69).
The text acknowledges that these moments of “sudden impulsiveness” reveal a new layer, an
unforeshadowed “depth”:
[The character] may be thought to be inconsistent, and even so he is. But for this, is the author to be
blamed? True, it may be urged that there is nothing a writer of fiction should more carefully see to, as
there is nothing a sensible reader will more carefully look for, than that, in the depiction of any character,
its consistency should be preserved.
(69)
Anticipating readerly judgment, the text defends itself by identifying the artifice of consistent
character development: “how does it couple with another requirement … that … fiction based
on fact should never be contradictory to it; and is it not a fact, that, in real life, a consistent
character is a rara avis?” (69). This argument prepares the way for Chapter 44’s discussion of
“original” characters in fiction: readers eagerly expect “original” characters but mistake a gen-
uine original for characters who are “novel, or singular, or striking, or captivating, or all four at
once. … More likely … they are odd characters” (238).
Instead of describing its literary program or method, Chapter 14 defends The Confidence-Man
to readers by attacking their aesthetic criteria. “Specifically, Chapter 14 attacks the assumption
that realist fiction can represent reality in a meaningful way.” The narrator’s dissatisfaction with
“that fiction,” which is fun to read but cannot be “faithful to facts,” exemplifies Melville’s broader
“quarrel with fiction.” As Nina Baym’s classic essay argues, Melville’s literary career reflects an
increasing disillusionment and frustration with fiction’s ability to accurately represent reality or
express truth (Baym 911). As early as Mardi (1849), Melville began experimenting with nine-
teenth-century narrative forms and “normative genres” (913; see also Timothy Marr’s analysis of
Mardi in Chapter 5 of this Companion for more on Melville’s experimentation with fictional
forms). Baym attributes this experimentation to a “rapid disenchantment with fiction both as a
mode of truth telling and as a mode of truth seeking” (913). Reading Melville’s correspondence
alongside his literary career, Baym demonstrates that Melville became increasingly frustrated
with the limitations of both fiction and “all other already existing categories” of knowledge,
because he sought to express an original “sceptered instinct” (913–14).
Melville’s “quarrel with fiction” also emerges from similar concerns among the New England
Protestant intelligentsia, who interrogated the relationships between reality, experience,
knowledge, and narrative. These issues structured transatlantic British Protestant culture as early
as the seventeenth century; during the eighteenth century, they became distinguishing features
of New England Protestantism and the American intellectual cultures influenced by it. By the
nineteenth century, as Philip Gura, Lawrence Buell, Jonathan A. Cook, and others have noted,
American Protestant culture had developed a robust intellectual conversation around the philos-
ophy of language. Indeed, early nineteenth-century Protestant groups were undergoing a series of
schisms and transformations, catalyzed by new philosophical ideas about the nature of truth and
of language. Melville’s intellectual peers, including the Transcendentalists, struggled to evaluate,
adapt, renew, or challenge earlier, Puritan epistemology and metaphysics. These philosophical
experiments centered on two questions: what is the nature of language, and what is the relation-
ship between human nature and Nature? Nineteenth-century New England Protestant
intellectuals worried about whether their forefathers’ answers to these questions still held true, as
key terms took on new meanings and the social world changed around them.
138 Caitlin Smith
Although literacy, writing, and reading were central practices in early New England Puritan
culture, their philosophies of language consistently depicted human words as flawed reflections of
God’s Word (logos). The distinction between God’s perfect language and imperfect human lan-
guage means that humans were always destined to fail at fully expressing their intentions. This
view rested on a fundamental dichotomy in Calvinist Protestantism: the difference between fallen
human nature, and God’s perfect nature. According to the doctrine of total depravity, human
nature was irreparably fallen (in the abstract), and every human faculty (reason, emotions, senses)
was similarly irreparably broken. Only through God’s grace could humans begin renewing or
restoring their faculties. Spiritual practices to aid this restoration were rooted in reading and
interpreting the Protestant Bible, hearing and notating sermons, and introspective journaling.
But, in the early nineteenth century, American Protestantism evolved a theologically liberal wing
that denied the doctrine of total depravity (see Packer). This wing of American Protestantism
would go on to become the Unitarian church, and eventually produce thinkers such as Ralph
Waldo Emerson, who moved beyond liberal Protestantism into new philosophical constellations.
Contemporaries of Emerson, such as William Ellery Channing, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore
Parker, and Margaret Fuller, tried to fuse the Protestant intellectual legacy with new Romantic
philosophy and natural sciences. Though philosophically diverse, these thinkers shared a belief
that human nature was coextensive with a divine Nature (variously understood as God, the
Oversoul, or an idealist world-historical spirit). They argued that by studying personal experience
and the natural world, humans could access the experience of universal Nature. Such “revelation”
was always available to any individual. Because every individual personality was coextensive with
the universal Nature, readers who were practicing self-culture could authoritatively interpret
sacred texts. These authors could also transmit their intentions through written language to audi-
ences who were practicing self-culture, trusting that the true, spiritual meanings would arrive
safely in their readers’ minds (or, perhaps, souls). After all, both author and reader were ontologi-
cally rooted in the same universal Nature, and they became more and more aware of this connec-
tion through self-culture. A key Transcendentalist practice, self-culture grew out of earlier
practices of pious introspection. It emphasized fully developing an individual’s intellectual and
spiritual faculties by acquiring self-knowledge and communing with other exemplary people—
either by reading the works of great minds past, or speaking and working with one’s intellectual
peers and heroes. Melville’s lifelong readings of, and struggles with, Calvinist Protestant theology
are well-documented; in his later writings, he also grapples with Transcendentalist thought. The
Confidence-Man exemplifies his dissatisfaction with both Puritan/Calvinist philosophies of lan-
guage (which asserted that a divine, perfect language did exist, and therefore a final meaning
existed somewhere), and with the liberal Protestant cultures differentiating themselves from
Calvinism.1 Melville differs from both by withholding any access to stable, final meaning, while
1
Melville remained sympathetic to Calvinist accounts of human nature, which he found more persuasive than liberal
Protestant and Transcendentalist alternatives. Calvinism emphasizes the total and unrecoverable depravity of the
human person, while newer, liberal Protestant religious anthropology framed these perspectives as outdated, gloomy,
and unrealistic. While critical of other Calvinist doctrines (such as double predestination), Melville found himself
moved by its dark view of humanity and willingness to confront the problem of evil. In his later poetry, especially
Clarel, Melville scathingly dismisses liberal Protestantism because it tries to simply explain away and smooth over what
he sees as inescapable facts of human consciousness: a capacity for evil and suffering.
repeatedly pointing to the necessity of making decisions as if such a meaning exists. There is no
concept of personal or special revelation in The Confidence-Man’s epistemological meditations.
And, in discussing literary interpretation and the novel form, the narrator attacks similar authority
structures: “nature,” “experience,” and “personality.”
This historical context is necessary to understand why Chapter 14 starts by debating literary
form, then pivots on the concept of “nature,” and ends with a debate about humanity’s essential
character. The narrator points out that “no writer has produced such inconsistent characters as
nature herself has,” citing the “duck-billed beaver of Australia” (platypus), which was disbe-
lieved by “naturalists” because it defied their “classifications” (70–71). Some individual truths—
some natures—do not fit into pre-existing “classifications.” Then, the narrator moves to
reflecting on the relationship between human and divine natures in the abstract. “Novelists,” the
narrator argues, try to “represent human nature not in obscurity, but transparency” and consis-
tency, because they imagine that “human nature can be so readily seen through” (70). Eliding
Transcendentalist philosophy and realist novelistic conventions, the narrator argues that consis-
tent fictional characterization fails for the same reasons that one cannot move from individual
experience to universal experience: “no one man can be coextensive with what is” (70). Sidestepping
arguments about the coextensiveness of human nature (in the abstract) and divine Nature (also
in the abstract), the narrator insists that individual humans cannot even connect with the abstract
category of human nature. The narrator argues, “in view of [human nature’s] inconsistencies,”
“human nature” is like “the divine nature … past finding out” (71). The novel thus asserts a rad-
ically individualized and fragmented vision of human nature—one that poses new challenges to
social trust. In the chapter’s conclusion, the narrator warns “the studious youth” who pores over
novels, hoping to learn about human nature from a Transcendentalist explanation of the abiding
ideal Spirit: The youth’s book states that “the grand points of human nature are the same to-day
as they were a thousand years ago. The only variability in them is in expression, not in feature”
(71). Novelists, mathematicians, and psychologists still “cherish expectations with regard to
some mode of infallibly discovering the heart of man,” or arriving at a final, ideal, and stable
meaning (71).
The narrator insists that individual “experience” is coextensive neither with “what is” nor with
an abstract “human nature.” Yet, many people—studious youths, novelists, mathematicians, psy-
chologists, and philosophers—continue to assume that a universal human nature is accessible
through individual experience. Here, as throughout the text, the narrator refuses to take a definite
stance. Instead, this distinction prepares the reader for the Confidence Man’s game. Throughout
the novel, the titular Confidence Man assumes a series of personas and then asks other characters
to “have confidence” in the abstract category of human nature. Once they are persuaded to do so,
he urges them to transfer that confidence to a specific embodiment of human nature—by lending
him money. The Con Man’s Game involves a philosophical preparation before his big ask.2 “Oh,
won’t you have some respect for the human race!” he pleads with the misanthrope (136). And,
when the latter refuses to believe in the goodness of human nature, or the trustworthiness of the
Confidence Man: “To you … I came ambassador for the human race … [I] sought to conciliate
between you and them” (138). The Confidence-Man depicts a world where social ties are
2
The morphology of the conversion narrative is reflected both in the preparatory stage leading to a personal relationship,
and in The Confidence-Man’s repeated depiction of characters’ decisions at this moment of crisis as a “transformation.”
140 Caitlin Smith
constructed through shared valuation of abstract human nature (among other abstractions)—
another reason why it feels unfamiliar or “unrealistic” to first-time readers.
Moreover, as Edgar Dryden notes, the Confidence Man manipulates his interlocutors by
drawing on assumptions about human nature, character, personal identity, and social cohesion
(Dryden 54). These reflect both the religious and philosophical contexts of New England, and
especially the method of writing, reading, and criticizing novels which “takes for granted the
mystified assumption that characters in novels are real people, personalities,” and discovers by
“careful reading” the surface signs to reach an underlying, unified self (54). The Confidence-
Man highlights and questions these assumptions and forms of interpretation by staging
dilemmas of interpretation and trust: “the success of the confidence man depends on the
other’s presumption that external signs correspond to and reveal a hidden internal nature”
(57). Because contemporary readers typically do not want to be conned or tricked, they notice
the unquestioned assumptions that undergird the Confidence Man’s game. The text itself
carefully cultivates suspicion toward the Confidence Man, both through the title, the dis-
tanced, ironic tone throughout, and the narrator’s sardonic puncturing of rhetorical
performances.
The move to destabilize familiar literary-interpretative strategies appears throughout The
Confidence-Man, and especially in the relationships it tries to build between the text and
readers. From its opening lines, The Confidence-Man establishes a challenging, even “antago-
nistic” relationship with its readers (Seybold 73): “At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared,
suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the waterside in the
city of St. Louis” (3). The text’s opening character, the “man in cream-colors,” is the first guise
of the titular confidence man. From the first sentence, he is presented behind a screen of mul-
tiple possible identities: religious and historical metaphors, apophatic language, and messi-
anic imagery. Throughout the novel, the narrator consistently deploys obscure, unexpected,
and unfamiliar metaphors to illustrate how the confidence man approaches his marks, how he
moves, how he dresses, or how he speaks. Here, the familiar action (a stranger boarding a
steamboat) is hidden behind a dense network of allusions, which draws attention to the act of
reading itself. Specifically, it requires and highlights a way of reading that must assign
meaning to surfaces by looking through them—here, moving through the allusive surface to
the literal action. The Confidence-Man is not interested in building immersion, and refuses to
interiorize the Confidence Man (or reveal who he really is behind his clever stream of dis-
guises). Instead, the text constantly draws attention to the process of textual interpretation,
the assumptions that make it possible, and the vulnerabilities to manipulation that result. The
Confidence-Man links textual interpretation and its danger to a related enterprise: choosing
whom to trust in a pluralized, emerging mass society, and knowing when to remain
skeptical.
Skepticism and Trust

As Maurice Lee has argued at length, Melville became increasingly preoccupied with philosophical
skepticism after the publication of Moby-Dick (Lee, “Skepticism,” and Uncertain Chances). Lee sees
The Confidence-Man as the “culmination” of “Melville’s engagement with skepticism,”
especially
skeptical philosophers from Pyrrho (“[I]f appearances are deceitful, then they do not deserve any
confidence”), to Montaigne (“Man cannot avoid the fact that his senses are the sovereign regents of his
knowledge, and yet, in all circumstances, uncertain and fallible”), to Hume (see his chapter “Of
Scepticism with Regard to the Senses”…) to Emerson (“Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no
end to illusion.”).
(Lee, “Skepticism” 116)
Indeed, The Confidence-Man not only engages with skepticism as a topic but also uses skeptical
dilemmas to spin out its experimental prose style. The text is like a crazed-glass pane, presenting
images that warp and swim through untrustworthy surfaces. Scenes of dreaming, dissimulating,
role playing, counterfeiting (and counterfeit-detecting), intoxication, illusions, and masquer-
ading proliferate. Melville also builds a counterpoint around the word confidence and various verb
forms such as appear, seem, trust, believe, and doubt. The novel explores the problems of philosophical
skepticism through a series of increasingly metafictional dialogues, notably the Cosmopolitan’s
discourses with the sophomore, the miser, and the boon companion. But The Confidence-Man
combines traditional dilemmas of philosophical skepticism, new problems of religious “belief,”
problems of fiction and believability, and hallmark problems of emerging modernity: identity,
recognition, and trust. The novel juggles these different senses of “suspicion” and “confidence.”
In conversations, readers may initially anticipate where a dialogue or scene is going, but, midway
through, the text pivots on a key term or concept and takes an unexpected direction. The central
problem of Humean skepticism, for example—that the senses are self-evidently fickle and
untrustworthy, yet all knowledge begins with sensory data, and humans must make decisions
every day based on this knowledge—suddenly transforms into the problem of political trust as a
necessary condition of democracy, despite the obvious existence of individual bad actors (con art-
ists, demagogues, charlatans) and systemic practices of “gulling” and “conning.” Similarly, the
apocalyptic final chapter entangles a characteristically Protestant problem of textual verification
and religious belief (discerning the true parts of the Bible from “apocrypha”), and a problem of
numismatics and economy (discerning counterfeit from value-retaining currency—no small task
before the standardization of federal currency in the Legal Tender Act of 1862).
The Confidence-Man emphasizes the social need to have “confidence”: not “absolute certainty,”
but “a willingness to proceed as if something were true, even if—and sometimes precisely
because—that something cannot be rationally guaranteed” (Lee, “Skepticism,” 116). The novel’s
provisional, action-oriented sense of “confidence” parallels a common theme among British and
German Romantic writers, American Transcendentalists, and, later, American Pragmatists.
These thinkers consistently emphasized skepticism’s moral dilemmas as well as its epistemolog-
ical problems. By focusing on social action as the solution to religious doubt or philosophical
skepticism, they also criticized religious doubt and Humean skepticism as “moral paralysis” or
bad-faith attempts to abandon moral and political responsibility. Emerson’s essay “Montaigne,
or the Skeptic” is particularly exasperated by the “pyrrhonist” skeptic who is more concerned
with avoiding “extremes” (and remaining politically and materially comfortable) than address-
ing evident labor abuses:
But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot see. I know that human strength is not in extremes, but in avoiding
extremes. I, at least, will shun the weakness of philosophizing beyond my depth … I neither affirm nor
deny. I stand here to try the case. I am here to consider, skopein, to consider how it is. I will try to keep the
142 Caitlin Smith
balance true. Of what use to take the chair and glibly rattle off theories of society, religion and nature,
when I know that practical objections lie in the way, insurmountable by me and by my mates? … Why
fancy that you have all the truth in your keeping? There is much to say on all sides.
(Emerson, “Montaigne,” 236–37).
For all its scathing assessment of Emersonian Transcendentalism in the “Mystical Master” and
“Practical Disciple” chapters, The Confidence-Man closely tracks Emerson’s mature view that both
embraces and condemns skepticism. Emerson saw “wise” skepticism as both a necessary compo-
nent for changing identities—because skepticism as “negation” could break through calcified
identities, making way for new circles or new beginnings—and as a potential danger to democ-
racy because of its socially corrosive effects. The Confidence-Man reflects Melville’s deeper and
more pessimistic engagement with epistemological limits, but similarly grapples with the
unavoidability of skepticism, the limited good, and the dangers of allowing skepticism to pre-
empt moral judgment.
Melville grapples with philosophical skepticism through a complex, self-deconstructing
literary style. Literary critics frequently point to similarities between Melville’s experimental
prose after Moby-Dick and postmodern and post-structural literature of the late twentieth and
twenty-first century. But there is a key difference: aboard the Fidele, interpretations cost money.
In contrast to Moby-Dick’s riotous celebration of textual ambiguity and the play of interpretation,
The Confidence-Man poses questions with real monetary and personal stakes. For example, the
title of Chapter 12 asks the reader to evaluate a story, and judge “whether or no” the “unfortunate
man” “has been justly so entitled” and is therefore worthy of financial support (60, emphasis
added). The unfortunate man, aka the Man with the Weed (one of the confidence man’s key dis-
guises), narrates his own backstory. The text’s tone shifts from the satirically distanced style into
an earnest key with less complex syntax. The Man with the Weed recounts his emotional and
financial downfall at the hands of his wife Goneril, who is, according to him, “inhuman,” dispas-
sionate, coldly cruel, “Indian”-like, animalistic, sadistic, and a “calm, clayey, cakey devil” (62).
Motivated by “patient long-suffering,” the husband sees Goneril “artfully torment” their
daughter and decides to abruptly “remove” the daughter from her mother. At this point, Goneril
gains the support of “the whole female neighborhood” and “some woman’s-right” organization,
which pays her attorney’s fees as she sues for custody and recovers it and “such a settlement … as
to make penniless the unfortunate man (so he averred)” (62). Worst of all, “yet more lamentable,”
the divorce case “blasts” the husband’s “private reputation” (62). He appeals to the court and
forces Goneril to take a psychological evaluation, which she passes. Then, he suspects that
Goneril intends to do the same and have him “permanently committed for a lunatic,” so he must
flee to the Fidele and live “an innocent outcast” (63). The narrator’s occasional interjections of “so
he averred” perforate the tale’s sentimentality and misogyny, both of which are supposed to
arouse sympathy from the Man with the Weed’s interlocutor (the old gentleman) and perhaps
with the novel’s nineteenth-century readers. At the end of the story, both the narrator and the
Man with the Weed ask for an interpretive decision backed by personal risk. Do you trust the
Man with the Weed enough to loan him money? Is his story compelling enough to be believ-
able—and if not totally believable, is it enough to warrant sympathy and trust? Who is the real
victim in this complicated story? And what action will you take to address it?
The Goneril episode exemplifies why The Confidence-Man seems to resonate so strongly with
contemporary political dilemmas of trust and narrative. For example, in the 2020 presidential
election, both the incumbent Republican president and the Democratic presidential nominee
were accused of sexual assault—and the most popular counter-arguments by their supporters
carefully deployed skepticism. Similarly timely is the novel’s insistence that neither democracy
nor capitalism can work without optimistic “confidence” in the goodness of an abstract
humanity—to the point that belief becomes less about epistemological evaluations of truth vs.
falsehood, and more about believing for the sake of belief’s social and economic benefits. How
can we summon the confidence necessary to restore the stock market and prevent the breakdown
of democratic institutions, when con artists are obviously plentiful? Such questions were partic-
ularly salient in 2020. In that year, America faced a global pandemic, the beginning of a serious
US economic downturn, a national reckoning with racial injustice and violent history, an
attempted coup after a bitterly contested Presidential election, and an intellectual crisis related
to widespread disinformation and conspiracies. These crises emphatically demonstrated that
processes of textual interpretation and social cohesion are closely linked; that trust is central to
both; and that this trust in the other is similarly tied to confidence in a brighter future.
Disinformation, partisan distrust, and disillusionment in the future were key themes in that
year’s pivotal events. The Confidence-Man attracts attention at this moment in history because it
holds up a mirror to the social problems currently animating American culture. Namely, the text
repeatedly calls attention to the process of evaluating testimony for trustworthiness when poten-
tially investing in someone or their cause. (In 2020, this was especially highlighted by the deeply
partisan interpretations of police bodycam footage, which showed routine arrests escalating to
the killing of Black citizens). The Goneril episode also exemplifies what Sianne Ngai calls The
Confidence-Man’s “refusal of empathy,” and its resistance to familiar ways of readerly engagement.
The episode withholds Goneril’s voice or the testimony of any impartial third party. The text
lures its readers into both presentism and a search for decisive closure before debarring us from
both.
The Man with the Weed’s story offers another biased perspective. He presents Goneril as inhu-
manly absolute—perfectly monstrous—in a novel where every other character is morally com-
plex. The narrator’s interpolations destabilize the Man with the Weed’s trustworthiness as a
narrator, drawing the reader’s attention to the story as a calculated performance. As a result,
when the Man with the Weed concludes with his characteristic request for money, the reader is
asked to judge his story not (solely) as a true or false factual record but as a rhetorical performance.
Does the Man with the Weed’s performance persuade? Does it merit investment, despite its nar-
rator’s evident tendency to exaggerate (at the very least)? In short, just as the Man with the Weed
asks his interlocutor to financially invest after a persuasive performance, the text asks the reader
to reframe interpretation as a form of emotional or decisional investment. It asks the reader to
think about stories of suffering or victimhood, and reflect on why some performances seem more
resonant—or more believable—than others. Because Goneril’s perspective is absent, and neither
the reader nor the old gentleman has access to the facts, the reader can only reflect on the reso-
nance (or lack thereof) of the story, to evaluate “whether or no” the Man with the Weed is “justly”
entitled to his self-claimed status as a victim. In other examples, beyond the Goneril episode, The
Confidence-Man withholds traditional post-Kantian criteria for judging the believability
144 Caitlin Smith
(epistemological trustworthiness) of a narrative, such as witness testimony or impartial (or less

partial) perspectives. But it also withholds emotional cues to the reader that might tip them into
sympathizing with one character over another. The text identifies the performative elements of
self-presentation, the epistemological problems with evaluating unverified stories, and the
necessity of trusting a narrator (to avoid misanthropy or paralysis in decision-making). In the
absence of interpretative cues, the reader is confronted with the a priori beliefs or habits of
reading that guide her interpretation, that make one story more believable than another.
The Confidence-Man also builds a literary method around skepticism by anticipating,
invoking, and subverting reader expectations of the novel genre. Contemporary readers, who
initially sense a deep analogy between twenty-first-century crises and the novel’s problems,
often find themselves repelled by the text’s formal opacity. They are not alone. The text culti-
vated a similar reaction in nineteenth-century readers, signaling literary aspirations to popular,
familiar genres, but denying the pleasurable endings of those genres. For example, in Chapter
3, the reader meets one of the book’s most infamous characters: Black Guinea, the “grotesque”
African American double amputee compared to a black “Newfoundland dog” (10). Melville
temporarily embraces realist novel conventions, immersing the reader in the sights, sounds,
smells, and feel of Guinea’s “game of charity” (12). Black Guinea’s begging strategy is, “whether
by chance or design… a singular temptation at once to diversion and charity” (11). Black
Guinea’s introduction revolves around animal metaphors and vivid descriptions of sense qualia,
such as the drover’s “large purple hand” resting on the “cripple’s bushy wool” (11). Guinea’s
introduction sharply contrasts with the “man in cream-colors,” who entered the text screened
by messianic allusions, historical references, and religious metaphors. Guinea’s introduction
emphasizes the physicality of bodies, along with tactile and aural details. Instead of calling
attention to the intertextual work of interpretation, Melville describes “viewers” interacting
with Guinea’s body (by throwing pennies into his open mouth), and points to the sensory
descriptors in the encounter.
Guinea’s introduction illustrates the role of the senses in parsing intent and “secret emotions;”
it also sets up the skeptical trial of the senses in Chapter 6 (11). There, three characters—the
young clergyman, the man in grey, and the “scoffer” with a wooden leg—debate whether Guinea
is actually as he appears, or only “apparently a cripple” (29). The “scoffer” insists that, contrary
to the evidence of sight and touch, Guinea is “an ingenious imposter,” “some white scoundrel,
betwisted and painted up for a decoy” (31). But far from being an isolated instance of an “inge-
nious imposter,” the “scoffer” points out, Guinea is part of a “class” of racial performers: black-
face minstrel players. Today, the minstrel show is largely effaced from contemporary American
consciousness as an embarrassing cultural artifact. But from the 1840s to the 1870s, the minstrel
show was the most popular form of amusement in the United States. Not only that, the minstrel
show was touted then (and now) as “the first distinctly American form of theater,” legible to
European audiences as the artistic marker of an emerging US national character (Nowatski 1).
Guinea’s introduction, drawing attention to the tactile, aural, and visual components of interpre-
tation, sets up the dialogue about the trustworthiness of the senses. But the dialogue also pivots
from trusting one’s senses, to trusting performances of identity in modern society. As the “scoffer”
points out, individual and national identity can be asserted by performance and recognized—
even trusted—by audiences who know very well that it is a performance.
More than entertainment, less than intimacy, this kind of imagined social relationship mirrors
the ambivalent reader responses the text seeks to cultivate. These dynamics may feel all too
familiar to twenty-first-century readers, who watch a similarly inconsistent series of personas
deployed by prominent political and religious figures across multiple channels of new media.
But, while The Confidence-Man anticipates certain interpretative dilemmas that have sharpened
and expanded since its publication, it stubbornly withholds clear answers or solutions. After
underscoring the necessity of social trust, and the unavoidable role of performance in assessing
modern identities for trustworthiness, The Confidence-Man deflects responsibility to the reader in
its final line: “Something further may follow of this Masquerade” (251). The author then falls
silent, and the text stops; any further “something” will be picked up by the reader’s inferences,
reflections, or writing.
Far from prioritizing private authorial experiment over public audiences, The Confidence-Man
is keenly interested in its readers and their responses. The text deploys a sophisticated range of
literary strategies and philosophical dilemmas, pushing the reader into a heightened awareness
of the process of interpretation. Depicting textual interpretation and the creation of social trust
as similar, dynamic relationships between personas and audiences, The Confidence-Man ultimately
challenges both nineteenth- and twenty-first-century readers to consider their own agency in the
process of writing a common world.
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12
Lyric Anonymity in Battle-Pieces
Tony McGowan
Fame is a bee.
It has a song—
It has a sting—
Ah, too, it has a wing.
–– Emily Dickinson
Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of every-
thing that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had “pretty much made
up his mind to be annihilated.”
–– Hawthorne’s Journal, Nov. 1856
(Leyda 529)
Thank goodness for the second Melville revival! Because of it we no longer lament a failed novel-
ist’s lapse into “silence,” as did R. W. B. Lewis in 1950, or waste our “pulsed life” defending
Melville’s strangely original, “unbodied” verse against those who have chosen to ignore the art-
ist’s radiant half-life as a poet (On Melville 61, “Art,” in PP 280, line 2). Indeed, after two-plus
decades of scholarship on Melville-as-poet, we now recognize the war poems as reaching far
beyond early assessments of them as flawed renderings of the war. As part of that ongoing
project, I argue here that in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), Melville’s art tends toward
lyric anonymity, or the radical refusal of settled poetic voice (see also Davis, Jalal, Nurmi, and
Thwaites).
Lyric anonymity in Battle-Pieces begins with the sidelining of authorial personality, and
with the erosion of stable lyric personae. In Melville’s untitled preface, for example, he claims
not to have been involved in the making of his poems: “I seem, in most of these verses, to
148 Tony McGowan
have but placed a harp in a window, and noted the contrasting airs which wayward winds
have played upon the strings” (PP 3). This disclaimer of personal engagement may condition
our reading, but the romance is not to be trusted. Though no pre-publication manuscripts
confirm Melville’s writing process for this first published book of verse, and though we cannot
explore the evolution of Melville’s battle pieces as we can with Dickinson’s wartime lyrics or
Whitman’s oft-edited Drum-Taps, fascinating evidence of Melville’s post-publication revi-
sions of Battle-Pieces confirm the stance in the preface to be an artful pose.1 In Melville’s
edition of Shakespeare, for but one vivid example of Melville’s lifelong tortured relationship
with the page, he penciled a checkmark next to this passage in the introduction to the first
volume: “With a privilege rarely indulged even to the sons of genius, [Shakespeare] had pro-
duced his admirable works without any throes or labor of the mind.” Melville made a
corresponding mark in the bottom margin and scrawled, “How know you that, Sir?” (xxiv;
Sealts No. 460, MMO).2 The fiction of a poet-in-repose who does not need to work at it, who
offers his readers found arrangements of gently made things, constitutes the most legible indi-
cation of Melville’s progress toward lyric anonymity—expressed here as the ritual cloaking of
the hardworking human writer.
Yet in Melville’s hands, lyric anonymity becomes more than an impersonality effect. The first
poem in Battle-Pieces has long provided a critical portal through which to better observe this
aspect of Melville’s aesthetic (see also Cohen and Nurmi):
The Portent.
(1859.)
Hanging from the beam,
Slowly swaying (such the law),
Gaunt the shadow on your green,
Shenandoah!
The cut is on the crown
(Lo, John Brown),
And the stabs shall heal no more.
Hidden in the cap

Is the anguish none can draw;
1
For discussion of Melville’s complex self-education as a poet leading up to Battle-Pieces see Hershel Parker’s “Historical
Note” in Published Poems (PP 498–512) and for the making of the war book itself, his chapter XI: “Battle-Pieces and
Aspects of the War: Melville’s Second Volume of Poems” in The Making of the Poet. For virtual exploration of Melville’s
post-production revisions within extant author copies of the first edition, see the “Versions of Battle-Pieces” edition at
MEL: https://melville.electroniclibrary.org/battle-pieces-corrected-first-edition-and-bound-proofs.html.
2
Thanks to excellent stewardship by Steven Olsen-Smith, MMO has become an indispensable asset for scholars
concerned with the significance of Melville’s extensive reading (melvillesmarginalia.org). For examples of recent
scholarship derived from digital analysis of Melville’s marginalia, see the special edition of Leviathan titled Melville’s
Hand, guest edited by Steven Olsen-Smith and Christopher Ohge. For my own close reading of how the marginalia
inform Melville’s complex “recoiling from his own poetic agency” in Battle-Pieces, see in the same number pages 30–32
in “Melville’s Hand in Chapman’s Homer”.
Lyric Anonymity in Battle-Pieces 149
So your future veils its face,

Shenandoah!
But the streaming beard is shown
(Weird John Brown),
The meteor of the war.
The exclamation marks in “The Portent” after “Shenandoah!” may signal what Geoffrey
Sanborn has described as Melville’s exuberant “aesthetics of thinking,” but it also marks the
volume and velocity of voice the speaker needs both to escape the sway of Brown’s story and to
shatter the speaker’s singularity (Sanborn, “Thinking”). Radiating what Helen Vendler calls the
“aura of names,” the word “Shenandoah!” floods the poem with American “pastoral green,” and
opens the verse to geographies and temporalities that exceed the event horizon of Brown’s
hanging (Vendler 266). First, “Shenandoah!” refers forward in time, from the hanging of Brown
to the bloodiest Civil War event horizon: the Shenandoah Valley of Northern Virginia. In this
narrow, “western war” place, from Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign in early 1862 to Philip
Sheridan’s defeat of Jubal Early in the Battle of Cedar Creek in the fall of 1864, many thousands
of men, women, children, and beasts died. Moreover, in “The Burning” of the valley, Sheridan
boasted that his men destroyed “2,000 barns filled with wheat, hay, and farming implements
[and] over seventy mills filled with flour and wheat” (“Anderson”). As Tom Nurmi has richly
discussed, the word “Shenandoah” likely refracts through its repetition in “Oh Shenandoah,” a
popular Missouri riverman’s brown-water shanty that Melville certainly knew (9). The affec-
tively unstable and polyvocal exclamation, “Shenandoah!” points not only to other speakers, but
to other times. The tension between these two exclamatory registers, one of mourning and out-
rage in bello, and the other of pastoral nostalgia ante bellum, deepens our reading of line 3—“Gaunt
the shadow on your green.” Brown’s “gaunt” face and body appeared in every visual representa-
tion of him that Melville would have seen by war’s end, and after successive raiding and burning
campaigns, the Shenandoah valley, known as the breadbasket of the confederacy, had become
squeezed, a thin place of starvation and misery. So, either from Harper’s Ferry or from the
Charles Town site where he and his confederates were hanged, Brown’s thin body cast a “gaunt”
“shadow” onto the future of the valley and nation (Nurmi 10–14). Hennig Cohen details how
“cut” and “stabs” in lines 5 and 7 pick up on words Brown used in a letter to Judge Daniel R.
Tilden to describe his injuries (203). He also notes the literary and political resonance of the
word “crown” (Cohen 204). It is just possible, as Nurmi notes, that “crown” implicates the
“crown” of trees, that it carries forward from the word “green” to record the devastating
scorched-earth campaign wrought on the valley’s forests, and, through metonymic displace-
ment, that Melville imbricates the human harvest of death (22). Nurmi extends from “crown”
and “beam” (through etymological registers Melville may not have known) to suggest that the
swaying canopies of Shenandoah trees and the bodies of lynched Blacks are involved in the
image of Brown’s swaying corpse. The figural half-lives of Brown, perhaps especially Brown as
a type of Satanic martyr or Christ, emerge as “a blurry and grotesque tableau of human body
entangled with tree” (Nurmi 10).
Though Nurmi does not read this entanglement forward to “Malvern Hill,” that poem would
seem to confirm his argument and open another window onto the proleptic power of “The
150 Tony McGowan
Portent.” The last stanza of “Malvern Hill” presents the strangest lyric perspective in
Battle-Pieces:
We elms of Malvern Hill

Remember every thing;
But sap and twig will fill:
Wag the world how it will,
Leaves must be green in Spring.
The call-and-response structure of “Malvern Hill” appears commonly in African American

slave songs, the antiphonal form of maritime work songs, and in psalmody, but it also recalls
“The Dream of the Rood,” where Christ’s cross speaks to and through the dream of an anony-
mous believer: “It happened long ago––I remember still–– / I was hewed down… . those war-
men left me … . That I have outlasted the deeds of the baleful, / of painful sorrows … . Hope
was renewed / with buds and with bliss for those suffered the burning” (“Anonymous”). Melville’s
simple separation of “every” from “thing” does a lot of poetic work. The space horizontally dis-
tributes the environmental and human impacts of war, leading us back to the blasted “pastoral
green” of the Shenandoah. Widening perspectivism to its extreme, the space extends the war’s
impact beyond the human and political register to what, from the trees’ perspective, is a timeless
natural struggle for life’s sovereignty.
Brown, as the meteoric portent of abolitionist revenge, anticipates the poetic impact and lyric
trajectories of more earth-bound missiles in Melville’s volume—and of the continuing displace-
ment of any single lyric personality and voice. Consider, for example, “The Swamp Angel,” a
poem named for a “great Parrott gun.” Melville indicates in a note that it was “planted in the
marshes of James Island, and employed in the prolonged, though at times intermittent bom-
bardment of Charleston” (PP 175). The contested geography is actually a jigsaw of low land and
tidal stream, by then the isolated home-within-a-nation of Gullah Geechee culture, which pro-
vides one likely reason Melville had access to his exotic figuration of the gun as “a coal-black
Angel / With a thick Afric lip,” that “breathes with a death that is blastment, / And dooms by a
far decree” (PP 78, lines 1–2, 6–7). Before itself exploding, the Swamp Angel rained down
incendiary or “Greek” fire on the besieged city from the innovative “Marsh Battery” constructed
under the command of Col. Edward W. Serrel. Men of Serrel’s New York Volunteer Engineer
Corps built on a boggy acre of harder ground, by “the creek between Morris Island and Light-
House Creek”—not actually on James Island, as Melville wrote, but half a mile to the North
(Hedden):
By night there is fear in the City,

Through the darkness a star soareth on;
There’s a scream that screams up to the zenith,
Then the poise of a meteor lone––
Lighting far the pale fright of the faces,
And downward the coming is seen;
Then the rush, and the burst, and the havoc,
And wails and shrieks between.
(PP 78, lines 9–16)
Eliza Richards’s chapter “Poetry Under Siege” in her excellent Battle Lines explores the life of
this gun in American print culture before considering Melville’s retrospective verse; she distin-
guishes his poem from much of the popular balladry during the war by arguing that, “even under
these extreme conditions [writing under the “siege” of ideologically charged positions], poetry
does not have to serve as an automatic part of war’s arsenal; it can create room [even within a
“remarkably unified rhetorical field”] to consider the relation of violence to ethics rather than
foreclosing the possibility of contemplation” (147). One of the ways Melville “think[s] through
violence” is by flooding his (im)personal figuration of the Swamp Angel with contrasting regis-
ters of cultural belonging. Critics including Richards have often noticed that the “gun’s ‘thick
Afric lip’ alludes to the metal lip of the Parrott gun” (148). “But,” Richards continues, “it does
so via caricature, to an unclear end: Is Melville revealing his own racism? Is he drawing attention
to the ways white poets use an African American figure to deliver their own vengeance by proxy?”
(148). The gun’s Africanized “lip” certainly involves the cannon’s mouth, but, I suggest, it may
more deeply involve Melville’s ekphrastic sensibility, and his deliberate study of Theodore R.
Davis’s sketch of the “March Battery” as it appeared in Harper’s on September 19, 1863 (Davis).
In the more well-known Harper’s Weekly sketch, as in this rendering from a G.T. Lape carte de
visite of the time, the predominant aspect of the emplacement is not the gun, massive as it was,
but rather the protective battery, see Figure 12.1. Constructed of log grillage overpiled by thir-
teen thousand sandbags, the three-sided emplacement is not “black,” here, but as shaded in
Davis’s sketch, nearly so (Hedden).
Davis draws the sandbags illuminated by a full-moon, reflected by clouds, and also lit by the
cannon-flash and at least one meteor-like incendiary round bursting over Charleston, which in
Figure 12.1 “The Swamp Angel.” Lape, G.T. photographer. Print on carte de visite mount: albumen; 6.1 × 10.0.
Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC, 20540, USA http://hdl.loc.gov/
loc.pnp/pp.print. Created between 1861 and 1865.
152 Tony McGowan
the Davis sketch is literally “over a bay of the sea” (PP 78, line 6). The idea is perhaps as fanciful
as it is racist, but can we say that this glistening battery seems a kind of “thick” pursed mouth
or “lip” surrounding the gun, which itself “breathes with a breath that is blastment”? What are
we to do with the speaker’s early, even deeper commitment to racist caricature? We do not know
if this speaker is Melville or one of the momentarily inhabited voices imported from the strident
ideological verse Richards catalogs. Does the language ventriloquize the voice of some laborer
among the engineer corps? Is the “far decree,” the violent judgment brought down on Charleston
somehow Africa’s, since it hails from the “free” Gullah geography of the swamps, or, as Richards
wonders, is the voice mediated through “white poets … who would deliver their own vengeance
by proxy?” (148). What happens to the stability of any lyric voice if this is all occurring at once?
What we do know is that the amalgamated lyric voice in many Melville ballads tends to first
inhabit positions the author seems not to have fully agreed with, only to settle, often in the last
volta-like stanza, into a more philosophical, deliberate, and anti-war “thinking through [of] vio-
lence” (Richards 147). Another example of this tendency, which I have written about elsewhere,
occurs in “Sheridan at Cedar Creek” (the poem appeared first in Harper’s as “Philip”), which con-
tains a final stanza radically destabilizing the hagiographic strain in a precursor ballad, Charles
Buchanan Reed’s popular “Sheridan’s Ride.” These are Melville’s last four lines:
There is glory for the brave

Who lead, and nobly save,
But no knowledge in the grave
Where the nameless followers sleep.
(PP 85, lines 36–40)
The short, twin-couplet last stanza of “The Swamp Angel” evokes the ending of the Sheridan
poem:
Who weeps for the woeful City

Let him weep for our guilty kind;
Who joys at her wild despairing––
Christ, the Forgiver, convert his mind.
(PP 79, lines 44–47)
Notice the general polyphonic trajectory of both poems. The poems try out lyric perspectives
on hero-worship and revenge, respectively, before ushering in a voice we call “Melville” at our
critical peril.3 The simplest thing Melville does in the Sheridan poem is to exclude the hero’s
name from what is ostensibly a praise poem. Mourning the loss of regular troops, and almost
indicting Sheridan for their death, the culminating speaker suggests that no fame waits in the
3
Readers who would deliberately pursue the biographical Melville’s route through the war have an array of useful
sources. Here are but a few: Hershel Parker’s Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 2 (especially chapters 19-27), Parker’s
Melville: The Making of the Poet, Stanton Garner’s The Civil War World of Herman Melville, and most recently, Christopher
Sten’s and Tyler Hoffman’s edited collection “This Mighty Convulsion,” which should become the new standard for
readers (and teachers) seeking the general terrain of the field.
afterlife for the rank-and-file dead, implying that Sheridan’s glory in life is an empty signifier.
More darkly still, the speaker suggests that there is no immortality at all in death, or “in the
grave,” of any sort, for any sort. This act of striking through class lines to emptiness is classic
Melville; the human poet has finally emerged to deliver a stark message about the fragility of
fame. But Melville’s stance also evinces what Christopher Ohge calls Melville’s narrative double-
ness and “allusive tact” that marshalled any number of ventriloquized poetic sources, from con-
temporary reportage to the epic ways of pagan gods to the humanity Melville gleaned from
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and then Chapman’s Homer––or from Shelley’s “Ozymandias,”
for that matter (Ohge 179).
In the last stanza of “The Swamp Angel” Melville’s speaker turns against patternings of reli-
gious language in previous stanzas to collapse into error both those “who weep” and those “who
joy” at the questionable bombardment of Charleston, which was not fully evacuated of civilian
population at the time. The plea for “Christ, the Forgiver,” to “convert” “mind[s]” applies vari-
ously to vengeful Blacks, to sinful soldiers targeting the city, to northerners gleeful at the success
of siege terror, and in its most general interpretation to all of us, “our guilty kind” after The Fall.
The speaker offers a perspective that stands apart from cause and manages, as Richards would
have it, to “think through violence” to a moral/ethical conclusion—but only by way of religi-
osity evacuated from the closing lines of the Sheridan poem. Is this finally Melville, the voicing
of crossed-up verities, an aesthetic that concludes against conclusions? It is impossible to tell.
When we begin to glean from the volume’s form this larger, intra-poem balancing act, we are left
with no conceptual through line, no lyric perspective to trust. Even the deeper truths that seem
to emerge in the closing lines of such poems collapse by virtue of their having been recanted by
nearby counter-philosophies.
The last stanza of “The Swamp Angel” also turns on the appearance of “Michael” in the
previous stanza. “Vainly [the city] calls upon Michael / (The white man’s seraph was he), / For
Michael has fled from his tower / To the Angel over the sea” (44–47). Melville’s own note seems
to historicize a Miltonic figure: “St. Michaels, characterized by its venerable tower, was the his-
toric and aristocratic church of the town” (PP 175). Jonathan Cook’s work on “divine warrior
rhetoric in Battle-Pieces” affirms further the allusive thickness of Melville’s irony (see also Ohge,
for other allusions to Milton in “The House-top”). “In the war in heaven,” Cook writes, “the
archangel Michael and his fellow angels fight against the dragon and his angelic allies, after
which the latter were cast out of heaven (Rev. 12. 9); in Melville’s poem, by contrast, the arch-
angel ironically deserts the city to join the retributive black angel sending out destruction from
a swamp where terrorized slaves might have hidden” (145–46). Histories tell us that Union
artillerymen targeted the steeple of St. Michael’s Church in aiming their huge Parrott gun, and
Melville’s figural countermovement of Michael against the line of fire, from the target to the
gun, makes robust sense as Cook reads it. But Melville overdetermines the symbolic register.
For starters, Michael is the patron “seraph” of warriors; he makes better sense as the gun’s
“angel.” Moreover, Melville’s own determination of St. Michael’s as “historic and aristocratic”
suggests his awareness of the building’s history. Both Washington and Lee worshipped there,
and the edifice, which was modeled on Christopher Wren’s work and opened before the revolu-
tion, stands “on the site of the first Anglican church built south of Virginia” (St. Michael’s). In
noting the flight of Michael to the “angel over the sea,” Melville certainly refers to the Swamp
Angel, but may, given his Anglophilia, also refer to transatlantic geopolitical contexts. The
British aristocratic and chivalric orders descended through St. Michael and St. George. By the
154 Tony McGowan
time of the siege of Charleston, the British had largely abandoned first their public and then
their stealth support for the Confederacy—especially as represented by trade with blockade run-
ners out of Charleston.
“The Swamp Angel” ties back, through “The Portent,” to Melville’s concern for the new,
material inhumanity of warfare. A whole series of poems, written from starkly differing perspec-
tives, takes up this issue, which Melville makes personal by casting back to the maritime world
of his own experience. Some, like “The Stone Fleet: An Old Sailor’s Lament, (December, 1861)”
and “The Temeraire (Supposed to have been suggested to an Englishman of the old order by the
fight of the Monitor and Merrimac),” come across as nostalgic elegies for sunk and dismembered
ships, and are rightly read against poems about the mechanized Civil War at sea like “In the
Turret” and “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight.” Because criticism on this cluster of
poems is so robust, I will offer a reading of “At the Cannon’s Mouth,” a less discussed poem, but
one that extends the thematic concerns of the cluster, and links back to “The Portent” in unex-
pected ways.
The poem ostensibly celebrates William Cushing’s destruction of the Confederate Ram
Albemarle but invests in hagiography only to subtly erode the humanity of this officer figure by
entangling his personhood with the impersonal aspect of mechanized warfare. Cushing, in real
life a self-centered prankster and a poor student, was expelled from the Naval Academy (Schneller
22–23). Adrift after the attack on Fort Sumter, he lucked upon a roundabout route to a quasi-
commission as an “acting volunteer master’s mate”; he was back on track for promotion (Schneller
25). Eventually, Cushing led a sneak attack on the CSS Albemarle with a small group of sailors
in a steam launch that he had inventively fronted with a manually detonated torpedo charge
placed out at the end of a long spar.
Melville erodes Cushing’s heroic stature by drawing the poem’s title from the Shakespearean
cynic, Jaques’ “ages of man” soliloquy to the Duke Senior in As You Like It: “Then a soldier, /
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, / Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel
/ Seeking the bubble reputation / Even in the Cannon’s mouth” (2.7.149–53; MMO). That
Cushing was young—the real Cushing was only twenty-one—suggests a collapse of the sol-
dier back into earlier, earnest ages—either the lover or the schoolboy. The speaker’s awe before
the failure of earthly “charm to stay in the Boy / The martyr-passion” works to establish the
voice as older—a significant inversion from other officer poems, such as “Lyon,” where we
assume the speaker to be a junior officer or enlisted soldier close to the action (PP 92–93,
lines 11–12).
The Cushing poem features a voice of “senior wisdom” regretful that “young Indians lead the war”
(PP 9, line 49, PP 13, line 45). Beyond the external and internal imbrication of differing ages or
personalities in the figure of Cushing, and the negative implications of the man imported through a
reader’s memory of Jaques’ leveling tone, Melville’s change from “in” to “At the Cannon’s Mouth”
inscribes a third way that the speaker conditions our reading. The difference between being cannon
fodder “in” the cannon’s mouth, and being “involved” with the weapon “at the cannon’s mouth,” as
Melville writes, matters: “Palely intent, he urged his keel / Full on the guns, and touched the spring;
/ Himself involved in the bolt he drove / Timed with the armed hull’s shot that stove / His shal-
lop—die or do!” (PP 92, lines 1–4). As I have written elsewhere, Melville’s inversion of Tennyson’s
heroic line from “The Charge of the Light Brigade” suggests the dangerous proximity of “cause,” or
patriotic enthusiasm, to suicidal madness, and implicates the first officer ballad in the volume,
“Lyon” (“Melville’s Low-Relief Officer Corps” 54). Melville tied the two poems together by way of a
pencilled post-publication edit to “Lyon” in his first edition of Battle-Pieces. He crossed out the pen-
ultimate word “brave,” and inserted “pale,” so the poem ends with “pale Lyon” (PP 18, line 65). The
Cushing poem begins, as if continuing the thought, with the words “Palely intent, he urged…”.
To be imaginatively “at the cannon’s mouth,” and then to trigger it manually, suggests that
Cushing was a suicide, and marks his difference from those anonymous figures in “Malvern
Hill,” who die in the act of reloading, “with the cartridge in their mouth” (PP 49, line 7).
Melville’s intimation of Cushing’s suicidal selflessness recalls John Brown’s “weird” martyrdom
for cause, nearly collapsing the heroic register of the poem, especially when we read it as part of
the more often discussed series of poems dealing with the diminution of modern warriors in the
machine age (“In the Turret,” “The Temeraire,” and “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight”).
For example, Melville suggests in “Utilitarian View” that war has changed, that “a singe runs
through lace and feather”; in his last work, Billy Budd, he implies that heroism might belong to
“the time before steamships” (PP 45, BB 3). Cushing is not “in” the cannon, to be expelled as
masculine shot. If Shakespearean allusion overdetermines the moment, and Cushing is somehow
still “In the cannon’s mouth,” it is as “involved” rifling, this weaponized American having
become a strangely grooved and volute aspect of the “hull’s” imaginary barrel (lines 3–4). Before
the poem’s meditation on the madness of boyhood martyrdom and the poetics of fame can even
gather steam, Cushing has been stripped of humanity, converted into “a breathing thing / To
marvel at,” sharing its affective charge with the Swamp Angel, another alloy of humanity and
weaponry (7–8).
If “The Portent” “veils” Civil War space, time, and event, it also presents a metaphor that
would seem radically clear—John Brown’s corpse as “The meteor of the war” (line 14). Critics
have long known that there were actual meteors behind the trope. Jay Leyda’s Melville Log (1951)
collects a July 3, 1861, entry in Evert Duyckinck’s diary about an idyllic day and evening spent
with Herman and his brother Allan. The “tranquility of the landscape stretching to the blue
waters of the sound reflect[ed] the azure waters of the skies [and provided] relief to the war agi-
tations of the times. … The comet in the evening––a brilliant apparition in the north … which
first made its appearance a few nights since” (Leyda 641). Frederic Church painted The Meteor of
1860, based upon a later celestial event. While Melville probably never saw this relatively
obscure Church painting, lexical echoes in Whitman’s earlier Brown/meteor poem, “Year of
Meteors (1859–60),” suggest Melville’s reactive poetics.
I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair,

mounted the scaffold in Virginia;
(I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I watch’d;
I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indiffer-
ent, but trembling with age and your unheal’d
wounds, you mounted the scaffold;)
(Walt Whitman Archive)
Both poems have inaccurately been correlated with singular meteors, but interdisciplinary
research has revealed that Church’s canvas actually captures a unique astrological event—an
156 Tony McGowan
“Earth-grazing meteor procession” (Blaschke), a fragmentary display of large and smaller trailing
celestial lights. Whitman ends his poem like this:
year of forebodings! year of the youth I love!

Year of comets and meteors transient and strange!—lo!
even here, one equally transient and strange!
As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone,
what is this book,
What am I myself but one of your meteors?
In “The Portent” Melville may have reused Whitman’s word “lo,” and converted “strange” to
the more complex “weird,” but of more note is the radical difference between the poet’s lyric
stances. Whitman creates kosmic equivalence between an exorbitant lyric persona and every sign
it encounters; he explicitly connects this persona as book to the meteor’s flight. Playing at
humility, he asserts the ephemerality of his heavenly impact on imagined readers, whereas
Melville, preferring anonymity to a practiced humility, stands aloof, quietly shattering his
speaker’s voice, place, and time.
I have tried to trace the “swinging” figure of Brown and the internal shattering of lyric voice
through Battle-Pieces, but one might extend this study much further through the volume’s verse,
and to earlier and later Melville. “The House-top,” for example, which ostensibly takes up the
infamous July 1863 draft riots in New York, and which has been received as internally riven over
perspectives on popular and state violence, also offers a web of metaphor and literary allusion, a
“double aesthetic” that further complicates our ability to pin a singular lyric perspective to the
poem, as Christopher Ohge has explored in his richly textured study of “Melville’s historical
imagination” (Ohge 173). Or consider Melville’s tortured Southern sympathy in the prose
“Supplement” to Battle-Pieces, which offers a strained meditation on race and regional relations—
in stark contrast to the easy, hands-off romance promised by the volume’s preface. Timothy
Marr’s excellent essay on Melville’s “literary lost cause” takes up the “Supplement,” noting that
his “generosity to the defeated Southerners [ironically] was itself seeded with an antidemocratic
racial allegiance to whiteness that proved to be a primary force impeding the purification of the
nation from the excesses of the war”—excesses we are still rooting out today (Marr 156). From
here scholars might trace the strange permutations of voice in this war book through Clarel, later
poetry, even to Melville’s return to prose in the manuscript archive known as Billy Budd and
Weeds and Wildings. Melville’s “Billy in the Darbies” remembers Brown and the Civil War in
ways that are just legible. Both the war poems and the late war novella ask us to linger over, and
to render extreme scrutiny upon, the justice of their respective executions. The least effective
argument for or against law’s “decree” in Billy Budd occurs in Chapter 21, the Vere-dominated
dialogue (almost a monologue) on what is to be done—though he has already exclaimed in near
prolepsis that “the angel must hang!” (BB 47). We follow Vere’s reasoning, as if he were a fully
rendered character, and start at how his rationalizations collapse. The “ragged endings” of Billy
Budd fold into what remains a fluid manuscript problem: why do Melville’s works so often end
in versioned repetition of catastrophe? Why, like Walter Benjamin’s war-inspired Angel of History,
that sees “one single catastrophe” and is unable to turn away, does Melville persist “in wandering
to and fro over” life’s most traumatic landscapes (Benjamin 256, Hawthorne’s Journal, Leyda 529).
Through the crafted insecurities of shattered polyphonic lyric voices in Battle-Pieces, this already
evolved poetry seeks to triangulate the wreckage of war, and to rescue something from it. Nearing
his biological death, Melville checked in his copy of Schopenhauer’s Wisdom of Life: “The lust of
fame is the last that a wise man shakes off” (qtd. in Dillingham 75). We are usually forced to
surmise why Melville marked what he marked in his books, and here I think he was checking in
with dark knowledge he had largely absorbed and put into practice by 1866.
William Shurr may have erred in imagining a fixed perspective called Melville, but he was
onto something when he discerned in one war poem the “Most concise statement of Melville’s
philosophy to be found anywhere in his writings” (42):
The Apparition.
(A Retrospect.)
Convulsions came; and, where the field
Long slept in pastoral green,
A goblin-mountain was upheaved
(Sure the scared sense was all deceived),
Marl-glen and slag-ravine.
The unreserve of Ill was there,

The clinkers in her last retreat;
But, ere the eye could take it in,
Or mind could comprehension win,
It sunk!—and at our feet.
So, then, Solidity’s a crust—

The core of fire below;
All may go well for many a year,
But who can think without a fear
Of horrors that happen so?
(PP 116)
The Civil War context of “The Apparition” is the Battle of the Crater at the Siege of Petersburg,
July 30, 1864. There the ground literally “sunk” from beneath soldiers’ feet. But, like so many
of the verses in Battle-Pieces, the contexts of this poem exceed Melville’s wartime parameters. The
poem reminds us that no single literary, biographical, or historical catastrophe can definitively
point to what facilitated the emergence of Melville’s successively experimental aesthetic stances
before or after the Fall of Richmond. But we might observe a train of such wrecks: the brutal
reception of Pierre and The Confidence-Man, the tragic and largely unrecoverable loss (and perhaps
scattering) of Poems, 1860, the meteor-like fall of Benjamin Ray, a Nantucket boy, to the deck of
The Meteor, and the ideational pressure of Melville’s reading might all join the catastrophe of the
war itself to have engendered lyric anonymity in Battle-Pieces. Revaluing Melville’s drive toward
a poetics of anonymity as willing subjection to (and artistic realignment before) literary and life
forces does not deny the catastrophe of the Civil War as a central force in the making of the
poems. Rather, it admits that the real war gets in Melville’s book only as conjoined by other forces
the poet deeply counted. Sadly, such revaluing means that Melville’s lyric stance, by virtue of its
intrinsic unascribability, its persistently ungraspable human center, sometimes only redirects us
158 Tony McGowan
to the many still-blank pages in our knowledge about this artist. Lyric anonymity requires an
admission that Melville’s half-known art and life is what recursively draws us to the page.
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13
Re-writing the Holy Land Narrative
Tradition: Clarel as Poetic Pilgrimage
Jonathan A. Cook
For many admirers of Melville’s writings, the existence of his sprawling poetic epic Clarel; A
Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) may seem like a monster more intimidating than the
White Whale, both for its demanding format, with almost 18,000 lines of knotty rhymed
iambic tetrameter, and its complex discursive and digressive narrative structure involving an
international group of pilgrims traveling through the Holy Land in the early 1870s. Yet despite
the poem’s obvious challenges in being too somber and erudite for a mass readership, Melville
likely had reason to hope that he might gain a modest audience, fit though few, for his literary
efforts. Hershel Parker has traced the inspiration for beginning composition of Clarel to the
summer of 1869, when Melville vacationed in a Lenox, Massachusetts hotel and no doubt recalled
his transformational Berkshire friendship there with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who served as the
model for the character of Vine in the poem (Ch. 18). The year is significant for another reason,
for as if to prove that a long erudite narrative poem could appeal to the contemporary public,
Melville might have looked to the example of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, a 21,000-
line saga in twelve books, which was published in four volumes to great critical acclaim and
brisk sales in both England and America in 1868–1869, just as Melville would apparently begin
composition of his own four-book poetic epic.
By the same token, while setting his poetic narrative in the Holy Land, Melville was joining
a host of American writers, both literary and clerical, who had penned entertaining or edifying
narratives of travel through the Levant. Given the growing body of American tourists and
Protestant pilgrims annually visiting Jerusalem and its sacred environs, we might well call the
second half of the nineteenth century a golden age of American travel literature dedicated to the
fabled landscapes of the Bible—the best known of these texts today being, of course, Mark
Twain’s Innocents Abroad (1869) (Vogel; Yothers; Obenzinger). Melville had visited the Holy
Re-writing the Holy Land Narrative Tradition: Clarel as Poetic Pilgrimage 161
Land in January 1857, commenting in his travel journal on his stay in Jerusalem and his tour of
the region following an itinerary later duplicated by the pilgrims in Clarel. And if his journal
provides the original creative impetus for Clarel, especially in the mood of religious disillusion-
ment that informs both journal and poem, Melville turned to Anglo-American Holy Land travel
literature to flesh out some of the scenes in the poem, while he also echoed the religious doubts
of various prominent Victorian authors—notably Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Tennyson, Clough, and
especially Arnold—whose troubled views are reflected in Clarel’s prolonged debates on the fate
of modern Christianity (Cook).
The plethora of writings on the Holy Land produced by Anglo-American authors in the later
nineteenth century thus suggests that Melville’s capacious poetic narrative was not as anomalous
as it may appear to us today. What was unusual about Melville’s Clarel as a record of Holy Land
travel was that he framed his narrative in poetry, not prose. Seen in this light, Clarel invites
comparison with other major poetic summations of religious and moral belief systems in earlier
eras of English literature, notably The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, and The
Excursion. While emulating the epic scope of his poetic predecessors, Melville’s Clarel also reveals
the author’s predilection for generic innovation, as his narrative is undergirded by a variety of
literary forms and structures augmenting the encyclopedic nature of the poem’s subject matter
and allusiveness.
So, for example, Stanley Brodwin argues that Melville’s poem, chronologically extending from
Epiphany to Pentecost, represents a modern Existential “Fifth Gospel” in which the characters of
Derwent, Rolfe, and Vine effectively act as three “wise men,” or Magi, to the youthful Clarel as
they undertake a pilgrimage that effectively ends at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
Zephyra Porat, on the other hand, astutely asserts that “as a milestone in 19th century cultural
history, Melville’s symposium (or dialogues on supernatural religion) is unmatched …. Adopting
the polylogic structures of Plato’s Symposium and Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion, Melville
recasts his contemporaries’ wars of faith and doubt in the mold of an inverted pilgrimage” (31).
So, too, Edgar A. Dryden usefully suggests that in Clarel Melville draws on older literary and
cultural traditions of emblematic “characters” rather than modes of characterization found in
nineteenth-century fiction (Ch. 3). One formal approach that has been neglected in criticism of
Melville’s poem relates to its titular designation as a “pilgrimage,” a religious and literary para-
digm that shapes the narrative on multiple levels. The following discussion will accordingly
examine how varied concepts of pilgrimage, including their literal and figurative dimensions,
helped frame Melville’s labyrinthine poem.
Religious historian James Harpur notes that pilgrimages to the sacred sites of Christianity
have been a feature of Western civilization ever since Constantine’s mother Helena in the fourth
century CE identified the now legendary landmarks of Christ’s life in Jerusalem and its environs,
notably the Church of the Holy Sepulchre erected on the site of her alleged discovery of the True
Cross. As Harpur remarks, the Christian idea of the pilgrimage journey has, since its beginnings,
involved both an outer and inner dimension, including both travel and personal transformation:
“Therefore, whether pilgrimage is made physically or contemplatively, the idea of journeying
remains central to it: the pilgrim must make a journey because he or she needs time—time to
reflect on personal milestones or conflicts, or upon the great mysteries of life such as love, fate,
suffering, and the nature of God” (8). This combination of mobility and spirituality is reflected
in the term’s biblical origins. In the Old Testament, God told Moses that for the Hebrew slaves
in Egypt, Canaan was “the land of their pilgrimage” (Exod. 6:4), or the redemptive physical goal
of their national quest. Starting from the late classical era, Christians were, in turn, encouraged
162 Jonathan A. Cook
to engage in pilgrimage journeys to holy sites, above all Jerusalem; but another tradition of
Christian pilgrimage was based on the New Testament belief that the believer was engaged in a
lifelong sorrowful passage from earth to heaven. St. Paul accordingly wrote that “even we our-
selves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body”
(Rom. 8:23); for “in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which
is from heaven” (2 Cor. 5:2). The Pauline author of the book of Hebrews similarly noted that,
like the archetypal Old Testament religious pilgrims Abraham and Sara, all Christians were
“strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Heb. 11:13).
Melville’s Clarel conforms to this traditional religious model in that the diverse group of pil-
grims in poem begin in Jerusalem, the archetypal goal of Christian pilgrimages, and travel to the
major biblical landmarks in its vicinity, while many of them, notably the poem’s title character, are
looking for spiritual transformation. Clarel’s pilgrimage is therefore both an outer and inner journey
in quest of religious truth in an era when the Christian faith was under attack from a wide array of
historical forces in the West. By the same token, St. Paul’s—and later John Bunyan’s—idea of the
life of the believer as a metaphorical pilgrimage from birth to death, with spiritual seekers “groan-
ing” for their heavenly home and feeling “strangers” to the world, is also relevant to the unfolding
narrative of Melville’s poem, particularly in the spiritual struggles of its eponymous hero.
It is thus appropriate that near the beginning of Clarel the reader enters the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre, the most visited site for Christian pilgrims since its initial establishment by
Constantine’s mother Helena. The narrator of Clarel provides a comprehensive portrait of the
storied history, complex structure, and spiritual significance of the Church as the epicenter of the
pilgrim’s faith, based on the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ. The narrator thus notes the
massive scale and cavernous structure of the Church:
What altars old in clusters rare

And grotto-shrines engird the Tomb:
Caves and a crag; and more is there;
And halls monastic join their gloom.
To sum in comprehensive bounds
The Passion’s drama with its grounds,
Immense the temple winds and strays
Finding each storied precinct out—
Absorbs the sites all roundabout—
Omnivorous, and a world of maze.
(C 1.3.17–26)
The “omnivorous” nature of the Church hints at the all-consuming nature of religious faith,
while the “maze” implies the allegorical labyrinth of the believer’s path through life as well as
the labyrinthine faith traditions that have grown out of the life and death of Christ. The narrator
goes on to explore the “haze of mystery” (C 1.3.52) that characterizes the varied sacramental
activities taking place within the Church, which constitutes an architectural microcosm of the
world of Christian faith. While Catholic friars maintain the Tomb, vast numbers of pilgrims
come into the Church to seek assistance, confess sins, or share their grief, as the narrator remarks:
“And, sooth, to think what numbers here, / Age after age, have worn the stones / In suppliance
or judgment fear; / What mourners—men and women’s moans, / Ancestors of ourselves indeed”
(C 1.3.99–103). The collective “moans” of the visitors to the Church are thus all participating in
St. Paul’s paradigmatic “groans” of the Christian pilgrim.
In his journal of his visit to the Holy Land, Melville repeatedly noted with distaste the perva-
sive commercialization of sacred sites; and indeed many contemporary American Holy Land
narratives invariably commented on this same phenomenon, notably Twain’s. The narrator of
Clarel duly alludes to the repugnance of some visitors at the pervasive intermingling of God and
Mammon: “to mark the dome / Beset in court or yard forlorn / By pedlars versed in wonted
tricks, / Vendors of charm or crucifix” (C 1.3.121–24). Yet such disapproval does not dissuade
the narrator from communicating the complex spiritual and moral spectacle of the faithful who
continue to make pilgrimages to the birthplace of Christianity: “Unvexed by Europe’s grieving
doubt / Which asks And can the Father be? / Those children of the climes devout, / On festival in
fane installed, / Happily ignorant, make glee / Like orphans in the play-ground walled” (C
1.3.135–40). Ignorant of the alleged death of God, these blissfully ignorant believers, making
themselves into simple-minded children as Christ advised (Matt. 19:14), are psychologically
protected against the grievous burden of doubt that afflicts Clarel and other troubled Victorians.
Melville’s disillusioned young student of divinity makes his visit to the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre on the Christian holiday of Epiphany—the celebration of the arrival of the Magi in
Bethlehem celebrated on January 6—but his visit is notable for a sense of disillusionment and
disappointment, as when he looks at the empty Tomb of Christ and notes the stifling smoke-
screen inadvertently created by lamps burning there: “In smoke / Befogged they shed no vivid
ray, / But heat the cell and seem to choke” (C 1.5.29–31). Looking in at the Tomb, Clarel spec-
ulates on where exactly Christ’s spirit now resides, and whether he “tranced lies, tranced nor
unbewept / with Dorian gods” or if he has become diffused into the elements, “Dispersed in soil,
in sea, in air?” (C 1.5.36–37, 42). The choices of where Christ’s soul exists for Clarel include the
possibility that Christ was simply another defunct god like the Homeric deities of the past, but
one whose spirit now perhaps exists in a state of “soul sleep” in accordance with the concept of
Christian mortalism popular in the seventeenth century, or perhaps his spirit was dispersed
throughout the material world in keeping with the philosophy of pantheism propounded by
Spinoza and later popularized in the Romantic era. Like a man trapped in a labyrinth, Clarel
cannot untangle the thread of his doubts as he “slack and aimless went, / Nor might untwine the
ravelment / Of doubts perplexed” (C 1.5.44–46).
Looking into the Chapel of the Apparition, the alleged site where the risen Christ appeared to
Mary Magdalen, who mistook him for the gardener (John 20:11–18), Clarel sees a group of tired
Greek Orthodox pilgrims, including mothers and children, recumbent from the fatigue of their
travels. In contrast to the hopeful message of the Resurrection found in John 20, Clarel imagines
these Greek pilgrims joyfully possessed of the traditional palm leaves of the completed pil-
grimage but then shipwrecked on their way home along the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean:
How hopeful from their isles serene

They sailed, and on such tender quest;
Then, after toils that came between,
They re-embarked; and, tho’ distressed,
Grieved not, for Zion had been seen;
Each wearing next the heart for charm
Some priestly scrip in leaf of palm.
But these, ah, these in Dawn’s pale reign

Asleep upon the beach Tyrian!
Or is it sleep? No, rest—that rest
Which naught shall ruffle or molest.
(C 1.5.120–30)
The arduous journey of the pilgrimage for these Orthodox Christians has resulted in fatal
disaster despite the magic “charm” of their palm leaves, thereby reversing the usual order of
events in pilgrimages traditionally taken in pledge for disasters survived and life divinely pre-
served. Clarel thereupon has a prolonged mental vision of the challenges that members of other
major world faiths are willing to undergo to complete their pilgrimages, beginning with expe-
ditions of Muslims—“Rich men and beggars—all beguiled / To cheerful trust in Allah’s care” (C
1.5.155–56)—making their way to Mecca while trekking through the Sinai Desert past camel
bones: “With skeletons but part interred— / Relics of men which friendless fell” (C 1.5.172–
73). So, too, when Hindu pilgrims make their way to their holy sites, they face similar risks to
life when “numbers, plague-struck, faint and sore, / Drop livid on the flowery shore—” (C
1.5.193–94). Considering the stubborn instinct to make such religious journeys despite their
risk of death, Clarel asks himself: “What profound / Impulsion makes these tribes to range?” (C
1.5.203–4). Clarel thereupon imagines all faiths involved in an “intersympathy of creeds,” a
phrase suggesting Melville’s recognition of the contemporary trend toward acknowledging the
commonality of all religious faiths, as seen in the development of the discipline of comparative
religion in the late nineteenth century (Potter). But Clarel’s vision of the risks associated with
pilgrimages in the great world religions suggests that the impulse to seek spiritual renewal and
transformation could often be a self-destructive pursuit. The ultimate paradox of the pilgrimage,
whether Christian or otherwise, was that individuals sought spiritual renewal at the price of their
lives in the physical hazards of travel, as seen in the deaths of Nehemiah and Mortmain in Clarel.
When Melville’s pilgrims are staying at the Mar Saba monastery, as described in the third part
of the poem, the subject of Christian visitors to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre comes up in
association with Rolfe’s remark that their aloof Muslim guard Belex, as Rolfe has learned, once
served as a hired warder at the Church, which has led to his disdain for the many instances of
conflict among Christians. Indeed, the latent animosities between various clerical guardians of
different sectors within the enormous structure of the Church have often led to vicious fights
breaking out between opposed religious groups. As Rolfe goes on to explain, Belex had to act in
a policing role to control mass hysteria and violence taking place during the Easter festival, when
a special quasi-miraculous display of fire occurs:
What backs he’s scored

When on the day by Greeks adored,
St. Basil’s Easter, all the friars
Schismatic, with the pilgrim tribes,
Levantine, Russian, heave their tides
Of uproar among the shrines,
Waiting the burst of fraudful fires
From vent there in the Holy Tomb
(C 3.16.46–53)
As Rolfe notes, in this unedifying spectacle of believers rioting in reaction to a specially con-
trived system of pyrotechnics in the Church, meant to suggest that angels were lighting the
lamps, many of the pilgrims were trampled to death. An astonished Clarel notes the incongruity
between the hospitable and devout deportment of the Orthodox monks at Mar Saba, in contrast
to those responsible for the fraud of the “Easter Fire,” to which Rolfe replies that the monastery
of Mar Saba is financially supported by the Russian Czar, and the lights in the chantry were in
fact lit with the same fire used during the Easter ceremonies in Jerusalem: “Thus you see, /
Contagious is this cheatery” (C 3.16.108–9). But Rolfe ultimately reasons that even though the
Easter fire is manifestly contrived and leads to riots in the Church, it still represents a tradition
that pilgrims wish to see continued and that potentially enhances faith: “Greek churchmen
would let drop this thing / Of fraud, e’en let it cease. But no: / Tis ancient,’ tis entangled so /
With vital things of needful sway” (C 3.16.133–36). Rolfe’s revealing explanation of the politics
of faith in the Holy Land is reminiscent of those contemporary American Holy Land narratives
that critiqued the fraudulent practices of non-Protestant faiths there; but it also reminds Clarel
and the reader of the desperate human need for belief, even as Rolfe assumes a nonjudgmental
stance on the suspect methods used to reenforce faith.
If historical traditions of Christian pilgrimage provide an essential formal structure to
Melville’s Holy Land poem, he also incorporated the tradition of the inner Christian pilgrimage
into Clarel; hence, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the most notable English text in this tradition,
also informs Melville’s schematic design. On a journey from the City of Destruction to the
Celestial City or New Jerusalem, Bunyan’s figure of “Christian” thus finds his modern counter-
part in the character of Clarel, whose experience of varied Holy Land sites and landmarks sug-
gests some features of Bunyan’s metaphorical landscapes. Just as Bunyan’s Christian is weighed
down by his sense of sin at the beginning of his journey, Melville’s Clarel, at the start of his pil-
grimage, is weighed down by his religious doubt. And just as Christian is initially “saved” by his
early encounter with the “Evangelist” who gives him a “Parchment-Roll” bearing the message to
“Fly from the Wrath to come” (9), Clarel finds a friend in the elderly American evangelical mis-
sionary Nehemiah, whose millennial tracts warn of Christ’s imminent Second Coming: “Deep
read he was in seers devout, / The which forecast Christ’s second prime, / And on his slate would
cipher out / The mystic days and dates sublime” (C 1.8.44–47). When Nehemiah asks Clarel
whether he is a fellow “pilgrim,” Clarel feels it incumbent to respond that he is only “a trav-
eler—no more”; but despite this disappointment, Nehemiah with Bible in hand generously
offers to be Clarel’s “guide” to Jerusalem, acting thus like Bunyan’s Evangelist to Christian:
“‘Come then with me, in peace we’ll go; / These ways of Salem well I know; / Me let be guide
whose guide is this,’ / And held the Book in witness so, / As’ twere a guide that could not miss”
(C 1.10.29–33). Yet while Bunyan’s Christian stood in front of the Cross and felt that his burden
of sin was released, Clarel in Melville’s poem fails to feel any sense of renewed faith in the Church
of the Holy Sepulchre, which only antagonizes his troubled spiritual condition.
Another character from Clarel with a likely prototype in Pilgrim’s Progress is the geologist
Margoth, an outspoken atheist whose counterpart in Bunyan’s allegory is the character designated
“Atheist,” whom Christian and Hopeful meet after being misdirected by Flatterer and then put
on the right path by an Angel. When the two pilgrims tell Atheist that they are going to Mount
Sion, or the Celestial City, “Then Atheist fell into a very great Laughter,” further telling them, “‘I
laugh to see what ignorant persons you are, to take upon you so tedious a Journey; and yet are like
to have nothing but your travel for your paines’” (110). Atheist then categorically asserts: “There
is no such place as you Dream of, in all this World” (110). In his mockery and scorn, Bunyan’s
outspoken Atheist is comparable to the militantly secular geologist Margoth, a Jew whom the
pilgrims encounter in the Wilderness near Quarantania and who identifies the demon-haunted
peak as Jura limestone: “It needs we scientists remand / Back from old theologic myth / To
geologic hammers” (C 2.20.48–50). Just as Bunyan’s Atheist laughs at the presumed folly of
Christian and Hopeful’s quest for the Celestial City, Margoth mocks the devout Nehemiah when
the latter drinks from the Jordan River and then spews the water out: “The fool! / Fool meek and
fulsome like to this— / Too old again to go to school” (C 2.24.79–83). However, the callous
Margoth himself later provides a source of comedy for the pilgrims when Nehemiah’s ass inter-
rupts Margoth’s disquisition claiming that the biblical myth of the destruction of the Cities of
the Plain was simply a geological event: “A hideous hee-haw horrible rose, / Rebounded in
unearthly sort / From shore to shore, as if retort / From all the damned in Sodom’s Sea / Out
brayed at him” (C 2.33.67–71). The unprepossessing Margoth’s reductive view that “‘All’s mere
geology’” (C 2.33.47) is thus adjudged to be a risibly inadequate teaching within the evolving
philosophical and theological debates of the poem.
The spiritual topography of Bunyan’s narrative similarly finds a few coordinates in Melville’s
poem as in the correspondence between the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where Christian
spends a haunted night surrounded by hellish fiends, and the shores of the Dead Sea valley where
Melville’s pilgrims spend the night, and where the saintly Nehemiah has a delusive celestial
vision in his dreams and sleepwalks into the sea and drowns. As the narrator notes, “In magic
play / So to the meek one in the dream / Appeared the New Jerusalem; / Haven for which how
many a day— / In bed, afoot, or on the knee— / He yearned: Would God I were in thee!” (C
2.38.40–45). The symbolic equivalent of Bunyan’s Vanity Fair in Melville’s Clarel, on the other
hand, is not a city where, as in Bunyan, the corruptions of the world are on display and where
Faithful is unjustly tried and executed for speaking ill of the inhabitants, but the monastery of
Mar Saba, where the vanities of the world are highlighted, as when the monks perform a masque
on the story of the Wandering Jew, during which the protagonist laments: “Vanity, vanity’s end-
less reign!—” (C 3.19.105). Continuing the vanity motif, Clarel must give the password of
“Death” to the mad monk guarding the skeleton-filled crypt of Mar Saba in Book 3, Canto 24
(“Vault and Grotto”).
While some aspects of the pilgrims’ visit to Bethlehem in Clarel, with its peaceful “Valley of
the Shepherds” (C 4.9.22), suggest Bunyan’s Delectable Mountains where Christian and Hopeful
meet shepherds who give them further guidance toward the Celestial City, Clarel’s subsequent
shocking discovery of his fiancée Ruth’s death as she is buried with her mother Agar outside the
gates of Jerusalem more forcefully suggests an ironic reversal of the ending of Bunyan’s allegory,
when Christian and Hopeful cross the River of Death and are welcomed into the Celestial City:
“Now I saw in my Dream, that these two men went in at the Gate; and loe, as they entered, they
were transfigured, and they had Raiment put on that shone like God. There was also that met
them with Harps and Crowns, and gave them to them; The Harp to praise withal, and the
Crowns in token of honor” (132). In Clarel, after a night ride back to Jerusalem from Bethlehem
on the eve of Ash Wednesday, the young divinity student recognizes the pattern on the scarf
wrapped around Ruth’s body and experiences a shock of recognition: “With piercing cry, as one
distraught, / Down from his horse leaped Clarel—ran, / And hold of that cloak instant caught /
And bared the face. Then (like a man / Shot through the heart, but who retains / His posture)
rigid he remains” (C 4.30.70–75). Here Ruth’s “raiment” is a token of death, not life, and her
hasty pre-dawn burial with her mother in “two narrow pits” (C 4.30.60) ultimately shows the
lethal folly of her father Nathan’s ambition, as a Jewish convert, to redeem the Holy Land. While
Bunyan’s Christian and Hopeful are given harps to sing praises to their God, an enraged Clarel
curses his Jewish fiancée’s religious guardians for Ruth’s death: “And ye—your tribe—’twas ye
denied / Me access to this virgin’s side / In bitter trial: take my curse!— / O blind, blind, barren
universe!” (C 4.30.90–94). Having seen his elderly spiritual guide and mentor Nehemiah—who
introduced him to Ruth—accidentally drown himself in the Dead Sea in pursuit of a religious
vision, Clarel is now traumatized by the death of his fiancée, whose premature demise will render
him a permanent pilgrim and stranger bereft of faith in a redemptive God. Tellingly, he ends the
poem as one of the cross-bearers on the Via Crucis in Jerusalem at the time of Whitsunday or
Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit allegedly descended on the apostles.
While Clarel is not a rigidly schematized allegory like Bunyan’s, with its flat personifications
of vices and virtues, it does offer a range of secondary characters whose emblematic juxtapositions
provide a marked contrast between a cluster of religious figures devoted to carnal renunciation,
and a gallery of hedonists bent on enjoying the pleasures of the flesh. If the former are all
involved in assiduously shunning the world, the flesh, and the devil, as St. Paul advised (Eph.
2:1–6), the latter dedicate themselves to the enjoyments of wine, women, and song, as Solomon
reputedly promoted in the book of Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. Thus in Part 2 of Clarel,
the pilgrims have the company of a worldly Greek banker and his future son-in-law Glaucon
who together bring three mules carrying panniers of food and wine (“Rosoglio pink and wine of
gold” [C 2.1.180]), while in conversation with Clarel, Glaucon reveals himself to be ignorant of
Homer but very much interested in discussing attractive local women: “But Bethlehem—beyond
compare! / Such roguish ladies! Tarried there?” (C 2.5.28–29). When the pilgrims are passing
through the bleak landscape on their way to Jericho, Rolfe notes how inappropriate it would be
for the banker and his son to meet their death in the vicinity: “Not Pleasure’s darling cares to
seek / Such counselor” (C 2.12.37–38). In contrast to this pair of Greek hedonists, who quit the
pilgrimage before reaching Jericho, we encounter an abstemious Syrian monk who has been
living on the legendary mountain where Christ was tempted by the devil, reliving the experience
in ascetic withdrawal to purify himself of the sin of doubt: “He told how that for forty days, /
Not yet elapsed, he dwelt in ways / Of yonder Quarantanian hight, / A true recluse, an anchorite;
/ And only came at whiles below, / And ever in the calm of night / To beg for scraps in Jericho”
(C 2.18.30–36). The Syrian monk thereupon rehearses to the pilgrims, in imitation of Christ, his
hallucinatory dialogue with the devil of modern doubt, a dialogue in which the devil seems to
have the more winning arguments: “‘Nay peace were best— / Could the unselfish yearner rest! /
At peace to be, here, here on earth, / Where peace, heart-peace, how few may claim, / And each
pure nature pines in dearth—’” (C 2.18.126–30). The self-torturing monk serves as a reminder
to Clarel and the other pilgrims of the unappeasable spiritual yearnings and relentless carnal
mortifications of deep Christian faith.
On their way to the Orthodox monastery of Mar Saba in Part 3, the pilgrims encounter the gaily
singing Cypriote whose mission of dipping his mother’s funeral shroud in the Jordan River oddly
contrasts with his sensual lyrics, suitable for an inhabitant of Venus’s legendary birthplace. Such an
incongruity anticipates the vivid contrast at Mar Saba between the variously occupied monks, notably
those involved in extremes of asceticism, and the affable, pleasure-loving Lesbian provision merchant
who supplies the monastery. With his lyric songs and light conversation, the sensually inclined
Lesbian merchant offers a sustained contrast to the monkish asceticism of the monastery: “Purveyor,
he some needful stores / Supplied from Syrian towns and shores; / And on his trips, dismissing care,—
/ His stores delivered all and told, / Would rest awhile in Saba’s fold” (C 3.11.14–18). The “jovial”
Lesbian comes from the idyllic Greek island of the famous female lyric poet (whose island name had
not yet been used to designate same-sex love between women); thus it is not surprising that he him-
self is frequently given to song throughout the pilgrims’ extended stay at Mar Saba: “In Mytilene, /
Sappho and Phaon’s Lesbos green, / His home was, his lax Paradise, / An island yet luxurious seen, /
Fruitful in all that can entice” (C 3.11.26–30). Upon the pilgrims’ arrival, the Lesbian proposes a
drinking party and provides the wine, with the company of pilgrims joined by the soldierly Arnaut
and then the old sailor Agath, all of whom are entertained by the Lesbian’s anacreontic lyrics and antic
behavior, climaxed by his comic act of waltzing with Rolfe: “And so these improvised twin brothers
/ Dance forward and salute the others, / The Lesbian flourishing for sign / His wine-cup, though it
lacked the wine” (C 1.13.57–60).
As a counter to the Lesbian’s celebration of sensual pleasures during the pilgrims’ revelry, the
frivolous mood of which troubles Clarel, who is grieving over the recent death of his friend
Nehemiah (“Are these the pilgrims late that heard / The wheeling desert vultures scream / Above
the Man and Book interred” [C 3.14.116–18]), the Mar Saba monastery the next day offers
Clarel striking examples of fleshly mortification, as in the mortuary crypt where Clarel encoun-
ters a “cenobite inclined / Busy at scuttle-hole in floor / Of rock” (C 3.24.27–29) where he looks
in and sees a vision of death: “On stony benches, head by head, / In court where no recorders be,
/ Preserved by nature’s chemistry / Sat the dim conclave of the dead, / Encircled where the
shadow rules, / By sloping theatres of skulls” (C 3.24.49–54). Here Clarel also sees a “sheeted
apparition wait, / Like Lazarus at the charnel gate / in Bethany,” this being the mad monk Cyril,
who demands the “countersign” of “Death” to let Clarel pass (C 3.24.63–66). In addition to these
stark reminders of human mortality, before leaving the monastery Clarel also talks to the saintly
looking “Celibate” who tends the monastery’s doves and who answers Clarel’s inquiry about
monastic life by handing him an ancient misogynistic text with arguments “striving in their fear
/ Of clay, to bridle, curb or kill; / In the pure desert of the will / Chastised, live the vowed life
austere” (C 3.30.20–23). The result of Clarel’s visit to the Celibate is a canto (“The Recoil”) of
anguished self-doubt about the value of heavenly versus earthly love: “‘Truth, truth cherubic!
Claim’st thou worth / Foreign to time and hearts which dwell / Helots of habit old as earth /
Suspended’ twixt the heaven and hell?” (C 3.31.60–63).
The fourth and final part of the poem largely takes place in Bethlehem, where the most
prominent antithesis between spiritual and carnal values appears in the contrast between the
Catholic monk Salvaterra and the French-Jewish “Prodigal.” As the pilgrims’ guide through the
Church of the Nativity, the Franciscan monk Salvaterra provides the tour of the physical settings
allegedly associated with the birth of Christ, as designated in the various parts of the Church,
inspiring incredulity in Derwent, who nevertheless restrains any humorous comment: “Perish
truth / If it but act the boor, in sooth, / Requiting courtesy with jeer; / For courteous is our guide,
with grace / Of a pure heart” (C 4.13.92–96). Salvaterra’s passionate devotion to his vocation
manifestly overrides the site’s dubious historical authenticity. Clarel subsequently encounters, as
a carnal counterpart to the monk Salvaterra, the sprightly “Prodigal,” a young Lyonese cloth
merchant who shares Clarel’s room at the Catholic monastery. The Prodigal is full of
light-hearted songs, conversation about attractive Jewish women, and the erotic message of the
Song of Songs, which comes as a shock to Clarel, who has learned in his seminary the conven-
tional view that the poem is an allegory of the individual’s love for God. In conversation with the
Prodigal, Clarel finds his traditional Protestant ideas about the necessity of suffering and the
punitive God of the Old Testament questioned, as the former remarks: “‘You of the West, / What
devil has your hearts possessed, / You can’t enjoy?’” (C 4.26.145–47). Later when Clarel is sleep-
ing he dreams of the antithetical worlds of the Prodigal and Salvaterra in which he “seemed to
stand / Betwixt a Shushan [city from the Old Testament book of Esther] and a sand; / The
Lyonese was lord of one, / The desert did the Tuscan own, / The pure pale monk” (C 4.26.303–7).
Re-inspired to return to his Jewish fiancée in Jerusalem and a marriage that will commit him to
the world of carnal pleasures and pains, Clarel will soon discover that the message of mortality
taught by the mad monk Cyril is more relevant to his deceased bride, a final lesson in his
prolonged debate over matters of flesh and spirit.
As we have seen, the progress of Clarel’s quasi-allegorical pilgrimage in Melville’s poem
involves a dialectical structure of debates, including an implicit conflict between worldly and
spiritual values, neither of which offers the exclusive answer to the questions of human existence
poised by Melville’s young protagonist. Unlike the resolution of Pilgrim’s Progress, Clarel offers
no assurance of a redemptive Celestial City awaiting the pilgrims. Instead, Clarel returns to the
stony desolation of Jerusalem, where he discovers Ruth’s death and later views the Easter pil-
grims who stream into the city to celebrate, as Clarel is haunted by the ghosts of Celio, Nehemiah,
Mortmain, Nathan, Agar, and Ruth. In view of these multiple deaths, the narrator plaintively
inquires, “Where, where now He who helpeth us, / The Comforter?—Tell, Erebus!” (C 4.32.103–
4). Asking the ancient Greek god of Chaos for the “Comforter” promised by Jesus (John 14:16,
15:26, 16:7) is a symptom of the deep religious despair that ironically marks the end of the pil-
grimage before the narrator’s more hopeful Epilogue ends the poem.
At the start of the narrative, Clarel had discovered a fragment of an old poem (“Judea”) used
in the paper lining of his trunk, and there had read a brief dialogue between “The World” and
“The Palmer.” In the poem, the former asks what gift of grapes, garlands, or roses the pilgrim
has brought, to which the latter replies that he has clung to “the precincts of Christ’s tomb” and
thus has only the traditional palm leaves to offer: “These palms I bring—from dust not free, /
Since dust and ashes both were trod by me” (C 1.2.121–22). Significantly, the language here
recalls the lesson of humility and mortality taught to the Old Testament patriarch Job, who
ultimately declares to God: “wherfor I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:6). As
Clarel draws to a close, the young divinity student is walking the Via Crucis on Whitsun-tide
along with a crowd of other individuals of varied faiths and nationalities, meditating on the Job-
like lesson seemingly gained from his pilgrimage. Yet in the end, it is a moot point whether this
Old Testament lesson of humility and mortality is the final truth of Clarel, for the narrator in the
Epilogue encourages a continued search towards a more affirmative New Testament vision: “But
through such strange illusions have they passed / Who in life’s pilgrimage have baffled striven—
/ Even death may prove unreal at the last, / And stoics be astounded into heaven” (C 4.35.23–
26). The debate goes on.
Works Cited
Brodwin, Stanley. “Herman Melville’s Clarel: An Parker, Hershel. Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative.
Existential Gospel.” PMLA, vol. 86, no. 3, May 1971, Northwestern UP, 2012.
pp. 375–87. Porat, Zephyra. “Towards the Promethean Ledge:
Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress, edited by N. H. Varieties of Sceptic Experience in Melville’s Clarel.”
Keeble. Oxford UP, 1998. Literature and Theology, vol. 8, no. 1, March 1994, pp.
Cook, Jonathan A. “Clarel and the Victorian Crisis of 30–46.
Faith.” Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion, Potter, William. Melville’s “Clarel” and the Intersympathy of
edited by Jonathan A. Cook and Brian Yothers. Creeds. Kent State UP, 2004.
Northwestern UP, 2017, pp. 21–70. The Bible. Authorized King James Version. Oxford World’s
Dryden, Edgar A. Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Classics. Oxford UP, 1997.
Literary Career. Stanford UP, 2004. Vogel, Lester I. To See a Promised Land: Americans and the
Harpur, James. The Pilgrim Journey: A History of Pilgrimage Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century. Pennsylvania State
in the Western World. BlueBridge, 2016. UP, 1993.
Obenzinger, Hilton. American Palestine: Melville, Twain, Yothers, Brian. The Romance of the Holy Land in American
and the Holy Land Mania. Princeton UP, 1999. Travel Writing. Routledge, 2007.
14
“The Fair Poet’s Name”: Late Poems
Peter Riley
“Herman Melville ranks with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as one of the three great
American poets of the nineteenth century.” So begins the dust jacket copy of the Library of
America’s 2019 edition of Melville’s Complete Poems.1 A confident claim, and one that––the
desire to promote the book notwithstanding––confirms a trend in scholarship that has, over the
past two decades or so, sought to consecrate Melville the poet alongside Melville the novelist
and short story writer. The scholarly consensus has come a long way since a critic could rail
against Melville’s “countless infelicities of execution: grotesque inversions, tortured ellipses,
banal rhymes, expedient archaisms, distorted word forms, and limping rhythms” (Stein 11).
With the publication of Hershel Parker’s landmark edition, alongside a host of critical assess-
ments that have rehabilitated his reputation, Melville’s status as “Great American Poet” (GAP)
at last seems assured.
Yet leafing through the edition, the first to collect all of Melville’s poetry in one place, you
might find it difficult to shake the impression that it is precisely this “assurance” and “status”
that his writing seems committed to unravelling. In contrast to recent enthusiastic endorse-
ments, reclamations, and confirmations of his vaunted poetic stature, it is curious to note that in
his later years, Melville studiously avoided the terms poet and poetry––almost altogether. He
deferred instead to a more ephemeral vocabulary: his poems were “Sea-Pieces,” “Pebbles,”
“Fruit,” “Weeds and Wildings,” “This, That, and the Other,” “A Rose or Two”––epithets seem-
ingly chosen in self-effacing and playfully ironic contradistinction to what any monumental or
canonical poet might produce. He is of course not alone in describing his own verse in terms
other than poetry––think Leaves of Grass, as well as the self-deprecating stance of Romantic poets
1
This is the edition used for all references to Melville’s poems in this chapter.
172 Peter Riley
with their “fragment poems”2––but the habit is so persistent with Melville as to imply a consid-
ered hesitation and even studied aversion.
Such taxonomic reticence should come as little surprise, perhaps. Those moments in his career
when he had used the terms with any confidence had ended in abject failure: the prospective
publishers who read the manuscript for his 1860 collection Poems summarily rejected the volume
(Melville abandoned the project shortly after). And in 1879, Melville agreed to have the 200
remaining copies of Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) pulped because (the
publishers said) they were taking up valuable space in the G.P. Putnam & Company warehouse.
From this chastening moment onward––a suitable place to start periodizing the “late poetry”––
there are only two further examples of him labelling his own writing as “poems”: “Fragments of
a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century” in Timoleon, and an uncollected piece called “In the
Hall of Marbles (Lines recalled from a destroyed poem).” As the titles insist, these “poems” are
not coherent totalities; destroyed, lost, fragmented, and recalled, they fall short of mastery or
even clear authorial origin.
It also ought to be noted that in the verse projects he developed after Clarel––John Marr and
Other Sailors (1888), Timoleon ETC (1891), the unpublished “Weeds and Wildings,” “Parthenope,”
and “Billy in the Darbies”3––Melville references the figure of the poet only twice, and not
without opacity. In the “Inscription Epistolary” to John Marr, the narrator describes prose writer
Richard Henry Dana as “a true poet’s son” (653). More substantially, the opening prose work of
Parthenope is entitled “House of the Tragic Poet.” In this work, the narrator sees the magnifi-
cence of the “House” itself and argues that it could not have been the residence of any poet;
instead it must have been the home of a well-to-do publisher wise enough to scare “away from
his premises the important nuisance of the literary tyro—with his unsalable wares” (795). Of
course a caustic sentence such as this, most likely written in the late 1870s, would have carried
along with it specific connotations for this once famous writer turned Deputy Customs Inspector
in Manhattan.
To locate such reticence in the later writings is not to suggest, however, that he treated the
epithets with any particular veneration in earlier phases of his career. Whenever “poet” or
“poetry” comes up in the fiction, they are always in some way held to account or playfully under-
mined. In Mardi (1849), Queen Media listens to the recitation of a song by the court minstrel
Yoomy and flatly responds: “Call you this poetry?” (M 453); in White-Jacket (1850), Lemsford’s
poetry is comically “published” by being fired from the barrel of a cannon (WJ 192); and in Pierre
(1852), the testily ironic narrator writes of the eponymous character that: “he possessed a genius
for celebrating such things, which in a less indolent and ambitious nature, would have gained a
fair poet’s name ere now” (P 98). Even in Moby-Dick (1851), in which Ishmael explicitly seeks to
redress the opinion of “landsmen” that whaling is an “unpoetical and disreputable pursuit,”
poetry is only ever affirmed in relation to the material certainty of the body––whether human
and cetacean (MD 108). In Chapter 102, “The Bower in the Arsacides,” Ishmael claims to have
had the dimensions of a whale tattooed on his arm, saying that he did not trouble himself with
the odd inches because he “wished the other parts of [his] body to remain a blank page for a poem
2
See Andrew Allport’s treatment of the “fragment” topos in “The Romantic Fragment Poem.”
3
“Billy and the Darbies” was initially set for inclusion in the John Marr collection, before Melville pulled it and began
developing it into Billy Budd.
“The Fair Poet’s Name”: Late Poems 173
[he] was then composing” (451). Melville, as a general rule, tended to question the status of any
poetry that attempted to sever or disguise its relationship to the material contingencies that
defined its production––that sought to ethereally drift away from its material moorings and
claim any abstract or autonomous status.
Nowhere, perhaps, is this predilection more apparent than in his own copy of Emerson’s
Essays: Second Series (1844), in which he marked and commented upon the following passage from
“The Poet”:
… the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,––re-attaching even artificial things,
and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight,––disposes very easily of the most disagree-
able facts. Readers of poetry see the factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the
landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but
the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive, or the spider’s geomet-
rical web.
(Sealts No. 205, MMO)
To the left of the underlining, Melville responds, with some exasperation, “So it would seem. In
this sense Mr E. is a great poet.” Over the page he continues: “[Emerson’s] gross and astonishing
errors and illusions spring from a self-conceit so intensely intellectual and calm that one at first
hesitates to call it by its right name.”4 For Melville, the Emersonian poet’s disposal of “the most
disagreeable facts,” the factory village, the railway (both symbols of commerce and labor), via the
monumental American Poet’s claims to organic order and timeless universality are a troubling
erasure. So conceived, poetry becomes nothing more than an intoxicating, nationalistic balm
while the poet becomes a reactionary representative of privilege and exception, reinforcing the
status quo by figuring it as natural and inevitable. In formal terms, Emerson wrote that “it is not
metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive
that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature
with a new thing” (450). Turning resolutely away from the formal precedents of the past––and
from the burden of history––the American poet would contribute a new form that would
perfectly embody the uniqueness and scale of America itself. Form, Emerson claimed, ought to
organically merge with, and be a seamless extension and expression of, content; metrical
precedent should not be allowed to distort or impose itself upon the magnitude and promise of
the “new” nation. No wonder that Emerson (and countless subsequent commentators) regarded
Walt Whitman’s poetry as the fated fulfilment of this idea––with his lines spilling across the
page, apparently liberated from the confines of European tradition. Melville, though, was iden-
tifying similar formal sleights of hand operating in the work of one of the most iconic European
poets. In his copy of Paradise Regained, Melville noted Milton’s “intensifying of intense phrases,”
asking what would be left of this poet’s reputation if he had not written his narrative in monu-
mental blank verse. Milton, at least for Melville, was all style over substance: “As for his grand
catalogues of mighty names, take them out of his blank verse, & what’s left but some proper
names?” “Perhaps had this been all,” Melville continues, “then he [Milton] would not have been
known for a poet” (Sealts No. 358b, MMO).
4
It is worth noting here that Melville acquired his two-volume set of Emerson’s Essays in 1861/2, exactly when he was
turning more attention to poetry.
174 Peter Riley
Drawing out Melville’s long-standing ambivalence, this chapter suggests that Melville’s late
poetry probes the multiple formal thresholds at which these exceptional, organic, and autono-
mous claims for the poet and poetry start to unravel. Anyone coming to the late poems for the
first time will tend to experience––if not “countless infelicities of execution”––then something
very different from Emerson’s “great Order” or Milton’s sustained monumental intensity: a lack
of generic stability as this writing switches restlessly between verse and prose, and among archaic
metrical forms; an uncertainty as to how one ought to respond to writing that allows the formal
conventions of versifying to continually intrude and comment back upon and jar against the
“content” of particular poems; the dilemma of what to do with a poetry that seems to continually
draw attention to its own fabrication. In Melville’s case, it really ought to be taken for granted
that any discussion of poetic form already encompasses a discussion of content. A thinker such as
Fredric Jameson would go so far as to say that the formal components of a literary work are
always already “sedimented content in their own right,” capable of transmitting meanings that
are “distinct from the ostensible manifest content” of a particular work (84). Jameson’s broader
point is that literary form is always already an encoding of and response to a particular set of
determining economic or political horizons. Melville’s poetry never loses sight of these contexts,
with the formal qualities of his work continually putting pressure on the very possibility of the
seamless organic wholes and fated progressions.
Melville’s late poetry was responsive to and determined by a very particular set of legal,
economic, and infrastructural uncertainties that tended to define the production and reception
of poetry throughout the course of the nineteenth century. Such contingencies made sure that
those writers without secure incomes––and especially poets––had little to no chance of emerging
as national figures, let alone of establishing stable and sustaining incomes from their writing. At
least until 1853, when according to Meredith McGill “literary markets became centralized and
literary culture became stratified” (3), it was impossible to establish anything like a “national”
literary reputation because of a basic lack of distribution networks. Publishers were also contin-
ually going out of business, vulnerable to the economic depressions that struck in roughly ten- to
fifteen-year cycles from the beginning of the Free Banking Era in 1836 onward. According to
John Timberman Newcomb, it was only the “Fireside Poets” who managed to weather such dif-
ficulties and secure any kind of settled status. And of course they did this by already being
wealthy, “claiming independence from local and material contingencies and insisting on fidelity
to established traditions, formal conventions, and universal moral laws” (4)––from Melville’s
perspective, not the most alluring set of characteristics. As William Charvat explains: they, along
with a handful of relatively privileged women poets who emerged later in the century, such as
Emma Lazarus and Frances Kemble, were the exceptions that proved the rule. “Longfellow and
Whittier notwithstanding,” poetry was throughout the century chiefly “an avocation––an ama-
teur activity rather than a professional one”; it was more often than not “issued by the local
printer, in pamphlet form, at the author’s expense” and “continued to be, for the most part,
something that was not marketed but inflicted on friends and libraries” (33). Melville’s poetry
was sensible to these unsettling limitations––skeptical of the monumentalizing claims for
American poetry being put forward by his contemporaries. For Melville, the coherence of genre,
speaker, “value,” and vocation were all far more precarious than the title “Great American Poet”
might imply.
Parthenope
Melville’s unpublished Parthenope collection, which he developed after Clarel during his final
years working for the New York Custom House, exemplifies a particular set of local limitations
that shaped the formal and thematic parameters of his writing. As a deputy customs inspector,
Melville did not merely write poetry for the sake of it; poetry also had the capacity to smooth his
own professional and social passage. When he started working, the Custom House essentially
resembled a patronage system; a kind of social club defined by the unpredictable tides of political
affiliation. In order to shore up his political standing, Melville was not averse to gifting signed
copies of his poems (and earlier prose works) to his colleagues and superiors. Richard Henry
Stoddard, who worked for the Custom House until 1870, remembers asking for and receiving a
handwritten copy of Melville’s recently published poem “Sheridan at Cedar Creek”; in 1867,
Melville also gave an inscribed copy of Battle-Pieces to his colleague, the Civil War Colonel Henry
L. Potter; and in 1865, he presented a signed copy of Typee to his boss, the Collector of Customs
for the Port of New York, Henry A. Smythe (Parker, Biography 603–5). Melville’s position had
been secured through the particular patronage of Smythe, his former traveling companion, who
wrote a successful letter of support to the Republican Secretary of the Treasury in 1866. It was
in fact this old-boys network that the landmark Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883
sought to dismantle, transforming this nepotistic spoils system into something that began to
resemble a meritocracy (Grossman 259). By the time Melville retired in 1885, he found himself
part of an old guard, complicit in the courtly transactions of a bygone age. No wonder perhaps,
that so many of Melville’s late poems locate themselves either in the classical past or in the midst
of the Renaissance—the defining moments of the patronage system. In Parthenope, Melville play-
fully refers to the rear-guard social and economic stance he had occupied. Consisting of two long
poems, “At the Hostelry” and “An Afternoon in Naples in the Time of Bomba” (interspersed
with multiple prose prefaces and commentaries), the collection ostensibly draws on Melville’s
own reminiscences of Italy. In “At the Hostelry” Melville’s narrator experiments explicitly with
the address of flattering poet to patron: “TO M. DE GRANDVIN … Pardon me, Monsieur, in
the following sally I have endeavored to methodize into literary form, and make consecutive,
upon one of your favorite themes, something at least of that desultory wit, gaiety, knowledge,
and invention so singularly yours” (803). A few pages later we get a similar address “To Major
John Gentian,” who happens to be Dean of the fictional “Burgundy Club”––an organization, it
becomes apparent, that the narrator would very much like to be part of and realizes he can only
gain access to through what only can be described as courtly flattery. Here is the narrator’s open-
ing address to Gentian, one of the longest and most bombastic sentences Melville ever wrote:
With thy rare single-mindedness, so resented by the ambidextrous double-dealers, a virtue putting thee
in a worldly sense almost as much at disadvantage with them as thy single arm (the other lost in the
Wilderness under Grant) assuredly would in a personal encounter; the genial humor of thy club-chat—
garnished, as not infrequently it is, even like to a holiday ham, with sprigs of parsley, (Horatian Latin), or
inserted cloves of Old English proverbs, or yet older Latin ones equally commonplace yet never losing the
verity in them, their preservative spice; thy yellow-wrinkled parchment from Harvard hung up framed
in thy bachelor quarters (so convenient to the Burgundy Club); thy cherished eagle of the Society of the
176 Peter Riley
Cincinnati a golden insignia thou polishest up and sportest on occasion; and—be it never omitted—thy
high relish for the noble qualities of M. de Grandvin, through frequent communion with whom thou
hast caught much of his generous spirit enhancing what is naturally thine own, yes, and something of
his beaming aspect as well; insomuch that unto thee,—after him,—belong all the titles of good
fellowship—Dean of the Burgundians but I love thee!
(824)
The narrator eventually goes so far as to claim that the verses contained in the volume “are essen-
tially but thoughts and conceits” of the Dean’s, “the product of seeds which planted and sponta-
neously developing in me, eventually effloresced into rhyme” (832). “Not unmindful of the
enthusiast’s injunction, ‘Put it in verse,’” the narrator continues, he has “after a fashion done
accordingly” (832). Flattery, obsequiousness, self-deprecation, name-dropping, circumlocu-
tion––Melville, in high satirical mode, indulges in a series of character-sketches that are indeed
“after a fashion”: the work of an amateur “enthusiast” who remains doggedly untroubled by
self-reflection or literary talent––who “inflicts,” as Charvat has it, his wares “on friends” and
associates. In one of the most comically discordant passages, the narrator comes across a juggler
in Naples, who himself is indulging in song:
Whereon a juggler in brocade

Made rainbows of his glittering balls,
Cascading them with dexterous sleight;
And as from hand to hand they flew
With jinglings of interior din,
He trilled a ditty deftly timed
To every lilted motion light:—
“The balls, hey! The balls
Cascatella of balls—
Baseless arches I toss up in air!…
(845)
Melville surely took delight in adopting such an obsequious and unpleasant persona who under-
mines his own petition for club membership by writing so parochially and clumsily. This is by
no means an isolated example: the opening stanza of “An Afternoon” includes the lines: “In
season when the vineyards mellow / Suddenly turning a corner round— / Ha, happy to meet you,
Punchinello!” (833). It is difficult to conceive of a poetic form that so intensely fulfills a kind of
anti-Emersonian injunction: the fetishization of European culture, the flattery of superiors,
verses that constitute the antithesis of a “metre making argument.” If anything, we are con-
fronted here with an argument-making metre––a series of formal intrusions that very obviously
govern the placement of particular words, and even the introduction and shape of ideas. With the
introduction of the juggler, there is also a momentary affirmation of Emerson’s formal union:
“He trilled a ditty deftly timed / To every lilted motion light.” This is followed immediately by
the amazingly awkward transition to a “ditty” (though it is difficult to tell whether this is a
ditty): “The balls, hey! The balls!” Jarring against the kind of writing we might expect from an
iconic figure of the American Renaissance, Parthenope binds itself to a series of limitations, and
to a particular context, and unfolds its own comedy of the alternative American poet.
John Marr and Other Sailors (1888)

Published in a limited print run of only twenty, John Marr and Other Sailors is, at least on the face
of it, a more recognizably Melvillean text. Indeed, before he saw the narrative’s potential, the
earliest drafts of Billy Budd were initially going to be part of the John Marr collection. In a poem
such as “The Haglets”––a work that begins the “Sea-Pieces” section of the volume––he turns
back to the themes of fate, oblivion, and decay. “The Haglets” charts the fated voyage of an
English military vessel as it gets thrown off course by a cache of bullion and swords in its hold
that diverts the ship’s compass. Swelled with pride at recent military success, the admiral of the
fleet does not “attend the stir / In bullioned standards rustling low, / Nor minds the blades whose
secret thrill / Perverts overhead the magnet’s Polar will;—” (681). The ship strikes a reef and
sinks. Personal glory, the poem implies, is always shadowed by a much greater and inescapable
pattern of existence. The admiral does not notice the three Haglets (sea-birds) that doggedly
follow the ship’s course, and that (in an unforgettable line) “follow, follow fast in wake, / Untiring
wing and lidless eye—” (681). The poem ends with a self-chastening cosmic vision that blends
a night’s sky with the rolling sea: “up from ocean stream, / And down from heaven far, / The rays
that blend in dream / The abysm and the star” (683).
While this poem might constitute a more satisfactory and reassuring reading experience––
befitting of a GAP––many of the other works in John Marr prove more resistant. How, for
example, are we meant to read the succession of sentimental retired sailor monologues that begin
the volume? Bridegroom Dick, a long poem of well over four hundred lines, subjects a completely
silent wife to a succession of dick jokes and difficult-to-follow maritime reminiscences. The only
redeeming feature of the piece comes with the acknowledgment that the wife is as bored as we
are: “Don’t fidget so, wife; an old man’s passion / Amounts to no more than this smoke that I
puff” (673). Again, this is poetry self-consciously inflicted on a local audience, rather than
studied for any particular “great” literary merit. “Tom Deadlight,” the third piece in John Marr,
adapts a version of the capstan shanty “Spanish Ladies.”5 Deadlight, a “grizzled petty-officer”
sick with fever, sings to two messmates who are at his bedside:
Some names and phrases, with here and there a line, or part of one; these, in his aberration wrested
into incoherency from their original connection and import, he involuntarily derives, as he does the
measure, from a famous old sea-ditty, whose cadences, long rife, and now humming in the collapsing
brain, attune the last flutterings of distempered thought.
(673)
Deadlight summons up a shanty to give form to his broken thoughts:
Farewell and adieu to you noble hearties,—

Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain,
For I’ve received orders for to sail for the Deadman,
But hope with the grand fleet to see you again.
I have hove my ship to, with main-topsail aback, boys;
5
See Agnes Dicken Canon’s discussion of Melville’s use of shanties in Moby-Dick and the later poetry, “Melville’s Use of
Sea Ballads and Songs,” 11.
178 Peter Riley
I have hove my ship to, for to strike soundings clear—

The black scud a-flying; but by God’s blessing, dam’ me,
Right up the Channel for the Deadman I’ll steer.
(674)
Melville looks back here to the sea-shanties and song lyrics that he would have heard and sung
as a sailor; to an oral tradition that was now being put out of service along with the sailors that
sang them. But, at the same time, he also looks sideways—to a contemporary literary fad.
Shanties (the work songs sung by sailors to make their alienating and ruinous work slightly
more bearable) were actually enjoying a prominent afterlife when Melville wrote John Marr,
resurfacing in several collected editions of sea lyrics that sought to capitalize on a disappearing
maritime tradition and the sentimentalism for a bygone age. Newspapers had started running
stories on “mysterious” sea-faring practices: an 1890 New York Times headline read “Jack Tar’s
Vernacular: Some of the Odd Words and Phrases Used at Sea”: “Jack […] will put his feelings
into a topsail halyard song, and often has the anchor come up to a fierce chorus compounded
of improvised abuse of the ship and the skipper” (np). With the disappearance of the sail, the
songs, stories, and poems of “Jack Tar” suddenly became very popular—an implicit rejection
of an industrializing present in favor of an apparently more wholesome (and entirely mythic)
laboring past (a coeval sentimentality also ensured a market for the oral cultures of chattel
slavery at this moment). John Marr (1888) was a contemporary of Laura Alexandrine Smith’s
The Music of the Waters: A collection of the sailors’ chanties, or working songs of the sea, of all maritime
nations. Boatmen’s, fishermen’s, and rowing songs, and water legends (London: K. Paul, Trench & co.,
1888); Rebecca Ruter Springer’s Songs by the Sea (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1889);
Elizabeth Amelia Sharp’s Songs and Poems of the Sea (New York: W. Scott, 1888); and Stephen
B. Luce’s Naval Songs: A Collection of Original, Selected and Traditional Sea Songs, Songs of Sailors
and Shanties (New York: W.A. Pond, 1883). In his preface to the 1888 first edition of The
Music of the Waters, R.M. Ballantyne claims that “these ‘chanties’ will assuredly bring back,
like a half-forgotten—yet never-to-be-forgotten—dream, many a pleasant memory of tramp-
ing round the capstan, and heaving at the windlass … No puny invention of man—steam or
electric—will ever take the romance out of the sea!” (xi). In 1884, the New York Times pub-
lished an article entitled “Minstrelsy on the Sea, Songs which the Real Sailor Sings at His
Work. Good music and doggerel words which often delight the hearers and help Jack’s labours
very much” (np). “Landlubbers” were sold the illusion of coming into contact with an unadul-
terated sea-faring lyric idiom: Jack Tar was packaged as a hearty “rough and tumble” character
who sang jolly and slightly salty songs.
Again, it may feel uncomfortable for Melville readers, but “Tom Deadlight” and “Jack Roy”
(“He’d ascend in love-ditty, kissing fingers to your ladies!” [675]) are very much bound up with
this popular nostalgic fad: “But give me my tot, Matt, before I roll over; / Jock, let’s have your
flipper, it’s good for to feel; / And do’nt sew me up without baccy in mouth, boys, / And do’nt
blubber like lubbers when I turn up my keel” (675). We think of Melville as having defiantly
turned his back on the reading public after the ambivalent reception of Moby-Dick in 1851, and
maybe the inclination here is to assume that Melville is casting caustic satirical light––ironically
critiquing this sudden glut of sentimental sea-songs. But a more challenging perspective to take
here is that Melville was caught up in the zeitgeist, or worse, trying to quietly market his
own volume of sentimental sailors’ songs along with the rest. The GAP surely ought to give us
something more.
Weeds and Wildings Chiefly: With a Rose or Two

A similarly discomforting work of Melville’s later years is Weeds and Wildings Chiefly: with a Rose
or Two. Ostensibly, this unpublished collection of light verse and pastoral musings is an extended
address and tribute to Lizzie Melville: it is dedicated “To Winnefred” (Herman’s pet name for his
wife).6 Part I of the volume “The Year,” is a pastoral cycle that runs through the spring “Clover,”
“The Blue-Bird” of summer, “The Chipmunk” of autumn, and ends with “A Dutch Christmas.”
The first poem “The Loiterer” is typical of the tone that defines so much of the volume:
She drew to the weather-beat door

That was sunned through the skeleton-tree:
Nothing she said, but seemed to say—
“Old folks, aren’t ye glad to see me!”
And tears brimmed our eyes––bless the day!
(746)
As the winter recedes with the coming of spring, so too does the chance that the “Old folks” will
be carried off by the cold; the reprieve brings tears of joy. Husband and wife are safe for another
eight months or so. Capturing a general sense of scholarly unease with this lightly comic and often
sentimental volume, Wyn Kelley writes that “it is hard to recognize or locate the Melville many
readers know in these seemingly charming ditties and musings on flowers” (Kelley, 172). Keen to
recuperate the collection from its apparently trivial preoccupations, some have attempted to pro-
vide “darker readings of these supposedly sentimental and artless pieces.” Lyon Evans, for in-
stance, asserts that in Weeds and Wildings, “Melville ‘goes underground’ to draw out his ambivalence
and even contempt towards a difficult and unsatisfactory marriage” (81)––though this is just a
different kind of sentimentality: the tragedy of the misunderstood genius. For others, the collec-
tion is an extended tribute and meditation on Melville’s intellectual and emotional romance with
Nathaniel Hawthorne.7 Reading over such assessments, it is difficult to shake the feeling that on
some level, they seem to be attempting to insulate this GAP from anything that skirts too closely
to that which might be construed as parochial or domestic. So again, what if we momentarily sus-
pend the attempt to recuperate this volume in terms of its potential “hidden depths”?
By orchards red he whisks along,

A charioteer from villa fine;
With passing lash o’ the whip he cuts
A way-side Weed divine.
But knows he what it is he does?
6
See, for example, Laurie Robertson-Lorant’s interpretation, pp. 608–12; also John Bryant.
7
See Gillian Osborne’s “Herman Melville, Queen of the Flowers.”
180 Peter Riley
He flouts October’s god

Whose sceptre is this Way-side Weed,
This swaying Golden Rod?
(751)
Melville’s “A Way-side Weed” sets out a popular sentimental theme: namely noticing and reha-
bilitating a part of the natural world that ordinarily we would consider trivial and uninteresting.
It is possible the poem’s title alludes to a near-contemporary effort by Robert Browning called
“Inapprehensiveness” (1889): “What of a wilding? By you stands and may / So stand unnoticed
till the Judgement Day” (362). Whether or not that allusion holds, Melville’s effort does seem to
treat the theme of judgment and justice—albeit in an earlier classical setting. A likely candidate
for “October’s god” (aside from the beauty of late-autumn itself) is the Greek goddess Themis,
holder of the scales of Libra, the sign of the Zodiac that corresponds with (most of) the tenth
month. So as well as being the weed itself, the “swaying Golden Rod” which ends the poem also
carries with it connotations of the balancing scales of justice, which weighs up the charioteer’s
supposed flouting of divinity. The weed-turned-sceptre or Rod is also a fairly conventional allu-
sion to the pen of the Romantic poet: the opening poem of Blake’s “Songs of Experience” includes
the lines: “And I plucked a hollow reed, / And I made a rural pen” (56). Perhaps Melville’s poem
is a self-conscious meditation on literary obscurity––a Blakean acknowledgment that this poem
in all likelihood is not going to be read, beyond its intended audience. Just as likely, though, this
is Melville writing in derivative and sentimental mode. As with John Marr, there are scores of
contemporary poetry volumes that bear similar titles and dwell on similar themes. The following
lines are from “When Forth the Shepherd Leads the Flock,” a piece of writing that seems to
actively resist “underground” hermeneutic interpretation:
The farmers scout them,

Yea, and would rout them,
Hay is better without them––
Tares in the grass!
The florists pooh-pooh them;
Few but children do woo them,
Love them, reprieve them,
Retrieve and inweave them,
Never sighing––Alas!
(747)
You can just about imagine this being read out to––and (at a stretch) delighting––children,
but it seems like something of a category mistake to subject something like this to close scrutiny.
Many of the poems included in Weeds ask us to confront some uncomfortable questions, like what
do we do with the Melville who rhymes “pooh-pooh them” with “woo them”? That is, what to
do with the work of a canonized American writer that does not automatically give way to hidden
depth, and that seems content to fulfil a specific social function?
Conclusion: Timoleon ETC. (1891)

At first glance, Timoleon ETC., the volume Melville published just before he died in 1891, seems
like a very different text from the more locally bounded volumes introduced and discussed in this
chapter. With its sustained engagement with classical culture, mysticism, and religion, Timoleon
seems to aim directly at a state of monumentality and autonomy that many of the other late writ-
ings seem to disrupt (though what more self-deprecating and dismissive move than to include
“ETC.” in a book’s title). In the much-anthologized poem “Art,” we get a manifesto-like
meditation on the competing forces (“instinct and study; love and hate; audacity—reverence”)
that are required to “wrestle with the angel—Art” (717). That said, there is also a tendency here
to once again fixate on archaic formal qualities, as well as to emphasize an inescapable connection
to a European “past.”
In the “Fruit of Travel Long Ago” section of Timoleon, Melville included two brief verses. The
first is entitled “Greek Masonry”:
Joints were none that mortar sealed:

Together, scarce with line revealed,
The blocks in symmetry congealed.
(x)
The piece that immediately follows, “Greek Architecture,” is a similarly sparse and obdurate
effort: “Not magnitude, not lavishness, / But Form—the Site; / Not innovating wilfulness, / But
reverence for the Archetype” (731). Here again, Melville seems to offer a rejoinder to Emerson’s
organic formal argument. Set in the classical past, studiously speaking of reverence to archetypes,
laboriously exposing their own rhyme schemes and meter—this is not what a GAP ought to be
doing. Momentarily putting to one side Melville’s achievements with Battle-Pieces and Clarel, can
we really so confidently affirm these late poems as the work of “one of the three great American
Poets of the nineteenth century”?8 Or is this something of a stretch when it comes to the kind of
verse Melville was invested in producing and distributing towards the end of his career? On one
level, it is of course understandable that some would be in a hurry to shore up this part of the
Melville story––to right the perceived historical injustice of his guaranteed “genius” being
underappreciated in his day. But maybe it is also time to start asking what facets of Melville’s
late verse start being illuminated when it is released from the constraints and expectations of the
“fair poet’s name”? If there is greatness to be found in his late poetry, perhaps it might be pre-
cisely in his anti-romantic rejection of “poetry” itself, and his exploration of the alternative set-
tings in which poetry circulated. We find in these late writings an impulse to self-consciously
expose their own laborious composition, self-deprecatingly undermine their own classification as
8
The historical note appended to the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Published Poems (Northwestern UP, 2009) also
provides the following affirmative headings for his chapters concerning Melville’s apparent emergence: “A Poet in Prose,”
“Melville’s Progress as Poet,” “His Verse still Unpublished, Melville defines himself as Poet.” When contrasted to Melville’s
own body of work, the repetitions rather force the issue, applying a series of existential consecrations that this writer was so
reluctant to confer. See also the relevant chapter headings in Parker’s Melville: The Making of the Poet (2008).
182 Peter Riley
poetry, and readily engage with local contexts of poetry’s production and dissemination. Melville’s
status as a Great American Poet needs to be treated with caution, not necessarily on the grounds
of its “quality” or “value,” but on the grounds of its refusal to endorse the certainties of such an
affirmation. The generic and vocational stability of the signifiers “poetry” and “poet” are contin-
ually called into question by this body of work—in its variety and range, Melville’s late verse
reminds us to pause when committing to any such descriptive securities. In the process, Melville
makes us think again about how poets and poetry are made, and consequently how they might
be remade.
Works Cited
Allport, Andrew. “The Romantic Fragment Poem and Jackson, Virginia. Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric
the Performance of Form.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. Reading. Princeton UP, 2005.
51, no. 3, 2012, pp. 399–417. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a
Anon. “Minstrelsy on the Sea, Songs Which the Real Socially Symbolic Act. Oxford UP, 2002.
Sailor Sings at His Work. Good Music and Doggerel Kelley, Wyn. Herman Melville: An Introduction. Blackwell,
Words Which Often Delight the Hearers and Help 2008.
Jack’s Labours Very Much.” New York Times, 27 McGill, Meredith L. American Literature and the Culture
January 1884. of Reprinting, 1834–1853. U of Pennsylvania P, 2003.
Anon. “Jack Tar’s Vernacular; Some of the Odd Words Melville, Herman. Complete Poems, edited by Hershel
and Phrases used at Sea. A Dialect Which the Parker. The Library of America, 2019.
Landsman Could Never Hope to Master except on ———. “Melville’s Marginalia in the Poetical Works of
Shipboard.” New York Times, 20 July 1890. John Milton. A New Edition, with Notes, and a Life of the
Blake, William. Selected Poetry. Oxford UP, 1998. Author.” Melville’s Marginalia Online, edited by Steven
Browning, Robert. The Poetical Works. XV vols. Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. Marnon.
Clarendon Press, 2009. 1836. http://melvillesmarginalia.org/Share.aspx?Doc
Bryant, John. “Melville’s Rose Poems: As they Fell.” umentID=108&PageID=37085
Arizona Quarterly, vol. 52, 1996, pp. 49–84. ———. “Melville’s Marginalia in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
Canon, Agnes Dicken. “Melville’s Use of Sea Ballads and Essays: Second Series.”Melville’s Marginalia Online, edited
Songs.” Western Folklore, vol. 23, no. 1, January 1964, by Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C.
pp. 1–16. Marnon. 1844. http://melvillesmarginalia.org/Share.
Charvat, William. Literary Publishing in America 1790– aspx?DocumentID=68&PageID=24061
1850. U of Massachusetts P, 1959. Newcomb, John Timberman. Would Poetry Disappear?
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. The Library American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity. Ohio State
of America, 1983. UP, 2004.
Evans, Lyon. “‘Tears of the Happy’: The Design of Osborne, Gillian. “Herman Melville, Queen of the
Darkness in ‘To Winnefred’ and ‘The Year’.” Leviathan: Flowers.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, vol.
A Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, 2007, pp. 18, no. 3, 2016, pp. 129–48.
79–94. Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 2,
Grossman, Mark. Political Corruption in America: An 1851–1891. Johns Hopkins UP, 2002.
Encyclopedia of Scandals, Power, and Greed. ABC-CLIO, ———. Melville: The Making of the Poet. Northwestern
2003. UP, 2008.
Roberston-Lorant, Laurie. Melville, A Biography. Clarkson Rowing Songs, and Water Legends. London: K. Paul,
Potter, 1996. Trench & co., 1888.
Smith, Laura Alexandrine. The Music of the Waters: A Stein, William Bysshe. The Poetry of Melville’s Late Years:
Collection of the Sailors’ Chanties, or Working Songs of the Time, History, Myth and Religion. State U of New York
Sea, of all Maritime Nations. Boatmen’s, Fishermen’s, and P, 1970.
15
Melville’s “Ragged Edges”: Billy Budd,
Sailor and the Arts of Incompletion
John Wenke
“God keep me from ever completing anything.”

