Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation

INTRODUCTION

DOUGLASS AND MELVILLE IN RELATION

Robert S. Levine & Samuel Otter

Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville. The essayists in this volume take up the large issues raised by that conjunction. Given the overlaps in Douglass’s and Melville’s careers, the biographical junctures, and the issues they shared, all made vivid in the following pages, it is remarkable that the conjunction has hardly been pressed. Yet maybe it is not so remarkable when we consider the divisions of race, status, genre, and reception. The two men, of course, occupied conspicuously different racial and social positions in the nineteenth-century United States. They had different senses of vocation and wrote, for the most part, in different forms. Douglass, who had escaped from slavery, tied his autobiographies, essays, and speeches to his political activism. Melville, the grandson of Revolutionary War heroes, sought literary fame, wrote mostly fiction and poetry, and rarely took clear political stances on specific issues. Until recently, the study of Douglass has been the province of historians rather than literary critics, while Melville’s art has been placed at the center of the stories we tell about nineteenth-century American literature. Even as literary critics have turned their attention to Douglass and those who study Melville have analyzed his works in their historical contexts, most have treated the two writers as though they lived and wrote in separate worlds: black and white, political and literary.¹

What do we learn by joining Douglass and Melville in this volume? We gain a fuller sense of nineteenth-century intellectual and social history. We understand how the two writers helped to forge the bonds between authorship, celebrity, and moral authority; examined the relationships between Pauline Christianity and political activism; represented black music and dance; and debated issues of race, slavery, freedom, union, fraternity, sympathy, masculinity, violence, war, Reconstruction, and memory. The two writers contributed to public debate on the key issues of their times and were noticed in some of the same periodicals during the 1840s and 1850s. Douglass’s and Melville’s writings press us beyond the boundaries of the United States to England, where both were attracted to antislavery politics, as well as archaism and obsolescence, and to islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the focus of their writings on U.S. imperialism.

Reading Douglass and Melville together, we are compelled to test our assumptions about the social space the two men occupied. Did Melville and Douglass encounter one another when they crossed paths in New Bedford, Albany, or New York during the 1840s, or in their responses to the Fugitive Slave Law rulings of Massachusetts chief justice Lemuel Shaw in the 1840s and 1850s? As Robert K. Wallace demonstrates in his essay for this volume, Shaw was a pivotal figure in the early careers of both men. To what extent did Douglass and Melville read one another’s writings? Excerpts from Melville’s Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) and Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) were reprinted in Douglass’s periodicals. If they did read each other’s work, why are there no explicit references by Douglass or Melville to one another, since both were irrepressibly allusive writers? Given their cultural prominence and geographical proximity during the 1840s and their shared interests in racial justice and political critique during the 1840s and 1850s, how could they not have been aware of one another? Several of the essays in this volume raise the possibility that, given the color line in the midcentury United States, Melville and Douglass may have been closer than we have ever realized and yet also apart; in particular, Melville may have seen, but not registered or registered only obliquely, the presence of Douglass.

Reading Douglass and Melville together, we understand more deeply the interests of nineteenth-century male writers in questions of gender and sexuality. Both writers critiqued the printed euphemism that elided sexual violence. Both represented closets from which their protagonists anxiously viewed sexuality. In their texts and in their lives, both writers were fiercely attached to visions of patriarchs who sacrificed their sons. In Douglass’s and Melville’s appraisals of the rhetoric of apocalypse and demonization in a time of war, we discern resonances between the 1850s and our present moment. Both writers savored their words, and issues of form and politics become complicated when we consider the two careers. Douglass, the activist, refused to limit his literary interests, meticulously crafting his essays, speeches, and autobiographies, reprinting poems and fiction in his periodicals, and writing poetry and fiction himself. Melville, the literary artist, obsessively returned to issues of racial encounter, social violence, and male authority. Despite their differences in status and calling, Douglass and Melville were both fascinated with point-of-view, analyzing the pleasures and dangers, the potentials and limits, of being maneuvered into the position of others. The writings of both men are distinguished by formal experimentation in which aesthetics and politics intersect but are not reduced to one another.

Considering Douglass and Melville together and in tension is not an arbitrary interpretive move. The relations between the two involve biography, career, and politics. Both men were preoccupied by a set of issues, which they pursued in surprising rhythms of contiguity and contradiction. The essays in this volume show that there has been something missing in our effort to understand nineteenth-century U.S. literature and history. There has been something before our eyes that we have not yet seen: the elaborate counterpoint of Douglass’s and Melville’s careers as they developed from the 1840s through the 1880s. That counterpoint has broad implications for how we think about nineteenth-century U.S. literary and cultural studies.

PARALLEL AND DIVERGING LINES

The paths of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville intersected on several occasions in the 1840s. In late 1840 and early 1841, when they were young men still unsure of vocation, Douglass and Melville both walked the streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Douglass, the son of an enslaved African American, Harriet Bailey, and an unknown father, had escaped from Maryland in 1838 and then fled to New York City and settled in New Bedford. He was a laborer and a preacher licensed by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Melville, whose grandfathers were celebrated for their roles in the Revolutionary War (one, Thomas Melvill, participated in the Boston Tea Party, while the other, Peter Gansevoort, defended Fort Stanwix in a pivotal New York battle), was preparing to ship out on a whaler after having tried jobs as a clerk and teacher. His own father had died bankrupt and mentally unstable. His family, now led by his oldest brother Gansevoort, was in financial difficulty, and Melville, who in 1839 had sailed to Liverpool on the merchant ship St. Lawrence, was seeking further adventure and subsistence in the Pacific. In New Bedford, Melville may have heard Douglass preach just before embarking on a voyage that would keep him out of the country for nearly four years. The Carpet-Bag chapter in Moby-Dick indicates that he—or at least his character Ishmael—had been in one of the city’s African American churches.²

