text:
“More Lively Counterfaits”
Experimental Imaging at the Birth of Modern Science
By Gregorio Astengo
September 17, 2020

From infographics to digital renders, today’s scientists have ready access to a wide array of techniques to help visually communicate their research. It wasn’t always so. Gregorio Astengo explores the innovations employed in early issues of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, the world’s first scientific journal — new forms of image making which pushed the boundaries of 17th-century book printing.

One of the most demanding challenges for early modern scientists was devising how best to visually portray their discoveries to the public. In the absence of any sort of technology for automatic visualisation, like cameras or scanners, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural philosopher had to rely on drawings and subsequently woodcuts, etchings, or engravings to turn an experimental finding into a reproducible and publicly accessible demonstration. This was a laborious, expensive, time-consuming, and often problematic operation. Negotiated between several parties involved in the world of image-making, such as draughtsmen, engravers, and printers, the results were inevitably compromises between the intentions of the researcher and the possibilities of the printing press.1 For example, what a drawing could express with shading, washing, and chromatic nuances, printed illustrations could only approximate through a binary system of black and white, resulting from the pressure of an inked copper plate against a page.
The problem of efficient imaging was particularly felt during the early years of the Royal Society, a scientific institution founded in London in the early 1660s and today still regarded as one of the most prestigious institutions of scientific research in the world. In its early decades of activity, the Royal Society established itself as one of the central forces of the Scientific Revolution, with renowned members such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. Members of the Society used to meet on a weekly basis to discuss ongoing research on a variety of subjects, such as physics, mathematics, biology, astronomy, mechanics, geography, and antiquarianism.
Soon after its foundation, the Royal Society sought new ways to increase visibility and maximise its public reach. From this emerged the Philosophical Transactions, a monthly peer-reviewed journal, the first of its kind, featuring extracts from the Royal Society’s weekly research meetings. Founded in 1665 by the Society’s Secretary Henry Oldenburg and still published to this day, the Transactions are regarded as the first and longest-running scientific journal in history, as contributions were the result of original explorative studies into natural and mechanical matters informed by the Society’s culture of experiment — part of what today we generally call science.2
The Transactions were printed in small quarto format (about 17x22cm) with up to about a dozen articles per issue and could be purchased for the price of one shilling, about £5 today. The journal was a pioneering learned publication, with exceptional frequency and aimed at a diverse public of curious researchers. As such, especially in the early years, its contributors were often preoccupied with how best to communicate their ideas and discoveries through the immediacy of mass-producible visual media.3 A closer look into a selection of these articles demonstrates the extent to which natural philosophers were prepared to re-invent the production and consumption of images with new and often odd strategies for representing the world. This was a process of endless hands-on experimentation, often pushing beyond the traditional confines of the printing house.
The issue of accurate replication was effectively problematised in 1665 by art critic, writer, and Royal Society founding fellow John Evelyn. Evelyn was particularly sensible to the potentials and limits of engraving. He was an avid collector of prints and in 1662 published his own De Sculptura (here in a later edition), an adaptation of Abraham Bosse’s classic Traicté des manieres de graver (Treatise on Line Engraving). Shortly after the Transactions’ launch, Oldenburg published an account forwarded to Evelyn from an anonymous correspondent in Paris. The article described “a Way of Making More Lively Counterfaits of Nature in Wax, Then are Extant in Painting”.4 The article briefly introduced the technique of wax-modelling and colouring to faithfully sculpt natural specimens and produce maps in relief. The resulting models, Evelyn argued, were much more convincing than figurative drawing and so lifelike “that they kill all things of this Art”. In his praise of the illustrative potentials of a plan-relief, Evelyn was pointing at the necessity of sophisticated research into scientific reproducibility, preserving important information, and at the same time inviting a more substantial engagement on the part of the viewer.
Evelyn was not alone in his concern for new and effective forms of imaging. In the early months of 1686, a large table of colour pigments appeared in the 179th issue of the Transactions. The foldable sheet, accompanying an article entitled “A Catalogue of Simple and Mixt Colours”, featured a total of 128 colour samples, each arranged in a large chart and categorised with its type and name in several languages.
The accompanying article offered a detailed description of each colour in the chart. “Smalt”, for instance, “is made of Zaffer and Pot-ashes, calcined together in a Glass-furnace” and “Ceruse is the Rust of Lead made by a vaporous Calcination”. The author of the article was Richard Waller, one of most active illustrators in the circle of the early Royal Society and himself editor of the Transactions from 1691 to 1693. Waller’s objective with his table of colours was to establish a standardised system for the visual mapping of colours, bypassing the monochromatic limitations of engraving.
Thus to describe a Plant [Waller proposed] it may be seen which of the simple or mixt Colours come nearest to it, and then the Word affixt to that Colour may be made us of, which the reader, if desirous, may look in his Table and find together the Pattern thereof.5
In other words, with this table of colours, Waller was offering a portable chromatic lexicon for natural philosophers, a universally generalisable reference system for reproducing the nuances of coloration without ever actually having to use colours.
Waller was arguably the first in England to propose a descriptive account of natural colours, and his was the first and only article in the Transactions which made use of colour at all.6 Producing Waller’s chart must have been especially complicated, as each of the swatches had to be added manually to the several hundred copies of the journal’s issue.7 The last page of the issue also included explicit instructions for the printer:
The Table of Colours is to be inserted after this leaf, which ought to be done with Guard and a White-leaf between after the book is bound, lest otherwise the Colours by beating stick together.
The format of the learned periodical was substantially new to the printing world of seventeenth-century London, presenting image makers with novel problems and opportunities. Waller’s instructions then also evidence how the intellectual mission of the journal’s visual apparatus could only exist in a relationship with the printers, binders, and booksellers involved in its manufacturing. Another example of this cooperation is an illustration of the micrometer, an astronomical instrument invented by William Gascoigne to optimise focal magnification and measurability, presented in 1667 by mathematician Richard Townley for issue 29 of the Transactions.
The article, entitled “An Instrument for dividing a foot into many thousand parts”, was accompanied by an engraved plate, originally drawn by mechanical practitioner Robert Hooke . Hooke was another extraordinary seventeenth-century enquirer: curator of experiments at the Royal Society from 1661, he soon became widely renowned for his best-selling book Micrographia (1665), which gave us the first close look into the anatomy of the flea and other minute animals.
In his drawing of the micrometer, Hooke included an additional leaf printed at the bottom of the page, representing a flat wooden cover bolted with two long screws. This “moveable Cover” was
to be by the Bookseller cut off by the pricked Line (xxx) from the Paper, and to be fitly placed on Figure I. according to the pricked Line (yyyy) answering thereto; that by the taking off, as it were, or folding up of this Cover, the inward contrivance of the Screws and Sight may appear.8
The “cover” was to be fixed in position as a moveable flap by cutting it out and gluing it along one edge of the instrument. Hooke devised this cut-paste system which, once assembled by the bookseller, would allow the reader to “open” the micrometer. The drawing, then, operated very much as its own “paper instrument”, reproducing with increased realism the physical properties of the original.9
The micrometer was one of the many pieces of technology occupying the Royal Society’s research agenda, alongside more notable examples like the telescope or the microscope. Similarly, instruments for automating the accurate visual recording of nature were also key in solidifying the Society’s empirical mission. In a preface to the Transactions from 1670, Oldenburg paraphrased philosopher Francis Bacon by using the metaphor of instrument making to express the progress towards universal knowledge:
any vulgar hand may draw a Circle more perfectly by a compass, than the most perfect Penman can do by hand alone. [. . .] we may find how to draw in Perspective any Object both accurately and dispatchingly, by an instrument.10
At the time Oldenburg was probably referring to the perspectograph, a drawing machine invented by Christopher Wren in the 1650s and recently presented in the Transactions.11 Wren was himself a virtuoso draughtsman: he was one of the first in England to experiment with the technique of mezzotint and soon turned out to be an exceptionally skilled architect, authoring an extraordinary amount of projects, St. Paul’s cathedral among them. His device, a vertical board with a pen attached to a tracer, allowed anyone to draw in perspective by following the contours of an object through a pinhole.
Wren’s intent with this device was to optimise visual representation, perhaps even for use in printmaking. In his outstanding drawings of the human brain for Thomas Willis’ Cerebri Anatome (1664), Wren is thought to have used his own perspectograph to draw directly on a copper plate.12
Similar to this device was the “Prosopographical Parallelogram”, an instrument for reproducing objects using parallel lines and published in the Transactions in 1673.13 The machine consisted of a vertical board, mounted on a tripod, with a pantograph (a hinged parallelogram) attached to it. A pointer was attached to one end of the pantograph, while on the opposite end a pencil would draw on the board. By moving the pointer around the contours of the model, an inverted image would be automatically outlined on the board as its 1:1-scaled “elevation”. 14
While Wren’s perspectograph assisted the automatic rendering of perspectival views, as in modern photography, the Parallelogram operated like an early modern scanner and produced measurable drawings. As such, the intention of these instruments was not at all dissimilar from Waller’s table of colours. At the heart of these projects was the search for convenient yet precise methods of reproduction — to make, in short, “more lively counterfaits”.
In fact, even the distinct and longstanding traditions of perspective and parallel drawing, which these instruments were supposed to mechanise, could become intertwined for the sake of graphic exegesis. A case in point is an illustration of Northern Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway, the first one ever published, which appeared in 1694 for the 212th issue of the Transactions.15 The image was produced by engraver Edwin Sandys and based on an on-site drawing made by Dubliner Christopher Cole. It depicted a bird’s eye view of the famous promontory in Northern Ireland, detailed with its characteristic forest of natural rocky formations in the foreground.