(MD 145)
Textual Foundations
John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea Pieces (1888) offers Herman Melville’s poetic tribute to
aging sailors. His time at sea as a young man became in his later years a procreant resource that
led him to produce and publish in twenty-five copies this sometimes nostalgic, sometimes rueful
collection. Responding to the impress of memory and invention, Melville created a matrix of
such un-landed men as John Marr, Bridegroom Dick, and Tom Deadlight, who tell their tales in
a salty vernacular.
No doubt originally conceived and written for this project, “Billy in the Darbies” details the
wistful, first-person account of a convicted mutineer on the eve of his execution. Grateful for the
Chaplain’s prayerful attention, this Billy Budd—a man of mature years with a talent for figural
self-representation—foresees that he will be made “A jewel-block” and anticipates hanging
suspended, a “Pendant pearl from the yard-arm-end / Like the ear-drop I gave to Bristol Molly”
(BB 71).1 With deft verbal acuity, this sailor wryly accepts his guilt and impending
1
Citations from Billy Budd, Sailor are from the Northwestern-Newberry edition edited by Parker et al. and will include
parenthetical citations from the reading text (1–72) and parenthetical citations from “Transcription of Billy Budd,
Sailor” (441–545) with page and manuscript leaf numbers identified.
Melville’s “Ragged Edges”: Billy Budd, Sailor and the Arts of Incompletion 185
punishment: “Ay, Ay, all is up; and I must up too” (71). He misses in advance the call to grog
and feels the onset of drowsiness, a harbinger of death’s deeper dreaminess. With an arresting
imagistic conflation, he pictures himself as one already dead, situated on the ocean floor with the
“darbies” shackling his wrists, even as “the oozy weeds about me twist” (72).
“Billy in the Darbies” never became part of the John Marr volume. This poem, along with
News from the Mediterranean, appears at the end of Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) and
comprises what might be identified as Melville’s “outside narrative” of the young sailor, who
replaces the voluble mutineer but retains his euphonious name. In the aftermath of “Billy in the
Darbies,” which was likely composed in 1886 (Parker et al. 386), Melville created a new Billy
Budd, a youthful, powerful, innocent Handsome Sailor, who serves as problematic “peacemaker”
on a merchant ship, The Rights of Man, before being impressed, or legally kidnapped, into service
on a warship first named the Indomitable but later changed to the Bellipotent (6). On this ship,
from the earliest extant draft likely composed in 1888, Billy becomes the target of master-at-arms
John Claggart and his malicious, slanderous persecution. In this conflict, Billy’s archetypal
goodness diametrically opposes Claggart’s archetypal evil. In an early, truncated version, Billy
kills Claggart and is summarily hanged. In reporting on this event, News from the Mediterranean
gets everything wrong. Billy is cast as a depraved, mutinous “ringleader,” who “vindictively
stabbed to the heart” a patriotic paragon, “a middle-aged man respectable and discreet” (539–
40, leaves 341 and 342). Abruptly closing out Billy’s story, the narrator notes the ironic inversion
of allegorized attributes: “Here ends a story not unwarranted by what sometimes happens in this
{word undeciphered} world of ours—Innocence and infamy, spiritual depravity and fair repute”
(540, leaf 344, italics in original).
When writing these words, Melville believed he had completed Billy’s tragic tale. Instead, he
had simply punctuated one point in an expansive process of creation and revision that would play
out and be left unfinished at his death. Melville could not let go the haunting story of the
doomed Handsome Sailor. Open-hearted and joyful, physically beautiful, Billy embodies near
innocence. Melville marked Billy in a postlapsarian way with a stutter induced by stress. In a
climactic moment of tongue-tied paroxysm, Billy answers Claggart’s lying accusation of muti-
nous activity with a single killing blow to the officer’s high forehead. Throughout the last years
of his life, Melville pursued the entangled contingencies associated with the boy “nipped in the
vice of fate” (61), eventually constructing a manuscript totaling 373 leaves with 351 of them
containing Billy’s story. As Parker et al. note, “This course of documentary expansion reveals
three major phases in the composition of the story, each of which focused on a different character:
first, Billy, then Claggart, and finally Vere” (386–87).2 To avoid having to recopy earlier, osten-
sibly finished materials, Melville retained leaves from the earliest stages. As he interpolated new
pages, he renumbered leaves and continually revised older work, even adding materials by some-
times pinning patches to existing leaves. This highly complicated manuscript—replete with
idiosyncratic color coding—offers a compilation and collation of successive fair-copy inscriptions
2
Parker et al. summarize Melville’s compositional process: “The novel itself developed out of a brief prose headnote
setting the scene and introducing the speaker of the poem, and the physical evidence in the manuscript makes possible
a reconstruction of the general outlines of this process. Nine stages of development can be inferred: six fair-copy
stages … plus the drafts preceding the first one … pencil composition following the third, and pencil revisions and
additions after the sixth” (386).
186 John Wenke
that repeatedly led Melville into making further revisions in pen and pencil. Even after he wrote
on the last leaf “End of Book / April 19th / 1891” (542, leaf 351)—five months before his death
on September 28, 1891—Melville found himself returning to the text and making momentous
changes in pencil that had the pronounced effect of unsettling the implications of materials sup-
posedly completed elsewhere in the manuscript.
Following Melville’s death, this very untidy mass of paper was stored in a bread box from
which it was extracted, transcribed, and published by Raymond M. Weaver, author of Herman
Melville: Mariner and Mystic (1921). Appearing in 1924 as Volume 13 of The Works of Herman
Melville (Constable), Weaver’s deeply flawed text assumed a central place in the Melville revival
of the 1920s. In Reading Billy Budd, Hershel Parker provides a meticulous, authoritative, and
compelling account of the relationship between those energies fueling the Melville revival and
the discovery, and nearly instant canonization, of this hitherto unknown tale (53–71). Parker
demonstrates how a handful of enthusiastic British literary men trumpeted Billy Budd as a late
masterpiece, a circumstance that had less to do with critical exegeses of a poorly edited text and
more with matters of cultural politics. Weaver’s publication of Billy Budd first in 1924 and again
in 1928 gave readers sympathetic to Melville confirmation of the author’s prodigious creative
powers—the resolute artist, who worked to overcome anonymity, old age, and impending death.
Through this recovered text, Melville ascended, phoenix-like, to posthumous acclaim, celebrated
by an audience now prescient enough to appreciate him. The process of canonization included
questions about what final message Melville may have been sending to his legatees. For example,
“Billy Budd: Melville’s Testament of Acceptance,” a highly influential essay by E. L. Grant
Watson, pictures a conservative Melville, who dramatizes the impress of the hard hand of
necessity on the good, beleaguered Captain Vere, “the man who obeys the law, and yet, under-
stands the truth of the spirit” (75). If Vere embodies a God-fearing champion of authority, law,
and order, then Billy stands as God’s messenger-angel and martyr, offering his final words—
“God bless Captain Vere!” (64)—as a divinely sanctioned benediction: “…Billy’s last words are
the triumphant seal of his acceptance… the souls of Captain Vere and Billy are at that moment
strangely one” (77). Strangely indeed! Nevertheless, it is remarkable that Melville’s story, even
in its muddled condition, had the power to move readers to such deeply felt responses.
In the “Textual Note on Billy Budd, Sailor,” Parker et al. examine the many problems plagu-
ing Weaver’s editorial practice as well as the attempt by F. Barron Freeman in 1948 to produce
what he characterized as a “a definitive text” based upon “the first accurate transcription, with
all variant readings, of the manuscripts of Billy Budd” (qtd. in Parker et al. 395). Although not-
ing that “Freeman did more than anyone had yet done to advance understanding of the manu-
script,” Parker et al. make clear how Freeman was, like Weaver, overmatched by the intricacies
of the manuscript as Melville had left it (395). Drawing upon and updating the great work of
Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. in their 1962 landmark edition of Billy Budd, Sailor
(An Inside Narrative), Parker et al. carefully elucidate the major problems with Freeman’s work:
“In the first place, Freeman’s study of the manuscript was inadequate, resulting in mistaken
deductions about genetic matters and in textual errors” (396), most notable of which was
Freeman’s inability “to recognize the handwriting of Melville’s wife” (397). This foundational
error led Freeman not only to misrepresent Melville’s title as Billy Budd, Foretopman and to add
two superseded leaves entitled, “Lawyer, Experts, Clergy” (481, leaves 135 a-b), but, more
importantly, to follow Raymond Weaver’s original editorial misreading in casting superseded
leaves 229-d-f as a “Preface.” This choice validated Weaver’s misleading error, especially insofar
as it preemptively determined that the ensuing narrative represented a “crisis for Christendom”
(509, leaf 229d). This heavily thematized premise led to a profusion of determinant and ideolog-
ically fixed readings that tended to offer “pro-Vere” and “anti-Vere” interpretations of the novel.3
Whereas the development of a critical dichotomy between pro- and anti-Vere (sometimes called
“ironist”) arguments seems an understandable response to the tale’s tragic center—was Vere
right or wrong to hang the nearly innocent murderer?—such readings have the effect of freezing
the purpose of the story into a search for a clarifying moral, ideological, or political imperative
designed to cast light on whatever Melville might have been attempting to dramatize about this
“crisis for Christendom.”
One cannot overstate the degree to which Hayford and Sealts made a monumental contribu-
tion to Melville scholarship in making available the intricacies of this slow-growth manuscript.
They rendered their painstaking and meticulous analysis of the manuscript into a Genetic Text
that served as the basis for the first authoritative reading text of Melville’s uncompleted story.4
A brilliant scholarly construct, the Genetic Text presents a coded “literal transcription of the
Billy Budd manuscript, leaf by leaf including superseded leaves, in a form that incorporates
[their] analysis of it” (Hayford and Sealts 270). They conclude that the manuscript, as Melville
left it, is the challenging product of draft stages they labeled A through G, although draft stage
A does not survive in textual form. Stage A constitutes a conjectural embodiment of whatever
writing led to Melville’s first fair copy inscription at stage B. The manuscript leaves, as delin-
eated in the Genetic Text, appear as a kind of literary archeology—layered textual findings,
wherein any particular leaf may retain inscriptions from multiple stages.
Melville is particularly concerned with such layerings when indicating how Billy’s archetypal
attributes are qualified by his human imperfections. For example, on leaf 26, Lieutenant Ratcliffe
looks at Billy and proclaims, “Apollo with his portmanteau!” (447). This passage derives from
stage E and was interpolated into descriptions from the earlier Stage B, wherein the narrator dra-
matizes Billy’s departure from the Rights of Man. Melville composed most of the material associ-
ated with Billy’s induction on to the Bellipotent during stage B with later additions coming
during stages D and E. The most arresting and telling revisions within this sequence occur on
leaves 47 and 48, near the end of Chapter 2. Very late in the compositional process, Melville
developed the implications from stage E pertaining to Billy’s “organic hesitancy” in his speech
(453, leaf 47). At the late stage G, Melville added, “In this particular Billy was a striking in-
stance that the arch interferer, the envious marplot of Eden still has more or less to do with every
human consignment to this planet of earth. In every case, one way or another he is sure to slip in
his little card, as much as to remind us—I too have a hand here” (452, leaf 48). At this time,
Melville completed the allusion to Hawthorne’s “The Birth-mark”—identified earlier at stage E
as “one of Hawthorne’s minor tales” (453, leaf 46)—wherein Georgiana’s facial “blemish”
assumes the shape of a hand. These layered revisions later culminate with a patched leaf attached
to the manuscript: “The avowal of such an imperfection should be evidence not alone that the
3
For powerful pro-Vere arguments, see Stern, The Fine-Hammered Steel and Stern, “Introduction,” xi–xliv. For important
and discerning anti-Vere arguments, see Zink, Withim, Widmer, and Garner, “Fraud as Fact.” See Parker for his
meticulous analysis of Weaver’s editorial choices, 47–50.
4
For critical arguments based on the Genetic Text, see Parker, 85–95 and 97–177; Mailloux, Wenke, “Melville’s
Indirection”; Wenke, “Complicating Vere”; Kelley; and Ohge.
188 John Wenke
Handsome Sailor is not presented as a conventional hero, but also that the story in which he is
the main figure is no romance” (453, leaf 48). The narrator insists that Billy’s “imperfection”
mitigates his archetypal qualities, accentuating not only his flawed humanity but also the narra-
tive’s verisimilitude. In asserting that Billy’s story is no mere allegory of good destroyed by evil,
the narrator complements his claim later in the text that the evolving story has “less to do with
fable than with fact” (538, leaf 335)—materials also composed at the late stage G.
The Genetic Text does not in any simplistic way offer an easily navigable roadmap to Melville’s
final intentions. Rather, it makes available the literal impress of Melville’s hand as he made
specific changes on these pages as part of a sporadic process of revision and reconceptualization.
The fact that Melville wrote this particular word in this particular compositional stage provides
sound textual evidence for the development of authoritative critical arguments—arguments per-
taining to particular revision sites as well as to the overall direction and import of Melville’s
emergent creative practice. The Genetic Text is particularly useful in exploring who the narrator
is, how he came to be developed, and how he depicts, and responds to, the story’s emergent
action. Indeed, the nature and performance of Melville’s problematic narrator present critical
complications of the first importance—complications that are examined more fully below. At
this point, one telling instance will suggest the value of the Genetic Text in establishing solid
grounds for pursuing critical consequences of Melville’s compositional interventions.
As the manuscript haltingly developed, the narrator reveals himself to be less interested in
achieving interpretive finality than in adumbrating and expanding the range of interpretive pos-
sibilities that position the reader as primary arbiter of meaning and purpose. For example, in a
very late pencil revision inscribed at some point after April 19, 1891, Melville has the narrator
evade the question of whether Billy’s murder of Claggart causes Captain Vere to become
“unhinged,” as the surgeon speculates (48). In an early version of this scene, the narrator declares,
“I for one, decline to determine”—a statement that suggests that the narrator could, if so minded,
pursue such a purpose (512, leaf 237). In Melville’s late pencil revision, the narrator abrogates
interpretive responsibility and invites every reader to respond to the surgeon’s belief regarding
Vere’s mental stability: “Whether Captain Vere, as the Surgeon professionally and privately sur-
mised, was really the sudden victim of any degree of aberration, every one must determine for
himself by such light as this narrative may afford” (49, leaf 237). This revision site indicates that,
even in the last months of Melville’s life, he remained a puzzled reader of the text he could not
stop revising. Throughout his revisions over multiple versions, Melville accentuated interpretive
nuances, enlarged ethical mysteries, and dramatized matters of moral obliquity and historical
reconstruction—a sometimes quirky process that would overtly destabilize, and qualify, even the
most intrepid attempts to critically explain the text’s tangled skein of facts, surmises, and mis-
apprehensions in a tidy, summary way.5
The textual history of Billy Budd has recently culminated with two major publishing events—
one in print and the other in digital format. The Northwestern-Newberry (NN) edition of Billy
5
See Russell Weaver for a recent, book-length inquiry into moral and aesthetic issues animating the text. In persuasively
arguing that the narrative’s central purpose is to resist moral closure, Weaver enacts the sort of critical engagement that
Billy Budd seems designed to elicit—a multilayered, dialectical plunge into the narrative’s sea of morally conflicted
cross-purposes.
Budd revises and augments the Hayford and Sealts 1962 edition, correcting errors and presenting
within the expansive Editorial Appendix an authoritative examination of textual issues, emenda-
tions, and the corrected Genetic Text as “Transcription of Billy Budd, Sailor,” wherein the num-
bered manuscript leaves are keyed to page numbers within the reading text (1–72). The NN
reading text has “many fewer emendations. What Sealts provided was a modernized text, gener-
ally bringing spelling and punctuation into conformity with mid-twentieth century usage”
(406). In the cause of favoring consistency and correctness, the Hayford and Sealts reading text
essentially cleaned up Melville’s sometimes odd and disjunctive use of “capitalization and
hyphenation” (406). The NN editors use the corrected transcription of the Genetic Text as the
basis for their reading text, but their reading text “is not modernized and, except in a few
instances, is not concerned with consistency” (Parker et al. 406). The NN reading text seeks to
render this work in “an unmodernized form meant to incorporate Melville’s latest recoverable
intentions” (409). For example, whereas Hayford and Sealts excised some intermittent chapter
titles, NN restores titles for chapter 4 (“Concerning ‘the greatest sailor since the world began’”
[13]); chapter 12 (“Pale ire, envy and despair” [29]); and chapter 26 (“A digression” [65]). To
foster a sense of seeming finish, Hayford and Sealts made the editorial choice to excise these
chapter titles from their reading text. On the contrary, even though NN does some light copy-
editing, finishes incomplete revisions, and sometimes restores earlier wording for Melville’s
incomplete revision, NN generally proceeds from the conviction that this uncompleted text
must include disjunctive evidence of incompletion. If Melville chose to give titles to three chap-
ters out of thirty, then these three titles belong to the text and therefore to the reader.
The other major recent publishing event concerns the digital edition of Billy Budd as it appears
in the Melville Electronic Library (MEL). The MEL edition celebrates—and makes readily avail-
able—the manuscript’s intricacies and critical possibilities associated with this work’s status as
“a fluid text.” As John Bryant notes, “Melville’s novella is a fluid text in that it exists in multiple
versions” (“Editing Melville” 114).6 It would be difficult to name a text that possesses more flu-
idity than Billy Budd has exhibited over nearly a century of public life. Through the textual
marvel of a cutting-edge digital platform, MEL attempts to override the fixed and necessarily
dated consequences of print publication. The MEL edition inaugurates “ways of developing the
protocols of the print and digital symbiosis” (Bryant, “Editing Melville” 114). The MEL edition
provides digital reproductions of each manuscript leaf, recto and verso. In fact, thanks to one’s
ability to enlarge the images, one can undertake minute examinations of the most obscure
inscriptions. The MEL Billy Budd goes a long way toward bringing the reader into the creative
crucible of Melville’s writing desk. MEL does not simply offer a facsimile reproduction of man-
uscript leaves, but instead situates these leaves in relation to two kinds of transcription—one
that reflects genetic attributes; the other that transcribes these attributes into a basic reading
text: a “diplomatic transcription,” in Bryant’s words, presents “a typographical and exact simu-
lation of a leaf’s handwritten revisions that offers a faithful and immediately readable transcrip-
tion. Another option is a ‘base version’: a more readable text, derived from the diplomatic
transcription, that removes deletions and adds insertions but still shows all resultant
6
For explorations of theoretical and practical critical issues pertaining to the fluid text, see Bryant, “What Is a Fluid
Text?” and Bryant, The Fluid Text.
190 John Wenke
inconsistencies, idiosyncrasies, and errors” (“Editing Melville” 116–17). The effect of such schol-
arly reproductions of Melville’s authorial hand is that students, general readers, and scholars have
easy and authoritative access to the manuscript as Melville left it and, therefore, have the oppor-
tunity to meet Melville in his compositional present. There, on the page, one can see how he
crosses out one word and writes another. He scrawls something that remains indecipherable. He
writes a note to fix a problem but later cancels the instruction. He avoids re-copying anything
that he thought was finished. He draws arrows and insets carets. He writes in ink. He writes in
pencil. Traces of the artist-at-work cover every leaf.
Critical Complications
Throughout the evolution of Billy Budd, Melville continually reconfigured the narrator’s highly
innovative, problematic performance, presenting him in a number of not easily reconcilable pos-
tures. Frequently drawing attention to his own authorial activity within the compositional pre-
sent, the narrator sometimes identifies himself as a living person writing from the temporal
perspective of the late 1880s. At the beginning of Chapter 2, for example, he interrupts the
progress of his tale: “In this matter of writing, resolve as one may to keep to the main road, some
by-paths have an enticement not readily to be withstood. I am going to err into such a by-path.
If the reader will keep me company I shall be glad” (13). Intermittently, he casts himself as a
first-person actor—a character—who recounts events from his life, some of which seem to match
documented events in Melville’s life. Most significantly, in presenting himself as sole source of
the “Inside Narrative,” the narrator offers an ambiguous counter-text to the ironic falsifications
of the “outside narrative”—those materials included in News from the Mediterranean and, given its
ingenious placement at the conclusion of the novel, the recast mischaracterizations of “Billy in
the Darbies.” In exercising this office, the narrator operates as a transhistorical voice with
expanded access to events as they occurred during the Napoleonic Wars, specifically the summer
of 1797 not long after the resolution of mutinous insurrections that occurred in the British
navy—the first at Spithead and then at the Nore.7 The troubles at Spithead ended with
agreements stemming from reasoned mutuality. The more radical, and threatening, outbreak at
the Nore concluded with draconian retribution with twenty-nine sailors summarily hanged.8
Learned in the arts of “indirection” (27), the transhistorical narrator provides access to public and
private events on the Rights of Man and the Bellipotent, delineating the unspoken thoughts of
Billy Budd, the Dansker, John Claggart, the Surgeon, and Captain Vere, among others. In
depicting the inner lives of multiple characters, the narrator often reveals what he knows in rela-
tion to what he does not—or cannot—know, even at times referring to what he knows but
refusing—or failing—to divulge whatever it might be.
In considering Melville’s multitasking narrator, one must avoid reductive designations that
identify him as a projected version of Melville, whether liberally or conservatively inclined, or,
7
For an extended discussion of the transhistorical aspects of Melville’s narrator, see Wenke, “Melville’s Transhistorical
Voice.”
8
For discussions, facts, and speculations pertaining to the two mutinies, see Gill and Garner, The Two Intertwined
Narratives 89–101.
on the contrary, a benighted dunderhead, who functions as an ironic foil for whatever alleged
position Melville obliquely insinuates. However convenient it might be to enfold the narrator’s
identity and purpose within a fixed and cohesive set of ideological purposes—as projecting, say,
a consistent, knowable, endorsed authorial point of view—the manuscript reveals that the nar-
rator continually shifts between these multiple roles, each one of which operates—specifically
and cumulatively—in strategic ways, no one of which signals a clear, unambiguous reflection of
some informing authorial testimonial.
The narrator is best approached in terms of the very cross-purposes that characterize his
performance. In fact, he reveals who and what he is through the protean, self-conflicted reach of
his multidimensional performance. For example, when giving the narrator experiences that draw
on events possibly related to events from his own life, Melville blurs the lines between personal
history and the exigencies of historical fiction, especially as the narrator delineates little more
than tenuous, inherently ambiguous connections between his own life and the distant historical
“time before steamships” (3). Writing presumably from 1889, the narrator describes how “forty
years ago” he conversed with “an old pensioner in a cocked hat … a Baltimore Negro, a Trafalgar
man” (21). The sailor asserted that “the deficient quota” for the number of sailors necessary to
man a warship “would be eked out by draughts culled direct from the jails” (21). Melville visited
the veteran’s hospital in Greenwich, England, on November 21, 1849.9 This account within
Billy Budd has a possible incidental relation to Melville’s own life, but its purpose within the
novel bears directly on the narrator’s attempt to reach back through time and conjure a reference
point that evokes a cluster of determinant and indeterminate implications. What is most impor-
tant here is not the truth of what happened but how difficult it is to know the truth of what might
have happened. For example, the narrator mentions this allegation in relation to something that
he read somewhere, even though he cannot remember what it was or where he read it. Taking a
stand on decidedly “boggy ground” (14), the narrator observes that the old salt’s allegation
“lends color to something for the truth whereof I do not vouch” (21). In this case, Melville dem-
onstrates that the narrator possesses little more than provisional authority. His pursuit of truth
here—did British naval authorities empty the jails to man their ships?—is qualified, or limited,
by the very content and context of his uncertain recollections.
The interpolation of this material into Billy Budd suggests a number of hermeneutical prob-
lems. For example, the notion that an actual Trafalgar man, fifty years after serving on that ship,
may constitute an authoritative resource for what might have happened on the fictional Bellipotent
is hypothetical at best. Nor can the specific search for truth or fact be dissociated from the prob-
lematic limits of the narrator’s memory or the old sailor’s testimony. Thus, whatever narrative
authority may be available is innately a matter of positioning determinant facts in relation to the
indeterminate, if enticing, reach of conjectural possibility. Such a mode of open-ended discourse
provides grounds for a number of competing possibilities—all of which underscore, and advance,
9
In Melville’s journal entry, he makes a series of clipped notes that seem designed to jog his memory. Melville
encountered a “Negro” and spoke with “an old pensioner,” but there is no indication that they are the same person: “Saw
the Pensioners at dinner. over 1500. Remarkable sight. The negro.—Hat off! Hat on!—Married men & unmarried—
mess apart. 2 & 2. Pensioners in palaces! Story of Charles II. Walked in Greenwich Park. Observatory. Fine view from
a hill—talk with an old pensioner there. Home by railway” (J 23).
192 John Wenke
the inherently disputatious nature of what the Billy Budd story grew to become. Through the
multifaceted, transhistorical narrator, Melville creates a hybrid story that uses actual historical
contexts to establish the arena within which faux historical characters interact: the Napoleonic
Wars did indeed take place; there were mutinies at the Spithead and Nore; the great Admiral
Nelson did lose his life at Trafalgar; however, there was no Bellipotent, no Billy Budd, no Dansker,
no John Claggart, and no Captain Vere. The narrator conducts the reader into this hybrid
domain, wherein history and faux history intermingle.
To summarize, then, the narrator dramatizes events and ponders their implications as they
relate to his own status as one who writes in the now of the late 1880s and who remembers—not
well—a pertinent event that happened in Greenwich in 1849. The same narrator reaches back
nearly a century, assuming the role of a disembodied presence capable of depicting events as they
affect Billy’s life and working to describe—not always fully—the psychological recesses of such
characters as Billy, the Dansker, Claggart, and Vere. By extending the range of his first-person
narrator well beyond the experiential limits of any one person’s limited subjectivity toward the
expanded access associated with third-person omniscient narration, Melville constructs the
means whereby the reader enters the conjured past and thereby engages the complicated exi-
gencies that roil the “Inside Narrative.” Conscious of viewing the reader as a companionate
presence—“If the reader will keep me company I shall be glad” (13)—the narrator addresses a
host of intersecting critical complications—complications that pertain to the Dansker’s reflec-
tions on Billy’s incongruous placement in a world of war; to a host of entangled hermeneutical
problems posed by Claggart’s nature and his mysterious, iniquitous hostility toward the
Handsome Sailor; and, ultimately, to Captain Vere’s conflicted personal attributes as they inform
his troubled thoughts, his spoken words, and his momentous decisions related to Billy’s impul-
sive murder of the master-at-arms.
Like Claggart and Vere, the Dansker comprehends the moral phenomenon of Billy’s inno-
cence, appearing as one who knows who Billy is but not what he means. At one point, the narrator
casts the Dansker’s reflections in the form of recondite interrogatives: “Was it that his eccentric
unsentimental old sapience, primitive in its kind, saw or thought it saw something which in
contrast with the war-ship’s environment looked oddly incongruous in the handsome sailor?”
(24). The Dansker meditates on the ontological implications of Billy’s nature. His “quizzing sort
of look” gives way to “an expression of speculative query as to what might eventually befall a
nature like that, dropped into a world not without some man-traps” (24)—the essential issue
that the story dramatizes and probes. True to the dictates of his self-serving cynicism and “that
bitter prudence which never interferes in aught and never gives advice” (36), the Dansker informs
Billy that Claggart “is down on you,” but he refuses to say why it may be so or how Billy might
protect himself (36, italics in original). Like others in the novel, the Dansker does not seem
capable of acting in opposition to the rigidities circumscribing his character.
Whereas the Dansker earned his “bitter prudence” by applying lessons learned from a reten-
tive memory, Billy does not even seem to recognize a Claggart prototype from his own recent
past. When conversing with the bemused Lieutenant Ratcliffe, Captain Graveling explains how
Billy’s “virtue went out of him, sugaring the sour” members of the crew, except for Red Whiskers,
who mocks Billy as a “sweet and pleasant fellow” (6), the terms that Claggart later uses to
describe Billy. Upon hearing from the Dansker that Claggart “is down on you,” Billy replies,
“[W]hat for? Why he calls me the sweet and pleasant young fellow, they tell me” (25, italics in
original). In conflating aspects of these situations, the narrator intimates how Billy comes even-
tually to be “nipped in the vice of fate” (61). Here the notion of “fate” has less to do with some
predestined imposition of divine causality than with the Heraclitean notion that character is
fate, a position evoked years before in Melville’s White-Jacket (1850), where the narrator remarks,
“Ourselves are fate” (WJ 321).10 On the Rights of Man, the relation between cause and effect is
simple and leads to a benign consequence. After Red Whiskers gives Billy a nasty poke in the
ribs, Billy responds “[q]uick as lightning,” pummeling the bully and converting him to love (6).
Nevertheless, Billy’s innocence, however configured, is clearly conditional and co-exists with a
latent tendency toward explosive, unpremeditated violence. On the merchant ship, such ferocity
has the salutary, if ironic, effect of making Billy the ship’s “peacemaker” (6). This scene antici-
pates aspects of Billy’s conflict with Claggart, but not the outcome. In the Bellipotent’s more
sinister environment, Billy’s innate tendency to irruptive violence prefigures his fate. Whereas
Captain Graveling uses a natural image to describe Billy’s “quick as lightning” assault, the nar-
rator describes Billy’s attack on Claggart as erupting “quick as the flame from a discharged
cannon at night” (46). Appropriately, the simile evokes the destructive power of war armaments.
In exclaiming “Fated boy” (46) in the near aftermath of this attack, Captain Vere has an instan-
taneous apprehension of the mortal consequences of Billy’s act. In effecting his transformation
from being the nearly innocent Handsome Sailor to becoming a nearly innocent murderer, Billy acts
impulsively through a kind of substitute speech. Even though he brings justice to the malicious
“false-witness” (44), Billy does not have a clue as to what motivated Claggart—a mystery that
Vere later claims might task a host of “psychologic theologians” (53).
Claggart is Melville’s Iago—a man whose malice appears at odds with any notion of reasoned
causality. How can criticism take account of a condition of being that stands beyond the reach of
explanation? The narrator takes up this question by admitting his hermeneutical incapacity:
“His portrait I essay, but shall never hit it” (19). In Chapter 8, this sentence was inscribed at
stage E and added to the manuscript directly before material concerning Claggart’s past already
inscribed at stage B. Stage E is also where Melville inscribes most of Chapter 11 and the narra-
tor’s expansive exploration of those conflicted attributes informing Claggart’s malign nature. In
this process, the narrator combines determinant and indeterminate forms of exposition. By
unequivocally stating, “But, at heart and not for nothing, as the late chance encounter may indi-
cate to the discerning, down on him, secretly down on him, he assuredly was” (26), the narrator
foregrounds the open-ended, suppositious quality of the “essay” that follows. At a very late stage,
Melville inserted in pencil the phrase “to the discerning” (475, leaf 123)—a revision suggesting
that some coterie of “discerning” readers may be capable of exploring “the hidden nature of the
Master at Arms” (29). In this venture, the narrator employs “indirection” (27) as he pursues “the
essential in certain exceptional characters, whether evil ones or good” (28).
The narrator remembers his mentor, the late “honest scholar,” who taught him that one must
go beyond “what is known as knowledge of the world” (27, italics in original) in order to “define
and denominate certain phenomenal men” (28). The narrator builds on a tautological extract
10
As early as Mardi (1849), Melville referred to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, often identified popularly
as “the weeping philosopher.” For further discussion of Melville’s use of Heraclitean maxims, see Wenke, “‘Ontological
Heroics,’” 568–69 and 588–90.
194 John Wenke
from Plato that defines Claggart’s “Natural Depravity” as “a depravity according to nature.”
Claggart’s evil is inherent and irreducible and becomes manifest through a collision of opposites.
Claggart’s “reason” becomes nothing more than an “ambidexter implement for effecting the
irrational” (28). When snidely remarking “And handsome is as handsome did it too,” Claggart
insinuates that he despises Billy’s unity of being—the astounding fact that what Billy is achieves
expression in how he acts (26). Perhaps Claggart, as one might imagine and argue, is twisted by
repressed homoerotic rage—his sexualized love for Billy warped into hatred.11 However that
may be, Claggart has contempt for Billy’s apparent archetypal goodness. Billy’s beauty “went
along with a nature that as Claggart magnetically felt, had in its simplicity never willed malice
or experienced the reactionary bite of that serpent” (30). Perhaps Claggart’s hidden purpose is to
induce Billy to will malice, to experience a self-consuming hatred that obliterates his innocence.
Be that as it may, Claggart’s view of Billy’s ostensible ideality is subtly mistaken. Billy may have
avoided the “bite of that serpent,” but in receiving his stutter, he was marked irrevocably by the
“hand” of “the envious marplot of Eden” (11). Tragically, Billy’s drubbing of Red Whiskers fore-
shadowed his fate. With an ingrained capacity for irruptive violence, Billy finds himself on a
collision course with the inexorable imperatives impelling Claggart’s being. As with Billy,
Claggart’s character is fate. The compulsions of his being drive him to “act out to the end the
part allotted it” (30). These words are the result of Melville’s latest stage of pencil revisions that
he made during the last months of his life. Essentially, regarding Claggart’s fated persecution of
Billy, Melville replaced “live out to the end the nature allotted it” with “act out to the end the
stage-part allotted it” (leaf 142). In recasting the narrator’s focus on the forces impelling
Claggart’s being, or “nature,” Melville accentuates the power of a pre-scripted kind of histrionic,
or performative, imperative operating within Claggart that coheres with the theatrical imagery
dominating the next leaf—the outset of Chapter 13. Given the profusion of histrionic metaphors
in this transition between chapters, Melville later crossed out “stage” from “stage-part” at the
end of Chapter 12 as possibly redundant.
In positioning Billy and Claggart in face-to-face proximity in order to “scrutinize the mutually
confronting visages” (45), Vere expects to identify the guilty party. The reader also has an oppor-
tunity to gauge the credibility of the narrator’s earlier claim regarding Vere’s alleged ability to
read the truth of another man’s character: “… something exceptional in the moral quality of
Captain Vere made him, in earnest encounter with a fellow-man, a veritable touchstone of that
man’s essential nature…” (44). For a pro-Vere reader, this passage celebrates his powers of dis-
cernment; for an anti-Vere reader mindful of the horrific outcome of those “mutually confront-
ing visages,” this passage mocks the captain’s arrogant presumption.
Throughout the novel, the narrator interprets Vere in conflicting ways, casting him as both a
conservative champion of civilized norms and a martinet contemptuous of common sailors and
less bookish officers. Rather than advocating the primacy of either view, the narrator frequently
describes Vere in equivocal terms. For example, Vere stands as “a sailor of distinction even in a
time prolific of renowned seamen.” He is a member of the aristocracy, but his “advancement had
not been altogether owing to influences” related to his kinship with “the higher nobility” (16).
11
See Yothers’ “Testament of Justice and Love” for a discussion of the critical tradition regarding homoerotic contexts
in Billy Budd, 35–37.
Was his promotion a matter of personal merit or did his “advancement” have more to do with
class affiliations? Rather than simply debunking Vere, the narrator underscores his many-sided,
sometimes conflicting characteristics. For example, in a generally celebratory chapter, the narra-
tor reports on the nickname “Starry Vere.” At stage E, Melville wrote: “How such a designation
happened to fall upon him was in this wise” (462, leaf 79). On a late pencil patch, Melville mod-
ified his neutral description to the detriment of his syntax: “How such a designation happened
to fall upon one who whatever his sterling qualities was without any brilliant ones was in this
wise” (462, leaf 79). Similarly, in Chapter 7, the narrator describes Vere as possessing a “marked
leaning toward everything intellectual” (18). Vere’s “bias,” in his choice of reading, “was toward
those books to which every serious mind of superior order occupying any active post of authority
in the world, naturally inclines: books treating of actual men and events no matter what the era”
(18). In a late pencil patch, Melville added how such reading confirms Vere’s “positive convic-
tions, which he forefelt would abide in him essentially unmodified [proof to all sophistries] so
long as his intellectual part remained unimpaired” (463, leaf 83). Melville added the bracketed
phrase and then deleted it. With “proof to all sophistries” included, the narrator certifies Vere as
a man capable of refuting sophistries. The deletion of the phrase not only suggests that Vere’s
“positive convictions” refer simply to his solitary viewpoints, but it also implies that his intel-
lectual rigidity might lack the saving grace of critical self-examination.
Ultimately, Vere’s “settled convictions” dictate his conclusive response to Billy’s crime, even
if the shock of Billy’s act leads Vere to display behavior that the surgeon judges to be “unhinged”
(48). In his speech to the drumhead court, Vere displays an intellectual reach that makes avail-
able an expansive array of argumentative refinements. Whereas Vere’s complications derive
mostly from his ability to see multiple sides of the case, the capacious range of his dialectical
energies have no effect on those conditions prescribing his narrow path to action. In recognizing
that Claggart was “[s]truck dead by an angel of God” (47), Vere is certain that Billy will be
acquitted at “the Last Assizes” (55). Nevertheless, Billy’s fate and Vere’s fate are intertwined:
“Yet the angel must hang,” and Vere (47)—not some prospective Admiral—must hang him for
the good of “lasting institutions” (18). As an agent of the king’s law, Vere must surrender the
radical possibilities inherent in free choice. What if Vere suddenly went rogue and persuaded the
court not to “condemn” but to “let go” (56)? After all, Billy just happened to kill Claggart
shortly before Vere—with the weight of law authorizing him—would have hanged the treach-
erous master-at-arms from a “yard-arm-end” for being “the false-witness” (44). For a character
conflicted in Vere’s peculiar way, with a mind capable of examining alluring possibilities that
cannot be actualized, he has no choice but to play the part allotted to him, even though his
actions have no salutary result. Shortly after Billy dies, Vere dies from a combat wound. On the
top of the leaf where Melville inscribed News from the Mediterranean, he made a note to “Speak of
the fight & death of Captain Vere” (539, leaf 340). Subsequently, Melville cancelled the note,
making the entire “inside narrative” and Vere’s alleged “agony of the strong”—whatever that
may mean—an historical nullity (58). In depicting, but not letting go, these complications,
Melville dramatizes how such haunting moral, ethical, and political imbroglios remain not only
dialectically charged but uncompleted and perhaps irresolvable—with the effect being that the
reader, like Melville himself, can never quite escape the vexing confinements of the “inside
narrative.”
196 John Wenke
Works Cited
Bryant, John. “Editing Melville in Manuscript.” ———. “Introduction.” Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside
Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, Narrative. Bobbs-Merrill, 1975, pp. xi–xliv.
June 2019, pp. 107–32. Watson, E. L. Grant. “Melville’s Testament of
———. The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing Acceptance.” Melville’s Billy Budd and the Critics,
for Book and Screen. U of Michigan P, 2002. edited by William T. Stafford. Wadsworth, 1961,
———. “What is a Fluid Text?” Melville Electronic Library: pp. 74–78.
A Critical Archive, https://melville.electroniclibrary.org/ Weaver, Russell. The Moral World of Billy Budd. Peter
editing-fluid-texts Lang, 2014.
Garner, Stanton. “Fraud as Fact in Herman Melville’s Wenke, John. “Complicating Vere: Melville’s Practice of
Billy Budd.” San Jose Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, May 1978, Revision in Billy Budd.” Leviathan: A Journal of
pp. 82–105. Melville Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, March 1999, pp. 83–88.
———. The Two Intertwined Narratives in Herman ———. “Melville’s Indirection: Billy Budd, the Genetic
Melville’s Billy Budd. Edwin Mellen Press, 2010. Text, and ‘The Deadly Space Between’.” New Essays on
Gill, Conrad. The Naval Mutinies of 1797. Manchester Billy Budd, edited by Donald Yannella. Cambridge
UP, 1913. UP, 2002, pp. 114–44.
Hayford, Harrison, and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., editors. ——— “Melville’s Transhistorical Voice: Billy Budd,
Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative, by Herman Sailor and the Fragmentation of Forms.” A Companion
Melville, U of Chicago P, 1962. to Herman Melville, edited by Wyn Kelley. Blackwell,
Kelley, Wyn. “‘This Matter of Writing’: Melville and the 2006, pp. 497–512.
Manuscript Page.” Critical Insights: Billy Budd Sailor, ———. “‘Ontological Heroics’: Melville’s Philosophical
edited by Brian Yothers. Salem Press, 2017, pp. 128–46. Art.” A Companion to Melville Studies, edited by John
Mailloux, Steven. “Judging the Judge: Billy Budd and Bryant. Greenwood, 1986, pp. 567–601.
‘Proof to all Sophistries’.” Cardozo Studies in Law and Widmer, Kingsley. “Billy Budd and Conservative
Literature, vol. 1, no. 1, 1989, pp. 83–88. Nihilism.” The Ways of Nihilism: A Study of Herman
Ohge, Christopher M. “Melville’s Late Reading and the Melville’s Short Novels. Ward-Ritchie. 1970, pp. 16–58.
Revisions in the Billy Budd Manuscript.” Critical Withim, Phil. “Billy Budd: Testament of Resistance.”
Insights: Billy Budd Sailor, edited by Brian Yothers. Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 2, June 1959,
Salem Press, 2017, pp. 93–111. pp. 115–27.
Parker, Hershel. Reading Billy Budd. Northwestern UP, Yothers, Brian, editor. Critical Insights: Billy Budd, Sailor.
1990. Salem Press, 2017.
Parker, Hershel, et al. “Textual Note on Billy Budd, Sailor.” Yothers, Brian. “Testaments of Justice and Love: The
Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings, by Critical Reception of Billy Budd Sailor.” Critical
Herman Melville, The Writings of Herman Melville, edited Insights: Billy Budd Sailor, edited by Brian Yothers.
by Hershel Parker, et al., vol. 13, Northwestern UP and Salem Press, 2017, pp. 22–41.
Newberry Library, 2017, pp. 381–407. Zink, Karl E. “Herman Melville and the Forms—Irony
Stern, Milton R. The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman and Social Criticism in ‘Billy Budd.’” Accent, vol. 12,
Melville. U of Illinois P, 1957. Summer 1952, pp. 131–39.
Part III
Texts, Print Culture, and Digital
Technologies
16
“A Widow with Her Husband Alive!”:
Gender, Collaboration, and Melville
Studies
Adam Fales and Jordan Alexander Stein
On November 27, 1854, the Melvilles—Herman, Elizabeth, and their children—missed their
train to Boston and returned home to Pittsfield for another night. Maria Melville, Herman’s
mother, recounts this mishap in a letter:
They were all very good humoured about it, the day was fine & pleasant, they had a ride to town &
the children said the Cars ran away from them. So in a few minutes after their return home, Herman
went up to his library as usual Lizzie took a book and seated herself before the fire, Bessie was put
to bed, & the boys went out to play.
(Leyda a, 493–94)
Maria’s letter provides a pleasant glimpse that counters the stormy depictions that tend to dom-
inate our understanding of Herman’s domestic life. Maria’s elided punctuation (hardly unusual
for the family’s letter writing habits) further complicates our received understandings of the
relationship between Herman and Elizabeth: “Herman went up to his library as usual Lizzie took
a book and seated herself before the fire.” To whom does the phrase “as usual” apply? Without
punctuation to specify, it could apply equally to Herman or Elizabeth, painting a p ortrait of a
marriage in which both people contribute domestically and intellectually. Such a portrait opposes
the lopsided view of Herman as the tortured genius burdened by a simple wife that most other
accounts provide, from Raymond Weaver in the early twentieth century to Hershel Parker in the
early twenty-first. Instead, considering the Melville family from the perspective of Maria’s letter,
we are compelled to ask whether Herman’s writing in his library could happen without Elizabeth’s
reading by the fireplace.
200 Adam Fales and Jordan Alexander Stein
As one scans indexes and bibliographies, it is not apparent that Elizabeth Shaw Melville lived
a life of her own. She most often appears in cursory mentions in biographies of her husband or in
critical readings that find her in Herman’s books, which become a series of romans-à-clef of an
unhappy marriage. Unable to know all that her life actually contained, we might proceed from
the assertion that it was filled with at least as many books, questions, and ponderings as that of
her husband. After all, they did share a home for nearly four decades. Elizabeth both read and
wrote, even as she assisted Herman with his own literary endeavors. Herman is particularly
regarded for his resistance to domesticity, his young wanderlust, his sporadic travels in later life,
and his incessant walks through cities and hillsides. For those of us who study Melville as an
author, what do we make of Elizabeth’s parallel work, which was largely fixed to domesticity, as
described in Maria’s letter and noted elsewhere in the family’s papers? Can or should that labor
factor into accounts of Melville’s authorship? It is not news that many great authors relied on
their wives for support of different kinds, but it is remarkable that we have no cogent models for
thinking about authorship in terms of the gendered shadow labor of the wife that, if pressed, we
all agree is always there.
Our ongoing archival research on Elizabeth Melville has reopened a more robust question
about the collaborative aspect of Elizabeth’s contributions to Herman’s career. One part of this
research traces how Elizabeth not only enabled Herman’s writing during his lifetime but also
successfully reprinted and promoted four of his novels in the fifteen years between his death in
1891 and hers in 1906, laying the material groundwork for his revival by scholars in the 1920s
(Fales and Stein). Elizabeth worked as copyist, literary agent, and biographer before those roles
were taken up by professional scholars. Melville studies as we know it was made possible by her
proto-scholarly work, but ironically, Elizabeth was largely erased by the scholars who relied on
her work to establish that field. Though a later cohort of feminist scholars––including Wyn
Kelley, Joyce Deveau Kennedy, Kathleen E. Kier, Amy Elizabeth Puett, Elizabeth Renker, and
Laurie Robertson-Lorant––have made cases for Elizabeth’s contributions to both Herman’s work
and Melville studies, their interventions have remained unheeded, never prompting a field-level
revision. Summarizing this scholarship in a previous essay, we conclude that “the task ahead is
not for Melville studies to learn about Elizabeth, for that’s easily enough done. Rather, the task
ahead is to measure all that Elizabeth might help us to unlearn” (117). It is this unlearning upon
which the following pages aim to expand.
To unlearn some of the misogynist reflexes of Melville studies, we suggest a methodological refor-
mulation of the place of collaboration and stewardship in literary histories. Typically, and as we
will explain in greater detail, scholars have instead favored a topical reformulation, such that, for
example, the overlooked lives of Elizabeth and the other Melville women represent the various
missed avenues and uncovered narratives lost in the stories that we tell ourselves about Herman
Melville, his life, work, and scholarly revival. Meanwhile, outside of Melville studies, textual
scholars, from Jerome McGann to Anna Mercer, have developed accounts of collaborative labor
and literary production––without textual studies of Melville following suit. Elizabeth’s labor,
which made Melville’s work possible both materially and intellectually, is thereby multiply
obscured, and interpretations and biographical studies have often defaulted misogynistically to
making meaning out of her absence, which they themselves created. Scholars and readers, conse-
quently, can know more about Elizabeth without knowing what to do with that knowledge, how
to assess it, how to value it, how to relate it meaningfully to their study of Herman. Thus, we are
“A Widow with Her Husband Alive!”: Gender, Collaboration, and Melville Studies 201
instead calling for a methodological shift in order to begin to account for the centrality of collab-
oration and stewardship to author studies.
From our view, one of the most consequential limitations of Melville studies as a field has been
its almost monomaniacal pursuit of the author who is its central focus, such that even alternative
pursuits have been limited by their exclusive focus on Melville himself. In 1999, for example,
when Wyn Kelley approached the letters of Augusta Melville, she identified their contribution
capaciously, arguing that “study of these letters could extend well beyond Melville biography
and into questions relevant to cultural studies…, gender studies…, and media studies” (Kelley,
“Literary Thirst” 46). For Kelley, Augusta’s letters disrupt the logic of the author-centric field,
yet that disruption to the field is projected away from it––such that studying the Melville
women would take us outside the bounds of Melville studies (or even literary studies) proper––
precisely because these letters reveal that the study of Herman Melville is never the study of just
Herman Melville.
We suggest that insights from textual scholarship, which have developed robust accounts of
collaboration and stewardship, should be taken up by––and perhaps put at the very heart of––
literary history. More immediately, these insights can provide a means of accounting for the place
of Elizabeth and the other women within Melville studies. Collaboration, as an object of analysis,
names the various types of labor that go into literature’s creation, bringing multiple co-laborers
together without effacing their differences. In our account, studying collaboration is a way to
study the often unequal, gendered, and exploitative practices that have structured much of
literary production and, indeed, literary history. We hope to restore credit to where it is due, but
above all to gain a more complete and methodologically revised narrative of the way that we
produce and value literary history. As we noted earlier, doing so is both a process of learning
about Elizabeth’s labor and unlearning the ways her imputed absence has conditioned normative
readings of Meville’s work. Such a project involves rethinking how we approach literary interpre-
tation, even of some of the most familiar texts in our canon.
To understand why Elizabeth has not been regarded as Herman’s collaborator, one has to rec-
ognize both the received understanding of her place in Melville studies, and the hostility to
feminist interpretation that characterized the field for much of the twentieth century. Through
the 1950s Melville scholars marshalled a number of disparaging but nonidentical interpretations
of Elizabeth’s place in Herman’s career, with a particular focus on the character of their marriage.
Raymond Weaver’s book-length study set the tone in 1921, blending family lore, tendentious
Freudianism, and the prose stylings of Melville’s published fictions, to craft apocalyptic conclu-
sions such as, “By the very ardour of his idealisation, Melville was foredoomed to disappointment
in marriage. Though both he and his wife were noble natures—indeed for that very reason—
their marriage was for each a crucifixion” (340). Such conclusions––about Herman and Elizabeth’s
union at least––informed Lewis Mumford’s more psychologically probing biography eight years
later, one of whose recurrent themes was “Melville’s early disillusion with marriage” (339). Yet
Mumford was notably dismissive of Elizabeth, for example, asserting incorrectly that “One can
only speculate dimly on what manner of girl Elizabeth Shaw was” (86), or, substituting for
Weaver’s “noble natures” an Elizabeth who was “dutiful, girlish, commonplace,” “inexpressive
and jejune” (86). A consensus emerged that Melville was psychologically unfit for marriage, a
point in equal measures elaborated and distilled a generation later in Newton Arvin’s 1950
biography, which interpreted Melville as neurotically conflicted in his homosexual tendencies––

suggesting that Melville’s unhappy marriage had less to do with the particular woman he mar-
ried than the fact that he had married a woman at all.
With respect to this implication, however, Arvin’s remained a minority view, and further unfa-
vorable interpretations of Elizabeth proliferated, with both Leon Howard’s 1951 biography (for
many years the standard reference) and Eleanor Melville Metcalf’s 1954 documentary compen-
dium, each describing Herman and Elizabeth in a fairly conventional marriage of unequals.
Though Metcalf’s study devoted a whole chapter to “Herman’s Lizzie” and, sixty-five years later,
remains the only printed source for a number of Elizabeth’s letters, its authorial perspective iden-
tifies with Herman and the scholars who lionized him over and against his wife, such that
Elizabeth’s “life with a genius husband brought her much that she was emotionally unequal to; yet
her loyalty and devotion to him were unswerving” (55). Egbert S. Oliver’s “Elizabeth Shaw and
Herman Melville: The Story of Their Life” (an unpublished study probably completed sometime
in the 1950s) earns the distinction of being one of the few of its time that does not blame Elizabeth
for her temperamental differences from her husband, portraying instead a marriage in which,
despite all manner of good intention, different personalities simply developed different expecta-
tions and satisfactions. By 1956, two generations into the Melville revival, with dozens more
books, articles, and dissertations in circulation than just those mentioned above, Lavon Rasco
observed that “Perhaps Melville’s attitude toward love and marriage posed the most baffling
problem for Meville biographers, for it is on this point that they are in most disagreement” (21).
The one abiding through-line in these interpretations was to consider Herman and Elizabeth’s
marriage from his perspective, his psychology, his career. Far from a collaboration, the Melvilles’
marriage was framed by scholars as something that happened first and foremost to Herman. As
Amy Elizabeth Puett noted in her careful 1969 dissertation, however, contemporaries in 1847
mostly viewed the marriage from Elizabeth’s vantage. The only daughter of Lemuel Shaw mar-
rying a man who had lived among cannibals and unblushingly described Fayaway’s nudity was,
for many among her society, an unexpected match. Shortly after their marriage, the New-York
Daily Tribune gibed on August 7, 1847: “fair forsaken Fayaway will doubtless console herself by
sueing [sic] him for breach of promise” (qtd. Leyda a, 256). To his contemporaries, in contrast
with early Melvilleans, Herman was the one marrying up. Puett crucially emphasizes Elizabeth’s
decades-long contributions to her husband’s career, variously as copyist, amanuensis, and pro-
moter (see also Sealts).
Puett’s desire to shift perspective on the Melvilles’ marriage to Elizabeth and her labor was
echoed by Joyce Deveau Kennedy and Kathleen E. Kier, whose reexaminations of evidence, and
in particular of Elizabeth’s letters, show how dismissive early biographers had been. The Elizabeth
who emerges from Kier’s account––which, among these revisionary accounts, positions itself
most explicitly as feminist––is girlish in her letters to Edmund Clarence Stedman but in a delib-
erate and affected manner, politely offering gifts, flattery, and access to family papers and
information. This strategy enlisted Stedman as a witting accomplice to Elizabeth’s desire to
secure her late husband’s literary reputation, including in the republication of Herman’s early
works in 1892, the year after his death. Kier further reminds us that Elizabeth cultivated not
only Stedman and his son, Arthur, but also Joseph Edwards Adams Smith, who likewise wrote
posthumous biographical notices about Melville in the Pittsfield Evening Journal. Even as
Elizabeth was republishing Herman’s writing, her own understudied writings indicate that she
had clear-eyed awareness of her agency in the story.
Yet if this revised account of Elizabeth as agent provocateur did not become orthodoxy in
Melville studies, the reason may simply be timing. Generative as these feminist revisions to the
story of Herman and Elizabeth’s marriage might have been for rethinking Melville’s career, this
long-standing topic in Melville studies ironically stalled out at roughly the moment in the
1980s when feminist analysis was taking hold in literary studies. The critical understanding of
the Melvilles’ marriage had shifted dramatically by 1994, when Elizabeth Renker’s essay,
“Herman Melville, Wife Beating, and the Written Page,” appeared in American Literature. Renker
builds on the 1975 publications of letters by and about Elizabeth that imply Herman was phys-
ically and emotionally violent, to argue that Melville’s “wife abuse is one crucial element in a
network that also includes his tortured relation to writing and his simultaneous dependence on
and resentment of the Melville women whose labor he needed to produce his texts” (123). Yet
Renker does not cite scholars such as Puett, Kennedy, or Kier, possibly because her aim is differ-
ent. While prior scholars sought to reinterpret the Melvilles’ marriage and career from Elizabeth’s
perspective, Renker instead draws extensively on Elizabeth’s letters but with the aim of holding
Herman (and the scholars for whom he was a “hero” [130]) accountable for his abusive behavior.
Drawing out Elizabeth’s voice, perspective, and agency––in the way that, for instance, Mumford
declared nearly impossible––is secondary among the concerns of Renker’s argument.
While the contours of any critical debate inevitably mutate over time, in this case the roads
not taken deserve particular scrutiny. The versions of feminism that took hold in literary studies
in the 1980s were shaped in part by that decade’s complicated cultural backlash against both
feminism and the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Accordingly, one detects in Renker’s essay
traces not only of the self-consciously feminist historical interventions that precede it, but even
more of engagements with the battles over social value that came by the early 1990s to be called
the culture wars. Indeed, Renker’s essay served as a flashpoint across publications ranging from
The New York Times Magazine to The Chronicle of Higher Education, none of which disputed her
research or sources, but all of which expressed varying degrees of shock that a history of violence
against women could be a factor in how one estimated the author of Moby-Dick (Weiss; Heller;
Davidson). It was with cautious awareness of precisely this kind of shock that the editors of the
“New Melville” special issue of American Literature, in which Renker’s essay appeared, prefaced
their collection. “We are well aware that these essays will strike different chords with different
readers––and not all readers will like all the essays in this volume” (vi–vii), they write, before
arguing for the value of dissensus: “Setting forth different, even contradictory views of Melville,
[the six essays in the special issue] attest to the energy that new critical concerns can bring to
bear” on “recurrent” themes in Melville criticism (v).
As a means of brokering a way through the culture wars, recourse to multiple interpretations
made sense: studies of literature, even those concerned with single authors and the facts of their
biography, do not have to be guided by consensus. Yet this recourse to a kind of interpretive plu-
ralism has had the inadvertent effect within Melville studies of framing as optional things that were
once indisputable––for example, the historical fact that Herman Melville married Elizabeth Shaw.
It seems likely that many scholars, uncomfortable with or doubtful of the evidence about
Elizabeth’s labor (Puett, Kennedy, or Kier) or about Herman’s violence (Renker), deliberately
minimized or outright ignored it. In any case, the vast majority of Melville scholarship in the
1990s found publication without saying anything at all about Elizabeth, marriage, or even
about gender broadly construed. (And the ones that did, like Laurie Robertson-Lorant and
Charlene Avallone, met with relatively cool reception.) That is, the debates dating from the
1920s about the significance of the Melvilles’ marriage or Elizabeth’s labor to Herman’s career
shifted by the 1990s from a staple of Melville criticism to an elective consideration. The idea of
interpretive pluralism brokers an accommodation to the acrimony of the culture wars: it does
not matter how we interpret Melville’s life and works so long as we keep doing so. This
accommodation protects the prestige literary object––“the text”––from unpopular interpreta-
tions, by agreeing to disagree. In other words, this approach implicitly concedes that all inter-
pretations can be of relative but equal value, so long as one is under no obligation to consider
interpretations one does not value.
In so protecting the integrity of the text from the multiplicitous work of interpretation,
scholars quietly guarded against the possibility that a particular interpretation might decenter
or upset the dominant interpretive paradigm of a text. Surely, the claims that follow from Puett’s
argument––such as the one we are advancing, that Herman could not have written Moby-Dick
without his wife’s labor––diminish the valorization of an author estimated in terms of his sole
agency. In our view, however, the fact that this argument is historically verifiable challenges not
so much the integrity of the author of Moby-Dick but the literary historical practices that protect
social and cultural values at the expense of the difficult political work of unlearning sexist his-
tories. It is this political work that helps us learn to value the more truly inclusive accounts of
collaboration that make literary production possible. Put another way, only when we dispense
with the misogyny embedded in scholarly practice will we realize that the existence of women
in Melville’s life and work is not merely one interpretation among many.
Feminist revisions to the received story of Melville’s career brought to light facts that were
mistaken for interpretations, and these revisions were taken up as optional or alternative, rather
than contributing to ongoing revisions in the scholarly consensus about Melville’s biography and
writing process. The result was an emphasis on the integrity of the literary text, available for
multiple interpretations through multiple lenses, even when those interpretations came into
conflict with the facts of that text’s production. Such a tacit emphasis on the integrity of the text,
however, obscures the significant work that went into that text’s production––work often per-
formed by people in addition to the text’s designated author.
Collaborative textual production has a long history, with notable cases among major
nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors (e.g., McGann; Pizer; Rose). But given the renewed
interest in early modern literary “practice” among “American Renaissance” authors, scholars of
early modern literature have offered the most germane accounts of literary production decentered
from a singular author (Matthiessen 102). Jeffrey Masten, for example, has identified the histo-
riographic stakes of early modern collaborative authorship, which confounds modern attempts to
identify who the “real” author of a text may have been. Masten contends that “the collaborative
project in the theatre was predicated on erasing the perception of any differences that might have
existed, for whatever reason” (17, italics in original), and he urges scholars to read without an
assumed individual author. Connecting Masten’s work to Melville’s corpus, Kelley has taken up
the case of Melville’s missing “Agatha” story––also known as Isle of the Cross––the main record of
which exists in letters between Melville and Hawthorne. Arguing that this text is not a missing
Melville novella but a collaborative story created between Melville and Hawthorne’s letters, she
elucidates how, for writers like Melville, a diffuse conception of authorship was not just a side-
effect of collaboration; it was precisely the point: “Mistaking one hand for another co-laborer’s or
for the medium itself captures exactly the allure of Renaissance drama to many nineteenth-
century readers” (“Hawthorne and Melville” 19).
However, the conditions for collaboration often extend beyond creative exchange, and
Elizabeth and Herman’s collaborations took place in a scene whose hierarchies and boundaries
are markedly different from the early modern authors that Masten studies or the idealized space
of Herman and Hawthorne’s letters. The case of Elizabeth shows us that, even as collaboration
can, in certain situations, “erase the perception of any differences,” it also constructs and rein-
forces differences in other contexts, especially when readers and scholars value creative work
over other information management activities that are essential for manuscript preparation,
like copying.
Masten, Ann Blair, Richard Yeo, and Meredith Marie Neuman have each shown how forms of
information management, like note-taking, constitute intellectual work in their own right.
While this labor, from copying to note-taking, often looks like or even involves writing, such
work is also irreducible to authorship; it is necessary for literary production, without being
another form of literary production. Information management is creative work which is not
measured by the originality of its contents—it is a kind of collaborative textual production that
does not adhere to the domain of authorship.
Elizabeth did not write Herman’s works, but she often copied them out. We might reasonably
assume that her collaborations with Herman were lifelong, but in the absence of any confirming
evidence, we do know that she was actively involved in the production of his texts at intervals
between 1847 and 1891, including the productions of Mardi, of “Hawthorne and His Mosses,”
of Billy Budd, and of nearly all of his poetry, including the ultimately unpublished volume he
worked on in 1859, as well as Battle-Pieces, Clarel, John Marr, Timoleon, and the uncompleted
Weeds and Wildings (Puett, 58, 73–75, 175–80, 115–18, 126–27, 147–50, 180–83). We have
argued elsewhere that she was fully involved in the republication of Typee, Omoo, White-Jacket, and
Moby-Dick in 1892 (Fales and Stein). While Herman created the contents, Elizabeth created the
materials that went to his publishers and their typesetters; she also assisted in correcting the
proofs and foul sheets that the publishers returned. Their textual productions were clearly col-
laborative, even if their roles were not equivalent.
That inequity of roles also bespeaks the cultural chauvinism that Blair notes in detail, by
which the labor undervalued in collaboration is very often feminized. Blair traces the role of
often unnamed, unthanked, and indirectly compensated family members in producing scholar-
ship. Summing up wives, daughters, sons, amanuenses, and assistants, from the fourteenth
through the nineteenth centuries, she writes: “No doubt the help of many a family member has
gone unacknowledged and undetected” (Blair 105). In the case of Emile Littré’s dictionary
(1859–1872), she finds that credit and payment to female literary laborers arrived only indi-
rectly, “by funds contributed by the publisher to pay for someone else to do the housework the
women were unable to perform while they were working on the dictionary, checking quotations,
and turning the slips contributed by readers into systematic entries” (105). In this instance,
housework becomes fungible to the myriad forms of information management that allowed this
dictionary to reach the press, and women receive compensation only through their absence from
other areas of the domestic sphere.
These accounts of the gendered and familial dynamics of collaborative information management
elucidate not only Elizabeth’s contributions to her husband’s books, but also something about
how the contributions she and Herman’s sisters made have been neglected by Melville studies.
In the “Historical Note” to the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Moby-Dick, the editors draw
from Maria’s letter to Augusta Melville on May 17, 1847:
Herman just left the room & sends his love to you. We have been particularly busy to day [sic] in
assisting him, in embellishing the small front room as a Library and Study. The walls have been
colored the bed-sted removed a new carpet, and curtains, the library has been remove’d [sic] and
placed before the door leading into the next room, a great box & two trunks have been unpacked
filld [sic] with books, and handsomely disposed together with the Ship and miniature Anchor–– his
desk &c together with three mahogony [sic] Chairs from the attic, he looks, and his Study looks,
ready to begin a new work, on the “South Seas”–– of course…
(618)
The editors summarize this preparation with astonishing understatement: “All that Melville
had to do was write.” Privileging Herman’s authorship above any of the material conditions
that enabled it, this summary rather starkly devalues “all that” was required of those besides
Herman. This evaluation falls in line with what Julian Markels calls the “methodological
misogyny of the Moby-Dick Historical Note” that “muzzles” scholars who show faith in the
Melville women as viable collaborators (119). Markels notes how this misogyny explains
Herman’s “thwarted intentions” and errors in the text of Moby-Dick, but a contiguous “meth-
odological misogyny” also fails to account for Elizabeth’s contributions both before and after
Moby-Dick’s publication.
We have been arguing that the texts called Melville’s are fundamentally collaborative crea-
tions, at the level of their material production, and that the persistent devaluation of the acts
of information management that made these texts possible is rooted in the misogyny of the
field. Nonetheless, given the prevalence of the figure of the author, from Melville’s day to our
own, it might be countered that scholars cannot account for something that the texts and
authors they study could not see. However, Melville did understand something about the
unequal collaboration that makes creative work possible, and the evidence for his under-
standing hides in plain sight, in a text on which he labored alongside his wife between 1850
and the summer of 1851. If understanding the writing of texts like Moby-Dick involves a more
thorough account of their collaborative production, then we must also understand the way that
reading texts like Moby-Dick should account for that same collaboration.
Moby-Dick has often been the ground on which scholars have understood Melville’s portrayal of
relationality and collaboration, especially in Chapter 94, “A Squeeze of the Hand.” Here, the
Pequod’s sailors fall into a deindividuating ecstasy of co-labor, while squeezing spermaceti. As
Kelley glosses this chapter: “author-ity rests not in the hands of a single genius but in the clasped
hands of the many” (“Hawthorne and Melville” 21). The collaboration of “A Squeeze of the Hand”
is one of equality, where the many become unified in purpose and experience. This reading finds
relative gender equilibrium in the homoerotic play of the scene––the one becomes the many
because they already happened to be, as it were, the men-y. By contrast, the collaborations we find
in the scenes of Melville’s textual production are not scenes of equality because a gendered division
of labor distributes textual production differentially across the hands of Elizabeth and Herman.
Yet scenes of such unequal collaboration are figured in Moby-Dick as well, though in admit-
tedly less spectacular ways than “A Squeeze of the Hand.” The late chapter “The Symphony”
unfolds unequal, gendered presences in the novel. Moving from descriptions of the sea and the
air, Ishmael pursues an unequal, gendered metaphor, leading his narration to a rhetorical under-
statement that highlights the effaced presence of women in the novel. Juniper Ellis describes
“The Symphony” as one instance in Moby-Dick where “[d]isplaced or deflected […] images of
femininity threaten to interpose themselves between men and their desires” (74). Situated near
the end of the novel, “The Symphony” immediately precedes Moby-Dick’s concluding, three-day
chase sequence, at the end of which almost every character dies. Its placement, in other words, is
fateful, and merits consideration for our understanding of the novel overall.
“The Symphony” is both about and narrated through gendered difference. Ishmael begins by
describing Ahab’s pondering of the sky: “It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were
hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with
a woman’s look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long-strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s
chest in his sleep” (542). The female sky and the male sea are just as inextricable as the many squeezing
hands in Melville’s images of ecstatic collaboration, but here, relation is not equation. The sky receives
markedly less description, with just the “look” of a woman, compared to the “robust and man-like sea,”
which is not just gendered but also personified as the biblical Samson (Delilah makes no appearance).
This descriptive inequality carries over to the significance of each firmament, as Ishmael imbues the sea
with an infinite inscrutability: “Ahab leaned over the side, and watched how his shadow in the water
sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity” (543). This
unpierceable profundity engenders a superfluity of repeated language, as Ahab’s gaze “sank and sank”
in order to only find “the more and the more.” On the other hand, the sky is expressed through light
and airy language that assuages the anxiety of meaninglessness: “That glad, happy air, that winsome sky,
did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affec-
tionate arms around his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that
however willful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless” (543).
These gendered images in Moby-Dick, and the gendered relations at the scene of writing,
inform one another. Earlier, we discussed how Herman’s writing relied on Elizabeth’s information
management, that her work was a necessary condition for his. Through these gendered images,
Melville is himself working out how women’s contributions become subordinated to men’s.
Moby-Dick registers in metaphor a notion of gender constructed through inequality––a registra-
tion, arguably, of the same conditions of Herman’s creative partnership with Elizabeth.
Ours is quite a different claim than saying there are no (or few) women in Moby-Dick; rather,
Melville writes multiple gendered relations into the novel, pointedly making women half-seen,
subordinated to the men whose labor the novel centers. In “The Symphony,” these differing char-
acterizations align a male, infinite wandering, and a female, constrained embrace, that then man-
ifests in Ahab’s own life. The scene sets the backdrop for Ahab’s deranged confession of the story
of his wife to Starbuck, in which he describes himself as a man of solitude, “away, whole oceans
away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving
but one dent in my marriage pillow—wife? wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye,
I widowed that poor girl when I married her” (544). Ahab figures his solitude as a paradox. His
description mimics the repetition with which Ishmael characterizes the male sea earlier in the
chapter. However, Ahab further characterizes his wife and son: “I have seen them—some summer
days in the morning. About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy vivaciously wakes;
sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep,
but will yet come back to dance him again.” Despite his earlier paradoxical solitude, Ahab remains
attuned to the domestic temporality that underwrites his oceanic adventure. His wife’s indirect
and imagined speech brings her wandering and deceased husband both back to life and back to her.
Starbuck matches this description of a wife and son awaiting their seafaring husband and
father, almost convincing Ahab to return home, but the deranged captain ultimately damns the
ship. Melville frames this final decision in contrast to Ahab’s second, hopeful account of his wife
and son. Instead of saying, “I have seen them,” now “Ahab’s glance was averted” (545). This
disjunction between sight and aversion, when considered in light of Moby-Dick’s outcome, frames
gendered difference as important to witnessing, stewardship, and protecting memory from the
wreckage of history. Were Ahab (and Herman) willing to engage in the denigrated work of stew-
ardship, as opposed to merely gazing into the infinite profundity and meaninglessness of the
abyss that so many scholars have valued in Melville’s work, who knows what evidence of the
Melvilles’ lives we might have today? Rather than merely point to this labor’s necessity, Moby-
Dick suggests we should understand the implications of its degradation.
Melville’s recognition of the roles of Ahab’s and Starbuck’s unnamed wives proceeds through
formal understatement, pointedly not calling attention to the object it describes. However, an under-
statement is still a statement. It occurs through an authorial voice that acknowledges something in
such a way that it appears, but comparatively less present than the other characters, objects, and ideas
beside it. María Felisa López Liquete has termed such understatement the “presence-absence” of
women in Melville’s work. Understatement calls attention to the things that are left out, but not in
a straightforward manner. To understate something, as Melville understates the presence of women
in Moby-Dick, is not to erase it entirely. Rather, it proceeds by showing us a world shaped by these
women’s absence. In this way, we might read the minor status of women in Moby-Dick not for their
minority as such, but rather for their impetus to revise the world in which Melville lived, and about
which he wrote, to reflect the structurally subordinated labor of the wives that made those
worlds possible.
While, as we have said, scholars typically turn to “A Squeeze of the Hand” for the equality
figured in its Whitmanian man-on-man ecstasy, here too––in a manner remarkably similar to
“The Symphony”––women appear through understatement as an expression of the way that all-
male sociality relies on their present-absence. Following the exclamation, “Would that I could
keep squeezing that sperm for ever!” Ishmael then imagines what gets left behind in that ecstatic
eternity immediately before the chapter’s section break:
For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must
eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the
intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the
country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the
visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of
spermaceti.
(416)
In what initially seems like a version of the misogyny that structures most imaginations of
sociality between men, the passage gradually reveals itself as an understatement similar to
Melville’s rhetoric in the later chapter “The Symphony.” Ishmael’s lowered and shifted “conceit
of attainable felicity” neither denigrates nor excludes women; rather, it yearns for their free-
dom from gendered labor conditions. His ambivalent position largely blames this separation
of felicity from “intellect” and “fancy,” in a way that, if it critiques women, does so only
through the strictures placed on the separation of spheres and the regimentation of domes-
ticity in American society. Lopez Liquete makes a similar point, directing attention to
Melville’s career long critique of “[r]epressive attitudes towards sex and corporal functions,
which had appeared at the end of the eighteenth century, increased throughout the nineteenth,
reviving the old polarization of woman as mother and sexual object” (119). Ishmael’s repeti-
tion of the phrase “now that I have perceived all this”––in which “all this” names the typical
experience of a repressive American society––suggests that “A Squeeze of the Hand” is less
concerned with an all-male utopian fantasy than it is with the actually existing heterotopic
systems of sex, gender, and domesticity.
Underwriting Ishmael’s fantasized escape from “all this” in the same way that Elizabeth
underwrote his own literary production, Melville makes sure to mention the marginalized
presence of women in that society. As in “The Symphony,” women appear in “A Squeeze of the
Hand” through figurative understatement, a rhetorical demonstration of the marginalization of
women in Melville’s society. Ishmael’s fantasy, which dominates the details of this chapter, does
not conclude with a positive veneration of the masculine clasping of hands in homoerotic ecstasy,
but instead results in a wholesale escape, unlearning the actually existing structures of the
world, with its sex-gender binary and domestic fixity.
The understatement that characterizes the formal treatment of women in Moby-Dick, from
“A Squeeze of the Hand” to Ahab’s and Starbuck’s wives in “The Symphony,” anticipates and,
in a way, answers the contradictory reception of the feminist historiography concerning the
labor of Melville’s own wife, Elizabeth. “The Symphony” provides a model for reevaluating
literary labor of the type that we have aligned with Elizabeth. It not only suggests that we must
recognize the crucial role that women have played in our novels, scholarship, and lives, but that
we must also note the way that men have so often stood in front of them. The case of Elizabeth
suggests that idealized notions of collaboration, in which male bodies melt into one another,
are as complicit in women’s erasure as the more explicit degradation that we find in the work
of generations of scholars. Indeed, if we are going to build a more inclusive and, we would
argue, more accurate Melville studies, unlearning how to avert our glance is one way to start.
To return, then, to author studies: we began by suggesting the need to revise the study of
single authors (like Melville) to account for the people (like Elizabeth) whom they included in their
lives. But what counts as an inclusion? Where do lives intersect and where do they merely overlap? Or,
what kinds of inclusion make a person present to a life that is not theirs, and which do not? We have
suggested that some preliminary answers to these questions can be found in “The Symphony” (and,
however ironically, in “A Squeeze of the Hand”), which imagines the possibility of a different conclusion
to Moby-Dick, one that could, but does not, take place. To posit this possibility, this chapter centralizes
Ahab’s and Starbuck’s wives. At the same time, their centrality to that vision is presented rhetorically
by means of understatement and so, for a majority of readers, this understated glimmer of what could
be gets eclipsed by the novel’s next three chapters and their thunderous statement of what is. From our
view, this is not just an incorrect reading of Moby-Dick; it ignores something that Melville knew, about
history, about wives, and, by extension, about literary labor.
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17
Melville’s Cervantes
Rosa Angélica Martínez
In a diary entry dated August 1, 1851—which marks not only Herman Melville’s thirty-second
birthday, but also his having completed writing Moby-Dick; or, The Whale in late July—Nathaniel
Hawthorne narrates a memorable encounter between him and Julian (his five-year-old son) with
a Spanish-speaking Melville on horseback:
While thus engaged, a cavalier on horseback came along the road, and saluted me in Spanish; to
which I replied by touching my hat, and went on with the newspaper. But the cavalier renewing his
salutation, I regarded him more attentively, and saw that it was Herman Melville! So, hereupon,
Julian and I h astened to the road, where ensued a greeting, and we all went homeward together,
talking as we went. Soon, Mr. Melville alighted, and put Julian into the saddle; and the little man
was highly pleased, and sat on the horse with the freedom and fearlessness of an old equestrian, and
had a ride of at least a mile homeward.
(25)
Nowhere in the diary entry does Hawthorne reveal what Melville said. Scholars have repeat-
edly grappled with possible salutations, knowing that while writing his whaling book, Melville
had been immersed in Cervantes’s Don Quixote (Part I in 1605 and Part II in 1615), drawing on
it for his invention of the monomaniacal Ahab, a passing reference to “the stumped and pau-
pered arm of old Cervantes” (MD 117), and back-to-back chapters entitled “Knights and
Squires,” to name a few obvious borrowings. Of all the salutations possible, none seems more
fitting than Cervantes’s opening line from the preface to Don Quixote that Melville reread while
writing Moby-Dick: “Desocupado lector,” Cervantes’s satirical address to the “Idle reader” who
comes to his book presumably looking for entertainment and pleasure instead of instruction and
Melville’s Cervantes 213
work.1 As we learn by pursuing Melville’s Cervantes, Melville was no idle reader, and he would,
throughout his career, return to his Spanish “source” and predecessor, over and over again.
Of this encounter with Hawthorne, the literary historian Stanley T. Williams explains, “No
one would submit this incident or the fact that Melville marked passages in Calderón’s Spanish
texts as proof of his mastery of the language” (224). Nevertheless, a Spanish-speaking Melville is
likely, as Williams continues: “[O]n his voyages he must have known Spanish-speaking sailors;
the odds are in favor of both his conversational and reading knowledge. The shore leaves in Lima
and other Spanish American ports hint at the former, and his devotion to ‘Don Quixote, the
sagest sage that ever lived,’ makes probable the latter” (224). Also attesting to Melville’s Spanish
knowledge is José De Onís: “Tenía algún conocimiento de la lengua española y había leído en su
original algunos de los clásicos del Siglo de Oro” (114).2 According to Onís and Williams, it
seems foolish not to expect that Melville would have glanced at, read through, and savored pas-
sages of Don Quixote in Spanish. Indeed, Spanish editions would have been available to him, a fact
that Merton M. Sealts, Jr. confirms in Melville’s Reading, a list of the books and documents that
Melville was known to have possessed, borrowed, or consulted. Moreover, Sealts states, Melville
frequently visited the Boston Athenaeum, which “owned translations by Smollett (4 v., Dublin,
1796) and Motteux (5 v., Edinburgh, 1822) as well as editions in the original Spanish,” and
where he frequently charged books to his father-in-law’s account (48). This is all to surmise that
Melville’s salute in Spanish may very well have come from the book he had been rereading, over
and over again, not only in English but also in Spanish.
Hawthorne’s image of a Spanish-speaking Melville has occasioned scholarly excitement. While
Hawthorne documented his own knightly (and Don Quixote-like) adventures with Julian, in
feats of horseback riding, chivalry, and great “sham-battles” with plants and bushes that father
and son imagined into “hydras, chimaeras, dragons and Gorgons” (21),3 a Don Quixote-obsessed
Melville was in the final stretch of revising and publishing Moby-Dick. Cervantes’s influence
appears throughout Melville’s entire oeuvre—in numerous works, in the portraits of major
characters, and in the margins of his personal copy of Don Quixote. How exactly did Melville—the
reader, the writer, the imagination—venture into the Spanish waters of Cervantes’s genius to find
inspiration? How did Melville’s aesthetic depend on Cervantes’s profound blueprint?
Melville’s Spanish Reading

In his lecture at Harvard University, originally titled “Cervantes and Melville” (1947), Harry
Levin became the first critic to rank Melville with the world’s preeminent novelist: “No
American author, however, can more fitly be compared with Cervantes than Herman Melville”
1
In the nineteenth century, English translations of Don Quixote, including the edition that Melville would come to own
in 1855 (the Charles Jarvis translation), the opening line of “The Author’s Preface” is “Loving reader”: yet more recent
translations offer the more accurate opening: “Idle reader.”
2
Translation mine: “He had some knowledge of the Spanish language and had read in their original some of the classics
of the Golden Age.” Also see Sealts’s entry for number 114. Sealts also states, “Annotated; passages in both English and
Spanish marked” (46–47), which Onís reiterates.
3
See Hawthorne’s diary entry 31 July 1851. The full passage is, “He picked up a club, and began war again—the old
warfare with thistles—which we called hydras, chimæras, dragons, and Gorgons” (21). See as well the diary entry 11
August, “The old boy (who well merits to be dubbed a Knight of the Thistle) performed feats of valor against these old
enemies; neither did I shrink from the combat” (66).
214 Rosa Angélica Martínez
(100). Melville repeatedly looked to Cervantes for inspiration, and, according to Levin, that
inspiration might have begun much earlier than is typically imagined. Perhaps while at sea and
before commencing a literary career, as Levin states, “Melville’s seafaring bookishness possessed
the measurable advantage of also including Don Quixote within its ken” (101). Drawing his
claim from Melville’s semi-autobiographical narration in White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-
of-War (1850), Levin recalls Melville’s “Quixotic shipmate who read the book and only became
more confirmed in his native Quixotism” (101). The scene Levin discusses appears in Chapter
54. “‘The People’ are given ‘Liberty’”: “But one of our Surgeon’s mates, a young medico of fine
family but slender fortune, must have created by far the strongest impression among the
hidalgoes of Rio. He had read Don Quixote, and, instead of curing him of his Quixotism, as it
ought to have done, it only made him still more Quixotic” (227–28). Melville relocates quixo-
tism to Latin America in the phrase “hidalgoes of Rio” de Janeiro, Brazil, and with Spanish
touches like medico and hidalgoes. Earlier in the text, Chapter 13. “A Man-of-War Hermit in a
Mob,” Melville offers another Don Quixote-like character named Nord, a sailor who had been
“a reader of good books,” “an earnest thinker,” “very romantic,” and then “bolted in the mill of
adversity,” as Melville describes: “I had often marked his tall, spare, upright figure stalking like
Don Quixote among the pigmies of the After-guard, to which he belonged” (51). In White-
Jacket, Melville reveals how his life on ships, at sea, and on foreign shores included imaginings
from Cervantes’s Don Quixote.
Stanley T. Williams, following Levin’s lead, offers a broad critical perspective for under-
standing Melville’s Cervantes: “Melville’s purchase of the Jarvis edition in 1855 appears to
date not the beginning but the maturing of his interest in Spanish literature. He had bought
Guzmán de Alfarache [1599] in 1849, and in the following year he had borrowed Lazarillo de
Tormes [1554]” (224). Melville’s reading of Mateo Alemán’s picaresque novel may have
prompted him to read the anonymously published precursor to the genre, both of which are
inscribed in Don Quixote. How Melville came upon the study of Spanish literature is only ever
briefly discussed, in part because it is difficult to track (see Close 15–19). For instance, in a
footnote following Williams’s comment above, he offers credit to Sealts’s authoritative bib-
liographic checklist, then states, “Melville may have derived some of his interest in Spain
from [Washington] Irving” (395). Irving prompted Melville’s literary career by helping him
find a London publisher for Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), but his histories of Spain
may have been even more important. Indeed Evert Duyckinck, Melville’s editor, “spotted the
influence of Irving, the original Knickerbocker, in Melville’s Typee” (Dowling 40). And well
into April 1847, Melville was still reading Irving’s histories of Spain, which included its
literary classics (Sealts 70).
At the onset of Melville’s career, it is perhaps no wonder that the writer Nathaniel Parker
Willis spotted a Spanish flavor in Melville’s first two publications: “Herman Melville, with his
cigar and his Spanish eyes, talks Typee and Omoo, just as you find the flow of his delightful
mind on paper. Those who have only read his books know the man—those who have only seen
the man have a fair idea of his books.”4 In 1849, when Melville began composing Moby-Dick, he
was not only rereading Don Quixote but learning from Cervantes, who led Melville to the pica-
resque novel and to rethinking conventions of American prose fiction. Melville’s later readings
4
For more biographical information on Melville, see Hershel Parker, 145; Andrew Delbanco, 66. Willis’s article,
from which the quotation is derived, appeared in the New York Home Journal, dated 13 October of 1849.
of Don Quixote coincide with his most daring and genre-defying texts, such as his seventh novel
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), the historical novella “Benito Cereno” (1855), his ninth novel
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857), and his epic poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in
the Holy Land (1876). In September 1855, the month prior to the first serialization of “Benito
Cereno” in Putnam’s, Melville purchased an 1853 edition of Don Quixote—a small two-volume
set translated by Charles Jarvis (1675–1739) and illustrated by Antoine Johannot (1803–1852).
Perhaps that copy lay open on his desk as he wrote the opening of his 1856 story, “The Piazza”:
Early dawn; and, sallying westward, I sowed the morning before me.
Some miles brought me nigh the hills; but out of present sight of them. I was not lost; for road-side
golden-rods, as guide-posts, pointed, I doubted not, the way to the golden window. Following them,
I came to a lone and languid region, where the grass-grown ways were traveled but by drowsy cattle,
that, less waked than stirred by day, seemed to walk in sleep. Browse, they did not—the enchanted
never eat. At least, so says Don Quixote, that sagest sage that ever lived.
(PT 6)
Melville’s Marginalia
Scholarly work remains to be done to examine how Cervantes and Don Quixote influenced
Melville’s career beyond White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, and The Confidence-Man. Approaches in
Melville Studies have compensated for these perceived shortcomings by concentrating on
particular foundational aspects of his work to deepen our appreciation of Melville’s strategies,
such as his biography (Parker in Herman Melville), his reading and “sources” (Merton M. Sealts,
Jr. and Mary K. Bercaw Edwards), his reading activities (Harrison Hayford), and his marginalia
(Steven Olsen-Smith). Since Levin’s work, critics have paid more attention to Melville’s
knowledge of and interest in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in addition to his reading of other Spanish
classics and his varied historical references to Spain and Spanish America. Many critics have
turned attention to “Benito Cereno”: Williams has described Melville’s “special concept of the
Spaniard” (225); Jenny Franchot has shifted attention to “Melville’s Catholic imagery” and
“English Protestant legends of Spanish cruelty in the New World” (175); María DeGuzmán has
expanded the discussion of “how the Black Legend against Spain […] played a primal role in the
construction of Anglo-American identity as ‘American’” (4); and Wyn Kelley has returned to
“recovering Melville’s historical context and identifying the allusions that escape a twenty-first-
century reader but resonated with Melville and his nineteenth-century audience” (28). Melville’s
purchase of Don Quixote and the marginalia therein persuasively align with the composition of
The Confidence-Man, according to Levin (104–5) and Kelly L. Richardson (233–34), but Melville’s
marginalia echo in other writings as well.
Tracking Melville’s marginalia is a thrilling scholarly endeavor. Although Melville’s personal
copy of Don Quixote (Philadelphia: Blanchard and Lea) is housed at the Houghton Library at
Harvard University, only a handful of scholars have examined the text and published their find-
ings. Whereas Melville’s annotated reading copy of Shakespeare has been available to scholars for
more than half a century—including online access to source materials via Melville’s Marginalia
Online, edited by Olsen-Smith and Peter Norberg—Melville’s annotated reading copy of Don
Quixote has not, perhaps because of its minimal display of marginalia. As is the case with
Shakespeare, tracking Melville’s marginalia in Don Quixote allows entry into Melville’s reading
practices and writerly imagination, where readers can contemplate Melville’s methods of inter-
pretation and claims to originality.
Melville probably acquired his copy of Cervantes’s Don Quixote in late summer of 1855,
according to the penciled inscription on the verso of the flyleaf to the first volume: “H. Melville /
Sep 18. ‘55”.5 Throughout the text, Melville uses characteristic markings and notations, in
particular marginal scores, checkmarks or an “x” or “+” next to passages and illustrations, annota-
tions ranging in length, and various sizes of dog-eared pages. For example, in the table of contents
of the first volume, Melville adds a checkmark next to one of the most famous and most discussed
chapters in Don Quixote. Melville’s checkmark prods us to examine the chapter, which concerns
Don Quixote’s comical defeat of a traveling barber-turned-knight who, Don Quixote believes, is
wearing the famous helmet of Mambrino, the great Moorish king. Defeated by Reinaldo de
Montalbán, the hero of French romances, Mambrino is a prominent figure in fifteenth- and six-
teenth-century epics.6 When a giggling Sancho Panza offers his interpretation of the supposed
helmet, Cervantes renders what Leo Spitzer calls “linguistic perspectivism” at the center of the
novel: “‘What dost thou laugh at, Sancho?’ said Don Quixote. He answered, ‘I laugh to think what
a huge head the pagan had, who owned this helmet, which is for all the world, just like a barber’s
basin’” (197).7 Sancho confounds the boundary between reality and romance with his “just like,”
whereas Don Quixote cannot see the truth: “‘Knowest thou, Sancho, what I take to be the case?
This famous piece, this enchanted helmet, by a strange accident, must have fallen into the hands
of some one, who being ignorant of its true value, and not considering what he did, seeing it to be
of the purest gold, has melted down the one half for lucre’s sake, and of the other half made this,
which, as you say, does look like a barber’s basin’” (197). He concludes, “‘[I]ts transformation
signifies nothing,’” an answer which only somewhat satisfies Sancho (197). Of the episode, Roberto
González Echevarría notes that “Mambrino’s helmet has an incontestable chivalric pedigree,
a deep pedigree, which makes it all the more ridiculous that it be confused with a barber’s basin”
(85). The humor moves in several directions, from physical comedy to metaphysical wonder to
rhetorical play, all of which move in and out of resemblance and perspectivism.
Let’s turn to an example in Clarel, which also draws upon “Benito Cereno.” Comprised of four
parts, 150 cantos, and nearly 18,000 lines in iambic tetrameter, Clarel is Don Quixote-like with its
interpolated tales and epic patterns. According to Samuel Otter, “Melville toiled on Clarel for longer
than on any other book he wrote” (467). Among numerous encounters between characters, a debate
ensues between Rolfe, an American sailor, and Derwent, an Anglican priest, in which Rolfe reflects
on Mambrino’s helmet but calls it Malbrino’s helmet. And these details are intentional.
5
See Sealts number 125. In the case of Melville’s personal copy of The Dramatic Works of Christopher Marlowe, Melville
includes a similar inscription but adds the city in which he purchased the book: “H. Melville / London, December /
1849” (also housed at the Houghton Library).
6
For more information on pre-novelistic genres that influenced Cervantes, see Cascardi, 58–79. Early epics referencing
Mambrino’s helmet include Matteo Boiardo’s unfinished poem Orlando innamorato (1495) and Ludovico Ariosto’s
continuation in Orlando furioso (1516).
7
See Spitzer’s seminal essay, “Linguistic Perspectivism in the Don Quixote,” 172–74.
“And don’t you know?

Malbrino’s helmet is sublime—
The barber’s basin may be vile:
Whether this basin is that helm
To vast debate has given rise—
Question profound for blinking eyes;
But common sense throughout her realm
Has settled it.”
(2.20.98–104)
Rolfe’s Spanish linguistic alteration of Mam (meaning “mother”) to Mal (meaning “evil” or
“bad”) thus disrupts the “incontestable chivalric pedigree” of his reference to Cervantes. Melville
(or the Melville-like Rolfe) conjures up the shadow-side to Mambrino and the collective inter-
pretation that the Moorish king deserved to be defeated. For readers of Melville, this talk of
barbers is reminiscent of the “play of the barber” in “Benito Cereno,” when Babo, the African
slave-turned-captain, invites Don Benito, the Spanish captain-turned-slave, into the cuddy for
an afternoon shave (PT 87). Here, the line “The barber’s basin may be vile” is a nod to the
“barber’s blood,” that of the revolting slave. In “Benito Cereno,” the physical violence and dark
comedy of Cervantes can be seen in Babo’s “trickling razor” and in his “sort of half humorous
sorrow,” especially when he cunningly states, “‘See, master––you shook so––here’s Babo’s first
blood’” (86). Similarly, in Clarel, Melville’s line, the “Question profound for blinking eyes,”
suggests the linguistic perspectivism with which his characters have grappled––that is, a Don
Quixote-like monomania or a sort of Melvillean shadow-side, including Delano’s “benevolent
heart” (47), Babo’s “hive of subtlety” (116), and Don Benito’s “silky paw to his fangs,” and thus
“a true off-shoot of a true hidalgo Cereno” (65). Comparing Clarel alongside “Benito Cereno”
reveals the layering of Cervantine and Melvillean genius.
Melville’s markings appear in the introduction to his edition of Cervantes, titled “MEMOIR
OF CERVANTES, WITH A NOTICE OF HIS WORKS,” by Louis Viardot (xvii–lxl). In it,
Melville added a marginal score next to the line, “Don Quixote is but the case of a man of dis-
eased brain; his monomania is that of a good man who revolts at injustice, and who would exalt
virtue” (lii), and dog-eared the bottom of the page across a description of Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza. Melville may have seen Viardot’s essay during earlier studies of Cervantes’s Don
Quixote, as many editions include it. Viardot’s observations are significant because they suggest
how Cervantes approached Alonso Quijano, the hidalgo who resides in the village of La Mancha,
somewhere in Spain, and dwells among the chivalric classics of his precious library. Quijano’s
excessive reading models his imaginative transformation into Don Quixote, not as that of a
“madman” but rather of “a good man who revolts at injustice” (lii). The description of the rela-
tionship between Don Quixote and Sancho likely resonated with Melville, who created a number
of bonded duos of his own, such as Tommo and Kory-Kory from Typee, Ishmael and Queequeg,
and Ahab and Pip, in Moby-Dick, and Don Benito and Babo in “Benito Cereno”: “We see these
two men, become inseparable, like the soul and body, sustaining and completing each other;
united for an object, at once noble and ridiculous” (lii). Melville dog-eared the entire paragraph,
and in this line, Viardot points the reader to Melville’s most profound marginalia within either
volume of his personal copy of Don Quixote.
Figure 17.1 Marginal marking and annotation in Melville’s copy of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. AC85.
M4977.Zz853c. Houghton Library, Harvard University.
In the second volume and Part II of Don Quixote, Melville marked a famous chapter concerning
Don Quixote’s philosophical defense of Lady Dulcinea: “‘[A] knight-errant without a mistress is
like a tree without leaves, a building without cement, a shadow without a body that causes it’”
(215–216). In the top margin he also responded: “Or as Confucius said ‘a dog without a master’,
or, to drop both Cervantes & Confucius parables—a god-like mind without a God.” (Figure 17.1).
Melville’s pairing of Spanish (Cervantes) and Chinese (Confucius) philosophers extends Quixote’s
remark into a Melvillean parable. Dulcinea, the mistress, validates Don Quixote’s chivalric quest;
thus Don Quixote’s remark to the Duchess, “‘God knows whether there be a Dulcinea or not in the
world, and whether she be imaginary or not imaginary,’” emphasizes her counterbalance to the
knight-errant’s existence (216). Likewise, Sancho’s fidelity plays a critical role in upholding the
master/servant binary that, as Genaro Padilla phrased for me in correspondence, “Melville found
both thrilling and terrifying.” Of course the line “‘a shadow without a body that causes it’” recalls
Captain Delano’s remark to Don Benito—“‘[W]hat has cast such a shadow upon you?’” (PT 116);
and the line “a god-like mind without a God” recalls Captain Peleg’s comment to Ishmael about
Captain Ahab, “‘He’s a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab’” (MD 79). In his markings
and annotations, Melville plunges into heterodox waters, departing from Cervantes and Confucius
(but also Viardot), to create his own original aesthetic.
Compiling Melville’s marginalia starts to reveal relations between texts such as White-Jacket,
Moby-Dick, “Benito Cereno,” The Confidence-Man, and Clarel, as reflections of Melville’s reading
and borrowing of passages in Don Quixote. It is difficult not to see the ways in which Cervantes
and Don Quixote helped to shape Melville’s imaginative potential. Don Quixote not only gave
Melville literary and political content through which to invent his characters and pursue a design
of his own around plots and themes, but it also challenged him to explore form, character
development, the genres of tragedy and humor, and basic assumptions of fiction.
Melville’s “The Rusty Man”

In 1870, writing at his desk in New York City, Melville again reflected on Cervantes’s knight-
errant. Levin, in particular, states, “Therein we find him, after fifteen or twenty years, turning
back to [Cervantes] once more—and, on this last occasion, confronting it directly. Don Quixote
is the hero of a very brief poem left unpublished by Melville among his ‘Jack Gentian’ manu-
scripts” (108–9). Melville composed the poem, titled “The Rusty Man,” with a subtitle in the
form of a parenthetical whisper, according to Ilan Stavans, and Melville returned to it on
numerous occasions to rework and revise it (148). Transcriptions of the subtitle have varied due
to Melville’s numerous revisions to the manuscript, thus adding a fluidity to the subtitle and the
poem’s thirteen lines. Melville’s revisions unfold in a revealing sequence. Unmarked by editors
and publishers, the poem grants the reader access into an unfinished text and what John Bryant
calls “The Melville Text” or “the fuller fluid text” (559): that is, “The Rusty Man” is not “the
market’s singularized and fixed print text,” but reveals Melville’s intentions, his stages of com-
position, and a text free from scholarly interventions (599). Readings of the subtitle, for example,
have varied from “(By a timid one)” (Jay Leyda) or “(By a soured one)” (Raymond Weaver and
Howard P. Vincent) or “(By a tired one)” (Levin). In a way, Melville’s manuscript retains a poly-
vocal design in its palimpsest-like quality, in which his revisions maintain uncertainty and
ambiguity and evidence of erasures––indeed, essential characteristics of Melville’s aesthetic.
Housed at Houghton Library, Melville’s manuscript shows inscriptions in black and light
gray ink, a range of penciled markings, strikethroughs, and notations, and also his pinning one
leaf to another along the left margin (Figure 17.2). While the top leaf is three quarters in
length and includes the title, subtitle (in pencil), and lines 1 to 8, the base leaf is full-length
and includes lines 9 to 13. However, beneath the top leaf there is a second line 8 on the base
leaf (canceled out) and in the ink used for lines 9 to 13. Although tracking Melville’s process of
writing and revisions within the manuscript is a complex task, by 1870, as Hershel Parker
reminds us, “Melville had been a practicing poet a dozen years,” and his revisions show the
layers of his poetic practice (xviii).
While we cannot infer that Melville considered this version complete, at the very least we can
examine the stages of revision from 1870 to 1876 and arrive at Melville’s intentions.
The image in the manuscript is less of Don Quixote the figure of legend and more of the vora-
cious reader (and perhaps writer) Alonso Quijano. Whereas Cervantes’s narrative unfolds the
figure of Don Quixote, Melville prods at Cervantine genius itself, shifting the focus to Alonso
Quijano. Melville accentuates the gentleman’s melancholia in the doubling of “mopeth” and in
the repetition and rhyme of “gropeth,” also evoking in “fusty library” his affinity for stuffy and
nefarious cuddies and cabins. Here, Melville sustains the depression before delusion will rescue
him from melancholia. And he distills from Cervantes Alonso Quijano’s physical transformation
and psychological epiphany, when, as he “Cites obsolete saws / Of chivalry’s laws,” in a dramatic
moment out comes the sword with “Be the wronged one’s knight: / Die, but do right” (8–9).
According to the Northwestern-Newberry editors, at an earlier point Melville had “cut off the
Figure 17.2 Manuscript of “The Rusty Man.” Herman Melville papers, 1761–1964. MS Am 188
(369.1). Houghton Library, Harvard University.8
bottom of the leaf immediately after line 8”: “(He apparently discarded the cut-away portion; the
lines it probably contained have never been located)” (930).
Melville then pinned this clipping to another leaf, most likely continuing in black ink, and
returning to both pages with pencil. Most startling in his new leaf is the revision in pencil of line
8 from “Be the beggar’s knight:” to “Be the wronged one’s knight:” and adding, then erasing, “Seek the
Sangrail Light.” in the right margin. In fact, the second line 8 beneath the top leaf is similar,
“Seek the San Grail’s light:” (which ends with a colon, not a period, and was canceled with
pencil), which the Northwestern-Newberry editors confirm: “[remaining lines inscribed on base leaf
with an edged nib in light gray ink; the first of these lines is covered by the clip]” (931). According to
Levin’s interpretation, “Originally Melville seems to have concluded with a single additional
line: ‘Seek the San Graal’s Light’” (109). Melville deliberates over an Arthurian ending; however,
he returns to Cervantes’s influence. In the final lines of the poem, Melville also turns inward to
8
For publications of the poem, see Levin’s Contexts of Criticism (108–9), Stavans’s Quixote (148–49), Vincent’s Collected
Poems of Herman Melville (377), and the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Uncompleted
Writings (285).
prod at his oeuvre. Melville also reworks “Philistine” and “pumpkin” in three separate lines until
deciding to omit them. In the vacillation of his revision process, Melville’s rewriting allows
readers to visualize a calculated sequence, witness poetic transformations, and glimpse Melville’s
unexplored aesthetics.
Although Melville never submitted “The Rusty Man” for publication, the unpolished manu-
script invites us into the poet’s experience of inventiveness, that of not only Melville but also
Alonso Quijano. Melville imagines Alonso the poet in an intertextual exercise seeming to recall
the characters and themes from Melville’s career. In the final lines of the poem, instead of Alonso
recalling chivalric romances, we find him recalling Melville’s romances. Line 11, “each grocer
fine green,” reminds one of Chapter 20. “All Astir” in Moby-Dick, when the Pequod prepares for
voyage and Ishmael states, “Just so with whaling, which necessitates a three-years’ housekeeping
upon the wide ocean, far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers” (95–96),
and its revision of “While Philistine green,” also recalls Chapter 18. “His Mark,” when Captain
Bildad asks of Queequeg to Ishmael, “‘[I]s this Philistine a regular member of Deacon
Deuteronomy’s meeting?’” (88). Line 13, “Of the Philistine, mean. serene.” reminds one of Part
I Canto 30. “The Site of the Passion” in Clarel, when the narrative voice reflects on “Inquisitive
Philistine: lo, / Tourists replace the pilgrims so.” (105–6), and also the the Hawthorne-like
character, named Vine: “At peep of that brisk dapper man / Over Vine’s face a ripple ran / Of
freakish mockery, elfin light; / Whereby what thing may Clarel see?” (107–10). Line 12,
“Thriveth apace with the pumpkin ^fulsome face,” recalls Amasa Delano’s “singular guileless-
ness” in “Benito Cereno” (67), suggesting what Kathleen Donegan phrased to me in conversation
as “his mask of innocence,” and the final line 13 (or 14), creates a ring in “Of a fool serene.” To
match the Spanish ring in the “sounding name,” Don Benito Ce-re-no (64). Melville finds, in the
toggling between “Philistine,” “pumpkin,” and “serene,” Alonso alluding to Quixotic-like char-
acters from Melville’s texts.
Additionally, within The Melville Text we find in the revisions a process of writing that draws
upon multiple resonances, including Cervantes’s influence. Similar to “Philistine” and “serene,”
for example, the use of “pumpkin face” recalls Melville’s famous letter to Evert Duyckink, his
reading of stories by Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a memorable scene at the
end of Cervantes’s novel. In Melville’s 1850 letter to Duyckink, which Wyn Kelley brought to
my attention, he states, “Then, pay a visit to my cow—cut up a pumpkin or two for her, & stand
by to see her eat it—for it’s a pleasant sight to see a cow move her jaws—she does it so mildly and
with such a sanctity” (L 174). Here Melville is alluding to Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,”
(1820) with the headless horseman, and Hawthorne’s tale “Feathertop” (1852), which includes
pumpkin-head talk. Thematically, these parallels suggest Melville’s decoding of a quixotic lan-
guage. For example, in Part II of Don Quixote, where Don Quixote tells Sancho, “‘[Y]ou are the
greatest glutton in the world, and the greatest dunce upon earth, if you cannot be persuaded that
this messenger is enchanted, and this Tosilos a counterfeit. Stay you with him, and sate yourself;
I will go slowly on and wait your coming,’” (417). Then, the narrator states, “The lacquey
laughed, unsheathed his calabash, and unwalleted his cheese; and taking out a loaf, he and Sancho
sat down upon the green grass. In peace and good fellowship they attacked and speedily got to
the bottom of the provisions in the wallet, with so good an appetite that they licked the very
packet of the letters because it smelt of cheese” (417; emphasis added).
Yet in the final lines of “Rusty Man,” he draws back to an original and earlier interpretation
that underlies and distinguishes quixotism. Melville’s revision of “pumpkin face” alongside
Cervantes’s scene of calabash and cheese recalls the opening pages of Don Quixote and the moments
before the rusty man becomes a knight-errant: “It is said his surname was Quixada [Jaw], or
Quesada [Cheese] (for there is some difference among the authors who have written upon this
subject); though, by probable conjectures, it may be gathered that he was called Quixana
[Complaint]” (68). (Even Melville’s “by a soured one” subtitle hints at the latter). Thus, in the
final pages of Don Quixote, and before Alonso’s death, he renames himself Alonso Quixano the
Good, resonating with Melville’s line, “Die, but do right.”
Similarly to Don Quixote, the poem renders two figures in two parts: the image of the rusting
but musting figure of Cervantes’s Alonso in the first part of the poem, and the figure of the foolish
“grocer green” of Melville’s works in the second part of the poem (Wood, 243–244). Perhaps the
final lines of the poem constitute a call to a new generation, prodding the idle reader to glimpse
the heroic height of the would-be-knight and thus consider the legacy of the gentleman late-in-
age. Cervantes, who was writing in 1605, and Melville, writing in 1870, were the same age as
Alonso Quijano, all of whom are on the threshold of an escape to new literary adventures.
The image of Alonso Quijano—“With beard thin and dusty,”—is the image of Cervantes, the
playwright-turned-novelist always in the shadow of the Lope de Vegas of the world. Here, too,
is the romantic image of Melville, who finds himself in both Cervantes and Alonso Quijano, that
gentleman faithful to Art who embraces a different heroic role in the literary canon. In the gloom
that closes the poem, through Alonso’s rusting and musting, perhaps Melville pondered his own
legacy and anonymity while at the same time honoring Cervantes. From the vantage point of this
later moment in his career—when Melville was rereading Don Quixote, completing Clarel, and
revising “The Rusty Man”—he could recognize the generations that continued to bear Cervantes’s
effect, himself included.
Works Cited
Bercaw, Mary K. Melville’s Sources. Northwestern UP, DeGuzmán, María. Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend,
1987. Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire. U of
Bryant, John. “The Melville Text.” A Companion to Minnesota P, 2005.
Herman Melville, edited by Wyn Kelley. Blackwell, Delbanco, Andrew. Melville: His World and Work. Alfred
2006, pp. 553–66. A. Knopf, 2005.
Cascardi, Anthony. “Don Quixote and the Invention of the Dowling, David. Literary Partnerships and the Marketplace:
Novel.” The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, edited Writers and Mentors in Nineteenth-Century America.
by Anthony J. Cascardi. Cambridge UP, 2002, pp. Louisiana State UP, 2012.
58–79. Franchot, Jenny. Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant
Castiglia, Christopher. “Alienated Affections: Hawthorne Encounter with Catholicism. U of California P, 1994.
and Melville’s Trans-intimate Relationship.” Hawthorne Gibian, Peter. “Cosmopolitanism and Traveling Culture.”
and Melville: Writing a Relationship, edited by Jana L. A Companion to Herman Melville, edited by Wyn Kelley.
Argersinger and Leland S. Person. U of Georgia P, Blackwell, 2006, pp. 19–34.
2008, pp. 321–44. González Echevarría, Roberto. Cervantes’ “Don Quixote.”
Close, Anthony J. “The Legacy of Don Quixote and the Yale UP, 2015.
Picaresque Novel.” The Cambridge Companion to the Kelley, Wyn. “An Introduction to Benito Cereno.” Benito
Spanish Novel, edited by Harriet Turner and Adelaida Cereno, edited by Wyn Kelley. Bedford College
López de Martínez. Cambridge UP, 2003, pp. 115–19. Edition. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006.
Lazo, Rodrigo. “So Spanishly Poetic,’ Moby-Dick’s ———. Herman Melville: A Biography. 2 vols. John
Doubloon and Latin America.” Ungraspable Phantom: Hopkins UP, 1996 and 2002.
Essays on Moby-Dick, edited by John Bryant, Mary K. ———. Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative.
Bercaw Edwards, and Timothy Marr. Kent State UP, Northwestern UP, 2012.
2006, pp. 224–37. Richardson, Kelly L. “Picaresque Novel.” Herman Melville
Levin, Harry. Contexts of Criticism. Harvard UP, 1957. in Context, edited by Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge UP,
Melville, Herman. Collected Poems of Herman Melville, 2018, pp. 232–41.
edited by Howard P. Vincent. Hendricks House, Sealts, Merton M., Jr. Melville’s Reading: A Check-List of
1947. Books Owned and Borrowed. U of Wisconsin P, 1966.
Olsen-Smith, Steven, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. Spitzer, Leo. “Linguistic Perspectivism in the Don
Marnon, editors. “Online Catalog of Books and Quixote.” Cervantes’ Don Quixote: A Casebook, edited
Documents Owned, Borrowed, and Consulted by by Roberto González Echevarría. Oxford UP, 2005,
Herman Melville.” Melville’s Marginalia Online. http:// pp. 163–216.
melvillesmarginalia.org. Stavans, Ilan. “Introduction.” Quixote: The Novel and the
Onís, José. Melville y el Mundo Hispánico (Nueve conferencias World. W. W. Norton, 2015.
y un prólogo). Editorial Universitaria: Universidad de Viardot, Louis. “Memoir of Cervantes, with a Notice of
Puerto Rico, 1974. His Works.” Don Quixote de la Mancha, by Miguel de
Otter, Samuel. “How Clarel Works.” A Companion to Cervantes Saavedra. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Blanchard
Herman Melville, edited by Wyn Kelley. Blackwell, and Lea, 1853, pp. xvii-lxl.
2015, pp. 467–81. Weaver, Raymond M. Herman Melville. Duran, 1921.
Parker, Hershel. “Foreword.” Clarel: A Poem and Williams, Stanley T. The Spanish Background of American
Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, by Herman Melville, Literature. 2 vols. Yale UP, 1955.
edited by Harrison Hayford, et al. Northwestern Wood, Sarah F. Quixotic Fictions of the USA, 1792–1815.
University Press, 2008. Oxford UP, 2005.
18
Melville’s Shakespeare: Survivors
and Stepmothers
David Greven
Herman Melville wrote to Evert Duyckinck on February 24, 1849, “Dolt and ass that I am I
have lived more than 29 years, & until a few days ago, never made close acquaintance with the
divine William. Ah, he’s full of sermons-on-the-mount, and gentle, aye, almost as Jesus” (Corr
119). The occasion for Melville’s ecstatic, epiphanic rediscovery of Shakespeare was the 1837
American edition of the Hilliard, Gray Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, a seven-volume set
in which Melville marked thirty-one plays. Melville found this edition eye-opening in many
ways. Every previous edition assaulted him with “vile small print unendurable to my eyes,” but
he “exults” over this “glorious” larger-print edition, “page after page” (Corr 119).
One might say that Melville’s richly productive encounter with Shakespeare was overdeter-
mined. Yet, as Jonathan Arac notes, “During the romantic period the most consequential writers
of the various Western national cultures found Shakespeare an indispensable means of defining
their own innovations” (Arac 6). Arac summarizes Shakespeare’s impact on Melville:
In the midst of writing Moby-Dick, Melville registered a double encounter with literary greatness
which, scholars have argued, caused him to reconceive his work in progress at a higher level of ambi-
tion and complexity. He had been passionately reading in a recently acquired edition of Shakespeare
(now in Harvard’s Houghton Library), which had print large enough for his bad eyes. The fruits of
this reading mark his letters and found their first printed form in “Hawthorne and His Mosses”
(1850), a review essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom Moby-Dick was dedicated when it appeared
in 1851. … Through Shakespeare, Melville feels his own powers.
(21–22)
Melville’s Marginalia Online, a digital archive of books Melville owned, borrowed, and consulted,
allows readers to search these volumes for Melville’s notes, several of them newly recovered
through digital technology.
Melville’s Shakespeare: Survivors and Stepmothers 225
Computational approaches to Melville’s marginalia allow readers to calculate word counts and
frequencies, word variety, topic clusterings, and sentiment associations. Complemented with
informed acts of careful reading and source elucidation, these text analyses reveal Melville construct-
ing new paths in his own writing from his experiences of reading Shakespeare.
(Ohge, Olsen-Smith, et al. 65)
Ohge and Olsen-Smith make the case that “using distant reading strategies with the marginalia,
in their own right and in the service of close reading, we arrive more informed than ever at the
‘very axis’ of their genius.”
The sheer variety of Melville’s applications of Shakespearean precedents demands a discrete
essay. Melville engaged widely with the full range of Shakespeare’s work, a total immersion indi-
cated by the nearly 700 instances of marginalia across all seven volumes of the Hilliard, Gray
edition. Digital analysis of Melville’s marginalia has also revealed a more extensive engagement
with comedies and histories than with the tragedies. As Olsen-Smith and Ohge showed in their
2018 article, there is much potential in examining Melville’s allusions to the comedies and other,
lesser-known plays like Henry VIII. Also, while central to his thinking, Shakespeare was far from
the only writer influencing Melville. Robin Grey has extensively studied connections between
Melville and Milton and several other British precursors. Melville interprets Shakespeare, Milton,
and Sir Thomas Browne as authors, she says, “who dared to question the very moral, natural, and
theological paradigms that structured their worlds” (Grey 253; see also Justina Torrance’s
Chapter 19, “Melville’s Milton,” in this volume).
While mindful of these concerns, I intend to break new ground on a connection long noted by
critics, Melville’s self-conscious reworking of Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear (1605–1606) in
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851). It is safe to say that in this work widely acknowledged as his
masterpiece, Melville “feels his own powers.” In Call Me Ishmael, Charles Olson argued that
Melville’s immersion in Shakespeare led him to produce a radically distinct second draft, the
novel we know today. “Moby-Dick was two books written between February 1850 and August
1851,” Olson notes, adding provocatively, “The first book did not contain Ahab. It may not,
except incidentally, have contained Moby-Dick.” He continues:
It was Lear that had the deep creative impact. In Moby- Dick the use is pervasive. That its use is also
the most implicit of any play serves merely to enforce a law of the imagination, for what has stirred
Melville’s own most is heaved out, like Cordelia’s heart, with most tardiness.
(Olson 47)
Julian Markels’s book Melville and the Politics of Identity extensively corroborates Olson’s point.
Our knowledge of “Melville’s Markings in Shakespeare’s Plays,” as Markels titled his book’s
foundational essay, has been clarified through digital archival research, a statistical analytical
tool to which Markels did not have access. Though using different methodological means, Ohge
and Olsen-Smith concur with these earlier critics, and Ohge later glossed: “It is difficult to ima-
gine Ahab’s character coming into being with such force––and nuance––if Melville had not
studied Shakespeare’s plays” (Ohge, “Digital Text Analysis”).
Two themes reveal, as Olson put it, the simultaneously “implicit” and “pervasive” presence of
Lear in Moby-Dick: survival and femininity, the first of which concerns the analogous roles of
Ishmael and Edgar, the legitimate son and heir of the Earl of Gloucester, a nobleman loyal to
226 David Greven
King Lear. The implicit relation between Ishmael and Edgar is their shared status as survivors
and symbolic orphans. Thinking of Edgar and Ishmael as queer survivors, wayward sons cut off
from the father’s economic, social, and personal power, dovetails with current concerns in both
queer theory and Shakespeare studies.1 Tricked by Edmund, who convinces him that Gloucester
believes Edgar to be part of an assassination plot against him, Edgar flees the kingdom, disguising
himself as a Bedlam beggar and calling himself “Poor Tom,” and spends much of the play in this
disguise and state of estrangement. Edgar’s half-brother Edmund, Gloucester’s illegitimate son
and a Machiavellian schemer who successfully plots to oust Edgar from the kingdom, typically
steals the focus from his more upstanding sibling, Edgar, who fascinates in his weirdness and
shifting role and is much debated by critics.
The ultimate survivor, Ishmael famously quotes Job in the Epilogue: “And I only am escaped
alone to tell thee” (Job 1.14–19). After a two-day eternity of floating on the sea after the
destruction of the Pequod, Ishmael is rescued by the “devious-cruising Rachel, that in her
retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan” (MD 573). William V.
Spanos describes Ishmael as “a nameless orphan, a centerless self in a Fatherless and decentered
world” (Spanos 167). I concur with Spanos regarding the stepson/orphan Ishmael but disagree
with his reading of the Pequod world as “Fatherless,” given Ahab’s overwhelming authority to
rule his men. Commanding us to call him Ishmael, Moby-Dick’s narrator raises the possibility
that his identity is a mask, his “biblical/Puritan name” a convenience of the moment. Ishmael’s
penchant for highlighting his own fictionality and similar metatextual resonances “demystify
the mystique of authorship” while deepening the orphan theme (Spanos 75). The forms of dis-
guise—Edgar’s performance as Poor Tom, including bodily transformation (besmearing his
body with dirt, wearing ragged clothes), and Ishmael’s rhetorical masquerades—signify
defenses against and expressions of outcast status. If Edgar inexorably moves toward the recla-
mation of his identity and the right to rule, his passage to restoration is a fraught one, tinged
throughout with melancholy. Ishmael moves toward the status of survivor, a passage that sig-
nals the obliteration of all of those around him, including his friend Queequeg. To be a survivor
is to lose everyone else.
Second, the vexed issue of Moby-Dick’s treatment of the feminine is less explicit yet also
significant and indexes intertextual concerns, as does Melville’s 1852 novel Pierre (especially in
its echoes of Hamlet). Pierre offers remarkable portraits of femininity, especially that of Pierre
Glendinning’s half-sister Isabel Banford (if she is indeed that) and her highly involved backstory
and subsequent entanglement with Pierre’s life, to say nothing of Pierre’s formidable mother
Mary. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael’s stepmother appears in Chapter 4, “The Counterpane,” where
Ishmael and Queequeg share the titular blanket, and then reappears in a late chapter that answers
and extends the implications of this one, Chapter 132, “The Symphony,” where Melville makes
reference to “the step-mother world” (543). Moby-Dick’s stepmother, the non-biological mother
1
Numerous queer theory and feminist treatments have established survival as a crucial topic. Shakespeare scholarship
has also turned to this topic, as evinced by a special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly edited by Jonathan Gil Harris
organized around the theme “Surviving Hamlet.” Reflecting the interest in survival in both queer theory and
Shakespeare studies, Lee Edelman’s characteristically dense essay in Harris’s special issue, “Against Survival: Queerness
in a Time That’s Out of Joint,” focuses on Hamlet.
with the power to reject, abandon, and replenish the subject, a figure of rejection and abandon-
ment, echoes the themes of motherlessness and misogyny in Lear.2
Survivor: Ishmael
Moby-Dick is a tale told by a survivor, a retrospective narrative act. For all its dynamism of por-
traiture, the novel makes vivid and lifelike a series of persons long since annihilated. Only the
narrator, Ishmael, has survived to tell the tale of Captain Ahab’s disastrous quest to destroy the
titular white whale. Melville thematizes survival through references to the biblical figures of
Job, the survivor of persecutory trials; Jonah, who survives engulfment by a whale; the Rachel of
Jeremiah 31:15, the symbolic mother of the Jews inconsolably lamenting the loss of her chil-
dren; and the ultimate biblical survivor, Ishmael, cast out along with his mother Hagar into the
desert by Abraham at his wife Sarah’s behest.
If Melville revises the relationship that Edgar/Tom maintains with Gloucester and Lear in his
depiction of Ishmael’s relationship to Ahab, the young man’s interactions with the fatherly figure are
more diffuse than Edgar’s with his father and the deposed king. Ishmael maintains a discrete dis-
tance from Ahab throughout the novel, even given his uncanny insights into Ahab’s mind and his
unfathomable access to private conversations Ahab conducts with other crew members. Ishmael and
Ahab do not interact; no dialogue between them exists, a remarkable silence substituting for
revealing interaction. The narrator can get close to Ahab only by “orally sculpting him… he not only
does not come near his captain; Ahab never even sees him” (Stein 12). Ishmael presents Ahab as icon,
charting his ascent into dark Satanic antihero and cataloging his numerous flights of rhetorical gran-
deur. He documents Ahab’s interactions with Pip, who plays the wise Fool to the mad kingly cap-
tain, but Ishmael never joins this duo to form an oddball community that parallels the wayward
band of Lear, Gloucester, the Fool, and Edgar in Lear. Keeping Ishmael at a significant distance from
the captain in interpersonal terms while making him, rhetorically and narratively, Ahab’s bosom
companion emerges as one of Melville’s chief fictive strategies.3 Yet Chapter 41 begins with lines
that clarify Ishmael’s allegiance to and identification with the fallen father: “I, Ishmael, was one of
that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger
I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild,
mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine” (MD 179).
The falsely accused and outcast Edgar’s performance as Poor Tom finds its foundation in styl-
ized and self-consciously poetic language (“Who gives anything to Poor Tom? / …Tom’s a-cold”
[3.4.50–57]). Tom’s art language is most closely echoed in Moby-Dick by Pip, whose dialogue
with Ahab is “among the most self-consciously literary in the novel” (Stein 2014, 12). The aris-
tocratic Edgar performs a class masquerade by impersonating a Bedlam beggar (who typically
impersonated the mad) by physical and verbal disguise: “My face I’ll grime with filth,” Edgar/
2
Though I do not have the space to address these themes here, Hawthorne’s work of the 1850s similarly incorporates
themes from Shakespeare that inform his representation of women.
3
Glauco Cambon observes, “it should be possible to accept Ishmael as a persona of Melville, invisibly present through
his narration when he ceases to be directly present in it; and that this persona, even as he ceases to have objective
existence, has dramatic existence as actor-spectator of a half-remembered, half-conjured action” (Cambon 523).
228 David Greven
Tom declares, and notes the “roaring voices” of these outcast performers (2.2.180–85), the end
result being “Edgar I nothing am” (2.2.192). Melville’s characterization of Ishmael throbs with
the class tensions that echo Shakespeare’s depiction of Edgar as the slumming son of a nobleman.
In “Kings and Commoners in Moby-Dick,” Larry Reynolds incisively challenges earlier readings
of Ishmael as an inveterately democratic narrator.4 Ishmael, Reynolds counters, “ironically
undercuts his idealization of democracy by presenting the crew as the knights, squires, and com-
moners of a feudal hierarchy” while extolling Ahab’s greatness (Reynolds 108–9).
In preserving Ahab as king, Ishmael fulfills his Edgar-like role, not only by acknowledging
Ahab as the presiding ruler of the Pequod but also by preserving the impasse between Lear and
Edgar in Shakespeare’s tragedy. As Simon Palfrey notes in his superb book Poor Tom, Simone
Weil observed that Lear foregrounds a truth that no one has the capacity or the willingness to
recognize as such, “the bitterness of possessing the truth and having won at the price of nameless
degradation, the power to utter it and then being listened to by nobody” (Palfrey 149).5 (Weil
expressed these views in a 1943 letter to her parents.) The impasse between Edgar and Lear finds
a complement in Ishmael’s relationship with driven, eloquent, myopic Ahab, who fails to recog-
nize Ishmael in even the delimited ways that Lear can recognize the abject Edgar. For if Lear
cannot recognize Edgar (as Gloucester also cannot), Lear can recognize something of Edgar’s
abject status within Poor Tom’s condition. When Edgar/Poor Tom presents himself to Lear as a
naked wretch exposed to the elements, Lear famously describes him as an exemplum of
“Unaccommodated man,” “a poor, / bare, forked animal” (3.4.105–6). In contrast, Ishmael
remains unknown to Ahab, and in this regard embodies the crew at large, whose right to existence
remains, in Lear-like fashion, only slenderly known by Ahab.
The Fates’ Lieutenant

Most of the readings of Melville’s reworkings of Lear in Moby-Dick focus on the similarities bet-
ween Lear and Pip, Pip being linked to both Lear’s Fool and Poor Tom. Indeed, most readings of
Melville’s reworkings of Lear in Moby-Dick focus on male characters and what we might call
male-oriented themes—the burdens of kingship, masculinity versus nature, the agon of Melville’s
attempt to match Shakespeare’s literary potency. Leland S. Person observes that Moby-Dick both
“apotheosizes and critiques nineteenth-century models of manhood—aggressive, competitive,
self-centered, phallocentric. It also explores alternative constructs, especially in the marriage bet-
ween Ishmael and Queequeg” (Person 236). The understanding that Moby-Dick is a novel about
and for men stems from the long-standing view that the novel has no women in it or that it has
nothing for women. Rita Bode has helpfully outlined and analyzed the numerous instances in
4
Reynolds takes issue with Ray B. Browne’s argument in Melville’s Drive to Humanism: “Ishmael, the commonest of the
commoners, has been apotheosized as a symbol of the rise of the common man” (Reynolds 56). He also challenges F. O.
Matthiessen in American Renaissance, specifically his argument that, in contrast to Ishmael, Ahab is a “fearful symbol of
the self-enclosed individualism that, carried to its furthest extreme, brings disaster both upon itself and upon the group
of which it is a part” (Matthiessen 459). Reynolds argues that in echoing Matthiessen here, critics like Browne and
Milton R. Stern along with Matthiessen oversimplify the “complex sociopolitical views represented by” Ishmael and
Ahab (Reynolds 102–3).
5
Palfrey quotes from Simone Weil: An Anthology, 1–2.
which femininity is referenced in a novel presumed to be, in Richard Brodhead’s words, “so out-
rageously masculine that we scarcely allow ourselves to do justice to the full scope of its mascu-
linism” (Brodhead 9; Bode 181). Her essay focuses on the references to mothers, both human and
nonhuman, and on the theme of the lost mother. Scholars such as Grace Farrell have discussed
this theme in terms of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), his one novel, also a sea
fiction. Bode draws attention to Melville’s singular masculinization of the sea, typically depicted
as feminine, as in Whitman’s description in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” of the “savage
old mother incessantly crying” (Whitman 210). Bode argues, however, that the “dominance of
Moby-Dick’s masculine images is deceptive, for a pattern of transformations emerges in which the
masculine gives way to suggestions of the maternal” (Bode 183).
As Janet Adelman argues, although King Lear seems to be a “motherless” text, the maternal
nevertheless informs the play’s key themes and conflicts. Much of “the play’s power comes from
its landscape of maternal deprivation or worse, from the vulnerability and rage that is the
consequence of this confrontation and the intensity and fragility of the hope for a saving maternal
presence that can undo pain” (Adelman 104). Moby-Dick similarly evokes femininity and the
maternal even though, in his choice of subject matter and the workings of the plot, Melville
chose to eschew the tragedy’s central female characters and female-centered concerns. Seemingly
devoid of the feminine, Moby-Dick is fueled by the energies of a repressed female presence (a topic
which is also taken up by Fales and Stein, Chapter 16 in this volume).
In Chapter 4, “The Counterpane,” Ishmael recalls an incident in which a maternal presence
neither saves nor undoes pain, but instead inflicts it. Scampering about and attempting to climb
inside a chimney, the child Ishmael incurs his stepmother’s punitive wrath. She sends him to bed
without supper. Although the stepmother signifies a maternal presence, this presence conveys the
theme of maternal deprivation Adelman locates in Lear. Oddly, Ishmael’s recollection occurs while
experiencing Queequeg’s surprisingly familiar “bridegroom clasp” in their room at the Spouter-
Inn (MD 26). While a certain amount of discomfort and embarrassment colors this episode in
which a male stranger made doubly strange by his exotic appearance holds the narrator close, it is
one marked by Ishmael’s growing sense of curiosity about his new friend, whose toilette he studi-
ously observes and whose “civility and consideration” he praises (27). This chapter is a prelude,
then, to the two men’s pleasurable physical intimacy as they keep each other warm in Chapters 10
and 11. In contrast, Ishmael’s childhood memory is a potentially traumatic flashback marked by
an inscrutable yet telling further episode in which, banished in his room for sixteen hours, he
wakes up from a nightmare to feel a “supernatural hand” that seems “placed” in his own (26).
Ishmael describes, I argue, a desire for a maternal comfort and loving gesture that is, first, answered
nightmarishly in the phantom hand that clasps his own and, second, is given the beginnings of an
answer in Queequeg’s bridegroom clasp. Inevitably, we think ahead to the ecstatic moment in
Chapter 94, “A Squeeze of the Hand,” of collective male sperm-squeezing that emblematizes
same-sex camaraderie. This rapturous moment has its origins in a ghostly and ominous childhood
episode over which the mother or the mother’s frightening doppelgänger hovers and in the expe-
rience of being clasped in close quarters by another man. To ignore the implications of the step-
maternal is to leave the scene of male-male intimacy only partially understood.6
6
Christopher Looby, in his essay “Strange Sensations: Sex and Aesthetics in ‘The Counterpane,’” calls our attention to the
“counterpane,” or bedspread, that covers the two men lying in bed together. For a rebuttal to Looby’s reading that this scene
foregrounds sensuality rather than sexuality, see Greven, Gender Protest (32–34).
230 David Greven
If Ishmael is an Edgar cast out not through the machinations of a duplicitous half-sibling but
from a set of circumstances beyond our knowing, who reverences the fallen father Ahab as Edgar
does Lear, the step-maternal familial background Ishmael provides is a brief but telling indica-
tion that he has suffered an estrangement prior to the “damp, drizzly November in my soul” that
provokes his wandering quest. The homoerotic affection and attention he receives from Queequeg,
framed in marital terms, also substitute for the maternal love Ishmael was denied. Queequeg
offers this to Ishmael as Pip does to Ahab, who claims to know his “fiery father,” but “my sweet
mother, I know not. Oh cruel! what hast thou done with her?” Pip offers Ahab, who ultimately
rejects the gesture, the gifts of the “compassionate feminine.”7 Leslie Fiedler, in his characteris-
tically pathologizing if also suggestive manner, identified this pattern in nineteenth-century
American literature as the image of the “white man, wounded by the evil woman who would
have separated the two good companions and feels no love, only a lust that does not even demand
to know the name of the phallus-bearer who satisfies it, ends up lying in the arms of the colored
man, who sings to him like a mother to a child; and still together, more than ever together, they
are borne off to jail” (Fiedler 389). While there is a legitimate critique that non-white male char-
acters offer maternal love to white protagonists, not so much of their own volition but because
this emotional labor is one of their compulsory burdens, I contend that the scenes of interracial
same-sex intimacy cannot be reduced to the phobic, pathological, or racist. The intimacy bet-
ween Ishmael and Queequeg and Ahab and Pip has a plangency that resists that reduction.
Much like the titular protagonist’s mother in Melville’s next novel Pierre, the stepmother in
Moby-Dick connotes censure, not affection; stringency, not love. For these reasons, it is significant
that when the stepmother returns, she does so in a reversal of these earlier affective terms. In
Chapter 132, “The Symphony,” Melville foregrounds a conversation between Ahab and Starbuck
where Starbuck comes extremely close, or so it would appear, to persuading driven Ahab that he
must abandon his suicidal mission to hunt down and kill the White Whale.
Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side, and watched how his shadow
in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity.
But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous
thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-
mother world, so long cruel––forbidding––now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck,
and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet
find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the
sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.
(MD 543)
Occupying the place of the cruel stepmother of myth and fairy tale, Lear’s daughters Goneril and
Regan inflict violence––emotionally on Lear, and physically on Gloucester, whose eyes are
plucked out at Goneril’s suggestion (stagings frequently depict her doing the plucking of at least
7
John Halverson observes,
“As M. O. Percival has shown (A Reading of Moby-Dick [Chicago, 1950], pp. 97 ff.), Pip offers Ahab the way to
love. Ahab knows his ‘fiery father,’ but ‘my sweet mother, I know not. Oh cruel! what hast thou done with her?’
As if in answer to Ahab’s plea to the ‘clear spirit’ to ‘come in thy lowest form of love,’ Pip appears to show the
way to the ‘compassionate feminine.’ But Ahab repeatedly admonishes Pip to stay below; he will not raise him
up to the deck level as Ishmael did Queequeg. Ahab remains master to the end, and Pip laments, ‘Oh, master!
master! I am indeed downhearted when you walk over me.’”
(Halverson 1963: 443)
one eye). When Lear finally rejoins Cordelia, whom he banished for failing sufficiently to shower
him with encomiums at the start of the play, he finds a healing balm in her acceptance and love.
Cordelia shatters the stepmother world of Goneril and Regan. Interestingly, in Ahab’s fantasy,
the stepmother is not replaced by the loving mother but instead herself transforms into one:
“long cruel––forbidding,” she now wraps “affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did
seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find
it in her heart to save and to bless.” Indeed, the stepmother now becomes an entire “world”
embracing the wayward male subject. If only in fantasy, Ahab experiences what Ishmael, who
appeals to his stepmother for leniency but gets punishment instead, longs for, the change in atti-
tude that results in a loving gesture. The comparisons so often made between Ahab and Lear now
seem especially apt, as a woman’s love frees the vainglorious and oppressive tyrant from his own
self-annihilating and destructive qualities, if only for a moment. Just as Cordelia in her reappear-
ance at the end of Lear tacitly and redemptively forgives her misguided and injurious father, the
figural stepmother who appears near the end of Moby-Dick offers newfound love to the wayward
subject. In Powers of Horror (1982), Julia Kristeva theorized abjection in terms of the subject’s
relationship with the maternal body. Subjectivity depends on the ability to transcend the
maternal realm. Associated with the preoedipal mother, abject materials—things that have been
expulsed from the body, like spit, vomit, feces, and related excrescences, such as the skin that
forms over milk, materials that provoke disgust—must be repudiated by the subject in order for
maturation to occur. Consequently, the widely developing subfield of abjection theory has tended
to focus on the subject’s flight from the maternal. Works such as Moby-Dick and Lear, however,
make palpable an equally potent desire to return to the maternal embrace.
Melville’s thematization of the stepmother world extends to the entirety of Moby-Dick, which
teems with references to maternal and other kinds of feminine figures, often rendered with pal-
pable ambivalence. Ishmael offers, early on, a portrait of himself in thrall to a powerful female
authority figure, his stepmother. Toward the end of the novel, Ahab reveals that he is equally in
thrall to powerful female entities. In Chapter 134, “The Chase – Second Day,” Ahab confesses to
Starbuck that he has “felt strangely moved to thee,” indicating that Starbuck’s efforts to persuade
him to give up his obsessive quest have made an impact. But Ahab emphasizes that their conver-
sations as well as his quest are preordained: “This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed
by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled.” Then Ahab calls someone—Starbuck or
himself—“Fool!” before he declares, “I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders” (561).
Christopher Sten observes that Ahab’s language of fate indicates “the advanced state of his amor
fati, the failed hero’s fatal love of fate that masks his yearning to be free of all personal account-
ability for his actions” (Sten 80). Specifically, however, it is to the Fates, rather than fate, that
Ahab relinquishes agency, adding to the novel’s recurring motifs of fate and the Fates.8 The Fates,
the Greek Moirai and the Roman Parcae, three mythic and supremely powerful goddesses that
8
Ishmael shares Ahab’s self-understanding of being tethered to the Fates. In the first chapter, called “Loomings,”
Ishmael declares the “invisible police officer of the Fates” responsible for his decision to embark on his fateful whaling
voyage with Ahab, “part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago” (MD, 7). Ahab
performs a Satanic parody of baptism, bathing the weapon that will be used to slay the White Whale in the blood of
Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo. The weapon consists of “pole, iron, and rope,” and “like the Three Fates” remains
“inseparable” (489–90). In Chapter 47, “The Mat-Maker,” Ishmael once again contends with the Fates. And in the
Epilogue, Ishmael reveals that “I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman,” an event that
leads to Ishmael’s lone survival of the destruction of the Pequod and all of her crew (573).
232 David Greven
were said to frighten even Zeus, are comprised of Clotho (in Greek, the “spinster” or “spinner” of
destiny), Lachesis (in Greek the “disposer of lots”), and Atropos (in Greek the “ inexorable, inflex-
ible” one, i.e. death). Clotho spins the web, Lachesis measures it, Atropos cuts it.9 In “The Theme
of the Three Caskets,” Freud interprets Lear’s three daughters as versions of the Fates. Freud,
beginning with The Merchant of Venice and concluding with Lear, argues that the male subject’s
determination to avoid death inspires the fantasy that he can choose an option other than death.
The recurring figure of three women is a tripartite female goddess, the mother, wife, and the
mother-death who waits for and finally claims the subject. (Lear believes that he carries the dead
Cordelia in his arms, but in Freud’s reading it is really Cordelia who carries him into death.)
In his rendering of themes in Lear, Melville does not include his own versions of Lear’s daugh-
ters, a female triad that recalls the Three Weird Sisters in Macbeth who prognosticate the titular
protagonist’s rise and fall (like Lear, it dates to 1605–1606). Ahab presents himself as a Lear
figure, bound to the vagaries of female power (“the Fates’ lieutenant”). Although contemporary
feminist reinterpretations of Regan and Goneril make a case for their complexity, Melville’s
marginalia indicate that he conventionally viewed Regan and Goneril as corrupt and cruel
villains. At Regan’s line regarding Gloucester, “Ingrateful fox, ‘tis he” (3.7.27), said before she
and Cornwall inflict sadistic violence on their victim culminating in the plucking out of both
his eyes, Melville pencil-underlined her comment and, using double cross-checks for emphasis,
sardonically annotated, “Here’s a touch Shakespearean—Regan talks of ingratitude!” (Melville’s
Marginalia Online, King Lear, 7.085). In his last published novel in his lifetime, The Confidence-Man
(1857), Melville, emphasizing her masculine toughness, gives the name Goneril to the terma-
gant wife of John Ringman, the v ersion of the confidence man with the long weed on his hat.
(Lacking all maternal qualities, she abuses their young daughter, leading Ringman to take her
away from her mother. Goneril sues, bankrupts, and destroys the reputation of her husband
before dying herself.)
Both Melville and Hawthorne were struck by an artistic rendering of the Fates that affected
Emerson enough that he hung it above the mantel in his book-strewn study, where it was seen
by Margaret Fuller (a firm believer in the Fates) among others.10 Although writing after the
composition of Moby-Dick, Melville observed in his journal on March 27, 1857 that “The 3 Fates
of M. Angelo,” which he saw when revisiting the Pitti Palace, was a painting with an “Admirable
Expression.” A striking painting whose significance was no doubt enlarged by its attribution to
the legendary Michelangelo, “The Three Fates” (circa 1550) is now believed to be the work of
Francesco Salviati. Melville’s appreciation of it influences our interpretation of the Fates’
9
Adapted from Hornstein (254). For an extended reading of the relevance of the Fates to Melville’s work in a Miltonic
context, see Engel (39–45).
10
See Buell (140). Fuller would read in her room while Emerson spent the day in his study, coming out in the evening
for dinner and discussions with Fuller and his wife about his work. Fuller believed strongly in fate. “That Fuller’s story
seems like that of a Greek figure whose tragedy has been preordained by fate would not surprise this woman who, at
age twenty-nine, had depicted herself as Oedipus” (Murray 5). In commenting on the same painting of the Fates,
Hawthorne noted “the terrible, stern, passionless severity, neither loving nor hating us, that characterizes these ugly old
women. If they were angry, or had the least spite against human kind, it would render them the more tolerable. They
are a great work, containing and representing the very idea that makes a belief in fate such a cold torture to the human
soul. God give me the sure belief in his Providence!” (See Hawthorne 14: 306, 334). In reference to this passage, Barriss
Mills, in his essay “Hawthorne and Puritanism,” wrote, “Hawthorne obviously preferred God’s Providence to Fate, but
which he believed in is not entirely clear” (Mills 100).
significance to Moby-Dick. What makes the painting’s expression “Admirable” in Melville’s eyes
is “The way one Fate looks at other—Shall I?—The expectancy of the 3rd” ( J 115–16). The
reading I have been pursuing here, the comparative consideration of the outcast, orphaned,
Edgar-like Ishmael and the repressed yet manifest presence of femininity in Moby-Dick, can be
summarized with this affecting gesture, the way one Fate looks at another. The queer and femi-
nist valences of the novel intersect in the image of a powerful female presence that rises unbidden
in defiance—perhaps—of an attempt to suppress her (if we consider Melville’s eschewal of the
strong female presences in Lear as suppression). Just as same-sex desire was suppressed in
Melville’s time, and at times in his work, yet miraculously manifests itself, so too does the
presence of the feminine transcend its silencing confines.
Prior to the appearance of the mourning and salvific maternal figure of the Rachel, the ship
that saves the orphan sole survivor Ishmael at novel’s end, a related female force holds the Pequod
in its grip. In Chapter 135, “The Chase—Third Day,” the surviving but soon-to-expire sailors in
consternation search for sight of the ship. “Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw
her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana” (409). Fata Morgana is the Italian
name given to the sorceress of Arthurian legend Morgan le Fay.11 Thomas Malory’s famous Le
Morte d’Arthur, among other works, establishes her as Arthur’s half-sister. By mentioning Fata
Morgana, Melville refers to the castle-like mirages on the sea that confuse the sailors beholding
the “gaseous” entity’s “dim, bewildering mediums.” If the Moirai control destiny, Morgan le Fay
obscures vision and confuses sense, a fitting emblem of the destruction of the Pequod and all but
one of its crew, a destruction caused by a misguided man’s inability to see clearly, himself least
of all, a destruction that figures the harrowing powerlessness of this crew however “outrageously
masculine,” exposing the myth of male power precisely as such.
Coleridge, in his famous lectures on Shakespeare (also developed through marginalia), has
occasion to mention the concept of the Fata Morgana: “In the plays of Shakespeare, every man
sees himself, without knowing that he sees himself as in the phenomena of nature, in the mist of
the mountain, the traveller beholds his own figure, but the glory round the head distinguishes
from a mere vulgar copy. … Or as the Fata Morgana at Messina, in which all forms, at deter-
mined distances, are presented in an invisible mist, dressed in all the gorgeous colors of prismatic
imagination and with magic harmony uniting them and producing a beautiful whole in the
mind of the spectator” (Foakes 102). Melville, an American Romantic, echoes his British coun-
terpart in finding in Shakespeare a fata morgana of like unlikeness, a precursor in whose image
Melville “beholds his own figure.”
Works Cited
Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Arac, Jonathan. Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature
Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. in the Age of the Novel. Fordham UP, 2011.
Routledge, 1992.
11
For a discussion of the history of Fata Morgana sightings and their significance as supernatural and miraculous
events, see Warner (95–103). Warner observes that with the rise of scientific explanations for the causes of such mirages,
the “battle against divinatory significance provided the impetus from which a modern idea of the subject, an idea of
radical personal vision, issued forth to replace supernatural causation” (102–3).
234 David Greven
Bode, Rita. “‘Suckled by the Sea’: The Maternal in Moby- Hornstein, Lillian Herlands, et al. The Reader’s Companion
Dick.” Melville and Women, edited by Elizabeth Schultz to World Literature, 2nd revised edition, updated and
and Haskell Springer. Kent State UP, 2006, edited by Lillian Herlands Hornstein, Leon Edel, and
pp. 181–98. Horst Frenz. Signet Classics, 2002.
Brodhead, Richard H. “Trying All Things: An Kelley, Wyn. “Hawthorne and Melville in the Shoals:
Introduction to Moby-Dick.” New Essays on Moby-Dick, ‘Agatha,’ the Trials of Authorship, and the Dream of
edited by Richard H. Brodhead. Cambridge UP, Collaboration.” Hawthorne and Melville: Writing A
1986, pp. 1–21. Relationship, edited by Jana Argersinger and Leland
Browne, Ray B. Melville’s Drive to Humanism. Purdue S. Person. U of Georgia P, 2008, pp. 173–96.
University Studies, 1971. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection.
Buell, Lawrence. Emerson. Harvard UP, 2003. Columbia UP, 1982.
Cambon, Glauco. “Ishmael and the Problem of Formal Looby, Christopher. “Strange Sensations: Sex and
Discontinuities in Moby Dick.” Modern Language Notes, Aesthetics in ‘The Counterpane.’” Melville and
vol. 76, no. 6, 1961, pp. 516–23. Aesthetics, edited by Geoffrey Sanborn and Samuel
Edelman, Lee. “Against Survival: Queerness in a Time Otter. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 65–84.
That’s Out of Joint.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 62, Markels, Julian. Melville and the Politics of Identity: From
no. 2, 2011, pp. 148–69. King Lear to Moby-Dick. U of Illinois P, 1993.
Engel, William E. Early Modern Poetics in Melville and Poe: Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression
Memory, Melancholy, and the Emblematic Tradition. in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. 1941. Oxford UP,
Ashgate, 2012. 1968.
Farrell, Grace. “Mourning in Poe’s Pym.” Poe’s Pym: Mills, Barriss. “Hawthorne and Puritanism.” The New
Critical Explorations, edited by Richard Kopley. Duke England Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 1, 1948, pp. 78–102.
UP, 1992, pp. 107–16. Murray, Meg McGavran. Margaret Fuller, Wandering
Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. Pilgrim. U of Georgia P, 2008.
Revised edition. Stein and Day, 1966. Ohge, Christopher. “Digital Text Analysis of Herman
Foakes, R. A., editor. Coleridge on Shakespeare: The Text of Melville’s Marginalia in Shakespeare [A Progress
the Lectures of 1811–12. Routledge, 2005. Report].” 2018. https://christopherohge.com/digital-
Freud, Sigmund. The Theme of the Three Caskets, vol. 12. text-analysis-of-herman-melvilles-marginalia-in-
Standard Edition. Hogarth, 1913, pp. 291–301. shakespeare-a-progress-report.
Greven, David. Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Ohge, Christopher, Steven Olsen-Smith, and Elisa Barney
Antebellum American Literature: Margaret Fuller, Edgar Smith, with Adam Brimhall, Bridget Howley, Lisa
Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Shanks, and Lexy Smith. “At the Axis of Reality”:
Routledge, 2014. Melville’s Marginalia in The Dramatic Works of William
Grey, Robin. “The Legacy of Britain.” A Companion to Shakespeare.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, vol.
Herman Melville, edited by Wyn Kelley. Blackwell, 20, no. 2, 2018. pp. 37–67. doi:10.1353/lvn.2018.0019
2006, pp. 249–65. Olsen-Smith, Steven, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C.
Halverson, John. “The Shadow in Moby-Dick.” American Marnon, editors. Melville’s Marginalia Online. http://
Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 3, 1963, pp. 436–46. melvillesmarginalia.org.
Harris, Jonathan Gil. “Surviving Hamlet.” Shakespeare Olson, Charles, et al. Collected Prose. U of California P, 1997.
Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 2, Summer 2011, pp. 145–47. Palfrey, Simon. Poor Tom: Living King Lear. U of Chicago
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The French and Italian Notebooks.” P, 2014.
The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Person, Leland S. “Gender and Sexuality.” A Companion to
Hawthorne, vol. XIV, edited by Thomas Woodson. Herman Melville, edited by Wyn Kelley. Blackwell,
Ohio State UP, 1980. 2006, pp. 231–46.
Reynolds, Larry. “Kings and Commoners in Moby-Dick.” Sten, Christopher. Sounding the Whale: Moby-Dick as Epic
Studies in the Novel, vol. 12, Summer 1980, Novel. Kent State UP, 1996.
pp. 101–13. Warner, Marina. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors,
Spanos, William V. The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The and Media into the Twenty-first Century. Oxford UP, 2006.
Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Weil, Simone. An Anthology, edited by Sian Miles.
Studies. Duke UP, 1995. Penguin, 2005.
Stein, Suzanne. The Pusher and the Sufferer: An Unsentimental Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, edited
Reading of “Moby Dick”. Routledge, 2014. by Justin Kaplan. Library of America, Viking Press,
1982.
19
Melville’s Milton: Of the Devil’s
Party and Knows It
Justina Torrance
Melville’s set of The Poetical Works of John Milton is among the most heavily annotated volumes
in his personal library that have surfaced to date.1 It contains approximately sixty notes and
annotations, some erased and fully or partially recovered, and numerous of Melville’s habitual
marginal scores, checkmarks, and underlines. That level of engagement with Milton’s texts
alone would mark Milton as a significant influence for Melville, but the influence is also
apparent in Melville’s own body of work, from direct citations to style and form. Milton’s effect
on Melville was so thoroughgoing and profound that even before Melville’s set of Milton’s
poetry had come to light in the early 1980s,2 Henry F. Pommer devoted a monograph to the
subject based on his own careful reconstructions of Melville’s reading.3 Pommer documented
Melville’s borrowings of Milton, ranging in degrees of certainty from explicit citation to
probable allusion to possible echoes of word or phrase. Notably, Pommer’s remains the most
extended and comprehensive treatment of Milton’s influence on Melville to date, excepting a
collection of essays edited by Robin Grey, based on a March 2002 special issue of Leviathan.
Pommer’s analysis was conducted without the help of digital tools and without recourse to the
1
I would like to thank the editors of this volume and Steven Olsen-Smith for their help and precision in preparing this
chapter for publication.
2
For the history of the volumes’ discovery, and a plot filled with enough intrigue to please Melville himself, see “The
Provenance of Melville’s Milton Volumes” section in Robin Grey’s Introduction to Melville & Milton, pp. xvii–xxii. See
also an important source for Grey’s account, more readily available online: https://www.williamreesecompany.com/
pages/articles/49/collecting-herman-melville.
3
In Appendix A (pp. 118–19) Pommer correctly surmises, firstly, that Melville owned an edition of Milton’s poetry
and secondly, identifies which edition: the 1836 Hilliard, Gray, and Company. (A thorough researcher, he proposes other
possibilities as well, though he prefers the one that turned out to be correct).
Melville’s Milton: Of the Devil’s Party and Knows It 237
volumes themselves. The discovery of these volumes makes it possible to limn a Miltonic legacy
in Melville’s writing and thought that Pommer imaginatively anticipated. Since Grey’s volume
was issued, complete digital facsimile images of the set have been published at Melville’s
Marginalia Online, where a recent integration of data visualization tools now enables large-scale
quantitative analysis.4 The field is ripe for research.
Analyzing Melville’s reading of Milton offers a glimpse of one visionary, agonistic artist-
inheritor of theological and classical traditions reading another. Both Melville and Milton
inherited a theological vocabulary and acquired a reservoir of scriptural knowledge that formed
their thinking, even as they resisted or reshaped the materials of Christian tradition through
their art. Further, both men exhibited a leaning toward classical forms of art and poetry and
brought these to bear on their own literary creations. Both authors are recognized as having
produced monumental classics of English literature and written a late-life spiritual epic—
though Melville’s Clarel has not achieved the fame of Paradise Lost (or Moby-Dick, for that
matter). The resemblance of Melville’s Ahab to Milton’s Satan has been pointed out since the
early days of Melville criticism. But undergirding this evident, outsized similarity is a thick
web of artistic and philosophical influence that runs from the level of diction, to poetic form
and style, to the great philosophical and religious problems that preoccupied both men as art-
ists and thinkers, such as the freedom of the will and God’s responsibility for creation, including
natural and human evil. Close study of Melville’s Milton marginalia yields several striking
observations: namely, that Melville exhibits a marked sympathy with Milton’s figure of Satan—
and seems to have believed Milton shared it. A sympathy with Satan is not so surprising from
the creator of Ahab; but Melville’s distinctive interpretation suggests that he read Milton as an
ironist, or as a writer whose meanings cut counter to their surface indications. Whereas William
Blake and other Romantics found Satan appealing despite Milton’s perceived intent, Melville
appears to detect a hidden endorsement of this character that most represents evil in the
Christian tradition.
Melville returned to Milton during at least three distinct periods in his life, which coincided
with signally generative moments in his literary career. He acquired the volumes in 1849 and
read them as he was befriending Hawthorne, devouring Shakespeare, and composing Moby-
Dick.5 The next reading dates to 1860, when Melville brought the volumes on board the Meteor
as he sailed from New York to San Francisco and had begun to turn toward poetry. Melville’s
third documented reading occurred in 1868, as he was preparing to write his own spiritual epic,
Clarel. Allusions to Milton span the entire length of Melville’s writing career, from his first-
known published piece, “Fragments from a Writing Desk,” printed in a May 1839 local news-
paper under the pseudonym L.A.V. (PT 460), to his last, Billy Budd, which remained unpublished
at Melville’s death in 1891. In his Poetical Works of Milton, Melville’s sustained engagement with
matters of theology, philosophy, classics, and art was conducted over more than a quarter of a
lifetime. Melville’s repeated readings of Milton and consistent use of a pencil as a writing
4
For a recent study that uses these methods, see Peter Norberg and Anna Lendacky’s in the Works Cited section.
5
See Melville’s Marginalia Online (MMO), “Documentary Note” as well as my “Introduction to Melville’s Marginalia in
the Poetical Works of John Milton,” forthcoming, for a fuller historical context and more detailed account of Melville’s
readings. The dates of Melville’s readings are based on his own inscriptions in the front matter of the volumes.
238 Justina Torrance
implement throughout mean that it is impossible to establish, at present, a chronology of his

markings, or trace certain markings to specific periods. Because of this indeterminacy, my
argument treats Melville’s marginalia in the aggregate, though I indicate where there have been
erasures or revisions. It is likely that Melville’s views of Milton changed over time, but a deter-
mination of which marks derive from which readings remains elusive. Thus my argument that
Melville read Milton as an ironist must be considered in light of references to Milton in Melville’s
own work and marginal comments in other texts whose readings can be dated—a fruitful avenue
of further research.
Markings in the Life of Milton

Melville’s edition of Milton’s poetry includes an introduction by the Rev. John Mitford on the
“Life of Milton.” In his notations regarding Milton’s biography, Melville makes a connection
between Milton’s religious views and the consequences of their free expression. In the section
describing Milton’s travel abroad and friendship with Giovanni Battista Manso, the biographer
of the epic poet Tasso, Melville scores: “Manso was withheld from showing him some favours
by the opinions which Milton had too openly expressed on religious questions” (xxxv). As
Milton was a staunch Protestant visiting Catholic Italy, Mitford finds it unsurprising that “he
should give offence when expressing his feelings in the inmost bosom of the Papal Church”
(xxxv). Melville did not mark Mitford’s explanation of the episode, nor did he mark Mitford’s
quotation of Milton’s resolve “never to begin a conversation on religion in these parts, but if
interrogated concerning my faith, whatever might be the consequence, to dissemble nothing”
(xxxv). Melville does not focus on Milton’s resolve not to dissemble and instead focuses on the
cost of his decision.
The issue of secrecy had already appeared a few pages earlier, in a footnote to a sentence con-
tending that “Lycidas” contains “a stern and early avowal of [Milton’s] hostility to the church.”
Melville scores part of the footnote, which reads: “Mr. Peck thinks that the manner in which
Milton has dispersed his rhymes in Lycidas, is an attempt, though secretly, to give a poetical image
or draught of the mathematical canon of music: he informs us how to make this out, ‘by drawing
a bow line from rhyme to rhyme’” (xxx, italics in original). Melville followed these instructions and
drew such a diagram in the first stanza of his copy of “Lycidas.” The formal qualities of the
poetry, such as the rhyme scheme, may contain a significance of their own, apart from the content
of the lines. Such poetic forms are figured in terms of secrecy or hiddenness, able to conceal a
latent significance visible only to the eye of the trained interpreter. The theme of secrecy con-
nects this score to Melville’s next proximate marking, the one that highlights the detriment
following on Milton’s open expression of his religious views. Although the issues appear sepa-
rately here, poetry’s potential to hold secrets and Milton’s expression of his religious views in art
do become linked for Melville.
Toward the end of the introduction, Melville marked a series of passages explicitly concerning
Milton’s religion. In response to its portrayal of Milton’s “wanderings in religious belief” (a
phrase evocative of Hawthorne’s famous description of Melville’s own wanderings to-and-fro
after their meeting in Liverpool), Melville wrote: “He who thinks for himself never can remain
of the same mind. I doubt not that darker doubts crossed Milton’s soul, than ever disturbed
Voltair [sic]. And he was more of what is called an Infidel” (xcix). This key annotation provides
one of the more direct statements of Melville’s views on Milton. He shockingly compares Milton
to a reputed critic of Christianity and suggests that Milton exceeded even Voltaire in skepti-
cism.6 Melville has had little encouragement from the Rev. Mitford in this opinion. Significantly,
Mitford portrays Milton’s “wanderings” of belief as solely intra-Protestant, moving from
Puritanism to Calvinism to Arminianism to Anabaptism and so forth, but Melville takes the
comment in a much wider direction and questions the basis of Milton’s faith, portraying him as
a freethinker with dark doubts.
On the next page, Melville scored a passage that provides information and speculation about
Milton’s piety. Mitford reports that in the “latter part of his life, Milton frequented no place of
public worship.” Mitford immediately follows this fact with an excuse and reassurance:
It must, however, be remembered that he was old, blind, and infirm; that he was hostile to the
Liturgy of the established church, and at the same time not attached to any particular sect; that he
had decidedly and for ever separated from the Presbyterians; that he never frequented the churches
of the Independents; and that his allowed liberty of belief hardly consisted with the tenets of any
particular sect: but we are told that he never passed a day without private meditation and study of
the Scriptures, and that some parts of his family frequented the offices of public prayer.
(c)
This score displays Melville’s interest in Milton’s relationship to the organized religion (and
politics) of his day. Mitford takes an exculpatory tone toward Milton’s absence from church, but
one suspects Melville’s sympathies lay more with Milton than with the Rev. Mitford. In his copy
of the New Testament and the Psalms, Melville underlined the first half of Romans 14.22: “Hast
thou faith? have it to thyself before God” (MMO 274) and stated firmly in the upper margin:
“The only kind of Faith—one’s own.”
Accordingly, Melville also scored a long section of Mitford’s introduction that begins: “The
religion which he [Milton] sought was one that was not to be attached to any particular church,
to be grounded on any settled articles of belief, to be adorned with any external ceremonies. …
It was to dwell alone in its holy meditations, cloistered from the public gaze” (ci–cii). In the
margin, Melville wrote: “A singular coincidence.” The coincidence to which Melville signals a
recognition of a correspondence between his own deeply personal, agonistic relationship to
Christianity, and Milton’s.7 It seems they may at least have shared, in a way, that experience of
unshareable singularity, that “only kind of Faith—one’s own.” Melville’s alleging of this “coin-
cidence” is one of the most overt statements of the spiritual kinship he evidently felt toward
Milton, and this sense of secret kinship influenced his interpretation of Milton’s art.
6
In Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Charles Lamb expresses a nearly identical view, which Melville double scores:
“Milton, in the person of Satan, has started speculations hardier than any which the feeble armory of the atheist ever
furnished” (See Figure 4 in Olsen-Smith et al., p. 6).
7
See MMO’s commentary on p. cii for a similar usage of “coincidence” in Melville’s Spenser; that is, not in the sense of
happenstance but the sense of “to coincide.” Also see the entry for “coincidence” in the Oxford English Dictionary, senses
3a and 5: “Exact agreement or correspondence in substance, nature, character, etc.”; “Of persons: Agreement or
concurrence (in opinion or sentiment)”.
The Ironic Milton

In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Spiritual Laws,” Melville marked a passage speaking of “the
perfect intelligence that subsists between wise men of remote ages. A man cannot bury his mean-
ings so deep in his book, but time and like-minded men will find them. Plato had a secret doc-
trine, had he? What secret can he conceal from the eyes of Bacon? of Montaigne? of Kant?
Therefore Aristotle said of his works, ‘They are published and not published’” (MMO 131). He
also commented: “Bully for Emerson! –Good.” (In his engagement with Emerson, Melville often
loudly sifts the wheat from the chaff.) Melville appears to have approached Milton in a similar
way. Melville’s Milton was an “unpublished” Milton with secret doctrines and with whom he
shared the secret sympathy of wise men across the ages. Melville discerns meanings in Milton’s
poetry that contravene, in some cases, Milton’s stated intent. Whereas many readers of Milton
might attribute any such discrepancies to accident, Melville’s markings hint at a more skeptical
interpretation touching on Milton’s purpose. Lawrance Thompson describes Melville’s own
self-conscious use of irony, placing him in a “‘high-hushed’ literary tradition which included (in
different ways) such of his favorite authors as Rabelais, Montaigne, Pierre Bayle” (424). Melville
reads Milton as belonging to the same lineage. Though Thompson does not include Milton
among the ironic authors he lists, he cites a quotation from Book VII of Paradise Lost to assert
that these high-hushed writers were content if “fit audience find, though few”—a line which
Melville underlined in his own copy (1.225).
In his study of Paradise Lost, Stanley Fish claims that “the fitness of Milton’s audience” is “a
concern of the poem itself” (38). The experience of reading Paradise Lost for many includes being
swayed by Satan’s brilliant, persuasive rhetoric. From the perspective of traditional Christianity,
this persuasion resembles what transpired between Satan and Eve before the Fall. On this reading,
Milton’s poem reenacts the primal scene of temptation and disobedience in the reader’s own
psyche, and readers discover that they, too, like their first parents, are susceptible. However, Fish
argues, “Milton always supplies a corrective to the reader’s errors and distortions” with the intru-
sion of the epic voice (39). (Elsewhere he wryly refers to this alternation of entrapment and
correction as “Milton’s programme of reader harassment” [4].)
This programme did not work on Melville, or on many of the Romantics. The corrective voice
Fish identifies evidently is not so strong as to close down interpretive possibility. On the con-
trary, that Milton’s work, like Melville’s, generates divergent lines of interpretation is a testa-
ment to his ability to produce ambiguity. (Surely this influence was formative for Melville,
whose own work often issues in opposing interpretations.) As an example of the range of inter-
pretations Milton’s epic has sustained, the literary critics Northrop Frye and C.S. Lewis were
self-professed Christians, and both offered readings of Milton largely in line with Christian
orthodoxy. Others of a more heterodox persuasion, however, from many of the Romantics to
William Empson, have emphasized Milton’s heterodoxy. In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
William Blake famously remarked: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels
& God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party
without knowing it” (125). From his markings, Melville appears convinced of the same, with an
important difference: he credits Milton with intention and awareness.
At the beginning of Paradise Lost, Milton’s invocation of the Muse (or Holy Spirit) concludes
with the poet’s request: “what in me is dark / Illumine, what is low raise and support; / That, to
the highth of this great argument, / I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of
God to men” (I.22–26). The poet of Paradise Lost, then, hopes that the poem will function as a
theodicy. Melville’s markings make clear that the poem fails to produce a convincing theodicy in
his estimation. Even if we accept Melville’s judgment, surely if the task one sets before oneself is
to “justify the ways of God to men,” it is quite plausible to attribute any shortcomings to the
impossibility of the enterprise. But that is not what Melville does.
Melville insinuates that Milton’s failure to justify the ways of God may be intentional. Some
of the strongest evidence that Melville held this view comes from his response to Andrew
Marvell’s “Complimentary Verses” at the head of Paradise Lost. Marvell expresses the initial
worry that “the poet blind, yet bold” might harm the Christian myth by attempting an ambi-
tious retelling of its sacred story of creation and fall. Marvell writes: “the argument / Held me a
while misdoubting his intent, / that he would ruine…the sacred truths to Fable and old song: /
(So Samson groped the temple’s posts in spite) / The world o’erwhelming to revenge his sight”
(cxxviii). Marvell temporarily aligns the blind poet with the figure of the blind Samson, suggest-
ing a shared motivation of revenge. In these verses, the speaker worries that Milton’s rendering
of the sacred materials of Christian tradition in the form of “Fable and old song” might be akin
to Samson’s final act of heaving apart the pillars of the temple: a suicidal mission ending in the
destruction of the whole edifice—in this case, of the Christian story. A heavy charge, indeed, and
a terrible suspicion. But Marvell’s pious fear in the Verses soon gives way to a request for pardon,
and he apostrophizes Milton with the confident imprimatur: “Thou has not missed one thought
that could be fit, / And all that was improper dost omit.”
But Melville passes over Marvell’s reinforcement to piety and instead underlines, scores, and
checkmarks the initial worry. He responds to Marvell’s claim to have been “misdoubting
[Milton’s] intent” with a cheeky retort in the bottom margin: “It is still ‘misdoubted’ by some.
First impressions are generally true, too, Andrew” (cxxviii). Melville refers back to Marvell’s
“Complimentary Verses” in Samson Agonistes, a tragic drama about the very figure to which
Marvell compares Milton in his “Verses.” There Melville comments: “There is basis for the doubt
expressed by A. Marvel in his lines to Milton on the publication of the P. Lost. There was a twist
in Milton. From its place, the above marked passage has an interesting significance” (2.194).
The passage in question concerns the self-justification of Dalila to Samson. The lines that
provoke the annotation are the following: “…Not less renown’d than in Mount Ephraim / Jael,
who with inhospitable guile, / Smote Sisera sleeping through the temples nail’d” (2.194).
Dalila appeals to the Old Testament figure of Jael as a precedent for her own actions. In the
Song of Deborah, Jael is honored as “blessed among women” (Judges 5.24) for driving a tent
peg into the skull of the enemy army’s general while he slept, thereby delivering victory into
the hands of her people, the Israelites. As Jael brought her people victory through the cunning
destruction of a powerful man, so Dalila brought hers, she reasons. Just before invoking Jael,
Dalila points to the ambiguity of fame in a passage that Melville also scores: “Fame, if not
double-faced, is double-mouthed, / And with contrary blast proclaims most deeds; / On both
his wings, one black, the other white, / Bears greatest names in his wild aerie flight.” Dalila
then applies this double-edged logic explicitly to her own case: “My name, perhaps, among the
Circumcised…To all posterity may stand defamed,… / But in my country, where I most
desire,… / I shall be named among the famousest / Of women” (2.193)—just as Jael was
blessed among women in hers.
Dalila’s reasoning seems to be correct. Her case, like Satan’s in Paradise Lost, is prima facie con-
vincing, and we are seduced. How Samson manages to stand, how Jesus resists temptation in
Paradise Regained, Melville does not show signs of dwelling on; rather, he prefers the outside
challenger’s framing of the situation. The effectiveness with which Milton presents these diabol-
ical views, such that they can and do appear self-evidently true, may constitute the “twist”
Melville detects. The problem is that Melville ignores the resources the tragedy gives the reader
to resist Dalila’s and Satan’s interpretation of events (recall Fish’s contention about Paradise Lost).
In Dalila’s case, Milton establishes a tragic hierarchy of conflicting goods that can be seen to
undermine her claim. The text hints at the possibility that her loyalty is owed to her husband,
rather than her people, whom she left at marriage, as Samson reminds her (2.190). Whether or
not one accepts this claim, it is there in the text, and the text also furnishes many moments
where Dalila appears to be caught in self-contradiction as she plies her excuses. Melville, how-
ever, does not seem to take into account the wider interpretive context that might invalidate her
claims and instead finds her argument, analyzed as a piece of rhetoric, convincing.
In the case of Satan, there are places in both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained where Melville
appears to be persuaded by his rhetoric. (Perhaps it was not a hard sell.) In the interest of space,
I will not address the bulk of the instances but instead point to a small but powerful indication
of Melville’s opinion of Satan in an emendation rather than an annotation. In the passage that
begins Book II:
High on a throne of royal state…

Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d
To that bad eminence; and, from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue
Vain war with heaven; and by success untaught
His proud imaginations thus displayed.
Melville proposes altering the word order such that the penultimate line would read: “untaught
success” (1.037). This slight change in syntax profoundly alters the meaning. The original order,
“by success untaught,” means that Satan and his “proud imaginations” have not benefitted from
the instruction of success. Put simply—he has not succeeded. Melville’s syntactic reversal, how-
ever, inverts the meaning to suggest that Satan has achieved some measure of success, and this all
on his own. Melville thus reinforces and substantializes Satan’s power of self-determination—a
quality prized by Melville and the Romantics.8 Though Melville places a question mark after his
suggestion (“reverse?”), which could indicate tentativeness, he was confident enough to venture
a correction of Milton’s text. (An eagle-eyed reader, Melville habitually corrected misprints in his
editions, e.g., “ammiral” for “admiral” at 1.014.) It may be easier to suppose a typographical
error and revise a text than to revise one’s own understanding.
8
For evidence (if we require more from the creator of Ahab) that Melville valued this quality, see his [April 16, 1851]
letter to Hawthorne, in which he compares Hawthorne to “the man who, like Russia or the British Empire, 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. If any of those other Powers choose to withhold
certain secrets, let them; that does not impair my sovereignty in myself; that does not make me tributary” (Corr 186).
Note that he slips into the first person. My thanks to Steven Olsen-Smith for supplying this example.
The theological implications of Melville’s emendation are stark. In Milton’s version of the line,
Satan’s “success” is never more than hypothetical, as its immediate context—“proud imaginations”
and “vain war”—confirms. Satan has never been, and will never be, successful: the idea of a
Satanic “success” in anything more than a provisional, local skirmish like the temptation of Eve
and Adam is a theological impossibility for Milton. But apparently not for Melville, or Melville’s
reading of Milton. Melville’s small change suggests a nuanced view of Satan, but what can be said
for it? Melville’s attribution of success and glorification of Satan’s self-determination is perhaps in
keeping with the “merit raised” and “bad eminence” of the earlier lines; however, by proposing
the correction, Melville manages to exalt Satan far higher than Milton’s text does as written.
Melville’s interpretation of this scene may have been influenced by its representation in visual
art. Melville owned a reproduction of the scene as depicted in John Martin’s 1827 illustrated
edition of Paradise Lost (see Figure 19.1), and Melville displayed the print on his dining room
wall at Arrowhead, according to his granddaughter and biographer, Eleanor Melville Metcalf.9
The scene of Satan’s exaltation must have exercised a fascination for Melville, for him to own
and display such a print. The drawing presents Satan as muscular, powerful, and regal, enthroned
atop a massy orb and surrounded by innumerable followers arranged neatly in tiers, as in an
amphitheater. Perspectivally, the drawing is arranged such that the viewer is in the position of
Figure 19.1 John Martin, “Satan Exalted Sat.” Melville’s personal copy of this print is held by the Berk-
shire Athenaeum in Pittsfield, MA. The image above is from The Paradise Lost of Milton, with illustrations
designed and engraved by John Martin. London, 1827. British Library, shelfmark 643.m.18 and 643.m.19. https://
www.bl.uk/collection-items/john-martins-illustrations-for-paradise-lost-1827. Accessed 22 January 2021.
9
Personal communication cited by Henry Pommer, pp. 10–11 and n. 37.
gazing upward toward Satan, who is situated slightly above the midpoint of the frame. The
semicircular arc of the seated audience behind him mirrors the arc of the artificial lights above
and implies a full continuation around the front of Satan as well (the orb may even rotate—
unlike a podium, its shape suggests rotation). The viewer, then, is placed in the perspective of
gazing up at Satan as one of his followers—and from a low seat, at that. One can only imagine
how highly exalted Satan must have seemed from Melville’s dining room table.
Milton’s Tongue, Satan’s Mouth

