Out of the Bread Box: Eleanor Melville Metcalf and the Melville Legacy

Out of the Bread Box: Eleanor Melville Metcalf and the Melville Legacy WYN KELLEY MIT L ate-twentieth-century digital archives of canonical authors have produced uncommonly expansive texts. Whereas once editors had to squeeze a book, with notes, glossaries, bibliographies, lists of variants, illustrations, critical introductions—a clanking hulk of editorial apparatus— between two cloth-covered boards, new media paradigms can create and sustain immense bodies of work.1 With dazzling multimedia components, open-ended collaborations between readers connected by wikis and discussion forums, and armies of young scholars eager to play, the digital literary archive signifies multiplicity and proliferation. Yet as older media forms—print, film, video, sound recordings—evolve in new media landscapes, they have met (and collided) in what Henry Jenkins has identified as a “convergence culture,” where users may access many forms through one portal. This utopian notion of a single “Black Box” suggests that, like Hamlet, one can be bounded in a technological nutshell and count oneself a king of infinite digital space. Whatever the “Box”—a laptop, cell phone, or other personal device—one can use it to travel freely within a “participatory culture” where people and texts migrate, merge, and remix in endlessly proliferating combinations (Jenkins 1-24). And though in Convergence Culture Jenkins exposes the “Black Box” as an unachievable dream of the communications industry, this “Fallacy” has remarkable staying power, as entrepreneurs search for the one device that can do and contain all. How very different from this Box of infinite space seems the tin bread box within which Elizabeth Shaw Melville stored her husband’s manuscript pages of Billy Budd and which Eleanor Melville Metcalf (1882-1964) shared with Melville’s first biographers and critics. We tend to think of Melville’s family as having preserved his writings within a metaphorically as well as literally constrictive box. Protective of his reputation, they controlled access c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 Three exemplary American literature digital archives are The Walt Whitman Archive, ed. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price; the Dickinson Electronic Archives, ed. Martha Nell Smith, et. al.; Mark Twain in His Times; and Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture, both ed. Stephen Railton. The Melville Electronic Library (ed. John Bryant) is currently under construction with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 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 21 W Y N K E L L E Y to his papers for a considerable time after his death and were viewed by the academic establishment as having stifled Melville, his work, and his legacy. The Melville Revival might be read as the triumph of critics who wanted to liberate Melville from the box where his family had entombed him. We should remember, however, that Eleanor Melville Metcalf was the one to take Melville out of the box, sharing his work with writers like Raymond Weaver, Lewis Mumford, and Charles Olson and editing his personal papers in ways that made them available to later scholars. Although her work has not been sufficiently appreciated, Metcalf’s editorial choices have proven unexpectedly vital in a new media environment. O n October 14, 1951, Minna Littmann, staff writer at the New Bedford Standard-Times, produced a substantial two-page Sunday spread on Eleanor Melville Metcalf’s gift to Harvard University of precious letters , manuscripts, and objects from the Melville family. Littmann’s relationship with Metcalf dated back over two decades to August of 1929 when Littmann had written in loving detail about Metcalf’s summer house in Edgartown, Massachusetts, a dwelling formerly owned by Valentine Pease, captain of Melville’s first whaling ship the Acushnet.2 The 1929 article was written eight years after Raymond Weaver’s biography of Melville, and in the same year as Lewis Mumford’s, both of which had effusively acknowledged the importance of Metcalf’s contributions to Melville biography. But at that early stage of the Melville Revival Littmann dwelt primarily on Melville’s relationship with Valentine Pease, Metcalf’s personal memories of her...