Seeds of Discontent: The Expanding Satiric Range of Melville's Transatlantic Diptychs

Seeds of Discontent: The Expanding Satiric Range of Melville’s Transatlantic Diptychs AARON WINTER University of California, Irvine A fter the critical and commercial failure of Mardi (1849), Herman Melville promised his London editor that he would henceforth write “no metaphysics, no conic sections, nothing but cakes & ale.”1 If Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850) were a moderately successful return to the accessible sea adventures that had made his transatlantic literary reputation , Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852) were puzzling relapses into abstruse navel-gazing, especially for a would-be professional author with a growing family and a mounting debt. Bridling his wildest metaphysical ambitions for a second time, Melville spent the next period of his career hammering out material for Harper’s New Monthly and Putnam’s Monthly at a rate of five dollars per printed page.2 The magazine pieces are narrative experiments angling toward a “cakes and ale” populism that is nonetheless flexible enough to accommodate Melville’s ever-sharpening critique of American social and political values. One particular type of experiment is repeated in “The Two Temples,” “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs” and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” Written at Arrowhead in late 1853, and submitted C
2006 The Authors Journal compilation C
2006 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc 1 Herman Melville, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1993), 132. Many thanks to John Bryant, Brook Thomas, Mark Goble, and Linda Georgianna for helping me revise this essay. 2 Melville published most of these pieces anonymously although his authorship was an “open secret.” See Lea Bertani Vozar Newman, A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Herman Melville (Boston: Hall, 1986), 283. This period (1853-56) includes Israel Potter, serialized in Putnam’s (1854-55), and Melville’s early work on The Confidence-Man (1857), initially conceived as another serial for Putnam’s. The difference between Melville’s “popular” works and his “metaphysical” works should not be overstated. As Sheila Post-Lauria argues, Mardi, Pierre and Moby-Dick are deeply indebted to the conventions of the contemporary literary marketplace; their relative unpopularity probably results from their gymnastic attempts to hybridize modes and genres appealing to different audiences. Likewise the other works mentioned here are far more than boilerplate. See her Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the Marketplace (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). My sketch here only indicates how these works were received by contemporary audiences and how Melville himself spoke of them at the time. All of Melville’s prose balances multiple commitments; the magazine writings are characteristic in this regard rather than anomalous. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 17 A A R O N W I N T E R for publication in the spring of 1854,3 these works share obvious topical and structural traits. Each is a satire of contemporary British and American socioeconomic conditions, and each is a set of paired narratives. Invoking the form of the two-paneled medieval religious painting, Jay Leyda first labeled these works “diptychs” in his Complete Short Stories of Herman Melville: “The striking pictorial quality of all Melville’s writings found a precise reflection within the medium of the short story in the form of the diptych. At least three times he displayed pairs of contrasting images (Look here, upon this picture, and on this), to make the light one brighter, and the dark one blacker.”4 More recent critics have followed Leyda in categorizing these stories as “diptychs” and in viewing them as morally contrastive pictorial pairs.5 The diptych designation is useful as far as it goes, but it elides important differences between the three works and fails to account for their rhetorical complexity. Let me offer some supplemental terminology. “The Two Temples” comes closest to fitting Leyda’s rubric, establishing an ironic contrast whereby the first tale, or panel of the diptych, is held up against the second from the sufficiently reliable focal point of...