congreve and akenside: two poetic allusions in melville's “fragments from a writing desk”

Congreve and Akenside:Two Poetic Allusions in Melville’s “Fragments

from a Writing Desk”

PETER NORBERGSt. Joseph’s University

Herman Melville’s “Fragments from a Writing Desk” is interesting forits evidence of the author’s formative years. Published under thepseudonym “L. A. V.” in two installments (4 and 18 May 1839) in the

Lansingburgh Democratic Press, the “Fragments” are Melville’s first publishedfiction.1 The two numbered parts anticipate in form his later diptychs: “PoorMan’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” “The Two Temples,” and “TheParadise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids.” They also provide a wealthof information about his early reading, much of which he probably pursuedindependently during the time he was a member of the Albany Young Men’sAssociation from January, 1835 through the spring of 1837.2 Forecasting theallusive nature of Melville’s mature work, the narrator of the fragments weavesinto his prose quotations from writers including Shakespeare, Byron, Milton,Thomas Campbell, Edmund Burke, Coleridge, and Sheridan. But, according tothe Northwestern-Newberry Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860,two quotations are unidentified.3 Both occur in the first fragment and pertainto the narrator’s description of three of the fairest “blushing damsels” in thevillage of Lansingburgh (NN PT 193). The first, “Sail in liquid light, And floaton seas of bliss,” is taken from William Congreve’s tragedy The Mourning Bride(1697), and the second, “Effuse the mildness of their azure beam,” from MarkAkenside’s didactic poem “The Pleasures of Imagination” (1744).4

C© 2008 The AuthorsJournal compilation C© 2008 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

1 Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, 2 vols. (Baltimore and London: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1996 and 2002), 1:138-39.2 William H. Gilman, Melville’s Early Life and Redburn, (New York: New York University Press,1951), 73.3 Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, AlmaA. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press andThe Newberry Library, 1987), 623; hereafter cited as NN PT.4 Hershel Parker has also identified the sources of these two quotations in his book Melville:The Making of the Poet (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 53. Myidentification and Parker’s were made independently.

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Simply identifying the sources of these quotations adds to our knowl-edge of Melville’s reading. Yet, when read in context, as integral parts ofMelville’s first foray into fiction, they further illustrate an ironic attitude towardliterary conventions that can help us better appreciate two aspects of his craft:Melville’s facility for appropriating source materials, and his persistent interestin moments of discursive disjunction—moments of miscommunication, ornon-communication that occur when one person fails to recognize the conven-tions of discourse being spoken by another. Such moments are crucial in manyof Melville’s mature works. Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to,” Babo’s silence,or Billy Budd’s inability to respond in words to Claggart’s accusations, each ofthese moments indicates a lacuna in public discourse, a gap in communicationthat occurs when the terms of one discursive community cannot be translatedinto the terms of another.5 “Fragments from a Writing Desk” ends in justsuch a moment of baffled silence, one that reveals the disjuncture betweenthe discourse of romanticism and the culture of courtship among the middleclass. More specifically, Melville used these two poetic quotations to establishthe tropes of romanticism that structure the narrator’s aborted tryst with themysterious woman in the second fragment.

As Leon Howard first observed, “Fragments” is a parody of the romanticand sentimental fiction that was in vogue with Melville’s peers, and the narra-tor’s affected allusions to poetry are integral to the story’s humor.6 In the firstfragment, addressed as a letter to “My Dear M—,” the narrator presents himselfas a man about town modeled after the style of Beau Brummell. He claims to be“a distingue of the purest water, a blade of the true temper,” who walks down“the Broadway of our village” with a “slow and magisterial gait, which I can atpleasure vary to an easy, abandoned sort of carriage, or, to the more engagingalert and lively walk, to suit the varieties of time, occasion, and company” (NNPT 192). As one would expect after such an introduction, he pretends to acomparable “easy self-possession” (193) at local social events, where instead ofhanging back like the other young men “aloof, in corner, like a flock of scaredsheep,” he “sallied up to the ladies—complimenting one, exchanging a reparteewith another; tapping this one under the chin, and clasping this one round thewaist; and finally, winding up the operation by kissing round the whole circle”(192). The remainder of the first fragment is then given over to a series of

5 My understanding of discursive disjunction is informed by Jean Francois Lyotard’s discussionof the differend that occurs between phrase regimes in The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans.Georges Van Den Abeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3-31, and by StanleyFish’s discussion of the conflicts that occur between interpretive communities in Is there a Textin this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA. and London: HarvardUniversity Press, 1980), 158-173.6 Leon Howard, Herman Melville: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 15.

