Melville's financial success as a writer during his lifetime was not great, relative to his posthumous success; over his entire lifetime Melville's writings earned him just over $10,000 (equivalent to $286,125 in 2023).[180] Melville's travelogues based on voyages to the South Seas and stories based on his time in the merchant marine and navy led to some initial success, but his popularity declined dramatically afterwards. By 1876, all of his books were out of print.[181] He was viewed as a minor figure in American literature in the later years of his life and during the years immediately after his death.[182]
Poetry
Melville did not publish poetry until his late thirties, with Battle-Pieces (1866), and did not receive recognition as a poet until well into the 20th century. But he wrote predominantly poetry for about 25 years, twice as long as his prose career. The three novels of the 1850s that Melville worked on most seriously to present his philosophical explorations, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence Man, seem to make the step to philosophical poetry a natural one rather than simply a consequence of commercial failure. Since he turned to poetry as a meditative practice, his poetic style, even more than most Victorian poets, was not marked by linguistic play or melodic considerations.[183]
Early critics were not sympathetic. Henry Chapin, in his introduction to John Marr and Other Poems (1922), one of the earlier selections of Melville's poetry, said Melville's verse is "of an amateurish and uneven quality" but in it "that loveable freshness of personality, which his philosophical dejection never quenched, is everywhere in evidence," in "the voice of a true poet".[184] The poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren became a champion of Melville as a great American poet and issued a selection of Melville's poetry in 1971 prefaced by an admiring critical essay.[185] In the 1990s critic Lawrence Buell argued that Melville "is justly said to be nineteenth-century America's leading poet after Whitman and Dickinson"[183] and Helen Vendler remarked of Clarel: "What it cost Melville to write this poem makes us pause, reading it. Alone, it is enough to win him, as a poet, what he called 'the belated funeral flower of fame'."[186] Some critics now place him as the first modernist poet in the United States while others assert that his work more strongly suggests what today would be a postmodern view.[187]
Melville revival and Melville studies
Melville in 1860Melville in 1868The centennial of Melville's birth in 1919 coincided with a renewed interest in his writings known as the "Melville revival", during which his work experienced a significant critical reassessment. The renewed appreciation began in 1917 with Carl Van Doren's article on Melville in a standard history of American literature. Van Doren also encouraged Raymond Weaver, who wrote the author's first full-length biography, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (1921). Discovering the unfinished manuscript of Billy Budd, among papers shown to him by Melville's granddaughter, Weaver edited it and published it in a new collected edition of Melville's works. Other works that helped fan the flames for Melville were Carl Van Doren's The American Novel (1921), D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), Carl Van Vechten's essay in The Double Dealer (1922), and Lewis Mumford's biography Herman Melville (1929).[188]
Starting in the mid-1930s, the Yale University scholar Stanley Thomas Williams supervised more than a dozen dissertations on Melville that were eventually published as books. Where the first wave of Melville scholars focused on psychology, Williams' students were prominent in establishing Melville Studies as an academic field concerned with texts and manuscripts, tracing Melville's influences and borrowings (even plagiarism), and exploring archives and local publications.[189] To provide historical evidence, the independent scholar Jay Leyda searched libraries, family papers, local archives and newspapers across New England and New York to document Melville's life day by day for his two-volume The Melville Log (1951).[190][191] Sparked by Leyda and post-war scholars, the second phase of the Melville Revival emphasized research into the biography of Melville rather than accepting Melville's early books as reliable accounts.[190]
In 1945, The Melville Society was founded, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the study of Melville's life and works. Between 1969 and 2003, the society published 125 issues of Melville Society Extracts, which are now freely available on the society's website. Since 1999 it has published Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, currently three issues a year, published by Johns Hopkins University Press.[192]
The postwar scholars tended to think that Weaver, Harvard psychologist Henry Murray, and Mumford favored Freudian interpretations that read Melville's fiction as autobiography; exaggerated his suffering in the family; and inferred a homosexual attachment to Hawthorne. They saw a different arc to Melville's writing career. The first biographers saw a tragic withdrawal after the cold critical reception for his prose works and largely dismissed his poetry. A new view emerged of Melville's turn to poetry as a conscious choice that placed him among the most important American poets.[193] Other post-war studies, however, continued the broad imaginative and interpretive style; Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael (1947) presented Ahab as a Shakespearean tragic hero, and Newton Arvin's critical biography, Herman Melville (1950), won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 1951.[193][194]