What immediately appears odd is the off-centred, strangely tilted viewpoint of the picture, some way between a mid-view landscape and a large vista. Cole’s drawing, in fact, was a collection of separate views put together into one single drawing. Clergyman Samuel Foley, who wrote a short account accompanying the illustration, commented that Cole
has not drawn the Causway as a Prospect, nor as a Survey or Platform, which he thought would not answer his Design, and that he has no other name for it but a Draught, which he took after this sort: He supposed the Hills and Causway, & c. Epitomized to the same height and bigness the Draught shews them, and this he fancied the most Intelligible way to express it.16
In order to obtain this flattened image, it has been suggested that Cole produced two, perhaps three separate panoramas of the landscape, subsequently merging them into his final composition.17 This was neither a “Prospect”, nor a “Survey” nor a “Platform”, it was neither diagrammatic nor pictorial, neither a map nor a perspective view, but rather something in between, an odd collection of selected viewpoints rearranged to express the topographical qualities of the landscape as synthetically as possible, even to the detriment of realism.
In fact, as a consequence of its limited verisimilitude, the result in the end was not convincing. For Irish physician Thomas Molyneux, who would soon be elected Fellow of the Royal Society for his precise drawings of the elk-horns published in the Transactions, Cole was “no extraordinary Artist”, and the distinctive rocky formation still remained to be properly represented.18 In order to set the record straight, in 1694 Edwin Sandys was commissioned with a new, much larger “True Prospect” of the Causeway.19
In Sandys’ illustration the natural environment appeared more conventional, with rocky cliffs, buildings, and inhabitants in a more traditional landscape view. However, it was precisely through its unconventional technique that Cole’s first drawing was able to successfully introduce the physical distinctiveness of the Causeway’s basalt columns, something that gets partly lost in Sandys’ version. Cole’s unusual composition attracted the attention of natural philosophers such as Molyneux, who continued his enquiry by sending a further account of his observations on the Causeway to the Transactions a few years later.20
Historian of science Steven Shapin has argued that in the world of late seventeenth-century science “the transformation of mere belief into proper knowledge was considered to consist of the transit from the perceptions and cognitions of the individual to culture of the collective”.21 As a channel explicitly designed to foster a network of learned scholars in the pursuit of cumulative knowledge, the early Philosophical Transactions were an ideal arena to explore this “transit” of information between experimenter and public. Unconventional visual products such as colour tables, foldable flaps, or panoramas with multiple viewpoints offered “more lively counterfaits” than traditional visual aids because they proposed new paradigms to effectively collect, synthesise, and communicate visual data. In doing so, they also challenged and advanced the technologies necessary for their production and dissemination, like engraving and printmaking. They can be seen as early instances of a tradition of innovative scientific imaging which expresses itself nowadays in a wide range of important technologies, such as infrared or ultraviolet photography used to enhance astronomical and microscope imaging; photogrammetry and 3D-scanning used in surveys, topography, and geology; and infographics, like isochrone maps, graphs, and diagrams, to name a few.22
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 17, 2020

author: Gregorio Astengo


text:
Sicko Doctors
Suffering and Sadism in 19th-Century America
By Chelsea Davis
July 1, 2020

American fiction of the 19th century often featured a ghoulish figure, the cruel doctor, whose unfeeling fascination with bodily suffering readers found both unnerving and entirely plausible. Looking at novels by Louisa May Alcott, James Fenimore Cooper, and Herman Melville, Chelsea Davis dissects this curious character.

On one page [of George Lippard’s novel Ladye Annabel] you read a most graphic and minute description of breaking a criminal on a wheel, told by the executioner, with the same sort of cool gayety with which a parish doctor may be supposed to probe the wounds of charity hospital sufferers. Then, again comes a harrowing recital of the way they tore men to pieces with wild horses, dragging the four quarters of the wretch to as many four points of the compass; . . . [it is] enough to make the fortune of a race of small-fry Monk Lewises . . . [Lippard] pre-suppose[s] a morbid appetite or perverted taste, on the part of the buyer. — Motley Manners, 1848 review of George Lippard’s Ladye Annabel; or, The Doom of the Poisoner.1
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a doctor, an executioner, and a fan of “perver[sely]” violent fiction walk into a bar, cheerfully chatting about their shared passion for torture. Not ringing any bells? That’s likely because popular views on medicine have changed radically since 1848, when the above passage was penned. These days, it would seem borderline blasphemous to group physicians — now regarded by most as healers and helpers, sworn to do no harm — with two avowed sadists who watch suffering for sport. (Such an analogy would perhaps seem especially inapt in 2020, as countless medical professionals continue to put their own lives on the line to care for highly infectious COVID-19 patients.) But as it turns out, this excerpt’s framing of physicians as barbaric — as the kind of men who finger painful injuries with the “cool gayety” of an expert torturer — would not have surprised many Americans in the nineteenth century. Far from it: the sicko doctor, whose fascination with the human body’s gory workings makes him creepily indifferent to his patient’s discomfort, routinely cropped up as a bogeyman in the fiction, political cartoons, and nonfiction of the antebellum United States.
To understand why this was the case, we might take a closer look at the above-excerpted review, which uses a metaphorical doctor to evoke a real ethical question that obsessed Americans at the time: the appropriate way to relate to other people’s suffering. In attacking Philadelphian provocateur George Lippard’s novel Ladye Annabel (1844), pseudonymous reviewer Motley Manners suggests that the book’s explicit portrayals of medieval torture bespeak a “morbidity” and “pervers[ity]” on the parts of its characters, writer, and reader alike. (Manners is no innovator here: the gruesome content of Gothic literature, which supposedly both appeals to and breeds creeps, has produced moral panics ever since its inception in the late eighteenth century — panics which live on in pearl-clutching condemnations of horror movies and fans today.) But what Manners seems to find even more unsettling than the Ladye Annabel executioner’s actual participation in wheel-breakings and drawings and quarterings is the character’s breezy attitude toward his bloody deeds — the “cool gayety” with which he recounts them.
The seeming paradox of this particular phrase, which mixes apathy with joy, would have seemed no paradox at all to a nineteenth-century reader. Americans of this epoch were preoccupied with the idea that there was a causal relationship between the two emotions — that feeling indifference toward the pain of others threatened to eventually become active pleasure in the pain of others. All it took to desensitize a given observer, the thinking went, was overexposure to suffering — the kind of daily saturation with groans and gore that are the everyday experience of a professional flesh-cutter like a torturer. Or a doctor.
In other texts of the period, the analogy between unfeeling doctor and unfeeling author becomes even more literal. The critic George Gifflan, for instance, speculated that the English writer George Crabbe, notorious for his unflinching portrayals of poverty and crime, had acquired the “perfect coolness” characteristic of his writings during his prior career as a surgeon. “As a medical man, [Crabbe] had come in contact with little else than man’s human miseries and diseases”, observes Gifflan, and the experience “materially discolored [Crabbe’s] view of life”. It is for this reason that Crabbe’s fiction was able to “feel . . . with firm finger the palpitating pulse of the infanticide or murderer—and snuff . . . a certain sweet odor in the evil savors of putrefying misery and crime”. Again, the sick doctor disturbs because of his “cool gayety”, his admixture of clinically appropriate objectivity with straight-up schadenfreude. A “firm[ness]” in the face of suffering could easily mutate into a predilection for the “sweet odor” therein.2
To make matters worse, it was not only his own character that the gore-benumbed writer/doctor ran the risk of damaging. Nineteenth-century thinkers worried he might also wound his reader/patient. Thus another critic used the same harmful healer metaphor to skewer George Lippard (the guy couldn’t catch a break), this time with regard to a different Gothic novel. Reflecting a broader Victorian conviction that art’s main imperative is to improve its audience’s moral character, this second naysayer complained that Lippard’s blood-spattered The Quaker City: Or, the Monks of Monk Hall (1849) made its readers less moral by repeatedly bludgeoning them with descriptions of bombastic violence. “In what estimation would we hold a physician who would order his patient, exhibiting slight symptoms of a contagious disease, to a place where the malady rages in its most malignant forms?” the review asks accusatorily.3
Nor was the twisted physician confined to the realm of critical metaphor: he also took the shape of a full-blown character in several novels of the period. Among the earliest is James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821), which recounts the late stages of the American Revolutionary War through the travails of the Wharton family, inhabitants of a region of New York state hotly contested by the American and British forces. The Whartons are alternately aided and terrorized by one Dr Archibald Sitgreaves, a surgeon serving the Continental Army. Dr Sitgreaves’ surname — conjuring the image of one who sits on graves — perfectly suits a physician whose fascination with grievous injuries renders him insensible to the physical and emotional feelings of his wounded patients. When Henry Wharton, a captain in the British army, sustains a minor arm wound, the physician informs him with perverse regret that the limb will not need to be amputated:
“. . . the hurt is not bad, but you have such a pretty arm for an operation; the pleasure of the thing might have tempted a novice.”“The devil!” cried the captain [Wharton]. “Can there be any pleasure in mutilating a fellow creature?”“Sir”, said the surgeon, with gravity, “a scientific amputation is a very pretty operation, and doubtless might tempt a younger man, in the hurry of business, to overlook all the particulars of the case.”4
Here, as elsewhere, Dr Sitgreaves’ oblivious bedside manner is as funny as it is revolting. But this does not mean that he lacks the capacity for seriously sadistic acts. At one point, having caught wind that the novel’s hero, Harvey Birch, is slated to be executed for espionage, Dr Sitgreaves rhapsodizes about his plans to turn Birch’s corpse into a sculpture as a gift for an aunt (“his bones are well knit. I will make a perfect beauty of him”). Later, he boasts that he once broke his own finger simply to watch it heal. “[T]he thrilling sensation excited by the knitting of the bone . . . exceeded any other enjoyment that I have ever experienced”, he tells a horrified listener. “Now, had it been one of the more important members, such as the leg, or arm, how much greater must the pleasure have been!”