In Satan’s speech to Eve in Book IX, Melville finds that even the classic scene of primal tempta-
tion fits his ironic purposes. Melville double scores Satan’s enticement of Eve to disobedience,
appealing to her sense of sovereignty: “Why then was this forbid? Why but to awe, / Why but
to keep ye low and ignorant, / His worshippers” (Melville’s underline, 1.305). Next to the
passage he places an “X” to refer to an annotation in the bottom margin. The annotation has been
recovered to read: “This is one of the many profound atheistical hits of Milton. A greater than
Lucretius, since he always teaches under a masque, and makes the Devil himself a Teacher &
Messiah.” Melville appears to be referencing Lucretius’s opposition to religio, or religion under-
stood as a binding, constricting, and limiting force. But where Lucretius’s teachings are plainly
expressed, Melville highlights the subversiveness of Milton’s making the Devil himself a
teacher—and messiah. Far from rejecting Satan’s temptation of Eve, Melville credits Satan with
enduing a healthy suspicion of God and indicting God’s motivation for constructing the universe
the way God has. As Melville likened Milton to Voltaire before, he now draws a comparison of
Milton to Lucretius, and again claims Milton exceeds the non-Christian figure in his subversion.
Melville claims Milton “teaches under a masque,” a classic trope of irony,10 apparently using the
character of Satan as a mouthpiece.
In Paradise Regained, which he did not rate as artistically successful as Paradise Lost, faulting
its close conformity to the biblical source,11 Melville articulates the view of Satan-as-mouthpiece
for Milton even more forcefully. In response to a particular phrase he writes: “Put into Satan’s
mouth, but spoken with John Milton’s tongue;—it conveys a strong controversial meaning”
(2.132). The phrase occurs in the context of Satan’s offering Jesus dominion over the world in
exchange for his worship. Jesus rebukes Satan and insists that worship belongs to God alone, the
very topic that provoked Melville’s identification of Milton’s views with Satan’s above in Paradise
Lost. Satan then tries to incite Jesus to question his divine identity by pressing on the possible
interpretive ambiguities of the title “Son of God” (a pressure which Satan will develop more fully
in the final temptation). Melville underlines Satan’s correct statement, “Though sons of God
both angels are and men” and keys his annotation to that remark, as Satan tries to convince Jesus
he is only testing him to determine “whether in higher sort / Than these thou bear’st that title”
(2.132). Here as throughout, Milton’s Satan, like Dalila, speaks truth—even citing scripture—
in the service of falsehood. This is the crucial fact of Satan’s character, in Milton as in the Christian
tradition. Satan’s statement is correct in itself, though not in the destabilizing sense in which he
10
See Wayne Booth on a widely shared view of irony in which “the reader is thought of as unmasking an eiron, or
detecting behind a ‘mask-character’ or persona the lineaments of the true speaker” (33).
11
See the final, erased and partially recovered annotation in Paradise Regained (2.150).
tries to leverage it against Jesus as the Son of God. The larger interpretative context invalidates
his claims, and his rhetoric and clever reasoning turn inward upon themselves to their own
destruction. The textual dynamic I have just described comports well with an orthodox reading
of the poem, but Melville’s reading of Milton was not orthodox.
On the contrary, Melville was most dissatisfied when Milton seemed to recapitulate a tradi-
tional “free will” defense of God as a solution to the problem of evil. In response to God’s speech
in Book X of Paradise Lost, Melville comments: “All Milton’s strength & rhetoric suffice not to
satisfy, concerning this matter—free-will. Doubtless, he must have felt it himself; & looked
upon it as the one great unavoidable flaw in his work. But, indeed, God’s alleged omnipotence
& foreknowledge, are insuperable bars to his being made an actor in any drama, imagined”
(MMO 1.328). If Melville finds Milton’s Satan convincing, he also finds Milton’s God, speaking
on God’s own behalf, unconvincing. Far from suggesting Milton’s tongue animates this speech,
Melville tries to supply Milton with an artistic excuse for his failure: God, in possession of God’s
traditional attributes (tellingly, Melville labels them “alleged” and omits “goodness” from the
triad) cannot be represented as a character in a drama, an actor among actors. Remaining within
the purview of traditional theology where free will is concerned results in an artistic miscarriage,
Melville claims—and even on this point he ascribes full cognizance to Milton.
Accordingly, in Melville’s final work of fiction, Billy Budd, Melville’s narrator does not let God
off the hook for evil. In a description of Claggart’s character, he strenuously rejects the free will
defense: “With no power to annul the elemental evil in him, tho’ readily enough he could hide it;
apprehending the good, but powerless to be it; a nature like Claggart’s … 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” (30). For which the Creator alone is responsible: the narrator places the
blame for evil in this man-of-war world squarely back on God. This passage occurs in a chapter
devoted to Claggart, a character surely influenced by Milton’s Satan. Melville did not provide many
chapter headings in this unfinished work, but he heads this chapter on Claggart’s character with a
citation from Paradise Lost: “Pale ire, envy and despair” (Chapter 12). The citation is a slight mis-
quotation, because Melville omits the commas after “pale” and “envy” in his edition. The line is not
marked in Melville’s copy (1.114), which, combined with the inaccuracies, suggests he did not
consult the original and may have instead recalled the line from memory. Or he may simply have
taken an editorial liberty to suit his purposes. Whatever the case, he applies these words spoken of
Satan’s “thrice-changed” face to Claggart. Melville thus indirectly likens Satan contemplating what
he has lost, and can never again have (“Sometimes towards Eden, which now in his view / Lay pleas-
ant, his griev’d look he fixes sad; / Sometimes towards heav’n…” MMO 1.111)—the triple passions
of ire, envy, and despair—to how Claggart feels when he gazes upon Billy.
In the chapter before the direct Milton citation, Billy Budd’s narrator informs us that “for the
adequate comprehending of Claggart by a normal nature….one must cross ‘the deadly space bet-
ween’” (27). This line is taken from Thomas Campbell’s “Battle of the Baltic,” but it, too, has a
connection to Milton, for Melville. In the Archangel Raphael’s description of the war in heaven,
ranks of opposing angels stand arrayed face to face in the moment before battle: “Twixt host and
host but narrow space was left, / A dreadful interval, and front to front / Presented stood in ter-
rible array / Of hideous length” (MMO 1.193). Next to “A dreadful interval,” which Melville
underlines, he places a mark for the annotation: “‘The deadly space between’ Campbell.” Thus a
thorough analysis of Claggart’s character would benefit from triangulating these references. At
the very least, crossing this “deadly space” must mean, if anything, that evil cannot be
understood if held at a distance. One suspects an intellectual distance; one must engage it, battle
with it, experience it, in order to comprehend it. In his book on Clarel, William Potter draws on
R.W.B. Lewis’s claim that “Melville ‘believed with Hawthorne that, in order to achieve moral
maturity, the individual had to engage evil and suffer the consequences’” (77). Potter indexes
this belief to Milton as well, as he continues:
This idea, voiced so memorably by Milton in the Areopagitica, can also be applied to Melville’s con-
cept of the spiritual or religious maturation of the individual, what Joseph Knapp has described as
the “certitude that is learned only through suffering” (37). For Melville, the spiritual can only finally
possess value when it has met and engaged evil, and for him, evil was the experience of the world.
(77)
Melville’s engagement with religion, and Christianity in particular, was agonistic and complex.
It cannot be reduced to a simple statement. But Melville’s attention to the interweaving of the-
ology and form in the poetry of John Milton provides important insights into the relationship
between his religious-philosophical worldview and his own literary production. If Melville’s
readings of Milton may be theologically suspect, they are artistically generative. According to
Jenny Franchot, “Melville’s misreadings of Christianity form the heart of his lifelong artistic
production” (158). I would add that his misreadings of Christianity extended to, and perhaps
issued in, misreadings of Milton—the figure he called “our high-priest of poetry” (R 276):
another foundational, generative source for Melville’s work, like the Christian Scriptures.
Works Cited
Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, edited Lewis, Clive Staples. A Preface to Paradise Lost: Being the
by Clark Mixon Emery. U of Miami P, 1963. Ballard Matthews Lectures Delivered at University College,
Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. U of Chicago P, 1974. North Wales, 1941. Oxford UP, 1942.
“Coincidence.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford UP, Melville, Herman. “Melville’s Marginalia in the New
2020. https://www-oed-com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard. Testament and the Book of Psalms.” Melville’s Marginalia
edu/view/Entry/36005?redirectedFrom=coincidence# Online, edited by Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg,
eid. Accessed 2 December 2020. and Dennis C. Marnon. 2 December 2020. http://
Empson, William. Milton’s God. New Directions, 1962. melvillesmarginalia.org
Fish, Stanley Eugene. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in ———. “Melville’s Marginalia in the Poetical Works of
Paradise Lost. Macmillan, 1967. John Milton, Vols. 1 and 2.” Melville’s Marginalia
Franchot, Jenny. “Melville’s Traveling God.” The Online, edited by Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg,
Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, edited by and Dennis C. Marnon. 2 December 2020. http://
Robert S. Levine. Cambridge UP, 1998, pp. 157–85. melvillesmarginalia.org
Frye, Northrop. The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s ———. “Melville’s Marginalia in Ralph Waldo
Epics. U of Toronto P, 1965. Emerson’s Essays: First Series.” Melville’s Marginalia
Grey, Robin, editor. Melville & Milton: An Edition and Online, edited by Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg,
Analysis of Melville’s Annotations on Milton. Duquesne and Dennis C. Marnon. 11 September 2020. http://
UP, 2004. melvillesmarginalia.org
Norberg, Peter, and Anna Lendacky. “‘If Not Equal All, Pommer, Henry F. Milton and Melville. U of Pittsburgh P,
Yet Free’: Political Freedom and Theological Doubt in 1950.
Melville’s Reading of Milton.” Leviathan: A Journal of Potter, William. Melville’s Clarel and the Intersympathy of
Melville Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, June 2018, pp. 68–89. Creeds. Kent State UP, 2004.
Olsen-Smith, Steven, Dennis C. Marnon, Christopher Thompson, Lawrance. Melville’s Quarrel with God.
Ohge, and Nathan Spann. “Melville’s Marginalia in Princeton UP, 1952.
Marlowe’s Dramatic Works and in Selections from Torrance, Justina. “Introduction to Melville’s Marginalia in The
Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets.” Leviathan: Poetical Works of John Milton.” Melville’s Marginalia Online, edited
A Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, October by Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C.
2008, pp. 82–109. Marnon, forthcoming. http://melvillesmarginalia.org
20
Genre, Race, and the Printed Book
Katie McGettigan
On March 16, 1850, as Herman Melville was beginning a new work about a whaling voyage, the
Literary World, a New York literary magazine, published his review of a new edition of James
Fenimore Cooper’s The Red Rover as “A Thought on Book-Binding.” Rather than evaluating the
text, Melville spends most of his review complaining that the choice of binding––a “sober hued
muslin”––was unfit for a maritime adventure. Instead he proposes a binding of “flame-colored
morocco,” or of “jet black” with “a square of blood-colored bunting on the back, imprinted with
the title” (PT 237). In judging this book by its cover, Melville both has his tongue in his cheek
and is quite serious. He focuses on the binding to poke fun at the pointlessness of reviewing a
well-known novel of 1827, but also to argue that books matter––that books are material objects
that have an expressive potential of their own.
Across his fiction and poetry, Melville attends to the materiality of print: to the book as an
object, and to its manufacture and circulation. A grieving Wellingborough Redburn caresses the
morocco binding of his late father’s guidebook, and sleeps on a copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth
of Nations. Clarel sees that the trunk he carries to Jerusalem is “trimmed, in cheaper way, / With
printed matter” (Clarel 1.2.103–4). In Moby-Dick, Ishmael describes the “musty” smell of whal-
ing books (MD 445). But more than writing about print, Melville wrote with print, finding a
source of creative energy in the nineteenth-century industrial book. While print might seem to
give a text its final and fixed form, Melville prefigured what the book historian David McKitterick
would later observe, that “the most arresting quality of the printed word and image is that they
are simultaneously fixed, and yet endlessly mobile” (222). Indeed, the tension between the fixity
of a single copy and the mobility created by print reproducibility is central to the creative pos-
sibilities that Melville finds in print.
Through the entangled aesthetics and politics of his engagements with the printed book,
Melville experiments with genre and examines the production of racial difference. In Typee, he
Genre, Race, and the Printed Book 249
uses metaphors of and analogies with print to create narrative irony and unsettle the text’s self-
presentation as travel writing. As Tommo seeks to fix the Pacific in place via his mental impres-
sions, Melville suggests that the (re)production of printed impressions made authentic accounts
impossible. Melville also embeds the materiality of print in the complex racial dynamics of Typee,
a text that both employs and subverts travel writing’s white gaze, questioning white supremacy
while, ultimately, reinforcing the binary understanding of race that underpinned slavery. Typee is
thus in dialogue with an antebellum US culture in which print materiality reflected and
reinforced racial hierarchies. Specific print artefacts materialized and weaponized racial difference,
such as stock woodcuts of runaway slaves that refused Black individualism and were exhibited
alongside, and thus equated with, images of other goods in printers’ sheets of trade icons (Wood
88–89). More fundamentally, print creates legibility from an absolute distinction between black
type and a white page, which, as Jonathan Senchyne argues, “impl[ied] the possibility of ‘reading’
bodies in relation to one another;” black typed characters shared and reinforced the hypervisibil-
ity of Black persons and their characters, while paper embodied the invisibility of whiteness, by
making type visible without itself drawing the reader’s eye (“Bottles of Ink” 142). Melville
continued to draw upon these intimacies between race and the material text as he moved beyond
travel writing, using print to explore the production of whiteness, to criticize assumptions about
the legibility of Black characters, and to destabilize racial categorization itself in Moby-Dick, The
Confidence-Man, and “Benito Cereno.”
As well as providing a fresh perspective on his interventions into the problem of race in the
United States, analyzing Melville’s literary uses of print challenges a long-standing perception of
Melville as an embattled and embittered author, struggling against a literary marketplace that
shunned his works, and against the printed book as a commodity that constrained authorial
expression.1 This narrative, however, neglects Melville’s persistent pursuit of the expressive mate-
riality of print.2 When he could no longer make a living from writing alone, Melville still gave
meticulous instructions for the printing of a projected volume of verse in 1860, and self-funded
the publication of his poetry from Clarel onwards. Alongside the Melville who complained to
Nathaniel Hawthorne that “dollars damn me; and the malicious [printer’s] Devil is forever grin-
ning in upon me,” was the Melville who advised his first British publisher John Murray to
package Mardi “in handsome style, & independently of any series,” and the Melville who joked
with the Literary World’s editor Evert Duyckinck about rebinding the same book in “in a bit of
old parchment (from some old Arabic M.S.S. on Astrology)” so that its outside might better fit
its contents (Corr 191, 114, 154). Looking beyond assumptions about Melville’s rejection of
nineteenth-century print culture and considering the ways that Melville’s writing was enmeshed
in its own publishing moment, we can map new connections between Melville and his contem-
poraries and find new pathways through his texts.3
Melville wrote during a period in which changes to the manufacture, distribution, and con-
sumption of printed books in the United States drew particular attention to the material text:
writers and readers looked at books, as well as reading their texts. Tourists viewed the fascinating
1
For examples of such readings, see: Evelev, Gilmore, Kearns.
2
For other recent challenges to this narrative, see Peter Riley, who suggests that Melville questioned the Emersonian
ideal of an exceptional author genius (79–98), and Graham Thompson, who argues that Melville thrived when he
embedded himself in the material and generic forms of magazines (8–13).
3
See also Graham Thompson’s Chapter 21 in this Companion, “Melville and Periodical Culture”.
250 Katie McGettigan
and intricate machinery of newly industrialized paper mills: Melville himself visited Carson’s
paper mill in Dalton, Massachusetts, in 1851 while residing at Arrowhead, using the trip as
inspiration for the second half of “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” Printing
and bookbinding were also mechanized, and books, pamphlets, and articles described these
developments and reflected on their possible impacts on literary writing. George Palmer Putnam,
a partner in the firm that published Typee, celebrated the growth of the US print market as a
proxy for the development of American literature, boasting that “editions [of American books]
are usually larger than in England, and oftener repeated” (83). In contrast, Henry David Thoreau
believed that the clamours of an expanding reading public engendered the too-rapid creation of
bad books, like a production line gone wrong. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
(1849), which Melville read in 1850, Thoreau complained that “paper is cheap, and authors need
not now erase one book before they write another […] Books are for the most part wilfully and
hastily written, as parts of a system, to supply a want real or imagined” (97).4 If commentators
disagreed about whether print modernity fuelled a burst of American creativity or generated
heaps of printed trash, they did agree that printed books of the mid-nineteenth century were
very different objects from the handpress books of a generation before.5
In observing that authors no longer needed to “erase one book before they write another,”
Thoreau gestures toward one of the most important changes to the printing process: the inven-
tion and adoption of stereotyping. Type was expensive and printers had limited supplies, so,
traditionally, the printer produced an edition before disassembling the type so they could print
their next job. If they printed another edition of the same title, they would reset the type: few
books were consistently popular and profitable enough to justify being kept in standing type.
Stereotyping enabled a printer to preserve a typesetting, by making a flexible mould of the type,
from which a metal plate was cast. These plates could be stored so that when (or if) a new edition
was required, the publisher could produce it quickly.
By preserving the text between printings, stereotyping promised an end to variant editions,
but it may have actually made variants more common. Because publishers could reprint a text
quickly from stereotype plates, they could reduce financial risk by issuing smaller first editions.
This practice enabled publishers to permit––or compel––an author to make revisions before the
second printing. At the same time, copyright law and conventions of US print culture meant
that, as print culture scholar Lara Langer Cohen argues, “print was more likely to invest ante-
bellum texts with mobility than to fasten them in place” (7). Due to the lack of a functioning
international copyright agreement between the United States and Britain, British and American
authors sometimes saw their works reprinted in unauthorized and adapted editions across the
Atlantic. Even within the United States, articles from one periodical were frequently reprinted
in others, and book reviews habitually quoted long passages from the works under consideration.
A book, or portions of it, could therefore circulate simultaneously in different forms and con-
texts, thwarting the notion of a singular and fixed printed text.
These unstable and mobile printed copies posed a problem for travel writing, the genre with
which Melville was associated in his early career. Innes M. Keighran, Charles W.J. Withers. and
Bill Bell observe that travel books are not “simply repositories of geographical knowledge” but
“contested objects of reputational and epistemic construction” (222–23). A travel book’s cultural
4
For the record of Melville’s borrowing of Thoreau, see Sealts No. 524, Melville’s Marginalia Online.
5
For more detail on changes to the manufacture, distribution, and reading of books, see: Casper.
and market value was directly linked to the accuracy and authenticity of its text: readers wanted
to be enthralled and amazed by accounts of exotic locales, but they also wanted to be sure that
those accounts were true. A well-printed book that circulated widely was a just reward for the
author of an authentic account. At the same time, however, that printed book testified to a nar-
rative’s authority and value. To establish the legitimacy of a travel book, publishers included
accompanying maps and diagrams (which added costs to publication and promised empirical
accuracy) and commissioned expensive bindings that suggested permanent usefulness. Travel
authors further sought the legitimizing imprint of firms like John Murray, the London publisher
of Typee; as Keighran, Withers, and Bell observe, “print itself could act as a guarantor of authority,
not least when it issued from the house of Murray” (14). Yet these print copies were themselves
products of the technologies and economies that were destabilizing texts through the circulation
of extracts in reviews, magazines, and newspapers, and the rapid production of variant editions,
in the forms of unauthorized transatlantic reprints, luxury travel books reissued as cheap paper-
backs, and new editions promising extra illustrations, maps, or other material. With multiple
editions of a text in circulation, where was the authentic account?
Typee posed a particular threat to the association between the venerable Murray imprint and
authentic travel writing. John Murray III (then head of his family’s publishing house) suspected
the book to be, at least in part, a fiction. To placate him, Melville promised to send “one or two
original documents, evidencing the incredible fact, that I have actually been a common sailor
before the mast in the Pacific,” but actually supported his claims by creating variant copies of his
own book (Corr 105). Following Murray’s British edition and Wiley and Putnam’s first American
edition (based on the British edition), a second American edition appeared with expurgations
(including the excision of an entire chapter) as well as a new appendix, “The Story of Toby”––
Melville’s rewriting of a letter by his shipmate and the model for Typee’s Toby, Richard Tobias
Greene, that professed to testify to the narrative’s authenticity. Melville assured Murray that
Greene’s letter had ended speculation about Typee’s origins: “the impression which Toby’s letter
has produced is this––ie––that every thing about it bears the impress of truth” (Corr 55). Like a
steam-powered press, Melville issued a flurry of mutually supportive impressions to strengthen
his claims about the authenticity of his narrative.
However, Melville made some of the changes and omissions to the second American edition
under pressure from John Wiley, who had always been uncomfortable with Typee’s sensuous pas-
sages and its criticisms of Christianity and Western society. These changes further distanced
Typee from its “authentic” origins, and removed exoticizing details of the Pacific that reviewers
often took as evidence of truthful testimony. As such, the second version that was supposed to
shore up the text’s generic status further called its truthfulness into question. Nor was this the
end of Typee’s publication history. Melville purchased the stereotype plates of the Putnam edition
in January 1849, in order to transfer the book to the Harper Brothers, who published his books
from Omoo to Pierre: the Harpers issued their edition of Typee in June 1849. Melville defended
Typee as an authentic account, but the book’s print history exemplifies a fluid text, as John Bryant
terms the evolving nature of textuality, which betrays the notion of a single, authoritative ver-
sion of the story (45).
While Melville could not have foreseen Typee’s complex textual history, the text anticipates
that history by playing out a conflict between Tommo’s investment in print as a fixative medium,
and Melville’s understanding of print’s potential to destabilize a text. Tommo employs an
association between truth and fixed impressions––a term that encompasses mental pictures and
print materiality––to support his claims about his experiences, establishing authenticity through
metaphors of print. He presents his mental impressions of Nukuhiva as permanent and
unchanging. Describing Tior Bay, Tommo claims that “the impression produced upon my mind,
when I first visited this beautiful glen, will never be obliterated” (T 28). Similarly, the island’s
waterfalls will “ever be vividly impressed upon my mind” (45), and “vividly is impressed upon
my mind every minute feature of the scene” in the Typee village in which he is held captive
(243). He further relies on print to justify his decision to desert the Dolly, citing a newspaper
report as proof of the captain’s relentless voyaging in pursuit of profit: “but a few days since I saw
her reported in the papers as having touched at the Sandwich Islands previous to going on the
coast of Japan” (23). Tommo here adopts a strategy that Melville himself would later pursue:
when trying to assuage Murray’s doubts about the narrative, he sent clippings from local news-
papers in support of his claims.
Yet shortly before he uses newspapers to fix the voyages of the Dolly, Tommo describes varia-
tions in printed impressions of the Pacific, “those unstable islands in the far Pacific, whose eccen-
tric wanderings are carefully noted in each new edition of the South-Sea charts” (T 22). Melville’s
critique of the truth-claims of maps––a theme to which he would return in Moby-Dick and “The
Encantadas”––is also a critique of print’s claims to stabilize knowledge: each new impression
makes the islands more “unstable.” The American first edition of Typee supported his point, by
participating in this geographical muddling. Reproducing the map that John Murray included
in the British edition, Wiley and Putnam’s less-than-precise printing left ink blots that an
unsuspecting reader might mistake for islands. Indeed, Melville’s uses of print in Typee unsettle
the assumptions about print as a fixative medium that underpinned Tommo’s narrative and
travel writing more broadly. Tommo first concedes that he entered the valley “under the most
erroneous impressions of [the Typees’] character” and no longer believes them to be bloodthirsty
savages, although he later changes his mind again about their cannibalism (203). An ironic dis-
tance develops between Tommo’s faith in fixative impressions, and Melville’s complex under-
standing of the destabilizing effects of print’s reproducibility. This narrative mode also works
against the generic conventions of empiricist travel writing in the Murray tradition, which
assumes the narrator is a transparent conduit for information. Through his manipulations of
print, Melville suggests that the Pacific is resistant to the kind of knowledge-making in which
Murray specialized, and, instead, only reveals itself in the inbetweenness and hiddenness of ironic
discourse: a mode that resonates with the “slight glimpse” that Tommo eventually obtains of
possibly-human bones stripped of their flesh (238).
The Typees’ resistance to Tommo’s scrutiny subverts expectations of nineteenth-century travel
writing, which habitually reinforced the superiority of the white male gaze of the traveler, who
surveyed and explicated exotic locales. As Mary Louise Pratt argues in her classic study of impe-
rialism and travel writing, “the conventions of travel and exploration writing (production and
reception) constitute the European subject as a self-sufficient, monadic source of knowledge”
(136). Travel writing worked hand in hand with imperialism, “rhetorically justif[ying] the
unequal distribution of power between Europe and the rest of the world,” Douglass Ivison
observes, reinforcing the achievements of white, Western nations and confirming the white nar-
rator’s command, in language at least, of a non-white culture (116). Typee’s criticism of Western
missionaries and praise of indigenous life is, therefore, unusual for the genre. Yet while Tommo
tries out an indigenous perspective––a vocalization of the Other that is both an act of sympathy
and an act of control––he remains protective of and invested in his own whiteness. Melville
exposes the conflicts created by Tommo’s shifting perspective through further ironic engage-
ments with print that materialize the Black/white binary that Tommo both crosses and enforces.
Through metaphors and analogies with type and paper, Melville exposes how Tommo’s manipu-
lation of black marks and white surfaces preserves his own whiteness, and white supremacy.
Even as Tommo’s flirtations with indigenous life and indigenous people undoubtedly aided
the popularity of Typee, publication in Murray’s and Wiley and Putnam’s series confirmed the
narrator’s white gaze. Originally titled the Colonial and Home Library, Murray’s series promised
to deliver valuable works to the Empire’s outposts, strengthening the metropole’s cultural con-
trol. Wiley and Putnam’s Library of American Literature associated the nascent national tradi-
tion with domestic imperialism and white settlement in the American South and West, through
the inclusion of works by James Hall, Caroline Kirkland, and William Gilmore Simms. Beyond
the politics of individual series, the medium of print itself reinforced racial boundaries and hier-
archies through “techniques that graphically instantiate notions of white transparency and black
markedness,” Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein observe (11). In the nineteenth
century, as today, print made meaning legible through an absolute contrast between black ink
and white paper, that can be mapped onto an absolute separation of Black and white people. As
Brigitte Fielder observes, “the technology of racial representation in black-and-white […]
obscures non dualistic racial gradation,” reinforcing racial segregation and denying the existence
of mixed-race people (148). Moreover, although both paper and ink are necessary for legible text,
readers generally attend to the black text and ignore the white paper. As such, in the racial
economy of nineteenth-century America, print reinforced the position that whiteness, like paper,
was the primary, unmarked state and Blackness was its marked Other. Melville’s writings show
that he understood this racialization of print. In “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of
Maids,” the narrator’s tongue slips during his visit to the mysterious paper mill, and nearly says
that the mill produces white faces (cheeks) as it manufactures white paper: “so strange that red
waters should turn out pale chee–– paper, I mean” (PT 329). Similarly, in Pierre, Lucy Tartan’s
unblemished whiteness resists any translation into ink, when the narrator rhetorically asks “who
shall put down the charms of Lucy Tartan upon paper?” (25), while Isabel, who is repeatedly
described as “dark” and whose origins and race remain obscure, cries tears that mingle with ink
so that the latter looks like blood, echoing a wider cultural merging of bodies and pages.6
Melville’s explorations of the intimacies of print and race begin in Typee. The embedding of
the word “type” in “Typee”––which became the hinge of a James Russell Lowell joke about
dealing with printers, as Elizabeth Renker has shown (12)––positions Tommo as an ideal sheet
of paper. He is a white surface that can bear impressions of the Typee, making them legible to
others while his own whiteness, like the unmarked space between the characters, remains intact.
For all that Tommo enjoys what Mita Banerjee calls his “ethnic ventriloquism”––practicing local
customs, praising Typee life, and adopting the name “Tommo”––he never leaves whiteness
behind to achieve true empathy with the indigenous population (214–215). Indeed, Jeffrey
Santa Ana observes that Tommo’s decision to jump ship and live on the island stems less from a
desire to go native, than a specifically white American desire to “reclaim an autonomy lost in the
grinding exploitation of capitalism” (91). That Tommo jumps ship to preserve whiteness, as
6
For nineteenth-century associations between paper and the female body, and wider cultural familiarity with papermaking,
see: Senchyne 2019.
much as to cross racial barriers, is echoed in the black and white print of the newspaper that he
cites in support of his decision, which materially manifests racial divisions between bodies that
can and cannot access mobility and freedom under white supremacy.
Visiting the Typee also puts Tommo’s whiteness at risk as his skin becomes a desirable surface
for the “indelible impression” of their tattooing, although that desire is, of course, articulated by
Tommo himself (218). Melville links tattooing to printing when Tommo compares Kory-Kory’s
body to “an illustrated copy of ‘Goldsmith’s Animated Nature’” (83), and describes a tattooist’s
tools as resembling pieces of type: “their points disposed in small figures, and being placed upon
the body, were, by a single blow of the hammer, made to leave their indelible impression” (218).
The permanence of impressions, on which Tommo has previously relied, becomes a source of fear,
as Tommo believes that he will be “disfigured in such a manner as never more to have the face to
return to my countrymen” (218). Tommo’s anxieties about his face, and language of racial mix-
ing when he imagines the artist “engrafting […] tattooing on my white skin” suggest a fear that
tattooing would compromise his whiteness. But Melville’s connecting of tattooing and printing
means that “face” also evokes typefaces (especially as the word itself is printed in italics in
Murray’s edition) and signals concerns about non-white peoples controlling print. In a white
supremacist economy, being white requires that one’s own body is unmarked, and that one has
the power to designate Other, non-white bodies as marked and legible. As Frantz Fanon argued
in his study of identity, race and imperialism, “not only must the black man be black; he must
be black in relation to the white man” (82–83). The prospect of the Typees marking a white sur-
face and creating the print and racial legibility that Tommo believes to be under his command
frightens Melville’s narrator.
Tommo’s inability to neatly classify the Typee as either Black or white fuels his fears about
their mark-making abilities. In earlier, less anxious passages, he associates them with the white-
ness of paper, bolstering his praise of their society and justifying his own freedoms in mixing
with them. Tommo observes that many Typees “present profiles classically beautiful” (184)––
that is, like the European classical sculptures that Melville would primarily have encountered
through printed representations, where the whiteness of the page substituted for marble. In
addition to their paper-like complexions, the Typees’ only real industry––making tappa cloth
from mulberry tree bark––is very much like the manufacture of rag paper, a process with which
Melville and his contemporary readers would have been familiar. Like rag paper-making, tappa-
making involves creating pulp, moulding it into sheets, and beating it “to any degree of thinness
required,” before letting it dry (148). The end product is, like paper, a material “of dazzling
whiteness,” a color that Tommo describes as “the natural tint,” othering the “rich brown” and
“bright yellow” that the tappa are otherwise dyed (148).
However, the Typees cannot establish this “dazzling whiteness” as a neutral background
because “the art of printing the tappa is unknown upon the Marquesan islands” (148): they
cannot create the juxtaposition of black and white that reinforces racial divisions between Black
and white and produces whiteness. Indeed, it is through Tommo’s mental and printed impres-
sions of the island that the Typee are inducted into this Western understanding of race as a
binary. In contrast, Tommo and Toby carry “calico print” with them as a gift with which they
hope to curry favor with the indigenous population (42). Tommo, therefore, advertises his con-
trol over impressions, and over their production of race, long before he becomes the narrator of a
travel narrative, as he captures the Typees with printed cloth in a step toward later capturing
them in print. The only physical impressions that the Typees produce are their tattoos, which
compromise their possible whiteness by rendering them marked. Tattooing thus poses no threat
to Tommo’s own impressions of the Typee and his print-race logic, until they propose to tattoo
Tommo himself. It is at this moment that Tommo feels compelled to leave the island, end his
performance of Otherness, and re-establish racial boundaries. But by threading the language and
logic of print throughout Tommo’s account, Melville implies that Tommo never truly aban-
doned the hierarchies of white supremacy, and the binary understanding of race on which they
are based.
It is possible, then, to read Typee as a novel that criticizes the twinned logics of race and print.
Melville undermines Tommo’s narrative and, in particular, his promises to subvert the white
gaze by revealing Tommo’s imaginative investment in printed forms that reinforce the racial
binaries he claims to be subverting. However, Typee’s ironic narrative means that Melville artic-
ulates the ideologies of white supremacy in the process of deconstructing them. Tommo’s cri-
tique of Western missionaries’ contamination of the Pacific and his celebration of Typee life
contrast ironically with his casual construction of racial hierarchies that place the “European cast
of [the Typees’] features” above “the dark-haired Hawaiians and the woolly-headed Feejees,” ulti
mately placing Europeans above all (184). But the double-speak of Melville’s ironic narrative
means that Typee voices white supremacist thinking, even as it invites us to roll our eyes at
Tommo’s inconsistencies. Nor does Melville abandon or suggest a replacement for the intimacies
between race and print, even as he exposes how travel writing’s production of black (print) char-
acters and Black characters sustains whiteness. Indeed, Tommo is allowed to leave the Typee with
his whiteness intact, having preserved his sole ability to create impressions and mark otherness,
reinforcing his racial superiority by tossing more cloth to the Typees as he departs. The result is
a text that is far from black-and-white in its navigation of racial politics through print.
However, Typee is only the beginning of Melville’s evolving uses of print to navigate race. Its
incomplete critique of whiteness and white supremacy are the seeds of the more expansive
challenge to race as a legible index that Melville pursues through print in later works. In some
of these works, books make meaning outside of the contrast between black and white, and in
ways that call attention to the limitations of racial binaries for categorizing humanity. In others,
Melville uses the materiality of print to imagine Black characters as resistant to legibility, gen-
erating resonances with radical uses of print by Black writers.
In Moby-Dick, the material text cements Queequeg and Ishmael’s emerging friendship, and
prompts Ishmael to rethink racial hierarchies. After their first companionable night together,
Ishmael returns to the Spouter Inn to find Queequeg inspecting a book: “placing it on his lap
[he] began counting the pages with deliberate regularity” (49). Queequeg’s unorthodox naviga-
tion of print signifies his Otherness. Queequeg is so unacquainted with the technology of the
codex that he gives a “long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment” at the number of pages
while ignoring the text altogether (49). Yet watching Queequeg’s “nonreading,” to use book
historian Leah Price’s term, prompts a meditation from Ishmael that challenges the intimacies of
print and race that define Queequeg as Other (8). As Queequeg counts the pages, Ishmael
remarks that his bedfellow is “savage,” but also observes that he “reminded me of General
Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him […] Queequeg was George Washington
cannibalistically developed” (50). Ishmael’s intersection of visual art and phrenology limits the
radicalism of the imagined racial mixing, relying as it does on an “American way of looking” that
presupposes and confirms white supremacy, as Christine Yao has argued in relation to “Benito
Cereno” (136). Nevertheless, Ishmael does go beyond Tommo in imagining that George
Washington could cannibalistically develop, suggesting a transgression of racial boundaries that

Tommo flirts with, but anxiously withdraws from by Typee’s end. Queequeg shows Ishmael how
books can make meaning outside of print’s contrast between black and white, and Ishmael at
least considers how the Black/white racial binary might collapse.
Although Ishmael then attempts to teach Queequeg the Western way to read a book––“to
explain to him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures that were in
it”––it is Ishmael’s way of reading print and race that are transformed in this encounter (51).
First, Ishmael adopts Queequeg’s object-first method of engaging with print, when constructing
his “Bibliographical system” for classifying whales. In this system, Ishmael groups each type of
whale in relation to a size of printed book: Folio, Octavo, and Duodecimo. By favoring material
book over text, Ishmael implicitly rejects a contrast between black and white as a mode of
classification, instead praising the system that enables Ishmael to “take hold of the whales bodily,
in their entire liberal volume” through a pun on the capaciousness of the material text (140).
Though his system remains incomplete, this incompleteness resonates with Melville’s recogni-
tion of the generative instabilities of print: just as the multiplicity and reproducibility of print
resist completion, a classification based on print must similarly be unfinished. Second, if the
book itself is a source of meaning, then whiteness can no longer recede, invisible, like paper
behind a text, as Ishmael’s intense focus on whiteness in Chapter 42 demonstrates. Concluding
with the assertion that whiteness is a “visible absence” and a “dumb blankness, full of meaning,”
Ishmael suggests that readers give the same attention to whiteness that they give to the print
markings through which he communicates its intricacies (195).
Melville’s final novel, The Confidence-Man, begins with an inversion of black text on white
pages, as the deaf-mute displays a slate on which he repeatedly erases and rewrites maxims about
charity. The reader is thus inducted into a world where all texts, including the novel itself, are
unstable, and print can no longer stabilize racial categories or differences. Shortly afterward, the
man with the wooden leg accuses the beggar Black Guinea of being “some white operator,
betwisted and painted up for a decoy,” and Guinea is asked if he has “any documentary proof, any
plain paper about him, attesting that his case was not a spurious one” (13–14). This proposed
paper would substitute for a person who could “speak a good word” for Guinea: while the
Episcopal clergyman does not specify that this person should be white, the implied contrast bet-
ween this “good word” and Guinea’s own dialect speech reinforces this assumption (13). Guinea
offers an ambiguous list of supporters, but he has no “plain paper.” Indeed, how could paper be
both “plain”––that is, unmarked––and also document the ways in which Guinea’s body is
marked by race and disability? The questioning of Guinea’s racial identity suggests that the
Fidele is a space in which the black-white binary of print and Black-white binary of race are far
from stable.7 Even when the collector for widows and orphans returns to print metaphors in his
efforts to support Guinea––describing him as one “upon whom nature has placarded the evi-
dence of [his] claims”––the most immediate referent of “placarded” is the wanted placard of the
7
As Carolyn Karcher observes, if there is only one confidence man then the ambiguity of Guinea’s racial identity
destabilizes the racial identity of all the possible confidence men: “Is the Black Rapids man (for example) a white man
who earlier masqueraded as a black, or a black man now masquerading as a white? There is no way of knowing, and that
is precisely the point. Nothing could more radically discredit the concept of race” (220).
opening chapter that embodies the deception that it seems to warn against and distracts the
passengers whose pockets are being picked (29).
The novel’s repeated associations of print and deception lead Cohen to argue that Melville
attacks the press as “another of the novel’s confidence men,” exemplifying wider antebellum anx-
ieties about the fraudulence of material print and literary texts (175). But here, Melville’s target
is not print itself but those who seek fixity in print––be that the fixity of a text itself, or the
fixity of race. Rather than attributing power to print’s contrast between black and white, The
Confidence-Man locates the expressive potential of print in its characteristic reproducibility.
Formally and structurally, the novel luxuriates in repetitions, from the similar conversations bet-
ween the (possible) confidence men and their marks, to the staccato strings of repeated syllables
uttered by several of the characters, that seem to echo the clattering of an industrial press as they
mimic its reproductive action: “oh, oh, oh!,” “dear, dear, dear!,” “you, you, you!,” “yes, yes, yes”
(116, 115, 125, 126). What emerges from these repetitions is not a single, fixed text but a novel
that has, since its publication, resisted interpretation, such that critics cannot agree if the novel
contains one confidence man, many confidence men, or none at all. Just as they cannot fix the
identity of the confidence man, or even a coherent message of the text, paper and ink cannot sta-
bilize racial identities or divisions.
Melville’s most direct use of print materiality to address the legibility of race comes in “Benito
Cereno,” where he uses metaphors of black (textual) characters to question assumptions about the
legibility of Black characters. It is Captain Amasa Delano’s misreading that produces the story’s
aesthetic effects. Delano, a New Englander, is blinded by a romantic racism that assumes Black
people are naturally subservient. He thus fails to see that the San Dominick is the scene of a slave
uprising, and that the Spanish captain, Benito Cereno, is being controlled by his former cargo of
Black men and women. Delano turns to print metaphors as he seeks a reason for Cereno’s failure
to meet the expectations of white masculinity through his weakness and absence of fraternal
feeling. Unable to decide whether Cereno is feigning illness to conceal “savage energies,” whether
he is a lunatic, or whether these are “ungenerous” accusations of a real invalid, Delano resolves
that “to the Spaniard’s black-letter text, it was best, for awhile, to leave open margin” (PT 65).
Delano assumes that Cereno’s Hispanic off-whiteness makes him legible both to and against a
true white American like Delano himself. Yet Cereno becomes legible as Black––that is, his for-
merly transparent whiteness becomes visible and marked––only when Delano struggles to inter-
pret his actions. The metaphor’s “black-letter text” thus exposes Delano’s misplaced assumptions
about his ability to read Black characters, and, indeed, about the legibility of Blackness itself,
ironically anticipating his failure to comprehend the real state of affairs on board the ship.
In the concluding section of the story, the materiality of print embodies the illegibility of the
uprising’s Black leaders to Delano, and their subsequent refusal to explain their actions. The
most striking part of Benito Cereno’s edited, rather dry deposition is not the text, but the aster-
isks that punctuate it. The asterisk is perhaps the closest that a printed character can get to pure
materiality, because, in its most common usage, an asterisk marks a refusal of textual significa-
tion. Asterisks usually convey that certain passages are unimportant, that readers are prohibited
from accessing passages, or even that they need to be protected from the contents. Yet rather than
encouraging readers to look away, Melville’s asterisks draw the eye. A legible marker of illegi-
bility and the presence of an absence, the asterisks encourage and resist interpretation, and so
anticipate and materially manifest Babo’s final refusal to speak. The asterisks thus demand
attention to the text’s significant silences around race—the unspoken assumptions that propel
Delano’s misreadings, the motivations for Babo’s violence—rather than allowing them to evade
uncomfortable truths. As such, “Benito Cereno”’s asterisks operate like the dashes in Sketch
Eight of “The Encantadas,” which, Hester Blum argues, itemize the unnamed rapes suffered by
the Chola widow, Hunilla. Echoing the “notches” on a reed that Hunilla uses to counts her days
spent shipwrecked and that resemble “alphabets of the blind” (PT 157), these dashes signify
both sexual violence and the violence perfomed on texts when such violence is censored: “rather
than obscuring accountable facts of sexual violence, Melville invites even the blind to navigate
the ‘alphabet’ represented by the dashes” (Blum 269).
However, not all of the deposition’s asterisks function in the same way, as Marcy Dinius
argues: while the strings of five represent omissions, the asterisks in twos and threes are indexes
that draw attention to moments in which the enslaved Black people on board the San Dominick
show themselves to be “fully capable of conceiving of and desiring freedom, and of taking revo-
lutionary action to gain it.”8 Melville’s use of print materiality to resist racial stereotyping is
unusual for white authors of the antebellum period, although less so for Black authors. Dinius
finds a precedent for Melville’s use of punctuation to resist white supremacy in the “radical
typography” of David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1848), in which Walker
uses increasing strings of exclamation marks to visualize his growing anger at suggestions that
Black people were inferior to whites (Dinius 2011). However, Walker’s Appeal is not the only
Black literature with which the deposition of “Benito Cereno” resonates. Melville’s editorializing
asterisks further resemble Mary Ann Shadd’s use of asterisks to sign her editorials in the Provincial
Freeman, a Canadian newspaper that publicized the activities of self-emancipated Americans who
crossed the Northern border. As Jim Casey notes in an essay on Shadd’s signature, “it was pre-
cisely the opaque quality of the asterisk, its very deficit of information, that enabled her to speak
frankly without fear of direct personal reprisal” (115). Melville finds a similar productive resis-
tance in the asterisk, although its “opaque quality” suggests Babo’s radical refusal to speak,
rather than enabling radical speech. Furthermore, Melville’s transformation of the testimony of
an enslaver that convicted self-emancipated Black people, into an anti-slavery document through
print reproduction, recontextualization, and editing resembles uses of print by Frederick
Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, who reprinted and edited similar documents in their slave narra-
tives to argue for Black peoples’ capacity for self-governance.9
It is not clear whether or not Melville knew the writings of any or all of these Black abolitionists,
although his documented familiarity with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau suggests that he was
at least exposed to some abolitionist ideas.10 Nevertheless, he shares their sense of freedom in the
covert expressive potential of print. Melville understood how print could enforce racial hierarchies,
but also work against its dominant logic of visible blackness against an invisible white backdrop,
8
Marcy J. Dinius, “Punctuation and Race: Reading the Asterisks in ‘Benito Cereno,’” unpublished manuscript.
9
Douglass reprinted a letter from a A.C.C. Thompson, a white man who knew Douglass when he was enslaved and
claimed that Douglass could not possibly have written his book: Douglass himself claimed that this letter showed his
development after his self-emancipation and, therefore, how slavery limited Black people. For Jacobs, reprinting the
documents of her enslavement, see Sommers.
10
Robert K. Wallace has argued for “traces” of Douglass in Melville’s work and makes it clear that Douglass knew
Melville’s (56–116).
in order to express calls for Black humanity and freedom. While there has been important work on
Melville’s connections to Douglass, these correspondences between uses of print by Melville and
Black abolitionists suggest the need to further examine Melville’s aesthetic connections and debts
to Black and anti-slavery literature.11 Tracing these engagements with print materiality also rein-
forces that Melville’s thinking about race, and about how to represent racial difference in and with
print, changed across his lifetime. Melville’s aesthetic experiments with print are always politically
engaged. Melville’s play with genre boundaries and awareness of the imprecise mechanisms of print
reproducibility show the interpretative possibilities that open up when we leave behind narratives
of Melville’s rejection by and of print and print culture, and attend to the ways in which he uses the
printed book as a source of creativity. The uses of print explored in this essay are only one facet of
Melville’s engagements with the industrial book; Melville’s other uses of print are, like the unstable
islands on Typee’s South-Sea maps, still waiting to be explored.
Works Cited
Banerjee, Mita. “Civilizational Critique in Herman Dinius, Marcy J. “‘Look!! Look!!! At This!!!!’: The
Melville’s Typee, Omoo, and Mardi.” Amerikastudien / Radical Typography of David Walker’s Appeal.”
American Studies, vol. 48, no. 2, 2003, pp. 207–25. PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, 2011, pp. 55–72.
Blum, Hester. “Douglass’s and Melville’s Alphabets of the Evelev, John. “‘Made in the Marquesas’: Typee, Tattooing
Blind.” Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in and Melville’s Critique of the Literary Marketplace.”
Relation, edited by Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter. U Arizona Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 4, 1992, pp. 19–45.
of North Carolina P, 2008, pp. 257–78. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by
Bryant, John. Melville Unfolding: Sexuality, Politics, and the Charles Lam Markmann. Pluto Press, 1986.
Versions of Typee. U of Michigan P, 2008. Fielder, Brigitte. “Visualizing Racial Mixture and
Casey, Jim. “Parsing the Special Characters of African Movement: Music, Notation, Illustration.” J19: The
American Print Culture: Mary Ann Shadd and the * Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, vol. 3, no. 1,
Limits of Search.” Against a Sharp White Background: 2015, pp. 146–55.
Infrastructures of African American Print, edited by Gilmore, Michael T. American Romanticism and the
Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne. U of Wisconsin Marketplace. U of Chicago P, 1985.
P, 2019, pp. 109–27. Ivison, Douglas. “‘I Saw Everything but Could Comprehend
Casper, Scott E. “Introduction.” History of the Book in Nothing’: Melville’s Typee, Travel Narrative, and Colonial
America Volume 3: The Industrial Book: 1840–1880, Discourse.” ATQ, vol. 16, no. 2, 2002, pp. 115–30.
edited by Scott E. Casper, et al. U of North Carolina P, Karcher, Carolyn. Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery,
2007, pp. 1–39. Race, and Violence in Melville’s America. Louisiana State
Cohen, Lara Langer. The Fabrication of American Literature: UP, 1980.
Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture. U of Pennsylvania Kearns, Michael S. Writing for the Street, Writing in the
P, 2011. Garret: Melville, Dickinson, and Private Publication.
Cohen, Lara Langer, and Jordan Alexander Stein. Ohio State UP, 2010.
“Introduction.” Early African American Print Culture, Keighren, Innes M., Charles W. J. Withers, and Bill Bell.
edited by Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein. Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with
U of Pennsylvania P, 2012, pp. 1–16. John Murray, 1773–1859. U of Chicago P, 2015.
11
See, in particular, the essays in Levine and Otter.
Levine, Robert S., and Samuel Otter, editors. Frederick Senchyne, Jonathan. “Bottles of Ink and Reams of Paper:
Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation. U of Clotel, Racialization, and the Material Cultures of
North Carolina P, 2008. Print.” Early African American Print Culture, edited by
McKitterick, David. Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein. U of
Order, 1450–1830. Cambridge UP, 2003. Pennsylvania P, 2012, pp. 140–58.
Melville’s Marginalia Online, edited by Steven Olsen- ———. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century
Smith, Peter Norberg and Dennis C. Marnon. www. American Literature. U of Massachusetts P, 2019.
melvillesmarginalia.org. Accessed on 5 January 2020. Sommers, Samantha M. “Harriet Jacobs and the
Pratt, Mary Lousie. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Recirculation of Print Culture.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic
Transculturation. Routledge, 1992. Literature of the United States, vol. 40, no. 3, 2015,
Price, Leah. How to do Things with Books in Victorian pp. 134–49.
Britain. Princeton UP, 2012. Thompson, Graham. Herman Melville: Among the
Putnam, George Palmer. American Facts: Notes and Magazines. U of Massachusetts P, 2018.
Statistics Relative to the Government, Resources, Engagements, Thoreau, Henry David. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack
Manufactures, Commerce, Religion, Education, Literature, Rivers, edited by Carl F. Hovde, William Howarth, and
Fine Arts, Manners and Customs of the United States of Elizabeth Hall Witherell. Princeton UP, 1980.
America. London: Wiley & Putnam, 1845. Wallace, Robert K. Douglass and Melville: Anchored
Renker, Elizabeth. “Melville’s Spell in Typee.” Arizona Together in Neighborly Style. Spinner Publications,
Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 2, 1995, pp. 1–31. 2005.
Riley, Peter. Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Wood, Marcus. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of
Poetry: Against Vocation. Oxford UP, 2019. Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865.
Santa Ana, Jeffrey. “Cannibalism, Tattooing, and the Manchester UP, 2000.
Construction of White American Selfhood in Herman Yao, Christine. “Visualizing Race Science in Benito
Melville’s Typee.” Critical Sense, vol. 6, no. 1, 1998, Cereno.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century
pp. 80–123. Americanists, vol. 3, no. 1, 2015, pp. 130–37.
21
Melville and Periodical Culture
Graham Thompson
Herman Melville’s literary evolution is a jigsaw critics have struggled to piece together. The
early success of Typee’s travel narrative form bumps awkwardly against the allegory-shaped
experiment of Mardi and the pragmatic reconfigurations of Redburn and White-Jacket. What
comes next are the oddly aligned edges of mixed-form greatness in Moby-Dick and angry rebel-
lion in Pierre, a gap where The Isle of the Cross should be, and the jobbing years of magazine ano-
nymity that provide no traversable bridge to the fractured genius of The Confidence-Man. Melville
then fades away and reappears having shape-shifted from writer of prose to writer of poetry in
Battle-Pieces. Longer a poet than a prose writer, a writer who moved from novels to short fiction
and back again, and who wrote with money in and out of mind, Melville idiosyncratically defies
any available model of authorship. One happy result of attempts to arrange the disparate ele-
ments of Melville’s writing career is that we now better understand its long and varied nature.
Another is that we have come to pay more attention to the containers in which literary content
appeared. This chapter pieces together Melville’s nineteenth-century journey by concentrating
on one print container that is never very far away wherever one looks in his life. It travels with
him from boyhood through to old age, on shore and off; it educates, pleases, and angers him
along the way; it publishes him, and in it his reputation circulates. This object is the nineteenth
century’s most significant mass cultural form: the periodical. Melville’s literary lifespan coin-
cided with its rise and apogee.
Nineteenth-century periodicals manifested new print technologies, markets, and audiences.
Melville was embedded in their world, and periodicals were embedded in his. The relationship
became particularly significant between 1853 and 1856 when Melville published exclusively in
two of the era’s most important magazines, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Putnam’s Monthly
Magazine. It is even more visible when Melville turns the relationship into literary content, as he
262 Graham Thompson
does in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” when writing about paper making
(Thompson 25–39, 44–55) and in Pierre when he takes aim at the vanities of the New York City
publishing industry (244–256). But periodicals were more than an alternative to book publica-
tion or grist for Melville’s literary imagination. In the longer chronology of intimacy between
Melville and periodicals, Melville was sometimes an author but at other times a reader, a listener,
and a topic of commentary.
The word intimacy indicates two things. First, it denotes the physical, intellectual, and at
times emotional proximity between Melville and the material print world in which he was
embedded. The habitual and perpetual effect of such proximity ensured that periodicals—both
newspapers and magazines—helped mediate the world’s presence to Melville as they in turn
mediated Melville’s presence to the world at certain moments in his publishing life. Second, inti-
macy suggests significance. Periodicals may have been increasingly ordinary cultural objects in
the nineteenth century, an often taken-for-granted part of cultural life whose ephemerality
counted against their respectability. But print objects never simply just existed. They were con-
sequential enough to warrant strong reactions to their status and content. They were also vital
organs for the distribution and circulation of knowledge and information. And they were agents
of economic exchange. Melville experienced periodicals in all these, and in other, forms during
his literary life.
Straitened circumstances affected the beginnings of this life and interrupted Melville’s formal
education after his family’s flight to Albany in 1830. But he grew up in a literate if downwardly
mobile household, benefited from a bookish extended family, and lived in a town with a vibrant
newspaper and magazine culture. All provided opportunities for literary self-improvement. He
also had a good mentor in his elder brother, Gansevoort, whose example Melville followed when
he joined the Albany Young Men’s Association at the age of fifteen in early 1835. Such associa-
tions, increasingly common in sizeable cities, provided space for young men to meet, listen to
lectures, and debate. They also maintained well-stocked libraries. Melville could alleviate the
drudgery of work in Gansevoort’s cap and fur store (at least before his brother’s bankruptcy in
April 1837) by browsing through the Albany Association’s 13,000 volumes (Department of the
Interior 384). His membership fee also provided “admission to a News and Periodical Room, in
which all the leading Journals and Periodicals of the state and nation, and such foreign ones as
were deemed proper, should be taken” (Charter of the Young Men’s Association 3). Here Melville
could have found current and back issues of pioneering British literary periodicals such as the
Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine alongside leading American series such as the North
American Review and the American Quarterly Review and other more topical periodicals, including
the Anti-Slavery Record and the American Temperance Magazine (Catalogue of Books 3–32).
We know Melville read many of these periodicals because they are embedded in his literary
interactions with family. Toward the end of the time he spent teaching in Pittsfield in the winter
of 1837–1838, he wrote a letter to his uncle Peter Gansevoort, who had long encouraged Melville’s
reading by gifting him books. When he later came to write about the youthful reading habits of
Pierre and Redburn, Melville would draw “upon recollections of his own boyhood, either at home
in New York or in the Albany library of his mother’s brother Peter Gansevoort” (Sealts No. 16).
The letter to his uncle in December 1837 details Melville’s experience of school instruction and
reflects on the value of one of Peter’s gifts, J. Orville Taylor’s The District School. Melville’s judg-
ment is that “Essayests [sic] may exhaust their magazine of adjectives in extolling our systim [sic]
of Common School instruction,—but when reduced to practise, the high and sanguine hopes
Melville and Periodical Culture 263
excited by its imposing appearance in theory—are a little dashed.” Suddenly self-conscious about
his tone, Melville ends the letter with an allusive flourish: “But I have almost usurped the prov-
ince of the Edinburgh Reveiw [sic]—so as I am approaching the confines of my sheet I will sub-
scribe myself” (Corr 9). As William Gilman says, “the allusion suggests intimacy” (87). The
judgmental tone Melville strikes is what reminds him of the Edinburgh Review, a tone he clearly
understands he has absorbed. Even his use of the word “subscribe” does double duty: it signs off
his letter and indicates his intellectual, if not financial, attachment to the Edinburgh Review.
Melville’s literary education was from the beginning in part a periodical education.
The extent and significance of Melville’s periodical reading at this early stage in his life is
largely unknown. There is no scholarship to match the work done by Sealts, Steven Olsen-Smith,
and Mary K. Bercaw Edwards on Melville’s reading and sources and the use he made of them in
his own work. But he was imbricated in periodical content even at this early age. The same day
that Gansevoort’s bankruptcy devastated the family—April 15, 1837—Melville would have
seen himself discussed for the first time in a public print outlet, the Albany Microscope, one of the
city’s upstart periodicals, whose subtitle indicated its salacious appetite for local gossip: “Popular
Tales, History, Legends and Adventures, Anecdotes, Poetry, Satire, Humour, Sporting, and the Drama.”
What Melville would have read was not flattering, and he experienced in early life something to
which he would grow accustomed over the years: the animus of the periodical attack. The passing
of judgment with which he was familiar from more august publications like the Edinburgh Review
now landed on his head as he was contemptuously dismissed as a “Ciceronian Baboon” by the
pseudonymous “R.” The periodical was the appropriate outlet for such a savage attack, according
to “R,” because it “serves the purpose of ancient punishment, termed the whipping post, or the
modern tar and feathers” (Corr 552). Melville found himself exposed in a public sphere far removed
from the realms of Republican virtue.
The occasion for the attack was the local politics of the Albany debating scene and Melville’s
debating style. “R” accused Melville of acting “like a wary pettifogger” who “never considers
‘this side right, and that stark naught,’ or in other words, has no fixed principles” (Corr 552). The
guilefulness that later marked Melville’s writing evidently formed early. He certainly already had
thick enough skin to ignore “R” for the time being. Battle was rejoined the following year, how-
ever. In the manner of a modern-day celebrity whose brief and embarrassing youthful television
past emerges only once they find fame, the author who would later write brilliant periodical
stories had an inauspicious periodical writing past. Back in Albany, after his teaching stint,
Melville successfully stood for election as president of the Philo Logos Society. “Sandle Wood”—
who we now know to be Charles van Loon—attacked the “paltry hoax” of Melville’s election in
a letter to the Microscope (554). Melville felt bound to defend himself. Adopting the guise of
pseudonymity, he took his periodical bow as the “Philologian.”
What Melville wrote in his defense to the editor of the Microscope is less significant than the
act of crossing the threshold into periodical print. For many periodical readers, the local, regional,
and national expansion of newspaper and magazine markets after the 1820s offered new oppor-
tunities to become periodical writers. Periodicals were writing nurseries. Such was the fervor for
periodical writing among women that Catherine Maria Sedgwick could satirize its development
in “Cacoethes Scribendi” as early as 1830. Periodicals offered Melville the opportunity to turn
the words he dispensed in the debating hall into periodical content, just as Typee emerged out of
the stories he told his family and friends after returning from sea. Melville may have grown up
as a writer in books, but he was born in periodicals. It is not a coincidence that he soon followed
264 Graham Thompson
his newspaper letters with his first foray into fiction publishing. Shortly after the Microscope
face-off, debt forced Melville’s mother to relocate to Lansingburgh. Within the year he sub-
mitted “Fragments from a Writing Desk” to the Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser, a
local newspaper that had reprinted work by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Willian
Cullen Bryant, and Lydia Sigourney. The paper’s editor, William J. Lamb, was interested enough
to call Melville for an interview. Before “Fragments” appeared in two parts a few weeks later,
Melville was forced to suspend his engineering and surveying studies at the Lansingburgh
Academy, and he failed to find work on the building of the Erie Canal. A few weeks after publi-
cation Melville signed on to the St. Lawrence for its trip to Liverpool.
I dwell on these early periodical moments not because their literary content foretells the
writer Melville would become. Far from it. But Melville’s literary consciousness was forming in
Albany and Lansingburgh in the midst of life-changing events: his brother’s bankruptcy, his
mother’s debts, the end of his formal education, his failure to secure his future with a career, and
his preliminary excursions abroad. Periodicals were not central to these momentous events, but
they were proximate to them; they were at hand in the routines of lived life as it carried on bet-
ween major events; they were perforations between Melville’s private and public worlds. All this
looks more significant in hindsight, of course. If Melville had found work on the Erie Canal, then
his life might have turned out differently, and he might never have become the writer he did.
Periodicals did not propel Melville suddenly into his writing life; that was not their function.
Periodicals had a momentum of their own that incorporated many thousands of people, from
machine engineers and paper makers to editors and typesetters. Melville was a drop in this
particular ocean. But as periodicals consolidated their momentum, they generated a wake whose
low-level turbulence energized the cultural environment many thoughtful, literate young people
occupied.
Reading periodicals continued to be a habitual form of cultural consumption for Melville.
Even aboard the Charles and Henry, one of the three whalers on which he served, a library
contained volumes of Abbott’s Magazine and the Family Magazine (Sealts No. 250). Once he was
married and living at Arrowhead, Melville and his family enjoyed Dickens and Thackeray in
serialized form in the pages of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Melville also read Littell’s Living
Age and subscribed to The Literary World until early 1852. He wrote to Hawthorne that he had
read “The Unpardonable Sin” in Holden’s Dollar Magazine (Corr 192), and he read the Pittsfield Sun
and the Berkshire County Eagle as well as New York newspapers including the Herald and the
Tribune. When he sailed on the Meteor to San Francisco in 1860 he wrote to Evert Duyckinck that
“I have a good lot of books with me—such as they are;—plenty of old periodicals—lazy reading
for lazy latitudes” (346). And during the early Civil War years, even before he returned to New
York City Melville was still able to read “remarkably detailed and comprehensive news sum-
maries” of war developments, when often “a Pittsfield soldier in the field appointed himself an
unofficial correspondent, sending the local newspapers neighborly letters about the experiences
of his company or regiment” (Garner 31). Periodicals were the lubricant greasing the machines
of nineteenth-century life.
Specific periodical reading events also rippled into Melville’s writing in profound ways. Both
his best-known novel and short story had periodical antecedents. In the same month that Melville
published “Fragments,” the Albany Argus reprinted an extract from Thomas Beale’s just-issued
Natural History of the Sperm Whale (Parker, Biography 1:695) and provided Melville with his first
taste of a book George Putnam later imported specially for him when he was writing Moby-Dick
in 1850 (Sealts No. 68). More significantly, May 1839 also saw the publication of Jeremiah
Reynolds’s “Mocha Dick: Or The White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal”
in the venerable and popular Knickerbocker magazine. The great white sperm whale was an apoc-
ryphal beast, the stuff of legend, and belonged neither to Reynolds nor Melville. Ralph Waldo
Emerson once listened to a mariner with whom he shared a stagecoach tell him “of an old sperm
whale which he called a white whale which was known for many years by the whale men as Old
Tom & who rushed upon the boats which attacked him” (Porte 121). But Reynolds’s version
achieved circulation and notoriety partly because of its publication in the Knickerbocker. It suffi-
ciently lodged itself in the public consciousness for some reviewers of Moby-Dick to make com-
parisons. And the Knickerbocker fondly remembered its earlier “long and wonderful story” when
announcing Moby-Dick’s publication (Higgins and Parker 409, 411). Whether Melville read it
before he sailed on the St. Lawrence or over the next few years before and after his whaling expe-
rience is not known; it is hard to imagine that he never read Reynolds’s story at all.
Melville tells a very different story than Reynolds does. Where Reynolds has the harpooners
succeed in their quest to kill the white whale, Melville’s version is tempered by Owen Chase’s
account of what happened to the whale ship Essex. Melville was, after all, a literary magpie. As
Hershel Parker writes, he could have planned and written many of his whaling scenes “wholly
from memory of his own experiences or from tales he had been told, but always he felt more com-
fortable letting himself be reminded and inspired by other men’s accounts of experiences similar
to his own” (Biography 1:698). Mary K. Bercaw Edwards has shown that Melville used his sources
in one of two ways: incorporating old facts into new narratives, such as in Typee or Moby-Dick, or
editing and adapting already published narratives, as he did in Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno”
(27). Sources were a vital part of the creative writing process and to the way Melville improved
and extended the quality and range of his work, as Steven Olsen-Smith demonstrates in
Chapter 23 of this volume. Taking up the story of the white whale from legend and tethering his
version so closely to Reynolds’s periodical ancestor through his whale’s name, Melville nodded to
his sources. He also demonstrated a much rarer skill: the capacity for upcycling rather than just
recycling the accounts he read. And he demonstrated that periodicals were deeply embedded in
his ongoing literary education.
“Bartleby, the Scrivener” also had its origins in Melville’s periodical reading. On February
18, 1853, the first chapter of James Maitland’s The Lawyer’s Story appeared in both the New
York Tribune and Times. The odds of Melville coming up with his own lawyer’s story, written
and published in the summer and autumn of 1853, without reading the opening lines of
Maitland’s story seem infinitesimally small: “In the summer of 1843, having an extraordinary
quantity of deeds to copy, I engaged, temporarily, an extra copying clerk, who interested me
considerably, in consequence of his modest, quiet, gentlemanly demeanor, and his intense
application to his duties” (7). In “Bartleby,” the lawyer also needs extra help and advertises for
another copying clerk; he also is taken with the sedate, gentlemanly, and industrious qualities
of his new employee. As with “Mocha Dick” and Moby-Dick, the two lawyers’ stories take dif-
ferent routes. Maitland’s lawyer suffers none of the anxiety faced by Melville’s lawyer and soon
dismisses his copying clerk from his office once work dries up; the saga of family separation and
lost inheritance that follows is very different from “Bartleby.” But in choosing to create his own
version of a melancholy copying clerk Melville was again imagining alternative stories; like a
composer scoring variations, Melville wrote out other possibilities hidden or suggested in the
periodical stories he read.
266 Graham Thompson
Melville was also evidently steeped in periodical lore. Bartleby had many real-life brothers in
mid-century New York City and in Britain. As Brian Lusky notes, “clerks moved to the center
of the economy, society, and consciousness of their contemporaries with the maturing of industrial
capitalism and the growth of the anonymous city” (4). Young clerks were also literate, commit-
ted to self-improvement, and eager consumers of the cultural capital one found in periodicals
that “repudiated long-standing doubts about the legitimacy of commerce and gave clerks
without college educations new role models suited to the expansion of liberal capitalism” (Augst
121). Clerks and the urban world in which they worked became common currency in magazine
and newspaper writing. “Bartleby, the Scrivener” was one amongst many stories of lawyers and
clerks. In the same issue as the first installment of “Bartleby,” clerks appear as characters in
George William Curtis’s “The Potiphars in Paris” and Edmund Quincy’s Wensley. Charles
Dickens’s Bleak House, serialized in Harper’s from April 1852 to October 1853, contained enough
lawyers and clerks to warrant Putnam’s devoting an essay to them. “Bartleby” may have a specific
source in Maitland’s story, but it draws on a broader literary and periodical tradition of lawyers
and clerks. The story is a product of Melville’s periodical reading and is embedded in the generic
conventions of periodical writing. It is confirmation that when he came to write wholeheartedly
for magazines in the mid-1850s Melville did so with an ingrained knowledge of their quirks and
niches, their styles and genres. The stories he wrote for Harper’s and Putnam’s provide the literary
evidence of their embeddedness in mid-century periodical culture (Thompson 8–13). Rather
than a sign of literary defeat, periodical writing for Melville represented a homecoming that
allowed him to recuperate and recalibrate his writing future.
When he stopped writing fiction and turned to poetry Melville did not stop relying on reading
periodical content. He had his early literary life in Albany to draw on. As Parker notes, the
Young Men’s Association library that “nurtured Herman’s lifelong love of the older British quar-
terlies and monthlies” consisted of volumes “that almost invariably contained much poetry” (Poet
38). And the British influence continued when in late 1848 or early 1849 Melville ordered Carey
and Hart’s multi-volume Modern British Essayists. Although printed in book form, the series
gathered together material previously published in the best British quarterly periodicals. Here
Melville read essays on Milton and Dryden, Byron and Wordsworth (Parker, Poet 75–77).
Although he came to write poetry later in his career, then, Melville’s literary swerve had a clear
trajectory.
The first result was the now lost Poems (1860), but periodicals remained central to Battle-Pieces
(1866), his first published poetic work, and a volume that stands in stark contrast to much other
poetry about the Civil War. Newspapers readily published war verse alongside the other reports
that mediated the war to non-combatants. Much of this verse “fulfilled the desires of readers for
battles they could refight, stirring lyrics they could sing, satirical attacks on the South and on
political rivals they could savor, celebrations of famous generals they could cherish” (Garner 32).
This was not the intention of Melville’s verse. Melville also had access to Harper’s Weekly, to
which he subscribed at least between 1861 and 1863 and probably throughout the War (PP
505). Harper’s was renowned for the detail of its battle reports and the speed with which the
reports reached print. They were often accompanied by engravings based on photographs. The
magazine brought home to Melville and his fellow family readers the details of war and “hardly
a battle described in Melville’s book had not promptly been commemorated in verse in the
weekly newspaper” (PP 505). Newspapers also brought home the effects of the War on an
individual level. In November 1864, for instance, Melville and his brother Allan read in an
interview in the New York Times that their friend George Brewster had been taken prisoner by the
Confederates (Garner 365).
Melville also knew and read the Rebellion Record, a monthly compilation of newspaper pieces
about the War that began in late 1861. The sheer quantity of information being printed meant
that the Record defied George Palmer Putnam’s expectation of containing it within a single
volume. The twelfth and final volume was published in 1868. While it seems likely that Melville
made use of all his periodical sources to better inform himself about the war’s events and progress,
attempts to show the influence of specific entries from the Record on individual poems have run
aground because of the tenuousness of the links. As Stanton Garner points out, “Herman’s mind
contained a rebellion record of its own. … He used the Record as a convenient source of information
to jog his memory, to supply dates and detail, to avoid errors of fact, and to impose order on an
imagination bloated with impressions” (370). Melville’s direct purpose in Battle-Pieces was to
offer a version of events unavailable in periodicals.
Just as he used periodical sources in his prose writing to imagine alternative stories, so
Melville tried in his poetry to imagine other ways of writing about the war than he was familiar
with in the Civil War verse he read. Like other poets of the period, Melville focused on “a new
understanding of the ways language can communicate under conditions of mass media” and one
“that shifts attention away from war’s immediacies and toward its linguistic effects” (Richards
14). Moving beyond the language he found in his periodical reading, Melville wrote poetry, as
Cody Marrs puts it, “to generate aesthetic experiences that elude, repel, or undo the pressures of
the material world” (94). Embedded in the periodical world though Melville was, and as his
poems first were when they appeared anonymously in Harper’s New Monthly between February
and July 1866, did not mean being confined by periodical conventions. The iterative scale of the
periodical media industry meant it was too multitudinous to restrain writers. In its excess art
flourished.
Periodicals, then, were central to Melville’s career as a reader and a writer. But they also played
two other important roles in Melville’s life. First, they mediated his friendships and personal
relationships—for good and ill—over the years. Second, they forged his public reputation. The
publication of Typee in 1846 introduced Melville into New York City’s literary elite, and it was
where he first met Duyckinck, who edited the Wiley and Putnam series in which the book
appeared. Intellectually committed to promoting American literature, Duyckinck found in
Melville a cause to support. Duyckinck also knew the importance of periodicals to his project.
He edited and later owned The Literary World, which published an extract from Omoo before the
book’s formal publication in New York in April 1847, the first time Melville’s work had appeared
in periodical print since “Fragments” eight years earlier. Duyckinck’s fellow traveler Cornelius
Mathews employed Melville to write a series of sketches for Yankee Doodle magazine in the fol-
lowing summer. These “Authentic Anecdotes of Old Zack” satirized Zachary Taylor, the general
in charge of the war in Mexico, and especially his concern with his public image. But the sketches
also punctured the hubris of the Whig press who promoted Taylor’s presidential candidacy in the
1848 election.
Beyond their content, these sketches cemented Melville’s membership in Young America, the
Duyckinck-Mathews group who presumed to dictate the literary future. Over the next few years
Melville maintained his membership in this group. He published reviews in The Literary World,
including his paean to “Hawthorne and His Mosses” in August 1850. But as these friendships
and relationships bloomed in periodicals so they withered there too after Melville left New York
268 Graham Thompson
City for Pittsfield in late 1850 and especially after The Literary World’s lukewarm review of Moby-
Dick. In March 1851, Melville contacted Duyckinck and asked him to re-route his friend Eli
McFly’s copy of the World from Greenbush to Brattleboro. “And also will you send him the
Dollar Magazine,” another Duyckinck venture, Melville continued, “And when I get to New
York, the subscription to both will be duly paid” (Corr 183). He addressed the letter to “My Dear
Duyckinck.” Less than a year later he wrote to the “Editors of Literary World” asking that they
“please discontinue the two copies of your paper sent to J. M. Fly at Brattleboro’ (or Greenbush),
and to H Melville at Pittsfield” (Corr 222). When Pierre went to the printer shortly thereafter,
Melville inserted a merciless depiction of a “joint editor of the ‘Captain Kidd Monthly’” and a
whole chapter devoted to unstitching the conceits of “Young America in Literature” (P 253).
Other friendships were unexpectedly renewed thanks to periodicals. In July 1846, the Buffalo
Commercial Advertiser published an article claiming to have found Richard Tobias Greene,
Tommo’s castaway companion “Toby” in Typee and the only person capable of corroborating that
book’s details to doubters who believed Melville’s account to be fanciful romance. The Advertiser
included Toby’s testimonial, in which he verified Melville’s account and asked the paper to
“inform him of my yet being alive” (Corr 579). The Albany Evening Journal and Argus and the
New York Morning News reprinted the piece and letters between Greene and Melville followed.
Greene named his son after his old friend and although he tried to cash in on Melville’s pub-
lishing success by giving lectures on “Typee; or Life in the South Pacific” in 1855, Melville was
still sufficiently enamored of his old companion to send engraved spoons to Herman Melville
Greene and to Greene’s nephew, Richard Melville Hair in 1860 (Parker, Biography 2:243, 456).
Greene himself had become a newspaper man after returning from sea, editing the Buffalo Courier
and later the Sandusky Mirror in Ohio (Heffernan 208). He was forever grateful for being immor-
talized by Melville. But if Melville achieved this in book form, the shared attachment at the root
of that immortalization lived on thanks to the capacity of periodicals to attach people in unex-
pected ways.
More mundanely, periodicals played a role in the emotional investments required by Melville’s
domestic and family life. Melville advertised for a maid in the Berkshire County Eagle in April 1862,
and when he planned to move back to New York City later in the year he advertised Arrowhead for
sale in the same newspaper. His brother Allan acquired the property, but when Allan announced in
the Eagle that “he had bought Arrowhead for a summer home,” Melville’s wife, Lizzie, who already
disliked Allan’s wife Jennie, was unimpressed by such public tactlessness (Garner 163, 165, 235).
Melville’s brother Tom was reported by his cousin Kate Gansevoort in August 1867 to be “lying in
the hammock reading Harpers Magazine” (Parker, Biography 2:641); and another cousin, Kate
Lansing, and Lizzie were much exercised in 1885 by trying to track down an article published in the
London Contemporary Review by the sea-novelist W. Clark Russell in which he claimed admiringly
that Moby-Dick was much more than a sea story (Parker, Biography 2:865–6). And to Melville peri-
odicals could also be tokens of love, as they were at Christmas in 1865 when he gave his children
volumes of Harper’s Weekly. For someone who had every right to be resentful at his own treatment in
periodicals, Melville never took out his revenge on periodical objects themselves.
From his early experiences of personal attack in the Albany Microscope Melville knew that peri-
odicals were forums in which different worldviews collided. His willingness to stand his ground
in that instance and his lifetime commitment to keep writing suggest that he was confident
enough not to let disagreement and disappointment turn into destructive resentment. For each
writer there is a complex formula that calculates the relative significance of private support from
family and friends and judgments circulating in the public realm. But there is no doubt that
Melville’s public reputation was a periodical creation. Periodicals were stock exchanges that
traded literary reputations. When Typee appeared in Britain, his brother Gansevoort wrote to
Melville to tell him that “by the steamer of tomorrow I send to yr address several newspapers
contg critiques on your book. The one in the ‘Sun’ was written by a gentleman who is very
friendly to myself, and who may possibly from that reason have made it unusually eulogistic”
(Corr 575). Here was the hope that periodicals offered writers: unusual eulogy. But periodical
reviews were also the place where many writer’s hopes died. A balance of factors influenced the
exposure of each writer to eulogy and censure.
Three factors affected Melville’s exposure. First, he was a writer as much ahead of his literary
times as he was part of them. But his books were often reviewed by people whose literary prefer-
ences were as much behind the times as they were part of them. Rare are the occasions when
nineteenth-century periodicals gave us our literary futures. The closer Melville’s literary world-
view synchronized with his reviewers’—in Typee, Redburn, and White-Jacket—the more the
balance tipped to eulogy; the further it moved out of kilter—with Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The
Confidence-Man—the more the balance moved toward censure. Second, being embedded in
periodical culture meant that Melville was forced to rub shoulders with writers with whom he
had less in common than was often assumed. The April 1857 issue of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine,
for instance, contained an essay by Fitz-James O’Brien that set Melville alongside the now long-
forgotten George William Curtis and in which Curtis is described as “Mr. Melville’s younger
brother in letters.” Literary hindsight suggests nothing could have been further from the truth.
Third, the voluminosity of periodical culture also meant that it was easy for one to get lost
among the sheer quantity of other material. The publication of The Whale in Britain coincided
with the opening of the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, which meant that Melville’s book
was crowded out of periodicals that would ordinarily have reviewed it. Other periodicals, as
Parker notes, “were simply erratic, as when the London Globe chose to review The Cow by M. M.
Milburn but never found space for The Whale” (Biography 2:101). When Melville published his
short fiction anonymously in Harper’s and Putnam’s, there were no reviewers to praise or censure
him but similarly no mark of his authorship to prompt attention.
Melville benefited and suffered in the periodical lottery, but the Cincinnati Enquirer’s attempt
to sum up his literary career more accurately sums up the trajectory of his periodical reputation:
“Mr. M.’s authorship,” the paper’s reviewer of The Confidence-Man in February 1858 declared, “is
toward the nadir rather than the zenith, and he has been progressing in the form of an inverted
climax” (Higgins and Parker 506). The inverted climax shows in the number of periodical
reviews. Typee and Omoo were reviewed over 80 times and even Moby-Dick received a similar level
of attention. With Pierre the number had fallen to around 50. The reviews of The Piazza Tales
were noticeably shorter, and The Confidence-Man mustered only around 40 notices. Reviews
dwindled still further for Melville’s poetry. The solitary review of John Marr, in the New York
Mail and Express, on November 20, 1888, brought home the scale of the inversion: “The reputa-
tion of no American writer stood higher forty years ago than that of Herman Melville” (Higgins
and Parker 545).
Any assessment of the impact of the periodical reviews has to distinguish between Melville
the man and Melville the author. The reviews bruised but did not bow him. He clearly listened
to the criticisms of Mardi; the results are evident in Redburn and White-Jacket. But he was not so
quietened by criticism of his grand allegory as to rein in his literary ambition, as Moby-Dick
270 Graham Thompson
proved. The “untrained imagination” that the sole reviewer of John Marr identified in Melville’s
prose and poetry was a recurring theme of critics (Higgins and Parker 545). But even when
reviews reached their most vituperative—“Herman Melville Crazy,” stated the New York Day
Book when reviewing Pierre—Melville stoically pressed on with his writing. Lizzie claimed of
Melville’s response to Pierre’s reception that “in fact it was a subject of joke with him, declaring
that it was but just, and I know that however it might have affected his literary reputation, it
concerned him personally but very little” (Parker, Biography 2:140). Melville seemed never to let
criticism confine his imagination nor his capacity for work. From Pierre he moved quickly to The
Isle of the Cross and “Bartleby.” Periodical reviews were small fish in a big pond; even when they
gathered into a school, they were a less deadly foe than others he had faced. More damaging,
perhaps, was that reviews of his early work pigeonholed him as a writer of exotic travel narra-
tives. When reviewers wanted another Fayaway they got Captain Ahab; when they wanted an
adventure story set in foreign climes, they got an epistemological experiment set on a Mississippi
steamboat. But it is hard to criticize periodicals for being periodicals, and for having literary
preferences that were as much a part of their times as they were behind them. To the advantage
of later readers Melville spent his writing career casting off periodical expectations and reimagin-
ing what American literature might be.
Periodicals proved themselves capable of doing things for Melville that books never could.
Nobody ever reviewed Melville in a book; no book ever arrived by post at regular intervals each
week or month; nor did any book speed national events to his sitting room within the space of a
few days. Mediating his successes and his failures, his friendships and his fallings out, periodicals
gave Melville’s writing and non-writing life a rhythm and continuity. But they do not unify the
scattered pieces of his literary career. Toward the end of Billy Budd Melville includes a fictitious
excerpt from the Naval Chronicle, which hitherto is the only existing “human record to attest to
what manner of men respectively were John Claggart and Billy Budd.” The report only “served
to deflect and in part falsify” events aboard the Bellipotent (BB 70). We should not rely on peri-
odicals to give us our man whole and true. But periodicals do provide the heartbeat of a larger
literary and non-literary life to which Melville was connected. The chronology of intimacy bet-
ween Melville and periodicals was long and deep, and a few publications were even there to
memorialize him in obituaries—and to re-review him—when his own heartbeat stopped.
Works Cited
Augst, Thomas. The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Garner, Stanton. The Civil War World of Herman Melville.
Life in Nineteenth-Century America. U of Chicago P, U of Kansas P, 1993.
2003. Gilman, William Henry. Melville’s Early Life and Redburn.
Catalogue of Books in the Library of the Young Men’s New York UP, 1951.
Association of the City of Albany. Albany: Joel Munsell, Heffernan, Thomas Farel. “Appendix I: Toby
1837. Greene.” Wilson Heflin, Melville’s Whaling Years,
Charter of the Young Men’s Association for Mutual Improvement edited by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and Thomas
in the City of Albany. Albany: Joel Munsell, 1847. Farel Heffernan. Vanderbilt UP, 2004,
Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education. Public pp. 207–19.
Libraries in the United States of America: Their History, Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker, editors. Herman
Condition, and Management, Special Report, Part 1. Melville: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge UP,
Washington: Government Printing Office, 1876. 1995.
Lusky, Brian P. On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for ———. Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 2, 1851–
Capital in Nineteenth-Century America. New York UP, 1891. Johns Hopkins UP, 2002.
2010. ———. Melville: The Making of the Poet. Northwestern
Maitland, James A. The Lawyer’s Story: Or, The Orphan’s UP, 2008.
Wrongs. New York: H. Long & Brother, 1853. Porte, Joel, ed. Emerson in His Journals. Belknap Press, 1982.
Marrs, Cody. “A Wayward Art: Battle-Pieces and Melville’s Richards, Eliza. Battle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the
Poetic Turn.” American Literature, vol. 82, no. 1, 2010, U.S. Civil War. U of Pennsylvania P, 2019.
pp. 91–119. Sealts, Merton M., Jr. Melville’s Reading. U of South
O’Brien, Fitz-James. “Authors and Authorship: Melville Carolina P, 1988.
and Curtis.” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, April 1857, Sedgwick, Catherine Maria. “Cacoethes Scribendi.” The
pp. 384–93. Atlantic Souvenir. Carey, Lea & Lea, 1830, pp. 17–38.
Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 1, Thompson, Graham. Herman Melville: Among the
1819–1851. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Magazines. U of Massachusetts P, 2018.
22
Mediating Babo
Robert K. Wallace
The revolt masterminded by Babo in Melville’s Benito Cereno in 1855 turned inside out Captain
Amasa Delano’s account of the same event in his Narrative of Voyages and Travels in 1817. Melville
transformed Babo from a briefly mentioned slave in Delano’s story into the brilliant organizer of
not only the slave revolt but a shipboard charade. A century and a half later, Melville’s fictional
transformation of Babo became the inspiration for historian Greg Grandin’s reconstruction of the
lives of the enslaved Africans who had in fact enacted the revolt on Delano’s ship. Four years after
Grandin published The Empire of Necessity (2014), the artist Matt Kish reimagined Melville’s
story by copying its text on the left side of each page of a Moleskine notebook and filling each
facing page with his artistic response to Melville’s words. These four ways of telling the same
story are a case study of how a living legacy of history, art, and culture is created and
disseminated.
Melville wrote Benito Cereno during a difficult period in American life—especially for those
citizens who felt that Black lives matter. The story was published in installments in Putnam’s
Magazine in October, November, and December 1855, without Melville’s name attached to it.
Melville was officially identified as its author when it was reprinted as one of The Piazza Tales in
1856. That was one year before the U.S. Supreme Court declared in its Dred Scott decision that
Black Americans have “no rights which the white man was bound to respect” (Douglass 252).
Benito Cereno got little attention during Melville’s lifetime or during the first half of the twen-
tieth century. It began to speak to the needs of American culture during the Civil Rights
movement in the 1960s. By the early twenty-first century, many teachers and scholars began to
see Benito Cereno as Melville’s most important book next to Moby-Dick.
In the 2020s, Benito Cereno provides new insights into the ways in which Black lives in a global
community still struggle to overcome the dehumanizing results of colonialism while the United
States continues to wrestle with systemic racism resulting from its long legacy of chattel slavery.
Mediating Babo 273
Melville’s story speaks to readers today, but in complex ways that require careful attention not
only to the words and actions of the story but also to systems of thought, modes of oppression,
and pleas for liberation to be seen and felt deep beneath its surface.
If Melville wanted to highlight the humanity of Black Africans, retelling Chapter 18 of Amasa
Delano’s Narrative from Delano’s own point of view might seem a strange way to do it. Entitled
“Particulars of the Capture of the Slave Ship Tryal at the Island of St. Maria; with the Documents
relating to that affair,” Captain Delano’s Chapter 18 is one of 28 chapters in a 600-page book
narrating his voyages for three decades across the Northern and Southern hemispheres. Delano
presented this story as a curious adventure with a happy ending. His ship the Perseverance was a
“sealer” whose primary business was to kill seals whose skins could then be traded in Canton for
Chinese silks and tea.
Off the coast of Chile, in 1805, Delano’s ship encountered a Spanish vessel whose cargo
included more than a hundred enslaved Africans in transit to Lima, Peru. Its captain, Benito
Cereno, explained that the ship, after sailing from Buenos Aires, had encountered terrible storms
when rounding Cape Horn, resulting in the deaths of most of his officers and much of its living
cargo. After being battered by the fury of storms, the ship was becalmed by the absence of wind,
survivors left without enough food or water to sustain themselves. Driven by benevolent impulses
and sympathetic to the condition of all on board, Delano returned to his ship and immediately
brought over what food and water he could spare. He was somewhat concerned by a certain dif-
fidence in the Spanish captain—who seemed lax in policing actions of the enslaved Africans, one
of whom hovered “constantly at [his] elbows”—but he attributed these anomalies to the trauma
all on board had recently endured (PT, Delano: 818).
Delano’s intermittent confusion about the situation aboard the Spanish ship Tryal was even-
tually put to rest when Cereno suddenly leapt into Delano’s boat as Delano was returning to his
own ship after a long day on Cereno’s ship. He suddenly saw that the Africans, who had previ-
ously revolted, were actually in charge of the ship; they had been telling Cereno exactly what to
say. But the situation was easily remedied. With the weapons already on board for killing seals
and resisting pirates, Delano and his men used cannon fire, followed by “muskets, pikes, and
sabres,” to retake the ship from the poorly armed Blacks (833). The rebels who survived the
battle were put in double manacles for shipment to the coast of Peru, where they were tried
under the “Holy Crusade” of the colonial court of the Spanish Empire. Five leaders of the revolt
were decapitated, their heads “fixed on a pole, in the square of the port of Talcahuano” (PT,
Delano: 841). Delano had promised each member of his own crew a share of the “one hundred
thousand dollars” the Americans would receive for restoring the Tryal and its remaining cargo to
their Spanish owners (PT, Delano: 821). The ingratitude Cereno showed in trying to forestall
any such payment was the only dark shadow lingering over what for Delano was otherwise a col-
orful, satisfying episode in his seagoing career.
Most readers of Putnam’s in 1855 would not have known that the primary source of Benito
Cereno was an 1817 Narrative by a long-forgotten mariner named Amasa Delano. When the story
was reprinted in The Piazza Tales in 1856, no historical source was provided. Melville may have
learned about Delano’s story from his father-in-law Lemuel Shaw, who since 1830 had been Chief
Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Delano’s 1817 Narrative had sold poorly,
and Shaw, who was then a lawyer, had been involved in drawing up a contract for a new edition
in 1818 to be “distributed in any of the Southern states.” That contract, now part of the Lemuel
Shaw papers at the Social Law Library in Boston, MA, establishes Shaw’s knowledge of the book
274 Robert K. Wallace
his son-in-law was to draw upon very closely when writing Benito Cereno thirty-seven years later
(Wallace 43; Grandin 276). The Northwestern-Newberry edition of The Piazza Tales establishes
Melville’s intimate knowledge of Delano’s text by providing a facsimile reproduction from the
1817 edition with 171 “marginal page and line numbers to indicate the corresponding passages”
in Melville’s text (PT, Delano: 809, 812–841).
One change Melville made in Delano’s story was to double its length. Delano’s thirty-five-
page chapter became Melville’s seventy-page novella. Each story is presented in three sections,
but the content, length, and function of each differs radically. Delano begins with a three-page
extract from the ship’s log, briefly summarizing the encounter from the time they see the
Spanish ship to the moment they retake the ship from the Blacks. Delano then expands on that
account with some “remarks of my own” for the next eleven pages, followed by a twenty-page
section of “Official Documents” from the trial on shore. Melville begins his story with his own
fifty-seven-page expansion of Delano’s eleven-page section of personal remarks. This is fol-
lowed by an eleven-page extract from the “Spanish documents” of the trial, that being fol-
lowed by a four-page epilogue in which Delano and Cereno converse before Babo and Cereno
die (PT, Melville, passim).
In addition to doubling the length of Delano’s chapter, Melville’s story converts Delano’s
first-person narrative voice to a third-person limited omniscient voice in which the narrator
retells the story largely from Delano’s point of view, but in Melville’s own words. Melville did
this by reverse-engineering Delano’s story to imagine what might have been happening during
Delano’s one day on the Spanish ship that Delano did not narrate or could not imagine. He still
describes events as Delano might himself have experienced them, so that anything readers see
or feel beyond Delano’s own awareness must come from the imagination behind Melville’s own
intervention in the story rather than from any direct interpretation in his narrator’s own words.
Melville invites his reader to become omniscient rather than limited omniscient by reading and
feeling beyond what Melville’s Delano is able to perceive. One source for such omniscience is
found in patterns of imagery, irony, dialogue, allusion, and symbolism that unfold slowly over
the entire course of the story. These patterns become far more evident to most readers on a
second reading of the text.
Melville made many kinds of changes in the story as Delano told it. He moved the year of the
action back from 1805 to 1799. He changed the name of Cereno’s ship from the Tryal to the San
Dominick and Delano’s ship from the Perseverance to the Bachelor’s Delight. He crucially converts
Babo into the mastermind of not only every element of the successful revolt by which the Africans
had originally taken control of the ship but also of the extraordinary masquerade by which the
entire community of Blacks under his control deceived Captain Delano into believing they were
still under the control of Benito Cereno and his fellow Spaniards. Melville’s Delano does not
realize the Black Africans are actually in control until the fifty-second page of the story, when
Cereno, soon to be followed by Babo, leaps into Delano’s boat. The reader does not realize until
the sixty-third page of the story that Babo improvised and choreographed the entire masquerade
between the first appearance of Delano’s ship and the moment the American captain stepped on
deck. Elements of that improvised deception include the story about the storm Benito was forced
to tell, the six Ashantees with hatchets and the four-old oakum-pickers who were placed in posi-
tions of immediate surveillance, the canvas draped over a newly installed figurehead, the disguise
of Atufal as an enchained prisoner and of Francesco as a turbaned steward, and the coordinated
actions of all the Africans to appear as if they were still enslaved.
Mediating Babo 275
Knowing Babo has masterminded everything, the reader can appreciate not only Babo’s bril-
liance in conceiving the complex charade but also the interpersonal and managerial skills with
which he has carried it out. The best example of the way Melville’s narrator differs from Delano
himself in presenting the story comes in the last paragraph, where one declarative sentence in the
spirit of Delano (“Some months after, dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule, the black man
met his voiceless end”) is immediately followed by a more expansive sentence in the words and
spirit of Melville: “The body was burned to ashes; but for many days, the head, that hive of sub-
tlety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza, met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites.” For the reader who
might not feel the full force of “unabashed” in that last sentence, Melville’s narrator in the
previous paragraph notes that Babo’s “brain, not body, had schemed and led the revolt, with the
plot” (PT, Melville: 116).
Babo’s brazen subterfuge works because of Delano’s racist mind. In narrating his own story,
the original Delano saw the Blacks on the deck of Cereno’s ship as human cargo who “looked up
to me as a benefactor” (PT, Melville: 817). After the Spanish captain jumped into his boat,
Delano saw the Blacks as murderous rebels to be subdued, chained, tried, and beheaded. He felt
considerable sympathy for them when they were dying of hunger and thirst, but no sympathy
for them as humans desiring to be free. Melville deepens his own portrayal of the Delano figure
by inventing scenes and episodes in which racist assumptions implicitly governing Delano’s
own narration are made explicit in the words, thoughts, and feelings of Melville’s Delano. Such
words, thoughts, and feelings were not only plausible for the Massachusetts ship captain whose
own story Melville set in 1799; they remained prevalent in many white Americans in the
Northern states to whom Melville was writing his story in 1855. And in spite of the Civil War
that ended in 1865, and the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, and the Black American
president who served two consecutive terms beginning in 2008, the racist assumptions implicit
in Delano’s 1817 Narrative, made more explicit in the words and actions of 1855 novella, were
activated anew by the election of Donald Trump in 2016, bringing the perception of Black per-
sonhood again to the center of national debate.
Melville’s Babo deceives Delano through his consummate skill in embodying the submissive
body servant. Early in the story Babo’s attentiveness to Cereno confirms Delano’s feeling that the
Black man is “the most pleasing body servant in the world” (PT, Melville: 52). At the beginning
of the November installment of the novella, Delano is so taken when Babo adroitly restores
Cereno from one of his fainting fits that he offers to buy Babo for “fifty doubloons” (70). A bit
later, when Benito and Babo draw aside for a private conversation, Delano briefly wonders if
Cereno might be “in any way in complicity with the blacks,” but he reassures himself that they
“were too stupid. Besides, who ever heard of a white man so far a renegade as to apostatize from
his own species almost, by leaguing in against it with negroes” (PT, Melville: 75).
The shaving scene that Babo brilliantly invents to remind Benito who is in charge, with
Babo’s razor at Cereno’s throat, activates Delano’s reassuring belief that “most negroes are natural
valets and hairdressers; taking to the comb and brush congenially as to the castanets,” evidence
that “God had set the whole negro to some pleasant tune.” The pain and savage irony of this
scene is excruciating for any reader who realizes the power dynamics actually at play—as cer-
tainly would be true of almost every reader upon a second reading. But for Delano, in the real
time of Melville’s story, the reassuring sight of Babo giving Cereno a shave exemplifies “the
docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind, and that susceptibility of
blind attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors” (PT, Melville: 83–84).
A totally different side of Babo’s (and Melville’s) mind unfolds in a series of revelations about the
figurehead of Cereno’s ship. Delano’s 1817 narrative makes no mention of a figurehead on the
Spanish ship. Melville’s 1855 novella mentions the possibility of a figurehead as soon as Delano
approaches it: “Whether the ship had a figure-head, or only a plain beak, was not quite certain,
owing to canvas wrapped around that part, either to protect it while undergoing a re-furbishing, or
else decently to hide its decay” (PT, Melville: 49). When Cereno leaps into Delano’s boat, soon to
be followed by Babo, the cable holding the canvas over the figurehead swings aside, revealing the
shocking image of a human skeleton—which Cereno immediately recognizes as that of Alexandro
Aranda, the late owner of the Africans on board (PT, Melville: 99–100). This revelation prepares
the way for further revelations in the Spanish court documents near the end of Melville’s story.
In Delano’s original 1817 version, the slaves who had been ordered to murder Aranda had
brought him up mangled and half alive from his berth and tossed him into the ocean. In Melville’s
1855 version, Babo stops the same process before Aranda is thrown into the sea, ordering that he
be taken back below and stripped down to his skeleton, after which they “riveted the skeleton to
the bow” in place of “the ship’s proper figure-head, the image of Christopher Colon, the discov-
erer of the New World” (PT, Melville: 107, 112). Covering this new, highly symbolic, revolu-
tionary figurehead with canvas is one of many things Babo ordered his fellow freedom fighters to
do during the brief interval in the morning between when Delano’s ship was first seen and when
the American captain stepped on deck.
The final twist in this strand of the story comes in that last long sentence at the end of Melville’s
brief epilogue in which Babo’s mounted head, which “met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites,”
also “looked” to the church “across the Plaza … in whose vaults slept then, as now, the recovered
bones of Aranda” (PT, Melville: 116–117). Aranda’s bones have now been doubly “recovered,”
first from their riveted position on the bow of the ship, then by the coffin in the vaults of a Lima
church that has now replaced the flesh and blood of the living slaveholder that once had covered
them. For the reader attuned to the cumulative power of such image strands as these, Melville’s
story has itself become a “slumbering volcano” which could “suddenly set loose energies” of the
kind that Delano had vaguely feared might somehow be “hid” in Cereno’s ship (PT, Melville: 68).
For readers today who feel the force of those energies in the hearts and hands of the oppressed in
the story, Melville and his Babo were “post-colonial” a century and a half before that phrase was
widely embraced by America’s academic community in a variety of disciplines.
One somewhat shorter strand of imagery highlights the manner in which the “hive of sub-
tlety” in Melville’s own head added layers of meaning to Delano’s original story through atmo-
spheric visual description. In the third paragraph of Melville’s story, the sky and sea viewed from
the deck of Delano’s ship are both “mute and calm; everything gray.” Through this sky, “flights
of troubled gray fowl … mixed … with flights of troubled gray vapors,” which are “shadows
present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come” (PT, Melville: 46). As the light of the morning
sun slowly breaks through this pervasive gray, the sun itself is described in a strikingly unnatural
image: “hemisphered on the rim of the horizon” (PT, Melville: 47). This image of the solar
sphere sliced in half gives way to a more comforting image of the “mild light” of the sun setting
on the same day—until the “canvas shroud” swings back to reveal “death for the figure-head, in
a human skeleton” (96, 99). As the sailors on Delano’s ship prepare to retake the Spanish ship in
a bloody battle by the fading light of the waning sun, the riveted skeleton is seen “gleaming in
the horizontal moonlight, and casting a gigantic ribbed shadow upon the water,” as “one
extended arm of the ghost seemed beckoning the whites to avenge it” (PT, Melville: 102).
Mediating Babo 277
As Delano and Cereno have their last conversation during the “long, mild voyage” to the royal
and holy courts in Lima, the complex atmospherics of the story have finally cleared. Delano asks
Cereno why he is still so morose, since “yon bright sun has forgotten it all; and the blue sea, and
the blue sky.” To which Cereno answers, “Because they have no memory … because they are not
human.” Don Benito has been “saved” on the plot level, but spiritually he, unlike Delano, will
forever be “shadowed” by his experience with “the negro.” In that last long sentence of Melville’s
Benito Cereno, the mounted head of Babo that has “met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites” (and
had also looked even farther across the Plaza to the church in whose vaults are “the recovered
bones” of Aranda) now looks even “across the Rimac bridge … towards the monastery, on Mount
Agonia … where, three months after being dismissed by the court, Benito Cereno, borne on a bier,
did, indeed, follow his leader” (PT Melville: 114, 116–17). Melville allows his reader to decide
whether the recovered bones of Aranda or the mounted head of Babo has become Cereno’s “leader.”
If Melville did indeed turn Amasa Delano’s 1817 story inside-out to create Benito Cereno as a pow-
erfully anti-slavery novella in 1855, he did so in a strikingly different way from other anti-slavery
texts such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave
(1853), or Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). In each of those books, the virtues of Blacks
and whites, and the inhumanity of slaveholders and their white sympathizers, are relatively explicit.
But Benito Cereno is written in a such a way that an attentive reader can read it as a challenging but
exciting adventure story in which, as Melville’s Delano believes, all comes out well in the end because
the evil, rebellious slaves have been recaptured and punished. Some students in college classes do read
the story that way, resisting those teachers and fellow students who savor and celebrate the burning
energies and insights that slumber beneath and within words that Melville wrote so long ago.
Other students have quite the opposite experience. They begin this story sympathizing with
Captain Delano, not only because the story is narrated largely from his point of view, but also
because they share, even today, many of his assumptions about race that are still hard-wired
within significant portions of white American society. Melville’s story makes possible, within
the internal dynamic of reading against the grain of the story itself, a reversal of the reader’s
world view. Such a reversal can reveal, perhaps for the first time, in a strikingly unforgettable
way, that Black lives do matter in a way one had never realized before—a realization that is
essential to the health of the self, nation, and world.
One early example of the influential power of Melville’s “slumbering volcano” of a story came
at the beginning of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952). Ellison chose the conversation
between Delano and Cereno about whether Cereno is “saved” as the epigraph of his own novel.
In true Melvillian fashion, Ellison left it to his reader to decide exactly how this quotation from
a largely forgotten novella applied to his first published novel. Students of Melville as early as
C. L. R. James in 1953, H. Bruce Franklin in 1961, and Joyce Adler in 1974 began to relate
Benito Cereno to central issues in American society, these leading in 1980 to Carolyn Karcher’s
comprehensive overview of Melville’s career in Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and
Violence in Melville’s America. The increasing prominence of Benito Cereno within Melville studies
dramatically extended into the field of American literature in 1993 with Eric Sundquist’s To
Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Sundquist’s radical reconstruction of
nineteenth-century American literature puts Benito Cereno with Douglass’s My Bondage and My
Freedom at the center of his argument (135–82).
Greg Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (2014)
was the first work of history directly inspired by Melville’s story. Grandin had always been
intrigued by Benito Cereno. He became more so after realizing that it had a specific source in
Chapter 18 of Delano’s 1817 Narrative. At first, he thought he would write a case study of the use
Melville made of Delano’s book. What he eventually did write was a case study of the Atlantic slave
trade—especially as it operated in the Southern hemisphere between 1803 and 1805 in the lives
and deaths of the enslaved Africans who are the real-life subject of Delano’s 1817 narrative, the
fictional subject of Melville’s 1857 novella, and the historical subject of Grandin’s book. Like Benito
Cereno itself, The Empire of Necessity is a tightly structured text that activates the smallest specific
details and the largest implicit revelations of its source materials in the service of a narrative in
which, at its best, in Melville’s words, “past, present, and future seemed one” (PT, Melville: 98).
The most remarkable element of Grandin’s book is that he was able to document the actual
lives of the enslaved Africans Captain Delano encountered off the coast of Chile in early in 1805
all the way back to their departure from Bonny Island in the Bight of Biafra, near the mouth of
the Niger River in southeastern Nigeria. He then follows them across the Atlantic Ocean (in a
British slave ship that had been captured by a French corsair) to Montevideo and then to the slave
market in Buenos Aires, where they were sold to the slaveholder Alejandro de Aranda. Grandin
then documents the process by which Aranda transported them by foot across the Argentine
pampas to his plantation in Mendoza at the foot of the Andes mountains, over whose highly
perilous sequence of twisting paths through narrow rock walls he forced-marched them to
Valparaiso on the edge of the Pacific to be loaded on the ship that was to take them to Lima to
be sold. The new interpretive framework that this information provides for understanding, inter-
preting, and contextualizing both Delano’s narrative and Melville’s novella is profound. Grandin
was not able to verify the identities of all the enslaved Africans who appear in Delano’s and
Melville’s narrative texts and legal documents, but he established which of their leaders had most
recently been shipped from Africa (Babo, Mori, Atufal, etc.), which had been living in Mendoza
as servants of Aranda (José, Francesco), and who had for a time been working as a caulker along
the shoreline in Chile (Joaquin). Grandin also provided telling information about the actual lives
of not only Delano and Melville but also of such persons as the French privateer Hippolyte
Mordeille, the Argentine slaveholder Alejandro de Aranda, and the Chilean judge Juan Martínez
de Rozas both before and after 1805.
One of Grandin’s many insights is that a significant number of the enslaved Africans would
have been Muslims. Analysis of naming and demographic patterns in west Africa helped
Grandin determine which of the captives were likely to be Muslim or Christian, and which were
more likely to be from Senegal or the lower Niger River. This discovery led to further research
into the presence of Islamic worshippers among the enslaved Africans the Spanish had brought
to the Americas all the way back to 1501, “less than a decade after Columbus set foot on
Hispaniola” (190). Once Grandin had established the Islamic identity of a significant number
of the Africans purchased by Aranda with the purpose of selling them in Lima, some of their
actions could be seen in a new light. The enslaved Africans who wrested control of the Tryal as
they were being transported from Valparaiso to Lima began their revolt on the eve of 27
December, celebrated as “Laylat-al-Qadr, or Night of Power,” the most holy day of Ramadan in
Islamic tradition. Grandin discovered that “the largest urban slave rebellion in the Americas”
was enacted in 1835 by enslaved Africans in Bahia, Brazil, who “chose to start their uprising”
on “the same day Babo and Mori started theirs three decades earlier—Laylat-al-Qadr, the Night
of Power” (174–75, 196).
For someone like me, a white-identified American who came of age as a college student in the
state of Washington in the early 1960s, the Black Power Movement of Malcolm X, Stokely
Mediating Babo 279
Carmichael (Kwame Ture), and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) was the first indication that Islamic per-
sons living in the United States wanted to assert their rights as Black citizens. For many American
students who came of age at the turn of the twenty-first century, the attack on New York’s World
Trade Center by professed Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001 brought a new recognition of
law-abiding Islamic communities throughout the United States. For Grandin, the research showing
that “Babo, Mori, and some of the rest of their companions were Muslim” meant that members of
“the world’s three great monotheistic religions—Cerreño’s Catholicism, Delano’s Protestantism, and
the West Africans’ Islam—confronted each other” on the deck of Cereno’s ship (8).
Nor was that all.
Aside from the sheer audacity, what is most fascinating about the day-long deception is the way it
exposes a larger falsehood, on which the whole ideological edifice of slavery rested: the idea not just
that slaves were loyal and simpleminded but that they had no independent lives or thoughts or, if
they did have an interior self, that it too was subject to their master’s jurisdiction, it too was prop-
erty, that what you saw on the outside was what there was on the inside.
(Grandin 8)
That many Americans even a century and a half after Melville published his novella still cannot
imagine a rich interior life behind a black person’s skin is one reason this nation still needs its
Black Lives Matter movement. As I was drafting this essay in June 2020, “past, present, and
future seemed one” on the streets of Minneapolis, Louisville, Atlanta, and Tulsa.
Benito Cereno Recopied, the artist book Matt Kish created in 2017–2018, offers visual and textual
adaptations of persons and events that Delano, Melville, and Grandin described in words. His
project differs considerably from earlier artistic responses to Melville’s novella. In 1926, very early
in the literary reception of Melville’s story, E. McKnight Kauffer illustrated an edition of Benito
Cereno published by Nonesuch Press in London. In addition to an atmospheric frontispiece and a
mysterious title-page image, Kauffer contributed six full-page illustrations, each corresponding
closely to the text on the facing page, each “picture hand-coloured through stencils” in an edition
of 1650 copies (7, 11, 47, 75, 89, 97, [124]). American readers are probably more likely to have
seen the illustrations that Garrick Palmer created in boxwood woodcuts for editions of Benito Cereno
published by the Folio Society in 1967 and the Imprint Society in 1972, or the darkly abstract oil
paintings that Robert Shore created for reproduction by the Limited Editions Club in 1965.
Kish’s project differs from those in that he created seventy-two illustrations for Benito Cereno
Recopied rather than a few, or several. He also differed from his predecessors in printing out each
word of the novella in his own hand rather than illustrating a book whose words were typeset by
others. This choice gave Kish a tactile connection with the text itself—and perhaps with the
thoughts and feelings behind it. Printing out each word helped him decipher a text that was a
challenge to read and illustrate even though he had already spent 543 consecutive days illus-
trating the 552 pages of the Signet edition of Moby-Dick. Before embarking on Moby-Dick in
Pictures: One Drawing for Each Page, Kish had read Melville’s novel eight or nine times in the
course of many years. Before beginning Benito Cereno Recopied, he was not yet intimate with its
text. He assimilated the spirit of this story by printing out its text letter by letter before drawing
his response to those words on the facing page.
One of the advantages of Kish’s method in this project is that by drawing one image for each
new recopied page, he could alter the posture, expression, and power dynamics of the figures in
response to the way Kish felt those elements changing in the successive pages of the recopied
text. As in Moby-Dick in Pictures, he thereby created his own visual narrative to accompany
Melville’s verbal one. In the earlier project, drawing each image over the lines, words, or images
of “found” paper added an element of improvisation and mystery to drawings that were other-
wise attempting to be as faithful as they could be to the fictional text that inspired them. Here
the complexity and the richness came from having the source words for the inspiration printed
out on the facing page, both as test of how well his visual interpretation has responded to those
words and as a convenience to the reader interested in such a comparison.
Figure 22.1 reproduces the two-page opening revealing what has come to be known as “the
shaving scene.” The contrasting bodies, clothing, and eyes of Babo and Cereno are easily recog-
nizable from earlier drawings, but the relative size and power dynamics of the two men are
Figure 22.1 Matt Kish, Shaving Scene, pages 82 & 83 in Benito Cereno Recopied, 2018. Melville Society
Archive, New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Mediating Babo 281
entirely reversed (although Delano still does not perceive any change in the submissive relation
he so savors). This drawing could depict the moment in which Babo is about to say, “Now
master,” while “pressing the head gently further back into the crotch of chair.” He then says, as
“the steel glanced nigh the throat… . ‘You must not shake so, master.—See, Don Amasa, master
always shakes when I shave him. And yet master knows I never yet have drawn blood, though it’s
true, if master will shake so, I may some of these times’” (PT, Melville: 85).
In addition to illustrating the major pivot points in the mystery unfolding on the deck of
Cereno’s ship, Kish’s method also required him to illustrate occasional pages of recopied text
lacking in action that might lend itself in obvious ways to visual representation. This particular
challenge enabled Kish, like Melville, to convey hidden dynamics beneath the surface of the
story. The text on the left side of Figure 22.2 describes a moment in which Cereno and Babo have
Figure 22.2 Matt Kish, Surveillance Scene, pages 40 & 41 in Benito Cereno Recopied, 2018. Melville Soci-
ety Archive, New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, Massachusetts.
drawn aside and “begun whispering together in low voices.” At this point, Delano’s “glance
accidentally fell upon a young Spanish sailor” who, as he climbed up into the rigging, “kept his
eye fixed on Captain Delano, from whom presently it passed, as if by a natural sequence, to the
two whisperers” (PT, Melville: 64). In the drawing depicting this moment, Babo and Cereno can
each be identified, close together, by their signature eyes. Technically, this drawing illustrates
only a single moment that passes quickly on the facing page. Symbolically, it captures cross-
currents of surveillance from which Delano never escapes. That feeling is enhanced by the smaller
sets of eyes that Kish has drawn above and below the primary visual transactions.
Delano’s 1817 Narrative, written twelve years after his actual experience off the coast of
Chile—and told mainly through what his own eyes could see and imagine—is not one in which
Black lives matter except as cargo to be shipped and rebel bodies to be overcome. Melville’s 1855
Benito Cereno limits our literal visual experience primarily to what Delano is able to see and feel
while also prompting and prodding the engaged reader to envision what the American captain
is unable to see, feel, and imagine. Grandin’s 2014 Empire of Necessity expands on Melville’s
expansive imaginative vision by anchoring it with the weight of archival evidence to which
Melville had no access, this enriched by a century and a half of transatlantic historical scholarship
that has confirmed and validated some of Melville’s deepest instincts. Kish’s 2018 Benito Cereno
Recopied gave graphic expression to the exact words Melville wrote so long ago through images
that challenge anew those Americans who see themselves as white. Two years after Kish was
recopying Melville’s story in both words and pictures, a seventeen-year-old girl with her cell
phone on a street in Minneapolis made visible to the world as never before, whatever their place
in racial or national hierarchies, unendurable violence to an unarmed Black body until George
Floyd breathed his last breath.
Works Cited
Delano, Amasa. “Melville’s Source for ‘Benito Cereno.’” Kish, Matt. Benito Cereno Recopied, Parts 1 and 2, Artist Books,
[facsimile reproduction of Delano’s Chapter 18]. In 2017–2019. Melville Society Archive, New Bedford
Melville, PT, pp. 809–47. Whaling Museum, New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Douglass, Frederick. The Portable Frederick Douglass, Melville, Herman. “Benito Cereno.” In PT, pp. 47–117.
edited by John Stauffer and Henry Louis Gates. Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making
Penguin Books, 2016. of American Literature. Harvard UP, 1993.
Grandin, Greg. The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, Wallace, Robert K. “Fugitive Justice: Douglass, Shaw,
and Deception in the New World. Henry Holt, 2014. Melville.” In Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville:
Kauffer, E. McKnight. Illustrated Edition of Benito Cereno by Essays in Relation, edited by Robert S. Levine and Samuel
Herman Melville. Nonesuch Press, 1926. Otter. U of North Carolina P, 2008, pp. 39–68.
23
Books and Marginalia, Real and Virtual
Steven Olsen-Smith
Books and reading played an enormously important role in Herman Melville’s intellectual and
creative life. One might expect as much about any author of stature, but in Melville’s case—and
by extension in the scholarly field devoted to his thought and writing—their significance is
especially deep and pervasive. In literary composition, Melville relied more directly than most
other authors on material and inspiration from printed works. His appropriations from sources
involved compelling ideological gestures, and rhetorically laden allusions and references gleaned
from his reading dot his writings. Beginning with his semi-autobiographical narratives Typee and
Omoo (1846, 1847), Melville used books to flesh out otherwise original material with borrowed
factual information and detail, to prompt his creativity, and to generate material that often
cross-examines and revises the assumptions and attitudes of the source—appropriative methods
he went on to apply in Moby-Dick and other later works. As a philosophical thinker, Melville
engaged with other writers and works on subjects central to his writings such as religious belief,
human conditions and experience, and the nature of good and evil. Unwilling to forego a life of
the mind for the popular acclaim he achieved in the literary marketplace with his first two books,
Melville followed the example of authors he read and admired in ways that ensured the lasting
value of his writings while eroding his financial viability as a writer of fiction. Reading sustained
him intellectually over the long reputational decline that followed, and it informed his ongoing
commitment to technical artistry as a writer of poetry, which occupied him throughout his
obscurity. Toward the end of his life, he continued to take solace in the works of literary and
philosophical writers in whom he found confirmation for his devotion to his craft.
By his death in 1891, Melville had accumulated a large library of volumes containing mark-
ings and notes that spanned his reading life. The documentation and study of his personal books
constitutes the longest running effort of recovering documentary evidence in Melville
284 Steven Olsen-Smith
scholarship. From the late 1940s to 1999, Merton M. Sealts, Jr. maintained a “Check-List of
Books Owned and Borrowed” by Melville, which identified books known to survive, along with
their locations, and where possible supplied edition information for books presumed lost as well
as for books consulted by Melville through libraries or through the agency of friends and acquain-
tances.1 Sealts’s work made possible the efforts of another researcher, Wilson Walker Cowen, to
consult and transcribe the holograph evidence in surviving volumes. Though not a sustained and
regularly updated project like the Sealts Check-List, Cowen’s Melville’s Marginalia (first com-
pleted in 1965 as a PhD dissertation and published in facsimile in 1987) reproduced marked
content and annotations in the majority of books from Melville’s library then known to be
extant. Today, the scholarly web project Melville’s Marginalia Online, edited to date by Steven
Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. Marnon, succeeds and augments the work of both
earlier scholars by maintaining an updateable electronic catalog based on the Sealts Check-List,
by displaying high-resolution machine-readable images of Melville’s books, and by providing
electronic tools and methods for accessing and analyzing the marginalia. The ongoing recovery
of books from Melville’s library presents unique opportunities for scholarship, as does the
ongoing digitization of marked and annotated copies generously undertaken by holding institu-
tions. Just as each recovered volume with markings and notes in Melville’s hand has traditionally
added unique evidence for the ongoing study of his thought, newly digitized and machine-readable
copies of books from his library—even of books long known to survive—offer expanded oppor-
tunities for analysis unknown to pre-digital scholarship. Taken together, the expanding evidence
of Melville’s reading and of digital methods for analyzing it offer some of the most intriguing
prospects available for advancing our understanding of his craft and thought.
The promise of progress is not without caveats. The collection of Melville family papers at
Houghton Library, Harvard University, includes a notebook labeled “Catalogue of Library” and
“H. M.” on the spine that was expressly bound for the purpose of recording his holdings by
author and title.2 Likely made to order for Melville as a gift rather than produced at his own
behest, it contains not a single-recorded entry for any of his holdings. For scholars of Melville’s
reading, this blank artifact emblematizes some of the larger sources of frustration and regret in
the field. Melville’s library was too large for Elizabeth Melville to preserve intact after her hus-
band’s death on September 28, 1891, and by the following March well over half had been given
away to friends and family members and sold to used book dealers in New York City and
Brooklyn. The fate of his library parallels the loss and destruction of Melville’s papers, with few
manuscripts of his works known still to exist, and substantial gaps in his recovered correspondence.
1
First published by Sealts in volumes 2, 3, and 4 of the Harvard Library Bulletin (1948–1950, 1952), the “Check-List”
was expanded twice by Sealts for successive editions of his book Melville’s Reading (1966 and 1988), with supplements
by Sealts appearing in HLB (1971 and 1979) and Melville Society Extracts (1990, 1995, and 1998), and by Sealts and
Steven Olsen-Smith in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies (2004 and 2016). “Sealts Numbers” for books owned and
borrowed by Melville parenthetically cited in the present essay refer to entries in the 1988 “Check-List” and supplements
and at Melville’s Marginalia Online. Numeric values for entries added since Sealts’s work are here preceded by the
abbreviation “MMO.”
2
“Catalogue of Library,” Herman Melville Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 188.4. For a
facsimile image of the spine and opening page, see the introduction to the “Online Catalog of Books and Documents
Owned, Borrowed and Consulted by Herman Melville” at Melville’s Marginalia Online.
Books and Marginalia, Real and Virtual 285
In the decades immediately following dispersal, many volumes went through the hands of used
book sellers and staff at circulating libraries, and some marginalia were subjected to erasure—
itself a process of destruction and attenuation to which family members and, earlier, Melville
himself had contributed. Books currently located and known to survive remain geographically
sundered, with copies housed individually and collected in groups at separate research institu-
tions and in the holdings of private collectors. Thanks especially to the stewardship of Melville’s
granddaughters, most of the books retained within the family remain preserved at Harvard
University’s Houghton Library and at the New York Public Library, as well as at the Berkshire
Athenaeum and at Yale and Princeton Universities, among other repositories. Books owned by
the late William Reese constitute the largest private collection in existence. These and other
standing collections, along with the slow recovery of fugitive volumes continually tracked and
documented since Sealts first began his work, constitute a unique resource of books and margi-
nalia that include Melville’s copies of the King James Bible, Homer, Dante Alighieri, William
Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Honoré de
Balzac, Arthur Schopenhauer, and many others. Yet the aggregate of extant books from Melville’s
personal library will always be dispersed and fragmentary.
Melville’s library included books from his childhood as well as volumes that had been owned
by his father Allan Melvill, Sr. many of whose holdings had been auctioned off as a result of
financial decline when Melville was a child, but whose copy of an abridged version of Robert
Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (Sealts No. 103) Melville unknowingly purchased from a New
York bookseller on April 10, 1847. That day, particularly, was a formative one for Melville’s col-
lection, when with advanced earnings for Omoo he purchased at least ten books through various
sellers, most of them on nautical subjects in preparation for beginning his third book Mardi
(1849). The earliest documented reference to Melville’s library, as such, occurs in a letter of
January 6, 1851 from Augusta Melville to their sister Helen. She reports the arrival at
Arrowhead—the home outside Pittsfield, MA, that Melville had purchased the previous year—
of a holiday parcel mailed by their brother Allan containing “some very valuable books, for
Herman’s library.”3 By that point Melville’s collection had been seriously augmented by pur-
chases and acquisitions made during his visit to London and the continent in 1849, including a
number of seventeenth-century imprints as well as contemporary trade volumes. The blank
“Catalogue of Library” appears to have been prepared at around this time, likely by Allan or
another intimate witness to the growth of Melville’s holdings.4 His collection grew steadily dur-
ing the family’s residence at Arrowhead, as indicated by Richard Lathers, whose visits to Melville
likely occurred in the years immediately preceding Allan Melville’s purchase of the property in
3
Augusta Melville to Helen Melville, 6 January 1851, Gansevoort Lansing Collection, Manuscripts and Archives
Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
4
“Books Obtained in London,” “Books Obtained in Paris,” and “Books Obtained in Germany,” 1849 Journal, Herman
Melville Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 188 (371). For facsimile images, see the introduction
to the “Online Catalog of Books and Documents Owned, Borrowed and Consulted by Herman Melville” at Melville’s
Marginalia Online. The catalogue includes a label advertising the firm “Stationer’s Hall / 191 Pearl & 50 Wall St. New
York / David Felt & Co.” According to New York City directories, Felt operated at these addresses from 1848 to 1850.
1863: “I visited him often in his well-stocked library, where I listened with intense pleasure to
his highly individual views of society and politics” (Olsen-Smith, Melville 91). In remaining
decades, the accumulative glory of Melville’s library made a strong impression on visitors to the
New York family residence at 104 East 26th Street, as did the author himself among his books
in the final years of his life. As recollected by one family acquaintance:
His city home, then in 26th St., near Fourth Ave., contained a wonderful library, at which I gazed with
wonder and respect. Books to the right of you, books to the left of you, books all above you, and on the
long table. I can see him now, in memory’s picture, sitting in his big arm chair, a fine specimen of
manhood.5
Melville continued to acquire books during his final illness in 1891, as reported by Oscar
Wegelin of his apprenticeship to the Manhattan bookseller John Anderson: “It was my own good
fortune several times in those months to be the bearer of bundles of books to the Melville house”
(Olsen-Smith, Melville 149). Wegelin does not appear to have ever made it past the threshold of
the home in those months of decline, but he reports being generously tipped, and his estimation
of Melville’s collection based on the types of books he delivered was truer than he knew: from its
formation up until the end, “Melville’s was a reader’s and a student’s library” (149).
According to the appraisal of Melville’s estate, which is dated March 28, 1892 (exactly six
months after his death on 28 September) the library consisted of “about 1,000 volumes” (Charvat
252). But over a month earlier, on 25 February, the Brooklyn bookseller A. F. Farnell had in his
diary already reported having “bought the lot” from Elizabeth Melville (Sealts, Pursuing Melville,
133), leading to a notice in the New York Evening World of 19 March: “‘We have just purchased,’
says Mr. Farnell, ‘The library of the late Herman Melville, of New York, and we obtained some
valuable works.’”6 This timeline of events suggests the act of calculating the 1,000-volume
figure preceded the date of the appraisal document by more than a month. It should be empha-
sized, too, that Farnell had not purchased the entire appraised quantity. A number of books were
sold after Melville’s death through the Manhattan firm of Wegelin’s employer John Anderson,
who according to Farnell had alerted him to the opportunity. Since numerous books also went to
descendent family members, the appraised quantity must have been culled substantially by the
time Farnell entered the picture. Nonetheless, the dealer’s diminutive label displaying the name
of his Brooklyn store, “Ye Olde Booke Shoppe,” can be found on the rear pastedowns of several
surviving books, including Melville’s 10-volume sets of Moliere and Lord Byron. Charles Olson,
who interviewed Anderson as well as Farnell’s son Henry about the transactions long after the
fact, reported to Sealts that the portions sold from Melville’s library “ran to at least 500 vol-
umes,” a figure that falls considerably short of probability based on the smaller number of vol-
umes that went to descendants and ultimately to institutions (Pursuing Melville 34). Whatever
the quantity Farnell carted away on or shortly after February 28, 1892, his shop was a major hub
for the dispersal of Melville’s books.
5
See Phelps in Works Cited, 711. The recollection was first discovered and reproduced by Scott Norsworthy at
Melvilliana: the world and writings of Herman Melville.
6
See “Brooklyn Gossip” in Works Cited. The notice was first discovered and reproduced by Scott Norsworthy at
Melvilliana: the world and writings of Herman Melville.
As Sealts observed, it is not clear whether the appraised figure included an accounting of col-
lected editions by title or by individual volume. Multi-volume editions were numerous among
Melville’s holdings, including his extant seven-volume set of The Dramatic Works of William
Shakespeare (Sealts No. 460) and a four-volume folio set of Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical
Dictionary (Sealts No. 51), which is not known to survive. His complete set of the Harper Classical
Library series (Sealts No. 147) consisted of thirty-seven duodecimo volumes, two of which are
known to survive; and individual titles in that set consisted of one-, two-, three-, and five-vol-
ume editions. Two-volume formats were extremely common among nineteenth-century imprints
and are well represented among titles associated with Melville. But the approximate character of
the entry and a general paucity of detail in the appraisal document leads one to suspect that the
1,000-volume figure was arrived at by a rough process of measuring, or just counting, the
number of book-shelves in Melville’s study (and perhaps in overflow regions elsewhere in the
home), and calculating by some ratio of volumes per shelf or by foot, with little or no attention
to bibliographical niceties. Given the likelihood for imprecision in that process, not least owing
to variations of book size in a library whose contents ranged from porpoises to whales, the prep-
osition should be emphasized in the appraised figure of about 1,000 volumes. As of this writing,
roughly 420 titles are positively identified as books likely to have been among those that com-
prised the appraised collection, and these amount to approximately 570 individual volumes, or
57 percent of the appraised total. Roughly 250 of those titles are known or assumed to survive
intact and in the form of broken multi-volume sets, originally totaling around 347 distinct vol-
umes, or roughly 35 percent of the appraised total. Figures vary for estimates that include
Melville family volumes or sets that were in the home but may not have been considered part of
Melville’s own personal library, as well as books known by presentation inscription or other evi-
dence to have left Melville’s personal ownership before his death. Books he presented to others
include titles he demonstrably considered his own before he gave them away, as well as books he
only may have construed as such. Calculation scenarios and running tallies are updated regularly
at Melville’s Marginalia Online on the basis of emerging evidence.
It is impossible to estimate how many more volumes from Melville’s library may yet be recov-
ered and documented, and how many are lost for good. But the history and circumstances of
recovery indicate both numbers would not be insubstantial if, at the end of things, it were pos-
sible to perform an exhaustive tally. A number of volumes were reportedly destroyed after leav-
ing his library, such as his folio copy of The Works of Seneca (Sealts No. 457) by house fire in
1954. In 1999 his copy of Thomas Warton’s The History of English Poetry (MMO No. 447a) was
discovered, uncatalogued, in the holdings of the Brooklyn Public Library, having made its way
there through the earlier Brooklyn Library’s acquisition of a private collection owned by Mr.
Robert Bell, a prominent Brooklyn resident whose holdings included books he had purchased
from Farnell’s bookshop (Olsen-Smith “Fourth Supplement,” 106–7). In 2000, a month-long
search of the current institution’s older imprints yielded no other copies that could be associated
with Melville, and there is no telling what may have been deaccessioned and discarded from the
Bell collection over the preceding decades of the twentieth century. Most recently, Melville’s
copy of writings by the Roman satirist Juvenal, which includes both the satires of Persius and
Samuel Johnson’s imitations of Juvenal, and the third in his three-volume edition of the Greek
dramatist Euripides emerged as the only two recovered volumes from his set of the above-
mentioned thirty-seven-volume Harper Classical Library. These two volumes were rescued from
among a pile of books left for trash pickup outside a Gansevoort Street apartment in New York
City in 1989 and not examined closely and identified as Melville’s until 2016 (MMO Nos. 207a
and 304.1)—ludicrously late to rescue any other volumes that may have been left on the curb.7
Some items documented in the early years of Melville scholarship have since become lost,
including multi-volume editions of the writings of Edgar Allan Poe (Sealts No. 404a), Percy
Bysshe Shelley (No. 469), and Alexander Pope (No. 405), which was already broken as a set
when vols. 1 and 2 were documented in the 1920s, and of which vol. 3 alone (having resurfaced
through other channels) is located today. Still others are known about only from entries in early
twentieth-century booksellers’ catalogs, including Melville’s copy of Daniel Defoe’s History of
the Plague in London (Sealts No. 178, in 1926 described by Dauber & Pine Bookshops as auto-
graphed and annotated) and his copy of John Taylor’s The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin (No.
496, in 1931 described by the firm of Alfred F. Goldsmith as presented to or by Melville in
1851, with “an interesting note in his hand” on the title).
Including other autographed copies that have resurfaced over the past two decades alone, such
as Melville’s ten-volume set of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (Sealts No. 84) and the first five
volumes of his six-volume set of Charles Wilkes’s United States Exploring Expedition (No. 532), the
record of ongoing recovery since Sealts first began his work offers a strong basis for believing that
more discoveries await and may occur at any time. When Melville’s books emerge, they are duly
valued and acquired by institutions and collectors who preserve them appropriately. In cases
where an item is not already listed by Sealts and MMO on the basis of external evidence (such as
Melville’s references to purchases and acquisitions in letters and journal entries), it is assigned its
own identifier based on Sealts’s alpha-numeric labeling procedure, which he designed to incor-
porate new entries where appropriate in the larger alphabetical listing, and it is added to the
online catalog at Melville’s Marginalia Online. Yet the circumstances of resurfaced items such as
the orphaned Classical Library volumes and of the Boswell and Wilkes copies (both acquired ser-
endipitously from inexpensive used book inventories whose sellers missed their association with
Melville) offer a potentially grim testament for the past and future fates of many volumes that
have been documented through external evidence but which are not known to survive. Those
conditions apply even more acutely to books and titles owned by Melville that for lack of docu-
mentary evidence have simply never been known to scholarship. But hope springs eternal, as
Richard Altick observed decades ago when he urged that reports of artifactual loss and destruc-
tion always be met with scholarly skepticism until verified (234). Many books currently pre-
sumed lost were distinctively antiquated even in Melville’s day, such as the above-mentioned
folio set of Pierre Bayle, the correct 1710 imprint of which was identified by James Duban, and
Melville’s 1651 copy of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, which we know he owned thanks to recent
research by Scott Norsworthy at the website Melvilliana: the world and writings of Herman Melville.
These are by no means the sort of items, regardless of association now or since, that a book owner
would be likely to discard. Thanks to Sealts, furthermore, a lasting framework is in place for
documentation and collection of evidence that traces the movements of copies not permanently
preserved at research institutions, and that helps to direct information about newly emergent
volumes to the attention of scholars. Today, the World Wide Web presence of Melville’s Marginalia
7
See Peter Norberg and Steven Olsen-Smith, “A Second Update on Books Owned, Borrowed, and Consulted by
Melville” in the June 2021 issue of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, pp. 82–86.
Online makes it the logical destination for this intelligence, whether directly or through the
agency of researchers in the field. The project’s high-resolution digital copies of surviving vol-
umes provide a visual record of Melville’s handwriting and marking practices that any member
of the public—from librarians and collectors inventorying books in their holdings to non-spe-
cialists on their return home from used book or estate sales—can consult while examining
unidentified marginalia in their possession.
Melville habitually used lead pencil to inscribe marginalia, though instances of colored pencil
are present in rare cases. In addition to displaying a wide variety of marking types isolating pas-
sages that were of interest to him, books from Melville’s library frequently contain annotations
in the margins. Typically his inscriptions link to a marking type such as a pencil “x” first
alongside the passage under examination and, second, at the start of his annotation in the top or
bottom margin of the page, thereby keying his response to the portion of printed text that
prompted it. As we would assume about an incomplete body of commentary appearing in the
margins of distinct works, and spanning decades of reading, Melville’s recorded annotations defy
exhaustive classification. They vary in nature according to the author and type of book in
question, his incentives for reading it, and his reaction to its content. It is also reasonable to
assume (and in some cases quite clear) that responses he articulated were influenced by the mood
or frame of mind he happened to be in at the time of reading. Many annotations exemplify the
self-instructive character of his reading. In his immersive studies of poetry, he commonly noted
perceived instances of literary antecedents and influence by use of name references. For example,
he alluded succinctly to “Milton” alongside Homer’s description of Achilles, “sphere’d round
with beams,” in his copy of the Iliad (Sealts No. 277, 2.208) and, in his marginalia to Paradise
Lost, to “Dante” alongside Milton’s description of the damned: “Immovable, infix’d, and frozen
round” (Sealts No. 358b, 1.060). At greater length in his copy of Matthew Arnold’s Poems (Sealts
No. 21, 322), Melville noted with delight a chain of indebted elegiac imagery extending to
Arnold’s “The Youth of Nature” (“Rais’d are the dripping oars”) from Collins (“And off suspend
the dashing oar” in “On the death of Mr. Thomson”) through Wordsworth (“For him suspend
the dashing oar” in “Remembrance of Collins”). In writings by living contemporaries or near-
contemporaries, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Matthew Arnold, his annotations are fre-
quently dialogic and at points combative. In works by departed writers his annotations tend to
be more cogitative and reflective. To judge from Melville’s marginalia in Thomas Beale’s The
Natural History of the Sperm Whale (Sealts No. 52), he employed a varied annotative approach even
in books he consulted for the practical purpose of furnishing material for his own writings. The
copy of Beale includes annotations that pin down factual information and details for potential
use in Moby-Dick and that comment on their accuracy. But the Beale marginalia also include
rough drafts of poetic similes and imagery that Melville went on to develop in detail for inser-
tion, with pearl-like fruition, at significant points in the narrative of his masterwork.
In rare and arresting cases, Melville responded to content in ways that reveal inklings of
unique biographical relevance. On a passage in “Colin Clout’s Come Home Again” in his set of
Edmund Spenser’s Poetical Works (Sealts No. 483a), Melville remarked: “Absolute coincidence
here between Spenser’s conceit and another person’s, in connection with a very singular thought”
(Sealts No. 483a, 6.195; see Figure 23.1). The nautical subject matter of the passage in question
would have been enough to capture Melville’s attention, as illustrated by marginalia on sea
imagery and references in other surviving volumes. But here it was the poet’s focus on the human
Figure 23.1 Melville’s annotation to “Colin Clout’s Come Home Again” in The Poetical Works of
Edmund Spenser (London: J. Bell, 1787–1788), 6.195. *AC85.M4977.Zz787s. Houghton Library, Harvard
University.
death drive and his conception of sea-faring as a surrogate form of suicide that prompted a shock
of recollection:
Who life doth loath, and longs death to behold

Before he die, already dead with fear,
And yet would live with heart half stony cold,
Let him to sea, and he shall see it there.
(6.195)
Melville’s inscription, “C. H. 2,” on the front pastedown of the volume signifies his second
voyage around Cape Horn aboard his brother Thomas Melville’s ship the Meteor in 1860—one
decade after the composition of Moby-Dick, where Ishmael takes to the sea as a quiet “substitute
for pistol and ball” and later, in Chapter 112, discerns kindred tendencies in the character of the
blacksmith:
Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like [his]; but Death is only a launching into the region
of the Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the
Watery, the Unshored; to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior
compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his
whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures …
(MD 486)
Melville’s response to the passage in “Colin Clout,” with its diagonal reference to “another
person’s” conceit, is self-effacing even while it conveys a measure of satisfaction and vindication
in the shared singularity of its thought and the unindebted artistry of its application in Moby-
Dick. Linking him to Spenser’s example in the very domain with which it is concerned, and on a
voyage commencing his ambitious study of poetry and poetics, in the near term, and purportedly
also his long-term determination to write an epic poem, the annotation shows Melville glancing
backward to his masterwork in the midst of a determinedly forward-looking reading agenda at
this transitional point in his artistic career.8
In the journal he kept on the same voyage, Melville recorded a collision with another ship on
the open sea—a near catastrophe and “instance of the grossest heedlessness possible” on the part
of the other vessel; and at a later point in the voyage, he described the tragic fate of a crew
member who fell “from the main topsail yard to the deck, & striking head-foremost upon one of
the spars was instantly killed” (J 132, 134). His journal reflection on such occurrences as “an
order of human events, which staggers those whom the Primal Philosophy hath not confirmed,”
can be traced to his reading of “Ode: Intimations of Immorality” in his copy of The Poetical Works
of William Wordsworth (Sealts No. 563a), which he had with him on board the Meteor. The page
displaying section 10 of the “Ode,” with Wordsworth’s well-known remarks on the “primal
sympathy” that grants eventual solace to suffering in “years that bring the philosophic mind,”
was at some point torn out of the volume. But two years later Melville was still intrigued by the
lines when he encountered them excerpted in his copy of William Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English
Poets (Sealts No. 263b). Annotating Wordsworth’s words there, he remarked:
A rigid analysis would make this sentiment appear in a different light from the one in which it is, prob-
ably, generally received. Its vagueness makes it susceptible of many interpretations; but Truth is suscep-
tible of but one.
(2.199; see Figure 23.2)
Melville’s expressed sense of an esoteric character to the passage brings to mind his well-known
remarks on the rhetorically subversive craft of Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and “other masters of
8
See Parker’s “The Lost Poems” for Melville’s epic intentions and study of poetry on his voyage aboard the Meteor.
Figure 23.2 Melville’s annotation to lines excerpted (with inaccuracies) from William Wordsworth’s
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality” in William Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Comic Writers [and] on the
English Poets (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859), 2.199. Collection of Mr. William Reese. Photograph by
Melville’s Marginalia Online.
the great Art of Telling the Truth” (PT 244), and it aligns with annotations in his reading of
other Elizabethan writers and of Milton, among others. His unexpressed sense of the alternative
significance he attributes to the lines is symptomatic of annotations in his hand that address
literary and philosophical meaning more generally. In “Michael, A Pastoral Poem,” Wordsworth’s
description of the title character “alone / amid the heart of many thousand mists, / That came to
him and left him on the heights” prompted Melville’s succinct remark: “Very fine in its emblem-
atic meaning” (87:2.48–50). His attention to the passage corresponds to characteristic preoccu-
pations with the mystic impulse and its temporal character, an idea underlying numerous
instances of transcendent impasse in Moby-Dick and other writings. But he stops short of
elaborating on this or any other interpretive outcome for the lines, and there are comparable
examples throughout Melville’s surviving marginalia. “The moral here is wonderfully fine,” he
crisply says of the concluding paragraph to Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” (Sealts No. 248,
1.051). “A noble expression, with a clear strong meaning,” he observes of a passage in Emerson’s
“The Poet” (Sealts No. 205, 010). “There was a twist in Milton,” he remarked in his marginalia
to “Samson Agonistes”: “From its place, the above marked passage has an interesting signifi-
cance” (Sealts No. 358b, 2.194). Such annotations affirm but do not articulate the profundity
that drew him to these authors, obliging students of his reading to tease out and reflect on the
various conceptual possibilities that moved Melville to set pencil to page.
Melville tended to hold forth more freely in instances of dialogic and polemical marginalia. In
response to Arnold’s judgment that the genius of Keats was, like that of other phenomenal poets
who die young, “deeply influenced” by his maladies, Melville retorted: “So is every one influ-
enced—the robust, the weak,—all constitutions—by the very fibre of their flesh, & chalk of the
bones. We are what we were made” (Sealts No. 17, 099). As Anthony G. Cohen and Brian
Yothers have recognized, Melville’s ingrained sense of mortal and material imperfections is what
chiefly provoked the exasperated annotations in his marginalia to the essays of Emerson.9 In his
reading of “Spiritual Laws,” Emerson’s description of the world’s evils as figments and projections
of moral and conceptual failings in the observer provoked him to reply at length: “A perfectly
good being, therefore, would see no evel.—But what did Christ see? He saw what made him
weep.—[John] Howard, too, the ‘Philanthropist[,]’ must have been a very bad man—he saw, in
jails, so much evil” and “To annihilate all this nonsense, read the Sermon on the Mount, and con-
sider what it implies” (Sealts No. 204, 133). Just as he revered Arnold as the great critical intel-
lect of the age, Melville expressed sincere appreciation for the “nobility” of thought amidst what
he considered to be Emerson’s philosophical blind spots, and his annotations to these two tow-
ering contemporaries are among the most forceful and explicit to be found in volumes that sur-
vive from his library.
From their capacity to intrigue to their revelatory character, Melville’s annotations have tradi-
tionally captured the attention of critics more than the markings in his marginalia. Unlike anno-
tations, markings are unexpressive and neutral, at most conveying degrees of interest in a passage
as opposed to any sense by Melville of its depth and profundity of meaning, let alone agreement
or disagreement. Since the marginalia are fragmentary and unwieldy, dispersed across pages and
volumes, across different titles, across decades of Melville’s reading life and, since his death,
across geography, moments of articulated response are most welcome, leading to a natural affinity
for annotations in criticism. Thus the extent to which a volume is annotated has traditionally
played no small role in determining whether or not it receives serious interpretive analysis—in
its own right and in connection with Melville’s writings. In wider-ranging studies of his ideas
and writing, Melville’s marginalia are sometimes the target of casual plundering and creaming
from this or that volume for vivid brief citation, tendencies that inevitably favor annotation and
leave marked content unaddressed. Noteworthy exceptions include Hershel Parker’s two-volume
Herman Melville: A Biography, which as a matter of procedure attends to significant threads of
reading evidence to illuminate important stages of Melville’s intellectual and aesthetic
9
See Cohen and Yothers’s “Critical Introduction to Melville’s Marginalia in Emerson’s Essays: First Series and Essays:
Second Series” at Melville’s Marginalia Online.
development. But neglect of marginalia has tended to predominate in studies that could have
been enriched by it. Penetrating articles that focus on Melville’s documented reading of other
writers, such as Walter E. Bezanson’s “Melville’s Reading of Arnold’s Poetry” and R. W. B.
Lewis’s “Melville on Homer,” have been the exception rather than the rule in Melville criticism.
But marked content is vastly more abundant in Melville’s surviving marginalia than annota-
tions, with far-reaching implications for the range of his interests, the development of his
thought, and influence on his writings; and it holds no less potential significance for Melville’s
intellectual engagement with content. To illustrate, the poetic prose Melville created from his
marginalia in Beale’s Natural History for Moby-Dick include epic similes—one invoking an image
of “the noblest oaks when prostrate” and the other the image of a “mighty fountain”—he pro-
duced in response to the author’s descriptions of a blind whale with “fungous masses” in place of
its eyes and of a captured whale in its death “flurry.” He went on to deploy both poeticisms, with
many others, in his own episode of chase and capture in Chapter 81, “The Pequod Meets the
Virgin” (MD 357, 358; Sealts No. 52, 036, 182). The material difference in the marginal evi-
dence is that Melville roughly articulated the fountain simile in an annotation he keyed to
Beale’s description of the whale in its flurry, whereas he only marked Beale’s description of the
blind whale with an unprepossessing marginal circle. Artistically and methodologically, as
revealed by their exquisite outcomes in Moby-Dick, his engagement with each passage was iden-
tical (Olsen-Smith, “Melville’s Copy” 32–33).
Contributing to the comparative neglect of markings are the conditions by which Melville’s
marginalia have traditionally been available for study. Archived in institutional and private col-
lections, Melville’s books have traditionally remained out of convenient reach to most academics.
Cowen faced herculean challenges in terms not only of the quantity and geographical dispersal
of marked and annotated volumes that survive, but also of the rudimentary options available to
him for transcription and reproduction. As a PhD dissertation, Cowen’s edition was produced by
typewriter, and its uniform typography allowed for little visual distinction between his tran-
scriptions and his own editorial notes and commentary, making the resource awkward to use. He
used heavy pencil lead in his own hand to duplicate Melville’s markings. The most available
format for consulting the original dissertation is microfilm. Along with being difficult to use in
its own right due to a compacted format and reduced font size, the 1987 two-volume facsimile
reproduction of Melville’s Marginalia has always been rare even among the libraries of colleges
and universities owing to its limited print run. Further, Cowen’s edition is not indexed, which
severely limits its usefulness for investigation outside known quantities of author- and title-
focused investigation.
Access and analysis, the two factors around which barriers to critical engagement with
Melville’s marginalia have traditionally existed, are today greatly facilitated by digital tech-
nology—and in ways well-suited for investigation of marked content. Complete digital-
facsimile copies of marked and annotated books from Melville’s library are published at Melville’s
Marginalia Online, where Extensible Markup Language (XML) makes marked content
machine-readable and searchable across volumes by keyword and phrase as well as by word pair-
ings, or “collocates,” in individually marked passages. The result of these features is something
tantamount to what the availability of evidence would have been in the previous century if
Cowen had not only been able to index Melville’s Marginalia but had also supplemented the
edition with an exhaustive concordance, enabling users to trace and track down topics in the
marginalia wherever they may exist. But users of the web project have ready access to a growing
number of complete digital surrogates of Melville’s books and therefore the ability to examine
marked content in their full contexts—not just for copies to which Cowen had access but for
volumes that resurfaced well after he performed his work, such as Melville’s editions of Dante,
Milton, and Wordsworth—as well as to erased content in emergent and long-preserved volumes
that escaped twentieth-century means of detection and decipherment. In 2021, access and anal-
ysis were expanded still further by the project through its adoption of data visualization tools.
These resources make it possible to transform marginalia from encoded digital copies—or por-
tions thereof filtered according to marking type and other variables—into word clouds and lists,
trends graphs, and compendia that organize passages of marginalia by quantity of words and
linguistic density. The distant forms of analysis made possible by these tools reveal tendencies
and trends in Melville’s marginalia unknown to pre-digital scholarship, enabling researchers to
detect patterns of reading engagement within and across volumes, and within periods of
Melville’s reading life, that would never have been visible through traditional methods of anal-
ysis. Dynamic integration of visualization tools at MMO enables rapid tool-tip and mouse-click
navigation from selected wording and phrasing in visuals straight to page-level facsimile evi-
dence from which the visuals are derived, for nimble interaction between primary evidence and
digital output.
As observed at the outset of this chapter on books and marginalia, the growing availability of
reading evidence presents significant opportunities for scholarly and critical progress in Melville
studies. Among all volumes digitally encoded to date at Melville’s Marginalia Online—including
the author’s marked and annotated sets of Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton—the substantive
terms that appear most frequently in marked passages and annotations are “man” and “like,”
indicating Melville’s gravitation toward themes and subject matter involving the human
condition and his affinity for the rhetorical device of simile, which he used so pervasively in his
own writings. The top term in its pluralized form “men” is directly behind “like” in frequency,
and “life” figures distantly but still prominently as the fourth most frequent word to appear in
Melville’s marginalia. These are followed by a multitude of less frequent but potent concepts—
among them “love,” “death,” “world,” and “mind”—and no shortage of unique but resonant
terms will proliferate and expand as the project continues to encode marked and annotated
content. Considering the ubiquity of these and related associations in Melville’s writing, practi-
cally any subject addressed by critical studies of Melville written in the past century could be
revisited and enriched by digitally enabled analysis of his reading, just as we can assert that every
future study in the field will be obliged for thoroughness and credibility to consult and consider
the relevance of Melville’s books and marginalia to new approaches and insights about Melville’s
thought and craft.
Works Cited
Altick, Richard. The Scholar Adventurers. Ohio State UP, Cohen, Anthony G. and Brian Yothers. “Introduction to
1950. Melville’s Marginalia in Emerson’s Essays: First Series
“Brooklyn Gossip.” New York Evening World, 19 March and Essays: Second Series.” Melville’s Marginalia Online,
1892. edited by Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg and
Charvat, William. “Melville’s Income.” American Dennis C. Marnon. Accessed 30 Nov. 2020.
Literature, vol. 15, no. 3, Nov. 1943, pp. 251–61.
Cowen, Wilson Walker, editor. Melville’s Marginalia. 2 Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography. 2 vols.
vols. Garland, 1987. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996 and 2002.
Melville’s Marginalia Online, edited by Steven Olsen- ———. “The Lost Poems (1860) and Melville’s First
Smith, Peter Norberg and Dennis C. Marnon. http:// Urge to Write an Epic Poem.” Melville’s Evermoving
melvillesmarginalia.org/. 2006–present. Dawn: Centennial Essays, edited by John Bryant and
Norsworthy, Scott. Melvilliana: The World and Writings of Robert Milder. Kent State UP, 1997, pp. 260–75.
Herman Melville. https://melvilliana.blogspot.com. Phelps, William Lyon. “As I Like It.” Scribner’s Magazine,
Accessed 30 Nov. 2011–2020. vol. 85, no. 6, June 1929, pp. 703–13.
Olsen-Smith, Steven, editor. Melville in His Own Time: A Sealts, Jr., Merton M. “Melville’s Reading: A Check-List
Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from of Books Owned and Borrowed.” Harvard Library
Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, Bulletin, Vol. 2, nos. 2 and 3, Spring and Autumn
and Associates. U of Iowa P, 2015. 1948, pp. 141–63, 378–92; vol. 3, nos. 1, 2, and 3,
———. “Herman Melville’s Copy of Thomas Beale’s The Winter, Spring, and Autumn 1949, pp. 119–30,
Natural History of the Sperm Whale and the Composition 268–77, 407–21; and vol. 4, no. 1, Winter 1950,
of Moby-Dick.” Harvard Library Bulletin, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 119–30.
Fall 2010, pp. 1–77. ———. Melville’s Reading: Revised and Enlarged Edition.
Olsen-Smith, Steven and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. “A U of South Carolina P, 1988.
Cumulative Supplement to Melville’s Reading.” ———. Pursuing Melville: Essays and Chapters. U of
Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, Wisconsin P, 1982.
March 2004, pp. 55–77.
24
Counting (on) Melville: Moby-Dick,
Computational Literary Studies, and
Dictionary-Based Readings
Dennis Mischke
Digital scholarship on Melville has come a long way in the last decade, thanks first and foremost
to the staff of the Melville Electronic Library (MEL) and Melville’s Marginalia Online (MMO).
Without the resources and infrastructures of such digitized archives, any computational work on
Melville would be hampered considerably. Without them we would simply not have, as
Christopher Ohge and Steven Olsen-Smith put it, the “exciting and potentially transformative
developments in literary studies” (2) we see today. What can the digital humanities offer the
well-established field of Melville Studies, and what can Melvillian perspectives add to the emerg-
ing digital humanities discipline of computational literary studies? As the digital transforma-
tion advances and as an increasing number of digital tools and procedures can be used to retrieve
textual data from large collections of texts, a growing number of scholars have begun to think of
literature as data. Yet, what exactly is the benefit of such data-driven explorations of narrative and
what does it mean for literary studies? While the digital transformation has offered novel ways
of finding, accessing, distributing, and handling literary texts, Computational Literary Studies
(CLS) and Digital Humanities (DH) struggle to prove that the “evidence” they produce can tell
us new stories about Melville.
No wonder, then, that critics of computational and data-based approaches to literature have
argued that literary criticism predicated on data and quantification would necessarily miss the
true purpose of literary writing. Nan Z. Da’s polemic on CLS, for instance, has argued that
“CLS tends to stick to counting words and is, in an even more limited sense, forced to find
many of its significances by tweaking stop words” (607). By the same token Timothy Brennan’s
“The Digital Humanities Bust” focuses on the fact that counting words does not––under any
circumstances––reveal more than the descriptive nature of mere quantification itself. Referring
to Moby-Dick he posits: “the significance of the appearance of the word ‘whale’ (say, 1700
times) is precisely this: the appearance of the word ‘whale’ 1,700 times” (2). While the exact
occurrence of the word “whale” is actually considerably lower––depending on whether you
298 Dennis Mischke
count the original word-forms (lemma) or any occurrence of the word, it occurs either 908 or
1210 times1 ––Brennan’s imprecision is a provocation. At first sight, it might not make much
difference whether the total occurrence of the word “whale” is 908 times or 1700. Far more
interesting, for instance, is what changes in word frequencies can tell us about a text or collec-
tion of texts. As I show elsewhere (Mischke 2022), changes in the relative frequency of the
word “Ahab” in Moby-Dick, for instance, coincide with changes of sentiment measured in the
story. Now, one possible reading of this correlation may not be surprising for scholars of liter-
ature familiar with the plot of Moby-Dick––we know that Ahab’s fate is detrimental to the
development of the story. However, producing computational confirmation that Ahab is a
major driver of the plot in Moby-Dick––based on change rates in word frequency measurements
of emotional valency––suggests that a notoriously challenging author like Melville can be
meaningfully read with computational tools and methods. Hence, a digital analysis of a well-
researched and repeatedly canonized “frame narrative” (Pease 158) like Moby-Dick can add to
the evaluation, enhancement, and further development of methods in CLS. After all, CLS
should not be about counting and computing words for the sake of methodology alone. In a
seminal essay on the development of online critical archives, John Bryant has formulated a
demand for digital scholarship that seeks critical significance not only for digital editions but
also for computational approaches to literature. In “Where Is the Text of America? Witnessing
Revision and the Online Critical Archive,” Bryant notes:
Technicians will tell you that anything can be done digitally—with “Time, Strength, Cash, and
Patience” (as Melville also once put it)—but once achieved, a technical solution (elegant or not) is
worthless unless it sufficiently and coherently embodies a critical vision.
(158)
Much of the contemporary critique of CLS has a similar axe to grind. In conceptualizing,
planning, implementing, and maintaining the complex infrastructures necessary to run digital
archives as well as computational methods and tools, researchers find it an enormous challenge
not to lose sight of the objects and questions at hand. In other words, if CLS demarcates a sea-
change in digital scholarship that builds on the achievements of critical digital editions such as
MEL or the Women’s Writers Project (WWP), scholars cannot detach their tools and methods from
their epistemological object: the literary text. Unfortunately this divide between quantification
and hermeneutics, between data and literature, is widening.
1
In fact, after lemmatization the overall distribution of tokens of “whale” looks like this.
Token Overall NOUN ADJ VERB
whale 908 900 2 6
whales 240 240 0 0
whaling 52 0 0 52
Whale 4 4 0 0
Whales 4 4 0 0
whaled 1 0 0 1
Whaling 1 0 0 1
Total 1,210
“WHALES—a word, which, in the popular sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness” (Melville, Moby-Dick 123).
Indeed, counting words itself is anything but a trivial venture. Defining the boundaries of a word is a complex
linguistic research question to begin with. This token analysis of the lemma “whale” was done with spaCy 2.2.4.
Counting (on) Melville 299
While much work in the digital humanities has thus far focused on the development of meth-
odology alone (Scheinfeld), the field now confronts an ever more pronounced divide between
quantitative, data-driven approaches and the hermeneutic traditions of literary criticism and
scholarly editing. In his most recent essay, “The Roads to Rome” (2020), Franco Moretti elabo-
rates on the difficult synthesis between quantification and hermeneutics and puts fuel to the fire.
What relationship, between hermeneutics and quantification? […] the brief overlap between the
two practices, or the lexical proximity of the normative and the frequent, were too weak a foundation
for any genuine, long-term synthesis. Perhaps, I should have known it all along. Interpretation
transforms all it touches: “this, means that.” Quantification takes pride in an utter respect for its
data. The impulses are antithetical. Dionysus, Apollo.
(136)
How do we reconcile these two approaches to literature, the computational one based on
quantification and large-scale patterns (i.e. “distant readings”) and the hermeneutic one based on
“close readings” with informed interpretation? I suggest disrupting the connection between
quantification and distant forms of reading. Moretti presents a false binary that implies that a
hermeneutic close reading is excessive and indulgent, whereas only quantification of the scientific
“facts” will facilitate Apollonian sobriety. Applying what Martin Eve has called “digital close
reading” (12) to Melville’s Moby-Dick shows that readings based on quantification and computa-
tion are not “distant” and out of touch with their object of study; rather, they open up comple-
mentary perspectives that can help to formulate entirely new questions and ask old ones
differently. By bringing a critical and a computational approach to bear on a close reading of one
text, and by subsequently complementing it with a broader perspective, I think Melville can––
metaphorically speaking––be counted on and reckoned with in the digital era.
What does digitization do to the entities it digitizes, especially if that entity is a complex
work of art like Moby-Dick? It creates, I suggest, an entirely different epistemological object with
a completely different ontology (mode of being) in the world. Once digitization efforts have
transformed a literary text into a corpus, the text becomes a digital object (a dataset) with differ-
ent affordances. Now, the digital literary text can not only be read, studied, analyzed, inter-
preted, devoured, or performed, but it can also be counted, computed, data-mined, encoded,
annotated, referenced, addressed, and much more.
Above all, digital corpora lend themselves to machine reading that can indeed facilitate the
reading process by enabling access to additional information. Many proponents of digital
approaches to literature have pointed out that “distant reading” techniques and technologies are
especially helpful in digesting the enormous number of books that have been published until now.
Using computers to fathom the “great unread” (Cohen 23) is a noble goal that will help us to
retrieve hitherto undiscovered treasures of our literary heritage. Computational approaches to lit-
erature can hence be seen, as Martin Eve has put it, as an “antinecrotic practice, one that staves off
the limiting effects of death. But it is also an antireading practice that substitutes for direct,
human engagement with literature” (3). The ultimate merit of digital and computational read-
ings of literature then, as Eve also points out, will be a “death-avoidance-to-reading-avoidance
trade-off ratio” (3). Approaching the “great unread” with technologies that imply a kind of not-
reading in the first place ultimately contributes to a dialectic that enables more opportunities for
human reading. Therefore, Eve concludes: “In this respect, distant and close reading practices
perhaps diverge less than detractors [critics of digital humanities] sometimes imagine” (4).
300 Dennis Mischke
Regardless of how advanced the technologies of machine learning and artificial intelligence may
be, the question of whether machines will ever be able to “read” (as in interpreting) literary works
or not is impossible to answer. It may be better to ask instead how technological developments
shift reading practices and literary writing in the first place. Given the transformative nature of
the digital revolution, I would like to focus on the question of what digitization of literary works
of art actually means for the literary text. Or, asked differently, what precisely happens to the
literariness of the text after it has been transformed into a spreadsheet or data frame?
The quest for meaning in the humanities in general and for Melville studies in particular rests
on its capability of carrying relevance into a world that is and will increasingly be read, written,
and processed by digital and learned machines (Liu 410). Melville’s textual ingenuity, his intri-
cate aesthetic and philosophical force, his abilities to think outside the narrow horizons of local,
ethnic, or national categories––all of these can also be understood with computation. Doing so
may facilitate a critical transformation of his legacy into the digital age. After all, we know that
great literature can do so many things at once. Just as computer code can be the object of literary
studies––such as the new field of critical code studies suggests (Vee 41)––literature can also
quite literally be executable code as in the case of the Shakespeare Programming Language
(Hasselström and Åslund). As Christopher Ohge suggests in Chapter 25 of this Companion,
Melville’s literary works were not only concerned with pre-digital notions of computation, but
reading Melville has in many ways always been computational. In his view, digital Melville is
both metaphor and method.
First, I will briefly outline the promises and challenges that arise with computational readings
of Melville. Then I will sketch a computational and data-driven method of reading Moby-Dick
that is based on counting and computing the semantics of Melville’s words to establish a com-
putational connection between the text and the world. By combining a frequency analysis with
a lexical database to map and measure semantic relations between words in the text, I will
explain and explore the potential of PrincetonWordNet for what I call dictionary-based read-
ings. I will end with a brief reflection on the kinds of new literacy that are needed in a world
dominated by the digital and increasingly curated by Artificial Intelligence and “learned
machines.”
Close and Distant Readings; or Melville’s Encyclopedic Vision

