Melville and the Architecture of Antebellum Masculinity

The sphere of Herman Melville's work has, not unreasonably, been understood as masculine.¹ I use sphere advisedly here, for it alludes to the doctrine of separate spheres that so permeated nineteenth-century American thought about gender while insisting on the physical spaces through which this conception of gender was devised, implemented, and maintained. Critics have not yet recognized the degree to which Melville understood gender as produced by lived spaces.² Throughout Melville's writings, gender appears as a performance mounted in consultation with the built environments experienced by characters. In fact, Melville's oeuvre reveals a consistent fascination with the gender identifications enabled and thwarted by physical spaces. Becoming alert to the dynamic interactions of gender and interior space not only allows a more nuanced understanding of Melville's approach to questions of identity but also suggests a new basis for asserting continuities between the earlier seafaring work and the later "lee-shore" fiction. In each of these settings, Melville's male characters need access to domestic space in order to form viable identities.

In his attention to the influence of space on identity, Melville was a man of his time. Early-nineteenth-century discussions of domesticity increasingly attributed to houses the ability to shape their inhabitants' identities. In Rural Architecture (1852), one of a host of popular and influential mid-nineteenth-century American writings on home design, Lewis Allen asserts: "As the man himself—no matter what his occupation—be lodged and fed, so influenced, in a degree, will be his practice in the daily duties of his life."³ In the antebellum United States, architecture was understood as fundamental to both personal and communal constitutions of identity. In the mid-nineteenth century, domestic architecture shifted from the basic classical-revival colonial and its humbler cousin, the one-chimney New England farmhouse, to Gothic, Italianate, and bracketed cottages and villas that followed the more elaborate floor plans published in popular periodicals and house-plan books. Clifford Clark Jr. suggests that this shift was the result of "an intense crusade that, in terms of its social significance, deserves to rank with temperance and abolitionism as a major reform movement of the time."⁴ Just as the temperance and abolition movements mobilized the rhetoric of gender identity and reinforced conventional gender relations, so did the crusade to reform space. In the 1850s, Melville's fiction and correspondence are already alert to the inscription of gender determinism in the architectural determinism of his time.

If Melville was responding to a limitation of identity that he located in the determinism of mid-nineteenth-century domestic design, then he can be said to be in dialogue with recent critical trends. Reappraisals of the operation of gender in the United States in the nineteenth century have problematized the notion of separate spheres, often with a focus on the insufficiency of the trope for understanding the operations of race, class, and sexuality in the period.⁵ I do not want to imply that Melville's anxiety about the spatial inscription of separate spheres is attuned to the same intellectual deficiencies identified in contemporary criticism of the concept. Nor do I want Melville's idiosyncratic approach to gendered spaces to be read as simply a repudiation of a perceived increase in the influence of the feminine sphere in the mid-nineteenth century (what Ann Douglas terms "the feminization of American culture").⁶ In his examinations of gendered spaces, Melville is not subverting domesticity as it represents the status quo; rather, he is subverting the domestic status quo insofar as it limits masculine identification with the spaces and labors of domesticity. Melville experiences male exclusion from female space as a particular and vivid instance of American conceptual inflexibility on the topic of identity. As such, he must be understood as moving toward his own version of Lora Romero's assertion that "no one group owns domesticity," his own version of Cathy Davidson's indictment of separate...