Although Dr Sitgreaves has, for the time being, targeted only his own body for injury practice, his wistful reverie about the superior thrills of a broken “leg, or arm” gestures toward a ghastly escalation of medical violence. What atrocity might Sitgreaves not commit in pursuit of scientifically interesting spectacles? What stands in the way of his progressing from breaking fingers, to breaking arms, to breaking legs, to killing a man — especially if that man’s skeleton would make a “perfect” sculpture? The latter was no hypothetical nightmare for Cooper’s readers. Throughout the nineteenth century, the corpses of freshly dead Americans — often those of the poor, people of color, and criminals — were snatched up by medical schools for use as dissecting cadavers. This practice produced tremendous public ire toward surgeons, culminating in over a dozen “anatomy riots” from 1785 to 1855.5
The threat of the slippery slope of brutality — a slope down which Dr Sitgreaves has clearly already begun to slide — was central to nineteenth-century Americans’ anxieties over violent voyeurism. “The ‘taste’ for cruelty in . . . spectators was considered to be a ‘progressive vice’”, writes historian Karen Halttunen, “a ‘craving’ or ‘hunger’ that, like substance addiction . . . only grew more powerful as it was fed”.6 Thus in 1831 legal reformer Edward Livingston criticized the death penalty on the grounds that, although “human sufferings are never beheld, for the first time, but with aversion, terror, and disgust”, a person who frequently witnessed public executions eventually came to regard them as “a spectacle, which must frequently be repeated to satisfy the ferocious taste it has formed”.7 The Moral Advocate newspaper worried in 1821 that battle increasingly “dulled” a soldier’s instinctive horror of war, gradually poisoning his empathic capacities until he eventually took active “enjoyment [in] the most horrid scenes of carnage”.8 The presumed link between watching or reading about violence and enacting violence even seemed to come full circle in some instances, such as an 1833 murder committed by one Abraham Prescott, whose attorneys asserted that their client had been “agitat[ed]” into killing an acquaintance by reading the lurid trial transcript from a different murder case.9
The mounting fear of learned callousness was part of a broader preoccupation with suffering in the nineteenth-century US and England, a widespread “obsession with pain” that has led historians to dub the period the “Age of Pain”.10 Prior to the major innovations in anesthesia that marked the late eighteenth century, serious physical discomfort was a common and inalterable part of life. But as surgery and anesthesia grew more sophisticated, and doctors gained the ability to reduce more and more varieties of pain, it was no longer psychologically necessary for people to collectively embrace agony. Between 1772 and 1846 — the years marking the discovery of nitrous oxide and the first use of ether as a surgical anesthetic, respectively — Anglo-American culture developed a “new distaste for pain” that gradually “achieved the level of full revulsion and horror”.11
These improvements in pain technology produced two seemingly antithetical cultural responses in the States. On the one hand, the wildly influential philosophical and literary movement known as sentimentalism pursued the recent advances in anesthesia to their logical extreme, advocating for the reduction of pain in all spheres. Sentimental novels like Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1851) framed sympathy toward suffering as the utmost human virtue, and sentimental reform movements campaigned against brutality in the realms of slavery, the military, the schoolroom, and legal punishment. On the other hand, because nothing spells titillation like taboo, many Americans also increasingly sought frissons in the pain of others. This era saw a massive upsurge in the popularity of BDSM pornography, “penny press” newspapers that ran graphic accounts of gory crimes, and sensationalistic fiction in the US.12
Although the vectors of their interest in suffering may have been diametrically opposed, sentimentalists and sadists were equally fascinated by pain.13 And both camps found the cruel doctor to be a useful device for expressing, interrogating, or denouncing that fascination. The two critics who derisively compared Gothic novelist George Lippard to a perverted physician, for example, were using the same metaphor as the subject of their critique: the figure of the barbaric doctor looms large in Lippard’s most famous novel, The Quaker City; Or, the Monks of Monk Hall (1845). The grotesque Dr McTourniquet raves about various “beautiful” operations and the joys of public dissections (“quite a treat to the uninitiated”); a dentist punishes irritating clients by yanking their teeth with unnecessary force; the novel’s villain, Devil-Bug, is a voyeuristic torturer who calls his victims “patients” and sells pilfered cadavers to physicians.14 “Never a doctor of all the schools, with his dissecting knife in hand and the corpse of a subject before him, could have manifested more nerve and coolness” than Devil-Bug preparing to slaughter and maim, the narrator says.15
Yet when it comes to vicious physicians, Louisa May Alcott’s novella Hospital Sketches (1863) — an example of the theoretically gentler genre of sentimental fiction — gives Lippard a run for his money. A lightly fictionalized account of Alcott’s own experience as a nurse during the American Civil War, Hospital Sketches celebrates sympathy as one of the essential virtues of medical caregiving. But our protagonist, a nurse named Tribulation Periwinkle, also encounters the opposite — a chillingly cold-hearted surgeon in the DC military hospital where she is posted. Dr P., she writes,
seemed to regard a dilapidated body very much as I should have regarded a damaged garment . . . cutting, sawing, patching and piecing, with the enthusiasm of an accomplished surgical seamstress . . . The more intricate the wound, the better he liked it.16
What has caused Dr P.’s sadism? An overdose of observed brutality is once again to blame. Before taking up the Civil War posting where we meet him, Dr P. had previously served in the Crimean War (1853–56), and our narrator nurse conjectures that it is “through long acquaintance with many of the ills flesh is heir to, [that he] had acquired [his] habit of regarding a man and his wound as separate institutions”. In fact, this numbing process seems to be at work in multiple members of the hospital staff, and even Nurse Periwinkle herself admits that she is becoming a bit too attracted to the sights of surgery: “There was an uncanny sort of fascination in watching [Dr P.], as he peered and probed into the mechanism of those wonderful bodies”.17
War was not the only context in which doctors (and nurses) were bombarded with the sights and sounds of anguish. Even under ordinary circumstances in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century, the suffering of others was the bread and butter of physicians’ day-to-day-life. Before ether entered the operating theater, “the emotional ability to inflict vast suffering was perhaps the most basic of all professional prerequisites” to becoming a doctor, writes historian Martin S. Pernick.18 It was with distinct pride that Rutgers medical student Asa Fitch described his own transformation, over the course of a few weeks, from a naïf who “recoiled” the first time he observed an amputation to someone who could now see a “tedious and painful operation” performed on a child and feel “none of the tenderness which I have always before felt on such occasions”.19 Little wonder that the public frequently complained about doctors’ callousness.20
A particularly scathing version of this complaint came from none other than Herman Melville. His novel White-Jacket; or, the World in a Man-of-War (1850) satirizes high-intellect, low-compassion medicine men in the form of the vile Cadwallader Cuticle, MD. As the head physician of the frigate whose adventures White-Jacket follows, Cuticle enjoys a reputation as “the foremost Surgeon in the Navy” and memberships in the world’s finest medical associations.21 But Dr Cuticle’s top-notch education in human anatomy seems to have also deadened him to human emotion, leaving him with a “heartlessness of a purely scientific origin”. By the time we meet him, Cuticle views his patients’ bodies as exciting opportunities for medical discovery (and career advancement) rather than sources of real suffering: “Surrounded by moans and shrieks, by features distorted with anguish inflicted by himself”, Melville’s narrator recounts, Cuticle “yet maintained a countenance almost supernaturally calm”.22
In keeping with the “mad doctor” stereotype that he embodies,23 Dr Cuticle’s relentless pursuit of medical knowledge ironically becomes its own kind of distracting passion, in some cases clouding his professional judgment more than basic human sympathy might have. Eager to show off for the Navy’s other surgeons, Dr Cuticle opts to amputate an injured seaman’s leg rather than to pursue the less invasive (but less impressive) cure that his colleagues recommend. The sailor suffers greatly during the procedure and dies almost immediately afterwards.
To be sure, Dr Cuticle’s brutality approaches the realm of caricature: much like The Spy’s Dr Sitgreaves and The Quaker City’s Dr McTourniquet, the White-Jacket doctor waxes poetic about the “beaut[y]” of the grisly surgeries he performs, and collects figurines of grotesque medical anomalies. Yet the novel does not present Dr Cuticle’s insensitivity as exceptional. Instead, this highly credentialed, highly callous doctor serves as just one of the novel’s several object lessons in the ways that positions of great social power enable abuse. Throughout White-Jacket, various Naval officers delight in controlling and punishing lower-ranking sailors with various humiliations, flesh-rending floggings (over which Cuticle impassively presides), and even death. “The Navy is the asylum for the perverse”, the narrator bluntly summarizes. The novel’s scandalized readers agreed. Corporal punishment reformers handed out copies of White-Jacket to members of Congress, who voted just a few months later to outlaw flogging in the Navy. Although contemporary scholarship has found no evidence that the distribution of Melville’s book materially shaped this legislative decision, popular rumor held for decades afterwards that the novel had indeed been the straw that broke flogging’s back.24
The longstanding myth that Melville’s violent novel abolished flogging suggests there may be an optimistic alternative to fiction’s violence-warped doctor: Americans’ hope that bombarding readers with imaginary cruelty could sometimes make them less cruel instead of crueler. But if the line between edifying and harmful depictions of gore sounds like a difficult one to draw, that’s because it was — and is. We continue to wonder how much exposure to brutality awakens people to the wrongs of the world, and how much deadens us to them.25 For the pain-obsessed sentimental culture that produced him, the ethically precarious doctor — whose position of authority and constant IV drip of human suffering might just as easily make of him a sadistic harmer as a saintly healer — was the consummate symbol of that contradiction.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Chelsea Davis

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Postures of Transport
Sex, God, and Rocking Chairs
By Hunter Dukes
February 3, 2021

What if chairs had the ability to shift our state of consciousness, transporting the imagination into distant landscapes and ecstatic experiences, both religious and erotic? In an essay about the British and American fascination with rocking chairs and upholstery springs in the 19th century, Hunter Dukes discovers how simple furniture technologies allowed armchair travelers to explore worlds beyond their own.

