John "Every One to His Trade": Mardi, Literary Form, and Professional Ideology My own authorship was an impromptu affair, and as far as my experience goes, I have nothing about which to complain: my book having mei with a sale beyond my expectatioos. But it is my belief that Poets are not properly esteemed and recompensed in our country . . . [I]n this connection, I will give a br^ef account of how they manage these matters in Typee..., C)ne afternoon, while stretched upon the mats, taking my luxurious siesta, Kory-Kory ran in, shouting "Clingy Lingy/' (the poet's name,) ''makee Hmeer' and hoisting me on his back, trotted up to :he "charmed circle/' who were listening to the wild chantings of our Improvisatore. . . .—Grace Greenwood, "Letter from the Author of Typee, '' Saturday Evening Post race Greenwood's satire on Herman Melville in the aftermath of his commercial success with Typee and Omoo hints at the problems of defining authorship in the antebellum United States. Mocking Melville's "impromptu" forays into authorship. Greenwood belittles his right to comment on literary matters.^ Whether or not Melville read Greenwood's satire, by the time of its publication he had begun to v/rite his airibitious third book. Mardi (1849), which seems to implicitïy respond to Greenwood's criticism. Melville explained to his skeptical British editor, John Mün-ay, that Mardi was intended as a distinct departure from his fact-based narratives and thus should be understood "as a literary acheivement [sic], & so essentially different from those two iearlier] books/'^ The production oí Mardi has long Amencaît Literature, Voiiime 75> Number 2. June 2003. Coowiffht © 2003 bv Duke Uriversitv Press 306 American Literature been understood as a pivotal episode in Melville's career, signaling his commitment to become a professional author. The novel's sprawling, digressive, fragmentary form, I wi.ll argue, is derived from Melville's investment in a distinctly professional vision and demonstrates how the idea of professional authorship itself underwent changes in this period. William Charvat's The Profession ofAuthm'ship in America (1968) helped institute professionalism as an important category for the study of antebelltmi writers, proposing that "in so far as [the writer] was dependent upon, and inñuenced by, the reader and the book trade, he was not only artist but economic man."^ Charvat's definition of literary professionalism as the economic negotiations of the American author, who seeks to achieve self-sufSciency through \witing within the often threatening confines of the Iiterar5?^ marketplace, dominates critical work on the subject.'' I will argue, however, that as Greenwood's satire of Melville suggests, professional status in the antebellum literary field was not defined solelj^ by sales but also by the practitioner's artictdation of an authoritative literary persona, a concept undergoing change throughout the period. In balancing specialized skills, cultural authority, and the marketplace, antebellum literary professionalism mirrored the emergence of a new concept of professionalism generally, which encompassed a range of vocations from doctors, lawyers, and ministers to teachers, engineers, and businessmen. Professional standing in the United States had once been the exclusive domain of traditional urban elites, who depended upon patronage ¥/ithin their small communities in American cities: in the antebellum era, however, tlie swelling urban population led to an increased market for professional services at the same time that populist politics led to new demands for democratization of professional privilege. These challenges to older professional forms led to a new market-oriented professionalism that became associated with the antebellum urban middle class, whose members used this new authority to stabilize and legitimate their place in a neAv industrializing economy. With its focus on Melville's attempt at professionalization, Mardi allows us to chart not only some of the shifts in antebellum imderstandings of authorship but also the ideological turns and contradictions at the heart of the formation of American middle-class identité' in Northern cities. Mardi and Professional Ideology 307 The nevv^" market culture of the urbanizing and industrializing cities of the antebellum North oroduced collisions between older notions of elite professional authorit}- and a new middle-dass-market professioBai identity, especiaily in New "ferk City, which became the dominaju center of U.S. trsde during the period.^ As the first national center of publishing, antebellmn New York Cm took advantage of its emerging trade dominc¿nce to supplant fhe traditional regionalism of the ./American book trade/^ î/lehâlle's decision to move to New York Cilj while writing Mardi dearly reflects die city's prominence as the Dew /i]Tieric;an îiterEïry capitai He joiiied an onprecedented number of authors in a substantial uterarv cotnmunitv; Critical uiiderstandins[s of trJs communier have been lar-^f^elv sliaDed w Perry Miller's The Raven and the Whale (1956)., which depicts a landscape do'ininated by the divide between the genteel Whiggish Knickerbocker magazine set and the mai-ket-oriented arid nationalistk Dernocratic Young Americans J Miller's politicized split of antebellum New York City authors es other kinds of writers ^mc came to the city to pursue professional "^vritiELg careers. In fact, (he ai^tebellum New Tibrk literary community offered a remarkable rajige oi vocational identities. In the mid ~1840s, Washington Indng continued in bis ICnickerbocker mode, writing from the pose of a genüeraiin idler aaid depending in part on tbe patronage of John Jacob Astor. while at the same time, wj'iters such as the sensationalist citv-profUer Georse Foster and the transplantea transcendentalist Margaret FuUer, both working for Horace Greeley's Tribime. regarded their literary efforts as tied to their status as employees„ Thus, just as the new commercial possibilities of the antebellum urban ixiarketplace put pressiu'e cm understandings of the traditional professions, xhej also affacted notions of authorship, which were xiow expaodiîig across an ideological spectrum from residually aristocratic to emergenr corporate professional.^ We can read the work ol aiiiebelbm Ne\v Yot'k literary professirjnals and the waj^^s they understood their labor as participating in a larger debate over the forirts of professioEcLl idenütv in the new economy. This complicated concesd is reflected in Mardi, Over the two years that Melville invested m writing it, the novel variously took the shape of ai least fliree distiiact genres: romexice, allegorical travelogue-satire, even selí-refiective ï5TOiboIic meditations on aesthetic practice. Critical Eättention to Mardi once focused priniarib' on dating and tracing 308 American Literature the novel's genre shifts, but since the 1950s, the most important critical readings have tended to emphasize one genre. The influential readings by Richard Brodhead and Charles Feidelson, for example, focus on the novel's symbolism, and more recent work by Cindy Weinstein and Wai Chee Dimock consider MardVs allegorical nature.^ Rather than identifying a single genre as dominant, I will argue that Mardi 's disjunctive combination of nan'ative forms reflects the range of models of authorship available in New York Cit}^, with Melville shifting from the genteel Knickerbocker, to the ambitious reformist professional, andfinallyto the specialized professional artist. But if these elements of Mardi seem disparate and incongruous, they point to more thaa divisions in the New York literary community. By reflecting Melville's evolving notion of what constitutes the proper nairative form and content for literary professional work. Mardi also comments on key problems in middle-class vocational identity in the antebellum era, such as the limited eifecti^-^eness of gentility in a mai'ket societji^ and the conflicting impulses toward both refomi and specialization in the middle-class seaixh for leritimacy and autlioritv, Mardi's disjunctions document the conflicting impulses of the antebellum professional middle-class in its attempts to define its place and status in mid-nineteenth-centur)'^ American life. and Romance Greenwood's satire clarifies Melville^s reputation as a recorder of exotic facts in Typee and Omoo and calls into question his professional status. To prove himself among his literary peers, Melville needed to produce a work that would demonstrate his artistry and ambition. Although Miller's study and others situating Melville in New York City link him to the Young America literary movement, the early section of Mardi, his first novel with professional intentions, shows a surprising investment in Knickerbocker authorship.-** A pseudoaristocratic, reverie-oriented sensibility, in fact, dominates the first third of Mardi. Melville gradually revealed his intention to write Irvinginflected fiction to Murray, liis censorious editor, shifting his description of Mardi from a possibly factual narrative that "combines in one cluster all that is romantic, whimsical & poetic in Polynisia" to an overtly fictional narrative, a "Romance of Poljniisian Adventure," by that spring.