Douglass published his first book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, in 1845; Melville published his first book, Typee, the following year. By the standards of the mid-1840s, both books were best sellers, and both men quickly became celebrities—Douglass as the most eloquent black abolitionist in William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery organization and Melville as a promising travel writer and novelist. Douglass and Melville gained their celebrity by presenting themselves as mediating figures in autobiographical texts that gave their readers access to exotic and unsettling landscapes: the American South under slavery (Douglass’s Narrative) and Pacific islands on the verge of colonization (the Marquesas in Melville’s Typee) or under colonial sway (Tahiti in Melville’s 1847 Omoo, a sequel to Typee). Around this time, Douglass and Melville once again were in proximity. In the Albany area in 1845, Douglass was delivering antislavery lectures, and passages from his Narrative were being reprinted in the Evening Journal at the same time that Melville, also in the Albany area, was writing Typee. In New York City in 1847, Douglass delivered a prominent series of lectures while Melville was living and working nearby. Both men were praised by the same writer, editor and novelist Charles F. Briggs, in essays in the National Anti-Slavery Standard in 1847. In 1848 Douglass reprinted an excerpt from Melville’s Typee, under the title Tattooing, in his newspaper the North Star.³ If Melville had not known of Douglass, this reprinting may have led him to ask after Douglass and perhaps even to seek out his prominent autobiography. As Sterling Stuckey argues in an essay in this volume, textual evidence suggests that Melville may have drawn on Douglass’s Narrative for his representation of black music in Moby-Dick.

In the 1850s Douglass and Melville examined questions of slavery, union, freedom, national character, and national destiny in extended works: Douglass’s autobiographical My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Melville’s fictional Moby-Dick. As the country devolved toward war, both writers pointed to the inevitability of interracial violence in novellas about slave revolt—texts that invoked the historical details of the relatively recent revolts on the slavers Amistad and Creole. Though they worked in contrasting tones, Douglass’s celebratory The Heroic Slave (1853) and Melville’s opaque and anxious Benito Cereno (1855) both gave agency to shrewd black revolutionaries. The November 1855 issue of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine contained the installment of Benito Cereno with the now-famous scene in which the enslaved African Babo shaves the Spanish captain Cereno, as well as a positive review of Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom. In 1856 Douglass’s good friend James McCune Smith quoted from Moby-Dick in an essay on American political crisis appearing in Frederick Douglass’ Paper.⁴ And there were numerous other overlaps during the 1850s. Both Douglass and Melville wrote texts that parodied the racist ethnographic science of the day (Douglass’s 1854 lecture The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered and Melville’s 1856 sketch The ’Gees); and both adduced the icon of the Bunker Hill Monument as a way of underscoring the failure of the nation to live up to its Revolutionary ideals (Douglass’s lecture Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper? [1854] and Melville’s novel Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile [1855]). A number of essays in this volume explore these and other significant issues and motifs that came to focus for both writers during the 1850s, the decade that would turn out to be Melville’s most productive as a writer.

Douglass and Melville grappled with questions about the Civil War and approached Reconstruction from different perspectives. In essays and lectures such as Reconstruction (1866) and Seeming and Real (1870), Douglass sought to consolidate the gains made by African Americans, while in his poetry collection Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), which also contained a prose Supplement, Melville considered key battles and events of the war from a philosophical perspective. That Supplement, which calls for amity between the white men of the North and South and thus can appear to signal a break in Melville’s imaginative sympathies for the struggles of African Americans, stands as a locus classicus and interpretive pivot in this volume—a moment in which Melville and Douglass seem to be going in separate directions as social and political thinkers, and thus as a moment that perhaps discloses just how very different Douglass’s and Melville’s perspectives had been all along. (See the essays by William Gleason, Russ Castronovo and Dana Nelson, Carolyn L. Karcher, and Gregory Jay.) But questions of similarities and differences remain a matter of debate among a number of critics in this volume. What can be said is that despite the fact that Douglass and Melville presented contrasting perspectives on race and nation shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War, both men continued to reflect critically on the unfulfilled promises of the war at the nation’s centennial—Douglass in Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876) and Melville in his antiepic poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876). As Maurice S. Lee argues in his essay on Douglass, Melville, and pragmatism, and as Eric J. Sundquist suggests in his discussion of Douglass and Melville in the memory of civil rights reformers of the 1950s and 1960s, the differences between the post–Civil War Douglass and Melville may not have been so large after all.

Whatever one makes of their politics during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, it is worth emphasizing that while Douglass and Melville continued with their writing, they both spent many years working for the government as civil servants. Melville served as district inspector of the U.S. Customs Service at the port of New York from 1866 through 1885, and Douglass took on a variety of appointments for Republican administrations, including president of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company and U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia. Melville’s public role was quiet, dutiful, and invisible; Douglass remained at center stage as a prominent black Republican and a continued critic of antiblack racism.

In the 1880s Douglass, now a figure of international prominence, and Melville, now writing in obscurity, both composed extraordinary meditations on memory, biography, and history that revolve around questions of judgment and acts of violence: Douglass’s third version of his autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), and later his antilynching speech The Lessons of the Hour, published as a pamphlet in 1894; and Melville’s novella Billy Budd, which he left in near-final form at his death in 1891. In his essay in this volume, Gregory Jay offers surprising reflections on parallels between the lynching of Billy Budd and Douglass’s antilynching campaigns. Melville died in 1891, the same year that Douglass resigned as minister resident and consul general to Haiti after being attacked in newspapers around the country for supposedly being overly sympathetic to Haiti during the United States’ failed negotiations for rights to a naval base at a strategic port in the island nation. Douglass took advantage of his newsworthy status to bring out a self-vindicating expanded version of Life and Times in 1892, and he remained a prominent cultural critic until his death in 1895, hours after he addressed the National Council of Women.

