Melville's Story Research Articles

"Something within the Silent Black Man Answered No!"; or, Is Bartleby Uncle Tom on Wall Street?

"Something within the Silent Black Man Answered No!"; or, Is Bartleby Uncle Tom on Wall Street? Laura Korobkin (bio) Consider the following description of what happens in a mid-nineteenth-century American literary text: Ordered to perform a task accessory to his primary work, a new, socially isolated worker refuses, though he continues to be "an expert and efficient workman" at his main tasks, at least for a time. Though impoverished and disempowered, the worker is also always calm, self-contained, dignified, and respectful. The work environment is dehumanizing and hierarchical; the master values workers as profit-making tools; years of exhausting, repetitive toil have diminished the workers' humanness. The new worker's quiet, persistent refusal to comply with orders that others customarily obey with unquestioning deference is an unprecedented, destabilizing event that interrupts the smoothly functioning capitalist workplace. This resistance stuns, bewilders, and infuriates the boss, producing repeated confrontations with his surprisingly self-sufficient inferior. Though expecting continued resistance, the boss determines to win the intimate conflict and thereby regain his sense of acknowledged mastery. Significantly, the text's narrator makes explicit from the start that the master does not and will never know what goes on inside the worker's head. Though the refusing worker neither actively [End Page 562] recruits others to any cause nor encourages them to disobey commands, the "strange, silent patient man['s]" pervasive influence gradually permeates the workplace, unsettling the master and his two main assistants, who side with the boss against the resistor. Because he cannot obtain the worker's obedience, the master becomes paradoxically disempowered and the servant correspondingly strengthened, though in a painfully limited way. Internally, the resistor may be unassailable, but physically he deteriorates; and though he could end the conflict at any time by changing his behavior and following orders, the resistor instead passively enables his own decline and, ultimately, his death, which occurs in a captivity to which he is carried "unresisting."1 As readers will recognize (especially given this essay's title), every detail above fits both the interactions between Tom and Simon Legree in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), in which all quoted phrases appear, and between Bartleby and the lawyer-narrator in Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" (1853).2 Of course, this description elides enormous differences: between short story and long novel, between very different narrative structures and genres, between the brutal Legree's Louisiana slave plantation and the apparently benevolent lawyer's Wall Street chambers, and between Tom's explicitly Christian refusal to injure anyone or acknowledge Legree's ownership of his soul and Bartleby's enigmatic, pointedly unexplained deployment of the phrase "I would prefer not to." Yet the similarities detailed above are surely striking. Both texts focus intensely on the unfolding master-servant interaction and feature parallel chiasmic shifts in power and powerlessness between boss and worker. "Nothing so aggravates" both Legree and the lawyer as Tom's and Bartleby's quiet, respectful noncompliance, which both masters defensively interpret as mastery-challenging aggression (WHM, 9:23). Significantly, too, both Tom and Bartleby apparently choose to permit their own deaths. Given the extraordinary impact [End Page 563] and ubiquity of Stowe's novel when "Bartleby" was written, Melville's familiarity and engagement with Stowe would seem inescapable; nevertheless, so far as I am aware, no criticism of Melville or Stowe has considered Melville's story as a possible interrogation and adaptive rewriting of Stowe's depiction of the Tom-Legree relationship.3 Scholars' elision of Stowe's novel as interlocutor and intertext is especially surprising given the critical approaches to Melville's story that might bring it to mind. Though Stowe's Tom is the nineteenth century's most shocking and most commented-on literary Christ figure, the long (though typically ahistorical) critical tradition of reading Bartleby as a version of Christ, an "emasculated" Christ, and even Deleuze's "new Christ or the brother to us all," has never triangulated in relation to Stowe's exactly contemporary Christlike hero.4 And though biographical-cultural readings have figured Melville, embittered by the implosion of his career and reputation after the mixed reception and...

The New Art of Moby-Dick

A sequel to my 1995 book, Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century Art, this essay examines American and international art created in response to the novel from 1995 to 2018. Beginning with the numerous transformations of Moby-Dick—the whole book, single chapters, or letters—into works of art, I then consider recent illustrated editions, including children's books, comic books, and entire volumes. Contemporary artists have responded prolifically to the White Whale as "the ungraspable phantom of life" through a variety of realistic and abstract forms as well as through a diversity of media new to visual renderings of Melville's book. I take up the work of numerous Moby-Dick artists who, in recent decades, have interpreted Melville's story from personal, psychological, political, environmental, and feminist perspectives. In the last section, I examine four contemporary artists—Robert Del Tredici, Aileen Callahan, Mark Milloff, and Matt Kish—who have dedicated much of their artistic careers to interpreting Moby-Dick.