^^ Melville's interest in the Ir\àngesque Knickerbocker Mardi and Professional Ideology 309 mode of romance in Mardi, I will argue, is directh/ tied to his commitment to authorship as a profession and ro his search for a legitimating authorial oersona, Irying was at the center of early-nineteenth-century literary life in New York City, both as the author of the first American transatlantic success. The Sketch Book (1819), and as pan. of me Knickerbocker school. Paradoxically, by embracing Irying's m.ode as a sign of his new professional arjnbition, Melville had to ostensibly eschew ambition and regai"d authorship as i±ie product of leisure. The îMckerbocker Sd:hool, which included suca writers as JaiTies Kirke Paulding and FitzGreene Halleck. re^^arded authorship as ''an avocation rather than a profession and seJdom , ., a means of eaiiiing one's liyelihood."-^ The litermy personae of diese writers, ^'A-ho nostalgically associated litei^ ary pîjrsnits with aristocratic mdolence,, tended to fall into elaborate reyeries. fayored erudition in light doses, and regarded travel as an avoidarice of commitraent. In Tales of a Traveller (1824), for example, Irvrng's Buckthorn, a writer-rnanqué, elaborates on his literar)?" propensities: "J nave ,cúways been an idle fellow and prone to play the vagabond. *"^^ In spite of the increased commercial opportunides in tbe 1840s compared to the 1820s. a variety of popular antebellum New Yark writers of the next generation, inckiding Nathaniel Parker Willis, Donald Granit Mitchell (Ik MarveOi and George ¥1^ Curtis, emulated fs anticomrnercial persona. Called the "'male sentimentalist" by Douglas, it seemed an anachronistic figure, out of touch with tbe _r y commercial times, iTOnicaJh/, it was one of the most popular and coinmerciaiiy success&! conceptions of the writer in the antebellum era.'^-^ Given Melville's new commitment to authorship as a profession, it is not surprising tbat the early parts of Mardi show the imprimatur of the popular h-\ingesque male sentimentalist. Melyiîle was quick to signa] the differences between his narrator in Mardi and those in his earlier naiTatives., "^^vT^/le iifem'i's story begins, like the others, ¥7ith a Sciilor-Tiarra^or abandoning ship, MelviJie's new ambitious required that Mardi's narrator be gented, rather than a regular sailor, as this inig passage illustrates: [Ajboard all ships in which I have sailed, I have inyariably been kjiovm by a sort of drawing-room title. . . , [Sluffice it to sa)^, that it had gone abroad among the [ship's] crew, that at some indefinite period of my career, I had been a " 310 American Literature Melville's narrator emphasizes the genteel traits that distinguish him from his fellow sailors: "an occasional polysyllable; an otherwise incomprehensible deliberation in dining; remote, unguarded allusions to Belles-Lettres affairs; and other trifles superfluous to mention" (14). If the nairator complains of the "annoying" perception of his social difference, he does not disavow the validity of the judgment that he "had been a *nob.'" Embracing Irvingesque conventions, Melville transforms his narrator from a sailor into a genteel aesthete, whose literar}?^ taste is a mark of distinction that may be, it is implied, a reason for his abandoning ship. If the other sailors do not share the narrator's sympathies, neither does the captain: "Could he talk sentiment or philosophy? Not a bit. His library was eight inches by four: Bowditch, and Hamilton Moore" (5). Whereas the captains of Melville's previous narratives are tyrants of various sorts, ihere the captain's failing is his inability, despite his social status, to he a literary companion to the narrator. As if responding to_Greénwood's criticism of Typee's narrator for his limited knowledge of literature, Melville seems determined in the first chapters oí Mardi to invoke an array of literary sources, many of which he had read in recent months.^^ Tbe narrator invokes Frühiofs Saga, for example, in his description of his shipmate, Jarí: "Ah; how the old sagas run through me!'' (12). The early chapters also offer citations of Sir Thomas Browne, "my Right Reverend friend, Bishop Berkeley, " and "my Pelopormesian friend Thticydides" (39. 63, 104). No longer simply the exotic traveler, Melville's narrative persona is a well-read, casual name-dropper. Throughout this display, the narrator of these early sections of Mardi is cai'eful to take a mildly mocking tone, reflecting the male sentimentalists' adaptation of the eighteenth-century litterateur's habit of displaying his knowledge lightly, seeking to avoid pedantry. Like the ostentatiously modest claims of Irving, Willis, or Marvel, Melville entitles one of his early chapters "Containing a Pennyweight of Philosophy'* (83). Similarly, the narrator explains one character's dropping of the ship's log overboard as a display of "an aversion to literature'' and mockingly speculates on the log's fate: "Doubtless, it met the fate of man3î^ other ponderous tomes, sinking quickly and profoundly" (94). Ironically, as his vision oí Mardi changed, MeMlle remade it into the Yery sort of "ponderous tome" that writers Hke Irving or Manuel (and critics whose taste would follow them) might scorn. Mardi and Professional Ideology 311 Like the work of male sentimentalists in the wake of Irving, the early part of Mardi is filled with meditations on îhe nature of reverie, the priidleged starting point for those who joined roriianticism with a conser\^ative sensibility. Marvel, for example, introduces Dream-Life (J851), his foilow-up to the popular Reveries of a Bachelor (1850), with this praise of dreams as a source of self-laiowledge: Married or unraarried, old or young, poet or worker, you are still a dreatner, and will one time tmow, and feel, tliat 3?'our life is but a Dream. Yet you cali Ulis fiction: you stai^e off the thoughts in print which come over you m Reverie, Yo'\i will not admit to t i e eye what is true to the heart.. Poor '.veaiding, and woridJing, yon are not sti-ong e:riough to face yourself: ^^ For the male sentimentalists following ln/ing, dreams and Indolence are the sources of literary inspiration, a romantic spin on the construction of authorship as the privileged result of aristocratic leisure. The narrator oí Mardi .also seems to find in reverie the source of insight and imagination. Mter he and Jarl jump ship, he describes his encounter with an abajidoned ship they discover In a "quiet strolling and reverie" (100)-, he e\^okes Irving as he universalizes and idealizes the receprive state of dreaniy wandering: "Every one l-oiows vAat a fascination there is in wandering up and down in a deserted old tenement in some i/¡/arm, dreamy country: where vacant halls S'eem echoing of silence, and the doors creaJí; open like the footsteps of strangers'' (100). Tiiis generative círeain-state cha3"acterizes the ñrst third oí Mcírdi, which covers a substantial part of the novel's plot, including the nan^ator's jumping ship, the sudden appearance of the Pacific Islander's canoes beariîi^g the white maiden. Yillah to a whirlpoo] for ritual sacrifice, and the naiTator's murder of the head priest AleeiTta and his romance vrith Yillali.^^^ 1ÍMardi had sustai.ned this Ir'^ingesquc mode, we could confidently claim that Ivlehdlle considered it the best wav to forward tils career. Bui Me [ville qtiicMy changed direction. After Yillah/s mysterious kidnsippirjg, the rest of Mardi loosely narrates an allegorical episodic journey through the ITardiaa archipelago, inten"upted onty by occasioBai selireflective chapLers on the nature of his aesthetic work. These alternate forms hint at new Idnds of literary authority to which MelviJIe was drawn. Before lamichiDg these new narrative modes, however, Melville v/enL back, Î believe, íLiid augiriented Marc/fs first section, adding a 312 American Literature new chapter that demonstrates his revised sense of his project and his critique of the Irvingesque mode in which he had already written. Chapter 2, "A Calm, " introduces an additional, superfluous explanation for the narrator's desire to abandon ship and represents a change in narrative voice, switching from the first person that encompasses the rest of the eaidy section of the novel (and disappears after the Yillah romance) to an omniscient third person. More important, this chapter charts a new course for Melville's thinking. No longer citing genteel tedium and aesthetic disdain as causes for the naixator's jumping ship, "A Calm" finds a more complex reason. The ship's cakn is experienced as a philosophical crisis: "To a landsman a calm is no joke. It not only revolutionizes his abdomen, but unsettles his mind; tempts him to recant his belief in the eternal fitness of things; in short, almost makes aji infidel out of him" (9). Reverie stops being a source of gentle philosophy and insight as Melville suddenly presents the calm aboard ship as an identity-threatening stasis, a crisis that threatens the easygoing complacency upon which Irving and his followers relied. Far from embodying some "wai'm, dreamy country," the calm generates not imagination or ease but an existential uncertainty that requires effort to exist "ftüthin: "Vain the idea of idling out the calm. He may sleep if he can, or purposely delude himself into a crazy fancy, that he is merely at leisure. All this he may compass; but he rnay not lounge; for to lounge is to be idle: to be idle implies an absence of anything to do; whereas there is a cahn to be endured; enough to attend to. Heaven knows" (9), As Melville suggests, wi-iting as "enduring the calm" is not an a^z-oidance of work, not "leisure'' or idleness, but the challenging task of coming to temis with the philosophical questions that earlier models of philosophj? no longer answer: "enough to attend to, Heaven knows. " In this chapter, we can see Melville replacing the older vision of authorship as generative leisure with a new grounding in active mental work, a nonmanuaL non-" idling" labor that confronts mental tasks requiring skilled attention.