"Thou Shalt Not be Cozened": Incest, Self-Reliance, and the Portioning of Gendered Bodies in the Works of Herman Melville

Could I remake me! or set freeThis sexless bound in sex, then plungeDeeper than Sappho, in a lungePiercing Pan's paramount mystery!

—Melville, "After the Pleasure Party" (Selected Poems 134)

Introduction

Women's bodies are figuratively "portioned," and men's bodies dismembered, in much of Melville's work, and particularly in Pierre, where sexual difference is figured as a kind of irremediable metaphysical division. In many of Melville's novels and poems, from Mardi onward, the very existence of two sexes represents a fragmentation of the self from a whole and sexless divinity, or from the unity or "All" of nature itself. This divided or partitioned sexuality is closely connected to Melville's representation of a form of figurative incest, which comports with what Wendy Stallard Flory more generally terms "symbolic incest" in Pierre (135). Through such incest, the male self problematically merges with relatives or nature to transcend the imagined isolation, fragmentation, and sterility of white male individuality. Melville addresses not only the psychological components of fantasized incest with particular relatives, but an abstract and ontological incest that helps structure gendered identity. Some critics, such as Flory, contend that Pierre is only ambiguously incestuous at the literal level, but I would argue that, beginning with Mardi, Melville suggests the literal and figurative often cannot be clearly differentiated, and that such blurring is one of the defining traits of incest.¹ Throughout this article, I address, primarily in literary texts, both actual and fantasized acts of incest that involve actual or fantasized relatives, but also acts and fantasies that are transcendentally incestuous because they transgress the norms of individuation and merge multiple subjectivitities in nature.

Many of Melville's male characters imagine that some form of feminized incestuous merger with a relative or nature, figured as the opposite of phallic fragmentation, might reunify them with some version of the All. Melville here uses transcendental pantheism—a discourse of putative male self-reliance that turns out to be predicated on the dependence of the male self, who is also emblematized by figuratively incestuous longings—to address the extremes of white male identity. In Melville's work, incest becomes a proxy for redefining family, intimacy, reproduction, and the boundaries of individuality; and it serves as an unexpected locus for white male anxieties regarding self-reliance, gender, reproduction, race, originality, debt, and autonomy, the issues on which I focus in this article. For Melville, incest closely correlates with the rhetoric of transcendental pantheism and generates initially seductive fantasies of incestuous merger with nature, but subsequent fears of fragmentation or amputation in society.

To the male transcendentalist, the next best thing to absolute self-generation is reproduction from one's closest relative. Mimicking Greek gods, transcendentalists seek to replicate through parthenogenesis and incest, but encounter similar retribution for transgression. A self-reliant and self-created man would exist without debt, and incest becomes a reductio ad absurdum of self-generation. But like Emerson in the woods—and emblematized by Taji, "tranced on eternity's main" in Mardi (368), and Ishmael channeling pantheistic reverie on the masthead in Moby-Dick—the Melvillean self winds up losing his sense of boundaries. In Melville's works, forms of incest both erase and transcend the borders of self-contained male identity. Why do transcendentalists care so much about lineage and debt? Why are they cathected to ideas of incestuous self-replication (which also includes a variety of forms of asexual "bachelor" reproductions)? Incest represents a fantasized cure for the alienation and extreme isolation of white male identity in Jacksonian America, but turns out to reify the constraints of that identity. In a variety of contexts, Melville concludes that transcendentalism precipitates and "parallels" a discursive form of incest. Some aspects of incest in antebellum culture are also connected to broad cultural concerns regarding the Union, increasing political and geographic fragmentation, and federalism (as also related to issues of race and slavery); and the tensions between the parts and wholes of individuals and nations. Serving as a shorthand for the...