Herman Melville Sexual Orientation Watch, Part 2

At the end of her quirky 1996 biography of Melville, Laurie Robertson-Lorant (now a professor at U. Mass., Dartmouth) includes a quirky discussion of Melville's sexuality.  It's short -- three pages -- which is good, because she avoids a sustained argument.

She begins with a fun poke at deconstruction, observing that scholars are "as mesmerized by Paul deMan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Lacan as Ahab was by Fedallah and his crew of phantoms[.]"  Their politicizing of "[t]he language of sex and gender" is not for her.  She prefers to treat sex and gender as "organic components of complex, changeable human beings."

She then lays it on the line: "In successive drafts of this biography, I have struggled to craft a language for talking about Melville's sexuality without force-fitting him into the Procrustean bed of theory."  She's simply not ready to label him a gay writer.  While she concedes (as anyone must) that "his writings reflect a deep longing for emotional intimacy with other men," we lack evidence of gay sex on Melville's part.  Set Melville beside Whitman, Oscar Wilde, or Charles Warren Stoddard, as she suggests -- the contrast is instructive. 

Melville confuses us because of the upheaval (she uses the French term bouleversement) in his sexual attitudes when he lived in the South Seas.  In the literary world of antebellum America, he was an exotic.  Today, it's easy, probably too easy, to see gayness in the exotics among us.  But we err in applying the same worldly wisdom to Melville.

Robertson-Lorant also tries to contextualize same-sex activities.  Male travelers often shared beds; "erotic tropes" were often used between close friends of the same sex.  She puts the brakes on headlong readings of Melville's heavily scrutinized letters to Hawthorne, which are "more narcissistic than erotic[.]"  And she rightly criticizes the view that Melville must have had gay sex "because all sailors did[.]" 

Melville's fiction was "transgressive" (there's that word again), probing and questioning the pieties of his day.  Reducing that to "Melville was gay" detracts from his artistic achievements and ultimately makes his work less challenging.

Still, we mustn't presume to be definitive.  Yet-undiscovered letters and diaries may wait out there, ready to work a bouleversement in our Melville orientation.  "One never knows what 'great gliding phantom' will emerge from the lost material about, or by, the elusive Herman Melville."

Herman Melville Sexual Orientation Watch, Part 1

Herman Melville Sexual Orientation Watch, Part 1

The first time I tried (unsuccessfully) to read Moby-Dick, I was, if I recall correctly, 13 years old.  I don't think I made it as far as "The First Lowering."  I do have a distinct memory of being nonplussed by the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg.  Ishmael awakens to find "Queequeg's arm thrown over [him] in the most loving and affectionate manner" (Ch. IV, "The Counterpane"); that afternoon, Queequeg "pressed his forehead against [Ishmael's], clasped [him] round the waist, and said that henceforth [they] were married" (Ch. X, "A Bosom Friend"); afterward, they lay in bed together chatting, as "Queequeg now and then affectionately [threw] his brown tattooed legs over [Ismael's]" (Ch. XI, "Nightgown").  What the heck is this, thought I?  The 1956 movie didn't prepare me for ... whatever it was that was going on upstairs in the Spouter Inn.

As the world and I have grown older, and both of us have become more accustomed to discussing homosexuality and bisexuality in authors, I've come to find the question of Melville's sexual orientation (to use an anachronistic term) fascinating.  Is it true what they say about relations between some men aboard sailing ships?  Patrick O'Brian (in Master and Commander) and William Martin (in Cape Cod) certainly seemed to think so, although both were writing about war ships, not whalers.

Is Melville hinting at something that dare not speak its name in his fiction?  Was he gay or bisexual?  Was he a hetero gadfly with a transgressive sense of humor?  Or is a harpoon just a harpoon?

I can't begin to formulate even a tentative answer to those questions.  Someday I hope I will understand Melville better.  In the meantime, I pick up bits of what appears to be evidence, for future study.  For example, two passages from his 1849 novel Redburn: His First Voyage: 

It was the day following my Sunday stroll into the country, and when I had been in England four weeks or more, that I made the acquaintance of a handsome, accomplished, but unfortunate youth, young Harry Bolton. He was one of those small, but perfectly formed beings, with curling hair, and silken muscles, who seem to have been born in cocoons. His complexion was a mantling brunette, feminine as a girl's; his feet were small; his hands were white; and his eyes were large, black, and womanly; and, poetry aside, his voice was as the sound of a harp.  [Ch. XLIV]

* * * 

There was on board our ship, among the emigrant passengers, a rich-cheeked, chestnut-haired Italian boy, arrayed in a faded, olive-hued velvet jacket, and tattered trowsers rolled up to his knee. He was not above fifteen years of age; but in the twilight pensiveness of his full morning eyes, there seemed to sleep experiences so sad and various, that his days must have seemed to him years. It was not an eye like Harry's tho' Harry's was large and womanly. It shone with a soft and spiritual radiance, like a moist star in a tropic sky; and spoke of humility, deep-seated thoughtfulness, yet a careless endurance of all the ills of life.

The head was if any thing small; and heaped with thick clusters of tendril curls, half overhanging the brows and delicate ears, it somehow reminded you of a classic vase, piled up with Falernian foliage.

From the knee downward, the naked leg was beautiful to behold as any lady's arm; so soft and rounded, with infantile ease and grace. His whole figure was free, fine, and indolent; he was such a boy as might have ripened into life in a Neapolitan vineyard; such a boy as gipsies steal in infancy; such a boy as Murillo often painted, when he went among the poor and outcast, for subjects wherewith to captivate the eyes of rank and wealth; such a boy, as only Andalusian beggars are, full of poetry, gushing from every rent.

Carlo was his name; a poor and friendless son of earth, who had no sire; and on life's ocean was swept along, as spoon-drift in a gale. [Ch. XLIX]