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U·M·I University Microfilms International a Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road

INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adverselyaffect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyrightmaterial had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. U·M·I University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. M148106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 9429649 Subversive dialogues: Melville's intertextual strategies and nineteenth-century American ideologies Shin, Moonsu, Ph.D. University of Hawaii, 1994 V·M·I 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 SUBVERSIVE DIALOGUES: MELVILLE'S INTERTEXTUAL STRATEGIES AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN IDEOLOGIES A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH MAY 1994 By Moonsu Shin Dissertation Committee: Arnold Edelstein, Chairperson Steven Curry PauL Lyons Rob Wilson David Bertelson Copyright 1994 by Moonsu Shin iii To Kilsoon Lee, for all of her love, support, and patience, with deepest affection and thanks iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The germinous seeds of this work were planted by Mitchell Breitwieser, whose well-ordered and stimulating lecture at Berkeley aroused my interest in Melville and the American Renaissance. Arnold Edelstein was instrumental in sprouting the seeds into ever-growing greeness of interest and enthusiasm years later. I was fortunate to take his graduate seminar on Melville, which made irresistibly attractive its subject's encyclopedic world of hybridity. He has since been my guide in American life as well as in academic research. lowe great debts to Rob Wilson, who was always willing to share his brilliant ideas, sympathetic and trenchant, and also incomparably generous with his time and expert advice in matters intellectual and practical. Without his constant encouragement and his faith in my scholarly ability my life at Hawaii would have been dreary. I am also indebted to the other members of my committee. Special thanks are due to Paul Lyons, whose expertise in Melville scholarship and careful reading of the manuscript were invaluable. I am grateful to David Bertelson for his detailed comments on both the content and style of the dissertation. Steven Curry kindly agreed to participate in the final oral exam and made helpful comments. v I would like to express my thanks to Hee-jin Park, the advisor of my MA studies at Seoul National University, for her unfailing concern and full confidence in my work; to Steve Bradbury and Michael Seth for their friendship and proofreading; to Wimal Dissanayake, John Rieder, Gary Pak, Bevra Dang, and Helen de Leon Palmore for their kindness and encouragement. I thank Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and the East-West Center for their financial support. My children, Heeryoon and Heekang, have grown up proudly despite my long absence from home; they have nurtured this work and me more deeply than they know. lowe the most to my wife, Kilsoon Lee, whose support and love made possible the completion of my graduate studies which, at times, seemed interminable; so it is to her that this dissertation is dedicated, with love and gratitude. vi ABSTRACT This dissertation examines Herman Melville's self­ consciously intertextual use of antebellum popular texts to register and critique the prevailing ideological assumptions and values which underwrote the American exclusionary culture of the period. Through a subversive dialogue with his source texts which he maintains while refashioning them into his own texts, Melville simultaneously exposes and parodies, installs and negates, the dominant American ideologies embedded in them. This study also focuses on Melville's deconstructive practice in an attempt to explore his concern with the interactions among narrative, generic conventions, and ideology. Consisting of five chapters and an epilogue, this dissertation begins with a theoretical discussion of intertextuality, ideology, and the problems of traditional approaches to Melville's use of his sources, and then goes on to examine four texts which prominently exemplify how Melville uses the intertextual practice of subversive dialogue as a central textual strategy. Chapter Two deals with Typee in which Melville's dialogue with two American travel narratives, David Porter's Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean and Charles Stewart's A Visit to the South Seas, textualizes his critique of the ideologies of American expansionism and messianic nationalism. The third vii chapter discusses the relationship between Israel Potter and its key intertext, Henry Trumbull's Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter, examining Melville's demystification of the myth of the American Revolution and his deconstruction of the hero-oriented American biographical tradition. Chapter Four explores the antebellum racial ideologies which served to justify the institution of slavery by analyzing the way Melville refashioned a chapter of Amasa Delano's A Narrative of Voyages and Travels into llBenito Cereno." Chapter Five discusses the Indian-hating section in The Confidence-Man to demonstrate how its intertextual dialogue with James Hall's frontier narrative, Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the West, exposes the complicity of the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny in the removal and subjugation of American Indians. Finally, the epilogue analyzes the significance of Melville's meta-commentaries on the narrative form of fiction and explores the social potential of his subversive poetics for our age. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments v Abstract vii Chapter I. Reading Melville: Intertextualityand Ideology 1 Chapter II. Melville's "Narrative of Facts": Typee, or Uncovering the Ideologies of "Civilization" ..... 39 Chapter III. Refashioning American Autobiography: Israel Potter, or Reenvisioning the American Revolution 89 Chapter IV. Melville's "Black-Letter" Text: "Benito Cereno," or Critiquing the Antebellum Racial Ideologies .... 130 Chapter V. Rewriting "Forest Histories": The Confidence-Man, or Demystifying the Ideology of Manifest Destiny.. 173 Chapter VI. Epilogue: Melville's Legacy 219 Bibliography 235 ix CHAPTER I READING MELVILLE: INTERTEXTUALITY AND IDEOLOGY III don't like this cobbling sort of business--I don't like it at all; it's undignified; it's not my place, II complains the Pequod carpenter, when he is told to rework the coffin he made for Queequeg into a life-buoy, the one which will eventually save Ishmael. 1 Melville, as Harrison Hayford has suggested, seems to grumble through the voice of his character about his own practice of continual tinkering and reworking in the course of producing Moby-Dick. 2 In fact, it has now been amply demonstrated that Melville stuck to "this cobbling sort of business, II however undignified and distasteful he may have found it, for his trade of book­ making throughout his career. From Typee and Gmoo through Moby-Dick to Billy Budd, Melville's work was constructed upon his willful practice of purposive mixings and interweavings of experiences and knowledge, inventions and borrowings, and the factual and the fictional. As Charles Olson has suggested in Call Me Ishmael, Melville reads as he writes, and writes as he reads, borrowing and appropriating, cutting and rearranging all sorts of facts, formulas and motifs, tropes and languages, styles and genres. 3 At another well-known metatextual moment in Redburn, Melville more specifically explains how books are produced: writers 1 manufacture books out of "odds and ends" of old "yarns," just as sailors pick "yarns ' l to pieces so they can be "twisted into new combinations" (Redburn, 116). This particular, if not unique, writing practice of mixing and tinkering makes for the notoriously unwieldy shape of the Melvillean texts, which have often been characterized as "botches," a "hodge-podge," a "monstrous compound," or a bit approvingly, a "disorderly order. ,,4 Melville's text perhaps can best be figured in Queequeg's coffin itself, which is also a canoe, later used as a sea­ chest, and finally made over into a life-buoy. Made of "heathenish" old lumber aboard an American whaler, the canoe-coffin-sea-chest-life-buoy is, in cultural terms, a composite of Yankee craftsmanship and the savage art of tattooing, whose manufacture has been prompted by Queequeg's cross-cultural recognition of

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