In the 1960s, Harrison Hayford organized an alliance between Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, with backing from the Modern Language Association and funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to edit and publish reliable critical texts of Melville's complete works, including unpublished poems, journals, and correspondence. The first volume of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville was published in 1968 and the last in the fall of 2017. The aim of the editors was to present a text "as close as possible to the author's intention as surviving evidence permits". The volumes have extensive appendices, including textual variants from each of the editions published in Melville's lifetime, an historical note on the publishing history and critical reception, and related documents. Because the texts were prepared with financial support from the United States Department of Education, no royalties are charged, and they have been widely reprinted.[195] Hershel Parker published his two-volume Herman Melville: A Biography, in 1996 and 2002, based on extensive original research and his involvement as editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Melville edition.[196][197]
Gender studies
Melville only gradually attracted the pioneering scholars of women's studies, gender, and sexuality in the 1970s and 1980s. Though some held that he hardly portrayed women at all, others saw the few women in his works as traditional figures representing, or even attacking, nineteenth-century gentility, sentimentality, and conventional morality. Melville's preference for sea-going tales that involved almost only males has been of interest to scholars in men's studies and especially gay and queer studies.[198] Melville was remarkably open in his exploration of sexuality of all sorts. Alvin Sandberg said that the short story "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" offers "an exploration of impotency, a portrayal of a man retreating to an all-male childhood to avoid confrontation with sexual manhood," from which the narrator engages in "congenial" digressions in heterogeneity.[199] In line with this view, Warren Rosenberg argues the homosocial "Paradise of Bachelors" is "blind to what is real and painful in the world, and thus are [sic] superficial and sterile".[200]
David Harley Serlin observes in the second half of Melville's diptych, "The Tartarus of Maids", the narrator gives voice to the oppressed women he observes:
As other scholars have noted, the "slave" image here has two clear connotations. One describes the exploitation of the women's physical labor, and the other describes the exploitation of the women's reproductive organs. Of course, as models of women's oppression, the two are clearly intertwined.
— Serlin (1995)
In the end Serlin says that the narrator is never fully able to come to terms with the contrasting masculine and feminine modalities.[201]
Issues of sexuality have been observed in other works as well. Rosenberg notes Taji, in Mardi, and the protagonist in Pierre "think they are saving young 'maidens in distress' (Yillah and Isabel) out of the purest of reasons but both are also conscious of a lurking sexual motive".[200] When Taji kills the old priest holding Yillah captive, he says,
[R]emorse smote me hard; and like lightning I asked myself whether the death deed I had done was sprung of virtuous motive, the rescuing of a captive from thrall, or whether beneath the pretense I had engaged in this fatal affray for some other selfish purpose, the companionship of a beautiful maid.[202]
In Pierre, the motive of the protagonist's sacrifice for Isabel is admitted: "womanly beauty and not womanly ugliness invited him to champion the right".[203] Rosenberg argues,
This awareness of a double motive haunts both books and ultimately destroys their protagonists who would not fully acknowledge the dark underside of their idealism. The epistemological quest and the transcendental quest for love and belief are consequently sullied by the erotic.[200]
Rosenberg says that Melville fully explores the theme of sexuality in his major epic poem, Clarel. When the narrator is separated from Ruth, with whom he has fallen in love, he is free to explore other sexual (and religious) possibilities before deciding at the end of the poem to participate in the ritualistic order represented by marriage. In the course of the poem, "he considers every form of sexual orientation – celibacy, homosexuality, hedonism, and heterosexuality – raising the same kinds of questions as when he considers Islam or Democracy".[200]
Some passages and sections of Melville's works demonstrate his willingness to address all forms of sexuality, including the homoerotic, in his works. Commonly noted examples from Moby-Dick are the "marriage bed" episode involving Ishmael and Queequeg, who sleep with their arms wrapped around each other (Chapter 4, "The Counterpane" and Chapter 10, "A Bosom Friend"); and the "Squeeze of the Hand" (Chapter 94) describing the camaraderie of sailors' extracting spermaceti from a dead whale.[200] Clarel recognizes the homoerotic potential of its eponymous protagonist, including, in a fairly explicit passage, an erection provoked by the figure of a male interlocutor, Lyonesse.[200] In addition, Rosenberg notes that Billy Budd's physical attractiveness is described in quasi-feminine terms: "As the Handsome Sailor, Billy Budd's position aboard the seventy-four was something analogous to that of a rustic beauty transplanted from the provinces and brought into competition with the highborn dames of the court".[200]
Law and literature
Melville has been useful in the field of law and literature. The chapter "Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish" in Moby-Dick, for instance, challenges concepts of property rights.[204] In Billy Budd, a handsome and popular young sailor strikes and inadvertently kills the ship's master-at-arms.[205] The ship's captain immediately convenes a court-martial at which he urges the court to convict and sentence Billy to death. Critics debate Melville's intention. Some see the contradiction between unbending legalism and malleable moral principles.[206][207] Other critics have argued that the captain manipulated and misrepresented the applicable laws.[208]
