The art of escape: Herman Melville's bachelor machines, 1850--57.

摘要

Gilles Deleuze, following the work of D.H. Lawrence, claimed that the highest purpose of Herman Melville's writing was to "escape." As provocative as this assertion may be, however, it has not yielded a general consensus among Melville scholars, and the question of what exactly Melville was attempting to escape from remains an open one. This dissertation attempts to address this question by bringing it together with another, equally mysterious and long-standing problem: Melville's brief but intense friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the impact of this relationship upon Melville's work. It is not by accident that Melville's most feverish period of writing followed his initial encounter with Hawthorne, nor is it by chance that these texts are in dialogue with Hawthorne's work. This dialogue, in turn, helped transform Melville's art, forcing him to revisit earlier work and retrieve and rework certain figures, motifs and themes. That Melville's "major phase," roughly 1850 to 1857, a period which saw the publication of Moby-Dick (discussed in chapter one), Pierre (chapter two), and The Confidence-Man (chapter three), as well as all of his short stories, several of them masterpieces of the form---also ended with the demise of this enigmatic friendship is likewise no coincidence. By putting a sharper edge on the point of Melville's critique---in other words, clearly identifying that from which he was attempting one way or another to "escape"---this dissertation attempts to fill a gap in current scholarship and contribute to discussion and debate concerning those tumultuous and still-poorly understood years of Melville's "major phase." I argue three main points: that Melville was desperately trying to escape from the confines of, first, the nation-state (discussed in chapter one), second, the family (in chapter two), and third, subjectivity (in chapter three). His encounter with Hawthorne---its initial shock of recognition and joyful passion, its deepening affection and maturity, as well as its eventual dissolution and subsequent disappointment and pain---provided Melville with the impetus to construct various "bachelor machines," a term adopted from Deleuze that I employ in order to articulate the manner in which Melville attempted to "escape."