NP Melville's cross-cultural homoeroticism

[jbor]

A very positive review of the recent Elizabeth Hardwick biography:

    Jumping off from this complicated emotional business with Hawthorne,
    Hardwick devotes a good portion of her short book to the question of
    Melville's homoeroticism. It's a gamble that pays off. She'd never be so
    flat-footed as to say Melville was gay, since there's no evidence of a
    physical relationship with another man, but she does tease out deep
    meanings from his obvious fondness for filling his books with homoerotic
    images and joyfully charged relationships between men. (Who can forget
    "Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm
    till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a
    strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly
    squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the
    gentle globules.")

    For Hardwick, Melville's homoeroticism and his lifelong spiritual
    questing are cut from the same cloth: In the possibilities of love and
    communion between men, she suggests, Melville expressed his high
    spiritual ideals, imagining a realm of human freedom, passion, mutual
    responsibility and dignity. Yet failure and a stubborn loneliness took
    their toll, and Melville's ideals eventually transmuted into a measured
    skepticism. At his death at age 72, Hardwick sees in Melville a
    "backhanded, cool acceptance of his destiny, pride in failure, which he
    capitalized as a kind of deity."

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/07/26/hardwick/index.html

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