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elaborate descriptions of the “blushing damsels” of Lansingburgh (193). Thesedescriptions are supplemented with allusions to the sort of romantic verse onemight recite in company, or address privately to a woman during courtship,including most prominently, ten lines from Campbell’s “Pleasures of Hope”and fourteen lines from Coleridge’s “Genevieve.” The narrator presents thepoetic allusions to authorize his claim to be the village beau. However, whenread in the light of the second fragment, they function as parody, exposingthe narrator’s pretensions for what they are, a construction of literary tropes, adiscursive projection that veils a more mundane reality.

The second fragment begins with a series of cues that informs readers ofthe extent to which the discourse of romanticism influences the narrator’s per-ception and narrative presentation of events. In the opening sentence, the nar-rator flings his ancient Greek lexicon across the room and, like Wordsworth’sspeaker in “The Tables Turned,” quits his books in search of knowledgethrough experience, abandoning his study in order to “promenade” along thebanks of the Hudson, where he is “soon lost in revery, and up to the lips insentiment” (NN PT 197). That this movement from the study into nature ismeant to symbolize an exchange of one set of discursive terms for anotheris made clear when the narrator suddenly receives a letter—“an elegant little,rose-coloured, lavender-scented billet-doux”—from an admirer who identifiesherself only as “Inamorata” (197). Although Melville presents this missive inthe standard form of a romantic love-letter (even down to having it sealedwith “a heart, transfixed with an arrow”), its language ironically hints at theextent to which the narrator’s reading of popular romantic literature informshis perception of events.

“Gentle Sir—If my fancy has painted you in genuine colors, you will on

receipt of this, incontinently follow the bearer where she will leadyou.

INAMORATA.”

The presumption that the narrator will follow “incontinently” slyly hints at thenarrator’s gullibility, but his own doubting juxtaposes the romantic sentimentwith common-sense rationalism. “The deuce I will!” he initially exclaims uponreading Inamorata’s invitation to “follow the bearer” (197). But immediately,he talks himself out of this suspicion through an analysis of the “femininelydelicate” handwriting, which he “could have sworn was a woman’s.” However,the hopeful conclusion he draws from this analysis—“Is it possible . . . the daysof romance are revived?”—is balanced by an allusion to Edmund Burke thatserves as a skeptical counterpoint to his romantic enthusiasm—“No, ‘The days

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of chivalry are over!’ says Burke” (197). At the moment when the narrator ispoised to let his fantasies run away with him, Burke is dropped as an anchorfor readers’ critical perception of the narration that follows. And, in retrospect,the allusion undermines the narrator’s presentation of himself as the villagebeau in the first fragment.

The narrator’s pursuit of Inamorata’s messenger quickly becomes acomic play on his earlier description of the varied gaits he affects when hewalks down the Broadway of his village. The messenger alternately quickensand lessens her pace so as to maintain “a uniform distance” between them,ultimately causing the narrator to break into an all-out sprint, “plunging aheadlike an infuriated steed,” and then stop short abruptly, cursing with frustration(NN PT 198). This comic reversal of the narrator’s earlier pretensions parodiesthe gothic scenarios one finds in Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho or Byron’sManfred. In the parody’s descriptive passages, Inamorata’s messenger takesthe narrator out past the suburbs of Lansingburgh through a wooded grove,to a house that “bore the appearance of a country villa; although its plainexterior showed none of those fantastic devices which usually adorn theelegant chateaux” (200). The language of these passages clearly is derivedfrom Melville’s reading of popular romantic literature, evidenced by the poetryhe quotes in the first fragment. To make sure readers recall the influencethis literature has had on the narrator’s perception of events, Melville hasthe narrator’s doubts return. This time, however, they are not accompaniedby the rational skepticism of Burke but by his over-stimulated imagination.The gothic atmosphere of the wooded grove they pass through en route tohis rendezvous with Inamorata “gave a darkening hue to my imaginings,” andwith “the fictions of the nursery” filling his mind, he is about to “turn andflee,” when he suddenly clutches Inamorata’s letter to his breast. Ironically, it isher “romantic summons” which helps him dismiss “the absurd conceits whichinfested my brain” (200). That the letter figures prominently among thoseconceits is a fact lost on him, if not on Melville’s readers. Reintroducing theletter at this point in the narrative helps readers sustain a critical perspectiveon the narrator’s presentation of events.

