Bringing her home: The woman in Herman Melville.
Item
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Title
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Bringing her home: The woman in Herman Melville.
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Identifier
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AAI3330494
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identifier
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3330494
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Creator
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Dixon, Claudia A.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Neal L. Tolchin
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Date
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2008
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Gender Studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines Herman Melville's life and work through the lens of gender identification. It is my thesis that the essential mystery of Herman Melville's life, the one around which all others revolve, is his hidden feminine identification, which troubled his domestic life and found ambiguous representation in his art. I challenge the conventional biographical interpretations of his life and work to reveal the unrecognized feminine second self inside the man. His struggle to coexist with her and give her free expression in the face of cultural codes that forbade it accounts for his unhappy domestic life, his odd behavior and his frustrating art that doomed his promising career during his lifetime. The recurrence of spectral, elusive and abandoned women in his texts, as well as the persistent themes of damaged manhood, captivity and thwarted life represent his struggles with a culturally unacceptable cross-gender identity.;I use gender theory, cross-gender behavior theory, psychoanalytic and object relations theory as critical frames through which Melville's feminine identification can be understood. In positing a mechanism through which this identification could have formed, I focus on the connection between maternal depression and the formation of a feminine gender identity in boys as discussed in theories ranging from Sigmund Freud to Salvador Ferenczsi, Michael Balint, D.W. Winnicott, Robert Stoller, Susan Coats, Richard F. Docter, J. Michael Bailey and others.;I argue against an exclusively queer reading of Melville because I believe the issue of gender is prior to sexual orientation and desire. Queer theory rightly concerns itself with the dramas of the closet, same sex desire and its coded representations in texts, but it avoids talking about what I believe to be the central issue in Melville, the vortex around which all issues of the physical and culturally embedded body revolve---gender identification.;Reading Melville's life and work in this way turns everything around and changes everything we think we know of him. Seeing the woman in Herman Melville reverses the vectors of desire and, like the inverted, lightning struck compass needle in Moby-Dick, allows a new perspective on this complex and elusive author to emerge.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
