Literature and Resisting Injustice: Melville and Hawthorne on Patriarchal Manhood and Homophobia

Abstract

The article argues that Nathaniel Hawthorne's portrayal in The Scarlet Letter of how patriarchy harms its two male protagonists (Dimmesdale and Chillingworth) was the inspiration for Herman Melville's further investigation into these harms in Moby Dick and Billy Budd. It argues that it was Melville's love for Hawthorne, never sexually consummated, that explains how Melville was able to investigate the harms patriarchy inflicts on men in deeper ways than Hawthorne, including both the personally and self-destructively political irrational violence of Ahab in Moby Dick and the homophobic violence of Claggart and Vere against Billy in Billy Budd, a boy they both desired and, in Vere's case, loved.

Keywords:

• Billy Budd
• Britten
• Benjamin
• feminism
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• homophobia
• Love Laws
• Herman Melville
• Moby Dick
• patriarchy
• The Scarlet Letter

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article profited from the advice of Richard Weisberg and Jon-Christian Suggs, for which I am deeply grateful. Conversations with Phillip Blumberg were also indispensable.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

I acknowledge no financial interest or benefit arising from direct applications of my research.

Notes

1. David A.J. Richards, Why Love Leads to Justice: Love across the Boundaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

2. See Carol Gilligan and David A.J. Richards, The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy's Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 22. Under the influence of co-teaching with the psychologist Carol Gilligan and the psychiatrist James Gilligan, I have increasingly turned to literature as a further way of exploring the issues of the political theory and psychology of resisting injustice, particularly in regard to feminism and gay rights.

3. See Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Penguin, 1986), 15, 18, 20, 132, 190.

4. See, for further discussion and elaboration, David A.J. Richards, Women, Gays, and the Constitution: The Grounds for Feminism and Gay Rights in Culture and Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

5. See, for fuller discussion, Carol Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love (New York: Vintage, 2003).

6. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale (New York: Penguin, 2003), 30; see also 28, 57–8, 60, 62–3, 66–8, 349.

7. See, on this point, Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1996), 140.

8. Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 162–6.

9. See, on this analogy, ibid., 174–5.

10. Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales, ed. Robert Milder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 285.

11. Ibid., 285.

12. Ibid., 286.

13. See James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage, 1997).

14. Melville, Billy Budd, 358.

15. Ibid., 333.

16. See Richard H. Weisberg, The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 147–59.

17. Melville, Billy Budd, 340–45.

18. Ibid., 356.

19. Ibid., 342.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., 353.

22. Ibid., 346.

23. See, on this point, Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 2, 1851–1891 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 642–50.

24. See, on these points, Delbanco, Melville, 180–81, 199–205, 200–202, 275–9; Robertson-Lorant, Melville, 295, 370–71, 503–4, 505–9, 509–17; Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 2, 628–35, 642–50.

25. See, for example, Elaine Showalter, The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).

26. The analysis that follows (about the collaboration of Britten and Forster) is drawn from Richards, Why Love Leads to Justice, 65–7.

27. Paul Kildea, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 324.

28. See ibid., 326.

29. Ibid., 327.

30. Ibid., 343.

31. Ibid.

32. Quoted at ibid., 346.

33. Ibid., 146.

34. Ibid., 347.

35. See libretto, Billy Budd, CD, conducted by Benjamin Britten (London), 69–70.

36. On this point, see Richards, Women, Gays, and the Constitution, 29, 303–10.

37. See, on this point, Hershel Parker, Melville: A Biography Volume 1, 1829–

38. Robertson-Lorant, Melville, 109, 191, 268; but see 617–20.

39. See, on these points, Delbanco, Melville, 180–81, 199-205, 200–202, 275–9; Robertson-Lorant, Melville, 295, 370–71, 503–4, 505–9, 509–17; Parker, Melville: A Biography Volume 2, 628–35, 642–50.

40. See Delbanco, Melville, 199–205.

41. See Gilligan and Richards, The Deepening Darkness, 4–5, 19–20, 238, 241.

42. Parker, Melville: A Biography Volume 1, 760.

43. See Delbanco, Melville, 126, 148.

44. See Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 1154–71.

45. Ibid., 1167.

46. Ibid., 1165.

47. Robertson-Lorant, Melville, 254.

48. See, on this point, Brenda Wineapple, Hawthorne: A Life (New York: Random House, 2003), 227–8.

49. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, in Nathaniel Hawthorne, Collected Novels (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 631–848, at 749.

50. “Do not forsake me!” Ibid.

51. On this point, see Robertson-Lorant, Melville, 48, 52–3, 55.

52. Ibid., 147.

53. See Parker, Melville: A Biography Volume 2, 628–31.

54. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, in Hawthorne, Collected Novels, 853–1242, at 1089.

55. See Robert K. Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986). For a recent biographical study attributing Melville's inspiration to Sarah Morewood, see Michael Shelden, Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby-Dick (New York: Harper Collins, 2016). Leading biographers of Melville, including Hershel Parker, dismissed Shelden's thesis “as ‘fantasy’. Sarah Morewood was ‘a loose cannon,’ Mr. Parker says. ‘But there is absolutely no evidence that she had any sexual attraction to Melville or that he was attracted to her.’’’ Brenda Cronin, “Did Illicit Love Float ‘Moby-Dick’?” The Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2016, D3. See also Brenda Wineapple, “His Neighbor's Wife,” The Wall Street Journal, June 18–19, 2016, C9.

56. See, on these points, Wineapple, Hawthorne, 188–9, 199, 241, 322–3, 329–33, 349–50.

57. See Melville, Billy Budd, 278–9.

58. See, on this point, Gregory Jay, “Douglass, Melville, and the Lynching of Billy Budd,” in Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, ed. Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 369–95. See also “‘Speak Man!’ Billy Budd in the Crucible of Reconstruction,” American Literary History 21, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 492–517; Klaus Benesch, “Melville Black Jack: Billy Budd and the Politics of Race in 19^th Century Maritime Life,” in Joanne M. Braxton and Maria I. Dierich Monuments of the Black Atlantic: Slavery and Memory, ed. Joanne M. Braxton and Maria I. Dierich (Munster: Lit Verlag, 2004), 67–75. See also Jon-Christian Suggs, “Something About the Boy: Law, Ironic Comedy, and the Ideology of Agape in Billy Budd” (unpublished paper).

59. On how and why gay/lesbian loving relationships have led to creative ethical insights into injustice and resistance to injustice, see Richards, Why Love Leads to Justice.

60. See, on this point, Delbanco, Melville, 199–205; James Creech, Closet Writing/Gay Readings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

61. Delbanco, Melville, 187–8.

62. See, on this point, Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

63. See Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 1994).

64. See libretto, Billy Budd, CD, 69–70.

Additional information

Funding

Work on this article was supported by research grants from the New York University School of Law Filomen D'Agostino and a Max E. Greenberg Faculty Research Fund.

Notes on contributors

David A.J. Richards

David A.J. Richards is Edwin D. Webb Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, where he teaches Constitutional Law and Criminal Law. He is the author of 20 books, including recently The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy's Future (with Carol Gilligan, 2009); Fundamentalism in American Religion and Law (2010); The Rise of Gay Rights and the Fall of the British Empire (2013); Resisting Injustice and the Feminist Ethics of Care in the Age of Obama (2013); and Why Love Leads to Justice: Love across the Boundaries (2016).