Sinister Badges of Womanhood, Blackness, and Homosexuality in Melville's Redburn

Abstracts MLA 2007—Chicago What’s a Feminist to Do with Melville? CHAIR: CHARLENE AVALLONE, KAILUA, HI From left to right: Rodrigo Andrés, Ellen Weinauer, Heather Levy, Virginia Engholm, Charlene Avallone. F eminist criticism contributes a stimulating, if still compact, scholarship in the field of Melville studies. The past three decades of feminist study have not only revisited questions of Melville and misogyny, but also renewed interest in his short fiction, poetry, and Pierre; opened up multiple significances of gendered figures in his texts; reconsidered his career through new historical models of authorship; and more. This year’s MLA panel provided the occasion to extend the inquiry in a range of approaches that address a range of texts. C
2008 The Authors Journal compilation C
2008 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 117 E X T R A C T S Heather Levy shows the importance of continued feminist critique and careful reading to distinguish where Melville’s writing may escape social hierarchies and where it remains embedded in his era’s structures of inequality. Her study of Redburn takes Melville at his word in pointing up a commercial motive behind the novel’s conformations to an inequitable social system and resultant shortfalls of human solidarity. Virginia Engholm extends the feminist project of literary recovery and recuperation of the sentimental mode. Her comparison of Pierre and Violet aims to enlarge understanding of antebellum genre and family formation, as well as to deepen appreciation of Melville’s novel along with that of the fiction of his fellow New Yorker, Maria McIntosh. Rodrigo Andrés frames a materialist feminist reading of Melville’s short fiction in biographical analysis. With a sympathetic understanding of uneven antebellum gender configurations, he tallies some of the costs of male privilege, material and status costs for women, as well as psychological costs for both women and men, and traces these in the literary and psychological structuring of Melville’s stories. Ellen Weinauer provided a response that, together with the panelists’ papers, illustrated some of the many interesting, vital things that a feminist might do with Melville. Sinister Badges of Womanhood, Blackness, and Homosexuality in Melville’s Redburn Heather Levy Wright State University E lizabeth Hardwick optimistically suggests that “throughout Melville’s writing there is a liberality of mind, a freedom from tribal superstition , a rejection of superiority of race or nation” (xvii). Hardwick emphasizes Wellingborough’s indignant assessment of the failure of Americans to carry out the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence. Redburn does express egalitarian impulses about race and class, but they are only momentary asides rather than the heart of Melville’s bildungsroman. Although Redburn was written one year after Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott first proposed votes for women at the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Conference, it does not contain egalitarian impulses toward women of any race or class Redburn offers the feminist reader contrived tropes of womanhood, including the dutiful and sentimental mother who knits mittens and mends trousers, the devoted but ineffectual sisters, an emaciated mother with her 118 L E V I A T H A N M L A A B S T R A C T S distressed child in a pawn shop, and the generous wife Mrs. Jones with her heaping plates of maternal pudding. Once Wellingborough sets out to sea, the circle of standard tropes is only slightly widened to encompass an eccentric old black fortune teller De Squak, “hoydenish nymphs,” the sentimental daughter of the dock master, hopelessly domesticated wives who unwittingly participate in the roguish bigamy of their husband Max, Handsome Mary who tearfully accepts beatings from her laggardly husband, avaricious female prostitutes, the beautiful daughters of an English farmer with whom Wellingborough becomes smitten, and upper class ladies who scornfully offer pennies to the most woeful Irish emigrants. Hardwick characterizes Wellingborough’s encounter with the starving mother and her beleaguered children who have crept off to die in an old factory warehouse cellar in...