ALA 2018-San Francisco: Bartleby Now

ALA 2018-San FranciscoBartleby Now Wendy Anne Lee, Organizer and Meredith Farmer, Chair Click for larger view View full resolution Meredith Farmer, Wendy Anne Lee, Ralph Savarese, and Jeffrey Hole discussing the text of "Bartleby" during the "Bartleby Now" panel at ALA 2018. May 26, 2018. Photo courtesy of Dawn Coleman. High-spectrum, refusenik, divinity. What do we think about Bartleby now? Philosophers and critics have grappled with Melville's inscrutable figure as the boundary of the human. Emblem but also enigma of an unfolding allegory about capitalist production, Bartleby seems ready to absorb and project nearly every set of modern concerns and anxieties. In recent [End Page 141] years, cognitive and affective approaches to literary studies have informed a return to this iconic text. From Amit Pinchevski's assessment of "Bartleby's Autism" and Sianne Ngai's formulation of a "Bartlebyan aesthetic" of inertia to Giorgio Agamben's findings of a divine subject of "pure, absolute potentiality" and Nancy Ruttenburg's discernment of "the limit case of all character," we see how the subject of Melville's "Story of Wall Street" continues to elicit wide-ranging materialist and metaphysical conjecture. Panelists were invited to assess this critical and, indeed, popular attachment to Bartleby, either by taking up the history of his signification or looking to his ongoing potentiality. Jeffrey Hole takes up the interpretive lens of managerialism, a formal and ideological regime that aligns all interest and expression with market value. Hole reads Melville's story not as a tale of refusal but rather of "managerial deferral," which produces a "thanatopolitics" of the destroyed worker. Wendy Anne Lee takes a different turn to consider the peculiar scenario of "Bartlebyan intimacy" and its ongoing, millennial-friendly appeal. Lee offers context for the story's affective logic by way of an earlier narrative formula of seduction. Finally, Ralph Savarese looks to the current neuroscientific emphasis on gastroenterology to extend his own previously published critical insights on Bartleby's digestive practices. The scrivener's dyspepsia, Savarese argues, prefigures the vital connection between stomach and mind. Thanatopolitics and the Managerial Regime Jeffrey Hole University of the Pacific Although literary critics and theorists have focused extensively on Melville's title character, often attending to Bartleby's repetitive response, "I would prefer not to," this paper turns instead to the figure of the narrator-manager and, consequentially, the emergence of managerialism, a regime of knowledge that brings to bear a form of power to align human and nonhuman life with the nature of the market. "Bartleby" dramatizes the stakes of this managerialism—its disastrous effects on imagination and creation, its propensity to reorganize life around concepts of market and value, its reduction of the human to homo oeconomicus—allowing us to anticipate and recognize the manager as the figure par excellence of our neoliberal present. While Bartleby's "passive resistance" may appear as a form of revolutionary potential, in the end Melville's story casts doubt on this potential, depicting how the manager prevents revolution or resistance from coming to fruition. This is not the story of Bartleby's refusal, in other words, but the story of managerial deferral, a refusal of the refusal. Resistance—passive, potential, or kinetic—has from the opening been re-absorbed, re-framed through the lawyer's "biography," a narratological [End Page 142] and managerial ordering of life and politics, first marked by sympathy but ultimately by death, a thanatopolitics aimed at the dangerous worker. Our Bartleby Problem Wendy Anne Lee New York University As tote bags and outerwear sported by millennials and emblazoned with Bartleby's tagline suggest, Melville's scrivener remains a figure of curious allure. With his opt-out mantra and skinny-chic style, Bartleby's contemporary appeal is undeniable. But what is his particular message about sociality and why does it resonate so visibly today? Attending to the lawyer's specific spatial placement of his clerk, I consider the kind of intimacy suggested by their relation, what the lawyer fantasizes as the scenario in which "privacy and society were conjoined." What does it mean to be isolated "from my sight, though not remove[d] from my voice"? What desires are fulfilled or staged by this...