While discussions about Franco Moretti’s concept of “distant reading” have occupied large swaths
of DH discourses, reflections on the functions of traditional humanities practices such as reading,
interpreting, and contextualizing have often fallen flat. As Peer Trilcke and Frank Fischer have
noted: “a term such as ‘distant reading’ is on everyone’s lips, yet an understanding of what this
methodological concept is supposed to mean however has at best only occurred in passing”
(Trilcke and Fischer 3). Moretti coined the term “distant reading” in his essay “Conjectures on
World Literature” (2000), which proposes to face the impossible challenge of reading all world
literature by performing a “secondhand reading” based on “a little pact with the devil”:
And if you want to look beyond the canon (and of course, world literature will do so: it would be
absurd if it didn’t!) close reading will not do it. It’s not designed to do it, it’s designed to do the
opposite. At bottom, it’s a theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very
seriously—whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts,
now let’s learn how not to read them. Distant reading: where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition
of knowledge.
(emphasis original 57)
The pact with the devil that Moretti envisions here comes at a price. The essay was written before
the availability of high-powered computational processing we have today and points to the
potential of statistics and mathematical studies for distant reading. He continues:
[Distant reading] allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text:
devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems. And if, between the very small and the very large,
the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, less is more. If we
want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something.
(57)
However, using computational or data-based readings does not necessarily entail the loss that
Moretti is alluding to. Selected computational readings of Melville’s Moby-Dick and a few other
novels and short stories demonstrate––following Eve’s model––that computational readings do not
eliminate close reading at all, and that the apparent loss that Moretti laments is not a given.
Computational literary studies often start with counting words, but they need not end there. In a
collaborative effort with an interdisciplinary team of researchers from literary studies and computer
science at the University of Potsdam,2 we developed a methodology with which word frequency
analyses can be significantly enhanced. Using computational dictionaries and lexical resources such
as the lexical database Princeton WordNet (PWN), we created a research design that adds a
semantic component to computational reading. Such a semantic approach in DH yields intriguing
potentials for the computational processing of human language, as dictionaries can equip com-
puters, like humans, with additional information about words and their meanings.
Whereas classical dictionaries have been designed for human readers, a digital lexical dictio-
nary such as WordNet “provides a more effective combination of traditional lexicographic
information and modern computing” (Miller 39). Developed by the Cognitive Science lab at
Princeton University in the mid-1980s, the WordNet lexicon is a well-established computa-
tional resource that has been used in various contexts ranging from cognitive modeling,
information retrieval, and word disambiguation. As computationally extended dictionaries,
semantic databases such as WordNet are different from traditional dictionaries in that they are
designed to be used “under program control” (Miller 39) and therefore afford the benefits of both
dictionary and thesaurus, while helping to cluster and categorize large quantities of words in a
corpus. Semantic tools such as these thus promise to yield novel––and in a metaphorical sense
more “learned”––tools for a complex and nuanced form of word frequency analysis.
Such a dictionary-based approach to word frequency analysis is especially suitable for a com-
putational close reading of Moby-Dick, which has been called an “encyclopedic narrative”
(Mendelson 1976). In the following, I argue that beyond Melville’s typical tongue-in-cheek dou-
bleness, the form of the dictionary constitutes an elemental facet of the novel’s encyclopedic
2
Project FoLD (Forschen|Lernen Digital) is a research project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education
dedicated to the development of digital concepts for higher education in the humanities. https://www.uni-potsdam.de/
en/fold/index.
302 Dennis Mischke
vision. In his semiotic discussion of the differences between dictionaries and encyclopedias,
Umberto Eco has aligned both the dictionary and the encyclopedia with the “Porphyrian tree” of
knowledge that branches into definitions of words and ideas. Only the encyclopedia would go
one step further in providing context and additional knowledge to individual branches of the
“Porphyrian tree.” As Eco puts it: “if a dictionary is a disguised encyclopedia, then the only pos-
sible representation of the content of a given lexical item cannot be provided except in terms of
an encyclopedia” (Eco 68). The encyclopedia thus provides an image of knowledge that turns the
metaphoric tree of knowledge into a “maze” and a “net” (81). As a semantic network and data-
base, the PWN provides us with a manually built electronic resource that structures knowledge
as a network and maze of semantic relations, which are called “synsets” (Miller 40).
Seen in this light, Ishmael’s attempt of sorting, classifying––and in a way processing and com-
puting––the whale stands for a larger attempt to understand a world at the beginning of an age
of global transformations. In Chapter 104, “The Fossil Whale,” Ishmael says, “For in the mere
act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their
outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep as if to include the whole circle of the sciences and all
the generations of whales.” However, given the rich Enlightenment tradition of producing dic-
tionaries for the sake of bringing order to the realm of knowledge, the narrator is often unsatis-
fied with the dictionaries of his time:
But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the
weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to con-
sult one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson,
expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer’s uncommon personal bulk
more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.
(349)3
In an earlier chapter devoted to a common nineteenth-century practice of socializing when two

ships meet (“The Gam”), Ishmael is rather discontented with two dictionaries of the time that
do not include the term and goes on to suggest a definition himself. Melville employs dictio-
naries and encyclopedias as an aesthetic model or metaphor but then strenuously undermines
them. Part of the “perennial fascination” of encyclopedias, as Hillary Clark has argued, is their
“very unreadability, the sense that one will never have the time nor the stamina to read and
digest all its contents” (95). The aesthetic and epistemological richness of the text benefits from
critical digital editions at MEL, which shows, for example, how dictionary-like additions to the
text enhance its accessibility and readability. The above quotation provides a telling example for
this multi-layered kind of encyclopedic access to the text. The “huge quarto edition of Johnson”
that Ishmael is referring to here is Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language. The MEL
edition of Moby-Dick presents the following annotation:
The large-format quarto edition of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), and the
lexicographer’s legendary portliness are both wittily appropriate for research using the “weightiest”
words on the enormous whale. […] Johnson’s dictionary was originally published in folio format
(1755), but appeared in quarto editions as early as 1808. Johnson also appears in Chs. 53 and 69.
3
All references to Moby-Dick are taken from the second Norton Critical Edition.
In fact, references to Dr. Johnson’s and other dictionaries appear repeatedly throughout
Melville’s novels. In the chapter “The Chart” Melville even foreshadows the very concepts of big
data and distant reading by raising the idea of collating and in a way “data-mining” all ship-logs
of the entire whaling industry. “Were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully
collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in invariability to
those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows”4 (167). As a manifestation of “encyclopaedic
discourse” (Clark 95), Moby-Dick can therefore be read as the nineteenth-century equivalent of
“big data”; as both a close and distant reading of the “watery part of the world” (18). Given its
encyclopedic nature, I tested the capabilities of PWN for performing a computational literary
close reading of the novel.
From Data to Context––Close Reading with WordNet

By establishing connections between semantic relations and definitions, WordNet clusters lex-
emes with regard to semantic relations (e.g. synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms) into “syn-
sets,” or syntactic categories (noun, verb, adjective, adverb) as well as lexicographic files and
categories related to the denotation of words (such as act, animal, attribute, body, cognition).
These “synsets” create a dynamic, multidimensional network of concepts intended to enable
human reading as well as computational processing. As a knowledge network, WordNet clus-
ters concepts into distinct synsets and records the semantic relations between them. By thus
connecting the benefits of both dictionary and thesaurus, WordNet facilitates new perspectives
for literary analysis by enabling networked and semantically enhanced reading. Let me briefly
illustrate how a WordNet synset looks. An abridged extract of the entry for the word “whale”
appears as follows:
<noun.animal>S: (n) whale
<noun.person>S: (n) giant, hulk, heavyweight, whale direct hyponym/full hyponym
<noun.animal>S: (n) baleen whale, whalebone whale
<noun.animal>S: (n) toothed whale
<noun.animal>S: (n) narwhal, narwal, narwhale, Monodon monoceros
<noun.animal>S: (n) spouter direct hypernym/inherited hypernym/sister term
derivationally related form Verb
<verb.competition>S: (v) whal direct hypernym/inherited hypernym/sister term
<verb.competition>S: (v) hunt, run, hunt down, track down derivationally related form
sentence frame5 (WordNet)
Originally designed for cognitive modeling and early research on Artificial Intelligence, semantic
networks such as WordNet provide a tool to add semantic classifications to the word frequencies
of texts. In order to explore the methodological potentials of WordNet for the study of Melville
4
Ben Schmidt has visualized the ship-logs of the entire American whaling fleet. See: http://sappingattention.blogspot.
com/2012/11/reading-digital-sources-case-study-in.html.
5
This representation of the semantic network can be viewed in WordNet’s online interface at: http://wordnetweb.
princeton.edu/perl/webwn.
304 Dennis Mischke
we used the Python package NLTK 3.4.5 (Natural Language Toolkit), which includes WordNet
capabilities, to map and measure the semantic similarity of most frequent words.6
Moby-Dick is rendered as a data frame that counts and sorts all words of the novel “into for-
ty-five lexicographer files based on syntactic category and logical groupings” (WordNet). For our
purposes we reduced the number of lexicographer files to thirty-four semantic fields representing
one conceptual synset each. After preprocessing the text with spaCy 2.2.47––with which we
filtered function words (otherwise called stopwords, such as “the”), lemmatized8 the text, and
conducted POS tagging (automatic part-of-speech recognition and annotation)––we extracted a
list of word frequencies based on their classification according to WordNet’s semantic network.
Table 24.1 shows a reduced version of an automatically generated list of words from Moby-Dick
ranked according to the frequency of terms associated with each WordNet semantic field.
Interestingly, the categories with the highest frequency (absolute and raw) of words are “artifact,”
“communication,” “cognition,” “acting,” and “contact.” Perhaps unexpectedly, the category of
“animal” turns out to be insignificant in this analysis. The most frequent word in Moby-Dick (after
stopwords) is “whale” (and “man” comes in third with less than half the occurrences of whale); that
fact has led critics of digital humanities to argue that most-frequent-word-analyses produce trivial
and obvious results. While the number of occurrences of the word “whale” might be expected, we
do see how encyclopedic and dictionary-based approaches offer different and more nuanced ways
to read and understand the significance of quantified word-occurrences in literature.
What can be made of the high frequency of words in the semantic field of “artifact”? The lex-
icographic definition for nouns and verbs of that category is words “denoting man-made
objects.”9 Given the many elaborate details of the whaling business in Moby-Dick and Melville’s
first-hand knowledge of the sea-faring world, the thick and rich descriptions of material reality
of whaling in Moby-Dick indicate that non-human, material, inanimate actors, and tools have an
essential position in the novel. Moby-Dick certainly features a number of material artifacts and
man-made objects. The computational finding above corroborates the recent turn toward mate-
rialist readings of the book (see Otter, Sanborn, and McGettigan). Words that are classified as
“artifact” by WordNet in Moby-Dick include “ship,” “boat,” “deck,” “side,” as Table 24.2 shows.
Other suggestive words like “hand,” “thing,” “water,” “eye,” and “side” are among the most
frequent words in that class (and this is just the top ten results). One reason for this perhaps
unexpected variation (a hand, of course, is a material object, but it is also a human body part) is
that WordNet functions as a semantic net, which means that it classifies and clusters words that
are semantically related to one another. The many material objects on board the Pequod are in a
way dealt with through the hands of the crew. This relationship between the hands of the crew
and the hands of the officers demands closer scrutiny, especially with regard to whose hands
appear and what these “hands on deck” do and perform (and who and what has the “upper hand,”
figuratively). This connection between artifacts and human labor is especially pertinent to
6
The technical realization of this analysis-pipeline was designed by Peer Trilcke and Dennis Mischke and was
programmed by Henny Sluyter-Gäthje. All Python code implemented in Jupyter Notebooks is available for download
at this public repository: https://gitup.uni-potsdam.de/sluytergaeth/fold-teilprojekt-philologie.
7
“spaCy” is an open source software library for the programing language Python that provides “industrial strength
natural language processing” capabilities (https://spacy.io).
8
Lemmatization is the process by which a word is transformed into its uninflected form.
9
The WordNet documentation provides a list of WordNet lexicographer files with names and numbers of semantic
fields (https://wordnet.princeton.edu/documentation/lexnames5wn).
Table 24.1 Moby-Dick: Raw and relative frequency of words based on WordNet-synsets.
Rank WordNet Synset Frequency Relative Frequency

1 artifact 14661 0.124
2 communication 14279 0.121
3 cognition 13560 0.115
4 change 8414 0.071
5 motion 8398 0.071
6 contact 7753 0.066
7 stative 7598 0.065
8 person 7268 0.062
9 act 7222 0.061
10 body 6924 0.059
11 social 7003 0.059
12 attribute 5510 0.047
13 possession 5424 0.046
14 perception 5415 0.046
15 state 4424 0.038
16 group 3821 0.032
17 animal 3480 0.03
18 location 3434 0.029
19 creation 3459 0.029
20 time 3260 0.028
21 competition 3285 0.028
22 object 3206 0.027
23 event 3230 0.027
24 quantity 2757 0.023
25 phenomenon 2364 0.02
26 food 2292 0.019
27 substance 2066 0.018
28 consumption 1983 0.017
29 emotion 1695 0.014
30 shape 1423 0.012
31 feeling 1215 0.01
32 plant 1091 0.009
33 relation 737 0.006
34 process 499 0.004
35 motive 303 0.003
36 weather 351 0.003
Chapter 94 “A Squeeze of the Hand,” which celebrates the community of sailors and their (at
times) homoerotic bonds through work. The concordance tool AntConc10 reveals that among the
340 occurrences of “hand,” Ahab’s hand alone appears about 11 times, a finding that calls for
further research given that Ahab’s hand has received much less attention than his missing leg.
10
AntConc is a free tool for corpus analysis and concordance creation (https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/
antconc).
306 Dennis Mischke
Table 24.2 Moby-Dick table with top 10 most frequent words from the WordNet category “artifact”.
Rank WordNet field artifact Frequency

1 ship 594
2 boat 477
3 hand 322
4 thing 318
5 way 287
6 water 257
7 eye 241
8 side 229
9 deck 212
10 Line 193
In the following, I want to focus on the WordNet category of “competition” because it pro-
vides a unique opportunity to test the viability of a dictionary-based approach. Ishmael’s story is
one of competition and conflict on many levels. Be that competition between Ahab and the
whale, humanity, and nature, or free will and fate, on a social level the novel enacts all sorts of
conflicts between figurative slave and slave owner, as with Pip and Ahab, or between the officers
and the crew. Compiling a list of the top-ten verbs from Moby-Dick that fall into the WordNet
field “competition” shows that the most frequent item on the list is “see,” followed by “take,”
“turn,” “hold,” “strike,” “draw,” “sit,” “carry,” “rise,” “pull,” “die,” and finally, the verb “to
whale” itself.
Most competition verbs on the list (Table 24.3) are either directly or indirectly related to the
activity of whaling, which is a prototypical example of a competitive activity, especially one
involving “verbs of fighting, athletic activities.”11 In WordNet “to see”12 relates to the semantic
field “competition” as follows: <verb.competition> S: (v) see (match or meet) “I saw the bet of
one of my fellow players.”13 The verb “to see” also occurs in other semantic categories; I deem its
prominence in the context of competition especially significant because the dictatorial Ahab
seduces his crew into his monomaniacal quest for the white whale by promising those crewmem-
bers an “equatorial coin” and a golden “doubloon” to whoever “sees” the whale first. “What do ye
do when ye see a whale, men?” Ahab asks in the “The Quarter-Deck” (137). This kind of “seeing”
occurs three times in that chapter alone. In other words, “seeing a whale” marks the beginning of
competition. But also the other verbs on the list speak of Ahab’s competition with nature, him-
self, and the world, especially in the quarter-deck scene. Ahab’s remarks, such as “If man will
strike, strike through the mask” (140) or his famous wish to “strike the sun if it insulted me,” are
a further indication of the complex and multi-layered role that competition plays in the story.
Melville’s vision of Moby-Dick involves struggle and competition in a much wider, more met-
aphorical sense of the word––an abstraction that is difficult to detect with computational tools
11
An overview over the semantic fields (synsets) in WordNet can be found at: https://wordnet.princeton.edu/
documentation/lexnames5wn.
12
Remember that the preprocessing in our analysis turns words into their original forms, their lemmas.
13
This representation too can be viewed in WordNet’s online interface at: http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/
webwn.
Table 24.3 Moby-Dick table with top 10 most frequent words (verbs) from the WordNet category
“competition”.
Rank WordNet Field competition Frequency

1 See 576
2 Take 309
3 Turn 174
4 Hold 129
5 strike 99
6 draw 90
7 sit 87
8 carry 85
9 rise 82
10 pull 76
11 die 68
12 catch 66
13 drop 65
14 show 64
15 start 61
16 whale 60
and still requires the cognitive work of non-computational scholarship. Winfried Fluck has
shown that Moby-Dick must be read in the context of profound epistemological and social changes
that can be tied to the competition between the collective and the individual. While Fluck does
not analyze Moby-Dick with regard to competition alone, the picture he draws is nonetheless in
large part compatible with what I have just outlined. In his dispute with Starbuck about the
competitive laws of the market and the lack of revenue that Ahab’s vengeance will fetch them in
Nantucket, Ahab responds:
Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest a little lower layer. If money’s
to be the measurer, man, and the accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe,
by girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let me tell thee, that my
vengeance will fetch a great premium here!
(139)
Apart from the usage of words like computation, counting, and accounting that illustrate
Melville’s own thinking about computation and numbers (see Ohge in Chapter 25 of this volume),
the passage also illustrates the semantic magnitude of the concept of competition in Moby-Dick.
In a way, Ahab is the epitome of the competitive forces of the market––including the energies it
unleashes. In this particular matter, I concur with Michael Gilmore and Cesare Casarino, who have
argued that Ahab “participates in the very way of thinking he opposes” (Gilmore 117) and that in
attempting to “wrest himself away from the logic of capital, […] he also still functions completely
within that logic” (Casarino 87).14 Ahab’s “expressive individualism,” echoing Fluck’s analysis,
14
For a related critique of capitalism in Melville, see Ivy G. Wilson’s chapter in this volume, “Tawny Savages and
Blank-Looking Girls: Melville, Capitalism, and Racialized Labor” (Chapter 35).
308 Dennis Mischke
turns out to be a competitive individualism of a global order. Here, the white whale can be read
as a pure specter of global competition and outsourcing. Or, as Ishmael puts it in Chapter 27,
“because in all these cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world
[is] generously supplying the muscles” (107).
The Chart
How can a dictionary-based computational method bolster a richer historical analysis? What
trends can be detected in semantically grouped word-frequencies in a larger corpus? How do
Melville’s texts appear in comparison with other texts of his time? In order to answer these and
other questions, colleagues and I at Potsdam designed a pipeline that uses WordNet to measure
the relative frequency of words within specific semantic fields. To begin with, we assembled a
corpus of nineteenth-century American Literature based on one of the most established literary
histories of American Literature in Germany, Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte by Hubert Zapf
and Helmbrecht Breinig (2010). For the first run of experiments we restricted ourselves to a time
period from 1791 to 1907 and compiled a corpus of 168 texts that were mentioned in Zapf and
that were available via open access repositories such as Project Gutenberg.15 In a first step of our
research design, we created a derivative of the corpus enriched with extended metadata on
statistical values of word frequencies of each single text. The next step involved a preprocessing
of our entire corpus and then the creation of derived files with lemmatized texts and extractions
differentiated by word types. The pipeline and tools were programed in Python using natural
language processing libraries spaCy and NLTK. The WordNet capabilities of NLTK were used to
compute the relative frequency of words of single texts with regard to all of the WordNet semantic
fields. Our final output resulted in a large dataset that I set out to study, contextualize, and
understand from the perspective of Melville studies. In order to derive relevant information from
our computed dataset, we used a tool for information visualization16 that extracts information
from large spreadsheets or databases and translates it into relational forms that can be visualized.
Figure 24.1 illustrates the relative frequency of words that were associated with the WordNet
semantic field of competition.17 In looking at this data visualization, we find two things that
immediately stand out. First, Melville’s Moby-Dick and White-Jacket have the highest relative fre-
quency of verbs associated with this semantic field. In fact, with regard to the semantic field of
competitiveness Moby-Dick is even above the level of Tales of Soldiers and Civilians by Ambrose
Bierce and other post-Civil War novels. That Moby-Dick is a parable of America in danger that
anticipated the nation’s slow and steady slide into war has long been suggested by readers of the
novel (e.g. Pease). The high relative frequency of verbs within that semantic category confirms
the hypothesis. Furthermore, there was a general trend toward more competition in nineteenth-
century literature with Moby-Dick being a strong outlier, but in principle also an exceptionally
prescient predictor of the general tendency. This finding deserves closer scrutiny. Now, while our
corpus based on Zapf is only partly suitable for this task––it provides, like all literary history for
15
Large parts of this corpus were compiled and prepared by our team members Ronny Zimmernann and Allyn Maxwell. A
detailed list of works used can be downloaded here: https://gitup.uni-potsdam.de/sluytergaeth/fold-teilprojekt-philologie/.
16
For this run of experiments we used the online service available at www.datawrapper.de.
17
Figure 24.1 can be viewed in an interactive mode at: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/Y30jN/1.
that matter, a selection of texts and views—this prototypical research design can generate new
research questions and approaches. Viable projects such as the recent “Project Cassandra” study
the complex cultural imagination represented in works of literature to make predictions about
social and militarized conflicts in a specific region.18
Toward New (Digital) Literacies of Melville

Dictionaries are powerful tools of world-making. In Moby-Dick Ishmael mocks the “pale ushers”
that “dust their old lexicons and grammars” (7) only to acknowledge the power of dictionaries to
structure and control the practices of knowledge construction. In Chapter 53, “The Gam,”
Ishmael creates his own dictionary, producing a definition for the word GAM to describe the
social meeting of whale ships at sea. In line with his general tendency to co-create and institu-
tionalize an alternative base of knowledge that seeks to reach the “meanest mariners, and rene-
gades and castaways” (103), Melville here represents an empowerment of the global disenfranchised
working class of the sea-faring world. The lessons of Melville’s own creative design of encyclo-
pedic forms and knowledge, therefore, offer significant transhistorical strategies to cope with the
wide-ranging transformations of the twenty-first century. His ingenuity in conjuring ways of
knowing that match the challenges of globalization, nationalism, and the legacy of colonialism
might inspire equally strong but agile strategies to read and understand a contemporary world
of intense transformation––a world continuously shaped by novel agents, ranging from unsettled
climate, viruses, algorithms, and intelligent machines.
How can we “read” in our ever more digitized and data-rich world? The table of frequencies
in Figure 24.1 may provide a decisive hint. As the larger societal processes of digitization turn
our entire cultural heritage into ever more complex data frames, we increasingly develop new
abilities and skills to read, compute, and make sense of the texts and numbers that produce big
data. Data, however, can be appropriately understood only in conjunction with other data. The
relative frequency of words in the semantic field “competition” is interesting in its own right. In
relation to other semantic fields, however, it provides the unique semantic fingerprint or semantic
signal of a specific text.19 Putting this semantic signal into a relation with other texts creates a
new way of “reading” and analyzing literature that is both distant and deep.
Reading Moby-Dick with WordNet shows that semantically enhanced word frequency analyses
do not just repeat the obvious insight that Moby-Dick is a novel about whales and conflict. The
number of words associated with the semantic field (WordNet synset) of “animal” in the novel
ranks as merely the seventeenth highest category, among which are words such as whale (1148
times),20 shark (76), horse (38), elephant (27), and dog (23). Computational dictionaries reveal
the complexity of literary texts by increasing our understanding of language and meaning and
interconnected narrative tropes.
18
https://www.projekt-cassandra.net is a project of conflict prediction based on literary studies funded by the German
Federal Ministry of Defence.
19
The exact pattern of words fetched from one text according to WordNet synsets represents a unique and precise text-
specific sample of word-frequencies that can be seen as a kind of “semantic fingerprint” or watermark of the text. In a
further development of the method, we propose here it would be desirable to use this or other parameters to measure
the “semantic” distance between texts akin to the classic Delta or cosine similarity used in stylometry.
20
Here our pipeline counts: “whale” 908 times+ “whales” 240 times, see note 2.
Figure 24.1 Canonical works from nineteenth-century American literature based on Zapf et al (2010).
It is important to clarify that the dictionary or lexicon-based approach used in this analysis
does not involve “machine learning” in the sense of using an initial dataset to train a word-
classification algorithm. WordNet is a manually created lexical resource that has grown over
many years. However, regardless of whether the method is based on dictionaries or trained
machine learning algorithms to “mine” literary texts, machines are learning to “read litera-
ture”––reading in the physical sense of optical character recognition (OCR) and text encoding,
but also in a more abstract semantic sense. Will a “learned machine” ever be able to deal with the
complex nuances of human literature? Will it ever be feasible to create a machine capable of
understanding Melville’s intricate ambiguities and subtle literary wisdom? Despite all the recent
advances in text mining, information extraction, and even machine learning, this is still a distant
scenario. As machines are developed to “read” literature, human beings will need to develop the
literacy required to understand what reading machines reveal about language. Such a new literacy
helps us to recognize and read literature through digitization and datafication and to realize the
“learnedness” of digital tools and assemblages in a time, similar to Melville’s, in which “con-
sciousness even [at] the village level undergoes a transformation, experiences itself as linked up”
(Lyons 53). Once, however, the “data lakes” (Laurent) of an interconnected digital age have
turned into data oceans, it would be better not to repeat Tommo’s predicament in Typee: “I saw
everything, but could comprehend nothing” (144).
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25
Digital Melville: Computation and
Dead-Reckoning
Christopher Ohge
Show me, Lord, my life’s end

and the number of my days;
let me know how fleeting my life is.
You have made my days a mere handbreadth;
the span of my years is as nothing before you.
–– Job 14:5–6
Herman Melville had a fascination with numbers and patterns––a penchant for quantifying
and calculating.1 Numbers appear frequently in Moby-Dick and in Melville’s other writings,2 he
read books on mathematics and logic, and mathematical ideas appear in marginalia to his books
(Ohge and Olsen-Smith). Mathematics, at least the kind with which Melville was familiar,
posited the universe as numerical––with numbers being the foundational a priori truth of the
universe (Turpin). But mathematics is not the same thing as computation, which, while related
to mathematics, deals in logical patterns, rules, and modeling. Computation involves calcula-
tions based on human constructions; some new media theorists have even suggested that com-
puter programming languages are a form of literature or craft (Blackwell 172–76). The
modern-day software program consists of linguistic instructions that translate into machine code
rendered into binary digits (0s and 1s).
1
My gratitude goes to Wyn Kelley, the Literature Department, and the Digital Humanities Lab at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology for inviting me to give a lecture in October 2020 that formed the basis of this chapter.
2
See in particular the end of Chapter III of White-Jacket, which discusses the necessity of mathematics in sailing.
314 Christopher Ohge
Melville engaged with computing as a concept of calculation. The word “compute” is a bor-
rowing from the Latin computus, which was used well into the early modern period. Computus
denoted various calculations, including the dating of the calendar for Easter. Scholars from the
medieval era produced “computus texts” for accurate dating. Given its religious implications,
the English noun form of “compute” became synonymous with reckoning, evoking both a dating
or calculation as well as an accounting of religious observance. In the sixteenth century, the verb
form of “compute” appeared for the first time. To “compute” then started to mean “to calculate,”
but this act also became intertwined with thinking. Similarly, in the Renaissance the word
“machine” related to ingenuity and mental processing, whereas the “engine” connoted imperson-
ality, as Wendy Beth Hyman has recently shown. Melville was not only a keen reader of
Renaissance texts, but he also had a Renaissance view that human ingenuity and machines work
upon each other in symbiotic ways to program our inner lives.
Melville’s cognitive and aesthetic plasticity shows in his reckonings, in the double sense of
counting (quantification and pattern-seeking) and accounting (narration and reflection). (See also
Chapter 3 of Maurice S. Lee’s Overwhelmed for more on the nature of reckoning in the nineteenth
century.) Melville’s reckonings also prefigure Heidegger’s distinction between calculative and
meditative thinking. Like Melville, Heidegger worried that the frenzied advance of technology
would make people believe that calculation is the only valuable mode of thinking (Heidegger 35).
Technology has its root in the Greek techné, which denotes the craft of the true, and the poetical.
Melville’s fascination with reckoning and craft also reveals a penchant for computing and medi-
tating about death. How can digital technology reveal aspects of Melville’s techné? And how, in his
meditating on death, do these different kinds of computation constitute a form of reckoning?
Melville’s Marginalia Online (MMO) and the Melville Electronic Library (MEL) have been leading
the way on digital approaches to Melville. These projects’ data consist of text and image files
curated by scholars who understand the material and bibliographic facts of his reading and pub-
lication process. In a series of recent experiments using computational approaches to analyze
Melville’s reading and allusions, his style, and his manuscript revisions, I realized that compu-
tation is an important aspect of Melville’s writing and philosophical outlook.3 The basis of
undertaking such experiments requires a brief explanation of data provenance and the necessity
of textual studies. I have been working with teams of scholars at MEL and MMO to curate two
datasets on Melville: the first consists of plain text and TEI XML files, converted into data
frames, of all of Melville’s published works and private writings (for MEL). The second data set
consists of XML files of Melville’s marginalia and full texts of the works we know he read (for
MMO). The first dataset offers the potential of a bird’s-eye view of Melville’s works and his read-
ings of full texts. The second is narrow, pinpointing the words he chose to mark and annotate in
his books; it also enables word searching on MMO as well as nuanced linguistic analyses of the
markings. Creating machine readable scholarly documents can generate new research questions,
models, and conceptual metaphors.
Even with the digital tools available to a twenty-first-century scholar, some textual problems
seem incomputable. It should come as no surprise that Melville’s computations stand in tension
3
My main tools for basic text mining and corpus querying are Voyant Tools (https://voyant-tools.org) and AntConc
(https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc). I also use the R programming language to create some of the
analyses using the stylo (https://cran.r-project.org/web//packages/stylo/stylo.pdf) and tidy text libraries (Silge and
Robinson).
Digital Melville: Computation and Dead-Reckoning 315
with the incomputable, revealing a worldview that comes with angst about modernity and
progress.4 In his copy of Madame de Staël’s Germany, Melville commented on the (“delightful”)
“admission” that knowledge in “modern” thinkers such as Goethe was both “profound” and “dis-
couraging” (1:42; 2:60). Melville’s response illustrates his dark intuitions about our ability to
think clearly and to reckon with a broken world.
Whatever doubts Melville might have had about the “discouraging” results of human
knowledge and modernity, he had extensive early preparation for lifelong efforts of calculation.
Like Thoreau, Melville understood the principles of mathematics, geography, surveying, and
physical engineering after studying those subjects at Albany Academy and Lansingburgh
Academy (Parker 1:50, 55, 133, 137). Thoreau, himself attracted to “reckoning for reckoning’s
sake” (Lee, Uncertain Chances 147), was a keen reader of Typee and appreciated Melville’s artful use
of geographical, anthropological, and commercial data (Parker 1:460; Bryant 2: 932–33).
Melville also saw a connection between composition, imagination, and what Poe analogized as
the “mathematical problem” of writing in “Philosophy of Composition”: “It is my design to
render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intui-
tion—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid
consequence of a mathematical problem.”5 I want to push this idea further by making com-
puting both metaphor and method. It is through digital approaches to “computing” Melville
that I learn more about his computations––and his ultimate interest in the indiscrete, the incom-
mensurable, the incomputable. Using a methodology of reading with computers can offer a way
to understand Melville’s techné.
Other scholars have examined Melville’s fascination with science (see, e.g., Jennifer Baker,
Maurice S. Lee, Meredith Farmer) and mathematics (S. B. Hart), and suggested that Melville
anchored his mathematical interest in Platonism (Zachary Turpin). Yet there is another side
to Melville’s interest in calculation and quantification that goes beyond mathematics and is
decidedly not Platonic. It preempts William James’s pragmatist theory that the “very struc-
ture of our thinking” depends on our sense-experiences, and the use of concepts in everyday
life. James even used the word “compute” to claim that mathematical rules are made to be
true by sense-experiences:
Our ready-made ideal framework for all sorts of possible objects follows from the very structure
of our thinking. We can no more play fast and loose with these abstract relations than we can do
so with our sense-experiences. They coerce us; we must treat them consistently, whether or not we
like the results. The rules of addition apply to our debts as rigorously as to our assets. The hun-
dredth decimal of pi, the ratio of the circumference to its diameter, is predetermined ideally now,
though no one may have computed it.
(“Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth” 118–119)
James theorized that cognition and memory involve the neural networks (connections) and sensual
experiences that enable thinking––a way of thinking that embodied cognition scientists now char-
acterize as the distribution of schemas between neural networks and non-neural structures (see, e.g.
4
In “Bartleby, or the Formula,” Deleuze noticed Melville’s proto-pragmatic view, which is also picked up in Maurice
Lee’s and Paul Grimstad’s work.
5
See also Laverty 21–22; Pahl 3–4; Lee, Uncertain Chances 22–24. Grimstad makes the case that Poe’s philosophy of
composition takes the form of an “algorithm” (66–68).
Lakoff and Johnson). The same neural networks for running our bodies also structure our abstract
ideas and discourse. Melville also felt coerced by sense experiences to model, for example, the size
of whales using the size of different books. Thinking is entwined with reckoning, passing through
the machine of the body and connected to other interfaces both personal and impersonal. Displaying
a tension between mathematical calculation and the stark contingencies of the natural world,
Melville’s reckonings navigate between these two elements of computation to forge a philosophical
outlook that emphasizes experience and the possibilities of creating new vocabularies, as well as
offering bleak assessments of progress and human failures to adequately model the world.
Let’s now consider how “reckoning” suggests quantitative and spiritual meanings. Melville used
“reckoning” a total of seven times in Moby-Dick alone. Most of those instances involve Ishmael’s
numerical calculations in the cetological chapters.
Reckoning ten barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters of the
stuff of the whale’s skin.
(Chapter 68, “The Blanket,” 306)
… according to my careful calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between
eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference,
such a whale will weigh at least ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would con-
siderably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one hundred
inhabitants.
(Chapter 103, “Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton,” 452)
But the final two instances of “reckoning” show Ahab’s distinct (and suggestive) turn of phrase,
a “dead-reckoning.” When Ahab dismisses his quadrant––itself a calculator––before chasing
Moby Dick at the end of the novel, he launches into soliloquy, ending with a defiance of scientific
calculation:
“Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that
heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light,
O sun! Level by nature to this earth’s horizon are the glances of man’s eyes; not shot from the crown
of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!” dashing
it to the deck, “no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship’s compass, and the level
dead-reckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea.”
(Chapter 118, “The Quadrant” 501)
A dead reckoning indicates righting the ship’s position through calculative (and deductive) means,
yet they are “celestial computations,” which had gone out of fashion in the nineteenth century
(Lowell, “The Progress of the World” 160). The opposite of dead reckoning is true (per the OED);6 it
is an estimation of a ship’s position from the distance run by the log and the courses steered by the
compass. Ahab’s reference to the sun is a practical complaint about technology, as one of the
major flaws of the quadrant was that it required the observer to look directly into the sun to take
the measurement. But Ahab also insinuates a dark truth about the limits of computation in a
world governed by sinister forces. It is interesting context that Charles Babbage’s Difference
Engine No. 1 was designed to make the computation of logarithmic tables for navigation more
6
The Oxford English Dictionary entry for “dead reckoning” lists this quotation from Mark Ridley’s Short Treatise on
Magneticall Bodies (1613), 147: “Keeping a true, not a dead reckoning of his course”.
accurate and efficient (the engine was never built in Babbage’s lifetime). Ahab trusts his intuition
more than modern instruments, but the storm that throws off his compass and destroys the log
and line makes all of his navigational tools useless (Hart 18–19).
Ahab’s own day of reckoning with the perceived wrongs inflicted against him, coupled with
his rejection of logic and calculation, leads to his madness and self-destruction. Melville had used
“Dead Reckoning” in his first attempt at philosophical fiction, his third novel Mardi (1849):
Calms, light breezes, and currents made every thing uncertain. Nor had we any method of esti-
mating our due westward progress, except by what is called Dead Reckoning,—the computation of
the knots run hourly; allowances being made for the supposed deviations from our course, by reason
of the ocean streams; which at times in this quarter of the Pacific run with very great velocity.
(M 108–9)
It is the only instance in Melville’s work where “reckoning” and “computation” occur in the same
work (same sentence, even), but the intuitive calculation of Dead Reckoning and the uncertainty
of calm seas foreshadow the menace of both elements in Ahab’s control of the Pequod. James
Russell Lowell was therefore not alone in thinking of “dead reckoning” as a figurative, and
potentially dangerous, activity: “The mind, when it sails by dead reckoning, without the possi-
bility of a fresh observation, perhaps without the instruments necessary to take one, will some-
times bring up in strange latitudes” (“Witchcraft” 372). Human experience and history
themselves are a process of dead reckoning, ultimately leading nowhere.
Querying the digital corpus of Melville’s works reveals that he used various forms of the words
“compute” and “computation” seven times in his works, ranging from his first book Typee (1846)
to his historical novel Israel Potter (1855), and the related words “calculate” and “calculation”
occur 57 times. How, then, did Melville see the functions of computation? It is important to
stress that neither Melville’s works nor I intend to make the false choice between calculation and
imagination (see also Baker, “Dead Bones and Honest Wonders”). He was pondering how a priori
concepts (such as numbers) interact with the imperfect a posteriori calculations of the physical
world to generate a dynamic view of modeling the world. In this respect Melville put experience
and experimentation at the forefront, not only paralleling Poe but also prefiguring Charles
Sanders Peirce’s idea in “Logical Machines” (1887) that our senses are reasoning machines
(Grimstad 49). Reasoning, as Peirce had it, is not abstract, determinate inference but rather
experimental, relational, and part of our felt lives. As Jennifer Baker suggests in Chapter 38 of
this Companion, Ishmael concludes that a single bone of the whale’s ribs might reveal only “half of
the true notion of the living magnitude of that part” (453). Elsewhere Ishmael comments on the
“measureless crush and crash” of large flukes (378). Numbers such as these may have been verified
through observation, but they are half-true notions that have been filtered through the imagina-
tion. The cetology chapters of Moby-Dick demonstrate, according to Baker, “the pitfalls of human
efforts to impose logical art on experience,” yet, despite that (sometimes humorous) skepticism,
“what is at stake is not cetology or zoology per se but, rather, epistemological and aesthetic ques-
tions about how the mind responds to and handles information.” As Timothy Marr puts it in
Chapter 5 of this Companion, “With neither map nor quadrant, Melville’s ‘chartless voyage’ (M
556) in Mardi forces him to extemporize his bearings from the natural world, innovate out of his
own rhetorical resources, and eventually invent from within his own creative demiurge.” Melville
saw basic computation as a calculation rooted in lived experience, but there is also the lingering
anxiety of computation as it was manifested in the Industrial Age––“the great counting-house
the globe,” slavery, Wall Street, industries of abstraction and inhumane exploitation (MD 163).
Melville seems to have internalized Emerson’s statement in “Experience” that “Nature hates cal-
culators”: “Man lives by pulses; our organic movements are such; and the chemical and ethereal
agents are undulatory and alternate; and the mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but
by fits” (483).7 Ishmael reflects that “there are certain curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges,
whereby some whalemen calculate the creature’s age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings.
Though the certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical
probability” (334). Computations and probabilities offer the comfort of control, but experience
makes Ishmael eventually realize his lack of real control, and his distrust of received wisdom. This
realization preempts the comment in The Confidence-Man about the apocrypha, which “implies
something of uncertain credit”: “I never read anything so calculated to destroy man’s confidence
in man” (CM 243). Confidence relies on a flawed credit system.
Melville’s computations are also reflected in his readings, from which he is tabulating ideas,
techniques, styles, and data and setting them against his experiences. It was in preparation for
writing Mardi that Melville purchased books on nautical subjects and philosophical works such
as those by Sir Thomas Browne (Sealts No. 89) and Robert Burton (Sealts No. 103).8 His careful
notes on Beale’s observations on whales and Milton’s meter show how he collected various calcu-
lations in his readings for various purposes. In his copy of the biographical sketch drawing
attention to Milton’s knowledge of “Italian metres,” Melville also noted the view that Milton’s
rhyme scheme in “Lycidas” meant to secretly “give a poetical image or draught of the mathematical
canon of music” (Milton xxx; MMO). In Madame de Staël’s Germany, one of Melville’s (erased)
annotations conveys his “revulsion from the counting-room philosophy of Paley” in response to
the Utilitarian notion that “A man, regarded in a religious light, is as much as the entire human
race” (de Staël 2:348; Parker 2:499–500). Melville’s annotation has been discussed by previous
scholars, but no one has connected that annotation to the passage he also scored at the beginning
of de Staël’s paragraph, which is a computational metaphor applied to the ethics of Utilitarianism:
“Those who, notwithstanding the great crowd of particular misfortunes, attribute a certain sort
of goodness to Nature, consider her as a merchant, who, making speculations on a large scale,
balances small losses by greater advantages” (2:348). In Shakespeare, whom he studied carefully
at the crucial time in 1850 when he was composing Moby-Dick, Melville commented on Parolles,
the rogue in All’s Well That Ends Well, that “As 2 & 2 made 4 in Noah’s time, as now, so man
[?figures] ever. Here we have a character very common in the Rail Road Car of the [?most
mighty] nineteenth century” (Ohge and Olsen-Smith 1).9 This computation suggests a bleak
logic, independent of God, that accounts for duplicitous humans as well as the contingencies of
experience. Melville’s reading of Shakespeare had a profound effect on the composition of Moby-
Dick, so it is probably no accident that the novel features mathematical and proto-existentialist
characterizations, such as in Ishmael’s words before the Spouter Inn, “The universe is finished;
the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago” (10). The reference in that
7
See also Michael Jonik’s Chapter 34 in this volume, “Melville and Philosophy: Will, Agency, and ‘Natural Justice,’”
which addresses this topic in relation to William James’s exploration of the relation of will, impulse, and instinct.
8
As Steven Olsen-Smith explains in Chapter 23 of this Companion on Melville’s books and marginalia, parenthetically
cited “Sealts Numbers” refer to entries for books owned and borrowed by Melville documented first in Sealts’s Melville’s
Reading and now at Melville’s Marginalia Online.
9
Melville might have been recalling the way he characterized his conversation with Professor George Adler, that “there
are things out of God and independant [sic] of him,—things that would have existed were there no God:—such as that
two & two make four; for it is not that God so decrees mathematically, but that in the very nature of things, the fact is
thus” ( J 5).
passage to “a million years ago” offers a numeric reference of an ungraspable nature, illustrating
how quantities figure into his fatalistic conception of nature.
Melville was also attending to numbers while reading George Chapman’s translation of
Homer’s Iliad. When in Book 9 Agamemnon takes Nestor’s advice to entice Achilles to join the
Greek army in exchange for numerous gifts, his rehearsed speech to Achilles admits, “him I
wronged; him Jove loves from his heart, / He shows it in thus honouring him; who, living thus
apart, / Proves us but number” (1:190). Melville underlined that last phrase emphasizing the
singular (Achilles in isolation) and the numerous (Greek hosts): “who, living thus apart, / Proves
us but number.” What follows is a lengthy accounting (adding up) of all of the gifts Achilles
would receive. What Melville noted, and what Chapman also ingeniously constructed, was the
ethical difference between the singular-heroic Achilles, and the numerous untrustworthy Greek
chieftains. The computation is that virtue is a singular variable. And it turns out that the word
“singular(ly)” is very Melvillean indeed––it occurs 187 times throughout his work, and not just
in Moby-Dick. It also distinguishes Captain Delano, who is described, not without irony, as hav-
ing “a singularly undistrustful good nature” (Benito Cereno, PT 47); and Bartleby, “a man of so
singularly sedate an aspect” (PT 19). Melville’s mature fiction––peaking with Moby-Dick––has
the highest frequencies of the word “singular,” whereas the word “numerous” appears more in his
first two adventure novels and drops off from there. Melville made note of various forms of the
word “singular.” In Book 5 of Paradise Lost, following a speech by Satan’s disobedient angel
Abdiel, Melville marked Milton’s description of
… his zeale
None seconded, as out of season judg’d,
Or singular and rash…
(1:186; emphasis added)
Melville also scored the closing lines to that book, where Abdiel stands
Among the faithless, faithful only hee;

Among innumerable false, unmov’d,
Unshak’n, unseduc’d, unterrifi’d
His Loyaltie he kept, his Love, his Zeale;
Nor number, nor example with him wrought
To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind
Though single.
(1:188; emphasis added)
As in the Iliad, Milton’s faithful figure is singular, and the “numerous” or the “infinite host”
(1:187) is problematic (or “false”) because it is indiscrete, continuous, ungraspable––therefore
hard to compute.
As these examples of Melville’s marginalia show, he was engaging with a Renaissance concep-
tion of computation as a kind of meditative thinking. Marginalia also suggest a pre-digital form
of hyperlinking (Antonini, Benatti, and Blackburn-Daniels), making each text itself a kind of
textual computer that is connected to a network of other textual computers in an internet of
related discourse. Melville’s background, in addition to his dedicated reading of philosophers
after the publication of Typee and Omoo, took his fiction into contemplative subjects. The most
frequent words in Typee and Omoo concern description and characterization, but, under the
influence of Dante’s wild imagination in the Inferno, Robert Burton’s meandering philosophizing
in The Anatomy of Melancholy, and the eccentric reasoning and nonconformity of Thomas Browne,
the content of Mardi markedly shifts between the first and second volumes. The philosophical
nature of Mardi has been suggested before (see e.g. Foley, Grey, Yothers, and Jonik), but not by
showing how the prominent words in the second volume of the book feature a high number of
philosophical words distinct from the first volume: “world,” “wise,” “soul,” “philosopher,”
“love,” “death.” Here, I have taken the same results and mapped them onto an interactive net-
work graph (https://christopherohge.com/presentations/hm-and-philosophers-network.html).
The graph affords the possibility of assessing the strength of stylistic similarities between
Melville’s individual works and the philosophers he read. Graphs such as these are meant to pro-
voke new research questions, not to make definitive claims of influence. For example, how do
Thomas Browne and Robert Burton connect to volume 2 of Mardi? With this in mind I can run
a text analysis on similar word frequencies in Melville and Browne and Burton. What Melville
has in common with Burton and Browne are temporal and philosophical concepts such as “life,”
“age,” “ancient,” “action,” “absolute.” Melville overlaps with Browne in particular on temporal
language (recall the dating of the calendar as a “computation”): “time,” “day(s),” “short,” “hours,”
“adding.”
Then I can engage in close reading: for example, the following passages in Browne invoke time,
computing, and “reckoning with God” as against his innate depravity (another concern of Melville’s).
Persons of short times may know what ‘tis to live, but not the life of man … but such a compass
of years will shew new examples of old things, parallelisms of occurrences through the whole course
of time, and nothing be monstrous unto him, who may in that time understand not only the
Figure 25.1 Overlapping word frequencies between Melville and Burton’s and Browne’s works.
varieties of men, but the variation of himself, and how many men he hath been in that extent of
time.
(Works III: Christian Morals 137; emphasis added)
For my original sin, I hold it to be washed away in my baptism; for my actual transgressions,
I compute and reckon with God but from my last repentance, sacrament, or general
absolution.
(Religio Medici 101; emphasis added)
Clearly, Melville was experimenting with Browne’s topics in Mardi, but Melville shifts the emphasis
to earthly reckoning. The book begins with the narrator meditating on the temporal lag of life at
sea: “The days went slowly round and round, endless and uneventful as cycles in space. Time, and
time-pieces! How many centuries did my hammock tell, as pendulum-like it swung to the ship’s
dull roll, and ticked the hours and ages” (M 5). Later Babbalanja connects happiness with a calcu-
lation of the use of one’s innate powers as against merely accumulating materials, “not valuing
them by number or weight, but by the profit and esteem of the receiver”: “I will reckon benefits
well placed as the fairest part of my possession, not valuing them by number or weight, but by the
profit and esteem of the receiver; accounting myself never the poorer for any thing I give” (388).
Elsewhere he reckons with gods differently from Browne in that earthly heroes are also included in
the accounting of Media, “In his endless pedigree, reckoning deities by decimals, innumerable
kings, and scores of great heroes, chiefs, and priests” (M 190; emphasis added).
Melville was not merely attempting to make mathematical ideas concrete and setting them
against “Time’s endless tunnel” (M 230); he was also using the language of computation to
reckon with lived experience, or what William James later called the “coercions of the sensible
order and those of the ideal order.”
Between the coercions of the sensible order and those of the ideal order, our mind is thus wedged
tightly. Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be
they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.
(“Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth” 119)
For Melville, the temporal is the through-way to the epistemological, the ethical, the artistic,
and the political––all of which are tightly wedged in Mardi: “Thus, then, though Time be the
mightiest of Alarics, yet is he the mightiest mason of all. And a tutor, and a counselor, and a
physician, and a scribe, and a poet, and a sage, and a king” (M 230). His computation takes him
out of pure mathematics and into the world of experimentation; this nonetheless creates friction.
Melville’s philosophical novels, in tandem with his philosophical readings, demonstrably
increased his use of quantity words, according to data of semantic clusters of relative word
frequencies of numbers and number-like terms in Melville and other nineteenth-century con-
temporaries, which are produced using the WordNet lexical dictionary.10 Melville’s fiction––
especially the works appearing after Mardi, and going up to The Confidence-Man––distinguishes
itself with high-frequency quantification words. It might be countered that fiction about sailing
will include quantification words; indeed, that forms part of the explanation, but Omoo and Billy
Budd are sailing narratives that feature fewer quantity words.
10
See also Dennis Mischke’s essay in Chapter 24 of this Companion for more on WordNet and semantic dictionaries.
Mardi Word Mardi v. Word Moby- Word Word Confidence- Word

v. 1 Freq 2 Freq Dick Freq Pierre Freq Man Freq
hand 124 hand 120 hand 322 hand 208 one 142
head 81 word 50 foot 159 room 165 word 115
nothing 54 nothing 49 one 145 love 145 hand 111
foot 43 one 46 mate 114 nothing 125 case 92
one 41 foot 40 word 101 one 114 nothing 70
ocean 32 stone 38 nothing 101 word 112 head 58
word 29 point 31 case 96 head 79 point 48
quarter 29 palm 29 ocean 85 stone 57 dollar 48
case 25 cup 26 point 79 case 50 degree 34
yard 25 love 24 room 62 foot 49 box 30
Some of the top results of quantity words seem questionable (hand, for example, is not neces-
sarily related to counting), but some trends emerge that can generate questions: the increase in
“word” in Mardi volume 2, the closeness of “one” and “nothing” in Mardi volume 2, Pierre, and The
Confidence-Man, and the unique high frequency of “dollar” in The Confidence-Man. It is not pictured
above, but the top two results in “Bartleby, the Scrivener” are “nothing” (24) and “word” (23).
Pierre has several revealing examples of quantification clusters. Near the end of the novel, Pierre
moves through the street, pistol in breast pocket, and, as if channeling Poe’s “precision … of a
mathematical problem”: “Unentangledly Pierre threaded all their host, though in its inmost heart.
Bent he was, on a straightforward, mathematical intent” (P 359). Just before that passage, Melville
is also reckoning, accounting the time of day and the sense data of the scene: “It was a cold, but
clear, quiet, and slantingly sunny day; it was between four and five of the afternoon; that hour, when
the great glaring avenue was most thronged with haughty-rolling carriages, and proud-rustling
promenaders, both men and women.” One of Melville’s computations is accounting, or telling
stories about quantities and logical constructions––not only taking stock, or organizing, but also
narrating sense data. The logical constructions constitute formulas, or what we would call today
scripts or algorithms. I like formulas better; Deleuze also used this term in relation to Bartleby the
Scrivener: “A gaunt and pallid man has uttered the formula [“I would prefer not to”] that drives
everyone crazy. But in what does the literality of the formula consist?” (68). Formulas are not set in
stone for Melville; instead they are comparative, and based on experience. Computer programming
relies on stochastic simulation: if- and when-statements provide conditional instructions and for-
loops iterate recursively over a certain set of conditions. One of Melville’s classic formulas is the
conditional statement, which is usually deployed as a simile. His use of if/as conditionals and sim-
iles is high: in his work there are more than 3,000 if/as conditional and simile statements.
One of the most revealing combinations of numerical language and formulas shows with his
metaphor of the whims of Pierre’s heart:
The metaphysical writers confess, that the most impressive, sudden, and overwhelming event, as
well as the minutest, is but the product of an infinite series of infinitely involved and untraceable
foregoing occurrences. Just so with every motion of the heart. Why this cheek kindles with a noble
enthusiasm; why that lip curls in scorn; these are things not wholly imputable to the immediate
apparent cause, which is only one link in the chain; but to a long line of dependencies whose further
part is lost in the mid-regions of the impalpable air.
(67; emphasis added)
The “infinite series of infinitely involved … occurrences” is a recursive loop rendered in litera-
ture. Within this pattern is “one link in the chain” that relies on “dependencies” (another com-
putation term meaning the necessary relationships between software programs). Here the
numbers and looping patterns show how the seemingly discrete (the heart, “one link”) is
dependent on the indiscrete (the “infinite,” the “impalpable air”).11 The computations that rely
on discreteness are part of incomplete (or infinite) systems––recursive loops leading to strange
latitudes: a dead reckoning.
The majority of Melville’s formulas occur in Moby-Dick, which has the highest number of
quantity-words in Melville’s corpus. Take Ahab’s comparison of his vengeance to cash value in
“The Quarter-Deck”:
“… If money’s to be the measurer, man, and the accountants have computed their great counting-
house the globe, by girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let me tell
thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium HERE!”
(163)
This passage recalls Melville’s marking in de Staël criticizing an ethics based on a “merchant”
attitude of gains and losses. But Melville also universalizes the conditional within the human
condition, as it were:
There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and
at the last one pause:—through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adoles-
cence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pon-
dering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men,
and Ifs eternally.
(492)
A curious pattern emerges, namely that conditionals fire his imagination; he used computation
and creative composition as complementary Ifs.
Computation is therefore a creative catalyst that attempts to find truth. The “great Art of Telling
the Truth,” Melville states in “Hawthorne and his Mosses” (PT 244), is to penetrate the depth of
darkness while offering a surface veneer of lightness. Rendered in Moby-Dick: “The sun hides not
the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore,
that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not
true, or undeveloped. With books the same” (424). His simile here turns on books; the computa-
tion is that the truest literature is 2/3 darkness, and that it tries to reckon with the double-bind of
wisdom: “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness” (425). Solving one
kind of problem only means that we create, and must reckon with, new problems.
Then in Chapter 102, where Ishmael begins with a series of hypothetical questions about his
knowledge of measurements of sperm whale bones, and then reveals that he tattooed statistics on his
arm, he concludes by “wishing the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem.”
The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm,
where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way
11
See also Grimstad, who discusses this passage and argues that Melville was using allegory as a source of experience
(75–76).
of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of
my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing—at least, what untattooed parts
might remain—I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter
into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.
(451)
His body is the computer: it is one part memory device for holding statistics, and another blank
document, waiting for a poem to be written. Dan Beachy-Quick, in Chapter 42 of this Companion
“On Ekphrasis,” suggests that “Ishmael feels what is incommensurable in immensity.” Indeed,
that feeling of not knowing whilst in the activity of computing makes him a poet, but also a
digital one. Like Poe, Melville had a philosophy of composition with a mathematical intent. Yet
he also prefigured what Thomas Mann would call our “mystical schema,” which are rendered in
his novel Joseph and his Brothers as formulas passed down from our forebears (102). Melville is
connecting computation to creativity, and grounding it in the body––a body which has an
ancient schema, a program that recognizes Walt Whitman’s vision that “Human bodies are
words, myriads of words” (“To the Sayers of Words” 329).
Melville’s meditative calculations also take the form of stripping away the illusions of experi-
ence. Various forms of negation are then manifested to expose the indeterminacy underlying all
computations. In Chapter 56 of Moby-Dick, Ishmael negates computation while recalling an
engraving that shows the moment when a whale destroys an oarsman’s boat.
… a noble Sperm Whale depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath the boat from the profun-
dities of the ocean, and bearing high in the air upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The
prow of the boat is partially unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the monster’s spine; and standing
in that prow, for that one single incomputable flash of time, you behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the
incensed boiling spout of the whale, and in the act of leaping, as if from a precipice.
(266)
This is Melville’s attempt to imagine the space between being and nothingness––the incommen-
surability of experience that manages to pair the “incomputable” with action that is “wonderfully
good and true.” In this respect Deleuze was right to suggest that Ahab becomes the whale, and in
that becoming enters into “a zone of indiscernibility” that I would re-label a “zone of incomput-
ability” (Deleuze xxx). Moby-Dick features other recognitions of the incomputable––for example,
that the natural world will “insult” and “pulverize” our calculations and our greatest inventions
(273). The word “incomputable” is one of the more suggestive negations, but Melville progres-
sively increased his use of negation words in general throughout his published fiction, with Pierre
and the Confidence-Man having the highest frequencies. While the frequencies are reduced in his
shorter, late poems, his final work Billy Budd has one of the highest rates of negation words.
In a description of Claggart, the master-at-arms who accuses Billy of fomenting mutiny, and
whom Billy kills in response to the accusation, Melville writes that “Nothing was known of his
former life,” although “The fact that nobody could substantiate this report, was, of course,
nothing against its secret currency” (BB 20). The metaphor is curious, registering two nothings
and nobody, and suggesting that biographical narratives develop a currency (recall Ahab’s count-
ing-house of vengeance metaphor in Moby-Dick). That no facts can be marshalled against unsub-
stantiated claims shows the tension in Melville’s work between unknown abstract forces and
lived experience. But an accounting of Claggart’s “secret currency” was not fully figured out, for
Billy Budd was an unfinished project and the manuscript shows Melville was still at work on his
metaphor when he died in 1891. This section of Billy Budd ends with Melville pondering
Claggart’s “antecedents”—a suggestive computation evoking our “mystical schemas”––meaning
not only ancestors, but also a mathematical idea for the first number of a ratio and the logical
term for the conditional member of a hypothetical proposition. Melville is using a computa-
tional analogy for the hypothetical propositions we generate about the lives of others––that they
are like currencies, or symbolic and abstract representations of data that may or may not be
grounded in truth but are certainly governed by mental models. And Melville’s ingenious point
is that when there are no substantial verifiable facts behind the stories, the currency is all the
more powerful (yet another flawed credit system that nonetheless relies on computation).
I would like to conclude this analysis of the incomputable with Melville’s opening paragraph
to Chapter 21 of Billy Budd, where he questions the boundary between sanity and insanity:
Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins?
Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter
into the other? So with sanity and insanity. In pronounced cases there is no question about them.
But in some supposed cases, in various degrees, supposedly less pronounced, to draw the exact line
of demarkation few will undertake, though for a fee becoming considerate some professional experts
will. There is nothing nameable but that some men will or undertake to do it for pay.
(BB 49)
The multiple negation-words, as well as the rhetorical question at the beginning, meditates on
the indeterminacy of the phenomenon of rainbows. Melville may be questioning computations,
but he is also distinguishing between the philosophical indeterminacy of the world and the desire
of professional experts to clarify and make currency of those uncertainties. This is not to criticize the
experts or to accuse Melville of anti-realism; rather it is to identify the pragmatic functions of
everyday computations and their relation to imperfect measurements. All models are wrong,
George Box once said about computer programming in Statistical Control (1997), but he added
that some are useful fictions based on identifiable patterns. But where formulas fall short, there
are also metaphors. Such a pragmatic outlook also connects to what Fazi identified as the tension
between the indeterminacy of experience and the discrete nature of computation in “digital aes-
thetics”––namely, the “ontological discrepancy between that which is continuous (perception and
sensation) and that which is not (digital technology)” (“Digital Aesthetics” 5).
What is less known about Melville’s well known passage is that it was itself incomplete––it was
an unfinished draft in the middle of an unfinished work. Melville inscribed this opening phrase in
pencil as part of his late effort to complicate the narrative by questioning Captain Vere’s ethical and
psychological foundations after he decided to execute Billy for killing Claggart. Here Melville is cal-
culating through drafting, working through the problem of craft and narrative, experimenting with
calculative language about the rainbow metaphor. Initially he tried using the phrase “Equally impos-
sible” to describe the different hues, then tried “absolute” before settling on “different” colors. This
compositional information suggests that even in his computations, Melville had other computations
lingering beneath: after all, Vere’s decision is philosophy rendered as computational and aesthetic,
relying as it does on the principle that “forms, measured forms are everything” (68).
For Melville computation ultimately does come down to creative permutations of ones and zeroes:
first the singular and the numerous, and then the singular as against nothing. Melville seems to have
been thinking through bits (a word that combines binary and digit), distinguishing between meaning, a
Figure 25.2 Diplomatic transcription of the Billy Budd manuscript, beginning of Chapter 21 (MEL).
matter of art and ambiguity, and information, a matter of clarity that depends on measuring levels of
order and disorder (Eco 147). Computing relies on bits, of course, as well as well-structured
information. The incomputable is the linguistic code of death––the space between being and noth-
ingness, suggesting the problem of meaning. Computation is therefore both method and metaphor.
It is a method for bringing out the significance of Melville’s own techné, which reveals an underlying
tendency to stretch the possibilities of computational metaphors and attempts to model information
in the world. The essence of computation is following rules, and computer programmers operate
under the assumption that they are articulating a process of calculating rules with given inputs.
Literary scholars can harness these programs to experiment with complementary methods of close
reading and computational analysis.
Melville distinguished himself for quarrelling with rules—but he also knew that quantifica-
tion, thinking, and rules are inherent in the ways that we represent the nature of experience. It
was in the gaps between the numerical and the experiential that Melville computed. In that
respect, he foresaw that our machines do not reveal ideal truths, but mysteries about our psy-
chology. He knew that in crucial domains, the code was broken.
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Part IV
Circuits and Systems
26
Transatlantic Crossings
Edward Sugden
What materials are most relevant for exploring the interaction between Herman Melville and
the Atlantic world? First are biographical ones. These include Melville’s family genealogy, which
traced a long arc back into a revered but partially disregarded British past. Neither he nor his
family could fully cast off this heritage, not that they showed any particular desire to. Then there
are the Atlantic journeys that he undertook—along the coast of South America as a sailor and
across to England and beyond on a number of occasions, as a maritime worker, a writer, and a
grizzled, disappointed, and increasingly cynical tourist. These trips swell with import when we
channel his fiction and poetry through them as they provide threshold moments that mark clear
and distinct before-and-after points in Melville’s life and career.1
Second are the cultural and aesthetic influences of the Atlantic world. It is artificial, reductive,
and brittle to pin down Melville, a writer of uneven and eclectic tastes, as one shaped more con-
clusively by transatlantic materials than any other. He had an investment in mixing together
different worlds, bestowing equal stature upon Pacific cultures, global maritime traditions,
worldly esoterica, African American practices, deep time, ancient theology, natural science, and
literary nationalism, and much more besides. That being said, it is undeniable that the Atlantic
world—whether its oral sailor tales and demotic, usually unwritten traditions of African origin
diffused and communicated via the ocean or more canonical pleasures, particularly the Renaissance
essay, Elizabethan theater, the British novel, and somewhat stuffy and highly formalized Victorian
poetry—molded his idiom and aesthetic sensibility in ways that went far beyond the incidental
and ornamental.
Third, and perhaps most elusively, are the means by which these networks of experience and
aesthetics shaped and structured his work. It is always tough to trace cause and effect here. Most
1
For biographical accounts of these years, see Parker and Bryant.
332 Edward Sugden
straightforward would seem to be those moments of his work and writings that are decisively
transatlantic in content. His working journey to England recounted in Redburn, the Atlantic
coasts of South America in White-Jacket, his journals of 1849 and 1856–1857, the British mate-
rials in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” and Israel Potter, the reflections on
racial revolution in “Benito Cereno,” and the fictive origins of Billy Budd, all form the transat-
lantic canon of his oeuvre. Of the more biographical materials, when scrutinized these artifacts
come with considerable complexity that belies the ostensible straightforwardness of their
content. We cannot read them as biography, or at least reliable biography, as they mingle fact
and fiction, while the time-lag between experience and written iteration makes them curiously
double-layered, anchored to different moments simultaneously. Even without these complica-
tions, his Atlantic canon as a whole remains conceptually inconsistent for its transmutation of
experience into narrative and comes with representational apparatuses that defy easy explication.
Even more nebulous are the more microscopic moments in his work that are evidently saturated
with the transatlantic world and its various intersections: meetings between ships, fragmented
metaphors, half-memories, shreds of allusion, echoes of a phrase, and musical refrains humming
from out of the deep past.
Fourth are the many lives that his books lived as they circulated across the Atlantic. It was in
London that Melville’s work first received the cult-like and avid acclaim that we are now very
much familiar with. London, too, was where his books were first published in order to negotiate
the transatlantic literary marketplace and the (absence of ) copyright law that defined it; and,
one suspects, his choice to publish them there first had the additional effect of bestowing them
with a cultural capital that otherwise would have been lessened in spite of the swiftly emerging
print culture of the United States. It was in the transatlantic world that the reputation of his
works started to grow, after a period of obscurity that, for at least a couple of decades, threatened
to conclude in absolute annihilation. That we know of Melville now is indisputably owing to
the work of a rag-tag mixture of Atlantic citizens who, through the chance-like and erring
machinery of history transported this eccentric and often-unintelligible (to a large number of
his contemporaries at least) writing into the hallways of the canon. That being said, this narra-
tive should not obscure the ways that, even in the nineteenth century, Melville’s reputation
circled beyond the Atlantic world (although much of this material exists in anecdotal off-handed
comments and strange ephemeral documents) and, indeed, did not circulate transnationally at
all by remaining stubbornly within the frameworks of the nation state. Nor should this transat-
lantic world denature the significance of the continuing story of Melville’s reputation, given the
numerous passages that his work has subsequently taken into South East Asia, Australasia, the
South Pacific, the Caribbean, Latin America and, more recently, Africa in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries.2
Fifth, and operating beyond Melville as an individual writer, are the broader relationships that
existed between the United States and the Atlantic world, especially between England and
America, in the nineteenth century. Whole books have been written on these cross-currents, and
it will be far beyond the scope of this essay to arbitrate on the most substantive of them in
Melville’s life and work. Yet they are always there, running in the background, in the way that
determinate superstructures and substructures tend to be, invisible, but perceptible, powerful,
2
For a recent account of these circulations and afterlives, see the special edition of Leviathan edited by Janet Floyd and
myself entitled “Melville’s England/England’s Melville.”
Transatlantic Crossings 333
and lived. There are the numerous and unstable legacies of the Atlantic slave trade, from the
historical trauma of genocide and mass exploitation, to the ravaged routes of displaced cultures,
to the ongoing struggles for recognition, to the continuing violent legacies of it (for which, see
Gilroy). There is the Anglophilia of Americans, looking back to the mother country for intellec-
tual legitimation, moral example, political logic, and cultural sources in a nation hyper-
consciously searching for historical traditions to attach itself to. Then there is the postcolonial
ambivalence of the United States, seeking to slough off its colonial legacies, to rupture history
into a British past and an American future, but, in such acts, generating new connective tissues
between here and there, then and now. Then there are also the very real conflicts between the
Atlantic powers that continued throughout the nineteenth century, whether in Haiti and the
surrounding islands, out in the Pacific over the speckled archipelagoes that Melville visited in
his early life, and, indeed, on the soil of the North American continent in, for instance, the
Oregon territories.3
Weaving together these five mutually supporting elements, without seeking to arbitrate on
their final significance or to produce a unifying theory as to the precise dynamics of their inter-
action, this chapter provides scaffolding, or an apparatus to think within and against, as well as
speculations and hints for further exploration of Melville’s transatlantic world.
Melville’s Atlantic
In a letter of 1890 to the sexologist Havelock Ellis, who was conducting research into the links
between aesthetics and genealogy, Melville reflected, slightly tersely, on the Atlantic origins of
his family:
My great grandfather on the paternal side was a native of Scotland. On the maternal side, and in the
same remove, my progenitor was a native of Holland; and, on that side, the wives were all of like
ancestry.
As to any strain of other blood, I am ignorant, except that my paternal grandfather’s wife was of
Irish Protestant stock.
(Corr 529)
Although, in the year before his death, Melville describes these familial roots in a distant
tone, soaked with a semi-scientific formality and the evasive, multi-clausal, minimalism of
his late style, when he was growing up they were part of the family lore. Indeed, in another
universe, the writer we know as Herman Melville might well have grown up on the European
continent, scion of a respectable middle-class family of partly American extraction. In the
early 1800s, his grandfather sent his father Allan and Allan’s brother Thomas to Europe,
where the latter stayed for an extended period of time. In the period that he resided in Europe,
Thomas took on a French wife and would, it seems, on his return to the United States in the
1830s, recall at length his time in Europe to the young Herman when he visited his farm in
Pittsfield.
3
There are many accounts of the transatlantic world in the nineteenth century. A useful introductory primer is Susan
Manning and Andrew Taylor’s edited collection, Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader.
334 Edward Sugden
What Melville’s letter does not say is that these same ancestors worked to sever these links
with the old Atlantic world in the wars of independence. His grandfathers had taken part in
some of the most mythic events of the revolutionary era, including the Boston Tea Party and the
defense of Fort Stanwix (whose name would be given to Melville’s second child). We hear the
most about what Hershel Parker calls his “double revolutionary descent” (12) in Melville’s most
landlocked novel, Pierre. In this book, such a legacy of heroism is ambivalent, as the titular hero
finds himself simultaneously full of pride for his revolutionary heritage, but also weighed down
by it, feeling, as many Americans of the post-revolutionary years did, belated, as though the epic
age of American action had long since passed.
In this sense, Melville and his family occupied a strange middle zone in their dealings with
the Atlantic: nostalgically tied to his genealogical past there, yet proud for having extirpated it
politically. These tensions would cohere in 1818 when Melville’s father Allan journeyed to
England again and, while there, doubtlessly effecting a louche aristocratic nonchalance, paid a
visit to the Sixth Earl of Leven, purportedly a distant relative. Indeed, he would write to the good
Earl that “I assure you it is with no little pride of heart & elevation of sentiment, that I consider
myself a Descendant of the ancient and honourable House of Melvill, & shall always entertain for
your Lordship as its legitimate Head, the most profound respect & consideration” (qtd. Springer
15). In this trip to England, a further commercial element was added to the mix as Melville’s
father sought to gain contacts for his importing business. Both the past and the present of the
Melvilles were embedded in the Atlantic, as their financial circumstances fluctuated with the
instabilities of the ever freer transatlantic marketplace.
It was not until 1839 that Herman himself made an Atlantic journey. Growing up in New
York, he saw the ocean stretched out vastly before him, and now, as he moved into adulthood, he
finally heeded its call. He shipped aboard the Saint Lawrence as a common sailor and journeyed
to Liverpool. He records this trip in his fourth book Redburn: His First Voyage (1849). Already a
writer of some renown for his semi-autobiographical accounts of his whaling trips to the Pacific,
in this book he recalls the first time he took to sea, an experience that was, by all accounts, as
traumatizing as it was ecstatic.
In terms of Melville’s transatlantic world, Redburn’s importance lies less in whether it was true
or not—much of it seems unlikely, generic, or distorted—than for how it focalizes several
conceptual and intellectual strands that would recur in Melville’s lifelong work: the mingling of
fact and fiction, as he changes autobiography into fantasy; the syncretic fusing of written tradi-
tion, represented by his accounts of reading works by the likes of Adam Smith, with sailor lore,
in songs, dream books, and prophecies; the granular interest in the labor of the global industrial
working class; the analogies between ship and state, maritime discipline and metaphysics; the
suppressed sexual bonds between sailors; his own family’s history, as he walks in the steps of his
father’s 1818 trip; and of course more.4
There are also passages in the book that adumbrate the seeds of a differently constituted Melville
whose writing and aesthetics would have looked quite different, and that never came to pass. Most
notably, Redburn, the Melvillean cipher, relates an almost certainly fictional trip to London
4
Other chapters in this volume cover these topics as well: for example, Ivy G. Wilson (Chapter 35, “Tawny Savages and
Blank-Looking Girls: Melville, Capitalism, and Racialized Labor”), on industry and labor; and Éduoard Marsoin
(Chapter 6, “Discipline and Pleasure in Redburn and White-Jacket”), on maritime discipline.
with his pal Harry Bolton. While there they enter what appears to be a gambling den, or, even, a
male brothel, where Harry gets increasingly intoxicated. The style of this passage is distinctly un-
Melvillean, super-sensuous, hallucinatory, rococo, fusing moral censoriousness with a proto-deca-
dent atmosphere.
The most important moment, however, occurs in Liverpool, as Redburn examines the statue
of Lord Nelson. This statue, alone, is worth a trip up to the city of the Mersey. It depicts Nelson’s
triumphant death, his foes in chains about his feet, stepping over them, an avatar of British
martial might and imperial munificence. Up close, the dark metal eerily absorbs the gaze, and
the monumental magnificence of this world historical figure looks chthonic, as though spat up
by some Satanic sculptor long absent from earth. For Redburn, a green Yankee, seeing the statue
lifts him from a state of historical innocence into experience. Looking on those “naked figures in
chains” he is “involuntarily reminded of four African slaves in the marketplace.” His “thoughts”
therefore travel to “Virginia and Carolina” and “to the historical fact, that the African slave-trade
once constituted the principal commerce of Liverpool” (R 155). With these thoughts in mind,
he journeys back to the statue several times, thinking of home, of race, and of his father’s trip of
1818, where he met with the abolitionist William Roscoe.
It is a significant moment, as it allows Redburn to tear off the veil of the Atlantic world and
to see it in its gruesome, material form. A naïve, New World Engels, he glimpses into the struc-
tural forces that shaped the ocean, socially, politically, culturally, and historically. For the statue
is less of Nelson, than an emblem of how commodified, Black bodies underpinned the rise of the
Americas and its liberal-capitalist political system. As with Pip, at the bottom of the ocean, this
moment also allows Redburn to see the pulsing, tensile links connecting American culture with
the world. This is a traumatic and violent history, but also one that imported into the US many
of its most vital traditions of writing, music, and dance. In short, if Redburn is a story about
Melville coming of age in the Atlantic, this transformational shift is predicated on his sudden
awareness of race.
Melville’s next Atlantic voyage was southwards along the coast of the American continent.
Confusingly, he was to narrate this second voyage, first, in Typee, and his first voyage, later on in
his literary career in Redburn. On Christmas Day of 1840, he signed on to ship with the Acushnet,
a whaler bound for the Pacific. His journey took him into the Caribbean, towards the “Bahama
Banks,” possibly where he hunted his first whale, then further downwards toward Brazil, where
he arrived in May of 1841. Here he would have been greeted by the slave trade in all its barba-
rism. After this, Melville then journeyed onward to Nuku Hiva, where he would, famously, run
away, an event that he narrated in his first book Typee while moving on to its after-effects in his
second (non-)fiction account Omoo. Documents are scarce for this Atlantic voyage, but those
looking for a fuller account of what Melville might have thought about this Latin American world
can consult White-Jacket, where he discusses his time in Brazil on a later voyage with the mer-
chant Navy on the frigate United States.
Even in this narrative, Melville writes of his “ennui in Rio” (WJ 167), so perhaps even then we
might not learn much. But this documentary aperture opens up considerable possibility for spec-
ulation. After all, Melville would come to set his most direct account of slavery and revolution
in Latin America in “Benito Cereno.” By virtue of the sleights and refractions of literary memory,
we might wonder if these trips cemented further the links between the Atlantic and race. But
there are also more utopian overtones. As he gazes on the “amphitheatrical bay” of Rio, he sees
336 Edward Sugden
in its lush, verdant life, and the business of the port, “a circular cosmorama” (WJ 172), a breathing
hymn to the diversity of experience and the philosophical vitality of the natural world. The
Atlantic he glimpses in the bay of Rio is a possibly better one, even as it is cross-marked by the
scars of slavery and colonialism.
After Melville’s professional sea-faring years, recalled in his first publications, he next jour-
neyed across the Atlantic in 1849 to 1850. In this voyage, he went to London to sell White-Jacket
to a London publisher and, afterward, to travel through Europe as a tourist. The Melville who
arrived in England in 1849 was very different from the callow, green sailing youth of a decade
previous. By this time, he was a feted author with a committed (if odd) fan club in London and
possessed existing links with the publishing world and print culture of the transatlantic literary
marketplace. Gone were the visible material privations of his early years and, in their place, was
something that almost verged on respectability.
Of all of Melville’s Atlantic trips, the one of 1849 simultaneously appears as the most substan-
tively transformative and the most mundane. After all, it occurs in the aperture between White-
Jacket and Moby-Dick, implying that something vital changed as he was able to alter alchemically
the ore of his experience into fictional mystery in a way he had not been able to do before. Yet,
his journal of his time in England and Europe—one of the few that he kept—seems, at first
glance at least, to be rather banal. The fairly curt, off-hand entries do not reveal much beyond his
basic movements and the occasional thought, not particularly perceptive, here and there, about
what he sees.
But dig beneath the surface of the relatively predictable tourist wending that he carries out
and a few things emerge. He spent a lot of time in bookshops, finding, in particular, Elizabethan
tragedies, Renaissance essays, classics that he had yet to read, and an array of travel and pseudo-
scientific verbiage. Much of this material—in form and content—would find its way into Moby-
Dick. Equally, it is tantalizing to know what did not occur. There were no meetings with Thomas
Carlyle, whose Sartor Resartus is close in spirit to Moby-Dick, in spite of Melville’s desire to call
on him (he did read Sartor Resartus after the trip). Similarly, even though Dickens and Melville
seemingly witnessed the same hanging—of the husband and wife duo, the Mannings—they did
not, magnetically, find their way into each others’ company, the magnetic channels of history
missing, here, a beat.
Nonetheless, in spite of this mix of banality and missed opportunities, there is plenty of evi-
dence that his peregrinations provided much material for his later work, although, often, in more
cryptic, transfigured, and coded forms than his earlier travels. Indeed, if his work as a sailor
simply provided the raw, uncooked plot content for his work, this one, instead, offered a reposi-
tory for metaphor. Throughout Moby-Dick, we find his experiences in 1849 and 1850 figura-
tively represented, whether through references to Nelson’s column, the Thames Tunnel, Cologne
Cathedral, the scrimshaw of sailors, and more.
While in London, Melville was a committed socializer, engaging in many a pint, meal, and,
on occasion, bowling game. This old world merriment would also give him more straightfor-
ward content for his short story, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” The boozy
meals that Melville had in Temple, the winding, appropriately labyrinthine, riverside home of
London lawyers, here are juxtaposed with the degradations of workers who provide the
“Templars” with the paper that their jollity and craft, such as it was, required. More specula-
tively, meals like these might have granted Melville something like narrative voice, for I cannot
read “Bartleby, the Scrivener” without thinking of some imaginary or anonymous conversation-
alist, gregarious but soaked with melancholy, that he might have encountered in those inebri-
ated London back alleys.
On the basis of these experiences, but by no means reducible to them, when he was writing
Moby-Dick, Melville was able to come up with his most trenchant figure for his and, indeed,
nineteenth-century America’s relationship with the Anglophone Atlantic. This figure occurs in
Chapter 100, “Leg and Arm,” where Ahab boards the Samuel Enderby, an English whaler. Here
Ahab meets another captain who has suffered injury from Moby Dick’s voracious maw. He boards
the ship, albeit not without difficulty, and then touches his ivory leg to the captain’s ivory arm
and asks him about the white whale. This is a rare moment where Ahab might feel empathy for
another human being—and be redeemed by that emotion—but, instead, squanders the senti-
ment in the name of vengeance. After gleaning some information he swiftly vanishes, summoned
by Fedallah, and the book inexorably moves toward its tragic, fated climax.
It is an important if understudied chapter of the book. The Samuel Enderby has, already,
completed the plot of the Pequod. It has tracked down Moby Dick and suffered the conse-
quences of the encounter. All that will occur is already anticipated by the fate of the English
vessel. It is not difficult to extend this plot point into the realm of political symbolism.
Melville, like other Americans, felt a deep sense of cultural belatedness, as if he as a writer and
the nation as a political union could but repeat and imitate the actions of their colonial fore-
bears. Nonetheless, the ultimate outcome of the encounter between the Pequod and Moby Dick
does differ, implying that there are different and novel elements in the transatlantic mix as
iterated in the new world.5
In spite of the familiarity of their shared plots and experiences and their instinctively shared
mutual recognition, the meeting between Ahab and the benign Captain Boomer collapses into
incoherence. The touch between ivory leg and ivory arm is simultaneously a curiously intimate
meeting, yet a form of contact that fails to spark any further bond. To extend outward again, this
moment invokes the eerie feeling of similitude that English and American cultures felt during
the nineteenth century. Ahab and Boomer—the United States and England—are doppelgängers,
almost, or mirror images, yet, rather like two positive charges on the end of a magnet, this same-
ness repels, creates rupture. The effect is as though one had a twin but from a different, discon-
nected family. Much of the cultural tension between the two nations emerges from the gap that
this repulsive sameness birthed.
The publication of Moby-Dick marked a key point of transformation in Melville’s transatlantic
reputation. The imaginary “Melville”––an author function––changed in composition and repu-
tation. Prior to Moby-Dick, this mythical Melville was something of a London celebrity although
he had not, as an author (rather than green sailor), yet set foot on English soil. His early work
gained him some avid followers in London and beyond, attracted to the bucolic exoticism of his
South Pacific reveries. This enthusiasm is relatively easily quantified by marking the sheer
number of reviews his work garnered.
However, after Moby-Dick his reputation diminished and gradually faded to almost nothing, a
few followers still holding the flame. The version of Moby-Dick that came out in England, a
month or so prior to its American release, offers a useful analog for the slings and arrows that
5
For an utopian reading of this episode, see Castiglia, “Reading Ahab Blind.”
338 Edward Sugden
Melville the writer would come to face. Bowdlerized, with a different title (The Whale), an
excised Epilogue, the Extracts at the end, and a right whale rather than a sperm whale along the
spine, the book itself strangely encapsulates a moment when he would begin to fall from grace,
attacked by error and historical misrecognition. An 1853 review of Moby-Dick by a “Sir
Nathaniel” is a useful one to track down, not just for its rhetorical high-jinks, but also for the
ferocity of the dissatisfaction and disillusionment that would attach to his post-1851 work in the
Atlantic world. However, just as the moon waxes and wanes, this would not be the end of
Melville’s transatlantic literary reputation.
As the 1850s went on, Melville would return to his 1849 trip to London. On Tuesday,
December 18, 1849, Melville’s journal entry contained this passage: “Looked over a lot of ancient
maps of London. Bought one (A.D. 1766) for 3 & 6 pence. I want to use it in case I serve up the
Revolutionary narrative of the beggar” (J 43). These sentences refer to Israel Potter, which
appeared serially between 1854 and 1855 before its release in book form. Alongside Mardi, it
remains one of the more obscure works of Melville’s prose oeuvre. The story concerns an American
Revolutionary War fighter who, captured by the British, is exiled in England. While there he
meets a number of key figures of the Revolution—George III, Benjamin Franklin, John Paul
Jones, and Ethan Allen. After fifty years away from his home, he eventually returns, forgotten
and unloved in a changed America. It is an irreverent and strange work that tells history from
the margins. While set in England primarily, the book ultimately seems more concerned with
deflating the Revolutionary generation of the United States. The real historical figures tend to
be some combination of caricature, fool, and knave, while those who actually fought the war are
disregarded and forgotten. It marks the last sustained engagement with the transatlantic that
Melville would make in prose until Billy Budd.
He reveals his disillusionment with the Atlantic in his journal of 1857, as he travelled across
the ocean and through England on his way to what his family hoped, forlornly as it turned out,
would be a restorative trip to the Levant. The journal of 1849 has a pleasingly wide-eyed naivety
to it, which, eight years later, has all but disappeared, as a grizzled, depressed, angry, and disap-
pointed Melville takes the stage, clearly hurt by his literary obscurity. He swiftly grew tired of
Liverpool, finding little to tantalize him as before, even though he met up with his erstwhile
neighbor and inspiration Nathaniel Hawthorne (Hawthorne provided a memorable insight into
his mood at the time, writing that during their visit, “Melville, as he always does, began to
reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed
me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’” (English Notebooks, 432)). He
then journeyed across ocean and land, Turkey, Greece, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and Rome, before
arriving back into England filled with ennui. He found brief reprieve in Oxford, thinking of the
colleges there as cathedrals that could hold minds out of time, untouched by the pollutions of
society, dreaming of Robert Burton, before being brought swiftly back to earth as he passed
through industrial wastelands.
Melville dedicated himself to poetry and to his job at the New York Custom House after this
trip. Accordingly, the Atlantic traces are harder to find biographically and in his literary labors. His
poems bear the formal marks of Victorian poetry: Clarel, for instance, his poem of the Holy Land,
published in a small print run in 1876, is in iambic tetrameter, like Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,”
while he also showed interest in neo-classical and mythical themes influenced by his reading of
Matthew Arnold and drifts into a grave and morbid aestheticism through Charles Algernon
Swinburne and James Thomson.6 The second order “Melville,” the reputation, the public figure,
almost ceased to exist in this interregnum, save for a few scattered references here and there.
Yet something started to brew in England in the late 1870s and early 1880s. A rag-tag band
of proto-socialists, aesthete exoticists, decadents, and working men began to rediscover Melville,
mirroring, in their ardor, the fan clubs of the 1840s and 1850s (for more on the British roots of
the Melville revival, see Maki Sadahiro’s Chapter 3 in this volume, “Melville’s Twentieth-Century
Revivals”). For them, foremost among them the political activist Henry Salt, Typee was the text
that provided them a glimpse of a more utopian, communitarian world, while they also found
themselves drawn to its homosocial longings. As the eyes of England’s readers looked again on
Melville’s pages, so Melville’s mind returned to England and the Atlantic. In his posthumously
discovered novella Billy Budd, Melville tells the story of a handsome British sailor impressed into
the Navy where his instinctive goodness, as ever is the way in Melville, fails to overcome the evil
of the world about him. Melville possibly came across the prototype for Billy at some point on
his trips those decades previous.
A variety of working class readers and literary men and women joined Salt and his cadre of
eccentric Melvilleans after Melville’s death in 1891. He garnered a cult-like adoration among
these readers—there was even a secret Moby Dick Club in London—and gained famous readers
including Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad (although the latter, perhaps sensing he had been
bested and preceded, dismissed him out of hand). These fans tended to see Melville not as a great
writer, as such, but as a great writer of the sea and the Pacific in particular, yet the movement to
lionize Melville, by virtue of these Atlantic enthusiasms, had truly begun. While it is often
assumed that the publication of Raymond Weaver’s biography Herman Melville: Mariner and
Mystic (1921) sealed this apotheosis, much of the renewed interest can also be accounted for by
the publication of Moby-Dick in the Oxford World’s Classics series, with an introduction by Viola
Meynell. Even though an Everyman edition had existed since the early 1900s, it was this Oxford
University Press edition, more than any other, that was read popularly and finally gained Melville
popular fame.7
Herman Melville crossed the Atlantic and the Atlantic crossed him. The composite figure
that these crossings produce is a complex one, freighted with the legacies of colonialism and
slavery, as well as the numerous subterranean psychologies that lived out these processes.
But Melville the man, as much as the second order figure of Melville the writer, was very
much an Atlantic citizen, birthed and sustained by that ocean and all those who dwell
within and by it.
Works Cited
Bryant, John. Herman Melville: A Half Known Life. 2 vols. Castiglia, Christopher. “Approaching Ahab Blind.” J19:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2020. The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, vol. 6,
no. 1, Spring 2018, pp. 14–24.
6
See MMO, Search Catalog, Sealts Nos. 20 and 21 (Arnold); 492a (Swinburne); 505 (Tennyson’s In Memoriam); 515–
522 (Thomson).
7
Hershel Parker’s “Historical Note” is useful for elements of this history; for a take on the Meynell edition see Janet
Floyd’s essay in “England’s Melville/Melville’s England.”
340 Edward Sugden
Floyd, Janet, and Edward Sugden, editors. “Melville’s Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume I,
England/England’s Melville.” Leviathan: A Journal of 1819–1851. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
Melville Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, June 2020. “Sir Nathaniel”. “American Authorship. No. IV—
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Herman Melville.” New Monthly Magazine, Jul. 1853,
Consciousness. Verso Books, 1993. pp. 300–308.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. English Notebooks. Russell and Springer, Haskell. “The Scottish Connection.” Melville
Russell, 1941. Society Extracts, no. 42, May 1980, pp. 15–16.
Manning, Susan, and Andrew Taylor. Transatlantic
Literary Studies: A Reader. Edinburgh UP, 2007.
27
Holy Dread: Taboo in Typee and
“The Whiteness of the Whale”
Alex Calder
White appears to be the sacred color among the Marquesans.

(T 172)
When taboo—tapu in Maori, kapu in Hawaiian—entered the English language with the publi-
cation of Cook’s Third Voyage in 1784, much of its Polynesian meaning would be left behind, but
its crossing would make something new.1 In London, it soon became fashionable to speak of
taboo. From the OED’s record of usage, one learns that the subject of France was taboo to Edmund
Burke (1791), that the poet Robert Southey had lifted a taboo on the slaughter of pigs (1817),
that a governess—according to Charlotte Brontë—might be regarded as a “tabooed woman”
(1849). Noah Webster included the word in his 1828 Dictionary: “TABOO, n. In the isles of the
Pacific, a word denoting prohibition or religious interdict, which is of great force among the
inhabitants.” The word could also be used as a verb: “To taboo the ground set apart as a sanctuary
for criminals”—an example which has more to do with the customs of the medieval church than
anything Polynesian, but happily condenses several lines of association. Webster understands
that taboo is off-limits, socially proscribed, somehow mixed in with the sacred. In our time,
taboo has lost most of these already diminished Polynesian associations to become littered with
meaning: it is a word for perfumes, true-crime shows, lingerie. But over the century and a half
1
Tapu is a pan-Polynesian concept, but its meanings vary from place to place and time to time. In this chapter, I use
the Māori spelling whenever an indigenous meaning is being discussed or suggested, and I always do so in the light of
understandings from my own corner of the Pacific: Aotearoa/New Zealand. The word taboo, on the other hand, is an
English word of Polynesian origin. I use it sometimes in relation to a particular anthropological definition, sometimes
in relation to ordinary and non-specialist meanings.
342 Alex Calder
when the meanings of taboo were more aligned with their Polynesian origins, a notable literary
and cross-cultural fertilization occurred: Westerners began to know their own culture more
deeply by discovering how they themselves were enmeshed in taboo.
It is evident from customs described that James Cook and his men had been under the eye of
tapu since first venturing into the Pacific in 1769, yet the word does not register in shipboard
journals or vocabularies of Polynesian languages until 1777, when Tongan and Hawai’ian
encounters first prompted retrospective reflection on a signifier of “mysterious significance” and
“powerful and extensive operation.”2 Why did it take so long for this central trans-Polynesian
concept to cross the beach? The delay seems evidence of the thinness of those early encounters,
of how, despite all the everyday interactions in which people were able to make themselves
understood, a deeper level of linguistic and cultural comprehension eluded both parties. But
there is a further reason why tapu stayed in the shadows. Over those three long voyages, Cook and
his men by and large comprehended behaviors that were different from their own in a common-
sensical way. Islanders were expected to act differently because they had different customs. When
Cook refers to such-and-such a custom as having a religious significance, he does not so much
explain unusual cultural behavior as obviate the need for an explanation. After 1777, though, it
began to seem that different customs might themselves be articulated by a higher form of
difference—by a mentality, by some occluded principle governing the way human lives could be
lived. Tapu became something to figure out, to take into consideration, and to use. It generated
misunderstanding and hubris in the concatenation of events leading to the death of Captain
Cook at Kealakekua Bay in 1779. Tapu also became part of the pidgin of cross-cultural encounter:
Charles Stewart, one of Melville’s sources, explains how his captain would regulate ship-to-shore
relations by hoisting or lowering a white flag to indicate when the ship was taboo, and not open
to visitors (141–42). The early voyagers, missionaries, and traders made a detailed record of their
interactions with tapu, leaving an archive that would fuel the speculations of ethnologists
throughout the mid- and late-nineteenth century. Melville dived as deeply into that library as he
did into his whale books. And he had personal experience against which he could test the reality
discursively constructed by these works. He yarned with Polynesian shipmates and fellow run-
aways, he had an ear for the languages, he spent time ashore in three Pacific locations which give
rise to polemical contrasts throughout his writings: an effectively colonized and downtrodden
Hawai´i, a missionized Tahiti, and, supposedly least touched by progress, the Marquesas—the
most remote valley of which is the setting for his first novel, Typee.
That book, written before the formulation of an anthropological definition of culture, antici-
pates much of what ethnographers later in the century would make of taboo.3 While there are
subsequent mentions of taboo in Omoo, Mardi, and The Confidence-Man, this Polynesian signifier
leaves a more profound impression on Moby-Dick. The word “taboo” never appears in Moby-Dick,
but Queequeg is of course tapu, and the tattoo design he transfers from his person to his coffin
makes that knowledge part of the book. Ishmael calls him “a riddle to unfold” and goes on to
explain how those “hieroglyphic marks” inscribe “a complete theory of the heavens and the
2
Franz Steiner notes the delay in his history of taboo; the phrases from Cook’s Voyages (1784) are cited on pp. 23 and
25 respectively. Steiner was writing in the mid-1950s; for a more recent survey of the anthropological literature on
taboo, see Valeri 43–113.
3
For an account of how Pacific encounters contributed to the emergence of the modern idea of culture (first defined by
Edward Tylor in 1871), see Herbert, pp. 150–203.
Holy Dread: Taboo in Typee and “The Whiteness of the Whale” 343
earth” (MD 480). When Ahab exclaims, “Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods” (481), he intuits
a relation between those spiraling patterns and a sacred power that runs through them. As we
shall see, the most pertinent things Melville knew about tapu are first, that it is articulated by
“hieroglyphic marks,” and second, that it is characterized by what has always seemed, to its
Western observers, a counterintuitive blend of things that are holy and things that inspire dread.
Moreover, the tapu associated with a particular person is extended to objects they have touched—
in much the same way as qualities associated with Queequeg are transferred to the carved coffin
that will become Ishmael’s life-preserver. Ishmael’s own “complete theory” of the universe has an
inexplicit but active context in Melville’s knowledge of Polynesian ethnography. Tapu is central
to any Polynesian view of the world; what Melville made of it in Typee crosses over to become the
organizing principle behind “The Whiteness of the Whale” in Moby-Dick.
Typee’s narrator, Tommo, is a runaway from the fo’c’sle of an American whaler—there can be
no waft of the sacred about him. But when he becomes the obliging, amiable guest of those good
folk, the villagers of Tai Pi, he is rendered “sacred”—or made taboo—by a woven band that
Mehevi, their chief, ties around the sailor’s wrist. The same sign, Tommo notices, specifies certain
coconut trees as taboo, leaving even the shadow they cast upon the ground “consecrated by its
presence” (T 222). A protective aura also surrounds a pipe given to him by Mehevi, which
Tommo cannot persuade anyone else to smoke, yet other pipes circulate freely. Tommo’s pipe, the
coconuts, and by the same token Tommo himself, “belong” to Mehevi; they are an extension of
his mana (power, authority). Tommo can imagine he has received a “sacred investiture” (222)—a
notion that sits well with his sense of importance and agency—but, despite being aware that he
is under surveillance and always treated with circumspection, he does not fully appreciate that
he is himself taboo. But their taboo comprehends him, and from precisely that point where his
blind spot would be.
Taboo, then, is a web which Tommo comes to know by finding himself entangled. “For several
days after entering the valley I had been saluted at least fifty times in the twenty-four hours with
the talismanic word ‘Taboo’ shrieked in my ears, at some gross violation of its provisions, of
which I had unconsciously been guilty” (221). For example, he passes a tobacco pouch over the
head of the person sitting next to him; the man starts up, as if “stung by an adder,” and his
affronted companions exclaim, “taboo!” (221). Or he comes across girls making costumes. He
joins the gay circle and begins to unpick a rag of tappa cloth; “Taboo!” his friends cry, with swell-
ing bosoms and outraged pointing fingers. “The capricious operations of the taboo is not its least
remarkable feature,” Melville writes. “To numerate them all would be impossible. Black hogs—
infants to a certain age—women in an interesting situation—young men while the operation of
tattooing their faces is going on—and certain parts of the valley during the continuance of a
shower—are alike fenced about by the operation of the taboo” (222–23).
While the operations of taboo are as extensive as they are mysterious, “pervading the most
important as well as the minutest transactions of life” (221), Tommo soon learns that the pattern
he is trying to discern is not woven in a consistent manner. For example, taboo evidently
involves restrictions and prohibitions, but why then is Marnoo (manu means “bird”) able to
travel anywhere on the island precisely because he is taboo? Tommo figures that because of
certain friendships “his person, to a certain extent, is held as sacred” (140). He also gathers that
taboo must be closely involved with gender distinctions among the Tai Pi. There appears to be
a universal taboo against women using canoes, and yet, after some difficulty, Tommo obtains
permission for Fayaway to skylark with him aboard a waka—but as soon as she does so, a
344 Alex Calder
once-popular swimming-hole becomes off-limits to all the other women of the tribe. Examples
such as these suggest there must be some “power” that “imposes the taboo,” but Tommo con-
fesses he is “wholly at a loss where to look for the authority which regulates this potent institu-
tion” (224). If there is no such authority, the inclination to look for one might constitute what
the philosopher Gilbert Ryle terms a category mistake,4 but Tommo understandably would like
to know whether institutions comparable to the church or the government back home might
exist in this community and have the function of regulating taboo. The “thrice mysterious
taboo” (177) is at one point compared to a theology whose jargon-like intricacies might be
understood by trained adepts, but which the ordinary people of the valley are “either too lazy or
too sensible to worry themselves” with (171). Tommo’s better insight, though, is that the web
woven by taboo is not overseen by any synod or town council but might well be a collective
term for the various principles of social cohesion that are internalized by members of a
community.5 As such, in its combination of intuitively understood rules and exceptions, taboo
forms a system very like a language.
The word itself (taboo) is used in more than one signification. It is sometimes used by a parent to
his child, when, in the exercise of parental authority, he forbids it to perform a particular action.
Anything opposed to the ordinary customs of the islanders, although not expressly prohibited, is
said to be “taboo.”
(224)
And the next paragraph develops the point about signification:
The Typee language is one very difficult to be acquired … The duplication of words … is one of
their peculiar features. But another, and a more annoying one, is the different senses in which one
and the same word is employed; its various meanings all have a certain connection, which only
makes the matter more puzzling. So one brisk, lively little word is obliged, like a servant in a
poor family, to perform all sorts of duties; for instance, one particular combination of syllables
expresses the ideas of sleep, rest, reclining, sitting, leaning, and all other things anyways analo-
gous thereto, the particular meaning being shown chiefly by a variety of gestures, and the elo-
quent expression of the countenance.
(224–25)
The two syllables that combine in the word tapu mean “strongly marked.” Tommo has shown how
that root meaning performs “all sorts of duties” in semantic fields a speaker of English could dif-
ferentiate by using expressions as various as “men only,” “not yours,” “show a bit of respect,” and
so on. These are quotidian domains; over and above them loom associations in which taboo is
sacred as well as inscrutable. Sensing this, Tommo is often drawn to a small house in which the
wooden effigy of a dead chief sits upright in a canoe. “The place was sacred. The sign of the
inscrutable taboo was seen in the shape of a mystic scroll of white tappa” (171–72). In this
4
Ryle’s classic example of a category mistake is the first-time visitor to Oxford or Cambridge, who, after being shown
the colleges, libraries, laboratories, museums, etc., asks, “But where is the University?” (17).
5
“As to any general rule or standard of conduct by which the commonalty were governed in their intercourse with each
other, I should be almost tempted to say none existed on the island, except, indeed, the mysterious ‘Taboo’ be considered
as such” (T 200).
“holy” place, inscrutability works positively and encourages empathy and aesthetic appreciation.
“I loved to yield myself up to the fanciful superstitions of the islanders,” says Tommo, fancifully
(173). But things that are hidden and taboo also produce feelings of dread or horror. Tommo has
long been curious about the contents of three mysteriously wrapped packages that hang from the
rafters of his house. One day, he returns unexpectedly and surprises his friends who have been
engaged in some private business involving those bundles. The family angrily warns him off—we
may imagine the word taboo would be used—but Tommo presses forward and, in the instant
before the mokomokai are returned to their coverings, catches a glimpse of three mummified heads,
one of which is that of a white male. Aghast, Tommo immediately supposes the remains are those
of his friend Toby, but he soon recollects he had noticed the packages long before the puzzling
disappearance of his companion. Later in the chapter, Tommo uncovers grisly evidence of what he
assumes is a cannibal feast. The second scene is an intensified repetition of the first: a mystery
involving taboo generates epistemological suspense, and then something that should not be seen,
is seen. In each case, there is an appalling disclosure—and a leaping to conclusions. I have argued
elsewhere (Calder, 103–5) that Tommo’s point of view in the cannibalism episode cannot be
Melville’s. The wrapped bodies of three slain enemies have been carried to the Ti, but Tommo’s
proof that they have been cooked and eaten—“bones still fresh with moisture and with particles
of flesh clinging to them here and there!” (238)—rests on an assumption that cannibalism is their
customary practice. We know Melville had evidence to the contrary because he took much of the
episode from Porter (2:44–45) who, having once had similar suspicions, found them to be unwar-
ranted. Moreover, the details indicate another context entirely. Bones such as these, stored in a
large canoe-like container set apart by a short fence of bamboos, are not “left-overs” from a feast
but are part of the ordinary passage of death: the partially scraped bones have been left to molder
before being interred in a remote cave. But, as everyone tells Tommo, human remains are most
certainly taboo.
Melville had taken care to allow Tommo a questionable inference. Had he not done so, the
book would have confirmed one or another of the loaded alternatives—“Typee or Happar?”—
with which Tommo’s pursuit of the primitive begins. But Melville knew that both sides of that
binary were reductive in their implications and so preferred to end by placing his narrator at the
limit of his comprehension, on the hither side of his and our powerful taboo against cannibalism.
What is on the other side of that wall? Not kaitangata as practiced by any Marquesan, but not a
routine demonization of savage customs either. Instead, for a moment, a tropical paradise is
drained of its color. “Taboo! Taboo!” the people around him cry—and Kory-Kory, reading the
horror on Tommo’s countenance, exclaims “Puarkee!” (238). He means pork, and to Tommo,
pork means a deception and proof of something to hide—but the “he thinks I think he thinks”
aspect of the scenario is more suggestive of crossed purposes. While Tommo pretends to acqui-
esce in Kory-Kory’s assurances, the people of the valley act as if nothing has happened and are
“unwilling to manifest their displeasure at what could not be now remedied” (238). Everyone is
in effect now treating the whole episode as taboo. But there has also been a glimpse of taboo as
an underside, as the unseen lurking thing by which Tommo is repulsed.
Tommo has earlier intimated that questions of taboo might be approached as questions of
linguistics. Given all the various usages and shades of meaning previously noted by Tommo, it
would seem that taboo has the capacity not only to absorb any number of potential meanings,
but also to work as a metonym for the symbolic system in which it is deployed. To some extent,
then, the word functions as a “floating signifier,” a term, as Levi-Strauss says of mana, for
346 Alex Calder
whatever “represents an indeterminate value of signification, in itself devoid of meaning and

thus susceptible of receiving any meaning at all” (55)—or what Melville in “The Whiteness of
the Whale” would call “a dumb blankness full of meaning” (195).
I am intrigued by how closely Tommo’s experiences in the Marquesas in the early 1840s are
echoed by those of a late-twentieth century ethnographer of taboo, Valerio Valeri, who made
several visits to the Huaulu people on a remote island of the Moluccas in Indonesia in the 1970s
and ’80s. Like Tommo, Valeri is perplexed by the variety of occasions on which he has heard the
word maquwoli—or taboo.
A child seizes a fruit and brings it to his mouth; his mother raises her voice in alarm and warns,
“Tepi, ia maquwoli,” “Don’t, it is taboo.” A worried old woman looks at her fingers, spying the
progress of leprosy, and wonders aloud if her condition is the consequence of having eaten
[a forbidden combination of food]. The ethnographer attempts to photograph an innocuous-looking
but curious object hanging from a rafter, and he is stopped by a cry: “Ia Maquwoli.” A cricket jumps
inside a house at night and people scramble to put all the lights out and to cover a pregnant woman,
screaming excitedly, “Ia maqwuoli poto,” “it is very taboo.”
(xxi)
Valeri recalls how, in the face of perplexing variety, “the ethnographer pays more attention,
makes systematic inquiries,” yet “the subject will soon prove inexhaustible; the explanations
given to him puzzling” (xxi). He returns to his university and thinks of all the questions he
should have asked—and makes a note to ask them next time. After several such visits, he finds
himself hoping that “no new taboo will come his way” (xxi)—but every new day in the field fur-
nishes complicating evidence. The ethnographer recalls becoming “ruminative,” then “bitterly
philosophical” and, in baffled desperation, feels ever more deeply “confronted with the necessity
of making sense of the thick forest of taboos that threaten Huaulu (and he feels himself) from
every side” (xxi–xxii).
As taboo is to Tommo, as maquwoli is to Valeri, so whiteness is to Ishmael. Both taboo and the
dreadful quality of whiteness arouse distinct and palpable feelings in those who experience them.
Ishmael writes of a “vague, nameless horror … which at times by its intensity” (188) overpowers
all other thoughts and feelings. “And yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable” was this feeling, he
adds, that he “almost despairs of putting it in a comprehensible form” (188). In trying to get to
the bottom of those experiences, Ishmael—like Tommo, like Valeri, like the early ethnographers
of taboo—makes an inventory of cases in the hope of lighting upon “some chance clue to conduct
us to the hidden cause” (192) he seeks. Yet as the examples are assembled and multiplied, the
more hopeless the task of identifying an underlying principle. “How is mortal man to account
for it?” asks Ishmael. “To analyze it would seem impossible” (192). As with taboo, any search for
a common denominator founders on exceptions, yet Ishmael’s catalog hangs together even though
most readers will be unperturbed by many of the instances he cites in evidence of the unsettling
power of this hue (white nuns, the Andes). Even so, it is striking how little agreement there has
been as to what whiteness means to Ishmael, or why that color should motivate “the fiery hunt.”6
6
Khalil Husni provides a history of the foundational interpretations. Discussions of “The Whiteness of the Whale” are
too numerous to list, but for an interesting anthropological discussion, see Victor Turner’s “Some White Symbols in
Literature and Religion”—a chapter in his 1975 book on Ndembu ritual.
Is Ishmael adding to Ahab’s sense that “all the subtle demonisms of life and thought” were
“visibly personified and made practically assailable in Moby Dick”? (184) Or is he introducing a
contrasting set of motivations? How far does the chapter as a whole constitute the evidence to be
assessed? How far should the penultimate paragraph take center stage?
Ishmael’s difficulty in accounting for what troubles him about the whiteness of the whale
is homologous with the problem Tommo has in trying to understand taboo. Each confronts
an array of interconnecting evidence and each intimates something behind it—“a dumb
blankness full of meaning” (195). The parallel can be taken a step further. Michael Taussig has
suggested that “The Whiteness of the Whale” is Melville’s answer to the question, “What
color is the sacred?”7 Melville’s interest in the comparative religion of his day is well docu-
mented,8 but I am not sure anyone has noticed how closely “The Whiteness of the Whale”
anticipates theories about the origins of religion formed later in the century by the “armchair”
anthropologists of Polynesia, who were interested in taboo and drew on sources well known
to Melville.
The relation between Christian and Polynesian concepts of the sacred was close yet distant
enough to prove a snare for missionaries such as William Ellis, whose Polynesian Researches was a
major source for Melville, as well as the object of his particular scorn. All missionaries were aware
that the special qualities of the Sabbath day, for example, could be captured in translation by the
word tapu, but that same word, while seemingly applicable to all things sacred, was also used in
reference to things that were prohibited, or dreadful and unclean, such as corpses or menstrual
blood. Ellis looked forward to the day when all the negative heathenish taboos and idolatries he
had described in the course of his travels would be expunged, leaving only the pure ones that
chimed with his Christian notions. Later in the century, in the aftermath of Darwinism and a
new wave of historical criticism of the Bible, works like Polynesian Researches were mined for
evidence of “survivals”: ancient habits of thought that had supposedly lived on with little
modification in the remote and “simpler” cultures of the world. The biblical scholar, William
Robertson Smith, a prince of library research, took a passage through the reefs and shoals of
Polynesian ethnography in search of the lost worlds of ancient Hebrew tribespeople. Recently
encountered Polynesians, he observed, were as pre-occupied by the dangers of infection by malig-
nant supernatural beings as were the ancient Semites, whose precautions against psychic conta-
gion, as detailed in the Hebrew Bible, were exactly comparable with those recently observed
operating on far-flung Pacific Islands. Yet, as Ellis and all other commentators made clear, taboo
restrictions also governed holy persons and things—and that same curious doubling was evident
in the cradle from which the Hebrew Bible had emerged. In Smith’s analysis, the combination
of holiness and awfulness that seemed to characterize Polynesian tapu was living evidence of a
rudimentary form of religion against which, and out of which, the Hebrew prophets would
refine their concept of the Holy.9
7
Taussig writes: “Could it be that the question as to the color of the sacred is itself sacred, a spiritual exercise of the sort
Herman Melville undertook in Moby-Dick when he tells us it was above all the whiteness of the great whale that
appalled him?” (35).
8
The classic general study is Franklin, The Wake of the Gods. For Polynesian religion, see Breitwieser, “Pacific
Speculations.”
9
Smith, 148–55, 446–54.
348 Alex Calder
Smith’s student, Sir James Frazer, popularized and broadened the theory.10 Traces of taboo, he
believed, could be found in all religious and moral systems, and the double duty performed by
taboo as both sacred and unclean was evidence of an earlier stage in our evolution when these
concepts had yet to be differentiated. As Freud later explained in Totem and Taboo, “The meaning
of taboo, as we see it, diverges in two contrary directions. To us it means, on the one hand,
‘sacred,’ ‘consecrated,’ and on the other ‘uncanny,’ ‘dangerous,’ ‘forbidden,’ ‘unclean’” (71). But
these meanings were intertwined in ancient cultures: “Our collocation ‘holy dread,’” Freud sug-
gested, “would often coincide in meaning with taboo” (71).11
Frazer saw taboos as a negative form of sympathetic magic and developed two key meta-
phors—electricity and infection—to illustrate how he thought the magical thinking worked.
Where sorcery aimed to achieve a positive magical result, like a drummer making thunder to
produce rain, taboos worked to prevent an undesirable outcome from happening, such as not
touching a corpse so as to avoid developing leprosy. A corpse might be taboo because it contained
a dangerous spiritual charge; it might also be taboo as a potential source of contagion. The mag-
ical thinking Frazer thought characteristic of “primitive” peoples—and, according to Freud, of
modern neurotics—combines a perception of similarity (between leprous skin and a corpse, for
example) with the postulation of an influence that is transmittable by contact. In Frazer’s analogy,
taboos function like insulators to prevent the electro-spiritual force with which some things are
charged from causing injury. When the insulation fails, the charge is passed on as a form of
spiritual contagion, requiring rituals of decontamination to restore safety.
Frazer’s early critic, R. R. Marett, objected that far from explaining taboo, Frazer had merely
pooh-poohed it as a form of primitive thinking. Marett wanted to restore the sense of “awe,
wonder and the like” (10) out of which he believed humankind’s earliest religious sentiments
took shape, and which, far from being superseded by purer or more advanced forms, were at the
heart of anyone’s religious or aesthetic experience. In developing his ideas, Marett returned to the
closely imbricated Polynesian concepts of mana and taboo. Taboo, he suggested, was negative
mana—the opposite of mana’s positive charge. Marett was mistaken about that,12 but his insights
illustrate a tidemark for imagining the kind of relatively un-Eurocentric theory about taboo and
the origins of the sacred that Melville would never articulate in so many words, but which is
implicit in his speculations about holiness and dread in “The Whiteness of the Whale.”
Ishmael’s argument is that although white is “at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual
things” it is also “the intensifying agent in things most appalling to mankind” (195). Most early
European commentators on taboo noted that same duality but remained mystified. Ishmael
cannot account for it either, and he goes on to develop a series of analogies as to how or why that
may be so. The most telling of these concerns a white buffalo robe, a young colt from Vermont,
and the White Steed of the Prairies. The latter completes a long series of examples of sacred
whiteness provided by Ishmael and pivots toward the exposition of appalling whiteness to
follow. The steed is a “magnificent milk-white charger … with the dignity of a thousand
10
At Smith’s invitation, Frazer prepared an essay on “Taboo” for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed., 1888. Frazer
treated the subject more expansively in the second volume of The Golden Bough, “Taboo and the Perils of the Soul.”
11
Cf. the conclusion of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”: “Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy
dread, / For he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise.”
12
The “opposite” of tapu is noa. The former is sacred, restricted, whereas the latter is common, ordinary.
monarchs, in his lofty, overscorning carriage”; he is the “object of trembling reverence and awe”
to the bravest of Indians, “commanding worship” as well as “a certain nameless terror” (191).
Marett would say that the white steed, like the white whale, has mana and elicits its supposed
negative, taboo. Ishmael then adduces other instances of unsettling whiteness, such as the albino,
the White Sea, the tall pale man of the Hartz forests, and rounds up the long catalogue with his
story of the white buffalo robe and a colt from Vermont—a culminating example parallel to the
White Steed of the Prairies. If a white buffalo robe is shaken near that “strong young colt, foaled
in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey,” the animal paws the
ground in “phrensies of affright” (194)—much like Tommo’s companion who objected to
tobacco being passed over his head. The example is like all those in which taboo appears to work
by similarity and contact: some electro-spiritual current must be joining the white buffalo robe
to the colt. Ishmael’s larger point is that what the shaken buffalo robe does to the colt, whiteness
does to him. It is more than a whiff of something troubling: it is a world-connecting contagious-
ness. Ishmael credits the colt with “the instinct of the knowledge of demonism in the world”
(194). The chapter then takes a brief cosmological turn—“though in many of its aspects the
visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright” (195)—before
closing with a series of extraordinary ontological speculations on the nature of white as a “color-
less all-color” (195).
How might a Polynesian-ish understanding of tapu throw light on these much-discussed pas-
sages and their place in Moby-Dick? The Māori universe is organized by dualities, but they tend
not to involve distinctions between ontological states: mountains, for example, can be ancestors.
Two consequences of this idea might be noted. First, it explains why taboo has a more prominent
role in cultures that do not make a qualitative ontological division between, say, humans with
souls and animals who merely exist. When every living thing exists on the same plane, when we
share the same life, we are more likely to develop taboos about what we can eat and how we can
hunt. In Moby-Dick, this distinction is seen in the difference between Flask’s opinion that the
“wondrous whale” is “but a species of magnified mouse” (119) and Ishmael’s hunch that when our
fellow mammals lift their flukes to the sun, they share our instinct for reverence (378). Second,
the Māori universe has no beneficent creator saying “Let there be light”—and therefore no need
for a counter-balancing second agent to deal with the problem of evil, no “monomaniac incarna-
tion of all those malicious agencies” (184) required by Ahab’s theology. Instead, the Māori uni-
verse comes about through a process of differentiation. In the beginning there was te kore, the
void, and from within it, in the long night of te pō, breath stirs and beings take shape, culmi-
nating in the eventual forced separation of the sky father and the earth mother by their children.
From the formless dark, we enter te ao mārama, the world of light, in which all beings are both
distinct and genealogically linked. This cosmological pattern is recapitulated in such everyday
processes as the passage from day to night, birth to death, the left-right orientation of meeting
houses, the double spiral motif in tattoos and carving, and so on. A well-spring of creative poten-
tial, of tapu as sacred ancestral presence, moves from time immemorial into the now, but we also
spiral back into te pō, into darkness and death. Tapu inheres in and regulates the drift between
these conjoined dualities: between te pō and te ao mārama, between the side of death and darkness
and ancestral presence, and the side of daylight and life and the quotidian or common activities
we call noa. The component states are differentiated but they also threaten to mix and run into
each other. Let us further suppose that tapu, in what the early ethnographers saw as its positive or
sacred aspect, is a preserver of distinctions; and that in its awful or negative aspect, it is a state
350 Alex Calder
in which dualities have become mixed.13 There is a clear analogy with the color white, which is
at once the prismatic separation of color into “the gilded velvet of butterflies,” and a colorless
indistinct medium that “would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge”
(195).
In that state, tulips and roses, in their death-like pallor, would be dangerously taboo. Suppose
we were to run that image back through the projector, so that tulips and roses felt again the
touch of the water-colorist’s brush. They would be taboo in a positive sense—or, to invoke a com-
plementary passage from “The Bower of the Arsacides,” part of the “life-restless loom” whose
tendrils and living flowers ever-weavingly form a carpet of color mantling the “great, white, wor-
shipped skeleton” of the whale (450, emphasis added). I sense, too, a connection between
Melville’s inklings about taboo as a sign system and his and our experience of how language is at
once “full of meaning” and “a dumb blankness” (195). The writer can release emblazoning colors
from prism-like words, but in an endless recursion, those same words can feel like husks,
comparable to whiteness imagined not as the “concrete of all colors” but as the “visible absence
of color” (195).
In the final image of the chapter, Ishmael compares himself to a traveler in Lapland who,
refusing the protection of colored lenses, “gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud
that wraps all the prospect around him” (195). The passage has often been read as anticipation of
Sartre’s existential nausea or as a glimpse of the indifferent real, but the association of whiteness
with the sacred as well as the dreadful prompts a different emphasis. Taboo oscillates between
“the heartless voids and immensities of the universe” (195) and the first stirrings of te hau, the
breath of life. When Ishmael stares into the heart of whiteness, the polychromatic world is
leached of distinction, disclosing an underside that sickens, but Ishmael’s white is also the color
of origin, of potential, of flowerings and spoutings. I am not suggesting Melville was consciously
referencing Polynesian cosmology, but Ishmael’s response to the whiteness of whale parallels the
dualities and contagions of taboo. “I myself am a savage,” (270) boasts Ishmael, and if in his
“incantation of this whiteness” he thinks like one, it is to more deeply plumb the origins of our
sense of the sacred—which is not to be found in an ethnography of the primitive, but in our
shared capacity to respond to the universe with feelings of holiness and dread. “I have written a
wicked book,” Melville told Hawthorne, “and feel spotless as the lamb” (Corr 212).
Works Cited
Breitwieser, Mitchell. “Pacific Speculations: Moby-Dick Calder, Alex. “Pacific Paradises.” A Companion to Herman
and Mana.” The Arizona Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 1, Melville, edited by Wyn Kelley. Blackwell, 2006,
2011, pp. 1–46. pp. 98–112.
13
The account of tapu given above has the thinness of a basic but commonly accepted outline; it does not represent the
more holistic, nuanced, and flexible understanding of the concept in mātauranga Māori. Readers should also note that
my sentence generalizes from a point made in a specific context. In an essay in which tapu is partly explained through
its connections to public health, Duncan and Rewi write: “The dominant tikanga [cultural practice] was to keep these
positive tapu, which promoted well-being, and any negative tapu, which were harmful, separate from each other”
(40–41).
Coleridge, S. T. “Kubla Khan.” British Literature 1780– Husni, Khalil. “The Whiteness of the Whale: A Survey
1830, edited by Anne Mellor and Richard Matlak, of Interpretations, 1851–1970.” CLA Journal, vol. 20,
Harcourt Brace, 1996, pp. 729–30. no. 2, 1976, pp. 210–21.
Cook, James. The Voyage of the Resolution and the Discovery, Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Introduction to the Work of Marcel
1776–1780, edited by J. C. Beaglehole, Hakluyt Mauss, translated by Felicity Baker. Routledge,
Society, 1967. 1987.
Duncan, Suzanne, and Poia Rewi. “Tikanga.” Te Marett, R. R. The Threshold of Religion. 2nd ed. Methuen,
Kōparapara: An Introduction to the Maori World, edited 1921.
by Michael Reilly et al. Auckland UP, 2018, pp. Porter, David. Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean.
30–47. Gregg Press, 1970.
Ellis, William. Polynesian Researches. 2 vols. 1829. Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. Penguin, 1949.
Dawsons, 1967. Smith, W. Robertson. Lectures on the Religion of the Semites.
Franklin, Bruce. The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology. 3rd ed. Macmillan, 1927.
Stanford UP, 1963. Steiner, Franz. Taboo. Pelican, 1956.
Frazer, J. G. The Golden Bough. Macmillan, 1911. Stewart, C. S. A Visit to the South Seas, in the U.S. Ship
———. “Taboo.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed. Vincennes, during the Years 1829 and 1830. London: H.
vol. xxiii, 1888. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1832.
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. The Pelican Freud Taussig, Michael. What Color is the Sacred? Chicago UP,
Library. 13 vols, edited by Albert Dickson. Pelican, 2010.
1985, pp. 43–224. Turner, Victor. Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual.
Herbert, Christopher. Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Cornell UP, 1975.
Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. U of Chicago P, Valeri, Valerio. The Forest of Taboos. U of Wisconsin P,
1991. 2000.
28
Melville’s “Spanish”: Geopolitics and
Language in a Continental Writer
Emilio Irigoyen
The writings of Melville have rarely been considered from a continental perspective. While the
extensive presence of Spanish America in his works has long been recognized and there are
numerous studies of individual motifs, it is only recently that the region’s significance in his
geopolitical imagination has received specific attention (see also Rosa Martinez’s Chapter 17 in
this volume for an examination of Cervantes’s influence on Melville).1 Melville, whose first novel
was published the same year his country went to war with Mexico, began writing at a time when
discourses about Spanish America played a key role in the development of a hemispheric history
of the United States that would be instrumental to neocolonial projects in the rest of the conti-
nent. Yet the importance of the region in his work reflects not only his long-lasting interest in
continental geopolitics but also his sustained engagement with issues of interpretation—
particularly, transcultural interpretation.
1
Discussions of Melville’s Spanish American motifs have traditionally been conducted with little regard to their
political, cultural, and/or linguistic specificities, but this has significantly changed in the last two decades (see, as
examples, Kelley, Casey, and Spengler), and in the last fifteen years an increasing body of scholarship has discussed
Melville “as a New World author who extends, often ironically, the colonial legacy” of the entire continent and connects
“the cultures of America, North and South” (Barrenechea 20). Significant studies have framed “The Encantadas” in its
Latin American context (Wertheimer); read “Benito Cereno” from a South American perspective (Cordery and Vegh);
discussed this novella as a major example of “Literary Pan-Americanism” (Heide); read the role of translation in the
same text as related to the figure of Spanish America as a continental other (Furui); examined the opacity of Latin
American elements in Melville’s writings (Lazo, “So Spanishly”); put his works in dialogue with Jose Martí (Flores);
examined the role of Melville’s Spanish American settings both in his understanding of how race, gender, and class
affect one another (Lazo, “Dons”); and his examination of the links between the enchanting portrayal of those settings
and his critique of US continental expansionism (Lazo, “The Ends”). In October 2021, a special issue of Leviathan: A
Journal of Melville Studies was devoted to “Melville and Spanish America” and the first book on the subject, by Nicholas
Spengler, will be published in 2022. As for the significance of Hispanic culture as a whole in Melville’s writings, the
only extended discussion remains José de Onís’s 1974 Melville y el mundo hispánico.
Melville’s “Spanish”: Geopolitics and Language in a Continental Writer 353
As Rodrigo Lazo has recently pointed out in what is probably the most comprehensive
discussion of the subject to date, South America offered Melville “a continent whose history was
simultaneously comparable to yet different from that of the United States” (“Dons” 117). In
antebellum imagination, the countries and peoples south of the border functioned as a continental
other to which the national self was at once related and opposed. This relationship was most con-
sequentially expressed by the Monroe doctrine, whose guidelines were outlined in President
James Monroe’s 1823 address to Congress, in which he presents Latin American nations both as
“our Southern brethren” and a geopolitical space that, in accordance with said doctrine, the
United States would claim as a natural and legitimate object of its neocolonial expansion.
Jesse Alemán has read the ambivalent figure of Spanish America in nineteenth-century US
cultural production through the Freudian concept of the unheimlich, or uncanny––a presence
that is at once familiar and disturbing, recognizable and opaque. This figure applies especially
well to Melville, in whose texts foreign presences often confront US characters and narrators,
as well as readers, with an uncanny difference that is physically visible and yet remains inde-
cipherable. While this phenomenon encompasses a vast geographical and cultural range in his
work, Spanish American motifs are particularly prominent, both in numbers and relevance—
probably second only to Polynesian ones, with which they are often associated. The region (its
territory, its people, its defining language) appears time and again as at once alien and close—
much closer, both geographically, culturally, and linguistically, and more geopolitically
charged, than Polynesia.
The looming presence of a Hispanic other appears in the first fiction Melville published,
“Fragments from a Writing Desk.” In the first of these pieces, one of the “graces” who fascinate
the narrator seems to have grown up in Spain (PT 195), and in the second, the mysterious woman
he chases, who remains maddeningly refractory to his demands, responds only by piercing him
with her “Andalusian eyes” (203). Similar images are found in later texts, in the figures of
women covered by the saya y manto, a Peruvian outfit that concealed the whole female body
except for one eye, allowing women to avoid recognition (Casey). The saya appears in at least six
of Melville’s texts, always as a ghost-like image of concealment or deception (T 86; M 186;
P 149; PT 47; C 470; PP 239). Melville alludes time and again to the disturbing image of a
covered woman’s eye leering at the US character, which reverses the conventional scene where a
naked female is exposed to the gaze of the white male. It also foregrounds the mystifying, impen-
etrable figure of “Fragments,” with her piercing Spanish eyes, in Spanish America.
The saya is not the only Spanish American motif that hauntingly reappears throughout
Melville’s work. Even more recurrent and similarly uncanny is Lima, “the strangest, saddest city
thou can’st see” (MD 193), which he visited in 1844, and which appears in at least nine texts.
And there are other examples, such as Quito, which fascinated Melville by being at once the
capital of a country “planted in the middle of the world” (MD 431) and an iconic symbol of
South America and the Southern hemisphere. Of Melville’s various mentions of Quito, the most
remarkable one is in “The Piazza.” The first part of the story traces a careful mapping of home,
both physical and symbolic; the surroundings are inspired by the area of Western Massachusetts
where Melville was living, and the narrator’s house replicates Melville’s own. Yet the text repeat-
edly combines local and personal references with distant, exotic ones, often conflating locations
from the northern and southern hemispheres, and more specifically from North and South
America. Most of these cases result from the narrator’s reminiscences of his past as a sailor;
walking his “northern piazza” on a windy December day, for instance, he feels transported: “once
354 Emilio Irigoyen
more, with frosted beard, I pace the sleety deck, weathering Cape Horn” (PT 3). But in one in-
stance, the conflation takes place not in the narrator’s mind but in the physical space itself.
When describing the view from the four sides of his house, he makes a number of topographical
references, all of which correspond to places that actually existed in the area, but for one: some
miles to the east, near the Hearth Stone Hills, is “Quito” (2). Not only that, but the foundational
keystone of the narrator’s house, the “Kaaba,” was quarried “from the heart of the Hearth Stone
Hills” (1), those close to Quito—an image that is itself quarried, so to speak, from Moby-Dick,
where the Ecuadorian doubloon is made of gold “raked somewhere out of the heart of gorgeous
hills” in Ecuador and still preserves “its Quito glow” (MD 431). The insertion at the very heart
of home of a place that until that time had appeared in Melville’s work as a symbol of both hemi-
spheric and continental otherness does not seem to compromise the map of home in “The Piazza”
as much as to complete it.
The haunting recurrence of these and other Spanish American motifs goes hand in hand
with their resistance to interpretation. In an analysis of the doubloon, Rodrigo Lazo argues
that Melville repeatedly represents Latin America as a locus of uncertainty, where imperial
readings of the other are disabled (“So Spanishly” 234–35). One of the things that make
some Spanish American presences particularly unsettling is that at first, they may seem easy
to read, yet they ultimately prove impossible to decipher. (And sometimes, as in “Benito
Cereno,” they may be, in turn, effectively interpreting their US counterparts—just as the US
characters cannot identify or read the faces of the women covered by the saya, but the women
can read theirs.) The doubloon is a case in point. Ahab first presents it to the crew as nothing
but a “Spanish ounce of gold” (161), then proceeding to offer a transparent equivalence: “it
is a sixteen dollar piece, men—a doubloon” (162). But there is nothing transparent about
the doubloon, nor can its value be established by a simple conversion. One character after
another will try to interpret it, each offering “another rendering” of what is “still one text,”
but their readings reveal more about the different “kind of men” they represent than about
the coin itself (434). Melville’s Spanish American motifs repeatedly set a dynamic of
proximity and difference, of apparent simplicity and lasting opacity, in ways that reflect, as
well as complicate, the role of the region as a continental other in US antebellum
imagination.
Geopolitics in the Oceanic Contact Zone

The term “Spanish” encapsulates the underlying ambiguity of the continental Hispanic other in
antebellum US discourse, as in today’s, often intermingling geography, politics, culture, and
race. John C. Havard has argued that a key component of early US literature and culture was
what he calls Hispanicism: the construction of Hispanophone populations as a single entity,
often by eliding “the geographical, ethnic, and racial heterogeneity” of the peoples of Spain and
Spanish America (3). This amalgamation was key to framing Hispanophone peoples (commonly
referred to as “Spanish”) as a cultural and racial other of US Anglo-Americans. In “Benito
Cereno,” Havard points out, Melville both represents and questions the discourse of Hispanicism
(94–115), and a similar claim can be made about a number of his texts. François Specq has
argued that in “The Piazza” Melville responds to the South American landscapes of Frederic
Edwin Church, whose visual depictions of the region were popular among educated New Yorkers
at the time. Church’s imaginary vistas pretended to condense the exotic subcontinent into a
graspable image and, according to Specq, this illusion of a unifying master view is one of the
things Melville seeks to disclose and contest in the story (128).
Melville’s play on the slippery term “Spanish” exemplifies his engagement with the lan-
guage of Hispanicism and its geographical, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic reductionism.
From the Chilean Creole Benito Cereno to the Peruvians Ishmael encounters in Lima to the
Ecuadorian doubloon, his narrators often call “Spanish” characters and objects the texts other-
wise identify as South American.2 The most ostensible example is found in Chapter 5 of White-
Jacket, “Jack Chase on a Spanish Quarter-Deck,” where Chase, a Briton who has enrolled in,
and then deserted, the US navy, is found on the coast of Peru serving on a Peruvian sloop of
war, and is then forced to return to the US frigate Neversink, which he had previously aban-
doned.3 While the title refers to the South American ship as “Spanish,” that word is never used
in the body of the chapter, where only “Peruvian” (five times) and “Peru” (twice) are employed.
Melville pays serious attention to the chapter’s Spanish American setting, as indicated by the
fact that he names the Peruvian captain “Don Sereno” (WJ 16), thus pairing this seemingly
lighter episode with the more ominous one narrated in “Benito Cereno.” In a chapter whose
explicit subject is that of national loyalties and identities, the contrast between the “Spanish”
framing and the repeated and consistent reference to the Peruvian specificity of both the place,
the vessel, and its crew underscores one of the episode’s major themes: the fluid nature of
national markers.
The Peruvian incident of White-Jacket brings to the fore both the performativity and potential
fluidity of national definitions and the importance of those definitions when it comes to the
unequal and aggressive encounters that shaped US–Spanish American relations. After recog-
nizing that Chase is serving as an officer on the sloop of war, the North Americans force the
Peruvians to hand him over, using a combination of tenuous legal arguments, barely veiled coer-
cion, and open disdain (17–19). Their condescending attitude is matched by the narrator’s
almost burlesque tone:
What? when a piping-hot peace was between the United States and Peru, to send an armed body on
board a Peruvian sloop of war, and seize one of its officers, in broad daylight?—Monstrous infraction
of the Law of Nations! What would Vattel say?
(18)
The theatrical and short-lived indignation seems to invite readers to laugh off the whole inci-
dent; and yet, it also literally and emphatically frames this seemingly humorous case of bullying
in the wider reality of US interventionism in South America. Melville will use a similar formula
in Moby-Dick to address precisely this: when an overexcited Ishmael praises the might of the US
whaling industry, he compares it favorably to both continental and worldwide imperialism: “Let
America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India,
2
Melville scholars often do the same, usually referring to Cereno and the Peruvians Ishmael encounters in Lima but
also, if less frequently, to the officers of the Peruvian navy in White-Jacket and even the doubloon in Moby-Dick, which
bears the words “REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR” (431), as “Spanish.”
3
Jack Chase was actually a comrade of Melville’s on the United States who left the ship and fought in Peru; however, his
forceful removal from a Peruvian warship is Melville’s invention (Anderson 381–382; Vincent 40). As for the focus on
Jack’s national identity, decades later, Melville will dedicate Billy Budd to “JACK CHASE / ENGLISHMAN” (2).
356 Emilio Irigoyen
and hang out their blazing banner from the sun,” he says, since land domination can reach only
one third of the planet: “two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s” (64). Here
again, the narrator’s exuberance, now in the form of foolish exaggeration rather than grandilo-
quent outrage, seems to undermine or distract from what he is saying. In both cases, the text
appears to ask readers not to take seriously what it is pointedly stating: in one case, that the US
warship, as the nation itself, is not a friendly peer but a bully to the Spanish American republics;
and in the other, that the continent’s geopolitical future is not one of brotherly freedom, but an
“American” empire.
Melville has been described as “the first canonical US author […] to have perceived the effects
of gunboat diplomacy […] from the standpoint of its indigenous victims” (Buell 239), a view
that probably originated, in part, from his personal involvement with such diplomacy. White-
Jacket, which begins “in Callao, on the coast of Peru” (3) and is set almost entirely in South
American waters, is partially based on his experiences on the USS United States, whose main duty
at the time was, in official US parlance, to “protect American interests” in the region (Salazar
Torreon 3). The most notable of the ship’s interventions took place in October of 1842, ten
months before Melville enlisted as a common sailor, when the frigate captured Monterrey.
Commodore T.A.C. Jones ordered the action in case the United States had declared war on
Mexico. (It had not.) Incidents like this may have inspired the story of the US frigate noncha-
lantly bullying a Peruvian sloop of war on Peruvian shores.
The “South Seas,” which as Melville insisted included Mexico and Tierra del Fuego as much
as Polynesia (PT 411), were the parts of the world where he witnessed first-hand—as well as
participated in—the sort of European and US expansionism he would later denounce in his writ-
ings. This view is relevant to Chapter 5 of White-Jacket as well as the novel as a whole: it is the
very reason why the Neversink is in the South American Pacific in the first place. For all the ref-
erences to and talk about glorious sea battles of the more or less distant past, from Thracians to
Trafalgar, little is said of the frigate’s present or recent activities in the region. To an uninformed
reader, White-Jacket might seem to be the story of a rather pointless voyage, which stands in
striking contrast to Melville’s next novel. Geopolitical pursuits drive the course of the Neversink
just as much as commercial and personal endeavors drive the journey of the Pequod, yet foreign
interventions are as invisible in White-Jacket as whaling is ubiquitous in Moby-Dick.
Melville’s personal participation in US interventionism and his suggestive silence surround-
ing that participation are relevant to an understanding of the role his geopolitical views played
in his work, particularly regarding trans-American relations, but they do not provide easy or
definitive answers about either Melville’s opinions or his writings regarding those issues—an
ambiguity that may be useful to compare to his stance toward slavery. Critics have long debated
how Melville’s writing relates to US expansionism and Western imperialism at large; and, as for
US relations with the rest of the continent, not even direct observations or opinions can be taken
at face value. The same Ishmael who, in his praise of US whalemen, casually describes the US
attitude toward the rest of the continent as one of relentless imperialism will later place those
same whalemen at the origin of “the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia … and the establish-
ment of the eternal democracy in those parts” (110). Furthermore, while Melville repeatedly
engaged with concrete geopolitical issues, they were rarely the focus of his writing. His critique
of ethnocentric and nation-centric perceptions and parochial reductionisms, (of which the
“Spanish” amalgamation is but one example), is usually combined with other matters, such as an
exploration of the construed nature and potential mutability of cultural and national identities.
Such is the case of the Peruvian incident in White-Jacket, which is framed as little more than a
backdrop of one episode in Chase’s history of changing his national loyalties.
The apparent fluidity of Chase’s movement from one competing navy to another is remark-
able: while other sailors may be flogged for refusing to shave their beards, he is not even repri-
manded for deserting. Chase’s successive jumps from one ship and one navy to another (from
British vessels to the United States, to the Peruvian sloop-of-war, and back to the US frigate)
anticipate those of Israel Potter, where not only the hero, but at times also the ships themselves,
move back and forth between different navies. A useful frame for approaching such fluidity may
be Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the contact zone: the social space(s) where cultural and linguistic
exchanges take place in the context of asymmetrical power relations (7–8). Melville’s sea encoun-
ters often develop in a sort of oceanic contact zone where different nationalities, cultures, and
languages collide, often violently, but may end up commingling and/or interchanging some of
their components, to the point that they may become unrecognizable.4
Before relating the novel’s most famous and spectacular sea battle, the narrator of Israel Potter
explains what makes sea engagements fundamentally different from those fought on land: “All
is clear, open, fluent” (IP 122). Expanding on the image of fluency, he will later argue that, as a
result of the fight, the opposing vessels are “no longer, in the ordinary sense of things, an English
ship and an American ship,” but “a co-partnership and joint-stock combustion-company of both
ships” (126). As manifest in this image, in Israel Potter identity changes are usually forced and
result in destruction and loss. Chase’s back and forth, instead, is mostly voluntary and each
movement brings him a gain of both social and cultural capital. Potter’s fate is marked by his
efforts to maintain his national loyalty and to regain a fixed, inalterable home; Chase’s fortunes
rely on his willingness and ability to navigate the potential fluidity of national as well as social
and cultural identities. His rapid success in the Peruvian navy demonstrates that he is also able
to navigate smoothly across languages: he “could recite in the original” Portuguese parts of
Camões’s Lusíadas (14) as well as serve in a Spanish-speaking force.
Language and Otherness in “Benito Cereno”

