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Chapter 3

Carnival Bodies and Medical Professionalism in Melville’s Fiction

One of the effects of civilization (not to say one of the ingredients in it), is, that the spectacle, and even the very idea of pain, is kept more and more out of the sight of those classes who enjoy in their fullness the benefits of civilization. . . . All those necessary portions of the business of society that oblige any person to be the immediate agent or ocular witness of the infliction of pain, are delegated by common consent to peculiar and narrow classes: to the judge, the soldier, the surgeon, the butcher, and the executioner.

—John Stuart Mill, “Civilization,” 1836

Although Herman Melville did not write about medical men as often as Hawthorne, the fictional doctors that do appear in his works suggest a similar attentiveness to medicine’s ambitions, and resistance to professional discourses of somatic mastery. Melville was friends with some of the most eminent physicians of the day, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Wakefield Francis, and Augustus K. Gardner, and yet his representations of medical men are sharply satirical. In White-Jacket, a U.S. navy surgeon is a vicious butcher. In The Confidence-Man, the marketplace machinations of an herb-doctor reveal the profit motives behind medical sectarian squabbling. And in Billy Budd, Sailor, Melville ascribes narrow mechanistic thinking to another ship surgeon. In all three portraits, the medical man is oblivious to pain. The fleet surgeon in White-Jacket barely notices the death of a common sailor whose leg he has needlessly amputated, the herb-doctor’s sales pitch is a barrage of words that silences his customers, and the ship surgeon on the Bellipotent takes pride in a “scientifically conducted” hanging he directs.¹ In other words, while witnessing or inflicting pain was, as John Stuart Mill noted in 1836, increasingly “delegated by common consent to peculiar and narrow classes,” Melville was committed to writing about pain and somatic spectacles, spectacles that Mill suggested were “kept more and more out of the sight of those classes who enjoy in their fullness the benefits of civilization.”

Critics have commented on Melville’s interest in the body. Sharon Cameron notes a brutal literalness about bodies in Moby-Dick, Robert K. Martin discovers homosocial desire in Melville’s passion for writing about male bodies, and Peter Bellis suggests that “bodily-identity” is central to Melville’s fiction. To these incisive readings, I hope to add an awareness of Melville’s interest in the body as a resistance to the management at the center of nineteenth-century professionalism. By writing about the body—its pleasures and its pains—Melville distances himself from and critiques an emerging professional class that, as Dana Nelson suggests, depended heavily upon Enlightenment notions of disembodied reason and physical self-management. Although by birth Melville had entree into the ruling elite of the nation, he preferred in his writing to sojourn in carnival worlds—Marquesan island, U.S. man-of-war, Mississippi steamboat—and to develop a politics responsive to the unmanaged body. To put this another way, although in the nineteenth century both physicians and authors increasingly claimed authority by standing “apart from and above the carnivalesque scene as a transcendent, single, unified subject,” Melville preferred to write about the body from the ground level and to immerse his readers in spectacular somatic worlds.² To develop these suggestions more fully, I begin with a discussion of Melville’s first novel because in this early work he fashions a politics of embodiment central to his critique of medical professionalism.³

Melville’s interest in somatic spectacles is evident in the first pages of Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. The opening chapter features two tales of public nakedness. The first tells of natives stripping a missionary woman. Initially, the natives are beguiled by her calico dress, and they believe she is “some new divinity.”⁴ As she becomes familiar to them, however, they seek “to pierce the sacred veil of calico” in which she is “enshrined.” Before long, their “idolatry was changed into contempt: and there was no end to the contumely showered upon her by the savages.” Finally, “to the horror of her affectionate spouse, she was stripped of her garments, and given to understand that she could no longer carry on her deceits with impunity.” The “gentle dame” is not “sufficiently evangelized” to endure the exposure. She demands that her husband “relinquish his undertaking” of “reclaiming these islands from heathenism,” and they flee (6-7).

In the second tale, exposure is voluntary: an Indian Queen admires the elaborate tattoos on a U.S. sailor’s chest and lifts her skirts in order to show her own decorated body. As the narrator explains, because the French colonial leaders pride “themselves upon the beneficial effects of their jurisdiction, as discernible in the deportment of the natives,” they are eager, when a U.S. man-of-war comes into port, to arrange for the King and Queen of Nukuheva to make a formal visit to the U.S. Commodore. Melville describes in detail the festive formalities: “a gig, gaily bedizened with streamers” carries the royal pair to the U.S. frigate, and in return, “we paid them all the honors due to royalty;—manning our yards, firing a salute, and making a prodigious hubbub.” As “their majesties” stroll the deck, the French officers are “wonderfully pleased with the discreet manner in which these distinguished personages behaved themselves.” The King sports a “magnificent military uniform” and a “huge chapeau” with “waving ostrich plumes.” Devoted to expressing the “gaiety of their national taste,” the “tailors of the fleet” have given particular attention to the Queen’s “adornment.” She wears a “gaudy tissue of scarlet cloth, trimmed with yellow silk” and a “fanciful turban of purple velvet, figured with silver sprigs, and surmounted by a tuft of variegated feathers” (7-8).