Melville’s Liminal Bachelor and the Making of Middle-Class Manhood in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine

Melville’s Liminal Bachelor and the Making of Middle-Class Manhood in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine Timothy Helwig (bio) Critical studies of Herman Melville’s short stories of the mid-1850s, the infamous period at which Melville is said to have “gone underground” out of frustration with his reading public’s lack of appreciation for the more experimental writing seen in Mardi and Moby-Dick, tend to draw generalizations between his entries in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Putnam’s Monthly Magazine.1 The common line of analysis holds that Melville stories like “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” and “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” both published in Harper’s, reflect that periodical’s preference for a sentimental style of writing and a capitulation to middle-class values, while his stories like “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” published in Putnam’s, demonstrate the more politically engaged and psychologically complex writing that marks his best literary productions.2 While these latter stories are especially deserving of the robust critical attention they have received in the past thirty years, neglected stories like “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” and “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” when carefully contextualized with other bachelor stories and illustrations appearing in Harper’s, offer a unique opportunity to consider the complex ways Melville’s writing meditates on residual and emergent definitions of manhood of the antebellum period. Through the bachelor figure who narrates each story, Melville challenges key tenets of entrepreneurial manhood, expresses nostalgia for less alienated forms of masculinity associated with America’s agrarian past, and builds an alliance between the bachelor and the working classes that preserves the importance of civic virtue and thereby challenges Harper’s conventional depictions of bachelors as hapless foils to the socially disengaged middle-class married man. During the three decades leading up to the Civil War, the systematic erosion of the craft system of labor and the gradual rise of industrial capitalism had profound effects on what it meant to be a man. Pride in one’s craft and the [End Page 1] exercising of civic virtue, what David Leverenz calls the “artisan paradigm” of masculinity, were challenged by the entrepreneurial spirit of the professional middle-class man.3 Instead of more communal relationships among master artisans, journeymen, and their apprentices, alienated forms of labor and the fear of becoming dominated by other men in a public sphere separated men increasingly from the world of the home and the family and from each other. Instead of lording benevolently over the self-sustaining family farm in rural climes or the artisan’s home in the city, the new middle-class man was supposed to find solace in the rejuvenating power of the private sphere, a refuge from the sordid daily competition for capital and the abstract forms of managerial power in the public sphere. With its promise of retreat from the world’s problems into the private sphere predicated upon the heteronormative institutions of marriage and the family, laissez-faire capitalism offered professional middle-class men a sanctioned alternative to the virtues of civic engagement and community. Yet, as Sean Wilentz and other labor historians have shown, the ideology of liberal capitalism did not go unchallenged during the antebellum period. Artisan republican rhetoric, with its roots in classical republican attacks of the eighteenth century against the tyranny of the British crown, was taken up by the skilled working classes to express their anxieties about the new market economy and persisted at least into the 1850s. Artisans employed republican discourse that called upon citizens to act virtuously to protect the commonwealth and to subordinate private self interest for the public good in order to condemn merchants and industrial capitalists who could set wages and exploit others’ labor for economic gain. Wilentz locates iterations of artisan republican rhetoric in “court records, ceremonial speeches, contemporary prints and drawings, and accounts of parades and festivals” among the working classes in the first half of the nineteenth century.4 In popular expressions of this class-accented conflict over ideal manhood, the bachelor proved an especially effective touchstone, enabling nostalgia for a preindustrial commitment to civic virtue, as well as...

