Sea Narratives Research Articles

Book Review: The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives

Book Review: The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives

Women and Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives and American Identity

Women and Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives and American Identity

Review: Women and Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives and American Identity, by Robin Miskolcze and The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives, by Hester Blum

Review: <i>Women and Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives and American Identity</i>, by Robin Miskolcze and <i>The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives</i>, by Hester Blum

The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives. By Hester Blum. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. ix, 271. $59.95 cloth; $22.95 paper.)

<i>The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives</i>. By Hester Blum. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. ix, 271. $59.95 cloth; $22.95 paper.)

:Women and Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives and American Identity

:Women and Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives and American Identity

&lt;i&gt;Women &amp;amp; Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives &amp;amp; American Identity&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Women & Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives & American Identity Patrick Gleason Women & Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives & American Identity. By Robin Miskolcze. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. xxii + 220 pp. $45.00. In the ambitious book Women & Children First, Robin Miskolcze marks an important intervention in the current revaluation of maritime studies by arguing that images of women at sea were intertwined with a national crisis in masculinity and political identity in nineteenth-century America. Drawing on the work of Atlantic studies scholars such as W. Jeffrey Bolster, Donald P. Wharton, and Paul Gilroy, Miskolcze reveals how national dramas were often played out on the seas, particularly through narratives involving women and maritime disaster. Her central argument revolves around anxieties over the capitalist drive toward individualism in the latter eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, particularly as ideas defining manhood through duty to community and family gave way to the nineteenth-century cult of the self-made man. Shipwreck narratives involving women made use of the selfless behavior of men in saving women and children as a means to measure the moral scope of national manhood, providing a justification for American exceptionalism. These narratives, Miskolcze argues, were highly malleable. They provided both didactic materials for religious leaders to enforce Christian ideals of divine punishment and salvation and counterbalances to the morally destabilizing self-made man. They also allowed for white men of virtually any economic class to display valor and selfless behavior. Miskolcze singles out the international humiliation that the United States faced after the sinking of the USS Arctic, in which panicked officers and sailors saved themselves but left 314 of the 400 passengers to perish, including all of the women and children. This disgrace, Miskolcze argues, helped to codify the emerging maritime adage of "women and children first" (xi). Following the introduction, Miskolcze continues with chapters on Middle Passage narratives, Englishwomen and US shipwreck narratives, and the figure of the cross-dressed female sailor in antebellum US literature. The section on the Middle Passage contains some of the author's strongest claims, highlighted by an original and important analysis of its symbolic role in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The Middle Passage, [End Page 164] Miskolcze claims, provided Jacobs with the central metaphor of her enslavement: her hiding in the small attic space in her grandmother's shed as her means of escape. Even though Jacobs was not taken across the Atlantic herself, Miskolcze reads her description of the confining space as drawing on the experiences of slaves in the holds of ships, what she terms "a reshaping of the cultural memory of the Middle Passage" (77). Reading Jacobs's reference to Robinson Crusoe as an attempt to shift from slave ship to shipwreck narrative, Miskolcze highlights Jacobs's refashioning of herself from object to subject as she associates herself with the reasoning narrator and dynamic survivor of Daniel Defoe's tale of shipwreck (78–79). Analyzing the references to maritime travel and peril as structuring Nancy Prince's writing, Miskolcze here also persuasively demonstrates how African American women in the nineteenth century made use of the cultural memory of the Middle Passage in diverse and productive ways (74–77). The remainder of the book is concerned with English and American women at sea, both in the highly popular early-nineteenth-century Barbary captivity narratives and as cross-dressing sailors in works such as Fanny Campbell, The Female Marine, and James Fenimore Cooper's maritime novels. In these chapters, Miskolcze argues that shipwreck narratives and maritime novels "[use] the sea as a site for acting out the social concerns of the dominant social imaginary" (101). These concerns took the form of challenges to US national identity in the wake of the War of 1812, as with the publication of highly popular accounts of British femininity at risk on the seas and through Cooper's naval trilogy, in which anxieties of westward expansion for a new generation of American men are represented through the figure of the cross-dressed sailor. Such texts intriguingly move east into the Atlantic to explore the West in imaginative fashion, substituting the open sea for...