Douglass was quickly memorialized by cultural figures ranging from Booker T. Washington to Elizabeth Cady Stanton as the most influential African American orator and leader of the nineteenth century. Though Melville’s death initially prompted some obituary writers to express their surprise that he had actually lived into the 1890s, the neglect of Melville soon gave way to a broad reconsideration of his career, which culminated in what has been termed the Melville Revival of the 1920s and 1930s, augmented by the publication of Billy Budd in 1924. By the end of the 1930s, nearly fifty years after his death, Melville had achieved canonical status as the author of what many had come to regard as the great American novel, Moby-Dick. At midcentury, Douglass continued to be regarded as a major political and cultural figure and an influential polemicist. The republication of his Narrative in 1960 (its first reprinting since the early 1850s), along with a renewed interest during the 1960s and 1970s in slave narratives and African American writing more generally, helped to secure Douglass’s reputation as not just a major antislavery leader but also an important writer. Douglass and Melville are now not simply canonical figures but central to any understanding of nineteenth-century American literary and cultural history, and yet, as we noted at the outset, they are still regarded as inhabiting worlds apart.

In his essay for this volume, John Ernest alerts us to the dangers of a comparative project focused on Douglass and Melville: the allure of facile reconciliation in the face of persistent and systemic racial inequalities and the risk of undermining the contributions of African American studies. These cautions are well taken, and the editors do not mean this inquiry into the relation between Douglass and Melville to substitute for the continuing recovery of African American literary traditions, or the charting of an Afro-American presence in American literature, or the value of interpreting American literatures in distinctive contexts.⁵

Yet we do mean to insist that such distinctions and differences are not the whole story. The essayists in this volume acknowledge racial barriers and distinctive traditions, but they also suggest that Douglass and Melville force us, in their own careers, to rethink these boundaries, to clarify and also traverse them, and thus to rethink disciplinary boundaries as well. A failure to consider the intersections and divergences in the careers of these two prodigious, encyclopedic nineteenth-century writers seems part of the American interpretive dilemma. Such an examination does not mean ignoring the traditions in which Douglass and Melville wrote or folding and flattening them into a univocal American literature. It does mean acknowledging that, as several of the contributors to this volume demonstrate, those traditions are multiple and shifting, sometimes sealed by law, custom, myopia, or choice, but they are also permeable, crossed by experience, learning, and imagination.

This volume exists in large part because Douglass and Melville have made such impressive claims on our attention; that is mainly why they have come to be regarded as canonical figures. However, as canonical figures they can sometimes seem to tower over the culture to the point of obscuring it, making it difficult for their champions to discern the larger constellation of writers, thinkers, and ideas that influenced their own thinking or that operated independently of them. We are mindful of the interpretive risks, as elaborated by Deborah E. McDowell and others, of presenting men such as Douglass and Melville as representative of the culture, thereby ignoring the crucial role of women and, more broadly, the role of gender in cultural formations of the time.⁶ As with any intellectual inquiry, ours should be regarded as partial, aspiring to contribute to a larger critical dialogue, though by including a grouping of essays that explores Douglass’s and Melville’s notions of manhood and sexuality, we seek to avoid some of the pitfalls of taking their gender for granted.

We have encouraged our contributors to consider the two writers in the fullest possible contexts. Familiar literary and cultural contexts already have been established for each writer. Melville is often studied next to Emerson, Hawthorne, and other contemporary writers, as well as in relation to broad literary and philosophical Western traditions running from Plato to Shakespeare, Milton, and the romantics and to such specific antebellum contexts as naval reform, evangelical culture, and the literary marketplace. Douglass is often studied with respect to very different traditions and contexts, such as his contribution to the art of the slave narrative, his exchanges with antislavery activists Garrison and Gerrit Smith, and his leadership role as a black lecturer and newspaper editor. One of the aims of this volume, therefore, is not only to consider Douglass and Melville together but also to use such a comparative approach to rethink larger cultural and disciplinary configurations. Thus Steven Mailloux considers Douglass as a religious writer not only in relation to Melville but also to the political and religious activist Alexander Crummell; William Gleason considers Douglass as a poet not only in relation to Melville but also to Anglo-American antislavery poets; John Stauffer associates Douglass with Immanuel Kant and Melville with Edmund Burke in his analysis of their versions of the sublime; Elizabeth Barnes links Douglass and Melville to Adam Smith’s theories of sympathy, economy, and masculinity; and Maurice S. Lee, pointing to pragmatist tendencies in the two writers, aligns Douglass with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Melville with William James. It is our hope that the unusual dialogues generated by such recontextualized appraisals of Douglass and Melville will contribute to ongoing efforts to revitalize comparative analysis in U.S. literary and cultural studies. The contributors to this volume take us to places where religion, art, music, politics, race, nation, gender, and philosophy converge.

ALTERED BOUNDARIES

The eighteen essays in this volume are grouped into three sections, each of which focuses on a set of relations between Douglass and Melville and on the writers’ own scrutiny of boundaries: Literary and Cultural Geographies, Manhood and Sexuality, and Civil Wars. We have sought to use the sections as a way of bringing some narrative coherence to the disparate and wide-ranging essays in the volume; we also have chosen to juxtapose essays that are most clearly in dialogue on similar critical issues. In the first section, Literary and Cultural Geographies, the essayists explore biographical junctures and fissures, test racial transactions in the northern United States during the 1840s and 1850s, and consider Douglass’s and Melville’s own meditations on race. They also examine the ways Douglass and Melville maneuvered in the literary marketplace and extended their analyses across borders: between North and South, from the United States to England, from the mainland to islands in the Caribbean and the South Pacific. The second section, Manhood and Sexuality, contains essays on fatherhood, sympathy, sexual difference, and sexual violence. And in the third and final section, Civil Wars, the contributors examine issues of war and its aftermath: the defining of enemies; the meaning of carnage; questions of race and reunion; the rhetoric of tragedy, fraternity, apocalypse, and absolutes; and the ties between present and past.

