Hero, Captain and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville by Robert K. Martin (review)

Shorter Book Reviews 453 the literature of the loss of the newness. If he has supplied a new frame of reference for comparing Emerson's utterance, we might well expect that he would supply a like new frame of reference for his later influence, on less well-known writers of labor's struggles, on obscure but illuminating blissful anarchists. Unhappily, this third chapter carries us little beyond the second. The literary legacy extends to Melville, Twain, Whitman and Thoreau for the literature of work; to Cooper, Twain and Hawthorne for the literature of anarchy; to Hawthorne and Melville for the literature of loss. By and large, Howe shows us that the loss of the sense of Emerson's a-historicity is almost coeval with its generation of major dissent in the 1850s. This monograph, then, emerges from a troubled perspective on the work of the architect of the American cultural awakening. If Emerson will not serve us today as a "moral and philosophical guide" (14) in the tearing struggles of a ''desacrilizing world," Howe seems to leave us with the feeling that his own applause for Emerson as a man of letters is but another instance of the resonance of onehand clapping. Nevertheless, coming as it does around the sesquicentennial of Emerson's first major pronouncements as a transcendentalist-and at Harvard to boot-it may legitimately revive the celebrated man of letters in its very Emersonian motive of dissent. Robin P. Hoople Department of English University of Manitoba Robert K. Martin. Hero, Captain and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique , and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986. xvi + 144 pp. Hero,Captain and Stranger is a book which owes more to Robert Martin's vision of the world than to Melville's. For surely, someone who can anachronistically use Hart Crane's musings about Melville's homosexual meanings to "discover" that Moby Dick is a novel "homosexual at its core" (8), on the rather slim evidence of Queequeg's and Ishmael's mock-romantic marriage-such a man is not to be reasoned with. Martin's thesis is that Melville characteristically "used the male couple as a figure of an inherently democratic union of equals which could serve as the basis for a new social organization" (11). This critique of the established order is shaped by the pattern of conflict set up among the Hero, the Captain, representing the Establishment, and the Dark Stranger, the "illicit" male lover who triumphs over the ''Establishment'' in forming a forbidden homosexual liaison with the Hero. Martin's contention is that Melville used this non-competitive, masturbatory male relationship in a series of his sea novels-Typee, Redburn, White 454 Shorter Book Reviews Jacket, Moby Dick, and Billy Budd-in a conscious attempt to suggest an alternative, egalitarian model to the patriarchal structure of Protestant Capitalist America. Several points in the foundation and development of this thesis are questionable . The first and most serious is that Martin's central premise, that an antiestablishment critique is embodied in the erotica of the novels, was argued articulately years ago in Robert Shulman's influential essay "The Serious Functions of Melville's Phallic Jokes" (American Literature, 33, 1961). Shulman's assessment of the influence on Melville of Laurence Sterne's and Rabelais's humorous association of sexuality and artistic creation to celebrate the creative self, is summarily dismissed by Martin, who nevertheless uses Shulman's material to erect his own (not Melville's) vision of a society constructed on the grounds of playfully erotic male companionship. There are other questionable aspects of Martin's critique. First he eliminates novels, in particular Pierre, which suggest a rather different pattern of Hero, Captain and Stranger. In Pierre, Melviile's most autobiographical work, the dark stranger is a woman, the hero's implicit half-sister, and the anti-establishment sexual relationship is incest. Moreover, the "Captain" is clearly Pierre's mother, Mrs. Glendinning. Inclusion of this novel would certainly have indicated Melville's fascination with Byron and the Byronic hero, as well as the possible familial pattern that might underlie the relationship in his other novels. Second, although...