Stephen Matterson - Melville: Fashioning in Modernity

Melville

Melville

Fashioning in Modernity

Stephen Matterson

In memory of my parents, Charles and Mary They gave this child more of themselves than that

Contents

It is tempting just to say, in the immortal words of Captain Louis Renault, round up the usual suspects. These would be various colleagues in the School of English here at Trinity College, Trinity colleagues in other disciplines, and friends and colleagues at University College, Dublin. Suspects also include our undergraduate and postgraduate students, who never allow anything to be easy.

Anyone who works on Melville quickly learns that in order to follow the expansive nature of his fiction you really do, like Ishmael, need to swim through libraries. Such swimming incurs its own debts, and I would like to thank librarians at Trinity and at the Phillips Reading Room in Harvard for their considerable help, and the staff at the Houghton Library at Harvard for providing access to the Melville holdings.

Trinitys Faculty of Arts Humanities and the Social Sciences kindly granted me a study leave during the academic year 201011, without which this book may never have been started, never mind completed. The friendly encouragement of successive Heads of the School of English, Darryl Jones and Eve Patten, is also much appreciated, and both embody the collegiality that has meant so much to me since I was lucky enough to take up a post here.

I would like particularly to thank the three anonymous readers of my manuscript. Their scholarly, thoughtful and encouraging reports were invaluable in my revising towards publication. Since my very first contact with Bloomsbury, Haaris Naqvi and Laura Murray have been exemplary in their efficiency, courtesy and professionalism.

In what unexpectedly proved to be a most difficult year, the constant love, support and encouragement provided by Jean Nee have been of crucial significance, and she deserves more thanks than anyone. Besides, this is all her fault for giving me The Portable Melville and The Portable Hawthorne as birthday presents so long ago.

I recall vividly, though in a slightly embarrassed way, exactly when I started to reflect on the ideas behind this book. One Sunday I was preparing the clothes I was to wear during the week ahead, looking through my diary and deciding which outfit was appropriate to each days main activity. (This also occasioned some reflection on the varied roles of todays academic.) Ahead was a meeting of University Council for which I usually dressed formally, classes with a small group of first-year students, for which I prefer to dress informally, two lectures to large audiences, a book launch, a Faculty meeting, two advanced seminars, one afternoon that I could spend in the library and a meeting with a prospective student. I began idly to think of how much clothes project a persona, and how at some point they are not merely clothes but are costumes or uniforms or even camouflage. I do not want to dwell too much on this moment, partly for fear of representing myself as Cher at the opening of the film Clueless (for one thing I do not own a Junior Gaultier kilt). But it coincided with my rereading a good deal of Melville around that time, particularly Israel Potter, and I started to think about Melvilles attentiveness to clothing. At times his descriptions of particular items of dress are very detailed; and, after all, he named one of his novels, White-Jacket, after an article of clothing. Furthermore, his characters are often wearing the wrong clothes, or are uncomfortable in their clothing. Some characters use clothing as a disguise, concealing their true identity, others promote or even flaunt themselves through their dress. There is a variety of changes of clothing in his novels. In Typee, his first, Tommo changes the civilized clothes of the sailor and while he lives with the South Sea natives wears a variation of their dress. White-Jacket begins with its main character preparing the jacket that he will wear for the voyage, and ends with the loss of the coat. Israel Potter involves a striking number of changes of clothing, and Melville alludes at one point to Israels blue-jean career which the OED records as the first usage of blue-jean as an adjective, a metaphorical representation of the labourer. There are also instances of characters dressing others; the narrator of Bartleby, the Scrivener giving his coat to his employee, Turkey. I was dimly aware of Melvilles indebtedness to the prose of Thomas Carlyle in his development as a writer, and I knew that Carlyle had written Sartor Resartus, ostensibly at least about the symbolism of clothing.

As my interest deepened, I was particularly drawn to those characters of Melville who find themselves in the wrong clothing. Their attire may be wrong because it is inappropriate for the circumstances, or because it is no indication of their inner self. The wrong clothes may lead to shame, embarrassment and discomfort. But they may also be signifiers of defiance, expressive of ones individuation. They may be indicators of not belonging, and of a refusal to belong or to conform. Generally, those who are at ease in the wrong clothing, and who even flaunt this, tend not to be the major characters in the novels. They are Melvilles versions of the dandy, and their presence usually highlights the anxiety and discomfort felt by the central characters. It is these characters, Tommo, Israel Potter, Captain Vere from Billy Budd, who form the main focus of this book, with reference also to White-Jacket and to the ambivalent case of Wellingborough Redburn. The anxiety, discomfort and self-estrangement of these main characters are evident in the disconnection between their clothing and their actual sense of themselves, in some measure between their public identity and their inner reality. This is slightly less evident in the character of Tommo. Melville almost certainly wrote Typee and his second novel Omoo before his reading Carlyle stimulated further reflections on clothes as symbolic. Typee is more concerned with clothing and power, and how it relates to the colonizing that Tommo witnesses, but this also leads Tommo to consider his own costume as a signifier of self.

Typically, Melville represents characters who are struggling in modernity. While modernity is a much-discussed term, I have in mind here not so much the modernity of a specific historical moment or period but an ongoing confrontation with rapid social change leaving the individual dislocated and uncertain. For Melville this could be apparent at any time from the late eighteenth century to his own time. Looking at modernity in this way of course echoes Foucault, who in turn echoes Baudelaire. Foucault wondered

whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history. And by attitude, I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task.

Dress may be an important element of that unification of the self, as Elizabeth Wilson asserted in her influential study Adorned in Dreams:

[W]e may view the fashionable dress of the western world as one means whereby an always fragmentary self is glued together into the semblance of a unified identity. Identity becomes a special kind of problem in modernity.

Typically Melville explores those who struggle to keep a narrative going, those who unlike the dandy are objects rather than subjects in modernity.part of the writer in the same way that his protagonist Tommo changes out of his sailor clothes to act out a role with the native population, and is re-dressed (by others) at the end of the adventure. The mode of writing makes it difficult to locate