Grief Taboo in American Literature

Loss and Prolonged Adolescence in Twain, Melville, and Hemingway

Pamela A. Boker

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9780814786192
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

In this feminist rereading, Pamela A. Boker examines the prolonged adolescence of the American male in the works of three quintessential American male authors, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway, through a highly original psychoanalytic inquiry. Challenging conventional interpretations, Boker argues that failing to mourn loss and repressing one's true emotions do not demonstrate a heroic capacity, but rather, a damaging inability to work through psychological wounds that have not healed.

Boker locates in the lives and fiction of Melville, Twain, and Hemingway the suicidal orphan, the adolescent simultaneously seeking masculine maturity and escaping from it. She reveals a world of perpetual adolescence, repressed grief, and repudiation of feminine identification. All three writers lacked intimate relationships with their fathers and remained conflicted emotionally, a condition which profoundly influenced their creative work.

In Melville's life and work, readers encounter aggressive and guilt ridden characters, trapped in infantile and early adolescent development. Similarly, Mark Twain enlisted humor and nostalgic fantasies of an ideal past in his avoidance of difficult emotions. Silent references and vague allusions to painful feelings proliferate the fiction of Hemingway. In seeking out the repressed vulnerability of the tough guy in American literature, Boker finds it where it is most vigorously denied.

1. “Circle-Sailing”: The Eternal Return of Tabooed Grief in Melville’s Moby-Dick

Then there is the matter of my mother’s abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.

—Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off it is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has “got over it.” But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.

—C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to Southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that is not the game he would be after. How long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot one’s self.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick provides an ideal starting point for my investigation of the theme of tabooed, or unresolved grief in American literature. It also helps to establish the usefulness of object relations and feminist psychoanalytic theory in illuminating the novel in this fundamentally new way. The novel functions so well toward these ends, partly because it explores with sophistication and complexity the literary and psychoanalytic issues that will be taken up again in even greater depth in the fiction of Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, and partly because many of the claims that this study will make about the repression of grief in American literature and the vicissitudes of the American orphan-hero’s separation-individuation process have already been glimpsed by Melville’s critics in this most canonical of American novels; consequently, their attention allows me to focus upon the exemplary, or representative, qualities of these thematic claims.

The self-willed American orphan, who both embraces his independent orphan status, and at the same time mourns over his isolation and essential state of deprivation and loss, makes a striking appearance in this epic American novel. Ishmael’s heroic stature in the novel is defined by his emotional posture as an orphan insofar as it is predicated upon a valiant, yet ultimately unresolved, struggle with a fundamental ambivalence—an ambivalence created by the author’s repression of grief and inability to mourn openly. Throughout Moby-Dick the American orphan repeatedly acts out his conflicted desire, alternately to cling to and to distance himself from his personal past: to regress to a state of comforting dependency and yet, at the same time, to break away toward radical autonomy. This central crisis, in what may be called the young male’s separation-individuation process, becomes a major concern for the fictional heroes of Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway as well. Although for different reasons, these three authors were unable to conceive of an adequate resolution to their heroes’ ambivalence, which disposed the American orphan hero toward a permanent state of arrested development, and condemned him to an endless struggle with his adolescent conflict, in which he perpetually straddles the borderline between maturity and immaturity.

Moby-Dick also lends itself to a demonstration of how the absent, or implied, figure of the mother, and the son’s early relationship with her, play a central and pervasive role in the imaginative construction of what has previously been considered to be a masculine text. Despite her exclusion as a principal character in American fiction, the mother/woman occupies a prominent thematic place in the aetiology of the orphan hero’s psychic drama. She is the repressed object of desire that continually returns, and only by evoking her symbolic presence can the American male author work through his conflicted grief in relation to her. Whether the influence she exerts is positive or negative, at any one point in the young male protagonist’s psychological drama, to omit her is to risk underestimating the rich literary and psychoanalytic resources of the author’s creative faculties. By reinstating her presence and influence within the thematic and psychological context of Melville’s narrative, I hope to reinvigorate the novel as a feminist text, and, in doing so, recover the book for many of these essentially “lost” readers.