Jack Chase’s exceptional “accomplishments,” such as the rare gift of being loved by officers and
common sailors alike, are described in terms of a fluency that is both—and indistinctly—char-
acterological and linguistic:
those accomplishments were so various; the languages he could converse in, so numerous; that he
more than furnished an example of that saying of Charles the Fifth—he who speaks five languages
is as good as five men.
(WJ 14)
In Melville’s oceanic contact zones, identities are fluid as much as—and because—language is.
In defiance of the literary tradition of making linguistic barriers invisible, his texts often make
4
This may recall Foucault’s vision of ships as the heterotopia par excellence, which Cesare Casarino and others have aptly
applied to Melville’s vessels and particularly to the US frigate of White-Jacket. Yet the conflictive maritime exchanges
narrated in works such as White-Jacket, Israel Potter, and “Benito Cereno” rely on a fundamental—if sometimes
precarious, potential, or ghostly—connection of the ships to specific national spaces.
358 Emilio Irigoyen
language difference a key factor in transcultural encounters, underlying the promises as well as
the dangers of both fluency (the personal skill of moving across languages) and translation (the
ability to turn one language into another). These issues are pointedly explored in “Benito
Cereno.” One of the most extensively discussed aspects of the novella is Delano’s inability to
understand what he encounters on the San Dominick. While scholars have linked this lack of
comprehension to a myriad of factors (racial, political, cultural, religious), one obvious aspect has
been overlooked: what happens on the ship is played out in a foreign language. Delano is impe-
riously confident of his understanding of what he calls the “native tongue” (PT 51), and most
critics have been content to take him at his word. Yet both the historical source and Melville’s
novella contradict this, most notably at the crucial moment when the plot is revealed: a
Portuguese sailor has to intervene, translating Cereno’s Spanish into English, so Delano can
understand him (Delano 325, 339; Melville, PT 99).
Much of “Benito Cereno” is based on an English version of exchanges and documents originally
in Spanish, as most prominently displayed in the motto chalked on the ship’s hull: “Seguid vuestro
jefe (follow your leader)” (49). Repeated and paraphrased in English throughout the text, the
phrase serves as a leitmotif. The graffito is also the only passage wherein both original and trans-
lation are presented—and therefore, the reader’s only opportunity to check the translation.
Readers with at least a basic knowledge of Spanish, as Melville himself seems to have had, may
notice that the use of the verb seguir in this sentence requires a preposition: seguid a vuestro jefe. The
absence of the preposition suggests that the “Spanish” phrase has been fabricated, most probably
by translating word by word the English follow your leader. What is presented as original, the only
Spanish expression fully conserved in the English text, is instead a translation (Irigoyen 114). By
doing so, the narrator deceives English-speaking readers in much the same way the masquerade
played out on the San Dominick deceives Delano. The hoax orchestrated by Babo relies on luring
Delano into recognizing in what he sees what he expected to encounter. It succeeds, in part,
because the captain of the Bachelor’s Delight is all too eager to confirm his views of “blacks” and
his understanding of “Spanish,” two forms of otherness that he finds reassuringly transparent. If
the masquerade works by inverting the ruling order (the ship’s masters pretend to be slaves, and
vice versa), the narrator’s pseudotranslation5 inverts the order of languages: the “Spanish” we read
has been translated from, not into, English. Yet the ostensible mirroring of the expressions may
suggest the equivalence at face value, as self-evident as the simple conversion Ahab presents to his
crew: a “Spanish ounce” = sixteen US dollars = a doubloon (161). Readers are similarly encour-
aged to recognize seguid vuestro jefe as the apparent, transparent, unproblematic Spanish equivalent
of the English follow your leader. The foreign language seems easily readable; the translation seems
to render it perfectly. As Gillman and Gruesz have pointed out, “Spanish is marked as foreign” in
the novella, “yet not so foreign as to be untranslatable––and in that translatability lies its danger,”
the narrator being “complicit in the uses of language for misrecognition” (237).
Like the harmonious race relations Delano is happy to recognize (a bachelor’s delight, indeed),
the mirroring of languages in the story’s leitmotif displays a fantasy of equivalence as well as the
utopia of a fluid, unproblematic coexistence. A year before “Benito Cereno,” Melville produced
a similar mirroring of a ghostly Spanish original and a comfortable English equivalent in the
title of what is arguably the most transnational and oceanic of his texts, “The Encantadas, or
5
In translation theory, pseudotranslation is the target-oriented practice of imitative composition, producing texts that
are presented as translations although they are not.
Enchanted Isles” (PT 125). What is presented as the original (Spanish) name, however, is already
bilingual, combining an English article and a Spanish name (López Liquete 397). The archi-
pelago, like the text itself, appears as constantly moving between cultures, nations, and lan-
guages, an “apparent fleetingness” that “was most probably one reason for the Spaniards calling
them the Encantada, or Enchanted Group” (128). In a text deeply invested in variation and
spectrality, this title points not only to the isles’ hybridity, but more widely to the restrictive and
ultimately illusory nature of monolingualism.
In “Benito Cereno,” as in “The Encantadas,” few things seem to function, or be readable,
within a single language. This is embodied by the various combinations and conflations of
English and Spanish throughout the text. Several scholars have noted Melville’s habit of con-
flating English and other languages, particularly Polynesian ones. Yet after Mardi, Spanish seems
to have been the foreign language he most frequently used to that effect, and in “Benito Cereno,”
a story that brings North America into contact with South America, Melville repeatedly brings
English into contact with Spanish. Notably, he combines a Spanish word or name with an
English one, both in historic references such as “Christopher Colon” (107) and fictional ones such
as the name Melville gives to the South American ship: San Dominick (49). In Melville’s main
source, Amasa Delano’s 1818 Narrative of Voyages and Travels, the vessel is called Tryal, which is
itself a striking contradiction: a Spanish American ship bearing an English name. As Melville
probably knew, the “Spanish” vessel Delano encountered on the coast of Chile was originally a
whaler from Nantucket, seized in 1802 by the authorities of Valparaiso and incorporated into the
regional cargo fleet (Pereira Salas 147–49; Grandin 160–65). By calling the vessel San Dominick,
Melville inscribed the ship’s transnational identity in its very name. Throughout his work, he
engages with foreign languages not just as an expression of difference but as the ultimate site
where contact with the other may take place.
The Bilingualism of the Other: Hispanic Speakers and Listeners

Contrary to Delano, several of Melville’s narrators and characters recognize and engage with the
challenges of translingual communication. In “Benito Cereno,” when the plot is finally revealed,
Cereno starts shouting “in tones so frenzied” that none of the US characters “could understand
him” (although the Spanish speakers on the San Dominick clearly do). Delano, “eagerly asked what
this meant” by his officer, responds with “a disdainful smile” that “he neither knew nor cared”
(98). As Kate Huber has said, “Melville’s monolingualists either unsuccessfully attempt to trans-
late … unfamiliar words and sounds into their proper language,” as the narrator does with the
graffito, “or simply refuse to heed them” (207), as Delano does here. Along with “Benito Cereno,”
several of Melville’s texts present readers with an English written account of something that was
originally uttered in Spanish. Such is the case with Hunilla’s story, in Sketch Eight of “The
Encantadas,” and most notably with “The Town Ho’s Story.” In Chapter 54 of Moby-Dick, Ishmael
is a single US storyteller who discloses the story of a mutiny for a collective Spanish-speaking
audience. Likewise, in “Benito Cereno” a US character off the coast of Chile is the single spectator
of a collective masquerade designed to conceal a mutiny. In each case, the rebellion takes place at
sea, but information about it is fragmentary, and a full narrative of the events is constructed only
later in Lima and in Spanish. For all the inverted symmetries between these narrative framings,
one remarkable difference is found in the audience’s attitude.
360 Emilio Irigoyen
Delano is naively and imperiously confident that not a single term or nuance, either linguistic
or cultural, is escaping him. The Peruvians, on the other hand, repeatedly interrupt Ishmael when
they do not understand an expression, or a cultural reference, such as the words “lakeman” (244)
and “canaller” (248). They also intervene to comment upon how the distant realities described
may illuminate their own, or vice versa, as when Ishmael equates life in the Erie Canal to Venetian
corruption, and they extend the parallel to their own city (249). Ishmael’s Lima exchanges involve
people from different places, backgrounds, and languages, exploring what both the differences
and similarities of their experiences may tell them about the world they live in.
A similar contrast of attitudes is found in Clarel, with the Mexican character, “Señor Don
Hannibal Rohon Del Aquaviva” (C 449). Here, Melville’s habit of conflating languages in the
Spanish names he uses becomes a caricature. With this veteran who has lost an arm and a leg at
war, both his playful manner of speaking and the carnivalesque proliferation of languages and
references in his name are contrasted with his mutilated body, a transparent metaphor for his sev-
ered country—as underlined by the transparent allusions he initially makes to the US–Mexican
war (450). True to his name, Rohon seems prone to bilingual puns and transcultural jokes, which
the English-speaking characters are either unable or unwilling to recognize. The most notable is
his ironic linking of Ungar’s “brave vent” with the eruptions of the Cotopaxi, the iconic Ecuadorian
volcano featured in some of Church’s most famous paintings. This joke on outbursts may be also
playing on the Spanish false cognate of vent, viento (wind). At any rate, Rohon’s (and Melville’s)
play on translingualism becomes apparent on the Mexican’s final remarks on the subject: “Good,
excellenza—excellent!” (452). This may seem an expression of acquiescence, and it is received as
such (453), but it is also a playful succession of three words from two different languages that
either have a similar meaning but a different form (good, excellent) or a similar form but a different
meaning (excellenza, excellent). The latter pair are false cognates, whose conspicuous rapproche-
ment calls our attention to the dangers of equivocal translingual mirroring, as shown in “Benito
Cereno.” The passage illustrates both the protean possibilities of multilingual discourse, as
employed by Rohon, and the dangers and limitations of monolingual readings, as exemplified by
his listeners.
Critics such as Shelley Streeby have shown that in US antebellum culture, images of Spanish
America often conflated geopolitical, cultural, racial, and linguistic tensions. Melville similarly
recognized language as inextricable from geopolitical and cultural difference and therefore from
transnational and transcultural dialogue. The continental side of his work remains pointedly rel-
evant today because of not only his explicit comments on US foreign policy and expansionist
attitudes but also his exploration of the linguistic and semiotic mechanisms that shaped the
figure of Spanish America as both a relative of, and an opposite to, “America.”
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29
The Pequod as Middle Passage: Melville’s
Meditation on the “Long” Shipwreck
Michael E. Sawyer
In Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, C. L. R. James’s long meditation on Herman Melville’s

Moby-Dick, the author proposes that “(t)he most abased of the crew on board is Pip, a little Negro
from Alabama, the lowest of the low in America of 1851. It is Pip who in the end will be hailed
as the greatest hero of all” (19). A central preoccupation of this chapter is to take this claim seri-
ously in service of what it portends for the practice of Africana Philosophy and Theory. Melville’s
Moby-Dick then becomes an integral part of the canon of that discipline and profoundly compli-
cates the African-diaspora-forming phenomenon of the Middle Passage.
By adopting this reading practice and leaning upon what C. L. R. James understands as the
centrality of the putatively enslaved Pip, the Middle Passage becomes resonant with, if not an
exemplar of, the notion that the “shipwreck” metaphor exists as the threshold condition for
philosophical thought in the Western intellectual tradition. Furthermore, as a practical matter,
the Middle Passage exists as the threshold condition for Atlantic World chattel slavery which
allows, as a point of departure, (re)considerations of the iconic question in Moby-Dick, “Who ain’t
a slave?” (Melville 19) in relation to Pip, who is styled as “enslaved” in this narrative.1 The
Norton Critical Edition’s footnote to Ishmael’s question proposes that, unlike Henry David
Thoreau, Melville “did not feel a personal obligation to devote his life to ending” slavery, despite
regarding it as an “atheistical inequity” (19). This footnote implies an almost banal engagement
with the “Peculiar Institution” on Melville’s part, but Moby-Dick develops a complex examina-
tion of the institution of slavery and is inextricably related to anti-black racism.
1
References to Moby-Dick indicate the Norton Critical Edition (3rd ed.) throughout.
The Pequod as Middle Passage: Melville’s Meditation on the “Long” Shipwreck 363
The Pequod is both the means of transportation—and of subject-transformation of bodies—as

well as the place par excellence of the practice of coerced labor, the plantation. Melville’s Pequod
rewrites standard narratives of the Middle Passage and renders more complex the moment of the
arrival of enslaved laborers in the New World by extending the regime of coerced labor onto the
medium of transportation: the ocean. Examining the “death” and “resurrection” of Pip suggests
the idea of “social death” as exposed in Orlando Patterson’s essential book Slavery and Social
Death: A Comparative Study. Patterson proposes that slavery radically demeans the social status of
the enslaved:
Slavery … is a highly symbolized domain of human experience. While all aspects of the relationship
are symbolized, there is overwhelming concentration on the profound natal alienation of the slave. The
reason for this is not hard to discern: it was the slave’s isolation, his strangeness, that made him most
valuable to the master. On the cognitive or mythic level, one dominant theme emerges, which lends
an unusually loaded meaning to the act of natal alienation: this is the social death of the slave. On the
mythic level, the enslavement process is expressed in the terms of well-defined rites of passage.
(38)
In metaphysical terms, Moby-Dick situates Pip as utterly shipwrecked, his progress (passage)
toward knowledge and personhood undone by white supremacy that feeds on the “blackness” of
the body. This resonates with Melville’s preoccupation with the “whiteness” of the whale, which
inverts and destabilizes Plato’s hierarchy of black and white in the Phaedrus.
The first explicit reference to slavery in the novel is a question by the narrator, “Who ain’t a
slave?” Ishmael is describing his decision to go to sea “as a simple sailor” rather than “as a
Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook” (18). Melville’s addition of the cook amongst the highest-
ranking officials in any naval force is a curious notion that he justifies as follows: “And as for
going as cook, … I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on
ship-board-yet” (18).
In response to being ordered about the ship as a simple sailor, Ishmael’s well-known rhetorical
question follows:
Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—
however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right;
that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or meta-
physical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub
each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.
(19)
Many might read this as a cavalier dismissal of the institution of slavery as just one of many
forms of societal hierarchy that may or may not be as physically coercive as a plantation.
Ultimately, Melville does not seem to be making a meaningful distinction between the Middle
Passage and the Plantation. But the lack of a distinction is profoundly meaningful. In Stubb’s
relationship to Fleece and the “becoming” of Pip, I perceive Melville’s attempt to gloss, in com-
plex fashion, the Middle Passage and the Plantation. The text begins its deconstruction of the
institution of slavery in its most coercive form through the relationship between Ahab and
Stubb. Stubb then becomes the critical link between abstract forms of coercive hierarchy and the
anti-black racism that both informs slavery and speaks to the Middle Passage and the Plantation.
364 Michael E. Sawyer
In later works, Melville presents the Middle Passage as extending beyond the journey from the
Slave Coast of Africa to the Slave Ports in the Atlantic World; indeed, in Benito Cereno, he sug-
gests the Passage extends into the Pacific Ocean rather than imagining the transportation of
enslaved bodies as unique to the Atlantic Ocean. It appears that he is up to the same thing in
Moby-Dick but proposes even more provocatively that the Passage extends into the operation of
the Plantation; and the Pequod becomes the vehicle for that journey. “Plantation” appears three
times in Moby-Dick: in Chapter 14 “Nantucket,” Chapter 48 “The First Lowering,” and Chapter
104 “The Fossil Whale.”
The first two are related. In the first, Melville proposes the following: “The Nantucketer, he
alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro
ploughing it as his own special plantation” (61). In the second instance, Flask, aka “King-Post,”
exhorts the crew of his whale boat by yelling: “Sing out and say something, my hearties. Roar and
pull, my thunderbolts! Break me, beach me on their black backs, boys; only do that for me and I’ll
sign over to you my Martha’s Vineyard plantation boys; including my wife and my children, boys”
(176). In both of these critical passages, Nantucket, which is definitively not in the southern
United States and also putatively not in a slave-holding state after 1783, is understood to have a
relationship to the Plantation which we understand to be the “brand name,” so to speak, of forced
labor camps in the south. In this instance, “ploughing” the sea for whales is understood as being
the business of this “special plantation.” The question is whether the “product” of the plantation is
cotton, sugar, tobacco, etc., or also perhaps, more definitively, enslaved bodies. If the latter is at
least a product, then the whale becomes a complex representative of the enslaved body par excellence.
Additionally, Flask (even if figuratively) puts his family up for sale in exchange for the killing of a
whale, demonstrating the callous set of human relations on plantations.
The question of the whale as enslaved leads directly to the third reference to the plantation in
Chapter 104, “The Fossil Whale.”
But by far the most wonderful of all cetacean relics was the almost complete vast skeleton of an
extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-
stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels.
(335)
If the “whale” represents the enslaved, then the discovery of a whale skeleton on a plantation is
predictable. Perhaps more provocatively, the enslaved understand the skeleton to be an “angel.”
This image foreshadows the metamorphosis of Pip, who later becomes “angelic” after his forays
overboard. Melville’s references to the plantation clinch the relationship between Melville’s
Moby-Dick, Blackness as a way of Being, and the Middle Passage as a place of radical destabiliza-
tion as well as potentiality. The Passage serves as a space for a type of rejuvenation.
The Black Body

Chapter 40, “Forecastle—Midnight,” is rendered as a play, including stage directions. In one
jarring passage, Daggoo “grimly” takes no offense after his shipmate from Spain labels him as
representing the “dark side of mankind.”
Spanish Sailor
(Aside) He wants to bully, ah!—the old grudge makes me touchy. (Advancing)
Aye, harpooner, thy race is the undeniable dark side of mankind—devilish dark at that.
No offence.
Daggoo (grimly).
None.
(142)
Here Melville sets up a separation between black and white that is at least as old as Plato’s
Phaedrus—then dismantles its logic.
The primary thrust of Socrates’ dialogue with Phaedrus is to disabuse his interlocutor of the
rationale of Lysias’s formulation that “it is better to give your favors to someone who does not
love you than to someone who does” (Plato 508). Socrates’ position is the opposite and requires
that Phaedrus meditate on the nature of love and its relationship to the soul. In approaching this
complication Socrates describes the soul in the following fashion:
Let us then liken the soul to the natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer…To
begin with, our driver is in charge of a pair of horses; second, one of the horses is beautiful and good
and from stock of the same sort, while the other is the opposite and has the opposite bloodline. This
means that the chariot-driving in our case is inevitably a painfully difficult business.
(524)
Socrates then uses a black/white binary to delineate the “goodness of the good horse and the bad-
ness of the bad” (530):
The horse that is on the right, or nobler, side is upright in frame and well jointed, with a high neck
and a regal nose; his coat is white, his eyes are coal black, and he is a lover of honor with modesty
and self-control; companion to true glory, he needs no whip, and is guided by verbal commands
alone. The other horse is a crooked great jumble of limbs with a short bull-neck, a pug nose, black
skin, and bloodshot white eyes; companion to wild boasts and indecency, he is shaggy around the
ears—deaf as a post—and just barely yields to horsewhip and goad combined.
(531)
The soul is divided in two. The side with the worst impulses is represented by physical defor-
mity, of which “black skin” as well as metaphysical disability do violence to reason. Reason and
the ability to properly accede to moral authority, in this formulation, are exemplified by beauty,
conforming to a physical standard, and to Whiteness. Socrates continues to develop the notion
that love, as properly practiced, is driven by the “unreasonable” response to stimulus and the
refusal of control by the black-skinned horse. The souls of the lover and the object of his amorous
intent communicate at the level of the black horse.
When they are in bed, the lover’s undisciplined horse has a word to say to the charioteer—that
after all its suffering it is entitled to a little fun. Meanwhile the boy’s bad horse, has nothing to
say, but swelling desire, confused, it hugs the lover and kisses him in delight at his great
good will.
(532)
Melville may have read the Phaedrus subversively, not only as a social construct for representing
black and white, but also as a social critique that allows the reader to view the philosophical
framework informing the western mind.
Returning to Daggoo’s response to the provocation by the Spaniard that devolves into a fight
on the deck of the Pequod, readers might conclude that the African harpooner is fighting an
impulse to be swept away by the logic of white supremacy; the natural human response, Melville
suggests, is to assert your humanity. Melville frames a complex set of relations between the char-
acters of African descent and the characters from other racial and ethnic groups on board the
Pequod as well as amongst themselves. This conflict in Chapter 40 exemplifies the separation
between the Black characters and the “white” (or, more strictly rendered, “non-black”) subjects.
But it also appears later, in Chapter 93, “The Castaway,” and further illustrates the symbolic
linkage between Moby-Dick and the Phaedrus.
In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a white one of equal devel-
opments though of dissimilar color, driven in one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was
by nature dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very
bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe… Nor smile so, while I write
that even black has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king’s cabinets.
(319)
The explicit references to ponies and intelligence accommodate the argument that Melville is
troubling the dichotomies of color and virtue found in the Phaedrus.2 A careful reading of the
passage productively complicates the discourse of race in Moby-Dick as it relates to canonical
views of black and white. First, Melville troubles the Platonic notion of white being inherently
rational. Pip begins to migrate toward the center of the narrative even before his “rebirth” in
“The Castaway.” This development is most clearly illustrated by the relationship between Stubb
and Pip that triggers the metamorphoses of the latter.
The relevance of Stubb to the subjective alteration of Pip shows in Chapter 64 “Stubb’s
Supper.” Careful attention should be paid to the following passage:
…sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trot-
ting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere or a dead slave to be decently
buried…
(226)
Melville makes an interesting move here: the shark becomes the independent variable, the ubiqui-
tous presence that attends both the killing of whales and the kidnapping and destruction of Black
bodies. In focusing on the latter, I am most curious about the sharks’ craving for “parcel[s]” as well
as “a dead slave…decently buried” (226). I think of both the “parcel” and the “dead slave” as rep-
resentative of the kidnapped Black body. But in the former phrase, the body remains animated and
chooses to break away from the enslaved condition through suicide. Or there is another possibility:
I am thinking of the Zong Incident in 1781, when 130 Africans were hurled overboard from the
2
The only documentation of Melville’s reading of Plato is that he owned the 1849 edition of the Phaedon, published by
William Gowans of New York (MMO, Sealts No. 404.1a). It is not known to survive.
slave ship in order to facilitate an insurance claim for their value as property. In the case of suicide,
the slave’s bodily relationship to coercive possession is broken only at the point of drowning: either
as drowned or eaten by animal predators. The second notion, that of “proper burial,” implies the
disposal of bodies that have already “improperly” died on board the ship.
Just after referencing the relationship between sharks, whales, whalers, slave-ships, and
enslaved bodies living and dead, Stubb, in Chapter 29, “Enter Ahab; To Him, Stubb,” receives a
metaphysical “thump” from the captain. Reflecting on the incident in Chapter 31 “Queen Mab,”
Stubb says the following about the dream that followed the encounter.
“Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old man’s ivory leg, well I dreamed he
kicked me with it; and when I tried to kick back, upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right
off! And then, presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking at it. But
what was still more curious, Flask—you know how curious all dreams are—through all this rage
that I was in, I somehow seemed to be thinking to myself, that after all, it was not much of an insult,
that kick from Ahab. ‘Why,’ thinks I, ‘what’s the row? It’s not a real leg, only a false leg.’ And there’s
a mighty difference between a living thump and a dead thump. That’s what makes a blow from the
hand, Flask, fifty times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane.”
(107)
That thump, as Ishmael predicts, is passed along when Stubb summons Fleece, the Black cook,
to prepare him a steak in Chapter 64, “Stubb’s Supper.” The encounter again blurs the separation
between the Middle Passage and the Plantation. With regard to the former, the dialogue bet-
ween Stubb and Fleece refers meaningfully to the Middle Passage:
“Silence! How old are you, cook?”

“’Bout ninety, dey say,” he gloomily muttered.
“And have you lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, cook, and don’t know yet
how to cook a whale steak?” rapidly bolting another mouthful at the last word, so that the
morsel seemed a continuation of the question. “Where were you born, cook?”
“’Hind de hatchway, in ferry-boat, goin’ ober de Roanoke.”
“Born in a ferry-boat! That’s queer, too. But I want to know what country you were born in,
cook?”
“Didn’t I say de Roanoke country?” he cried, sharply.
“No, you didn’t, cook; but I’ll tell you what I’m coming to, cook. You must go home and
be born again; you don’t know how to cook a whale-steak yet.”
(228)
Melville emphasizes that Fleece is born in transit, somewhere on the Roanoke River, thus desta-
bilizing the notion of land- or geographically-based subjectivity. Recall that Melville character-
izes the oceans plied by the whalers as a plantation. With that in mind, the text accommodates
understanding the Roanoke River as yet another example of the extension of the Middle Passage,
or more clearly, bodies of water, as spaces of liminality and transformation. Melville has explicitly
blurred the distinction later described in Robert Hayden’s poem “Middle Passage”:
Sails flashing to the wind like a weapon

sharks following the moans the fever and the
dying:
horror the compass and compass rose.
Middle Passage:
voyage through death

to life upon these shores.
(43)
Melville voices the same notion as Hayden of a form of reincarnation after the unnatural death in
transit to slavery when he asserts that Fleece “must go home and be born over again” (228).
Fleece’s relationship to death creates the bridge to a notion of Black people as angels. During the
same encounter Stubb asks Fleece what will become of him when he dies.
“When dis old brack man dies,” said the negro slowly, changing his whole air and
demeanor, “hisself won’t go nowhere; but some bressed angel will come and fetch him.”
“Fetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they fetched Elijah? And fetch him where?”
“Up dere,” said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his head, and keeping it there very
solemnly.
(229)
Recalling the analogy of the whale skeleton on the plantation in Alabama to the remains of a
fallen angel, this passage seems to imply that whales, as fallen angels, are also the entities that
Fleece suspects will take him to heaven upon his death. This reading suggests a re-thinking of
Melville’s rendering of the story of Jonah in Moby-Dick, a story which suggests another way of
imagining the sea, and the manner of movement on or through it, as transformative or even
redemptive. Space here does not allow for full analysis, but it should be bookmarked as a rich area
of inquiry.
In the final moment of encounter between Stubb and Fleece the specter not only of Middle
Passage but of Plantation recurs:
“Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch. D’ye hear? away you sail
then.—Halloa! stop! make a bow before you go,—Avast heaving again! Whale-balls for breakfast—
don’t forget.”
“Wish, by gor! whale eat him, ‘stead of him eat whale. I’m bressed if he ain’t more of shark dan
Massa Shark hisself,” muttered the old man, limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to
his hammock.
(230)
Here the Platonic “sage” Fleece bears witness to the fact that Stubb, whom Melville will compare
to the lord of a plantation, is worse than the sharks that consume the bodies of the enslaved. This
is the breach that renders several putatively distinct objects coincident: the ocean as both a
Middle Passage and plantation in which to hunt whales; the whale ship as a slave ship; whales as
both angels and the enslaved; and finally Stubb as a shark. The venality of Stubb with respect to
Black bodies, as exemplified by his depraved relationship to Fleece, prefigures the novel-defining
transformation of Pip.
The Becoming of Pip

Chapter 93 “The Castaway” is the beginning of the end for Pip as we have known him prior to
this moment in the text: the little Alabama Negro who has always, already been cast away. First,
it must be clarified that Pip, the “Alabama Negro” is not from Alabama at all.
… Pip loved life, and all life’s peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he had
somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his brightness; though as ere long
will be seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly illuminated
by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to ten times the natural lustre with which in his
native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler’s frolic on the green…
(306)
Although Melville identifies Pip with freedom in Connecticut, he becomes the enslaved Negro
upon his going aboard the Pequod, which is itself a space of coercive subject destruction. “Alabama,”
in this case, becomes a master signifier for Black enslavement and reflects upon the appearance of
the whale/angel skeleton on the plantation in that state. In the introduction here I proposed that it
is paradoxical to imagine Pip as the hero of a text that is narrated by the sole survivor of the doomed
voyage of the Pequod, Ishmael. Pip appears to function in the text as little more than entertainment
for the crew, but I believe that C. L. R. James has accurately understood the power of this character.
Elsewhere I have focused attention on the manner in which Melville appears to be intent on (dis)
forming elements of Plato’s Phaedrus in focusing on the “blackness of Pip” (Sawyer 168–69). That
is to say, the description of the black and white horses in the Plato establishes the white supremacist
logic that renders black as a deficit. Melville also means to trouble the Parable of the Cave by find-
ing the locus of enlightenment in descendance rather than ascendance. Indeed Melville seems intent
upon disorienting the Middle Passage from its horizontal orientation to the vertical axis in
Moby-Dick.
Recall what is at stake in the chapter in question. Pip has left the Pequod and is aboard a boat
in pursuit of a whale and not once but twice jumps into the ocean. The first time, Stubb, the
commander of that whale boat, cuts loose and allows the whale to escape. After the first incident,
Stubb asserts he is no longer going to entertain the possibility of losing his quarry to save Pip.
“Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won’t pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can’t afford
to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in
Alabama.”
(321)
The reminder that Pip is enslaved emphasizes the explicit stratification of humanity in Moby-
Dick, one that distinguishes between the savage soul and that of the noble savage as exemplified
by Queequeg. Melville’s undermining of the directional logic of Plato’s Parable of the Cave
reveals itself in the “Becoming” of Pip that is caused by his last foray overboard.
By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued [Pip]; but from that hour the little negro went
about the deck an idiot; such at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body
up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive
to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his
passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous,
heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that
out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the
loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense;
and wandering from mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is
absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
(321–22)
This passage is critical for this analysis. In the text Moby-Dick as Philosophy: Plato—Melville—
Nietzsche, Mark Anderson also finds an important linkage to the Phaedrus here but from a differ-
ent point of entry that employs the Platonic concept of philosophical madness to evaluate the
character of Pip. Anderson’s gloss on this passage does not account for the discursive importance
of blackness in the Phaedrus and in Melville, but creates an opening for my thinking:
Philosophical madness overtakes a man whose winged soul prior to its physical embodiment through
birth has ascended the high rim of heaven and gazed out from there on the colorless and immaterial
Forms of true reality revolving in circuits beyond the heavens. These are the originals on which the
natural kinds of this corporeal realm are modelled. Thus does Pip’s soul in a counter movement
descend into the depths of the sea and look on the “strange shapes of the unwarped primal world
[that] glided to and fro before” him.
(Anderson 234)
Here, it is the “counter movement” that shows Melville’s careful deconstruction of the Platonic
knowing subject. Pip’s soul, rather than ascending spiritually into the air descends metaphysi-
cally into the depths of the ocean and from there is resurrected. This counterintuitive movement
forces us to confront our understanding of birth as giving corporeal form to the soul as it relates
to the socially dead enslaved Black subject.
Anderson establishes the ascendance of the soul as the condition for philosophical madness.
Melville reverses the vector of that argument by having Pip descend to reach that state of being.
As the figure of the enslaved, who is marked with the spiritual stigmata of the Middle Passage,
the socially dead Pip arrives at the time of his birth into the enslaved condition along with death
as his constant companion. In this sense, Pip has been born already dead. Now, Pip experiences
the retracing of the Middle Passage disoriented from the horizontal to the vertical axis. It is the
second death of the already dead soul of Pip, through descent into the depths of the ocean, that
births the new Pip, and it is this death of the “black horse” soul of Pip that positions him to have
a prescient form of being that is best understood as god-like. Melville appears to be refuting
Plato by suggesting the death of Pip’s soul. The “madness” of Pip is also the product of a subject
that is distinctly different from the normative subject in Plato. Upon his return to the Pequod,
Pip, who was generally ignored by Ahab, attracts his attention. This attraction relates to the
central crux in the Phaedrus, understanding love as it is expressed between grown men and young
boys. Upon the drowning of his dead soul, Pip finds himself a resident of Ahab’s inner sanctum.
There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down here. Ye did beget
this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be
Pip’s home hence-forth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me
by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let’s down.
(320)
This new life of Pip speaks to the reversal of the Passage as a space of philosophical and
subjective (re)generation. The “Door of No Return” is just that. There is no dismantling the
logic of the Middle Passage and restoring the normality of human temporal existence—Birth-
Life-Death—in that this subject has arrived at the moment of (re)Birth from Death but there is
the possibility for an alternative way of Being. Saint Thomas Aquinas’ queries regarding the
nature of Angels in Summa Theologica may be relevant. Aquinas, in the First Part, Question 50
“On the Substance of Angels Absolutely Considered,” writes, “[n]ow we consider the distinction
of corporeal and spiritual creatures: firstly, the purely spiritual creature which in Holy Scripture
is called angel; secondly, the creature wholly corporeal; thirdly, the composite creature, corporeal
and spiritual, which is man” (242). It appears to me that the Middle Passage’s capacity to divide
the corporeal and the spiritual and reconstitute them creates a subject that is styled in the con-
text of white supremacy as not wholly human and further incapable of landing in the space of the
divine: hence the understanding of the newly risen Pip as an “idiot” within the social structure
of the Pequod.
Philosophical Shipwreck or “Conclusion”

The notion of “shipwreck” is a catastrophe with a capacity to create new beginnings, suggesting
that the Middle Passage is itself a long shipwreck. I am recalling Hans Blumenberg’s short text
Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, where he proposes that the metaphor
of the shipwreck is foundational for philosophical thought: “[s]hipwreck, as seen by a survivor,
is the figure of an initial philosophical experience” (Blumenberg 12). With this new form of
self-consciousness and philosophical paradigm, the creation of Blackness is a complex way
of being inaugurated by the Middle Passage, the echoes of which are just such an experience of
catastrophe that opens the breach for new forms of thinking. Blumenberg writes:
What can be salvaged from the shipwreck of existence proves to be not a possession withdrawn, in what-
ever way, into interiority but rather the self-possession achievable through the process of self-discovery
and self-appropriation. Long before it divests itself of the security of its relationship to the world, skep-
tical anthropology defines as its property what it can allow as a substance that is not endangered and
cannot be lost. To the outside that cannot be reached from the inside corresponds—and in this Montaigne
already moves close to Descartes—the inside that cannot be reached from the outside.
(14)
This idea of the shipwreck is generative in several ways for thinking about Black subjectivity
after the Passage, or, more pertinently, Africana Philosophy. What remains of the fractured
system of Western philosophy in this novel/thought experiment of the Pequod provides the way
forward to assembling the new way of thinking about self-consciousness that I am positing is the
same as Africana Philosophy, or a new self-consciousness.
Several questions arise from this thinking. First, what to make of the notion of philosophizing
“The Long Shipwreck of the Middle Passage”? Second, does this philosophical and aesthetic tra-
dition have as a possible result something like beauty? Finally, how to account for the omnipres-
ence of the Middle Passage in this system of thinking? Adorno may help to frame a new way of
thinking about Black Subjectivity, or the subject enduring the Long Shipwreck. Adorno’s anal-
ysis of Plato’s Phaedrus in Aesthetic Lecture number 9, on 16 December 1958, proposes that as
Socrates glosses his concept of love, there is “a magnificent rupture. The entire approach up to
that point is abandoned, and we are instead offered a doctrine of love that corresponds to Socratic
theory itself, and which is mostly based on the motif of re-remembering, or amanesis” (87–88).
Returning to the ubiquity of the Middle Passage, it is the degraded relationship of the enslaved
to something like genealogy, history, and memory that is the challenge and opportunity for
bringing Africana Philosophy to bear on Melville. Adorno situates “re-remembering” and its
resonance in literature to serve a philosophical purpose, one which addresses the lengthening of
the Middle Passage and asserts its existence as a radical transformation in Moby-Dick. Melville is
asking a complex question about the nature of this nation’s relationship to Black bodies and
coercive subject-dis-forming violence and the possibility of recreation. The reckless pursuit of
the white whale by Ahab, in refutation of capital accumulation, demonstrates that slavery, in all
of its forms, is both an interlocking set of practices and an over-arching system. There is no
escaping its logic. The inversion of the Phaedrus and Ahab’s headlong pursuit of what Ishmael
understands as “offensive” whiteness, in my reading, leaves little doubt that the Middle Passage,
in its manifold presence, is only the effect of the cause of white supremacy.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. U of Minnesota P, James, C. L. R. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways.
1998. Dartmouth College P, 2001.
Anderson, Mark. Moby-Dick as Philosophy: Plato – Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick, edited by Hershel Parker.
Melville – Nietzsche. S.Ph. P, 2015. Third Norton Critical Edition. Norton, 2018.
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Catholic Way Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A
Publishing, 1920. Comparative Study. 2nd ed. Harvard UP, 2018.
Blumenberg, Hans. Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Plato. Complete Works. Hackett Publishing, 1997.
Metaphor for Existence. MIT P, 1997. Sawyer, Michael E. An Africana Philosophy of Temporality:
Hayden, Robert. “Middle Passage.” The Oxford Anthology Homo Liminalis. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
of African-American Poetry, edited by Arnold
Rampersad. Oxford UP, 2005, p. 43.
30
Melville’s Spectral Mutinies
Lenora Warren
In Melville’s Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd, Sailor, spectral mutinies haunt the texts.
Sometimes they are offstage, thwarted, or conjured. In Moby-Dick, the question of why the crew
of the Pequod does not revolt finds a partial answer in the story of the Town-Ho mutiny and in the
murky fate of the crewmember Bulkington. In Benito Cereno, the shipboard revolt occurs offstage,
keeping the worst of the violence away from the readers’ view. In Billy Budd, a conspiracy is
invented to account for a random act of violence. Each of these texts explores the location of
mutiny in relation to the wellbeing of the ship, captain, and crew. Unpacking these relationships
reveals the dynamics between race and class within the context of revolution, possible revolution,
or unrealized revolution. Mutiny, for Melville, provides a case study of the relationship between
people and the state in both pre- and post-Civil War United States. If the Melville who wrote
Moby-Dick saw mutiny as a failure to act in the face of tyranny, the Melville who wrote Benito
Cereno questioned the power of revolt to upend the slave system as a whole rather than simply
reverse it in one instance. Yet the Melville who wrote Billy Budd saw revolutionary potential
within even the most ostensibly non-revolutionary character. In this final realization, mutiny
becomes not merely the result of poor management of an unruly workforce or brutal treatment
of enslaved peoples but an ever-present possibility in an unequal society. The spectral quality of
these mutinies shows both the elusiveness of obliterating the lines between race and class and the
consequences of ignoring those relationships in violent uprisings.
Michael Rogin cites the Somers mutiny as source material for Melville’s treatment of mutiny
in his texts. In 1842 three members of the navy ship, USS Somers, were convicted and hanged at
sea for planning to seize the ship. The ringleader, Philip Spencer, was the son of the secretary of
war. Coincidentally Melville’s cousin, Lieutenant Guert Gansevoort, was also serving aboard the
same ship (Rogin 6). According to Rogin, Melville’s condemnation of the Somers executions in
his earlier novel White-Jacket indicated his sympathies with Spencer and his cohort. But while
374 Lenora Warren
Melville’s sympathies are clear in his depiction of punishment aboard the Neversink in White-
Jacket, his mutinous protagonists in the three novels discussed here seem deliberately styled in
opposition to Spencer. Spencer, who was eighteen years old at the time, was by turns portrayed
as a rebellious son of privilege enamored of pirate tales and as an impressionable youth, too
young to understand the consequences of his actions (Nientemp). By contrast, Steelkit, Babo,
and Billy Budd are decidedly not privileged, and their volatility is less obvious. Even Billy
Budd, who might be the nearest analog to Spencer, departs from him markedly in particulars of
character. As such, the details of the Somers mutiny became perhaps less central to Melville’s own
philosophy on revolution and rebellion as it evolved over time.
Rather than focus on the specific mutinies to which these texts allude—those aboard the
Somers, the Tryal, and the ships at Spithead and the Nore—I will instead focus on the way these
texts use mutiny to examine both the possibility and the impossibility of radical change through
violence. If Melville’s depiction of mutiny, primarily through its absence or failure, appears to
suggest uneasiness with the political efficacy of armed revolt, one must also consider how in hav-
ing spectral mutinies haunt these texts, Melville reveals his substantial problem with the active
suppression or denial of the effect of mutiny.
The celebration of cross-racial brotherhood in Moby-Dick obscures a troubling question: why
does the sailors’ alliance fail to produce a united front against the fanatical Captain Ahab? The
absence of a mutiny aboard the Pequod matters because it suggests that if Melville’s so-called ship
of state sinks due to Ahab’s single-minded quest, the crew are also complicit in their own
destruction. The question of why the crew of the Pequod does not mutiny has already been
explored by scholars such as C. L. R. James, who sees this absence as Melville declaring that
“revolt was no answer to the question he asked” (53). But rather than view the absence of mutiny
as evidence of Melville’s unwillingness to support armed insurrection, this absence exposes a
fundamental weakness in this so-called “Anacharsis Cloots deputation” who are also “isolatoes”
(MD 107). Melville, in his depiction of the Town-Ho mutiny, or more accurately in his depiction
of the suppression of the story of that mutiny, reveals that beneath the ecstatic camaraderie of the
crew lies a more self-serving agenda that seeks to avoid conflict.
The way in which the crew of the Pequod comes to hear the story of the Town-Ho is described
in the following manner.
It was the private property of three confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems
communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secresy [sic], but the following night
Tashtego rambled in his sleep and revealed so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he
could not well withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing have on those
seamen in the Pequod who came to full knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so,
were they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among themselves so that it never tran-
spired abaft the Pequod’s main-mast.
(199–200)
It is worth mentioning that there are two stories of the Town-Ho. The first involves the ship’s
fatal encounter with Moby Dick and the way that encounter apparently foreshadows Ahab’s fate.
But the second is the “secret” story of the mutiny and the fact that the secret is carefully kept
away from Captain Ahab. That the story should be concealed from them is in keeping with the
fundamental character of mutiny. It is the decision of a smaller group to keep it from the larger
Melville’s Spectral Mutinies 375
crew that gives one pause. The implied effect of the Town-Ho story on the small group suggests
that there is something both immediately alluring and terrifying about the prospect of a mutiny
happening aboard the Pequod. The simultaneity of this attraction/repulsion and the decision to
ultimately suppress the knowledge exposes that the real power base on the ship is not Ahab at
all but the crew. Furthermore, it shows that the captains’ focus on the white whale renders them
oblivious to this other part of the story and reveals how maintaining secrecy depends as much on
the preoccupation of the leaders as it does on the discretion of their followers.
That the Town-Ho was “manned almost wholly by Polynesians”(199) at the time it encoun-
tered the Pequod seems at first glance to suggest that something has gone terribly wrong. Here
one is meant to see the unfitness of the captain manifesting itself in that no self-respecting white
seaman will ship with him. By noting that “three confederate white seamen” are the keepers of
the story, Melville may be gesturing toward antebellum conflicts between black and white
laborers that intensified from the 1830s forward when declining wages and limited advancement
led many white unions to make “scapegoats” for worsening conditions (see Foner 79).
Additionally, the framing of this story does not come to us straightforwardly but rather as a story
related to others at a later date in Lima, Peru. This displacement of the narrative to a further remove
from the action aboard the Pequod suggests an attempt on Ishmael’s part to dampen its potential
explosiveness. Yet his insistence on telling this story at all reveals Melville’s evolving view of revolu-
tionary politics. As Sascha Morrell points out, the convoluted way that Melville relates the mutiny of
the Town-Ho simultaneously “takes pains to distance the story of the Town-Ho from that of the Pequod”
and “bring[s] out the latent revolutionary tension of Ahab’s crew” (Morrell 2). Morrell’s broader
argument that the story of the Town-Ho reflects Melville’s “struggle to reconcile his ‘ruthless democ-
racy’ with the fear of mob violence” (2) is compelling as it helps us understand how mutiny maintains
a ghostly presence in the texts discussed in this chapter. But while Morrell sees this distancing as evi-
dence of Ishmael’s squeamishness toward class conflict, I look at Ishmael’s ultimately failed attempt
to exorcise the specter of mutiny from the environs of the Pequod as evidence of something else.
Tashtego’s role aboard the Pequod in both keeping and telling this “secret history” complicates
Ishmael’s alleged distaste for mutiny and the racial divide between white and non-white workers
mentioned earlier. If the presence of a mostly Polynesian crew is meant to indicate an intractable rift
between white and non-white seamen aboard the Town-Ho, Tashtego’s position as one of the keepers
of this secret suggests that the racial divide aboard the Pequod is not as deep.1
The Town-Ho uprising begins with a personal conflict between the mate Radney and a crew-
man called Steelkit, “a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.” This conflict turns into a larger
mutiny led by Steelkit and ultimately results in Radney’s death in pursuit of Moby Dick. In
describing Steelkit, Ishmael lapses into a brief ethnography of the people of the Great Lakes:
[T]hose grand fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and
Michigan,—possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many
of its rimmed varieties of race and climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even
as the Polynesian waters do. … Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkit was wild-ocean born,
and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any.
(201)
1
Tashtego is also unusual in that in Chapter 40, “Midnight, Forecastle,” he seems to position himself as simultaneously
suspicious of white men but unwilling to take sides in the fight between Daggoo and the Spanish sailor (MD
150–51).
376 Lenora Warren
Ishmael’s description of the Great Lakes as a sort of inland ocean and Steelkit as a landlocked
mariner may be done merely for dramatic effect, as Ishmael is spinning a yarn for his interlocu-
tors in Lima. But the description, particularly in light of Ishmael’s alleged distaste for mutiny,
might be read as a belated apology to the mutineer by acknowledging his strengths and only
obliquely referencing his weaknesses. Containing as it does allusions to Steelkit’s wildness and
the wildness of the United States, the tale appears to suggest that Steelkit’s penchant for mutiny
is more American than not. Moreover, in creating a vision of central United States as wild and
untamed as the South Seas, Ishmael suggests the distance between the Great Lakes and the South
Seas becomes insignificant when one considers the presence of “wild barbarians” and the peril
they present to “many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew” (201). These details also have
the effect of making Steelkit seem closer to the Polynesians who replaced him and his followers.
By blurring the racial and national lines in his description of both Steelkit and the Great Lakes,
Melville disrupts the view of the United States as the landlocked civilized opposite of the wild
and open ocean. In doing so, he also calls into question the false binaries of savage and civilized,
white and black, land and sea.
For this reason, I come to the opposite conclusion of James, who speculates that the Town-Ho
mutiny fails to produce anything resembling real political transformation. “The revolt is in
the end successful. But what happens? Steelkit and some of his fellow-mutineers escape and
get back home again. That’s all. Everything goes back to just where it was before” (53–54).
However, if indeed, this stasis is due to the deliberate erasure of Steelkit’s story and its revo-
lutionary potential. The absence of change is not a function of the failure of the Town-Ho
mutiny to produce change but rather the machinations of the few aboard the Pequod who
decided to suppress the story.
The absence of a true revolutionary spirit aboard the Pequod may also be by design rather than
happenstance. The character Bulkington, who appears at the beginning of the book only to be
elegized in Chapter 23, “The Lee Shore,” has long puzzled scholars: why does Melville introduce
him, only to do away with him in such an opaque fashion (Hayford; Morrell 15)? Bulkington,
whose death is given no explanation other than, “it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship,
that miserably drives along the leeward land,” first appears in Chapter 3, “The Spouter-Inn.”
Here he is described as tall with “noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam,” his face “deeply
brown and burnt” and having “in the deep shadows of his eyes … some reminiscences that did
not seem to give him much joy” (29). Ishmael speculates, on the basis of his accent, that he
“must be one of those tall mountaineers from the Alleganian Ridge in Virginia” (29). The scant
details mentioned here—the imposing frame, the sense of restlessness—have contributed to
speculation that Bulkington’s demise might have been due to either his participation in or
attempted spearheading of a failed mutiny (Morell 15).
The lee shore is the shoreline on a ship’s lee side, meaning the winds that blow toward the lee
shores are dangerous to watercraft because they can cause the craft to run aground (“The Lee
Shore”). Ishmael’s epitaph to Bulkington seems to fly in the face of the hypothesis that he is squea-
mish about mutiny. If the port represents safety, the lee shore is death, stasis, entrapment—in
other words, enslavement. Bulkington, by contrast, is described as “landless.” “But as in landless-
ness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that
howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed on the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like,
then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take
heart, take heart, O Bulkington!” (MD 97). Here Bulkington’s iconoclasm seems less a negative
than proof of a certain purity. This “highest truth” indicates that if Bulkington’s death were due
to execution because of some mutinous infraction, Ishmael views him less with critique than with
lamentation.
Bulkington’s spectral presence, therefore, provides Melville with a potential revolutionary
hero who haunts the rest of the novel. As Morell points out, “By emphasizing the presence of a
natural labor leader [Bulkington] in the Pequod’s crew but suppressing his role in the plot—
meanwhile offering glimpses of unrest aboard the ship that link with a full-blown account of
mutiny in ‘The Town-Ho’s Story’—Melville offers a covert commentary on the difficulty
of acknowledging class conflict in the United States” (Morrell 16). The request at the beginning
of the novel “Call me Ishmael” might also be read as a veiled homage to the “landless” Bulkington.
Ishmael, who is described in Genesis 16:12 as a “wild ass of a man” whose “hand is turned
against everyone” and whom “everyone is against,” creates a symbolic link to Bulkington by
incorporating this sense of “landlessness” into what is likely an alias (Coogan et al. 33). If the
failure of the crew of the Pequod to mutiny haunts the novel, the biblical Ishmael, as the haunted
subject, embraces the unfulfilled possibility of mutiny.
Benito Cereno explores the event of shipboard insurrection by refusing to engage directly with
the spectacle of slave violence and instead demonstrates the mechanism by which organized slave
revolt is rendered “unthinkable” (Trouillot 70–107).2 Rather than being haunted by a mutiny
that did not happen, both Benito Cereno and Amasa Delano, the so-called protagonist, end the
novella haunted by the specter of Babo, the deceased ringleader of the rebellion who successfully
led the insurrection aboard the slave ship the San Dominick. Babo stands simultaneously as a
model of success and a cautionary tale of what the pitfalls of mutiny can be.
Based on a real-life incident aboard the ship Tryal in the late-eighteenth century, Benito Cereno
depicts an encounter between the San Dominick and a merchant ship, the Bachelor’s Delight, cap-
tained by Delano. Having already been taken over by the enslaved Africans, the San Dominick
still maintains the look of a slave ship due to the machinations of the ringleader Babo who mas-
querades as Cereno’s devoted manservant. Delano, despite several moments of unease, detects
nothing amiss until Cereno attempts a desperate escape, and all is revealed. After a brief and
bloody battle in which the crew of the Bachelor’s Delight manages to retake the San Dominick, the
majority of the rest of the novella is given over to a court deposition in which the specifics of the
mutiny are revealed.
Using “haunting” to describe how this mutiny works in the novella may strike some as coun-
terintuitive given that, unlike in Moby-Dick, this mutiny does take place. But the story effec-
tively places the event offstage, and the structure of the novella gradually erases the mutiny, first
in the charade the insurrectionists perform for Delano, and then in the court deposition. In the
case of the charade, because it requires the insurrectionists to conceal their victory by pretending
still to be under Cereno’s control, the pretense effectively empties the mutiny of its revolutionary
2
“To acknowledge resistance as a mass phenomenon is to acknowledge the possibility that something is wrong with
the system. Caribbean planters, much as their counterparts in Brazil and the United States, systematically rejected that
ideological concession, and their arguments in defense of slavery were central to the development of scientific racism”
(Trouillot 84).
378 Lenora Warren
significance. What remains instead is an atmosphere heavy with portent and Delano’s flawed
interpretation of the insubordination he sees among the poorly contained slaves.3 Through
Delano’s eyes, the reader has the dual experience of both apprehending what has happened—
through Melville’s use of free and indirect discourse which warns us not to rely too heavily on the
hapless Delano—and being unable to fully access the real story behind the mutiny due to its
displacement.
This sense of “haunting” is further augmented by the court deposition with secondhand
accounts of Babo and his followers. Rather than offering illumination and closure on the specifics
of the insurrection, the deposition renders the revolt partially opaque due to its use of legalese,
redactions, and the secondhand voice of Babo. Babo, who spends the first half of the novella
speaking strictly in his role as the happy and devoted slave to Cereno, is ultimately rendered
voiceless by the lack of a first-person account from him in the second half. This silencing has the
effect of muting the revelatory potential of Babo’s victory.
This treatment of mutiny is due, in part, to Melville’s allegorization of the inability of white
America to confront the possibility of a large-scale slave revolt occurring in the United States.
Indeed, scholars have already suggested that the San Dominick is an avatar for Haiti and Benito
Cereno is Melville’s allegory of the United States’ unwillingness to face the implications of the
Haitian Revolution (Sundquist, 139–46, Beecher, 43–58). But the mutiny also failed to achieve
its ends—namely, the return of the Africans to Senegal (Grandin 2). The “success” of the mutiny
ultimately depends on more than the takeover of the San Dominick; after all the goal of the
Africans is to return safely to Africa, and their failure to do that illustrates the more substantial
problems faced in the wake of revolt. Melville’s treatment of the aftermath of the San Dominick
mutiny functions as a critique of revolts that do not look beyond the immediate moment to the
more extensive system of slavery. By depicting the necessity of maintaining the appearance of a
functioning slave ship, he exposes the illusory nature of victory when the victors are dependent
on their captives to run the ship to achieve their ends. The temporary show of strength revealed
by a successful mutiny masks a fundamental weakness. Melville undermines Babo’s position as a
leader by hinging the success of his scheme on the spectacle he presents as the “happy slave,”
which is the only voice in which we hear him speak. By contrast, when Babo’s true role is finally
exposed in the pages of the deposition, the impact is dulled both by the legal nature of the doc-
ument and the lack of a first-person account. As a result, Babo’s criminality, rather than his
potential heroism, becomes the story. Melville emphasizes a carefully calibrated spectacle of vio-
lence over the revolutionary implications of Babo’s actions, thereby drawing out white fears of
insurrection.
Benito Cereno forms part of Melville’s larger exploration of the politics of revolution in which
the failure of the mutiny aboard the San Dominick evinces his suspicion of slave insurrection as
a long-term solution to the problem of inequality. This suspicion seems rooted in a fear that
insurrection simply inverts rather than subverts the existing power structure on the slave ship.
Babo’s dual role in which he chooses to torment and control Cereno as both leader and “happy
3
In my book Fire on the Water, I discuss this charade as evidence that Babo’s cunning is less about the quality of the
charade and more in “how he understands his dupe” (Warren 120–21).
slave” reflects both the obduracy of slave power and Babo’s own complicity in its preservation.
The infamous shaving scene reveals that this power inversion fails to upend the system (PT
71–74). As Eric Sundquist points out, “Melville’s containment of the revolt of the slave against
master reveals the power relation to be one of artifice rather than nature; in making power the
only index of rule, however, he accentuates rather than dismantles the struggle to maintain
clearly marked hierarchies” (162). In accentuating this struggle, while he uses Babo to reveal
the corruption of a system that is easily exploited, Melville also undermines Babo’s potential
heroism by making him appear cunning and power-hungry rather than resourceful and
revolutionary.
That Babo “haunts” the text echoes Bulkington’s haunting of Moby-Dick. If Bulkington seems
at first to present a striking contrast to Babo—inspiring versus menacing, beloved versus
reviled—their similar fates (or presumably similar as we are never quite clear on precisely what
happened to Bulkington) draw them together. Both seem poised to play heroic roles in narratives
that remain unrealized. If the fate of a wild white seaman and a cunning black insurrectionist are
one and the same, then the differences between them are less significant than they at first seem.
Indeed, even in their differences lie key resonances. Bulkington’s place in the plot of Moby-Dick
is directly inverse to Babo’s place in Benito Cereno. Yet Babo’s character remains as opaque as
Bulkington’s. This shared opacity suggests that the true nature of the “revolutionary” remains
elusive, and that differences in race and status are less consequential than might be supposed.
This elusiveness is less a function of something inherent in either of these characters or of the
nature of revolution than a result of an active will on the part of those involved to suppress or
erase the evidence of revolutionary possibility. The burial of both the Town-Ho story and
Bulkington’s fate and the silencing of Babo and erasure of his victory complicate any reading of
Melville’s treatment of revolution as reluctant. Rather, he thematizes reluctance so that he might
examine and criticize its broader effects.
Billy Budd, Sailor, presents the most complex example of Melville’s exploration of revolu-
tionary possibility, not by depicting a failed or offstage mutiny but instead by showing how one
is conjured up. In his final, posthumously published novella, Melville tells the story of a
“Handsome Sailor” Billy Budd, who is impressed into the British Navy during the war against
France in the wake of the French Revolution. Billy finds himself accused of conspiracy to mutiny
and, in a moment of stress, strikes and kills his accuser, John Claggart. Despite the lack of pre-
meditation of the murder, and after agonizing over his decision, Captain Vere sees no other
option but to convict him of mutiny and execute him. Billy’s hanging haunts the end of the story
in the form of a song written by his shipmates called “Billy in the Darbies.”
Part of what is responsible for Billy’s demise is the fear of mutiny spreading from ship to ship.
At the time of Billy’s impressment, the narrator discusses an outbreak of mutinies at Spithead and
the Nore in 1797. These mutinies, which began in protest against poor treatment and impress-
ment, involved approximately 20,000 sailors and exacerbated fears of Jacobin radicalism spreading
through the navy (see Pfaff). Melville, in describing the effects of these mutinies, observes that
despite some implementation of reforms, the custom of impressment persisted, and its continued
use created an atmosphere in which “lieutenants assigned to batteries felt it incumbent on them,
in some instances to stand with drawn swords behind the men working the guns” (BB 116). This
image of swords pointed at the backs of sailors transforms Billy Budd from an ideal shipmate to
380 Lenora Warren
a potential insurrectionist. Through this transformation, Melville emphasizes both the muta-
bility of identity and the pervasive imminence of revolutionary possibility.
Billy Budd also allows Melville to explore revolutionary possibility by bringing to the fore, in
the figure of Billy, the permeability of race and class distinctions. Although Melville describes
Billy as phenotypically white—“cast in the mold peculiar to those finest physical examples of
those Englishmen in which the Saxon strain would seem not at all to partake of any Norman or
other admixture”—he uses the memory of another Handsome Sailor “so intensely black that he
must needs have been a native African of the unadulterate blood of Ham,” to introduce Billy’s
story (103–109). The explicit reference to race creates a stark contrast between Billy and the
unnamed sailor who reminds the narrator of him. Yet, the starkness itself raises the question of
whether racial difference matters in this particular narrative. Billy’s status as an impressed man
also blurs class and racial lines by underscoring the relationship between impressment and
enslavement.4 By having him bid farewell to his previous ship with an impulsive, “And good-bye
to you too, old Rights-of-Man,” Melville further shows the permeability of the racial line by hav-
ing Billy literally step out of freedom into bondage (108).
Racial ambiguity is further suggested during the drumhead court after Billy kills Claggart
and Captain Vere argues that the court has no choice but to find Billy guilty of mutiny even
though the convened officers seem to want to consider Billy’s innocent character as a mitigating
circumstance with regards to the sentencing. Within the context of the specific act, they can see
that Billy committed violence on impulse without the sense of premeditation one naturally
expects when confronted with a case of conspiracy. Vere, however, insists that the letter of the law
must be respected to prevent the possibility of Billy’s example emboldening others. When asked
by the junior Lieutenant if they might “convict and yet mitigate the penalty,” Vere’s response is
telling.
“The people…have native-sense; most of them are familiar with our naval usage and tradition; and
how would they take it? Even could you explain to them—which our official position forbids—they,
long moulded by arbitrary discipline have not that kind of intelligent responsiveness that might
qualify them to comprehend and discriminate. No, to the people the Foretopman’s deed, however it
be worded in the announcement, will be plain homicide committed in a flagrant act of mutiny.
What penalty for that should follow, they know [emphasis added]. But it does not follow. Why? They
will ruminate. You know what sailors are [emphasis added].”
(155)
Vere’s response creates an interesting parallel between the supposition of covert action involved
in the mutiny and the necessity for secrecy in maritime legal proceedings. The through-line of
secrecy between the legal framework and, potentially, lawless actors shows how the rigid hier-
archy of the navy necessarily makes enemy combatants out of the sailors and paranoid jailers out
of the officers. Vere’s use of the phrase “native-sense” not only points to the inherent or inborn
understanding of the sailors but also conjures up paternalistic attitudes of whites toward indig-
enous populations and slave owners to the enslaved and thereby positions the sailors as
4
See Warren, Fire on the Water, for more on the racial links between Billy Budd and the unnamed black sailor (Warren
98–113).
simultaneously uncivilized and sly. Their perceived inability to understand the nuance of such a
conviction and sentencing, combined with their aptitude to detect a chink in the armor of naval
authority, makes the junior Lieutenant’s suggestion impossible. “They know … they will rumi-
nate. You know what sailors are.”5
The end of the novella leaves two competing narratives of Billy’s crime and legacy, neither of which
adequately addresses the so-called true nature of both. The first is best encapsulated by the news item
about the crime that appears in “News of the Mediterranean.” It describes “William Budd” as the ring-
leader of “some sort of plot” and reports that Claggart was “vindictively stabbed to the heart by a sud-
denly drawn sheath knife of Budd … The deed and the implement employed sufficiently suggest that
though mustered into the service under an English name the assassin was no Englishman, but one of
those aliens adopting English cognomens whom the present extraordinary necessities of the service
have caused to be admitted into it in considerable numbers” (BB 168). Whereas Billy’s Britishness was
taken for granted at the beginning of the novella, despite the lack of hard information on his parentage,
it is stripped from him at the end to help further create a consistent narrative of his crime.
The second narrative is one that comes into being on the decks of the Bellipotent when the
sailors’ memories of Billy’s good nature take the shape of a mournful song called “Billy in the
Darbies.” The song is written in the voice of Billy as he awaits execution.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream fast asleep.

I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?
Just ease those darbies, at the wrist,
And roll me over fair!
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.
(BB 170)
The song, focusing solely on the tragedy of Billy’s execution, effectively erases the ambiguity of his
actions in favor of seeing his death as tragic. Billy’s death explicitly renders him into a phantom, nei-
ther substantial enough to conjure the intricate specifics of his actions nor ephemeral enough to eva-
nesce completely. Like Bulkington, Billy seems poised to become symbolically significant if not for the
particulars than for the general sense of his legacy. But, like Babo, Billy’s potential menace also hangs
uneasily in the air, suggesting that the potential for violent revolt raises more questions than it answers.
The conjured mutiny in Billy Budd brings us full circle to the question posed in Moby-Dick
regarding the place of revolt in politics and Melville’s perceived unease with mutiny. If the fear of
mutiny in Moby-Dick leads to the abuse of power, and if in Benito Cereno it exposes the potential for
power to corrupt others, in Billy Budd the absence of mutiny allows only for those in power to
invent it to create more draconian means of repression. As Melville observes later in his poem “The
House-Top,” a meditation on the New York Draft Riots in his collection of Civil War poems,
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of War, possibly more worrisome than the “ship-rats” who run rampant
through the city is “Wise Draco” who comes only to punish and refuses to parley with the disgrun-
tled (PP 255). Melville seems to suggest that the real danger is not the workers or the enslaved per
se, but the outsized fear of them, which produces the larger phantom of revolt. The implied sug-
gestion is that the constant repression only forestalls the outbreak and requires perpetual vigilance.
5
“Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body as
well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled and their
passions brought into subjection” (Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France 151).
382 Lenora Warren
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Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 2001.
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Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. and Moby-Dick’s ‘Darker Thread’ of Labor Tension.”
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“Lee Shore.” OED Online, Oxford UP, Dec. 2019. www. Insurrection in Early American Literature, 1789–1886.
oed.com/view/Entry/106961. Bucknell UP, 2019.
31
Religion and Secularity
Dawn Coleman
With Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), Melville launched his literary career at a watershed
moment in American religious life, when spiritual possibilities were multiplying exponentially.
The United States had long sheltered a diversity of faiths with regional centers of gravity,
including Congregationalists in Connecticut and Massachusetts, Jews in Rhode Island and South
Carolina, Quakers and the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, Catholics in
Maryland and Delaware, Episcopalians in Virginia, Methodists and Baptists and other evangeli-
cals in the West, and throughout the South, forms of Black Protestantism intertwined with
African beliefs and practices. American religious pluralism accelerated in the 1830s and 1840s
as railroads and transatlantic travel fostered an unprecedented circulation of people and ideas.
Charles Taylor has identified this mid-century moment as a pivotal one for religion in the
North Atlantic world, when an explosion of new varieties of belief and unbelief began to unseat
Christianity as a default worldview. Although the secular age of Taylor’s title began around
1500, it was in the mid-nineteenth century that Western societies were thrust into secularity: a
diverse, teeming cultural matrix of religious and non-religious possibilities. As this new envi-
ronment unfolded across the nineteenth century, belief in God became “an embattled option”
and “no longer axiomatic” (3). Taylor’s secularity is a new, unsettling cultural environment char-
acterized by the “mutual fragilization” (303) of all beliefs. Like other recent secular studies
scholarship, this approach rejects the familiar secularization narrative that assumes that religion
declines with modernization. Taylor joins Talal Asad, José Casanova, Saba Mahmood, and many
others in regarding the modern religious and spiritual landscape as a dynamic field of contin-
gencies, and recent secular studies work has been especially attentive to how political and
economic power shape belief.
The concept of secularity reframes the nineteenth century and Melville’s place in it. Nineteenth-
century Americans navigating secularity had to weigh competing visions of God, or no god, and
384 Dawn Coleman
humanity’s place in the cosmos. For those who kept up with intellectual developments, German
Higher Criticism and scientific advances in geology, natural history, and astronomy took a pick-
axe to biblical authority. But even people with little interest in such matters confronted a bewil-
dering roster of claimants to religious truth: manifold Protestant denominations, Catholicism,
Transcendentalism, Spiritualism, Mormonism, Millerism, and countless other sects and faiths.
Slavery’s increasing divisiveness also multiplied religious options, as Methodists, Baptists, and
Presbyterians split over this issue in the 1840s and 1850s. Throughout the mid-century, when a
perceptive contemporary might say with Derwent in Clarel, “a decade’s now a century” (3.21.392),
contests of religious and metaphysical ideas played out not only in churches, temples, and lecture
halls, but also in the period’s expansive print culture. Periodicals, pamphlets, tracts, and books
abounded, cheaper than ever, a clamor of voices, living and dead, echoing through “the long
Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth” (MD xvii), all seeking to guide readers on spiritual
matters.
Melville was wide awake to this new universe of spiritual possibilities, and his writing responds
to the mid-century swirl of religion and spirituality more constructively and pragmatically than
scholars have tended to acknowledge. For generations, many readers have seen him as a Promethean,
god-defiant rebel, an Ahabian “grand, ungodly god-like man” who scorned religious orthodoxies,
who inveighed against missionaries in Typee and wrote the “wicked book” of Moby-Dick “in nomine
diaboli” (Corr 212; MD 79, 489). His Modernist champions reveled in his iconoclasm and found in
him a “figure of even more heroic proportions than his own extraordinary characters” (Lauter 10).
This Melville is always saying, “NO! in thunder” (Corr 186): to the Calvinist theology of his youth,
to the popular Protestantism that abetted imperialism and slavery, to Transcendentalist idealism
and optimism, and to Unitarian compromise. Recent scholarship, such as many of the essays
(including my own) in Jonathan A. Cook and Brian Yothers’s Visionary of the Word: Melville and
Religion, has sought to tame the supposed heretic into a philosopher: a bookish skeptic who treated
faith as a set of intellectual or ethical conundrums.
Although Melville was an independent thinker with no desire to march under anyone’s ban-
ner, seeing him only as a visionary contrarian or brilliant skeptic burnishes myths of authorial
uniqueness while obscuring his similarities with some of his more thoughtful contemporaries.
More than we’ve recognized, he was a bright star in the sprawling constellation of nineteenth-
century religious liberalism. This cultural formation included Transcendentalism and
Unitarianism but extended well beyond them. In Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality,
Leigh Eric Schmidt shows how a diverse set of mid-nineteenth to early twentieth-century liberal
Protestants and former Protestants sought to communicate forms of spirituality, or individual
pursuits of abiding truth and meaning, that could withstand the age’s skepticism-inducing
crosscurrents. These spiritual seekers included Lydia Maria Child, Emerson, Henry David
Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, William Rounseville Alger, O. B.
Frothingham, W. E. B. Du Bois, and many more. Hoping to find “a religious world larger than
the British Protestant inheritance,” they developed new forms of spirituality “through a gradual
disentanglement” from Protestantism (Schmidt 3–4). They shared numerous core values:
individual spiritual striving; appreciation for solitude and meditation; recognition of divine
immanence; affirmation of religious diversity; commitment to social justice; and “an emphasis
on creative self-expression” (Schmidt 12). Melville’s writing resonates with these ideals, and he,
too, voices a “seeker spirituality” that can be “excitedly eclectic, mystically yearning, perennially
cosmopolitan” (Schmidt 6–7). Ever prescient, he anticipates religious liberalism’s late
Religion and Secularity 385
nineteenth-century flowering: a “movement … of spiritual-secular ambivalence; one multiply

implicated in shifting constructs of gender, race, empire, class, and sexuality; one of expansive
engagement with the arts; one enthralled with intuition and experiential authenticity at the
expense of creed and tradition” (Schmidt and Promey 11). Melville was likewise caught between
categories and elevated individual insight and the arts over creeds and institutions.
Below, I review how Melville’s Unitarianism and eclectic reading accord with his history of
spiritual seeking. I then examine how Moby-Dick and Clarel present pioneering visions of secu-
larity’s affective landscape, focusing on how they articulate two life-affirming spiritual feelings,
wonder and sacred intimacy. This approach redirects us from the usual cognitivist paradigm of
belief and unbelief, faith and doubt, toward those personal feelings and ambient moods vital to
religious and spiritual experience.
Melville as Spiritual Seeker

Like many of the religious liberals in Restless Souls, Melville was an exile from traditional
Protestantism. Growing up in Manhattan and Albany, he attended Dutch Reformed churches
where powerful, accomplished ministers preached Calvinist doctrines of divine sovereignty, total
depravity, and double predestination. This Protestant upbringing also habituated him to Christian
calendrical rhythms and life-course rituals, and impressed upon him the moral authority attributed
to preaching, a power his fiction summoned, often ironically. His early religious training also gave
him the language and stories of the King James Bible, which served him as a lifelong muse.
Melville left the Dutch Reformed tradition, the faith of his mother and her family, in his
young adulthood. Possible reasons include the youthful rebellion that prompted him to ship for
Liverpool in 1839; a curious mind’s chafing at doctrinal constraints; and, one suspects, his hori-
zon-expanding experience of meeting and working with men from around the world as he
knocked about the Pacific in the early 1840s. Nothing seems to have done more to alienate him
from Christian pieties and Western cultural norms than his sojourn with the Taipi on Nukuheva.
There he found a humane, thriving society whose cheerful collectivism and unashamed naked-
ness showed him forms of social harmony outside Christianity’s playbook and gave the lie to
traditional Protestantism’s knell of human fallenness. Typee makes a strong case that Pacific
Islanders are better off without Christianity than with it, and nearly all of Melville’s subsequent
fictions criticize professed Christians’ shortcomings and Christian dogma’s limitations.
Not long after Melville returned to the United States in 1845, he became engaged to Elizabeth
Shaw, an alliance that thereafter connected him to Unitarianism.1 Elizabeth’s family attended
New South Church in Boston, a Unitarian congregation, and the church’s minister married
Melville and Elizabeth in 1847 (Parker 543). This tie to Unitarianism allowed him to forge a
symbolic connection with his father; Allan Melvill had been a good friend of Elizabeth’s father,
Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, and a Unitarian as well. After moving to New York, the Melvilles
rented a pew at the city’s First Congregational Church (Unitarian), known as the Church of the
Divine Unity from 1845 to 1855 and then as All Souls. The congregation was led by the most
1
For a fuller discussion of Melville’s relationship to Unitarianism, see my “Melville and the Unitarian Conscience” and
Yothers.
386 Dawn Coleman
renowned American Unitarian minister of the mid- and late nineteenth century, Henry Bellows,
a dynamo who created a modern denominational body to hold together Unitarianism’s two
wings: liberal Christians faithful to the Gospels’ authority and religious radicals who, skeptical
of historical Christianity, wished to decenter the Bible and draw spiritual insight from a wider
range of sources. Bellows baptized the Melvilles’ oldest son Malcolm in September 1849, while
Orville Dewey, a friend of Shaw’s, baptized the three youngest children in Pittsfield in 1863.
When the family moved back to New York City in late 1863, they returned to All Souls. We
know that Elizabeth rented a pew from 1865 to 1873 and was baptized by Bellows in 1872, but
Herman’s own involvement with the church from 1865 through the early 1880s remains murky
since no membership records survive from Bellows’s long pastorate (1839–1882). Only after
Theodore Chickering Williams succeeded Bellows do we have a membership book, which lists
Melville as a member in 1884, and in 1887 he rented a relatively expensive ($800) pew in his
own name. Such a record was not the declaration of faith it might seem. From 1846 to 1922,
church bylaws stated that those who wished to join the church or take communion were not
required to profess any particular faith or creed. Would-be members need only say they wished
to join, a policy that accommodated congregants of all theological persuasions and none, allow-
ing the church to keep the door open for a wide variety of doubters, seekers, Transcendentalists,
agnostics, free religionists, and other independent-minded New Yorkers. At All Souls, Melville
could follow Emerson’s counsel to keep “with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude”
(Emerson 47). Melville’s loose affiliation with Unitarianism may also have owed something to
nineteenth-century Unitarianism’s deep connections to literary culture. At All Souls, for in-
stance, Bellows eulogized longtime attender William Cullen Bryant upon his death in 1878 as
the “[t]he patriarch of American literature” (Bellows 10).
Melville’s religious liberalism is also evident in Merton M. Sealts Jr.’s catalog of the books
Melville owned or borrowed, which includes many on religious topics, not to mention the
theological books “scrapped after his death as unsuitable for resale” (Sealts 122). Fellow religious
liberals authored numerous surviving volumes: Emerson’s poems and essays (1847–1860),
Channing’s six-volume Works (1848), Thoreau’s Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849),
Matthew Arnold’s poems and essays (1856–1883), William Rounseville Alger’s The Solitudes of
Nature and of Man (1867), and Frothingham’s Boston Unitarianism, 1820–1850 (1890). Melville
also knew John Kitto’s Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature (1845), “one of the first British encyclope-
dias to endorse the findings of German biblical criticism” (Pardes 47), and Darwin’s Journal
(1846). He balanced this contemporary fare with classics in the Calvinist tradition: John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and Divine Emblems (1686), John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), and prob-
ably several works by Jonathan Edwards.2 He also sought to understand non-Christian faiths,
investigations that spoke to travel-roused curiosities and that paralleled other religious liberals’
efforts to develop the field of comparative religion. He turned to Pierre Bayle’s Dictionary (1710),
where he learned about Zoroastrianism, ancient sects, and Islam; Thomas Broughton’s Selections
from Popular Poetry of the Hindoos (1814) and Arichandra: The Martyr of Truth: A Tamil Drama
(1863); Thomas Maurice’s Indian Antiquities (1793–1800) and History of Hindostan (1795–1798);
and, on Buddhism, Alger and Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia.3 He found in Sir Thomas Browne’s
2
On Edwards as a source for Melville, see Bercaw Edwards 79.
3
See Bell; Coleman, “Mahomet’s Gospel”; Vincent 278–80; Dillingham 32–34.
Religio Medici (1643) a model for negotiating religious difference: “to maintain productive dia-
logue between Protestantism and Catholicism … [and] between Christianity and other major
world religions and between numerous varieties of Protestantism and skepticism toward any
revealed religion” (Yothers 17). Melville set these diverse religious perspectives alongside
philosophical and metaphysical theories old and new, from canonical heavyweights, including
Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, to forgotten nineteenth-cen-
tury explorers of the mind-matter relationship such as Lorenz Oken and Walter Dendy Cooper.
Expansive reading taught Melville to see faith commitments and spiritual orientations as both
historically contingent and deeply felt.
Melville and Spiritual Feeling

Melville-and-religion discussions often take as a touchstone Hawthorne’s commentary on
Melville’s spiritual life, in which the older writer describes a November 1856 day that the two
spent talking metaphysics on the Liverpool beach. Hawthorne wrote in his notebook that
Melville “began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human
ken, and informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’; but still
he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think will never rest until he gets hold of a
definite belief ” ( J 628). He griped that Melville had long “persist[ed] … in wandering to-and-fro
over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills” they sat among. Then, seemingly
contrite about complaining, he offered his old friend an encomium destined to a long afterlife in
Melville studies: “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest
and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of
the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and [is] better
worth immortality than most of us” ( J 628–29).
Hawthorne’s précis confirms that Melville, like many Victorian-era thinkers, approached sec-
ularity’s epistemic multiplicity as an unsolvable intellectual problem. But taking Hawthorne’s
commentary as the interpretive key to Melville’s relationship to religion and secularity distorts
his relationship to religion. One, it overestimates the discomfort of Melville’s unbelief. After all,
Melville summed up the conversation that day with “Good talk” ( J 51), suggesting not existential
anxiety but satisfaction in Hawthorne’s friendship. Two, it exaggerates the importance of belief,
a crucial concept for Protestants, but only one way to understand meaningful engagement with
religion and spirituality’s knot of beliefs, texts, practices, rituals, and relationships.
Shifting from belief to feeling offers new insights into how Melville addressed secularity’s dis-
locations. Secularity generated not only new intellectual uncertainties but also new pleasures and
discomforts, new consolations and frustrations. This affective dimension is foundational to secu-
larity, which “occurred at the levels of emotion and mood, underneath the skin” (Modern 6). To
approach Melville’s relationship to secularity on these terms is to take a cue from William James’s
method in The Varieties of Religious Experience. There James waives an analysis of religious institu-
tions and theology to distill and analyze “religious feelings and religious impulses” as “articulate
and fully self-conscious men” express them ( James 12). He construes religious subjectivity
broadly, as including those, like Melville, who do not fit neatly within religious traditions.
James’s method illuminates Melville’s accomplishment in voicing secularity’s many spiritual
feelings and moods. Moby-Dick, for instance, veers between the poles of Ahab’s angry, swearing,
388 Dawn Coleman
last-stage-of-metaphysics rebellion against cosmic mystery and Ishmael’s giddy exuberance in

probing that mystery through the “deep, earnest thinking [that] is but the intrepid effort of the
soul to keep the open independence of her sea” (MD 107). Yet that is just the beginning.
Melville’s writings also show secularity’s indeterminacy generating melancholy, nostalgia, angst,
dread, wonder, serenity, delight, terror, despair, hope, stoicism, and indifference. Melville him-
self denied that these passing feelings should solidify into beliefs. Writing to Hawthorne in June
1851, he mocked Goethe’s counsel to “Live in the all,” then conceded that Goethe’s “‘all’ feeling,”
or a sense of union with nature, had “some truth in” it (Corr 194). But only some: “[W]hat plays
the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary
feeling or opinion” (Corr 194).
Melville seldom arranges secularity’s ephemeral feelings into a reassuring narrative order. His
writings reject the classic evangelical conversion narrative’s affective trajectory from miserable
consciousness of guilt, to fearful waiting upon God, to joyful realization of salvation. Mapple’s
Jonah sermon extols this pattern, but Moby-Dick’s plotlines reject it. Ahab dies blaspheming;
Ishmael is saved yet does not pray for rescue or praise God for deliverance. On occasion, Melville
incorporates something like the demythologized redemption arc of Sartor Resartus (1836), an
influential book among Transcendentalists that he borrowed in 1850. Sartor traces the spiritual
path of Herr Teufelsdröckh, who, thwarted in love, undergoes an existential crisis that drives
him from the Everlasting No’s dejection and misanthropy to the Centre of Indifference’s aimless-
ness and melancholy to Everlasting Yea’s resolute diligence. Ishmael briefly enacts this story
when Queequeg’s friendship transforms his irritability to contentment—a quick swing from No
to Yea—and he commits to arduous greenhorn labor. But he hardly finds redemption through
whale butchery, despite the supposed honor and glory of whaling. Pierre picks up Carlyle’s
pattern only to parody it. Pierre, aghast that his father might be Isabel’s too, declares his No by
recklessly fake-eloping with Isabel, then mumbles a joyless Yea by clinching himself to his
writing desk in a freezing garret, as fundamentally alone as ever. Instead of achieving secular
salvation through dedication to work, he, like Ahab, goes mad and brings his suffering to a
climax in self-destructive tragedy.
When Melville shapes spiritual moods into patterns, he tends to favor cycles or stasis over
linear development. Ishmael’s voyage on the Pequod and return form a loop, one of many, as his
“Whenever I find myself ” (MD 3) announces. Ahab, too, in his Osirian battles with Typhon,
repeats himself: “for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey”
(544). Clarel’s pilgrims make their planned circle, returning as much themselves as ever. Ahab
and Ishmael both propose that personal spiritual progress might be cyclical––“we trace the
round again” (MD 492) and “Oh! the metempsychosis!” (MD 429)––but most of Melville’s char-
acters display no development at all. Instead, they join a defining spiritual mood to an existential
orientation: jolly, fatalistic Stubb; indifferent, materialistic Flask; optimistic, conventionally
Christian Amasa Delano; beatific, faithful Nehemiah.
One of Melville’s most important contributions to conceptualizing secular spirituality is his
intimate association of these feelings with the body. Like Whitman in Leaves of Grass (1855),
who invited his soul to loaf with him on the summer grass, Melville shows spirituality’s physi-
cality. Edwards, for instance, had asserted the primacy of mind over body in religious feeling,
stressing that “it is not the body, but the mind only, that is the proper seat of the affections.”
While physical sensations accompany religious feeling, they are “in no way essential to them”
(Edwards 142). Melville unsettles this dichotomy of mind and matter and registers bodies,
individually and collectively, as creators of spiritual feeling. I elaborate here on two of the most
salient and characteristic spiritual feelings in Melville’s writing: wonder, especially as a response
to the natural world, and sacred intimacy, or a soulful connection between two men. Melville
grounds these feelings in sensory experience and describes them with religious language that
invokes divine immanence rather than transcendence. Both feelings provide what Taylor has
called “fullness” (5), or a sense of joy and purpose, even as they are inevitably shadowed by ephem-
erality, dread, and disappointment.
Wonder
Wonder is one of Moby-Dick’s most distinctive moods, marking the upper limits of the novel’s
emotional pitch. Paolo Costa, tracing this term and arguing for its importance in our experience
of a fragmented, incomprehensible world, offers this definition: “To wonder … is to feel a sense
of bodily and mental thrill as a result of a sensory (or imaginative or mnemonic) encounter (or
failed, but awaited encounter) with something in our world that appears new and is unpredicted”
(Costa 142). He builds in part on Descartes, who defined wonder as “‘a sudden surprise of the
soul which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraor-
dinary’” (Costa 142). Costa’s rewriting of Descartes’s “surprise of the soul” as “bodily and mental
thrill” suggests the instability of wonder’s ontological referents, its independence from the
supernatural. Free of utilitarian calculations, wonder “fosters in the subject a vague sense of joy
in the very fact of being alive” (Costa 147). At times it exceeds a response to a particular stimulus
and functions as “an expanding halo” around experience, creating an “‘oceanic’ feeling” (Costa
148). Wonder has its nuances and gradations. It sometimes has undertones of dread, and it
shades into “astonishment, amazement, surprise, awe, stupor, fascination, curiosity, or perhaps
even ‘startlement’” (Costa 143), as well as into delight, rapture, enchantment, and admiration.
Wonder is present from Moby-Dick’s first page, the dedication to Hawthorne, “In Token of My
Admiration for His Genius” (MD vii). Beyond registering high regard, this declaration inti-
mates that Melville’s book, too, may be a wonder, a product of rare and startling genius. Once
the story begins, Ishmael is the book’s main conduit of wonder, especially in his responses to the
natural world. He foreshadows wonder’s exalted moments when he confides that as he contem-
plated going whaling, “the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open” (7).
Chapter 35, “The Mast-Head,” memorably presents one such wondrous moment. Ishmael
describes how a youth posted to the masthead to scan the horizon for whales “loses his identity;
takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, per-
vading mankind and nature” (159). He feels wonder’s thrill as he peers down on “every strange,
half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing” (159). Ishmael draws the reader into this experience by refo-
calizing it through you as he describes how the sea’s rhythm, a physical manifestation of the
“inscrutable tides of God,” induces stupor: “In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to
whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space” (159). Here is the oceanic or all
feeling par excellence. Like many wondrous moments in Moby-Dick, it is tinged with dread.
Ishmael warns against forgetting your body as you undulate with the ocean. Let your foot slip or
lose your grip and “your identity comes back in horror”; “Heed it well, ye Pantheists!” (159).
This final exhortation to remember bodily limitation does not negate—perhaps even inten-
sifies—masthead-standing’s delightful otherworldliness.
390 Dawn Coleman
Moby-Dick relentlessly ties wonder to terror, horror, and menace. The whale embodies won-
der’s latent dread, as when Ishmael argues for whaling’s grandeur by invoking the “sperm whale’s
vast tail” as one of the “interlinked terrors and wonders of God” (109). Ishmael and Ahab alike
regard the whale not merely as an animal but as a sign or avatar of awe-inspiring divine power.
One of the book’s fullest elaborations of the wonder-terror link comes in Chapter 102, “The
Bower in the Arsacides.” There Ishmael finds the most impressive of the “natural wonders” that
the “wonder-freighted” sea has deposited on King Tranquo’s shores: the “wondrous sight” of the
“great, white, worshipped skeleton” wound about with vines: “Life folded Death; Death trellised
life” (450). The wondrous scene’s terror lies both in the leviathanic memento mori and in the mad-
dening silence of nature’s preoccupied “unseen weaver,” the “weaver-god” who, busy threading
together trees, vines, leaves, and skeleton, fails to answer Ishmael’s frantic pleas to pause—
speak—stop: “but one single word with thee!” (450). A scene that begins hushed and tranquil,
arranged by King Tranquo himself, careens toward the horror of God’s indifference. But then
Ishmael pivots. In a self-consciously performative sermon, he promises a revelation beyond the
grave: “only when we escape” nature’s din “shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through
it” (450). Terror-shadowed wonder shot through with hope: this nexus of feeling centers Ishmael’s
spirituality.
Even in Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” where terror seems to dwarf wonder,
Ishmael tempers fear with a will to hope. Seeking to explain why the White Whale “appalled”
(188), he acknowledges whiteness’s wondrous associations—the Persians’ holy white forked
flame, Jove as a snow-white bull, St. John’s white robes of the redeemed—then argues for white-
ness as terror: the polar bear, the white shark, the albatross, the “White Steed of the Prairies,” the
“Albino man” and more (191). All point to the “demonism of the world” (194). The case cre-
scendos when Ishmael identifies whiteness as the “colorless, all-color of atheism” and the blank-
ness of a “palsied universe” (195). But as in Chapter 102, Ishmael warns against committing
oneself to the belief that God—or some meaning-giving creative power, not necessarily the
veiled “Christian Deity” (195)—is non-existent or forever non-responsive: “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” (195). Are we surrounded by horrifying whiteness, or an apparent lack of meaning? Yes, as
Laplanders by snow. Should we stare ourselves blind? No. Why choose wretchedness? Better to
preserve one’s sight with glare-relieving colored glasses. One might yet escape.
So far I have discussed Ishmael’s solitary wonder in nature (at the masthead, in the bower, con-
templating whiteness), but Moby-Dick presents marvels experienced alongside other equally
wondrous people. Here Melville differs from James, who in Varieties defines religion, a term he
individualizes and deinstitutionalizes enough to encompass what I am calling spirituality, as “the
feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand
in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” ( James 36). In Melville, such solitude is rare, and
spiritual feeling is social more often than it might seem. Even when Ishmael seems to wonder
alone, he is often enmeshed with others. The Arsacideans use the whale skeleton as a chapel, with
an altar-skull and attending priests; his worship depends on theirs. Similarly, his wonder at
whiteness is entangled with others as he labors to connect with a comprehending reader. He
must communicate, even “in some dim, random way,” his private, “mystical,” “ineffable” horror
of whiteness, “else all these chapters might be naught” (188), and his avalanche of examples reads
like a passionate speaker striving to make a point.
Many of Moby-Dick’s wondrous moments occur within assembled groups. Mapple and
Ahab, two force-of-nature speakers, produce this effect. The congregation answers the sub-
lime sermon with “a quick fear that was strange to them” (47), and the Pequod sailors on the
quarter-deck “gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling” at their own responsiveness to
Ahab’s questions (161). But as with Ishmael alone, nature’s marvels are collective wonder’s
dominant catalysts: the spirit-spout that excites “wonder” and “dread” (233); the “enchanted
calm” at the gallied whales’ center, a “wondrous world” on the surface and “still stranger”
world below (387); the St. Elmo’s fire that dumbfounds the men into “various enchanted
attitudes” and elicits worship from Stubb, who pleads for mercy; Fedallah, who kneels; and
Ahab, who shouts defiance (507). Communal awe culminates in the final theophany: the
appearance of Moby Dick, “the grand god,” whom the crew first beholds swimming like a
monarch with his retinue, or like Jupiter spiriting away Europa, his glorious serenity hiding
“the full terrors of his submerged trunk” (548–49). Even though Ishmael, who works
Starbuck’s boat, stays on the ship as the other three boats pursue Moby Dick, he describes the
whale as “the breathless hunter” sees him at water level. This focalization magnifies the
whale while merging all the men, those who hunt and those who keep the ship, into one con-
sciousness. All feel the same awe. They feel this wonder again at the climax. As the whale
bears down on the Pequod, the sailors are stupefied, “their enchanted eyes intent upon the
whale” (571). Ishmael presents their paralysis as a legitimate response to the natural world’s
fascinating, terrible strangeness, which might or might not cloak “some unknown but still
reasoning thing” (164) behind the masks and walls. That Melville grants the crew this last,
shared peak experience honors their ordinary, laboring lives. Oblivion impends, but in their
death’s-door wonder, they are spiritually alive.
Clarel is a book of anti-wonders, a tour of a melancholy, not-that-Holy Land where miracles
have probably never happened, sacred sites disappoint, and the main marvels are the faithful
themselves. The core pilgrims, a disparate, skeptical band, are “Themselves … lost, / At settled
hearts they wonder most” (3.5.126–27).4 In the poem’s only sustained moment of wonder, the
pilgrims behold a transfiguring rainbow over the Dead Sea. The narrator heralds the apparition
with breathless asyndeton—“Fiery, rosy, violet, green— / And, lovelier growing, brighter, fairer”
(2.29.120–21)—and calls it the flag of Isis, the gods’ messenger, and an “oriflamme,” or royal
banner (2.29.124). Like the Pequod sailors before the corpusants, the pilgrims regard it silently,
“As in a world made new, / With upturned faces” (2.29.125). But the awe-filled moment glim-
mering with redemptive possibility quickly fractures into Nehemiah’s reverie, Vine’s irony,
Derwent’s hope, Margoth’s spite. It would seem that by 1876, chastened by civil war, personal
tragedy, and New York City’s ever-increasing religious pluralism, Melville found unifying the-
ophanies implausible.
Yet, at the end of his life, Melville returned to the wondrous, hope-tinged natural spectacle in
Billy Budd. When Billy is executed, another heavenly oriflamme appears, as “the vapory fleece
hanging low in the East was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the lamb of God
seen in mystical vision.” Billy, rising, “takes the full rose of the dawn,” figuratively joining the
heavens, as if borne like Elijah on a fiery chariot (BB 65). The men respond like the Pequod’s
4
See also Jonathan A. Cook’s Chapter 13 in this volume, “Re-Writing the Holy Land Narrative Tradition: Clarel as
Poetic Pilgrimage.”
392 Dawn Coleman
sailors or Clarel’s pilgrims: as one, with a “wedged mass of upturned faces” (BB 65). The super-
natural aura around the execution increases when, “to the wonder of all” (65), Billy’s dying body
is mysteriously still, without spasm. All feel this wonder, presumably even the surgeon, who
refuses to explain the phenomenon: “I do not, with my present knowledge, pretend to account
for it at all” (66). Like Clarel’s rainbow, Billy’s death begets interpretive multiplicity: state pro-
paganda, sailor reverence, the tragicomic ballad, and the story itself, which promises an “inside
narrative” yet leaves much unexplained.
Melville is clear that life gives no answers, yet his representations of wonder suggest that indi-
viduals might somehow outlast death. Clarel’s Epilogue speculates that the weirdness of life
itself might portend immortality: “But through such strange illusions have they passed / Who
in life’s pilgrimage have baffled striven / Even death may prove unreal at the last, / And stoics be
astounded into heaven” (4.35.23–26). Premising heaven’s possibility on ordinary life’s “strange
illusions” expands the halo of wonder beyond discrete, surprising phenomena to encompass every
moment of our inexplicable lives.
Sacred Intimacy
Wonder is often shared but seldom leads to satisfying relationships. Melville associates a differ-
ent spiritual feeling with strong interpersonal bonds––a sacred intimacy, or a sense of connection
to another person that is as powerful and inviolate as anything religion can provide, an equivalence
he signals through residually religious vocabularies. Intimacy is a “feeling or sense of closeness”
that “involves asymmetrical and nonreciprocal forms of relation, attention, and appreciation,”
ones “undetermined by, but not indifferent to, the ideal of mutuality” (Yousef 3). Intimacy dif-
fers from sympathy or sentimentality by recognizing the other’s fundamental inaccessibility and
preserving their “existential privacy” (Yousef 2). Melville associates intimacy with a deep personal
satisfaction rooted in bodily experience and a shared spiritual perspective, and he does so exclu-
sively with men. None of his women—Fayaway, Yillah, Isabel, Ruth, Hunilla—spark the same
religiously inflected longing for emotional closeness. Should readers then infer that Melville was
gay or queer? Perhaps, though those words would not have meant to him what they mean to us.
Like the surgeon in Billy Budd, I will not pretend to explain the phenomenon.
Melville’s most notable instance of sacred intimacy occurs when Ishmael and Queequeg con-
nect at the Spouter-Inn. The signposts of this relationship’s intensity are well known: their cozy
first night together in the innkeeper’s marital bed, Queequeg’s affectionate arm around Ishmael,
the ritual marriage of forehead-press and waist-clasp, Ishmael’s admiration for his new “pagan
friend” (51), Queequeg’s halving his silver with Ishmael, the tangle of their naked legs, and their
smoking and chatting in bed and out, especially in, as Ishmael extols bed as the ideal spot for
“confidential disclosures,” where “man and wife, they say, open the very bottom of their souls to
each other” (52). Ishmael and Queequeg may not achieve this soul-baring—“they say” suggests
that married couples might not do so either—but they are unquestionably intimate, with their
cultural differences figuring the enduring privacy of their inner selves.
The aspect of their intimacy that deserves equal recognition is its religious framing, which
gives their friendship the power to trump all scriptures and sermons. This framing begins when
they participate in one another’s religious rituals, poorly. Queequeg attends Mapple’s sermon and
leaves early; back at the inn, he flips the pages of the “marvellous book” (55), presumably a Bible,
without attempting to read it.5 When Queequeg worships Yojo that evening, Ishmael recipro-
cates Queequeg’s spiritual generosity by reasoning that the golden rule requires him to join his
fellow man in worshipping Yojo. Lighting the fire and offering the biscuit, as Queequeg had
previously, Ishmael then goes off script, “salam[ing] before [the figure] twice or thrice” and
“kiss[ing] its nose” (52). He does not attempt Queequeg’s “pagan psalmody” (23) of the first
night, and the bowing and kissing are his invented play-acting of idol-worship.
Through the pair’s cross-cultural misfires and garbled religious practices, Melville affirms the
importance of shared spirituality to strong friendships while relativizing the significance of
specific acts, even sacrosanct ones like staying for the entire sermon and studying the Bible, or,
in the imagined Kokovokan context, intoning the correct chant. Downplaying religious partic-
ulars directs attention to the ethical principle that many liberal Protestants regarded as
Christianity’s ethical core: Ishmael’s golden-rule conviction that “to do to my fellow man what I
would have my fellow man to do to me—that is the will of God” (52). It also elevates the
spiritual satisfactions of embodied intimacy over those of traditional religiosity. Ishmael gets
religion—or spiritual fulfillment—not through Mapple’s sermon or studying the Bible but
through private chats and sensual pleasures enjoyed with Queequeg: the “hearts’ honeymoon [of]
… a cosy, loving pair” (52).
Sacred intimacy suits secularity in that it generates inclusive spiritual rhetorics that bridge
cultural differences. Following his Spouter-Inn intimacies with Queequeg, Ishmael speaks a reli-
gious language that protects their friendship above all, rewriting Christian dogma as needed. He
shrugs off, for instance, the doctrinal differences of Queequeg’s so-called Ramadan: “Heaven
have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike” (81). Although he tries to convince
Queequeg that fasting is unhealthy—an appeal not to metaphysics but to embodiment, where
they have found common ground—he concedes that his friend “no doubt thought he knew a
good deal more about the true religion than I did” (86). He again chooses loyalty over doctrine
when he champions the harpooner as a member of “the great and everlasting First Congregation
of this whole worshipping world” to which all belong, differing in details but sharing in “the
grand belief,” which he leaves artfully unspecified (88). Although his religious rhetoric soon
spirals off in a thousand directions, a shift announced in his paean to “deep, earnest thinking”
and independent thought, his spiritual intimacy with Queequeg persists as they weave mats,
work the monkey-rope, and endure Queequeg’s life-threatening fever. When the Pequod sinks,
Queequeg’s life-buoy coffin saves Ishmael, representing their relationship’s redemptive power.
Nineteenth-century Protestants tended to see investing too much spiritual feeling in another
person as sacrilegious, the creature displacing the Creator, but for Melville, sacred intimacies
were just the opposite: oxygen to the flickers and embers of his mostly cold faith in the super-
natural. As he wrote to Hawthorne in November 1851, describing his experience of reading
Hawthorne’s “joy-giving and exultation-breeding” response to Moby-Dick: “I felt pantheistic
then—your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s” (Corr 212). He con-
tinues, “Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in
Old Rome’s pantheon” (Corr 212). Melville connects himself and Hawthorne to God or the gods
and to one another through shared bodily pleasures. This feeling cannot last but is nonetheless
5
See also Katie McGettigan’s treatment of this scene in Chapter 20 of this volume, “Genre, Race, and the Printed
Book.”
394 Dawn Coleman
perceived as the center of existence: “I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an
incidental feeling” (Corr 212). Melville denies that this feeling is future-oriented at all—“no
hopefulness is in it, no despair” (Corr 212)—yet ends the letter on hope: “I shall leave the world,
I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more
than the Bible of our immortality” (Corr 213).
Clarel revisits and intensifies these feelings, as Clarel seeks an intimacy that will intertwine
divine and human love. Many scholars have read this poem as the title character’s failed quest for
religious certainty, with the many religious and philosophical discussions among the pilgrims,
especially between Derwent and Rolfe, pointing to the unreliability of religious systems and
scriptures. These intellectualized readings of the poem’s conflicting religious viewpoints tend to
overlook Clarel’s desire to discover on his pilgrimage not merely stronger religious convictions
but also an intimate friendship that will shore up his faltering faith and give him the sweet plea-
sures of soul-companionship.
This desire announces itself early in the poem. Alone and lonely outside the Jaffa gate, Clarel
sees the road to Emmaus and recalls the Lucan pericope in which, three days after Jesus’s death,
two disciples traveling to Emmaus meet a stranger who explains scriptural prophecy to them—
and who is revealed that evening as the risen Jesus himself (Luke 24:13–35). This remembered
scene kindles Clarel’s desire for a similar revelation, though with a humanizing difference: it
“bred / A novel sympathy, which said— / I too, I too; could I but meet / Some stranger of a lore
replete,” one who “Would question me, expound and prove, / And make my heart to burn with
love” (1.7.46–47, 50–51). With love—it is a surprising addition to the disciples’ remarks to one
another: “Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he
opened to us the scriptures?” (Luke 24:32). Clarel glosses this biblical text, which says nothing
of love, as presenting the enticing possibility that he, too, could meet a fellow traveler—like
Jesus, or like the two disciples and co-exegetes—who would impart divine revelation while
inspiring heartburning love. The poem shows Clarel seeking this love in successive failed
attempts at sacred intimacy. That this search might not go well is immediately apparent. Right
after Clarel expresses his desire to meet a life-transforming stranger, he sees Nehemiah, mirage-
like: “Emerging from the level heaven / And vested with its liquid calm” (1.7.60–61). This
saintly millennialist, despite his thorough biblical knowledge and qualifying “lore replete,” will
not be the friend to satisfy Clarel’s heart.
Clarel follows the divinity student’s poignant quest to establish a sacred intimacy with
someone as sensitive and doubt-filled as himself. Sending out feelers to nearly every man he
meets, he discovers prime candidates in Celio and Vine. More so than Moby-Dick, Clarel repre-
sents the difficulties of sacred intimacy between men. Clarel cannot find shared beatific ease in a
slapdash religious ritual or two and a warm bed. More idealistic than Ishmael, he longs for soul
communion, a desire the poem respects but does not allow him to fulfill.
When Clarel first sees Celio, whom the narrator calls, echoing the Emmaus story, a “stranger”
(1.11.40) and “the Unknown” (1.11.51), at the Lower Gihon reservoir, they seem to share an
instant, silent connection. Without speaking, “more perchance between the two / Was inter-
changed than e’en may pass / In many a worded interview” (1.11.54–56). Whereas Ishmael and
Queequeg chat, here sacred intimacy transcends speech. While being cagey about what exactly
this silent give-and-take communicates, the narrator affirms that such exchanges are genuine:
“Such passion!—But have hearts forgot / That ties may form where words be not? / The spiritual
sympathy / Transcends the social” (1.19.2–4). Following two lines of rhyming, iambic
tetrameter, the short, unrhymed, metrically irregular declaration, “The spiritual sympathy /
Transcends the social,” blazons Clarel’s motivating desire.
Clarel’s response to his initial meeting with Celio echoes his yearning when he recalls the story
of the disciples traveling to Emmaus: he feels a “novel sympathy” (1.11.58). The phrasal repetition
highlights Clarel’s inchoate, nameless recognition that he longs to find intimacy with another man.
Celio is the first whom Clarel sees as a likely partner: a Roman-born free inquirer who “stages a
Risorgimento of the soul” by declining to join the Franciscans and pursuing an “‘Italian turn of
thought’ that owes more to Roman stoicism and Renaissance humanism than it does to Christianity”
(Berthold 233–234). Celio is more intellectually confident than Clarel, but his inwardness and
spiritual homelessness mirror Clarel’s own. When they meet again the next day, the narrator coyly
suggests that, like converging lines, they “Mutual in approach may glide / … which from poles
adverse have come” (1.15.54–55), might even “climax share” (1.15.53). But Clarel wavers. After
again exchanging looks that may be meaningful—the narrator is diffident on this point—Clarel
averts his gaze, and Celio, sensitive about his hunchback, turns away abruptly, as if too proud to
risk Clarel’s rejection. For Melville, sacred intimacy is linked to mutual physical acceptance, and
the narrator chastises Clarel for not responding to Celio’s silent advances: “Ah, student, ill thy sort
have sped” (1.15.79). Clarel has found his type yet failed to act.
The pain of missed opportunity sharpens when Clarel muses over Ruth’s past and somehow
cannot stop thinking about the handsome young Italian, whose kyphosis now seems irrelevant
to desire: Celio “sought / Vainly in body—now appeared / As in the spiritual part, / Haunting
the air, and in the heart” (1.18.53–55). Their spiritual connection reaches its promised climax,
albeit etherealized, when Clarel, insomniac, clairvoyantly perceives Celio’s dying spiritual
struggle as “a vision far and dim” of fighting “fiends and cherubim” (1.18.61, 64). Clarel runs to
the death-chamber and, “in the throb that casts out fear,” devours the probing journals of his
bosom-friend manqué, finding there “a second self” (1.19.22, 26). The phrase reinforces the
intensity of Clarel’s desired spiritual intimacy and evokes Wordsworth’s “Michael,” which
Melville read and marked.6 There the speaker introduces his tale of a good man surviving great
disappointment, a theme resonant with Celio’s journals, by saying that he shares it “for the sake
/ Of youthful Poets, who among these hills / Will be my second self when I am gone” (Wordsworth
87). Clarel and Celio also share a vocation, or, rather, the lapsed one of holy orders, and Celio’s
probing, faith-bereft journals both guide Clarel intellectually and, like “Michael,” impart a sense
of unfulfilled hopes.
Clarel soon falls for another religious skeptic, the alluring, ironic Vine. Clarel repeats with this
new friend the furtive looks and awkward silences that marked his flirtation with Celio—and
again fails to connect. Vine is too aloof and possibly too superficial, and Clarel is too awed. He
feels Vine’s magnetism like the “perfumed spell / Of Paradise-flowers invisible / Which angels
round Cecilia bred” (1.29.24–26). The allusion’s excess and gender inversion—angels, perfume,
flowers, Paradise, a female saint—suggest that the narrator is gently poking fun at Clarel for his
6
Melville annotated this page in “Michael,” though not this line. Matthew Arnold also uses the phrase “second self” in
an essay that Melville marked extensively on Eugénie de Guérin, older sister of French poet Maurice de Guérin. Eugénie
kept a journal addressed to her brother alone, and Arnold comments that he “was a kind of second self to her” (Arnold
120). This essay may have inspired Melville to represent Celio’s journal as a medium of spiritual communion.
396 Dawn Coleman
crush. The Cecilia reference is especially arch. Walter Bezanson notes that Melville had seen
Raphael’s St. Cecilia in Ecstasy in Bologna in 1857, but the apter Cecilia may be the first one
Melville is known to have seen, John Tenniel’s fresco St. Cecilia, which he viewed with Tenniel as
guide (“an artist friend of [ John] Murray’s”) in Britain’s House of Lords in December 1849, just
months after the painting’s completion ( J 45).7 In this portrait, a brightly lit, pink and alabaster
Cecilia, patron saint of music and musicians, plays the organ, her pallid face turned heavenward,
her ruby lips parted. The pious tableau’s composition is similar to Raphael’s, yet the overall
impression is slightly comical. This too-white, too-flat Cecilia (Tenniel was blind in one eye,
distorting his perspective) seems too good, too pure, a caricature of innocence. It is a visual paean
to music, graced with a falsetto. For Melville, considering the painting retrospectively, the
parody would have been intensified by the fact that in 1876, Tenniel had been a Punch cartoonist
since 1850 and the illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the
Looking Glass (1871).
The early Garden of Gethsemane scene contains loud, unheeded warnings that Vine will not
satisfy Clarel’s soul-cravings. When Vine spots a tourist there and a “freakish mockery, elfin
light” (1.30.109) flits across his face, Clarel, watching him, also briefly sees the tourist satiri-
cally, as an irreverent looky-loo. Vine’s sardonic perspective, which dismisses or mocks others’
possible earnestness, dismays Clarel, though his infatuation burns on. Clarel’s memory of the
Garden story should also have put him on his guard. Faithfully, he imagines the nighttime scene
of John 18: men with lanterns, Judas coming forward to kiss Jesus, Jesus’s unworldly submis-
sion. All is rote until he dwells on intimacy betrayed—“Ah, now the pard on Clarel springs: /
The Passion narrative plants stings” (1.30.50–51)—and he must turn away. The story apparently
hits close to home, given his own betrayals of Celio and Ruth, through silence and abandonment,
and the possibility that he, too, might be betrayed.
Soon Clarel presents the most wrenching description of unfulfilled desire for sacred intimacy
in all of Melville’s writings. Ignoring the Garden’s lessons, Clarel persists in seeking out Vine,
who holds himself aloof for the pilgrimage’s first two days, then finally speaks as he and Clarel
recline together by the Jordan. This idyllic tête-a-tête will be the relationship’s high point. Vine
remarks casually on their surroundings, but Clarel can hardly listen. Full of the “thrill / Of
personal longing” (2.27.72–73), he can only gaze at Vine admiringly, an attraction he attributes
to his new friend’s spiritual purity: “so virginal in shrine / Of true unworldliness looked Vine”
(2.27.62–63). He longs for an intimate, holy bond clinched through mutual self-revelation: “O,
now but for communion true / And close; let go each alien theme; Give me thyself!” (2.27.68–
70). Vine muses about Arabs and the history of civilization; Clarel is impatient. Such topics
would be fine, Clarel thinks, “if said / After confidings that should wed / Our souls in one”
(2.27.105). Even more directly than Ishmael with Queequeg, Clarel dreams that same-sex inti-
macy will fulfill secularity’s spiritual longings.
Yet Melville was no idealist. The poem respects Clarel’s yearning but drives home the diffi-
culty of fulfilling it. When Clarel hints at his feelings, Vine’s mood shifts discouragingly. He
perceives that Vine is urging him to conquer his religious doubts and—this part hurts—to quit
trying so hard to find the man who will complete him:
7
Melville also owned two prints of Cecilia, a color lithograph of Francesco Francia’s The Marriage of Cecilia to Valerian
and a William Sharp engraving of Domenichino’s St. Cecilia (Wallace 49–50).
Does Vine’s rebukeful dusking say—

But for thy fonder dream of love
In man toward man—the soul’s caress—
The negatives of flesh should prove
Analogies of non-cordialness
In spirit. —E’en such conceits could cling
To Clarel’s dream of vain surmise
And imputation sting.
(2.27.124–30)
Betrayal’s sting returns, not as conscience’s pang but as rejection’s smart, as Vine rebuffs Clarel’s
hopes with, as Clarel imagines it, an “imputation” of unseemly physical desire and silent scold-
ing about the “negatives of flesh.” But that “fonder dream” of love, both dear and foolish, is not
so easily laid to rest. A “serious softness” (2.27.132) in Vine’s eyes puts all in doubt again, and
shame at having such stirrings apart from Ruth overwhelms Clarel: “Nay, dizzard, sick these
feelings are” (2.27.139). Later, as he watches Vine contemplate the Mar Saba palm, he recognizes
that his mysterious desires are “unsubdued”: “Possessing Ruth, nor less his heart / Aye hun-
gering still, in deeper part / Unsatisfied” (3.30.146–49). His thoughts of Ruth have been nothing
but confused, and the monk’s misogynist tract—and, implicitly, the beautiful, grace-filled monk
himself—have rekindled his hope for “a bond /… Passing the love of woman fond” (3.30.149,
152). This sentiment underscores Clarel’s confusion about Ruth’s role in his life, an uncertainty
exacerbated by the many attractive men he meets on his pilgrimage, not Celio and Vine only but
also the Mar Saba monk, Derwent, Rolfe, the Dominican, and the Lyonese.
Through Clarel’s intertwined desires for stronger faith and a heartfelt bond with another man,
Melville illustrates that secularity’s spiritual feelings cannot be partitioned off from our feelings
for one another, even from sexual ones. The poem’s ending suggests that Clarel may yet find the
soul communion he seeks. Although he is horrified when he returns to Jerusalem and finds Ruth
being buried, her death is liberating, as he never saw her as a “second self” or desired her as pas-
sionately as he did Vine. With the world all before him, he may yet form a relationship with a
beautiful man who shares his Christian-adjacent soul-longings. The Epilogue encodes this fur-
tive hope of a companioned paradise in its counsel to Clarel to “keep thy heart” and its image of
the “swimmer”—naked, one assumes—“rising from the deep,” who is equated with the “burning
secret” and the hope in immortality (4.35.27, 30, 31). Here as elsewhere, Melville entangles
spirituality with intimacy and the body.
Conclusion
In the spirit of religious liberalism, Melville surveyed secularity’s chaos and traditional faith’s
wreckage and sought to articulate the spiritual feelings that might still prove satisfying and that
could move humanity beyond former religious certainties to some newly imagined future. He
recognized that these feelings, fulfilling as they could be, did not come unmixed, that wonder
and intimacy, for instance, carried with them dread, betrayal, shame, and disappointment. From
Typee’s critiques of capitalism to Billy Budd’s melancholy assessments of war and law, his writings
398 Dawn Coleman
present modern life as an “unfulfilled romance” (Clarel 2.1.13) of fleeting pleasures and ambig-
uous, closure-resistant narratives.
Although Melville saw Christian verities disintegrating around him, he anticipated current
views of secularity in recognizing religion as a perennial element in human history. He perceived
that history might not be a story of ever-advancing rationalism but rather a repeating cycle of
faith and doubt, of old religions collapsing and new ones rising. Rolfe: Jove “died. Christ came.
/ … Let fools count on faith’s closing knell— / Time, God, are inexhaustible” (1.31.264–65). In
a secular age, faith persists little changed for some. Melville’s writing reveals that others, unset-
tled, feel compelled to reinvent it, working from the inside out to find language equal to their
elusive, enigmatic spiritual longings.
Works Cited
Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism. Ticknor and Fields, Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays: First Series. 4th ed.
1865. Melville’s copy available on MMO, edited by Munroe, 1847. Melville’s copy available on MMO.
Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Marnon. Writings 1902–1910. 1902. Library of America, 1987.
Bell, Millicent. “Pierre Bayle and Moby Dick.” PMLA, Lauter, Paul. “Melville Climbs the Canon.” American
vol. 66, no. 5, 1951, pp. 626–48. Literature, vol. 66, no. 1, March 1994, pp. 1–24.
Bellows, Henry W. Oration at the Funeral of William Cullen Modern, John. Secularism in Antebellum America. U of
Bryant. Delivered at All-Souls’ Church, New York, June Chicago P, 2011.
14, 1878. Religious Newspaper Agency, 1878. Pardes, Ilana. Melville’s Bibles. U of California P, 2008.
Berthold, Dennis. American Risorgimento: Herman Melville Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 1,
and the Cultural Politics of Italy. Ohio State UP, 2009. 1819–1851. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
Coleman, Dawn. “Mahomet’s Gospel and Other Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Restless Souls: The Making of American
Revelations: Melville’s Hand in The Works of William Spirituality. HarperCollins, 2005.
E. Channing.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, ———, and Sally M. Promey. American Religious
vol. 17, no. 2, June 2015, pp. 74–88. Liberalism. Indiana UP, 2012.
———. “Melville and the Unitarian Conscience.” Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard UP, 2007.
Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion, edited by Vincent, Howard P. The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick. 1949.
Jonathan A. Cook and Brian Yothers. Northwestern Southern Illinois UP, 1965.
UP, 2017, pp. 129–57. Wallace, Robert K. “From Ancient Rome to Modern
Costa, Paolo. “A Secular Wonder.” The Joy of Secularism: Italy: Italian Art in Melville’s Print Collection.”
11 Essays for How We Live Now, edited by George Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 15, no. 3,
Levine. Princeton UP, 2011, pp. 134–54. 2013, pp. 41–54.
Dillingham, William. Melville and His Circle: The Last Wordsworth, William. The Complete Poetical Works of
Years. U of Georgia P, 1996. William Wordsworth, edited by Henry Reed, 1839.
Edwards, Jonathan. “A Treatise Concerning Religious Melville’s copy available on MMO.
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32
Ruthless, Radical Democracy
Jennifer Greiman
“Democracy may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone.”
Astra Taylor
“Democracy” has been a keyword of Melville scholarship since the field’s inception. Beginning
with Raymond Weaver’s sly conflation of Melville with the protagonist of Pierre in Herman
Melville: Mariner and Mystic (1921), the assumption that Melville was himself “a thorough-going
Democrat… perhaps a little too Radical altogether to your fancy” has become axiomatic.1 But if
critical consensus has secured the problem of democracy at the center of Melville’s corpus since
the early twentieth century, the term itself and its meaning to Melville’s biography and writing
have never been stable and have often been burdened with negotiating a host of tensions and
paradoxes (much like the history of democracy itself ). For Weaver––and for many subsequent
critics––the term “democratic” has served the needs of biography and literary nationalism at
once, crafting an egalitarian persona for Melville while also staking claims for the exceptional
status of his work. Weaver threads this needle by borrowing and parsing the language of Pierre:
“Radical he came to be, indeed: it was the necessary penalty of being cursed with an intelligence
above that of the smug and shallow optimism of his country and his period. Democratic he may
have been, but only in the most unpopular meaning of that once noble term” (37). Weaver’s por-
trait of a Melville “cursed” with an uncommon intellect while rejecting the aristocratic preten-
sions of his family combines biography and canon-building by disentangling the radical from
the democratic, the exceptional from the common. Two decades later, in The American Renaissance
1
Raymond Weaver quoting Pierre (37). See Brian Yothers’s excellent survey of democracy as a critical touchstone in
Melville scholarship (160–70).
400 Jennifer Greiman
(1941), F.O. Matthiessen joins radical aesthetics to political democracy in order to describe
Melville’s key role in the creation of both a “literature for our democracy” and a “culture com-
mensurate with America’s political opportunity” (xiv–xv). C. L. R. James, writing Mariners,
Renegades, and Castaways (1953) from immigration detention, proposes yet another distinction as
he cautions against attributing any particular political philosophy to Melville from the views of
his characters, while still assuming his “fanatical” democracy: “It is also extremely dangerous to
take these ideas as specific political policies of Melville. He was an artist, and had made no con-
sistent studies of economics and politics. He was for example an extreme, in fact, a fanatical
democrat” (75).2 This critical history might suggest that Melville’s readers can take for granted
the fundamental significance of “democracy” to his corpus, even though the term cannot be said
to signify anything certain about his personal beliefs, political preferences, or even the cultural
function and aesthetic form of his art.
Rather than a grounding term–one that defines critical methodologies for reading Melville’s
work or established biographical facts about his beliefs–“democracy” is the term that a century
of scholarship has given to a set of questions and problems in Melville’s work concerning the
relationship of politics and culture; of biography and work; and ultimately of aesthetics, history,
and representation. Is democracy principally a cultural or political descriptor in reference to
Melville and his work? Does it lie, that is, in Melville’s “intensely democratic urge to absorb and
fuse contradictory elements in American culture,” as David S. Reynolds argues (275–76)? Or
does it lie in the tensions of a “political egalitarian” who wrote and thought as a “cultural aristo-
crat,” as Robert Milder claims (63)? If, as generations of scholars have suggested, Melville’s work
must be read in relation to his biography and rooted in personal history and belief, is the story
of democracy then one of defeat, as Michael Rogin characterizes it, the triumph of fathers and
monarchs over “Melville’s dream to speak for American democracy” (221)? Or, is the story of
Melville’s career instead that of his embrace of an imperial autonomy and authorial sovereignty,
as Wai-Chee Dimock claims (24)? Finally, if “democracy” can be read as a feature of Melville’s
writing that is independent of biography, where does it appear? Are the democratic elements of
his prose and poetry embedded in the culture and politics of the nineteenth century and mea-
sured in Melville’s thematic engagements with “nascent capitalism, aristocratic nostalgia,
literary elitism, constitutional monarchies, populist economics, workers’ rights, mob violence,
and socialist revolutions” as Dennis Berthold claims (24)? Or, does democracy appear instead in
those moments of Melville’s writing that sound the very limits of representation, as Nancy
Fredricks shows?
A full century of criticism on the problem of democracy in Melville’s writing has placed the
concept firmly at the center of his work while yielding little in the way of consensus about the
term’s precise meaning. However, it would be a mistake to assume that this is due either to an
irreducible ambiguity or ambivalence on Melville’s part, or to perennial blind spots of histori-
cism, presentism, or ideological presupposition on the part of his critics. Instead, the very
absence of consensus and the shifting meanings that democracy takes for Melville’s readers
2
Michael Rogin amplifies this point in 1979: “Melville did not adopt a particular political program. … Melville lived
through that turmoil and artistically transformed it… Melville was less politically programmatic than various partisans
would have it, and more immersed in political detail” (21).
Ruthless, Radical Democracy 401
point to one of Melville’s most significant and concrete insights about democracy: its capacity
to become something other than what it appears to be. The significance of democracy to
Melville’s oeuvre lies in the very tension between its obviousness and its instability, its
fundamental and ubiquitous presence coupled with the constantly shifting forms and mean-
ings that mark it as evanescent and mutable. If studies of Melville’s engagement with democ-
racy do not agree on whether democracy is a matter of culture, politics, history, or aesthetics,
this is because for Melville, democracy is ultimately a matter of living and being. Democracy
appears in Melville’s work as an ontology of equality, at once fundamental and transient, which
belongs to art, philosophy, politics, culture, and history––not to mention cetology, geology,
chemistry, physics, and botany.
Melville’s conception of democracy is radical in the root sense of that word:3 it is both
fundamental to his writing and derived from the oldest associations of the term with equality,
instability, and transformative potential. Melville hews closely to the original sense of the term
which, as Raymond Williams notes, joins simplicity with mutability: rule (kratos) by the people
(demos), but “everything depends on the senses given to people and to rule” (93). Indeed, so com-
plex and mutable is the word, Williams argues, that its modern sense as a representational form
of government is a near inversion of its original meaning, direct and participatory rule, and even
operates to the “exclusion of one of its original forms, at one point its only form” (98). Jacques
Rancière also returns to one of the oldest formulations of democracy, Plato’s definition of it by
negation in The Republic, to argue that the most “astonishing” feature of democracy is that “the
very ground for the power of ruling is that there is no ground at all” (Dissensus 50). In joining the
manifest equality of the demos to its groundless title to rule, Rancière’s definition shares a basic
assumption with the most influential theoretical formulations of “radical democracy” from the
last several decades––namely that democracy is best characterized by a lack of permanent char-
acteristics. What Claude Lefort calls the “empty place” of democratic power that cannot be occu-
pied or represented (17); what Jacques Derrida designates as the ontology of “democracy to
come” (38–39); or what William Connolly associates with creative collective processes in a world
of contingencies: radical democracy has come to be defined by political theorists through a series
of spatial and temporal gaps and a basic resistance to representation (10).4 But if such a concept
would seem to demand that it be left alone, without qualities or qualification, contemporary
political theory has named such democracy “radical” precisely in order to carry it back––literally
and etymologically––to its roots and rescue it from the modern adjectives which belie and betray
it: liberal democracy, constitutional democracy, representative democracy. In contemporary
political theory, that is, radical democracy does not simply refer to a more militant, extreme, or
direct expression of these, but to the form of democracy that rejects the presupposed foundations
that claim to give democracy its enduring forms––a constitution, a nation, even a presumptive
people. Instead, radical democracy has become the necessarily compound name for the thesis that
nothing about democracy can be presupposed except for the groundless claim to rule by a people
which does not yet exist because it is always becoming something else.
3
Rooted itself in the Latin, “radicalis relating to or forming the root, original, primary,” the English term “radical”
comes to describe political extremism in the eighteenth century: “radical, adj. and n.” (OED Online).
4
For a fuller discussion of Melville and radical democratic theory, see Jennifer Greiman, “Militant, Ruthless, Round.”
Beyond Melville’s personal beliefs and political affiliations, beyond the cultural status of his
work, beyond even the antagonisms between egalitarian and authoritative forces across his books,
his writing reveals a radical impulse to root democracy in nothing more than an assertion of
equality precisely so that it can generate something new. Melville himself calls this impulse “my
ruthless democracy,” and while he uses the phrase only once, in a May 1851 letter to Nathaniel
Hawthorne, it describes a force that is present in all of his writing, from his personal letters and
journals to his most multivocal and experimental fiction and poetry (Corr 190). More than an
autobiographical assertion, that is, Melville’s “ruthless democracy” is an expansive claim about
the relationship of being and creativity, about the work that equality enjoins on everyone, and
about the aesthetic processes and forms that Melville devises across his career to answer that
demand. Charting an unusual path through the problem of democracy in Melville’s life and
work, I begin with a close examination of Melville’s specifically botanical elaboration of his
“ruthless democracy” to Hawthorne in order to show how his figurative riff on grasses, seeds, and
roots in the spring of 1851 connects the radical proposition of ruthless democracy to processes of
artistic creation and natural proliferation, to labor and life, which must be pursued without
foundation or end. By taking Melville’s figures seriously and tracing the spread of grasses and
plants through Pierre, The Confidence-Man, Battle-Pieces, and Clarel, I argue that, although the
conditions for this ruthless democracy change and although Melville invokes a grave tone,
Melville shows a remarkable consistency in his thinking––over three decades––about democracy
as a principle of creativity and change that is at once rooted and groundless.
Democratic Grass
Appearing in the opening of a “long and meandering” letter that, Hershel Parker notes, “has
proved irresistibly quotable since Julian Hawthorne first published it, without Melville’s per-
mission,” Melville’s claim of “ruthless democracy” has been a crucial touchstone for scholars for
what it adds to the portrait of Melville’s political philosophy.5 David Reynolds takes the phrase
as the title for his chapter on Melville in Beneath the American Renaissance, as well as the source of
that chapter’s thesis about Melville’s subversive cultural politics and his sympathy for the radical
egalitarianism of popular literature (278). Nancy Fredricks generalizes from the autobiograph-
ical detail it offers to argue that Melville’s claim to this “‘ruthless democracy on all sides’ is
grounded in a political and ethical philosophy” that guides his characterizations of marginal
figures in Moby-Dick and Pierre (11). Robert Milder finds the letter most revealing for the artistic
self-consciousness that emerges from Melville’s descriptions of his mental unfolding and even-
tual decline (xi), and for the support it lends to his thesis that Hawthorne’s writing is vital to the
development of Melville’s own metaphysics of democracy (51). This “meandering” letter is a
statement of all that––the personal, cultural, ethical, metaphysical––and much more. As Melville
wanders in the letter from topic to topic, from the farm to “the Whale,” from Solomon to
Goethe, from money woes to dreams of champagne picnics, the letter’s circuitous digressions and
5
Parker 842–44. Julian Hawthorne’s version of the letter was also printed “without a date and surely with some
transcriptional errors,” but despite its shaky provenance, Parker and others read it as one of Melville’s frankest and most
sustained self-assessments.
strange non sequiturs reveal both a manifesto and a performance of what, in the spring of 1851, he
was developing into a full-blown democratic aesthetic practice.
Melville opens the letter with a series of extravagant apologies for his negligence in visiting
his more famous and patrician friend. First, he floods Hawthorne with excuses of fatigue and
details of his work on the farm at Arrowhead––“I had my crops to get in––corn and potatoes”
(Corr 190)––while also joking about class, etiquette, and social formality. But then mid-apology,
Melville reverses course and withdraws it, saying “with no son of men do I stand on etiquette or
ceremony.” Parsing the cultural and political meanings of democracy, he concedes that “it is true
that there have been those who, while earnest on behalf of political equality, still accept the intel-
lectual estates,” cultivating “an aristocracy of feeling––exceedingly nice and fastidious,” and he
guesses that though Hawthorne likely ascribes to this view, he may also derive a kind of “tor-
pedo-fish thrill at the contact with a social plebeian” such as himself.
So, when you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you may possibly feel a touch of
shrink, or something of that sort. It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a
thief in jail is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington. This is ludicrous. But Truth is
the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth––and go to the Soup Societies.
Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they
would ride him out of his Church on his own pulpit bannister. It can hardly be doubted that all
Reformers are bottomed upon the truth, more or less; and to the world at large are not reformers
almost universally laughing-stocks? Why so? Truth is ridiculous to men. Thus easily in my room do
I, conceited and garrulous, reverse the test of my Lord Shaftesbury.
It seems an inconsistency to assert unconditional democracy in all things, and yet confess a dislike
to all mankind––in the mass. But not so.––But it’s an endless sermon,––no more of it. I began by
saying that the reason I have not been to Lenox is this,––in the evening I feel completely done up,
as the phrase is, and incapable of the long jolting to get to your house and back.
(191)
Melville’s tone here is breezy, but his characterization of democracy is precise. He concedes that
his belief in democracy is both fixed and conflicted because it is captured in the paradox of assert-
ing total equality and selective preference at the same time. In laying claim to an idea of democ-
racy that is “ruthless,” he detaches it from pity, sentiment, partiality, and compromise to describe
it instead as a principle that moves between the personal and impersonal, irreducible to either
particularity or universality. Such a “ruthless” principle may be claimed as “mine,” but it cannot
be swayed by personal feelings of sympathy any more than it can be undone by a universal “dis-
like to all mankind––in the mass.” This is a democracy that is “unconditional” without being
given because it names that truth which appears most ludicrous to the world: the basic equality
of presidents and convicts. But as the ludicrous becomes truth and the truth ludicrous, so “ruth-
less democracy” entails Melville in a practice of ongoing action and articulation––“an endless
sermon”––through which he must constantly and “boldly” proclaim the equality of all that is
denied everywhere by everyone, and he must proclaim it not as a feeling but as a fact.
“Equality is not a fiction,” Rancière writes. “All superiors experience this as the most
commonplace of realities,” one to which all the ruses of legitimacy, rank, and authority testify as
long as power seeks to make inequality look like nature (Hatred 48). Because of this doubleness of
equality as a fact which is at once obvious and inadmissible, Melville may try to end the endless
sermon at the start of the letter, but he cannot. No mere digression on social niceties and the
“aristocracy of the brain,” the “ruthless democracy” that he describes turns out to be a process
without beginning or end. What governs this letter is neither the form of apology that opens it, nor
the details about the final push on “the Whale” that appear to occasion it. Instead, the letter itself
is driven by the process of planting, seeding, and growing that Melville claims has kept him away
from both Hawthorne and “the Whale” but which has come to twine all of these things together.
Put another way, the letter comes to perform what “ruthless democracy” names as it moves from
paragraph to paragraph, transforming as it gathers the most disparate of topics together––farming,
money woes, German Romanticism, theology, fame––and treating each of these as equally worthy
of serious thought and writing, none more deserving of partiality or preference than any other.
Melville thus pursues and extends his explanation of a principle that is both true and ludicrous,
both personal and impersonal, both ongoing and demanding, precisely through this meandering of
thought that is joined to the figure of grass that repeats throughout the letter. Biography, theology,
philosophy, and literature also become botany as the recurring figures of seeding, rooting, and
growing literalize the process of creative, egalitarian energy that ruthless democracy names.
On the circumstances of family and farm that pull him out of work on “the Whale,” he writes:
“The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose––
that, I fear, can never be mine” (191). On his dream of enjoying a tippling afterlife with Hawthorne:
“If ever, my dear Hawthorne, in the eternal times that are to come, you and I shall sit down in
Paradise … and if we shall by any means be able to smuggle a little 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… then, O my dear fellow-mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all
the things manifold which now so distress us” (191–92). On the belatedness of his intellectual
development after his twenty-fifth year: “I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian
pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in
English soil, grew to greenness, and then fell to mold. So I” (193). On the truth in what he called
the “flummery” of Goethe’s “genius” of “all feeling”: “You must often have felt it, lying in the grass
on a warm summer’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves
upon your head. This is the all feeling” (194). Unable to make the “silent grass-growing mood” his
own or to loaf in “celestial grass” with champagne and Hawthorne, Melville makes himself grassy,
becoming a seed that sprouts, “grows to greenness,” and goes to seed, only to lay himself down in
the grass, sprout once again, and concede some truth to Goethe. In this way, the grass that winds
its way through the disparate claims and thoughts of this letter models a process of sustaining
transformation that Melville cannot fully claim or direct, even as his prose enacts it.
Although it goes by the name of “ruthless democracy” in the opening of the letter and the “‘all
feeling” by its postscript, this process conforms to a specific political ontology that Melville
begins to tease out in his earliest novels, fully develops in Moby-Dick and Pierre, and pursues and
transforms across The Confidence-Man, Battle-Pieces, and Clarel. Key to this ontology is the linking
of abundant vegetable and animal life with multivalent senses and actions, both collective and
creative, that declare and fix particular truths and ludicrous sensations over and over again. This
is no simple assertion of a natural basis for democratic politics: for all of the grass that sprouts,
grows to greenness, and goes to seed in this letter, Melville makes an equally forceful case for the
work that remains necessary to his life, his politics, and above all his art––work that includes
endless sermons on equality, reveries in the grass on warm summer days, and all of his “botched”
books (191). Such work mirrors the process of vegetable life, in part, because the aesthetic and
political tasks that are necessary to “ruthless democracy” are endless. That is, “ruthless
democracy” involves a process that is recurrent and self-organizing, like the growth and going-
to-seed of grass, but it demands the constant effort of a “never-ending sermon” because there is
no decisive action or assertion that can fix equality on a permanent foundation even as the
equality of life manifests everywhere. This is why Ishmael, in evoking the “just Spirit of Equality”
in “Knights and Squires,” must nevertheless work to “weave… tragic graces” around “meanest
mariners, and renegades and castaways,” and to “touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal
light; and spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun” (MD 117). This is also why the narra-
tor of Pierre must combine the greens of natural verdure and chemical verdigris to describe “the
democratic element” and the process of transformation it accelerates as the work of nature and
art at once, “forever producing new things by corroding the old” (P 9).6 Melville’s ruthless
democracy is radical––and like Pierre, perhaps “a little too Radical altogether for your fancy”
(13)––precisely for the ways that it refuses the false choice between what is given and what is
made. Melville proposes instead that both art and democracy exist where creative actions partic-
ipate in and improvise alongside ongoing, self-organizing processes like the transformative
combination of substances or the seeding and growth of plants.7
Unplanted to the Last

Attending to this kind of creativity brings into focus a far more extensive archive of Melville’s
writing and thinking about democracy, one that moves beyond the usual touchstones of rebel-
ling sailors, kingly commons, and radical young aristocrats to capture the ways in which the
most basic elements of Melville’s aesthetics––experiments in figurative excess, perspectival
shifts, analogical transformations––also elaborate his ruthless democracy. Central to his formal
and aesthetic experimentation across his published work, this improvising creativity also mani-
fests in letters, marginalia, and journal notes. For example, in the summer before his grassy letter
to Hawthorne (and just after acquiring the copy of Mosses from an Old Manse that he would review
in August 1850), Melville took an agricultural tour of Western Massachusetts and, on the back
endpaper of his copy of David Dudley Field’s A History of the County of Berkshire, Massachusetts, he
turned the grasses of western Massachusetts into a list poem:8
Redtop.
Ribbon Grass.
Finger Grass
Orchard Grass
Hair Grass
6
For more on Melville’s use of plant metaphors throughout his writings, see also Tom Nurmi’s Chapter 37 in this
volume, “Verdure.”
7
William Connolly proposes such a relation between democracy and self-organizing processes, calling for “a more
militant democratic politics” to emerge from the entanglement of “differing degrees of creativity in the domains of
human culture, nonhuman force fields, and culture-nature imbrications” (Fragility 10).
8
Parker suggests he used the book semi-ironically, like a foreign traveler in the farmlands around Pittsfield and Great
Barrington (735–37).
Melville made copious notes throughout his copy of Field’s History of Berkshire, marking pages on
the region’s history of indigenous peoples, colonial settlement, and modern emigration; on
stories of famous figures and obscure anecdotes; and on accounts of the strange behaviors of ani-
mals, insects, and plants.9 But while the list of grasses echoes marks he made next to several
plant species in the chapter, “Catalogue of Plants,” it also stands at the end of the book as
something more deliberate than a simple mnemonic, an exercise in naming the grasses he knew
(Parker 737). Written on the verso endpaper facing his transcription of a Shaker poem on the rear
pasteboard that extols the “Valley of Berks,” the list includes both native North American grasses
(ribbon, finger, hair) and transplanted European and North African varieties (redtop and orchard).
In this, Melville both records the imbrication of artificial and natural processes in the fields of
the Berkshires and creates out of it a verbal pasture with elements of poetic play and composi-
tion. With the first and final lines comprising two feet and the middle lines of three each, there
is both symmetry and meter to the proliferation of the wild and the cultivated in this list, all of
which combines into an incantation to the creative possibilities of grass.
That grassy incantation in 1850 resonates through Melville’s letter to Hawthorne as he seeds
and roots his claims to ruthless democracy in art, philosophy, and farming. It spreads into Pierre
in the fields of amaranth that overtake the pastures of the Glendinning estate’s tenant farmers
and threaten the stability of the aristocratic rent-deed system.10 And that poetic invocation of
the wild and transplanted grasses of Berkshire further transforms in The Confidence-Man, mod-
eling a process of pluralizing combination and figurative transformation through which a forest
becomes a river which in turn becomes the constantly changing community of passengers on the
Fidèle:
As pine, beech, birch, ash, hackmatack, hemlock, spruce, bass-wood, maple, interweave their foliage
in the natural wood, so these varieties of mortals blended their varieties of visage and garb. A Tartar-
like picturesqueness; a sort of pagan abandonment and assurance. Here reigned the dashing and
all-fusing spirit of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the
most distant and opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan and confi-
dent tide.
(CM 15)
Melville’s analogy of trees, humans, and waters works by way of proliferation and transformation,
in which any question of what is symbolic figure and what is concrete ground is rendered moot.
The passage is just as much about the relations of “pine, beech, birch, hackmatack” etc., as it is
about the relations of Tartars and pagans and distant streams. All are equally involved in a pro-
cess through which every addition, every new relation, transforms the very being of a collective
entity, whether a forest, a river, or a people. Melville’s democratic grass has a long figurative
reach across his career, cropping up in unexpected texts decades after his Berkshire summers,
precisely because it functions less as a figure for something stable, like the people or the nation,
9
For example, the story of one bug who “eat its way out of a table” owned by a P.S. Putnam of Williamstown in 1806
undergoes further metamorphoses in “The Apple-Tree Table” (1856), becoming the test for an encounter between the
Greek philosopher Democritus and the New England theologian Cotton Mather.
10
See Roger Hecht’s reading of the amaranth and the Rent Wars in Pierre (140–42).
than as a meta-figure for the transformative accumulation that figuration and analogy illustrate
in Melville’s writing.
Melville is not the only American writer of the second half of the nineteenth century to
devise an experimental aesthetic process out of the creative possibilities of democracy and the
figurative bounty of grass. But the differences between the evolving functions of, say, Walt
Whitman’s democratic grass and Melville’s are instructive. Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass
opens with the loafing speaker “observing a spear of summer grass,” which generates the
child’s question and the poet’s explosion of answers. “What is the grass?” It is at once flag,
handkerchief, baby vegetable, hair, and hieroglyphic, but most of all is it common ground,
“growing among black folks as among white” (Leaves 1855, 24). Whitman’s radical egalitari-
anism is rooted in a shared foundation out of which democracy may flourish like prairie grass
so long as it is well planted by the poet. He makes the poet’s role as the planter of democracy
explicit three decades later in “For You, O Democracy”: “I will plant companionship thick as
trees along all the rivers of America, and along all the shores of the Great Lakes, and all over
the prairies.” The poet, “by the manly love of comrades,” sings and seeds the land so that
democracy (“ma femme”) will reunite the continent and “make inseparable cities” (Complete
Leaves, 115). Like Whitman’s grasses, Melville’s grasses figure democracy’s creative, plural-
izing, and equalizing drives; like Whitman, too, Melville imagines aesthetic, poetic work as
drawing from these drives and participating in this proliferation. But unlike Whitman’s poet,
Melville’s is no planter, and his democratic grass offers no firm ground. Instead (with apologies
to Ishmael), the fundamental trait of democracy across Melville’s writing is that it must remain
unplanted “to the last” (MD 264). As with Ishmael and the unpaintable whale, so with
Melville and democracy: both derive the most radical aesthetic possibilities from chasing after
all that cannot be fixed or founded, from ruthlessly offering figures and inventing forms to
answer that impossibility.
If Melville’s botanical figurations of ruthless democracy suggest a Whitmanesque process of
becoming equal, plural, and different in the 1850s, these same figures appear throughout his
poetry from the 1860s and 1870s in far graver tones precisely because he begins to grapple
directly with the experience of democracy’s groundlessness after the Civil War. Writing in the
context of one people that has dissolved and another that has not yet formed, Melville confronts
democracy’s radical meaning as a politics without permanent foundation. “Events,” Melville
writes in his “Supplement” to Battle-Pieces, “have not rounded themselves into completion…
there is an upheaval affecting the basis of things” (PP 181). But rather than abandoning the prin-
ciple and process of democracy, Melville’s tonal shift signals his increasing attentiveness to the
ways in which certain affects and dispositions belie and betray what is most radical and ruthless
in it. In “The Conflict of Convictions,” the third poem of Battle-Pieces, Melville stages something
like a war of political feeling as voices of idealist hope and cynic despair shout each other down:
“Yea and Nay–– / Each hath his say” (PP 11). The dueling voices trade images of “starry
heights” and “slimed foundations,” of twinkling lights and darkened tunnels, while the poem as
a whole turns a critical eye on the ways that particular figures carry determinate political affects
which in turn presuppose specific historical trajectories and outcomes. Melville even subjects his
once-sanguine figuration of grassy democracy to this critical view. As the poem takes a long his-
torical gaze across generations “inurned to pains” and the force of “strong Necessity” that “surges
and heaps Time’s strand with wrecks,” the figure of the people appears as a spreading grass that
bears false hope:
The People spread like a weedy grass,

