Clifton Snider: Clifton Snider is the author of eight acclaimed books of poetry, including The Age of the Mother (Laughing Coyote, 1992) and The Alchemy of Opposites (Chiron Review Press, 2000). His novels, Loud Whisper (2000) and Bare Roots (2001), are both published by Xlibris Corporation. A specialist in Jungian literary criticism, his book, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made On: A Jungian Interpretation of Literature, was published in 1991. He teaches writing and literature at California State University, Long Beach.
In compiling a selection of Melville's homoerotic passages, including the full text of Billy Budd, Ken Schellenberg has done a great service to GLBT and gender studies and to homosexual and heterosexual readers who want a window into Melville's queer world.
As Schellenberg points out in his Introduction, gay male readers are largely responsible for rescuing American's greatest 19th-century novelist from the dustbin of literary history. When I studied Melville as a graduate student, little or nothing was said about Melville's homoeroticism. Like too many of my professors, my professor for American Renaissance was an older, kindly, conservative man, either myopic or homophobic on the subject of his authors' homosexuality. Schellenberg's collection is a welcome correction to a curriculum that, alas, is still homoerotically myopic on too many campuses.
I do have a quibble with Schellenberg's opening comments, however. Having just taught Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" in a class on literary theory, I find inadequate his declaration, "Melville's scenes of sailors at sea and on land give off a homoerotic charge that I simply don't find in similar scenes written by, say, Joseph Conrad." Conrad's story about a novice captain who harbors his "double," a fugitive first mate from another ship, in his own sleeping quarters is charged with homoeroticism.
Nevertheless, the selections Schellenberg has chosen are apt. They include the wonderfully sexually-charged scene from Moby Dick in which Ishmael and Queequeg share the innkeeper's wedding bed. Ishmael awakes to find "Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife." There is also the sensuous whale sperm squeezing scene ("my fingers felt like eels [. . .] let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness."). The homoerotic, mutually masturbatory ritual makes Ishmael feel "divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever."
The book also contains the passage from Redburn in which the title character/narrator finds a friend in the attractive, androgynous Harry Bolton, who takes him to London and Aladdin's Palace, a male brothel. Also from Redburn is a passage describing the sexy Italian adolescent, Carlo, who anticipates the many similar beauties photographed by Wilhelm von Gloeden.
Also represented is Pierre, Melville's strange tale of family drama with its protagonist whose mother is infatuated with him, who masturbates to a portrait of his own father in a literal closet, and who is attracted to his sister because she reminds him of his father. White-Jacket gets a few pages in which Melville's marvelous punning humor is displayed: one of the chief ways sailors on ship amuse themselves is through "pricking" (emphasis Melville's), that is, tattooing. The sexual connotations are as clear for the time as they are today.
That leaves Billy Budd, Sailor, "a detailed examination," as Schellenberg writes, "of the results of internalized homophobia." The story about the incredibly beautiful young sailor is so well-known no plot summary is necessary. To have the novella here in full makes The Gay Herman Melville Reader perfect as a text for a gay studies or a multicultural studies class.
The book is simply but handsomely bound, and at $16.00 not unreasonable for a class or the interested reader. I wish Schellenberg had included some of Melville's homoerotic poetry. To have done so would have made an already smart and original volume even better.
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