Melville’s fixation, in Moby-Dick, on the theme of clinging versus distancing, or attachment versus loss, which the fiction of Twain and Hemingway also play out in various ways, can be traced, within the novel, to a fundamental experience of early deprivation and loss that directly affects not only the content but the narrative style of the American writer’s fiction of tabooed grief. Melville, like Twain and Hemingway, used logocentric, patriarchal reasoning, or as Melville wrote in his novel Pierre; or, the Ambiguities, “all-stretchable philosophy,”¹ to seek conciliatory patterns that transcend personal sorrow, and to make sense of their experiences of loss, deprivation, and disappointment. Yet, their rationalizations served merely to give a narrative and dramatic form to their grief, rarely to resolve it. Consequently, their fictions as a whole became monuments to their chronic mourning and unresolved grief.

In developmental psychology the conflict of clinging versus distancing is the dominant crisis belonging to what is called the “rapprochement phase” of psychic growth, which occurs somewhere between the ages of one and three years.² It is the time when the child longs to explore his or her emerging autonomy and freedom, yet only within the safe assurance that the child’s mother, or some other familiar and comforting object, is able to provide. When this feeling of connection is lost or suddenly disappears, the frightened child feels as though its whole inner world is dissolving, as though it is being abandoned, with emotional and physical rescue nowhere in sight. According to Daniel N. Stern, “[separation loss (even momentary) is probably the most anguishing experience” a child can have. The primary caregiver, Stern explains, “is a psychological oxygen, without which, within seconds, the child experiences panic. And part of the panic of separation is most likely a feeling of becoming fragmented, of losing boundaries, of disappearing into a lonely, empty infinity.”³ From the point of view of the child, Stern contends, such isolation and abandonment feel as if the self is “dissolving like grains of salt in the ocean of space” (98). The anxiety of separation, Stern also maintains, does not change significantly when one becomes an adult: “The separation reaction is basic to us all and may not change much from the age of twelve months till death” (99).

In both its main plot and its many multiple sub-plots, Moby-Dick dramatizes the desolating consequences of abandonment and isolation. Young Pip’s abandonment upon the broad and vast “open sea,” which Melville describes as an experience of “intolerable” and “awful lonesomeness,” is but a central moment in an entire novel of isolation and deprivation that resonates outward to envelop the tragic story of the fated Pequod and its crew.⁴ The repetitious sections on the anatomy of the whale that dissolve into unresolvable philosophical speculation, and the compulsive repetitions of variations on the Pequod’s story through the gams, all point to a problem of rapprochement-phase ambivalence that Melville was compelled to deal with repeatedly in the novel, yet could not seem to resolve. Longing for protection and escaping from confinement simultaneously lead Ahab and Ishmael to traverse backwards and forwards across this psychic terrain, but this strategy also holds the authorial figure, Melville himself, in a constant position of dual possibilities.

Specifically, Melville’s affixed gaze on the “good” nurturing mother and the “bad” smothering and disappointing mother, like the whale that cannot fuse the two distinct views of reality captured separately by each eye,⁵ became something of a primal scene that he could not get beyond in the book; thus, the novel as a whole takes shape as an anatomy of a fixation in narrative form. Through the dramatization of this fundamental conflict in the novel’s plot, exposition, and characterizations, Melville draws the reader into his own efforts on behalf of Ishmael and Ahab either to repair, work through, or repudiate the anger and grief that he feels toward the ambivalently loved good/bad mother—which is acted out on several different levels in the novel. Hence, he allows us to participate regressively in his ongoing struggle with a primary ambivalence, in effect encouraging us, by perpetually reaching out to us and hectoring us, to engage in a kind of ego-merging with the author’s own creative impulse in the book. In this way the rapprochement theme that thrives on Melville’s own psycho-philosophical indeterminacy informs the psychological power that he masterfully manages to sustain throughout the book.