The thing that they will bring to pass,
And prosper to the apoplex.
(PP 9)
Rather than growing out of common ground, the “weedy grass” figures the people as a force that
is both inexorable and temporary, bringing to pass what it wills and prospering “to the apoplex.”
That is, the people may spread and thrive on their expansion, but only up to the point where a
hidden hemorrhage strikes them down as a body from within. Such a vision of the people cannot
be greeted with hope because hope ignores how they may turn inward against themselves, but
neither can it be greeted with despair because despair ignores the possibility that such a self-
organizing power can always begin again and become something new.
If Melville’s poem plants democracy in no ground, it nevertheless clears space from which to
witness the failure of our most predictable political responses in the face of the unexpected. Jodi
Dean describes such an impoverished range of political affect as the “knot of hope and despair”
that has captured the future and absorbed it into a “field of already given political possibilities”
(76). In this poem––and indeed across all his writing––Melville helps us to slip this knot by
refusing the consolations of certainty that both idealism and cynicism offer. Melville’s ruthless
democracy pushes beyond Dean’s “knot of hope and despair,” beyond the captured politics of
“already given possibilities,” because it does not belong to politics as it is known but to what
Jacques Rancière calls “the politics of politics” which is always posing the question of who the
people are and how they rule. Also known as “democracy,” this politics appears when a people
collapses in apoplexy, when the founders flee, and when foundations are revealed to be chasms
because, Rancière argues, the “astonishing” meaning of democracy is that its only ground is “no
ground at all” (Dissensus 50). Perhaps none of Melville’s characters understands this better than
Ungar, the scarred and embittered ex-Confederate who shows up at the end of Clarel to argue
politics, history, and theology with his fellow-pilgrims:
“Ay, Democracy
Lops, lops; but where’s her planted bed?”
(C 4.19, ll. 126–27)
The answer lies at the core of Melville’s understanding of democracy: nowhere. The grass that
figures ruthless democracy in Melville’s letter to Hawthorne is not planted in any permanent
ground but grows sporadically wherever its seeds chance to land: it sprouts millennia and conti-
nents away from the Egyptian pyramids where it was entombed; it sends shoots into the earth
from human legs and leaves from sun-bathed heads; and it springs forth out of the silent moods
“in which man ought to compose.” With “ruthless democracy,” Melville proposes that the only
“bed” for such a political principle lies not in a founded people, past, or state but in the lived fact
of equality and the demand for creative, ongoing action to secure it amid perpetual, unpredict-
able change.
Works Cited
Berthold, Dennis. American Risorgimento: Herman Melville Melville, Herman. “Melville’s Marginalia in David
and the Cultural Politics of Italy. Ohio State UP, 2009. Dudley Field’s History of Berkshire.” Melville’s
Connolly, William. The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Marginalia Online.
Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Milder, Robert. Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We
Duke UP, 2013. Imagine. Oxford UP, 2006.
Dean, Jodi. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Rancière, Jaques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics.
Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Duke UP, Translated by Steven Corcoran. Continuum Press,
2009. 2010.
Derrida, Jacques. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Translated ———. Hatred of Democracy. Translated by Steven
by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford Corcoran. Verso, 2014.
UP, 2005. Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The
Dimock, Wai-Chee. Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville.
Poetics of Individualism. Princeton UP, 1989. Oxford UP, 2011.
Fredricks, Nancy. Melville’s Art of Democracy. U of Georgia Rogin, Michael. Subversive Genealogy: The Art and Politics
P, 1995. of Herman Melville. U of California P, 1985.
Greiman, Jennifer. “Militant, Ruthless, Round: Herman Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 1,
Melville, William Connolly, and the Aesthetics of 1819–1851. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
Radical Democracy.” REAL: Yearbook of Research in Taylor, Astra. Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It
English and American Literature, vol. 35, 2019, When It’s Gone. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt, 2019.
pp. 207–20. Weaver, Raymond. Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic.
Hecht, Roger. “‘Mighty Lordships in the Heart of the George Doran, 1921.
Republic’: The Anti-Rent Subtext to Pierre.” A Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Complete Edition. Signet
Political Companion to Herman Melville, edited by Jason Classics, 1980.
Frank. U of Kentucky P, 2013, pp. 141–61. ———. Leaves of Grass: The Original 1855 Edition. Dover
James, C. L. R. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways. Thrift Editions, 2007.
Dartmouth College Press, 2001. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and
Lefort, Claude. Democracy and Political Theory. Translated Society. Oxford UP, 2015.
by David Macey. Polity Press, 1991. Yothers, Brian. Melville’s Mirrors: Literary Criticism and
Matthiessen, F. O. The American Renaissance. Oxford UP, America’s Most Elusive Author. Camden House, 2009.
1968.
33
Melville and Masculinity
Ellen Weinauer
From first to last, in fiction and in poetry, Melville explored the expectations, mores, and codes
that were associated with being a man in the United States. Indeed, it would be hard to find a
text across the Melville corpus that did not, on some level, speak to and engage what Mark C.
Carnes and Clyde Griffen have called “Meanings for Manhood.”1 Melville examined such mean-
ings always and everywhere, whether depicting the relations between men on shipboard or the
soldiers whose young lives are stolen by the Civil War; a son’s cataclysmic break from his father’s
legacy or a man’s efforts to preserve his household arrangements against the modernizing efforts
of his wife; a master-at-arms’s hostility toward a beautiful young sailor or a questing youth’s pil-
grimage to the Holy Land.
The question of what it means to be a man might be seen to be an almost overdetermined one
for Melville. To say that his life spans a critical period of change in regard to gender roles and
expectations would be a profound understatement. These changes are themselves rooted in the
dizzying shifts taking place in virtually all sectors in the early nineteenth-century United States,
a period in which, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg explains, “three massive revolutions—the
commercial, transportation, and industrial—swept through American society” (79). Both facil-
itated by and further fueling market capitalism, these revolutions disrupted the traditional social
patterns associated with primarily rural, preindustrial socio-economic structures. Although the
United States remained fundamentally rural, across New England and along the eastern seaboard
1
This phrase serves as the book title for an important 1990 collection of essays that surveys how nineteenth-century
white manhood is constructed and experienced in a variety of spheres, including the home and the workplace. For other
studies of manhood and/or gender role formations in the US culture, see Smith-Rosenberg; Rotundo; and Kimmel.
Melville and Masculinity 411
in particular, cities blossomed as work began to shift away from farms and artisanal sectors into
factories, offices, and mercantile systems.2
Family structures, along with the gender roles that underwrote them, were radically altered as
a result of these changes. Especially for those in the white middle class, “work” became increas-
ingly defined as wage-earning activity that was performed by men outside the home, in a highly
competitive and volatile domain. Thus, new models of and expectations for white manhood
emerged—based, as David Leverenz explains, “much more exclusively in work and entrepre-
neurial competition” (74). In short, as the century progressed, an earlier “patrician paradigm,”
one that defined manhood in terms of “property, patriarchy, and citizenship” (Leverenz 78),
increasingly gave way to a new paradigm, a “reigning model of manhood” defined “by unceasing
self-reliant competition” (Herbert 76). Of course, as both Herbert and Leverenz note, with
unceasing competition comes unceasing anxiety. “In a world of much greater mobility and com-
petition,” Leverenz observes “manhood becomes a more intense anxiety” (74); the new “self-re-
liant American masculinity,” Herbert writes, is “stress-laden” (64). Adding to such anxieties was
the growing ferment over women’s rights and authority, within both the private and the public
domain. The 1840s and 1850s saw monumental changes in laws regarding married women’s
ownership rights, for example, along with efforts to gain for women additional protections in the
domestic sphere and new rights in the public domain. With such changes came new questions
about the definitions of “femininity” and “masculinity,” “womanhood” and “manhood”—terms
that began to look far less fixed and grounded in nature than they had once appeared.
Born into this period of “relentless change and uncertainty” (Smith-Rosenberg 89), Melville
was introduced early on to the perils of failing to live up to masculine ideals. In 1832, when
Melville was just 12 years old, his father died after a series of failed business ventures, leaving the
family insolvent and financially precarious from that point forward. Melville thus perceived from
a young age the traumatic consequences of failing to satisfy masculinity’s terms—consequences
he tried to avoid by eventually seeking out a number of practical careers, including clerking,
teaching, surveying, and, of course, going to sea. Writing was not such a career—certainly not
in the mid-nineteenth century, when it was all but impossible to make a living as a professional
author. Thus, while the 1846 publication of Typee established him as a writer of import, Melville
would spend his life struggling to provide for his family, often relying on the financial support
of his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, and others to keep his household afloat. Nor did the act of
writing itself—requiring what Melville called, in a letter to Hawthorne, the “silent grass-grow-
ing mood” (Corr 191)—fulfill the manly requisites of noisy, competitive striving.3 Eventually,
after largely forgoing published authorship, Melville settled into a post as a US customs inspector
in New York, a position he held for nearly twenty years. Yet even this position paid only a
2
This broad-stroke survey does not, of course, deal with slavery’s development or the ways in which the institution of
slavery shapes social, economic, and political developments in the nineteenth-century US; nor does this chapter explore
the considerably complex ways in which gender role formation in general, and in Melville’s work in particular, is shaped
by cultural attitudes toward race and by the institution of slavery itself. I attempt throughout to acknowledge the
limits of my analysis by specifying that it is white, middle-class masculinity with which the chapter is concerned.
3
Melville uses this phrase in a letter that draws a distinction between the sort of writing that pays and the sort of
writing that Melville feels himself called to do: “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,––it will not pay. Yet,
altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches” (Corr 191).
412 Ellen Weinauer
pittance, and the family continued to rely on Elizabeth Shaw Melville’s inheritance and other
gifts. It would be fair to suggest that Melville never fully satisfied the prevailing terms of white,
middle-class manhood.
Given these cultural and personal contexts, then, it should come as no surprise that Melville’s
work explores the meaning of masculinity in a variety of settings: on a whaler and a naval frigate,
in wartime, in the South Seas, in the world of Wall Street. Across Melville’s corpus, his writing
resists the idea that manhood should, or even can, have a singular meaning—a notion that is
reflected in the rich and lively body of scholarship that has emerged around the question of
Melville and masculinity. In recent years, for example, critics have studied the ways in which
Melville’s work embraces non-normative sexualities, registers an awareness that gender expres-
sion varies across cultures, experiments with transgressive relationships, and depicts manhood’s
strictures as deforming and destructive.4 Although Melville was long understood to be a writer
little concerned with domestic matters, critics have begun to recognize Melville’s home spaces
and investigate how men and women live out their gendered identities within them, beginning
with Pierre (1852) and into the magazine fiction that followed.5
In light of antebellum periodical culture, Melville’s turn to the domestic is not surprising.
Seeking subscribers among the growing middle-class audience, Harper’s and Putnam’s—the mag-
azines in which Melville published fourteen pieces between 1853 and 1856—catered to their
interests. One such interest was the rapidly changing domestic domain. As Sheila Post-Lauria
and Graham Thompson have shown, Melville was a shrewd negotiator of the antebellum maga-
zine culture in which, as both reader and writer, he was fully engaged.6 It is in this context that
I will consider a pair of loosely linked texts that Melville published just three months apart in
Putnam’s—“I and My Chimney” (March 1856) and “The Apple-Tree Table” (May 1856).
Commending “I and My Chimney” to Putnam’s publisher J.H. Dix, editorial adviser George W.
Curtis called it “a capital, genial, humorous sketch by Melville, thoroughly magazinish” (qtd. in
Leyda 507). One of the elements that makes this (and its companion) sketch so “magazinish,” I
submit, is its careful anatomy of domestic relations and the gender roles on which they rely—
topics to which Putnam’s gave a great deal of attention. Putnam’s provides Melville with an apt
venue to explore one of his most abiding themes—what does it mean to be a man?—in the
specific context of domesticity.
4
To give full attention to this long and lively critical history would take more than my allotted space in this chapter.
Important studies in this domain are, in addition to Douglas and Leverenz: Robert K. Martin; Person, Aesthetic
Headaches and “Melville’s Cassock”; Wiegman; Penry; and a number of essays in Argersinger and Person. A landmark
study is Renker’s Strike through the Mask, which addresses the fraught gender politics of the Melville household. Renker
brings to the surface an often-overlooked episode in Melville’s biography: the fact that his wife contemplated leaving
him, possibly because he abused her. Further treatment of Melville’s depiction of and engagement with women can be
found in Schultz and Springer. For studies that train our focus on how race shapes Melville’s attention to masculinity,
see Ellis; and Otter.
5
For an important treatment of Pierre in this context, see Kelley.
6
In Chapter 21 of this volume (“Melville and Periodical Culture”), for example, Thompson documents the shaping role
that periodicals played in Melville’s life and work, noting that by the time Melville turned to magazine publication, he
was deeply versed in the conventions and expectations of periodical literature; see also Thompson, “‘Bartleby’ and the
Magazine Fiction” and Herman Melville Among the Magazines; and Post-Lauria, Correspondent Colorings. Regarding Melville’s
familiarity with Putnam’s in particular, Sealts notes that, while personal subscription information is unknown, “a portion
of Melville’s Piazza Tales (1856) was set from Putnam’s Magazine sheets in his possession” (MMO, Sealts No. 413).
Launched in January of 1853, Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science, and Art
entered an increasingly crowded magazine market with a rival, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,
in its sights. Post-Lauria explains that, from the beginning, Putnam’s was intended to offer “a
direct contrast to the political conservatism and sentimentalism of Harper’s Magazine” (177). In
addition, while Harper’s often reprinted (indeed, frequently pirated) British texts, Putnam’s
focused on serving American audiences with American fare. Putnam’s also sought to provide what
editor Charles Frederick Briggs called “running commentary upon the countless phenomena of
the times as they rise” (“Introductory” 2), whether at home or abroad, from an explicitly American
point of view. Among the “phenomena of the times” that Putnam’s saw fit to address quite spe-
cifically were the changing roles of men and women in the antebellum home. Between January
and July of 1856, for example, Putnam’s published, in addition to “I and My Chimney” and “The
Apple-Tree Table,” a number of texts that explicitly treat courtship and marriage, including “My
Wife and I,” “The Ring,” and “Young Love” (all poems); a story entitled “How I Courted Lulu”;
and “Owlcopse,” a three-part story about a buoyant young woman who withers away and dies
after marrying into a rigid reformer’s family.
Putnam’s may have rejected sentimentalism and political conservatism in some areas, but in
the domain of marriage and family, it seems to reflect more cautious views. “Cater[ing] to the
concerns of the growing ranks of upper-middle-class men,” Milette Shamir asserts, the magazine
featured articles that “argued against women’s rights from a masculine perspective”—articles
like “A Word for Men’s Rights,” which Shamir calls a “stringent defense of masculine power
against the perceived threats of feminine insurgency” (80). “A Word for Men’s Rights”—some-
times seen as the originating text for the “men’s rights” movement—provides critical background
for what I take to be the subversive treatment of masculinity in “I and My Chimney” and “The
Apple-Tree Table.”
Addressed primarily to men, this “defense of masculine power” highlights some of the many
anxieties and stressors associated with manhood in the antebellum period.7 “A Word for Men’s
Rights” is especially interested in the laws governing rights and responsibilities in marriage. As
the roles of white men and women shifted, so too did the marital laws that largely governed their
relations. Beginning in the 1830s, states debated the economic, procedural, and social efficacy of
marital law; of special concern was the common law principle of coverture—the absorption of
the married woman into her husband—and the loss of property and procedural rights that fol-
lowed from it. Motivated first by the financial disasters of 1837, states began to chip away at that
principle, offering married women more protections and procedural rights than previously
allowed. Mississippi led the way in 1839, with many states following suit not long after. By the
late 1840s, both Massachusetts and New York—Melville lived in both states, and Putnam’s was
based in New York—had revised the statutes governing married women’s property.
Published in February of 1856, “A Word for Men’s Rights” takes note of this social and
legislative fervor: “Almost all our state legislatures are at work, with more or less diligence and
enthusiasm, modifying their statute books, under the influence” of a “new zeal” for “woman’s
rights” (208). “To that,” the author assures his readers, “we do not object. Putnam is for reform.
Putnam is for progress. Putnam is for woman’s rights” (208). But then, striking what we would
7
Though at one point the author acknowledges the essay’s potential “female readers,” he also concedes that it is unlikely
that “a single female [reader] has had patience and temper to follow us thus far” (209).
414 Ellen Weinauer
today call an “all lives matter” note, the piece goes on: Putnam is “also for man’s rights—for
everybody’s rights; and, in that spirit, we are going to offer a few hints to our legislators, whose
vaulting zeal, on behalf of the ladies, seems a little in danger of overleaping itself” (208). In an
attempt to cool this “vaulting zeal,” the essay tries to prove that new laws have placed the mar-
ried man in an inconsistent and indeed “impossible” position. In the common law tradition on
which the laws governing marriage in the United States were primarily based, the “heavy obli-
gations” imposed on husbands were “very logically and reasonably” reinforced by “corresponding
powers and authority” (209). Unfortunately, “A Word for Men’s Rights” insists, the new marriage
statutes have retained all of a husband’s obligations but diminished his “corresponding powers,”
leaving married men in an “absurd and anomalous position” (210).
The essay details a number of alleged anomalies: although he is held responsible for her
behavior, a husband “cannot lay his finger on his wife in the way of chastisement”; if she leaves
him, he “has no means of compelling her to return,” and if he “attempts to lock her up, she can
sue out her habeas corpus, and oblige him to pay the expenses of it”; she has gained control of
wages and property, but he is still held responsible for her debts; if she beats him [sic!] and he
sues for redress, he has to pay the fine (210).8 Discussing the very statutes about which “A Word
for Men’s Rights” complains, legal historian Linda Speth has observed that the revised marital
property laws emerging in this period left women in an “economic and procedural limbo” (71).
In a perverse inversion, “A Word for Men’s Rights” suggests that it is men, not women, who
have been so affected: while the wife has been “rendered to a great extent independent of her
husband, he, by a strange inconsistency, is still held, both by law and public opinion, just as
responsible for her as before” (210). With all the responsibilities but none of the prerogatives, the
“American husband” has been turned into “a logical impossibility, required to fly without wings,
and to run without feet” (210); he is a “mere chimera” (209), a “legal monster” (210).9 “A Word
for Men’s Rights” repeatedly insists on its embrace of progress, declaring that “We have no
objection to an amendment of the law in relation to husband and wife. Public opinion demands
it. The progress of society requires it” (210). This progressive claim is belied, however, by the
wistful nostalgia with which the essay reckons the loss of male power and authority.
Published just a month after “A Word for Men’s Rights,” “I and My Chimney” appears to be
equally concerned about “independent” women and disempowered husbands. The narrator of “I
and My Chimney” makes this theme explicit, complaining that he has been “insensibly stripped by
degrees of one masculine prerogative after another” (PT 362–63) by his wife. With characteristic
density of allusion, linguistic play, and bawdy innuendo, “I and My Chimney” recalls the narrator’s
efforts to preserve his grand, “old-fashioned” chimney (353) against the depredations of his enter-
prising wife and daughters, who want to remove it in the interest of modernizing their country
home. Given this basic plot and the bald symbol at its center, it is no wonder that the story is most
8
Another bête noir for the author of “A Word for Men’s Rights” is breach of contract suits: the law, he complains, “seeks
to entrap us into matrimony against our inclinations, by holding … that any man who shows signs of having been
impressed by a woman, becomes, if she is single, her lawful prize, and is bound to marry her if she insists upon it, or
else—stand a suit for breach of promise” (210).
9
There are striking echoes here of the rhetoric deployed by those in favor of increasing property protections for married
women; in his important Essays on Human Rights and Their Political Guarantees, for example, New York Supreme Court
Judge Elisha P. Hurlbut wrote that marital law made the married woman a “monster … whom nature disowns, a
fictitious being, breathing a legal, not a moral atmosphere” (146).
commonly read as a narrative of masculinity under siege—more parodic, perhaps, but of a piece
with the besieged masculinity depicted in “A Word for Men’s Rights.”10 But a closer look reveals
a more complex treatment of masculinity, one that ultimately rejects as unhealthy an obsession
with masculine power and the loss of manly prerogatives in the modern moment.
Early on, “A Word for Men’s Rights” observes skeptically that “the women have discovered, or
think they have, that they are, and long have been tyrannized over, in the most brutal manner, by
society, the laws, and their husbands” (208). Melville’s narrator expresses similar skepticism about
where the power lies in antebellum marriage. He notes all the ways in which his wife lords it over
him. In his own home, the narrator observes, “I have little authority to lay down”; not only does his
wife embrace the “principle that certain things belong of right to female jurisdiction” (362)—a
glancing reference to separate spheres ideology—but she has encroached on the domain of mascu-
line jurisdiction as well: one day, he discovers “fresh deposits of mysterious boards and timbers” on
the property (363). When he queries his wife about them, she answers “with a pitying smile”:
“Why, old man, don’t you know I am building a new barn? Didn’t you know that, old man?” (363).
And this, he notes wryly, is the “lady that was accusing me of tyrannizing over her” (363).
Throughout this story, the wife is associated with a kind of energetic power that the narrator
lacks. He admits to being a “dozy old dreamer” (360) who “take[s] to oldness in things,” his
chimney most importantly; she, by contrast, “takes to nothing but newness”—from “new cider
in autumn” to “Swedenborgianism,” from a “new course of history” to “young company,” from
“all sorts of salads and spinages” to “set[ting] out young suckers in the orchard” (361–62). As
Vincent Bertolini notes, the narrator “values aristocratic social relations of dominance and sub-
servience, playing the ministering subject to the king, his chimney”; by contrast, his wife is “a
restless projector, builder, and transformer” who “incarnates the energy and diversity of
Jacksonian America” (723). Her obsession with taking down the chimney is simply of a piece
with this embrace of Jacksonian “newness”; the narrator’s wife and daughters “want the house
redesigned along the recent convenient proto-suburban pattern, best suited to feminine needs
and ideals,” Ann Douglas explains (317).11 The “battle over the chimney” thus “symbolizes” not
simply a contest between old and new but also a “contest over the patriarchal foundations of
American social life” (Bertolini 724).12
10
See, for example, Allison, who argues that “I and My Chimney” “advocates a rhetoric of evasion and resistance against
forces of cultural innovation that threaten the self and the symbolic extensions of the self” (17); and Slater, for whom
the domestic environment in both “I and My Chimney” and “The Apple-Tree Table” is a “hostile” one that works
against “personal development” and imaginative exploration (273). Drawing on queer theory, Simonsen explores the
“embattled identity of the narrator” in terms of erotic desire and a “disavowal of the feminine orifice in favor of the
masculine” (38).
11
In Douglas’s reading, Melville becomes increasingly hostile to a female reading audience that doomed his efforts to
embrace and write about “a genuinely political and philosophical life” (294). Along with numerous other texts, “I and
My Chimney” reflects Melville’s “antipathy to domesticity” (318) and the sentimentalism that underwrites it. In a
reading more aligned with my own, Sarah Wilson argues that, across its corpus, Melville’s work embraces “gender
flexibility” (81) and resists rigid constructions of domestic space that limit such flexibility for men and women. Wilson
examines “I and My Chimney” and a number of other texts in the context of nineteenth-century architectural design.
12
For Shamir, “I and My Chimney” is part of a cultural conversation regarding the right to privacy in the antebellum
home. In her reading, the story both “fret[s] over the disappearance of one model of manhood” and “dramatizes the
ascension” of a new model that is based on “the right to be alone” (84).
416 Ellen Weinauer
As represented by the narrator, however, those “foundations” hardly seem fruitful or prom-
ising. The narrator insists that, by attempting to preserve his chimney against attacks by his wife
and daughters—along with those of a mason, Scribe, whom they enlist in their schemes to
remove the chimney—he is taking a stand for old-fashioned sociality, for the power of the hearth
to inspire deep reflection, and against the false notions of progress encouraged by the market. Yet
the narrator also admits that, while his wife is characterized by a “very vernal young soul” (362)
and an “unwarrantable vitality” (361), he is aging, “rather obese” (353), and troubled by sciatica,
which sometimes leaves him “as crippled up as any old apple tree” (360).13 This self-proclaimed
“good-for-nothing” loafer (363) is so profoundly lazy that he will, “out of a sabbatical horror of
industry …, on a week day, go out of my road a quarter of a mile, to avoid the sight of a man at
work” (360–61). It is perhaps no wonder that his industrious wife has “frequently made me
propositions to take upon herself all the responsibilities of my affairs” (362); after all, someone
has to keep the household running.
All of this the narrator explains with a knowing and disarming wink. His genial, playful admis-
sions suggest that he is fundamentally untroubled by his failure to conform to antebellum gender
codes or by his wife’s “manly” behaviors and qualities. Yet how, then, to explain his obsession with
the chimney, with its meanings and, indeed, its very foundation? He reports that “very often” he
goes into the cellar to “survey” the “vast square of masonry” that is the chimney’s base: “I stand
long, and ponder over, and wonder at it” (357). He is so desirous of solving the mysteries at the
chimney’s core that “one day—when I was a little out of my mind, I now think, … I set to work,
digging round the foundation” (357). When he is unceremoniously interrupted at his digging by
a neighbor, he sounds more like one of Edgar Allan Poe’s disturbed obsessives than the urbane
“grey-headed old smoker” (352) he presents himself as being. “Gold digging, sir?” the neighbor
asks teasingly. “‘Nay, sir,’ answered I, starting, ‘I was merely—ahem!—merely—I say I was merely
digging—round my chimney’” (358). So obsessed is the narrator with his chimney, and so paranoid
about its potential destruction that, we learn at the end of the tale, he has refused to leave his house
for seven years in order to keep constant watch. Again, this may be a nod to Poe, whose “accounts
of persons bricked up in walls, hidden under floorboards, or jammed in chimneys,” Kenneth
Silverman has written, create a “mythology of enclosure, constriction, and victimization” (228).
“I and My Chimney” offers us, beneath its winking surface, just such a narrative of “enclosure,
constriction, and victimization.” And although the narrator would have us believe that he is
forced into such “enclosure” by his wife and the superficial market culture with which he asso-
ciates her, the story suggests otherwise. When describing how the structure of his home is deter-
mined by the chimney, the narrator observes that “Going through the house, you seem to be
forever going somewhere, and getting nowhere. It is like losing one’s self in the woods; round
and round the chimney you go, and if you arrive at all, it is just where you started” (364).
13
Critics have long found much that is biographical in “I and My Chimney.” For Sealts, for example, the story “is
Melville’s subtle comment on a major spiritual crisis of his life” (142)—namely, his family’s efforts to determine
whether he was mentally ill. Melville’s aging and exhaustion, his sciatica, his fondness for the chimney at Arrowhead,
his frustrations with the rapacious literary market—represented in the story by Scribe—have also been seen to figure
in the tale. In this light, the story could be seen to reflect a true crisis of masculinity, one brought on by artistic failures
and by Melville’s inability to provide for his family (an inability rendered complexly in the tale by the narrator’s refusal
to do anything but dream and protect his chimney). Occluded in this reading, however, is that the story documents and
critiques the narrator’s obsessive unraveling.
Obsessed with his chimney, the narrator is “getting nowhere”; lost in the forest of male anxiety,
he figuratively bricks himself in so that he can keep perpetual watch over his “prerogatives.”
Thus, while “I and My Chimney” appears to be in keeping with “A Word for Men’s Rights,”
the narrative of self-immurement that lies beneath its surface suggests a more complex engage-
ment with the idea of besieged masculinity. According to “A Word for Men’s Rights,” legislative
progress has turned husbands into anomalies, powerless and chimerical. But “I and My Chimney”
shows that men can make themselves anomalous by refusing to move forward. Self-limiting and
self-obsessed, they go “round and round” in a past that they cannot escape and refuse to abandon.
Indeed, the narrator is locked into a binary of resistance that seems limiting: “Content with the
years that are gone, taking no thought for the morrow, and looking for no new thing from any
person or quarter whatever, I have not a single scheme or expectation on earth, save in unequal
resistance to the undue encroachment of hers” (361). It is hard to read the text as an endorsement
of such obsessive and oppositional stasis. In the end, then, “I and My Chimney” portrays men not
so much as victims of “feminine insurgency” (Shamir 80) but as entrapped by a paranoid nos-
talgia for lost forms of patriarchal power and control.14
Published in Putnam’s two months after “I and My Chimney,” “The Apple-Tree Table, Or,
Original Spiritual Manifestations,” also explores gender role expectations in the domestic
domain. The story makes use of the same family structure (and even some of the same characters)
that we get in “I and My Chimney”—a structure that we also encounter in “Jimmy Rose,” a
slightly earlier story published in Harper’s.15 “The Apple-Tree Table” has an unnamed narrator
husband/father who is old-fashioned in his tastes, a pragmatic and enterprising wife, two daugh-
ters named Anna and Julia, and a servant named Biddy. While “The Apple-Tree Table” is set in
a different locale (“a very old house in an old-fashioned quarter of one of the oldest towns in
America” [PT 378]) and is much broader, even farcical, in its humor, its central plot device is
largely the same: like “I and My Chimney,” “The Apple-Tree Table” centers on an ancient
domestic object—in this case, a “necromantic little old table” (378)—that focuses the attention
of and wreaks havoc on the household. The narrator has retrieved this table from his attic, deter-
mining that it can serve a number of useful household functions: it will be a “nice little breakfast
and tea-table”; is “just the thing for a whist table”; and will also “make a famous reading-table”
(381). But once the table is granted “an honorable position in the cedar-parlor” (381), chaos
ensues. From his foray to the attic, the narrator has also retrieved Cotton Mather’s Magnalia
Christi Americana, an “ecclesiastical history” of the New England colonies that treats, among
other subjects, the Salem witchcraft crisis and the trials that followed. Late one night, while por-
ing over Mather’s “detailed accounts of New England witchcraft” (382)—Mather is, it should be
noted, a true believer in demonic possession—the narrator is alarmed by a “faint sort of inward
rapping or rasping,” a “sort of ticking” coming from the table (383). His self-possession com-
pletely lost (“My hair felt like growing grass,” he admits [383]), he retreats to bed, where his
14
Henton has similarly observed that “It is the narrator, not his wife and daughters, who is myopic, insular, rooted in
the past and incapable of change or flexibility”; for Henton, there is “something deeply engaging and even redemptive
about the progressive model of femininity so enthusiastically embodied by the narrator’s wife and daughters” (273).
15
“Jimmy Rose” was published in November of 1855. Space does not allow me to discuss this story at length. However,
the story’s treatment of its titular character, a “ruined man” (339) whose business failures leave him destitute and reliant
on handouts and charity, and the narrator’s fascination with Rose’s losses and legacy represent another exploration into
the meanings of antebellum manhood.
418 Ellen Weinauer
wife accuses him of drinking too much. But the next morning, the whole family has heard the
ticking, and the household descends into disarray. A series of comic instances follows, culmi-
nating in a big reveal: the source of the ticking proves to be two beautiful bugs, which had lain
dormant for perhaps 150 years before eating their way through the wood and emerging, to the
amazement of all but the practical wife.16
Not surprisingly, “The Apple-Tree Table” is dense with allusions and thematically rich, but it
also engages the spiritualist movement that had emerged in 1848 and quickly gained a place in
the national imagination.17 “Spirits! spirits!” (385), the narrator’s daughters repeatedly exclaim,
convinced that the ticking sound is indeed an “original spiritual manifestation,” a communica-
tion from the dead to the living.18 In treating this theme, Melville again manifests his awareness
of the magazine culture for which he is writing: spiritualism was among the “phenomena of the
times” on which Putnam’s offered “running commentary.” Appearing in the same issue as “The
Apple-Tree Table,” for example, is “The Spirits in 1692, and What They Did at Salem,” an essay
that draws connections between the Salem trials, Cotton Mather, and the current spiritualist
craze—a craze the essay roundly condemns.19
In “I and My Chimney,” spiritualism is among the “phenomena of the times” to which the nar-
rator’s wife is attracted: she “has an itch,” the narrator says, for “the Spirit-Rapping philosophy”
(362). In “The Apple-Tree Table,” by contrast, the wife is a manifest skeptic: “For that spirits
should tick … was, to my wife, the most foolish of all foolish imaginations” (394). This difference
notwithstanding, the wife of “The Apple-Tree Table” evinces the same qualities of brisk, energetic
practicality that she does in the earlier tale. While the other members of the household, from the
narrator to the servant, live in a state of fear regarding the ticking table, she is entirely “exempt[]
from panic” (387). Dismissing their fears as “childish,” the wife determines to get to the bottom of
the mystery; until then, she states, the family will “breakfast on no table but this” (387).
Much of the story’s broad humor derives from this contrast between the wife’s business-like
practicality and the rest of the household’s emotional susceptibility. The story’s philosophical
poles are Mather and Democritus, the Greek philosopher who embraced scientific rationalism
over supernaturalism.20 The husband in this story notes that, while he pretends to be “pure
Democritus—a jeerer at all tea-table spirits whatever,” in truth he “oscillate[s] between
16
Here, Melville draws on a legendary incident—one that Thoreau also references in Walden—that he had likely
encountered in a number of texts addressing the history of New England and the Berkshires. For details, see Dillingham
341–44; and Newman 2–4.
17
See also Hannah Murray’s Chapter 8 in this volume on spiritualism in Pierre.
18
Examining “The Apple-Tree Table” in relation to a Putnam’s essay from 1854 entitled “Spiritual Manifestations,”
Thompson has recently asserted that Melville’s story “treads light-footedly between skepticism of the spiritualists and
skepticism of the logicians and scientists” (Herman Melville: Among the Magazines 152). Karcher reads the story as a satire
of the spiritualist movement, whereas Davidson sees the story’s satirical elements as “cover” for Melville’s profound
“thoughts on religion at a critical time in his life” (479).
19
“The Spirits in 1692” condemns Mather in no uncertain terms, calling him a “pedantic, painstaking, self-complacent,
ill-balanced man” (506) and warning that the spiritualist movement is characterized by the same superstitious and
dangerous credulity (511). I take up Melville’s engagement with spiritualism in “I and My Chimney” at greater length
in “Hawthorne, Melville, and the Spirits.”
20
Maurice Lee dismantles this binary, arguing that the “philosophical plot of ‘The Apple-Tree Table’ conjures a
complicated history of science” (62) and is consistent with Melville’s long-running interest in ways of knowing. Thus,
Lee challenges the view that this story is “a minor production more committed to dramatizing intellectual dualisms
than pursuing the great Art of Telling the Truth” (62).
Democritus and Cotton Mather” (394). His wife, however, is indeed “pure Democritus”; “indig-
nant” at the “lurking inquietude” of her family members (387), she mocks their lack of compo-
sure and their credulity. “The Apple-Tree Table” thus undercuts the common assumption in “A
Word for Men’s Rights” that “Women care nothing for logic” (210), and, as in “I and My
Chimney,” it is the wife who thinks practically and logically. But “The Apple-Tree Table” explic-
itly bends gender: “with authority in her eyes” (391), the wife looks more like a traditional hus-
band; the husband, aligned with his emotional, irrational daughters and female servant, looks
more like a traditional wife.
As I have elsewhere argued, this story can thus be read as a kind of “domestic carnivalesque,”
staging a gender role inversion that is at once playful and liberating (Weinauer 316). “The
Apple-Tree Table” lacks the anxiety of loss that characterizes both the narrator of “I and My
Chimney” and “A Word for Men’s Rights.” There is a feeling of salutary—even salvific—play
both in tone and in theme. In “I and My Chimney,” the narrator reports that he “very often”
descends into his “dark, damp” cellar to ponder his chimney’s foundations (357); early in “The
Apple-Tree Table,” by contrast, the narrator opens the skylight in his attic, emerging into the
“balmy air” as “from the gloom of the grave and the companionship of worms” (380). These
divergent movements—one down and in, another up and out—may be emblematic of different
responses to changing gender roles in the antebellum period. In a reading of “I and My Chimney,”
David Dowling refers to the “progressive, even radical vision” with which Melville treats “the
resituation of gender roles” (54); similarly, Sarah Wilson discusses Melville’s “prescient aware-
ness of the performative nature of gender” and the “fantasy of gender flexibility that unites much
of Melville’s work” (81). Like Dowling and Wilson, I see these texts as embracing a kind of open-
ness, a salutary and in many ways subversive flexibility regarding the nature of masculinity and
the terms by which male identity is defined. Perhaps this is not surprising in an author whose
corpus is replete with non-normative sexualities and transgressive relationships, an author whose
fiction and poetry repeatedly tally the costs of what we today call “toxic masculinity.” But exam-
ining how Melville injects this progressive model into the pages of Putnam’s illustrates another
way in which this always challenging author at once works within the expectations of his readers
and liberates them into new ways of thinking and being.
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February 1856, pp. 208–13. Monthly Magazine, January 1853, pp. 1–3.
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Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” South Central Review, Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian
vol. 13, no. 1, 1996, pp. 17–25. America. U of Chicago P, 1990.
Argersinger, Jana L., and Leland S. Person, editors. Davidson, Frank. “Melville, Thoreau, and ‘The Apple-
Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship. U of Tree Table.’” American Literature, vol. 25, no. 4, 1954,
Georgia P, 2008. pp. 479–88.
Bertolini, Vincent. “Fireside Chastity: The Erotics of Dillingham, William B. Melville’s Short Fiction, 1853–
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Literature, vol. 68, no. 4, 1996, pp. 707–37.
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Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. Otter, Samuel. Melville’s Anatomies. U of California P,
Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1988. 1999.
Dowling, David. “‘Parlors, Sofas, and Fine Cambrics’: Penry, Tara. “Sentimental and Romantic Masculinities in
Gender Play in Melville’s Narrations.” Leviathan: A Moby-Dick and Pierre.” Sentimental Men: Masculinity
Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2009, and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, edited by
pp. 37–54. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler. U of California P,
Ellis, Juniper. “Engendering Melville.” Journal of 1999, pp. 226–43.
Narrative Theory, vol. 29, no. 1, 1999, pp. 62–84. Person, Leland S. Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a
Henton, Alice. “Melville’s Comedy of Gender: The Battle Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne. U of
for Domesticity in ‘I and My Chimney.’” A Passion for Georgia P, 1988.
Getting It Right: Essays and Appreciations in Honor of ———. “Melville’s Cassock: Putting on Masculinity in
Michael J. Colacurcio’s 50 Years of Teaching, edited by Moby-Dick.” ESQ, vol. 40, no. 1, 1994, pp. 1–26.
Carol M. Bensick. Peter Lang Publishing, 2016, pp. Post-Lauria, Sheila. Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the
259–76. Marketplace. U of Massachusetts P, 1996.
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Hawthorne, edited by Richard H. Millington. 1996.
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Hurlbut, Elisha P. Essays on Human Rights and Their in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era.
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‘The Apple-Tree Table.’” American Quarterly, vol. 23, Sealts, Merton M., Jr. “Herman Melville’s ‘I and My
no. 1, 1971, pp. 101–9. Chimney.’” American Literature, vol. 13, no. 2, 1941,
Kelley, Wyn. “Pierre’s Domestic Ambiguities.” The pp. 142–54.
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Robert S. Levine. Cambridge UP, 1998, pp. 91–113. Antebellum American Literature. U of Pennsylvania P,
Kimmel, Michael S. Manhood in America: A Cultural 2006.
History. 2nd ed. Oxford UP, 2006. Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and
Lee, Maurice S. “Science, Philosophy, and Aesthetics in Never-ending Remembrance. Harper Collins, 1991.
‘The Apple-Tree Table.’” Melville’s Philosophies, edited Simonsen, Rasmus R. “Melville’s Chimney: Queer Syntax
by Branka Arsić and K. L. Evans. Bloomsbury, 2017, and the Rhetoric of Architecture.” Leviathan: A Journal
pp. 61–77. of Melville Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, 2015, pp. 26–40.
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34
Melville and Philosophy: Will, Agency,
and “Natural Justice”
Michael Jonik
Civilization, Philosophy, Ideal Virtue! Behold your victim!

Melville, Pierre (302)
Introduction
Herman Melville’s writing is marked by a consistent and complex engagement with the
philosophical tradition. While Ishmael might whimsically suggest tossing overboard the “thun-
der-heads” Locke and Kant to ensure the “boat float light and right” (MD 327), and Pierre’s Vivia
might call upon us to cast away the “chattering apes of a sophomorean Spinoza and Plato” (P 302),
nonetheless, Melville profoundly responds to philosophers from the Greeks to Schopenhauer, and
weaves a multitude of philosophical ideas and problems into his writing. He is deeply attuned to
how writers like Shakespeare, Goethe, Coleridge, Emerson, and Hawthorne perform singular types
of literary thinking and, at the same time, he develops a unique, thoughtful style that evades
classification as either only philosophy or literature. His writing dives deep into the thick of things,
probing the complex material relations that make up the world, that render the world thinkable or
knowable and yet, at the same time, inscrutable or unfinished—like the great Leviathan he details
in Moby-Dick, “unpainted to the last’’ (264). His young protagonist Clarel, in the poem that bears
his name, thus asks the question that goes to the core of Melville’s philosophical endeavor:
What may man know?

(Here pondered Clarel;) let him rule—
Pull down, build up, creed, system, school,
And reason’s endless battle wage,
Melville and Philosophy: Will, Agency, and “Natural Justice” 423
Make and remake his verbiage—

But solve the world! Scarce that he’ll do:
Too wild it is, too wonderful.
(C 4.3.107–13)
Melville’s writing bears relentless witness to this “too wild” and “too wonderful” world that
routs systems of philosophy and cherished beliefs. Though reticent in person, Melville struck his
contemporaries as an avid and intense philosophical conversationalist, as attested by his all-night
discussions about German metaphysics en route to Europe in 1849 with George Adler, his meet-
ing near Liverpool in 1856 with Hawthorne, who recalled how he characteristically “began to
reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything else that lies beyond human ken” (Hawthorne
432), or the reminiscence of Dr. Titus Munson Coan who visited Pittsfield as a student to discuss
his South Seas adventures, whereupon Melville instead “pour[ed] forth his philosophy and his
theories of life.” As Coan relates, “I managed to draw him out very freely on everything but the
Marquesas Islands, and when I left him he was in full tide of discourse on all things sacred and
profane. But he seems to put away the objective side of his life, and to shut himself up in this
cold north as a cloistered thinker” (qtd. Stedman xxiv).
In what is perhaps yet another making and remaking of our philosophical verbiage, recent
critical essays, monographs, and edited collections have sought to articulate anew the stakes of
Melville’s philosophical endeavor, amounting to a veritable renaissance in philosophically
inflected studies on him. These scholars, eschewing characterizations of him as a “cloistered
thinker,” have critically repositioned Melville in relation to the history of philosophy, to political
philosophy, and the philosophy of race, to aesthetics and the philosophy of language, and have
offered wide-ranging reconsiderations of his ontologies of matter or life.1 Melville, from a plu-
rality of perspectives and through his own distinct formulations of ideas, therefore has continued
to shed light on long-standing philosophical issues and to provoke the creation of new
philosophical concepts.
But rather than chart how Melville engages philosophy across his novels, shorter fiction, or
poetry, or how philosophers such as Deleuze, Derrida, Blanchot, Agamben, or Rancière2 have
drawn figures of thought from his work, here I will suggest that we can understand the relation
of Melville and philosophy through another philosophical question that he repeatedly poses, the
question of what it means to act. Perhaps all dramatic prose and poetry, at least implicitly, raises
1
For Elizabeth Duquette and K. L. Evans, far from casting the thunderheads overboard, Melville’s philosophical
writing is given to a complex nineteenth-century philosophical balancing of Locke and Kant. As Evans puts it, “Melville
understood his contemporary moment of philosophy as ‘stranded’ between ‘an empiricism derived from Locke,’” which
“teaches us that sensory experience shows us things as they really are” and “an idealism derived from Kant” which
“teaches that since the system of concepts in terms of which experience structures the world is provided by the mind,
real things are in principle inaccessible to human knowledge” (Evans 163; cf. Duquette 42). For Gilles Deleuze, in his
influential “Bartleby, or the Formula,” Melville announces a different philosophical direction toward a proto-Pragmatist
vision of a world in process (Deleuze 86). Jennifer Greiman deftly argues how Melville’s Pierre “makes literal the
processes of figuration and fabulation that are central to both literature and philosophy” (Greiman 147).
2
For comprehensive treatments of Bartleby and philosophy, see Branka Arsić’s Passive Constitutions, or, 7 1/2 times
Bartleby or Kevin Attell’s “Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis: Bartleby Among the Philosophers.”
424 Michael Jonik
this question, whether at the level of plot or narrative, character or even voice. And if fiction in
particular naturally lends itself to the philosophy of action, it is not hard to see how Melville’s
dramatic and historical plots hinge on characters’ acts: Tommo’s determined plan of action to
abandon the Dolly with Toby and remain among the Typee in Nuku Hiva; Ahab’s monomaniacal
quest to find Moby Dick and Quequeeg’s “running delivery” of Tashtego from a submerged sev-
ered whale’s head; Babo’s machinations to have Benito Cereno “act the part” (PT 64) of captain
and his own desperate leap to save his act of revolt from failure; or, the paralyzing inaction of
Pierre’s Hamlet-like indecision and Bartleby’s extreme non-preference for willing. Melville’s
characters thus prompt us to reconsider the contours of action. But the question of what it means
to act, in turn, raises broader philosophical questions, such as agency (Who or what can act? How
do multiple agencies inter-act in the guise of punctual actions?); volition, will, motivation, or
instinct (Why do we act? What impels us to act?), causality (What previous events make pos-
sible action and what are the consequences of an action?), and justice (Who is responsible for
actions and how might we reward or punish actions’ consequences?). We could perhaps reread
Melville’s corpus as a sustained philosophical dramatization of forms of action and the forms of
agency that construe action.
To see this better, I will first survey how Melville develops his philosophy of action across his
writing before turning in greater depth to explore how it culminates in his last great work,
Billy Budd. While readers of the novella have long debated whether to understand Billy’s
involuntary striking dead of his accuser Claggart and Vere’s decision to have him tried and exe-
cuted as Melville’s “testament of acceptance”3 of conservative political values or as a passage to
a subversive or emancipatory politics, I resituate the text as a complex and often ambiguous
meditation on questions of the will and unwilled action, intentionality and instinct, and
responsibility and justice. Diagramming Melville’s ontological scenography of action and
agency allows us to better understand how his work animates, on its own terms, the philoso-
phies such as those of the “thunderheads” Locke or Kant, or likewise Spinoza or Schopenhauer,
but also how he integrates and repurposes philosophy in a particular historical and literary
setting.
“Subtle Agencies”
While not usually classed among his so-called philosophical novels, such as Mardi, Moby-Dick,
Pierre, or The Confidence-Man, Melville’s early romance Typee nonetheless provides an inter-
esting entry point for thinking about Melville’s philosophy of action. As a novel of daring
leaps, exotic adventures, and narrow escapes—and counterpointed with extended ethnographic
meditations on the social conditions and habits of the Polynesians—it offers a range of descrip-
tions of motivations and actions. As Tommo and Toby traverse the rocky interior of the island,
however, it is not only their overtly willed acts that are at stake. To take just one instance, as
3
For useful discussions of this debate see John Wenke’s contribution in Chapter 15 of this Companion, or his early texts
“Melville’s Indirection: Billy Budd, the Genetic Text, and ‘the deadly space between’” or “Melville’s Transhistorical
Voice: Billy Budd, Sailor and the Fragmentation of Forms.”
Tommo is overcome with a feeling of “raging thirst” that “so completely deprives [him of the]
power to resist its impulses,” he cannot determine if he “was helplessly falling from the heights
above, or whether the fearful rapidity with which I descended was an act of my own volition”
(T 53). Although this moment is a minor one, by rendering the source of Tommo’s volition as
uncertain and given to the power of irresistible impulses, Melville raises questions about the
relation of the willing rational subject to the impersonal impulses that befall it and lead it to
act. Melville’s characters often find themselves in positions in which involuntary forces shape
their actions.
The novel’s explorations of action take on an ethnographic urgency as Tommo considers the
“enigma” of the Marquesans’ harmonious character and social condition. How could it be that
these “heathens! savages! ay, cannibals!,” he asks, ventriloquizing prototypical imperialist epi-
thets for indigenous peoples, can control their passions and regulate their actions to live so peace-
fully with one another?
It may reasonably be inquired, how were these people governed? how were their passions controlled
in their everyday transactions? It must have been by an inherent principle of honesty and charity
towards each other. They seemed to be governed by that sort of tacit common-sense law which, say
what they will of the inborn lawlessness of the human race, has its precepts graven on every breast.
… It is to this indwelling, this universally diffused perception of what is just and noble, that the
integrity of the Marquesans in their intercourse with each other, is to be attributed.
(T 200–1)
The inherent “integrity of the Marquesans” bespeaks a principled morality, one meant as an
ironic contrast to those putatively “enlightened” Anglo-European Christians who require the
law or a moral code, as hypostases of God, to govern or restrict their actions. Instead, the
Marquesans live in harmony without law courts, police, the Western legal provisions that man-
age “Christendom.” Tommo celebrates their “unanimity of feeling” and their lack of disagree-
ment: “[t]hey all thought and acted alike” and “showed this spirit of unanimity in every action
of life; everything was done in concert and good fellowship” (203).
Despite their admirable idleness—one that posits them as antipathetic to the imperatives of
profitable activity which drive capitalist modernity—when they do work, they present a spec-
tacle of collective action. Using the question of action as his basis, Melville redresses colonialist
prejudices against South Pacific indigenous peoples: the Typee are not characterized by a
“savage” accession to instinctual passions, but a natural control of their actions. While the
“mysterious” and “all-controlling power” of “taboo,” Tommo insists, does dictate their “minutest
transactions of life” and “every action” of their being, in the final analysis, they live satisfied
lives of general repose (T 221).4 They exemplify a Rousseauian model of polity in which the
autonomy of individuals is balanced with communal participation, and healthy physical activity
is undertaken in concert with nature. This balance of individual, collective, and natural action
is the root of their “continual happiness” (127). Indeed, Melville invokes Rousseau as he sug-
gests that their happiness “sprang principally from that all-pervading sensation which Rousseau
has told us he at one time experienced, the mere buoyant sense of a healthful physical existence”
4
See also Alex Calder’s extended consideration of the South Pacific context of taboo/tapu in Chapter 21 of this
Companion.
426 Michael Jonik
(127). For D. H. Lawrence, in Studies in Classic American Literature, Melville finds in the
Marquesans “Rousseau’s Child of Nature.” They are “gentle, laughing lambs compared to the
ravening wolves of his white brothers, left behind in America and on an American whaleship.
The ugliest beast on earth is the white man, says Melville. … It is true, the Marquesans were
‘immoral,’ but he rather liked that. Morality was too white a trick to take him in” (Lawrence
143). Yet Melville does not merely see in their social condition a seductive immorality as does
Lawrence, but indeed an alternate morality to the system of white Christian morality and a
model of natural justice which can exist without being “enforced by the statute-book” (T 203).
Typee, then, is not only an action-filled romance, but a romance in which the question of action
is posed in a variety of ways; it inaugurates the life-long questioning in Melville’s writing of the
relationship between will, agency, and natural justice.
While Typee may offer only brief philosophical excurses, in Mardi, Melville’s third novel,
he undertakes an extended metaphysical questioning of action. He offers a series of dialogic
philosophical reflections on volition, instinct, necessity, and free will—questions he had
encountered in his readings of eighteenth-century British empirical philosophy and Coleridge,
even before his later studies of German Idealism and Schopenhauer.5 To take just one example
from this expansive and complicated novel, in the chapter “Babbalanja Discourses in the
Dark,” Melville’s cast of Polynesian characters discuss the problem of action against the back-
drop of an oceanic calm. A restless sailor named Vee-Vee had sounded a conch-shell alarm
that reverberates across the quiet sea and startled everyone, including the paddler on whose
shoulders he was raised up. Vee-Vee loses his balance and falls, nearly breaking his arm.
Pausing to reflect on this turn of events, the philosopher Babbalanja asks King Media:
“... was there any human necessity for that accident?”

“None that I know, or care to tell, Babbalanja.”
“Vee-Vee,” said Babbalanja, “did you fall on purpose?”
“Not I,” sobbed little Vee-Vee, slinging his ailing arm in its mate.
“Woe! woe to us all, then,” cried Babbalanja; “for what direful events may be in store for us
which we can not avoid.”
“How now, mortal?” cried Media; “what now?”
“My lord, think of it. Minus human inducement from without, and minus volition from within,
Vee-Vee has met with an accident, which has almost maimed him for life. Is it not terrifying to
think of? Are not all mortals exposed to similar, nay, worse calamities, ineffably unavoidable?”
(M 424–25)
For Babbalanja, Vee-Vee’s accident reveals how it is not only individual human volition that
shapes action, but also unwilled or uninduced accidents. Media is skeptical that it could be
anything more than Vee-Vee’s congenital carelessness, but for Babbalanja, Media is thus a
Necessitarian, one who sees events are linked in a causally necessary way. Media, however,
rejects the label, conflating it with that of a Fatalist, which would be a “bad creed for a
monarch, the distributor of rewards and punishments” (425). For a monarch to pass sover-
eign judgment on subjects, that is, there must be the possibility of free choice and
5
For a discussion of Melville in relation to eighteenth-century British empiricism and Coleridge, see Jonik 2019.
Melville’s late study of Schopenhauer has been well documented. See for example Ohge; Dillingham 48–49; Cameron
196–99; Marrs 114–20; Hurh 160–68; and Jonik 2018: 230–35.
accountability beyond divine providence. But Babbalanja corrects him: “Confound not the
distinct. Fatalism presumes express and irrevocable edicts of heaven concerning particular
events. Whereas, Necessity holds that all events are naturally linked, and inevitably follow
each other, without providential interposition, though by the eternal letting of Providence’’
(428). At stake in this debate is the question of whether humans can act other than in a way
that is preordained by a divine Providence (thus able to be foreknown through prophecy). To
be responsible, however, one must have the ability to act in a way that it is not preordained.
Babbalanja, who champions the “right use of reason” as a form of instinct, will not settle for
an either/or relation between free will and necessity, and rather avers the possibility that the
two are reconcilable:
“Your Highness,” said Mohi, “this whole discourse seems to have grown out of the subject of
Necessity and Free Will. Now, when a boy, I recollect hearing a sage say, that these things
were reconcilable.”
“Ay?” said Media, “what say you to that, now, Babbalanja?”
“It may be even so, my lord.”
(429)
Despite Babbalanja’s allowance for a reconciliation of necessity and free will, Mardi rarely offers
settled philosophical positions. Its dialogues dramatize issues from multiple viewpoints and in
multiple voices. The discussion of the cause of Vee-Vee’s accident is consequently left unresolved:
it was neither a willed event nor one wholly attributable to a determinate, necessary causality. It
shows that action cannot necessarily be premised on the agency of a willing autonomous subject or
even a human individual. Instead it is often made manifest through a collectivity of personal and
impersonal or human and nonhuman agencies that shape action, if not make action possible at all.
In Moby-Dick and Pierre, in turn, Melville further probes human agency in relation to the
inhuman or impersonal agencies which serve as their submerged contexts: the “subtle agencies’’
that become wrought on Ahab (MD 126); the white whale as a “monomaniac incarnation of all
those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on
with half a heart and half a lung” (184); Ishmael’s sensation that “some invisible, gracious agency
preserved” him (283). Melville reformulates the question of free will he had raised in Mardi in
the chapter “The Mat-Maker” where he fleshes out necessity, free will, and chance against the
backdrop of another calm. Ruminating on the actions of the loom Ishmael, like Babbalanja, the-
orizes that chance, free will, and necessity are “all interweavingly working together,” a view that
philosophers call compatibilism:
The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course—its every alternating
vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads;
and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its
motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and
has the last featuring blow at events.
(215)6
6
For Maurice S. Lee, this moment represents when Melville first “interjects chance into the question of fate and free
will” in Moby-Dick (Lee 60).
428 Michael Jonik
In such “calm” moments of his novels or dramatic poems, Melville voices through characters like
Babbalanja, Ishmael, Pierre, the Confidence Man, or Clarel complex ideas or positions in ways
that often blur literary genres into philosophical dialogues or treatises. Such moments amount
not so much to breaks in the action as to reflexive meditations on the conditions of possibility of
action itself. In this passage, if necessity is an unswervable advance of events, it nonetheless pro-
vides a track across which free will can “freely” move, and a set of conditions in which chance
events can occur. Individual action, by consequence, is ontologically dependent on the “straight
warp of necessity” and given to the external blow of chance in the form of the external agencies
and natural forces that have their last say in the actualization of events. In “The Monkey Rope,”
Ishmael further realizes the dissolution of his own “individuality”: it has become “merged in a
joint stock company of two” with Queequeg, as if his free will “had received a mortal wound”
amidst an “interregnum in Providence” (320). His autonomous will is tangled amidst transindi-
vidual relations and extrinsic agencies, literalized by the ligatures of the monkey-rope. Pierre,
too, experiences dissolution of individuality as he attempts to lose himself in the “All-Feeling”
of a pantheistical oneness. Or, when deciding whether to open a letter that holds the secret of his
love and fate, he is torn by conflicting agencies: he seems “distinctly to feel two antagonistic
agencies within him; one of which was just struggling into his consciousness, and each of which
was striving for the mastery; and between whose respective final ascendencies, he thought he
could perceive, though but shadowly, that he himself was to be the only umpire” (P 63). Pierre’s
perception that he will be the “only umpire” proves false, however, as his search for the origins
and consequences of his actions leads only to more obscure causalities and ambiguous agencies.
If Pierre’s indecision reveals him to be riven by doubt and conflicting agencies, Bartleby’s
extreme will for non-preference takes willing itself to the point of negation. “Bartleby” thus
works as a parable for not only the dissolution of individuality and personhood, as many com-
mentators recently argued, but for how the will of another person can remain inscrutable to even
the most assiduous of interpreters. To understand why Bartleby acts the way he does, it is note-
worthy that the Lawyer turns for philosophical guidance to Jonathan Edwards’s Treatise on the
Will, a text that argues that God’s immanent providence preordains human action, and Joseph
Priestley’s Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity, which posits that deterministic natural laws foreclose
human free will and which Mardi’s characters also debate. At the same time, “Bartleby” is a par-
able of the Lawyer’s own divided will; we often find him agonizing over whether to act out
against Bartleby for his lack of action, or to let him off, thus repressing his own actions. Melville
relates the Lawyer’s fantasy of violent action against Bartleby to the sensationalistic 1842 murder
of Samuel Adams by John C. Colt in New York:
I was now in such a state of nervous resentment that I thought it but prudent to check myself at
present from further demonstrations. Bartleby and I were alone. I remembered the tragedy of the
unfortunate Adams and the still more unfortunate Colt in the solitary office of the latter; and how
poor Colt, being dreadfully incensed by Adams, and imprudently permitting himself to get wildly
excited, was at unawares hurried into his fatal act—an act which certainly no man could possibly
deplore more than the actor himself. …But when this old Adam of resentment rose in me and
tempted me concerning Bartleby, I grappled him and threw him. How? Why, simply by recalling
the divine injunction: “A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another.” Yes, this it
was that saved me.
(PT 36)
Colt’s act, as the Lawyer sees it, resulted from his becoming wildly excited, as if he himself had
not committed the murder, but was seized up passively by an all-too passionate rage. Unlike the
Marquesans who do not need Western morality to restrain violent action, the Lawyer finds his
salvation in Christian charity to prevent his violent act. Charity, or philanthropy, allows him to
“drown [his] exasperated feelings towards the scrivener by benevolently construing his conduct”
(36). Of course, in recent decades Bartleby’s inaction has been celebrated as a powerful
philosophical resource, but we might just as easily see the Lawyer as Melville’s case study for the
conflicting imperatives of action. He joins a cast of characters across Melville’s work who prob-
lematize our understanding of what it means to act—leading to tragic consequences, as in
“Bartleby,” or in a different mood, marking what he calls in The Confidence-Man, the passage from
“the comedy of thought to that of action” (CM 71). But it is in Melville’s last great work of
fiction Billy Budd that questions of will, agency, and natural justice find their most powerful, if
complex articulation.
“Budd’s Intent or Non-intent Is Nothing to the Purpose”

Billy Budd centers on Billy’s act of killing his shipmate Claggart, who had borne false witness
against him. But Melville’s novella is striking not merely due to its depiction of this discrete act
of violence, but in how it explores the failure of individual volition to explain its causes or its
consequences. To begin with, Budd’s death-blow to Claggart is foreshadowed by an event on his
previous ship in which he reacts to being teased by another shipmate, Red Whiskers, who
“insultingly gave him a dig under the ribs.” Billy’s response is described as a reflex action:
“Quick as lightning Billy let fly his arm. I dare say he never meant to do quite as much as he did,
but anyhow he gave the burly fool a terrible drubbing” (Melville 283). The unintentional
character of Billy’s reaction rhymes with the “enforced” character of his impressment insofar as
both occur outside of the realm of his volition. Impressment is nonetheless a fate Billy simply
accepts: “he seemed to take [it] pretty much as he was wont to take any vicissitude of weather.
Like the animals, though no philosopher, he was, without knowing it, practically a fatalist”
(285). If Media in Mardi rejects the label of fatalist, Billy unknowingly is a fatalist to the extent
that he reacts to the causal world in an instinctual or even animal-like manner. Instead of a tragic
moment of recognition, Billy, in the face of Vere’s judgment, gives “a look in its dumb expres-
siveness not unlike that which a dog of generous breed might turn upon his master, seeking in
his face some elucidation of a previous gesture ambiguous to the canine intelligence” (339).
Rather than a fully autonomous, willing human individual, Billy exhibits an “exuberance of
vitality …[in] accordance with natural law”; he is given to his shipmates’ “co-operating influ-
ences’’ rendering him an “upright barbarian” (288). He is a “child-man,” a “novice in the com-
plexities of factitious life” (286), with “none of that intuitive knowledge of the bad which in
natures not good or incompletely so foreruns experience” (319). Melville’s characterization of
Billy is another of his philosophical studies of the ambiguities of action. In the line of Vee-Vee,
Ishmael, or Pierre, he seems suspended between free will and accident, predetermined events and
the caprice of his impulses, human responses, and inhuman imperatives. As Bartleby inscribes
himself in a space of non-preference outside of willing and not willing, Billy’s innocence, his
simplicity, and his instinctual nature posit him in a space in which, as Vere asserts, his “intent or
non-intent is nothing to the purpose” (343).
430 Michael Jonik
Melville also outlines Claggart, Billy’s instigator and victim, in terms of a conflict between his
autonomous volition and involuntary impulses or malicious passions. Claggart’s will seems over-
taken by ambiguous feelings for Billy, impelling him to negatively interpret Billy’s actions. He
responds to Billy’s accidental spilling of his soup as if it were a “sly” gesture of “a spontaneous
feeling” of antipathy that reveals Billy’s hidden intention (312). But Melville’s choice of the
phrase “to some extent willfully, perhaps” to describe Claggart’s response renders uncertain
whether he consciously intends his malice, even as Melville describes Claggart’s conscience as
“the lawyer to his will” that makes “ogres of trifles” (313–14). Claggart is at once attracted to
Billy’s exuberant vitality and antagonized by the unbidden nature of Billy’s influence over him.7
That Claggart “could have even loved Billy but for fate and ban” (321) suggests not only a “ban”
of his homoerotic feelings for Billy, but also a “fate” that forecloses any such feelings as outside
of any possible necessary conditions of free will and action. Like Billy, Claggart is ultimately
suspended by a determinate causality, which Melville had earlier signified in understanding his
inherent malignity in terms of the problem of original sin. Could we then transform Melville’s
conditional “Claggart could have even loved Billy but for fate and ban,” into “if Claggart could
have freely chosen, he would have loved Billy?”
Captain Vere, in turn, appears to be the consummate figure of judicious rationality; his modest
demeanor, resolute nature, and aristocratic virtue even suggest an aversion to “pronounced action”
(296). His “philosophic austerity,” nevertheless, hides the secret passion of unrealized ambition
(359); he never achieves the fame of that epic doer of deeds, Lord Nelson, who “vitalizes into acts”
the “exaltations of sentiment” sung in his praise (293). What ultimately marks Vere, however, is
how he cedes his own agency in the name of the application of the “forms, measured forms” (358)
of martial law. Vere’s martinet-like discipline on the Bellipotent, exacerbated by the recent mutinies
in the British navy and sparks of insurgency coming across the Channel from revolutionary France,
reveal him as one who does not act of his own will, but out of duty. Indeed, Vere’s renunciation of
individual agency puts him among his sailors who, by enlistment or impressment, have acceded to
a higher authority that supersedes their individual wills. Melville even puts Nelson’s heroic deeds
in relation to a loss of free agency in terms of his presentiment of his own death at Trafalgar (and
thus a fatalism of predetermined events)—a “priestly motive” which “led him to dress his person
in the jewelled vouchers of his own shining deeds’’ (293). Like the sailors on the Pequod who weld
themselves to Ahab’s iron will in Moby-Dick, the sailors on the Bellipotent could be taken to be an
aggregate of individuals who have ceded their free agencies. Indeed, is it not true that “the power
of war,” as the ship’s name indicates, can be made manifest only as a collective will in which free
agencies are lost? Melville thematizes martial discipline as through several formulations: “[e]very
sailor, too, is accustomed to obey orders without debating them; his life afloat is externally ruled
for him” and therefore his social relations are not based on a putatively “unobstructed free agency
on equal terms” (320); all those who sail “[i]n His Majesty’s service … there are Englishman forced
to fight for the King against their will. Against their conscience, for aught we know’’ (343); or
again, “[t]rue 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” (357). The Dankser (whose prophetic pronouncement that Claggart is “down” on Billy
7
For Birgit Mara Kaiser, “Billy Budd’s simplicity involuntarily–magnetically–has triggered Claggart’s aversion, but
due to this simplicity Billy does not acknowledge this” (66).
adds another interpretation of the ship’s events as preordained) is likewise one who is “subordinated
lifelong to the will of superiors” (306). Life at sea turns the second nature of habits of martial dis-
cipline into an instinct. This reaches its dramatic crescendo with the crew’s involuntary echo of
Billy’s veneration of Vere: “[w]ithout volition, as it were, as if indeed the ship’s populace were but
the vehicles of some vocal current electric, with one voice from alow and aloft came a resonant
sympathetic echo: ‘God bless Captain Vere!’” (354).8
It is in the context of these characterizations of diminished will and involuntary action that Melville
presents Billy’s fatal act of killing Claggart. It is perhaps no surprise then that as he choreographs the
deathblow in slow and fast time, he emphasizes that Claggart’s killing was unintentional:
The next instant, quick as the flame from a discharged cannon at night, his right arm shot out, and
Claggart dropped to the deck. Whether intentionally or but owing to the young athlete’s superior
height, the blow had taken effect full upon the forehead, so shapely and intellectual-looking a fea-
ture in the master-at-arms; so that the body fell over lengthwise, like a heavy plank tilted from
erectness. A gasp or two, and he lay motionless.
(331–32)
Vere’s initial response to the murder already insinuates the conflict of fate and free will that will
haunt his deliberation on Billy’s punishment: “‘Fated boy,’ … ‘what have you done!’” (332). Yet
as Vere resolves himself to remove from his considerations the expanded set of motivations,
impulses, or intentions that led to the act, he affirms that “Budd’s intent or non-intent is nothing
to the purpose” and that it is only his “undeniable deed” (337) that he will use as the basis of his
judgment. The problem for Vere, and the philosophical problem the text thus stages, is that
Billy’s undeniable deed is both deed and not deed. His deathblow is more like a reflex which
emerges out of the failure of another act, his stuttering “organic hesitancy” (289) and thus
inability to carry the successful speech act of rebutting Claggart. “I did not mean to kill him.
Could I have used my tongue I would not have struck him” (338). His stuttering contrasts with
his more usual frank and “impulsive above-board manner” which renders his denial of mutinous
intent believable to Vere and the jurors (338).
Vere’s judgment is predicated only on the punctuality of Billy’s act, and not on the involuntary
agencies or natural forces that conspired to construe it. As he decides Billy’s fate, he desires to
keep his mind resolute to “surmount difficulties even if against primitive instincts strong as the
wind and the sea” (340–41). He resists any compassion that might “vitalize” his scruples or
“enervate” his decision to act against his martial obligations (341). Yet these agencies and cau-
salities impinge on Vere:
Speculatively regarded, it well might be referred to a jury of casuists. But for us here, acting not as
casuists or moralists, it is a case practical, and under martial law practically to be dealt with. … If,
mindless of palliating circumstances, we are bound to regard the death of the master-at-arms as the
prisoner’s deed, then does that deed constitute a capital crime whereof the penalty is a mortal one.
But in natural justice is nothing but the prisoner’s overt act to be considered? How can we adjudge
8
In Jason Frank’s evocative reading of this scene in “The Lyre of Orpheus: Aesthetics and Authority in Billy Budd,” he
argues that Melville “seems fascinated by the indeterminacy of such collective states, as they drift along in a kind of
mesmeric attraction between voluntarism and habituated behavior” (Frank 378).
432 Michael Jonik
to summary and shameful death a fellow-creature innocent before God, and whom we feel to be so?
… I too feel that, the full force of that. It is Nature. But do these buttons that we wear attest that
our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King. Though the ocean, which is inviolate Nature primeval,
though this be the element where we move and have our being as sailors, yet as the King’s officers
lies our duty in a sphere correspondingly natural? So little is that true, that in receiving our com-
missions we in the most important regards ceased to be natural free agents. When war is declared
are we the commissioned fighters previously consulted? We fight at command. If our judgements
approve the war, that is but coincidence.
(341–42)
The ocean, as a symbol of “inviolate Nature primeval,” comes to speak for itself, providing a sort
of mute testimony on behalf of impulsive, instinctual, and natural Billy. The ocean, as the natural
element where sailors operate, is like the subtle, collective agencies which serve as the broader
context of action. But Vere’s duty can serve only the de-naturalized law of the King. Just as
Billy’s act is involuntary, so, in a sense, is Vere’s judgement.9 Though he brackets away the forces
of nature that affect him, his own agency is nullified as he can only act as an agent for the appli-
cation of his allegiance to the King and the martial law. Vere cannot settle the tensions of will,
agency, and natural justice.
Even Billy’s final “act” of descent from the halyard becomes another allegory for involuntary
action. In Chapter 26, in a reprise of Mardi’s debate of Vee-Vee’s fall, a purser and a surgeon dis-
cuss the phenomena of Billy’s lack of usual muscular spasm when executed.
“How then, my good sir, do you account for its absence in this instance?” “Mr. Purser, it is clear that
your sense of the singularity in this matter equals not mine. You account for it by what you call will
power––a term not yet included in the lexicon of science. For me, I do not, with my present
knowledge pretend to account for it at all.
(355)
Was the absence of a muscle spasm in death an act of will power? Did perhaps the chain of cau-
sality itself snap as “the action of Budd’s heart intensified by extraordinary emotion at its climax,
abruptly stopped—much like a watch when in carelessly winding it up you strain at the finish,
thus snapping the chain?” Is it a phenomenal occurrence, or phenomenal “‘in the sense that it
was an appearance the cause of which is not immediately to be assigned’” (355)?
The novella’s debates regarding will, moral volition, and natural justice are left purposefully unre-
solved. The question for readers of Billy Budd, then, is not so much whether Melville himself under-
stood his last great work to be a testament of acceptance or of revolutionary possibility, but of the
ambiguities of action and justice that it stages. The crux of the issue is not merely how Vere’s act of
judgment answers Billy’s act of violence, but how the complexities of the metaphysics of the will both
make judgment possible and reveal its limits. How do we understand the mismatch between Vere’s
“justice” qua condemnation and “natural justice?” Further, if the law is de-naturalized such that its
“forms, measured forms” mismatch with the multiple causalities and agencies that eventuate any
punctual act, then can there really be justice? Or can there be justice when it relies on a false account
of the causes and consequences of an act? Like a good sailor who subordinates his will, Vere is clear on
9
See also Gregg Crane, “Judgment in Billy Budd,” 142–54.
where his priorities lie: “Our vowed responsibility is in this: that however pitilessly that law may
operate in any instances, we nevertheless adhere to it and administer it” (342). In the world of the
Bellipotent, then, the Rousseauian happy polity of Typee is a priori foreclosed. There can be no natural
justice if humans remain alienated from their natural relations by the measured forms of the law.
What remains unsaid in the “inside narrative” of Billy Budd—very much a narrative in which Vere’s
conflicted inner voice is unfolded—is the provocation to think further what natural justice could be.
Perhaps it is a justice, borne of love for Billy, that Vere could have administered if not for fate and ban.
Conclusion: Melville’s “Dilemma of Determinism”

At the same time that Melville was writing Billy Budd, psychologist and philosopher William
James was composing his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890), which likewise explores the
relation of will, impulse, and instinct. As James simply states: “Every instinct is an impulse” (385).
James pays special attention to children and animals, but he also thinks through how human
instincts shape the behavior of adults across a variety of experiences, such that some instincts
become habits while others relate only to transitory acts. In his discussion of the “explosive will,”
he remarks that there are those individuals for whom “impulses seem to discharge so promptly into
movements that inhibitions get no time to arise’’ and those who are “obstructed” and given to more
deliberate action (537–38). The former are instinctual, and are often the “most successful military
and revolutionary characters in history” (538) or are talented athletes. He cites in a footnote an
article “Mental Qualities of an Athlete’’ by A.T. Dudley, who writes: “Ask him how he performed
a certain act … and he will tell you that he does not know; he did it by instinct; or rather his nerves
and muscles did it of themselves” (cited in James 539). Nonetheless, James writes, “[p]roblems
come much harder to reflective and inhibitive minds. They can, it is true, solve much vaster prob-
lems; and they can avoid many a mistake to which the men of impulse are exposed. But when the
latter do not make mistakes, or when they are always able to retrieve them, theirs is one of the most
engaging and indispensable of human types” (538–39).10
It is not hard to see parallels in Billy Budd to James’s descriptions of explosive and deliberate
individuals. But, at the same time, Melville does not merely classify types of action into a clear
taxonomy. Billy Budd is a study of the ambiguities of deliberation and impulse, of voluntary and
involuntary action, free will and determinism, and of a resolute mind attempting to surmount
the force of instinctual life. As many have noted, Melville shaped his last testament to the will
in relation to his late, intense study of Schopenhauer. But Melville’s complex examination of the
will, if in dialogue with Schopenhauer—or with Spinoza, Kant, or, implicitly William James—
does not cohere to any single philosophical system or exposition of concepts. Melville does not
provide clear answers to the question of what it means to act, or offer a well-delineated theory of
justice in Billy Budd. Rather, by enshrouding Billy’s punctual act and Vere’s punishment of its
10
See also Emerson’s “Experience”: “Nature hates calculators; her methods are saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by
pulses; our organic movements are such; and the chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and alternate; and the
mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but by fits. We thrive by casualties. Our chief experiences have been
casual. The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely, and not by the direct stroke: men of
genius, but not yet accredited: one gets the cheer of their light, without paying too great a tax. Theirs is the beauty of
the bird, or the morning light, and not of art” (Emerson 483).
434 Michael Jonik
consequences in an assemblage of impersonal agencies and indeterminate causalities, he provokes

us to think further about the antimonies of action and justice themselves. Such a provocation is
the mark of Melville’s dialogic thinking. He does not articulate a philosophical system in
advance, but voices multiple passages to philosophy. If truth uncompromisingly told will always
have its ragged edges, then Melville’s art of writing, as an art of thinking, remains relentlessly
unfinished, and ever has us think again.
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Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Experience.” Essays and Poems, McCall, Corey, and Tom Nurmi, editors. Melville Among
edited by Joel Porte, Harold Bloom, and Paul Kane. the Philosophers. Lexington Books, 2017.
The Library of America, 1996, pp. 471–92. Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales,
Evans, K. L. One Foot in the Finite: Melville’s Realism edited by Robert Milder. Oxford World Classics
Reclaimed. Northwestern UP, 2018. Edition. Oxford UP, 1997.
Ohge, Christopher M. “Melville’s Late Reading and the Wenke, John. “Melville’s Indirection: Billy Budd, the
Revisions in the Billy Budd Manuscript.” Critical Genetic Text, and ‘The Deadly Space Between.’” New
Insights: Billy Budd, Sailor, edited by Brian Yothers. Essays on Billy Budd, edited by Donald Yannella.
Salem P, 2017, pp. 93–111. Cambridge UP, 2002, pp. 114–44.
Rancière, Jacques. The Flesh of Words: The Politics of ———. “Melville’s Transhistorical Voice: Billy Budd,
Writing. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford Sailor and the Fragmentation of Forms.” A Companion
UP, 2004. to Herman Melville, edited by Wyn Kelley. Blackwell,
Stedman, Arthur. “Introduction” to Typee, edited by 2006, pp. 497–512.
Arthur Stedman. The Page Company, 1892.
35
Tawny Savages and Blank-Looking Girls:
Melville, Capitalism, and Racialized Labor
Ivy G. Wilson
In her 1988 Tanner Lectures on Human Values, entitled “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Toni
Morrison limns how race has always posed problems for how the political project of liberalism
has attempted to define the human and, more specifically, how racial formation in America has
concomitantly informed the framing of the US literary canon. With characteristic verve, equal
parts incisive as nuanced, Morrison illuminates the costs of whiteness as an ideology for both
white and Black Americans. Ruminating specifically on Herman Melville and race, Morrison
would write this about the Pequod:
I would not like to be understood to argue that Melville was engaged in some simple and simple-
minded black/white didacticism, or that he was satanizing white people. Nothing like that. What
I am suggesting is that he was overwhelmed by the philosophical and metaphysical inconsistencies
of an extraordinary and unprecedented idea that had its fullest manifestation in his own time in his
own country, and that that idea was the successful assertion of whiteness as ideology.
On the Pequod the multiracial, mainly foreign, proletariat is at work to produce a commodity, but
it is diverted and converted from that labor to Ahab’s more significant intellectual quest.
(16)
Morrison’s depiction of the crew gains its meaning not through the more political, if affective,
language of community but rather through the economic, and particularly Marxist, lexicon of
“proletariat,” “commodity,” and “labor.” More specifically, Morrison’s quote intimates how
“Ahab’s more significant intellectual quest”—presumably his monomaniacal search for spiritual
resolution; his desire to “strike through the mask”—comes increasingly to redefine the actions,
if not ontology, of the crew itself (MD 164). Ahab’s quest, in Morrison’s estimation, converts the
material into the metaphysical, multiplicity into singularity.
Tawny Savages and Blank-Looking Girls: Melville, Capitalism, and Racialized Labor 437
Morrison’s reading of Melville in “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” also bespeaks the larger
contours of US literary criticism, especially those of the New Americanist and New Historicist
veins, that have arguably overdetermined racial formation over labor, work, and class conscious-
ness in considering identity politics. The pivotal turn to examining racial formation and
American literature was initiated about three decades ago with a series of important works
including Dana Nelson’s The Word in Black and White (1992), Kenneth Warren’s Black and White
Strangers, George Hutchinson’s The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (1995) and, more spe-
cifically on Melville, Eric Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations (1993). As Wai Chee Dimock and
Michael T. Gilmore note, however, the demise of the Soviet Union and of Eurocommunism not
only put expressions like “class struggle” and “working class” into question but seemed to have
compromised the very idea of “class” itself as an analytic category (1). With this in mind, they
propose a historicization of class, “foregrounding not only its cognitive environment but also its
contextual associates, the company it kept at its moment of emergence” (2).
From Morrison’s understanding of the racial economies of chattel slavery to Eric Williams’s
earlier claims about the interconnections between capitalism and slavery; from Stuart Hall’s
maxim that race is the modality though which class lives back to W. E. B. DuBois’s notion that
whiteness functions as a compensatory wage—twentieth-century Black intellectuals have wres-
tled with the “contextual associates” of class to illuminate the race/class dyad as a particular
problematic constituted by modernity. Albeit quicksilver, Morrison’s line about the Pequod being
composed of a “multiracial, mainly foreign, proletariat” echoes aspects of C. L. R. James’s read-
ings of Melville in Renegades, Mariners and Castaways (1953) as well as the notes for what would
eventually be published as American Civilization ([1950]; 1993). Turning to how James reads
Melville promises to not only offer a different genealogy of Black cultural critique of Melville by
Morrison, Sterling Stuckey, and, more recently, Christopher Freeburg, but also reframe our
understanding of the materialist or class critiques of Melville offered by Michael Rogin, Barbara
Foley, and Dimock, among others. By principally taking Moby-Dick (1851) and “The Paradise of
Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855) as examples, this chapter examines Melville’s repre-
sentations of factories to evince how the vicissitudes of racial formation always animate, if not
underwrite, the imperatives of capitalism.
The Ship as Factory and the “Blackness of Darkness”

James’s concerted writings about Melville assumed a deliberate cause when, in 1948, the
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began proceedings to have him deported for not
having proper documentation. In an attempt to gain support for his INS case, James delivered
public lectures on American literature. In the same period that James was writing on Melville
specifically for Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, he was also undertaking a broader review of
American culture writ large, something he imagined being akin to Alexis de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America, that would eventually comprise American Civilization. In the volume, James
comments on a wide range of topics in popular culture including detective novels, comic books,
B-movies, and literature and history, as well as a chapter on Melville and Walt Whitman. “A
finished book,” James wrote, “will have to relate Emerson, Thoreau and the Transcendentalists
to Whitman, Melville, and the Abolitionists. It cannot be done here. Suffice it to say that even
Parrington says the soil which produced Emerson also produced Garrison—they were
438 Ivy G. Wilson
complementary parts of the same movement” (American Civilization 87). In the quote, we can
discern James’s ideological critique of a generation of critics including Lewis Mumford, Richard
Chase, Newton Arvin, and F. O. Matthiessen, none of whom engaged in any sustained way the
issue of abolitionism in their foundational work that would become instrumental in creating the
field of American Studies. If it was not possible to have Transcendentalism without abolitionism,
it might also be said that it was not possible for capitalism to emerge in the United States
without the backdrop of chattel slavery.
The end of James’s quote about “complementary parts” is also important as a recognition of
the numerous pairings replete throughout Moby-Dick as well as a methodological cue for prefig-
uring race and class as a kind of dialectic. Insofar as the Pequod is comprised of mariners, rene-
gades and castaways, it is comprised of sundry dichotomies, dyads, and “odd couplings” that put
dialectical critique into high relief. While the Pequod is a highly structured organizational
system—sometimes monarchical, others feudal; sometimes Cartesian, others schizophrenic—the
work relationships between crew members are often characterized as pairings that nonetheless do
not quite concretize as dialectics. In this schematic, each of the three mates has their counterpart
harpooners: Starbuck has Queequeg; Flask, Daggoo; and Stubb, Tashtego. Even Ahab, identified
as monomaniacal, is alternately, if apparitionally, paired with Fedallah and Pip.
Throughout his writings on Melville, James was most concerned with how the Pequod repre-
sented in microcosm an emerging modern world that was being reconstituted around industrial
production and underwritten by the political economies of capitalism as well as how this modern
world was redefining the meanings of “individualism,” “freedom,” and “hierarchy.” Perhaps no
one symbol emblematized this new industrial society more than the factory. Issues of work and
labor inflect a number of Melville’s other works, including, for example, “Poor Man’s Pudding
and Rich Man’s Crumbs” (1854), “The Bell-Tower” (1856), and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1856).
Melville not only reckoned with the forces of the literary marketplace in the early 1850s but also
depicted in graphic illustration the sheer force of capitalism in key chapters of Moby-Dick as well
as in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.”
If capitalism, as a mode of sociality—not just mode of production—depends upon the obfus-
cation of labor to modulate value, a process which Marx identifies as the processes of “commodity
fetishism,” then Melville mitigates against such obfuscations in a piece like “The Try-Works”
chapter of Moby-Dick.
The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front of them. Standing
on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers. With
huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the
fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The
smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil,
which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further
side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the
watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched
in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards,
and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capri-
cious emblazonings of the works … then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with
fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material coun-
terpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.
(424)
“The Try-Works” chapter has long been understood for how Melville simultaneously depicts the
drudgery of labor and foreshadows the crew’s descent into the heart of darkness. In the former
register, Melville’s depiction of the drudgery of labor will be further illustrated by Rebecca
Harding Davis in her “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861). In Davis’s short story, one of the main char-
acters, Hugh Wolfe, is at pains to not become fully enmeshed in the iron mills, desperate to see
himself—or any self—outside of the “cognitive environment” of the factory by carving figurines
from the korl refuse (Dimock and Gilmore 2). But in Moby-Dick, as well as the second half of
“The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” Melville intimates the seeming impossi-
bility of such a separation. Within this new capitalist mode of production, the harpooners in
Moby-Dick not only use tools as the means of production, but they also increasingly become the
very means of production with their “tawny features … strangely revealed in the capricious
emblazonings of the works.” The labor entailed at the try-works in Moby-Dick is more than
simply demanding; it is totalizing. Melville attempts to encapsulate this totalization through
the image of Ahab being monomaniacal, but labor in this kind of economic regime is also total-
izing in the historical materialist sense that capitalism evacuates teleology from a conceptual
end, replacing any ostensible terminal point with an incessant drive toward increasing profit.
Indeed, one way to examine Moby-Dick within its historical context in the age of emergent
capitalism is to interrogate how competing definitions of concepts like “profits,” “lays,” and
“ownership” get trafficked through Melville’s trope of the “joint stock” company. As the Pequod
ventures further and further away from its economic purpose, charting a new path guided by
Ahab’s vision, Starbuck attempts to appeal to Ahab’s better reason by reminding him that they
have a fiduciary obligation to the owners of the ship. Long having lost interest in mere profit,
Ahab is furious that Starbuck has even broached the topic. Who are these “owners,” whom
Starbuck believes should act as a backstop to their actions? Who comprises the “joint-stock
company” of the Pequod? The principal owners are Captain Bildad and Captain Peleg, but the
other share-holders are community members local to, or at least knowledgeable about, the whal-
ing industry.
[T]he other shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd of old annuitants;
widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each owning about the value of a timber head, or a
foot of plank, or a nail or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling vessels,
the same way that you do yours in approved state stocks bringing in good interest.
(73)
Melville’s description of the different vested interests in the Pequod illuminates a larger social
history in the development of capitalism. On the one hand, the Pequod is held primarily by two
captains who presumably made enough fortune to own, and not just commandeer, a ship; a
transition to ownership that one might readily expect in feudal societies. On the other hand,
Ishmael’s analogy that owning “shares” in a ship is somewhat akin to investing money in
“approved state stocks bringing in good interest” or bonds prefigures the abstraction of
investment that will become a key feature of finance capitalism.
In a sense, the concept of the “joint stock” as the affective register of intimacy among the male
sailors acts as a foil to counterbalance the seemingly more impersonal register that circumscribes
another community of abstract investors. In the “Wheelbarrow” chapter, where Ishmael and
Queequeg leave the Spouter Inn for Nantucket, “joint stock” appears as an instance of
440 Ivy G. Wilson
homosociality when Queequeg saves the life of a young boy from drowning. Surmising what he
feels Queequeg must be thinking, Ishmael narrates “‘It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all merid-
ians. We cannibals must help these Christians’” (62). While Ishmael invokes the symbol of the
barnacle to describe his newly found attachment to Queequeg, it is precisely the economic lan-
guage of an emergent finance capitalism—specifically that of a fiduciary obligation or bond—that
functions as the lexicon of this new grammar of belonging. This new grammar of belonging, one
underwritten by the language of economics, is further reified later in the novel in the “Monkey
Rope” chapter where Ishmael likens Queequeg as his “inseparable twin brother,” bonded by “an
elongated Siamese ligature” that unites them—“So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of
my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctively to perceive
that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two” (320).
Inasmuch as private ownership of the means of production and joint stock companies are
fundamental to the idea and bureaucracy of capitalism, so too does Moby-Dick illustrate the con-
cept of wage labor in the development of capitalism as a particular kind of system. In such a
system, workers ostensibly have the freedom to enter into contracts by their own volition, insofar
as “wage labor” signals a socioeconomic relationship between a worker and employer in a market
where salaries can be determined. Ishmael seemingly enters such a system in “The Ship” chapter
when he decides to join the Pequod—“I began to think it was high time to settle with myself
what terms I would be willing to engage for the voyage. I was already aware that in the whaling
business they paid no wages; but all hands, including the captain, received certain shares of the
profits called lays” (75–76). While Melville, with characteristic wit, makes jest by having
Ishmael offered close to the smallest fraction of the profits with only the 275th lay, the passage
also reveals a differential in how the logic of capitalism is beginning to re-conceptualize ideas
such as “futurity” and the “speculative” versus a more traditional, if not feudal, socioeconomic
system that holds land in exchange for service or labor. In the novel, a place aboard the Pequod
amounts to such space holding when Ishmael admits to himself that if they have “a lucky voyage,
[it] might pretty nearly pay for the clothing I would wear out on it, not to speak of my three
years’ beef and board” (MD 76). The scene as a whole, then, lays bare the way that capitalism will
frame a socio-economic order where subsistence wages and surplus profits can co-exist in the
same system not as opposites but rather as antinomies.
Blank Whiteness, Wonderful Factories, and the Reserve Army of Labor

“Yours is a most wonderful factory,” announces the narrator to Old Bach in “The Paradise of
Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”; “Your great machine is a miracle of inscrutable intricacy”
(678). The narrator’s praise conveys the general enthusiasm for and faith in the marriage of
industry and technology. There are skeptics in the mid-nineteenth century US to be sure; among
them, Henry David Thoreau, who was suspicious that the abandonment of artisanal forms of
production in the wake of the advent of industrialization would lead to a loss of individual con-
sciousness and thrust men and women under the weight of mechanical wheels. It is less sur-
prising then that the factories at Lowell employed almost exclusively women—heretofore an
untapped reserve army of labor—whose condition was ostensibly protected not only by the safety
and sterility of the workplace but by older custodians who ensured the piety of the women.
While the bachelors in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” indulge in rit-
ualistic hymn and song, the women at the paper-mill enjoy no such leisure, partake in no
gaieties, indeed, do not even speak, moving instead to the cadences and rhythms of the machines.
When the narrator finally stumbles into the factory, “one sweeping glance” of the place exposes
countless women serving some type of machine (675). Highly discrete and compartmentalized,
they work with such concentrated silence that “[n]ot a syllable was breathed” and nothing can
be heard save the “overruling hum of the iron animals” (675). And then, in a reaction that recalls
Thoreau’s assessment of railroads, the narrator thinks to himself:
Machinery—that vaunted slave of humanity—here stood menially served by human beings, who
served mutely and cringingly as the slave serves the Sultan. The girls did not so much seem accessory
wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels.
(675)
His comparison of wage laborers to slaves is doubly mediated. The first association invokes the
image of an exotic overlord of a distant land, indeed, of another epoch altogether. The machine
produces a schism in the narrator’s understanding of temporality—rather than being the visual
resonance of a futurity, the relationship of the women to the machine is described as anachro-
nistic. Given the frequent discussions of racialized slavery at mid-century, Melville’s Harper’s
Magazine readership most likely would have at least momentarily recalled the condition of
millions of enslaved Blacks. The comparison was being widely disseminated, most prominently
in George Fitzhugh’s Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters (1857) but even in literary works
such as William Grayson’s poem “The Hireling and the Slave” (1856). This attenuated reference
is notable because, unlike The Piazza Tales (1856), which have both “Benito Cereno” (1855) and
one of the epigraphs of “The Bell-Tower” to put Melville’s reader in mind of enslaved Blacks, the
abjection of the women in “The Tartarus of Maids” is compounded by their ostensible mechani-
zation as well as by their semblance to slaves.
With Melville there are no sounds from the women, nothing to recover what would allow the
narrator to recognize them as human beings trapped in and subsumed by the paper. Instead,
Melville uses concise language and imagery to depict how the women are dissolved into the
paper—“At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, with blank, white
folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper” (675). The women’s alabaster com-
plexion not only conflates them with the paper but also translates their ghastly and ghostly posi-
tions as near synonyms.
The white paper prompts the narrator to think of John Locke’s tabula rasa, but Marx’s idea of
the “social hieroglyphic” nature of commodities is more pertinent, especially given the narrator’s
wish to use the paper allocation for envelopes to effectuate his own business transactions. As
Marx writes, the extraction of value depends upon the seemingly mystical ways that a com-
modity “transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic” (167). As with his invoca-
tion of theology as a hermeneutics that can help explain the mystical qualities by which things
are transformed into commodities, Marx’s concept of the “social hieroglyphic” functions as a
reminder that the legibility of commodities as the very embodiment of human labor necessitates
acts of deciphering because capitalist modes of production and consumption would otherwise
conceal, obfuscate, or overwrite the human labor needed to produce said commodities.
Proceeding from the rag-room, the narrator of Melville’s short story thinks to himself that the
women are rather like “state-prisoners,” condemned as such to a sentence of working to death.
The metaphoric sentencing of the women in “The Tartarus of Maids” is not dissimilar to the
floating prison-house ship of captured Africans in the third selection of The Piazza Tales—in
442 Ivy G. Wilson
“Benito Cereno,” there is a vessel which, ironically, is recovered no less by the Bachelor’s Delight.
Although they would come to represent different ends of the labor spectrum, the sentence of
“blue collar” drudgery that condemns the Tartarus women was, in some respects, prefigured by
the “white collar” Bartleby, who starves to death in the Tombs. Leaving the factory at Devil’s
Dungeon, his carriage well-supplied, the narrator is now prepared to distribute his seeds
“throughout all the Eastern and Northern States, and even … into the far soil of Missouri and
the Carolinas” enclosed in paper-envelopes (674). Perhaps some of the foolscap from the factory
will make its way slightly south to New York City, where Melville’s more notoriously alienated
subject, Bartleby, will pick up the paper and better understand the women enmeshed therein
than did our narrator, an act leaving him, in a sense, more capable of deciphering the “social
hieroglyphic” of the paper: maybe it is this grander understanding that compels Bartleby to con-
tinually mumble, “I prefer not to” (PT 20).
Pip’s Mutterings and Money-Making Animals

As the action of the Pequod begins to accelerate and the crew’s pursuit of Moby Dick is converted
from pecuniary gain to fanatic spiritual fulfillment, Pip can be found roaming the decks to and
fro, mumbling to himself. At the end of “The Doubloon” chapter, Flask says he must “quit Pip’s
vicinity” and “leave him muttering” (435). Like others on the ship, Flask now sees Pip as mad or
a lunatic after the drowning mishap has clearly transformed the young boy. And yet both
Starbuck and Ahab recognize undeniable insights in Pip’s mutterings—for Starbuck, Pip, “in
[the] strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all our heavenly homes”; for
Ahab, Pip is an avenue to “unknown conduits from unknown worlds” of “wondrous philoso-
phies” which he himself wants to access (479; 529).
In addition to Pip’s importance to the novel’s larger philosophical meaning, his significance
to the Pequod’s particular kind of imagined community cannot be overstated. His tambourine
playing is the sonic aura of the “Midnight, Forecastle” chapter: a chapter which, as much as any
other in the novel, galvanizes the crew when their performance of collectivity is underscored by
the musical accompaniment of Pip’s playing. In many respects, Pip’s sounds act as political
soundings from the international anthem of the ring shout to his quiet mutterings that float on
lower, broken, and inchoate frequencies.
While Pip emerges from the second drowning wholly transformed, the threat of another kind
of transformation or conversion previously loomed over him. In “The Castaway” chapter, Pip is
asked to replace an injured after-oarsman in Stubb’s whaleboat. Slight of frame in physical
stature, Pip is out of his depths on the boat and jumps off out of fear; others on the boat are
furious since his actions have caused them to lose a whale. Stubb is riled and implores Pip to
always stick to the boat:
“Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won’t pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can’t afford
to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in
Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don’t jump any more.”
(413)
When Melville has Stubb state that they cannot “afford to lose whales by the likes of you,” those
words are set in contradistinction to the novel’s subtextual query about whether the crew can
afford to lose whales, the Pequod itself, or their very selves to Ahab. The episode remains one of
the most important in Moby-Dick, as much for what it helps reveal about competing economic
systems at mid-century as that it intimates that the propensity of “man [as] a money-making
animal … too often interferes with his benevolence” (413).
Far from being localized to Pip alone, Stubb’s threat should also be understood as an acute nodal
point where the racialized underpinnings of capitalism, on the one hand, and economic underpin-
nings of chattel slavery, on the other hand, amount to an existential threat against Black life itself.
It is neither unexpected that Stubb’s tone shifts from being one of “undiluted conscientious advice”
to “a more peremptory command” nor that he avails himself of the image of chattel slavery as a
rhetorical gesture (413). Rather, Stubb’s mentioning of Alabama intimates how the vicissitudes of
US racial formations can always be mobilized to foreshorten African American claims to a more
complete subjectivity in any number of so-called “cognitive environments” from work and labor
to formal politics to the culture industries, among others (Dimock and Gilmore 2). The specter of
slavery at this moment, then, threatens to “convert,” to return to Morrison’s language, Pip from a
worker ostensibly vested with rights to a slave ostensibly without agency.
Pip can be thought of as both a constitutive member of that crew of mariners, renegades, and
castaways and outside of it. When James turns to Moby-Dick in American Civilization, he offers
relatively little commentary on Pip, even though Pip is at the very center of the chapter entitled
“The Castaway.” By recalling how the “base and superstructure” axiom influenced James’s
political philosophy at this point, it becomes easier to see how he was able to index the Pequod ’s
other crew members as precursors to twentieth-century laborers but ignored Pip. Because Pip is
figuratively suspended between the free market enterprise of the whaling industry and the sov-
ereignty of racialized chattel slavery, and ostensibly absent in the class consciousness that cir-
cumscribes workers or the political consciousness that circumscribed abolitionists, he is a figure
that escapes James’s view. In this sense, James’s admission that correlating the Transcendentalists
to the abolitionists “cannot be done here,” should also be apprehended meta-critically for what
it evinces about the historiography of capitalist critique in the mid-twentieth century. James’s
remarks are not simply an admission of being in a hurried state himself per se, but they expose
the litmus of a Marxist historical materialism that privileges class stratification over racial
formation. Rereading Melville through James exposes some of the philosophical predicaments of
orthodox Marxist critique but also reframes our understanding of Melville’s engagement with a
wide set of social predicaments embodied in figures from “tawny savages” to his own difficulties
in the literary marketplace, from the “blank-looking” factory women to the white-collar Bartleby,
all cast in the long shadow of capitalism.
Works Cited and Further Reading
Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the
Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Duke UP, 2005. Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated
Berthold, Dennis. “Class Acts: The Astor Place Riots and by Peggy Kamuf. Routledge, 1994.
Melville’s ‘The Two Temples’.” American Literature, Dimock, Wai Chee, and Michael Gilmore. “Introduction.”
vol. 71, no. 3, 1999, pp. 429–61. Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formation,
Cesarino, Cesare. Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore.
in Crisis. U of Minnesota P, 2002. Columbia UP, 1994, pp. 1–11.
444 Ivy G. Wilson
Foley, Barbara J. “From Wall Street to Astor Place: Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 28, no. 1, 1989,
Historicizing Melville’s ‘Bartleby.’” American Literature, pp. 1–34.
vol. 72, no. 1, 2000, pp. 87–116. Pease, Donald E. “Introduction.” Mariners, Renegades, and
Freeburg, Christopher. Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Castaways and the World We Live In, edited by Donald
Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America. E. Pease. UP of New England, 2001, pp. vii–xxxiii.
Cambridge UP, 2012. Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Radical Tradition. Zed Books, 1983.
Consciousness. Harvard UP, 1993. Rogin, Michael. “Herman Melville: State, Civil Society,
James, C. L. R. American Civilization. Edited by Anne and the American 1848.” The Yale Review, vol. 69, no.
Grimshaw and Keith Hart. Blackwell, 1993. 1, 1979, pp. 62–88.
———. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Simpson, Eleanor E. “Melville and the Negro: from Typee
Herman Melville and the World We Live In. New York: to ‘Benito Cereno.’” American Literature, vol. 41, no. 1,
C. L. R. James, 1953. 1969, pp. 19–38.
Kaplan, Sidney. “Herman Melville and the American Spanos, William V. The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The
National Sin.” Journal of Negro History, vol. 41, no. 4, Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American
1956, pp. 311–38. Studies. Duke UP, 1995.
Karcher, Carolyn L. Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Stone, Edward. “The Whiteness of ‘The Whale.’” CLA
Race, and Violence in Melville’s America. Louisiana State Journal, vol. 18, 1975, pp. 348–63.
UP, 1980. Stuckey, Sterling. African Culture and Melville’s Art.
Lang, Amy Schrager. The Syntax of Class: Writing Class in Oxford UP, 2008.
Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton UP, 2003. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, or Life in the Woods.
Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1: The Process of Production of [1854]. Signet Classic, 1960.
Capital [1867]. Penguin Books, 1976. Weinstein, Cindy. “Melville, Labor, and the Discourses of
Melville, Herman. “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Reception.” The Cambridge Companion to Herman
Tartarus of Maids,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine Melville, edited by Robert S. Levine. Cambridge UP,
vol. 10, April 1855, pp. 670–78. 1998, pp. 202–23.
Morrison, Toni. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The
Afro-American Presence in American Literature.”
Part V
The Natural World
36
Ocean
Richard J. King
Before the surge of American nature writing about the ocean in the mid-twentieth century, no
American writer had written so profoundly and extensively about human relationships with the
sea as did Herman Melville. The nineteenth-century “watery world” (MD 64) of so many of his
major stories, however, was different from that of the mid-twentieth century and even more dra-
matically different from the ocean of the twenty-first century. As an author, reader, and mariner,
Melville created literary works that provide perspectives on how the ocean and its inhabitants
have changed since the 1800s and how human relationships with the ocean have shifted over
time. How, then, may we read Herman Melville’s sea novels within the environmental crisis of
climate change?
Blue Ecocriticism
Recent anthropogenic impacts on global and local ecosystems have produced new models for
thinking about literary texts. Beginning in the 1970s, corresponding with modern environ-
mental movements led by writer-activists such as Rachel Carson, Farley Mowatt, and Barry
Lopez, literary critics sought to study the human impact on the environment, proposing an angle
of reading and interpretation that has since been called “ecocriticism” (see Branch and O’Grady,
1). Scholars such as Glen Love began asking what the works they regularly used in classes taught
about modern human relationships with the natural world, or what new works would raise
awareness of the need for conservation. Some of ecocriticism’s primary questions include: What
can this work reveal about the author’s perspective on the natural world? What cultural,
economic, social, or technological aspects of the author’s or reader’s world might influence the
writing or reading of this text? How, when, and why are humans elevated or decentered in a
448 Richard J. King
given text? How does the text advocate for or undermine human connections with the non-
human world? Gender, race, language, class, location, job, and political party all influence how
one interacts with nature, defines nature, thinks about nature, or reads and writes about nature.
For example, did anyone in the 1800s feel as helpless and guilty about human impact on the
natural world as so many people do today? Literary works, as cultural artifacts, can address such
questions as this.
“Blue ecocriticism” is a sub-field of ecocriticism that aims for an ocean focus. Scholars such as
Anissa Wardi, in her introduction to Water and African American Memory (2011), claim that eco-
criticism has been biased toward terrestrial matters—to the settings and concerns of the American
West, to frontiers, to notions of soil and farming and mountains—when oceans deserve equal if
not more attention (16). Cheryll Glotfelty, a foundational scholar of ecocriticism, explained in
1994: “As a critical stance, [ecocriticism] has one foot in literature and the other on land” (Branch
and O’Grady, eds., 6). Dan Brayton, in his Shakespeare’s Ocean (2012), pointed to statements like
Glotfelty’s to highlight a terrestrial bias among ecocritics. Why does she use land to mean all of
the natural environment (15–19)? Why not one foot in literature and the other foot in a boat?
Or in a boot? Or in a neoprene bootie? Why, for starters, is something that is environmentally
friendly always called “green”? (See Mentz, xi–xiii, among others, as well as, by neat contrast,
Tom Nurmi’s Chapter 37 in this Companion on “Verdure”). Blue ecocriticism, based on founda-
tional studies by scholars such as Bert Bender, Elizabeth Schultz, and Robert Zoellner, offers a
new lens with which to read Melville’s work.
Melville’s Ocean Experiences and Knowledge

Several scholars have researched and written about Melville’s experiences at sea, notably Wilson
Heflin in Herman Melville’s Whaling Years (2004), co-edited by Mary K Bercaw Edwards, the
same scholar who wrote “Ships, Whaling, and the Sea,” found in the first edition of A Companion
to Herman Melville. Bercaw Edwards explains how much experience Melville brought to his
writing about this watery planet (84–86). His literary works demonstrate deep empirical
knowledge of the nineteenth-century open ocean and its inhabitants.
Melville’s voyages (especially from 1841–1844) gave him that knowledge in a time when over
ten thousand people a year patiently and quietly observed deep ocean environments in their hunt
for whales. At one point aboard the whaleship Acushnet, Melville spent more than six months
meandering across the equatorial Pacific, not stopping in a single port and perhaps only anchoring
a couple of times in the Galápagos. He opens his first semi-autobiographical novel Typee (1846)
with this proud declaration: “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!” (T 3).
By necessity and vicinity whalemen also carefully observed small marine mammals, such as
dolphins, as well as seabirds, sharks, krill, squid, and pelagic fish, like tuna, swordfish, and
mahi-mahi. They noted and recorded all these other animals because “lively grounds,” the whale-
man’s term that Ishmael cites in Moby-Dick, meant the presence of whales (282). The men were
also hungry for edible fish and birds; and they were often bored during years on a quiet, slow-
moving ship and hours in a small boat. In “The Encantadas” (1854), Melville writes of a desolate
rock spire off the Galápagos, about which he says, “I know not where one can better study the
Ocean 449
Natural History of strange sea-fowl than at Rodondo. It is the aviary of Ocean” (PT 135). In
Mardi (1849), a novel set among Pacific islands, Melville writes: “I commend the student of
Ichthyology to an open boat, and the ocean moors of the Pacific. As your craft glides along, what
strange monsters float by. Elsewhere, was never seen their like. And nowhere are they found in
the books of the naturalists” (39). Surpassed perhaps only by that of Polynesian navigators of
previous centuries, the whaleman’s knowledge of marine biology and oceanography was a hunt-
er’s knowledge. If largely limited to inconsistent surface observations and superficial dissections,
this knowledge was still unmatched at the time—and perhaps ever in human history—in its
wealth of direct, broadly surveyed, firsthand experience over long stretches of time.
Melville’s knowledge of the sea—its weather, its waves, its inhabitants—plays out in surpris-
ingly accurate descriptions, even when read with twenty-first century hindsight. “A whale-ship
was my Yale College and my Harvard,” Ishmael famously declares in Moby-Dick (112). Throughout
his writings Melville tips his hand to many of the works he read, too, or at least perused. As
Jennifer Baker discusses further in Chapter 38, “Anatomy” in this Companion, these sources
included scientific theorists such as Louis Agassiz and Charles Darwin, naval oceanographers such
as Matthew Fontaine Maury and Charles Wilkes, and English surgeon-naturalists such as Thomas
Beale and Frederick Bennett, who spent years aboard whaleships a decade before Melville did.
Melville used all these sources to inform his stories. Ishmael smugly adds to his authority in
Moby-Dick, making clear he has both scholarly and firsthand knowledge: “I have swam through
libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands” (136).
Combining bookish and empirical knowledge, Moby-Dick and Melville’s other stories provide
a rare benchmark and an anecdotal record for Western, non-native knowledge of the sea in the
1850s. There are few studies on ocean temperature or chemistry or coral reef health during
Melville’s time. Record-keeping of average United States air temperature began only in 1895, yet
there are enough data to show that Melville’s air in the United States was likely colder on average
by about 1.5˚ F (Walsh and Wuebbles, 20). For studying sea level rise, few tide gauge data sets
go back to the 1800s, but scientists today believe that Melville sailed over a Pacific Ocean in the
1840s that was at least eight inches on average lower than it is in 2020 and likely more than an
average of 2–3˚ F colder on the surface (Walsh and Wuebbles, 21; Tierney, et al., 234). In terms
of fisheries, only in the 1850s, in work largely began by zoologist Karl Ernst von Baer in Russia,
did naturalists begin to examine and encourage the recording of data on catches, location, season,
and fishing gear. In 1854, Baer described what researchers now refer to as the shifting baseline:
people recalibrate what is “normal,” ignoring historical accounts of past abundance, health, and
expanse. In other words, researchers (and the general public) resist believing that fish “back then”
were indeed far more numerous and often much larger on average than those of today (Lajus, 177;
Jackson, J.B.C., et al., 629, 636). Even less is known about marine organisms with no commercial
value. No one recorded in the 1800s in any quantitative way over time how many sharks or squid
or copepods there were (that data is limited even today). The first large-scale global voyages with
oceanography and marine biology as a primary mission were just beginning to launch in Melville’s
mid-nineteenth century. Earlier, coastal survey or naval exploration expeditions more often con-
ducted oceanography and marine biology incidentally and opportunistically as dependent on
individual interests on board (Rozwadowski, 46–51; Smith, J., 32–36).
For example, when Darwin circumnavigated the Earth as a guest aboard the HMS Beagle from
1831–1836—the account of which Melville likely read—the young naturalist had a plankton
net, he observed fish and mused on the sources of bioluminescence, and he was especially
450 Richard J. King
interested in coral reef formation (Bercaw, Sources 74). But Darwin’s focus and interest were
almost exclusively terrestrial, in part because geology was the major science of his time, and
because he was regularly seasick and escaped the Beagle for months whenever he could. In 1850,
Lieutenant Maury was the first to send out a schooner with the primary mission of ocean sam-
pling, which included deep-ocean soundings (Rozwadowski, 74). Maury is famous today for
consolidating mariners’ logbooks to map global weather patterns, currents, and whale migra-
tions. He partnered with whalemen to organize large-scale studies of commercially hunted whale
species, which Ishmael references directly in “The Chart,” adding to Ishmael’s understanding of
the intersections between oceanography and whales that Melville read about in the five-volume
narrative of the US Exploring Expedition by Charles Wilkes (Bercaw, Sources, 130).
In Moby-Dick, Ishmael explains that two-thirds of the earth is covered by water (64, 273, 424).
Melville understood or intuited the enduring truth that the sea drives the earth’s climate, biodi-
versity, economy, international politics, and human imaginations. Yet he also addressed in his
fiction some of the concerns at the forefront of oceanography and marine ecology today.
In the following three examples, I will introduce a blue ecocritical reading of Melville’s coral;
of Ishmael’s perspective regarding whale populations and extinction; and of Ishmael’s plankton.
These examples suggest how we might read Melville within the contemporary climate change
crisis, especially with the rising tragedy of the climate refugee.
Coral
Aside from his last novella Billy Budd, all of Melville’s sea novels and stories were published before
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), the book and the debate that would forever shift Western
understanding and perceptions of the relationship between faith and animal life. Melville’s perspec-
tive, closer to that of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louis Agassiz than that of Darwin, tilted in his sea
works toward nature as a creation of God alone, a view that wove recent scientific discoveries—such
as fossils and the realization of extinct species—into Judeo-Christian teachings.
As naturalists and mariners, Melville and his contemporaries thought coral reef was as sub-
lime as the iceberg: stunning, unknowable, terrifically beautiful, and yet fatally dangerous to the
hull of a ship and thus to human lives. While in the South Pacific, Melville rowed and sailed over
clear tropical waters that held these wonders of coral. He swam out to fringing reefs. He described
spearfishing around them by the light of torches. In Papeete harbor, French Polynesia, he gazed,
as he wrote in Omoo (1847), “down in these waters, as transparent as air,” to see “coral plants of
every hue and shape imaginable” (O 162).
Coral in the 1800s in Anglophone literature was a symbol of death and the creative powers
and brilliance of God. Several contemporary voices, both popular and scientific, reveal this point
of view, from Shakespeare in The Tempest to the essays of Reverend Thomas Milner (Shak[e]
speare, 23; MMO; Milner, 12–13). It is no coincidence that Pip, during his near-drowning
immersion in a landless Pacific, sees “the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that
out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs” (MD 414).
What are Pip’s “colossal orbs” exactly? This phrase might refer to the enormous Porites corals,
which Melville might have seen for himself. Scientists believe Porites to be some of the longest
living organisms on Earth. In the waters of American Samoa, for example, is “Big Momma,” also
known as “Fale Bommie,” a colony that is a twenty-three-foot tall globe, 135 feet around and
Ocean 451
estimated to be about five hundred years old (Ansel, “Valley of Giants”). Or perhaps Pip’s “colossal
orbs” are meant to evoke the very islands of the Pacific. The formation of atolls and taller isolated
Pacific islands was a point of significant debate at the time, advanced by Darwin’s first published
paper, and the topic of a comic, although informed discussion in Mardi (417–18).
In the twenty-first century, although we have not all had the privilege of snorkeling around a
coral reef, we likely have seen videos and color photographs of these scenes. Today, coral is rarely
connected in popular culture to God’s creations or death; coral is more often correlated with dec-
adent recreation or, more recently, seen as a climate change canary. Dizzying swaths of the Great
Barrier Reef have died due to global warming. The 2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) report states: “Almost all warm-water coral reefs are projected to suffer significant
losses of area and local extinctions, even if global warming is limited to 1.5˚ C (high confidence)”
(Pörtner, et al., SPM-29).
Melville observed and understood that invasive plants and animals were altering the Polynesian
Islands. He wrote and lectured about how Americans and Europeans were corrupting and demol-
ishing Pacific Island native cultures. Less understood then was that Pacific Islanders themselves,
in their relatively recent migrations, had altered these islands through deforestation, spreading
invasives, and hunting to extinction such species as the giant flightless moa (Dinornis spp.) in
Aotearoa New Zealand. Yet I suspect that few nineteenth-century cultures, Indigenous or colo-
nial, could fathom that humans might ever influence the growth of coral reefs in the sea. In
Mardi, the outer coral reefs are burial grounds for the dead and a symbol of eternity (161, 417,
303). In Omoo, Melville retells part of a song from the elderly Tahitians, which de-emphasizes the
long-term relevance of humanity:
“A harree ta fow,
A toro ta farraro,
A mow ta tararta.”
The palm-tree shall grow,
The coral shall spread,
But man shall cease. (192)
Extinction and Whale Populations

One of Melville’s most compelling chapters for twenty-first century blue ecocritical enquiry is
Ishmael’s discussion of whale populations and extinction in Chapter 105 of Moby-Dick, “Does the
Whale’s Magnitude Diminish—Will He Perish?” (See, e.g. Schultz, 106–9). Here Ishmael
acknowledges that the topic of potential extinction of whales had been a source of debate in the
1840s, especially given the number of mast-headers searching the globe “into the remotest secret
drawers and lockers of the world” (460). Ishmael begins the chapter by comparing the whale’s
fate to the pending extinction of the buffalo. He recognizes that “the cause of [the buffalo’s] won-
drous extermination was the spear of man,” and compares the situation to the inefficiency of
American whaling (461). Where men once killed 40,000 buffalo in four years, American whale-
ships on a four-year voyage were content with some forty whales. To Ishmael these whaling num-
bers were not only poetic, but they were also largely accurate (see, e.g. Wilkes, 493).
452 Richard J. King
Open boat whalemen in the mid-1800s primarily focused on two types of large whales that
they were capable of hunting: sperm whales and right whales, the latter of which for Melville and
most scientists at the time included all three species (North Atlantic, North Pacific, and southern
right whales) as well as bowhead whales. Not believing that right whale populations are in
significant danger, Ishmael says of “whale-bone whales,” i.e. right whales:
For they are only being driven from promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer enlivened with
their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very recently startled by the unfa-
miliar spectacle.
Furthermore: concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have two firm fortresses, which,
in all human probability, will for ever remain impregnable…the whale-bone whales can at last
resort to their Polar citadels.
(461)
Although Ishmael says that American hunters have taken far more right whales—fifty to one
compared to sperm whales—the right whales, he says, are like elephants in that they can survive
the loss of enormous numbers, especially because whales have such vast “pasture” in which to
dwell. Ishmael concludes confidently: “The eternal whale will still survive” (462).
In hindsight, Melville’s pre-Darwinian understanding of population ecology was limited and
flawed, but from a maritime history perspective, Ishmael’s position on the sustainability of whal-
ing is representative of his time and even reasonable. Nineteenth-century whalemen had observed
that they were depleting whales in various regions as they sailed farther and farther from home.
Whalemen had in fact nearly extirpated North Atlantic right whales from the waters of New
England as early as the mid-1700s, a full century before Melville sailed through this region him-
self on a whaleship (Laist, 261–62). Regional right whale depletion often happened quickly. For
example, within the two decades of the 1830s and 1840s, whalemen hunted so many thousands
of southern right whales off the coast of New Zealand that they crashed the local population by
an estimated ninety percent. Whalemen then moved up into the North Pacific. Within the
decade of the 1840s, which Ishmael recounts as an example of abundance without yet seeing the
crash on the other end, men killed tens of thousands of North Pacific right whales so quickly that
they then abandoned this North Pacific region to go still farther north for bowheads (Jackson,
J.A., et al., 11; Smith, T.D., et al., 1, 8).
As coastal mammals slow enough to be caught by open-boat whalemen, individual right whales
were not chased around the globe, but resident populations were essentially depleted in a clear,
traceable pattern from the North Atlantic into the Pacific (Smith, T.D., et al., 1). In contrast, sperm
whales, which are far less coastal, likely fared better in the long term during the nineteenth century.
Sperm whale populations still suffered, however, especially as open boat whalemen killed thousands
of mothers and juveniles in equatorial waters in both hemispheres (Whitehead, 19–20, 129–31).
One whaleman’s 1846 account, by M. E. Bowles, which Melville probably read secondhand
from Reverend Henry T. Cheever’s whaling narrative, sounded the alarm even then: “the poor
whale, chased from sea to sea, and from haunt to haunt, is doomed to utter extermination, or so
near it, that too few will remain to tempt the cupidity of man” (Bowles, 83; Cheever, 48; Bercaw,
Sources, 68). Bowles predicted that global whaling would be abandoned within a century. In some
ways Bowles’s warning about the demise of whaling is analogous to early climate-change scien-
tists’ reports. In 1851, Melville could brush off this warning. Much of Ishmael’s logic on the
Ocean 453
question of extinction and depletion alludes to the views of earlier-published experts that
Melville consulted, such as William Scoresby, Jr., and Thomas Beale, who both believed whale
populations were untouchable and immortal. Beale, at sea in the 1830s in a new sperm whale
fishery off Japan, writes: “Such is the boundless space of ocean throughout which it exists that
the whales scarcely appear to be reduced in number” (151; MMO). In “Does the Whale Diminish,”
Melville closely followed the observations and rhetoric of naval officer Charles Wilkes, as he did
when writing “The Chart.” In 1841, Wilkes wrote that there is “ample room for a vast fleet” in
the Pacific, with space for more ships, but “an opinion has indeed gained ground within a few
years that the whales are diminishing in numbers; but this surmise, as far as I have learned from
the numerous inquiries, does not appear well founded” (493). Melville and his contemporaries
had not yet seen, of course, the widespread developments of long-range explosive harpoons or the
twentieth-century technologies that enabled whaling of all species in polar seas.
The most significant ecological point that Ishmael avoids in regard to extinction and deple-
tion is that whales had nearly no predation threats for millions of years before humans in large
numbers entered their habitat offshore. Ishmael celebrates, but does not understand in light of
species evolution by natural selection, that sperm whales had evolved to thrive in that specific
deep-water niche in the ocean. In the late 1790s, before the arrival of commercial whaleships,
sperm whale populations in the Pacific were limited almost entirely by fluctuations in their food
source and reproductive competition. Humans were a new predator, against which sperm whales
had no evolutionary defense.
In Melville’s time, species extinction was recognized but usually understood as God’s choice
to eradicate certain animals from the Earth with floods and ice ages as part of paving the way
toward the ultimate creation of humans, of Adam and Eve (Agassiz and Gould, 237–39). This
perception potentially absolved humans of responsibility, although much of the general public
understood by the 1850s that human action had indeed threatened local animal life. For example,
in his The California and Oregon Trail, which Melville reviewed right before composing Moby-
Dick, Francis Parkman does not use if, but “When the buffalo are extinct” (176, 229). Melville
witnessed and understood the fragility of animal populations on land, yet he thought those of the
sea were different: whales, for example, would always have their “polar citadels” for escape.
Plankton
As “Does the Whale Diminish?” represents one of the most compelling chapters in Melville’s
writing about marine populations and the shifting human perceptions of the ocean, his chapter
“Brit” offers a still more direct comparison to how he saw the differences between life on land
and at sea.
The word “brit” was a whaleman’s word, almost absent from any scientific writing at the time.
It refers to plankton aggregations upon which baleen whales feed. Melville himself likely saw
large swaths of zooplankton—primarily copepods, pteropods, and krill—on the surface, notably
on the Brazil Banks or the Coast of Chile Ground. For Moby-Dick, he accurately chose a part of
the ocean, off the Crozets in the southwestern Indian Ocean, where brit and right whales had
been found and hunted (McKenzie, 140–41; Townsend, pl. 3).
The “Brit” chapter opens with right whales skim-feeding peacefully through plankton. At the
masthead, Ishmael recognizes the poetic irony and ecological miracle that the largest animals on
454 Richard J. King
the planet subsist on the smallest prey. Marine invertebrates such as copepods and krill reproduce
by the trillions globally. We know today that copepods, of which there are hundreds of species,
make up the majority of all global zooplankton biomass. Copepods are likely the most numerous
multi-celled organisms in the sea, perhaps even on Earth (Mauchline, 1). Krill, which are usually
much larger individually than copepods, congregate in swarms so vast and dense that in the
Southern Ocean mariners have sailed through clouds at the surface that covered an area of 175
square miles (Nicol and Endo, 2). The larger rorquals, such as blue and sei whales—which were
too fast for nineteenth-century whalemen in the age before marine engines—more commonly
feed on these swarms of krill. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael’s brit is yellow. Both copepod and krill
species are more commonly pinkish-brown in their clouds at the surface, but historical and
current accounts do attest they can appear yellow, green, or brown.
The right whales in “Brit” graze through “golden wheat,” creating a visual image of wide blue
stripes expanding through yellow. Metaphorically, the land (and thus sanity: consider the phrase
to be grounded) is disappearing as the Pequod and her crew progress eastward, deeper into the
Indian Ocean (Kish, 266). Melville’s baleen whales are removing the brit, like “long wet grass,”
leaving only deep blue, slowly wiping clean all traces of the color that represents the safety of the
shore. The sailors from the mastheads first mistake the right whales for stationary rocks, looking
like slow-moving elephants. Quickly Ishmael pivots to state that this comparison to elephants is
misleading, even false. No. Animals at sea are entirely different from those on land. There are no
direct analogies. Thus in “Brit,” Melville advances one of the master themes of Moby-Dick, “The
Encantadas,” and other ocean stories: the sea is a profoundly different place from the land
(Vincent, 220; e.g. PT, 134–35).
Here Ishmael summarizes a representative nineteenth-century view of the sea in a single
spiked club of a sentence:
But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever been regarded with
emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra
incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial
western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal disasters have immemorially and
indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters;
though but a moment’s consideration will teach, that however baby man may brag of his science and
skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and
for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiff-
est frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has
lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.
(273)
Aside from a rather peaceful, habitable ocean in Mardi, Melville’s literary ocean throughout his
works, especially in Moby-Dick, is immortal, vast, violent, and indifferent to human concerns.
Ishmael in “Brit” suggests that landlubbers have not spent enough time paying homage to the
sea’s sublimity and terror.
Why, then, does Ishmael deliver this message in a little chapter on plankton? One of Melville’s
most trusted sources was the religious whaleman William Scoresby, Jr., who was interested in the
biology of whales and wrote statistically and philosophically about the enormous number of
“animalcules” that inhabit the ocean and serve as whale food (Bercaw, Sources, 116). In his Account
Ocean 455
of the Arctic Regions (1820), Scoresby expounded on his own natural theological masthead about
the sheer numbers of these organisms:
What a stupendous idea this fact gives of the immensity of creation, and of the bounty of Divine
Providence, in furnishing such a profusion of life in a region so remote from the habitations of men!
… on their existence possibly depends the beginning of the whole race of mysticete, and some other
species of cetaceous animals … thus producing a dependant [sic] chain of animal life, one particular
link of which being destroyed, the whole must necessarily perish.
(179–80)
Scoresby’s comments on whale food may have influenced Melville’s writing in “Brit,” especially
when Ishmael expands the significance of the sea to all life on Earth. Scoresby, for his part,
revealed an early understanding of food webs and the critical importance of what we now call
primary (phytoplankton) and secondary (zooplankton) productivity in the ocean.
In “Brit,” Ishmael alludes to his skepticism of lubberly “old naturalists.” He declares that
under the surface are “numberless unknown worlds” that humankind has yet to discover. His
lack of clarity or specificity about the actual makeup of “the peculiar substance called brit,” as he
writes elsewhere in Moby-Dick, is part of the point. Human society’s knowledge of the ocean is
enormously and inevitably limited regarding the sea’s inhabitants and its overall dangers. By
choosing the sailor’s word brit, instead of Darwin’s or Beale’s or Scoresby’s crustacea, animaculae,
or medusae—wonderful words that Melville resisted including—he once again sides with those
who knew the vast wild ocean most directly: the whalemen. (See Baker’s “Anatomy” in Chapter
38 of this Companion for more on Melville’s view of the shorebound scientific community.)
To close “Brit,” Ishmael re-emphasizes the difference between land and sea. Just as in “The Lee
Shore,” he warns of a physical or existential departure from the safety of land and home. Melville’s
nineteenth-century sea is merciless, “savage,” and “masterless,” and one should not be fooled by a lazy,
pastoral day at sea: the ocean will still come to get us. Today, we are still afraid of the sea. So we may
now read here in “Brit”—as well as in the ending of Moby-Dick—evocations of the slow-motion threat
of sea level rise and the dramatic cataclysmic threats of hurricanes and tsunami.
Conclusion: Reading Melville in the Anthropocene

In September of 2019, a month after the bicentennial of Melville’s birth, the IPCC published
“The Ocean and the Cryosphere in a Changing Climate.” The report synthesized for policymak-
ers all of the current scientific work on climate change and projected effects on the ocean and ice
and the subsequent impact on humans and the rest of Earth’s inhabitants. The IPCC report
begins with an executive summary that simply states: “All people on Earth depend directly or
indirectly on the ocean and the cryosphere. The global ocean covers 71% of the Earth’s surface
and contains about 97% of the Earth’s water” (Pörtner, et al., SPM-3). The IPCC report refers to
very few papers that can reliably speak to conditions at sea in Melville’s time.
Since the Industrial Revolution, beginning roughly in the second half of the eighteenth
century with the development of the steam engine and the regular burning of coal—Captain
James Cook’s Endeavour was first a collier—humans have been combusting an increasing amount
of fossil fuel that has emitted unnatural volumes of carbon into the atmosphere. Add this to
456 Richard J. King
increasing deforestation, industrial farming, and the emissions of other greenhouse gases, and we
have our anthropogenic climate crisis. This report by the IPCC makes a series of alarming state-
ments about the global ocean and shrinking ice and snow cover, none of which is breaking news
by now. Sea levels and global ocean temperatures have risen rapidly. The rate of ocean warming
has likely doubled since 1993 (Pörtner, et al., SPM-8). The warming ocean has also become more
acidic, a change which is harmful, in places catastrophic, for marine life in coral reefs, rocky
intertidal zones, and other coastal ocean ecosystems. This acidification, heating, and subsequent
shifting in currents and upwelling have in turn likely sucked a substantial ratio of the oxygen
out of the upper thousand feet of the ocean where most marine animals and plants live. Meanwhile,
storm systems thumping and blasting our coastlines have become more intense on average and
perhaps build with greater frequency. Records show that even the extreme wave heights in the
North Atlantic and the Southern Ocean are increasing. The IPCC authors write that “from the
equator to the poles” and “from the surface to the deep seafloor” marine animals and plants have
been dying, and will continue either to die or adjust their distribution, migrations, abundance,
and ecology to this quick shift in climate. Some species will benefit, but far more will become
endangered or even locally or globally extinct before their time. The IPCC report states with
“high confidence” that the “rate and magnitude of decline are projected to be highest in the
tropics” (Pörtner, et al., SPM-25).
In short, for nonhuman life, the ocean is changing fast and faster, and for the worse. For
humans, oceanic climate change has broad effects on human food security, renewable energies,
how we travel, how we make money, where we live, what we value, and even how and where we
like to enjoy ourselves.
Our twenty-first-century relationship with the ocean of the Anthropocene leads then to new
readings of Melville. In Moby-Dick Ahab stands aloft and declares his ocean: “The same!—the
same!—the same to Noah as to me” (565). We know now, though, that the ocean is very much
not the same. Yet how could Melville have possibly conceived that humans would alter our
global ocean: shift the very height of the surface, the very chemistry of the water, and even render
Heaven’s storms more intense? So in the 1850s, Melville could never have imagined twenty-
first-century goals of “saving the oceans” or the desire to “steward the sea.” Melville never
touched or saw anything that had an unknown biodegradability. He never held a piece of plastic,
a fact that is both obvious and profound.
That said, perhaps we have still underestimated how Melville and others of his time felt guilty
about human impact on the natural world—even if their individual helplessness to counter this
destruction might have been tempered or rationalized by American manifest destiny and a per-
ception of God’s role in the natural order. Perhaps Ishmael hopes that he can escape to sea, to get
away from these visions, away from his eco-guilt and back to the pre-adamite wild, because he
still genuinely believes in a pure, deep, dangerous ocean that remains beyond the touch of man.
Our current climate crisis also leads to new readings of the castaways in Moby-Dick. For the final
scenes, Melville leaves open the longitude of where Ahab and the Pequod meet the White Whale
on the equator, but it is reasonable to imagine it somewhere among the vast and isolated island
nation of Kiribati, close to the implied fictional setting of much of Mardi and a common cruising
ground for nineteenth-century whalemen (See Michael P. Dyer’s “Visualizing Melville: A Museum
Exhibition Perspective” in Chapter 47 of this Companion). Kiribati is today one of the island
nations in the Pacific that is most vulnerable to sea level rise. The country’s approximately 100,000
citizens are on the frontlines of climate change, a complex, existential global problem caused by
Ocean 457
nations and cultures half the globe away. The I-Kiribati have begun planning for retreat from their
islands, because of the rapid loss of arable, livable space and the pollution of their groundwater.
Thus the I-Kiribati will almost certainly represent one of the first, if not the first, entire nations to
be without a claim to home soil. For the first time in recorded human history, a people, an entire
culture, will become a stateless republic of climate refugees. As fine artists like Timothy Vermuelen
have found inspiration in the novel to grapple with the impacts of coastal storms (Figure 36.1), a
blue ecocritical reading of Moby-Dick considers the plight of the climate refugee, those millions of
people who need to leave their homes because of sea level rise and coastal flooding. A 2019 study
found that some 190 million people around the world currently live in homes that, even with a
low emissions projection, will be below high tide in 2100 (Kulp and Strauss, 1). The IPCC report
explains that ten percent of the world’s population currently lives in high-risk low-lying coastal
zones (Pörtner, et al., SPM-3). For example, entire communities along the coast of Louisiana have
already moved, retreated, and scattered.
At the end of Moby-Dick, Ishmael, the Biblical orphan, floats alone, evocative of a refugee, a
victim and witness to events he has no power to stop. Fittingly, the frigatebird is the national
Figure 36.1 Timothy Vermuelen’s “I Only Am Escaped” (2010) is the last of his series of his paintings
on the novel; this is partially inspired by the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. Courtesy of
the artist.
458 Richard J. King
symbol of Kiribati, that same “sky-hawk” and “sea-hawk” (whalemen’s common names for this
bird) that Tashtego takes down with him at the sinking of the Pequod—and the same seabird,
along with the sharks, that permits Ishmael’s safe passage as he clings to the Pacific Islander’s
coffin after the sinking of the ship of state (Bennett, 2:242).
Along these lines, in an earlier scene is Pip, floating alone, a castaway and an African American,
who can also be read as an icon of any human whose experience teaches that social justice and
environmental justice are inseparable. As the least powerful on the ship, a castaway, Pip repre-
sents those most vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change, depleted water resources, and the
coastal pollution that is left in the wake of the hubris, the harpoons, of petro-capitalism (Luciano).
In Moby-Dick, speaking to future environmentally minded generations, Ahab is killed with his
own rope as he tries to kill the White Whale—who never pursued him—and in the process spurs
the death of his entire crew, save, by chance, one witness. The whale survives and the ocean rolls on.
Twenty-first readers may read this conclusion as a comfort, a green (or blue) fable, but also as a far
darker death knell for humans on this watery planet—and what we will bring down with us.
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37
Verdure
Tom Nurmi
Although it might strike modern readers as awkward or archaic, the word verdure appears in
nearly all of Melville’s major works. From the “universal verdure” of Typee to the “enlocking”
ground-vines of Weeds and Wildings, Melville’s elegant descriptions of plant processes—germina-
tion, flowering, senescence, and decay—suggest the significance of vegetal life in his environ-
mental imagination (T 49; BB 104). Plants comprise ninety percent of all visible living matter
on Earth, so any understanding of Melville’s engagement with the natural world demands
attention to the persistent, extraordinary presence of the botanical in his fictions and poems.
Verdure is thus a key term for environmentally-sensitive readers of Melville, one that signals how
nineteenth-century transatlantic discourses of natural science influenced his imagery, his themes,
and even his extravagant, spiraling style. Frequently portraying plants not as discrete organisms
but as dense “masses” of multiple forms of life—as verdure—Melville embedded mosses, bushes,
and trees in crowded textual landscapes full of tangled, involute sentences and the branching
narratives for which he is celebrated today (T 28). Melville’s literary treatment of florae, and
greenness more generally, enables us to appreciate the magnitude of his ecological consciousness
in ways that make his work relevant to broader conversations in twenty-first-century environ-
mental humanities.
Verdure has three primary meanings that would have been familiar to Melville and his con-
temporaries. Verdure is, first of all, a category of life: vegetation. It is also a metonym for color:
greenness. Finally, verdure designates an artistic form: visual representations of plants dating to
tapestries in sixteenth-century Europe (OED). For antebellum admirers of Melville’s Pacific
novels, verdure conjured snarls of jungle that typified uncontrolled growth and exotic vitality far
from Western spheres of influence. Recall, for example, Ishmael’s memory of Pupella in Moby-
Dick, that “sea-side glen” where a beached sperm whale skeleton, all “woven over” with “vines,”
is slowly absorbed into the vale, “every month assuming greener, fresher verdure.” The
Verdure 461
“industrious earth” beneath Pupella’s forests is “as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it,
whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures.”
In the famous Arsacidean bower, “Life folded Death; Death trellised Life… Through the lacings
of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure” (MD 449–
50). As Melville uses it in this remarkable passage, verdure implies the “woven” texture of ener-
getic ecological relations beyond individual species—welters of vegetal, fungal, and animal life
interacting at different levels of complexity amid tapestries of greenness (made possible by the
photosynthetic operations of minerals, chemicals, and sunlight that were beginning to be under-
stood in Melville’s lifetime).1
Melville was surprisingly well-read in nineteenth-century sciences, especially those that wid-
ened the scope of natural history far beyond the human: e.g., botany, geology, and astronomy.2
References to Hutton, Lyell, Agassiz, and Darwin appear throughout his writings at a time when
early plant geographers like Alexander von Humboldt and Asa Gray—whose 1857 correspondence
with Darwin helped formulate the theory of evolution—were familiar figures to the American
reading public. Plus, like many middle-class families at mid-century, the Melvilles populated
their personal library with a variety of botany books and floral cultivation guides. The “Bower in
the Arsacides” chapter is therefore a useful starting point for a discussion of Melville’s greening
prose within the wider scientific cultures of nineteenth-century American society. A byword for
flourishing or viridity, greenness carries a host of implications for understanding reproduction,
evolution, and energy on both sides of the Atlantic during the span of Melville’s career.
As they were enthralled by “overgrown” Pacific vistas and racially-tinted tales of “wild” indig-
enous life, Melville’s readers were also aware of developments in botany from Linnaeus to Darwin
that seemed to demonstrate unlikely affiliations between plants and humans (T 24, 15). These
affiliations centered on the comparative meanings of growth, creativity, and excess in social as
well as vegetal contexts. Mardi’s philosopher-guide Babbalanja goes so far as to claim that the
human “may be said to be an inferior species of plant,” and many of Melville’s lesser-known
literary experiments with plant life highlight questions of originality and iteration that echo in
ecological and literary realms alike (M 508).
Could it be that the speculative fictions of a long-dead, globe-sailing sea novelist can help us
better represent problems of planetary scale and biogeochemical complexity in an era of environ-
mental crisis? The answer, it seems, is yes. In Melville’s worlds, “palm-trees and elms—canoes
and skiffs—church spires and bamboos—all mingled in one vision of the present and the past”
to reveal “how transient human greatness” seems from the broader, planetary view (O 102, 306).
In Melville’s worlds, we see that the human species has always been “wreathed with the green
tendrils of a vine” (255). We are surrounded by plants that we depend on—for air, sustenance,
shelter, and knowledge—yet take for granted as we continue to destroy our global “sea of ver-
dure” and subject others, human and nonhuman, to scenes of cruelty (T 64).
But if by the 1840s taxonomic identification of plants had become commonplace for amateur
and professional botanists, why does Melville continue to deploy romantic, fuzzy terms like
1
On the history of photosynthesis beginning in the 1840s, see Nickelsen 15–54.
2
On Melville’s reading in science, see Bercaw 67, 73–74, 99; Farmer 11–21; Smith 19–89; and Melville’s markings in
volumes like Cuvier’s The Animal Kingdom (1827–1843): http://melvillesmarginalia.org/Share.aspx?DocumentID=46&
PageID=9864.
462 Tom Nurmi
verdure or greenness? First, these phrasings disclose Melville’s philosophical anxiety over the
capacity of language to capture the intertwined systems of “Nature,” especially plant life (for
more detail, see Jennifer Baker on the “powers and limitations” of anatomy in Chapter 38 of this
Companion). In Typee, for example, the arbors of “Nukuheva” spread “with such rich profusion,
that it was impossible to determine of what description of trees it consisted” (T 49). Second,
Melville’s emphasis on the profuse and indeterminate qualities of verdure extends his environ-
mental vision past charismatic megafauna like whales or tortoises to glimpse the nested inhabi-
tation of life-within-life at more extreme scales of existence, from the microscopic to the
planetary. An abbreviation for the multifold scales of ecology, verdure condenses into a single
word the chemical, symbiotic, and parasitic relations between plants, algae, fungi, and animals.
In Omoo’s coral reefs, for instance, Melville recognizes the contingent interdependence of salinity,
soil, seeds, and birds that together constitute “the very process of creation” of coastal ecosystems
and that also, simultaneously, remind us of their fragility (O 62–63). For Melville, Tahiti is best
depicted as tellurian, emergent, in flux: a “belt of low, alluvial soil, teeming with the richest
vegetation” (65). And the Coral Islands east of Tahiti, “always covered with verdure,” should
really be understood as “a complete zone of emerald” (62).
Melville’s use of verdure illuminates our impoverished categories of environmental thought
and fosters humility toward that which lies at the outer reaches of human representational capa-
bility—that which can be perceived only as color, movement, and intensity. “The vine, the vine!”
Melville writes in The Confidence-Man, “is it not the most graceful and bounteous of all growths?
And by its being such, is not something meant—divinely meant?” (CM 168). Verdure is, in
other words, a through-line in the arc of Melville’s career: a series of green images and loamy
metaphors that draw together issues of scale, imperialism, science, and spirituality to haunt as
much as inspire readers in the deepening shadow of the Anthropocene.
Emerald Zones: The Early Novels

“Six months at sea!” exclaims the narrator in the opening line of Typee. All this time away from
land has cultivated a feverish yearning for greenness. One “blade of grass,” he cries, just one
“green thing” with the “semblance of verdure… how I wish to see the living Earth again!” (T
3–4). Juxtaposing the mundane colors and flavors of sailor life with the vibrant shades and tastes
of island life, the narrator uses verdure as shorthand for “freshness,” “sharpness,” and even the
apparent innocence that characterizes a “green hand” like Ishmael (OED; MD 75). Such height-
ened contrast between “sickly” ship and “living Earth” helps Typee’s narrator to fully grasp the
botanical splendor of the Marquesas Islands (T 3). Later, bathing in the glen of Tior, he gazes at
his secluded “verdant recess… draperied with vines, and arched overhead with a fret-work of
interlacing boughs, nearly hidden from view by masses of leafy verdure” (28). Likewise, on the
island of Tamai, Omoo’s narrator Paul looks out “through a rustling screen of foliage upon the
surface of the starlit water” and sees that the ground is “carpeted with a minute species of fern,”
similar to the aromatic ferns (“nahee”) on the “verdant bank” of Imeeo (O 238, 240, 257). But at
other moments in the early novels, verdure becomes a way for Melville to contemplate the var-
ious magnitudes of life on the planet: how, for instance, human houses and animal nests are anal-
ogous artifacts of the interrelations between living species and inanimate materials across
different degrees of complexity. At Hannamanoo, Paul marvels at a “range of steep green bluffs
Verdure 463
hundreds of feet high, the white huts of the natives here and there nestling like birds’ nests in
deep clefts gushing with verdure” (O 126).
Careful observation generates in these narrators an appreciation for the “vertical bowers of
verdure” that epitomize volcanically-formed Pacific islands and play central roles in the lives of
their human inhabitants (O 102). Tommo explains that the “Arva” root has both “narcotic
influence” and “medicinal qualities” for the Typee, while the cosmetic “papa” root bleaches the
skin white for social rituals (T 164–65, 182).3 Paul is more concerned with trade between island
economies—especially in breadfruit, “cocoa-nuts,” and “cocoa-nut oil”—as well as the political
and health ecologies of those exchanges. Although Pacific islanders had been importing animals
and crops for centuries, Paul notices that imperial exploration networks brought non-indigenous
fruits like “fig, pineapple, and lemon” more regularly, along with limes that became “highly
valued as an anti-scorbutic” (O 63, 120–21). Noting the farming of Peruvian “Tombez potatoes”
and other exogenous crops like taro, yams, and sugarcane, he warns that the “wild scrub guava-
bush, introduced by foreigners,” spreads with “fatal rapidity” on Tahiti (258, 261). Here Paul
outlines the effects of imperial botany, which Londa Schiebinger defines as “expertise in bio-
prospecting, plant identification, transport, and acclimatization” that served the colonial project
and was, “in turn, structured by it” (11). Melville’s accounts of botanical imperialism in the
Pacific novels point to a nuanced critique of the intersections between ecology and empire, bet-
ween the verdant excesses of plants and the “excessive” natures of indigenous peoples, both of
which required taming and economizing by “white civilized man,” the “most ferocious animal
on the face of the earth” (O 189; T 125).
In this way, Tahiti’s political ecology allows Melville to track a vegetal counter-vision to colo-
nial practices. Though occasionally lapsing into condescending racism—he condemns some
islanders for not maintaining the “Ati” tree and calls others “improvident Polynesians”—Paul is
nonetheless sensitive to questions of sustainability and conservation, particularly of the “cocoa-
palms” that are replanted and “set out with great care” by the Tahitians (O 213–14). He details
how Tahitians use every part of the palm—for shade, food, drink, and shelter as well as for
clothes, cups, pipes, fishing-line, and canoes. But even more astonishing is how the Tahitian
“heals his wounds with a balsam compounded from the juice of the nut,” and with “the oil
extracted from its meat embalms the bodies of the dead” (262). For Tahitians, the trajectory of a
palm’s life over time blurs the distinctions between human and vegetal bodies, living and dead.
As its resin dissolves into a wound or embalms a corpse, the flesh of the palm tree makes its way
inside the human body so that a Tahitian’s life is, literally and metaphorically, becoming verdure:
an indigenous ontology Melville takes seriously against colonial practices of objectification and
extraction.
Like the “marvelous race” of Tupia in Mardi (“all wreathed and festooned with verdure”) and
the “God of Groves” idol in Typee (rotting into “green old age” with “spears of grass” sprouting
from its mouth), Omoo’s Polynesian palm is an early instance of Melville’s fascination with the
sensory experience of crossing between bodies, shapes, colors, species, and states of being (M 282;
T 178–9). For example, Mardi’s Babbalanja asks King Media: “Think you, my lord, there is no
sensation in being a tree? feeling the sap in one’s boughs, the breeze in one’s foliage? think you
it is nothing to be a world? one of a herd, bison-like, wending its way across boundless meadows
3
On “nature as an endless source of drugs” in Melville’s early novels, see Arsić 186.
464 Tom Nurmi
of ether?” (M 458). Via Babbalanja, Melville follows the implications of the post-human, palm-
tree-chronologies that the high priest imagines in Omoo: “The palm-tree shall grow, / The coral
shall spread, / But man shall cease” (O 192). But in Mardi, Melville multiplies these chronologies
through vocabularies of sensation and movement that seem to undergird domains of life from
palms to bison herds to humans. Melville’s “tendency to linger over sensation,” to quote Pilar
Martínez Benedí and Ralph Savarese in Chapter 39 of this Companion, discloses his “affinity” for
perceptual experience that “lurks beneath language and higher-order thought.”
The relation between sensate “worlds” and the diversity of life on the planet is precisely what
interested Goethe about plants, particularly in The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) and his Italian
journals (1786–1788), which led him to the conclusion that “All is leaf… and through this sim-
plicity the greatest diversity becomes possible” (Morphologie 7:282). In his own edition of Goethe’s
Autobiography (1849), Melville checked and underlined Goethe’s 25 March 1787 entry about
“the primal vegetable type” which anticipated the theory of “morphology,” a term Goethe later
coined from the Greek morphe meaning “shape” (Autobiography 448).4 For Goethe, morphe
explained the multiplicity of difference in vegetal life and pointed to an underlying continuity
of form that he called Urorgan or Urpflanze. Goethe’s emphasis on comparative morphologies—
affiliations of corpora across kingdoms of life—unexpectedly appears in the startling hybrid
imagery of many of Melville’s mid-career texts. Ahab’s beard, for instance, is gnarled as “unearthed
roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper
verdure” (MD 537). Then there is Fedallah, described as a “gamboge ghost” pigmented yellow
by the resin of southeast Asian evergreens, who sees the “deep wrinkles” of the right whale’s
oaken head in “the lines in his own hand” (325, 333, 327).
Still, although Melville owned Goethe’s major works and references to Goethe show in his
writings, his relationship to Goethean ideas was thorny. As with Emerson, Melville mocked
Goethe for what he saw as faith in an abstraction, “the all-permeating principle” (M 176). He
derided Goethe and Emerson for their philosophies of nature because, for Melville, both thinkers
avoided the problem of evil and the persistence of cruelty that featured so prominently in human
history and its legacies of violence, destruction, and injustice. But in the novels after Redburn and
White-Jacket, Melville catches himself subtly directed by Goethe’s morphological rhetoric. He
grants that when “lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day,” one’s “legs seem to send out
shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head” (Corr 194). In a February 1850
letter to Evert Duyckinck, Melville even imagined that his first commercial failure Mardi might
someday “flower like the aloe, a hundred years hence—or not flower at all, which is more likely
by far, for some aloes never flower” (154).
On the one hand, Melville’s floral metaphor for Mardi’s reception conveys an increasing aware-
ness that his most experimental work might not be appreciated in his lifetime. But, on the other
hand, “aloe-Mardi” allies literary success with the ab-human cycles of vegetal growth. Read from
the perspective of the novels and stories that followed between 1850 and 1857, Melville’s off-
hand botanic-chemical characterization of “aloe-Mardi” indicates that plants had helped him
better conceptualize literary legacy and its relation to the vexing, contingent “nature” of crea-
tivity more generally. Peering into the “milky-way of white-weed” and other kinds of vegetal life
after Mardi, Melville started to recognize creativity not in the traditional sense of the individual,
4
See MMO, http://melvillesmarginalia.org/Share.aspx?DocumentID=47&PageID=11255.
Verdure 465
human genius but as a property of life itself (PT 7). To speak of the eloquence of plants suddenly
seemed to Melville less metaphorical than material, a tight spiral of the semiotic and biotic.
Botany, then, was a window into the questions of originality and iteration that shadowed his
entire career, from debates over the authenticity of Typee and Omoo to the copies in Bartleby’s law
office and the proliferating avatars of The Confidence-Man. In the 1850s, Melville began to ask if
human dilemmas of free will and determinism might be entangled with the nonhuman ecolog-
ical creativity he saw in forests, prairies, and reefs. Ever the skeptic of religion, Melville made
continuing forays into greenness that offered him more concrete insights into the planetary
meaning of the human species. In the end, he would muse, are we but the “drifting sea-weed of
the universe” (CM 206)?
Immortal Vigor of Plants: The Experimental 1850s

The novels and stories of the 1850s underscore Melville’s appreciation for the historical influence
of plants, especially pine and oak, on the development of human societies. In Chapter 36 of this
Companion, Richard King has observed that the sea drives the Earth’s “climate, biodiversity,
economy, international politics, and human imaginations,” yet terrestrial and marine plants are
equally the material basis for agriculture, economy, and the infrastructure of civilization. So, just
as “Nature planted our Pierre” in the sylvan worlds of Saddle Meadows, Melville planted his
mid-career writing in the antebellum scientific discourses of vegetal life (P 14). The Melville
family library contained many books that read floral diversity through poetry and associated
certain flowers with virtues, fitting with the broader history of the popularization and dissemi-
nation of nineteenth-century American science (see Bercaw 54, 102, 107). Asa Gray’s botany
textbook Elements of Botany (1836), for example, helped to professionalize American science at
mid-century, and Almira Phelps’s Familiar Lectures on Botany (1836) educated generations of
women readers and amateur botanists.
By the late eighteenth century, botany had developed as an explicitly “sexual science” when,
as Greta LaFleur has demonstrated, “plant exchange, dissection and illustration exploded among
the middle-class and the wealthy,” spawning a “major cultural idiom” that redefined “public
discussions of sex in the latter half of the eighteenth century” (37). To cite a popular example,
Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather) blended science with erotic verse in The Botanic Garden
(1789), exploring the “sociosexual organization of the plant world” while at the same time allow-
ing the public to “imagine human sexual behavior as a categorical form of human diversity”
(LaFleur 149, 140). Nineteenth-century American women—who were expected, Dorri Beam
reminds us, to “cultivate flower-like qualities” and essentially “be a flower”—were encouraged to
study botany as a way of “knowing themselves” and to produce highly stylized “flower writing,”
often centered on the exuberant fertility of plant life (40, 38).
Like the work of these women writers, and like his sailors’ slang in Omoo, Melville’s self-con-
fessed “flowery style” seems to take inspiration from the profuse, uncontrolled verdure of his
Pacific novels (O 100). Similarly, Melville’s “purpleness”—his ornate and sometimes sexually
suggestive writing style—has engendered constant criticism, including the earliest reviews of
Typee’s irreligious immodesty and Moby-Dick’s “purposeless extravagance” (Parker 134). But if all
thought assumes a certain style, a certain shape of expression, then literary style provides a gauge
for a thinker’s relationship to his or her historical (and environmental) milieu. In other words,
466 Tom Nurmi
Melville’s attention to the cycling of life in passages like the “Bower in the Arsacides” is not
groundbreaking per se. The power of Ishmael’s account comes not from its imagery of the hum-
ming glen but from its poetics: the linguistic conventions that shape our reading experience and
produce emergent complexity in the very event of reading, wherein vegetal motif is mirrored in
literary form. Melville’s interlinked, semicolon-dense syntax in the Arsacidean passage visualizes
on the page the “ever-woven” intermixture of organisms and environments, mimicking the same
self-organizing principles by which the “green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood” cre-
ates the “ever-woven verdant warp and woof” around the whale skeleton (MD 252). Like the
Spirit in Goethe’s Faust (1808)—“At the rustling loom of Time I have trod, / And fashioned the
living vesture of God”—loomer Ishmael weaves this digressive story into the baggy vesture of
Moby-Dick, a story hidden by the flowery, verdant prose that surrounds it (5).
A year later, in Pierre, Melville pushes his floral style even further. Vines and flowers creep into
Pierre’s metaphors and imagery to create gothic literary landscapes that refract the novel’s
thematic “inhumanities” through a grotesque, feracious background. The “greenness” of Saddle
Meadows fuses with the “fresh-foliaged heart of Pierre” (P 353, 68). After Moby-Dick, the tidy
norms of the sentimental novel appeared incongruous with the formal experimentation and het-
erodox thematic risks of Melville’s overgrown literary sensibility. But the sentimental novel was
the perfect genre for tracking the taboo, vegetal, and unsettling kinds of desire Melville plays
with in Pierre. This is because, as Jeffrey Nealon has argued, wild plants have regularly been
understood as metonyms of all the “emergent undocumented material that needs to be rendered
meaningful, negated, and raised” to fit narratives of national progress and domestic order (69).
The cultural connotations of plants may partially explain the common pretense in antebellum
women’s literature of dismissing writing as falling “leaves” randomly “gathered,” to quote Fanny
Fern, which allowed writers to strike a pose of gender humility and botanical decorum (Fern 5;
see Osborne 133). But in Melville’s case, Pierre’s vegetal tropes supplied the lexicon to enunciate
his evolution as a writer in the post-Moby-Dick period, his growing “to greenness” as he explained
it to Hawthorne (Corr 193).
No surprise, then, that the word “green” appears more than thirty times in Pierre. The first
sentence describes a city-sojourner “wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and
golden world” of Saddle Meadows, foreshadowing a longer meditation a few pages later: “nothing
can more vividly suggest luxuriance of life, than the idea of green as a color; for green is the pecu-
liar signet of all-fertile Nature herself” (P 3, 9; see Greiman 428). With greenness in mind,
Pierre’s description of “the god-like population of the trees” lining Saddle Meadows—which
look to him “a nobler race than man”—makes more sense. Pierre hopes that these trees’ “high
foliage shall drop heavenliness upon me; my feet in contact with their mighty roots, immortal
vigor shall so steal into me” (106–7). He wants to steal the “immortal vigor” of plants, an energy
he later identifies with the creative impulses of writing and music. Struggling to write at the
Church of the Apostles, for instance, Pierre “resolved to plant his head in a hot-bed of stove-
warmed air, and so force his brain to germinate and blossom, and bud, and put forth the eventual
crowning, victorious flower” (298). And, earlier in the novel, after hearing Isabel’s guitar for the
first time, Pierre is “a tree-transformed and mystery-laden visitant, caught and fast bound in
some necromancer’s garden” (128). Brain-blossoming and tree-transforming, Pierre finds his
match in Isabel, for whom happiness is feeling like a “plant, absorbing life without seeking it,
and existing without individual sensation… drank up into the pervading spirit animating all
things” (119). Joining Pierre’s literary ambitions with the rhetoric of germination and flowering
Verdure 467
gave Melville license to reflect on the process of literary creation and its tenuous relation to orig-
inality, much as vegetal seeding, growth, blossoming, and reseeding remind us of the iterative
nature of botanical diversity. “No one great book must ever be separately regarded, and per-
mitted to domineer with its own uniqueness upon the creative mind,” the narrator tells Pierre.
Rather, “all existing great works must be federated in the fancy; and so regarded as a miscella-
neous and Pantheistic whole” (284). In this post-Goethean philosophy of creativity, literary
composition follows botanical composition in endless assemblage, dissemination, and iteration.
Moreover, Pierre was written after a particularly challenging financial period for the Melville
family. Melville admitted that Redburn and White-Jacket, both composed and published in less
than a year, were “done for money” rather than out of “heart” or purely creative drive (Corr
138–39). They were not plant-like in the Greek sense of the word psūkhe, meaning “growth
itself,” blind and purposeless, both promise and danger (Nealon 31). Quite the opposite, Melville
called the process of writing these two novels plant-destroying. He was by economic necessity
“forced into it, as other men are to sawing wood” (Corr 138–39). But by 1850, for the moment
Melville had secured enough money to feed his family and buy Arrowhead Farm in western
Massachusetts, finding once again “the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always
compose” (191). Returning to the compositional mood of Mardi, Melville was free to consider
how human and ecological creativity converged, how both energetic activities produced unpre-
dictable results that overspilled the literary or taxonomic categories in which we seek to contain
them.
This is why Melville’s arboreal rhetoric appears more often and in denser, matted figurations
after 1850. Ishmael explicitly compares his narrative to an oak tree—“Out of the trunk, the
branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters”—and even
Ahab, that “thunder-cloven old oak,” sends forth “some few green sprouts” each spring (MD
289, 125). In Pierre’s America, “the vast mass of families be as the blades of grass, yet some few
there are that stand as the oak; which, instead of decaying, annually puts forth new branches” (9).
Against most critical readings, but dovetailing with Martínez Benedí’s and Savarese’s arguments
in Chapter 38, I would argue that Pierre’s apparent deadness (its stones, statues, and cities)
diverts our attention from the abundant descriptions of living matter in the novel, including
Pierre’s “organic” nature and persistent “earthliness” (P 347). The novel’s emphasis on decay and
death—the Glendinning name falling to the “mold”—turns out to be a way to see the obverse,
a way into the radicle of Melville’s philosophy of life (197). The “most mighty of nature’s laws is
this,” Pierre’s narrator intones, “that out of Death she brings Life” (9).
In a more general sense, Pierre’s gloomy ruin delivers the contrast necessary for readers to see
the dawn of modern, biopolitical life via biological, botanical, and medical sciences in mid-
century America. Whereas these sciences made life intelligible and manageable, Pierre smears
the distinctions and hierarchies that structure conceptions of life as fully legible and ordered.
Plants, algae, fungi, and slime accumulate and flourish in Pierre’s knotted syntax. These forms of
life, precisely because they do not exist for human cultivation or use, remain largely ignored or
repressed. Amid the wreckage of Pierre’s life, Pierre teems with ferns, bubbles with foams, and
explodes with lightning storms. The creative, inhuman wilderness of Saddle Meadows generates
life even as it destroys, initiating spirals of ecological reproduction that Pierre—with his sexual
frustrations and writing blocks—simply cannot match. Melville’s attacks on publishing and
literary originality in Pierre therefore concentrate on how writing reduces the complexity of eco-
logical relations by compressing ever-expanding meshes of life into familiar narratives, anatomic
468 Tom Nurmi
charts, and Procrustean tropes. Melville resists systemizing this “complex web of life” by staying
rooted in vegetal rhetoric that veers from the traditional style of the sentimental romance and
from the dominant, patriarchal norms of heterosexual reproduction (141). Instead, Melville cre-
ates a novel of “mutilated stumps,” a novel whose attention to decay and partiality makes visible
the interstitial spaces where life and nonlife intersect, deform, and reform (141).
We see this developed in “The Piazza”—remember the “Chinese creeper” vine growing on the
narrator’s house that contains “millions of strange, cantankerous worms”—and in “The
Encantadas,” where desertification leaves the islands with “distorted cactus trees” and tangled
“thickets of wiry bushes, without fruit and without a name, springing up among deep fissures of
calcined rock” (PT 6, 127). Critics in the 1850s certainly noticed how Melville’s verdant style
more closely associated him with cannibals, criminals, and “wildings”—those “without culture
or training, like a wild plant … natural, native” (OED). According to many reviewers after Moby-
Dick, Melville had indeed gone “crazy,” running wild with his excessive literary productions, his
“chaff” (Parker 123–34). It was as if Melville, melding with his vegetally-lush prose, had become
to his readers an inexplicable wilding. Once a roguish sailor and sturdy novelist, Melville ended
the decade in obscurity, lost in the weeds of a literary culture that had once admired him for the
verdurous tales it now ignored.
Avatars of the Vine: The Poetry

After 1859, Melville continued to cultivate imagery of plants in his writing. Now, though,
he tested the specific demands of poetic forms and how they might generate new modes of
ecological thinking, especially about the more obscure forms of vegetal life (like algae or
weeds) that he would examine in John Marr and Weeds and Wildings. While Battle-Pieces,
Clarel, and Timoleon contain numerous references to botanical facts, these works reflect a
different orientation to the natural world, a less material and more figurative one, in which
plants are usually sublimated into political, spiritual, or historical meanings. Still, a number
of lyrics from these collections focus on the underappreciated biogeochemical phenomena
necessary for plant flourishing: atmospheric factors like wind, storms, and dust. Dust covers
nearly all of the landscapes in the later writings, providing Melville a gritty surface on
which to examine the material and philosophical implications of atmospheric force. As
Judean deserts mound and erode in Clarel’s cantos, for example, Jerusalem monuments gen-
erate immanent matrices for life:
… day and night

The sands subsiding from the height;
In time, absorbed, these grains may help
To form new sea-bed, slug and kelp.
(C 1.24.73–76)
Faced with the apparently barren expanses of Clarel’s deserts, Melville perceived that sand grains
are actually markers of future potential for flourishing and greenness. Sand is the physical
foundation for new constellations of life in yet-to-be-formed seabeds that, in turn, may foster
slugs and algae.
Verdure 469
A decade later, in John Marr, Melville proposes a more pessimistic environmental future in his
short poem “The Tuft of Kelp,” where the speaker addresses algae directly:
All dripping in tangles green,

Cast up by a lonely sea,
If purer for that, O Weed,
Bitterer, too, are ye?
(PP 235)
Melville puns on the bitterness of shore-cast-kelp, suggesting that algae’s ability to extend
human knowledge (in the nineteenth century, kelp was chemically “purified” to produce paper
and glass) means it will inevitably be used unsustainably, to extinction, to the bitter end. Read
from a twenty-first-century perspective, Melville’s beached kelp is an icon for the bitter end of
an ecologically diverse planet in which eighty percent of breathable oxygen comes from marine
algae (like North Atlantic kelp forests) whose diversity is threatened by climate change. Even
Ahab acknowledges his breath as an exhalation of once-vegetal life swirled through water, air,
and lung: “I am buoyed by breaths of once-living things, exhaled as air, but water now” (MD
497). Ahab concedes that our very breath is linked to the health of the kelpy bottoms around the
globe, the “sea-weed and all the slime of the sea” as Father Mapple puts it (42). Here, Richard
King’s blue ecocritical Melville merges with the green Melville in algal bitterness, in the unap-
preciated power of planetary weeds.
Furthermore, throughout his later work, Melville returned again and again to the notion that
the human species is far more weedy than it would care to admit. In “A Dirge for McPherson,”
Melville writes that “Man is noble, man is brave, / But man’s—a weed” (PP 90). During the blood-
shed of the Civil War, Melville identified the human species as a resilient but self-destructive
planetary force. We are a species that, in the deepest of ironies, cannot see our own weediness:
The People spread like a weedy grass

The Things they will they bring to pass,
And prosper to the apoplex.
(“Conflict of Convictions,” PP 9)
Melville summarizes this dynamic in “A Way-Side Weed” from his late collection of poems
Weeds and Wildings, which describes a busy charioteer who lashes a roadside weed as he speeds on.
The speaker asks: “But knows he what it is he does?” (BB 90). For an aging Melville, literature
had precisely this function—of communicating what it is we do to our environments, both
material and social. Literature permits us, as Emily Dickinson phrased it, to see ordinary,
“familiar species” anew. Suddenly, forms of life like wild plants, so regularly ignored, disclose
“amazing sense” (J448). Because a weed is a “profitless creature— / Profitless to man!” it has
little place in our existential schemas or economic habits (“When forth the Shepherd,” BB 79).
Because it is not immediately useful or beautiful or fragrant to humans, the weed is idle, exempt,
and to some degree unthinkable:
A weed grew here.—Exempt from use,

Weeds turn no wheel, nor run;
Radiance pure or redolence
470 Tom Nurmi
Some have, but this had none.

