Herman Melville in Context ed. by Kevin J. Hayes (review)

Herman Melville in Context collects thirty-four essays that are divided almost evenly among five sections devoted, in order, to geographical, social, cultural, and literary contexts and to contexts of literary reception. Following the main content is a “highly selective list of suggestions for further reading” (357). Paying homage to Stanley T. Williams (the book’s dedicatee), who in the 1930s and 40s mentored the great Yale group of Melville scholars that included Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., volume editor Kevin J. Hayes explains in his preface that the collection “seeks to remedy the ongoing disdain toward tangible fact and ground the study of Herman Melville’s writings to the world that influenced their composition, publication, and reception” and to illustrate Sealts’s frequently articulated position that “literary scholarship is essential to criticism” (xix). Hayes thus sets a high and venerable standard for the collection, one that weds scholarly research with informed and convincing critical interpretation. But the standard set by Hayes in his preface is unevenly met by the contributions. To an extent, that is an unavoidable result of the topical assignments, since existing documentary resources support research on some subjects in the collection more fully than others and since some topics lend themselves less to practical criticism and more to reportorial forms of commentary and documentation.

Quite apart from such variety, however, the collection shows clearly enough that a professed grounding in real-world evidence is by itself no guarantor for persuasive readings of Melville’s work. Such outcomes depend no less on the acuity, discipline, and good sense of the interpreter than on the contextual or documentary framework of the interpretation. Rather than adhere to the contents and order of the above-named topical sections, each of which varies substantially in quality and approach, I take the liberty of organizing the present review qualitatively. Assessing the majority of the collection by Hayes’s stated principles, it identifies the best chapters first, turns next to the weaker contributions, and finally discusses chapters that by nature of the topic or by deliberate choice of the contributor pursue a non-interpretive approach and therefore warrant different evaluative criteria. This more flexible approach produces a welcome by-product, since by following it we begin and end with some of the strongest and most useful essays in the collection.

If the primary measure of value in Herman Melville in Context consists of well-researched scholarship combined with insightful, rigorous critical interpretation, a handful of chapters stand out admirably: informed and perceptive analyses on Melville and “Europe” (David Watson), “The Holy Land” (Brian Yothers), “Slaves, Masters, and Abolitionists” (Susan M. Ryan), “Officers and Men” (Martin Griffin), “Panoramas” (Susan Tenneriello), “The Bible” (Dawn Coleman), “The Picaresque Novel” (Kelly L. Richardson), “Travel Writing” (Tim Youngs), and “Modernism” (David M. Ball). Watson discusses how Melville’s early conception of European politics and culture led him to conceive of American destiny as an antidote to Old World corruption, putting special emphasis on White-Jacket for its celebration of American exceptionalism and tracing the erosion of that concept in Melville’s work up through Clarel, which “unmakes the optimistic promises offered in White-Jacket, suggesting America has become too much like Europe to be still considered a ‘New World’” (62). Watson alludes all too briefly to the many European writers who influenced Melville’s thought and literary output, but he productively spotlights Melville’s response to Dante’s Inferno as one potential source for the disenchantment. With deeply researched mastery of the subject, Yothers discusses contemporaneous events and travelers in the Holy Land and effectively contextualizes Melville’s experiences and writings in relation to them. He naturally and instructively explores connections between Melville’s journals and Clarel, elucidating the compositional and conceptual motif whereby “a site in nineteenth-century Palestine recalls a biblical story; the biblical story suggests a connection with contemporary events in the United States; and both ancient and modern histories are juxtaposed in order to illuminate one another” (71...