Introduction

From the very start of his writing career, Melville was fascinated by human variation and mutability, by ideas about norms and the facts of divergence. And from the very start, things are complicated. In the two sketches “Fragments from a Writing Desk,” published two weeks apart on May 4 and May 18, 1839, in the Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser, Melville links stories of romantic pursuit. In the first sketch, a narrator writes to an acquaintance, effusing over the charms of three young ladies, each a paragon of beauty representing classical, heavenly, and fairytale allure. In the second sketch, a narrator, possibly the same narrator, receives a billet-doux from a cloaked female figure, carrying a message from “Inamorata”: “Gentle Sir—If my fancy has painted you in genuine colours, you will on the receipt of this, incontinently follow the bearer where she will lead you.”11 Herman Melville, Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987), 197. Hereafter cited as NN PT. With eagerness and some anxiety, the narrator follows the figure out of town, through the woods, and to a country villa, where he and his conductress are elevated to a lofty window in a basket. They enter a perfumed, mirrored apartment decorated with the splendors of the East, the perfect setting, the narrator explains, for “the matchless beauty of its inmate”: “When I first obtained a glimpse of this lovely being, she lay reclining upon an ottoman; in one hand holding a lute, and with the other lost in the profusion of her silken tresses, she supported her head” (NN PT 202). The joke, and the shock, of the paired sketches is that the sentimental narrator of the first sketch has his desires fulfilled in the odalisque of the second—but this fulfillment climaxes in a gothic exposure: “Those lustrous orbs again opened on me all their fires ... looking her in the face, I met the same impassioned gaze; her lips moved—my senses ached with the intensity with which I listened,—all was still,—they uttered no sound; I flung her from me, even though she clung to my vesture, and with a wild cry of agony I burst from the apartment!—She was dumb! Great God, she was dumb! DUMB AND DEAF!” (NN PT 204). The second sketch ends at the expense of the self-indulgent male narrator, who is appalled by the female “inmate” he has immured in his fantasies. The “lustrous orbs,” overdecorated chamber, and staggering revelation of female identity all seem reminiscent of Poe's “Ligeia,” another story of male pursuit, first published in September 1838, although the narrator of Poe's story seems to experience pleasure, as well as recoil, at his imaginative achievement. Both sketches from Melville's “Writing Desk” are filled with literary and art historical allusions. Despite the verbal echo they share about a “loveliness” that “no art can [could] heighten” (NN PT 193, [202]), the two sketches suggest the role that art can play in amplifying and distorting desire. At the climax of the second sketch, muteness and deafness are left to stand as capitalized signs of monstrous defect. The reader is invited to share the narrator's repulse and his “wild cry of agony.”“Inamorata,” who at first sight appears more than human, is ultimately revealed as only a sight, without access to sound or speech, and thus less than human. Her objectification is symbolized by her muteness and deafness, or, in the telling diction that then and now conflates the absence of conventional speech with cognitive impairment, by her “dumbness.” The narrator's horror seems as excessive as his fantasy. Although Inamorata does not speak, she does use language. The written words in her note draw him to her. In the climactic scene, she attempts to communicate. Yet to the narrator, her moving lips, forming without providing sound, are a sign of profound deviance. He requires the auditory to fulfill his vision and to complete his desire: “`I feel my passion is requited: but, seal it with thy own sweet voice, or I shall expire in uncertainty!'” (NN PT 204). The two stare into each other's eyes, and then they kiss, but the narrator flees at the sight of her soundless lips. The fancies of Inamorata, too, are thwarted. Despite the hope expressed in her note, she has not painted the narrator in genuine colors (although she may be right about his “incontinence”). He responds to her words and to her body, but he recoils from her silence. Even though the narrator has the last word, and that word (“DEAF!”) sums up his agony and his rejection, Inamorata's own gestures—“I flung her from me, even though she clung to my vesture”—indicate that the final scene depicts a mutual shock. Although Inamorata fails to connect with the narrator, the second “Fragment” from Melville's “Writing Desk” suggests a bond of silence between its two female characters: the messenger and her mistress. Inamorata's messenger brings her finger to her lips whenever