As I have argued, that presentation is governed by the conventions ofliterary romanticism established in the first “Fragment” through the narrator’sdescriptions of three of the fairest of the “blushing damsels” of Lansingburgh.With the second of these women, the narrator invokes this discursive contextdirectly when he addresses his “dear friend M—,” to whom the “Fragments”are written as a letter, on how to read the description that follows. “Pour downwhole floods of sparkling champaigne, my dear M—, until your brain growsgiddy with emotion; con over the latter portion of the 1st Canto of Childe



Harold, and ransack your intellectual repository for the liveliest visions of theFairy Land, and you will be in a measure prepared to relish the epicureanbanquet I shall spread” (NN PT 194). The intellectual repository Melvillerefers to is one filled with the books that informed romanticism in Britain,Europe, and America. Identifying the quotations from Congreve and Akensideputs two of these books back on the shelf, helping to bring into sharperfocus the critical perspective essential for appreciating the humor of the story’sconclusion.

The conclusion is set in an apartment decorated “in a style of Easternsplendor” that anticipates Melville’s descriptions of the “semi-public placeof opulent entertainment” that Redburn and Harry Bolton visit during theirmysterious night in London.7 The description of this room adds to our senseof the distance between the narrator’s hyperbole and the reality it describes,a distance that increases as the narrator shifts his focus from the room’sfurnishings to its occupant, Inamorata. The first sentence of the paragraphdescribing Inamorata presents her in a pose stereotypical of romantic paintingsand engravings done in an Orientalist style, and it is punctuated by yet anotherquotation, this one taken from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

When I first obtained a glimpse of this lovely being, she layreclining upon an ottoman; in one hand holding a lute, and withthe other lost in the profusion of her silken tresses, she supported herhead.—I could not refrain from recalling the passionate exclamationof Romeo:

“See how she leans her cheek upon her hand;Oh! that I were a glove upon that hand,That I might kiss that cheek!” (NN PT 202)

This last passage again reminds us of the narrator’s deployment of conventionalromantic imagery to heighten readers’ anticipation of the consummation of hisaffair with Inamorata. But when the narrator is finally led before her, he stands“mute, admiring and bewildered in her presence” (203).

His muteness foreshadows hers, and in a manner that keeps our atten-tion focused on his romantic rhetoric. For the narrator recovers his “self-possession” only by falling back on the conventions of romantic discoursehe has assimilated from his reading. He advances “en cavalier, and gracefullysinking on one knee,” exclaims “‘Here do I prostrate myself, thou sweetDivinity, and kneel at the shrine of thy peerless charms!’” (203). When she

7 Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G.Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The NewberryLibrary, 1969), 228.



says nothing in reply, he seizes her hand and exclaims “‘Fair mortal! . . . I feelmy passion is requited: but, seal it with thy own sweet voice, or I shall expire inuncertainty!’” (204). His asking to seal their love not with a kiss but with hervoice shows he is more interested in a rhetorical exchange than an exchangeof sexual favors. Yet Inamorata remains silent; however, Melville records thefollowing denouement:

I held her from me, and looking in her face, I met the same impas-sioned gaze; her lips moved—my senses ached with the intensity withwhich I listened,—all was still,—they uttered no sound; I flung herfrom me, even though she clung to my vesture, and with a wild cry ofagony I burst from the apartment!—she was dumb! Great God, shewas dumb! DUMB AND DEAF! (204)

While on its surface, the story’s conclusion approaches the sort of miso-gynistic joke that says of women, “Your lips are moving, but you’re notsaying anything,” the deliberate manner in which Melville directs readers’attention back to the narrator’s overblown rhetoric makes his rhetorical pos-turing, not women, the butt of the joke.8 Inamorata’s inability to respondto the narrator’s high romantic rhetoric, even as she remains a figure ofdesire (with her “impassioned gaze” and desperate attempt to cling to him),indicates the romantic movement’s failure to propose an alternative to thecultural order of things it ostensibly challenged. If, as Robert Milder hasargued, Polynesia gave Melville “the permanent sense of an alternative psy-chosocial organization” which served as “a touchstone for his sexual andcultural critique of contemporary America,” then Inamorata’s muteness canhelp us see his early recognition of the absence of such an alternative withinAmerica.9