As it turns out, the French effort is for naught. Haute couture cannot conceal the primitive body. The King’s chapeau does not hide the “broad patch of tattooing stretched completely across his face,” and fine silk cannot conceal the “spiral tattooing” on the Queen’s legs. Haute couture also cannot curb the primitive’s love of flesh. When the Queen spies “an old salt, whose bare arms and feet, and exposed breast were covered with as many inscriptions in India ink as the lid of an Egyptian sarcophagus” she pulls open his shirt, rolls up his trousers, and hangs “over the fellow, caressing him, and expressing her delight in a variety of wild exclamations and gestures.” To demonstrate further her appreciation, she “bent forward for a moment, and turning sharply round, threw up the skirts of her mantle, and revealed a sight from which the aghast Frenchmen retreated precipitately” (8).

As a narrative device, the occasional glimpse of skin makes Melville’s Peep at Polynesian Life a titillating striptease. In these opening accounts of nakedness, we know from the beginning that there will be a climactic disrobing, and the teasing delay of gratification serves as verbal fore-play. This is particularly true in the second account. We know the Queen is not shy of “exhibiting her charms,” and so the reader may savor Melville’s elaborate descriptions of French costume even while awaiting the Queen’s nakedness. There is, in fact, throughout the book a coy delight in describing risque or disturbing somatic spectacles (even the remains of a cannibal feast) in formal, modest, and circuitous language. Thus the humor in the second account of disrobing depends not only upon the contrast between a French love of fabric and a native preference for tattoos, but also upon a playful disconnect when refined language is used to describe a primitive, childlike scene in which “I’ll show you mine since I’ve seen yours” is the operative principle. In short, Melville begins his account of life on a Pacific Island by plunging his readers into a carnivalesque world in which high and low mix irreverently. French finery is flung off so that a Queen can show her tattooed backside, a gentle missionary woman is stripped naked, and highbrow, literary language is used to recount “low” events.

Attentive to Melville’s high style and his somatic interests, Richard Brodhead rightly notes that for Melville “the literary” was not necessarily “in opposition to unrepressed bodily life.”⁵ But Melville’s interest in the tensions between the high culture of literary language and the low world of naked bodies is not only about expanding highbrow aesthetics to include representations of bodily life. It is about challenging a political order in which corporeality serves as a marker of people and cultures deemed uncivilized, unrefined, less rational and more physical. Melville’s carnivalesque challenges middle-class decorum and the implicit class hierarchy that accompanies it. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White explain, “bourgeois democracy emerged with a class which, whilst indeed progressive in its best political aspirations, had encoded in its manners, morals and imaginative writings, in its body, bearing and taste, a subliminal elitism.”⁶ The two scenes of nakedness that open Typee reject refinement and bourgeois embarrassment and disgust with things somatic.

The politics of nakedness were not lost on Melville’s U.S. publisher. Typee appeared in England in February 1842 and in the United States in March. A second U.S. edition, entitled the “Revised Edition,” appeared four months later. Both U.S. editions, supervised by John Wiley of Wiley and Putnam, were bowdlerized.⁷ In the first U.S. edition, probably a rush-job, deletions and changes are few but pointed, with four of the five coming in the first seventeen pages. Two of these are aimed at the accounts of disrobing in Chapter 1. Melville’s jab at religion in his editorializing on the missionary dame’s response to being stripped must have worried Wiley. He deleted the ironic suggestion that more religion would have made her more tolerant of being exposed, changing “not sufficiently evangelized to endure this” to “could not endure this.” In the account of the Queen of Nukuheva’s display of her tattooed backside, the first American version deletes “threw up the skirts of her mantle.” Wiley also excised a reference to the “unholy passions of the crew and their unlimited gratification,” a change that required resetting ten lines.

The extensive changes made with the “Revised” edition (the only version readily available until the Melville revival of the 1920s) have the same intent as the changes made in the first U.S. edition; they delete or minimize Melville’s references to somatic pleasures. In the Revised Edition, the “naked houris” become the “lovely houris,” and Typee damsels “anoint my body with a fragrant oil” instead of “my whole body with a fragrant oil.” Wiley also deleted references to Tommo’s burning cheeks and his “bashful timidity” when he takes his first river bath, and he deleted Melville’s ironic observation that it was “foreign benefactors” who introduced venereal disease to the islands. A chapter explaining the open, casual sexual relations among the Typees was also heavily edited. Perhaps most dramatic, though, was Wiley’s editing of accounts of nakedness. He deleted in their entirety both accounts of nakedness in Chapter 1, and he also excised an account in Chapter 4 of a French admiral wearing a richly decorated frock coat and laced chapeau-bras while he attempts to persuade a naked Tior King to give away his people’s independence. In all three instances, expurgation of references to naked bodies serves a more basic goal—minimizing Melville’s critiques of missions and imperialism.

On one level, the transgression in both tales of nakedness is fairly direct. To be stripped is to be violated, and most readers, even liberal readers inclined to question the value of evangelism, surely wince at the image of a gentle Christian dame being stripped by suspicious natives. The Queen’s bare skin is less obviously transgressive. She is not Western, she disrobes herself, and she is not embarrassed by nakedness. And if her nakedness insults those around her, we might easily forgive her act as naive rather than aggressive. But the tale emphasizes the transgressive nature of her act. If Melville had reported on the Queen’s nakedness as part of a larger ethnographic account of naked islanders, then the scene might be read as respectable, scientific reporting. But the account is not offered as a contribution to scientific understanding of native customs. Flipping up one’s skirt during a formal affair with Western men is a gesture that is sexually bold and even pornographic, at least to Westerners. When the Frenchmen flee, we understand that the “sight”—her backside—has violated their deep sense of the privacy and shame of the naked body. According to Western etiquette, gentle dames should not be stripped and queens should not display their rumps.