the narrator seeks a response from her. The only sound she makes is “a slightly audible scream of surprise” when the narrator threatens to overtake her as she leads him to her mute mistress (NN PT 198). The two women are linked, rather than alienated, by their lack of speech. These slight, intricate sketches inaugurate Melville's career-long pursuit of issues attached to bodies: the presence of human physical and cognitive variation, the impulse to interpret human difference, the relationships between the material and the metaphorical, the response to “disability,” the pressures of the “normal.” Inamorata is the first (and a rare female instance) in a series of figures across Melville's prose and poetry whose physical or psychic difference is often stigmatized and whose ways of being in the world are explored. Such a series would include “Tommo,” the narrator of Typee, whose swollen leg places him in a “disabled condition”; the inhabitants of Hooloomooloo, “The Isle of Cripples,” in Mardi, who have been segregated because they were “not symmetrically formed” and whose king Yoky communicates with his fingers and a through the aid of a translator: “meaning made its way through four successive channels to the mind—hand, sight, voice, and tympanum”; the versatile, voiceless beggars in Redburn, lining the Liverpool dock wall, who inscribe the stories of their disabilities on painted boards, chalked flagstones, and wounded flesh; the narrator of White-Jacket, whose jacket, figured repeatedly as skin, marks him for discrimination and impairs his mobility; the monomaniacal Captain Ahab and his prosthetic limb in Moby-Dick, of course, but also the cabin boy Pip, whose abandonment at sea and glimpse of its “wondrous depths” make him an “idiot,” and the “crazy” prophets Elijah and Gabriel; the aphasic Isabel in Pierre and Pierre, who physically disintegrates and sees himself as the dismembered Enceladus, whose psychic excess (along with his author's) has been diagnosed by literary critics and, most prominently, by the Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray; the stricken Benito Cereno, hypersensitive and melancholic; the society of extraordinary bodies in The Confidence-Man: the deaf mute, the crippled Black Guinea, the man with a wooden leg, the coughing miser, the sick old man, the invalid Titan, the paralyzed soldier of fortune Thomas Fry, and the crazy beggar; in Clarel, the humpbacked Celio and also Don Hannibal, the one-armed and one-legged Mexican veteran of the revolutionary struggle against Spain; and finally Billy Budd, whose stutter, his “organic hesitancy,” is the object of narrative desire and a fatal engine of the plot.22 Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1968), 61, 119; Mardi: and a Voyage Thither, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1970), 569-74; Redburn: His First Voyage (ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1969), 186-88; Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988), 414, 93, 314, hereafter cited as NN MD; Henry A. Murray, introduction to Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, by Herman Melville (New York: Hendricks House, 1949), xiii-ciii; Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 53. The number and range of these characters, many of them major, indicate the centrality in Melville's thinking of what we have come to call “disability.” The heterogeneity of the list suggests the difficulty of arriving at a stable definition of the term. Disability studies scholars, political activists, and domestic and international service agencies have considered various designations, such as handicapped, impaired, disabled, disabled person, and person with disabilities. Most of those who work in the field emphasize the ways in which cultural beliefs and social barriers have transformed physical and mental differences, temporary and permanent, into disabilities. Lennard J. Davis, David T. Mitchell, Sharon L. Snyder, and Tobin Siebers have suggested that the unstable category of “disability,” rooted in the body, reminds us that human differences can be material as well as constructed.33 On issues of terminology and identity, see Gary L. Albrecht, Katherine D. Seelman, and Michael Bury, eds., The Handbook of Disability Studies (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, Inc., 2001), 1-8; Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (New York: Verso, 1995), xii-xiv, 158-71, and Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York Univesity Press, 2002), 1-5, 79-101; David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, eds., The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 1-4, and Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 1-4, 43-45; and Rosemarie Garland Thompson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 12-15. Valuable overviews of the field of disability studies in the humanities are provided by Davis, “Crips