^^ Mardi 's transformation from the light romanticism of dreaminess to the serious philosophical work of "enduring the calm" speaks to a change in Melville *s vision of authorship. This shift to mental labor as a new literary professionalism mirrors the shifts in antebellum professional ideology more generally. Like Melville, many new professionals came to reject professionalism's anachronistic investment in patrician social standing, finding a new authoritative persona in the writer as marketer of skilled, nonmanual Mardi and ^Professional Ideology 313 services. The new allegorical and metacritical forms that Mardi takes aj'ter the Yillah romance reveal Melville's commitment to an emergent vision of professional authority and exposes some of the contradictions at the heart of the new modern American Drofessional ideology. and Allegory Melville's turn to allegory in Mardi suggests that he sought to adopt a v'isiofi iof authorship in line with the reformist movement of the period. Suddenly casting aside the Yiliah romance,. Melville transformed his story into an episodic travelogue through the imaginary Mardian islands. For the rest of the novel, the first-person narrator of the first part becoioes the character Taji (the name of B demigod for whom he is mistaken by the Mardian islaaders), who joins with a troupe of island characters embod}irig perspectives Mehilîe wanted to ixplore, including those of a king, an older conservative historian, a young poet, and a philosopher, '"rhe troupe travels from island lo iáand, ostensiMy m search oí the kidnapped Yiliah but more practicalty allowing MebilJe 1:0 comment at length on a seemingly endless rou^d of subjects, from religion to literary trends, and from vaiious forms 0Î quackery io the political tamuli of 1848.^'^ in pemaps the most imffcorLant recent criii^cal •commentfir;/ on allegory in Mardi, Weinstein argues that Melville's iiwestmenL in alle£rory should be seen as a commitment to a Knd of liDerar}^ mind-work^^' V*»Tiile J agi"ee, K is important to ackno'iirfed!^ that this new model of mental work v^as associated ¥4th the political ajid social eüios encouraging what Margaret Fuller characterized as the need for "either great improvements" to "our present social system" or its "thorough reform.''-^ Just as reformism hinted at tbe importaiTit n.ew role the professional middle class could take in imprOTing /"iinericajii life., Melville s turn towaj'd reformist allegory in Maräi Mlo^íved him a new author itative literary persona. While Mardi/s reformist mode demoB strate s tbe new possibilities for author i^:y available to the middle class, Ihe course of Mardi^s allegories, particular!}^ the depiction of the European Revolutions of 1848, also re^^eals the limits oi? professional middle-class cormBitment ïo reform, exposing the n^^vei's i]ivestment in social hierarchy and the status quo. This reformist sensibility spread rapidfy dnrmg tbe antebellum era. From aiitiprostitutioii to temperance to the abolition of slavery, reform movements galvanised antebellum Americans, particularly iit cities. Debating tbe causes of this phenomeDon, historians have found 314 American Literature sources in humanitarianism and altruism as well as class interest and social control.^^ Many of these movements began under the aegis of elite leadership, but the constituency of reform groups at midcentury came to take on a decidedly middle-class air.^'* ^^Tiatever their causes and motives, reform movements became sites of identit}^ formation and political action. They gave members of the new middle class a public forum from which to express their values and make legitimate theii- place in society.-^ Middle-class professionals and nonprofessionals alike, particulaiiy women, found reform moyements a potent way to reconstitute their cultural authority and attempt to remake American life in their i This activism was apparent also in the literary field, as the 1840s saw the rise of an alternative to the writer as aristocratic dilettante: the professionalized literary reformer. This transformation was particularly visible in New York City, where a number of successful writers openly tied their literary professionalism to reform. In her Letters from New-York (published in the abolitionist newspaper National AntiSlavery Standard, 1841-44), Lydia Maria Child, a prominent, if controyersial, literary professional, used the letter's personal form to describe social conditions in the city. In one letter. Child observes the infamous New York neighborhood of "the Five Points." where "you will see neai'ly every form of human misery, every sign of drunken degradation."-" In a similar fashion, Margaret Fuller, who came to New York from the transcendentalist stronghold of Concord to pursue a career as the nation's first full-time book reviewer for Horace Greeley's Tribune (a notable step toward the professionalization of criticism), used the literary pages of the paper to advance a social reform agenda.^^ In a piece supporting Thanksgiving as a national holiday. Fuller comments: And for this present day appointed for Thanksgiving, we know of so many wrongs, woes and errors in the world yet unredressed;... yet on the other side, we know of causes not so loudly proclaimed why we should give thanks. For that movement of contrition and love... which calls . . . tlie Poet from his throne of Mind to lie with the beggar in the kennel, or raise him from it; [and] which says to the Poet, "You must reform rather than create a world. "^^ In the face of "so many wrongs" in American life. Fuller finds the new push toward reformist authorship something to celebrate in the Mardi and Pi'ofessional Ideology 31E new Thanksgiving. Both Child and Fuller come to define the work of authorshio as distincth^ tied to the Droiect of reforming social ems. Although Fuller called for her fellow writers to eschew fictional creation for reform, otber New York Citv writers found ways to iom the b¥0. Fbr example, Willisum Starbuck Mayo, whose North African travel adventure KaloolaM (1849) was favcirabh^ compared with Mardi when t-be books were first pubiished. found space for reformist gestures in hh descripdon of Fran].azugda, an i^Tiaginary v/hite Mrican society of order .and plent}^ Mayo, a doctor as well as an author, describes at ieng;th the public b3^giene s;/stem of Frama^ugda, favcirably comparing it to Nexv York City. Mayo ends his detailed description by highlighting the importance of tbis lesson to his ''New-York readers'': "There can be no doubt that similar means ^tvould produce like results in the cities nf AiTjedca, and it is in hope of sürrirg up some of the New-York readers to the importance of the subjecu that Î dwell upon it to the exclusion ofniore interestingdetai^s/'^^ In Mayo's reformist-oriented, V'/hite, African, Utopian conimnaity, a requirement for appointment lo pulïlic office was to "have ^svriixen a book, or perpetrated something In the literary way" so that "an opportunity is thus afforded to the people cf judging of the general capacity; tbe mental and moral tone oí their rulers. . . ."^' The new reiorroi:st model of authorship imag^ îned v¡T:"iters ti'axisfomied irom inconsequential idlers and ^^agabonds to socially and pcJttlcally important fig-iires in the reform of Americari culture. Lili:e Ma^i'O, Melville used an masrinar'^^ exotic setting to forward his refonriist project, trausforimmg his narrative irto an episodic travelogue of thinly veiled allegories of social political, and cultural issues, particularly reflecting tbe concerns of New York City and its new middle class, Befart? he had e^'en t^rranged to make Yillah disappear, J^elvHle sigi:!aled his new interests, describing the contrast of living conditions in the island of Oro, the home of Taji's future travel companion, íüng Media, in chapter 63, "Oro and its Lord." Here, Melville exotici^es CMld's and Fuller's reformist observations on cit]^ life, noting that the "higher classes'* of Ore live in "separate households,'' whetiier in '*tbe cool, quivering bosoms of the groves" or at the beach or, ''like the birds, . , [iol their nests amons^ the svlvan nooks of the elevated iriterior; whence ail below, and hitzy green, lay steeped in languor the island's rhi'obbmg heart'' Í191). But the ''common sort" of Oro 318 American Literature "lived in secret places, hard to find": "noisome caves, lairs for beasts, not human homes" (191). Melville's allegory explores the increasingly common discussion of class distinctions in antebellum New York City, as housing became one of the most noted embodiments of that city's class divide.