The furniture of the nineteenth century is difficult to approach. Not for lack of material, which abounds at every turn. The difficulty lies rather in the psychological domain.—Sigfried Giedion1
. . . and the piece of furniture [meuble]—oh, surprise, surprise—into an automobile.—Michel Serres2
When is an armchair something more? When it becomes a mode of imaginary locomotion. Elbowed seats date back millennia, but the expression “armchair traveler” did not appear until the early 1800s. These bookish men and women (in their proto La-Z-Boys) followed Emerson’s advice: the wise stay at home.3 With enough literacy and time, you could walk the world from an easy chair or roam Constantinople on an ottoman. Discussions of armchair travel tend to focus on the travelogue. But what about the chair itself in the nineteenth century? Its changing styles and technologies — the advent of rockers, say, or upholstery springs? And how do techniques of the reading body, the physical regimens of leisure and reverie, feed what we might call the sedentary imagination?
I ask this last question with two tangled senses of imagination in mind: both the horizon of seated cognition (what kind of things it was possible to imagine at rest) and the representation of lounging bodies in literature and popular culture. While armchair traveler refers to gapers of stereographs or travel-lit enthusiasts, consumers of colonial memoirs and explorers’ journals, my sights are on a more obscure tradition: those who use furniture and other props to trick the mind into ambulation. Toward the century’s turn, readers piloted mahogany spaceships, upholstered time machines with tufted buttons: the seat base jounced and rocked its occupant into journeys of the mind: adventurous, erotic, or devout.
“If ‘a landscape is a state of mind’”, the artist Bowyer Nichols once declared, “so too is a paneled room, a chair, or a table. These things have an indwelling spirit, to those who care to question them confiding in response”.4 We should ask the question, try to understand the states of mind produced by variations in the spinal column: a presence or lack of lumbar support, the thoracic angle of repose. If chairs answer back, only part of their reply can be heard through history. The rest will come from an awareness of our own engagements, the curve of the cushioned seat that lets me make these words, or whatever takes the weight off as you proceed to read.
Virtual Travel, or, How to Kill a Shark from the Chaise
“He travels and I too”, wrote William Cowper in his 1785 poem The Task, in reference to the experience of reading nautical travelogues. His speaker treads the decks of colliers and climbs their topmasts, muddying the moat between experience and recollection: “through his peering eyes / Discover countries, with a kindred heart”.5 John Keats uses the same sort of image in his 1816 “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, where opening an Elizabethan translation makes one party to colonial conquest. His speaker feels like “stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He stared at the Pacific”.6 In both poems, books become uplinks to eyes trained on the edges of empire.
In correspondence, Cowper kills the swashbuckling vibe, reveals the Kurtz in Keats’s Cortez. After reading John Hawkesworth’s edition of James Cook’s Voyages, gifted to him by John Newton (erstwhile slaver, born-again abolitionist, hymnist of “Amazing Grace”), Cowper wrote a thank-you note:
My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions, that I seem to partake with the navigators in all the dangers they encountered. I lose my anchor; my main-sail is rent into shreds; I kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from the fire-side. The principal fruits of these circuits that have been made round the globe seem likely to be the amusement of those that stayed at home.7
Beneath these mannered pleasantries, the proclaimed elation with bloodsports, Cowper chides Cook for the imperial casualties of adventure narratives. “Nations that live upon bread-fruit, and have no mines to make them worthy of our acquaintance, will be but little visited for the future. So much the better for them; their poverty is indeed their mercy.”8 (Note the doubled usage of “fruit” in this letter: on the one hand the breadfruit that feeds Cowper’s spared colonies, on the other,  the fruits of explorers’ global circuits, the sellable stories of derring-do for those that stayed at home.)
While Cowper intimates something morally askew with the economic and cultural systems that allowed Captain Cook to capture the Georgian imagination, he also worries about the physical effects of armchair travel. “Assure yourself that easy chairs are no friends to cheerfulness, and that a long winter spent by the fireside is a prelude to an unhealthy spring.”9
A century or so later, Joris-Karl Huysmans was a novelist for whom Cowper’s sedentary malaise became a springboard toward new forms of imaginary transport. During a biographical work about the medieval Dutch mystic Lydwine of Schiedam, who suffered progressive paralysis, Huysmans describes how the housebound saint travelled “motionless on a bed”.10 Using this technique, and with an angelic guide, Lydwine is able to visit Rome’s seven pilgrimage churches and local convents in the Low Countries, commenting on their architecture in astounding detail. But mental travel had physical consequences: spraining her foot in a distant ravine, Lydwine returns from the ecstatic journey to find it dislocated upon the bed.
For those without angels, Huysmans offers a secular version of sedentary travel in À rebours (translated as Against the Grain or Against Nature), when its reclusive protagonist Jean des Esseintes fingers gauge nets and rolls of nautical sail; inhales lime, salt steam, and sulfate of soda; reads guidebooks describing the seashore’s splendor. The result? Something like virtual reality avant la lettre:
Thus, without stirring, he enjoyed the rapid motions of a long sea voyage . . . The secret lies in knowing how to proceed, how to concentrate deeply enough to produce the hallucination and succeed in substituting the dream reality for the reality itself . . . What is the use of moving, when one can travel on a chair so magnificently?11
This hallucinating homebody summons the image of a mystic fallen, an anchorite whose devotions have turned from the spirit toward sensation. A less-consecrated recipe for sailors of the settee appeared in Fun magazine a year later, signed by one Diogenes Tubb: an apt pseudonym for fantasies of immobile travel.
Get a packet of Tidman’s sea salt and put it in a pail of hot water beside you, then recline on a rocking-chair after having devoured hastily a fat ham-sandwich. Rock yourself violently and inhale the salt steam. It’s every bit as good as a steamboat journey, and a great deal cheaper.12
Invoking the cynic philosopher who lived in a pithos, Tubb apes Huysmans for a different reading class, trades his Michelin for a Baedeker. These adult games are a form of child’s play, as a poem published in The Youth’s Companion (1909) makes clear:
When I do not wish to stayAt my home I go away;And my trusty rocking chairKnows the road to everywhere.Up and down the parlor floor.Travelling twenty times or more . . . Then I make believe that weAre two thousand miles at sea;13
Huysmans and Tubb had a precursor in Xavier de Maistre, whose 1794 Voyage autour de ma chambre (A Journey Round My Room) was translated into English for the first time in 1871. A soldier in the Sardinian army, De Maistre was placed under forty-two days of house arrest for illegal dueling. During the isolation, he scabbards his épée and unsheaths a pen. The resulting “voyage” is Lilliputian, but that’s the point. Summaries make the author sound like Lil Jon in a cravat: chair to bed to window, wall, and back again. Yet how does one do it? With a vehicle, of course. “I had so placed myself in my arm-chair . . . I was able, by balancing myself from left to right, to make by degrees, and at last, almost without knowing it, to get close to the wall, for this is how I travel when not pressed for time”.14 Couchsurfing in its truest sense; just imagine if he had had a rocking chair.
De Maistre might be the most famous chair traveler, but he did not venture alone. As Bernd Stiegler recounts in his history of the “room-travel” genre, Xavier was joined by Léon Gautier’s Voyage d’un catholique autour sa chambre (1862); Emma Faucon’s Voyage d’une jeune fille autour sa chambre (1864); Edmond de Goncourt’s Voyage dans un grenier (1878); Marie O’Kennedy’s Inventaire de ma chambre (1884); and many more bedsit inventories and parlor peregrinations.15 My favorite chair traveler appears in Murphy (1938), Samuel Beckett’s first published novel. Murphy too finds chairs transporting, but in a different way. He chooses the ascetic over the exotic and tries to romp, not through foreign lands, but in the mind of God:
He sat naked in his rocking-chair of undressed teak, guaranteed not to crack, warp, shrink, corrode, or creak at night. It was his own, it never left him . . . Seven scarves held him in position. Two fastened his shins to the rockers, one his thighs to the seat, two his breast and belly to the back, one his wrists to the strut behind . . . He sat in his chair in this way because it gave him pleasure! First it gave his body pleasure, it appeased his body. Then it set him free in his mind.16
There are many good theories for the explosion of armchair travel. Between 1815 and 1914, the British Empire colonized more than ten million square miles of territory, subjugating an additional 400 million people. With the decline of Grand Tour and “voyage” narratives that had fueled the genre, this era saw the demographics of travel writing widen. Tourist gained its contemporary pejorative associations; urban commuters became a thing, as did globe-trotters. By the 1880s, passengers could board a Parisian train and alight in Istanbul. Telegraphy and telephones linked the near with the farther, while panoramas, zoetropes, magic lanterns, and stereoscopy continued to lengthen the colonial gaze. In London, exhibitions like the Egyptian Hall and the British Museum’s acquisition of the Elgin Marbles brought treasures from “antique lands” into the metropole. By 1914, a narrator in James Joyce’s Dubliners could visit something like “Arabia” without leaving Dublin, an example of what Edward Said called Orientalism’s radical realism.17 Armchair travel is a parodic endpoint for the spring-like compression of geographic space. Why travel at all, if the world — that is, a specific representation of the world, which veils accuracy under the cloak of immediacy — comes home to you?
But let’s return to Tubb and Murphy, the way that chair travel can resemble Lydwine’s mystical practices, religious techniques for spiritual transit. While there are some tongues in the cheeks of those passages I quoted above, they depict secularized versions of ritual transportation. The salty vapor of a steaming bath might as well stream from thuribles in the Catholic or Eastern Orthodox mass. It’s no surprise that smudged frankincense has psychotropic properties. And rocking?
