By Andy Stewart MacKay
“I have written a blasphemous book” said American novelist Herman Melville (1819-91) of his best-known work, Moby Dick, first published in 1851. Narrated by Ishmael, the biblically-resonant mariner afloat a “wilderness of waters”, ostensibly it’s the story of Captain Ahab’s obsessive hunt for a giant whale – the eponymous Moby Dick. Set on the high-seas of the South Pacific, it’s a novel that’s rich in metaphor and – as in Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness – becomes for the main characters a psychological journey into the unknown. The elusive Moby Dick is, according to author Peter Hoare, “an icon of otherness”. Indeed, the novel itself reads like an old shanty-song to “otherness” and one that takes a special place in the canon of queer literature.
Despite the early privileges of a Classical education in upstate New York, after his father’s bankruptcy and death, adolescent Melville became a bank clerk, a shop assistant and a teacher. But it was an appetite for adventure that led him in the early 1840s to find work on a merchant ship between New York City and Liverpool – and then on whaling missions into the Atlantic to The Bahamas and around Cape Horn into the South Pacific to the Galapagos Islands. In July 1842 he and a friend, Richard Tobias Greene, broke their contract by jumping ship at the Marquesas Islands. A month later, finding passage on an Australian whaling ship bound for Tahiti, upon arrival Melville was jailed – albeit briefly – for his apparent part in a mutiny. Eventually winding up in Hawaii, he a became a recruit to the United States Navy, again serving for a year in the South Pacific – or, more romantically, the “South Seas”. Upon returning home, Melville began writing his first novel Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, published with great success in 1846, and married – albeit “unexpectedly” according to his wife Elizabeth – in 1847.
Critics often credit Melville’s modernity – his curiosity for the ‘unknown’, sympathy with the dispossessed, lack of religious conviction and keenness to see American culture with an ‘outsiders’ eye – to his experiences at sea. Over the last few decades, readers and critics have in particular highlighted the intensity of the male relationships depicted in his novels – and particularly in Moby Dick. Melville’s work suggests that, in the all-male environment of a ship upon the ‘savage’ high-seas, there may have been a greater variety of social and sexual roles available to men than on ‘civilized’ land.
With his sensitive and unprecedented depiction of a ‘marriage’ between two men – the American sailor-narrator Ishmael and the Polynesian whaler Queequeg, both crewmen and ‘outsiders’ far from home – Melville was a literary radical. Initially forced to share a bed with a drunken Queequeg, Ishmael wakes with pleasure the following morning to find the whaler’s arm slung warmly around him in a “loving and affectionate manner”, just as if Ishmael had been his “wife”. Living and working together, the pair soon develop a passion for one another. Ishmael tells us that Queequeg “pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said henceforth we were married”. The idealized, uncomplicated and unselfconscious love of a foreign or working-class man would henceforth pervade queer colonial English literature for at least a century. The queer subtext of Melville’s unfinished high-seas novella Billy Budd famously inspired composer Benjamin Britten and novelist E. M. Forster – himself the author of cross-cultural love stories between men – to adapted it as an opera that premiered in 1951.
Inspired by Melville’s adventures and by the romantic example of Ishmael and Queequeg, American author Charles Warren Stoddard (1843-1909) developed a consuming passion for the South Seas and its native island cultures. Leaving San Francisco in his early 20s, a place he adored for its brash mid-century newness, Stoddard set out for Polynesia. Immediately enamored of the people and the cultures he encountered Stoddard would return for extended visits a further four times over the coming decades. The result was several successful travel books, including The Island of Tranquil Delights, that contributed to Stoddard becoming one of the most prolific American travel writers of his day. South Sea Islanders were, for Stoddard, free of Christian dogma and prejudice and joyfully open to love between men. He even began to write poetry – sending a collection of his efforts to Melville himself in 1866 – and, later, the explicitly queer vaguely-autobiographical novel For the Pleasure of his Company, published in 1903. Sexually confident, he enjoyed romantic relationships with men all over the world – and at the opera in Venice in the winter of 1874 began a relationship with the American artist Francis Davis Millet (1848-1912). In Moby Dick Stoddard found not only a reason to travel the world but a joyful way to love other men.
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Andy Stewart MacKay is an author and cultural historian.