Elizabeth Hardwick: The Mystique of Manhattan

Elizabeth HardwickThe Mystique of Manhattan Stephen Miller (bio) New York, as many observers have said, is a magnet city, attracting immigrants from all over the world. It also has attracted many American writers from the Midwest, the Far West, and the South. Willa Cather, a native of Nebraska, came to New York in 1906 and stayed. Elizabeth Hardwick, a native of Kentucky, came to New York in 1939 and stayed (except for a few years in Boston and Europe). Hardwick's first two novels are not set in New York, but her most famous novel, Sleepless Nights (1979), is set mainly in New York. So are many of her short stories. She was fascinated by New York, which for her meant Manhattan. In 1985 she told an interviewer: "Yes, I'm faithful to New York, one might say. It's ours, our country's, our great metropolis." In her essay "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street," Hardwick uses the word Manhattanism several times. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Manhattanism was coined by the architectural critic Rem Koolhaas in 1978 (five years before Hardwick used it) to signify "a culture or ideology associated with modern-day life in a large city (spec. New York)." Hardwick never clearly defines Manhattanism, but she does say that Manhattan attracts people who want to live alone. She speaks of "the undomesticity of a great city like New York, undomestic in the ways other cities are not." She notes that in Whitman's day many men lived in boardinghouses. "Whitman did a lot of 'boarding round,' as he called it." Many people "lived in a space that is not biography . . . an escape from the hometown and the homestead, an escape from the given." She uses the past tense, but she seems to be referring to the present as well. Manhattan is filled with people who went there to get away from the world in which they grew up. In 1969 Hardwick wrote a vitriolic attack on her hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, yet she remained in close touch with her family there all her life. If Manhattanism means deracination, it also means energy. The city attracts energetic and ambitious people—from stockbrokers to writers, from painters to ballet dancers. (Henry James said Manhattan "bristles.") Melville's story about Bartleby, Hardwick says, has "nothing of the daunting hungry 'Manhattanism' of Whitman." Hardwick quotes two lines from Whitman: "O an intense life, full to repletion and varied! / The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!" Since Bartleby has neither energy nor ambition, [End Page 600] he "is not a true creature of Manhattan." Melville's story, Hardwick says, is "a fable of inanition." Nevertheless Hardwick sees Manhattanism in Bartleby: "There is something of Manhattan in Bartleby and especially in his resistance to amelioration." In the last paragraph of her essay Hardwick says: "There is Manhattanism in the bafflement Bartleby represents to the alive and steady conscience of the lawyer [the narrator of the story] who keeps going on and on in his old democratic, consecrated endurance." Deracination, energy, resistance to amelioration, bafflement—Manhattanism is an elusive notion that Hardwick does not fully clarify. Why did Hardwick want to live in Manhattan? In an interview she gave in 1979, she says: "Even when I was in college [in Kentucky] . . . I'm afraid my aim was . . . to be a New York Jewish intellectual. I say 'Jewish' because of their tradition of rational skepticism; and also a certain deracination appeals to me." She admitted that this goal might sound "ridiculous." Six years later she qualified the remark. "I said that as a joke, but it was more or less true." So Hardwick likes Manhattan because it has so many deracinated residents, many of whom are secular Jewish intellectuals. In an essay on Henry James's Washington Square she speaks of the "fluid, inconstant, nerve-wrung landscape" of New York. But is Manhattan so different from, say, Chicago or San Francisco? Moreover aren't the landscapes of all large cities fluid and inconstant? After marrying Robert Lowell in 1949, Hardwick lived in Boston for several years. In an essay written in the early 1960s she says...

“The Master-Key of Our Theme”: Master Betty and the Politics of Theatricality in Herman Melville's “The Fiddler”

In what is by now among the more famous personal histories in American studies, by 1852 Herman Melville was facing bankruptcy and personal ruin after the financial failures ofMoby-DickandPierre. Under the guidance of the new editor ofPutnam's Magazine, Charles Briggs, Melville turned to writing magazine fiction. Building upon work that seeks to show how Melville in his short stories negotiated the terrain between the riotous world of the popular press and the sanctified realm of high art, this article looks at a frequently neglected work by Melville from 1854, “The Fiddler,” as a response to this personal crisis. I show how Melville's story resurrects a forgotten transatlantic history (the life of the Irish actor Master William Henry West Betty) as a means to explore his own search for an aesthetic that could adequately serve both the demands of the spectacular world of antebellum publishing and his own high literary ambitions.

The B-effect, or: How to do literary criticism with a nuclear power-plant

The B-effect, or: How to do literary criticism with a nuclear power-plant The essay, in the process of making its meta-critical point, reviews the collection Co-memorative essays on Herman Melville's ‘Bartleby the scriverner’ edited by Janusz Semrau (2009). The collection was published almost simultaneously with the new Polish translation of Melville's story, published as a companion volume with Gilles Deleuze's and Giorgio Agamben's pertinent essays (Melville 2009). There follows a wave of interest among Polish critics, which amounts to a new, local Bartleby industry (Czaplińki 2009; Jankowicz 2009; Kapela 2010). This review is inspired by one important example, a lecture delivered on March 24th, at the Department of Polish Studies of Poznań's Adam Mickiewicz University, in which one of the preeminent Polish literary critics presented the ‘melancholic vampire’, the predatory writer, the walking death that lingers, does not want to go, stalks, and sucks out the life of his friends and admirers. Although the speech was primarily about Arthur Miller, Bartleby loomed (stalked) behind, until he surfaced, with a reference to the new Polish translation.