^Like the sensational "mysteries of the city" profiles by writers like George Foster, Melville's allegory offers to expose the hidden truth of "island" (city) life.^^ The distinction between Oro's visible wealth and hidden poverty creates a deceptive scene: "to a stranger, the whole isle looked care-free and beautiful" (191). But if popular city writings like those of Foster demonstrate the allure of revealing a sordid underside to urban life, Melville's allegory reflects the moi'e earnest reformist rhetoric of Child and Fuller, considering the economic and social causes beneath the scandalous behavior of Oro's poor: Toil is man's allotment: toil of the brain, or toil of the hands, or a grief that's more than either: the grief and sin of idleness. But when a man toils and slays himself for masters who withhold the life he gives to them—then, then, the soul screams out, and every sinew cracks. And so with these poor serfs. And few of them could choose but be the brutes they seemed. (191) In contrast to the idle reveries of the earlier part of the novel, in this allegorical mode Melville highlights the w^orld of work. Although he mentions the distinction between manual and nonmanual labor that became crucial to antebellum middle-class identity, Melville's allegory also invokes the solidarity of labor against "masters" (191) .^* Like the reformism of Child and Fuller, Melville's allegory simultaneously marks his social and moral elevation above the poor, while still seeking to reform the status quo. If Melville was eager to address the poverty of New York City in a tropical light, he was also interested in commenting on the other end of the urban social spectrum: the world of upper-class fashion in antebellum New York City. In allegorical encounters with the inhabitants of the island of Pimminee, Melville describes a communitj^ of clothing manufacturers who, having achieved wealth themselves, "resolved to secede from the rabble" and form their ow^n island community (399). Because much of the community's fortune was based upon their production of clotliing and their standing as "capital judges of tappa [South Seas cloth] and tailoring/' these islanders are called "Tapparians" (399). In depicting them, Melville allegorizes New York Mardi and Professional Ideology 317 City's newlv wealthv merchants and manufacturers who were often dismissively called the "shopkeeper aristocracy" in antebellum city profiles written by a range of social observers.^^ Drawing attention to the social habits and refined tastes of the nouveaux riche over the course of several chapters, MeMlle concludes by dismissing the notion that the wealthy of Pimminee (and thus New York City) might be in any way representative of the culture at large: Tliey iJiink themselves Mardi in full; whereas, by the mass, they are stared at as prrcidigies; e^xeptions to the lav,?, ordaining that no Mardian shall undertake to live, unless he set out with al least the average quantity of brains. For these Tapparians have no brains.... They are the victims of bvo incurable maladies: stone in the heart, and ossification of the head, (413) Speaking O:G behalf of the poor and dismissing the cultui'al agency of the wealthy, Melville's allegories mirror conventional tropes of antebelium middle-class reform discourse on city life, paj'ticularly that of New York City. Melville uses bis South Seas allegory to justify^ the importance of middle-class perspectives on the urban social scene. ^ibile Tajiks voj^g^^ aJlorv^^ed Meíviíle to discass a range of social reform issues, ^10^'^"^ alLegories culmi-nate in his depiction of the European revolutions of 1848, A chain reaction of uprisings in England, France, Germaiíy, Austiia. ftalj'.. and Hungary emerged out of the conibmatlon Oif bours;eoif> ¿aid worldiig-class activism. Ne'^^ York City "was particularly enthusiastic in resf^onse to the revolutions, greeting news of the French uj:>risi]ig with a rail}? in City Hall Park O^D 3 April wher'e thousandíí ceiebratíííd.^^ Although Melville "^^as not in the city during the celebration, his initial œsponise to ttie explosion of revohitio]> ary feivor in Europe seems guardedly optimistic. In a span of chapters from 145 to 163. Mardis TOyagers visit Dominora (England), fiaieedoni (Scotland), aod %rdanna (Ireland) and witness the eruption oía volcano in Porphee3-o (Europe)., particularly affecting Franko (Frajice). în MardL while the cojnservative historian Moh] laments, ""Tiii-s fire must make a desert of the land . . .: burn up and bur]-- all her tiJth/ "" the poet YoomyreplLes:" ' jV]ijiej^ards flourish o^er buried villages'" (500).. The philosopher Babbaíaríja extends the comment: ''Tnie, minstrel . . . arjd prairies are purified by fire. Ashes breed loara. Nor cas any sldJl malie [he same surface forever fruitful. In all tinses past., things have been oi-erlaid; and though the first fruits of 318 American Literature the marl are wild and poisonous, the palms at last spring forth; and once again the tribes repose in shade It may be, that Porpheero's future has been cheaply won. " (500) Melville's agricultural metaphor for the European uprisings suggests the necessity of violent change. Like overfarmed land, the European political landscape requires purification that can only be brought about by dramatic reform. For Melville, the 1848 revolutions initially ofi^ered a fulfillment of the possibilities of reform. As Mardi's travelers continue on to Vivenza (the United States), however, Melville's narrative reflects on the later developments of the revolutions and seems to look upon the events far more skeptically, epitomizing the shift of middle-class attitudes more generally. By June of 1848, the alliance of the working class and bourgeoisie in France broke down into violent conflict, as it did all over Europe. American sympathy for the bourgeois political struggle was far greater than for the worldng-class social struggle. As a result, when the violence of France's June proletarian revolution arose (itself the product of bourgeois suppression of the working-class social struggle), middle-class American support dwindled. In this way, American attitudes toward the revolutions min-ored Georg Luiíács's general characterization of the transformation of boui'geois attitudes about the revolutions from "revolutionär}?^ democracy into compromising liberalism. "^^ Reflecting this new skepticism toward revolution, Melville shifts from praising the European uprisings to criticizing the enthusiasm of \-ivenzans for the revolutions and Jacksonian populist egalitarianism. Melville then closes out his allegorical \asit to Yhrenzii's north with the reading of a lengthy scroll that encapsulates his views on politics. The scroll, Melville's most overt and sustained political commentarj, is apparently Y^ritten by one of the voyagers (it is left undetermined whether by King Media or the philosopher Babbalanja) and is directly addressed to the Vivenzan crowd, who tear it into shreds after it is read to them. Drawing attention to limitations of reformism, the scroll refutes the efficac}^ of revolution: Now, though far and wide, to keep equal pace with the times, great reforms, of a verity, be needed; nowhere are bloody revolutions required. Though it be the most certain of remedies, no prudent invalid opens his veins, to let out his disease with his life. And though all evils may be assuaged; all evils can not be done away. For Mardi and Professional Ideology 319 ii is the chronic malady of the universe: and checked in one place, bréales forth in another. (529) Tlie earlier agricultural metaphor of burning exhausted fields here gives way to the more moderate medical metaphor of the "prudent inv,a]id/' who avoids the unnecessary letting of blood. This limited reformist theory, called Burkean b^^ one of the more attentive readers QÍMüfdi 's politics, reñects not simply a political attitude.^'^ The scroll's deyabation of political change and the radiccüly dehistoricized sense of social order ("evil is ihe chronic malady of the universe'') turns cap^ trails t competition into a universal, reflecting what Ltikács describes as "a n'jetaphysicaî history-dissolving mystique" that characterized the bourgeois response to the 1848 reyolutions.^^ Melville's scroll demonstrates the limitations of antebellum rniddle-class reformism, what Burton Bledsceîn describes as its fear of '"the excessiye openness of American society . . , and the failure of moral restraint.'"''^^' By this point in the narrati^?-e, Melville's social views have evidently shifted, especially from his first allegorical chapter depicting the brutalizaüon of the poor on the island of Oro. justifying class animus and proclaiming tbe need for r\úorm. The 1S4S re\^olutions were a test of middle-ciass reformism both in Europe and the United States. By the time they ended in the yiolerit suppressions of v/orking-class calls for social equality, the European reyolutions had transcended the limits of most AiBericaß î^aJformist sensil.