It turns out one may find more of the traditional underdog female experience in Ishmael, more of survival humor, than in many a female character, for instance, in Hawthorne's more traditional fiction.
#Deepsleep melville free#
I would like to suggest Melville's appeal to women springs from his humor, his gift in portraying marginalized people, the sub-sub librarians of any gender in the modern world, and how they have lived at the bottom, dreamed of the top, survived by their wits, bucked their "betters," fought subservience, and lyricized a closeness to the feel of life free of the pretensions and distortions in the upper regions of power. In fact she connected folk and literary culture in a broad clear bond. Rourke's work does not emphasize women, but in an extraordinary breakthrough she emphasized male humor instead of male self-seriousness and self-righteousness, and she valued culture not just of the elite, but from and of the folk.
#Deepsleep melville full#
Constance Rourke's 1931 classic analysis of Moby-Dick, in American Humor: A Study of the National Character, written after the Melville revival of the 1920s, and presenting a crucial corrective to it, has its flaws but as Rourke heralded American humor, which she characterized as a "lawless element, full of surprises," she presents its immense value as the thrust of American culture. Raising the question provides a chance to suggest how Melville's humor has played a key role in his work, and in its monumental, actually non-gender-specific meaning. It is fascinating to observe the dynamic of that interest, which through recent scholarship we are learning has been there all along, and certainly in our own time shows no sign of abating if anything it is increasing, in so many ways that they need no recounting here. Nonetheless, it is interesting to face the question head on, and notice why in fact women (and girls too I want to vouchsafe) respond with such interest to Melville's fiction. Surely a literature so uninvested in female characters, arenas, and perspectives, could in fact simply be pronounced masculine but women readers knew otherwise, and caught on early that its genius, as in all great art, is androgynous. It seemed in the 1920s that Melville's work, with its marked preponderance of male characters, could be championed as the literature par excellence for "men and boys." If this approach to Melville signaled a kind of literary gender apartheid, if men could get a literary mansion of their own in this way and throw out the women of the house, it seemed so much the better. It is the lowest paid man, Ishmael, the quintessential sub-sub, who is the lone survivor of the disaster, and he is hardly a role model for machismo, American or otherwise the comic hero is the one who finds survival by grabbing hold of the primitive Queegueg's coffin bobbing up to save him, and gets picked up at sea by the good ship Rachel. Another irony was that if Captain Ahab, for instance, embodies the fierce manifest determination of the imperial male American, Melville's famous work about this sea-captain sinks the man, and his entire enterprise, in a whirlpool of self-destruction.
One was that in the 1920s, when this cultural discovery was part of a nationalistic anti-immigrant program to shut down the country to the vast numbers of non-"Nordic" immigrants flooding in, Melville was, in fact, a citizen of the world in the broadest and best sense, who celebrated human diversity in the most profound way. This revival had multiple and almost dazzling ironies. Melville, as we know, was tapped in the 1920s to establish American male hegemony in the cultural world, to promote America to itself, as manly, vigorous, and deeply rooted in Anglo-Saxon or Nordic-looking ancestry Melville with his English, Scotch-Irish, and Dutch ancestors fit the bill perfectly. The question dates from the androcentric Melville revival in the 1920s, which was so aptly described by Paul Lauter over a decade ago in his "Melville Climbs the Canon." The revival of course launched Melville's widespread fame as an American writer. Women, like men, stop short to hear tales told with suspense and subtlety, or poetry that is sublime, or theatre that wakes us from the deep sleep of everyday life. Do only Russians like the Russian novel, only blacks like Toni Morrison, only the French love Moliere? Human beings are first of all human, and love to see, read, think about, ponder, and admire human works. If Melville's work is mostly about men, why is his work of interest to women? The question is silly, of course. Let's start by asking a very retro question. Ishmael or Ishfemale: Gender and Humor Jane Mushabac
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