Remodeling the Nation: The Architecture of American Identity, 1776–1858 (review)

Remodeling the Nation: Architecture of American Identity, 1776-1858. By Duncan Faherty. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2007. Pp. 246. Cloth, $50.00.)Reviewed by Robert St. GeorgeRemodeling the Nation begins with an anecdote long familiar to historians of rhetoric in the years leading up to the Civil War. Standing somewhat awkwardly before crowd at the Illinois State House in Springfield in 1858, Lincoln reaches into remembered gospel texts and pulled out the phrase a house divided against itself cannot stand. In Faherty's hands, these words encapsulate the metaphor that drives this study - that the nation is conceived as house. Or, as he has it, I trace the complex evolution of this recursive figuration of the domestic houses as the wellspring of identity (5). In five chapters, he delivers precisely such figuration as he moves chronologically from Virginia in the 1770s to Pennsylvania in the 1790s, to early nineteenthcentury New York, and finally, to rumination on Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. final pages of the text conclude with one subtle meditation on Melville's I and My Chimney of 1856.Indeed, Faherty's method for determining what each putative chapter will include merits comment. For just as final fifth chapter brings readings of Poe's The Light-House (1849) into contact with Hawthorne's Sights from Steeple (1831) and Scarlet Letter (1850), as well as the Melville story, so too do other chapters combine elements both familiar and unfamiliar into pastiches that can be at once arresting and entertaining. Take, for instance, remarkable second chapter, that carries the title 'No Longer Assigned Its Ancient Use': Biloquial Architecture and the Problems of Remodeling. It moves something like this: Nominally, we hear first of the difficulties and accomplishments of William Bartram, whose father John was luminary in Philadelphia learned society. By contrast, young William had difficulty finding autonomous voice. After unsuccessfully trying hand at running plantation father had purchased for him in Florida, and then mooching again off father's largesse back in Philadelphia, William travels in the 1770s in the South, among the English, the Creeks, and the Choctaws. He finally penned record of travels that found ruin and desolation wherever he turned. And as Faherty carefully notes, he was writing this litany of loss in Philadelphia in 1791, the city that denned the constitutional ethos of the new nation. As he asserts, the political implications of Bartram's Travels derives from his taxonomic collection of failed settlement patterns, the collective weight of which testifies to the uncertainties facing the possibilities for and stability (40). He now moves into prolonged discussion of two of Charles Brockden Brown's well-known novels, Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1800), the readings of which owe debt to the work of, among others, Christopher Looby, but attain level of Brownian complexity which cannot effectively be summarized here. final section of this chapter takes its cue from the national expansion mandate, and carries the reader along with Lewis and Clark to their construction of Fort Clatsop in November 1805; the image of the fort's plan (72, Figure 4) taken down by Clark on the cover of field book suggests the importance of even minimalist understandings of domestic space to the business of holding steady those slipping signifiers of the quest for national stability. Each chapter contains set of texts, usually (but not always, since recursion appears) arranged chronologically.Faherty is often at pains to bring other scholars into discussion, so much so that work at times risks seeming derivative. first chapter seems case in point. In order to ground the idea that building house can be (and was) continuous through metaphor as building nation, he takes us to Jefferson's small mountaintop outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, and to the plantation that Washington inherited from sisterin-law in the late 1750s. …

Toward a Feminist Reading of Herman Melville's Stories About the Material Conditions of Writing

Toward a Feminist Reading of Herman Melville's Stories About the Material Conditions of Writing

