I have always appreciated male authors who could penetrate
into a women’s mind and vice-versa and create believable characters and dialogues.
It was interesting to read in Elizabeth Renker’s chapter in Strike through
the mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing that this difficulty of
penetrating into the women’s soul and characteristics became such an issue and
a burden on Melville and his writing; the male authorship which cannot put into
words the essence of the feminine is similar to the occurring theme in Moby
Dick of a fruitless attempt of nailing life’s meaning.
Another thing I found interesting in Renker’s detailed and
interesting analysis of both Melville’s personal life situation and his
difficulty with women, and the association of that to the difficulty he had
with writing, made me think of the famous Platonic text, the Symposium.
In it, the only true way to beat this earthly life and transcend beyond it is
through creation, which comes through a semi-erotic copulation with an obscure
female figure which is the muse. Melville, with his broad classic education,
must have known it and this, along with his romantic views of the muse landing
upon the writer and through him to his pen, might have escalated his
frustration and his violence behavior.
Family Fiction
ReplyDeleteIn chapter 3 “Wife Beating and the Written Page” Renker creates a “metonymic chain associating (Melville’s) writing with misery, women with misery, and women with writing” (p. 61). Renker attempts to pin the “madness and anguish” that so often accompanies Melville’s prose on the strained relationship between Melville, his wife Elizabeth, and the numerous other women living in his household.
Perhaps the most convincing information Renker presents in strengthening her thesis is the female Melville’s actual participation in the act of writing. An idea wholly foreign to the modern day writer, in Melville’s time the act of writing required far more participation and actual labor. While Renker questions the extent to which Melville pushed his family’s participation, it does seem as if he was reliant on them to produce. Renker indicates Melville not only relied on them to transcribe but to provide feedback, a scary proposition in light of his supposed “ritualize, emphasized, exaggerated aggression.”
The factuality of Melville’s abusiveness remains at least partially obscured, and yet his tormented process of writing has been well documented. While we may imagine a monomaniacal writer locked away in thought, Melville seemed unable (perhaps unwilling) to extricate his writing from his family day-to-day life. And while we cannot concretely deduce that this led to far more extreme abuses, it seems a solid jumping off point for those looking to incriminate the tempestuous writer.