Melville: Fashioning in Modernity by Stephen Matterson (review)

No attentive reader of Melville could miss how often and how vividly he describes clothing. The son of an importer of fashionable French clothing, Melville’s attention to dress and its social and emotional importance runs from his first writings to his last; though, as Hawthorne once noted, Melville himself was “a little heterodox in the matter of clean linen” (qtd. on 33). In superbly clean prose, Stephen Matterson guides us through this fixture of Melville’s writing, with chapters on Typee, Redburn, White-Jacket, the too-often-neglected Israel Potter, and Billy Budd, Sailor. In each of these narratives, Matterson maintains, Melville develops the conflicts and confusions of his central characters by describing the intimate details of their dress.

Matterson’s focus is thematic rather than historical, or “symbolic” rather than “material,” to use his terms (4). He argues that Melville’s characters are always uncomfortable in their clothes, and that this discomfort reflects an existential alienation from their social environments and the roles expected of them. His central technique of analysis is close reading, with a few detours into historical context along the way. One particularly illuminating detour of this sort comes in the chapter on Redburn and White-Jacket, which features a lengthy discussion of Thomas Carlyle’s “clothes philosophy” in Sartor Resartus (1834). According to Carlyle—or at least according to his pseudo-scholar character, Teufelsdröckh—it is wrong to understand clothing as decorative. It is actually “Emblematic” of one’s whole self, or, as Matterson puts it, “the spiritual and the imaginative made physical” (55). Clothes are not a “matter of ornament or utility but of individualization”; they are material embodiments of one’s culture, one’s place and time in the world (73). Melville absorbs all of this, Matterson argues, but bends it: for Melville clothes are emblematic not of self-possession or cultural belonging but of uncertainty and abjection. Whereas Carlyle celebrates the romantic possibilities of self-fashioning through clothing, Melville explores how selves unravel and fray when they wear outfits that do not quite fit or that are not appropriate for the situation. “Wearing the wrong clothing,” we learn, is an “indicator of identity ambivalence” (58).

Matterson’s thematic of existentially uncomfortable clothing makes for an engaging tour of Melville’s fiction, beginning with Tommo’s anxiety that his Typee hosts will tattoo his body and so tailor a “suit to be worn for life,” as he puts it (qtd. on 123). If Matterson relies on a somewhat tenuous equation of clothing and skin in his reading of Typee, his analysis of men’s outerwear in Redburn and White-Jacket is straightforward enough. Both books send their central characters to sea fitted in comically absurd apparel: in the former, a green gentleman’s hunting jacket that earns the protagonist the emasculating nickname “Buttons,” and in the latter, the “cursed jacket” that names the book and that its narrator banishes to the bottom of the sea at the novel’s climax. Matterson also suggests that these ill-fitting jackets symbolize Melville’s own “discomfort and sense of displacement” as a professional author, but the evidence for this claim needs more development than Matterson provides (81). In Israel Potter, “bewildering changes in clothing proliferate to the point that we are left with no certainties of identity at all,” and Matterson argues that this emphasis on costumes and mistaken identities characterizes many of Melville’s additions to his source text, Henry Trumbull’s Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter (139). In this world of costumes and theatrics, caricatures of Benjamin Franklin and John Paul Jones make cameo appearances, and both perfectly perform the roles demanded of them. Israel, however, cannot adequately identify the uniforms of the people around him or get his own costumes right, a recurrent difficulty that, Matterson writes, reflects his “inability to be an actor in modernity” (143). A similar out-of-place-ness echoes in Matterson’s reading of Captain Vere, who dresses more like “the King’s guest” than a naval...