In the first section, critics analyze the contiguities and distances between the two writers, focusing on questions of writing and location. John Ernest expresses skepticism about the comparative project, emphasizing the very different positions Douglass and Melville occupied in a racist society. The gaps between the two writers, he argues, are the product not only of their different positions and traditions but also of a critical history that has undervalued African American cultural distinctiveness. He describes the risks of abstracting Douglass from the complexities of African American community in the nineteenth century, and he cautions against a bringing together of Douglass and Melville that might represent a new form of interpretive appropriation in which Douglass is assimilated into established accounts of American literature and our sense of Melville remains unchanged.

A number of the essays in this section and the other two grapple with these large issues of history and method and offer possible responses to Ernest’s concerns. Robert K. Wallace shows us that the relation between Douglass and Melville was not only figurative but literal. With new discoveries from nineteenth-century periodical archives, Wallace describes how the careers of both Douglass and Melville developed in the shadow of Lemuel Shaw—lawyer, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and Melville’s father-in-law after 1847—who ruled in several key fugitive slave cases in the 1840s and 1850s. Douglass gained fame, and first came into print, opposing Shaw’s decisions against the fugitive George Latimer in 1842. Sterling Stuckey argues that Melville read Douglass’s 1845 Narrative and developed Douglass’s insights about black music in his 1851 Moby-Dick. Presenting Douglass as a theorist of black music who describes the origin of the spirituals and the blues in the songs he overheard while a slave, Stuckey sees Melville pursuing similar interests in the Ring Shout and blues structure in Moby-Dick. Melville may have read Douglass’s Narrative (Robert K. Wallace’s research indicates that he probably was aware of it) or he may have drawn upon his exposure to black music and dance during his whaling voyages. Either way, Stuckey—in his analyses of the slave song passages in Douglass’s Narrative and of the tonal fusions of Moby-Dick and the African American rhythms in the chapter Forecastle—Midnight—offers new perspectives on Douglass’s range and Melville’s technique, presenting Melville as a writer more influenced by African American culture than we might have imagined.⁷

In the first section, as our contributors examine Douglass and Melville’s reflections on writing and location, ironies abound. Susan M. Ryan explores the terrain of the literary marketplace, showing how in the 1850s Douglass simultaneously advertises My Bondage and My Freedom, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and his own moral authority in his public struggle against slavery, while Melville in Pierre (1852) rejects the expectations of his publisher and audience and corrosively undermines the moral status of his protagonist author. Confronting the marketplace, Douglass and Melville respond in surprising ways: Douglass, the former slave, manipulates his status as literary property in order to sway his audience, while Melville rejects the claims of the reading public, even as he desires its approval. In a study of Douglass and Melville as poets of insurrection, William Gleason addresses the marketplace from a complementary perspective, showing how Douglass more deliberately reached out to his readers by reprinting, quoting, and also writing abolitionist poetry. At the end of his essay, for the first time since its initial appearance in Frederick Douglass’ Paper in 1857, Gleason reprints Douglass’s poem The Tyrants’ Jubilee! Gleason compares Douglass’s portrayal of a white slaveholder’s anxious recognition of the inevitability and justice of black resistance with Melville’s sequence of poems in Battle-Pieces that figure black insurgency. In Gleason’s essay, Douglass and Melville, surveying the divides of race and region from their different perspectives, meet as poets of apprehension.

According to John Stauffer and Steven Mailloux, Douglass and Melville also meet as theorists of aesthetics and interpreters of Pauline Christianity. In his analysis of Douglass’s The Heroic Slave and Melville’s Moby-Dick, Stauffer shows how the two authors sought to represent interracial friendship through notions of the sublime. Both writers, with different emphases, imagined that friendship might bridge the divides forged in history and culture. For Douglass, the recognition of freedom and equality was crucial, required for a friendship that would serve as a model for human relations in a more just society; for Melville, who asserted a joint subjection, friendship allowed for local, personal experiences of freedom. Notions of interracial ethics and freedom may well have informed their considerations of religion, or vice versa, for as Mailloux observes by paying close attention to the religious literary marketplace of the period, Douglass and Melville were vitally engaged with the figure of Saint Paul. Mailloux concludes that Douglass adopted a positive political theology, in which he invoked Paul to support his activist commitments to various social reforms, while Melville’s struggles with faith led him toward a negative political theology in which reformism seemed futile. Analyzing their encounters with Pauline Christianity, Mailloux helps us understand key differences in Douglass’s and Melville’s stances on political activism during the 1850s and beyond.

Elisa Tamarkin and Rodrigo Lazo direct our attention to international literary and cultural geographies. Arguing that Douglass and Melville were fascinated by aspects of English culture that they associated with obsolescence and uselessness, Tamarkin suggests that Douglass, in his speeches on England, and Melville, in his novel Redburn (1849), sought in the idea of England an alternative to American instrumentalism, a respite from the demands of service. Unlike the militant Pauline Douglass of Mailloux’s essay, Tamarkin presents a black abolitionist who took great pleasure in embracing forms and practices that served no material end in the abolitionist struggle. Focusing on Cuba, Haiti, and the Galapagos, Lazo shows that while Douglass and Melville may have responded to the allure of Englishness, they sought to demystify the rhetoric of island enchantment, which exoticized the objects of U.S. imperialism and concealed specific histories and military ventures. In essays Douglass wrote and published in his periodicals during the 1840s and 1850s, he forcefully criticized U.S. designs on islands in the Caribbean. In the ten sketches of The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles (1854), Melville reproduced the mechanisms of enchantment, drawing upon the details of colonial expeditions in Cuba and the Galapagos and exposing his narrator’s ideological investments. Both writers demonstrated an acute awareness of the United States’ designs on the southern hemisphere; at various moments in their careers, both were implicated in those designs.