In the essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” written during the composition of Moby-Dick, Melville confesses that the drive toward radical separation and autonomy—toward orphanhood—was an important motivating force in his conception of the novel. “Would that all excellent books were foundlings, without father or mother,” he writes, “that so it might be, we could glorify them, without including their ostensible authors.”⁶ Melville admits that what he aspired to as a writer was complete “originality,” a radical break with one’s personal, historical, and literary past.⁷ It is “better to fail in originality,” Melville proposes, “than to succeed in imitation.” Like a child seeking a new form of empowerment through an assertion of his or her emerging sense of autonomy, Melville senses that true greatness can be achieved only through separation and isolation.⁸ According to Leo Bersani, Melville, in Moby-Dick, participates in a nineteenth-century American “experience of an impossible dream: that of a literature without debts, which would owe nothing to the past.” Bersani then draws an allegorical parallel between America and the Pequod, claiming that: “by insisting on the Pequod’s nearly total break with the land and the past, Melville simultaneously evokes the origins of America as a house for exiles from everywhere and makes those origins absolute. That is, he evokes the possibility of exile as a wholly new beginning and brutally deprives it of the comforting notion of loss.”⁹

Melville’s orphan-hero Ishmael is, like Melville himself, a self-willed orphan. When Ishmael begins his narrative with the injunction, “Call me Ishmael,” he too is expressing a willful desire to assume an orphan identity as the disinherited son (3). Having no father or mother, Ishmael is a “loose-fish” that has been “abandoned . . . upon the seas of life” (396–97). He will forge an original self out of his complete isolation, as he forges the narrative of Moby-Dick out of his experience of abandonment on the sea when the Pequod and its crew sinks and disappears into the “closing vortex” of the black ocean (573). For both Melville and his narrator, then, Moby-Dick can be understood as an act of mourning, a product of greatness resulting from the grief of loss, separation, and isolation. Indeed, as Melville tells us by way of Ahab’s final epiphany: “my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief” (571). Ahab’s greatness, however, like Melville’s aspirations for the greatness of his novel, lies not in the expression of grief from loss but in the willful denial of grief; in, as Bersani observes, the “brutal” deprivation of the “comforting notion of loss.”¹⁰

What Melville is advocating for both himself and for Ahab is to prolong the mourning process indefinitely by displacing one’s grief from abandonment and isolation into a motivating force that drives one on to greatness. Ahab, Melville informs us, was abandoned by a “crazy, widowed mother, who died when he was only a twelvemonth [sic] old” (79). It is perhaps possible, and indeed Melville seems to imply, that Ahab’s mother was “crazy” from grief at having been made a widow. As John Bowlby or D. W. Winnicott might suggest, a mother preoccupied with her own grief would have functioned as a poor mirroring mother to her newborn infant.¹¹ The feeling of deprivation and abandonment that the infant Ahab would have felt from his grief-distracted mother is confirmed when she dies and abandons him forever. Throughout Ahab’s life at sea, which he began as a “boy-harpooner of eighteen” (543), he carried within him the emotional pain of his “privation”:

forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! . . . When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without—oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! (543)

One may well assume from this that Ahab channeled his repressed grief from maternal abandonment into a desperate, aggressive rage against the outwardly projected image of his abandoning, persecuting “bad mother”—Mother Nature, the sea, and their concomitant, the white-whale breast of Moby Dick.¹² Given the tragic nature of Ahab’s mother-infant relationship, Ishmael speaks truly when he intuits that “all the anguish” of Ahab’s “present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe” (463–64).

