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PARTISAN REVIEW
archetypal face. An obsession to be with "blue-eyed Natty," to dive
deep in long talk, passing the tankard, relighting a cold cigar, this is a
conceivable obsession to assign Melville. When Melville reconsidered
his unfulfilled friendship with Hawthorne in C
larel,
he wrote bluntly:
But for thy fonder dream of love
In man toward man-the soul's caress–
The negatives of flesh should prove
Analogies of non-cordialness
In spirit.
Melville had himself thought through his yearning for camarad–
erie to the positives of flesh, but this is not the question in Miller's
biography. Other critics have already characterized the route of sexual
preference in Melville's fiction. And G.
J.
Barker-Benfield's recent
study of male sexuality in the nineteenth century,
The Horrors of the
Half-Known Life,
which takes its title from Melville, explains that
preference in great detail. Miller retraces the appearance of the adhesive
feeling in Melville's writing, the Hawthorne factor, but he is ultimately
concerned with the effect of this feeling. And that interest throws a
strange light on the whole book. Although Miller seems to fault
Hawthorne for his chaste distance, in the end Miller, too, steps back
from the stickiness of Melville's embrace. Lawrentian repugnance, that
distaste for broken tissue and slime, is discreetly stated in liberal terms:
Billy's fate confirms that the hermaphroditic icon is life-denying, or,
more kindly, life-evading. Billy and all the handsome sailors want
out from adult heterosexuality: they want to be neither husbands nor
fathers. The underscored references to Billy's impotency-his neuter
state, as it were-reveal all too dearly that behind the icon or fantasy
lay the author's fear of genitality and his disgust with the insatiable
demands of sexual urges.
Behind Miller's assault on the hermaphroditic icon lies the
familiar Pauline accusation of homosexuality.
Contra naturam.
Fi–
nally the icon denotes narcissism, Miller asserts, "which, as Melville
hints in the opening chapter of
Moby
Dick,
may be 'the key to it all.'
Narcissus, we recall, perished of self-love." And so does Satan. And so
do we all, one by one. Melville and Hawthorne doubtless saw in
narcissism everything that Miller sees, and more. The myth is not
merely an exemplum for them, a sign posted near the brook, but a truth
smiling at us. Billy Budd and Donatello. Where does Miller get the idea
that the hermaphroditic icon is life-denying? From medicine perhaps,
