4 - Melville’s Beard II: Gender, Sexuality, and the Body

Summary

If Melville’s Beard has Been a Sign for some critics of Melville’s sometimes problematic association with wisdom in popular and critical writing alike, for many other critics, the beard portends something else entirely. To some, the stern aspect of Melville’s bearded portraits from the 1850s and 1860s associate him not so much with prophecy as with patriarchy, and the resulting body of criticism has delved into Melville’s personal life, asking painful questions about misogyny, alcoholism, and physical and emotional abuse. A second approach, which forms a kind of riposte to the first, has looked at Melville’s position within a world of writing conventions established in no small part by women, and at his position in a household composed primarily of women, and asked to what degree female sexuality might prove central, rather than peripheral to Melville’s project as a writer. A third line of inquiry might be seen as taking the beard as an indication of Melville’s concern with masculine experience. This approach to Melville has looked at Melville’s representations of manhood and the relationships between men and asked questions both about Melville’s own sexuality and the role that his writings play in the history of representations of same-sex desire. Finally, and most recently, some critics have set themselves the question of the meaning of the literal, physical bodies in Melville’s texts: female and male, human and nonhuman alike. If the scholars discussed in chapter 3 found their version of Melville in a world of the mind and spirit, the scholars in this chapter have located Melville firmly in the physical, corporeal world of the human body and its natural surroundings.

Domestic Life, Gender, Violence, and Authorship

Melville’s own marriage has figured centrally in many of these discussions. From the early days of Melville biography, indeed from Raymond Weaver’s pioneering biography of Melville in the 1920s, there was speculation about Melville’s relationship to Elizabeth Shaw Melville, his wife. A persistent topic of discussion in biographical studies of Melville has been whether Melville was a bad husband, a bad father, an alcoholic, a verbally abusive man, a physically abusive man, insane, or all of the above. There has been a tendency for Melville critics to divide into defenders and condemners of the man himself in this regard, although the lines between the camps have never been completely clear.