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  • Melville in the Asylum:Literature, Sociology, Reading
  • David J. Alworth (bio)

We are all role players. This is the key claim of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956; 1959), the book that catapulted Erving Goffman to prominence both within the discipline of sociology and far beyond it. As we move from one scene of face-to-face interaction to another, he contends, we rely on highly refined skills of self-presentation, making minute, split-second adjustments in posture, gesture, and speech to “control the impression” that others receive of us (15). And yet, our performances can still flop. “When individuals witness a show that was not meant for them,” Goffman argues, “they may, then, become disillusioned about this show as well as about the show that was meant for them. The performer, too, may become confused” (136). These effects, disillusionment for the audience and confusion for the performer, arise because we try mightily to play whatever role a given audience demands, while suggesting that this role is not only our “most important” but also reflective of our “most essential and characteristic attributes” (136). To substantiate this claim, Goffman quotes a passage from Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change (1953)—which begins, “We are all, in our compartmentalized responses, like the man who is a tyrant in his office and a weakling among his family” (qtd. 136)—followed by a passage from Herman Melville’s White-Jacket; or The World in a Man-of-War (1850). The Melville quote portrays a typically reticent “commodore” who becomes “exceedingly chatty” when he leaves his ship, and this quote is meant to exemplify how the “problems” discussed by Burke “can become especially acute when one of the individual’s shows depends upon an elaborate stage setting” such as the frigate Neversink, the setting of White-Jacket (qtd. 137). For a moment, then, Goffman [End Page 234] plays the role of literary critic rather than sociologist, invoking a theoretical source (Burke) to organize an interpretation of a literary text (Melville) as a means of conceptualizing a broader set of nonliterary “problems” that his argument seeks to address. Typical of Goffman, such role-playing raises two interrelated questions, both situated at the juncture of sociology and literature, that I aim to explore in this essay. First, how can imaginative literature participate in the production of sociological knowledge? And, second, what new knowledge might emerge from literary critics who are following Goffman’s lead in reverse: playing the role of sociologists, however problematically?

I approach these questions by analyzing one striking case of literary and sociological intersection: the presence of Melville’s White-Jacket in Goffman’s Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961). While the sociologist cites the novelist once in The Presentation of Self, he cites him 15 times in Asylums. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork at St. Elizabeths Psychiatric Hospital in Washington, DC, Asylums is a capacious study of “total institutions,” such as prisons, naval ships, and boarding schools, where individuals are cordoned off from “wider society” and forced to lead highly regimented lives (ix, 5). Throughout his career, Goffman relied on a variety of literary sources to illustrate his arguments, but his use of Melville in the essays that constitute his 1961 book is especially compelling and variegated.1 Like many of Melville’s readers, including several generations of literary critics, he was drawn to the novel’s critical treatment of corporal punishment and autocratic rule in the US Navy.2 His first quotation from White-Jacket depicts a flogging scene, which he likens to electroshock therapy in the psychiatric hospital (33–34). He claims that “when an individual witnesses a physical assault,” whether by lash or by electrode, that individual may “suffer the permanent mortification of having (and being known to have) taken no action,” as when the narrator of White-Jacket, forced to watch the “sufferings” of his companions, stands passively and registers “the omnipotent authority under which he lives” (34). In general, Goffman seems to accept the interpretation offered by William Plomer in the introduction to the Grove Press edition that he cites.3 “This book is classed as a...

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