The two shorter sections of essays provide more focused considerations of key overlaps and concerns in the writings of Douglass and Melville. In the second section, Manhood and Sexuality, the contributors analyze how masculine sympathy can deplete, injure, and unite men and also conceal and disclose violence against women. Elizabeth Barnes dissects the limits of masculine sympathy and the costs of fraternity in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom and Melville’s White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850) and Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (1853). Both writers depict the ways in which identification with the powerless can render the sympathizer vulnerable. They explore the economy in sympathetic exchanges: profits and losses, who has and does not have the privilege of choosing to identify with the pain of other men. Hester Blum approaches the costs of sympathy from another direction and in relation to different texts. In Douglass’s Narrative (the gashed back of Aunt Esther) and in Melville’s The Encantadas (the violated body of the Chola widow), Blum sees both writers judging the conventions through which sexual violence is elided, the cruel kindness that protects female victims from exposure—and withholds their stories. Manipulating narrative and typography (especially the euphemistic dash), the two writers indicate how print can conceal, as they reflect on language and violence.

Violence and concealment have an important place in David Van Leer’s meditation on the closets of Douglass and Melville: the recesses from which their characters view sexuality indirectly. Van Leer compares the perspectives of the enslaved Douglass who, as represented in the Narrative and My Bondage and My Freedom, views the whipping of his aunt from a literal closet and fears that he will be next, and Melville’s Clarel, who gazes at other men from a distance and identifies and sympathizes with them, part of a pattern in Melville’s work in which he represents the intense desires between men. Acknowledging the difficulty of comparing the two writers, Van Leer tests the limits of the analogy between a racially oppressed narrator and a sexually embattled one. Maurice Wallace argues for a different kind of link in his consideration of Douglass and Melville as fathers, describing the two figures as patriarchs who dream about sacrificing their warrior sons. Both fathers fixate on photographs of those sons (and Douglass is obsessed with his own visual representations) in order to enhance their status and work through their guilt. Wallace draws attention to the images of Melville’s son Malcolm, who died by his own hand, especially an 1867 carte de visite showing him in the uniform of the New York State National Guard, and to the pictures of Douglass’s sons Charles and Lewis, who enlisted in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry regiment during the Civil War. These images of the three sons are reproduced in Wallace’s pages, juxtaposed in eerie symmetry.

The essays in the final section consider Douglass and Melville in relation to the Civil War and its aftermath. Focusing on some of their key writings of the 1850s and 1860s, Russ Castronovo and Dana Nelson join Douglass and Melville as cross patriots. Rather than demonizing southerners during the Civil War, the two writers sought to comprehend, even while countering, their views. Castronovo and Nelson suggest that Douglass and Melville may provide models of how the literary values of identification, ambiguity, and complexity can be used to understand enemies in times of fierce political conflict, then and now. Carolyn L. Karcher and Gregory Jay more pointedly separate Douglass and Melville on issues of war and Reconstruction. They argue that Melville was drawn to the white fraternal reunion that Douglass feared would take place at the expense of African American rights. For Karcher, Douglass in his Civil War writings embraces apocalyptic rhetoric to justify the conflict as a struggle between good and evil and in an attempt to establish bonds between whites and blacks in the North. In contrast, Melville in Battle-Pieces subverts an apocalyptic account, presenting the Civil War as a white fraternal tragedy. Yet Karcher, like Castronovo and Nelson, argues for the persistent value of Melville’s skepticism about the legitimating rhetoric of war. Asking Was Billy Budd lynched?, Jay insists that we need to understand the issues of justice, epistemology, and race in Billy Budd in the context of Douglass’s and Ida B. Wells’s denunciations of social violence in the late nineteenth century. In this context, Melville’s novella appears to reproduce the politics of white reunion, even as it raises questions about the sacrificial loss such a reunion might entail.

Skeptical about critical approaches that present Douglass and Melville as adhering to specific political positions, Maurice S. Lee discusses the two writers as protopragmatists who, in their responses to the Civil War, sought to undermine foundations and absolutes. According to Lee, despite, or maybe as a result of, his conviction that the war was justified, Douglass saw the conflict as a laboratory in which truth claims could be tested, as would Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whereas Melville viewed the war as the tragic result of attachment to extreme positions and unquestioned beliefs, as would William James. Making a historical leap to the middle of the twentieth century, Eric J. Sundquist traces the sinuous antislavery legacies of Douglass and Melville in the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. He describes how figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Lowell invoked and reworked the two writers. My Bondage and My Freedom and Benito Cereno become vehicles for confronting the unfinished work of racial justice and imagining the prospect, even imminence, of violence. Sundquist notes an irony that he believes both writers would have savored: Melville, the descendant of Revolutionary royalty, became an exile, while Douglass, the former slave, again and again insisted upon a place for himself in U.S. society.

In this final section, the disagreement among our essay writers is sharp, as is the shared sense that the two writers are uncannily prescient. Whatever their differences, the contributors to Civil Wars present Douglass and Melville as writing about crucial questions of membership and exclusion, militancy and consent, the shape and tone of national stories, and the foundations of belief—all urgent topics in contemporary debate.

