"Every One to His Trade": Mardi, Literary Form, and Professional Ideology

My own authorship was an impromptu affair, and as far as my experience goes, I have nothing about which to complain; my book having met with a sale beyond my expectations. But it is my belief that Poets are not properly esteemed and recompensed in our country . . . [I]n this connection, I will give a brief account of how they manage these matters in Typee. . . .

One afternoon, while stretched upon the mats, taking my luxurious siesta, Kory-Kory ran in, shouting "Clingy Lingy," (the poet's name,) "makee rimee!" and hoisting me on his back, trotted up to the "charmed circle," who were listening to the wild chantings of our Improvisatore. . . .

—Grace Greenwood, "Letter from the Author of Typee," Saturday Evening Post

Grace Greenwood's satire on Herman Melville in the aftermath of his commercial success with Typee and Omoo hints at the problems of defining authorship in the antebellum United States. Mocking Melville's "impromptu" forays into authorship, Greenwood belittles his right to comment on literary matters. ¹ Whether or not Melville read Greenwood's satire, by the time of its publication he had begun to write his ambitious third book, Mardi (1849), which seems to implicitly respond to Greenwood's criticism. Melville explained to his skeptical British editor, John Murray, that Mardi was intended as a distinct departure from his fact-based narratives and thus should be understood "as a literary acheivement [sic], & so essentially different from those two [earlier] books." ² The production of Mardi has long been understood as a pivotal episode in Melville's career, signaling his commitment to become a professional author. The novel's sprawling, digressive, fragmentary form, I will argue, is derived from Melville's investment in a distinctly professional vision and demonstrates how the idea of professional authorship itself underwent changes in this period.

William Charvat's The Profession of Authorship in America (1968) helped institute professionalism as an important category for the study of antebellum writers, proposing that "in so far as [the writer] was dependent upon, and influenced by, the reader and the book trade, he was not only artist but economic man." ³ Charvat's definition of literary professionalism as the economic negotiations of the American author, who seeks to achieve self-sufficiency through writing within the often threatening confines of the literary marketplace, dominates critical work on the subject. ⁴ I will argue, however, that as Greenwood's satire of Melville suggests, professional status in the antebellum literary field was not defined solely by sales but also by the practitioner's articulation of an authoritative literary persona, a concept undergoing change throughout the period.

In balancing specialized skills, cultural authority, and the marketplace, antebellum literary professionalism mirrored the emergence of a new concept of professionalism generally, which encompassed a range of vocations from doctors, lawyers, and ministers to teachers, engineers, and businessmen. Professional standing in the United States had once been the exclusive domain of traditional urban elites, who depended upon patronage within their small communities in American cities; in the antebellum era, however, the swelling urban population led to an increased market for professional services at the same time that populist politics led to new demands for democratization of professional privilege. These challenges to older professional forms led to a new market-oriented professionalism that became associated with the antebellum urban middle class, whose members used this new authority to stabilize and legitimate their place in a new industrializing economy. With its focus on Melville's attempt at professionalization, Mardi allows us to chart not only some of the shifts in antebellum understandings of authorship but also the ideological turns and contradictions at the heart of the formation of American middle-class identity in Northern cities.

The new market culture of the urbanizing and industrializing cities of the antebellum North produced collisions between older notions of elite professional authority and a new middle-class-market professional identity, especially in...