Peddlers of the Rod: Melville's "The Lightning-Rod Man" and the Antebellum Periodical Market

Peddlers of the Rod: Melville’s “The Lightning-Rod Man” and the Antebellum Periodical Market JOSHUA MATTHEWS University of Iowa THOU, that in tempests art Our sure Protector!—now, in the calm air, Gladly we hail thee,—and with thankful heart Confess thy guardian care. “To a Lightning Rod” The Western Monthly Magazine1 H erman Melville’s “The Lightning-Rod Man” concludes with an odd threat made by the title character, a lightning-rod salesman. After entering the narrator’s home, the salesman attempts to convince the narrator to purchase a lightning rod. His performance, intended to produce anxiety in his potential customer, acts out the safety instructions he advises the narrator to take. But the narrator—a rural mountain dweller—resists, exclaiming in language consistent with the theological tenor of their conversation , “Who has empowered you, you Tetzel, to peddle round your indulgences from divine ordinations? The hairs of our heads are numbered, and the days of our lives. In thunder as in sunshine, I stand at ease in the hands of my God. False negotiator, away!” Then comes an odd threat from the salesman: “Impious wretch! . . . I will publish your infidel notions.”2 The threat to publish the narrator’s refusal to buy a lightning rod is troubling for prior critical readings of the story. Categorizing “The LightningRod Man” as a religious allegory, critics have decontextualized the story from nineteenth-century cultural discourses concerning lightning rods and efforts to market them in the lightning-rod advertising of American print culture. These allegorical readings assume that lightning rods signify only religious themes. As Ben Kimpel contends, with a strong degree of certainty, C  2010 The Authors Journal compilation C  2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 “To a Lightning Rod,” The Western Monthly Magazine, and Literary Journal 4 (August 1835): 122. 2 Herman Melville, “The Lightning-Rod Man,” The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces: 18391860 , ed. Harrison Hayford, Herschel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987), 124; hereafter cited as NN PT. 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 55 J O S H U A M A T T H E W S “obviously there is some allegory here.”3 Sean Silver, agreeing with Kimpel, views the peddler’s rod as something far more than a lightning rod because the story’s dialogue “orbit[s] into vocabularies not properly about lightningrods , . . . [and] the sale of the rod never seems to turn on questions appropriate to the purchase of a lightning-rod; questions of voltage differentials and electrical resistance, of conductivity and the strange logic of electric ‘fluid’ never quite come up.”4 Yet the salesman’s threat to publish the homeowner’s refusal to buy a lightning rod suggests that “The Lightning-Rod Man” responds to contemporary print culture. The threat implies that the narrator’s refusal will engender the scorn of a local or national readership already convinced of the truthfulness of the peddler’s sales pitch about lightning rods. The possibility of such a media scandal opens up important questions that allegorical readings of “The Lightning-Rod Man” have not addressed. Specifically, why does the salesman think that the publication of the narrator’s rejection would condemn the narrator in the eyes of some unknown reading public? After all, who would really care about someone not buying or using a lightning rod? The answers lie in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American discourses on lightning rods, of which Melville was well aware. By August 1854, when Putnam’s Monthly published the “The Lightning-Rod Man,” lightning rods had long been a subject of national discussion. Ever since Benjamin Franklin began promoting his invention to colonial homeowners and the Royal Society of London, lightning rods had been marketed in numerous print venues in numerous ways. Not only were lightning rods commonly sold doorto -door (at least by the 1840s), but periodicals for decades had also hyped the lightning rod as a necessary technology of safety and security. Magazines as...