If, however unconsciously, Melville was acting out an unresolved rapprochement-phase conflict in the novel, then it becomes significant that the mother, at this stage of development, is a figure of great ambivalence to the child, who both longs for her comforting protection and seeks to escape from her smothering confinement.¹³ To the child she is the prototype of all the good and evil in the world. It sometimes happens, however, as in the case of Ahab, that the trauma of maternal abandonment transforms the mother into a predominantly bad object. In order to preserve the image of the “good mother,” the child internalizes the aggressive or persecuting image of the “bad mother,” which results in a masochistic personality structure.¹⁴ The psychological motive for Ahab’s early integration and outward projection of the “bad mother” was to preserve the untainted image of the “good,” nurturing mother. Indeed, so split off from Ahab’s projective conception of an evil reality has the good or “sweet mother” become, that he “knowest not how” he came to be, and hence concludes that he is “unbegotten” (508).

The aggression toward the “bad mother,” that is internalized in order to retain the uncorrupted image of the desired “good mother,” may then take one of two courses. It may remain internalized and take the form of persecutory, destructive attacks against the self, leading ultimately to suicidal fantasies. Or, it may be projected outward onto the external world—onto God and nature. In the latter case, God and nature become narcissistic mirror images of the sinful blackness within the self—external objects that may then be attacked or hated. The guilt from Ahab’s early hatred and rage toward his mother results in a fear of retaliatory persecution from the threatening external object, which is now identified as the locus of absolute evil, and is itself a remnant of the “bad” pregenital mother. As some critics already have suggested, to feel cursed and persecuted by Moby Dick, as Ahab does, is to suffer the malevolent attacks of his own hatred and aggression that are first projected onto the bad object and later turned upon himself.¹⁵ Within this sado-masochistic dynamic, the white whale is, for Ahab, both the agent and the instrument of evil.

Through Ishmael’s analytical musings on Ahab’s “malady,” Melville makes it clear that, for the Pequod’s captain, the loss of Ahab’s leg symbolizes all the “intellectual and spiritual exasperations” and “woes” he has suffered in his life (184). When Moby Dick bites off Ahab’s leg, Ahab takes it as an opportunity to project his repressed grief and outward aggression onto a single, tangible object: “ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he’s been a kind of moody—desperate moody, and savage sometimes” (79). This dynamic of projection, and the metaphorical displacement of intangible and ineffable psychological issues onto tangible, symbolic objects, parallel Melville’s sweeping projective displacement in the novel of an inner ineffable ambivalence onto philosophical indeterminacy. By pondering intellectually and attempting to understand rationally his pressing and unresolved psychological issues, Melville, like Ahab, was, to some extent, able to transcend his own personal suffering.

In the past, Melville’s Freudian critics have viewed the white whale as a symbol of the father, interpreting Ahab’s ivory leg as an emblem of oedipal castration. If Ahab’s leg is indeed a phallus, however, it is one that belongs equally to the devouring, “bad” phallic mother. Ahab’s artificial limb is a memorial to the grief from loss that was denied expression and replaced by his monomaniacal hatred and rage against a persecuting, malignant object of evil. Yet, below the stump where Ahab’s leg ends, as he confesses to the carpenter, he is still sensible, though only vaguely, of his lost wholeness. Accordingly, this phantom leg that Ahab still feels is the absent, yet still present, mother who was, and is, the source of all his unconscious loving desires and all-too-conscious pres...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. “Circle-Sailing”: The Eternal Return of Tabooed Grief in Melville’s Moby-Dick
• 2. “My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It”: Deprivation-Grief and the Making of an American Humorist
• 3. “Blessed are they that mourn, for they— they—”:Repressed Grief and Pathological Mourning in Mark Twain’s Fiction
• 4. Huckleberry Finn’s Anti-Oedipus Complex: Father-Loss and Mother-Hunger in the Great American Novel
• 5. The Shaping of Hemingway’s Art of Repressed Grief: Mother-Loss and Father-Hunger from In Our Time to Winner Take Nothing
• 6. “Ether in the Brain”: Blunting the Edges of Perception in Hemingway’s Middle Period
• 7. Grief Hoarders and “Beat-Up Old Bastards”: Hemingway’s Bittersweet Taste of Nostalgia
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index