Strike Back: The Rise of Disability Studies,”American Literary History 11.3 (1999), 500-512; by Mitchell and Snyder, The Body and Physical Difference, 1-31, and Narrative Prosthesis, 15-45; and by Tobin Siebers, “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to a New Reality of the Body,”American Literary History 13.4 (2001): 737-54. “Disability” is the term of choice for contemporary activists and theorists. Through his characters, Melville analyzes social ascriptions, repeats stereotypes, explores the allure of charity, and meditates on human imperfection. “Disability” is a crucial part of his fascination with how meanings are invested in and extracted from human bodies. Critics too often have overlooked the disabilities represented in Melville's texts or restricted their understanding to the figurative: disability “as metaphor,” to use Susan Sontag's influential phrase.44 See Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrat, Straus, & Giroux, 1978). While Sontag persuades that certain kinds of metaphors can be pernicious, it is hard to imagine how or why metaphor itself should be proscribed in efforts to understand illness (or disability or any other human condition), as she argues on her first page. That is, they have interpreted disabilities as signifying moral or spiritual deformity or psychic distress and viewed them as providing the key to the characters of Melville's characters. In such accounts, the extraordinary array of human bodies and minds across Melville's work has been “screened” but also “screened out,” in ways similar to those that Paul K. Longmore has analyzed in twentieth-century film and television, in which characters with disabilities are seen but not acknowledged.55 Paul K. Longmore, “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People in Television and Motion Pictures,” in Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images, ed. Alan Gartner and Tom Joe (New York: Praeger, 1987), 65-78. The writers of the essays in this volume approach Melville's texts in a different way. They bring the insights of two decades of disability scholarship to interpret the bodily experiences of characters (and of the writer), the cultural responses represented and examined in Melville's works, and the nineteenth-century contexts in which the meanings of disability were produced. In “Ishmael's Recovery: Injury, Illness, and Convalescence in Moby-Dick,” from whose have critics of Moby-Dick, to and his psychic and physical and to the and writing upon which he with analyzes the literary by these two whose bodies are He argues for Melville's with and his writing David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. and the of disability in The They the narrator's to disability to or of the in the response to the call for essays for this of was the of in The a which may come to play a role in literary studies of disability similar to the role that has in of upon the work of of disability such as and Mitchell and and The at a in cultural They a understanding of disability as the of that to and and of that the disabled as and to for In of as a Mitchell and that Melville as a that rather than He the of in a that for its on the it the Mitchell and that disability in The an excess that and the represented In Melville to The Disability in American Literature and that the figure of the man was with about the or of and she how disability was to Melville's and argues that Melville's narrator his disabled makes his the of his and the of thus the of and upon which the In his Mitchell leg, the and to suggest that of absence and presence and the meanings of a crucial to These essays and work in disability studies in the way to of Melville's of the with the and the in his Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Lennard J. the meanings of in the differences between the absence of and the absence of sound and the role of silence in narrative as and as represented that we between which is and and which is and he the of and approach can lead to a understanding of the kinds of the of and the about and in such as “Fragments from a Writing Moby-Dick, Pierre, and Billy In “Disability in Tobin Siebers to the of social of the body, by which an that has been and and which disability with He argues for the of material bodies whose are not to political and of for is as as Physical is often in Melville's to of and by in ways that Siebers to The of and of Siebers suggest for studies of Melville and Rosemarie Garland to another and in Melville's influential in on the in and that were not for by to their such by Melville have also an influential on mental illness and in between an of a and an of the the of and See Thompson, Extraordinary Henry “The of Michael Paul The and of Herman Melville (New York: A. and The of the and Harvard University Press, brings us to The is elevated by critics for his leg is metaphor and and by for Ahab is only the of to