And yet heaven gave it leave to live
And idle it in the sun.
(“Inscription for a Boulder…”, BB 100)
Like the amaranth that grows at the base of Mount Greylock in Pierre, weeds resist Western nar-
ratives of utility and progress. Weeds are outside ordinary human time, as in the secondary def-
inition of a “weed” in nineteenth-century grief cultures: a band on clothing that signified a
period of mourning. Think, for instance, of the man “in mourning” with “a long weed on his
hat” in The Confidence-Man, or of the tortoises in “The Encantadas” colored “black as widower’s
weeds” (CM 18; PT 131). Both mourning weeds and actual weeds have in common a shared time
of exemption. Time otherwise. Time for “idle,” non-radiant existence or the suffering of “profit-
less” grief.
In Weeds and Wildings, Melville dedicates an entire volume to hidden, abjected, floral per-
spectives on the world. He takes the point of view of the aster-flower, lets the aloe plant speak,
and listens to a ground-vine converse with a rose: “O Rose, we plants are all akin. / Our roots
enlock” (BB 104). Unpublished in his lifetime and only restored in 2017 to its original struc-
ture for the final volume of the Northwestern Newberry editions, Weeds and Wildings is the
culmination of a writing career crammed with plants, seeds, and all kinds of greenness. The
narrator of the prose sketch “Rip Van Winkle’s Lilac,” for example, finds new layers of ecolog-
ical complexity and beauty in a fallen willow tree just as Melville exhumes new layers of
meaning from Irving’s familiar, time-worn tale. In a nod to Erasmus Darwin, the young artist
who paints Rip’s deserted house declares: “Decay is often a gardener,” one with a painterly eye
for botanical color (111; see Darwin IV:398–99). Old Rip, formerly the definitive figure of
antebellum laziness and unproductive labor, is suddenly a visionary eco-spiritualist whose
abandoned willow produces the most gorgeous lilacs in the county. For “where man finds in
man no use, / Boon Nature finds one” (115).
Ultimately, Weeds and Wildings is remarkable because, in its poems and prose, Melville shifts
from a mode of seeing individual organisms like willows and lilacs at specific moments in time
to seeing their life cycles and vegetal kinships over time: drifts of pigments that index the
temporal movements of bodies in surreal patterns. In “The Blue-Bird,” a dying bird becomes
somehow “transfigured in the Flower” because both bird and delphinium share an identical
color; they are avatars of the “self-same welkin-blue” that tints the irises of “welkin-eyed Billy
Budd” (86, 4). The word “avatar,” Melville knew, comes from the Sanskrit avatāra meaning
descent, or passing to Earth (see also MD 261 and Sullivan and Hall 362–70). So in “The
Avatar”—one of the final poems of “Part II” of Weeds and Wildings—the speaker contemplates
the expression of color in flowers, from the splendor of the red rose to the humbler, pink eglan-
tine. The “rose-god” descends equally in the crimson bloom and in the “meeker form and hum-
bler look / Of Sweet-Briar, a wilding or weed” (102).5
If an avatar is at once a manifestation and a phase, created and creating, then in the welkin-
blue, verdure-green spectra of Melville’s writings, plants are ephemeral avatars for human
5
For more on Melville’s rose poems—including the influence of Omar Khayyám’s The Rubáiyát (1859, 1878) and
Sa’di’s The Gûlistân (1822)—see MMO: melvillesmarginalia.org/intro.aspx?id=17 and http://melvillesmarginalia.org/
Note.aspx?id=33.
Verdure 471
existence. They are color-coded emblems of fleeting planetary order in an entropic universe.
More viscerally than in science textbooks or environmental policies, in Melville’s chromatic
poetics we are forced to confront our blindness to the weedy avatars that make breathing and
petromodernity possible. We realize that Western culture’s repression of vegetal life is merely
shorthand for its long history of myopia, carelessness, and imperialist cruelty. “I dally,— I
delay.— / Long do hesitate,” confesses the narrator of “The Rose Gardner.” “I came unto my roses
late” (127, 128). Melville’s literary verdure implicates us, humbles us, and calls insistently from
the past. It poses a simple question: Will we awaken to our weediness before it is too late?
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38
Anatomy
Jennifer J. Baker
The anatomist takes something apart to grasp the workings of the whole. Herman Melville
admired this intellectual exercise, but he also saw risks inherent in both the analytical and
synthetic steps of the dissection process. Subdivision could easily devolve into an empirical
reduction that leaves the anatomist with nothing but parts; at the same time, the anatomist’s
effort to grasp the whole could be just as reductive if it projects onto the object of study an over-
determined unity. Melville’s treatment of anatomy continually posits two related questions: how
does one decompose something without reducing it to mere parts, but also how does one envi-
sion the whole without effacing complexities and anomalies?
Anatomy was a cornerstone of biological research and medical practice in Melville’s lifetime.
Although physicians, surgeons, illustrators, and artists had for centuries used detailed studies of
bones and organs to understand the architecture and functioning of human and animal bodies,
anatomical study in the early nineteenth century took on new significance as it provided much
of the evidence for emerging evolutionary theory that would redefine the study of life. As the
practice of medicine in the United States evolved in these years from a trade to a profession, ana-
tomical instruction and dissection also became central to the training and credentializing of
doctors.
For Melville, this anatomical analysis of life-forms was also inseparable from anatomy as a
mode of philosophical investigation. In Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Thomas
Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica (or Vulgar Errors), Melville found compelling examples of minds
that use subdivision to understand complex subject matter and organize information. Burton’s
dizzyingly rich and rambling work deploys a surgical analogy in announcing on the title page
that melancholy will be “philosophically, medically, historically opened and cut up” and the
findings presented accordingly in “three partitions” (Burton). Browne, a physician and anato-
mist, categorizes common fallacies by topic—such as the natural world, humankind, art, history,
Anatomy 473
geography—and he further subdivides each of these categories. Since the Melville Revival a
century ago, a range of scholars, including Nathalia Wright, Northrop Frye, Paul McCarthy, A.
Robert Lee, and Samuel Otter, have detailed Melville’s penchant for literary anatomies that break
up their subjects along disciplinary lines and catalog knowledge from diverse fields of study.
For Melville, then, anatomy was a cutting-edge field of scientific research as well as a
philosophical tradition that dated back to the Renaissance and found expression in encyclopedic
modes of writing. The confluence of these two forms of anatomy—what I would call
“physiological” and “philosophical” anatomies—was well established in Western thought.
Surgery and dissection had long been powerful metaphors for thinking about thinking, Emily
Jane Cohen writes, because “anatomizing, involving at once an unearthing of hidden mysteries
or origins and a dividing into parts so as to reassemble a coherent whole, was the paradigm of all
philosophical enterprises and was duly reflected in all branches of knowledge” (371). Melville
recognizes these endeavors as analogous but also suggests that a sometimes fraught relationship
obtains between the two. The work of anatomists and surgeons in Melville’s lifetime was closely
associated with the consolidation of authority in the life sciences and the efforts of scientific and
medical establishments to define standards by which life-forms should be observed and under-
stood. This authority was often at odds with the aims of a philosophical anatomy that deliber-
ately embraced different disciplinary perspectives in its quest to understand a subject.
Melville’s knowledge of anatomical theories informed his depiction of animal and human
bodies as well as of surgeons, surgical operations, and dissection. In these depictions, anatomical
methods exemplify how the mind observes and responds to the natural world, revealing both the
powers and limitations of the mind’s tendency to de- and re-compose. One indication of Melville’s
admiration for anatomy is, as Hershel Parker notes, his transcription of William Hazlitt’s praise
for John Hunter into his personal copy of Frederick Bennett’s Narrative of a Whaling Voyage:
“John Hunter was a great man. He would set about cutting up the carcass of a whale, with the
same greatness of gusto, that Michael Angelo would have hewn a block of marble” (qtd. Parker
652). But Melville also found that such bodily dissection could be too empirical and reductive,
or, conversely, too quick to derive laws or systems from the particulars. Moreover, he often con-
templated the continuities and discontinuities between the zoologist’s or doctor’s anatomy and
the philosophical anatomy he associated with Burton and Browne. Both forms involved deep-
diving and subdivision in ways consistent with Melville’s own intellectual methods, but scientific
and medical anatomy did not, like Burton’s and Browne’s, always support his experiments in
perspectivism.
Cutting Up
Melville learned much about anatomy from natural history books and encyclopedia articles on a
range of zoological and medical subjects. In December 1849, he visited a Paris morgue and the
next day took in the Musée Dupuytren, which held wax anatomical models and specimens exhib-
iting disease and malformation. “Pathological,” he wrote of the exhibit, “Rows of cracked skulls.
Skeletons and things without a name” (J 33). In London shortly after, he visited the Royal
College of Surgeons, which housed the specimen collections of renowned surgeon John Hunter.
Throughout his writings Melville alludes to Hunter and many of the leading anatomists of the
late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries: Georges Cuvier, the French zoologist who studied
474 Jennifer J. Baker
skeletal affinities between living and extinct organisms; German Romantics Lorenz Oken and
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who sought to demonstrate the morphological unity of animate
bodies; Louis Agassiz and Richard Owen, who looked to anatomical structures for evidence of
divine design; and Samuel George Morton, Josiah Nott, and George Gliddon, who promoted
scientific racism by using craniometry to classify and rank human populations.
The term “anatomy” derives from the Greek word for dissection or, literally, “cutting up.” In
practice, however, the term refers both to the separation of something into parts and to the
subsequent understanding of the whole that this reduction makes possible (in this sense, it is
similar to “analysis,” which derives from the Greek word for “breaking up”). The “anatomy”
entry in the Penny Cyclopaedia, a multi-volume reference work that Melville consulted regularly,
emphasizes this dual meaning: anatomy, the author declares, is not only dissection but the
“knowledge acquired by dissection” and a “science inasmuch as certain general principles are
deducible from it” (“Anatomy” 498).
Anatomical research was central to the efforts of nineteenth-century zoologists and botanists to
make the study of life as systematic and theoretically rigorous as Newtonian mechanics. This
“second scientific revolution” entailed the professionalization of biological research, the establish-
ment of new museums and institutions, and the codification of empirical and experimental
methods—methods that often rejected the aesthetic, associative, and analogical maneuvers typical
of Melvillean narrators. With these changes, natural science eventually became distinguished from
natural history, an older mode of inquiry that was polymathic, open to the amateur, and focused
on description and the aesthetic appreciation of natural phenomena. Anatomy was a crucial com-
ponent of this new methodological rigor because it viewed the body as a system reducible to reg-
ular principles. Georges Cuvier, for example, posited that because all structures of the body are
functionally integrated, one could determine the identity of an organism using just a single bone.
Excavating fossilized creatures in the gypsum quarries outside Paris, Cuvier famously demon-
strates this “correlation of parts” by uncovering a bone, predicting the creature’s identity, and then
confirming that prediction with a full exhumation. Cuvier’s comparative anatomy, he announced
in his Animal Kingdom, studied structural similarities among animals to determine “principles of
distribution” for classifying organisms and aimed to “reduce” the organization of life to “general
rules” (2, 1). “Without a knowledge of anatomical structure,” the Penny Cyclopaedia author declares,
“arbitrary distinctions,” based on considerations like the creature’s locomotion, “would almost
entirely prevail” in classification: whales, for example, would be classified with fish rather than
with other mammals (“Anatomy, Comparative,” 501–3). In the words of science historian Paul
Lawrence Farber, comparative anatomy offered a “key to erecting a natural system of classification”
and grasping the “underlying order of nature.” It created a “secure foundation on which to build
a scientific discipline to explain the mass of detail known about the living world” (38).
This research program assumed that the organism’s interior is a key index of its place in the
animal kingdom. As a taxonomical tool, anatomy conjoins the physiological and philosophical
by dissecting and analyzing bodies of individual organisms in order to organize the animal
kingdom as a whole. The mammalian class, for example, is defined by shared interior structures
often disclosed only through dissection: the bones beneath the whale’s flipper, the bat’s wing,
and the human hand reveal a common mammalian identity despite differences in external form
and function. Hence, Ishmael observes, the whale’s “side fin, the bones of which almost exactly
answer to the bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb,” reveals kinship that would not
otherwise be discernible because those fingers are “permanently lodged” in “fleshy covering” like
Anatomy 475
human fingers covered by a mitten (MD 263–64). Anatomists of Melville’s time posited both
metaphysical and physical bases for their taxonomical groupings: many discerned a common
transcendent archetype or blueprint on which the structures had been intelligently designed;
Charles Darwin later argued that the similarities were the physical evidence of descent with
modification.
Anatomy also played a key role in the professionalization of medicine. The day-to-day work of
doctors might have consisted largely of delivering babies and treating infections and broken bones,
but in US medical schools, the first of which began to be established in the late eighteenth century,
anatomical knowledge was the means by which doctors were to gain mastery of human physiological
systems and pathology. Hands-on dissection supplemented book-learning and gave medicine its
scientific legitimacy. With advancements in anesthesia, Michael Sappol notes, surgeons could pio-
neer new procedures, such as amputations, skin grafts, and organ repairs, by performing them first
with dead bodies (58). Anatomical research was controversial, criticized for encouraging grave-
robbing and blasphemous violations of the deceased, but defenders argued that it was essential to
medical progress. Promoting an 1831 proposal to legalize the dissection of human bodies in
Massachusetts, one writer for the North American Review declared that “more and greater improve-
ments” in surgery had been made in the last half-century than in any two centuries prior, all trace-
able to the “minute and thorough acquaintance with anatomy” (“Address” 67).
Anatomy, Reduction, and Matter

At first glance, Melville’s fiction might seem to have nothing good to say about anatomy. In
Moby-Dick, dissection is the province of so-called closet naturalists, who work in prestigious lab-
oratories studying dead specimens sent to them from the field and have no firsthand knowledge
of living animals. Their limited knowledge is a constant theme of the cetology chapters as
Ishmael distinguishes between those who have observed living whales and those who have only
ever beheld their corpses. Any exclusive focus on dead specimens, he concludes, yields a kind of
dead knowledge:
How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this
wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful
wood. No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes;
only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.
(453–54)
Experiential knowledge is essential to understanding the living animal, for only through first-
hand encounter can one “truly and livingly” find out the whale. By contrast, anatomical study
unassisted by firsthand observation yields knowledge as desiccated as bones themselves. Here,
Ishmael echoes a complaint about the overreliance on dissected (as well as stuffed and preserved)
specimens common in the writings of many naturalists associated with the Romantic tradition.
Henry David Thoreau called natural history museums “catacombs of Nature” and detested the
“pickled world” presented in cabinets, cases, and jars (465, 472). Philip Henry Gosse worried
that the study of nature had become “necrology,” focused on stiff, shriveled, distorted and color-
less body parts measured to a “thousandth of an inch” (3).
Anatomists deal with dry and cold bones of death rather than the warm flesh and blood of life,
Ishmael makes clear, and these dead specimens can never tell the entire story of the living
creature. The vibrant colors of fish fins and bird feathers fade quickly after the animal dies. Skin
grows pale as blood pools, pupils dilate, and the muscles relax, often leaving the animal in very
un-lifelike positions. Whale specimens are especially deformed because their skeletons collapse
under their massive body weight when no longer buoyant in water. Whale skeletons can reveal
much about the animal, but because their mammalian skeletons are incongruous with the outer
form adapted for marine locomotion, the bones alone give a poor indication of the living animal.
Gazing at the whale’s ribs, Ishmael concludes that the “skeleton of the whale is by no means the
mould of his invested form.” Whereas the clothed body measures at least 16 feet in one place, he
notes, the “corresponding rib” might measure only eight; hence, a single bone might convey
only “half of the true notion of the living magnitude of that part” (453).
Not surprisingly, when artists rely exclusively on dead specimens, their art fails to capture
the living animal. “Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the stranded fish,”
Ishmael notes, “and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken
back, would correctly represent the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and
spars” (263). Zoological illustration often took cues from anatomy and presented organisms
as isolated specimens. Although whales were too large to be dissected in a laboratory, ceta-
cean illustration often depicted whales as if static objects on an exam table: a plate from
Frédéric Cuvier’s l’Histoire Naturelle des Cétacés, for example, depicts an “invested” sperm
whale arranged on a white background amid skull and jaw bones (see Figure 38.1). Illustrations
that do depict whales in marine environments often simply superimpose these static poses on
seascapes. Such positioning allows the viewer to see the whale’s body in its entirety, but the
animals usually appear to be implausibly bobbing on the water’s surface or sitting perched
atop rocks.
Figure 38.1 A plate from Frédéric Cuvier’s 1836 De l’histoire naturelle des cétacés features the fully
invested whale surrounded by details of the skull and jaw bones. Courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling
Museum.
Anatomy 477
Ishmael’s criticism of anatomy is consistent with the anti-reductionism of many Romantic

writings that rejected the Enlightenment zeal for subcategorization. In William Wordsworth’s
view, the anatomizing mind is a “meddling intellect” that “mis-shapes the beauteous forms of
things” rather than apprehend intuitively its holism. Hence, as he famously writes, “We murder
to dissect” (60). In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s aesthetic theory, dissection is associated with a low
empirical perception. “Those who have been led to the same truths step by step, through the
constant testimony of their senses … contemplate nothing but parts,” he writes (Coleridge,
“Letter to Thomas Poole, 16 October 1797” 623). This inferior faculty, often dubbed “fancy,” is
akin to taking a “dissected map” out of a box, rearranging it, and retroactively projecting a
wholeness on it (Coleridge, Biographia Literaria 528).
In this Romantic tradition, anatomy is also associated with a related tendency to degrade
human beings as objects of study. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the dissecting room, along with
the slaughterhouse and charnel house, furnish many of the body parts for Victor’s fatal and
hubristic creation of a composite human. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-mark,” Aylmer
fails to understand that the mark on his wife’s cheek “goes as deep as life itself” and cannot be
excised without destroying her (41). In a poem by Emily Dickinson, the speaker issues a similar
warning about a potentially deadly reductionism: “Surgeons must be very careful / When they
take the knife! / Underneath their fine incisions / Stirs the Culprit—Life!” (Poems 194). If we read
surgery here as a figure for editorial excision, as many readers have, we might also conclude that
poems, like bodies, possess for Dickinson an organic irreducibility; Coleridge makes a similar
organicist claim when he writes that poems do not merely consist of the “words to which they
are reducible” (Biographia 515). Techniques of amputation, transplantation, and grafting, some
of which are depicted in White-Jacket and Mardi, helped advance medical treatments, but these
practices also produced unsettling scenes of corporeal violation.
A case in point is the amputation performed by Dr. Cadwallader Cuticle in White-Jacket. More
oblivious than malicious, Cuticle exhibits a “heartlessness” of a “purely scientific origin.” His
desire to advance and display his own anatomical knowledge blinds him to the suffering of the
patient before him. Although the doctor is trained to save lives, his “enthusiasm” for “all speci-
mens of morbid anatomy” and penchant for Parisian casts of human deformities make him a
grim “patch-work of life and death” (WJ 250–51). He views his patients as collections of parts,
and with his wig, dentures, and glass eye, his own body similarly lacks such integrity. Cuticle
would not hurt a fly, the narrator wryly assures the reader, unless, of course, given a microscope
and the opportunity to dissect the creature.
The new anatomical orientation of medicine, Michael Sappol writes, rendered the patient an
inert object of study and encouraged surgeons to perform “flashy but unnecessary procedures” in
order to advance their research (58). It is in this context that we should read White-Jacket’s darkly
comical surgeon, who rushes to amputate the leg of an injured top-man despite the misgivings
of fellow surgeons gathered to watch. A former instructor at the renowned Philadelphia College
of Physicians, Cuticle is bored by treating fevers and broken bones aboard the Neversink and is so
eager to amputate that he fails to consider other medical options. Surgeons used cadavers to
develop procedures that could heal living patients, and yet Cuticle treats the corpse and the
patient as interchangeable vehicles for his own professional advancement (tellingly, the injured
top-man is brought in on a death plank that has been converted to an operating table). The
amputation showcases Cuticle’s skills but kills the top-man, and in the end, the surgeon only
fleetingly acknowledges his patient’s demise. “Long habituation to the dissecting-room and the
amputation-table,” the narrator concludes, “had made him seemingly impervious to the ordinary
emotions of humanity” (251). A similar scene occurs in Mardi when Samoa mends a man’s frac-
tured skull with a trepan. Samoa “complacently” regards his own workmanship after the
procedure, and only Babbalanja thinks to ascertain whether the patient has survived. When it
turns out he has not, the bystanders lament the death but declare the “surgeon a man of mar-
velous science” (M 295).
In Billy Budd, the unnamed ship’s surgeon exhibits another kind of myopia with respect to the
human body. When the purser asks the surgeon if the absence of spasmodic movement during
Billy’s death might have been the result of will power, the surgeon insists that any presence or
absence of movement should be explained in mechanical terms. He dismisses the purser’s
thinking as “imaginative and metaphysical,—in short, Greek,” contrasting his own tough-minded
empiricism with idealism but also casting doubt on the “authenticity” of any concept of the body
not already established in the “lexicon of science” (BB 66). The surgeon denies not simply meta-
physics but also the notion of a body that is more than merely inert and mechanically controlled
by the mind. Yet when Billy’s arm strikes Claggart, the body exhibits its own kind of conscious-
ness, eroding, as Matthew Rebhorn writes, the “distinction between the mind as a locus of sub-
jectivity and the body’s status as mere object.” The surgeon seeks to keep this distinction intact,
despite, as Rebhorn notes, an emerging neuroscientific discourse that was “endowing the body
with a conscious subjectivity.” Alexander Bain’s neuroscientific theories, often discussed in the
pages of Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, The Galaxy, and other periodicals Melville read, maintained
that the body’s nerve centers operate outside the brain’s control. In this context, Rebhorn argues,
the ship’s surgeon represents not simply a man of science but a man of mainstream science who
resists this alternative “lexicon of science” (222, 224).
Anatomy, Insight, and Revelation

Melville’s caricatures of anatomists, however, do not tell the whole story, for anatomical investi-
gation can also generate profound insight. While a reliance on dead specimens yields laughably
inaccurate and uninspired representations of whales, dissection is also a meaningful act of intel-
lectual excavation. Dissection seeks knowledge beneath the surface, and in Moby-Dick, the whale
is an especially apt specimen for the searching mind because the skeleton’s contours are so sur-
prisingly different from the outward amorphous shape. Ribs, finger-bones, and even tiny hind
legs lie encased in blubber. In “Extracts,” Melville cites Georges Cuvier’s characterization of the
whale as a “mammiferous animal without hind feet,” but both Cuvier and Melville knew of the
non-functional hind legs hidden inside the body—structures that would eventually be under-
stood as the vestiges of the terrestrial ancestor from which whales evolved (MD xxiii).
Stephanie P. Browner has examined Melville’s negative depictions of ship surgeons who abuse
their professional authority: White-Jacket devotes four chapters to Cuticle and mentions ship sur-
geons who participate in floggings by certifying that sailors are constitutionally sound enough
to endure more punishment. However, Thomas Beale and Frederick Bennett, two of Melville’s
favorite whaling authors, were ship’s surgeons who supplemented their eyewitness accounts with
anatomical findings and drew from their surgical training to advance knowledge about the
natural world. By necessity, a great deal of cetological knowledge derived from dissected stranded
whales or the body parts viewable during the “cutting in” phase of whaling. The whale was too
Anatomy 479
large and too obscured by water to be visualized in its entirety while alive, and a large whale
could not, like a fish, be hauled on to the deck of a ship or held in captivity for observation (both
the Boston Aquarial Gardens and P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in Manhattan attempted to
hold beluga whales in display tanks at this time, but the animals usually survived only weeks, if
not hours, under these conditions). Beale criticizes the inaccuracies of Frédéric Cuvier’s sperm
whale drawing and contrasts Cuvier’s “imaginary figure” with a diagram Beale has created using
both a drawing “taken from nature” by whaling captain James Colnett and another drawing
made “over the dead animal” by painter William John Huggins (Beale 13; see “Melville’s
Marginalia to Thomas Beale” 14 for image). Beale’s chapters not only rely on information gleaned
from his and others’ dissections (John Hunter’s work figures prominently here) but also use the
metaphor of cutting to partition the whale into more manageable bits of information. In order
to make the creature “more readily understood,” Beale replicates his whale diagram in the first
chapter but subdivides the figure and assigns letters to the spout-hole, case, junk, bunch, eye,
fin, blanket pieces, hump, ridge, narrowing of the tail, and the tail itself (23; see “Melville’s
Marginalia to Thomas Beale” 23 for image).
In Moby-Dick, anatomical study helps restrain those imaginations that are prone to exaggera-
tion and fanciful depictions. Anatomy was often shorthand for any kind of empirical observation
and method. Dickinson uses the phrase “faith in anatomy” (as opposed to “faith in faith”) to refer
to one’s reliance on the senses, exemplified by Thomas’s skeptical refusal to accept Christ’s return
unless he could place his fingers in his wounds (Dickinson, Selected Letters 159). In an early lecture
titled “The Naturalist,” Ralph Waldo Emerson similarly uses the term “dissection” to refer to
empirical verification, emphasizing that the evidence of the senses crucially disciplines the imag-
ination lest the poet lose “himself in imaginations” and “for want of accuracy” become a “mere
fabulist” (“Naturalist” 79). Tellingly, when Ishmael measures the skeleton, he declares he is “not
free to utter any fancied measurement” of the whale because the reader may easily refer to the
specimens on record at English and American museums (MD 451).
Anatomical measurements provide important correctives to the myths and yarns that sur-
round whales and, in particular, the white whale. As I have argued elsewhere, such correctives do
not simply curb exaggeration but also produce for the reader what Ishmael calls an “honest
wonder,” a natural phenomenon that is all the more awe-inspiring because it is verifiable. As the
narrator of Mardi puts it, “a thing may be incredible and still be true; sometimes it is incredible
because it is true” (M 296, emphasis added). Measuring the whale and assigning a finite number
to it is precisely the means by which Ishmael can marvel at the whale’s amplitude. Knowing that
the tail measures a remarkable 50 square feet in area and 20 feet across at its widest point gener-
ates his sense of the “measureless crush and crash” of its flukes (378). Similarly, John Hunter’s
determination that 10–15 gallons of blood are “thrown out” with each stroke of a small whale’s
heart illuminates the animal’s size and power (MD xxiii). These numbers are powerful because
they have been verified. In these instances, Ishmael achieves what Emerson describes as a middle
ground between the purely imaginative and purely sensual. Whereas the poet risks becoming a
“mere fabulist,” the scientist risks becoming a “pedant” when he loses sight of the “end of his
inquiries”; hence, Emerson concludes, “I fully believe in both, in the poetry and in the dissec-
tion” (“Naturalist” 79).
On a number of occasions, Ishmael’s observations seem to have been shaped by anatomical
theories circulating in the 1840s. He contemplates the notion first popularized by Goethe that
the spine is a sequence of units replicating the shape of the skull. Like Cuvier and other
comparative anatomists, he notes the striking structural resemblance between two mammalian
skulls. Like Darwin, who in his 1839 Journal of Researches notes the “wonderful relationship …
between the dead and the living,” Ishmael gazes on fossils and discerns the extinct whales’ struc-
tural similarities to modern whale skeletons and presumably to structures of even older extinct
species—such affinities, Darwin declares, that will “hereafter throw more light” on how some
species arise and others go extinct (173). On these occasions, the measurement data reveal ratios
and relationships previously unnoticed. Beneath the whale’s amorphous exterior, the length of
each rib bears a “seemly correspondence” to its width, the proportion of one to the other beauti-
fully consistent in every bone (MD 453). When, in “The Nut,” Ishmael apprehends “the won-
derful comparative smallness of his brain proper” together with “the wonderful comparative
magnitude of his spinal cord” (350), the relation between the smallest part and the largest is
itself a marvel to behold.
Skeletons elicit an aesthetic experience through which Ishmael also apprehends nature’s unity
and essential workings. When the “mind is penetrated” by a sense of nature’s grandeur and scale,
as Alexander von Humboldt put it, the “existence of laws that regulate the forces of the universe”
are revealed to the soul through mysterious inspiration (25). Ishmael finds that empirical
reduction is a precondition for understanding the general plan of life-forms and even the macro-
organization of the natural world. Laying bare the bones of the whale’s skeleton allows him to see
the holistic structure of an organism and the affinities between organisms both within the animal
kingdom and across time.
Knives in the Brain: Anatomizing Anatomy

In a posthumously published lecture on New England intellectual life, Emerson used an anatom-
ical metaphor to define the self-consciousness he felt characterized his own era. “The key to the
period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself … The young men were born
with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives”
(“Life and Letters” 329). The anatomical studies in Melville’s works are similarly self-conscious.
Ishmael continually anatomizes ship life, whale art, maritime customs, and, especially, cetology,
for it is only by turning his attention to particular features of the animal or smaller bits and
“extracts” of information that he can apprehend and convey the whale’s enormity, majesty, and
terror. In enacting such methods, Ishmael also puts his own mind on display.
One indication of self-consciousness is Ishmael’s worry that the anatomist’s efforts to generalize
from parts might lead to an overdetermined unification. The anatomist not only takes bodies
apart to understand the whole but also extrapolates that whole when presented with partial
information. Cuvier uses a single bone to predict the animal’s identity, displaying imaginative
power but also potentially overreaching. When Dickinson writes of Cuvier’s “‘Comparative
Anatomy’–– / By which a single bone–– / Is made a secret to unfold / Of some rare tenant of the
mold,” she suggests a hubristic assumption that humans can intellectually master nature (Poems
188). For Emerson, the mind’s continual quest to discover the “identities” that unite experience
can result in “a too rapid unification” of experience (“Plato” 30).
The “Cetology” chapter of Moby-Dick is Melville’s most notable critique of this overdeter-
mined coherence. Ishmael’s taxonomy of whales poses vexing questions about how the classi-
fying imagination works and comically explores the pitfalls of human efforts to impose logical
Anatomy 481
art on experience. All of Melville’s sources on classification, including Beale’s Natural History,
the Penny Cyclopaedia, and Georges Cuvier’s Animal Kingdom, vacillate between, on the one
hand, aspiring to classify animals according to essential characteristics in such a way that the
taxonomy would reflect a natural order and, on the other hand, acknowledging that
classifications are mental constructs. Ishmael insists on his own size-based classification of
whale species, which gives primacy to scale and reflects his understanding of the whale as, first
and foremost, an awesome creature. Yet, he also considers the “nature of [the whale’s] structure
in other and more essential particulars” (140), acknowledging the possibility that whales may
have bodily characteristics that can be a definitive basis for classification. In these latter
moments, he echoes the conviction, expressed in the “Whales” entry of the Penny Cyclopaedia,
that determining meaningful classification groups requires distinguishing “real or organic”
resemblances from “superficial” ones (“Whales” 288).
The playful mix of taxonomical approaches resists any single system. Ishmael, who announces
at the outset that his whale taxonomy will be an attempt to classify the “constituents of a chaos”
(134), undermines any possibility of definitive classification. For decades, Melville scholars saw
this chapter as a mockery of scientific hubris, but more recently readers have concluded that
what is at stake is not cetology or zoology per se but, rather, epistemological and aesthetic ques-
tions about how the mind responds to and handles information. Samuel Otter, for example, has
argued that scenes of whale anatomization in the book function as a critique of racial ideology:
the cetology chapters demonstrate how ethnologists locate racial “definition, coherence, and
difference” in the human body, and the “categorical difficulties” that arise in the “Cetology”
chapter “unsettle confidence in defining human types” (5, 132). In a recent study of the
“information revolution” prompted by the mid-nineteenth-century’s expansion of print, Maurice
S. Lee has described Moby-Dick as a meditation on how the mind manages voluminous knowledge.
The book “takes pleasure in the surfeit of information,” he writes, but it rejects the idea that
nature can be reduced to ordering principles and embraces an “untamable aesthetic” that mocks
systematization and classification (1).
The taxonomist’s efforts to impose coherence on experience are particularly troubling when
they ignore oddities that do not fit easily into established categories. Melville was drawn to
anomalous creatures because they were verifiable life-forms that, in their atypicality, could stim-
ulate the imagination: the “strangely hideous” albino whale, the “perplexing” platypus, the
voiceless iguana that is “that strangest anomaly of outlandish nature” (MD 191, CM 70, PT
127). Such animals, both real and strange, deny neither the dissection nor the poetry. Melville
resists the unifying impulse of nineteenth-century naturalists, who, as Harriet Ritvo has shown,
worked to rationalize oddities and incorporate them into a “newly elaborate and therefore newly
powerful system” of classification (137). Although Melville values the philosophical aspirations
of modern life science, he is skeptical of scientific efforts to normalize the abnormal at every turn.
Emerson had expressed a similar concern in “The American Scholar,” warning that the mind
“tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct” might be too intent on “tying things together,
diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote
things cohere, and flower out from one stem” (“American Scholar” 54).
This defense of anomaly is central to the discussion of literary practice in The Confidence-Man.
Readers criticize writers for creating inconsistent characters, Melville’s narrator notes, but such
character inconsistency is no different from those inconsistencies found in nature. When they
first beheld the duck-billed beaver of Australia, English naturalists, “appealing to their
classifications,” maintained the creature must be a hoax (CM 70). Faced with new specimens
arriving from every corner of the globe, they could find no place in their taxonomies for an
animal, which, like the whale, defied expectations of what constitutes a mammal (biologists now
understand that this duck-billed, egg-laying, venomous mammal belongs to an early offshoot of
the mammalian family tree, other branches of which went on to produce the marsupial and pla-
cental mammals that give birth to live young). Melville’s narrator similarly mocks readers who
reject inconsistencies in literature because they do not fit their preconceived notions of human
character. Melville’s defense of inconsistency does not mean the narrator relinquishes all stan-
dards of realism: the platypus does exist after all, and “fiction based on fact should never be con-
tradictory to it” (CM 69). But strange facts can elude understanding and excite the imagination.
Natural oddities—whether platypuses or human psyches—justify artistic latitude and liberties
precisely because natural phenomena are never easily rationalized.
The renunciation of system does not mean the effort to systematize has no value. “Dissect him
how I may, then, I but go skin deep,” Ishmael writes despairingly, and yet he is compelled to
keep trying, and this compulsion shapes the very form and methods of the book itself (379). This
“restless dissecting consciousness,” as Otter describes it, generates chapter after chapter of anal-
ysis (4). When dissection fails, that failure is itself powerful because it attests to the mystery and
elusiveness of the whale and other subjects. The encyclopedic form of the book, moreover, arises
from the limitations of anatomical generalization: there is no single dive that will excavate the
truth, so Ishmael approaches his subject indirectly, gathering glimpses and snatches that might
collectively yield a vision of the whole. “At best, we come up with Extracts,” A. Robert Lee
writes, “partial, multiple and largely conflicting, readings of Truth” (80).
These multiple readings comprise Moby-Dick, but they commingle particularly memorably in
the “Cetology” chapter as Ishmael contemplates different methods of organizing nature. As to
whether whales are fish or mammals, for example, he asserts that whales are fish. This common-
sensical claim, based on “obvious externals,” challenges the Linnaean system that separates the
whales from fish on the basis of the animal’s heart, lungs, moveable eyelids, hollow ears, manner
of reproduction, and the nursing of young (136–37). Moreover, Ishmael organizes the whale
family by sorting species, like printed books, according to size. This organization ignores the
anatomical distinction that zoologists, then and now, held to be one of the most meaningful for
purposes of classification, namely whether the whale has teeth or baleen (the sperm whale is by
far the largest of toothed whales, and by this logic, shares the odontocete suborder with the smallest
cetaceans like orcas, dolphins, and porpoises). In this chapter, the classification of zoologists is
ultimately the authority against which Ishmael positions his layperson’s approach. This zoological
organization of whales works against the philosophical anatomizing that embraces multiple per-
spectives and governs the book as a whole. Robin S. Grey has argued that Melville was attracted
to the anatomizing of Burton, Browne, and others because it produced catalogs that were both
“compendious” and aimed “to sort fact from myth” (221). While Melville acknowledges the
power of modern life science to sort fact from myth, he also worries that the efforts of zoologists
to erect a definitive system might curtail intellectual capaciousness.
In Melville’s Redburn, one can sense a similar uneasiness about then-current medical and
scientific anatomy, which aspired to establish a single authoritative understanding of life. When
Redburn eyes the dizzying array of ship lines as he prepares for his first voyage, he wishes the
rigging could be anatomized and made more readily intelligible for a greenhorn like himself.
Invoking both physical and philosophical anatomy, Redburn compares this “grand new naming
Anatomy 483
of a ship’s ropes” to both botanical classification and the names that “surgeons and anatomists
give to various parts of the human body” (R 65, 66). Yet, upon reflection, he also wonders if the
taxonomies of surgeons and anatomists only create specialized jargon that is unintelligible to
laypeople. He questions why names should outnumber the things they name, filling and con-
suming the air as “lamp-burners do gas” (R 66). Finally, with faux-naivete, he wonders if names
are only created by those who want to appear more learned than others. The narrator of Mardi
similarly pokes fun at scientific pretensions when he notes that the creature commonly known
among sailors as the bill fish is given the “outlandish appellation of ‘Xiphius Platypterus’” by
those who “love science and hard names” (M 104).
Drawing on its multiple, and even contradictory, resonances, Melville invokes anatomy to
carry out investigation that encompasses different perspectives but also to consider how scientific
and medical practices could exclude other approaches to life-forms. Among readers of Melville,
anatomy has tended to be shorthand for any kind of deep study and analysis, but if we under-
stand that this anatomy could take different forms, we will also understand how the knowledge-
seeker could variously imagine the relation between parts and the whole. Melville suggests that
surgery, dissection, and anatomical analysis promote both the worst and best intellectual
impulses: there is anatomical work that is reductive, objectifying, and myopic, and there is ana-
tomical work that aspires to discern the grand interrelation of parts, whether of a body, the
animal kingdom, or all of the natural world. Moreover, the anatomical mind can tend toward a
disciplinary subdivision and cataloging that embraces capaciousness and difference, but it can
also promote systematization that ignores information that does not readily conform to
established expectations. Melville’s work is a register of a tension—between catalog and system,
between pastiche and method—that was playing out in the sciences themselves as an older form
of natural history, which valued collection and description, was being displaced by a theoretical
biology aimed at reducing the natural world to regular principles.
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39
A “Mute Wooing”: Animism in Pierre
Pilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph James Savarese
The first book of Pierre famously throws us into an idyllic scene of rural life:
There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the
city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the
green and golden world. Not a flower stirs; the trees forget to wave; the grass itself seems to have
ceased to grow; and all Nature, as if suddenly become conscious of her own profound mystery, and
feeling no refuge from it but silence, sinks into this wonderful and indescribable repose. (P 3)
As any reader of the novel knows, the verdant, pastoral quietude soon morphs into gothic, urban
decay as Pierre reverses the direction of the typical Romantic escape. Samuel Otter has suggested
that, over the course of the novel’s first books, “the grass and flowers of Saddle Meadows throb
with ominous intensity” (172). Yet something in the tone of this first scene persists.
The narrator vigorously personifies nature, but here it is strangely still. The primary thing
that allows it to resemble its human counterpart—motion—has ceased. This lack of motion par-
adoxically brings nature to life, conscious life. It facilitates reflection, though the mystery of
being cannot, in the least, be penetrated. Suddenly sentient, yet unable to communicate, nature
relaxes into trance, like a “patient etherized upon a table,” as T.S. Eliot once famously wrote.
Melville not only pushes the animistic trope further than other writers, but he also fundamen-
tally remakes it. In Pierre quite literally everything (trees, stones, a portrait, a disembodied face,
a guitar) seems to be endowed with life—indeed with agency. What is more, movement has been
demoted as the primary indicator of sentience. Silence, stillness, and repose give rise to the
apprehension of consciousness. Why, Melville implies, should the nonhuman have to mimic the
human with its body? Why should it have to speak to register awareness? Said another way,
anthropomorphism always expects a recognizable performance.
486 Pilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph James Savarese
Finally, Melville insists on a reciprocal process of transubstantiation. Just as trees become

human-like, so too do humans become tree-like. Elms stand “rooted by [an] inscrutable sense of
duty to their place” (109); lindens stand “guardians of this verdant spot” (110). Like the elms,
Pierre often appears “rooted in thought” (94); his emotions take hold “of the deepest roots and
subtlest fibers of his being” (48). Isabel yearns, she says, for the peaceful motionlessness of plants
(119). In their final embrace, her long hair “arbors” Pierre “in ebon vines” (362). Like two arbo-
real therianthropes, the novel’s incestuous pair seems clad in the glory of the plant, as Georges
Bataille might say, as if to introduce an alternative version of “humanities” and “inhumanities.”
In this chapter, we present Melville as a wild, contrarian animist, one who eschews an easy,
solipsistic anthropomorphism. Such an assertion might not seem new. As Geoffrey Sanborn notes
in “Melville and the Nonhuman World,” Melville was known to enjoy “patting [trees] upon the
back” (10). Not only did he consider trees as “beings like himself,” Sanborn explains, but he was
also “moved to socialize with them” (10). We, however, are less interested in his affection for
trees or other nonhuman things than in the way that Pierre stages the problem of language—how
it produces the categories “animate” and “inanimate,” “alive” and “not alive,” which then require
the bandage of personification (or, to switch the register, the taboo of incest, both linguistic and
sexual.) To make distinctions, Melville tells us, is to wound.
Distinctions also betray our own lower-level perceptual systems, which track not separate cat-
egories but common properties. A plastic bag blown by the wind is just as alive as a white dove
until our frontal lobes label it as “inert.” These systems function largely without bias: they lib-
erally include as opposed to conservatively exclude. Cognitive scientists distinguish between
lower-level perception and higher-order thought, between what is called “innate first principles”
(the apprehension of motion) and “folk biology” (labeling that motion and assigning or
withholding agency). The latter is said to inhibit or subordinate what the former “tells” us,
though both age and cognitive disability limit its influence. The reference to cognitive disability
seems especially apt since Pierre struggles, in contemporary parlance, with mental health.
By deploying a cognitive approach to the novel, we are in no way repudiating other approaches.
Indeed, we seek to amplify their findings. For example, Colin Dayan reminds us that Melville
insistently “forced proximity on categories usually kept separate” (48). He was “obsessed …,”
she says, “with the uneasy boundaries between human and nonhuman” (46). Appealing to the
neuroscience of animism, we seek to make sense of such forced proximity. We seek to reframe the
categorical blurring for which Melville is rightly known by proposing that it originates in his
tendency to linger over sensation, to delay the moment of conceptual mastery that demystifies
the animistic impulse (prolonging, as it were, the life of that airborne plastic bag!). We have no
intention of merely applying science to literature. To the contrary, we will attempt to show how
Melville’s work complicates contemporary neuroscientific insights.
In Pierre, Melville’s novel of “nominal conversions” (P 177), a mother becomes a sister, a sister
becomes a wife, and people become trees. These categorical crossings and transformations occur,
you might say, in two places at once. The novel’s frequent animistic images vitalize the paradoxical
higher-order account of pre-categorical perceptual responses. The end result is that Melville
gives voice—a very different sort of voice—to both lower-level systems and to inarticulate
things.
A “Mute Wooing”: Animism in Pierre 487
First Principles Degrade Last: The Science of Animism

A 2008 study discovered animistic tendencies in people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). It also
discovered these tendencies in the elderly in general. Until that time, with respect to the
“able-bodied,” animism had been relegated to the very young and to those deemed “primitive”
or “uncivilized.” The study found that “many elderly controls” and “most AD patients”
“attribute[ed] life to inanimates capable of self-generated activity (the sun, fire)” (Zaitchick and
Solomon 27). People with Alzheimer’s additionally attributed life to inanimates such as cars and
lamps that do not move on their own. The study’s authors postulated a set of “innate first prin-
ciples” that “predispose us to attend to particular aspects of the perceptual world” (35). This sort
of attention is bathed in affect and largely indiscriminate. It does not parse experience with
words.
The acquisition of a higher-level “folkbiology” (28) typically suppresses the earlier and more
fundamental attunement to agency as a product of motion, which serves evolutionary survival.
In contrast to basic motion detection, folkbiology feasts on distinction, and it relishes language.
In this way, complex categorization, a cognitive achievement, repudiates the body’s more fluid
and feeling-oriented response to perceptual input. With aging, and especially with Alzheimer’s,
higher-level folkbiology breaks down, the authors argue, leaving the earlier response in place and
ready to assert itself. As they blithely declare, “First principles degrade last” (36).
This model strikes us as too cognitive—indeed as acting out the triumph (and, in the case of
certain populations, the lamentable failure) of reason, of cerebral governance. It is also ageist and
ableist. The model presupposes the inadequacy of an immediate, pre-reflective, and feeling-ori-
ented reaction to the world around us. What could such a reaction possibly accomplish? Here, a
critical cognitive literary studies approach might begin to contribute not only to Melville studies
but also to the scientific understanding of animism.
The plot of Pierre may suggest the tragic impossibility of dismantling human hierarchies, of
living with nature as a kind of cosmopolitan co-equal, but Melville undeniably presents a cri-
tique of the norm. At one point the narrator says, “Still wandering through the forest, … remote
from all visible haunts and traces of that strangely willful race, who, in the sordid traffickings of
clay and mud, are ever seeking to denationalize the natural heavenliness of their souls; there came
into the mind of Pierre, thoughts and fancies never imbibed within the gates of towns, but only
given forth by the atmosphere of primeval forests” (139). When they set out, by carriage, on
their journey, Isabel, that human-plant hybrid, cries to her brother-husband, “I like not the
town. Think’st thou, Pierre, the time will ever come when all the earth shall be paved?” (231).
How we describe the manner in which our lower-level perceptual systems respond to nature mat-
ters, for in the twenty-first century these systems might be the only thing that can save us from
environmental catastrophe. Melville’s emergent eco-sensitivity expresses itself, we believe, less as
an argument about human arrogance, an argument that cannot help descending from frontal
lobe processing, than as a kind of silent, perceptual affinity which lurks beneath language and
higher-order thought. In our reading, country and city signify not only different spaces of being
but different systems in the brain.
A more recent study, from 2017, was less cognitive in its account of animism, though it, too,
cast aspersions on what disability studies scholars call neurodiversity. Galloping toward the city
of its conclusions, it, too, “trafficked in clay and mud.” The study confirmed the previous study’s
results but offered a different explanation for the reemergence of animism late in life. The authors
contended that, with respect to the elderly (and perhaps also with Alzheimer’s patients), higher
order concepts do not degrade; rather, the ability to inhibit the “developmentally prior agency
theory” (Tardiff et al. 145), that feeling of aliveness in response to motion, weakens. It is a gating
problem. As a result, the relationship between higher-order and lower-order systems changes.
Now, as in a Metro station after a ballgame or concert, the turnstiles open. No ticket to con-
sciousness is required for that more inclusive and “egalitarian diffusion of regard” (Savarese, See
It Feelingly 114). Or, to craft a metaphor from the country, now, as in spring, the stream wildly
overflows its banks.
And yet, as we noted, the authors cannot help dismissing what a neurodivergent brain might
teach us. Animism, they propose, involves a “competition” between a “correct response” (“folk-
biology”) and an “incorrect but prepotent response” (“agency theory”) (Tardiff et al. 147). Notice
how the language of the marketplace has infected this ostensibly neutral scientific description:
the frontal lobes must prevail at the expense of other brain regions—there is little that is coop-
erative about assigning agency. Notice, too, that the description also captures, in symbolic terms,
the fate of a writer such as Pierre or Melville who would resist convention.
Put simply, an elderly or disabled person’s lower-level perceptual systems are wrong and should
not be allowed to govern. Pierre, a novel in which the most mundane objects seem to have agency
despite purported evidence to the contrary, is filled with “prepotent” responses. The protagonist’s
“dilated senses” perceive the “all but intelligent responsiveness of the guitar—its strangely scintil-
lating strings” (151); or the “mystical intelligence and vitality” (197) of his father’s portrait; or, the
“invisible agencies” (37) in “the comings and the goings” of a disembodied face (53). We could
provide a hundred additional examples because Melville positively delights in being “incorrect”
(even as he imagines a popular audience for his novel). Indeed, he endeavors to capture what these
lower-level systems communicate, what they would whisper if they could whisper—or, if we would
listen. Perhaps the trees, that “nobler race than man” (106), are his ideal audience.
It should go without saying: animism is not a stage through which a child passes. Nor is it a
stage to which the child will eventually return. It is a continuous undercurrent or baseline, our
awareness of which fluctuates during the life course. David Miall reminds us that “the animistic
intuition takes hold…before we are aware of it” (700). Long past childhood, “it continues to
serve as the feeling framework for our initial, primitive response to an object” (Savarese, “I
Object” 83), as Miall observes, “prior to the processing that issues in a recognizable image with
cognitive meaning” (707). Ralph Ellis points out that “emotional and action-initiating processes
are triggered as early as 18–20 ms [milliseconds], … prior to any occipital processing” (qtd.
Miall 707). In other words, you do not need to be able to label that roaring yellow thing over
there a lion in order to be flushed with fear and running for your life. These lower systems, Miall
explains, invoke “capacities at a precategorical, prereflective level” (701).
That the young, the elderly, the cognitively disabled (and the work of an author such as
Melville) are so readily animistic should give us pause. After all, people tend to theorize about
animism—they tend to level the charge of anthropomorphism—from a distinctly minority posi-
tion: that middle period of life when they are engaged practically with the world and at their
most vigorous, when they bow down, one might say, to reason’s meticulous arrangement of
human affairs. Thus, our first move in resisting the mere application of neuroscience to literature
is to propose that the scientists have it wrong: this middle period is the problem. The failure to
inhibit first principles in reality constitutes a boon of non-hierarchical relation.
Silence Is the Only Voice

At the very beginning of the novel, we are told that
In the country … Nature planted our Pierre; because Nature intended a rare and original development
in Pierre. Never mind if hereby she proved ambiguous to him in the end; nevertheless, in the
beginning she did bravely. She blew her wind-clarion from the blue hills, and Pierre neighed out
lyrical thoughts, as at the trumpet-blast, a war-horse paws himself into a lyric of foam. (13–14)
In this conceit, Nature becomes a farmer and Pierre, a seed. That is, the former is humanized and
the latter, dehumanized. Then nature becomes an army bugler and Pierre, a horse. The former,
acting like the Muse, inspires the latter: a frothy, ephemeral poem of movement emerges. It is a
poem without words, a poem bubbling up from the body. Ever so subtly, Melville condenses the
plot of Pierre: a young, natural poet heads into battle, a battle he will lose.
As we have said, the novel engages in obsessive, cross-directional transubstantiation. To cite
another example, as Pierre stares at the portrait of his father, human feeling morphs into wintry
weather, and wintry weather morphs into something like a community gathering. The narrator
says, “Thus sometimes stood Pierre before the portrait of his father, unconsciously throwing
himself open to all those ineffable hints and ambiguities, and undefined half-suggestions, which
now and then people the soul’s atmosphere, as thickly as in a soft, steady snow-storm, the snow-
flakes people the air” (84). These “hints,” “ambiguities,” and “undefined half-suggestions” are
nothing less than a perceptual communique, which finds linguistic expression only in the trope
of personification. An object’s “pre-potent” possibility materializes, you might say, through
higher-order translation.
Immediately after this elaborate description, Pierre awakens: “Yet as often starting from these
reveries and trances, Pierre would regain the assured element of consciously bidden and self-pro-
pelled thought; and then in a moment the air all cleared, not a snow-flake descended, and Pierre,
upbraiding himself for his self-indulgent infatuation, would promise never again to fall into a
midnight revery before the chair-portrait of his father” (84–5). The novel stages a fundamental
conflict between conscious, self-propelled reason and unconscious, other-directed trance. The
latter, it should be clear, is aligned with nature. “In their precise tracings-out and subtile causa-
tions, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight,” the narrator explains.
“We see the cloud, and feel its bolt; but meteorology only idly essays a critical scrutiny as to how
that cloud became charged, and how this bolt so stuns” (67).
Isabel, that natural phenomenon, swims in “sparkling electricity” (151). “She seemed
molded from fire and air, and vivified at some Voltaic pile of August thunder-clouds heaped
against the sunset” (151–2). Pierre is “bound to her by an extraordinary atmospheric spell”
(151), a spell of innate first principles—here figured as a sort of invisible yet animating
weather. The undifferentiated, prepotent world of matter beckons; it appeals to our senses,
asking for an equivalent reply. “This spell,” the narrator tells us, “seemed one with that
Pantheistic master-spell, which eternally locks in mystery and in muteness the universal sub-
ject world” (151). Like Ishmael who squeezes sperm “till a strange sort of insanity came over
[him]” and “[he] almost melted into it” (MD 416), Isabel “absorb[s] life without seeking it,
and exist[s] without individual sensation” (119).
The mystery and muteness of the “universal subject world” are key. Deep into the novel, Lucy
declares to Pierre, “Our mortal lives…shall henceforth be one mute wooing of each other; with
no declaration” (310). Here, Lucy gestures to the link between a lack of speech and perceptual
seduction—a link that the figure of Isabel constantly actualizes. According to Pierre, Isabel has
“uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces
of visible time and space” (52). “Silence,” we learn, “is the invisible laying on of the Divine
Pontiff’s hands upon the world. Silence is at once the most harmless and the most awful thing in
all of nature… Silence is the only Voice of our God” (204).
What our first principles “tell” us feels theological—it is that alive, that interconnected and
interfused with nature. These lower-level systems cannot speak, yet they have a voice, a “mag-
ical” (204) one that predates the existence of the world. Such a voice predates thought; it
“broods upon the waters” (204) of consciousness, tempting and tantalizing them. Melville’s
animism at times seems explicitly Christian; at other times, pagan: “Pierre felt himself sur-
rounded by ten thousand sprites and gnomes, and his whole soul was swayed and tossed by
supernatural tides” (150). He has difficulty “resist[ing the pine tree’s] too treacherous persua-
siveness” (42). “Thou’lt not so often woo me to thy airy tent” (42), he vows, no sooner exclaim-
ing, “This day I will forsake the censuses of men, and seek the suffrages of the god-like
population of the trees (106).
Pierre resembles one of the neurodivergent characters with a keen ecological conscience in
Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory—in particular, the deaf dendrologist Patricia Westerford
who spends her life listening to trees. What they tell her is that “there are no individuals in a
forest” (280). Like Isabel and Westerford, our poet from the countryside eschews “sharp individ-
uality” in favor of that “rosy melting of all into one” (250), his eschewal marked, as we will show,
by a gradual assimilation into the vegetal world.
This is not just a matter of imaginative fiction, as we hope our appeal to neuroscience makes
clear. The neurodivergent memoirist Dawn Prince has similarly posited a “language of silence,”
so fiercely animistic is her own orientation to experience. She communicates with the nonhuman
world in a strange and paradoxical tongue; only something like poetry, with its dislocated
grammar, can later capture it on the page:
When I was young I talked to animals in that language of silence. I knew what trees and streams
were saying because they told me. I knew what sow bugs were saying because they molded me. I
grew together with them because of the words of living together in a world where everything needed
everything else. Sometimes my grandfather would ask me in the garden, “What are the worms
saying today?” “Fine fine slither dirt push good rotting green,” I would answer smiling.(“Silence”)
It is not within our scope to flesh out the connection between autism’s privileged access to the
pre-categorical and animism. Suffice it to say that for Prince (as for Isabel) this form of commu-
nication persisted into adulthood—hers is not a developmental tale by Piaget, a sloughing off of
an earlier skin. As Savarese describes elsewhere, regarding the obdurate trope of natural speech
in autistic writing, “It is as if autistic people have no other way of expressing the mute, though
completely vital, significance of what exists around them. Language, to put it simply, is the ulti-
mate marker of the status that humans—and especially neurotypicals—grant themselves”
(Savarese, “I Object” 79). And so nature must babble to be heard.
In “The Snow Man,” Wallace Stevens manages to reflect some aspects of Pierre while seeming,
strangely enough, less modern than Melville. According to the subjunctive proposition of the
poem, a man made of snow, unlike his human counterpart, “beholds / nothing that is not there and
the nothing that is.” In other words, this icy creature would never fall prey to the pathetic fallacy.
“Listen[ing] in the snow,” it would hear only what can be heard apart from human projection—if,
that is, it had actual, functioning ears. (It does not.) Yet what can be heard apart from human pro-
jection turns out, at least in theory, to be “something” because Stevens appends to that “nothing”
the definite article “the.” An embodied-cognitive reading of the poem, however, would insist on a
still more complicated phenomenology and a still more divided human subject. (In this light, the
charge of anthropomorphism would reflect merely a haughty dismissal of lower-level input.) And
a disability studies reading would make room for neurodivergent snow men!
In Pierre, “the nothing that is” is everything, and it speaks—or, rather almost speaks—through
deceptively familiar tropes of personification. For example,
Far beyond the mild lake’s further shore, rose the long, mysterious mountain masses; shaggy with
pines and hemlocks, mystical with nameless, vapory exhalations… At their base, profoundest forests
lay entranced… From out the infinite inhumanities of those profoundest forests, came a moaning,
muttering, roaring, intermitted, changeful sound: rain-shakings of the palsied trees, slidings of
rocks undermined, final crashings of long-riven boughs, and devilish gibberish of the forest ghosts.
(109–10)
It is as if Melville provides both a standard, frontal lobe account of this gloomy, natural scene and
a perceptual one transposed into language. What the forest ghosts say cannot be fathomed, yet
only the conceit of speech can afford them an equal presence. When Isabel sings “a few brief
words” while playing the guitar, the narrator reports, “All this had bewitched him and enchanted
him, till he sat motionless and bending over, as a tree-transformed and mystery-laden visitant,
caught and fast-bound in some necromancer’s garden” (128).
So Wild a Being
Isabel is famously known for her ferality, as her own tale of seclusion and belated acquisition of lan-
guage makes clear. There is something “primal” about Isabel, writes Priscilla Wald: she is “unformed
humanity” (105)—“So wild a being” (P 129), Pierre calls her. As Len Gutkin observes in an essay
that reads her character alongside the famous feral child Caspar Hauser, she has difficulties distin-
guishing among disparate natural objects as well as “between different kinds of agency (or non-
agency) attributable to humans, animals, and plants or non-organic material” (25).1 Before Isabel
is moved to the “sweetly quiet” farm-house, she says she could not distinguish people from “stones,
trees, cats;” nor herself from a snake; nor the action of men from the action of “lightning” (P 122).
Isabel, that is, behaves very much like the animist AD patients described in the studies above: her
“innate first principles” uninhibited by living/inert categories. And her own tale seems to recount
1
For an essay directly linking Hauser to autism and contemporary tales of belated emergence into language, see
Savarese, “Neurocosmopolitan Melville.”
the belated and painful process whereby those first principles—her inclusive animistic impulse—
are gradually tamed by a divisive “folk biology.” “I began to learn things out of me,” she says, “to
see still stranger and minuter differences” (P 123). “Learn things out of me”—the phrasing is both
awkward, as if Isabel were still mastering idioms, and utterly suggestive. Distinctions must be
manufactured from primitive perceptual materials.
In his book How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move? the nonspeaking autistic writer Tito
Mukhopadhyay presents an analogous scene of “learning.” Finding himself in a doctor’s office, he
discovers, in the words of Prince, how language both “cut[s] up the world…and also cuts groups
of people one from another” (“Silence”). “Because I flapped my hands, because I did not respond
to those [building] blocks, because I did not talk, and because I could not imitate [the psychol-
ogist], the diagnosis: autism” (28), he writes. Like Isabel learning things out of herself, he then
deploys such diagnostic reasoning ironically:
Now that I knew I was autistic, I began to group things under it. I made up a whole list of things
that I thought had autism. The curtains that moved in the wind, the big and small leaves that
moved a little more with the air because of their suspended positions, the little bits of paper, or the
pages of an open book under a fan were classified as autistic. They were affected with autism because
they flapped their arms, because they would not play with building blocks, because they did not
talk, and I was sure that they would not be able to imitate the clinical psychologist.
(28)
The scene concludes with Mukhopadhyay “wonder[ing] how the clinical psychologist would
look if she imitated the leaves on a branch if the leaves wanted to find out about her condition”
(28). Establishing a kind of animistic community, he repairs “the stranger and minuter differ-
ences,” the wounds that categorical thinking inflicts.
Again, there is evidence connecting Isabel to feral children and what has come to be called
autism. Consistently presented as “wild” (P 129), a “child of everlasting youngness” (140), Isabel
belongs to one of those populations that, as we have said, have traditionally been associated with
animism. Yet Melville does not regard this population with condescension. Unlike the afore-
mentioned scientists, he does not consider animistic responses “incorrect.” To the contrary, by
putting Pierre under Isabel’s “Pantheistic master-spell” (151), Melville invites us to step back
from that vigorous middle period of life, from that normative response to the world governed by
discriminating categories. He brings us closer to those animistic margins in which our “prepo-
tent” responses reign. The novel itself participates in Isabel’s animistic impulse; as if, to use
Deleuze’s words, it draws its strength from “a mute and unknown minority” (109).
As several critics have suggested, one of the novel’s central aims is to expose the “inade-
quacies” (Baym 909) or “powerlessness of language to mean” (Duquette 134). Isabel, as Priscilla
Wald notes, “points to a realm beyond language.” She inhabits a “chaotic world” that “annihi-
lates distinctions” and “a liminal space that temporarily illuminates the role of language in …
social constructions” (Wald 111). This is the sense of Pierre’s words to his sister as he reveals his
incestuous plan: “I cannot be an open brother to thee, Isabel. But thou wantest not the openness:
for thou dost not pine for empty nominalness, but for vital realness” (192). The opposition bet-
ween “empty nominalness” and “vital realness” structures the novel as it tries repeatedly to come
down on the side of silence over language (Faulkner 49); the latter, with all of its categorical
fragmentation, stifles the liveliness of being.
While aligning with readings that focus on the role of muteness (and sometimes even mur-
murs) as a kind of “resistance” to “meaningful language,” we go further by recovering Melville’s
sense of a pristine, bodily relation to experience (Wald 120).2 For all of its self-conscious wordi-
ness, the novel relishes the “language of silence”—that “infinite, dumb … mystery” (52) that
Isabel discerns and that the novel associates with the natural world—in particular, plants and
trees (or “verdure,” as Tom Nurmi puts it in Chapter 37 of this Companion).3 Some critics have
shown a “geological” interest in Pierre.4 Emphasizing the “interrelatedness of stone and affect,”
Michael Jonik, for instance, reads Pierre’s gradual “living in the all” as a process of “petrification”
(103). Given the insistence with which Pierre suggests, in the words of Emerson, an “occult rela-
tion between man and the vegetable,” we find more clarity in proposing Pierre’s gradual
“arborification” (Nature, 6).
Isabel, whose black tresses resemble ebon vines, is the paradigmatic plant-person, very much
like the “primeval pine-tree” (40) with which she is confused in Pierre’s imagination. Her pan-
theistic animism links explicitly to vegetation. She longs, as quoted earlier, for the feeling of
herself “as of some plant … existing without individual sensation” (119). As a seed sown by
Nature (13), Pierre sprouts only when coming into contact with his sister. Upon seeing the
nameless face, his emotions take hold of “the deepest roots and subtlest fibres of his being” (48).
After he receives the letter that discloses the identity of the face, Pierre decides to give up the
society of men, seeking refuge among that “nobler race,” the “god-like” trees (106). “Their high
foliages shall drop heavenliness upon me,” he says, “my feet in contact with their mighty roots,
immortal vigor shall so steal into me” (106).
After he hears the first part of Isabel’s story and the “inexplicable spell of the guitar,” Pierre,
we are told, is “tree-transformed”: she is a “necromancer,” and Pierre the most treasured plant of
her “garden” (128). When Isabel offers to earn money in the city by giving lessons, Pierre half-
indignantly exclaims, “Thou art the mistress of the natural sweetness of the guitar, not of its
invented regulated artifices… what thou hast can not be taught” (334). Isabel, Pierre claims, is
fluent in a tongue not parsed by words—a tongue he longs to learn by unlearning everything
else. Put another way, Isabel would have to teach her students to hear a guitar that strums
without strumming, that does not need a player to be heard. How to listen to the music of that
wood and its mother, the tree from which it came?
It is to this realm of “vital realness”—of innate first principles—that Pierre is irresistibly drawn.
He craves that “all feeling” that Melville initially called “nonsense” in his famous June 1851 letter
to Hawthorne—a feeling in which, the former concedes, there has to be some truth: “You must often
have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the
earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling” (Corr 193–94). For Melville—
and for Pierre less hesitantly—the all feeling amounts to something akin to becoming-plant.
2
In his vision of the Memnon stone, Michael Jonik writes, “Melville privileges silence and materiality rather than voice
and meaning” (101). We believe that this is the case for the novel in general.
3
Nurmi seems to have in mind such a wordless, bodily relation to experience when he connects Melville’s use of
“verdure” with his “anxiety over the capacity of human language to truly capture the intertwined systems of ‘Nature.’”
Put differently, “verdure” registers the inability of “our impoverished categories” to capture that which lies beyond
“human representational capability—that which can be perceived only as color, movement, and intensity.”
4
The word pierre, as Sianne Ngai reminds us, is French for stone (239).
Isabel leads Pierre to such a becoming. If she sparks his initial transformation, her sway per-
sists even after they move to the city: “Sun or dew, thou fertilizest me! Can sunbeams or drops of
dew come too nigh the thing they warm and water?” (333), he tells Isabel after Lucy’s arrival at
The Apostles. The vegetal image turns Isabel into plant-food: energy and nourishment for Pierre
the human-plant hybrid. And this symbiotic relation is sealed in the last scene, where brother
and sister lie dead in an arboreal embrace.
As we witness Isabel’s gradual socialization through language, her story, her murmuring, and her
guitar impel Pierre’s rapid desocialization beyond or out of language.5 The novel hinges on these
divergent trajectories: into and out of nominalness, out of and into realness. The conclusion of the
interwoven plots weighs heavily on what we have called Melville’s celebration of lower-level per-
ceptual responses. After all, neither Isabel nor Pierre reaches their stated destination. They both
plainly die. How can we read the ending as anything but a gothic tragedy, one reinforced by the
failure of Pierre in the marketplace and the perceived failure of Melville as a writer?
For one, the plants persist. They go on mutely communicating. They may even reclaim the
planet. Isabel, with her worry about paving over the world, at the very least anticipates the ecolog-
ical movements of the present day and their renunciation of anthropocentric damage. For another,
Melville carves out a space for resisting not only the contrived distinctions of language but also,
more generally, what disability studies scholars term “cognitive privilege”: the valorization of intel-
ligence and the workings of the frontal lobes—what is said to distinguish us from all other crea-
tures. Pierre and Isabel resemble the human-animal hybrids of the Lascaux caves that Georges
Bataille describes in his well-known essay on the birth of art. It is as if, to recast his words, they felt
obliged to clothe their humanity with vegetal attributes so as to recapture a lost primordial connec-
tion with the world.6 Which is to say a lost, but still lurking, pre-categorical one. Pierre, the
aspiring writer, cannot find a marketplace for “neighed out … thoughts” and works of “lyric foam.”
Readers of Melville are familiar with his critique of capitalist progress. Yet there is also a critique
of evolutionary progress and within it an implied comment on ontogeny. By that we mean Melville
does not view the human as the pinnacle of creation; nor does he view an individual human’s
development in a one-way, linear fashion, where childhood and disability suggest strictly lamen-
table disruptions of reason. Pierre, after all, tries to move backward. In Pierre, we find an author
who rejects the subordination of perceptual input to prefabricated constructs and values—one who
resists, as Nurmi writes in his contribution to this Companion, reducing “the complexity of ecolog-
ical relations by compressing ever-expanding meshes of life into familiar narratives and Procrustean
tropes.” Were he to be acquainted with the emerging neuroscientific literature on animism,
Melville would have aligned himself, as an artist, with young children, the elderly, and those with
cognitive disabilities who remain receptive to nature’s mute wooing.7
5
As Priscilla Wald puts it, “Isabel is not a teacher who can consciously lead Pierre to the margins of discourse; rather
she is an example who dwells on, and so illuminates, those margins” (112).
6
The “manipulated” quote of Bataille comes from Lascaux, or the Birth of Art (115). Our reading of Bataille’s idea of
“the human clad in the glory of the beast” is inspired by Amélie Bonnet-Balazut’s reading of his famous expression.
7
The Italian Academy requires a statement about authorial contribution. While the article is a joint venture to which
both authors have contributed equally, Martínez Benedí drafted section one (“First Principles Degrade Last”) and
Savarese drafted section two (“Silence Is the Only Voice”). They drafted the introduction and concluding section
together and then revised the essay together.
Works Cited
Bataille, Georges. Lascaux, or the Birth of Art, translated Powers, Richard. The Overstory. W.W. Norton, 2018.
by Austryn Wainhouse. Skira, 1955. Prince, Dawn. “The Silence Between: An
Baym, Nina. “Melville’s Quarrel with Fiction.” PMLA, Autoethnographic Examination of the Language
vol. 94, no. 5, 1979, pp. 909–23. Prejudice and Its Impact on the Assessment of Autistic
Bonnet-Balazut, Amélie. “The Animal Mirror of and Animal Intelligence.” Autism and the Concept of
Humanity.” Expression, vol. 22, 2018, pp. 24–32. Neurodiversity, a special issue of Disability Studies
Dayan, Colin. “Melville’s Creatures, or Seeing Otherwise.” Quarterly, edited by Emily Thorton Savarese and
American Impersonal. Essays with Sharon Cameron, edited Ralph James Savarese, vol. 30, no. 1, 2010. http://dsq-
by Branka Arsić. Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 45–56. sds.org/article/view/1055/1242.
Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Sanborn, Geoffrey. “Meville and the Non-Human
Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minnesota World.” The New Cambridge Companion to Herman
UP, 1997. Melville, edited by Robert S. Levine. Cambridge UP,
Duquette, Elizabeth. “Pierre’s Nominal Conversions.” 2014, pp. 10–21.
Melville and Aesthetics, edited by Geoffrey Sanborn and Savarese, Ralph James. See It Feelingly. Classic Novels,
Samuel Otter. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 117–37. Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-good English
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. The Essential Writings of Professor. Duke UP, 2018.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Brooks Atkinson. The ———. “I Object: Autism, Empathy, and the Trope of
Modern Library, 2000. Personification.” Rethinking Empathy through Literature,
Faulkner, Howard. “The Ambiguousnesses: Linguistic edited by Megan Marie Hammond and Sue J. Kim.
Invention in Pierre.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Routledge, 2014, pp. 74–92.
Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, 2010, pp. 41–52. ———. “Neurocosmopolitan Melville.” Leviathan: A
Gutkin, Len. “The Feral Sublime: Caspar Hauser and Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2013, pp.
Melville’s Pierre.” Leviathan: A Journal. of Melville 7–19.
Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2013, pp. 20–35. Tardiff, Nathan, Igor Bascandziev, Kaitlin Sandor, Susan
Jonik, Michael. Herman Melville and the Politics of the Carey, and Deborah Zaitchik. “Some Consequences of
Inhuman. Cambridge UP, 2018. Normal Aging for Generating Conceptual
Miall, David. “Wordsworth’s ‘First Born Affinities.’ Explanations: A Case Study of Vitalist Biology.”
Intimations of Embodied Cognition.” Poetics Today, Cognitive Psychology, vol. 95, 2017, pp. 145–63.
vol. 32, no. 4, 2011, pp. 693–715. Wald, Priscilla. “Hearing Narrative Voices in Melville’s
Mukhopadhyay, Tito. How Can I Talk if My Lips Don’t Pierre.” boundary 2, vol. 17, no. 1, 1990, pp. 100–32.
Move. Inside My Autistic Mind. Arcade, 2008. Zaitchik, Deborah, and Gregg E. A. Solomon. “Animist
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard UP, 2005. Thinking in the Elderly and in Patients with
Otter, Samuel. Melville’s Anatomies. U of California P, Alzheimer’s Disease.” Cognitive Neuropsychology, vol.
1999. 25, no. 1, 2008, pp. 27–37.
Part VI
Symposium I: Art and Adaptation
40
Art and Illustration
Matt Kish
While Moby-Dick is thought of as a quintessentially American text, my first experiences with it

were primarily visual. As a child who interacted with the world through art, my encounter was
significant and would continue to inform my relationship with the text for most of my life. My
visual engagement with the story grew out of my earliest experiences with books, with visual
narrative, and with the sense of wonder that illustration can convey.
I was born into a home that was full of illustrated books and stories. My earliest memories as
a child are of slowly paging through the lushly illustrated twelve-volume set My Book House,
edited by Olive Beaupre Miller. These books collected nursery rhymes, fables, fairy tales,
mythology, and heavily adapted versions of epic poems such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The
Inferno of Dante Alighieri. Each of these was beautifully illustrated by artists such as Willy
Pogany, Donn P. Crane, and Marguerite Davis. Well before I could read the words on the page,
I had an intuition that the pictures were connected, that they were meant to be viewed one after
another, and most importantly that the art was telling a story. Even after I learned to read, and
revisited these books, I was keenly aware that to my sensibilities, the illustrations were con-
veying a narrative in more visceral and compelling ways than the text.
Later in childhood, I discovered video games, on the early Nintendo Entertainment System,
and comic books. Again, what immediately interested me about these media was that they were
visual narratives. Video games created the illusion of interactivity and added sound and motion,
but the story was conveyed mostly through the graphics on the screen. Comic books were to me
the perfect medium because of their seamless blend of text and image, presented in a sequential
manner.
All of these influences shaped me as an individual and provided the foundation for the artist I
would eventually become. Art and illustration in books, comics, and videogames thrilled and
excited my imagination. I felt as if I had internalized every single image I had ever seen, and that
500 Matt Kish
I would be able to recall any of them with very little effort. There seemed to be a mnemonic
database of images in my mind, composed of the art I had seen for years in these books, comics,
games, and more. Many of these images were connected to very specific times in my life. Each
brought with it a wealth of vivid emotional associations.
A moment in the 1988 Capcom video game Mega Man 2 illustrates the key to both my
childhood and my identity as an artist. The small figure of the player character Mega Man, a
plucky blue robot boy who battles against seemingly impossible odds and increasingly powerful
robotic opponents, stands pensively atop a colossal floating face, high above the clouds. This
image conveys a palpable sense of fear, awe, myth, and limitless possibilities. Within the game
itself, the player can choose to go to the left or the right or even plummet to destruction. There
is no “right” direction to choose.
This was my world when I first encountered Moby-Dick. As an eight-year-old child in the late
1970s, I used to get dropped off at my grandmother’s house on Saturday afternoons while my
father ran errands. An added bonus was that in this pre-cable television era, my grandparents had
a strong aerial antenna and were able to pick up the signal for WUAB Channel 43, from
Cleveland, Ohio. On Saturday afternoons, this station would regularly broadcast monster movies
from all eras, and I was obsessed. One Saturday, the monster movie marathon came to an end, and
the station shifted to a broadcast of the 1956 film version of Moby-Dick, starring Gregory Peck
and directed by John Huston. Upon seeing sailing ships and people walking around in what
were clearly historical costumes, my initial reaction was to associate the imagery with school,
which I associated with boredom, so I lost interest immediately. Having little else to do, and still
waiting for the return of my father, I remained within earshot of the screen. Eventually, I caught
sight of a monstrous white whale churning through the waves, and my interest was rekindled.
Over the next few minutes, I witnessed this white whale destroy ships, slaughter whalers, and
stare balefully from the television with a single eye that filled me with dread. My brain felt as if
it had short circuited because, within what seemed to be a boring historical drama, I was seeing
a presence that in every way resembled the monsters in the movies I adored. Here was something
I could see, a story I could watch, and a tale full of myth and wonder. I was galvanized, and
watched the remainder of the movie with rapt interest.
I was so engrossed that I did not notice my father’s return, and for a time he sat quietly behind
me, watching me watch the movie. When the film was over, he explained to me that it was based
on a book, and several days later he came home from work with an abridged version. The book
was nearly square, released under the imprint Illustrated Classics Editions, and was approxi-
mately 200 pages. What especially delighted me about this opportunity to read the thrilling
story I had just experienced on the television screen was that every page of text was faced with a
scratchy, black and white illustration. Once again, this was a story I could see as well as read.
Enmeshed with my visual mind almost perfectly, Moby-Dick instantly made a lasting impact on
me long before I had even finished elementary school.
Because I spent so much of my early life looking at art, and because I had inadvertently inter-
nalized it all in a vast database of images, I quite literally visualized every story, novel, and even
poem that I read. I do not mean that I saw only the letters on the page: I also saw the characters,
objects, settings, actions, and drama playing themselves out in my mind, sometimes as a series
of images like a comic and sometimes like a film. All the imagery I had internalized in my years
as a reader of books and comics and a player of video games became the raw material for these
visual dramas, although these changed and evolved in syncretic ways over time. As I read
Art and Illustration 501
Moby-Dick, first in heavily abridged form and later as a complete novel, the crew of the Pequod
and battles with whales manifested from images I had stored from film, comic books, children’s
picture books, and more.
In addition to being a visual reader, I began making art early in life. Making art was how I
made sense of and ordered my existence, my memories, and my identity. I drew imaginary beings
from my own personal mythology, figures from fairy tales, characters from my favorite novels,
and I created my own comics as well. I was a self-taught artist, having no formal artistic experi-
ence beyond a basic drawing class as a freshman in community college. Because I lacked a formal
degree in fine art, I had a hard time finding financial and publishing success as an artist. Finally,
after turning forty and carefully considering my new career as a public librarian and the time I
enjoyed spending with my wife, I made the difficult decision to quit making art. While not a
terribly expensive practice, it was very time consuming and at times mentally exhausting.
However, that decision did not sit well with me. I felt I could not leave art behind without
attempting some kind of ludicrously ambitious swan song. Inspired by the artist Zak Smith and
his illustrations for every page of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, I decided that my
final project as an artist would be to illustrate every single page of Moby-Dick, the book that had
meant the most to me as a thinker and an artist. I had read the unabridged novel eight times,
starting in high school, throughout my undergraduate and graduate years, and several times as
an adult. Each reading simultaneously revealed more while still feeling familiar and known. I
felt that everything a person would need to know in life was explained in some manner in Moby-
Dick. Melville gives just enough information to guide the artist, while leaving enough ambi-
guity for the artist to run free.
With very little planning and a head full of ambition, I began my visual exploration of Moby-
Dick on August 5, 2009. I gave myself three simple rules. The first was to complete one illustra-
tion per page, per day. The second was to proceed sequentially through the novel, starting with
an illustration for page 1 and ending with an illustration for page 552. The third was to use
paper from old books, maps, and other ephemera as the foundation for the art, but not to limit
myself in any way in terms of media and representational art. I chose the Signet Classics paper-
back edition of Moby-Dick (featuring cover art by Claus Hoie) because chapter one begins on page
one, and Hoie’s beautiful watercolor painting as a color image seemed to me to be a statement
that the book was eternally modern and relevant.
My choice of found and repurposed paper was both deliberate and essential to my vision for the
project. I had always been interested in the visual display of information, whether this took the
form of maps or of diagrams, charts, symbols, or other esoterica. Even when the precise nature of
information being displayed was unknown, such as in the television repair diagrams I used most
often, the viewer was always certain that something coherent and complex was being represented.
I often had the feeling that if one only spent enough time with these visual representations, and
worked hard enough at comprehension, eventually knowledge would be revealed. This idea mir-
rored my experiences reading Moby-Dick over and over at various times in my life. I was always
cognizant that greater meanings lay beneath Melville’s tangled nest of words, and that I simply
had to keep reading and rereading and working at the task in order to comprehend it all.
A second element of painting and drawing on old texts, diagrams, maps, and charts is that the
images I produced would provide a visual parallel to the novel. As the artist, I would be carefully
and deliberately making my marks on the paper, and the viewer of these images would be able
to see my representations of the men, the ships, the whales, and the action. This initial
502 Matt Kish
engagement with my images would parallel my first experiences reading Moby-Dick when, at
best, I was only aware of the main plot of Captain Ahab’s obsessive quest to destroy the whale
who maimed him, and I had missed out on much of Melville’s subtext. With my art, the viewer
who was willing to spend more time returning to my images would begin to see elements of the
underlying maps, charts, texts, and diagrams, and to draw meaning from the often random but
strangely insightful juxtapositions of these pre-existing marks swimming under and around the
marks I had made on the page. I felt this deeper engagement with visual layering would parallel
the experience of the reader who was willing to deeply engage with Melville’s text to find myriad
layers of meaning beneath the surface of the whale-hunting narrative.
A third element of using found paper for the art was my intention that the art itself would
be a physical object, something that a viewer could hold in their hand and experience, on a
tactile and visceral level, absorbing the texture and aroma and perhaps even stains of the old
paper. Using technology to create art does not interest me, and digital art often seems cold,
soulless, and flat to me. I wanted my illustrations for this great novel to be firmly rooted in the
analogue world and to retain a robust materiality. Additionally, Moby-Dick was originally writ-
ten by hand, typeset by hand, and printed in books that themselves were also physical objects
meant to be held, carried, and read despite their weight and unwieldiness. I wanted the work
that I created to be connected to this long tradition of printing and of books as physical objects,
and I wanted to do this by using paper from books that were years and, in some cases, even
decades old.
From a lifetime of reading comic books, I was aware that I would be called upon to show the
same characters repeatedly in ways that would necessitate some consistency so that they would
be visually recognizable. Comic books often achieve this effect using immediately recognizable
color schemes, costumes, and symbols, so I conceptualized my versions of the whalers and har-
pooneers as living symbols. Ishmael, as narrator and cipher, became a flat whale-shaped mask
with a vaguely wavelike pattern marking his mouthless face. He was, literally, the man with the
sea inside of him.
Queequeg’s intricate facial tattoos, which would have been maddeningly laborious to repro-
duce with any precision dozens of times, were reduced to a simple scalloped pattern in turquoise.
This pattern was easy to recognize and grew into a marvelously malleable visual signifier for the
heroic harpooneer.
The sailors and whalers of the novel resembled ships, or machinery, more than men. Life on
board a nineteenth-century whaler often involved being away from home for years at a time,
being at sea for months on end, living and sleeping and eating in cramped and filthy condi-
tions, performing backbreaking labor in all sorts of weather, and dangerous physical combat
with some of the largest animals that ever existed. The pay was often poor and working condi-
tions were at times inhumane. As a landlocked, privileged, twenty-first-century man with a
desk job and tender feet, I could imagine this sort of life only by seeing the sailors as creatures
of wood and steel, roughly crafted to resemble the very ships they sailed on these dangerous
voyages.
Ahab proved to be one of the greatest challenges. As a reader, I had seen him in my mind many
times, but his visage was fluid and ever evolving. Sometimes he looked more like Gregory Peck,
sometimes more like the version made famous by the illustrator Rockwell Kent. After all, these
were powerful and lasting depictions that cast a long shadow culturally and artistically. I found
some freedom and comfort in the occasional vagueness in the text regarding Ahab’s physical details,
Figure 40.1 “Call me Ishmael.” From Matt Kish, Moby-Dick in Pictures. Image courtesy of the artist.
such as precisely which of his legs had been shorn by the whale. This reality, along with my prior
imaginings of the sailors and harpooneers as creatures more like ships than men, helped me see
Ahab in a completely new and yet fitting way. Like the whalers he commanded, Ahab was an
unyielding and rigid thing. His head resembled a turret, profaned by a jagged bolt-shaped scar. A
single eye gazed out balefully, an obvious visual symbol of Ahab’s single-minded obsession. While
the shape of his form was rigid, the eye and the mouth were malleable, allowing me to explore
Ahab’s rage, glee, and sorrow with subtle changes in line, color, and texture.
For the next 543 days, I worked on art nearly every single day. For the most part, I achieved
my goal of completing a single illustration each day. On some days, the illustration was complex
enough that it took me two days of work. Often, I would make up for lost time on the weekends,
completing two or even three illustrations per day. My process was to read the novel in small
chunks of several chapters on a weekly basis. Each morning I would read and reread (and re-
reread) the page that I was to illustrate that day until some element of the text provoked in me
a visual response. This element could be anything—a character, an action, an idea, or an entire
line. Often, the challenge was narrowing down what element from each page I wanted to focus
on, since the book is so rich in provocative themes and visual language. Over the course of each
504 Matt Kish
Figure 40.2 Queequeg. “Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer…” From Matt Kish, Moby-
Dick in Pictures. Image courtesy of the artist.
day I would obsessively visualize the illustration until it was fixed in my mind, and upon my
return home from my job I would begin work immediately. The illustrations were not polished.
They were raw and visceral responses to a book which I had grown up reading and thinking
about and dissecting. I used a wide variety of materials that included acrylic paint, markers, ball-
point pen, collage, even nail polish. I allowed myself the freedom of exploring any representa-
tional style from the realistic to the abstract. And after eighteen months of labor and obsession,
my task was completed.
I never set out to create a definitive visual version of Moby-Dick. That would have been an
impossible thing to achieve under any circumstances. I wanted to create a visual record of my
experiences with the novel, from my very first viewing of the movie and the sense of awe that
watching provoked all the way through my readings as a middle-aged adult and the added
wisdom and perspective that time, pain, and loss had given me. What amazes me is that now,
nine years after completing the task, I feel as if the book has more than enough mystery and maj-
esty to inspire a second round of illustrations for every page. I have created something small but
worthy of attaching, like a barnacle, to the great ship that is Melville’s novel.
Works Cited
Kish, Matt. Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every My Book House, vols. 1–6, edited by Olive Beaupre Miller.
Page. Tin House Books, 2011. The Book House for Children, 1951.
Mega Man 2. Tokyo: Capcom, 1988. Smith, Zak. Pictures Showing What Happens on Every Page
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Great Illustrated Classic of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Tin House
Editions. Waldman Publishing Corporation, 1979. Books, 2006.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. 150th Anniversary
edition. Signet Classic, 2003.
41
Anthologizing Moby-Dick; or,
Classifying a Chaos
Kylan Rice and Elizabeth Schultz
A Field Strewn with Thorns

In 2011, commissioned by The Nature Conservancy, Dutch artist Christien Meindertsma col-
lected forty-nine different types of prairie grasses and flora local to the Nachusa Grasslands near
Chicago, pulped each variety into a separate sheet of paper, and bound the pages together into a
book. Plants such as blazing star, bur oak, smooth sumac, white wild indigo form an anthology
whose fibrous pages are flecked with tiny integrated seeds, so that if the book were to be buried,
a prairie would spring up over it. Several of the plants in Meindertsma’s collection bear
conspicuous flowers. Blazing star, for instance, flares into a long rod of rose-purple, a cross some-
where between a cattail and a thistle. In this way, 49 Prairie Plants is an anthology in its original,
etymological sense, from the Greek anthología, meaning “flower-gathering.” With plant names
laser-cut into each page of her book, Meindertsma has made northern Illinois’ shrunken 3,500-
acre prairie both portable and legible, the “classification of the constituents of a chaos” (MD
134)—or at least what once was chaos, the whole state swathed as late as the early nineteenth
century in a waving ocean of tall-grass. Of course, this phrase—“the classification of the constit-
uents of a chaos”—was coined by Herman Melville to describe not America’s grasslands, but the
difficult work of cataloging whales, grouping and ordering them using book-printing terms
such as “folio,” “quarto,” and “octavo” (134, 137), transforming Moby-Dick into an anthology.
Yet whales, for Melville’s Ishmael at least, are precisely like prairies. Chapter 79 of Moby-Dick,
titled “The Prairie,” is a comparative, phrenological account of the “brow” or forehead of
Leviathan. Though the word “prairie” appears nowhere in the short chapter, Ishmael describes
the brows of men and whales as landscapes. While “most creatures,” including “man himself,”
have brows like “a mere strip of alpine land lying along the snow line,” geniuses like Shakespeare
have foreheads that “rise so high, and descend so low, that the eyes themselves seem clear, eternal,
Anthologizing Moby-Dick; or, Classifying a Chaos 507
tideless mountain lakes; and all above them in the forehead’s wrinkles, you seem to track the
antlered thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland hunters track the snow prints of
the deer” (346). The whale, by comparison, has an infinite mind behind an indefinite brow; it is
impossible to see where it begins and ends. “You see no one point precisely; not one distinct fea-
ture is revealed” (346). Faced with the whale, one sees “nothing but that one broad firmament of
a forehead, pleated with riddles” (346). By implication, the whale’s brow, and the whale as mind,
is like a Great Plains prairie—a vast, trackless, featureless sea of land or “flowery earth” (491),
ringed by an impossible horizon. The effect, as Ishmael suggests, is the opposite of Meindertsma’s
anthology. While the visible expressions and the narrow brows of men can be read like a book,
“how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow?” (347)
The prairie of the whale’s face is an insoluble cipher. The attempt to translate, interpret, catalog,
or classify must terminate in failure.
To make her anthology, Meindertsma had to destroy the prairie plants that form her pages.
The grasses are blended, broken down, and rendered unrecognizable. What replaces recognition
is language, words that are manifestly absences, cut from the sheets of wild processed paper with
the clean precision of a laser. This is the paradox at the core of anthologization: in the attempt at
representation and comprehensiveness, you pluck the flower or the poem from its original
ecology, cutting it off from its vital contexts. Melville’s insight in Moby-Dick is that the thing
anthologized is no longer the thing sought, no longer the living whale, no longer the undulating
prairie of actuality. If an anthology is supposed to make an object legible as representative, com-
prehensible, and thus portable, it replaces that object with paper-pulp and words (so many black,
Pip-like seeds).
Ishmael’s cetological classification of whales as books turns Moby-Dick into a book of books—
an anthology. But even before this, in the paratextual preludes to his novel, Melville signals that
he is concerned with the risks and ambitions of anthologization, of any “systematized exhibi-
tion” (134). As Athanasius C. Christodoulou has observed, “Etymology” and “Extracts” are small
“anthologies” that prepare readers with instructions for reading the rest of the novel (5). Yet, as
Christodoulou also reminds us, the gathered material in “Extracts,” by virtue of the definition of
the word, is by nature incomplete, excerpted. Etymology, too, is a form of extraction, of breaking
words apart, rendering them partial and fragmentary in order to explain their truth, their etymon
(13). “Etymology,” Christodoulou observes, “is not only a deep research, but also a destroying
method, a solvent process” (13). If the “Etymology” that prefaces Melville’s novel is, like
“Extracts,” a “small anthology” (12), then anthologization is a form of knowledge-building that
necessarily destroys, leaving only laser-cut, disconnected words behind: quack-grass and finback,
carpet bugle, killer whale, little bluestem, sperm.
Fragments of Moby-Dick have circulated in American anthologies since 1917—though, as
Joseph Csicsila notes, anthologies published during the “New Critical phase” (1947–1965)
opted to feature shorter, complete, or non-excerpted texts, including Melville’s poetry and
shorter fiction (52). In light of the anti-classificatory anxieties and insights in Moby-Dick, the
New Critical attempts to preserve the wholeness of the text in a collected format have a quixotic
redolence. That Moby-Dick reflects on the risks and failures inherent in the anthology genre pres-
ents a curious challenge to the anthologist. If Melville and Ishmael attempt to anthologize the
unanthologizable, resigning themselves in the end to producing a mere “draught of a draught”
(145) in their anatomization of Leviathan, how does this affect the way we think about anthol-
ogies that include excerpts from, or—like the recent After Moby-Dick: An Anthology of New
508 Kylan Rice and Elizabeth Schultz
Poetry (Spinner Publications 2019)—thematically organize themselves around Moby-Dick, that

book of books? What can the compiler and editor learn from Moby-Dick about the drawbacks and
difficulties of extractive exemplification or epitomization? As an anti-anthological text, does
Melville’s novel advocate for different ways of organizing knowledge, those, perhaps, which
relinquish all claims to representativeness? What might a non-representational anthology look
like—a textual assemblage which, like Moby-Dick, forecloses the possibility of its own closure?
Moby-Dick’s lack of closure as well as its fundamental concern with the limits and frontiers of
literary representations are qualities that have invited a rich reception history of remix, riff,
spin-off, and critical experiment; it calls ever for its copestone. As Rodolphe Gasché observes,
Ishmael’s insistence on his own inability to write a book offering any complete account of the
“living whale” (which, “in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfath-
omable waters…, a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist…bodily into the air”
while yet “preserv[ing] all his mighty swells and undulations” [MD 263]) means that “a single
book cannot comprehend [the whale’s] untamable motion,” and “its complete life manifests
itself in endless substitutions of one book for another” (34). Moby-Dick is a text (and/or whale)
that demands its own endless reinscription: “one book opens in its volume the need for its further
supplementation by other books. The hidden chaotic architecture concealed at the bottom of the
sea, whose foundations Ishmael strives blindly to elucidate, is this never-to-be-perfected library
through which he swims” (35). Moby-Dick is not only a book of books, but a book that gives way
to other books. It is, by Roland Barthes’s classification, a “text of bliss,” a text that is outside
criticism, accessible or reachable only “through another text of bliss,” which speaks “in [the]
fashion” of the text that called it into composition, committing thus “a desperate plagiarism,” a
hysterical affirmation of and in the wake of a “blissful” reading experience (22).
Paradoxically, the text that most eludes its own anthologization is the same text that “permits
only its endless repetition through supplements” (Gasché 35). After Moby-Dick: An Anthology of
New Poetry is one such supplement—or, more precisely, it anthologizes supplementary texts,
poems written in the wake of Melville’s novel. In fractal fashion, a supplement of supplements,
the collection, as well as the individual poems in the anthology perpetuate the aesthetics of
incompletion underlying Moby-Dick’s status as an anthology. The commentary that follows—in
which Elizabeth Schultz, with whom I co-edited After Moby-Dick, reflects not only on the ways
in which the anthology both fails to achieve completeness, but also establishes the groundwork
for additional, future attempts, trials, prosecutions, and experiments in compilation—helps dia-
gram the decision-making that went into this unprecedented (and thus non-representative)
Moby-Dick-inspired anthology, and to reflect on the risks that accompany any bid for complete
representativeness implicit in the anthology form.
“The Multiplicity of Other Things Requiring Narration”1

On July 10 and 11, 2014, I sailed for twenty-four hours on board the Charles W. Morgan, the last
of the world’s nineteenth-century wooden whaling vessels. In response to that memorable
journey, I wrote two dozen poems, in which I imagined myself as Ishmael, considering how he
might have experienced being aboard a whaleship in the twenty-first century, a whaleship
1
See Chapter 99, “The Doubloon” (430).
manned by a number of women, outfitted with computers and seeking not to destroy whales but
to celebrate them. The following summer, in 2015, I arrived at the biennial international
Melville conference, held that year in Tokyo, aiming to identify a young Melville colleague who
would be interested in collaborating on a collection of Moby-Dick-inspired poetry. Having
decided that such a collection would be not only timely, but also revelatory and potentially exhil-
arating, I knew I would need assistance. I would need not only technological know-how, but also
the perspective of a younger Melville scholar.
How fortunate I was to come upon a panel in which Kylan Rice was delivering a presentation!
Impressed by the thoughtfulness and clarity of his paper, I invited Kylan to join me in orga-
nizing the anthology. Kylan’s ready enthusiasm for this project, his keen mind and sensitivity to
poetry made our project possible. I remain in gratitude. Having a collaborator who knew Moby-
Dick as well as contemporary poetry was central to the creation of After Moby-Dick: An Anthology
of New Poetry. From our Tokyo meeting in 2015 until the publication of our anthology in 2019,
Kylan and I consulted not only on each step in the process of creating the anthology but also on
the merits of each poem we selected for inclusion.
We agreed that our first task would be to cast our net as widely as possible among the oceans
of Melville scholars, Melville-related writers, and English departments. Thus, in November
2015, we sent out a call online for poems. In inviting poets to submit “one-to-five pages …
totaling no more than 1400 words,” we also asked them to consider why “Moby-Dick prompts us
to sing.” We stated our intention “to anthologize poems written on or about or alongside
Melville’s great lyric novel.” Using language from the novel, we noted that we were making “a
call to replicate the loom at which the ‘weaver-god’ weaves in Moby-Dick,” indicating that “In
our anthology, we [would] seek to weave your poems into a humming, flying fabric.” While
acknowledging that “many media offer viable modes of response to Moby-Dick,” we speculated
that it was in Melville’s own medium of poetry “that we might weave most intricately, dive most
deeply.” Our online call brought in ninety-nine poems, written by sixty-nine poets. Working
with a spreadsheet, we contemplated a wide diversity of poems. Above all, we hoped in the best
of these poems to experience Melville’s novel anew—to experience its characters, action, images,
concepts, and phrases transformed into startlingly new language. We were not disappointed.
After careful deliberations, Kylan and I selected a gathering of poems written by twenty-three
poets, in several instances choosing more than one by a single writer.
Both Kylan and I, knowing several outstanding Moby-Dick poets, contacted them to see if
they would be willing to contribute. Dan Beachy-Quick, Tim Wood, Mira Dougherty-Johnson,
Alice Wolf Gilborn, Laurie Robertson-Lorant, and Everett Hoagland thus submitted previously
published poems to our collection. Learning from Robert Wallace about the remarkable haiku,
written in pidgin—one for every chapter in Moby-Dick—that Onyinye Miriam Uwolloh had
created for his class at Northern Kentucky University, we added a selection of her poems as well.
In addition, we reviewed the numerous Moby-Dick poems published since 2000 in Leviathan: A
Journal of Melville Studies, selecting those by Louis Phillips and Rick Mitchell, among others, for
inclusion. Each of us also chose poems we ourselves had written in response to Moby-Dick. Finally,
to conclude the Table of Contents for After Moby-Dick: An Anthology of New Poetry, we identified
two short, single stanza poems, explicitly evoking “the little lower layers” of Melville’s novel and
written by highly respected contemporary American poets, Jeffrey Yang and Susan Howe.
Contemplating the astonishing diversity of these poems, Kylan and I were then confronted
with organizing “the constituents of a chaos” (MD 134) for our anthology. We recognized that
510 Kylan Rice and Elizabeth Schultz
although written in a remarkable variety of forms and styles, the poems might be divided gen-
erally into two groups: (1) those which explicitly responded to and transformed particular char-
acters, events, and images in Melville’s novel, and (2) those which personalized the poet’s
experience of the novel, related an aspect of the novel to contemporary issues, and/or suggested
how the novel had transformed them or might transform others. Thus, in the first section of After
Moby-Dick are poems from new perspectives specifically focused on Ishmael, on Ishmael and
Queequeg, on Ahab on the quarter-deck and in his cabin, on Moby Dick and diverse whales,
ambergris, and the Epilogue. The second part of our anthology, in which many of the poems are
written in experimental language, prompted by Melville’s own astonishing and memorable
linguistic forays, uses Melville’s novel as a springboard for questions and possibilities.
However, in making our selections for After Moby-Dick, Kylan and I, focusing on the quality
of the poetry and its relationship to Melville’s novel, inadvertently dismissed other fruitful
approaches we might have considered. A different anthology might well be enriched through
attention to the gender, race, ethnicity, or nationality of the poets. After making selections on
the basis of ingenuity and formal diversity, we discovered in retrospect that we had chosen poems
by fifteen women and twenty-two men. Focusing above all on the singularity of the poet’s voice
and the particular quality of his or her use of image and language, we also included poems by an
African American, an Asian American, and a Nigerian. Following the publication of our
anthology, we were interested to learn that among the poets we had chosen for inclusion in our
anthology were those identifying variously as British, Guyanese of Indian descent, and queer.
After a year of attempting to convince a university press to accept our manuscript, we were
pleased that Spinner Publications in New Bedford, Massachusetts, accepted After Moby-Dick for
publication. The editor of the press was enthusiastic about using an image owned by the New
Bedford Whaling Museum for the anthology’s cover: Kathleen Piercefield’s painting, “Queequeg
in his own proper person,” which depicts a benign, but muscular image of the Polynesian har-
pooner. Not only is Queequeg here characterized by an abundance of tattoos, but he is also posed
against a background of tattoos. Significantly, a painting of Asa W. Twitchell’s portrait of
Melville is tattooed over his heart. By choosing an image of Queequeg for our cover, we attempted
1) to distinguish our book from most editions of Moby-Dick which feature Ahab, the Pequod, or
the White Whale on the cover; 2) to establish, through Piercefield’s thoughtful portrait of
Queequeg, a sense of intimacy with our potential readers as well as to underscore the importance
of plurality and community; and 3) through the multiple hieroglyphs in Piercefield’s image, to
underscore the importance of multiple interpretative and creative processes, which prompted
and underscored the diverse poetry in our volume.
Following the publication of After Moby-Dick, we received an email from one of our contrib-
utors, who questioned our choice of Piercefield’s representation of Queequeg for our cover.
Specifically, the contributor asked about Piercefield’s qualifications for representing an
Indigenous body, and queried whether the image of Queequeg we had selected for the cover was
culturally appropriate, given the absence of Pacific Island poets in the anthology. The contribu-
tor’s response to our cover prompted us to question our method of creating our anthology. If we
succeeded in attracting such a diverse range of poems for After Moby-Dick by being fairly unspe-
cific, we wondered whether we might have generated an even wider range of poetic responses by
being more specific in our guidelines? Might we have asked our Moby-Dick poets to respond to
the novel from explicit ideological perspectives, for example, the political or the environmental?
Might we have gained a broader range of responses by encouraging our poets to write using
particular poetic forms or from the perspectives of historical or contemporary individuals? How
could we have used the internet to encourage yet more responses to our project? How might the
internet in the future be used to develop new ways of interpreting Moby-Dick? Will Melville’s
capacious novel, which has inspired innumerable works of art, illustrated editions, comic books,
movies, novels, science-fiction stories, musical pieces, operas, and poems in the twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries continue to inspire aesthetic re-interpretations in the future?
To date, we believe that After Moby-Dick, open to multiple interpretations, is an embodiment
of Melville’s own incomplete, continuous, and creative attempt to know the essence of the whale
and of life itself. It further exemplifies lessons regarding the limits of representation already
embedded in Moby-Dick, in which the whale not only eludes attempts to classify, categorize, and
contain it within tidy frames, but actively warns against the gesture to anthologize in the first
place. Ahab’s monomania has a fusing, combinatory effect, dissolving individual differences
among his crew members, charismatically reorienting them toward his own “fatal goal” (557).
By the second day of their pursuit of the White Whale, the crew of the Pequod were “one man,
not thirty” (557). At this point, the ship takes on an anthological bent, all compressed under a
single theme, seemingly in defiance of the fact that “it was put together of all contrasting
things,” of oak, maple, pinewood, iron, pitch, and hemp. As a result, “the individualities of the
crew…, all varieties were welded into oneness” (557). Ahab’s strenuous and destructive focus,
prosecuted at the cost of pluralism, finds, perhaps, its bookish correlate in the anthologist’s pas-
sion, who ships to sea with a crew of individuals and ends with “one concrete hull” (557), hur-
tling blindly toward the object of its dearest pursuit.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Hill and Wang, Csicsila, Joseph. Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends in
1975. American Literature Anthologies. U of Alabama P, 2004.
Christodoulou, Athanasius C. “A Double Prelude on Gasché, Rodolphe. The Stelliferous Fold: Toward a Virtual
Melville’s Moby-Dick: ‘Etymology’ & ‘Extracts.’” Law of Literature’s Self-Formation. Fordham UP, 2011.
Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, Rice, Kylan B., and Elizabeth Schultz, editors. After
2014, pp. 5–21. Moby-Dick: An Anthology of New Poetry. Spinner
Publications, 2019.
42
On Ekphrasis
Dan Beachy-Quick
A poetic art as old as art itself, ekphrasis is easily defined: a poem written about another form of
art. A poem about a painting, a sculpture, a shield, a tapestry, that lets us envision in mind what
our eyes cannot see. Ekphrasis is an approximation of kind, weaving from its lines a present sem-
blance of the artifact that is missing. It is a thin line, but one that wends its way through the
whole fabric of Moby-Dick, what I might call an ekphrastic thread. It is there in the Weaver-god’s
own weaving, the thread that pulled once is pulled eternally, unraveling the picture of the world
we thought we would come to know—that world of the whaler’s, so nearly our own. Moby-Dick
asks a dubious question most novels refuse to pose about the nature of representation, image, and
accuracy; it suggests the world is not quite real, after all. Not real in the way we imagined it was
real, not real in the way we wanted. I do not simply mean the world in the book. I mean this
world in which we read the book, this world that is our own. Thought opens an abyss.
Or to alter the metaphor materially, yet struggle to the same point, we might conjure the
thread into a plank and point at a few other authors pondering the crisis. In his essay “Poetry and
Abstract Thought,” Paul Valéry writes:
Each and every word that enables us to leap so rapidly across the chasm of thought, and to follow the
prompting of an idea that constructs its own expression, appears to me like one of those light planks
which one throws across a ditch or a mountain crevasse and which will bear a man crossing it rapidly.
But he must pass without weighing on it, without stopping—above all, he must not take it in his
head to dance on the slender plank to test its resistance! … Otherwise the fragile bridge tips or
breaks immediately, and all is hurled into the depths.
(212)
Emily Dickinson, undergoing the ritual of funereal thought in poem “340,” concludes with a
quatrain whose image is a haunted parallel of Valéry’s own consideration:
On Ekphrasis 513
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down—
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing—then—
(366)
Or take a plank and fasten it to others, put it upright and paint upon it the picture of a bridge,
and we can find Blaise Pascal in his Pensées: “We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting
something in front of us to stop us seeing it” (53). Each author shares a skepticism, rooted in the
very language used to convey the thought, that solid-seeming surfaces have succumbed secretly
to a kind of dry-rot, and our epistemologies and faiths cannot bear the weight of lives that rely
upon them. To pause upon thin logic will plunge us into unreasonable depths; to “finish
Knowing” is not to end in knowledge, but to be done with it, every world only a scaffolding of
words; and the illusion we sprint toward is dispelled on arrival, a collision preceding a fall.
These planks in reason can be used to build many forms, as Herman Melville knows. The
Pequod is one of them. The men dance to Pip’s tambourine, a cadence “prelusive of the eternal
time” (MD 121), a music “so gloomy-jolly” (411), upon no more than such planks—their joy a
vital percussion above the infinite depths that could cancel their lives out. These are the planks
of the quarter-deck, where Ahab’s “steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old
rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over dented, like geological
stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk” (160); lines of fret that weaken the structure upon
which he paces, lines mimicked by Ahab’s “dented brow” (160), where also “you would see still
stranger foot-prints—the foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought” (160). The
forehead is another one of reason’s planks, keeping separate the daily world of sun-up and sun-
down from that other world, comparable only to the ocean in its dark profundities, of the mind’s
obsessive, depthless, unconscious, where leviathan also lives. Dickinson knows:
The Brain is deeper than the Sea—

For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As sponges—Buckets—do—
(366)
I can imagine this “gloomy-jolly” thread of representative doubt as the pitch-soaked line cursive
in the whale-boat’s tub, and I can imagine it is the line of ink tracing lines on maps, the line that
writes poems, that writes novels. I can imagine a poem as a craft—not simply an aesthetic techne,
but a craft like a vessel, like a boat.
Let this thread tying together these planks be a reminder of our fragile craft.
*
Ekphrasis is a craft that describes another craft: a poem that mimics—represents—another piece
of art. See Homer on Achilles’s shield; see Milton on Satan’s shield. Its most immediate effect is
to let the mind see what the eye cannot. But mimesis has stranger realms, and deeper depths,
than surface imitations. Radical ekphrasis seeks not to offer an identical representation, but to
approach and enter into the deeper formal logics the other artwork both embodies and seeks, to
ask questions the other art asks, not to point at, but participate in. Works of such ekphrasis open
514 Dan Beachy-Quick
up a space of symphonic symbols, a space in which the contents of separate realities, separate
consciousnesses, strangely coincide. As in Dickinson’s poem, the innermost and the outermost—
mind and world—exchange natures. The mind is an ocean; the sea thinks. A full-of-awe and
awful reciprocity reveals itself as the primary cosmic law. As above, so below; as without, so
within. Captain Ahab, with his bloody-subtle mind and his broken body, does not signify, but
symbolizes—does not name, but resonates. He is at work in radically ekphrastic spaces, pencil in
hand, sitting at his desk in his chamber, drawing his lines upon the chart, lines in which “all
possibilities would become probabilities, and…every possibility the next thing to a certainty”
(198), seeking that point—among the infinitudes of colliding points—where he and Moby Dick
would again meet. The ocean is mined by thought, lines of traceable intelligence, and as
Dickinson notes in her poem quoted earlier, the depths of the mind bear an eerie reciprocal sym-
metry to the ocean’s depths. Ahab is not mining these depths, but minding them—in not a
brooding meditation, but a transubstantiation of water into a thinking element. Moby Dick is a
white blankness who exists in that thinking, is that “inscrutable thing” that is “chiefly what I
hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon
him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me” (162).
The sun that Ahab would smite emits a rational light, promises accuracy as simply as the eye
will see, bears in its beams some authoritarian promise that the world is just as it seems. To trust it
unwittingly inscribes one with a faith in the given, so that even to see might secretly be praise, or
prayer. The notion charges the very air with theological intensity—of faith and of doubt, of belief
and of blasphemy. Looking works within the primary logos, witness to Word, and Word and words
both create and represent, form and describe, and we can finally count, among all the bewildering
hierarchies, the simple act—not simple at all—of opening our eyes and saying what it is we see.
The very air is a light-charged question of accuracy, a question agonized by images, imitations, rep-
licas. That agony is the shadow cast by all things, by anything. Or as Ahab himself has it, “not the
smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind” (310).
*
Ishmael is as poignantly aware of these duplicates—these issues of reference and accuracy, image
and signification—as Ahab is, though his relation to the crisis differs considerably. He knows, as
all the whalers do, that the success of the voyage depends on the accurate aim of the harpooners,
and the entire crew are expert interpreters of the text that is the ocean’s page. But the world for
Ishmael, as for Ahab, is not simply the world of event and action, is not merely the immediately
palpable. He is aware, as the poet Paul Éluard anecdotally says, that “there is another world; it is
inside this one.” As the sole survivor of a destroyed whaling ship whose purposive nature is to
capture and process the inner vitality of its prey, Ishmael also seeks after some cunning element
hidden in things, not to boil its fat down into oil to sell, but to seek after some eternal flame
burning always within what exists, this deepest token of being, and his question is not how to
profit from it, but how to recognize it, how to claim it as real, and enter the sacred predicate is.
But Ishmael is also one orphaned in metaphysical ways. Like Pip before him, he finds himself
alone, solitary monad in infinite seas. He experiences the world then as a self stripped of selfhood,
the fact of a person sloughed of identity, where I is a location and not an ego. He lives then in a
world of philosophy’s first crisis, in the element Anaximander describes, “the principle element
of being was boundlessness” (translation mine). That the boundless is also bound within the
body is a paradox that riddles the mind’s rule. One consequence is in Moby-Dick’s first sentence,
On Ekphrasis 515
initiating a tale lived out long before pen comes to paper, “Call me Ishmael” (1). The certainty
of nouns, of proper nouns, of given names, is made to tremble and shake, and the reader enters
into Ishmael’s story only by crossing this ambiguous threshold in which language itself is ques-
tionable material.
Names go awry, stray, dive down into error, sound down into safety. Ishmael’s quest, the
opposite side of Ahab’s, is to discover what knowledge, if any—holding whole and true—binds
the world together. This quest charges with emotion those passages in the novel’s middle dis-
missed as merely technical in their concerns. Ishmael wants, as he admits in “Cetology,” “The
classification of the constituents of a chaos” (129).1 That chaos is both Anaximander’s elemental
unboundedness before cosmos has patterned the world as world, and also the taxonomy of
warm-blooded, breathing creatures that live in ocean’s fluid chaos. Though Ishmael sees that “of
real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are plenty” (135), he sets to writing an encyclo-
pedia defining—by comparing whales of different size to books of different size—the character-
istics of each cetological species. Every definition fails in defining. Each whale is seen only in
partialities, and it proves vain “to attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan, founded upon
either his baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth” (140). Whales elude “both hunters and philosophers”
(140). Some whales exist as no more than rumors.
But Ishmael’s incomplete dictionary of whales is not the only epistemological failing Moby-
Dick records. We have presented to us Vishnu reincarnated as leviathan sculpted in stone in the
“cavern-pagodas of Elephanta, in India” (260); the gilded whale stamped on title-pages and
covers of books, winding sinuously around an anchor; and even those illustrations that should
gain accuracy from direct experience, as of “one Captain Colnett, a Post Captain in the English
Navy” (262), who offers a spermaceti whose eye is so out of proportion to body, it would be the
size of the bay window of a house. Book after book fails in capture. And not just books. The
natural history museum containing a whale’s “naked skeleton,” and the library in which a skel-
eton hangs as candelabra, give “very little idea of the general shape” (263), leading Ishmael to
claim that “the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted
to the last” (264). The most accurate portrayal he sees is one painted by a beggar, scene of the
moment that crippled him, when (as with Ahab) a whale crushes his boat in its jaws—the
painting is fine, but what truly convinces is the stump, as “unquestionable a stump as any you
will find” (269). Imitations grow myriad in errors: weather-cock whales; whales carved on the
ivory teeth of whales; wooden whales; whales sculpted out of bone; whale tails as knockers on
doors. The list in its comedy could go on forever; the list in its agony offers moving testament to
the ways in which the riddling desire to know that one knows what one knows, fails to bring
experience accurately into consciousness. The facts seem to drift into error; there is a blankness
that bleeds from the margin of things toward the center; it is as if all things are a written page
slowly returning to blankness.
There is the appalling whiteness of the White Whale, potent living form of a “rather vague,
nameless horror” (188). The pallor of the dead. The “midnight sea of milky whiteness” horrid as a
“real ghost” (193). The blankness that “by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and
immensities of the universe” (195). When for Ishmael “the Plank in Reason” breaks, when in him
those planks break, when below him the planks are splintered, destroyed, sunk in “voids and
1
This quote also inspires the work of anthologizing poems in Kylan Rice and Elizabeth Schultz’s Chapter 41 in this
Companion; see “Anthologizing Moby-Dick; or, Classifying a Chaos.”
immensities” he floats above, single mote in a boundless chaos, he knows knowing is no rescue
from our condition, but the laboring failure introducing us to it. Some silence hides in what we
speak. Some blankness lives in the pages we write. Ishmael becomes a strange scholar of such blank-
ness by years of wild wandering, tattooing himself all over his body, writing upon his skin the
discoveries he made, so that he would not lose or forget them. Coming across the skeleton of a
Sperm Whale in the Arsacides, used by the natives there as a church, he measures the whole, and
inks the dimensions onto his right arm, though these admit of something vague and nameless, even
if humorously so: “I did not trouble with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into
a congenial admeasurement of the whale” (451). As an initiate to the world that exceeds the imag-
ination, and that is perhaps most real where the mind cannot reach, Ishmael feels what is incom-
mensurable in immensity. He is a student of what he cannot know, which might be one way to call
him a poet, as we learn he has become, wishing “the other parts of my body to remain a blank page
for a poem I was then composing—at least what untattooed parts might remain” (451).
I have meditated on that blank page on Ishmael’s body for many years. At one time I thought the
novel Moby-Dick was that poem, and reading it was so unexpectedly to embrace Ishmael—an embrace
not altogether different from his embrace of Queequeg’s coffin, carved as it was with the epistemolog-
ical tattoos of his bosom friend’s body. But somehow I also know that poem has yet to be written, not
yet by Ishmael, not yet by me. It is hard to know the size of the page when the blankness of it is infi-
nite; it is hard to know what you can say, or do, to fill it. And sometimes I think the difficulty is not
writing, but reading, and the question Ishmael asks us to ask ourselves, is how to learn to read the
whiteness of the page. It is there somehow, beneath the surface of words, describing something other
than the words naming the world, describing what is underneath the world.
*
I wrote a book called A Whaler’s Dictionary. It takes its formal impulse from Ishmael’s Cetological
Encyclopedia, that forever unfinished catalog defining every type of whale, failing to classify fully,
exactly because whales outpace or dive down past the reach of the lines meant to capture them.
It is strange to say, but true, that what I wanted was to write a book on Moby-Dick that failed in
capturing the living whale that is the book itself. What I sensed most deeply is that Melville had
written a novel about the paradoxical nature of ardent pursuit—of whales, of profits, yes; but
also of knowledge, of truth, of answers, of meaning, of understanding. And in the ever-lower
layers of the novel’s metaphysical complexity, I saw that—like the hunted whales—these other
entities being pursued likewise sought most to elude capture; when it feels we’ve caught our
prey, it proves as the dead whale proves, to be something other than an accurate description of
the living, vital principle we were hunting. The profit turns prophet, and offers us its warning.
Yet I also knew that pursuit was noble, needed, beautiful. I wanted to write a book that traced
some motion that is deep current in Moby-Dick, the swift chase after meaning, made all the
swifter by the furious urge of the question. I wanted to write a book whose formal logic was
structured by those underwater labyrinths that mirror the mind’s unconscious depth, seeking
after the lives that live invisibly therein. The idea proved simple, but maddening: to write a set
of dictionary-like entries, each an essay meditating on a single theme in Moby-Dick pulled,
briefly, from the novel’s depths. At the end of every entry would be a set of cross-references, terms
connected in ways loose or fast to the current essay, but bending the line of interpretation to an
unexpected angle. In its ideal form, it would be a different book every time it was read. Undoing
the habit of reading a book from first page to last, unsettling the satisfaction of “knowing” a
On Ekphrasis 517
book by having finished reading it, A Whaler’s Dictionary meant to enliven the reader in the pur-
suit of meaning by allowing a different path of interpretation every time. Something in the book
would always escape the intelligence of the reader—it could not be wholly caught, could not
entirely be processed in the try-works of critical reason, could not be processed into a flame-like
idea burning in the mind. An entry of “Unwritten Entries,” connected to no other terms in the
book, floats in the volume like orphaned Ishmael in the sea, keeping alive certain cares by keep-
ing them unexpressed and free, beyond the reach of any lines.
But it might be truest to end these thoughts on words and worlds, imagery and inherencies,
cunning duplicates and singular vitalities, by breaking the threads tying this essay together, and
weaving in a line of thought pulled from the pages of A Whaler’s Dictionary, so that the last
gesture of this small work is a leap far away into another:
Line
The line connects one to what one wants. The whaler wants the whale. When the line is in the
whale, the whale flees. The tar-dark line allows the whaler, once the whale has spent all his
energy, to bring the boat to the body. But if the whale gains furious momentum enough, it
empties the tub of line, and escapes into fathomless depths. By the line we know when we are
attached to what we desire, and by the line we know when what we desire has escaped.
§
The line is the most basic unit of verse. A poem is a line winding from margin to margin, until
the poem is done. A book is composed of dark lines. A book pursues in lines the meaning it
desires to understand or convey. A metaphoric stretch can claim for the poetic line the same dan-
gers as the whale-line. The reader and the whaler are in the same boat.
§
Euclid: “A line is breadthless length.”
§
Emerson: “Every opinion reacts on him who utters it … It is a harpoon thrown at a
whale, unwinding, as it flies, a coil of cord in the boat, and, if the harpoon is not good, or
not well thrown, it will go nigh to cut the steersman in twain or sink the boat.”
§
Etymology: a linen thread.
§
Ahab to the Carpenter: “Dost thou spin thy shroud out of thyself?”
§
The White Whale is found upon the Season-on-the-Line.
§
The Carpenter on Ahab: “He’s always under the line—fiery hot, I tell ye!”
§
Every book, unlike every whale hunt, ends in silence. The line runs out and becomes blank.
“All men live enveloped in whale-lines.”