Nineteenth-century klismonauts, if you will, knew something that scientists did not demonstrate until 2011, when a paper for Current Biology claimed that rocking chairs are wavy: they approximate sea travel, but also compound the waves in our brains, boosting slow oscillations and spindle activity. While this research focuses on how rocking “facilitates the transition from waking to sleep”, what about those twilight states of hypnagogic consciousness?18 How much of chair travel’s imaginary motion comes from the somatic rhythms of rockers and upholstery springs?
An 1873 essay in the Edinburgh Review asked the same question about hypnosis and mesmerism. “As regards the simple effect in question, we believe we might as well speak of sermon sleep, of rocking-cradle sleep, of the sleep of an easy arm-chair, or of a dull book, as of Mesmeric sleep.”19 The author means to dismiss mesmerism, but there is nothing simple about this effect. If rockers produce profound changes in our brain’s electrical impulses, then cradles, easy chairs (which, by the 1870s, were often outfitted with upholstery springs), and even the cadences of a preacher are advanced neuropsychological technologies.
What is the overlap between the halting physicality of certain shamanic practices and the physiological effects of rocking furniture? Take, for instance, Orthodox Jewish shuckling — swaying backward and forward in prayer, believed by some to boost the wireless connection with God. “For the mystics”, writes Ronald L. Eisenberg, “shuckling during prayer represented an erotic union with the Divine.”20 While I would rather feed myself to Cowper’s parlor shark than imply Alan Dershowitz a mystic, he too credits shuckling with . . . well, you can read for yourself:
I need to thank my local synagogue for helping me discover sex. I am convinced that some higher authority built the benches at precisely the right height to introduce sexual feelings at precisely the right time. When Orthodox Jews pray, they shake back and forth while standing. When I reached a certain height, the top of the bench in front of me, which had a curve, was exactly parallel to my genitals. It was while shuckling back and forth in the synagogue that I experienced my first arousal.21
What a suggestion: that a temple’s seating redirects the sexual impulses of adolescence back toward the Torah. A joke, I think (and a queasy one at that, in the autobiography of a man accused of raping a minor, who has advocated throughout his career for lowering the age of consent). Yet it serves, unfortunately, to introduce a different dimension of my argument. Like other entheogenic techniques (drugs, song, rhythm, light, sex), the ecstasy induced by rockers can lead upward, in the case of Beckett’s Murphy, or deeper into the sensual world.
The Motion of Moveables
While moral and spiritual comfort arrived in English through Anglo-Norman, our sense of comfortable as being physically content, relaxed and reclined, appears in the late eighteenth century. Soon after, a type of French easy chair, the confortable, became popular at home and abroad. What made it cozy? The systematic use of springs, hidden beneath inflated upholstery. In 1833, it was still possible for J.C. Loudon to claim that “the effect of spiral springs as stuffing has been long known to men of science; but so little to upholsterers, that a patent for using them in stuffing was taken out, some years ago, as a new invention.”22 Soon after, however, chairs gained ornate shapes, cushioned bases that had been impossible before the employment of springs. “It would appear that as the century drew to its close”, writes Dorothy Holley, “some of the furniture assumed proportions so great as though it would burst.”23 During a wild treatise on posture, Sigfried Giedion describes this period as the reign of the upholster. “Furniture became a means of filling the room; to inflate its bulk was the first step.”24 Whereas chairs were once classified under a set of possessions called moveables (meubles), now that motion had moved into the seat itself.25
The elasticity of springs created new caches in the Victorian imagination. Chairs were no longer skeletons — now their bones were buried inside vaulted seats and cushions, fabrics domed on animate springs in coiled and zig-zag form. With new spaces (however hidden) come new narrative possibilities. To wit: a story called “The Scissors Swallower” from Frederick Barnard and Charles H. Ross’s Behind the Brass Knocker: Some Grim Realities (1883). Mrs. Mite’s boarding house has a particular problem: the scissors always disappear. Not one pair, mind, “I mean everybody’s scissors—the scissors of the united household—and every lady member of it, and, indeed, a few of the gentlemen even, continually invest in pair after pair of scissors with quite reckless prodigality.”26 A rumor starts — hearsay spreads like bedbugs in the boardinghouse  — that a certain “aged, shriveled, high-dried” woman is the culprit.27 The narrator first compares her to a voracious shark, then to a “cheerful nautical person” who participated in a fatal, object-eating wager.28 Upon dissection, his stomach is found to contain half-digested knives, “some of them with four blades”, among other kitchen items.29 ※※Indexed under…ContainmentOrgans' capacity for
When the old woman dies, another kind of dissection takes place. Mrs. Mite inherits her armchair and reupholsters it, ripping off the worn leather to get at the stuffing below. “The stuffing below! What think you it was composed of? Horsehair, to be sure, and springs more or less damaged, and fifty-three pairs of scissors that had somehow slipped down through the crevices in the woodwork.”30 The Scissors Swallower of the title is not the late woman after all, but her lounger. The story trades on a resemblance between the spring cushion’s rhythmic compressions and a stomach’s accordion rhythms. The seat partakes in a mechanical form of deglutition and digestion.
In the spatial imaginary, locked rooms are a default location for hidden psychic content. Yet in the examples to follow, repression is offset by a kind of evidential decompression. Moving furniture resists the compartmentalization of domestic space: worn-out springs hint at last night’s affairs, the rocker’s rasps amplify an activity taking place behind closed doors. If the basement of American homes served as a storehouse for the id in the twentieth century, the upwelling of libidinous energy exploited by Hitchcock and other contributors to horror, new furniture technologies played an analogous role in the nineteenth-century parlor. For the latter case, however, we find moving furniture explicitly coupled to fraught scenes of sexuality.
Dershowitz was not the first teen to get off on seatbacks. Consider, for instance, the trope of broken springs or rockers, evidence of hanky-pank conducted in the social, family rooms of Britain and America. Three years after “The Scissors Swallower”, the Birmingham Owl published a humorous “letter” titled “A Sweetheart’s Bill,” supposedly penned by a father named Hezekiah Blodgers, whose daughter, Maria, has given her suitor “the sack”.31 Note, below, the broken rocking chair and the damaged upholstery springs.
The letter ends with a threat. If the suitor comes around again, “I’ll whale the life out of you and make you glad to sit down on your stomach for the rest of the week”.32 In the former story, the old woman’s sexual illegibility — “aged, shriveled, high-dried” —  precedes the broken springs beneath her seat. In this letter, presumed heavy petting, sexual energy discharged outside of normative social structures, breaks the springs and rocking chair. With strange symmetry, the corrective punishment (whaling) will force the beau to sit on his stomach, the way the accused Scissors Swallower sat on hers (shark).
We encounter the same sexual trope, sans springs or sea creatures, in a poem titled “A Parlour Secret” that circulated through various magazines and newspapers between the 1890s and mid 1910s (I found it in the Chicago Evening Post and Australia’s Mercury and Weekly Courier, to take just two examples):
Why does the family rocking chair    That’s silent all the weekOn Sunday nights in mad despair    Proceed to mildly squeak?
Whenever father rocks it will    In gentle swaying go,It never seems to squeak until    The daughter has a beau.
Ah! Who that knows the cause would dare    To spoil the lovers’ fun?“Two souls with but a single chair;Two forms that rock as one.”33
Adopting a cliché from Friedrich Halm’s play Ingomar, The Barbarian, this poem reduces spiritual ecstasy to physical intimacy.34 I do not know enough about sex in the nineteenth century to wager on the act. Furtive lap sitting? A variation of the Kama Sutra’s love swing? Or is the rocking chair a sonic euphemism, providing a more palatable source for the squeaking? We lack a history of the bodily techniques associated with springs and rocking furniture: a creaking mattress in the in-laws’ guestroom; the childhood taboo against jumping on beds; or murderous recliners. But I do know that upholstery springs and rocking chairs furnished Victorian erotic writing. For example, this scene from The Romance of Lust, published in the 1870s:
There was a perfectly shaded walk in the east shrubbery leading from the greenhouse down to a most charming summer house overlooking the very finest prospect, and perfectly secure from all observation. It was furnished very appropriately for amorous purposes, the couches being low, broad, and with patent spring-cushions. In the sequel it was the scene of many a bout of lubricity.35
Or, let me proffer this creepy excerpt from the third volume of My Secret Life, an obsessive, million-word, highly pornographic “memoir” that began appearing in the late 1880s:
By the sofa was an American rocking-chair, the first I ever recollect having seen. Matilda began rocking herself in it, I rocked the chair violently for her and then as far as it would go, back and held it there, then rapidly I pushed one hand up her petticoats.36
Rocking chairs (and seats that rocked) carried an erotic charge in the nineteenth century, approximating, perhaps, a tumble dryer before its time.
For a certain type of Victorian mind, easy chairs made easy women. Polite society sat erect. Some American commentators found these English regimens laughable. “I am told that the English nation sit bolt upright, like mummies”, wrote the humorist Fanny Fern in “A Chapter on Chairs” for The London Reader (1864). “Poor creatures! No wonder they are so red in the face.”37
While rocking chairs had been around America since the early eighteenth century, they did not fully enter the European consciousness until the 1830s, when travelers to the United States began commenting on their ubiquity. “In America”, wrote James Frewin for The Architectural Magazine and Journal in 1838, “it is considered a compliment to give the stranger the rocking-chair as a seat; and when there is more than one kind in the house, the stranger is always presented with the best.” Not everyone appreciated the gesture.