^ilities. including, apparently, Mel\'ille's.*' These chapterñ on the revolutions signal in effect, the end oí MeMIIe's iiiterest m alie^gory in Mardi, reflecting not just the end cf its nan-ative efficacy for the text but also apparent^ the end of his belief in the merits of a reformist literary p^ojeci. iÜ the end of the risk to Yivenza (and the end ^rfthe révolutions of 1848), Meiville shifts his narratif?e kom dlegory anci the reformist sociid. thinking to v/hich 5: seems tied, xo aesttieticism. a moye that reflects the maior shift in European ai-t at the time "from politïca] radicalism and social realism i rito aestheticism. " '~ With the dose of th e allegories of re'v olution, selfreflexiye writins: and increasineív ïierm^etic symbolic commentaries on tbe process of v^riiing dominate the end of the novel. Mardi m\û Früfsssioii&fism At the siwie time that :Vielville redirected Mardi into an allegorical travelosxie, he also beean to include chapters addressing readers 320 American Literature on the nature and difficulties of the task of writing and to include characters engaged in long debates on philosophical issues touching upon the artist and literary production. While these episodes are only occasional counterpoints to the allegorical encounters through much of Mardi, they become increasingly important in the aftermath of Melville's allegorical meditation on the 1848 revolutions, as he turns toward what has been called "symbolistic" writing, literary work that self-consciously confronts the terms of its own creation.^^ It is this fitful form that leads Richard Brodhead to characterize the "real object" of the novel as "nothing [Melville's] characters seek but the mental world he himself discloses through the act of creating the book/'^^ Criticizing the formalism of these readings of Mardi that cast the novel simply as Melville's symbolic narrative of aesthetic autonomy, Dimock insists that "the figure of the ^creative artist' Is not without its own history" and that we should "study the emergence of [the creative artist] and the attendant elevation of his calling—... study it not just as an episode in literary tdstory, but as a phenomenon concun^ent with and perhaps connected to other historical events. ""^^ Connecting MaräVs vision of artistry with history, we can read Melville's investment in an autonomous and hermetic mode of aesthetic practice by the end of his novel as a reflection of the professional middle-class project of vocational specialization. Just as the other literary forms of Mardi signal Melvifle's interest in the legitimating possibilities of a particulai* literai'y persona, wMch LR turn reflect larger shifts in the ideologj?^ of professionalism, the novel's final self-conscious and selfreflective symbolic form reveals Melville's commitment to the professional project of specialization. The late 1840s saw an unprecedented "wave of association, " as professional groups such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1847), American Medical Association (1847), and American Legal Association (precursor to the American Bai- Association, 1849) began developing normative educational methodologies and establishing internal mechanisms for validating certain work practices and im/aJidating others.-^ The various professionai associations constituted in the antebellum era all depended upon specialization to establish their authority. No longer tied to an elite patronage sj^stem, professions were required to enter the marketplace. Specialization allowed the professions to "constitute and control a market for their expertise. "^^ Thomas Haskell presents the project of the Smithsonian Mardi and Professional Ideology 321 Institute's Joseph Henry as a prime example of this process, demonstrating how the antebellum scientific community created criteria for establishing the merit or validity of scientific work, with the double eifect of "insulatiingl the practitioner of science from those least competent to judge Mm, and . . . bring[ij}g] him into intimate contact with—and competitive exposure to—those most competent to judge him, '' '-^ \¥hile professionals used private organizations and specialized discourses both to test ideas and to insulate themselves from outside compétition, this autonomy was ne\er an end in itself. Autonom;^ and specialisation prodraced what Mag'ali Larson has called a "special kind of non-physicaJ property," wbat other sociologists have ca[led cultural! capital, which gives professionals a privileged position in the markets of service, labor, and ideas.^^ Professionals, as Pierre Bourdieu asserts, 'live on the sale oi cultural services/' and as a result, "the accumulation of economic capital merges with the accumulation of symbolic capital,... [añ m] tíie acquisition of a reputation for competence and an of respecta bi lit}''. " ^^ Professional specidization may have been a ^awal from an open marketplace of sen/ices and ideas, but it was designed inevitaMy to return to that marketplace from a new position of authority^ Seeminghy a rejection of the marketplace, specialization in iitct reñecEed the interest of the middle ckss in altering its highly vulnerable pktce within the new economy ajid social hierarchy by cO'iitrolling 1:he terms of its entrance into the n^arketplace. ^LÍS prafessional logic of specialkation found its literary expres5ÍGn in artebelhim New ïbrk City prioiarlly in the work of the Young si America movemenr. This groiip was quick to pick iL¿p this notion of vocationaL SDecialij^ation as is way to leíritímate the author in the literary maitetplace, often comparing vmdng to other forms of professional work, whether medicine, law^ business, or the ministiy. At the center of this pregect- E'i:^rt Duyfeinck used the prospectus to the first edition of his ma^iizine Literarv Woríd to ask: ''There is a refeious. a political, a mercantile v^^orld, yñr^ not a literary/ one?"^^ In a similar vein, Duyckifick's Voung-Americans cohort¥aHiam A. Jones explains the need for the specialization of authors and cri-dcs in his 1845 essayin üem-ocrai-ic Revievr An amateur in ajm.ost every walk is regarded as much inferior to a woddîig member of the craft. A man rarely puts his heart or invests the whole stock of his faculties in a pursuit which he takes up casually to ^Aribile awar an hour or ih?vo of an idle day . , . You are never 322 American Literature sure whether they are doing their best or not. . . . They injure the true author who unites a love for his profession, deep interest in his subject, and an honest independence, with the aim of procuring a sufficient livelihood.^" Devaluing the Knickerbockers' amateur model of authorship, the Young Americans envisioned professional authorship as a distinctly middle-class endeavor, joining nonmanual labor with a desire to support oneself that explicitly sought to find a counterpart in the emergent professionalism of other fields in the period. As a result, Jones could attack all amateurism and link professional writers to all other professionals: "Now we all know very well how absurd a thing it would be for a client to ask the services of an amateur lawj^er, with an air of confidence in the request, and, indeed, the analog}^ holds in every walk of life. "^^ Like doctors, lawyers, and a host of other professionals, some antebellum authors were persuaded of the importance of specialization and began to consider wa^.'^s to define their fields and denote their specialized skills. We can see Melville participating in this ideological process, particularly in the final section of Mardi where the novel tuions toward self-referentiality and metaliterary meditations. At interstices bet\¥een different strands of substantial allegorical plotting in the second half of Mardi, Melville inserts philosophical interludes that defend or validate his own literarv efforts and melhods. These chapters are respites from the story, marked as different by their titles, characterized by grand philosophical and metaliterar}^ themes ("Time and Temples'' or "Faith and Knowledge") and by the invocation of nonallegorical contexts and sources. In the later chapters "Dreams'' and "Sailing On," however, the commentary on Melville's act of writing turns explicit. In "Dreams," Melville openly addresses the reader in the act of writing: "My cheek blanches white while I write; I stail at the scratch of my pen; mj?^ ov/n mad brood of eagles devoui's me; fain would I unsay this audacit)?