Probating Melville's Posthumous Work, Billy Budd : Authorship in Self-Imposed Jingoism
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The best-selling female writers working in the nineteenth-century society of mass-producing imperialistic capitalism were not bashful in wooing their customers. Their rather straightforward responses to capitalistic pressure helped pave the way to the establishment of their authorships. Melville held views in common with these best-selling writers : both were sympathetic to the economically disadvantaged factory girls and critical of the male-dominated capitalistic society. Yet when Melville focused on domestic affairs and wrote sentimental but sensational stories in the vein same as the best-selling female writers, his topics drew harsh criticism for their sensationalism. Melville, unlike the women writers, must have taken these criticisms as wounding affronts to his professionalism, even his selfhood. This paper discussed how the author implemented his fragile authorship and the devices available to him for the establishment of his authorship. Melville's last novel, Billy Budd, is a final benchmark for judging the validity of his attempts to establish authorship.My ensuing argument, however, is not premised on a gender-specific analysis,given that even the subversive power arising from proto-feminism writers was subsumed into consent by the American way or the overriding cohesive power that had Americanized dissenting opinions (and probably still is). Melville's strivings for authorial establishment should also be interpreted as strivings formulated under the inescapable influences of the American Way,American skewed democracy, so-called American Manifest Destiny (the political and literal movement for cultural and economical independence from England, or the slogan of territorial expansion), American imperialism.Melville wavered between pro and con in his views towards American democracy,as exemplified by his treatment of Ahab in Moby-Dick as the absolute democrat defiant against God and merciless exploiter of the whaler crew. Melville can thus be said to have carried out a determined act for the establishment of his authorship as he was both trammeled and untrammeled under the American Way. This exemplifies the stipulation of the postmodernism critic Michel Foucault: there is no purely apolitical realm within an apparently freewilled subjective entity.According to James Adamson, a Freudian psychoanalytical critic, Melville had a propensity to idealize the parental imago and thus to merge with that imago to satiate his hidden desire to aggrandize himself. In the case of Melville, the queer writer, the parent or substitute parent in question is Nathaniel Hawthorne, the canonical writer several years his senior, who in the psyche of Melville was homoerotically apotheosized and transformed into a polity of America (to be exact, the fall of Niagara). Wai-chee Dimock, the critic of cultural studies, points out that "Hawthorne is to be admired""because his authorial geography mirrors the nation's." If allowed to refer to the conclusion of the psychoanalytical critic Joseph Adamson, I can argue the following. First, those suffering from shame and rage are eager to melt into a powerful nation, an American polity that can be equated with the image of Hawthorne. Second, we can hypothesize Dimock's statement, i. e., that "[i]t makes sense that America should strike Melville as the ultimate model for authorship." In the following analysis, we see how Melville deployed jingoism in his own work Billy Budd for the establishment of his authorship.Claggart, the master-at-arms who hates the Handsome Sailor Billy in Billy Budd, is related to the author, in that neither man enjoys his due love from the paternal figure. There are several parallels between the two. Claggart pretends to be an ardent jingoist to curry the favor of the paternal figure Captain Vere, only to incur displeasure from him. Melville acts likewise in his trial to establish his authorship. In just the same vain as Claggart and Melville,Captain Vere, as an aristocratic and as a rather outmoded jingoist inflexible to modern society, also needs to mask his injured selfhood and thus pretends to be an imperialistic nationalist. By virtue of his Indian-like adamancy, Veremoves to his own extinction, going the way of the Native Americans.Melville's posture as an imperialistic nationalist thus appeared to endanger his professional status in modern imperialistic capitalism. The only way Melville could have made this problem disappear would be to have portrayed Billy in a manner that offsets the disadvantageous circumstances implied by Claggart and Vere. While the apparently imperialistic author Melville succeeded in depriving this handsome young sailor of a command of language by depicting him as innocent, primitive, uneducated, and race- and gender-ambiguous, the author failed to keep his artificial imperialistic posture from protruding grotesquely.In conclusion, we may reasonably affirm that Melville's strivings to merge with America, the ultimate model for authorship, through his mimicry of the American Way, American imperialism, challenged him to reconcile conflicting views of democracy and eventually led him into a dystopian realm that imperiled his authorship. Confoundingly, the author could not refrain from dissociating himself from his repeatedly failed attempts to establish authorship even when he was aware of his possible failure. The author already had an inkling of coming postmodernistic circumstances that would render all claims for authorship futile. Overcome by a pathological eagerness to deny the dawning of the new age, the author stuck to the outmoded way of establishing authorship.
- 2007-06-20
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関連論文
- Mock-Christ, Mater Tenebrarum, and Hawthorne : Disastrous Deification in Melville's Domestic Metafiction, Pierre ; or, The Ambiguities (Special Issue Dedicated to Professor OKADA, Akiko)
- Probating Melville's Posthumous Work, Billy Budd : Authorship in Self-Imposed Jingoism