“Us Lone Wand’ring Whaling-Men”: Cross-cutting Fantasies of Work and Nation in Late Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Whaling Narratives by Jennifer Hope Schell B.A., Emory University, 1996 M.A., University of Georgia, 1998 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2006 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Jennifer Hope Schell Jennifer Hope Schell It was defended on April 21, 2006 and approved by Susan Z. Andrade, Associate Professor of English Jean Ferguson Carr, Associate Professor of English Kirk Savage, Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture Dissertation Advisor: Nancy Glazener, Associate Professor of English ii “Us Lone Wand’ring Whaling-Men”: Cross-cutting Fantasies of Work and Nation in Late Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Whaling Narratives Jennifer Hope Schell, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2006 My project takes up a variety of fictional and non-fictional texts about a kind of work which attracted the attention of American novelists Herman Melville, Harry Halyard, and Helen E. Brown; historian Obed Macy; and journalist J. Ross Browne, among others. In my Introduction, I argue that these whaling narratives helped to further develop and perpetuate an already existing fantasy of masculine physical labor which imagines the United States’ working class men to be ideal, heroic Americans. This fantasy was so compelling and palpable that, surprisingly enough, the New England whalemen could be persistently claimed as characteristically and emblematically American, even though they worked on hierarchically-stratified floating factories, were frequently denied their Constitutional rights by maritime law, and hardly ever spent any time on American soil. In my second chapter, I scrutinize the emerging assumption of an ideological fantasy of masculine physical labor that was specifically American and interrogate how certain kinds of physical labor, farming and whaling among them, were cast as particularly American in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Chapter 3 demonstrates that there was something about the work of whaling that resisted these kinds of nationalistic appropriations, and I present a close analysis of Crèvecoeur, Cooper, and Melville’s whaling narratives. My fourth chapter further explores this resistance, and I read Melville’s Moby-Dick alongside J. Ross Browne’s Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, arguing that both Melville and Browne—despite their texts’ formal differences—share an intellectual project of configuring certain aspects of the collective, physical labor of whaling as artistically generative. Chapter 5 addresses both reactionary and progressive depictions of whaling wives with regard to domesticity and nationality. My last chapter examines how some separatist-minded Nantucket Islanders demonstrated that federalism was contested not just in the antebellum South, but in other areas of the United States as well. Taken together, all of these chapters address different aspects of the complex and multifaceted identity of the American whalemen, but they also show how a particularly resilient ideological fantasy of masculine American labor develops and gains power, perpetuating itself across time. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE..................................................................................................................................... V 1.0 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................ 1 2.0 CHAPTER 2 ............................................................................................................... 26 2.1 SECTION 1 ........................................................................................................ 29 2.2 SECTION 2 ........................................................................................................ 33 3.0 CHAPTER 3 ............................................................................................................... 48 3.1 SECTION 1 ........................................................................................................ 50 3.2 SECTION 2 ........................................................................................................ 60 3.3 SECTION 3 ........................................................................................................ 65 4.0 CHAPTER 4 ............................................................................................................... 82 4.1 SECTION 1 ........................................................................................................ 90 4.2 SECTION 2 ...................................................................................................... 106 5.0 CHAPTER 5 ............................................................................................................. 121 5.1 SECTION 1 ...................................................................................................... 134 5.2 SECTION 2 ...................................................................................................... 152 6.0 CHAPTER 6 ............................................................................................................. 168 6.1 SECTION 1 ...................................................................................................... 175 6.2 SECTION 2 ...................................................................................................... 182 6.3 SECTION 3 ...................................................................................................... 187 7.0 EPILOGUE............................................................................................................... 195 APPENDIX A............................................................................................................................ 205 BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................................... 211 iv PREFACE This project first began as an outgrowth of a seminar paper which I wrote for a graduate course about late nineteenth-century American periodical literature. Curious about what lingering and nostalgic representations of the declining whaling industry might remain in the turn-of-the- century American imagination, I set out to track down a sample grouping of texts from the University of Pittsburgh’s nineteenth-century periodical collection. I found only four articles which dealt with the whaling industry, most of which were published in popular periodicals such as the Century and the New England Magazine.1 However, this handful of lengthy articles contained a wealth of interesting material, dealing with particularly enduring nineteenth-century configurations of work identity, national identity, and gender identity. These pieces valorized the New England whalemen, holding them up as examples of what every American could and should aspire to be. They credited whalemen with being some of the first hardy souls to venture into the Pacific ocean, exploring unknown territory and contributing much to the stores of scientific and geographic knowledge. These articles depicted whaling wives as highly liberated women, who insisted on leaving the safety and sanctity of their homes so that they could sail around the world with their husbands on the ships that had heretofore solely been the realm of men. And they intimated that it was on the New England whaleships that the system of industrial capitalism got its start, for they claimed that the whalemen were the ones who invented the assembly line as a means of efficiently organizing workers. While these articles provided me with more than enough material for a seminar paper, I knew that four texts would not be enough to form the backbone of the larger project upon which I wanted to embark. Needing more 1 These four articles were: James Temple Brown’s “Stray Leaves from a Whaleman’s Log,” published in the Century in 1893; Gustav Kobbé’s “The Perils and Romance of Whaling,” published in the Century in 1890; George F. Tucker’s “New Bedford,” published in the New England Magazine in 1896; and an excerpt from Frank T. Bullen’s longer narrative The Cruise of the Cachalot: Round the World After Sperm Whales, published in Scientific American in 1899. v whaling narratives for my sample grouping, I set out to explore representations of the whaling industry which appeared during the heyday of whaling—the early to mid nineteenth century. Prompted by a desire to know more about the extracts which constitute the opening sections of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, I used Melville’s list of whaling narratives as a starting point for my research. As I soon discovered when I turned to these narratives themselves, this diverse array of extracts—taken from Milton’s Paradise Lost, Owen Chase’s narrative of the Essex disaster, and the writings of Thomas Jefferson, among other sources—only addresses a modicum of the myriad issues and concerns that emerge from the full texts. For the most part, Melville seems to have selected his quotations with an eye towards emphasizing the grandeur and impressive size of whales as well as the dangers inherent in working in the whaling industry—note the quotations from Joseph C. Hart’s Miriam Coffin and Harry Halyard’s Wharton the Whale-Killer!—but delving deeper into texts such as these yields even more complex configurations