The essayists in this book bring a variety of methods to their inquiry into the relation between Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville. They use the insights of historicism, intellectual history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, African American studies, gay studies, close reading, and aesthetics. Across the eighteen essays in this volume, the contributors seek to understand how Douglass and Melville are bound and separated, and they also examine the dynamics of relation, crossing (but not erasing) lines of race, status, tradition, and genre. Often the contributors point to altered premises and unexpected recognitions brought about by the joining of Douglass and Melville. As critics have long argued, the literary projects of each writer have been distinguished by such unsettling, reforming, and reframing. In relation to one another, as the essays in this volume show, these defamiliarizing effects are multiplied. The closer we look—and the contributors to this volume look very closely—the more complex and surprising Douglass and Melville become. After this volume, we hope that it will no longer be possible to consider these two major figures without feeling the pressure and the tension of that and.

NOTES

1. Several critics have juxtaposed Douglass and Melville, but sustained comparative analysis has been rare. For pairings of the two writers, see H. Bruce Franklin, "Animal Farm Unbound; or, What the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave Reveals about American Literature," New Letters 43 (Spring 1977): 46; H. Bruce Franklin, Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 26–34; Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 33–34, 107–8, 126, 133, 141, 256 (n. 104); Russell J. Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature (New York: Methuen, 1986), 252–55, 269–72; William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 81; Richard H. Brodhead, Melville; or, Aggression, in Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays, ed. John Bryant and Robert Milder (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997), 188; Russ Castronovo, Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 17–21; Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 14–171; Geoffrey Sanborn, The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 11–14; and John Carlos Rowe, "Melville’s Typee: U.S. Imperialism at Home and Abroad," in National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, ed. Donald Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 269–71. Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1853) and Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), two stories of maritime slave revolt, have been contrasted in works such as Herman Beavers, The Blind Leading the Blind: The Racial Gaze as Plot Dilemma in ‘Benito Cereno’ and ‘The Heroic Slave,’ in Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies, ed. Henry B. Wonham (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 205–29; Maggie Montesinos Sale, The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 146–97; and Joseph Young, A Reversal of the Racialization of History in Hegel’s Master/Slave Dialectic (Douglass’s ‘Heroic Slave’ and Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’), in Race and the Foundations of Knowledge, ed. Joseph Young and Jana Evans Braziel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 94–113. Eric J. Sundquist makes Douglass and Melville central figures in his account of the cross-racial debate about slavery and revolution in the decades before the Civil War; see his To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 27–221. Recently, Robert K. Wallace has provided the most thorough description of the biographical contiguities of the two writers, and he speculates about literary influences, in Douglass and Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style (New Bedford, Mass.: Spinner Publications, 2005).

2. For biographies of Douglass and Melville, see Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1948); Waldo E. Martin Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); McFeely, Frederick Douglass; Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1996); Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, 2002); and Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

3. Wallace, Douglass and Melville, 23–51. Elizabeth McHenry documents Douglass’s reprinting of the Typee excerpt in the June 2, 1848, issue of his North Star in her Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 123.

4. John Stauffer discusses James McCune Smith’s invocation of Moby-Dick in the March 7, 1856, issue of Frederick Douglass’ Paper in his The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 66. Stauffer reprints the essay, entitled Horoscope, in his edition of The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 143–48.

5. The quoted phrase is, of course, Toni Morrison’s, serving as the subtitle to her influential essay Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature (1989), reprinted as the lead essay in Wonham, ed., Criticism and the Color Line, 16–29.

6. See Deborah E. McDowell, In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-American Narrative Tradition, in Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1991), 92–213.

7. On Melville as an African American artist, see Sterling Stuckey, Going through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), chaps. 9 and 10.

PART ONE

LITERARY AND CULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES

REVOLUTIONARY FICTIONS AND ACTIVIST LABOR

LOOKING FOR DOUGLASS AND MELVILLE TOGETHER

John Ernest

To consider Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville together is to enter the chaotic terrain of U.S. cultural history, a world just beyond the existing maps of established literary traditions, and a world that cannot be contained by monumentalizing approaches to great authors. To be sure, this is the reason why we need to enter this terrain. As Robert K. Wallace has observed in his groundbreaking study of the two writers, Douglass and Melville moved in physical proximity between 1840 and 1850 and in mutual awareness between 1847 and 1855. Following these two young Americans during the middle of the nineteenth century provides a better sense of the nation’s shared heritage—and squandered legacy—in the early twenty-first century.¹ The challenge, of course, is to understand the terms of this shared heritage without simplifying the realities of U.S. racial history.

Both the benefit and the danger of considering Douglass and Melville together is that these men have become, in effect, significant historical sites, representative figures whose lives and texts survey the complex dynamics of the American political and cultural landscape. It is indeed difficult to consider a comparative study of Melville and Douglass without thinking of the two writers as serving a representative function, both individually and together. But how should we understand this representative pairing, and to what end should it be directed? Considering the preeminence of these two writers, their centrality in nineteenth-century literary studies, one might well be tempted to endorse Wallace’s hopeful response to this question—that Douglass and Melville should be classified as Americans, and that to classify one as black and the other as white creates a false dichotomy between them that, more than anything else, has prevented American society from seeing them in relation to each other.² And therein lies what I consider the central challenge of this project, for if we take this as a simple, self-evident statement—that is, if we read it as many white Americans have read this sort of statement over the years—then we will fall into a familiar pattern of adopting the discredited logic of racialized bodies momentarily so as to deny the currency or usefulness of race as a category of historical and cultural analysis. But if we note, as we must, that classifying Douglass and Melville as Americans is an entrance and not a conclusion, then we find ourselves forced to consider the cultural complexity of the signifiers black and white, far beyond questions of complexion, parentage, or legal identifications.

