Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Engendering Melville

1999; Eastern Michigan University; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jnt.2011.0083

1549-0815

Juniper Ellis,

American Sports and Literature

Engendering Melville juniper Ellis Given scholars' recent attention to hypermasculinity in the works of such figures as Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer, it is tempting to believe that the relationship between certain presentations of masculinity and of U.S. literature have been adequately identified. Americanists will remain indebted to foundational works like Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes's Hemingway's Genders (1994), but scrutiny should not stop with those canonical writers who most obviously divulge an exaggerated masculinity. Indeed, even Herman Melville's works retain an ambivalent treatment of gender to an extent that has been thus far unrecognized . A study of Melville's treatment of gender offers more than a supplement to extant examinations of masculinity; it also reveals that such examinations are limited by lack of attention to the way masculinity is constructed in relation to femininity, race, and class. A study of Melville's presentation of women characters is a necessary corrective to Melville studies and to aspects of Americanist studies more generally. A strategic focus on Melville's presentation of women, far from succumbing to an essentialist claim, reveals precisely how integral gender is to apparently unrelated scholarly inquiries. Some of the most recent and productive examinations of U.S. literature, however, in formal or structural approaches, attention to individualism and imperialism, and queer JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 29.1 (Winter 1999): 62-84. Copyright © 1999 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. Engendering Melville 63 theories, continue to overlook the way Melville's presentation of women necessarily affects his theories of aesthetics, as well as influences his depiction of race, nation, and gender. Wai-chee Dimock's Empire for Liberty (1989), for instance, identifies the ways in which Melville's reliance on individualism and imperialism is inextricable from his presentation of democracy. Dimock's presentation only in part carries forward the revisionism required in contemporary scholarship, since she, like such scholarly antecedents as Richard Chase and F. O. Matthiessen, bids to investigate his conception of democracy without taking into account the implications of Melville's presentation of gender. Indeed, an examination of gender in Melville's work both extends and modifies the terms Dimock establishes, since Melville's presentation of gender is itself integral to his consideration of nation and empire. The claim that Dimock makes goes as far back in Melville scholarship as the 1920s, when the Melville revival occurred through claiming Melville as a "democratic" writer devoted to challenging or critiquing stereotypes or limited forms of language or social roles. This claim was promulgated precisely through omitting examination of Melville's presentation of women and racial "others." Scholars such as Chase and even Matthiessen, who wish to maintain this image of Melville, must ignore his various presentations of gender and its implication in race. In The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), Chase suggests that Melville, like the other U.S. authors he examines, only observes and experiences, while the British appropriate and annex foreign territories (4-5). ' Matthiessen, too, argues in American Renaissance (1941) for a U.S. exceptionalism, suggesting that U.S. commerce achieves a more peaceful and humane civilizing process than does British imperialism (655). The democratic vision granted to Melville in these instances can only be upheld by occluding Melville's presentation of the women whose production and reproduction enables male quests, whether Taji's for the pure white maiden in Mardi (1849) or the title character's for transcendent artistic creation in Pierre (1852). Even recent scholarship in queer theory, which more than many other areas of study attends to conceptions of masculinity, has continued to overlook Melville's ambivalent presentation of women. Melville's depiction of women shapes his celebration of "non-normative" masculinity and male-male friendships. Among contemporary scholars, however, neither 64 JNT Robert K. Martin nor Joseph Allen Boone, for instance, examine Melville's presentation of women and femininity. Expanding upon veiled hints and protests by prior Melville scholars, recent critical studies examine Melville's presentation of homoerotic exchanges and his intense relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Where Lewis Mumford had denied in 1929 that there was any reason to read the friendship with Hawthorne as homosexual, two decades later Newton Arvin...