Blank
Inscribe
Skin
Writing
Works Cited
Anaximander. Early Greek Philosophy, Vol. II: Beginnings Pascal, Blaise. Pensées, translated by A. J. Krailsheimer.
and Early Ionian Thinkers, edited by Andre Laks and Penguin Classics, 1993.
Glenn W. Most. Harvard UP, Loeb Classical Library, Valery, Paul. “Poetry and Abstract Thought.” Toward the
2016. Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800–1950, edited
Beachy-Quick, Dan. A Whaler’s Dictionary. Milkweed by Melissa Kwasny. Wesleyan University Press, 2004,
Editions, 2008. pp. 209–30.
Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by
R. W. Franklin. The Belknap Press of Harvard UP,
1998.
43
Melville in Film Adaptation: The Lives
and Deaths of Pip
Jaime Campomar
Melville’s work connects to film in unexpected ways that go beyond what is adapted on the
screen. These connections occur because film production generates parallel and sometimes
hidden archives that expand the process of adaptation into a system of versions or micro-ver-
sions of Melville’s texts, generating what Kate Newell calls “adaptation networks” (1). When
Warner Bros. premiered The Sea Beast in 1926, it organized a series of promotional stunts that
transformed pockets of New York into a kaleidoscopic Moby-Dick experience. People could
walk into Wanamaker’s department store for “Moby Dick Week” and see life-size stills from
the film, inspect whaling relics, listen to sea chanteys performed by the Ritz Quartette, and
attend a lecture by A. K. Dawson titled “Moby Dick Adventure Land”; and if they went to see
the movie at the Brooklyn Mark Strand, they would have enjoyed the live performance of a
prologue that included a storm scene (“Wanamaker’s” 687; “Caption” 2486). These adver-
tising ploys represent a fraction of the alternative archives of film adaptation, which also
include, to name a few, screenplays and their drafts, internal production-memos, storyboards,
manuscripts for the composition of a film’s soundtrack, and comic books (see Matt Kish’s
Chapter 40 in this Companion for an example of how engagement with adaptation networks
can influence how we perceive, experience, imagine, and understand literary texts; also,
Martina Pfeiler’s Chapter 46 provides an example of how adaptation networks might prove to
be a useful pedagogical tool).
Thinking about adaptations as networks complicates the traditional approach which focuses
exclusively on an original literary source and its cinematographic counterpart. Thinking about John
Huston’s Moby Dick (1956) as an adaptation network acknowledges that the film is not the final
520 Jaime Campomar
version of its draft screenplays, but rather another revision that is drafting future works to come.1
For instance, the movie can be perceived as anticipating the comic book adaptation by the
Argentineans Saccomanno, Durañona, and Breccia (1999), who model Ahab’s appearance on
Gregory Peck’s persona from the Huston film; or Chabouté’s graphic novel (2017), which recreates
shots from Huston’s movie in its frames. Such a perspective encourages us to think of adaptation as
always-in-between versions and of Huston’s movie as engaging not only Melville’s novel but also its
historical, ongoing adaptation network. Huston admitted as much when he explained that he cast
Austrian count Friedrich Ledebur as Queequeg because “he looked very much like” Rockwell Kent’s
illustration of him for the 1930 Lakeside Press edition of the novel (Open Book 252).
Looking into the other archives of Melvillean film adaptations heightens our awareness of Huston’s
choices in relation to screenplay revisions made during the movie’s pre-production and production
stages. These screenplay versions were composed by Ray Bradbury prior to the shoot, with sections
revised and rewritten by John Godley, an Irish journalist Huston hired to work on the script during
the shoot. Specifically the scene of Pip’s death, the result of a minor revision, reveals how Classic
Hollywood’s star system left its mark on the adaptation process (as much as that of any individual
involved), and discloses the issues involved in representing race on screen during the 1950s.
Classic Hollywood’s star system began when Carl Laemmle fabricated news about the death of
actress Florence Lawrence to promote the movie The Broken Oath (1910). This publicity stunt
helped introduce the notion of “bankable” stars, making them the lynchpin that ensured movies,
as commodities, could be marketable. This development prompted studios to invest heavily in
publicity for their actors, affecting film production and, consequently, certain aspects of the
overall style. As the industry solidified its storytelling strategies, the star system facilitated nar-
rative characterization by supplying previously advertised personality traits to the characters
played by a given star, a strategy known today as typecasting. Over time, this and other narrative
practices led to the congealing of Classic Hollywood style, which structured every aspect of a
film’s production around “Character-centered—i.e., personal or psychological—causality”
(Bordwell, “Obvious” 12). During the 1950s, when Huston’s Moby-Dick was produced, a white,
usually male, hero became the focus of all aspects of plot and mise-en-scène, meaning that every
event in the story should be interpreted as tending toward the resolution of the protagonist’s
desires and every element that comes into contact with him (a prop, a character, a setting) as
becoming significant to the narrative, symbolically and causally.
A typical device of Hollywood heroism is the trope of recognition, which usually comes at the
plot’s climax, and which implies acknowledgment of the protagonist’s identity as a hero. In
Western narrative tradition, recognition (also known as anagnorisis) creates an opportunity for audi-
ences and secondary characters in the story to acknowledge the heroic traits that help protagonists
defeat obstacles in their way, and signals their transition from humiliation to elevation (Auerbach
18). In Huston’s Moby-Dick, the moment of recognition comes in the final chase, probably its most
memorable sequence, when Ahab lowers after the white whale and ends up a corpse tied to his body
(taking what had been Fedallah’s place in the novel), from where he beckons his crew to their
1
In separate works, John Bryant has expanded on adaptation as a process of “cultural revision” (Fluid Text 93, 108–10)
and on the adapter’s intervention as a form of “adaptive revision” (see “Textual Identity”). Within this framework,
Bryant defines adaptation as “an announced retelling of an originating text” (“Textual Identity” 48). Although there is
a case to be made elsewhere for unannounced retellings, by focusing the present essay on the unexpected connections
and alternative archives that make an adaptation network, I am calling attention to the meaningful nuances implied in
the announcement of an adaptation. Uncovering these nuances needs to be a key operation of adaptation studies.
Melville in Film Adaptation: The Lives and Deaths of Pip 521
doom. The sequence is filled with climactic symbolism: it suggests that Ahab has met his fate and
that his fate, though ending in death, is an example for others to follow. When Ahab resurfaces, his
antagonist Starbuck is converted to his captain’s cause and leads the final charge.
As impactful as the sequence is on screen, one of its component scenes, the one showing Pip’s death,
raises questions regarding which characters needed to step down during the adaptation process so that
Ahab could step up as a hero. While the men are trying to avenge Ahab’s death, Moby Dick crashes
into the Pequod, causing the masts to shatter and fall on Pip, who had been left on board as shipmaster.
Someone who has read the novel may think the scene is problematic because Melville does not describe
Pip’s death in any detail. Although the discrepancy could be explained as the result of artistic differ-
ences between Melville as author and Huston as filmmaker, the screenplay drafts for the scene compli-
cate that assumption. As versions in-between, the drafts reveal a wayward process. In the novel,
Melville uses the trope of recognition to empower and humanize Pip, whereas Bradbury and Huston
struggle to do the same because the star system they were working under set stringent limits to the
determination of who was worthy of heroic recognition within the confines of a Hollywood film.
Pip’s first appearance in the novel links him to the trope of recognition and signals his elevation
from the lowest depths of human consideration: “Poor Alabama boy! … he was bid strike in with
angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a hero there!” (MD 121). In
these lines, Ishmael anticipates the crisis Pip suffers when he is abandoned at sea during a hunt,
which leaves him to go “about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was” (414). Yet the crew’s
perception of Pip’s idiocy is not shared by Ahab, who singles the boy out as a model of human dig-
nity: “I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor’s!” (522).
This crisis of recognition imbues Pip with the humanity he had been denied as an African American.
Melville has interspersed the language of slavery into the figure of Pip as a sign of his oppression:
when Pip falls overboard the first time, Stubb tells him he is worth “thirty times” less than a whale
(413), and when he delivers his mad monologue on deck, Pip describes himself as a runaway: “One
hundred pounds of clay—five feet high—looks cowardly—quickest known by that!” (522). But by
elevating him from enslaved to human and from ordinary person to hero, Melville instils in Pip a
sense of symbolic agency and empowerment and makes him a heroic figure for the disenfranchised.
In contrast, Pip’s death in Huston’s film represents an inversion of the recognition trope and
an erasure of Pip’s agency and empowerment. This reversal is set in motion when the crew is
lowering for the final chase, and Ahab stops Pip from boarding his boat, telling him to stay on
board as captain, to which Pip turns and exclaims “Cap’n Pip!” As a result, he remains on board
and gets crushed by the masts minutes later. As the screenplay drafts show, Pip’s cinemato-
graphic fate was revised at the last minute. Huston’s shooting script replicates Ahab’s and Pip’s
exchange on folio 104r, marked as “Revised 1.11.55.” (CRBS8).2 Yet on folio 106r, as the boats
glide toward Moby Dick, a line that escaped revision shows: “{423. 454} CLOSE SHOT PIP IN
AHAB’S BOAT. | PIP rows” (CRBS8). In the final script sent to the studio, this line is revised
2
Overall, there are eight screenplay versions of the final chase sequence that includes Pip’s death, which make for 207
folios of typewritten text, some with handwritten marginalia by both Bradbury (transcribed in between square brackets
“[]”) and Huston (transcribed in between braces “{}”). The documents used for this essay are photocopies of Bradbury’s
carbon copies of the screenplays and are held at the Archives of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies (CRBS) at Indiana
University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). However, as they are not the only copies in existence, they have
been classified according to the number assigned by the curators of the archive to the folders containing each version,
preceded by the acronym CRBS to indicate its provenance.
522 Jaime Campomar
to reflect the situation on screen: “771. CLOSE SHOT PIP | Pip rows” (CRBS9 f. 135r). On a
surface level, the discontinuity between folios 104r and 106r indicates a degree of ambivalence
about Pip’s function as a character within the film’s plot, that is, about how he could best serve
Ahab’s moment of heroic recognition in the final sequence. Pip’s subsequent erasure from Ahab’s
boat illustrates a symptom of Classic Hollywood’s need for the protagonist never to be upstaged
by any other character.
Bradbury insisted on writing a “castaway” scene for Pip in the versions of the ending that he
worked on. In the first and second version (CRBS2 and CRBS4) the chase is divided into two
lowerings with a sequence in between that includes Pip’s rescue (“A dark head bobbing among
the waves. The voice calling faintly. | PIP (A dream-like calling) | Where’s Pip! Pip! Where’s
Pip!” [CRBS2 f. 152r; cf. CRBS4 f. 144r]); the crew’s boarding of the Pequod; the sighting of
the Bachelor; a typhoon with St. Elmo’s fires; and a brief monologue by Pip on deck that expands
on his insanity. Significantly, after this revision, Pip’s madness is no longer caused by the crew’s
abandonment at sea but by Moby Dick, effectively repurposing the cabin boy’s madness to
emphasize the symbolic importance of Ahab’s obsession.
The third and fourth versions (CRBS5 and CRBS6) represent Bradbury’s final revision, the
purpose of which was to condense the chase into the single lowering seen on film: the sighting
of the Bachelor is cut out entirely; the typhoon scene is moved backward; and the two lowerings
are organized into one lowering with two charges: the first, in which Ahab’s boat is destroyed;
and the second, in which the crew attacks the whale after Ahab resurfaces. But even after this
final revision, Pip still lowers as Ahab’s oarsman (“PIP rows” [CRBS6 f. 141r; cf. CRBS5 f. 32r])
and is later found by Starbuck’s boat amid the wreckage:
His eyes are closed, he trembles as he is pulled in over the

side and placed in the bottom of the boat by STARBUCK.
PIP
(calling)
Pip’s gone. .he run off. . he run
away. .where’s Pip…have ye seen him?
(CRBS6 f. 149r; cf. CRBS5 f. 38r)
In the spirit of condensation, Bradbury took Pip’s mad monologue on deck from the first version
and reduced it to a few mumblings in Starbuck’s whaling boat. These mumblings are supposed
to produce a cinematic image of frail humanity torn to pieces that motivates Starbuck to charge
one more time and to awaken sympathy in viewers.
Although rendered faintly and repurposed to highlight Ahab’s heroic madness, Pip’s humanity
still holds in Bradbury’s final version. Yet the film reduced Pip’s recognition even further.
Ironically, his “promotion” to captain becomes an acknowledgment of Pip’s autonomy that is
quickly taken away when the mast falls on him. From what is visible in the screenplays, it
appears that several factors came into play during the revision process of the shooting script
(CRBS8) to turn “mad Pip” into “Cap’n Pip,” although further archival research is needed to get
a clearer picture of what happened.
The first factor responds to a desire to remain faithful to the original text. After Bradbury had
left the production, Huston hired John Godley to work on revising the script while the film was
being shot. In a letter to Bradbury, Godley confesses that he worked mostly on “the quarter final
of the film,” which included “some additions to Pip” (1954f. 2r). In his memoir he explained
that, while revising, his “guiding principle was to get back to the book as much as possible” (Like
a Lord 251). If leaving Pip on board subscribed to this logic, then the revision brought the film
closer to the novel, since Melville does the same. Yet the “addition” of him being crushed under
the masts deviates from that proximity.
On one level, this departure buttresses Classic Hollywood stylistic norms that required that,
whenever possible, an ending should close all open plotlines, and that, if this were impossible,
the epilogue should reinforce certain motifs to disguise the actions the narrative left unresolved
(Bordwell 159). Being typically averse to ambiguity in narrative closure, the paradigms of
Hollywood storytelling encouraged showing Pip’s death onscreen. Still, Ishmael’s final words in
the movie are “I only am escaped, alone, to tell thee,” which would reinforce the idea that Pip
has died even if his death has not been shown. This drive for closure appears to be what pushed
Huston to overcorrect the revision of Pip’s death, which highlights its gratuitousness in the
movie.
Such an overcorrection lays bare how the power dynamics of Classic Hollywood style recreate
social hierarchies in unsuspected ways, an issue that becomes even clearer when adapting a
character of color like Pip. The micro-narrative arc dramatized in his death diminishes the rec-
ognition trope to a short-lived “promotion” that ends violently and inverts the character’s
transition to one that moves from elevation to humiliation. In other words, when Pip approached
Ahab’s boat, he was choosing of his own free will to join the hunt against Moby Dick. By
ordering him to stay, Ahab curtailed that freedom in exchange for the promise of greater social
standing that culminates in violence.
Within the wider symbolic armature of the ending, the meaning of this micro-drama is
expanded to a metaphysical dimension by Huston’s philosophical approach to the ending. In his
letters to Bradbury, Godley explains that during the time he worked on the screenplay he met
with Huston almost every day, a detail that indicates that Huston was setting the guiding princi-
ples for Godley’s revisions, as well as making revisions of his own. Huston read Moby-Dick as an
existential drama that required its hero to take a stance against the unjust universe he lived in.
The style of Huston’s filmography has been hard to pin down for critics and biographers,
which allowed some to think of him as a “chameleon” director (Brill 1). What little consensus
there is about his work tends to focus on its thematic elements, most predominantly the notion
that his characters typically participate in failed or soured quests (see Brill 7; Heredero 33ss;
Kaminsky 182; Laws 125). Because of the mythology surrounding Huston himself, there is a
feeling that his films play along with the stereotypical individualism of Hollywood’s protago-
nists. However, as Martin Rubin points out, his movies tend to focus on problematizing the
“hero position” itself (142). For Huston, heroes are not isolatoes, which means they have to take
responsibility for their choices as they impact the communities they live in as well as those com-
munities projected by their behavior. This is one reason his heroes on the screen are usually put
in a situation that demands them to define the values that define the human condition. This hero
position resonates with Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist stance that “life has no meaning a priori…
and value is nothing more than the meaning we give it,” and that each individual person is
“responsible for [himself] and for everyone else…. In choosing myself, I choose man” (Sartre 51;
24–25). Film critic Jean-Claude Allais took notice of the similarities and identified the Hustonian
hero as preeminently Sartrean, as someone whose identity is irretrievably linked to their own
“ontological freedom…, condemned to have no other law than their own” (4; translation mine).
524 Jaime Campomar
This existential framework fits within Huston’s interpretation of the novel. When explaining
his adaptation, he often paraphrased Ahab’s complaint to Starbuck in chapter 132: “For me the
point of Moby Dick as Melville wrote it is that Ahab hated God, and in essence felt that he was
bringing the Judge himself before the bar of judgment and condemning Him” (qtd. in Phillips
41). In line with this premise, Ahab’s beckoning to his men from Moby Dick’s side imbues the
scene with an air of metaphysical revenge against a “malignant being” represented in “the whale
who was the symbol of God” (Huston qtd. in Ford 28). In the film, Huston makes this interpre-
tation clear during an earlier scene (the spirit-spout sequence, revised by the Huston–Godley
pair) by framing a close shot of Pip standing behind Ahab as his boatsteerer, looking offscreen at
Moby Dick, saying: “that ain’t no whale. That a great white god.” Under this light, the crew’s
final charge against Moby Dick becomes an act that empowers the men, who achieve a level of
exemplary humanity by attempting to destroy the evil deity. In remaining on board, Pip is
denied this metaphysical agency, and whatever autonomy he was given by being named captain
of the Pequod results in a demotion to the function of stock character, a character with lesser
agency than Ahab and the crew.
Following the stylistic logic of Hollywood’s star system, the recognition tropes revised in
Ahab’s rebellion and Pip’s rise and fall are brought together to heighten the intensity of the
climax and raise Ahab to the status of exemplar. As they worked on this final sequence, Bradbury
and Huston struggled to find Pip’s place in it and retain characterological elements of his agency
and frailty. In the first version, Pip participates in the crew’s last stand and the image of his mad-
ness acts as a motivation for Starbuck to charge against Moby Dick once Ahab is gone. In the
version seen onscreen, Pip is denied participation in the chase, a choice which erases what little
agency the character had left. Such an erasure is summed up in the studio’s final script revision
“Pip rows” (CRBS9 f. 135), which finds its cinematic equivalent in the image of Pip crushed
under the masts (stricken through in a physical way), and lays bare the trappings of representing
race in 1950s Hollywood. In the past, Huston’s Moby Dick, with its allusions to the Bikini Atoll,
has been interpreted as reflecting Cold War anxieties about the threat of nuclear holocaust and
America’s place in the world (see Metz). However, analyzing the screenplays opens up the
adaptation and suggests that national anxieties about the agency and autonomy of African
Americans during the time of Jim Crow are at work in the film as well. Looking into these other
archives of the adaptation process reveals the unexpected ways in which Melville’s presence in
movies remains critically productive.
Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge the Center For Ray Bradbury Studies, especially Jon Eller and Robin
Condon, for their generosity in providing access to Ray Bradbury’s copies of the screenplay
drafts. Many thanks are also due to Warner Bros. and to copyright holders of the Bradbury, John
Huston, and John Godley trusts for granting permission to cite previously unpublished docu-
ments. Finally, I would like to acknowledge Chris Sten, John Bryant, and the editors of this
volume for their generous advice and suggestions while writing the chapter. This being said, I
alone bear all the responsibility for its content and conclusions.
Works Cited
Allais, Jean-Claude. Premier Plan: Hommes, Oeuvres, Godley, John. Living Like a Lord. Victor Gollancz,
Problèmes Du Cinema, no. 6, February 1960. 1955.
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Heredero, Carlos F. John Huston. Ediciones JC, 1984.
Western Literature. Princeton UP, 2013. Huston, John. An Open Book. Da Capo Press, 1994.
Bordwell, David. “An Excessively Obvious Cinema.” Kaminsky, Stuart. John Huston: Maker of Magic. Houghton
The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Mifflin, 1978.
Production to 1960, by David Bordwell, Janet Laws, Page. “King Adapter: Huston’s Famous and
Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. Routledge, 1988, Infamous Adaptations of Literary Classics.” John
pp. 89–97. Huston: Essays on a Restless Director, edited by Tony
———. Narration in the Fiction Film. Routledge, 2008. Tracy and Roddy Flynn. McFarland & Company,
Breccia, Enrique, Leopoldo Durañona, and Guillermo 2010, pp. 123–35.
Saccomanno. Moby Dick. Buenos Aires: Comic Press, Metz, Walter C. “The Cold War’s ‘Undigested Apple-
1999. Dumpling’: Imaging Moby-Dick in 1956 and 2001.”
Brill, Lesley. John Huston’s Filmmaking. Cambridge UP, The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation, edited
1997. by James C. Welsh and Peter Lev. The Scarecrow
Bryant, John. The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Press, 2007, pp. 65–76.
Editing for Book and Screen. The U of Michigan P, Newell, Kate. Expanding Adaptation Networks: From
2002. Illustration to Novelization. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2017.
———. “Textual Identity and Adaptive Revision: Phillips, Gene D. “Talking with John Huston.” John
Editing Adaptation as a Fluid Text.” Adaptation Huston: Interviews, edited by Robert Emmet Long. UP
Studies, edited by Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik, of Mississippi, 2001.
and Eirik F. Hanssen. Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. Rubin, Martin. “Heroic, Antiheroic, Aheroic: John
47–67. Huston and the Problematical Protagonist.” Reflections
“Caption for Photograph of Prologue Performance at the in a Male Eye: John Huston and the American Experience,
Brooklyn Mark Strand.” Motion Picture News, 22 May edited by Gaylyn Studlar and David Desser.
1926, p. 2486. Smithsonian Institution P, 1993, pp. 137–56.
Chabouté. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Dark Horse Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism, translated
Books, 2017. by Carol Macomber. Yale UP, 2007.
Ford, Dan. “A Talk with John Huston.” John Huston: “Wanamaker’s ‘Sea Beast’ Show: Whaling Relics, Sea Chanteys
Interviews, edited by Robert Emmet Long. UP of and Lecture in Auditorium Tie Up with Warner Feature.”
Mississippi, 2001, pp. 21–29. Motion Picture News, 6 February 1926, p. 687.
Films
Huston, John, director. Moby Dick. Warner Bros., 1956. Webb, Millard, director. The Sea Beast. Warner Bros.,
Solter, Harry, director. The Broken Oath. Independent 1926.
Moving Picture Co., 1910.
526 Jaime Campomar
Archival Material
Bradbury, Ray, and John Huston. Moby Dick. “A.” (Third ———. Moby Dick. “H.” Final Shooting Script, Folder 8
Draft). Script, Folder 2 (CRBS2). Archives of the (CRBS8). Archives of the Center for Ray Bradbury
Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, IUPUI, Indianapolis, Studies, IUPUI, Indianapolis, 1954. Facsimile.
1953. Facsimile. ———. Moby Dick. Final. Studio’s Final Script, Folder 9
———. Moby Dick. First Carbon of 1st Complete Version of (CRBS9). Archives of the Center for Ray Bradbury
Screenplay. Script, Folder 4 (CRBS4). Archives of the Studies, IUPUI, Indianapolis, 1954. Facsimile.
Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, IUPUI, Indianapolis, Godley, John. “Letter to Ray Bradbury, All Soul’s Day
1954. Facsimile. 1954,” November 2, 1954. Archives of the Center for
———. Moby Dick. “D.” Script, Folder 5 (CRBS5). Ray Bradbury Studies, IUPUI, Indianapolis.
Archives of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, Facsimile.
IUPUI, Indianapolis, 1954. Facsimile.
———. Moby Dick. “E.” Script, Folder 6 (CRBS6).
Archives of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies,
IUPUI, Indianapolis, 1954. Facsimile.
Part VII
Symposium II: Teaching, Learning,
and Public Engagement
44
“Of Whales in Paint”: Melville in the
High School Classroom
Jeffrey Markham
So omnipotent is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces
of flowers upon the barren refuse of rocks thrown aside at creation’s final day.
(MD 33)
In drawing a picture of New Bedford, Massachusetts, Ishmael delivers an important truth

about the creative force of art: it can produce vitality and beauty in the most unlikely places.
Such has been my experience using art as an integral part of reading instruction. Over three
decades of my life as a high school teacher, nothing has helped my students to create deep, emo-
tional connections with literature, or to read with innovation and passion, as much as working
with visual journals.
The word “visual,” in this context, is intentionally vague to allow students the freedom to
respond in any way they wish, and each time I have used this approach I have been overwhelmed
with the variety of media produced. Naturally, there are hand-drawings using pencil or marker,
but mostly I encounter a profusion of startling creativity. Students have created oil paintings,
digital art, glass art, memes, ceramics, and sculpture. They have written songs, filmed circus
vignettes, composed short plays, and created animations. Needlepoint, crocheted pieces, finger
puppets, mobiles—in short, a creative spectrum arises from this process, representing a whole
range of talents, sometimes hidden, in my students. Assessing these projects is always mean-
ingful because I am constantly surprised by the innovation and execution of their ideas.
Furthermore, I love these journals because when a student can play to her strengths in a school
assignment, sometimes for the very first time, she becomes engaged sincerely, creatively, and
insightfully.
The basic steps of a visual journal are simple. Each entry begins with a quotation from the
text. Next, students envision and then execute a creative response borne out of the quotation.
530 Jeffrey Markham
And finally, they reflect on why they selected the quotation and how their creative response
speaks to it. In practice, each visual journal begins when a student becomes more attentive to
what is happening within herself. The student is reading for comprehension and is attempting
to fall into the flow of the narrative, but, expecting to encounter something that cues a sense of
deep meaning, she is also staying mindful of how the text is affecting her. This part of the process
is almost hidden from view. It involves intuition, self-reflection, and an ineffable openness to
how the text feels and how it looks in her mind. Since this process of visualization is abstruse, I
decided to appeal directly to an expert.
Matt Kish’s Moby-Dick in Pictures is essentially a visual journal writ large. Every day, for 552
consecutive days, he took one page from his edition of the book, meditated on it throughout the
workday, and then came home with a quotation in mind upon which to build a work of art. The
process demanded a nearly monomaniacal focus for the better part of two years. In our interview
I asked him about the initial stages of making each work of art. He explains what it feels like to
look for a quotation from the text:
It forces you as the reader to slow way down and to immerse yourself in the text in a much deeper way
than even a complex deep reading involves and also in a very different way. Because rather than simply
looking at words or parsing over the meaning… you begin to look at literature with an added inten-
tion. You’re looking for visual cues. And often what happens during that search is you begin to see the
way in which that literature resonates with your own personal experience as a human being.
(Kish, “Telephone”)
Two elements of the above excerpt are worth pointing out separately. First, while we teach our
students to read different types of texts at different speeds, Melville’s writing is something we
want our students to read slowly and carefully. The process of making visual journals encourages
students to experience the benefits of slowing down and becoming immersed in a text. Many
high school students feel pressures common in increasingly “corporate” (Berg and Seeber 83)
settings and they, too, feel the benefits of what the authors describe in The Slow Professor:
The slow movement can get us back in touch with what it means to carry out scholarly work.
Instead of “I am producing…,” we might say to ourselves and others, “I am contemplating…,” or
“I am conversing with…” or even “I am in joyful pursuit of…” …Slowing down is about asserting
the importance of contemplation, connectedness, fruition, and complexity.
(Berg and Seeber 57)
Second, Kish also highlights the benefits of looking for visual cues in the reading. As students
consider the text visually, they are taking an active role in the reading process. They become
engaged in a search that encourages them to see the literature in a new way and to let it interact
with their personal experience. The process demands careful reading, but also something more:
a willingness to feel into the text, as Berg and Seeber say, to “converse with” the text, and, as Kish
says, to have it resonate within themselves.
What does Kish mean when he speaks of literature resonating with the reader? Slowing down,
looking for cues, engaging the creative self in the reading process have the effect of bringing to
the surface a great deal of powerful material from within the student. In the second step of the
visual journal process, the interaction between person and text intensifies. This step, creating a
“Of Whales in Paint”: Melville in the High School Classroom 531
visual response, requires time and interaction with many things simultaneously—with the text,
with the internal self, and with an insight that is being externalized in a work of art. None of
these components acts singly; rather an almost alchemical synthesis occurs as meditation trans-
mutes into execution of art. This is a subtle but powerful dynamic that Kish describes using a
metaphor based on a sphere:
Imagine a sphere that’s kind of a mosaic … and every one of those pieces covering that sphere is
either a word or an image. And so, things start to ricochet around inside that sphere, and your ideas
are bouncing back and forth between the visual and the verbal—and you have to include the emo-
tional as well. And it becomes something where there is no hierarchy; there’s not a primacy of the
verbal, not a primacy of the visual, there’s not a primacy of the emotional—these things are all on
roughly equal footing and the mind zigzags back and forth between all of them. And if you capture
that lightning in a bottle and crystallize or distill that into something, whether it is a written
response or a visual response or a choreographed response… then I think that is the best way to
capture that engagement with the work …
(Kish, “Telephone”)
Kish describes a psychological dynamic of ever intensifying power which connects the reader not
only to the text but also to deeper areas of her own psyche. Removing the primacy of the text and
putting it on equal footing with emotions and images encourages the type of deep, personal
interaction with the author’s words that is at the very heart of excellent reading. It also provides
a bridge for those students who have weaker reading skills. When a student is encouraged to
believe that her own thoughts and emotions matter as much as the text after she has had a deep
interaction with it, she becomes more confident and sees her reading experiences as important.
When students combine creativity with reading, they feel as if they have something valid to
say and become more eager to share it with others. Tolstoy’s essay, What Is Art?, offers great
insight here:
To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and having evoked it in oneself then by means
of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that
others experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art.
Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external
signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings
and also experience them.
(Tolstoy 123)
As they make art based on their reading experience, students connect with themselves and with
others. They feel an urgency to show each other their artwork, to infect each other with the feel-
ings and experiences they had while reading and creating. Students who share their visual jour-
nals at the start of class, for example, initiate powerful connections not only with the text but
also with each other’s art. For many students, entering a discussion about literature, especially
literature as complex as Moby-Dick, can be intimidating. Arriving in class with an experience to
transmit can give even quieter students the confidence and courage to jump in and share their
thoughts.
Artistic communion with a text can also develop a student’s courage because of what deep
interaction with great literature can dredge up from within. Another prolific and profound
532 Jeffrey Markham
artist, George Klauba, captured many of the most powerful moments of Moby-Dick in well over
sixty paintings remarkable for their beauty and depth of psychological exploration. In Robert K.
Wallace’s interview with Klauba, the artist describes what happens when he, in effect, uses a
creative process to interact with the text:
A lot of thoughts seem to surface as I’m painting. Past dealings and interactions with people that I
wish could have been different. There must be an adjacent door to the artistic one, an analyzing door.
Once the creative side opens up, all the garbage and whatever spills out also.
(Wallace, “Birds” 80)
The “two doors” metaphor provides insight into much of the artwork emerging from the visual
journal process. A great deal of this work is powerful simply because visual journals encourage
students to creatively interact with and then represent powerful emotional material, both light
and dark. The freedom to explore oneself is often a revelation, even if what it reveals is not always
pleasant. We are reminded, perhaps, of Ishmael’s musings in “Loomings”: “Not ignoring what is
good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since
it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in” (MD 7).
While Ishmael feels he is not encouraged to interact with the darker elements of the human
experience, he has the wisdom or “the itch” to do so anyway, thus enabling the “great flood-gates
of the wonder-world” (7) to swing open. When we urge our students to interact with whatever
comes up during the creative experience there is a sense of release, of revelation, and excitement,
all of which contribute to a student’s courage and confidence in reading and in sharing what they
have experienced.
John Dewey identifies such a dynamic of psychological engagement in Art as Experience, albeit
from a lighter side of the psyche:
… when excitement about a subject matter goes deep, it stirs up a store of attitudes and meanings
derived from prior experience. As they are aroused into activity they become conscious thoughts and
emotions, emotionalized images. To be set on fire by a thought or scene is to be inspired.
(Dewey 65)
I propose that being set on fire by a thought or a scene is precisely what we want our students to
experience. Intellectual engagement with a text is absolutely necessary, of course, but only emo-
tional meaning, as it were, can create that deep connection between text and reader. Sometimes
the content is beautiful, sometimes it is not, but the result is always excitement, inspiration, and
fleeting contact with what might be called the experience of truth.
Coming into contact with truth is yet another aspect of the visual journal experience which,
even though subjective, is at the very heart of Moby-Dick. It is difficult to talk directly about
truth because if a reader admits to having seen it, she is hard-pressed to articulate what she has
seen. Melville says as much in “Hawthorne and His Mosses”: “Truth is forced to fly like a scared
white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself … even though
it be covertly, and by snatches” (PT 244). In other words, a reader might catch a glimpse of
something that feels true, but it will not hold still long enough for her to define it. From my
perspective as a teacher, a definition of truth does not matter because when a student says a book
“Of Whales in Paint”: Melville in the High School Classroom 533
feels true, or that parts of it do, I know she has experienced something exciting that will drive
her deeper into the text, hoping to see more. And even if a definition of truth eludes us, it is still
worth taking a deeper look into the dynamics of seeing truth because of the pedagogical oppor-
tunities such sight offers.
Elizabeth Schultz, in Unpainted to the Last, her brilliant and groundbreaking book on the sub-
ject of art and Moby-Dick, talks about artists’ and illustrators’ experiences with truth: “… drawn
into Moby-Dick, they have (re)viewed it from their particular Ishmaelian positions and proved to
be invaluable witnesses. They have seen visible truth in it and in turn have made it visible to
others” (Schultz 325). Encountering visible truth and making it available to others is central to
the visual journal process. Furthermore, in evaluating my students’ creative work, I am struck
time and time again not only with glimpses of truth but also by their powerful reactions to such
glimpses. Schultz makes a profound point about the value of great artists, but even student art-
work communicates this sense of value.
When students engage creatively with the reading experience and share what they have seen,
they make close ties, surprisingly, to literary criticism. In a fundamental sense, criticism is
concerned with elucidating different ways of seeing a text. For decades, Robert K. Wallace has
been encouraging his students at Northern Kentucky University to make creative responses to
Moby-Dick in lieu of more formal, critical essays. At first, Wallace was concerned that an artistic
option might short-change his students the opportunity to approach the text critically. But this
was not the case: “Moby-Dick art created in the twentieth century initiated a pictorial tradition
in the interpretation of the novel comparable to that of literary critics who write with words”
(Wallace, “Moby-Dick” 693). Wallace is correct to assert that artists are doing criticism in their
own way. The works of George Klauba, Matt Kish, Aileen Callahan, and Gil Wilson, to name
only a few, urge us to see Moby-Dick from different perspectives, to consider ever new lenses
through which to see the book. Using visual journals has taught me that students are capable of
sophisticated interpretations even if they do not bring highly developed critical skills to the text.
The process of creating art allows them to envision elements of Moby-Dick in ways that are
remarkably innovative, and this innovation goes hand in hand with the development of critical
insight, engagement, and confidence.
The process of visual journals would theoretically succeed with any work of literature. Indeed,
I have tried it with other books and found all the surprising results described above. Nevertheless,
Moby-Dick is unique in its visual depth, and for this reason visual journals work remarkably well
with it. Again, Elizabeth Schultz is a profound observer of the generative force of Moby-Dick:
Ishmael’s sense of urgency to discover meaning in visual signs has engaged readers who are them-
selves artists. His verbal paintings of his experiences about the Pequod and of “something like the
true form of the whale” have become the basis for a proliferation and a profusion of visual responses.
(Schultz 3)
While Schultz focuses on artists of great sophistication and power, her observations apply to our
students. When given the opportunity, all readers are also artists whose creativity helps them to
experience Ishmael’s sense of urgency. And when the classroom sparkles with the omnipotence of
art, with a flowering of creative, visual responses, students are drawn deeper and more confi-
dently into their reading experience and into the life of The Whale.
534 Jeffrey Markham
Works Cited
Berg, Maggie, and Barbara K. Seeber. The Slow Professor: Tolstoy, Leo. What Is Art and Essays on Art, translated by
Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. U of Aylmer Maude. Oxford UP, 1959.
Toronto P, 2017. Wallace, Robert K. “Birds, Carnage, Salvation: An
Dewey, John. Art as Experience. Perigee, 1980. Interview with George Klauba.” Leviathan: A Journal
Kish, Matt. Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every of Melville Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, 2010, pp. 68–84.
Page. Tin House Books, 2011. ———. “Moby-Dick and the Arts in the Early Twenty-
———. Telephone Interview. 26 April 2019. First Century.” Moby-Dick: An Authoritative Text,
Schultz, Elizabeth A. Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Contexts, Criticism. 3rd ed., edited by Hershel Parker.
Twentieth-Century American Art. UP of Kansas, 1995. W. W. Norton, 2018, pp. 692–701.
45
Diversity, Reading Publics, and the
Community College
James Noel
Barnes & Noble’s 2020 launch of their Diverse Editions series was supposed to be an effort to
promote diversity during Black History Month. Partnering with Penguin Random House and
TBWA/Chiat/Day for the project, Barnes & Noble planned to place people of color on the cover
of twelve canonical texts. The books were chosen using an algorithm that selected texts in which
some of the main characters were not racialized. Specifically, natural language processing (NLP)
software detected speech and linguistic patterns to select the titles for the edition. When I
learned about the series, my response was mixed. As an unapologetic Melville scholar, I was
intrigued to learn that Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick would be included in the series, but I won-
dered—and was concerned—about the effectiveness of the campaign.
Was the inclusion of Melville’s text in the Barnes & Noble series really a move that could
effectively diversify the publishing industry during Black History Month? Are algorithms free
of racial bias? Or could this episode be perceived as an unsettling example of literary min-
strelsy—the Blacking up of white literary characters? Although I still do not have a clear
answer to any of those questions, I soon learned that the obstacles that obscured my belief in
the project were congruent with some of the criticisms the project received within the first
twenty-four hours after its release. Tracey Livesay tweeted, “What?!? No! Is it really this hard?
People sat down & had meetings & put a lot of energy & money into creating covers f/Black
people on books w/the same old stories INSTEAD of promoting books written by Black authors
& featuring Black characters?WTF?!” (@tlivesay). Similarly, Sofia Quintero expressed via social
media, “What occurs when people don’t understand that diversity is a means not the end.
Marginalized communities don’t need you to retrofit classic literature. What we want is you to
536 James Noel
recognize that we have our own and continue to create new classics that belong in the canon”
(@sofiaqt). Seeing the connection between Blackface and the series, several referred to the
incident as “literary Blackface.” Many took to social media to express their disapproval, pointing
out the need to celebrate Black authors during Black History Month instead of creating new
covers for canonical texts written by white authors. Perhaps selfishly, I wondered about the stu-
dents who walked into our classrooms every day—how would they interpret this situation? To
them, in what ways could placing a Black Ahab on the cover of Moby-Dick be considered as a
celebratory act of Black history, or even an act of diversity? How can Melville be used in mul-
ticultural community college classrooms to facilitate pedagogies that foster empowering and
transformative student learning?
As a community college professor in a diverse community college in Pittsburg, in the East Bay
of northern California, I am well aware of the notion floating around campus that Melville and
many of the classics have no place. In the past, I overheard colleagues say that our students just
are not academics or that “they just don’t read that stuff.” However, to me, there is not much
validity in the assumption that community college students cannot handle, or are not interested
in, classic novels. I never impose my adoration of Melville on students to prove a point either. I
use as many authors as I can in my classes: Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright,
William Faulkner. I use what I can and who I can because, like many community college instruc-
tors, I face retention issues. If a phrase or a word has the potential to capture a student’s interest,
regardless of where it came from, I try to fold it into one of my courses.
Barnes & Noble ultimately ended the campaign, releasing a statement saying, among other
things, that the project was “inspired by our work with schools”:
We acknowledge the voices who have expressed concerns about the Diverse Editions project at our
Barnes & Noble Fifth Avenue store and have decided to suspend the initiative. Diverse Editions
presented new covers of classic books through a series of limited-edition jackets, designed by artists
hailing from different ethnicities and backgrounds. The covers are not a substitute for Black voices
or writers of color, whose work and voices deserve to be heard. The booksellers who championed this
initiative did so convinced it would help drive engagement with these classic titles. It was a project
inspired by our work with schools and was created in part to raise awareness and discussion during
Black History Month in which Barnes & Noble stores nationally will continue to highlight a wide
selection of books to celebrate Black history and great literature from writers of color.
(Nawotka)
The implication is that without specification, there could not be racialization. According to the
creators of the initiative, in Moby-Dick’s case there was as much chance for Ahab to be Black as
white.
This rationale has shortcomings for several reasons. Firstly, the company’s dependence upon an
algorithm is troubling, as studies show that algorithms are not free from racial bias. In Algorithms
of Oppression (2018), Safiya Umoja Noble highlights the dangerous consequences of data
discrimination. Her argument illustrates the ways that women of color—primarily Black
women—are often on the receiving end of biased algorithms that reflect the white hegemony
that is central to our culture. Studies like Noble’s illustrate that the data used to develop an
algorithm do not escape the biases that society is built upon. In order to eradicate such biases,
systemic changes would need to take place––for example, in the case of literature, reimagining
the canon.
Diversity, Reading Publics, and the Community College 537
Secondly, the reasoning behind the campaign is problematic because it does not speak to the
nuances of how race is portrayed in literature. The unstated—the absence—is complex. In
Playing in the Dark (1993), Toni Morrison draws attention to the unsettling ways that the
“Africanist presence” could be illuminated in a literary text even when that Africanist presence
or persona is ignored. Her life as a writer sparked her interest in the ways that writers craft
literary characters who do not share their racial identity. Interestingly, Morrison expresses her
interest in the ways that Melville could craft Pip, examining his ability to trust himself to ima-
gine others that “may represent” the “othered” (4). The Africanist presence, according to
Morrison, provided a surrogate that allowed writers to think critically about the ways that
human liberation was being defined in America (37). Morrison amplifies the notion that even
when racialized bodies are absent in literature, those bodies may still be present.
Though Morrison’s focus is on the “Africanist presence,” some critics have addressed whiteness
in literature or popular culture in similar ways. As Richard Dyer suggests, authors might be less
likely to racialize a literary character when a character is white: “The sense of whites as non-raced is
most evident in the absence of reference to whiteness in the habitual speech and writing of white
people in the West. We (whites) will speak of, say, the Blackness and Chineseness of friends, neigh-
bours, colleagues, customers or clients, and it may be in the most genuinely friendly and accepting
manner, but we don’t mention the whiteness of the white people we know” (10). Though anec-
dotal, Dyer’s examples draw attention to the normativity of whiteness—the ways that whiteness
can go undetected, the ways that white people can be unraced. Ultimately, Dyer attempts to make
“whiteness strange,” a move that he believes will delegitimize and dismantle whiteness’ normativ-
ity by putting whiteness on par with “othered” racial groups that have been constructed in uncanny
ways (4). Dyer’s project illustrates that Barnes & Noble’s initiative has not managed to escape
whiteness’ sway, its normalizing power. This realization seemed to be absent when people were cre-
ating this series for Barnes & Noble. There is a strong chance that many of the authors did not
specify certain characters’ race due to the normativity of whiteness.
Perhaps Melville, despite his ambiguity, did not manage to escape this tendency, a tendency
that I was forced to think about over a year ago when presenting a paper at a Frederick Douglass
conference in Paris. My paper dealt with early trauma in the work of Douglass and Melville,
building on readings of Douglass that undermined existing scholarship. During the question
and answer period, I was asked about my reading of Pip. A prominent white scholar in the audi-
ence asked me how I knew that Pip was Black. As I thought that Pip’s racial identity was
obvious, I was unsure how to answer his question, an inquiry that made me question my own
reading. If Pip was not Black, then the heart of my paper would have fallen apart.
The most obvious example of Melville’s declaration in Moby-Dick that Pip is indeed Black
seems to be when he discusses Pip and Dough-Boy. Melville writes:
In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a white one, of equal
developments, though of dissimilar color, driven in one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-
Boy was by nature dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom
very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever
enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year’s
calendar should show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year’s Days.
Nor smile so, while I write that this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy;
behold yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king’s cabinets.
(411)
538 James Noel
During this comparison, Melville makes it clear that Pip is indeed Black. His simile at the
beginning of the passage implies that Pip is Black. When discussing Pip, Ishmael also uses this
opportunity to describe Pip’s race stereotypically. Toward the end of the passage, Pip is being
referred to as the “little” Black. These are clear indicators that racialize Pip, and he is not the only
character of color who is explicitly racialized. Daggoo is referred to as “a gigantic, coal-black
negro-savage” (120). Fleece’s color is also mentioned during his altercation with Stubb. He is
referred to as “the old” Black and “the old ebony” (294). One cannot therefore assert that when
Melville does not mention a character’s race, the character is therefore raceless. This move per-
haps speaks more to the normativity of whiteness, as Melville consistently racializes characters
who are not white—even in a text that is well-known for its interrogation of whiteness. This is
what makes Barnes & Noble’s move so wrong. Placing a Black Ahab on the cover can never be a
celebratory act of Black History Month, primarily because Ahab was not meant to be raceless.
Given the racial hierarchy aboard the ship, if Ahab were Black, the narrative would look much
different (perhaps more like Benito Cereno). I would imagine that this obstacle would prevent
students from seriously reading Ahab as Black.
Barnes & Noble’s campaign also forced readers to take seriously and revisit questions pertain-
ing to the effectiveness of making Melville required reading in a community college classroom.
Nonetheless, beyond students’ approval, the Barnes & Noble incident also caused me to think
about Melville and pedagogy. Does Melville have a place in institutions called to create and
develop more equitable teaching practices? Though using a book such as Moby-Dick in a college
classroom could create some obstacles, reading Melville can be used to foster pedagogies that
empower students because works like Moby-Dick challenge how we define our sense of freedom,
speaking to how we deal with the social, political, and economic structures that confine us. In
the introduction to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), Richard Shaull states,
“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the
younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes
the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with
reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world” (16). In the book,
Freire encourages us to pursue a “problem-posing education,” a brand of education that never
stands still—one that prompts people to assess their position in reality (12). This kind of educa-
tion—creating “a reality in process, in transformation”—is similar to what bell hooks refers to
as “engaged pedagogy” (19). Though hooks places a deeper emphasis on joy and excitement,
both pedagogical approaches are intended to facilitate a meaningful learning environment that
will provide freedom for students through active and interrogative education. Freire objected to
education as a simple transaction (students receiving knowledge from an instructor). Instead, he
called for more participatory forms of education that permit students to take ownership of their
academic experiences. Moby-Dick is one of those texts that speaks directly to “problem-posing”
pedagogical practices because it urges us to grapple with the issues that a hierarchical structure
can impose. Ultimately, in the crew’s case, Ahab’s megalomania leads those aboard the Pequod
to catastrophe. The motion of the Pequod serves to amplify the tragic ending that ensues at the
end of Melville’s epic narrative.
These kinds of questions—difficult questions—are questions that I have thought about on
numerous occasions, especially as a teacher and scholar of Melville. Is teaching an author like
Melville the act of a sightless optimist? Does Melville have no place in the diverse classrooms
that I walk into every day? The Melvillean in me pushes me to say “no” to both of these
Diversity, Reading Publics, and the Community College 539
questions, but I know that I cannot stop there, as I am certainly aware that Melville is not for
everyone.
No single student response can encapsulate how students will react to Melville. Whenever
Melville’s publications are added to the course catalogue next to my name, I have witnessed dif-
ferent responses. One mirrors Kiese Laymon’s response in Heavy. In his famed memoir, he
explains, “I didn’t love my paper, because I didn’t really want to be writing about Moby-Dick, but
I thought my next-to-last paragraph was the best writing I’d ever done for Coach Schitzler. It
had an allusion to Moby-Dick, alliteration, and some commentary on our nation. I tried to write
a paragraph for our people, like Margaret Walker asked me to do, even though I had to write it
to Coach Schitzler because he was grading me” (109). Moby-Dick did not appeal to Laymon
because he found it hard to relate to the text. For Laymon, this conflict does not occur with
Melville solely because he is a white author, as he also struggles to relate to Black authors who,
he senses, abandon Black audiences. I have witnessed similar conflicts from some of my students
in the past.
However, other students had distinctly different responses to Melville. After reading Moby-
Dick in one of my literature survey courses, one student mentioned in an essay exploring Melville’s
relationship with Hawthorne that “Moby-Dick answers the call for truly American literature
because it touches on themes that are specific to American literature.” The student went on to
explain that these themes are enduring and unresolved “one hundred years after it was written.”
Other students in my critical thinking class found parts of themselves in some of Melville’s
shorter works, such as Benito Cereno and “Bartleby.” Some were unsettled but also marveled at the
ways that Benito Cereno tactfully manipulates readers as the narrative moves forward, speaking to
the unreliability of human perception. Their writing seemed to go beyond responses that they
thought would appease me; the kind of response that connected Melville to their historical
moment was not required in any of the assignments. Many of them grappled with Melville and
found ways to make connections. Some even referred to Melville as “dope” in terms reminiscent
of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s declaration that Melville is a “badass.”
It is difficult to consider problem-posing pedagogies without considering whiteness. This is
another reason why Moby-Dick can be useful when employing instructional strategies that pro-
mote empowered learning. The narrative is a rare novel that perhaps manages to get closest to
capturing whiteness’ obscurity. Whiteness in Moby-Dick is a signifier that cannot be anchored.
Whiteness is ambiguous in Moby-Dick, and the minute that we reach for it, it slips through our
fingers. The white Leviathan can be read as the very thing that stands between the human and
meaning—situating Moby Dick as some sort of “floating signifier,” a term that Stuart Hall used
to capture the meaning of race. According to Hall, race’s dependence upon difference makes race
much like a language with no fixed meaning. Whiteness in the novel exceeds the parameters of
race but does not escape it. The racial implications of whiteness in the book are daunting and
enduring, speaking to unresolved issues that stem from the racial conflicts of our past.
Employing engaging and empowering pedagogies is as important for instructors as it is for
students. Sparked by the death of George Floyd and America’s overdue racial awakening, the
recent national call to make our classrooms equitable brings educators face to face with the dis-
criminatory and paradoxical nature of our educational system, a system not immune to dispar-
ities that shape life on the other side of our classroom walls, especially for students at community
colleges. This recent call prompts us to reevaluate our teaching practices and encourages us to
develop anti-racist pedagogies that favor equity over equality. Being able to constantly
540 James Noel
reevaluate our pedagogical approach means that we must be cognizant of the hierarchies that
shape our reality and our education system. To enable the conflict and the praxis that Freire
champions, we must be mindful of the ways that education has been tainted by issues that stem
from our dark colonial and socio-economic histories. This does not mean that Moby-Dick ought
to be a selection for Black History Month. There were certainly a plethora of Black authors that
Barnes & Noble ought to have selected—both for contemporary and older works. However, the
mammoth company’s initiative not only was blind to the ways that whiteness can be normative
in literature and in algorithms, but also thwarted the potential of Moby-Dick to be useful for
“problem posing” instructional methods.
Works Cited
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Herman Melville—Badass.” The Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search
Atlantic, 24 December 2009. https://www.theatlantic. Engines Reinforce Racism. New York UP, 2018.
com/entertainment/archive/2009/12/herman-meville- @sofiaquintero (Sofia Quintero). “What Occurs When
badass/32587 People Don’t Understand that Diversity Is a Means Not
Dyer, Richard. White. Routledge, 1997. the End. Marginalized Communities Don’t Need You
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 2000. to Retrofit Classic Literature. What We Want Is You to
Hall, Stuart. Race: The Floating Signifier. Video. Produced Recognize that We Have Our Own and Continue to
and Directed by Sut Jhally. The Media Foundation, Create New Classics that Belong in the Canon.” Twitter,
1996. 4 February 2020, 5:16 p.m., https://twitter.com/
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice sofiaquintero/status/1224864354761310208
of Freedom. Routledge, 1994. @tlivesay (Tracey Livesay). “What?!? No! Is It Really
Laymon, Kiese. Heavy: An American Memoir. Scribner, This Hard? People Sat down & Had Meetings & Put a
2018. Lot of Energy & Money into Creating Covers f/Black
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the People on Books w/the Same Old Stories INSTEAD of
Literary Imagination. Vintage Books, 1993. Promoting Books Written by Black Authors &
Nawotka, Ed. “B&N, PRH Cancel Diverse Editions Featuring Black Characters?WTF?!” Twitter, 5
Promotion.” PW (Publishers’ Weekly), 5 February 2020. February 2020, 2:54 a.m., https://twitter.com/
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry- tlivesay/status/1225009816856408065
news/bookselling/article/82335-b-n-prh-cancel-diverse-
editions-promotion.html.
46
Teaching Melville Through the Lens of
Popular Culture
Martina Pfeiler
From the perspective of twenty-first century learners, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is inextri-
cably intertwined with mediated and commercialized spaces. Ever since A. Burnham Shute’s first
visual illustration of the novel in 1896, international artists and producers have imagined the
iconic white whale in a wide range of genres and media, such as motion pictures, art, cartoons,
graphic novels, pop-up books, TV series, computer games, video clips, opera, musicals, and fan-
fiction. As Elizabeth Schultz confirms, “Moby-Dick has inspired a staggering variety of mass-
produced images … making it the most continuously, frequently and diversely visualized of
American literary works” (Schultz in Leroux 332; see also Schultz 1995, 2006, 2019). This mass
production includes “canonical franchise” (Leitch 103), such as tea mugs, bath towels, toy
whales, T-shirts, card games, whale watching tours, restaurant menus, etc., which continue to
increase the novel’s global visibility. They discursively shape, as Jeffrey Insko suggests, “the rich
public life of Moby-Dick” (21; see also Inge 1986; 2006; 2009).
As a popular trope, the mythic hunt for the white whale has circulated in a wide range of
intersecting types of popular cultures for more than two centuries. As John Storey’s Inventing
Popular Culture (2003) suggests, these include folklore (e.g. folkloric maritime tales), high
culture (e.g. today’s Moby-Dick), mass culture (e.g. Hollywood films), and global culture (e.g.
transnational flows). Since these academically constructed categories are not neutral, they are
useful in igniting students to unravel the complex historical archive of Melville in popular
culture. Indeed, what tends to be forgotten in these contexts is that the novel’s nineteenth-cen-
tury folkloric foreground, that is, the hunt for the white whale, already existed prior to Moby-
Dick, when it was inextricably intertwined with popular themes such as masculinity, rivalry,
economy, sexuality, marriage, patriarchy, religion, and male adventurism (Pfeiler 2017, 2020).
And, equally overlooked, this “whaling lore” (Vincent 184), which has been transcoded into
print by Jules Lecomte, William Comstock, Jeremiah N. Reynolds, and Emma Embury in the
542 Martina Pfeiler
1830s and 1840s, was reused in Down to the Sea in Ships (1922), the first motion picture that bor-
rows from Melville’s novel. In view of a vast eclectic material culture, Moby-Dick provides stu-
dents a prime example of “the ways in which literature means something and matters are
networked” (Glazener 4).
Indeed for students, focusing on Moby-Dick through the lens of popular culture renews, shifts,
and alters, if not transforms, their experience with the text as a global literary classic. As Wyn
Kelley elucidates in Reading in a Participatory Culture, “the question of which readers Melville
reached and which he neglected, what characters or groups he represented and which he repre-
sented unsatisfactorily or not at all, has become more urgent and critical” (131). Simultaneously,
Moby-Dick continues to be made popular through new modes of “transmedial storytelling”
(Hutcheon 2012, xxiv). Thus, scrutinizing popularizations of Moby-Dick sharpens critical aware-
ness that “a literary classic is a product of all those circumstances of which it has traditionally
been supposed to be independent” (Tompkins 3–4). In my teaching, I encourage a comparative
perspective on Melville and popular culture, which prompts the question of Moby-Dick’s
(un)popularity itself.
Melville’s (Un)Popularity: A Comparative Perspective

Reading Melville’s novel within the context of American popular culture not only elicits cultural
insight into the author’s self-positioning in “an aggressively expanding commercial literary
market”; it also creates a dynamic point of inquiry through which learners critically reflect on
America’s powerful culture industry and learn to situate Melville’s magnus opus within global cir-
cuits (Kelley 7; Pfeiler 2013).
According to Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville was pursued by women in the 1840s as the
“sailor-author” who “had written a racy travel book” (21). Although this remark seems slightly
exaggerated, it highlights the notion of the first public reaction to Melville. The remark fit-
tingly reveals that at some point Melville experienced a kind of American celebrity as one of the
country’s best-selling seafaring travel authors, whose progressive mind shocked some, yet
enthralled many. Just a few years later, however, in August 1850, Melville himself decried
“popular and amiable writer[s]” (PT 247). And, as if in defiance of a popular storm, Melville
complains in a letter to his editor Evert A. Duyckinck about a growing commercial promotion
and visual construction of authorship: “almost everybody is having his ‘mug’ engraved nowa-
days; so that this test of distinction is getting to be reversed; and therefore, to see one’s mug in a
magazine is presumptive evidence that he’s a nobody” (Corr 180). He unveils his dilemma to
Nathanial Hawthorne: “Dollars damn me; … what I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—
it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and
all my books are botches” (Corr 191).
Although Scott Norsworthy suggests in his Melvilliana Blog entry on February 25, 2020 that
“Moby-Dick [was] widely praised in 1851–2,” or more admired among his critics than the
author himself was aware, the novel did not sell or circulate widely enough on a transatlantic
scale to have gained the status of a popular work of nineteenth-century literature. By reflecting
on a selection of favorable and unfavorable contemporary reviews, students are even more curious
to learn how Melville became one of the most highly acclaimed American authors and Moby-Dick
so widely known.
Teaching Melville Through the Lens of Popular Culture 543
Melville’s Ascendency in High Culture and Growing Popularity

In spite of a long “popular apathy towards [Melville] and his work” (MacMechan 121), as Archibald
MacMechan puts it in his “rehabilitation” (120) essay, Melville “received more and greater praise
from other literati” (Marovitz 517), literary critics, and translators, especially toward the end of his
life and beyond. In fact, even before the now famous Melville Revival that is frequently attributed
to Columbia University Professors Carl Van Doren and Raymond Weaver, Melville fueled the
leftist interest of a network of American and British authors on a transatlantic scale (see Maki
Sadahiro’s Chapter 2 of this Companion, “Melville’s Twentieth-Century Revivals”). From his British
supporters William Clark Russell and Henry Stevens Salt to MacMechan, who occasionally “taught
at Harvard University and Columbia University” (Marovitz 516), Melville’s posthumous reputa-
tion began not only to grow, but also gradually to institutionalize him as a literary genius.
Previously unacknowledged, America’s great popularizer of the sciences, Edwin Emery
Slosson, too, had his share in popularizing Melville in the 1910s. While living in New York and
holding a teaching position in the School of Journalism at Columbia University, Slosson consid-
ered him not only as writer of great sea novels, but in several articles published in The Independent
between 1912 and 1917, he discusses Melville and emphasizes Moby-Dick’s philosophical depth
and popular potential. Slosson (even before Van Doren and Raymond Weaver) perceived the
author as “very modern” (Slosson 552). In an article about Moby-Dick from 1915, he explains:
“Ahab is mad with the madness of Nietzsche, obsessed by the fright of the endless return. ‘Men
tragically great are made so thru a certain morbidness’—that’s [Max] Nordau. ‘Thou great
democratic God’—that’s [Harry Allen] Overstreet” (552). By referring to social Darwinist and
influential Zionist Max Nardau, as well as Harry Allen Overstreet, whose modern philosophy
and psychology at the time were widely spread in the United States, Slosson calls attention to
Melville as a modern thinker. And, by placing him amongst canonized writers of British and
American fiction and poetry, he compares Melville to William Blake, Joseph Conrad, Richard
Henry Dana, Jr., and Nathaniel Hawthorne (552). Equally important, and great for student
discussion, Slosson stands out as the first Melville revivalist, who recognizes Moby-Dick’s poten-
tial as popular culture: “The plot is that of the pirate scenes of [J. M. Barrie’s] Peter Pan where
the crocodile, who has bit off the captain’s leg, chases him to get the rest. Only Ahab is more
courageous than the pirate and pursues the great White Whale who ‘unmasted’ him” (552).
But it was Raymond Weaver’s centennial essay that eventually immortalized Melville despite
the “blind ingratitude of mortals” (Weaver, “Centennial” 145). In the first Melville biography,
titled Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (1921), Columbia University professor Raymond
Weaver copiously and audaciously embraced Moby-Dick’s “extraordinary style,” as well as its bold
departure “from all scholastic rules and conventions” (Melville 18). His book-length study is par-
ticularly noteworthy as the driving force for canonizing Melville. As early as the 1920s, Moby-
Dick became the subject of “astonishing reinterpretations by diverse artists and commercial
entrepreneurs” (Schultz and Springer 13).
Thus, America’s reading public honored its writer only when his once unpopular sixth novel
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) received the status of a work of high literary art. In this new
eruption of critical engagement with the nineteenth-century author, Melville’s high art culturaliza-
tion began. In due course, the author’s reputation as a popular American novelist after World War
I experienced a watershed moment in his redefinition on a national and international scale.
544 Martina Pfeiler
Melville became popular once again, yet contemporary literati and scholars based his popu-
larity on parameters different from those that yielded him his early success with Typee. As Aimery
Dunlap-Smith suggests, Weaver’s scholarly work “kindled a fire of popular interest in the author
which became known as the Melville revival” (Dunlap-Smith 63; emphasis added). Perry Miller
adds, “[t]he drama of its rediscovery in 1920 excited the devotion of what has become virtually
a cult; Americans have been so gratified to find a work of genius unexpectedly added to their
glory that the adulation is possibly a bit excessive” (3). Christopher Castiglia goes so far as to say
that “Melville in an inversion of his contemporary reception became over the course of the twen-
tieth century a literary rock star” (5). While Weaver’s efforts ensured that Melville “is ranked
among America’s greatest novelists and his masterpiece Moby-Dick (1851) among the world’s
greatest novels” (Dunlap-Smith 63), at the same time Hollywood directors and scriptwriters
played a major role in constructing Melville’s popularity.
Melville’s Emerging Popularization in America’s Motion Picture Industry

When investigating Melville in popular culture with students, I consider the first wave of
creative receptions of Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale (1851) from the 1920s, which I call the “melo-
dramatic wave,” not as subsidiary, but as complementary, if not paramount, to the construction
of the author’s growing popularity in American culture as well as internationally. Between 1922
and 1931, Elmer Clifton’s Down to the Sea in Ships (1922), and three Warner Bros. motion pic-
tures, that is Millard Webb’s The Sea Beast (1925), Lloyd Bacon’s Moby Dick (1930) and Michael
Curtiz’s Dämon des Meeres (1931), reached millions of people in the United States and interna-
tionally (Pfeiler 2020).
In this context, it is crucial to recognize John Legget Evert Pell, the scenario writer for Down
to the Sea in Ships, as America’s first author (as early as 1921) to reimagine Moby-Dick for America’s
silent motion picture industry by remixing it with the folkloric tradition of the whaling romance.
According to a handwritten note located among the “John L. E. Pell Papers” (Mss. 93) at the
New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library and Archives, the scenario writer was born in
New York City in 1876, but moved to Great Barrington, Massachusetts, less than twenty miles
from Melville’s Arrowhead in Pittsfield. Pell’s grandfather was a whaling captain (The World,
July 9, 1922), so it is possible that Pell may have heard of Melville’s Moby-Dick during his
childhood.
According to archival sources, Pell titled his scenario “Brawn of the Brine.” It was purchased
by the Whaling Film Corporation, from which Pell and a second author, Arthur Manley
Wickwire, received money “as part of the expenses and preparation” for the film (Mss 39, Series
A, Subseries 4 Folder 1). This organization was composed of “men familiar to New England
finance” (“New Bedford,” The World, July 9, 1922), including Edmund Wood, President of the
New Bedford Board of Commerce, W. A. Robinson, Jr., of New Bedford’s W. A. Robinson Oil
Refining Co., and Abbott P. Smith, director in several of New Bedford’s largest cotton mills. For
its musical score, The Whaling Film Corporation commissioned Henry F. Gilbert. Incorporating
music from the well-known comic opera Fra Diavolo, ou L’hôtellerie de Terracine, first performed in
Paris in 1830, Gilbert used nineteenth-century music predominantly to lend period flavor (Pell,
Series E). Its director Elmer Clifton also played an important role in how the production unfolded,
coming to the Whaling City with Hollywood credentials. In fact, in the 1910s, Clifton
co-directed the overtly racist epic motion picture Birth of a Nation (1915), also playing the
Northerner Phil Stoneman (Zboray 33). The ninety-three-minute, black and white silent motion
picture Down to the Sea in Ships is intricately intertwined with cultural memories of “bygone
glory” (Dolin 353). It can be characterized as a “restorative nostalgia film” (Spengler 68), with
the city’s inhabitants and various historical landmarks playing a crucial role in the creative enact-
ment of the 1840s. In other words, New Bedford, under Clifton’s direction, collectively engaged
in “retrospective constructions” (Spengler 68) of a bygone whaling past.
The motion picture was officially released on March 4, 1923 (American Film Institute Catalogue
201). As mentioned in the introduction to the “Inventory to the Whaling Film Cooperation
Records,” it had “subsequent showings in most major American cities and numerous foreign
countries” (Mss 39, “Inventory”). Archival documents list numerous screenings in over thirty
states from New England to the Midwest, the South, California, and even Alaska (Mss 39, Series
C, Folder 3). In his introduction to a special screening from 1927, Abbot P. Smith states: “it is
of interest to know that these films have been shown in every port of the globe, and aroused the
same enthusiastic comment in foreign countries as they have here” (Mss 39, Series E, Folder 5).
Although this statement sounds like a vast exaggeration, the list of “Contracts and Agreements”
of the Whaling Film Corporations is staggering. The eight-page-document mentions dozens of
countries and regions, ranging from Canada to the Republic of Mexico to Central America,
Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Australasia, Oceania, Asia, and Europe. It confirms the inter-
national distribution of the film in more than one hundred countries, including European col-
onies and protectorates in Africa.
Down to the Sea in Ships, first and foremost, explores the nineteenth-century cultural trope of
male rivalry, following “the romance of the days when a stern family code demanded that any
young man who would aspire to the heart and hand of a whaleman daughter must first undergo
the supreme test and himself plunge a harpoon into the side of a whale” (8), as The World put it
on July 22, 1922. Emma Embury’s seven-page sentimental story, “Love and Whaling” (1843),
which also includes a reference to the white whale Mocha Dick, ironically presents the coquettish
Marian “May” Morton (alluding to Charles W. Morgan here) and her “reverence for manly
courage; how she depicted in glowing colors the dangers of those who ‘go down to the sea in ships’
… and battle with the monsters of the deep.” However, May, who ends up marrying the wrong
suitor, is “torn between Tom H—,” a whaler and “admirable specimen of the animal man” and
“Louis W—,” who is depicted as an effeminate son of a whaling family, who “has slowly and
laboriously fitted himself for college” (Embury 24–26).
Following this basic plotline, the motion picture Down to the Sea in Ships updates the two anti-
thetical rivals. One of them is Thomas Allan Dexter (played by Raymond McKee), a charming,
white New Englander and recent college graduate, who initially cares little for whaling. By con-
trast, his rival, the effeminate and mysterious Samuel Siggs (played by J. Thornton Baston), is
Orientalized, having a “sinister yellow strain hidden by sheep clothing.” Siggs is presented as a
threat not only to the local community but to the nation, which is symbolized by a low angle
shot of an aged patriarch, Charles W. Morgan (played by William Walcott) and his daughter
Patience (played by Marguerite Courtot) in front of the American national flag and an empty
cradle. In this hegemonic reimagining of the nineteenth-century whaling romance, the motion
picture participates in “a system of discourse that represented the ‘ethnic and racial other’ … as
an ‘imaginary other’ but ‘real’ threatening presence …” (Denzin 8).
546 Martina Pfeiler
And, as unlikely as it may seem to students, Melville’s novel is first injected into this basic
plotline of a whaling romance at the same time he is being launched into high culture at
Columbia University. Amongst research notes for the shooting script, loosely dated 1921–1922
and filed under Pell’s manuscripts, the first line of a fifty-one-page document reads “Herman
Melville, Mariner and Mystic, by Raymond Weaver” (Mss 39, Series 4, Folder 1), revealing Pell’s
and Clifton’s awareness of Weaver’s publication and Melville’s growing critical reputation.
Yet, rather than exploring Melville’s emblematic critique of New England’s whaling, Down to
the Sea in Ships reimagines Melville as part of the dominant cultural politics of America’s white,
male supremacy and patriarchy. In addition to using quotations appropriated from Melville on
intertitles, including the line Chapter 105 “Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish—Will he
Perish?,” which is used to support the glorification of the whaling past, Moby-Dick’s intertextual
presence stands out in particular via the usage of props and borrowing from character traits.
Students are quick to spot that Down to the Sea in Ships features Charles W. Morgan as an elderly,
entrepreneurial overseer in a long black coat, with a black hat, using a conspicuous white staff as
a walking aid. On one level, the walking aid symbolizes the white patriarch’s waning power,
despite his obsession for whaling oil when checking the caskets in New Bedford’s harbor. Yet,
visually and verbally the scene draws on Melville’s Ahab. The whaling tycoon is depicted as “the
domineering figure at the waterfront,” as he shapes later filmic representations of Ahab with his
impressive black coat and hat, and his white peg-leg. Similarly, and again with regard to props,
when Samuel Siggs arrives in New Bedford, he is equipped with an “old carpet-bag” (MD 8),
evoking Ishmael’s departure for the whaling town in Moby-Dick. Although this object was
common in the nineteenth century, the visual reference, I would suggest, goes beyond recon-
structing New Bedford’s whaling culture. This subtle inclusion of references to Moby-Dick also
becomes evident when Samuel Siggs holds a small wooden figure in the form of a smiling Buddha
in his hand. In an overt analogy to Queequeg’s “ebony idol” (MD 419), the scene constructs
Siggs as a Chinese-American threat to the community, while also alluding to Fedallah.
While Down to the Sea in Ships also contains verbal allusions to Moby-Dick commenting on the
hard work of whalers, a final observation falls on Thomas Allan Dexter, who is visually depicted
in a low-angle shot as a dreamy mast-header. It provides viewers with an Ishmaelian image of a
sailor who longs to muse about home while being ignorant of his maritime obligation to sing out
for whales. Yet, subverting this notion in an instant, the scene conveys Dexter’s uncontained
excitement over the chance to prove his masculinity by harpooning a sperm whale. This thrill is
verbalized on an intertitle with loaded sexual and racial undertones: “White-Water! White-
Water!” As already mentioned, in its melodramatic adaptation of the whaling romance, the once
lofty mast-header “spares” New Bedford from miscegenation, a reading which is supported by a
medium shot of the enlarged Morgan family in New Bedford rejoicing over its male heir in the
once empty cradle.
Conclusion
John L. E. Pell’s and Elmer Clifton’s creative exploitation of Moby-Dick as part of their visual
reconstruction of the 1830s and 1840s “glorious whaling days” may tell students more about the
way New Bedford in the 1920s created a white supremacist image than about their newly dis-
covered American author. Indeed, it tells them a great deal about which cultural trajectories
Melville refused to pursue when departing from the hegemonic myth of the hunt for the white
whale.
Nevertheless, Down to the Sea in Ships, with its journalistic reviews which students can search
for in digital databases, played a hitherto underestimated role in exporting the celebrated name
of Herman Melville to a global mass audience just a year after Raymond Weaver’s Mariner and
Mystic. Students can subsequently confront the adaptations of Moby-Dick from more popular
Warner Bros. movies The Sea Beast (1926, directed by Millard Webb), Moby Dick (1930, directed
by Lloyd Bacon), and Moby Dick (1956, directed by John Huston) departed from Down to the Sea
in Ships.
As I have suggested, studying the nineteenth-century maritime trope of the hunt for the
white whale offers students a productive lens through which to draw connections between seem-
ingly opposing subjects: one located in high culture, the other one in a more overtly commercial
one. Comparing various textual sources from Emma Embury’s “Love and Whaling” and Melville’s
Moby-Dick to Elmer Clifton’s Down to the Sea in Ships inspires students to think about the overall
effect of Melville’s amputating the novel’s “sentimental subtext” (Dawey 110). It also helps them
to see why filmmakers in the early twentieth century amplified it. As Michael J. Dawey states:
“Moby-Dick’s sentimental subtext works to reinforce and expand its nineteenth-century readers
of the gender-structured domestic sphere as the locus of simultaneously anguish and of the ten-
derness that anguish calls up” (110; see also Schultz “The Sentimental Subtext” 31). A compar-
ative approach contextualizes the commercial failure of Moby-Dick within Melville’s times as
much as it sheds light on his growing popularity during the Melville Revival.
Works Cited
Bacchilega, Cristina. “Folklore and Literature.” A Down to the Sea in Ships. Directed by Elmer Clifton
Companion to Folklore Studies, edited by Regina Bendix (USA. 1922), performances by Raymond McKee,
and Galit Hasan-Rokem. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. Clara Bow, and Marguerite Courtout. Whaling Film
447–63. Corp. DVD.
Castiglia, Christopher. “Melville and His Critics: A Dunlap-Smith, Aimery de France. “Raymond Weaver,
Special Issue.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, Melville Revival Pioneer: An Annotated Checklist.”
vol. 13, no. 1, 2011, pp. 5–9. Leviathan. A Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 15, no. 1,
Comstock, William. A Voyage to the Pacific. Descriptive of March 2013, pp. 63–80.
the Customs, Usages, and Sufferings on Board of Nantucket Embury, Emma Catherine. “Love and Whaling.” The
Whale–Ships. Boston, MA: Oliver L Perkins, 1838. Ladies’ Companion and Literary Expositor; a Monthly
Dämon des Meeres. B/W. Sound. Directed by Michael Magazine Embracing Every Department of Literature, vol.
Curtiz. (USA/Germany 1931). German Screenplay: 19–20, November 1843, pp. 23–29.
Ulrich Steindorff. Film Lost. Glazener, Nancy. Literature in the Making. Oxford Studies in
Dawey, Michael J. Herman Melville. A Routledge Study American Literary History. Oxford UP, 2016.
Guide. Routledge, 2003. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge,
Denzin, Norman K. Reading Race Hollywood and the 2012.
Cinema of Racial Violence. Sage, 2001. Inge, M. Thomas. “Melville in Popular Culture.” A
Dolin, Eric Jay. Leviathan. The History of Whaling in Companion to Melville Studies, edited by John Bryant.
America. W.W. Norton, 2007. Greenwood Press, 1986, pp. 695–739.
548 Martina Pfeiler
———. “Melville in the Popular Imagination. An Mss 39. “Inventory of the Whaling Film Cooperation
Introduction.” Leviathan. A Journal of Melville Studies, Records,” Series A, Subseries 4 Folder 1 “Agreement
vol. 11, no. 3, 1997, pp. 3–5. and Related Correspondence Regarding Film
———. “Three Moby Dick Movies.” Herman Melville’s Production and Purchase of Screenplay to BRAWN
Moby Dick: A Documentary Volume Dictionary of Literary OF THE BRINE,” 1921, 1935. Archival Material.
Biography, edited by Jean-François Leroux, vol. 349. New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Gale Cengage Learning, 2009, pp. 312–21. ———. Series A, Subseries 4 Folder 5 “Summary of
Insko, Jeffrey. “‘All of Us Are Ahabs’: Moby-Dick in Contracts for Foreign Rights,” 1923–1926. Archival
Contemporary Public Discourse.” The Journal of the Material. New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Midwest Modern Language Association, Special ———. Series C, Folder 3 “Records of Distribution to
Convention Issue: High&Low/Culture, vol. 40, no. 2, United States Cities,” ca. 1923. Archival Material.
Fall 2007, pp. 19–37. New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Jenkins, Henry, and Wyn Kelley, eds. Reading in a ———. Series E, “World Premiere Program,” 1922.
Participatory Culture. Remixing Moby-Dick in the English Archival Material. New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Classroom. Teachers College Press, 2013. Mss 93. “John L. E. Pell Papers, 1925–1973. Series B,
Kelley, Wyn. Herman Melville. An Introduction. Blackwell, Folder 7 “Biographical Sketch,” ca. 1958.” Archival
2008. Material. New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Lecomte, Jules. “La Légende Cachalot Blanc.” “Études. “New Bedford Has Recorded Its Romantic Old Whaling
Maritimes. De Quelques. Animaux. Apocryphes. Et Industry in Film Taken on Real Voyages, with Crew
Fabuleux. De la mer.” Musée des Famille. Lectures du from Seven Colleges.” The World, New York, 9 July
soirs, vol. 4, 1836–1837, 97–104. 1922, pp. 1–2; continued on p. 8.
Leitch, Thomas. “Adaptation and Intertextuality.” Norsworthy, Scott. “Moby-Dick Widely Praised in 1851–
Blackwell Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, 52”. Melvilliana. 25 February 2020. Web.
edited by Deborah Cartmell. John Wiley & Sons, Pell, John Leggert Evert. Shooting Script. “Down to the
2012. Sea in Ships.” USA. 1922, 87 pages. Series E. “Script,
Leroux, Jean-Francois, editor. Herman Melville’s Moby- Musical Score, Research Notes, Publicity Material,
Dick. A Documentary Volume. Gale Cengage Learning, Clippings, Lectures, and Miscellany,” ca. 1921–ca.
2009. 1950. Archival Material. New Bedford Whaling
MacMechan, Archibald. “The Best Sea Story Ever Museum.
Written.” Queen’s Quarterly, 7 October 1899, pp. Pfeiler, Martina. “Hunting Moby Dick: Melville in the
120–30. Global Context of the American Studies Classroom.”
Marovitz, Sanford E. “The Melville Revival.” A Companion Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 15, no. 3,
to Herman Melville, edited by Wyn Kelley. Blackwell, 2013, pp. 81–9.
2006, pp. 515–31. ———. Ahab in Love. The Creative Reception of Moby-Dick
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; Or, The White Whale. in Popular Culture. Habilitationsschrift. TU Dortmund
Illustrated by A. Burnham Shute. Belgravia Series no. University, 2017.
14, American Publishing Corporation, 1896. ———. “Warner Bros.’s Moby-Dick Adaptation Dämon
Miller, Perry. The Raven and the Whale. The War of Words des Meeres (1931) as Part of a Transcultural and
and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville. Greenwood Textual Network.” Literature/Film Quarterly, Special
Press, 1956. Issue: Transcultural Adaptation, vol. 48, no. 2, Spring
Moby Dick. B/W. Sound. Dir. Lloyd Bacon. Perf. John 2020. Web.
Barrymore and Joan Benett (USA. 1930). Warner Bros. Reynolds, Jeremiah N. “Mocha Dick; Or, the White
Moby Dick. Directed by John Huston. Screenplay Ray Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript
Bradbury. Performance by Gregory Peck. (U.S.A. 1956). Journal.” The Knickerbocker Magazine, 13 May 1839,
Warner Bros. pp. 377–93.
Robertson-Lorant, Laurie. “Melville and the Women in and Women, edited by Elizabeth Schultz and Haskell
His Life.” Melville and Women, edited by Elizabeth Springer. Ohio UP, 1996, pp. 3–14.
Schultz and Haskell Springer. Ohio UP, 1996, pp. Slosson, Edwin Emery “A Number of Things.” The
15–37. Independent, 28 June 1915, p. 552.
Schultz, A. Elizabeth. Unpainted to the Last. Moby Dick Spengler, Birgit. Literary Spinoffs. Rewriting the Classics –
and Twentieth Century Art. UP of Kansas, 1995. Reimagining the Community. Campus Verlag, 2015.
———. “The Sentimental Subtext of Moby-Dick. Storey, John. Inventing Popular Culture. From Folklore to
Melville’s Response the World of Woe.” ESQ: A Globalization. Blackwell, 2003.
Journal of the American Renaissance, vol. 42, no. 1, 1996, The Sea Beast. B/W. Directed by Millard Webb,
pp. 29–49. performances by John Barrymore and Dolores Costello.
———. “Creating Icons: Melville in Visual Media and (USA. 1926). Warner Bros. DVD.
Popular Culture.” A Companion to Herman Melville, Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of
edited by Wyn Kelley. Blackwell, 2006, pp. American Fiction, 1790–1860. Oxford UP, 1996.
532–52. Vincent, Howard P. The Trying-out of Moby-Dick. 1949
———. “Re-viewing Moby-Dick.” Herman Melville’s Kent State UP, 1980.
Moby-Dick. A Documentary Volume, edited by Jean- Weaver, Raymond M. “The Centennial of Herman
Francois Leroux. Gale Cengage Learning, 2009. Melville.” The Nation‚ 109, 2 August 1919, pp. 145–6.
Originally published in 1995. ———. Herman Melville. Mariner and Mystic. George
———. “The New Art of Moby-Dick.” Leviathan: A Doran Company, 1921.
Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, March 2019, Zboray, Ronald J. “The Real and the Realistic in Down to
pp. 7–96. the Sea in Ships (1923).” Film & History: An
Schultz, Elizabeth, and Haskell Springer. “Melville Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies,
Writing Women/Women Writing Melville.” Melville vol. 10, no. 3, 1980, pp. 33–8.
47
Visualizing Melville: A Museum
Exhibition Perspective
Michael P. Dyer
Moby-Dick is a notoriously challenging text. With its technical maritime jargon and allusions to
sources ranging from the works of William Shakespeare to the Holy Bible, the nineteenth-century
vocabulary and syntax alone demand a great deal of the modern reader. A phrase so simply writ-
ten as: “I sallied out among the shipping,” is language rife with nineteenth-century assumptions.
Few of us “sally” about today and even fewer, seeking employment, would do so “among the
shipping” (MD 69). Given such challenges, where could one seek cultural context for this book?
Could a museum be of any use in achieving a clearer understanding of Moby-Dick, and if so, how?
Strictly from the point of view of its whaling content, the answer is “yes.” A whaling museum,
or even a good maritime museum with whaling collections, could help to unlock some of the
mysteries of this antique-sounding text. Take scrimshaw, for instance. In Chapter 57, Melville
mentions the whalemen’s art without going into great detail. The chance to see actual whale-
men’s scrimshaw of the 1840s in a museum gallery would clearly illuminate the text. The same
can be said for ship models, whaleboats, harpoons, lances, and all of the technical stuff of the
whaling industry. That is not all, however—not by a considerable sight.
In the fall of 2010, the New Bedford Whaling Museum needed an exhibition for a small
changing gallery. In those years the exhibition rotation schedule was robust, and events moved
swiftly. The Chief Curator at the time was new on the job and asked me if I had ideas for the
space. By the time I had put down the phone something was percolating. It seemed to me that
elements of Moby-Dick could be translated into an exhibition. We could use the Museum’s col-
lection in conjunction with Melville’s language to create a fuller experience for readers perhaps
unfamiliar with the ingredients of his storytelling. We could also use the collection to create a
visual parallel for certain passages. The text of the book, with all its subtle beauties, hints, and
allusions, could be an “artifact,” or treated as such, and other parts of the deep and wide collec-
tions could then illuminate the story without exactly translating it. After all, this is the New
Visualizing Melville: A Museum Exhibition Perspective 551
Bedford Whaling Museum, with a superb collection of nineteenth-century American art and
objects immediately contemporaneous with and relevant to Melville’s life and work. As he sailed
from Fairhaven on a whaling voyage in 1841, and spent the next few years knocking around the
Pacific and then writing about it, how hard could it be to thoughtfully conjoin the two? The
whole exhibit fell together like magic.
The obvious starting place for me, as Curator of Maritime History, was the passage in Chapter
3, where Ishmael describes “a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears” adorning the
entryway to the Spouter Inn (13). The Museum holds plenty of monstrous clubs and spears, sev-
eral of which, including our collection of Gilbert Islands tebutje, or shark-tooth swords, exactly
match Ishmael’s horrifying description: “thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws”
(13).1 Yes, not only could we exhibit a seldom-seen array of fascinating and exotic weaponry from
the far-off Bismarck Archipelago, the Fiji Islands, Tonga, and the Solomon Islands, but we could
do it within the fecund context of Moby-Dick. In its final configuration, the exhibit case included
two shark’s tooth weapons from Kiribati, an Apa’apai “coconut-stalk club” from Tonga, a Totokia
“battle hammer club” from Fiji, a Gugu dance club from Fiji, a Sali spurred club from Fiji, a
spatulate club from the Trobriand Islands, and an obsidian-tipped spear from the Admiralty
Islands, New Guinea.
Once the concept settled, the language of the novel guided my selections and was the key
to the exhibit. Using quotations as a discrete component of the visitor experience enabled me
to remove myself from an interpretive experience. I let Melville do the work. While I was
selecting the quotations and objects and creating the overall experience (hence a degree of sub-
jectivity was inevitable), nonetheless in execution the concept spoke for itself. Keep in mind,
this was never meant to be a scholarly one-to-one interpretation of Melville’s text. Stuart
Frank, in Herman Melville’s Picture Gallery had already done that, identifying the exact copies
of prints and examples of objects to which Melville referred. Nor was it a largely ambiguous,
or general, any-old-whaling-thing-will-do, selection.2 No, this was meant to display, to under-
score, to add value to the text (were that even possible), and to do it using the stuff of the
period. As a nineteenth-century text, Moby-Dick can be understood (indeed, enjoyed and
enhanced), through nineteenth-century material culture.
After satisfying the concept of “a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears,” I next set-
tled on a personal favorite: “Quakers with a vengeance.” The full passage from Chapter 16 reads:
“For some of these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They
are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance” (74). Ishmael explains that while the
1
Called today Kiribati. The Russian Admiral Adam Ivan Krusenstern (1770–1846) named the Gilbert Islands, as the
group of sixteen atolls and coral islands was called by Westerners in the nineteenth century. The “Kingsmill Group,”
of seven islands served as the western geographical terminus of the “Line Grounds,” a section of the Pacific Ocean
following the equator from the Galápagos Islands in the east, including one or two degrees north and south. Sperm
whaling “On the Line” brought whalemen into regular contact with the Kiribatians. Most famous for their extraordinary
weaponry, Kiribatian collections are found in many museums.
2
This is a particularly unfortunate tendency periodically encountered in various types of works on Melville and
whaling, where photographs of wharves or other scenes, toggling harpoons, outboard cutting-stages, covered try works,
shipboard deckhouses and after- cabins and the like, all representations of whaling a few decades after Melville’s
experience, are used to illustrate the industry as he knew it. In the case of Moby-Dick it matters a great deal what the
ships looked like and which mediums are appropriate for its interpretation.
552 Michael P. Dyer
abiding tenets of their belief include conscientious objection to bearing arms against one’s fellow
man, that scruple does not extend to whales, as “this world pays dividends” (74). Melville’s char-
acters Captains Peleg and Bildad represent Nantucket’s famous Quaker sperm whalers, and por-
traits from the Museum’s art collection seem to reflect their pertinacity. Some stalwart characters
in the portrait collection stand out in particular. For instance, William Rotch, Sr. (1734–1828),
arguably the father of American commercial whaling, came from Nantucket but also lived in
New Bedford. One wonders if the allure of whaling in the Pacific Ocean was perhaps construed
by William Rotch as divine justification for following “our pacific plan,” as he termed the
Quaker philosophy toward commerce in war time, and as equally likely, commerce in general
(Bullard, Rotches 175). His son, William Rotch, Jr. (1759–1850), is another such example. He
also was born on Nantucket but moved his family and business to New Bedford around 1790,
noting “as long as the sperm fishery lasts we have a prospect of doing well,” adding “I find the
convenience for conducting my business [in New Bedford] very great” (Bullard, Rotches 175).
While neither William Sr., nor Jr., was a whaling master like Peleg or Bildad, they were none-
theless canny businessmen devoted almost entirely to conducting the whale fishery with efficiency
and knowledge. One who better parallels Bildad was Captain Edmund Gardner (1784–1875), of
Nantucket and New Bedford. Like the Rotches, Edmund Gardner was a legendary figure in the
whale fishery. He commanded the first American whaler to visit the Hawaiian Islands, the ship
Balaena in 1819, and he also holds the distinction, like Ahab himself, of having been chewed up by
a sperm whale. As if that startling reality were not enough, Gardner commanded the ship Union of
Nantucket, which struck a large whale in the North Atlantic Ocean and, prefiguring the fate of the
Pequod, sank in 1807. While in command of the ship Winslow of New Bedford (a ship, incidentally,
owned by Samuel Rodman, a Quaker merchant of New Bedford who married William Rotch’s
daughter, Elizabeth), Gardner lowered for a sperm whale off the coast of Peru and in the ensuing
fight to subdue the animal was badly bitten. He survived his traumatic injuries and went on to
command another three sperm whaling voyages to the Pacific Ocean (see Bullard Gardner). He was
truly a “Quaker with a vengeance.” We mounted three oil-on-canvas portraits at the entrance to the
exhibit. Left to right their dour visages included Portrait of William Rotch, Sr., anonymous, after
Edward Dalton Marchant, mid-nineteenth century; Portrait of William Rotch, Jr., by Edward Dalton
Marchant, 1844; Portrait of Edmund Gardner, by William Allan Wall, circa 1840. The exhibit ulti-
mately included thirty-one discrete elements each combining an object, print, or painting, with
text from the book.3 Some of the parallels proved striking. The Thomas Sully (circa 1833) oil-on-
canvas portrait of Elizabeth Rotch (1815–1886) of New Bedford, with its perfect coloring of the
girl’s complexion, exactly mirrors Melville’s language from Chapter 6: “And the women of New
Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine
carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens” (33).
Other extraordinary pairings included a painting of an aged Wampanoag woman who lived in
the seventeenth-century stone-ended house of Captain Thomas Taber in Fairhaven, Massachusetts,
in 1850. The woman’s name was Annis Sharper, known as “Indian Annis,” or “Black Annis,” and
she was among the last full-blooded Wampanoag people to live in Fairhaven. A local artist living in
Fairhaven, Mary Tallman Willis Hawes (1769–1858), painted her around 1850 (see Figure 47.1).
3
Only twelve of the exhibit sections are included in this article and the William Allen Wall painting of his two
daughters, was too large to hang in the small gallery, but it was identified with a discrete label where it hung by a
public staircase.
Figure 47.1 Portrait of Annis Sharper (known as “Indian Annis” or “Black Annis”), by Mary Tallman
Willis Hawes (1769–1858), c. 1850. Used with permission and courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling
Museum.
As such her persona was uniquely (although not directly) relevant to the following quotation
from Chapter 16 of Moby-Dick: “Captain Ahab did not name himself. ‘Twas a foolish, ignorant
whim of his crazy widowed mother, who died when he was only a twelve month old. And yet the
old squaw Tistig, at Gayhead, said that the name would somehow prove prophetic” (79).
Among the many curious characters in Moby-Dick is Captain Bildad’s sister, Aunt Charity.
Ishmael introduces her as the ship is outfitting and reveals that she herself has invested money
in the voyage. Women did sometimes invest their own money in whaling voyages, although
married women could not control property in Massachusetts until the passage of the Married
Women’s Property Act on May 5, 1855 (see Warren 51–53). The Act allowed married women to
own and sell real and personal property, to control their earnings, to sue, and to make wills, but
not until long after Melville’s whaling experience. Single women seldom made enough money to
venture. Charity has invested “a score or two of well-saved dollars” (96) in her brother’s ship.4
4
This voyage was rather a family affair, as Massachusetts whaling voyages often were, and Stubb, the second mate, was
also Charity and Bildad’s brother-in-law. The fact that Ishmael tells us that Charity’s cash was “well-saved” is suggestive
less of Quaker thriftiness than of the true position of women in the nineteenth-century American economy.
554 Michael P. Dyer
Figure 47.2 Image of a wooden Polynesian tapa cloth beater and an example of the cloth itself, c.
nineteenth century. Used with permission and courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Charity, too, is clearly a Quaker. In this case, the pairing was very subjective on my part. The
quotation from Chapter 20 reads: “Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was
Captain Bildad’s sister [Aunt Charity], a lean old lady of a most determined and indefatigable
spirit… who seemed resolved that, if she could help it, nothing should be found wanting in the
Pequod” (96). Of the many portraits of women in the collection, one, an oil-on-canvas attributed
to artist Frederick Mayhew dated 1820, which to my eye matched Charity’s description, stood
out. Lucy Randall Standish (1781–1849), while not a Quaker, did, like Charity, invest her
personal money in whaling voyages. She invested in four vessels over eight voyages, and curi-
ously, did so for the same voyages where another woman, Sylvia Ann Howland, who was a
Quaker, also invested. Lucy’s first investments came two years before her husband, Levi’s death.
Laws in Massachusetts did allow wives control of assets if the husband was incapacitated, so per-
haps Levi fell ill. In any case, Lucy has a fairly lean look about her, but also an unmistakably
determined spirit. She continued her whaling investments until a year before she herself passed
away in 1849 (see Ship Registers 35, 81, 85).
The nautical and whaling scenes were among the easiest to source. Among several interesting
pairings is the following from Chapter 119: “Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of
her canvas, and bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly ahead”
(503). Such a vivid description demanded exact representation and one of the nine great
watercolor paintings by the “Anonymous Whaleman Artist” painted around 1835 matched
perfectly.5
Queequeg is a perennially favorite character, but rather than attempt to match his thoroughly
ambiguous South Pacific kinship network, I chose rather to focus on the fact that there were
many inhabited islands throughout the South Pacific and many of them were visited by whalers.
Hence, the quotation from Chapter 12—“Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far
away to the West and South. It is not down on any map; true places never are…a Sag Harbor ship
visited his father’s bay, and Queequeg sought a passage to Christian lands” (55)—is reflected
nicely in a painting of the harbor at Apia, Samoa. The painter of the oil-on-canvas scene, Elisha
Lyman Hamilton, left an unidentified New London whaling vessel in the 1850s, and then served
as a pilot, harbormaster, commercial agent, and American Consul at Apia, Samoa on the island
of Upolu in the Navigator Islands.
Melville experienced and wrote about a great deal more in his South Pacific whaling experi-
ences than is reflected in Moby-Dick. In fact, his first novel, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846),
takes place largely at the Marquesas Island of Nuku-hiva, a fabled land of Polynesian culture
where tattooed warriors wielded carefully carved and crafted Janus-faced u’u war clubs in their
periodic internecine strife. In more peaceable times of employment, cultures of Oceania, including
the Marquesas, manufactured tapa, or bark cloth, made primarily, but not solely, from the inner
bark of the paper mulberry tree. In Chapter 19 of Typee, Melville comments extensively on many
aspects of life in the islands including the making of tapa cloth: “I was often attracted by the noise
of the mallet, which, when employed in the manufacture of the cloth, produces at every stroke of
its hard, heavy wood, a clear, ringing, and musical sound, capable of being heard at a great dis-
tance (T 148).” In one of two exhibit cases in the show, we included a wooden Polynesian tapa
cloth beater and an example of the cloth itself, probably from Samoa (see Figure 47.2).
In another passage from Typee, in Chapter 11, Melville provides further insights into Marquesan
domesticity: “These lively young ladies were at the same time wonderfully polite and humane;
fanning aside the insects that occasionally lighted on our brows; presenting us with food; and
compassionately regarding me in the midst of my afflictions” (77). In this instance, the object
came before the quotation. Knowing that we had objects from the Marquesas, I found a fan from
the Marquesan Islands woven from pandanus and coconut fiber. Whaling Master Horace P.
Smith collected it on one of his voyages, 1883–1907. With such a superb object in hand, I then
went searching for a quotation to match it, finding a good passage in Typee. Fans like this one,
usually with ornately carved wood or bone handles, were status symbols custom-made by skilled
individuals for the islands’ aristocracy. It must be said, however, that the likelihood is small that
such a fine, prestigious object would have been used to shoo flies off the face of a deserting
whaleman.
Far from such literal examples as the fan and the tapa cloth beater, other quotations led to
some distinct flights of fancy. In Chapter 87 of Moby-Dick, as the Pequod approached the straits
of Sunda passing between the two points of land, Sumatra and Java Head, he likened the passage
thus, “… to the central gateway opening into some vast walled empire: and considering the inex-
haustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels, and gold, and ivory, which the thousand islands
of that oriental sea are enriched…” (380). Melville’s poetic language reminded me of a particular
Chinese painting, an anonymous oil-on-canvas view of Houqua’s Garden, circa 1850. Wu
5
For an analysis and more examples of the work of this artist see Dyer, “O’er the Wide and Tractless Sea,” 113, 315, 316.
556 Michael P. Dyer
Figure 47.3 Houqua’s Garden, by an anonymous Chinese painter, circa 1850, oil-on-canvas, 1977.46.
Used with permission and courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Bingjian (1769–1843), who traded with westerners under the name “Houqua,” was a wealthy
merchant at Canton who made his millions trading silk and porcelain with the British. New
Bedford merchant Francis S. Hathaway (1803–1869) acquired the painting while a resident
trader in China in the 1850s. In an inexplicably beautiful way, Melville’s language lends itself to
illustration, as if he harbored a vast reservoir of mental images which he tapped into as he wrote.
The analogy encompasses his intent fully, and the Chinese art works of the period seem to as
well. The riches of the China Trade had been available in American seaports since long before the
first American merchant ship Empress of China of New York returned from Canton in 1785, and
so-called “oriental” goods were both evocative and desirable (see Figure 47.3).
Finally, in a pairing so charming and unexpected as to impress an uncanny notion that
Melville’s awareness parallels New England art of the period more closely than one might expect,
a passage from Chapter 28 of Moby-Dick reads: “…as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April
and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thun-
der-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted
visitants” (125). In a large oil-on-canvas double portrait, circa 1843, New Bedford painter
William Allen Wall painted his own two young daughters, Annie and Mary, cavorting in a
wood, smiling, red-cheeked, and obviously joyful in their spring dresses, frilled socks, and slip-
pers. In this case, the spring months of April and May being analogous to “red-cheeked dancing
girls,” suggests an ideal, a kind of bucolic reverence and purity exemplified in nature, perhaps
idealized in the femininity in the previous example (see Figure 47.1), but certainly mirrored by
William Allen Wall’s own flesh-and-blood children (see Figure 47.4).
Figure 47.4 Portrait of Sisters (Daughters Annie (1835–1920) and Mary (1838–1909) Wall), by
William Allen Wall (circa 1843), oil-on-canvas. Used with permission and courtesy of the New Bedford
Whaling Museum.
Many artists over the last century ranging from Rockwell Kent to Frank Stella to Matt Kish
have sought to illustrate or interpret Moby-Dick. It is the mark of Melville’s genius to thus
inspire dynamic creative reactions to his characters and stories. His fiction is rooted in American
maritime culture, and is a product of its age. As interpretations go, museum collections of con-
temporaneous art and objects can vividly supplement the texts, often astonishingly well. Direct
one-to-one examples of words or ideas are useful for inspiring a greater appreciation of Moby-
Dick. The book is broad enough in its scope, with references to the builders of Babel, to pharaohs,
Catskill eagles, ancient Joppa, and the like, to serve as a literary accompaniment to a stroll
through almost any of the world’s great art museums. With a bit of imagination, a bit of exact
knowledge of museum collections, and the desire to do so, students could curate their own
authentic pictorial accompaniment to Moby-Dick. Given the excellent access available online
today to museum and library collections, such an exercise would prove educational. The stuff of
nineteenth-century New England, but also that of many world cultures and histories, can serve
as a contextual framework for Melville’s language, and instill a satisfying comprehension of the
place of Moby-Dick in the American experience.
558 Michael P. Dyer
Works Cited
Bullard, John M. The Rotches. The Cabinet Press, 1947. Frank, Stuart. Herman Melville’s Picture Gallery: Sources
———. Captain Edmund Gardner of Nantucket and New and Types of the “Pictorial” Chapters of Moby-Dick.
Bedford: His Journal and His Family. New Bedford, Edward J. Lefkowicz, Inc., 1986.
MA: n.p., 1958. Ship Registers of New Bedford. 3 vols. Boston, MA: Work
Dyer, Michael P. “O’er the Wide and Tractless Sea”: Original Projects Administration, 1940.
Art of the Yankee Whale Hunt. New Bedford Whaling Warren, Joyce W. Women, Money, and the Law: Nineteenth-
Museum, 2017. Century Fiction, Gender, and the Courts. U of Iowa P, 2005.
Index
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes
Abbott’s Magazine, 264 Albany Argus, 102, 264, 268

adaptation networks, 519–20 Albany Microscope, 263, 264, 268
Adelman, Janet, 229 Albany Young Men’s Association, 262
Adler, George, 318n, 423 alcohol, 14, 78, 79, 82, 83, 84–88
Adler, Joyce, 277 Aleema (Melville, Mardi), 70, 71
Adorno, Theodor, 372 Alemán, Jesse, 353
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 62 Alexander the Great, 69, 70
aesthetics, 12, 22, 37, 40, 44, 45–46, 149, 221, 229n, 248, Alger, William Rounseville, 384, 386
325, 331, 333, 400, 401, 405, 423, 431n, 508 Alhambra, 69
Africa, 5, 152, 278, 332, 335, 364, 378, 406, 545 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 396
African Americans, 11, 14, 16, 19, 144, 150, 151, 331, alien, 3, 113–21, 396
366, 443, 448, 510, 521, 524 Allais, Jean-Claude, 523
African Methodist Episcopal Church, 383 All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare), 318
Africana Philosophy, 5, 362, 371–72 American Civilization (James, C. L. R.), 437, 438, 443
“Africanist presence,” 537 Alzheimers, 5, 487, 488
Africans, 72, 127, 128, 132, 217, 272, 273, 274, 276, 278, American Literature, 1, 24, 25, 203
279, 366, 377, 378, 380, 441 American Protestantism, 137, 138
Agassiz, Louis, 449, 450, 453, 461, 474 American Renaissance (Matthiessen), 24, 33, 204, 228n,
“Agatha” story (Melville), 204. See also The Isle of the Cross 399–400
Ahab (Melville, Moby-Dick), 12–14, 15, 17, 18, 22, 31, 39, anatomy, 5, 68, 317, 320, 412, 449, 455, 462, 472–84
59, 70, 75, 76, 91, 100, 226, 109, 207–9, 212, 217, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 285, 320, 472
218, 225, 227–28, 228n, 230–31, 231n, 232, 237, Anaximander, 514, 515
242n, 270, 298, 305–7, 316–17, 323–24, 337, 337n, Anderson, John, 286
343, 347, 354, 358, 363, 367, 370, 371, 372, 374, Anderson, Mark, 370
375, 384, 387–88, 390, 391, 424, 427, 430, 436, animism, 104, 485–94
438, 439, 442, 443, 456, 458, 464, 467, 469, 502–3, anthology, 6, 28, 228, 506–10
510, 511, 513–15, 517, 520–22, 523, 524, 536, 538, Anthropocene, 455–58, 462
543, 546, 552, 553 anthropomorphism, 485, 486, 488, 491
Albany (New York), 11, 262, 263, 264, 266, 385 “The Apparition: A Retrospect” (Melville, Battle-Pieces), 157
Albany Academy, 39, 315 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (Walker), 258
560 Index
“The Apple-Tree Table” (Melville), 103, 406n, 412, 413, Beale, Thomas, 92, 95, 289, 294, 318, 449, 453, 455, 478,
415n, 417–19 479, 481
Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 371 The Natural History of the Sperm Whale (Beale), 92, 95,
Arac, Jonathan, 224 264, 289, 294, 481
Aranda, Alexandro, 128, 276–88 Bell, Bill, 251
Arens, William, 58 Bell, Robert, 287
Arichandra: The Martyr of Truth: A Tamil Drama Bellamy, Edward, 29
(Broughton), 386 Bellipotent (Melville, Billy Budd), 185, 187, 190, 191, 192,
Arnold, Matthew, 28, 161, 285, 289, 293, 294, 338, 193, 270, 381, 430, 433
386, 395n Bellis, Peter, 79, 115, 118
Aronoff, Eric, 28 Bellows, Henry, 386
Arsić, Branka, 45, 423n, 463n “The Bell-Tower” (Melville, The Piazza Tales), 123, 124,
Arthur, T. S., 85 131–32, 438, 441
Arvin, Newton, 40, 67n, 201–2, 438 Belshazzar, 69
Asad, Talal, 383 “Benito Cereno” (Melville, The Piazza Tales), 4, 5, 38, 42,
“At the Cannon’s Mouth” (Melville, Battle-Pieces), 154–55 43, 115, 119, 123, 127–8, 136, 215, 216, 217, 218,
Atlantic civilization, 31 221, 249, 255, 257–58, 265, 272–82, 319, 332, 335,
Atlantic slave trade, 278, 333 352n, 354, 355, 357–59, 360, 364, 373, 377–79,
Atlantic Monthly, 478 424, 441, 442, 538, 539
authorship, 102, 103, 109–10, 200, 204, 205, 206, 226, Benito Cereno Recopied (Kish), 4, 279–82
261, 269, 411, 542 Benjamin, Walter, 56, 61, 156
autism, 5, 125, 490, 491n, 492 Bennett, Frederick, 449, 458, 473, 478
autobiography, 3, 14, 55, 60, 64, 114, 214, 283, 334, 402, Bentley, Richard, 67, 74, 75
448, 464 Bercaw Edwards, Mary K., 3, 38, 46, 100, 215, 263, 265,
Avallone, Charlene, 203 386n, 448, 450, 452, 461n, 465
Berkowitz, Roger, 43
Babbage, Charles, 316, 317 Berkshire County Eagle, 264, 268
Babbalanja (Melville, Mardi), 73–74, 76, 321, 426–8, 461, Berthold, Dennis, 46, 395, 400
463–64, 478 Berthold, Michael C., 67
Babo (Melville, “Benito Cereno”), 6, 42, 127, 217, 257–58, Bevir, Mark, 26
272–82, 358, 374, 377–79, 381, 424 Bezanson, Walter, 70, 129n, 294, 396
Bachelor’s Delight, 127, 128, 274, 358, 377 Bible, The Holy, 2, 44, 63, 68, 87, 115, 124,138, 141, 160,
Backus, John, 15–22. See also Pip (Melville, Moby-Dick) 161, 162, 165, 166, 207, 226, 227, 244, 285, 347,
Bacon, Francis, 240 364, 377, 384, 385, 386, 392, 393, 394, 457, 550
Bacon, Lloyd, 544, 547 biblical criticism, 386
Bain, Alexander, 478 Bierce, Ambrose, 308
Baker, Jennifer, 5, 315, 317, 449, 455, 462 Bight of Biafra, 278
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 81 bilingualism, 359–60
Ballantyne, R. M., 178 Billson, James, 27, 29
Banerjee, Mita, 253 Billy Budd (Melville), 4, 5, 13, 30, 38, 39, 40, 41,
Banford, Isabel (Melville, Pierre), 3, 102–11, 226, 253, 388, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 59, 76, 79, 84, 155–56,
392, 466, 486–94 172, 177, 184–96, 205, 220n, 237, 245, 270, 321,
Baptists, 383, 384 324, 325, 326, 332, 338, 339, 355n, 373,
Barrie, J. M., 25, 543 374, 379–81, 391, 392, 397, 424, 429–34,
“Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Melville), 39, 43, 123–27, 265, 450, 470, 478
266, 270, 315n, 319, 322, 336, 412n, 423n, 424, biographical criticism, 12, 17, 18, 20–22
428–29, 438, 442, 443, 465, 539 biopolitics, 47, 79–81, 84, 85n, 88, 467
Barthes, Roland, 87, 508 Birth of a Nation (Clifton), 545
Barton, John Cyril, 43 Black abolitionists, 258–9
“Battle of the Baltic” (Campbell), 245 Black bodies, 4, 335, 364–69, 372
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (Melville), 4, 43, 46, Blackface, 144, 536
147–58, 175, 181, 205, 261, 266, 267, 381, 402, Black Guinea (Melville, The Confidence-Man), 144, 256
404, 407, 468 Black History Month, 535–36, 538–40
Bayle, Pierre, 240, 287, 288, 386 Blackmur, R. P., 44
Baym, Nina, 137, 492 Black Power Movement, 278
Beachy-Quick, Dan, 6, 324, 509 Black Protestantism, 383
Index 561
Blair, Ann, 205 cannibalism, 12, 38, 57–61, 74, 98, 202, 207, 252,
Blair, Ruth, 55, 58, 71 255–56, 345, 425, 440, 441, 468
Blake, Casey, 28, 29, 31 capitalism, 5, 16, 41, 42, 123, 143, 253, 266, 307, 307n,
Blake, William, 180, 237, 240, 543 334n, 335, 372, 397, 400, 410, 425, 436–43,
Blum, Hester, 39, 78, 100n, 115, 117, 258 458, 494
Blumenberg, Hans, 371 Carlyle, Thomas, 68, 161, 336, 388
Bode, Rita, 228–29 Carnes, Mark C., 410
Bollas, Christopher, 92 Carroll, Lewis, 396
Boone, Joseph, 40 Casanova, José, 383
Boston Athenaeum, 213 Casarino, Cesare, 79, 307, 357n
Boston Herald, 32 Casey, Jim, 258
Boston Tea Party, 334 Cassady, Neal, 62
Boswell, James, 288 “The Castaway” (Melville, Moby-Dick), 14, 15, 91, 366,
Bourdieu, Pierre, 83 369, 442, 443, 522
“The Bower of the Arsacides” (Melville, Moby-Dick), 91, Castronovo, Russ, 114n, 115
172, 350, 390, 461, 466, 516 Catholicism, 162, 168, 215, 238, 279, 383, 384, 387
Bowles, M. E., 452 Center for Ray Bradbury Studies (CRBS), 521n, 522, 524
Box, George, 325 Cervantes, Miguel de, 4, 41, 211–22
Bradbury, Ray, 6, 520–24 Cetology, 317, 401, 475, 480, 481
Brayton, Dan, 448 “Cetology” (Melville, Moby-Dick), 480, 481, 482, 515
Brickhouse, Anna, 41 Channing, William Ellery, 44, 138, 386
Briggs, Charles Frederick, 413 Chapman, George, 148n, 153, 319
British Socialist Melville revival, 26–29 Charlemagne, 124
Broderick, Warren, 37 Charvat, William, 174, 176, 286
Brodhead, Richard, 67, 229 Chase, Owen, 265
Brodwin, Stanley, 161 Chase, Robert T., 117
Brontë, Charlotte, 341 Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales, 161
Brooks, Van Wyck, 24, 27–30 Cheever, Henry T., 452
Broughton, Thomas, 386 Christianity, 26, 42, 106, 108, 134, 161–66, 237, 239,
Brown, John, 148–9, 150, 155–56 240, 241, 244, 246, 251, 278, 347, 383, 385–87,
Browne, Ray B., 228n 388, 390, 393, 395, 397, 398, 425, 426, 429, 440,
Browne, Sir Thomas, 68, 75, 225, 318, 320, 321, 386, 472, 450, 490, 555
473, 482 vs. paganism, 58, 440, 490
Browner, Stephanie P., 478 Christodoulou, Athanasius C., 507
Browning, Robert, 160, 180 Christophersen, Bill, 115
Bryant, John, 2–3, 12n, 30, 37, 38, 47, 60, 100n, 148n, Church, Fredric, 155
179n, 189–90, 219, 251, 264, 298, 315, 331n, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 161–5
520n, 524 Civil War, United States, 4, 43, 116, 147–58, 175, 264,
Bryant, William Cullen, 105, 386 266, 267, 275, 308, 373, 381, 391, 407, 410, 469
Buchanan, Robert, 24, 26, 29 Claggart, John (Melville, Billy Budd), 43, 84n, 185, 188,
Buddhism, 44, 73, 386, 546 190, 192–95, 245, 270, 324, 325, 379–81, 424,
Buell, Lawrence, 137, 232n, 356 429–31, 478
Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, 268 Clarel: A Poem and a Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (Melville),
Bulkington (Melville, Moby-Dick), 19, 75–76, 373, 376–77, 4, 39, 43, 45, 46, 68, 135, 138n, 156, 160–9, 172,
379, 381 175, 181, 205, 215–18, 221, 222, 237, 246, 248,
Bull, John, 86 249, 338, 360, 384, 385, 388, 391–92, 394–97, 398,
Bunker Hill (Boston, Massachusetts), 114, 117, 118 402, 404, 408, 422, 428, 468
Bunyan, John, 162, 165–67, 386 class, 5, 13, 19, 23, 26, 27, 29, 32, 47, 72, 83, 86, 106,
Burke, Edmund, 341, 381n 107, 115, 118, 119, 123, 124, 131, 153, 195, 227,
Burton, Robert, 68, 75, 285, 318, 320, 338, 472, 473, 482 228, 309, 333, 334, 339, 352n, 373, 375, 377, 380,
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 12, 68, 76, 266, 286 385, 403, 411, 412, 413, 436–43, 448, 461, 465
Clifton, Elmer, 544–47
Calder, Alex, 5, 100n close and distant readings, 4, 44, 148n, 225, 299, 300–3,
Calvinism, 45, 138, 239, 384, 385, 386 320, 336
Cambon, Glauco, 227n Clough, Arthur, 161
Campbell, Thomas, 245 CLS, 297, 298
Campomar, Jaime, 6 Clymer, Jeffory, 102, 109n
562 Index
Coan, Titus Munson, 423 Inferno, 320, 499

Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 539 Darwin, Charles, 39, 130, 131, 347, 386, 449, 450, 451,
“Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” (Melville), 39 452, 455, 461, 475, 480
cognitive science, 301 Darwin, Erasmus, 465, 470
Cohen, Anthony G., 293 Davis, Merrell, 68
Cohen, Emily Jane, 473 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 439
Cohen, Hennig, 118, 119, 148, 149 Davis, Theodore R., 151–52
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 132 Dawey, Michael J., 547
Cohen, Lara Langer, 253, 257 Dawson, A. K., 519
Cohen, Margaret, 299 Dayan, Colin, 39, 43, 115, 486
Colatrella, Carol, 115 dead-reckoning, 313–26
Coleman, Dawn, 5, 44, 46, 100n, 386n Dead Sea, 166, 167, 391
Coleman, John B., 60–61 Dean, Jodi, 408
Coleman, Nathan, 64 Defoe, Daniel, 288
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 68, 233, 422, 426, 477 DeGuzmán, María, 215
collectivism, 27, 385 Delano, Amasa, 4, 119, 127–28, 217, 218, 221, 257–58,
Colnett, James, 130, 479, 515 272–82, 319, 358, 359–60, 377–78, 388
colonialism, 26, 62, 71n, 123, 130, 131, 272, 273, 276, Delbanco, Andrew, 37, 214n,
309, 333, 336, 337, 339, 352n, 406, 425, 451, Deleuze, Gilles, 315n, 322, 324, 423, 423n
463, 540 DeLombard, Jeannine Marie, 81, 81n, 82n
Columbus, Christopher, 69, 278, 454 Del Tredici, Robert, 46
computational literary studies, 297–311 democracy, 5, 14, 16, 42, 43, 141, 142, 143, 228, 356, 375,
Computus, 314 399–408, 437
Comstock, William, 541 radical or “ruthless” democracy, 375, 399–408
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (Melville), 4, 17, 32, Democritus, 406n, 418, 419
38, 39, 40, 80, 129, 134–45, 157, 215, 218, 232, Dening, Greg, 56, 58
249, 256–57, 261, 269, 318, 321, 322, 324, 342, Derrida, Jacques, 401, 423
402, 404, 406, 424, 428, 429, 462, 465, 470, 481 desertion (sailing), 16, 19, 55–56, 60, 61, 252, 355,
Connolly, William, 401, 405n 357, 555
Cook, Captain James, 70, 342, 455 De Staël, Madame, 315, 318, 323
Voyages, 342n Dewey, John, 31, 532
Cook, Jonathan A., 4, 44, 45, 137, 153, 384, 391n Dewey, Orville, 386
Cooper, James Fenimore, 12, 24, 67, 78, 105, 248 Dickens, Charles, 12, 67, 264, 336
copepods, 449, 453–54 Dickinson, Emily, 39, 147, 171, 469, 477, 479, 480,
coral, 370, 449, 450–51, 456, 462, 464, 551n 512–14
Cotkin, George, 46 digital approaches to Melville
Cotopaxi (Ecuador), 360 computation and reckoning, 314–17
“The Counterpane” (Melville, Moby-Dick), 40, 99, 226, 229 dictionary-based readings, 297–311
Cowen, Wilson Walker, 284, 294, 295 digital scholarship, 37, 284, 295, 297–98, 313–26
Cowley, Ambrose, 130 Dillingham, William, 67, 157, 386n, 418n, 426n
Creech, James, 40 Dimock, Wai Chee, 72, 100, 400, 437, 439, 443
Cruz, Margarita, 117 Dinius, Marcy J., 258, 258n
Csicsila, Joseph, 507 “A Dirge for McPherson” (Melville, Battle-Pieces), 469
Curtis, George William, 266, 269, 412 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 132
Curtiz, Michael, 544 distant reading, 300–3
Cushing, William, 154–55 Dobell, Bertram, 26
Cuvier, Frédéric, 476, 479 Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity (Priestley), 428
Cuvier, Georges, 461n, 473, 474, 478, 480, 481 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 4, 85, 124, 212–22
Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature (Kitto), 386 Dough-Boy (Melville, Moby-Dick), 19–20, 366, 537
Cyrus the Great, 69 Douglas, Ann, 412n, 415
Douglass, Frederick, 39, 81, 82, 84n, 252, 258, 258n, 259,
Daggoo (Melville, Moby-Dick), 19, 231n, 364–65, 366, 37n, 277, 537
438, 538 Dowling, David, 214, 419
Dämon des Meeres (Curtiz), 544 Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare (Hilliard & Gray),
Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., 78–79, 80, 83n, 85, 172, 543 224, 225, 287
Dante, Alighieri, 6, 41, 68, 75, 285, 289, 295, Drum-Taps (Whitman), 148
320, 499 Dryden, Edgar A., 115, 140, 161
Index 563
Dryden, John, 64, 266 Episcopalians, 383

DuBois, W. E. B., 437 equality, 206–8, 401–5, 408, 539
Dudley, A. T., 433 Erie Canal (New York), 264, 360
Dunlap-Smith, Aimery, 23n, 38, 544 Evans, K. L., 45, 423n1
Duquette, Elizabeth, 100n, 423n, 492 Evans, Lyon, 179
Dutch Reformed Church, 385 Eve, Martin Paul, 299
Duyckinck, Evert A., 55, 67, 74, 75, 76, 103n, Evening Journal (Albany, New York), 268
155, 214, 221, 224, 249, 264, 267, 268, Evening Journal (Pittsfield, Massachusetts), 32, 202
464, 542 Everton, Michael J., 38
Dyer, Michael P., 6 exile, 75, 104, 113–21, 385
Dyer, Richard, 537 experiential knowledge, 475
Dylan, Bob, 61–62 Extensible Markup Language (XML), 294, 314
extinction of whales, 32, 39, 450, 451–53
Earl of Gloucester, 225
Earl of Leven, 334 Fabianism, 26–28, 29–30, 43
Ecclesiastes, 66,76, 87, 167 Faerie Queene (Spenser), 124, 125, 130, 161
Echevarría, González, 216 Faflik, David, 45
Eco, Umberto, 302 Fairhaven (Massachusetts), 15, 19, 55, 551, 552
ecocriticism, 5, 447–59 Fales, Adam, 4, 40, 41, 200, 205, 229.
ecology, 38–40, 447–59, 463, 465, 467, 468, 469, 470, Familiar Lectures on Botany (Phelps), 465
490, 494, 507 Family Magazine, 264
Edinburgh Review, 262, 263 Fanon, Frantz, 254
education, 28, 148n, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 538, 539, Farmer, Meredith, 39, 315, 461n
540, 557 Farnell, A. F., 286
Edwards, Jonathan, 45, 386, 428 fatalism, 427, 430
Egypt, 21, 161, 404, 408 Faulkner, William, 536
Einboden, Jeffrey, 42 Faust (Goethe), 466
ekphrasis, 6, 512–18 “Feathertop” (Hawthorne), 221
El Cid, 69 Feidelson, Charles, 69
Eliot, George, 313 feminism, 106, 199–209, 226n, 232, 411, 413, 415, 417
Eliot, T. S., 64, 485 Field, David Dudley, 405
Ellis, Havelock, 26, 333 Fielder, Brigitte, 253
Ellis, Juniper, 206, 412 film adaptation, 519–24, 541–49
Ellis, Ralph, 488 First Congregational Church (Unitarian), 385
Ellis, William, 62–63, 64, 347 “First Lowering” (Melville, Moby-Dick), 13, 93, 364
Ellison, Ralph, 100, 277, 536 Fischer, Frank, 300
Éluard, Paul, 514 Fish, Stanley, 240
Embury, Emma, 541, 545, 547 Fitzhugh, George, 441
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 2, 28, 30, 33, 125, 126, 138, 141, Flask (Melville, Moby-Dick), 19, 349, 364, 367, 388,
142, 173, 174, 176, 181, 232, 240, 249n, 258, 265, 438, 442
285, 289, 293, 318, 384, 386, 422, 433n, 437, 450, Fleece (Melville, Moby-Dick), 363, 367–69, 538
464, 479, 480, 481, 493, 517 Floyd, Janet, 23n, 332n, 339n
Emery, Edwin, 543 Fluck, Winfried, 307
empire, 41, 242n, 253, 273, 356, 385, 463, 555 fluid-text theory (Bryant), 2–3, 38, 47, 60, 189, 219,
Empson, William, 240 251, 520n
“The Encantadas” (Melville, The Piazza Tales), 39, 42, 119, Foley, Barbara J., 437
123, 130, 131, 132, 252, 258, 352, 358, 359, 448, “folkbiology,” 487–88
454, 468, 470 Folklore, 541, 544
encyclopedic narrative, 300–3, 304, 309, 473, 482 Fort Stanwix (New York), 334
enslaved people, 20, 41, 42, 43, 72, 81–82, 84, 106, 107, Foster, Elizabeth S., 72
116, 120, 127, 128, 131, 132, 150, 153, 161, 217, Foucault, Michel, 79, 82, 132, 357n
249, 257, 258, 272–83, 306, 335, 356, 358, 362–72, Fox sisters, 105
373, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 384, 411, 437, Franchot, Jenny, 215, 246
438, 441, 443, 521 Frank, Jason, 43, 431n
environmentalism, 31, 447–59 Frank, Stuart, 551
Epiphany, 161, 163 Frankenstein (Shelley, Mary), 477
564 Index
Franklin, Benjamin, 114, 115, 120, 129, 338 Grey, Robin S., 68n, 225, 236, 482
Franklin, H. Bruce, 43, 67, 76, 277, 347n Griffen, Clyde, 410
Franklin Evans (Whitman), 85, 86 Gullah Geechee culture, 150, 152
Frazer, J. G., 348 Gura, Philip, 137
Fredricks, Nancy, 400, 402 Gutkin, Len, 491
Freeburg, Christopher, 42, 100n, 109, 437
Freeman, F. Barron, 186 Hale, Philip, 25, 32
Freeman, John, 24, 41 Hall, James, 253
free will, 245, 306, 426–31, 433, 465, 523 Hall, Stuart, 437, 539
Freire, Paulo, 538, 540 Hanafi, Zakiya, 132
French Revolution, 104, 379, 380 Hardie, Keir, 26
Freud, Sigmund, 201, 232, 348, 353 Harper Brothers, 251
Frothingham, O. B., 384, 386 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 261, 264, 266, 267, 268,
Frye, Northrop, 240, 473 269, 412, 413, 417, 441, 478
Fugitive Slave Law, 116 Harper’s Weekly, 151, 152, 266
Fuller, Margaret, 138, 232 Harpur, James, 161
Fuller, Randall, 43 Harter, Deborah A., 130
Harvard Library Bulletin, 284n
Galápagos Islands (Ecuador), 119, 130, 131, 448, 551n Hathaway, Francis S., 556
The Galaxy, 479 Hauser, Caspar, 491
Gansevoort, Guert, 373 Havard, John C., 354
Gardner, Edmund, 552 Hawes, Mary Tallman Willis, 552, 553
Garner, Stanton, 43, 152n, 187n, 264, 267, 268 Hawthorne, Julian, 402
Gasché, Rodolphe, 508 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 32, 33, 41, 44, 67, 74, 86, 107,
Geddes, Patrick, 32 147, 156, 160, 179, 187, 204, 205, 227n, 206,
gender, 3, 4, 5, 15, 40–41, 47, 106, 107, 108, 131, 212–13, 221, 224, 227n, 232, 237, 238, 242n, 246,
199–209, 226–33, 343, 352n, 385, 395, 410–19, 249, 264, 285, 291, 293, 338, 350, 387, 388, 389,
448, 466, 510, 541, 547 393, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 408, 411, 418n, 422,
Genetic Text, 187–89, 424n 423, 466, 477, 493, 539, 542, 543
German Romanticism, 404 “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” (Melville), 17, 25, 66, 128,
Germany (de Staël), 315, 318 204, 205, 224, 267, 323, 532
Gibbs, Sir Philip, 25 Hay, John, 114n, 115
Giles, Paul, 41, 115 Hayden, Robert, 368
Gilman, William, 263 Hayes, Kevin J., 37
Gilmore, Michael T., 249n, 307, 437, 439, 443 Hayford, Harrison, 19, 62, 186, 187, 189, 215, 376
Gliddon, George, 474 “Unnecessary Duplicates,” 19, 376
Glotfelty, Cheryll, 448 Hazlitt, William, 291, 292, 473
Godley, John, 520, 522, 523, 524 Heflin, Wilson, 15, 58, 61, 62, 448
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 315, 388, 402, 404, 422, 464, Heggie, Jake, 46
466, 467, 474, 479 Heggie and Scheer’s Moby-Dick: A Grand Opera (Heggie), 46
Goffman, Erving, 129 Henry, Joseph, 39
“Goldsmith’s Animated Nature,” 254 Herbert, T. Walter, 342n, 411
Gollin, Rita K., 61 Herman, Daniel, 44
Goneril (Melville, The Confidence-Man), 142–43 Hispanicism, 354–55
Gosse, Philip Henry, 475 Hispanic speakers and listeners, 359–60
Gothic, 42, 45, 68, 102, 103, 104, 119, 466, 485, 494 History of the County of Berkshire, Massachusetts, 405
“The Grand Armada” (Melville, Moby-Dick), 13 Hoare, Philip, 39
Grandin, Greg, 4, 42, 272, 274, 277–79, 282, 359, 378 Hobbes, Thomas, 288
Gray, Asa, 461, 465 Hoffman, Tyler, 43, 152n
“The Great Pyramid,” (Melville, Timoleon), 21 Hoffman-Schwartz, Daniel, 45
“Greek Architecture,” (Melville, Timoleon)181 Holden’s Dollar Magazine, 264
“Greek Masonry,” (Melville, Timoleon), 181 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 32
Greene, Richard Tobias (“Toby”), 55, 56, 58, 251, 268 Homer, 47, 148n, 153, 163, 167, 285, 289, 294, 295,
Greiman, Jennifer, 5, 43, 100n, 401n, 423n, 466 319, 513
Gretchko, John, 37 The House of the Seven Gables (Hawthorne), 107, 108
Greven, David, 4, 40 “The House-top” (Melville, Battle-Pieces), 43, 153, 156, 381
Index 565
Howard, Ebenezer, 30 Jack Chase (Melville, White-Jacket, Billy Budd), 83, 355, 357
Howard, Leon, 202 Jamali, Leyli, 42
Howe, Susan, 509 James, C. L. R., 5, 117, 277, 362, 369, 374, 400, 437
Howland, Sylvia Ann, 554 James, William, 315, 318n, 321, 387, 433
Hubbard, Henry, 15–16, 18 Jameson, Fredric, 174
Huber, Kate, 359 Japan, 2, 42, 69, 252, 453,
Huggins, William John, 479 Jarvis, Charles, 213n, 214, 215
Humboldt, Alexander von, 461, 480 Jehovah, 21
Hunter, John, 473, 479 Jenkins, Henry, 46
Hurh, Paul, 45, 426n Jericho (Palestine), 167
Hurlbut, Elisha P., 414n Jerusalem, 160–62, 165–67, 169, 248, 338, 397, 468
Hurley, Natasha, 40 Jesus Christ, 149, 150, 152, 153, 162, 163, 165, 224, 242,
Hurston, Zora Neale, 536 244–45, 394, 396
Husni, Khalil, 346n Jim Crow, 20, 524
Huston, John, 6, 500, 519–24, 547 Job, 44, 169, 226, 227, 313
Johannot, Antoine, 215
“I and My Chimney” (Melville), 40, 412, 413, 414–17, John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea Pieces (Melville), 4,
418, 419 46, 172, 177–80, 184, 185, 205, 269, 270, 468, 469
I-Kiribati, 457 John O’London’s Weekly, 25
Iliad (Homer), 289, 319, 499 Johnson, Samuel, 288, 302
illustration, 4, 6, 39, 102, 215, 216, 243, 251, 254, Johnstone, Francis, 58
279–82, 396, 465, 476, 499–504, 511, 515, 520, Jonah, 68, 116, 227, 368, 388
533, 541, 556 Jones, Gayl, 2
imperialism, 5, 29, 43, 70, 71, 252, 253, 254, 355, 355, Jones, John Paul, 114, 120, 338
356, 384, 425, 462, 463, 471 Jones, Martha, 67
Indigenous life and people, 252, 253, 254, 341n, 356, 380, Jones, T. A. C., 356
406, 425, 451, 461, 463, 471, 510 Jones, Sir William, 68
Industrial Revolution, 72, 178, 266, 317, 334, 410, 438, Jonik, Michael, 5, 39, 43, 72n, 318n, 320, 493
440, 455 Jonson, Ben, 64
innate depravity (original sin), 70, 71, 84, 185, 288, Joppa, 557
320–21, 430 Jordan River, 166, 167
Innocents Abroad (Twain), 160 Journals (Melville), 11, 21, 22, 30, 56, 161, 163, 191n, 232,
Insko, Jeffrey, 115, 541 285n, 288, 291, 332, 336, 338, 402, 405, 464
Invisible Man (Ellison), 277
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), 451, Karcher, Carolyn L., 109n, 115, 256n, 277, 418n
455–57 Kauffer, E. McKnight, 279
Irigoyen, Emilio, 5, 41, 119, 121 Keighran, M., 251
Irving, Washington, 214, 221, 264, 470 Kelley, Wyn, 1, 2, 38, 41, 46, 47, 100n, 102, 179, 187n,
Isabel (Melville, Pierre), 3, 102–11, 226, 253, 388, 392, 200, 201, 204, 206, 215, 221, 313n, 352n, 412n, 542
466, 486–94 Kennedy, Joyce Deveau, 200, 202, 203
Isaiah, Book of, 63 Kent, Rockwell, 502, 520, 557
Ishmael (Melville, Moby-Dick), 13, 18, 19, 20, 22, 31, 40, Kerouac, Jack, 61
73, 74, 75, 92, 94, 95, 97, 98–100, 172, 206, 207, Kevorkian, Martin, 44
208, 209, 217, 218, 221, 225, 226–28, 229–33, 248, Keyssar, Alexander, 115
255–56, 302, 306, 308, 309, 316, 317, 318, 323, Kier, Kathleen E., 200, 202, 203
324, 342, 343, 346–50, 355, 356, 359, 360, 362, King, Richard J., 5, 39, 465, 469
363, 367, 369, 372, 375, 376, 377, 388–96, 405, King George III, 114, 117
407, 422, 427, 428, 429, 439, 440, 448, 449, 450, King James Bible, 285, 385
451–56, 457, 458, 460, 462, 466, 467, 474, 475, King Lear (Shakespeare), 13, 231, 224–32
476, 477, 479–82, 489, 502, 503, 506–8, 510, Kirkland, Caroline, 253
514–16, 517, 521, 523, 529, 532, 533, 538, 546, Kish, Matt, 4, 6, 46, 272, 279–82, 454, 499–504, 519,
551, 553 530–31, 533, 557
The Isle of the Cross (Melville), 204, 261, 270 Kitto, John, 386
Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (Melville), 3, 17. 41, 70, Klauba, George, 532, 533
72, 113–21, 124, 129, 265, 317, 332, 338, 357 Knickerbocker Magazine, 265
Ivison, Douglass, 252 Knip, Matthew, 41, 84
566 Index
Kreuger, Freddy, 59 “Lycidas” (Milton), 238, 318

Kristeva, Julia, 231 Lyons, Paul, 71n, 311
Krutch, Joseph Wood, 31
Macbeth (Shakespeare), 13, 232
Labour Leader, 26 machine learning, 300, 311
Labour Prophet, 26 MacLeish, Archibald, 30
Laemmle, Carl, 520 MacMechan, Archibald, 543
LaFleur, Greta, 465 Magnalia Christi Americana, 417
Lamb, Charles, 239n Mahmood, Saba, 383
Lamb, William J., 264 Malory, Thomas, 233
Langsdorff, Georg H. von, 57, 58, 62, 64 Mammoth Cave, 21
Lathers, Richard, 285 Mandeville, Bernard, 69
Latin America, 117, 130, 131, 214, 332, 335, 352n, Mann, Thomas, 324
353, 354 Manso, Giovanni Battista, 238
Lawrence, D. H., 24, 426 Marco Polo, 69
Lawrence, Florence, 520 Mardi, and a Voyage Thither (Melville), 3, 6, 11, 66–76, 97,
Laymon, Kiese, 539 115, 123, 124, 137, 172, 193n, 205, 249, 262, 269,
Lazo, Rodrigo, 3, 41, 352n, 353, 354 285, 317–22, 338, 342, 359, 424, 426, 427, 428,
Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 171, 388, 407 429, 432, 449, 451, 454, 456, 461, 463, 464, 467,
Lecomte, Jules, 541 477, 478, 479, 483
Ledebur, Friedrich, 520 Marett, R. R., 348–49
Lee, A. Robert, 46, 473, 482 marginalia (Melville), 1, 4, 12n, 22, 38, 44, 47, 92, 148n,
Lee, Maurice S., 39, 100n, 134, 140, 314, 315, 418n, 173, 215–19, 224, 225, 232, 233, 237, 238, 283–95,
427n, 481 297, 313, 314, 318n, 319, 405, 461n, 464n, 470n,
Leech, Samuel, 79, 85, 86, 88 479, 521n,
“The Lee Shore” (Melville, Moby-Dick), 76, 91, 376, 455 Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (James), 362, 400, 437
Leeson, Ida, 61 Markels, Julian, 206, 225
Lefort, Claude, 401 Markham, Jeffrey, 6
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” (Irving), 221 Marnon, Dennis C., 2, 38, 47, 284
Le Morte d’Arthur, (Malory), 233 Marovitz, Sanford E., 28, 46, 543
Leverenz, David, 411, 412n Marr, Timothy, 3, 38, 317
Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, 1, 47, 115, 148n, Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Blake), 240
236, 284n, 288n, 332n, 352n, 509 Married Women’s Property Act, 553
Levin, Harry, 213, 214, 215, 219 Marrs, Cody, 43, 267, 426n
Levine, Robert S., 38, 100n, 109n, 114n, 116, 259n Mar Saba monastery, 164–68, 397
Lewis, C. S., 240 Marsoin, Édouard, 3, 41, 334n
Lewis, R. W. B., 147, 246, 294 Martha’s Vineyard (Massachusetts), 364
Leyda, Jay, 56, 147, 155, 156, 199, 202, 219, 412 Martin, John, 243
Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter (Trumbull), Martin, Robert K, 40, 412n
114, 118 Martineau, Harriet, 124–25
“The Lightning-Rod Man” (Melville, The Piazza Tales), 123, Martinez, Rosa, 4
124, 128–30 Martínez Benedí, Pilar, 5, 104, 464, 467
Lima, 127, 213, 273, 276, 277, 278, 353, 355, 359, 360, Marxism, 5, 29, 436, 438, 441, 443
375, 376 masculinity, 3, 5, 6, 15, 62, 87, 88, 108, 111, 155, 209,
“The Line” (Melville, Moby-Dick), 18 228, 229, 232, 233, 257, 410–19, 541, 546
The Literary World, 103n, 105n, 248, 249, 264, Masefield, John, 25
267, 268 Masten, Jeffrey, 204–5
Littell’s Living Age, 264 Mather, Cotton, 406n, 417, 418, 419
Littré, Emile, 205 Mathews, Cornelius, 19n, 267
Locke, John, 422, 423n, 424, 441 Matthiessen, F. O., 24, 33, 67, 204, 228n, 399–400, 438
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 32, 174 Maurice, Thomas, 386
Looby, Christopher, 40, 100n, 229n McCall, Corey, 45
López Liquete, María Felisa, 208, 359 McGann, Jerome, 200, 204
López Peña, Laura, 45 McGettigan, Katie, 4, 45, 304, 393n
“Love and Whaling” (Embury), 545, 547 McGill, Meredith, 174
Lowell, James Russell, 253, 316, 317 McGinnis, Ellen, 39
Lusky, Brian, 266 McGowan, Tony, 4
Index 567
McKitterick, David, 248 Melville’s Marginalia Online (MMO), 1, 2, 4, 12n, 38, 44, 47,
“Meanings for Manhood,” 410 147n, 148, 173, 215–19, 224, 232, 237, 284, 285n,
Meindertsma, Christien, 506–7 287, 288, 292, 293n, 294, 295, 297, 314, 318n, 470n
Melvill, Allan, 20, 44, 285, 333, 334, 385 Melville Society Extracts, 284n
Melville, Allan, 155, 266, 268, 285 Melville’s Reading (Sealts, Jr.), 213, 318n
Melville, Augusta, 74, 201, 205–6, 285 Melville’s Spanish Reading, 213–15
Melville, Elizabeth Shaw, 4, 40, 44, 68, 74, 199–210, 284, Melvilliana: The World and Writings of Herman Melville
286, 385–86, 412 (Norsworthy), 32, 37, 240, 286n, 288, 542
Melville, Herman. See also individual titles Mercer, Anna, 200
aesthetics and arts, 45–46 The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 232
Americanization and discontents, 25–26 meritocracy, 175
America’s motion picture industry, popularization, mesmerism, 107–8, 431n
544–46 Metcalf, Eleanor Melville, 202, 243
Atlantic, 333–39 Meteor (ship), 157, 237, 264, 290, 291
biography, 1, 3, 11–22, 23, 24, 28, 29–31, 32, 37–38, Methodists, 383, 384
152n, 201–4, 215, 293, 332, 339, 400, 404, 412n, 543 Meynell, Viola, 23, 339
“Blackness of Darkness,” 437–40 Miall, David, 488
capitalism and racialized labor, 436–43 Middle Passage, 5, 362–72
criticism, 2, 12, 23–33, 36–47, 102, 154, 161, 203, 204, “Midnight, Forecastle” (Melville, Moby-Dick), 20, 375n, 442
237, 270, 293, 294, 297, 299, 400 A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 124
dilemma of determinism, 433–34 Milder, Robert, 400, 402
film adaptation, 519–24 Mill, John Stuart, 161
high culture and growing popularity, ascendency, Mill, Lowell, 107
543–44 Miller, Olive Beaupre, 499
in the high school classroom, 529–33 Miller, Perry, 544
library, 284–7, 289, 294 Milner, Thomas, 450
life, 2–4, 11–22, 30, 37, 38, 40, 188, 190, 204 Milton, John, 4, 12, 47, 68, 87, 153, 161, 173, 174, 225,
new (digital) literacies of, 309–11 232n, 236–46, 266, 289, 292, 293, 295, 318–19,
ocean experiences and knowledge, 448–50 386, 513, 514
philosophy, religion, and the secular, 44–45, 422–34 Milton, Henry, 60
poem/poetry, 4, 38, 45, 46, 153, 161, 162, 165, 166, minstrel performance, 20, 144, 535
169, 171, 174, 180, 269, 507 Mischke, Dennis, 4, 41
(un)popularity, comparative perspective, 542 Mitchell, Rick, 509
public, pedagogical and digital, 46–47 Mitchell Library in Sydney, Australia, 61
reception and criticism, 36–47 Mitford, John, 238, 239
revival, 3, 23–33, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 147, 186, 200, Moby-Dick (Melville), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11–22, 23, 24, 27, 28,
202, 339, 473, 543–44, 547 30, 31, 32, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 59, 62,
scholarship, 3, 24, 37, 38, 41, 44, 187, 203, 283, 288, 68, 73, 75–76, 87n, 91–100, 102, 115, 123, 124,
399 140, 142, 172, 177n, 178, 203, 204, 205–9, 212,
as spiritual seeker, 385–87, 389 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 221, 224–35, 237, 248,
teaching, popular culture, 541–47 249, 252, 255–6, 261, 264–65, 268, 269, 272, 279,
texts, 56, 116, 219, 221, 274, 308, 353, 502, 519, 535, 280, 283, 289, 291, 292, 294, 297–311, 313, 316,
551 317, 318, 319, 322, 323, 324, 336–8, 339, 342–43,
textual studies, 1, 3, 4, 5, 22, 37–38, 184–90, 200, 201, 347n, 349, 354, 355, 356, 360, 362–72, 373, 374,
204, 206, 251, 279, 314–15, 319, 520n 377, 379, 381, 384, 385, 387, 388, 389, 390, 391,
tragedy, 13–22, 219, 381, 388, 494 393, 394, 402, 404, 422, 424, 427, 430, 436, 437,
visualizing, museum exhibition perspective, 550–57 438, 439, 440, 443, 448–58, 460, 465, 466, 468,
will, agency, and “natural justice,” 422–34 475, 478, 479, 480, 481, 482, 499–504, 506–11,
Melville, Malcolm, 68, 386 512, 514, 515, 516, 519–26, 529–33, 535–40,
Melville, Maria, 199, 200, 205, 206 541–47, 550–57
Melville Electronic Library (MEL), 1–2, 4, 12n, 38, 47, 148n, adaptation of, 519–26, 529–34
189–90, 297, 298, 302, 314, 326 anthologizing, 506–11, 515
Melville revivals, 3, 23–33, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 147, 186, British version of, 15
200, 202, 339, 473, 543–44, 547 commercial failure of, 102, 547
Melville’s marginalia, 22, 92, 148n, 215–19, 225, 232, 233, composition of, 232, 290–91
237, 238, 283–96, 313, 314, 319, 405, 461n, 470n, gender, 207, 209
479, 521n historical and political dimensions of, 97
568 Index
pedagogical approaches, 96, 529–34, 535–40, 541–49 New South Church (Boston, Massachusetts), 385
publication of, 15, 140, 337, 339 New York Herald, 102, 264
reviews of, 36, 268, 338 New York Times, 117, 178, 203, 267
tragedy, 13 Ngai, Sianne, 143, 493n
The Whale, 15 Niemeyer, Mark, 38
wisdom, 76 Nigeria, 278, 510
“Moby Dick Adventure Land,” 519 NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit), 304, 308
Moby Dick Club, 339 Noble, Safiya Umoja, 536
Modern, John Lardas, 44 Noel, James, 6
Modern British Essayists, 266 Norberg, Peter, 2, 47, 215, 237n, 284, 288n
Modern Language Association, 25 Norsworthy, Scott, 32, 36, 37, 286n, 288, 542
modernism (literary), 27, 30–31, 384 Nott, Josiah, 474
monotheism, 21, 279 Nuku Hiva (Marquesas), 11, 55–58, 60, 61, 62, 252, 335,
Monroe, James, 353 385, 424, 462, 555
Montaigne, Michel de, 60, 75, 141–42, 240, 371 Nurmi, Tom, 5, 45, 72n,147, 148, 149, 405n, 448,
Moore, Maxine, 67 493, 494
Morell, Sascha, 376, 377
Moretti, Franco, 299, 300, 301 Obeyesekere, Gananath, 58
Morewood, Sarah, 32 O’Brien, Fitz-James, 269
Mormonism, 68, 75, 384 oceanography, 5, 447–58
Morning News, 268 Ogden, Emily, 107
Morris, William, 26, 28, 30 Ohge, Christopher, 1, 2, 4, 43, 47, 148n, 153, 156, 187n,
Morrison, Toni, 19, 42, 436–37, 443, 537 225, 297, 300, 313, 307, 318n, 426n
Morton, Samuel George, 474 Oken, Lorenz, 387, 474
Mosses from an Old Manse (Hawthorne), 405 Oliver, Egbert S., 202
Mount Greylock (Massachusetts), 124, 125, 470 Olsen-Smith, Steven, 2, 4, 32, 38, 47, 100n, 148n, 215,
Mukhopadhyay, Tito, 492 225, 236n, 239n, 242n, 263, 265, 284, 284n, 288n,
Mumford, Lewis, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29–31, 32, 33, 100, 201, 294, 297, 313, 318
203, 438 Olson, Charles, 225, 286
Munchausen, Baron, 69 Omoo (Melville), 3, 11, 14, 16–18, 23, 59–64, 66–67, 69,
Murray, Albert, 100 70, 80, 113, 123, 205, 214, 251, 267, 269, 283, 285,
Murray, Hannah Lauren, 3, 418n 319, 321, 335, 342, 450, 451, 462, 464, 465
Murray, John, III, 26, 56, 67, 68, 69, 70, 74, 249, 251–53, Onís, José De, 213, 352n
254, 396 optical character recognition (OCR), 311
Murray, John Middleton, 27 otherness, 12, 17, 255, 354, 357–59
Otter, Samuel, 1, 45, 59, 60, 81, 100n, 216, 304, 412n,
The Nation, 23 473, 481, 482, 485
Nation and Athenaeum, 25, 27 Owen, Richard, 474
natural history, 39, 130, 384, 449, 461, 472–83, 515 Owenite movement, 26
natural language processing (NLP), 304n, 308, 535
natural philosophy, 38–40 Palfrey, Simon, 228
Naval Chronicle, 270 Palmer, Garrick, 279
Nealon, Jeffrey, 466, 467 pantheism, 163, 383, 393, 428, 467, 489, 492, 493
Neuman, Meredith Marie, 205 Paolo Costa, 389
neurodiversity, 5, 22, 104, 487, 488, 490, 491 Paradise Lost (Milton), 87, 161, 237, 240–45, 289, 319, 386
Neversink (ship), 78, 80, 81, 87, 355, 356, 374, 477 “The Paradise of Bachelors, and the Tartarus of Maids”
New Bedford (Massachusetts), 1, 13, 510, 529, 544, 545, (Melville), 5, 72, 124, 250, 253, 262, 332, 336, 437,
546, 547 438, 439, 440, 441
New Bedford Whaling Museum, 1, 6, 280, 476, 510, Paradise Regained (Milton), 173, 242, 244
544, 550–58 Parker, Hershel, 26, 37, 38, 60, 67, 78, 102, 103, 111, 138,
Newcomb, John Timberman, 174 148n, 152n, 160, 171, 175, 181n, 184n, 185, 186,
Newell, Kate, 519 187, 189, 199, 214n, 215, 219, 264, 265, 266, 268,
New England Puritan culture, 89, 137, 138, 226, 232n, 269, 270, 291n, 293, 315, 318, 331n, 334, 339n,
239 385, 402, 405n, 406, 465, 468, 473
New England Quarterly, 25 Parkman, Francis, 453
New Guinea, 57, 551 Parrington, Vernon Louis, 33, 437
Index 569
Parthenope (Melville), 172, 175–76 Pope, Alexander, 285, 288

participatory culture, 29–31 “The Portent” (Melville, Battle-Pieces), 148–50, 154,
Pascal, Blaise, 513 155–56
Patterson, Orlando, 363 Porter, David, 58, 62, 64, 130, 345
Peck, George Washington, 102 Post-Lauria, Sheila, 412, 413
Peck, Gregory, 500, 502, 520 Potter, Henry L., 175
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 317 Potter, William, 246
Pell, John L. E., 544, 546 Powers, Richard, 490
Pellar, Brian R., 42 Poyen, Charles, 107
The Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Pratt, Mary Louise, 252, 357
Knowledge, 62, 474, 481 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 26, 27
Pequod (ship), 5, 13, 19, 20, 75, 92, 93, 100, 206, 221, 226, Price, Leah, 255
228, 231n, 233, 294, 304, 317, 337, 356, 362–72, Princeton WordNet (PWN), 301–3
373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 388, 391, 393, 430, 436, print materiality, 249, 252, 255, 257–59
437, 438, 439, 440, 442, 443, 454, 456, 458, 501, Protestantism, 33, 47, 69, 137–38, 141, 160, 165, 169,
510, 511, 513, 521, 522, 524, 533, 538, 552, 215, 238, 239, 279, 333, 383, 384, 385, 387
554, 555 Provincial Freeman, 258
periodical culture, 261–70 Psalms, Book of, 47, 63, 239
Pernot, Laurent, 118, 119 Puett, Amy, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205
Persius, 287 Putnam, George Palmer, 121, 172, 251, 264, 267
Person, Leland S., 228, 412n Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, 32, 114, 123–24, 129, 215,
Peterson, T. B., 113, 114, 120 261, 266, 269, 272, 273, 412–14, 417, 418, 419
Pfeiler, Martina, 6, 519 Pynchon, Thomas, 501
Phaedrus (Plato), 363, 365, 366, 369, 370, 372
Phelps, Almira, 465 Quakers, 383, 552–54
Phelps, William Lyon, 286 quantification, 297–99, 314, 315, 321, 322, 326
Phillips, Louis, 509 Quarantania (Palestine), 166
Philo Logos Society, 263 “The Quarter-Deck” (Melville, Moby-Dick), 79, 91, 306,
“The Piazza” (Melville, The Piazza Tales), 124–25, 215, 323, 391
353, 354, 468 Queequeg (Melville, Moby-Dick), 13, 40, 99–100, 217, 221,
The Piazza Tales (Melville), 3, 38, 45, 123–33, 269, 272, 226, 228–31, 255–56, 342, 343, 369, 388, 392–93,
273, 274, 412n, 441–42 394, 396, 428, 438, 439–40, 502, 504, 510, 516,
picaresque, 17, 64, 68, 119, 214 520, 546, 555
Piercefield, Kathleen, 510 queer theory, 40–41, 226, 233, 392, 415n
Pierre (Melville), 3, 5, 11, 32, 38, 39, 42, 102–11, 123, Quijano, Alonso, 217, 219, 221, 222
124, 157, 172, 215, 226, 230, 251, 253, 261, 262, Quito, 353–54
268, 269, 270, 322, 324, 334, 386, 388, 399, 402, Quixotism, 85, 214, 221
404, 405, 406, 412, 418n, 422, 423, 424, 427, 428,
429, 465–68, 470, 485–94 Rabelais, François, 6, 68, 75, 240
Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 165–67, 169, 386 race, 3, 5, 6, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 37, 41, 42–3, 61, 70,
pilgrimage, 4, 160–9, 391n, 392, 394, 396, 397, 410 71, 78, 98, 106, 107, 123, 131, 139, 156, 248–59,
Pip (Melville, Moby-Dick), 12, 14–16, 17–22, 217, 227–28, 277, 335, 352n, 354, 358, 362–72, 373, 375, 379,
230, 306, 335, 362–64, 366, 369–71, 438, 442–43, 380, 385, 393n, 411n, 412n, 423, 436–44, 448, 510,
450, 458, 507, 513, 514, 520–24, 537–38 520, 524, 535–40
Pittsfield (Massachusetts), 11, 15, 32, 199, 202, 262, 264, racial ambiguity, 380
268, 285, 333, 386, 405n, 423, 544 racial appropriation, 19, 20
Pittsfield Sun, 264 racial identity, 256, 257, 537
plankton, 449, 450, 453–55 racial ideology, 377n, 481
plantation, 5, 107, 132, 278, 363–64, 367–69 racial implications, 539
Poe, Edgar Allan, 12, 25, 39, 45, 288, 315, 317, 324, 416 racial injustice, 143
“The Poet” (Emerson), 173 racialization, 19, 42, 109, 253, 307n, 334n, 436–44,
The Poetical Works of John Milton, 236, 237 535–40
The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, 289, 290 racism, 3, 14, 19, 20, 98–99, 127, 151, 230, 257, 272,
The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 291 275, 362–72, 377n, 463, 474, 535–40, 545
Pommer, Henry F., 236, 237, 243n scientific racism, 377n, 474
Poole, Gordon, 46 Ramadan, 278, 393
570 Index
“Rammon” (Melville), 44 Sandberg, Robert, 46

Rampersad, Arnold, 115 Sapir, Edward, 28
Rancière, Jacques, 401, 403, 408, 423 Sappol, Michael, 475, 477
Ray, Benjamin, 157 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 350, 523
Rebellion Record, 267 Satan (Milton), 87, 237, 239n, 240, 242–45, 319, 513
Rebhorn, Matthew, 478 Savage, Elizabeth, 96
Redburn: His First Voyage (Melville), 3, 11, 14, 17, 40, 75, Savarese, Ralph James, 5, 104, 464, 467
78–89, 115, 123, 248, 261, 269, 332, 334–35, 464, Sawyer, Michael E., 5
467, 482 Saya y manto, 353–54
The Red Rover (Cooper), 105n, 248 Scarry, Elaine, 126
Reed, Charles Buchanan, 152 Schell, Jennifer, 38, 39
Reed, Christian, 40 Schiebinger, Londa, 463
refugee, 3, 104, 113–21, 450, 457 Schmidt, Leigh Eric, 384–85
The Refugee, 113 Schmidt, Michael, 136
religion, 2, 3, 4, 5, 31, 42, 44–45, 63, 69, 106, 114n, Schroeder, Jonathan, 120
134–45, 153, 160–69, 181, 236–47, 279, 283, 314, Schultz, Elizabeth, 6, 46, 412n, 448, 451, 515n, 533, 541,
318, 341–50, 358, 383–98, 418n, 454, 465, 541 543, 547
Renaissance humanism, 395 Scoresby, William, 453–55
Renaissance texts, 314 Scott, Sir Walter, 12
Renker, Elizabeth, 25, 46, 200, 203, 253, 412n, “The Scout Toward Aldie” (Melville, Battle-Pieces), 43
revolution, 5, 32, 68, 72, 104, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, The Sea Beast (Webb), 519, 544, 547
121, 128, 129, 153, 203, 276, 300, 332, 334, 335, Sealts, Merton M. Jr., 4, 47, 106, 186, 187, 189, 202, 213,
338, 373–82, 410, 430, 432, 433, 474, 481 214, 215, 216n, 262, 263, 264, 265, 283–95, 318,
Reynolds, David S., 85n, 400, 402 386, 339n, 366n, 386, 412n, 416n
Reynolds, Jeremiah N., 265, 541 Sears, J. Michael, 67
Reynolds, Larry, 228 secularity, 44, 135, 383–98
Rice, Kylan, 6, 509, 515n Sedgwick, Catherine Maria, 263
Richards, Eliza, 151 Seelye, John, 67, 73
Richardson, Kelly L., 215 Senchyne, Jonathan, 249, 253n
Riegel, O. W., 24 Sendak, Maurice, 102
The Rights of Man, 185, 187, 190, 193, 380 Serrel, Edward W., 150
Riley, Peter, 4, 46, 249n Seybold, Matt, 136, 140
The Ring and the Book (Browning), 160 Shakespeare, William, 4, 12, 13, 47, 73, 78, 124, 148, 153,
Ritvo, Harriet, 481 154, 155, 215, 216, 224–33, 237, 285, 287, 291,
“The Roads to Rome” (Moretti), 299 295, 300, 318, 387, 422, 448, 450, 506, 550
Robertson-Lorant, Laurie, 179n, 200, 203, 509, 542 Shamir, Milette, 413, 415n, 417
Rogin, Michael Paul, 373, 400, 437 Shaull, Richard, 538
Roscoe, William, 335 Shaw, Lemuel, 42, 74, 202, 273, 385, 411
Rosetti, William Michael, 27, 29 Shelley, Mary, 477
Rotch, Elizabeth, 552 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 153, 288, 360
Rotch, William Jr., 552 Sheridan, Philip, 149, 152, 153, 175
Rotch, William Sr., 552 “Sheridan at Cedar Creek” (Melville, Battle-Pieces), 152–53,
Roth, Philip, 135 175
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 425–26, 433 Shurr, William, 157
Rubin, Martin, 523 Shute, A. Burnham, 541
Ruskin, John Pater, 28, 161 Sidney, Sir Philip, 2
Russell, William Clark, 25, 268, 543 Simms, William Gilmore, 253
“The Rusty Man” (Melville), 219–22 Simonsen, Rasmus, 40
Ryle, Gilbert, 344 slaveholders, 81–2, 109n, 276, 277, 278
slavery, institution of, 41, 42, 43, 72, 81, 84n, 109n, 120,
Sadahiro, Maki, 3, 43, 339, 543 123, 128, 131, 132, 178, 249, 258, 259, 272, 277,
Sadleir, Michael, 25 279, 318, 335, 336, 339, 356, 362–72, 276, 277,
Salt, Henry Stevens, 24, 26, 29, 339, 543 279, 356, 362–72, 377n, 378, 379, 384, 411n, 437,
Samson Agonistes (Milton), 241, 293 438, 441, 443, 521
Sanborn, Geoffrey, 3, 39, 45, 60, 149, 304, 486 slaves. See enslaved people
San Dominick, 42, 127–28, 257, 258, 274, 358–59, 377–88 slave ship, 127, 273, 278, 362–72, 377, 378
Index 571
Smith, Adam, 248, 334 Sweet, Timothy, 39

Smith, Caitlin, 3 Swift, Jonathan, 68
Smith, Horace P., 555 “The Symphony” (Melville, Moby-Dick), 91, 206–9,
Smith, Joseph Edwards Adams, 32, 202 226, 230
Smith, Laura Alexandrine, 178
Smith, Zak, 501 Taber, Thomas, 552
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 410, 411 taboo, 5, 341–50, 425, 466, 486
Smythe, Henry A., 175 Taji (Melville, Mardi), 68, 70–76, 124
Snediker, Michael, 40, 100n Tamarkin, Elisa, 45, 100n
“social hieroglyphic,” 441–42 tapu (taboo), 5, 341–50
socialism, 24, 26–30, 31, 33, 43, 339, 400 Tashtego (Melville, Moby-Dick), 13, 14, 91, 231n, 374,
Socrates, 365, 372 375n, 424, 438, 458
Sotheran, H. C., 27 tattooing, 59–60, 98, 99, 172, 254–55, 323–24, 342, 343,
South America, 5, 41, 119, 127, 130, 331, 332, 352–60 349, 502, 510, 516, 555
Southey, Robert, 341 Taussig, Michael, 347
South Pacific, 5, 55–64, 268, 332, 337, 425, 450, 555 Taylor, Andrew, 118, 333n
“The South Seas” (Melville), 66, 70, 356 Taylor, Astra, 399
Spanish America, 5, 213, 215, 352–60 Taylor, Charles, 383, 389
Spanish, language and literature, 4, 212–22 Taylor, John, 288
Spanos, William, 226 Taylor, J. Orville, 262
Specq, François, 354, 355 Taylor, Zachary, 267
Spengler, Nicholas, 41, 352n temperance, 61, 78–89, 262, 404
Spenser, Edmund, 68, 71, 125, 239n, 285, 289, 290, 291 Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There (Arthur), 85
Sperry, Armstrong, 57 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 154, 161, 338, 339n
Speth, Linda E., 414 Thirty Years from Home; or, A Voice from the Main Deck (Leech),
spiritualism, 3, 102–11, 384, 418 79, 86
Spitzer, Leo, 216, Thompson, Corey Evan, 85n
Springfield Republican, 25, 32 Thompson, Graham, 4, 249n, 412, 418n
“A Squeeze of the Hand” (Melville, Moby-Dick), 91, 206–9, Thompson, Lawrance, 44, 240
229, 305, 489 Thomson, James, 26, 27, 29, 289, 339
Standish, Lucy Randall, 554 Thoreau, Henry David, 24, 26, 27, 33, 39, 138, 250, 315,
Starbuck (Melville, Moby-Dick), 13, 207–9, 230–31, 307, 362, 384, 386, 418n, 437, 440, 441, 475
391, 438–39, 442, 521, 522, 524 Tilden, Daniel R., 149
Stavans, Ilan, 219, 220n Timoleon ETC (Melville), 4, 44, 172, 181–82, 205, 468
St. Cecilia in Ecstasy (Raphael), 396 Toby (Melville, Typee), 58, 251, 254, 268, 345, 424
Stedman, Arthur, 202, 423 Tolstoy, Leo, 28, 531
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 202 Tomlinson, H. M., 27
Stein, Jordan Alexander, 4, 40, 41, 229, 253 Torrance, Justina, 4, 225
Steinbeck, John, 61 Totem and Taboo (Freud), 348
Steiner, Franz, 342n “The Town-Ho’s Story” (Melville, Moby-Dick), 32, 373–79
Sten, Christopher, 3, 43, 64, 231, 524 tragedy, 12–20, 115, 179, 219, 225, 228, 229, 232n, 242,
stepmothers, 224–33 381, 388, 494
Stern, Milton, 67, 187n, 228n transatlanticism, 3, 4, 5, 24, 28, 29, 45, 103, 118, 121,
Stetson, John B., 56 137, 153, 251, 282, 331–39, 383, 460, 542, 543
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 25, 29 Transcendentalism, 33, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 384,
Stewart, Charles S., 58, 62, 64, 342 386, 388, 437–38, 443
Stoddard, Charles Warren, 40 “The Transcendentalist” (Emerson), 125, 126
Stoddard, Richard Henry, 175 transnationalism, 115, 118, 332, 358, 359, 360, 541
Storey, John, 541 trauma, 11, 13, 14–15, 17, 20, 21, 37, 71, 106, 127, 128,
Stubb (Melville, Moby-Dick), 14, 15, 363, 366–68, 369, 156, 167, 229, 273, 333, 334, 335, 411, 537, 552
388, 391, 438, 442–43, 521, 538, 553n Tribune, New York, 264, 265
Stuckey, Sterling, 42, 437 Tricker, Spencer, 42
Sugden, Edward, 5 Trilcke, Peer, 300, 304n
Sundquist, Eric, 42, 100n, 277, 378, 379, 437 Trump, Donald, 116, 117, 135, 275
“The Swamp Angel,” (Melville, Battle-Pieces), 150–54, 155 Turpin, Zachary, 38, 113, 313, 315
Swedenborgianism, 415 Twain, Mark, 41, 62, 160, 163
572 Index
Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 78, 89 Wenke, John, 4, 424n

Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (Melville), 3, 5, 11, 14, 16, West, Cornel, 2
23, 26, 32, 38, 40, 45, 47, 55–64, 66–67, 69, 70, 75, whale populations, 450, 451–53
113, 123, 175, 205, 214, 217, 248–59, 261, 263, A Whaler’s Dictionary (Beachy-Quick), 516, 517
265, 267, 268, 269, 283, 311, 315, 317, 319, 335, whaleship, 55, 56, 56, 60, 426, 448, 449, 451, 452,
339, 341–50, 383, 384, 385, 397, 411, 424, 425, 453, 508
426, 433, 448, 460, 462, 463, 465, 544, 555 Acushnet, 15–16, 19, 55, 56, 335, 448
Charles and Henry, 60, 61, 264
Unitarianism, 44, 138, 384, 385–86 Lucy Ann, 56, 60, 61
United States Exploring Expedition (Wilkes), 69, 71, 288, 449, Whaling Film Corporation, 544, 545
450, 451, 453 White-Jacket, or, The World in a Man-of-War (Melville), 3, 11,
US interventionism, 355, 356 14, 43, 59, 62, 75, 78–89, 172, 193, 205, 214, 215,
US nationalism, 47 218, 261, 269, 308, 313, 332, 334, 335, 336,
US–Spanish American relations, 355 355–57, 373–74, 464, 467, 477, 478
discipline and pleasure in, 78–89
Vafa, Amirhossein, 42 “The Whiteness of the Whale” (Melville, Moby-Dick), 91,
Valéry, Paul, 512 341–50, 363, 390
Vanderbilt, Kermit, 25 white supremacy, 249, 253, 254, 255, 258, 363, 366, 369,
Van Doren, Carl, 23, 24, 67, 543 371, 372
Vendler, Helen, 149 Whitman, Walt, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 33, 43, 73, 85, 148,
Ventom, Henry, 61 155, 156, 171, 173, 208, 229, 324, 384, 388, 407,
verdure, 5, 405, 448, 460–71, 493 437
Vere, Captain (Melville, Billy Budd), 156, 185–95, 325, Whittier, James G., 174
379, 380, 424, 429–33 Wilkes, Charles, 69, 71, 288, 449, 450, 451, 453
Viardot, Louis, 217, 218 Williams, Eric, 437
Vincent, Howard P., 219, 355n, 386n, 454, 541 Williams, Raymond, 401
Voyage of the Beagle (Darwin), 39, 130 Williams, Stanley T., 28, 213, 214, 215
Voyages and Travels in Various Parts of the World Williams, Theodore Chickering, 386
(Langsdorff), 57 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 214
Wilson, Charles B., 61
Wald, Priscilla, 491, 492, 493, 494n Wilson, Gil, 533
Walker, David, 258 Wilson, Ivy, G., 5, 42, 100n, 307n, 334n
Wall, William Allan, 552 Wilson, Sarah, 415n, 419
Wallace, Robert K., 4, 6, 46, 258n, 396n, 509, 532–33 Withers, Charles W. J., 251
“Wandering Jew,”115, 166 Women’s Writers Project (WWP), 298
Warner, Nicholas O., 85n Woolf, Leonard, 27
Warner Bros, 519, 524, 544, 547 WordNet, 300, 301–9, 311, 321
Warren, Lenora, 5 Wordsworth, William, 153, 266, 285, 289, 291, 292, 295,
Warton, Thomas, 287 395, 477
Waters, Chris, 29 workers, 11, 27, 29, 107, 117, 336, 375, 381, 400,
Watson, E. L. Grant, 186 440, 443
“A Way-side Weed” (Melville, Weeds and Wildings), 179, Wren, Christopher, 153
180, 469 Wright, Nathalia, 70n, 473
Weaver, Raymond, M., 23, 28, 38, 41, 47, 186, 187n, Wright, Richard, 536
188n, 199, 201, 219, 339, 399, 543–47
Webb, Millard, 544, 547 Yamashita, Karen Tei, 42
Webster, Noah, 341 Yang, Jeffrey, 509
Weeds and Wildings Chiefly: with a Rose or Two (Melville), 4, Yankee Doodle magazine, 267
44, 156, 171, 172, 179–80, 205, 460, 468–70 Yeo, Richard, 27, 205
Weil, Simone, 228 “Ye Olde Booke Shoppe,” 286
Weinauer, Ellen, 5 Yothers, Brian, 3, 12n, 23n, 31, 160, 194n, 293, 320, 384,
Weinstein, Cindy, 38, 100n 385n, 387, 399n
Weisberg, Jacob, 135
Wells, H. G., 27 Zapf, Hubert, 308, 310
Wendell, Barrett, 31 Zimmerman, Brett, 67
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A New Companion to Herman Melville

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cover images: © Matthew Kish

1 Melville the Life: Accident, Coincidence, and Adjacency 11

4 Typee and Omoo55

ftoc.indd 7 04-08-2022 20:32:24

8 Spiritualism in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities 102

Part III Texts, Print Culture, and Digital Technologies 197

24 Counting (on) Melville: Moby-Dick, Computational Literary Studies,

Part IV Circuits and Systems 329

26 Transatlantic Crossings 331

Part V The Natural World 445

Part VI Symposium I: Art and Adaptation 497

40 Art and Illustration 499

44 “Of Whales in Paint”: Melville in the High School Classroom 529

Christopher Sten is Emeritus Professor of English at George Washington University; author of

This book began officially on the bicentenary of Melville’s birth—August 1, 2019—when we

Another important source of energy is revision––experiencing not only Melville’s revisions of

Melville-related project, an online illustration-a-day that became a book, Moby-Dick in Pictures:

Texts and Abbreviations for this Volume

Unless otherwise noted, references to PT  he Piazza Tales and Uncollected

Accidental Tragedy: The Third Man

Coincidence and Tragedy: The Third Man Replayed

What is most coincidental in Moby-Dick, Melville sedulously conceals. It is the coincidence of

Adjacency: Place, Mind, and Symbol

Melville’s Americanization and Its Discontents

The British Socialist Melville Revival and Its Heritage

Participatory Culture in Lewis Mumford’s Biography

Regional Melville, Communal Melville, and American Melville

Melville Biography and Textual Studies

Ecology and Natural Philosophy

Sex, Gender, and the Body in Melville’s Work and Life

A particularly stimulating development in recent scholarship has been the exploration of

Political Melville: Race, Violence, and Law

Melville and Philosophy, Religion, and the Secular

Melville, Aesthetics, and the Arts

Public, Pedagogical, and Digital Melville

Typee and Omoo

Hug the shore, naught new is seen.

You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the Truth in.

He thereby stands against the “tyranny” of pleasure regulations—“preserve me from a tyranny

spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer” (104). In addition to mentally summa-

Spite of this FRIGid WINter NIGHT in the BOIsterous AtLANtic,

sailors’ “lively sketches of whales” on whale-teeth (269), the “dentistical-looking implements”

The sentence’s five adverb-verb combinations (“ripplingly withdrawing, “vertically thrusting,”

“Shall I, mother?—Art thou ready? Wilt thou tell me?—Now? Now?”

extraordinary atmospheric spell—both physical and spiritual—which henceforth it had become

extends the social problems caused by skepticism’s barriers to consensus-formation. Meanwhile,

Reading The Confidence-Man

Skepticism and Trust

(epistemological trustworthiness) of a narrative, such as witness testimony or impartial (or less

Hidden in the cap

So your future veils its face,

We elms of Malvern Hill

The call-and-response structure of “Malvern Hill” appears commonly in African American

By night there is fear in the City,

There is glory for the brave

Who weeps for the woeful City

I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair,

year of forebodings! year of the youth I love!

1 Melville the Life: Accident, Coincidence, and Adjacency 11

4 Typee and Omoo55

8 Spiritualism in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities 102

Part III Texts, Print Culture, and Digital Technologies 197

24 Counting (on) Melville: Moby-Dick, Computational Literary Studies,

Part IV Circuits and Systems 329

26 Transatlantic Crossings 331

Part V The Natural World 445

Part VI Symposium I: Art and Adaptation 497

40 Art and Illustration 499

44 “Of Whales in Paint”: Melville in the High School Classroom 529

Unless otherwise noted, references to PT he Piazza Tales and Uncollected

biography, which interpreted Melville as neurotically conflicted in his homosexual tendencies––