Melville's White-Jacket: Sovereignty in the American Polity of Displacement

Abstract

Herman Melville the man was a democrat given to patrician nostalgia for an American aristocracy. Melville the writer entered into a grammar of the American political culture which disclosed the structural origins of these mixed aspirations. White-Jacket (1850), his allegorical documentary fiction chronicling the abuses committed aboard ships of the U.S. Navy, uses the metaphor of the ship of state as a means to uncover the hidden structures of America's complex relationship to the Old World. The novel illustrates, better than any other fiction Melville wrote, how the America of 1850, though independent, was still ensnared in a historical process belonging to European culture. Melville's narrator-protagonist, White-Jacket, becomes the hybrid representative of a nation which was itself a liminalized political space caught between the historical traditions of the Old World and the typological destiny of the New. Beneath the surface of Melville's allegory lie the deep structures of an America expressing itself in discordant languages of self-realization.1 'Evert Duyckinck, among Mellville's early readers, struck closest to the underlying concern of White-Jacket in his review for The Literary World. He saw in the metaphorical thrust of the "world in a man-of-war" an underlying principle of fragmentation. Beyond the separation of the ship's all-male crew from women, Duyckinck perceived in Melville's new novel a "divorce" of greater implication: "The man-of-war is divorced from civilization,—and we will not repeat the stale phrase, from the progress of humanity,—but from humanity itself. How thus divorced, through all the windings and intricacies of the artificial system White-Jacket will show."2 Both Duyckinck's observation and Melville's metaphor of the ship of state are acutely American. For precisely what constitutes the divorce, the break-away from "civilization," and how it occurs in history are factors that inspired Melville to construct a version of the American polis. The Neversink is the political anatomy of a culture which in 1850 retained at its center the paradoxical tension between a historical society of severed ties and a typological destiny of restored human harmony.