Unlike popular satires of courtship such as Royall Tyler’s The Contrast,Thomas Green Fessenden’s “The Country Lovers,” or Washington Irving’s“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Melville’s “Fragments from a Writing Desk”does not lampoon the excesses of romanticism so as to affirm a pastoral ideal ofrural domestic bliss. Instead, the narrative functions through negation, subtlyundermining the narrator’s rhetoric without returning us to a recognizablesocial and cultural environment. Because of this strategy of negation, Melville’sparody becomes clearer the closer we get to his sources. Identifying the

8 Commenting generally about Melville’s use of such naıve narrators in his short fiction, R. BruceBickley, Jr. observes that “Although Melville’s narrators may partially realize their own limitations,inadequacies, or foolishness, the point is that the last laugh, and the larger perception, are generallyleft to the reader”; see The Method of Melville’s Short Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,1975), 8.9 Robert Milder, “Circling Melville,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 52.4 (March, 1998), 534.



quotations from Congreve and Akenside can help us better understand hisironic stance toward his narrator and his explicit focus on the use of literaturein courtship. Both quotations occur in paragraphs that describe the “blushingdamsels” of Lansingburgh. The first is as follows:

Every man who is gifted with the least particle of imagination, mustin some of his reveries have conjured up from the realms of fancy, abeing bright and beautiful beyond every thing he had ever beforeapprehended, whose main and distinguishing attribute invariablyproves to be a form the indiscribable [sic] loveliness of which seemsto,

——“Sail in liquid light,And float on seas of bliss.” (NN PT 194)

The passage is taken from Act 2, scene 2 of William Congreve’s The MourningBride, with some slight variation. Congreve’s line reads “Where I shall swimin liquid light and float on seas of bliss.” The context adds to Melville’s irony,for Congreve’s speaker is not describing the imagination but the afterlife. Thepassage is lifted from Almeira’s speech before the tomb of Anselmo in whichshe invokes the peace to come when “Death, grim death, will fold me in hisleaden arms.” In Congreve’s speech, ideal love is attained only in death, whenthe spirit is freed from the mortal chains of flesh. Melville seems aware of this,even as his narrator is not; for the irony of the narrator’s misappropriationof this line suits perfectly the conclusion of the second fragment in thediptych, in which his romantic ideal of love pales in comparison with itsconsummation.

Melville’s use of these lines from The Mourning Bride (1697) is thus farthe only documented evidence we have of his exposure to English playwrightWilliam Congreve (1670-1729). Congreve is not listed in Mary K. Bercaw’sMelville’s Sources, and Merton M. Sealts Jr. makes only tantalizing reference toCongreve as being listed among the dramatists included in the Mermaid Seriesof plays, some volumes of which Melville is known to have read during hislast years.10 Now that it has been verified that Congreve is in fact an authorMelville quotes, scholars should be on the lookout for additional echoes ofCongreve in Melville’s works. As further research is done on Melville’s sources,and as additional volumes from his personal library surface, our understanding

10 Sealts cites Arthur Stedman’s report, in the introduction to his 1892 edition of Typee, that“during his last days [Melville] kept himself occupied ‘with readings in the Mermaid Series of oldplays, in which he took much pleasure’” (198). Although it is not known which numbers of theseries Melville had at hand, Sealts lists, “v. 11, William Congreve” as among the volumes in printprior to 1891.



of Congreve’s significance in Melville’s writings may increase. That he is amongthe authors cited in Melville’s first published work of fiction, and that he mayhave been among the last authors Melville read in his lifetime, suggests thatCongreve may be of greater significance than a passing reference in a minorpiece of prose might suggest. To establish that significance, however, willrequire further research into those periods of Melville’s life that have receivedless attention from scholars than the major phases of his career.

The second previously unidentified quotation can be linked to a vol-ume we know was in the Melville family household, and which also bearsdirectly on the influence of literature in courtship ritual. The quoted passageis given as part of the description of the third young woman from Lansing-burgh, and immediately precedes the much longer quotation from Coleridge’s“Genevieve.”

The cast of her physiognomy is singularly mild and amiable, and herwhole person is replete with every feminine grace. Her eyes,

“Effuse the mildness of their azure beam;” (NN PT 196)

The line is taken from Book 1 of The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) byBritish poet Mark Akenside (1721-1790), but again, with slight variation.Akenside’s line reads “Effuse the mildness of their azure dawn” (1.315). Andas with the Congreve quotation, placing this line from Akenside in its contextwithin The Pleasures of Imagination further clarifies Melville’s satiric intent.As the title of its concluding section indicates, Akenside’s poem is meantto demonstrate “The Pleasure and Benefit of an Improved and Well-directedImagination” by leading readers through a series of developmental stages thatillustrate the maturation of an awakening mind. Melville was likely awareof this didactic purpose because a substantial quotation from the poem’sconcluding section was included in Murray’s English Reader, Melville’s rhetorictextbook at the Albany Academy. The line he lifted from Akenside, though,was taken from an earlier section on “the pleasure of Beauty,” which precedesthe section in which the imagination becomes “Improved and Well-directed.”As deployed in the narrative, Melville’s allusion cuts against the grain of theinstructive purpose of Akenside’s poem.