That same year, in her Retrospect of Western Travel, the British social theorist Harriet Martineau stops off at a small inn between Stockbridge and Albany, New York. She describes “the disagreeable practice” of rocking in chairs and finds “ladies who are vibrating in different directions, and at various velocities, so as to try the head of a stranger almost as severely as the tobacco chewer his stomach.”38 A similar description later appeared in the Michigan Farmer and other magazines, echoing both the rocker’s nicotinic effects and asynchronicity; the author calls rocking chairs a woman’s “nervine, a narcotic, a stimulant”, and describes “a woman photographer [who] would sit in a rocker with a camera in her lap and placidly photograph a group of rocking women in rockers of various gaits”.39
Once Martineau gets going, she has trouble stopping. “How this lazy and ungraceful indulgence ever became general, I cannot imagine”, she laments, before painting America as the Land of the Rocker:
When American ladies come to live in Europe, they sometimes send home for a rocking-chair. A common wedding present is a rocking-chair. A beloved pastor has every room in his house furnished with a rocking-chair by his grateful and devoted people. It is well that the gentlemen can be satisfied to sit still, or the world might be treated with the spectacle of the sublime American Senate in a new position; its fifty-two senators see-sawing in full deliberation, like the wise birds of a rookery in a breeze.40
Charles Dickens made a parallel observation in his American Notes, finding a rocking chair aboard a steamship on the Connecticut river: “But even in this chamber there was a rocking-chair. It would be impossible to get on anywhere, in America, without a rocking-chair.”41 (Note the symmetry here: Dickens in a travelogue finds a rocker on a steamer; Tubb reads in his rocker to approximate the pitch and roll of steamboat journeys.) The novelist seems to appreciate his seesawing surroundings, but it is tough to tell what exactly gets Martineau’s goat. The fact that the parlor women are vibrating?
While we often associate springs with energetic release (trampolines and Tigger’s tail, Pogo sticks and prank nut cans stuffed with a tubular snake) they can also dampen motion (shock absorbers) or cancel it altogether. In the mid-nineteenth century, upholstery springs were introduced into train seating to absorb the jolts of rail transit on passengers’ nervous systems: a public health concern, connected to both sexual and physical disturbances. “A compulsive link of this kind between railway-travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensations of movement”, wrote Sigmund Freud in his essay on infantile sexuality.42 Adults and adolescents “will react to rocking or swinging with a feeling of nausea, will be terribly exhausted by a railway journey, or will be subject to attacks of anxiety”. And, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch chronicled, The Lancet released a pamphlet on The Influence of Railway Travelling on Public Health in 1862, describing an ergonomic antidote to wobbling train cars . . . namely, more rocking:
The springs of railway carriages, the horse-hair seats (and the elastic floor of cork supplied to the new royal carriage), are recognitions of the principle, which the habitual traveler may wisely extend for himself by many expedients, if he keeps in view what he has to attain—elasticity.
The disagreement over the costs and benefits of spring seating extended into rocking chairs too. In 1896, the Christian Observer reported that the chair’s oscillations have “a wonderful effect in stimulating the gastro-intestinal peristalsis”.43 But a 1905 article in Health described a condition known as rocking-chair spine: “the rocking-chair is an unmixed evil . . . [which] begins its deadly mission very early in the lives of its victims . . . [it] perpetually changes the equilibrium of the body and agitates the circulation”, argued William S. Birge. “It injures the eyes, as it continually changes the focus of whatever one may be looking at. It so disturbs the brain that physicians have forbidden mothers and nurses to rock delicate babies.”44
An Uneasy Chair (Coda)
When did my obsession — with a chair I had never sat in, in a painting only seen online — begin? Sometime during quarantine, when I sought images of closed domestic worlds, lives lived unobserved, like ours had suddenly become. Vilhelm Hammershøi’s interiors fit the criteria. Mute and soft, they are washed in the raw light that I only know from Nordic winters. Like so many of his other works, Hammershøi painted Interior with Young Man Reading (1898) in his apartment: Strandgade 30, Copenhagen, where he lived with his wife, Ida Ilsted, for eleven years, beginning in 1898.
But as with any good neurosis, perhaps its roots were always there — those stackable blue chairs of American schools, with their four steel bolts and slotted bodies . . . did that particular constellation of sensation and support, known to administrators as the Virco 9000, prime me to fixate, decades later, on the interface between human back and chair splat? No. At least, as far as I’m aware: we would need the comfort of an analyst’s couch to get at those depths.
It’s something in particular about this chair in Hammershøi’s painting, the way it demands attention. And the young man’s refusal to use the writing table, almost as if he is backing away. I see myself in him, typing from an armchair, avoiding the desk where I pay my bills. Sure, the light might be better for him by the window. Or perhaps he needs to lean into his novel with more movement and elasticity than those springless ribs allow. Watch how desk and chair (dark wood, pink cushion, white paint) mirror the gradient of his body (dark suit, pink face, white collar). And how the chair looks upon two anatomical drawings, as if trying to study their human form.
When I behold this painting, I do not know whether to focus on the boy’s face or his furniture. This reader is completely absorbed; but the chair, alert. Does it want to reciprocate my gaze? Do you feel that too? I think he made the right choice: not sitting. This same chair shows up in other paintings. And those who succumb seem to suffer. When Ida occupies it, she bends over an unseen task, and the deep focus and vertiginous vanishing point expand the apartment in a terrifying way, the indoor version of Van Gogh’s “Wheatfield with Crows”, as if gravity might pull her through the open door should she try to stand.
I’ve gone so far as to try and trace its movements, how a chair like that (of British design) traveled to Denmark at the century’s turn. The form leads to George Hepplewhite’s 1789 The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide, which contained furniture patterns to “unite elegance and utility, and blend the useful with the agreeable”.45 Its clean lines and shield back updated styles associated with Louis XVI and the Adam brothers, Hepplewhite’s precursors. Thomas Sheraton — whose own Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book (1791-93, revised 1802) reads like a geometry textbook, full of words such as cyma and mixtilinear — took a shot at this model: “if we compare some of the designs, particularly the chairs, with the newest taste, we shall find that this work has already caught the decline, and perhaps, in a little time, will suddenly die in the disorder”.46 Nothing like that happened, however, and the shield became a Hepplewhite classic. But Hammershøi’s paintings make me wonder if oblivion could have been a kinder fate.
As for Denmark, I cannot say if this style was common or unique (similar chairs show up in the work of Ida’s brother, Peter Ilsted, but there they are the joyous furniture of family life). I wrote a letter to the Danish Design Museum and a kind curator phoned the leading expert on Danish furniture from 1840-1920, Mirjam Gelfer-Jørgensen. She examined the chair and found no markings or signatures of the manufacturer. “Apparently no one knows who produced them”, ends the email. I also learned that English chairs were so desired by eighteenth-century Danes that the state banned importation. Workshops popped up soon after, imitating the designs of Thomas Chippendale. I imagine Hepplewhite proved popular too.
I tried to track the chair itself and had better luck. It now lives next to its painted form in Copenhagen’s Hirschsprung Collection. A curator told me that Hammershøi had left the chair to a janitor in Bredgade, from whom Emil Hannover, the Hirschsprung’s first director, purchased it in 1916. My guess is that the small sign on the seat base, seen in this photograph, says “no sitting” in Danish. But should the tourist do so anyway, what could she learn? To where would she be transported? Or is there no motion here?
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 3, 2021

author: Hunter Dukes


text:
The Skeptical Pilgrim
Melville’s Clarel
By Jeff Wheelwright
May 13, 2020

Weighing in at a colossal 18,000 lines, Herman Melville’s Clarel (1876), which centres on the theological musings of a group of pilgrims touring the Holy Land, is not for the faint-hearted. Jeff Wheelwright explores the knot of spiritual dilemmas played out in the poem and its roots in Melville’s trip to the Middle East two decades earlier.

In October 1856, Herman Melville left the tinted hills of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for a lengthy excursion to Europe and the Holy Land. Just thirty-seven years old, Melville was a half-broken man. He suffered from headaches, sciatica, eyestrain, crushed hopes — in a word, burnout. His epic Moby-Dick had failed to catch on in 1851, and his next novel, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities, was head-scratching at best, a laughing stock at worst. Subsequent short stories were tepidly received. Earlier in 1856 Melville had been able to squeeze out a final novel, The Confidence-Man, which was his tenth work of prose in thirteen years. The novel is a string of disjointed vignettes about hypocrisy and flimflam, a bitter rosary to brood on. The swashbuckler of the South Seas, the prodigy who had produced Typee and Omoo, was in the past. Herman Melville had pretty much decided to give up writing.
The trip was proposed and largely underwritten by his father-in-law, who worried, along with everyone in the family, about Herman’s physical and mental health. But if Melville’s spirit was half broken, the other half awakened when he was on his own again at sea, where he’d always been comfortable. The first entry in his maritime journal was: “Conversations with the Colonel on fixed fate &c. during the passage”.1 The conversational matter (with one G. C. Rankin, an anti-Christian polemicist) indicates his mixed state of mind at this period and also the philosophizing that, more than any other factor, had eroded and killed Melville’s popularity with American readers. “Fixed fate” refers to a line in Milton’s Paradise Lost about the paradoxes of “fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute” within the Puritan matrix of faith.2 On the one hand, a person’s moral fate, her ending in heaven or hell, was predetermined, and only God knew the outcome for sure. On the other hand, God, in creating human beings, had granted them the freedom to choose. There was a ray of light for human agency. How, therefore, was one to act in life?
Melville, we know, liked nothing better than to wade into these waters, but the stakes were high — not for him the sanctimonious talk or what he called the “parrot-lore” of conventional piety.3 Although the slant and depth of his religious convictions have been long debated, no critic doubts that Melville was obsessed with the implications of religion. Thus Athens, Rome, and the other places on his to-do list were all very fine, but Palestine was where the writer meant to test his understanding of faith in the landscape where Judeo-Christianity had emerged. The impressions he filed away of his brief stay would lead to his most ambitious and difficult work, the narrative poem Clarel, published twenty years after the voyage. At 18,000 lines, Clarel is the longest skein of verse in American literature and as knotty as the pasture pines of Pittsfield.
