Response 4: "Nature's Sweet or Savage Impressions": The Savage & the Virgin in Moby Dick



"As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage" (Moby Dick).

 

This final L632 response develops some of the observations I made in my first presentation on Moby Dick.  In response to the lengthy, baroquely constructed "sentence" containing the clause “…receiving all nature’s sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary confiding breast…” (Chapter 16: "The Ship," 169-70) I asked the question:  "How can nature be at once 'savage' and 'virgin'?"  This question originated from the preconception that the "savage" is ferocious, while the "virgin" is docile.  Other oppositional association clusters are:  

savage = active, violent, kinetic, rough, brutal, uncivilized, unrestrained, male, dark-skinned

virgin = passive, pacific, static, gentle, tender, civilized, contained, female, fair-skinned  

The attribute that the savage and the virgin share, however, is purity--that is, purity in relation to the restraining/corrupting influence of civilization for the savage; and purity in relation to the contaminating/self-dissolving effect of [sexual] experience for the virgin.

Thus the attribute of purity binds the savage and the virgin, as signified by Queequeg's matrimonial embrace of the insomniacal Ishmael.  In other words, the savage/virgin opposition that Queequeg and Ishmael respectively embody temporarily dissolves in the farcical bedroom scene. 

By exhibiting some of the stereotypic attributes of the savage (i.e. as listed above), Ishmael gradually evolves into a parodic type of the Romantic hero.  For example, he perceives Queequeg as the pure and noble savage of Romanticism (“…I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart…,” 144).  At the same time, he becomes increasingly prone to wild fits of impassioned feeling, as when he calls for an axe to break down the door behind which Queequeg had sequestered himself in the “Ramadan” chapter.  In other words, while Ishmael perceives purity in the savage (i.e. exercises his colonialist gaze over Queequeg), he indulges in increasingly savage--i.e. unrestrained--antics.   At the same time, however, the mock-Romantic hero is merely one facet of Ishmael--as is also the case with Ahab, whom Peleg describes as "savage sometimes" (177).  

Indeed Ishmael rapidly loses his whaling virginity so that by Chapter 57 he enunciates himself as a "savage" ("I myself am a savage," 376).  This self-enunciation gradually leads to the lyrical reverie fusing fish and bird, sky and sea, (378) recalling the equally lyrical "fish in the sky" passage with which the "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" section of Walden concludes.

 

 

Response 3: Wherein Mrs. Comstock Experiments with Rejuvenation and Becomes White: Resurrecting Racism in Gene Stratton-Porter

Anti-Chinese yellow peril flyer

Japanese immigrant girl (early twentieth-century California)

Janet Malcolm's review of Gene Stratton-Porter's Her Father's Daughter (1921) in The New York Review of Books (1/15/2009) focuses on the novel as a record of the kind of anti-Asian immigrant sentiment that was prevalent in Los Angeles in the early twentieth century.  If indeed Stratton-Porter was readily susceptible to this predominant collective sentiment as Malcolm suggests, the racial "hatred" that Stratton-Porter allegedly "enthusiastically embraced" can be read symptomatically.  Specifically, Stratton-Porter's anti-Asian racism is readable as anxiety symptom--the Asian immigrant "other" becomes in the yellow perilous discursive context of a racially divisive L.A. the abjected [disease] symptom that she attempts to contain and manage--that is, ironically, by relocating to L.A. from a life-long residence in Indiana to recover from flu-exacerbated overall exhaustion. 

Thus if Oka Sayye (which does not read as an authentic Japanese name) is symptomatically killed off in Her Father's Daughter (to contain orientalist anxiety), how then, can A Girl of the Limberlost, published twelve years prior to Her Father's Daughter be reread in the context of Malcolm's allegation of anti-Asian racism?  This question can be answered with the observation that Kate Comstock's "rejuvenation" experiment in Chapter 18 reinscribes the over-valuation of white skin both as a sign of female beauty and as a passport for upward socioeconomic mobility.  This reinscribed over-valuation could become the anti-Asian subtext of Her Father's Daughter.                 

Through a dubious home-concocted organic "evil-smelling" skin-peeling regimen, Kate Comstock alchemically achieves the "delicate porcelain white" skin that is the prized socioeconomic passport enabling her to pass for "the other girls' mothers" (345, 347).  While her whiteness (as racial attribute) is affirmed through her proud assertion, "I always knew I was white underneath it [tanned/sunburnt surface]" (349) the alternating appearance/disappearance of the highly valued and extremely elusive Yellow Empress/Yellow Emperor moth specimen provides Limberlost with its subtext of ambivalent desire.  In fact, the Yellow Empress/Emperor reads like an allusive orientalist short-hand sign, or enigmatic cipher, for the nonwhiteness that is otherwise discursively banished or marginalized (or uneasily contained) through Kate Comstock's skin-whitening "experiment."  The yellow color of the prized moth, then, becomes the color of subversive and ambivalent desire (i.e. Philip Ammon's for Elnora).  At the same time, yellow is intensified into the gold embroidery and accessories that materialize the economic value that Edith Carr splendidly embodies at her engagement ball. 

Thus it can be concluded that while racial whiteness emerges as prized spectacle through Kate Comstock's "experiment," yellow is de-racialized (i.e. becomes an ambiguous multivalent sign) even while uneasily suggesting the banished racial nonwhiteness of Mrs. Comstock's strange beauty "experiment."          