Melville’s exposure to Akenside is easy to identify. He most probablyread his mother’s copy of The Pleasures of Imagination (New York: M’Dermutand Arden, 1813), which was presented to her during her courtship with AllanMelvill: it is inscribed to “Miss Maria Gansevoort from her friend A M” (Sealtsno. 8). It is also likely that The Pleasures of Imagination was not the onlyvolume from his mother’s library that Melville had before him as he com-posed “Fragments.” The editors of the Northwestern-Newberry Piazza Tales



speculate that the ten-line quotation from Thomas Campbell’s “The Pleasuresof Hope” (2.73-82), which the narrator cites when he extols the beauty of the“blushing damsels” of Lansingburgh, may be taken from “an edition ownedby Melville’s mother” (NN PT 623), The Pleasures of Hope and Other Poems(New York: Longworth, 1811). As the inscription makes clear, that volumewas also given to her by Allan during their courtship: “Miss Maria Gansevoortfrom her friend A M Albany 11 March 1814” (Sealts 162-63).11 Identifying asecond quotation culled from Maria Gansevoort’s keepsake books deepens ourunderstanding of the biographical basis for Melville’s critique of the ideal oflove promulgated in courtship via literature. His use of these mementoes—surely the more cherished because of his father’s untimely death—showsMelville, consciously or unconsciously, creating fiction that subverts marriageas an institutional cornerstone of American society.12

Identifying his sources for the quotations from Congreve and Akensidedeepens our understanding of the satiric method Melville refined in his laterwork. His ironic citation of verse is an early instance of the sort of “buriedjokes” John Bryant has identified as central to Tommo’s “rhetoric of deceit.”13

They can help us see how “Fragments from a Writing Desk” anticipatesthe subtle humor Melville wove into his first book, Typee, humor he wouldsubsequently have to expurgate from the American edition because it offendedthe sensibilities of the middle class audience whose values it satirized (Parker1.405-6, 440-43). Despite this reaction, courtship was a theme he returned towith increasing intensity in Moby-Dick and Pierre because of how it focusedattention on the disjunction between masculine desire and the moral codes ofrespectable society. “Fragments from a Writing Desk” marks the beginning ofa progression in Melville’s use of the discourse of romanticism to challengesatirically the normative social values of his middle-class reading audience,a progression that runs from Tommo’s mock-courtship of Fayaway after the

11 Allan Melvill and Maria Gansevoort were married in October 1814.12 Melville returned to this theme with a vengeance in his characterization of Pierre Glendenning’s“courteous lover-like adoration” of his mother as a sentiment comparable to the “inexpressibletenderness and attentiveness which . . . is cotemporary with the courtship, and precedes the finalbanns and the rite” of marriage, a sentiment that ultimately proves incestuously self-destructivein the narrative that follows. Pierre, or The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, andG. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The NewberryLibrary, 1971), 16.13 John Bryant, Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance, New Yorkand Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 172. For further evidence of Melville’s use of popularliterature in constructing his humor, see Bryant’s discussion of Melville’s deleted reference to theSunday School tract Little Henry and His Bearer in the Typee manuscript, 157-60.



fashion of “The Young Men’s Own Book,”14 to Ishmael and Queequeg’s con-summation of their friendship in Ch. 10, “A Bosom Friend,” to the tortureddilemma Pierre Glendenning faces in making his commitment to Isabel, despitehis engagement to Lucy Tartan. His use of sources in “Fragments” givesevidence of the early origins of his satire and shows the unity of his artisticvision from his earliest writings through his major novels.

14 Herman Melville, Typee, A Peep at Polynesian Life, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, andG. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The NewberryLibrary, 1968), 132. Melville here appropriates the title of a popular conduct book for women TheYoung Lady’s Own Book (Philadelphia: Key, Mielke & Biddle, 1832).


congreve and akenside: two poetic allusions in melville's “fragments from a writing desk”

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