-; but an 5ron-mailed hand clenches mine in a vice and prints down everi'^ Jetter in my spite'* (368). Imagining the wTiter as Promethean, Melville portrays himself as both heroic and suffering, serang the vi^^orld but cut off from it as a result of his efforts. Melville's "Dreams" inscribes die act of writing and the author's feelings about it into the text, making it a drainatic action rather than a hidden effort. By dramng aii:ention to the act of writing itself, MeWUe legitimates the work of the author in Mardi. Mardi and Professional Ideology 323 If "Dreams" turns uniting into a heroic act, "Sailing OÎÎ'' converts ardV^ allegorical voyage into a metaphor for the progress of Melviîie's thinking Again addressing the reader direct!)', Melville calls the reader's attention to his own eflforts: Oh, reader, list! I've chariless voyaged. With compass and the lead, we had not fouiid these Mardian Isles. Those who boldly lamich. cast oif all cables: and turning from the common breeze, that's fair for all. vvith i:heir owe brearh, fill their own sails. ... That YOYBg^r steered his bark through seas, untracked before; ploughed jijs ovir^B path mid jeers; though v/ith a heart that oft was hea\7/ with thought, that he might be only too boid, and grope where land was none. T i feielvilîe's ^i;ision of the writer as voyager, invoked in other chapters by symbolic references to Marco Polo (228). Columbus (297), and Mungo Park (368), goes be5^ond mere mplicatiori into heroic self-assertion in this new vision where the writer trumps the explorer with his greater freedom: "'But this new world here sought, is stranger far than his, vi^ho stretched his vansfi-'omPalos. It is ike world of the mind; v/herein thie \^= an derer mav mze round, with more wonder than Balboa's band roving through the golden A^tec glades" (557; my emphasis). Melvilie*s announceraent that his narrative has explored a "world of the nind" is. in a sense, a revision of the allegorical impulse. Certainly no reader can hdive imagined that MardVs A/oyage was in any way factual \pj this point in fhe narrative, but the earlier allegorical chapters craw attention to pressing issues m antebellum US. social and politi caí life, srjealdng to the need for action dxA reform. In "Sailing On," ever., Melville calls on his readers not to take action in the ¥/orld but to perceive his own autonomous role in constructing rhis "world of the mind'' that îs his text.'" Feidelson reads "'Sailing On" as the centra^ rioment in MardL leading him to suggest of the narrative as a whole that '" Whst is thouölit about is a relatively minor matter; Melville's ultiniaie question is hou). In tine largest vie-v^^ ihe book is a study of what it entails to regard tbinkrng as a metaphysical iourney,"^^ If Feidelson's claim seems to simply forget 4Ö0 pages of reformist allegory, it does capture the Jnlensir^^ of feeling thai emerges in ''Dreams'^ and "Sailing On,"' "^^ich lesLps out at the reader after the fairly mechanical elaboraion oi" allegory late in MardL lv> effect, "Sailing On" rechristens Mardi 324 American Literature yet again, this time as a symbolic and autonomous exploration of the writer's aesthetic authority. This narrative shift is formalized at the end, when in his lengthy discussion of the Mardian author Lombardo and his text, the Kostanza, Melville turns the novel completely in on itself and makes his own writing process its subject. In the discussion between the voyagers and the traditionalist King Abrazza, Melville clearly represents his sense of his own writing process and the work it produces, Mardi itself. As in "Sailing On," Mehdlle denies the light romanticism of his earliest work on the novel and transforms "reverie'" and "idleness" into a rigorous self-exploration: "^¥hen Lombardo set about his work, he lmew not what it would become. He did not build himself in v/ith plans; he wrote right on; and so doing, got deeper and deeper into himself; and like a resolute traveler, plunging through baffling woods, at last was l'ewarded for his toils.... 'Here we are at last, then/ [Lombardo] cried; 'I have created the creative'" (595). This self-exploring Kostanza is, like Mardi itself, marked by its disparate forms and episodic nature. Pi'edicting his own skeptical readers' response to Mardi, Melville has Abrazza comment: " 'But the unities,... the unities! They are wholly wanting in the Kostanza.... [It] lacks cohesion; it is vrild, unconnected, all episode' " [597]). In the face of this kind of criticism from his contemporaries. Lombardo questions his impulse to reach a broader audience: "Who will heed it," thought [Lombardo]; "what care these fops and brawlers for me? But am I not myself an egregious coxcomb? Who will read me? Say one thousand pages—twenty-five lines each— every line ten words. That's two million five hundred thousand Ö'S, and i% and o's to read! How many are superfluous? Am I not mad to saddle Mai'di with such a task? Of all men, am I the w^isest, to stand upon a pedestal, and teach the mob?" (601) Implicitly acknowledging the difficulties oí Mardi and the problems of addressing a widely disparate readership (including elitist "fops" and populist "brawlers"), Melville questions the purpose of writing. But instead of ending on a note of self-doubt, he justifies a reorientation of his identification as author away from concern with sales or reaching an audience, finding the answer not in an imagined contemporary readership but in posterity. No longer writing to succeed with contemporary (and commercial) readers, Melville aims to write difficult Mardi and Professional láediogy 325 works that can only find a wider audience in the future, ît was this logic that belied Melville's 1849 famous assertion to his father-inJa^^ in which he posed the possibility of his novels' conrmercial '*success" against his "earnest desire to v/rite the soil of books which are said to *iail/"^'' Under this new logic, only commercial failure can guarantee the success Melville truly iongs for, the recognition of his artistry by his true peers and by posterity. In effect, Melville's final vision of Mardi is that of a specialist, who makes bis novel available to a limited audience suitably prepared or trained to appreciate his work. It is perhaps inevitable that MarâV^ embrace of a sjmbolic autonoTïsy has been read as a significant moment in Melville's career as a romantic artist. As Raymond Williams and Lawrence Buell have argued, however, romanticism itself (whether British or i^jnerican) was a vocation^J discourse of aesthetic specialization.^^ In fact, the conslTuction of literary or art bistof;/ as its ov'^'^n field of kaowledge or study cari Itself be understood ss a symptom of the Ideological process of specialization. As Boiw^ieu suggests, the v^orld of art as ilhas been constructed in modern life is dominated by a symbolic economy of cukuraJ capital, becoming "'a sacred island, systematicdJy ,and ostentatiously opposed to the profane, everyday world of production, a sanctuar)^ for ^çj'atuitous, disinterested a,cüvjty m a universe given over to money and seîiinterest.'"^^ In this sanctified "aaii-economv,''" the "''pvixe artist'' embraces a ''professiosal ideolog}'" that, fai" fiom being uniq-je, simply embodies in its purest form the professional middleclass relatJOTiShip to an industria] capitalist mode of production (RA, 82). Rather than seeing Melvil!e"s narro^t^ing of hi s ideal audience and ulive ior auto^Lomy in Mardi as simcih.' an oddity in literarv history, we cart read it as a cn-stsllization of the íarger process of professional middle-class specialisiatbn, a reacticsnto (but not a^iiolesale rejection of) the eme/"gent market ecorîO'rav of aritebeJîmri Ar^ferica. Over the course üíMarái 's composition, tiien, its form changed drarîiaticallj^, and wi1± it, MeJvîIle's vision ci authorship and audience. Ftom the general Ij^ut hnpdicithr Tn/inges^que genteel readership who Diiglit be drawn to ''ail that is roinaKtic, whimsical & poetic in Poiynisia'" to a refomi-minded middle class ^X\ÏO migi^it fijid their values seconded in the lîuegories, Melville &]:íÍfLed gradually to a narrower and more specialized vision of îîis audience, a shift that culminated in a text he deemed inaccessible to a general contemporary readership but ca]3able of finding a place in the pantheon at some future 326 American Literature date. While Melville consistently intended Mardi to authorize his literary professionalism, his vision of what constituted that identity kept changing, increasingly disassociating authorship from sales. By its end. Mardi functions under the logic of what Bourdieu has called "the antl-'economic' economy of pure art. " While rejecting the commercial and short-term economic profit, this aesthetic logic is also tied to an economy, Botu'dieu argues—but to a "symbolic economy, " where aesthetic ambition and difficulty function as "a kind of ^economic' capital denied but recognized" that can lead to prestige and authority (A4, 142). By its close. Mardi becomes the embodiment of Melville's specialized professional authority, a text v/ritten against market demands but with an eye toward the legitimation that would allow him to take up an authoritative position in the market. Far from simply an assertion of romantic artistry. Mardi refiects the complex negotiation of professiona[ism in antebelltim culture. In fact, some of Melville's readers were aware of this maneuvering and commented on it,. William A. Jones explored this context in a review of Mardi for the United States Magazine & Democratic Review in July 1849. Coming after the novel had been generally attacked in the press and showed little chance for finding a popular readership, Jones's review sought to explain the novel's failure not in the context of literary taste but in the broader context of work, the economy, and industrialization. The