Landing at Glasgow, Melville traveled next to Liverpool, where his friend and mentor Nathaniel Hawthorne was serving as the American consul. Hawthorne’s record of the Liverpool visit is justly famous and proleptically echoes one of the concerns of Clarel. After walking for a while on the beach the two writers sat down and talked.
Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief . . . . It is strange how he persists — and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before — in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting.4
On the spectrum between atheism and devotion, Hawthorne situated Melville to the left, toward unbelief, but a non-believer would not care what happened to him after he died. “Annihilation” was shorthand for the direst punishment administered in hell. However, if Melville had “pretty much made up his mind” to that eventuality, he was implying that he could choose — that it was up to him whether he would be saved or damned. Melville’s anti-hero Ahab had claimed the same power over his own fate. A true Calvinist would say this was more free will than God would allow.
Shipboard into the Mediterranean, Melville seemed to brighten with the warming winter sun. After passing through the Greek islands, he spent some days exploring Constantinople and was greatly stimulated by the mosques, fortifications, esplanades, and barges. Also the seediness and bustle in the streets of the Ottoman capital made him anxious; he clutched his wallet against pickpockets and sought the highest ground and most sweeping views. He surveyed the formerly Christian city from its topmasts, as it were.
Thence to Alexandria and his first taste of the sands of the Middle East. The Pyramids bowled Melville over. His journal sputters, stops, and starts again as he strives to make sense of the mysterious structures. He decided they were the preternatural afterbirth of Jehovah, the signs of a God who had issued from the imagination of ancient Egyptian priests, but “for no holy purpose . . . . Terrible mixture of cunning and awful”5. Climbing, as was his wont, to the top of a pyramid, he compared the desert at its base with an immense ocean billow that would not break, and he became dizzy and frightened. From this moment onward the unfeeling vastness of the sea, which Melville knew well, and of the desert were married in his poetic vocabulary. As the critic Helen Vendler observes: “In the desert, as in the sea, human scale is lost, and the mind grapples for a larger scale by which to measure both life and thought.”6
The desert was deeply dismaying to Melville. In his journal and later in Clarel, Melville speculates that God’s embrace had squeezed the life and greenery out of the landscape, leaving stones and desolation as the environmental cost of monotheism — “Is the desolation of the land the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity?”7. It is due to comments like these that some Melvillians find the author irreligious.8 Exhibit A in that school of thought is sacrilegious Captain Ahab raging on the deck, but just as important to the question of Melville’s religiosity are the earnest, prolix pilgrims who debate one another in the wasteland of Clarel.
The full title is Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Before taking up its scheme, we should consider that Melville, cantering with a guide into Jerusalem in January 1857, arrived at a time of fervent European and American interest in Palestine. The Ottoman Turks who controlled the region had opened up the holy places to the West, a concession they granted in exchange for military support against anti-Ottoman forces in Egypt. Although Holy Land tourism has been popular ever since, most present-day tourists lack the intellectual zeal and moneyed curiosity of nineteenth-century expeditionaries such as the Americans Mark Twain, Ulysses S. Grant, and the young Teddy Roosevelt, and the Europeans Chateaubriand, Disraeli, Thackeray, Flaubert, and Gogol. This was not leisure travel. Poor, gritty, and, outside the towns, lawless, the Holy Land all but guaranteed an adventure. Yet the travelogues stuck to the beaten paths so predictably that in 1852 a British newspaper groused: “Oh! Another book about the East. If you’ve read one, you’ve read them all. The same Arabs, the same camels . . . . ”9 Melville was unusual for a literary visitor; his journalizing was terse, jagged, and intended only for himself. When he got home, a couple of his relatives were bewildered when he wrote nothing up about Palestine.
There is a subset of Holy Land literature that we may call sacred geography. Christians, many of them clerics, and especially Protestants, who tended to treat the Bible as factually accurate text, journeyed there in order to experience the places that had emotional meaning for them. It is a powerful thing to have a religious place put into one’s mind perhaps in childhood, and to hear it addressed over and over in church, this shrine or village anchoring events humdrum or passion-filled, and later for one to resolve to see that site in person, in the hope, finally, of feeling its sacred power. Especially erudite pilgrims — for example the Anglican priest Henry Baker Tristram, who visited Palestine in 1863 — applied their knowledge of the Bible not simply to the shrines but also to the geological and biological features of the Holy Land. The skeptical era of Darwin and Comte having begun, pilgrims like Tristram labored to reconcile the truths of Scripture with contemporary science.
Herman Melville would pick up on all these currents later — but for now in his journal he tried to steady himself as Jerusalem’s sights, sounds, and smells buffeted his sensibilities:
In pursuance of my object, the saturation of my mind with the atmosphere of Jerusalem, offering myself up a passive subject, and no unwilling one, to its melancholy [sic] weird impressions, I always rose at dawn & walked without the walls. Not so far as escaping the pent-up air within, was concerned was I singular here.10
Thoughts in the Via Dolorosa — women panting under burdens — men with melancholy faces.11
The city besieged by army of the dead — cemeteries all around. — 12
The mind cannot but be sadly & suggestively affected with the indifference of Nature & Man to all that makes the spot sacred to the Christian. Weeds grow upon Mount Zion; side by side in impartiality appear the shadows of church & mosque, and on Olivet [the Mount of Olives] every morning the sun indifferently ascends over the Chapel of the Ascension.13
Wandering among the tombs — till I began to think myself one of the possessed with devils.14
The strange arches, cisterns, &c you come upon about Jerusalem — every day discovered something new in this way.15
I looked along the hill side of Gihon over against me, & watched the precipitation of the solemn shadows of the city towers flung far down to the bottom of the pool of Gihon [Gihon Spring was the main water source of the ancient city], and higher up the haunted darkened valley my eye rested on the cliff-girt basin, haggard with riven old olives, where the angel of the Lord smote the army of Sennacherib.16
Inside the walls are many vacant spaces, overgrown with the horrible cactus.17
The Old Connecticut man wandering about with tracts &c — knew not the language. — hopelessness of it — his lonely batchelor [sic] rooms . . . 18
We don’t know what Melville expected of Jerusalem. He seems claustrophobic and at times even alarmed, yet he also keeps a sharp eye out for idiosyncratic human behavior. He must have befriended the “Old Connecticut man” who was passing out religious tracts, or else he could not have known about the man’s dour living quarters. The fellow blossoms into a memorable character in Clarel, an addled evangelist who rides a donkey to the Dead Sea. In the Old City of Jerusalem today, throngs of natives and foreigners make a hugely distracting river of color, but one readily spots the visitors who are not all in their right minds: For instance, the youngish man with Jesus-length blond hair, in bare feet and white robe, whom I saw carrying a cross in Muristan in the Christian Quarter one day in 2011, and again, in 2019, this time sans cross, when he attended the Catholic Easter mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Israeli psychiatrists have documented many cases of so-called Jerusalem syndrome, whereby tourists — dehydrated, disoriented, and overwhelmed with emotion — claim to be biblical figures. Scores of people have to be treated every year, usually recovering rapidly or at least becoming well enough to be sent home. Less common but more serious are psychotic eruptions entailing violence and self-mutilation. Fundamentalist American Protestants appear to be most at risk for developing Jerusalem syndrome. “It is an odd fact that many Americans who arrive at Jerusalem are either lunatics or lose their mind thereafter”, remarked J. E. Hanauer, a writer and Anglican canon who grew up in the city during the latter half of the nineteenth century.19
During his stay, Melville returned more than once to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It was and still is a confusing, cavernous amalgam of theme park and holy of holies. The putative site of Christ’s tomb lies only yards from the putative site of the Crucifixion, just two of the shrines enclosed within the domed space. Christianity’s schismatic denominations have carved out zones in the church where each practices its rites. The leading officiants are the Greek Orthodox, the Roman Catholics, and the Armenian Apostolics, with lesser roles for the Syriacs, Copts, and Ethiopians. The Catholic Church is the sole representative of Western Christianity; the others are Eastern Orthodox. At times it’s hard to know where to turn. As competing liturgies and processions snake through the pilgrims and gawkers, incense wafts, cell phones swivel and flash, and tourist guides strain to be heard in a dozen languages.
Melville’s strongest comment about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was: “a sort of plague-stricken splendor reigns in the painted and mildewed walls . . . . All is glitter and nothing is gold. A sickening cheat”.20 He was repulsed by the hucksters and hawkers, the successors to the money changers who had infuriated Jesus. More importantly, he could not accept that Christ’s body was pulled down from a wooden cross that three centuries later the emperor’s mother uncovered just over there, at Golgotha, its grim rock conveniently at hand, and that his body was laid to rest in a cave that once was located just over here. The miraculous reappearances of the cross and burial cave prime the true believer for the even more miraculous disappearance: that of the Resurrection. Permitted in small groups, the worshipers duck inside the Edicule, the marbled tomb. Melville was stung by “the ineloquence of the bedizened slab . . . like entering a lighted coffin”.21 But why then did he keep coming back to the church “almost every day”?22
After a few days in the city he joined a horse party and ventured into the desert. With Arab guides and armed guards, Melville and his companions went down to Jericho and the Dead Sea and returned to Jerusalem by way of the renowned Mar Saba monastery and Bethlehem. It was a standard, three-day, Holy Land loop of some thirty-five miles in all. Melville’s journal actively disparages the landscape:
Barrenness of Judea: Whitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape — bleached — leprosy — encrustation of curse — old cheese — bones of rocks, — crunched, knawed, & mumbled — mere refuse & rubbish of creation —23
And:
Judea is one accumulation of stones — Stony mountains & stony plain; stony torrents & stony roads; stony walls & stony fields, stony houses & stony tombs; stony eyes & stony hearts. Before you, & behind you are stone. Stones to right & stones to left.24
The Dead Sea was no better:
— foam on beach & pebbles like slaver of mad dog — smarting bitter of the water, — carried the bitter in my mouth all day — bitterness of life — thought of all bitter things — Bitter is it to be poor & bitter, to be reviled, & Oh bitter are these waters of Death, thought I . . . . Rainbow over Dead Sea — heaven, after all, has no malice against it . . . . 25
Melville’s report of the water is accurate. Though invitingly clear, the Dead Sea scalds the mouth like acrid chili peppers. But its lovely color seems to have escaped him, a magenta-blue offsetting the rusty mountains of Moab on the eastern shore.
