Out of the Bread Box: Eleanor Melville Metcalf and the Melville Legacy

Abstracts MLA 2008—San Francisco Melville and His Critics CHAIR: CHRISTOPHER CASTIGLIA, PENN STATE UNIVERSITY From left to right: Hester Blum, Donald Pease, Jay Grossman, Christopher Castiglia, and Wyn Kelley F ew American writers have drawn as much critical attention as has Herman Melville, and few have generated as much biographical speculation . Melville’s great bursts of creative independence and his equally despairing silences, his homoerotic effusions and his domestic reveries, his moments of patriotic exuberance and transnational exoticism, all have troubled , inspired, and perplexed literary critics for the last 150 years. Just as Melville’s biography often seems haunted by paradoxes, so does criticism of C  2009 The Authors Journal compilation C  2009 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 93 E X T R A C T S his work, which reads Melville as a champion of renegades and castaways and as the epitome of nation-making mythology, as a devoted husband and father and as a trapped, closeted expatriate-of-the-heart. Because of these tensions in Melville’s life and work, critics have been able to identify in his figure the tensions in their own lives and times, finding in him ways to express both a feminine humility and a feminist craft, as Wyn Kelley shows in the work of Eleanor Melville Metcalf, the author’s editor and granddaughter; a closeted shame and a defiant sexuality, as Jay Grossman finds in the work of F.O. Matthiessen; or a colonial silence and a postcolonial space of articulation, as Donald Pease finds in C.L.R. James’s reading of Moby-Dick. The tensions Melville generates in projects of interpretation , identification, or textual production appear in Melville’s own literary works, which, as Hester Blum shows, stretched the elasticity of genre to the great consternation of his conventional contemporaries. Wherever one locates such tensions, paradoxes, or innovations, the relationship between Melville and his critics, then and now, continues to produce some of the most impressive criticism in American literary history, as the papers on this panel demonstrate. “No Life You Have Known”; Or, Melville’s Contemporary Critics Hester Blum Penn State University M id-nineteenth century evaluations of Herman Melville’s work share an attention to what many reviewers called the “extravagance” of his writing. Whereas a lively imagination could be a desired quality in an author, Melville’s own extravagant imagination was judged to have wandered beyond the comfort of boundaries, exceeding formal limits; William Dean Howells called this “the negative virtues of [Melville’s] originality.” This paper, however, does not romanticize Melville as the outsider, the outlier, or the man out of time. Instead, I read his novels as engaged in exploring what happens when the expectations and codes of a literary genre are stretched to their farthest point—yet not violated. What Melville seems to have most chafed at in terms of his market reputation was the idea that his novels failed out of poor planning or inconsistency. I argue that Melville’s extravagance lies in his turn to a kind of structural innovation that tests the elasticity of possibility within a given genre, rather than straying outside the precincts of fiction’s formal expectations. 94 L E V I A T H A N A B S T R A C T S Out of the Bread Box: Eleanor Melville Metcalf and the Melville Legacy Wyn Kelley Massachusetts Institute of Technology I t may seem strange to think of Eleanor Melville Metcalf as a critic at all, since she has been appreciated far more for her service to Melville biography than anything else. Her contributions, however, to the study of Melville’s writings seem remarkably prescient to scholars of digital texts and text editing. It is time to recognize her early role in preparing the ground for scholarship on what John Bryant has called the Melville Text: namely, a body of writing informed and enlarged by digital tools and a sense of authorship as extending beyond print editions. As...