Melville's "Factory Girls": Feminizing the Future

Of a sudden, Factories burst upon him, or their windows did,--hundreds of bright windows, illuminated every night in honor of Toil,--and which neither darkness of night, nor wilderness of storm, could obscure, and which never bent or blinked before rage and violence around. Factories, and life,--how it glowed at moment to his eye! And even his own ideal notions thereof were more than transfigured before him, and he envied girls, some of whom he knew, who, through troubled winter night, were tending their looms as in warmth, and quietness of a summer-day. --Sylvester Judd, Richard Edney and Governor's Family (1850) Why is it, sir, narrator of Melville's 1855 Harper' Monthly piece The Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids asks owner of paper mill he is touring, that in most factories, female operatives, of whatever age, are indiscriminately called girls, never women? (1) proprietor's answer, operatives are unmarried, all maids, has informed a tradition of critical commentary reads Melville's story in terms of desexualizing effects of industrial labor. Marvin Fisher, for example, finds the world of paper is antithesis of sex, and Michael Rogin glosses story's dominant image as white-faced humans reduced to sterility. (2) According to such views, desexing of adult women into factory represents Melville's critique of dehumanizing power of industrial modernization and his concern that, as Fisher puts it, machine production is not reconcilable with human production. images of female sterility in The Tartarus of Maids would, then, seem to contrast unfavorably with riotous fecundity of men represented in its companion piece, The Paradise of Bachelors. Sex appears to stand for a kind of fertile personhood, ability to produce oneself in health and beauty through acts of free will, as Fisher would have it. (3) In this dichotomous scheme, bachelors possess such power, while factory do not. But loss or rejection of a particular form of sexuality--and, by implication, humanity--need not imply loss of all. What Fisher and Rogin perceive as desexing may, in fact, be read as resexing--the reconfiguration of sexuality, and hence personhood, into forms consonant with modern social, economic, and technological environment represented by conditions of labor and production in factory. Tartarus' many images of fertility--from tour guide named Cupid to menstrual Blood River runs through mill--undermine notion of a clean dichotomy between sexless maids and over-sexed bachelors, and point instead toward a more uncertain and fluid relationship between different versions of sexuality. (4) And if sex really does stand, synecdochically, for personhood, then this uncertainty about sex must imply a deeper ambiguity about just what sort of persons these mill workers might be. factory represent experimental sketches of modern personhood, efforts to imagine what a human being might look like if established notions of health and beauty, or even free will, were to be abandoned or lose their currency. As such, they embody pattern of contradiction Leo Marx identifies in Melville's response to modernization. (5) If, as Marx argues, Americans at midcentury felt conscious of two kingdoms of force, technology and nature, then Melville's girls incorporate both America's celebration of technological progress and its deeply felt attachment to an anti-technological pastoral ideal into their own inscrutable bodies. story's full interest as an exploration of America's conflicted attitude toward modern forms of production has largely been missed in existing scholarship because of an unacknowledged assumption journalistic and other nonfictional accounts of labor constitute its only possible literary context. …

Staging Revolution in Melville'sBenito Cereno:Babo, Figaro, and the “Play of the Barber”

In 1928, Harold H. Scudder first demonstrated that Herman Melville's storyBenito Cerenohad been closely based on chapter 18 of Amasa Delano'sNarrative of Voyage and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres(1817). On the basis of the two texts' similarities, Scudder argued that Melville's story was mere reworking of Delano's account. Scudder's argument clearly overlooked Melville's ability to reframe the story in an ironic narration or to invest the details of Delano's plot with new meaning; nevertheless, readers of Delano's narrative might be amazed at how closely Melville's story follows that account. In addition to the basic sequence of events, some of the most artful and significant details ofBenito Cerenoseem to have taken their cues from the original story: Delano's offense at Cereno's incivility, his frustration that the valet stays constantly by Cereno's side, and his surprise that the Africans' unruly conduct is justified as the “sport of boys” are some of the materials Melville might well have found in the 1817 recollections.

Conservative Architecture: Hawthorne in Melville's "I and My Chimney"

In Pierre (1852) advises his semi-autobiographical writer/protagonist to thoroughly study architecture. From 18501863 lived with one dominating architectural presence-the chimney at Arrowhead. Little wonder, then, that realities of in and My Chimney (1856) provoke speculations concerning identity, representation, and meaning in Melville's story.' Heavy allusions to three of Hawthorne's sketches of domestic architecture and life--The Old Manse, Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure, and Fire Worship-suggest that meant to endorse Hawthorne's special brand of conservatism and to maintain a role as Hawthorne's cultural ally.2 In opposition to intrusive, exploitative, reformist, feminist, and Transcendentalist tendencies that both writers associate with modern times, writers privilege relics of material culture that represent and preserve a patrician and patriarchal model of individual, familial, and cultural identity. As we shall see, Melville's tale both enshrines Hawthorne as literary mentor and advocates a rhetoric of evasion and resistance against forces of cultural innovation that threaten self and symbolic extensions of self. In 1970 Edward Rosenberry was first to highlight a connection between Melville's and My Chimney and Hawthorne's work. In Melville and His Mosses, an article ofjust four pages, Rosenberry parallels Melville's conclusory words (for it is resolved between me and my chimney, that I and my chimney will never surrender) with Hawthorne's steadfast defense of the traditional rallying point of hearths near end of Fire Worship and The Old Manse (377).' While all studies pursuing Hawthorne/Melville relationship in and My Chimney are indebted to Rosenberry, only two of four pages of article are devoted to Melville's tale; article barely suggests extent and nature of Melville's preoccupation with Hawthorne, a preoccupation at very heart of Melville's role as creative writer and cultural critic during mid-1850s. More specifically, pursuing additional connections is worthwhile for two reasons. First, Melville's story clarifies what Richard Brodhead identifies-in Hawthorne's language-as a crucial

