INVENTION OF AN INFIDEL: HERMAN MELVILLE’S LITERARY HERESIES AND THE DOCTRINES OF EMPIRE by Jeffrey W. Hole BA in English and Spanish, Aquinas College, 1995 MA in English, University of Pittsburgh, 1999 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 2007 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Jeffrey W. Hole It was defended on October 25, 2007 and approved by Nancy Glazener, PhD, Associate Professor of English Ronald A. T. Judy, PhD, Professor of English Donald E. Pease, PhD, Professor of English Dissertation Director: Paul A. Bové, PhD, Professor of English ii Copyright © by Jeffrey W. Hole 2007 iii INVENTION OF AN INFIDEL: HERMAN MELVILLE’S LITERARY HERESIES AND THE DOCTRINES OF EMPIRE Jeffrey W. Hole, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2007 “Invention of an Infidel” examines Herman Melville’s prose fiction written in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Specifically addressing Moby-Dick, “Benito Cereno,” and The Confidence-Man, I argue that these imaginative works attempt to expose the catastrophic associations between the U.S.’s domestic “problems”—such as Negro slave revolt and Indian insurrection—and the U.S.’s broader global interventions in politics and commerce. I show that it was through invention, through historical discovery and re- making, that Melville was able to characterize new and intense forces of domination and regulation over human populations, property, and networks of exchange that accompanied American interests in opening and liberalizing commerce. Melville’s heretical inventions, I further show, were not necessarily limited to religious and theological contexts, as many previous critics have presupposed, but rather had developed simultaneously in relation to a dominant U.S. discourse that conflated the religious notions of redemption and election with liberal and secular expressions of American power. These expressions, or what I call doctrines of empire, were often evinced in the discourse of the American sublime and American transcendentalism. Writing in the midst of and attempting to provide a literary understanding of the intensification and transnational reach of American power during the nineteenth century, Melville’s heretical inventions make possible a theorization of American power that, I argue, is important for studies of the U.S. and its geopolitical influence over the globe in our own moment. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS........................................................................................................... vi PREFACE..................................................................................................................................... vii 1. FISHING FOR WHALES: MOBY-DICK AND THE TRAPPINGS OF AMERICAN POWER..................................................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Invention and the Arrangement of the Hunt ........................................................... 1 1.2. An Ancient Heuristic for a Modern Arrangement: Póros and Aporía.................... 8 1.3. Invention and Revision ......................................................................................... 18 2. BLOODY ENFORCEMENT ON A GRAND, GLOBAL SCALE........................................ 28 2.1. “Benito Cereno,” Amasa Delano, and American Power in the 1850s.................. 28 2.2. The American looking out to the Horizon and the Global Sublime ..................... 42 2.3. Ordo Mundi, the Geopolitics of Charity, and the Machinery of Control ............. 58 2.4. Literary Involutions and Historical Entanglements .............................................. 71 3. TERROR AND THE NEGRO: A MEDITATION ON ASYMMETRIC FORCE AND FUGITIVE SLAVE CONFLICT.................................................................................. 90 3.1. Conflict, Aesthetics, and Theories of American Power........................................ 90 3.2. Frederick Douglass’s Tactics of Escape and Aesthetics of the Final Struggle... 108 3.3. Babo’s Invention, Asymmetric Tactics, and the Aporia of American Power .... 139 4. THE FIDÈLE AND AMERICAN MOVEMENT................................................................ 161 4.1. A New Stultifera Navis ....................................................................................... 161 4.2. Missionary Liberalism, World Charity, and Immovable China ......................... 174 4.3. Weaving the Web of Trade................................................................................. 186 4.4. The Stasis of Movement ..................................................................................... 195 BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................................... 213 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My dissertation would not have been possible without the guidance and intellectual engagement offered by Professors Paul Bové, Nancy Glazener, Ronald Judy, and Donald Pease. Weaved throughout this text are the traces of long meditations on challenging and fruitful questions that each of these committee members posed while I attempted an invention of my own. I want to recognize the valuable support that the University of Pittsburgh has provided. The Nancy Anderson and Carolyn Chambers Pre-doctoral Fellowships allowed time for me to think, research, and write. While at Pitt I have been privileged to have participated in a dynamism generated by some of the most truly brilliant and generous intellectuals one could encounter. I especially want to recognize Jeffrey Aziz, Malkiel Choseed, Chris Warnick, and Richard Purcell whose advice and agitation, even, provided the necessary energies to help me through this project. Dwight A. McBride has been attentive to my work from the beginning. This work also benefits from the invaluable insights and comments made by participants in the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth. My family and friends have been patient, but none more than Dale and Lois Sparrow, Michael Six, Amy Marsh, my brother Jason, and my parents, Woody and Paula Hole. And none have sacrificed more, endured more, to see the completion of this project than Laine, Thomas, and Jill. This work belongs to them. vi PREFACE The title of this dissertation recalls the term “infidel” as a category important to Herman Melville’s literary and intellectual engagement with the conditions and arrangements of power that followed the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act in the United States. My work addresses Melville’s propensity towards heresy and his understanding of the “infidel” in a manner that extends and challenges the theoretical scope of previous scholarship, and I do so by situating this critical category in the context of the struggles and conflicts that dominated the 1850s. “Invention of an Infidel,” therefore, traverses earlier scholarship that has addressed the question of war (work by Joyce Sparer Adler and John Berstein, for instance) as well as a growing body of criticism that has attended to the topic of religion in Melville’s writing.1 Regarding the latter, it was William Braswell’s Melville’s Religious Thought, first published in 1943, which initially helped establish an important field of knowledge on Melville’s derisive 1 See Joyce Sparer Adler, War in Melville’s Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 1981); John Bernstein, Pacifism and Rebellion in the Writings of Herman Melville (London, The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1964). On the topic of Melville and religion, see William Braswell, Melville’s Religious Thought: An Essay in Interpretation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1943); Lawrence Thompson, Melville’s Quarrel with God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952); H. Bruce Franklin, The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963); T. Walker Herbert, Jr., Moby-Dick and Calvinism: A World Dismantled (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1977); Robin Grey, The Complicity of Imagination: The American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Robin Grey, “Surmising the Infidel: Interpreting Melville’s Annotations on Milton’s Poetry,” Milton Quarterly 26:4 (1992), 103–113. Gail H. Coffler, “Melville’s Allusion to Religion,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 8:1 (March 2006), 107-119; Gail H. Coffler, Melville's Allusions to Religion: A Comprehensive Index and Glossary (Westport and London: Preager, 2004). vii treatment of Christian doxa. With subsequent criticism, including works by H. Bruce Franklin, T. Walter Herbert, Lawrence Thompson, and most recently Robin Grey, this field formation has often focused on the question of the “infidel” or “heresy” in Melville’s oeuvre as one regarding disbelief, theocentric irreverence, or the flouting of “religious taboos.”2 It is true that Melville remained skeptical of both conservative and liberal, Calvinist and Unitarian theology in the mid-nineteenth century, and it is equally true that the “infidel” figured centrally in Melville’s reading of Sir Thomas Browne, Montaigne, Pierre Bayle, and John Milton, among others. That said, however, the above mentioned body of scholarship tends to repeat the central premise evinced by the title of Lawrence Thompson’s book, Melville’s Quarrel with God. I show in this dissertation that Melville’s