The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives; Women and Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives and American Identity; “Whole Oceans Away”: Melville and the Pacific

Book Review| December 01 2008 The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives; Women and Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives and American Identity; “Whole Oceans Away”: Melville and the Pacific Hugh Egan Hugh Egan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2008) 80 (4): 836–838. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2008-042 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Hugh Egan; The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives; Women and Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives and American Identity; “Whole Oceans Away”: Melville and the Pacific. American Literature 1 December 2008; 80 (4): 836–838. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2008-042 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2008 by Duke University Press2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Women &amp; children first: nineteenth-century sea narratives &amp; American identity

Women &amp; children first: nineteenth-century sea narratives &amp; American identity

:The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives

:The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives

Women &amp; Children First: Nineteenth‐Century Sea Narratives &amp; American Identity by Robin Miskolcze

Women & Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives & American Identity Robin Miskolcze. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Everyone knows that when a ship is sinking, women and children get the first seats in lifeboats; then men may take what's left. And the last one to leave is the captain. But what everyone knows is a relatively recent convention, says Robin Mickolcze. In 1854 the US Arctic took four hours to sink after having collided in the fog with a French steamer. Of those who boarded lifeboats, 70% were crew and only 30% were passengers. Not a single woman or child was saved. News of the disaster was bad enough, but accounts of the selfishness of the men were even worse for a nation that prided itself on being a city on a hill, a Christian model for the rest of the world to followwhat Alexis de Tocqueville had termed American exceptionalism. Miskolcze says this event shook America to its very core: the nation had failed to live up to its own espoused ideals. Three years later the Central America - carrying men, women, children, and gold-was hit by a hurricane on its way back from California. Three-quarters of those on board perished, a quarter of a million dollars in gold was lost, but under the direction of Captain Herndon all thirty women and twenty-six children were saved. This tragedy, horrific though it was, vindicated America's belief in itself. Men had sacrificed their own interests - wealth and life itself-to protect women and children. The nation's outpouring of sympathy was immediate and overwhelming. Newspaper readers subscribed to a fund for the widow of Captain Herndon -as water engulfed the ship, he was last seen on the bridge calmly smoking a cigar-and a monument to his memory was erected on the grounds of the US Naval Academy. Miskolcze reads antebellum sea narratives-factual and fictional -as coded cultural parables: they portray women as models of Christian and American ideals. What happens to women tests and explores anxieties about national identity. Her first two chapters take a chronological look a sea deliverance stories. Early Puritan accounts manipulated anecdotal details so that survival could be seen as evidence of the providential hand of God's protecting his chosen people: those coming to his New World. At the end of the eighteenth century, accounts showed that shipwreck survival depended not only on God's intervention but also on man's ingenuity. And by the nineteenth century, America was in fascinated by the exquisite sentiment (with an undeniable element of titillation) evoked by accounts of women in danger at sea. The code that demanded saving women served as a moral lesson from pulpit and editorial page. Miskolcze's final three chapters explore special cases. …

A Camera on the Banks: Frederick William Wallace and the Fishermen of Nova Scotia (review)