"Benito Cereno" and the Failure of Law

SUSAN WEINER "Benito Cereño" and the Failure of Law Do the rights of nature cease to be such, when a negro is to enjoy them?—Or does patriotism in the heart of an African, rankle into treason .' Letter on Slavery, by a Negro, 1 7891 Where liberty draws not the blood out of slavery, there slavery draws the blood out of liberty. Walt Whitman, quoted by Herbert Aptheker2 The decade of the 1850S, in which Melville's short stories were composed and published, was turbulent. It generated both expressions of Southern panic over the possibility of slave revolts and numerous abolitionist tracts calling for the immediate overthrow of slavery. It was the period during which both the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and the Dred Scott decision (1857) were written. The pre-Civil War decade also encompassed the Kansas-Nebraska debates, an economic depression in 1854-1856, and extraordinary slave unrest. Controversy over the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 continued to increase, beginning with the return of Thomas Sims from Massachusetts to slavery in 1851 and intensifying with the case of Anthony Burns in 1854. 5 This latter event prompted Thoreau to write: "I wish my countrymen to consider, that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it."4 Arizona Quarterly Volume 47 Number 2, Summer 1991 Copyright © 1991 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004- 1 6 10 Susan Weiner A segment of Melville's story "Benito Cereño" ran concurrently in the fall of 1855 with a review of Frederick Douglass's Autobiography in Putnam's, which was edited by Frederick Law Olmsted, an anti-slavery advocate. Yet contemporary reviewers of The Piazza Tales (1856) in which "Benito Cereño" was included, overlooked the connections between Melville's story of a slave rebellion at sea and controversial events of the time. Instead they attributed any disturbing qualities generated by the story to its Poe-like effects and its "thrilling weird-like narrative, which read at midnight, gives an uncomfortable feeling to a powerful imagination. . . ."5 Failing to see any relationship between the tensions contained within the story and the tensions within a republic that legally protected slavery, these early reviewers initiated a line of criticism that insulated the text of "Benito Cereño" from the context out of which it emerged. Rather than being dissociated from its social and political context, Melville's story is intricately connected to it, deriving both its content and its narrative form, as well as its unresolved contradictions, from its cultural background. Instead of avoiding the issue of slavery, the story confronts and explores slavery's moral and political dimensions in an attempt to disclose the "how" rather than the "why" of its persistence. Melville's concern with the problem of slavery represents a concern with fundamental flaws within a democratic society. The existence of slavery within American democracy highlighted several of the most glaring discrepancies between the principles and the facts of the founding of the nation. Did the laws of the nation tend towards the realization of a proposed but as yet unrealized ideal, or did these laws actually militate against the hypothetical ideal by upholding the status quo? Did slavery, by its stark negation of freedom, thereby reveal inadequacies in the ideal of freedom itself? How could a society which of necessity must be grounded in law permit the violation of law for a greater good? Could the concept of freedom embody the right to rebellion and if not, what was the basis for the United States itself? Ultimately, in times of crisis, when the most passionate instincts and interests of human beings collided, why did the law fail to move men towards justice rather than violence? What was it about the nature of the legal system that separated the spirit from the letter of the law and made of justice and law two different things? From the period of its first publication, "Benito Cereño" has always "Benito Cereño" been a problematical text to its critical readers. Interpretations of its content as...

