"Parlors, Sofas, and Fine Cambrics": Gender Play in Melville's Narrations

“Parlors, Sofas, and Fine Cambrics”: Gender Play in Melville’s Narrations DAVID DOWLING University of Iowa F or all his sins—generally womanless fiction, swaggering male narratives dominated by male relationships, where homosexual desire wins the spotlight (Billy Budd) and women remain mere objects of exotic sexual gratification (Typee)—Melville not only playfully inverted separate-spheres gender codes in Moby-Dick, but he also experimented with domestic adaptations of literary labor and his own sense of the work of writing in the tales. Even so, critics rarely associate Melville with any innovative or progressive gender politics. They have characterized Melville’s conception of authorship after 1850 as bitter, tormented, and depressed, crucified between reaching an increasingly indifferent readership and writing “the Gospels in this century.”1 However accurate this portrait might be, it obscures a persistent strain in Melville’s understanding of his occupation that not only transgresses masculine and feminine boundaries but also actively deconstructs conventional antebellum gender hierarchies in the process. The occasion for this essay comes from a challenge Corey Evan Thompson has issued to Melville scholars to modify their understanding of what Richard Chase has identified as “the commonly expressed idea that Melville’s writing displays no closely sympathetic understanding of women.”2 Thompson ’s insightful reading of Melville’s “The Apple-Tree Table; or, Original Spiritual Manifestations” rightly objects to the largely unsubstantiated assumption that Melville was a wife beater and misogynist totally unsympathetic to women’s oppression at the hands of a rigid gender ideology that would isolate them to the domestic sphere in antebellum America.3 Thompson’s C  2009 The Authors Journal compilation C  2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 Herman Melville, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1993), 192; hereafter cited as NN Corres. 2 “Introduction,” Herman Melville: Selected Tales and Poems, ed. Richard Chase (1950; rpt. New York: Holt, 1968), xix. 3 Corey Evan Thompson, “Melville’s ‘The Apple-Tree Table,’” The Explicator 64 (2005): 38–42. The significance of this story’s novel approach toward gender and domesticity may very well have been lost on nearly four decades of readers due to a less than flattering introductory note by Warner Berthoff, who comments that “despite palpable efforts to keep the thing going, the narration runs out of steam and drags to a flat, anti-climactic ending. The case seems symptomatic of the radical 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 37 D A V I D D O W L I N G article marks the first attempt in eleven years of Melville scholarship to locate Melville’s progressive leanings regarding the woman question. Prior to Thompson , critics have largely been content with the bleak implications of Elizabeth Renker’s 1994 essay, “Herman Melville, Wife Beating and the Written Page,”4 which inspired an outpouring of work on Melville and gender, most of it indicting the author.5 Forgotten in these studies is that much of the fiction reveals Melville as sympathetic to women’s struggle against the era’s rigid gender codes for both men and women, a pattern that extends beyond Thompson’s project of identifying a singular progressive female character in “The Apple-Tree Table.” Rather than redressing specific claims against Melville’s treatment of women, I investigate broader and deeper fictional terrain in which Melville refigures the gender spheres of his time in ways that reflect his understanding of the work of writing in his own career. My analysis of these strands in such fictions as “The Apple-Tree Table,” Moby-Dick, “I and my Chimney,” and “Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids,” and in the letters is not intended to exonerate Melville from charges of misogyny; the focus instead is to show where Melville’s protests against industrial capitalism’s encroachment upon faltering of Melville’s creative élan by 1856 and of the state of exhaustion and discouragement he had fallen into”; see Great Short Works of Herman Melville, ed. Warner Berthoff (1969; rpt...