lost leg include it as The or, the of the York: House, the of the The Melville University Press, Herman York: and and the of University of Chicago Press, the of and a of male L. and in the of Herman University Press, Ahab is considered by most who on disability and to be In he is a whose his an who seeks for the that has term is only Ahab his leg in a struggle that he has with the and as well as seems to the of While disability critics that Ahab even for his most and that Melville as a the leg for the the and is not only the of his it is also the of that “The in in Gartner and Images of the Disabled, see also his of the “The in the in the is by Longmore, “Screening Thompson, Extraordinary Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, and Davis, Bending Over Ahab is by such critics as A. Literary Herman Melville (New York: and Thompson, Melville's with University Press, and A. Melville (New York: Press, 1962), Henry “The of and, more introduction to ed. (New York: L. Captain and the Melville University Press, and K. L. University of Press, may be to this conventional The narrator of often (and often an of as the of his most in the of own the in the of “The for as Henry reminds to his with and we to the difficulty of the of At three the of as experience of physical his bond with Pip, and his I not to the or the allure of Ahab as alienated, monomaniacal I that the does not him to that Ahab is an extraordinary on physical this requires Tobin with that as the of social or the response to such Siebers argues that is and as the against the in ways that make the between and in most seem in Both and Ahab the of and the struggle between and for of the of of and in “The (NN or his about the intensity of and the of when Ahab in in “The (NN with the is him a in and the is him a different of a in Ahab on the and the and of male bodies. He and his own body, and he the meanings of The experience of the narrator to and Although Ahab is often as the of the disabled in his is Ahab with (or the and the He seeks with his first Most he out to another with the cabin boy Although the bond the of the between the two very different figures as a to the between and at the The two attached in and which with the of the that the to its my Ahab as he but a as this, he been and they hand in hand to cabin (NN Ahab to me for one lost and suggests that they will a (NN They are when Ahab to his that and for this my my most (NN On Ahab and Pip, see and in on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, ed. and Hershel (New York: G. K. and American and in the of and (New York: University Press, L. over the and in Melville's University Press, and Melville and The of in the American (New York: University Press, The and the between the their the response of the to what the the (NN and of in which are all is has for in the of the the narrator, when writing of does not to his or leg or to to his Ahab burst from his and his and he from his (NN 202). Ahab a on the and then in the at the cry that a has been (NN with its (NN He repeatedly the and (NN The of in The Melville 1987), At other and in the the narrator his and his in see Mitchell and how Ahab has the to his the in the the lining the of his the the and very he to himself on the (NN and the and he to the On see Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, we interpret the that in which seems a of an in writing and a different of the a a a temporary in the or the narrator's or the of how should we this The of representing disability in that identity is in and on his Ahab the often to disabled characters: object of charity, These are from the of “The in and Longmore, “Screening Mitchell and for an of the of for the experiences of disability and the responses to although they to Ahab as a in the of Studies of Melville and and of and us to human and to understand the that make their They us make of the contexts and of human

Art · Sociology · Disability Rights and Representation · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · History

• Subversive Genealogy

  Michael Paul Rogin•Subversive Genealogy•1985

  Add to list

• American Renaissance

  F O Matthiessen•American Renaissance•2007

  Add to list

• Disability in Theory

  Tobin Siebers•American Literary History•2001

  Add to list

• The Body and Physical Difference

  D Mitchell, Sharon Snyder•The body and physical difference•1997

  Add to list

• Tradition Counter Tradition

  Steven Cohan, Joseph Allen Boone•South Atlantic Review•1989

  Add to list

• Extraordinary Bodies

  Ann Folwell, Rosemarie Garland Thomson•American Literature•1998

  Add to list

• Mardi

  Lawrance Thompson, Herman Melville et al.•American Literature•1971

  Add to list

• The Melville Archetype

  John Seelye, Martin Leonard Pops•American Literature•1971

  Add to list

• Shadow over the Promised Land

  Lorman Ratner, Lorman A Ratner et al.•Journal of American History•1980

  Add to list