6 - Exploitation at Home and at Sea

Summary

One of the best ways to understand why Melville's response to slavery in “Benito Cereno” is so different from Stowe's in Uncle Tom's Cabin is to look at two of his works that rarely mention slavery: White-Jacket: or The World in a Man-of-War, written before the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, and Pierre; or the Ambiguities, written after. I will start with Pierre.

Pierre invites comparison with Uncle Tom's Cabin for a number of reasons. First, Melville started writing it while Uncle Tom's Cabin was being serialized. Second, Melville claimed to direct it toward the large female novel-reading public that Stowe had captured. Unlike Stowe's work, however, Melville's was a marketing disaster. Whether readers were too busy reading Stowe or sensed, as some critics have, that Pierre is an artistic failure, it seems possible that part of Pierre's failure in the marketplace was the result of its bleak attack on its audience's settled convictions, convictions to which Stowe was able to appeal in order to increase Northerners' moral sensitivity concerning slavery. Most important, Melville challenges his audience's faith in the sacredness of the domestic family. Melville's only extended treatment of the domestic family, Pierre shows that if the family is held together by private bonds of affection, those bonds duplicate the system of exclusions and repressions of the public sphere, rather than provide a haven from it. Constrained from following a higher moral law, Pierre renounces his family to follow a moral calling.