].Scythian Dead
In Puritanism's age of the United States of America, one had
to be very thorough to disguise homoerotical feelings. Similar to
what was in Europe, the only morally acceptable context for
conveying these feelings was male friendship, with the men
involved remaining unconscious of or sublimating their
sensuality. Such a relationship was described by Ralph Waldo
Emerson (1803-1882), a Neoplatonic philosopher, who had, while a
student at Harvard, born strong fondness for a male classmate of
his, and was applied to his closest friend, Henry David Thoreau
(1817-1862). As head of the Transcendental movement, Emerson
captained a group of revolutionary Romanticists. There is little
doubt that Emerson helped to form some of Thoreau's ideas,
influencing and encouraging Walt Whitman as well [].
After graduating from Harvard and teaching school for a few years, Thoreau went to live with Emerson both to study with him and to work as a handy man in Concord, a village near Boston, Massachusetts, inhabited by many of the literary figures of the 19th century. ... In his book, "Week on the Concord and Memmack River," that took him ten year to write and finally publish at his own expense, Thoreau tells us about a canoeing trip he made with his brother.
With his desire for a life of contemplation, of being in harmony with nature, and of acting on his own principles seen through his writing, he sublimated his latent homosexuality most vividly. Against Benjamin Franklin's advocacy of hard work for the fugal to get richer and richer, Thoreau thought physical labor and a minimum of material goods made men more sensitive and kept them closer to nature.
Similarly, the Russian novelist Nikolai
Vasilievich Gogol (1809-1852), knowingly made a starveling out of
himself as a way of penance to get rid of the haunting
homoerotism pertaining yet, because of his background or
religious principles, unacceptable to him. In this regard the
researcher S.Karlinsky of Russia's gay literature and culture [
] deduces Gogol's escape into religion,
mysticism, and moralism from him being unable to concede his own
homoerotism [
; pp. 288-289].
Although Herman Melville (1819-1891) was, unlike single
Thoreau, married at the age of 28 and had four children, he could
not find a person who would satisfy his need for love []. As a teenager, Melville was having a
yearning for adventures when he, at last, joined a ship bound for
Liverpool as a cabin boy in 1839. His next eighteen-month trip on
a whaling ship heading for the South Seas provided much of the
factual detail found in "Moby Dick". In July 1842 he
deserted the ship in the Marquesan Islands and lived for a month
among the Polynesians.
The sea for him is a very special element. The major charm in going to sea is being part of exclusive male community. Using a complex form of philosophical and adventurous novel, Melville pictures male friendship which overcomes all the extremes of seaman's daily way of life, social and racial discrimination included. These relationships do involve bodily contacts. Moby Dick's protagonist, the young lad Ishmael has to, because there is no single room at the hotel, spend the night in one bed with the harpooneer Queequeg, "the infernal head-peddler."
"Landlord," said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a snow storm, -- "landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand one another, and that too without delay. I come to your house and want a bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the other half belongs to a certain harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying and exasperating stories, tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow - a sort of connextion, landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the highest degree. I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe to spend the night with him. And in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I've no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you, sir, you I mean, landlord, you, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would thereby render yourself liable to a criminal prosecution." [
, pp.36-37]
When, in the dead of that night, the harpooneer suddenly found out in the almost dark room that someone had been lying on his bed, there was a life-threatening confrontation between horror-stricken Ishmael and him which was sorted out after the landlord stepped in; and they were reconciled in an instant.
"You gettee in," he [the harpooneer] added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and throwing the clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a civil but a really kind and charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment. For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. What's all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself - the man's a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. ... [Queequeg] again politely motioned me to get into bed - rolling over to one side as much as to say - I won't touch a leg of ye. "Good night, landlord," said I, "you may go." I turned in, and never slept better in my life. ... Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife [
Queequeg's "hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style" was evocative of the boy's childhood memories with little or no love and affection of his stepmother.
...my sensations at feeling the supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg's pagan arm thrown round me. But at length all the past night's events soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament. For though I tried to move his arm - unlock his bridegroom clasp - yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain [
This enigmatic, pretty much complicated but symbolic passage bears one very simple idea of a man's getting consciously or unconsciously aware of his own sexual orientation, either step by step or all of a sudden. Eventually, any gay man does find himself clasped by "that supernatural hand" of his own, not daring to drag away his own hand for fear of breaking "the horrid spell."
There are a lot of phallic symbols in "Moby Dick." Whalemen particularly enjoy squeezing out a whale's semen.
Melville distinguishes male friendship from usual marine
buggery which merely echoed the authoritative subordination that
exists in heterosexual relations. Contrasting joint or mutual
male masturbation with sodomy, he sees not only an erotic but a
social meaning in it; to jointly "come" is something
much more different than fight with each other or do some whaling
together [
, p. 94].
Most of Melville's homoerotic images and allusions, as well as those of his junior contemporary man of letters Henry James (1843-1916), has only been deciphered in the last decades.
...If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan's breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply [
— H.Melville. Moby Dick
Notes: The Random House 20th century top 100-listed novels by Henry James include "The Wings of the Dove,"(26) "The Ambassadors,"(27) "The Golden Bowl"(32).back
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