The problem, I suggest, is not that it makes no sense to consider these two writers together, but rather that this pairing seems to make such great sense as to seem almost inevitable. Since Douglass was first and remains almost alone among his contemporaries as an African American writer recognized as canonical, and since Melville has increasingly been recognized as one of the few white writers of his time who sometimes approached the subjects of race and slavery with surprising insight and complex self-awareness, this pairing could potentially teach us a great deal about the need to reenvision American literary and cultural history. And the lessons are likely to be complex, for both men were intimately associated with a range of difficult social issues, with communities often reduced to a generalized mass, and with concepts of justice that were central to their written work; and both men produced a body of work in which one text can seem suggestive of a theoretically conclusive vision of social order and justice until it is placed next to another text written earlier or later in the author’s career. A reading of their texts together reveals recurring tensions, productive indirections, and frustrated (and sometimes frustrating) searches for an encompassing vision. In effect, they both promise more than they deliver and deliver more than they promise—gesturing always to another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.³

The problem is that we have been to that world before, a world in which a delimited black presence facilitates a superficially interracial exchange. Black and white writers have often been studied in relation, but the burden of cultural translation and relocation, of reckoning with the tie, has been unevenly borne. Indeed, it is quite possible, even probable, that Douglass has been studied in relation to white writers more often than he has been studied in relation to black writers of his time.⁴ It remains important, in other words, to attend to Deborah E. McDowell’s now-famous observation that Douglass has been regularly presented as a representative man, as the part that stands for the whole, and that scholars and teachers who have privileged and mystified Douglass’s narrative have in effect twice distorted Douglass’s work into a kind of double duty, for not only does it make slavery intelligible, but the ‘black experience’ as well.⁵ One might say that a great deal of African American scholarship over the past few decades has been devoted to recovering a literary and cultural history that makes Douglass both more and less than the part that stands for the whole. This scholarship has been dedicated to the proposition that we will more fully appreciate Douglass when we are in a position to see him as one writer, one leader, one representative man among many men and women who devoted their efforts to the needs of an envisioned, and complex, African American community. This, too, might be another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie, but the scholarship on this world, so very much in process, remains largely unknown even to many who teach and publish on Douglass.

A comparative study of Douglass and Melville, then, in the context of the current status of an African American literary tradition still very much under (re)construction, runs the considerable risk of promoting the frequently operative assumption that we have enough to go on, since Douglass, above all other nineteenth-century African American writers, has received a great deal of scholarly attention. But however accomplished the scholarship on Douglass might be, there is still a great deal of work to do before we will be in a position to evaluate that scholarship within the full field of contingent relations that defined Douglass’s thinking, his sense of mission, and his public life. In the meantime, and with that larger project in mind, one might say that the challenge of considering Douglass and Melville together involves two simple but insistent questions: what worlds should we look for, and what are the ties that bind? These are the questions to which this essay is devoted.

WHITE SWELLING AND ITS CONSEQUENCES HISTORY AND COMMEMORATION

Let me state the question directly: if Melville and Douglass can be identified on the same street in the same town at the same hour, can we say that they were in the same place? What I mean by this is suggested by Bridget T. Heneghan’s observation about Frederick Law Olmsted’s reports on his travels in the South. Olmsted, Heneghan notes, has trouble following the directions from a local farmer, which include fallen-in cabins, fences, unidentifiable schoolhouses and hidden log houses, and he has trouble as well when he asks the distance to a certain house and the slave he questions can only estimate how long the journey will take. Heneghan observes that his frustration comes from a difference in perspective: the farmer’s directions draw from a knowledge of the history of the area and of the endpoints of each small path. The slave’s concerns are for the traveling time that he might control, rather than the measured land that he cannot. Olmsted only becomes confused when directed through ruined cabins and unused fields: these are the hidden and ignored elements of a planter’s formal landscape.⁶ Melville and Douglass similarly lived in a cultural landscape divided by labor and time, and they necessarily negotiated their separate ways through that landscape differently. Although they lived in the same historical period, they lived in different complexes of community, space, and time—and therefore, to a significant extent, in different historical continuums.

It is important, accordingly, to consider carefully the ways in which each writer directs us through the historical landscape, in part by attending to the historical communities that Douglass and Melville themselves identified as pertinent to their professional goals and their national visions. In doing so, I do not wish to suggest that either Douglass or Melville should be understood by way of a simple black/white racial binary, nor do I mean to suggest that there were homogeneous black and white communities to which the two should be relegated. Rather, I mean simply to recognize that both men lived and worked in a white supremacist culture, that their lives and writing were conditioned by that culture, and that they necessarily negotiated differently with the intricate dynamics of systemic racism. The actual workings of that culture would require a study of the chaotic dynamics of historical process and the racialization of social space and public performance, which is far beyond the scope of this essay. But the messiness of history was and is regularly gathered into a comprehensible story by way of commemorative practices—both the shaping of collective memory and the critiques that emerge from commemorative rituals. Accordingly, by way of a consideration of the two writers’ interrogation of (and participation in) monumental history and the commemorative imagination, we can glimpse each writer’s sense of the communities unacknowledged by national protocols of remembrance and continuity, and in this way we can identify the historical fields in which Douglass and Melville might be located.

