Melville’s England Leora Bersohn Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 © 2011 Leora Bersohn All rights reserved ABSTRACT Melville’s England Leora Bersohn Scholarship on Herman Melville has a tendency to treat the sea as a destination in itself, but in one of Redburn’s autobiographical moments the narrator confesses that initially his “thoughts of the sea were connected with the land; but with fine old lands, full of mossy cathedrals and churches, and long, narrow, crooked streets without side-walks, and lined with strange houses” (45). When in literary trouble, Melville rebounded by employing the earliest furnishings of his imagination, using England as his setting and his theme. In his examination of the political, economic, and above all cultural ties between Britain and the United States, Melville anticipated the analytical models used by transatlanticist scholars today: At times he treated England and America as uncanny doubles and trips abroad as akin to time-travel, with each country seeing the other as both a point of origin and a vision of the future. Elsewhere, Melville tracked the circulation of people and objects throughout a unified—and dehumanized—Anglo-American world. Critics are often tempted to treat Melville’s English writings, like his trips to England, as a vacation from his real work, but a deep engagement with British culture, and his attempt to write his way into it, was Melville’s life’s work. He is never writing only about England; produced at moments of professional crisis, Melville’s transatlantic fictions include interrogations of the global marketplace and the possibilities for art. Through readings of Redburn, the diptych stories, and Israel Potter, this dissertation aims to explicate what Melville’s English works have to say about England, America, commerce, art, and the author’s own place in the British literary heritage he valued so highly. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: Melville, His First Voyage: 15 An American Artist Discovers the Old World CHAPTER TWO: Exiled to the Promised Land: 71 Redburn’s Harry Bolton CHAPTER THREE: Counterparts: 99 Melville’s Diptych Stories CHAPTER FOUR: Department of Veterans’ Affairs: 211 Israel Potter’s “enduring monument” AFTERWORD: England’s Melville 248 WORKS CITED 253 i IMAGES Figure 1. Nelson Monument. Marsh, 1921. Liverpool Record Office Figure 2. Detail from the Nelson Monument. Merseyside Maritime Museum Figure 3. Equestrian Monument to King George III. Marsh, 1921. Liverpool Record Office Figure 4. Nelson’s Monument, at Liverpool. Drawing from The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, 1828 Figure 5. Talma, in the role of Manlius. Library of Congress Figure 6. William Charles Macready (1793-1873) as Othello. Library of Congress Figure 7. Statue of Gog in the Guildhall, London. Public Monument and Sculpture Association National Recording Project Figure 8. The Monument to the Great Fire of London. Sutton Nicholls. c.1753 Figure 9. Trafalgar Square, from National Gallery, London, England, c.1890. Library of Congress Figure 10. “View of Bunker Hill & monument, June 17: 1843.” J. Fisher and N. Currier lithograph. Library of Congress ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have benefitted tremendously from the perspectives of the professors for whom I was a teaching assistant, particularly Amanda Claybaugh, Julie Crawford, and Ross Posnock. Thanks as well to Maura Spiegel and Emily Ogden, who served on my defense committee and provided valuable feedback. Edward Mendelson, Jenny Davidson, and Martin Meisel taught me in multiple courses and sat on my orals committee, and I am grateful to them for continuing the conversation in the ensuing years. They have not only been my teachers but also my role models and my friends. I owe an especial debt of gratitude to Nicholas Dames, who was my junior tutor at Harvard and my mentor throughout my time at Columbia, and who is now my dissertation sponsor. Nick remains an alchemist of a teacher, able to make gold from studentish dross, including mine, and he taught me by example that professionalism is compatible with authenticity and that scholarship, done right, can be electrifying. Special thanks belong to my defense chair, Andrew Delbanco, whose seminar inspired this project, who provided funding for my research, who consistently encouraged me, and whose biography of Herman Melville shows that one need not choose between being a scholar and being a writer. I am grateful for the moral support of my fellow Columbians Dorothy Clementson, Lisa Hollibaugh, Radhika Jones, Karl Saddlemire, Sailaja Sasstry, Stefanie Sobelle, and Rachel Stadlen. I am also grateful to scholars at other universities who have made themselves available to compare notes and hash out ideas: Nicholas Davis at Northwestern, Lauren Klein at CUNY, Derek Matson at Cornell, and Nora Morrison at Harvard. Thank you to my managers at Morgan Stanley, Rachel Cottone and Sharon Parker, for keeping me gainfully employed and reminding me often that my dissertation should be my first