    

Response 2: Comstock & Queequeg: Fluctuating Significance/Value/Identity

Comstock > Cornstock > [Miss] Cornstalk

 

[Mr.] Queequeg > Quohog > Hedgehog

This second L632 response addresses the following question I included in the Gene Stratton-Porter handout:  When Elnora's family name "Comstock" morphs into "Cornstock" and thereafter "Cornstalk" (Limberlost 10-11, 49), this name change sequence suggests that "Comstock" is yet a mutable signifier for her unfixed and fluctuating socioeconomic status at this early point in the novel.  How does this name change phenomenon compare with the mutability of “Queequeg” in Moby Dick?

As I observed in my first L632 presentation, Queequeg’s name undergoes several mutations, indicating thus that he is the "savage" embodiment of the unpredictable forces of nature.  Thus the significance of his name "Queequeg" fluctuates constantly, which, in turn, invites [elusive linguistic] control and appropriation.  In other words, naming is an overcompensatory attempt to exert control over nature, as Melville's complex taxonomies parody throughout Moby Dick.  After the clamshell-laden iron-fisted Mrs. Hussey addresses Queequeg in a comically civil manner, (“Mr. Queequeg,” Moby Dick 162) the genteel name becomes a distorted caricature of "Queequeg" (i.e. as “Quohog”) before finally morphing into “Hedgehog” through Captain Peleg's crudely irreverent enunciation (185-86).

While Elnora attempts to achieve discursive authority in the mathematics classroom by regaining ownership of her name through eventual rectification ("'My name is Comstock,' she said distinctly," 11), Queequeg is seemingly oblivious to his own name distortions.  Instead, he secures higher wages through his valorous acts (i.e. than Ishmael, the novice harpooner), thus becoming invested with greater economic value (as Brooke Opel observed).  By contrast, Elnora's value is directly embodied by her alter ego Edith Carr--specifically in the latter's spectacular guise as the rare and valuable "Imperialis Regalis," or the Yellow Empress moth (356). 

It can be observed that both "Comstock" and "Queequeg" have functioned in Limberlost and Moby Dick respectively as mutable signifiers comparable to circulating currency, or to fluctuating currency values.  In fact, the metamorphosis of "Comstock" suggests both fluctuating stock value and metonymic significance (i.e. as "Cornstock," Elnora experiences herself as laughing-stock).  At the same time, the metamorphoses of "Comstock" and "Queequeg" signify the hybrid human/vegetable/animal identity fusion that remained a major discussion topic in L632.  Specifically, "Comstock" acquires a vegetable element ("Corn-") through the mathematics professor's misreading, while Peleg infuses "Queequeg" with an animal element ("-hog") before the name morphs into a full animal name ("Hedgehog").  "Comstock" undergoes a similar final mutation:  as "Miss Cornstalk," Elnora has been [mis-]enunciated as a full vegetable organism.

Although Elnora resists the professor's mis-enunciation, her vegetable affiliation is strengthened throughout the narrative as she gradually evolves into an idealized mystical seer of nature.  Thus it is implied that while men approach nature as scientific objects of investigation (e.g. Philip Ammon), women, by contrast, are pre-invested with an instinctual affinity with nature that is readily romanticized (i.e. Elnora).  Thus while Elnora embodies the ideal fusion of nature and culture, learning and affect throughout Limberlost, Queequeg caricatures the savage of the South Pacific seas and the untamable forces of nature throughout Moby Dick.  In either case both characters embody the forces of nature that invite control and appropriation, as their respective name changes signify.  At the same time, their strategies for resistance to that control and appropriation are variously determined by gender, race, class, and situation in life.
                

Response 1: E__ C__: Semantic Truncations & Romantic Triangulations in the Limberlost

As Christoph Irmscher suggested, the E__ C__ name initializing phenomenon in Gene Stratton-Porter's A Girl in the Limberlost is too uncannily symbolic to be merely coincidental:  E[lnora] C[omstock], E[dith] C[arr], E[lvira] C[arney].  Each of these E__ C__ initialized women participates in a triangulated relationship.    

     Elnora Comstock                                        Kate Comstock

            /                \                                          /                             \

Edith Carr  --  Philip Ammon            Elvira Carney  --  Robert Comstock


Edith Carr, the neurotic socialite, and Elvira Carney, the adulterous desire object, are the "other" women in relation to Elnora and Kate Comstock respectively.  The progressive idealization of Elnora as a type of naturalist Angel of the House, who [uneasily] embodies the opposition between the (positive) economic value and (negative) life-threatening danger aspects of the Limberlost swamp, promises to neutralize the respective desire threats that the other two women just as uneasily embody (Edith Carr = enervating economic overinvestment; Elvira Carney = punishing adulterous desire).  Elnora's uneasy embodiment of this specific opposition, together with the signifying volatility of "E__ C__," emerges at the beginning of the novel when "Comstock" morphs into "Cornstock" and thereafter "Cornstalk" (see Response 2).  Thus "E__ C__" can be read as a metonymic signifier cluster for a complicating (and implicating) desire that underlies A Girl in the Limberlost.

It can be speculated that James Joyce was familiar with A Girl in the Limberlost whose publication year predates his own bildungsroman novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by approximately five years.  Throughout A Portrait (and especially in Chapter 2) "E__ C__" functions as the signifier cluster for Stephen's romanticized adolescent desire for the elusive E[mma] C[leary] that generates the intense ambivalence, ironically driving him to the Nighttown prostitute's threshold.  Thus it would be no surprise if Joyce's "E__ C__" were just as intentional as Stratton-Porter's, especially considering that Joyce and Stratton-Porter were contemporaries.