Melville comments on commemorative work most directly in Israel Potter (1855), a narrative based on a narrative—preserving, Melville promises, almost as a reprint, Israel Potter’s autobiographical story.⁷ As he states in the dedication to His Highness the Bunker-Hill Monument that prefaces the narrative, commemoration is devoted to the preservation of the authentic, so that in the imagined eyes of His Highness the monument, the merit of the story must be in its general fidelity to the main drift of the original narrative (viii). Melville was well aware of the tastes of the audiences for historical literature, but he was characteristically incapable of believing that history could be apprehended by way of faithful preservation. Readers of Israel Potter encounter variously deflated or comically inflated American heroes—Benjamin Franklin and John Paul Jones, most brilliantly—along with the creation of Israel as a Yankee challenge to British nobility and the king. Readers also follow Israel on his winding journey through various identities, as well as the bondage of poverty and labor, in this enemy’s Egypt.

But although the narrator compares Israel’s forty years’ wanderings in the London deserts to the forty years in the natural wilderness of the outcast Hebrews under Moses, Israel finds himself in a strange exodus, with no one to either lead or follow, and with a journey directed only to the dubious promised land of a vaguely remembered past, where he dies on the same day that the oldest oak on his native hills was blown down (169). In his satirical treatment of monumental American icons as well as of the Bunker Hill Monument itself, in other words, Melville returns the people of Israel to a national landscape of forever arrested intentions, and its representative Israel to a long life still rotting in early mishap (168). Melville’s unkept promises of fidelity to the original narrative, indeed, help to transform Potter’s narrative into a journey through a largely unknowable past obscured by the myths of monumental history, something in the light of a dilapidated old tombstone retouched (vii).

African Americans would certainly identify with this critique of the Bunker Hill Monument (a frequent presence in African American writing of the time), and they would identify as well with the story of Exodus as a commentary on failed promises and arrested intentions, but they might well wonder where to locate themselves in this story of a nation described by the narrator as sharing the same blood with England (120). Indeed, as the novel follows the trials of the well-named Israel, the bondsman in the English Egypt, one has reason to wonder about the ideological role of those beyond the pale of the shared bloodlines of the two nations. In the heart of that English Egypt, as he faces the task of making bricks, Israel is supported by the narrator’s commentary on the symbolic significance of his task: Are not men built into communities just like bricks into a wall? As man serves bricks, the narrator adds, so God him: building him up by billions into the edifices of his purposes (156). An inclusive vision, it seems, until we learn that not all bricks prove to be equal when pressed to their separate roles in God’s kiln. The bricks immediately lining the vaults would be all burnt to useless scrolls, we are told, black as charcoal, and twisted into shapes the most grotesque; the next tier would be a little less withered, but hardly fit for service; and gradually, as you went higher and higher along the successive layers of the kiln, you came to the midmost ones, sound square, and perfect bricks (156). But as the black bricks are but useless scrolls, the uppermost layers of bricks are similarly of limited use, though they by no means presented the distorted look of the furnace-bricks (156). Between the two extremes lies the ideal, with the character of the bricks shaped by the particular contingencies of their position in the kiln: The furnace bricks were haggard, with the immediate blistering of the fire—the midmost ones were ruddy with a genial and tempered glow—the summit ones were pale with the languor of too exclusive an exemption from the burden of the blaze (156). Examining the various features of the bricks, and considering their external features, their relative physical positions, and their relative constitutional soundness, Israel sounds very much like a nineteenth-century student of race.⁸

Indeed, this passage is one of many in Melville’s work that reveals a determined but anxious critique of the racial order of his day, for he often reflected on the troubled social space between, in effect, the grotesque black and the languid pale bricks. In The Confidence-Man (1857), for example, the grotesque negro cripple sets the stage for the series of guises that follows, encountering early in the novel a purple-faced drover who asks where the Black Guinea sleeps. On der floor of der good baker’s oven, sar, the Black Guinea replies, about which the drover comments, What baker, I should like to know, bakes such black bread in his oven, alongside of his nice white rolls, too. Who is that too charitable baker, pray? The baker, of course, is the sun—and all God’s bricks and rolls alike are baked together, though the very thought of winter sends this black sheep of a Black Guinea into the thickest of the crowd, . . . nudging itself a cozy berth in the heart of the white flock.⁹ Melville here both satirizes racial prejudices and explores the social space that such prejudices create.

But the world of The Confidence-Man, in which trust and confidence are tested beyond their limits, hints at an anxiety not so easily satirized. As Leonard Cassuto has observed, nineteenth-century white Americans viewed the objectified African slave and his descendants as grotesque precisely because those of African origins did not fit into an existing category for ordering social relations. While those of African origins could not be seen consistently as a person in the Western worldview, Cassuto observes, neither could they be seen consistently as a thing, either.¹⁰ Nor, Cassuto demonstrates, were Melville’s characters free of this white dilemma, for Melville drew from and addressed a culture increasingly given to displaying non-Westerners as barbaric, subhuman creatures, a culture in which racial ‘science’ and freak show pamphlets grew from the same root.¹¹ In his discussion of Typee (1846), Cassuto argues that despite an exceptional desire to view the world nonhierarchically as he passes in and out of its cultures, Tommo cannot be considered a citizen of an imagined new world of tolerance toward native peoples. Instead, Melville makes him just like the rest of his antebellum American countrymen: a fascinated, repulsed, and finally ambivalent customer at the nationally sponsored freak show."¹² Indeed, in much of his work, Melville explores not just race but the social relations and interactions formed and complicated by racial difference, and, as many scholars have observed, his own anxieties on the subject are evident throughout.

These anxieties certainly play an important role in the background of Israel Potter, but Israel’s exodus is not simply a journey into the pretended certainties of racial science; rather, it is an exodus through the anxieties of race and into the dubious promised land of an imagined common man. Israel’s exodus is, in short, one that favors neither those too close to the laboring heat nor those too far removed from it—an exodus of the ruddy Yankee icon. The suggested image of a hierarchy of racial types leads instead to Israel’s vision, as he works the bricks, of a common humanity, as all bricks come from the same clay: "‘What signifies