Having stayed two weeks, Melville was bound next for Italy and the softer landscapes of art museums. His overall judgment in sailing away was: “No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine — particularly Jerusalem.”26 He was very glad to be through with the place, it appears, though the place was not yet through with him.
Melville told his family members the trip had revived him. If so, his work remained at an impasse. For a few years he tried the lecture circuit, where he expounded on travel, Italian art, and the South Seas, but his heart wasn’t in it. During the Civil War years, he published his first book of poems, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. Except for Billy Budd, his posthumously discovered short story, Melville’s writing following his pilgrimage eschewed prose for the constrained format of poetry, its compressions mirroring the squeezes upon his life.
Giving up on country living, Melville moved with his wife, Lizzie, and four children back to Manhattan in 1863. Money was tight, his drinking was a problem, and Lizzie nearly left him. His eighteen-year-old son Malcolm committed suicide in 1867. The year before, he had taken a job on the docks of New York as a customs inspector, a post that he held for nineteen years. Six days a week he would check the manifests of ships against their cargos and verify the import duties owed. He became an Ishmael-like figure, “grim about the mouth”, in the same haunts where he had introduced Ishmael to readers in 1851. But Melville meanwhile began to buy books about the Levant, and in his free time, unbeknownst to anyone, he started to compose Clarel.
The plot of the poem is simple. Clarel (pronounced CLAR-el) is a young seminarian whose faith has faltered. He arrives in Jerusalem. At loose ends, he wanders among the holy sites. He joins a circle of three other Americans and an Englishman, who are all older and more confident in their religious beliefs, or critiques, as the case may be. At the same time, Clarel falls in love with an American girl, Ruth, whose Puritan father has converted to Judaism and moved the family to Palestine. The youths’ happiness is not to be.
The story unfolds over four parts: “Jerusalem”, “The Wilderness”, “Mar Saba”, and “Bethlehem”. The first section introduces the core characters, and the other three follow Clarel and a shifting troupe on a ten-day peregrination on horseback. The passive, lovelorn seminarian has much less to say than the other characters do. We meet Rolfe, thought to be Melville’s alter ego, a pilgrim whose strength (and weakness) is to examine issues from many sides; Nehemiah, the aforementioned evangelist; Vine, a magnetic figure who is probably based on Nathaniel Hawthorne; Derwent, a cheery Anglican priest, always considering the Creator in a golden light; Mortmain, a bitter revolutionary; Djalea, a gnomic Muslim; and Margoth, a pick-wielding Jewish geologist who is scornful of the untestable revelations of religion. Ten or so lesser characters are no less distinctive. Not all live to return to the holy city.
Dialogue, not action, dominates Clarel. At first we’re reminded of old Western movies where long scenes take place inside a rocking stagecoach. The landscape out the window, with its scrolling mesas and peaks, is not very convincingly attached to the drama inside since obviously the actors are in a studio. Soon enough, however, Melville’s theological ruminations, biblical allusions, and historico-political commentary, dispensed as speaking parts to his cast, do connect us to the landscape, whether it is a crumbling edifice in Jerusalem or the bleak Judean wilderness. The monumental backdrop of Clarel never recedes but crowds right into the stagecoach. This trick cannot succeed unless the poet constructs metaphors tying the interior and exterior scenes together — but if Herman Melville could do one thing really well, it was to construct vigorous, compelling metaphors.
Clarel, a baggy monster of a poem, is not for everyone. First, the modern reader must not be discouraged by the staggering length. She must overlook Melville’s occasionally tortured syntax in shaping a rhyme and hold fast for the relentless beat of his iambic tetrameter. Thus, during the pilgrims’ ride along the Dead Sea:
Southward they file.’Tis Pluto’s parkBeslimed as after baleful flood:A nitrous, filmed and pallid mud,With shrubs to match. Salt specks they markOr mildewed stunted twigs uncleanBrushed by the stirrup, Stygean green,With shrivelled nut or apple small.27
The reader must also care about religion. As Melville’s characters navigate the fearsome desert, they discuss and question, in no particular order, reason versus faith, the twists and turns in the evolution of monotheism, human suffering and God’s tolerance for it, the commonality of the world’s creeds, the strangeness of monks, the false allure of America’s secular “progress”, and the contradictory demands of existing on earth; and much more. It’s quite a ride, and not every secular modern reader will be able to complete it. Here is a typical musing by Rolfe on the persistence of the religious instinct, which Melville clothes in a characteristically marine metaphor:
Though some be hurledFrom anchor, nor a haven find;Not less religion’s ancient port,Till the crack of doom, shall be resortIn stress of weather for mankind.Yea, long as children feel affrightIn darkness, men shall fear a God;And long as daisies yield delightShall see His footprints in the sod.Is’t ignorance? This ignorant stateScience doth but elucidate —Deepen, enlarge. But though ’twere madeDemonstrable that God is not —What then? it would not change this lot:The ghost would haunt, nor could be laid.28
Melville was intent that his poem should appear during the centennial celebration of the United States. Clarel would be his reply to the cap-flinging and self-congratulation of 1876. With funding supplied by an uncle, he commissioned the publication of 350 copies, each issued in two volumes, since a single volume would have been too unwieldy. It landed with a thud, as he strongly sensed it would. “[E]minently adapted for unpopularity”, was his ironic appraisal in a letter eight years later.29 Contemporary reviewers either objected to or ignored the poem, and even after Melville’s literary reputation was revived in the 1920s, critics looked askance at Clarel, almost embarrassed for him in his late-life failure. In American Renaissance (1941), the critical study that set Melville firmly beside his peers Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Whitman, F. O. Matthiessen commented: “It would be impossible to say, from the several thousand lines of discussion between the shadowy characters, precisely what Melville himself thought . . . . Clarel is practically unreadable because of Melville’s inexplicable choice of rhymed tetrameter as the medium for philosophic meditation.”30
Clarel gradually has gained admirers and defenders. New editions of Melville’s poetry have continued to appear, including a recent Library of America volume edited by Hershel Parker, author of the seminal two-volume biography of Melville. As with all great literature, what is old can be made new again. Young researchers interested in multiculturalism have found the poem fertile ground for articles and dissertations.31  The critic Hilton Obenzinger notes that the figure of Nathan, Ruth’s father, a Jewish convert and settler, is a “proto-Zionist” who foreshadows twenty-first-century Christian Zionism.32 Obenzinger’s colleague Carolyn Karcher suggests that Melville’s poem and journal contain a “pre-history” of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.33  William Potter, in Melville’s “Clarel” and the Intersympathy of Creeds (2004), hails the poet for recognizing and respecting the world’s religious diversity.34
For all of its high-flown ideas, the story of Clarel will be, for most, something of a downer. By the end of the poem, young Clarel has lost Ruth forever without having gained a deeper hold on his faith. The other characters quietly take their leave of Jerusalem, feeling bad for him. Clarel is last seen vanishing glumly into the crowded streets. With some effort a positive message may be extracted from the epilogue, which shifts, as if to change the mood, into iambic pentameter:
Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned —Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind;That like the crocus budding through the snow —That like a swimmer rising from the deep —That like a burning secret which doth goEven from the bosom that would hoard and keep;Emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea,And prove that death but routs life into victory.35
We are not consoled. Though Melville honors Jesus in the poem and the rosy afterlife Jesus promised, his heart was more attuned to the Old Testament stories of sackcloth and ashes.
For years Melville brooded over George Pollard, a real-life captain, whose life story informed both Moby-Dick and Clarel. In the 1820s Pollard had commanded two whaling vessels that were wrecked, the first by a sperm whale and the next by a reef. When the two men met, in 1852, a year after the publication of Moby-Dick, Pollard had been shunned and long forgotten. He was “a nobody”,36 Melville recalled, reduced to working as a night watchman on the docks of Nantucket. Impressed by the captain’s humility, Melville could not know then that his own career was headed for a crack-up and obscurity.
In Clarel, Rolfe describes an unnamed captain who is full of pride, an exponent of free will. Clearly the captain was based on Pollard — both suffered the sinking of two ships, by whale and by reef, and both ended their days as night watchmen on the docks. But in this unnamed captain, so stricken by double disaster, we can see parallels too with the author’s own life.37 For Melville, however, it was not ships but books — Moby-Dick and Pierre had sunk back-to-back, sending their author, careening and adrift, to the shores of the Holy Land. The job Melville took as a customs inspector was not that different from being a security guard on the docks. And so:
. . . Came the dayDire need constrained the man to paceA night patrolman on the quayWatching the bales till morning hourThrough fair and foul. Never he smiled;Call him, and he would come; not sourIn spirit, but meek and reconciled;Patient he was, he none withstood;Oft on some secret thing would brood.He ate what came, though but a crust;In Calvin’s creed he put his trust;Praised heaven, and said that God was good,And his calamity but just.38
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Jeff Wheelwright