Melville's Geography of Gender

Abstract

Perhaps more than any other writer, Herman Melville has been perceived as the American master of male bonding narratives and sentimental renderings of life among men. But while his work often features a male couple or fraternity, Melville's sense of the bond cannot be read as simple affirmation, especially his exploration of 1855, The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids. Here, a paradigmatic rendering of the ideological structures of gender, class, and race underlying the male bond, Melville is far more skeptical than his earlier works where, for instance, Ishmael and Queequeg sleep in our hearts' honeymoon ... a cosy, loving pair (Moby-Dick 54). In its structure and theme, this two-sided tale demonstrates a broader pattern of representation American culture which the mythology of the male bond reiterates America's cultural rhetoric ofraceless, classless possibility (Baker 65). Melville's critique of the ideological structures fashioning the fraternity occupies an important moment nineteenth-century American cultural production, foregrounding as it does the tensions within a social order fond of portraying itself as a standard of democracy for the world. This standard is contingent, as the classic representational scene of the male bond affirms, on diffusing cultural hierarchies of difference among men-a diffusion often achieved by casting the bond seemingly uncivilized realms where the oppressive systems of culture can be suspended. For this reason, the bond is frequently envisioned as an example of cultural innocence, a life beyond the reaches of civilization-on ships, forests, on deserted islands, across long, empty prairies. But no matter how far the fraternity goes, it cannot escape, because it depends ideologically upon the hierarchy within all patriarchal relations, sexual difference. As the most stable feature of the male bond, gender-either the image of woman or the evocation of the feminine space of otherness-gives the bond its cultural power, providing a seemingly natural, essential difference against which the masculine can define itself. Diffusing the bond's internal