review, in something of a departure from common practice, begins with a long preface on social issues: There are few men whose scope of vision extends over the area of human existence. The view of most is confined to their trade, profession, or sect. Success in the lowest uses of life, in the competitive sphere in which we Ihe, has made this limitation of sight a necessar}'^ fact. The boy's advice to the clergyman is too commonly quoted to need explanation, viz.: 'Every one to his trade— you to your preaching, and 1 to my mouse-traps.' A man cannot be expected to till his farm, btiild his house, and malie his shoes, and his Jones speaks first of a transformation of American society, the shift to w^hat he calls a "competitive industry" that necessitates vocational specialization ("MM/' 44). In this new model, traditional hierarchical forms of cultural authority, like the clerg>^ have been replaced by a horizontal model of specialization that establishes narrow fields of March- and Professional Ideology 327 authority. To explain MardV^ faiiui'e, Jones then discusses the gap that opens bet?v'een the **sphere'' of vocations and the "sphere'* of aesthetics: There seems a sort of necessit^;^ that men should not see all over the field of human economy, or philosophy, when engaged to the limit of their strength, in makiog pegs, or shoes, heads or points of pins, six daj^s out of tbe iveek.... Ana when their sight is thus abridged and confined, it would be gratuitous cruekv to blame them if thev do not recctgnize aad accept, as belonging to this mundane sphere, worldpictures made in high places, by the few of far-sight„ ("MM/* 44) For Jones, the competitive v^rorld of industrial capitalism renders speci-alization necessary: it creates both the maker of *'pegs" and the maker olMardi. In this context, neither Melville nor the general readership should be blamed'úMardÁis not widely appreciated. For Jones, the division bet^A^een the literaiy professional and the general readership was Inevitable under industrialization. Jones understands the commercial Mlure oí Mardi as a coîpmerjtaiy on the emergent econoiiiicaJh^ and sociailv determiaed vocatícoal differeimtiations witMn ar tebeilum AmericaB culture. Like Melville's conterriiporaries, we should understand Mardi as m interrogation of what defines literature, literature's audience, ctnd professional work in American culture. The disparate and, at times, ccntadictonr textud elements of Mardi directly reflect the conflicting impulses of Ajnerican professional ideology, revealing the tensions Mnthin roiddie-class social authority. As one ke}^ ges'ture of antebellum professionaiization, specialization encouraged autonomy by dividing fields oí knowledge and sep.arating experts from those deemed unqualified to judge specialized discourses and effort. In contrast, reform turned professioLaa] focus outward, both using and boisterwjy rej6:irmers' Enthorit^,^ through their involvement ^Kth problems in the larger social field. While the two impulses could work in conjunction, they also tugged in opposite directions, raising questions as to whether professionatisni was simply a self-interested class movement or a concerte'd effort at Improving conditions fcr knowledge and rejibrming áma'ican society: 'The text oí Mardi exemplifies these opposing impulses: its SOCÍÍLÍIY engaged reformist allegory demonstrates middle-class desires to improve both professional practice and xaericaii '\lie, -while its sdireferential s-voibolism turns a-w-av from 328 American Literature social problems to focus exclusively on specialized concerns and discursive authority. "V^Tiile Mardi has traditionally been read as Melville's journey into artistry, we can equally understand it as a journey through the evolving and contradictory ideologies of middle-class professionalism in antebellum America. University of Missouri, Columbia Notes As part of a larger project, this essay received generous support from the American Antiquarian Society, the Hodges Better English Fund of the University of Tennessee, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. 1 Grace Greenwood [Sarah Jane Lippincott], "Letter from the Author of Typee, " Saturday Evening Post, 9 October 1847; cited in Jay Leyda, Melville Log, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 1:262-63. 2 Herman Melville to John Murray, 25 March 1848, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Chicago: North^^'^estern Univ. Press, 1993), 107. 3 William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870 (1968; reprint. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1992), 292. 4 Chani^at's economic definition of the profession of authorship was important to a remarkably productive generation of scholarship on antebellum American literature in the 1980s, leading to major reconsiderations of the work of the canonical authors in relation to the literary marketplace and to the recovery of many popular authors, especially women, neglected in the mid-twentieth-century establishment of a nineteenthcentury literary canon (see, for example, Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985] ; and David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville [New York: Knopf, 1988]). 5 On New York City's antebellum trade dominance, see Robert G. Albion, Uie Rise of the New York Port (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939); Allen Pred, Urban Growth and City Systems in the United States, 18401860 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980); and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984). 6 On the rise of New York as the nation's publishing center, see Ronald Zboray A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 55-68. 7 Vçxry Miller, The Raven and the Wliale (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956). Examples of more recent works perpetuating Miller's vision of the New York City literary community include Edward L. Widmer, Young Mardi and Professional ideology 329 S 9 10 11 12 13 14 America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 1999); and Peter Buckley. "To the Opera House: Culture and Society j \ New York City. 1820-1860" (Ph.a diss.. SUNY-Stony Brook. 1984), 268-93. On distinctions between residual and enieî"gent cultural forms, see Raymond \¥illiams, Marxism and Literature (Ne\¥ Ycrk: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 121-27. For a typology of artists in relation to the marketplace, see RavTiiond Williams, Th-e Sociology of Ctdttife (1981: reprint, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), ¿4-52. The mos" notable e^iamtïles of the early criticism, to which I am heavily indebted, are Luther S. Mansfield, "Herman Melville: Author and New Yorker, 1844-1851" (Ph.D. diss., Liniyersit}^ of Chicago, 1936). and Merreli R. Eiavis. MelvPJe's ''Mardi"' A Chariless Voyage (Is^ew Haven: Yale Univ, Press. 1952'. For symbGlic readings, see Charles Feidelson. Symholism and Ajnerican Literatura ÍChicagoi Unh'". of Chi^cago Press, 1953), 166-75, and Richard Brodhead, "Mardi: Cresting the Creative," in New Perspectives on MelviUe, ed. Faith Pullin (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 197S), 29-'>3„ The allegorical school is best represented by Wai Chee Dimock, Empire forLibeñv (Princeton. NJ.: Princeton Univ. Press. 1989)-. 140-75: a^id Cmdy Weinst ero, The Literature of Lahor and tke Lahors of Literature {¥\e\^- York: Cambridge Univ, Press, 1995), 89-99. The most substajirlal mediisti':^!! on Melville's debt to Irving can be iound ill Johri Br^'-ant's Melvilh and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor m the Americmi Renaissance (New York: Orfoid Uni'/. Pi-ess, 1993). Bryant, however, deals primarily y,nïli Typee 'èvA Moby-Dick, ^nentioriing Mardi only br'lefly, debpitt the fact tbat the astute Even: Dui^ckinck made the following comment v-rhik Meh/iile was wxidtig Mcrdi: "Dined with Herman Mehàlle si t i e Asmr House. He is to be married next IVednesday, He is cheerful cortrpanr without being verv ^ille£rible^ or crigxnsl and models his writing evidently a great deal or ^Wa^ïMiigton Irving" (dväry entry, 31 July 1847; seeLe^rda, Melvzlk Log, 1:253;. Meiville to JohQ Murr^sy, 10 January 1S48 and 25 March 1S48. Correspo^iâence, ed. Horth. 100.106, respectp-?ely. Jonn Paul Pritchnrd, Tm Läemry Wise Men of Gotham (Baton Rouge: Louisiana Stste IJrir/. Press, 1963), 9. Washington Irving, Tales of a Traveller, in Life and Works of Washington ed. Ricbard H. Si:ûddard (New York: Dollard and Moss. 1880), 379; cited ir Ana Douglas, The FemirJzatîon ofAmerican Cidtu'^e (New York: 1977), 237, Douglas, Feminizaiion ofAm-erlcar? Culture, 237. "\^Tiile Douglas includes Willis, MitchelL and Cuî"tîs in her critique of sentimentalism generall5\ SaîJidra TIJÍTH: has; arg-ued. ábovt Willis particularly, that the Knickerbocker persona heralded "the new eDtreprenenrial-st)''le professionalism demanded bv the '^xoandins; book induslr^^" ("An idle Industry: Nathan- 330 American Literature 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 iel Parker Willis and the Workings of Literary Leisure, " American Quarterly 49 [December 1997]: 781). Tomc*s argument demonstrates the contradictions at the heart of Willis's literary persona without necessarily proving Willis's importance in the articulation of new models of literary work. Herman Melville, Mardi; and a Voyage Thither, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, vol. 3 of The Writings ofHerman Melville (Evanston. IIL: Northwestern Univ. Press and the Newheiry Library, 1970), 14. Further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically. For a chronology of Melville's reading during this period, see Davis, Mardi: A Chartless Voyage, 60-78. Ik Marvel, Dream-Life (1851; reprint. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1893), 10. This feverish plotting seems to join Irving to the darker romanticism of Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Southey. On the possible influence of the romantics on the Yillah romance, see Davis, Mardi: A Chartless Voyage, 125-41. In The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature, Weinstein argues that "A Calm" explores tensions in the work ethic in antebellum American life, setting the tone for Melville's use of allegory in Mardi to defend a new kind of symbolic nonmanual labor (89-99). However, Weinstein assumes a more unified project for Mardi than I do. At the point of "A Calm," Mardi\ allegories are still at least a hundred pages avv^ay. The earliest critical studies of Mardi have enumerated the sources and critical thrust of Melville's allegories carefully; see especially Mansfield, "Herman Melville: Author and New Yorker"; and Davis, Mardi: A Chartless Voyage. See Weinstein, The Literature of Labor. 89-99. Margaret Fuller, "The Rich Man—An Ideal Sketch/' New York Tribune, 6 Februar^^ 1846: in Margaret Fuller, Critic, ed. Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2000), 359. The historical literature on antebellum reformism is extensive. An instructive exchange between Thomas L. Haskell, David Brion Davis, and John Ashworth on the logic of abolition was compiled by Thomas Bender in The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ of California Press, 1992). See Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class (New York: Cambridge Univ. Pi-ess, 1989), 192-206. For a sample of the range of arguments for the correlation between antebellum reform movements and middle-class identity, see Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class; Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Mardi and Professional Ideology 331 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 Hill & Wang, 1978) : and John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum RepiMic (New York: Canibridge Univ, Press, 1995), The literature on women^s roles in antebelliup. reform is enormous. For an important earh^ articulation of women's involvement as part of a class movement, see Carroli Sraith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions cf Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 109-64. Lydia î^laria Child, Lettersfrorn Neiv-York. ed, Bruce MiUs (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press« 1998), 17. OÎJ Fuller as the ñrst full-time book reviewer in the United States, see 'Tilomas Bender, Neu> York hûelleà (Baltimore: Johns Hopldns Univ. Press, -1988), 158. Christina Zwarg explores Fuller's refoanisl notion of literature as "the great mutual system of interpretation bet;v-?'eep all kinds ana classes of mer«" (''Reading before Àïai^x" Mai-garet Fuller and the New-Ycyrk Daily Trihime,'' \n Readers in History, ed, James Macbor ÎBaîtimore: Johns Hopkins IJnrv. Press 1993], 229-58). Margaret Fuller, ^-Tbaiilísgiving,'' New York Tribune. 12 December 1844: reprinted m Margaret Fuller, CHtic. ed. Bean and M)^erson, 11. William Starbuck Mayo^ Kaloolah, on Journeyings to the Djebel Kumri An A uioMography of Jonathan Römer, ed, TK ' S, Mayo, fvLD, (New Yark: George Putnam, 1849). 463. "Vlayo, KaloolaL 465-66. See Elisabeth Bíacbuar, Pfankaitan for Rent ilthaca.. N.Y.: Cornell Uni\í. Press, 1989); and E-enneth A Scherzer, Tñe UnbowKded Community Ndgkborhooá Life and Social Siructttre in New York City, 1830-1875 (Durham, N.C: Duke Umv. Press, 1992). For examples of George Foster "s city profiles, see tbe reprint edition of Nev} York by Gadigkt, ed.. Stuart Blurnin (Berkeley and Los Angeles' Univ. of California Press, 1990)- ïn his God in the Street: New York Writing from the Penny Press to Melville (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press. 1995), Eans Bergmami explores vvhat he sees as Melville's engagement 'vvith, and traiiscetideince of, Nevi^ York's sensational and sentimental writings abou': the poor in Ms nexi bo'Dk, Redhirn (108-113). On die emergerce of the distinction berv/een manual and nonmanual labor as central to middle-ciass identit;;/ ir the period, see Blumin, Tlte EnhirgenC'¿ of ike MiMk Class, 6Ô-107 Blupiin notes that wrrters comneuting on New York's shopkeeper aristocracy rsiiged from Foster to John Jacob Aster's grandson. Charles Aster Bristed {The Emergence of the Middle Class, 234). Q'l New York Cibr's entbusiastic response to the revolutions, see Lam^ J. Reyiiolds, European Revolutions and the A?nerican Literary Renaissance (New HcTven: Ysle Univ. Press, 1993), 1Ö-12. Georg Lukács, The Nisicrkai Novel trans. Hannah MitcheP and Stanley Miicheil (1962; reprkrt. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983), 171. In discussinp' Melvilie's critical response to the 1848 revolutions. Rev- 332 American Literature 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 nolds finds the scroll "Burkean" {European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance, 49). See Liikács, The Historical Novel, 175. On conservative anxieties within middle-class reform, see Bui'ton Bledstein. The Culture of Professionalism (New York: Norton, 1977), 182. One of the few American writers who continued to support the 1848 uprisings was Margaret Fuller, whose postings to the Tribune from Europe were seen by many as the high point of her literary career. Her historv of the Italian revolution was lost when she dro^vned with her husband and child returning to Nev/York from Europe. Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: Tke Politics and Art ofHerman Melville (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1985), 21. The European retreat into aestheticism after 1848 is mapped more precisely in T. X Clark. The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848-1851 (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973). The most influential reading emphasizing Mardi'^ symbolism is Feidelson's famous Symbolism and American Literature, 166-75. Brodhead, "Mardi: Creating the Creative, " 39. Dimock, Empire for Liberty, 44. For dates on the founding of various American professional associations, see Bledsteiii, Culture of Professionalism) and Magali S. Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1977). Larson, The Rise of Professionalism, xvi. Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1977), 67. Magali S. Larson, ''Expertise and Expert Power," in The Authority of Experts, ed. Thomas Haskeil (Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1984), 36. A related discussion can be found in Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and ihe Rise of the Neiv Class (New York: Seaburj^ Press, 1979). Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, trans. Richard Nice (1979; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), 291. Evert Duyckinck, "Prospectus," Literary World 1 (6 February 1847): 5. William A. Jones, "Amateur Authors and Small Critics," Democratic Review 17 (July 1845): 63-64. Ibid., 62. See Brodhead. ''Mardi: Creating the Creative," 39. Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature, 167. Melville to Lemuel Shaw. 8 October 1849, Correspondence, ed. Horth, 139. On the association of romanticism with specialization, see Raymond Williams, "The Romantic Artist," Culture and Society: 1785-1950 (1958; reprint. New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 30-48; and Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Ctdture (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 56- Mardi and Professional Ideology 333 83, It should be noted that Williams distir^guishes this specialization from professionalism, vi^hije BueÜ e^rplicitly links the t^vo (wkhout tying them to class formatier;. 5g Pie^^e Bourdieu, Outline ofa Theory ofPractice, trans. Richard Nice (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), 197. For Bourdieu. the worid of art thus becomes a perfect object of sociological study and for that reason, his work has turned frequently and proiitably to cultura] attitudes toward the consumption of art (see Distinction) and the production of art (see TJie Rules ofArt: Genesis and Structure of ike Literary Field, trans. Susan EiXianuel [Stanford, Calll: Stanford Uciv. Press, 1996]). Fur ¡her references to T¡ie Rules ofArt will be cited parenthetically as RA, 59 Wiiliain A, Jones. "Melville's Mardi, '' Unäed States Magazine and Democraiic Fevien: 25 (JLIIT 1849}: 44, Further references ia this source will be dted ptirentheticaily as "MM/' Copyright of American Literature is the property of Duke University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.