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CHAPTER 2 Melville’s Fraternal Melancholies
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(51) CHAPTER 2 Melville’s Fraternal Melancholies That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped.With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick Melancholy . . . is the character of mortality. —Thomas Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy I n his 1850 novel White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-Of-War, Herman Melville pursues a theme recurrent throughout his fiction : that of the suffering of politically, socially, and emotionally vulnerable white men. In White-Jacket, this idea is specifically located in what Melvilleviews as the degrading effects of naval flogging on the common sailor. Although acknowledging the necessity of a code of government at sea “more stringent than the law that governs the land,” Melville’s eponymous narrator nevertheless contends that “that code should conform to the spirit of the political institutions of the country that ordains it. It should not convert into slaves some of the citizens of a nation of freemen.”1 The terms of “slavery” are this: that “for the most trivial alleged offences, of which [the sailor] may be entirely innocent,” he must “without trial, undergo a penalty the traces whereof he carries to the grave; for to a man-of-war’s-man’s experienced eye the marks of a naval scourging with the ‘cat’ are through life discernible” (141–42).Without benefit of due process, in other words, where guilt and innocence might be fairly and objectively determined, otherwise free men are liable (52) Melville’s Fraternal Melancholies to beatings that forever mark them as “slaves”—they lose sense of themselves as “men.” The idea that sailors in a like situation will always be able to discern such scars—“the man-of-war’s-man’s experienced eye”—links the condition of slavery to the identifications it produces between oppressed men. “To the sensitive seaman,” writes White-Jacket, the summons to witness another man’s punishment “sounds like a doom. He knows that the same law which impels it . . . by that very law he also is liable at anytime to be judged and condemned” (135). Even if the sailor does not himself carry “these marks on his back” with which the beaten “must rise on the Last Day,” he is able to perceive the traces of them on others. He knows from his own experience what they are, and, through empathy , how they feel. The troubling ironyof Melville’s eloquent and thorough critique of lawful beatings on board ship arises when one considers Melville ’s private history in the years that follow the writing of WhiteJacket . As biographical material on the Melville family history has brought to light, Herman Melville himself was an abusive husband and father, “periodically violent to his wife” between 1851 and 1856, and prompting friends and family of his wife, Elizabeth, to propose a feigned kidnapping in 1867 in order to remove her from the house.2 Described by Edwin S. Shneidman as a “rejecting father” who “battered his . . . children psychologically,” Melville appears in oral and documented familyannals as a tortured man. His authorial desire to “strike through the mask,” in the famous line from MobyDick , of epistemological uncertainty, was, as Elizabeth Renker has argued, consistently frustrated in his own mind by the women and children of the house, whose presence hindered his professional and artistic endeavors.3 Biographers seem to agree that in the years before Melville went to sea in 1839, years when he lived with his mother and sisters, and in the years after his marriage in 1847 the Melville household could be characterized, as Leon Howard puts it, as one “adjusted to an entirely feminine regime.”4 Although Renker notes that Melville relied on, and in some cases forced, his wife, sister, and daughters [44.200.240.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:31 GMT) Melville’s Fraternal Melancholies (53) to copy his manuscripts and read out proofs, that dependence, she claims, also produced extreme resentment, the combination of which “constitutes the secret ‘madness & anguish’ of his writing.”5 The practical impediments to Melville’s writing—the needs and noises of children, the financial and emotional claims of a life partner —produce frustrations analogous to Melville’s battles with his writing, so that women and paper come to represent concrete signs of Melville’s desire...