The "Spiritual Lesson" of Melville's "The Apple-Tree Table"

Abstract

MELVILLE S THE APPLE-TREE TABLE, OR ORIGINAL SPIRITUAL MANIFEStations, enjoys a unique place among his works as a topical satire on a current religious movement: the Spiritualist cult of the 1850s. This historical asset has also proved a bane; for the apparent narrowness of its subject has consigned Apple-Tree Table to near oblivion. Yet aside from its literary merits, the story deserves closer study if only because, as Frank Davidson long ago pointed out, it records its author's thoughts on religion at a critical time in his life'-a time when Melville was meditating, and perhaps actually writing, the more comprehensive religious satire generally considered his bleakest and most difficult work: The ConfidenceMan. In fact Melville's treatment of the Spiritualist excitement might provide valuable insight into the sweeping indictment of American religion which he issued the following year. Curiously, however, the two articles on Apple-Tree Table published to date present interpretations of its religious symbolism which entirely disregard the satire on Spiritualism announced in the subtitle Original Spiritual Manifestations. Frank Davidson sees the story as an inconclusive attempt to resolve its author's doubts about his inherited Calvinistic faith. Malcolm 0. Magaw's more recent apocalyptic reading, while illuminating the symbolic structure of Apple-Tree Table, reiterates the opinion that Melville's exploration ends without a formulation of conclusive judgment.2 Reconstructing the historical setting to which Melville was responding with his Original Spiritual Manifestations