Melville

Moby-Dick continues to be receive the most scrutiny, with this year's publications including two books and a special issue of Leviathan. "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and Billy Budd, Sailor are also the focus of a number of strong essays. The early works and "Benito Cereno," commonly the subject of much critical attention, receive less attention than usual this year.

i General

Harrison Hayford's Melville's Prisoners (Northwestern) collects 11 important essays (with a preface by Hershel Parker) written over the course of his distinguished career. While most of them have been published elsewhere, the volume does contain some newly available works. The title essay (pp. 3–25) identifies a key cluster of motifs, first noticed by Hayford in the Hotel de Cluny passage in Moby-Dick, that occurs in many of Melville's works: "the typical central figure is Prisoner; the typical scene, Prison. The typical tableau is Confrontation; the Prisoner confronts the Superior, or a massive object embodying his power, mystery, injustice—any of these, or two, or all three. He is facing, looking at (eyeing) it." Also frequently involved is the Observer, who may be sympathetic or not. Hayford provides a list of 18 associated motifs, then looks in detail at how they function with regard to three Prisoners: Pierre, Bartleby, and Billy Budd. He examines the end of Pierre, then argues that "by the motifs of the typical Prisoner situation, Bartleby's motivation and plight are clearly revealed" and we can see "the essential and noble dignity that Bartleby has quietly kept uncompromised while immobilized by the Wall." Finally, by looking at Billy in Vere's cabin and later in chains, Hayford shows that "Billy's situation is again the plight of a man of innocence and dignity confronted by a world that imposes a crushing injustice upon him." In "Melville's Imaginary Sister" (pp. 132–83) Hayford, "a very great reader of historical documents" (as Parker characterizes him), examines the "evidence" previously used to support the idea that Allan Melvill fathered an illegitimate child, who was the model for Isabel in Pierre. It is a meticulous and interesting account that shows conclusively that the "the 'secret sister' is an imaginary one, a chimera."

Three brief notes add to the biographical and textual scholarship. Torsten Kehler in "Herman Melville and the Olson-Mason Correspondence" (PNR 9, iii: 42–44) summarizes the letters between Charles Olson and Ronald Mason but has little to say about their views of Melville. In "Melville's Skull and the Idea of Jerusalem" (PR 69 [2002]: 36–47) Cynthia Ozick takes issue with Melville's journal description of emigrant Jews as "flies that have taken up abode in a skull"; Jerusalem is rather "the fount of Jewish civilization." Richard E. Winslow III and Mark Wojnar's "Melville Reviews and Notices" (MSEx 124: 1–3, 12–17) reprints a number of contemporary reviews and excerpts not previously available.

Two strong essays cover themes across the Melville canon. Gavin Jones in "Poverty and the Limits of Literary Criticism" (AmLH 15: 765–92) focuses on why poverty, or more generally class, is underrepresented—or elided into questions of race, ethnicity, or gender—in literary studies. Jones examines poverty "from a socially referential perspective, as a category that has always suffered from attempts to root its causes in cultural pathology or moral failure, or from attempts to dismiss it out of hand as the register of such oppressive usage." He begins his analysis with Melville, who "understands the culture and psychology of impoverished persons as functional adaptations to harsh environmental conditions, as situational responses to a structural position at the bottom of a stratified society—reasonable sets of behavioral patterns and ethical values largely imposed by the social system." Jones discusses transnational poverty in Redburn and Israel Potter, then briefly shows how Melville treats poverty in his short fiction. To Jones, "Pierre is a more convincing contemplation of the qualities special to poverty, as a distinct category of social being, that trouble literary depiction." Jones ends by comparing Melville to Wharton, Wright, and Agee. Gordon V. Boudreau in "Herman Melville, Immortality, St. Paul, and Resurrection: From Rose-Bud...