priority. Many thanks and much love to my family, who only nagged a little: Nehama Rezler Bersohn, Rina and Adam Spiewak, Miriam Rezler, and Sara Rezler. I could not have written a word of this without the love and support of my husband, James Rogers, who has been patient and kind and prematurely proud of me. This dissertation is dedicated to the beloved memory of my father, Richard Bersohn, who was the Higgins Professor of Natural Science at this university. On his last day my father sent me back up to Columbia, entreating me to “go study.” I did, Dad. Here’s what I’ve learned. iii 1 Introduction Going East: Melville and the Anglo-American Literary Tradition For under-employed young men in 19th-century America, there were two basic options: Go West, or go East. Going West—overland or by canal—involved taking on the frontier, abandoning established society and seeking to create something new. Going East, on the other hand, involved sailing to the Old World and accepting its terms, grappling with the pre-history so often denied in ahistorical America.i In 1839, unable to find work on the Erie Canal, 19-year-old Herman Melville joined the crew of a merchant- ship traveling between New York and Liverpool; he was away for four months. When a second attempt at the Erie Canal and a journey through the American West failed to yield gainful employment, Melville set sail yet again, remaining at sea for some four years, during which time he worked on a whaler and served in the U.S. Navy. This second set of voyages, which took Melville around the Pacific and the islands of the South Seas, was a sort of compromise between going East and going West: Melville went West geographically, traveling to lesser-known parts of the Western hemisphere, and also metaphorically, to the imagined West, the undiscovered country sparsely populated by interesting people who were destined to be conquered. But Melville also went East, in the sense that he joined the crews of ships, accepting their rules and entering into their hierarchy. Scholarship on Melville has long emphasized the hardy, frontier Melville who paid social calls on cannibals, in part because the West provides a convenient metaphor for artistic originality. Melville’s writing reflects his willingness to explore unmapped territory and his openness to all varieties of information and experience, so admirers of 2 his work have often presented him as both a literary and literal pioneer. The reality of both Melville’s seafaring life and his writing life was far more complicated. Just as the young sailor had to start at the bottom and work his way up, gaining experience and receiving the gruff tutelage of more senior officers, as a writer Melville was constantly conscious of his predecessors, and he spent his literary career trying to write his way up the hierarchy of great authors.ii For all that Melville’s review “Hawthorne and His Mosses” has rightly been characterized as a declaration of American literary independence from Britain, it is significant that throughout the essay Melville’s touchstone for literary greatness is the epitome of English authorship, William Shakespeare. As was the case for most American writers in the mid-19th century, the catalog of British authors Melville read and studied is lengthy. There has been significant scholarship tracing echoes and influences of the British literary tradition in Melville’s work. Merton Sealts’s Melville’s Reading demonstrates how avidly Melville kept up to date with British writing and how many books he purchased while in London. William Spengemann lists “Shakespeare, Burton, Browne, Milton, Coleridge, Carlyle, and De Quincey” as the authors without an understanding of whom we can never comprehend Moby-Dick (231). Rob Grey’s essay on “The Legacy of Britain” nicely encapsulates the influence of Shakespeare, Milton, and Thomas Browne, as well as other British literary antecedents, on Melville’s writing. Paul Giles’s chapter on Melville and Carlyle shows the stylistic and philosophical affinities between the two authors, who “both chose playfully to balance their neoplatonic idealism against the voices of imperfect narrators, narrators who can act for the reader as conduits between familiar everyday circumstances and the more abstract regions of metaphysics” 3 (233). As Amanda Claybaugh points out, “trans-Atlanticism is not an impulse that some authors feel or some critics pursue: rather, it is the condition under which all works in many periods were written, published, read, and reviewed” (2008 443). A writer working in America in Melville’s day was, by definition, a writer of Anglo-American literature. The Old World, especially England, is deep in Melville’s cultural consciousness. Recounting in fictionalized form the childhood fantasies that eventually sent him to sea, Melville wrote: “[D]uring my early life, most of my thoughts of the sea were connected with the land; but with fine old lands, full of mossy cathedrals and churches, and long, narrow, crooked streets without side-walks, and lined with strange houses” (Redburn 45).