Reviewed by: A Camera on the Banks: Frederick William Wallace and the Fishermen of Nova Scotia Carol Payne M. Brook Taylor . A Camera on the Banks: Frederick William Wallace and the Fishermen of Nova Scotia. Goose Lane. 147, $24.95 In mid-December 1912, the decrepit schooner Effie M. Morrissey hit rough waters en route to the fishing banks out of Portland, Maine. Frederick William Wallace, a Montreal-based writer and novice seaman aboard ship, thrilled to that 'inspiring sight': 'We could feel the vessel trembling throughout her hard-driven hull. And when she topped a big comber, we hung like bats to the jack-stay and caught our breaths as she swooped down into the sea with the suds boiling up and through the hawse pipes.' Although I read this passage from M. Brook Taylor's engaging A Camera on the Banks while sitting in sheltered safety by the still waters of an Ontario lake, I could all but feel the North Atlantic's unforgiving gusts as I clung for dear life to my beach chair and SPF 30. A Camera on the Banks is a popular social history of the Canadian maritime fishery during the waning days of unassisted sail. Told in image and text, it often reads like the boys' seafaring adventure stories that made Frederick William Wallace, the figure at the core of Taylor's narrative, famous almost a century ago. Taylor, a historian at Mt Allison University, eulogizes the fleet of fishing schooners based in Digby, Nova Scotia, on the shore of the Annapolis Basin during the 1910s. Taylor provides rich historic detail about these majestic vessels and the 'masculine world of work' aboard: schooner design, financing, the intricacies of navigation, the workings of a two-man dory, even the seamen's daily menu. But the early years of the twentieth century were the last for unassisted sail. Even as the [End Page 334] Effie M. Morrissey fought the waves and earned an impressive $1,500 for its catch in late 1912, steamships were the future of the fishery; sail was already the stuff of romantic legend. It was the romance of sail that captivated Frederick William Wallace, through whose words and photographs we see the Digby fleet. Wallace, the son of a much-storied maritime captain, longed for the sea, but parental trepidation and frail health confined him to the land-locked existence of a writer. With an invitation to report on the 1911 Digby regatta for Canadian Century magazine, that changed. Wallace talked his way on board the Dorothy M. Smart, a Digby schooner, for a three-week fishing trip to the banks and followed this with six more voyages on Digby fishing schooners over the next five years. On each he carried notepad and camera to record his thoughts and make illustrations for future publications. Wallace's experiences in the 1910s fuelled a stream of sea narratives, including the non-fiction Wooden Ships and Iron Men (1924) as well as the popular novels Blue Water: A Tale of the Deep Sea Fishermen (1914) and Captain Salvation (1925). As its title suggests, A Camera on the Banks features Wallace's photographs prominently. Portraits of the weathered seamen, dramatic perspectival views of the great schooners, and celebratory documents of their catch fill the pages. In writing the book and organizing an accompanying exhibition at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, Taylor was initially 'inspired by an academic question: what would a historical narrative look like if one began with photographs rather than documents, put images rather than words at the centre of the tale?' Yet, as happens all too often in historical writing, discussion of Wallace's photographic technique, the visual language of his images and their subsequent use are underdeveloped here. Instead, the images are made to stand as flat factual documents of a passing practice rather than enunciations from a distinct perspective. This aside, A Camera on the Banks is a rollicking account of the last days of unassisted sail in the east coast fishery that could sweep even the most hopeless landlubber up in the romance of sea and sail. Carol Payne School for Studies in Art, Carleton University Copyright © 2008...

Pirated Tars, Piratical Texts: Barbary Captivity and American Sea Narratives

Pirated Tars, Piratical Texts: Barbary Captivity and American Sea Narratives

DE UITTOCHT UIT EGYPTE: ‘VERDRIJVING’ EN ‘VLUCHT’?

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Summary Many scholars assume that the Old Testament texts contain different conceptions of the exodus out of Egypt. Especially M. Noth and R. de Vaux hold the opinion that there are at least two apparent presentations of the exodus story: the ‘exodus-flight’ and the ‘exodus-expulsion’. The idea that the Israelites have fled under the command of Moses, is based on the brief statement wygd lmlk m⋅rym ky brḥ h'm in Ex 14,5. The point is, however, that the flight motif occurs only here. I attempt to prove that this element does not reflect an (independent) tradition about the exodus. The introduction of the brḥ of the Israelites is in the first place determined by the context of the Sea Narrative (Ex 13, 17–14, 31), where it is said that the people of Israel are pursued by the Egyptians. This means that the use of the flight motif in Ex 14,5 depends on the description of this pursuit, even though it functions perfectly within the broader context of the narratives which deal with the conflict between Pharaoh and Israel (Ex 1–14). The comparison of the structure and the vocabulary of Ex 14,5–10 with those of Gn 31,22–25 is very helpful for that.

Melville's Pardonable Sin

ary history. Although some doubt remains about the intensity of their relationship subsequent to the publication of MobyDick (1851), their friendship was at its height when they were neighbors in Berkshire, the most western county of Massachusetts. From May, 185o, until November, 1851, Hawthorne and his family lived in a farmhouse on the Tappan estate, about two miles west of the village of Lenox. In the summer of 1850 Melville and his wife were boarders in Pittsfield, six miles away. That fall, Melville purchased a farm in Pittsfield, where he lived for the next thirteen years. When Hawthorne and Melville finally met at the now-famous party in the Berkshires on August 5, 1850, they were both highly regarded by the literary world. In addition to short stories and sketches, many of which were collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1842) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), Hawthorne had recently published The Scarlet Letter (1850) and was then writing The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Before he moved away fifteen months later, he had also written A Wonder-Book (1852) and parts of The Blithedale Romance (1852). Melville, though fifteen years younger, was already the author of five novels: Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), Mardi (1849), Redburn (1849), and White-Jacket (1850). More important, however, is the fact that Melville at the time of his meeting with Hawthorne was writing what would ultimately become his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. It has been generally concluded that until the time of his meeting with Hawthorne and his fiction, Melville was in the process of making Moby-Dick another sea narrative in which he would finally make use of his knowledge of the whaling industry, and that Melville's relationship with Hawthorne re-

