Melville and The Torrid Zone

Abstract

In this essay, I explore Melville's "The Encantadas" as an extended engagement with the Torrid Zone, nineteenth-century geography's inheritance from an ancient geographic concept. While the nineteenth-century Spanish American contexts of the sketches have been carefully elaborated, I attend here to the many epigraphs Melville takes from Edmund Spenser's Fairie Queene (1590)—enlisted to signal the historical moment of English belatedness in the hemisphere—while also examining the stunning retort to the Western category of the Torrid Zone that El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega issued in his Comentarios Reales de los Incas ["Royal Commentaries"] (1609). Like Garcilaso, I argue, Melville glosses the unstable category of the human, and in doing so suggests the rootedness of this concept in the history of New World slavery and colonialism—to shadow forth, paradoxically, the human suffering caused by anthropocentrism. Ultimately, Melville's Torrid Zone offers a space of philosophical rupture and a vantage point for meditation on the West: its enduring problem of evil, its invention of the human, and its perpetual creation of theodicies that justify the world's racial and geographical apportionment of suffering.