1 - The Problem with Labor and the Promise of Leisure

Summary

A censorious review of Melville's Mardi appeared in the April 1849 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger: there is “an effort constantly at fine writing, [and] a sacrifice of natural ease to artificial witticism.” Melville, according to dissatisfied critics, seemed to be continuing the assault against the gentlemanly figure of the (h)auteur that Poe had launched in “The Man That Was Used Up” by foregrounding the effort that went into the act of writing. Melville's talent is here assessed according to an aesthetic that uses the discourse of work, promoting those texts which display “natural ease” while dismissing others for their constant “effort.” Thus it was not unusual to see the following kind of praise in literary reviews: “Mr. Bryant's style in these letters is an admirable model of descriptive prose. Without any appearance of labor, it is finished with an exquisite grace.” Writing was supposed to appear effortless, natural, and easy. Bryant's did and Melville's did not. Simply put, writing was not supposed to look like work, especially of the unnatural and artificial variety. We can easily understand the many critics who pronounced Mardi a colossal failure because of its lack of organization or its disconnected flights into philosophical speculation, but to frame the attack against Mardi in the language of work seems especially problematic and interesting, given the fact that one of the dominant discourses of antebellum America, namely the work ethic, championed precisely the degree of effort evidenced throughout Melville's text.