Circumscription of Space and the Form of Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym

Circumscription of space is a fundamental and necessary feature of Poe's fictional universe of negative possibility. That his characters are almost always narrowly circumscribed suggests their severely limited prospects and interests. Diminished space also represents withdrawal into self, and Poe's centers of diminished space often contain symbols of that destructive core of the inner self which continually threatens the moral and rational being of the Poe protagonist. In undertaking The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe was committing himself uncharacteristically not only to the representation of movement in space but also to an objective mode of development, outward and ongoing testing and discovery of self in the infinite possibilities of space. The curious form of Arthur Gordon Pym is the result not so much of careless incompetence (as recent scholarship has suggested) as of a fundamental conflict between psychological inclination and the formal requirements of an unfamiliar genre. But this work is of special interest, since Arthur Gordon Pym is a first effort in an important line of experimentation in American fiction, the transformation of an undistinguished form, the sea narrative, into a vehicle of major literature.

Vandenberg by Oliver Lange

268 Western American Literature are in fact these quotations and its wealth of illustrations reproduced from contemporary engravings. One wonders whether Mr. Dodge is really more interested in the ethnological than the geographical aspects of his subject. Perhaps at this point some statement is in order regarding the act of scholarly imperialism implied in annexing Mr. Dodge’s subject, the entire Pacific Ocean, to the dominions of Western American Literature. It is true that nineteenth-century Americans regarded the exploration and colonization of the Pacific as an extension of the movement on land from East to West. It is also true that the Pacific was an integral component of the literary visions created by some of our great writers—Melville, Twain, Whitman, and Adams, for example. Thus, while few would dispute that America must stop some­ where, “the Pacific frontier” carries strong historical credentials for legitimate study as a setting wherein certain phases of American culture made their appearance. Mr. Dodge, whose approach is international, is of course not concerned with this issue. Interestingly, however, even though he lists none of the above American writers in his thorough index, he professes to be keenly interested in the “literature” of the Pacific— and as Director of the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, he undoubtedly is. “It has been my joy,” he writes in his introduction, “as well as my professional obligation over the years, to read the published voyages [italics mine] relating to the Pacific Ocean.” The obvious disparity between his notion of the “literature” of the Pacific and the orthodox critical one that would include Melville et al. raises a basic question about the present scope of literary study. If we agree that narratives of land travel constitute a dominant literary form in Western American literature of the nineteenth century, should we not go one step further and examine American narratives of Pacific sea travel also? Not in­ frequently the descriptive talents of the authors quoted by Mr. Dodge are impressive enough to warrant the surmise that their works merit study not only as “sources” (Wilkes’ Narrative as a source of Cooper’s The Sea Lions, for example) but as literary achievements in themselves. The reader of Beyond the Capes, sensitive to Mr. Dodge’s affection for early sea narratives and frus­ trated by his failure to do them justice, may be inclined to find out whether this is so. W a y n e R . K im e, New College, University of Toronto Vandenberg. By Oliver Lange. (New York: Stein and Day, 1971. 333 pages S6.95.) This is a "political” novel, this is an adventure novel (set in the not distant future) —and sometimes they come together, although most of the time they do not and what one has is a pretty good “western,” (with the “Indians” as the good guys) which gets interrupted by an essay. It’s certainly not Malraux , etc., etc. It’s not Walter Van Tilburg Clark. In short, it’s not a work of art; no one will ever re-read it, coming back, in delight, to discover how it is structured, how its words are articulated, how the political ideas are Reviews 269 realized in the work; if it is to be talked about, it is, first, as an act of politics (ratiier confused), and, second, as a more dian competent story for the middlelevel intellectual (most of us). Politically, it’s a grade A bitch about, against, almost everything in modern America (and modern Russia), given from the point of view of someone whose intellectual relatives are a mixed and somewhat contradictory bag of minor Nietzscheans, cross-grained Thoreauvians, etc.; e.g., technology is bad but some of its products, such as a fine rifle, are admirable; man, es­ pecially modern American man, is soft and weak and mindlessly cruel; nature, red in tooth and claw, is better; there is such a thing as original sin (not theological, but biological), although human institutions do not restrain evil (in fact, they promote evil, being prisons— no Grand Inquisitor here); most people are interior and, though they should not be hurt, the superior person owes nothing to them, owes nothing to anybody. In...

The Pillar of Cloud in the Reed Sea Narrative

The Pillar of Cloud in the Reed Sea Narrative