POE, HAWTHORNE, MELVILLE
or a cousin (as in
Eleanora, Berenice,
and
The House of Usher),
that
he was inhibited from full consummation by some forbidding image
from the past (as
in
Ulalume)
, and that he was haunted by fantasies
in which sexuality was associated with death. Necrophilia is, in fact,
one of his favorite themes, as
in
poems such as
Annabel Lee
and
stories such as
Ligeia
and
The Oblong Box.
In
The Philosophy ot
Literary Composition
he explains that the death of a beautiful woman
is the supremely poetic subject. It apparently gave him that thrill of
the nerves which he identified with aesthetic experience and inter–
preted in pseudo-religious Platonic terms.
Of Melville's actual married life we know almost nothing. In his
writings he presents normal masculine emotion only in association with
the Marquesan girl with whom he lived in Typee, in surroundings as
different as possible from his home. Elsewhere the only characters
towards whom he feels warmly and affectionately are men; his sailor
companions, Toby, Harry Bolton, Jack Chase, even the savage Quee–
queg, seem to establish the norm by which all other relationships are
judged and condemned. Apart from
Typee,
in fact, only two of his
books,
Mardi
and
Pierre,
deal with women at all.
Mardi
is a very
uneven book, beginning on a realistic level and then changing into a
fantasy, and containing inordinately long stretches of low-pressure
writing. When Melville touches the sexual theme, however, his prose
loses its flatness and becomes vibrant. Through most of the book the
narrator is pursuing a beautiful girl called Yillah. When he finally
finds
her, she has mysteriously become identified with a forbidding
mother-image called Hautia, a wicked enchantress by whom men are
enslaved. The narrator quickly abandons Yillah-Hautia and flies
away across the open sea. The general parallelism with the theme
stated in Poe's
Ulalume
is obvious. In
Pierre
Melville deals with
similar subject matter in realistic rather than allegorical terms. At the
beginning of the novel the hero is living with his mother, a selfish,
arrogant and domineering woman, towards whom he conducts him–
self
like a lover rather than a son. He then discovers that he has a
half-sister, for whom he feels an incestuous attraction, and this brings
about his destruction.
Pierre
is an unsuccessful novel, chiefly perhaps
because Melville was dealing with material which, for both social and
personal reasons, he could not make wholly explicit; but its general
implications are sufficiently clear.
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