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From "Some Unmentionable Cellar": The Natural World of the Urban Underground in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Literature

2013; Oxford University Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/isle/ist019

1759-1090

D. J. McNutt,

Crime and Detective Fiction Studies

In Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852), Herman Melville describes a New York City police station suddenly overcome by wild disorder when an indoor riot transforms the place into a scene that “fairly reeked with all things unseemly” (240). The mob shouts “words and phrases unrepeatable in God's sunlight,” obscenities that the narrator calls “the common household breath of their utterers” (240). In this chaotic scene, urban disorder emanates from homes fouled by curses and exhalations, yet the narrator develops well beyond these unwholesome conditions, configuring the mob's origins with grim specificity: “The thieves'-quarters, and all the brothels, Lock-and-Sin hospitals for incurables, and infirmaries and infernos of hell seemed to have made one combined sortie, and poured out upon the earth through the vile vomitory of some unmentionable cellar” (241). The list of sites shifts away from household exhalations to another offensive force, a fluid “sortie” poured from a cellar, a place able in this instance to concentrate vile substances. Pierre's mob coheres through images of foul exhalation, pouring liquid, and the solid earth, elements whose combination can make any cellar potentially noxious, even without the vomitory.