‘Twisted relations’: Method and meaning in Britten's Billy Budd

In Herman Melville's story, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), the potentially mutinous reaction of the Bellipotent's crew to Billy's execution is quelled by a call to order:For suddenly the drum beat to quarters, which familiar sound happening at least twice every day, had upon the present occasion a signal peremptoriness in it. True martial discipline long continued superinduces in average man a sort of impulse whose operation at the official word of command much resembles in its promptitude the effect of an instinct.

Judging the Judge:Billy Buddand “Proof to All Sophistries”

In The Failure of Word, Richard Weisberg addressed most controversial question in critical history of Melville's Billy Budd: How should we judge Captain Vere's decision hang Handsome Sailor?1 Weisberg develops his answer further in his paper for this symposium, Accepting Inside Narrator's Challenge: Billy Budd and 'Legalistic' Reader. In both book and paper, Weisberg quotes what he calls the central for understanding Billy Budd. It reads in part: Such events [as Great Mutiny] cannot be ignored, but there is a way of historically treating them.2 Weisberg claims that in this passage narrator hopes to educate us on theories of and he goes on use one such theory as basis for his re-interpretation of Melville's story. In following response Professor Weisberg's paper, I address his two main points in using this theory of communication: first, I discuss theory as part of his specific reading of Vere's actions; and then I briefly examine theory as part of a foundation alist project for grounding literary and legal interpretation in general. i By considerate communication, Weisberg thinks that Melville means communication characterized by covertness and deception. For Melville, this covertness is sometimes necessary, as when he suggests that certain truths can be told unwilling readers only covertly, and by snatches.3 But in Billy Budd, such covertness is most often unnecessary and reprehensible, as in Clag gart's dealings with Billy. Weisberg accuses Vere of this negative form of communication and argues that Melville wants us see through Vere's distortions and lies in condemning Billy in court scene. He goes on show in great detail how Vere egregiously mis reads military law, and he claims Vere does this intentionally in order justify7 hanging Billy. Weisberg argues further that there is a clear motive for Vere's unjust and illegal act: by executing Billy Budd, a

Melville's "Bartleby": Over the Republic, a Ciceronian Shadow

The time was coming when neither the ped- ants nor the people would really understand Cicero.... Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean I. INTRODUCTION The lawyer-narrator of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" remarked, of his eponymous subject, that "nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources." Many readers prefer to view the story itself as the adequate source: the narrator's leisurely account would appear to speak for itself, and the mixture of wry and pathos would call for no sophisticated interpretation. Literary critics, however, especially during the 1960's, ambitiously interpreted Melville's story. Some of this attention was inspired by the vogue for "urban" fiction, while others found in the story modish elements of alienation, or integration. And the commentary may be one upon which we can now selectively build.

Grace Church and Melville's Story of "The Two Temples"

Grace Church and Melville's Story of "The Two Temples"

Grace Church and Melville's Story of "The Two Temples"

Grace Church and Melville's Story of "The Two Temples"

Bartleby the Scrivener: A Parable of Pessimism

IN OCTOBER 1853 a troubled Matthew Arnold explained why he had chosen to drop Empedocles on Etna from his new collection of poems. Certain situations, Arnold suggested, are intrinsically devoid of the power to provide poetical enjoyment: those in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous. 1 And so, Empedocles, having chosen to leap into the crater of Etna in a fit of weltschmerz, was banished by the stern Victorian conscience of his creator. But the romantic pessimism which is as much a part of nineteenth-century literature as the optimistic faith in progress was not to be exorcised so easily, either from Arnold's poetry or from the work of his contemporaries. Shortly after Arnold wrote this condemnation of the literature of futility, Bartleby the Scrivener appeared in two installments in Putnam's Monthly Magazine (November-December, 1853). Through one of the ironic coincidences of literary history, Melville's story exemplifies every one of the gloomy traits which Ar-

A Note on Melville's Redburn

D R. Charles R. Anderson's compilation of evidence' has made it possible to check many of the apparently autobiographical passages in Typee, Omoo, Mardi, White Jacket and Moby Dick against established facts and other testimony. Unfortunately, no such discoveries have been made, or are likely to be made, by which we can check Melville's story of his first voyage as given in Redburn. Some of the few passages in the novel which can be checked are those referring to the books Melville read on the voyage of the Highlander. Melville's story of trying to read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations has the smack of truth.2 On the page preceding his account of that unsuccessful effort, however, there are two books mentioned which have not been identified, so far as I know. The passage reads: