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Melville's THE APPLE-TREETABLECorey Evan Thompson aa Ingleside, OntarioPublished online: 30 Mar 2010.

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Mobilitate viget viresque udquirit eundo; Parvu metu prirno, mox Sese atttolit in auras

4. Charles Dickens, The Uncommerical Traveller and Reprinted Piece. etc. (Oxford: Oxford

5 . Charles Dickens, The Mystery ofEdwin Drood (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996) 82-83. 6. Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood 3 1.

tngrediturque solo et caput inter nubile condit.

UP, 1987) 567.

Melville’s THE APPLE-TREE TABLE

Herman Melville’s role as an activist for female emancipation in mid- nineteenth-century America has gone largely unnoted by critics. In fact, many have implied that he directly contributed to the subordination of women by insinuating, with limited evidence, that he was abusive toward his wife, Eliz- abeth (Renker 123-50; Robertson-Lorant xi-xiii; Hardwick 5 1-52), and by describing the portrayal of women in his works as misogynistic (Adamson 26; Brown 160; Rollyson and Paddock 219-20). Contrary to such frequent yet largely unsubstantiated claims, Melville, in his 1856 short story “The Apple- Tree Table,” is an active voice in the call for women’s liberation from patriar- chal authority and, more specifically, from many of the ideals of domesticity that permeated mid-nineteenth-century American society. Although such an examination of only one of Melville’s stories will not fully exonerate him from the largely unjustified label of wife-beater or misogynist, it will provide critics further reason “to modify,” as Richard Chase has argued with regard to Melville’s diptych “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” ( 1855), “the commonly expressed idea that Melville’s writing displays no closely sympathetic understanding of women” (xi).

Stemming from the changing notions of the home that accompanied bur- geoning industrial America, there developed an ideal of domesticity, or “cult of true womanhood.” This new ideal, which was evident in the era’s women’s magazines and religious journals, provided a new view of women’s roles in society. As many have noted, this ideal identified certain fundamental virtues that “true” women possessed (Davidson et al. 302). Whereas men were believed to be naturally active, dominant, assertive, and materialistic, women served as their more refined counterparts. They “inherently” possessed such virtues as piety, submissiveness, and domesticity. “The Apple-Tree Table,” however, is rife with antipathy to many of the era’s traditional views regard- ing the domestic ideals imposed on women. Throughout the story, the narra- tor’s wife eschews many of the ideals of domesticity by portraying more mas- culine characteristics than her narrator-husband and by refusing to exhibit the

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supposedly inherent virtues prescribed by them. In doing so, the narrator’s wife becomes arguably the most progressive female character in the Melville canon.

The ideals of domesticity maintained that women had a particular propen- sity for religion. Pious women were expected to attend church and to perform church work on a daily basis. Such actions would demonstrate their devout reverence of God. During the five days over which the story occurs (the five days commence on pages 378, 385, 390, 393, and 395), however, the narra- tor’s wife does not attend a sermon, nor does she ever refer to the scripture, which is also in opposition to the cult’s requirements, as women were expect- ed to be handmaids to the Bible. In fact, other than the wife’s hope that her children are all “good Christians” (Melville 387), which is expressed in a more colloquial than formally religious tone, there is no explicit reference to formal religion in the story. With regard to the narrator’s wife, then, piety is only notable by its absence.

It is ironic that piety was regarded as the source of women’s strength because it also provided justification for the virtue of submissiveness. Pious women who attended church regularly, as required, would frequently hear ser- mons providing biblical justification for their need to be submissive. Many passages, such as Ephesians 5.22-23, state this explicitly: “Wives, be in sub- jection unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is head of the church, being himself the saviour of the body.” The narrator’s wife, however, heeds no such command. She is the furthest thing from submissive, in fact, as she is “not wanting in firmness and energy” (381) and is dominant over her husband and children: she frequently scolds them (385-86), addresses them in a “frightful business-like manner” (386), and has a propensity toward violence, which is a dominant and there- fore masculine trait, as she threatens to “whip that [ticking] out of [the table]” (392).

Stemming from piety and submissiveness, domesticity was also an integral component of the cult of true womanhood. As part of their domestic role, women were expected to perform household work joyfully and to provide comfort and cheer to everyone who lived in and entered their homes. Yet, the narrator’s wife does not perform any housework over the course of the story. The closest she comes is when she states that she wishes to have the titular table waxed (392). Immediately following this remark, however, she orders her housemaid, Biddy, to get wax and a brush and to give the table a “vigorous manipulation” (392). Biddy is also responsible for all other household chores, as she sets the table for the family’s dinner and carries the dishes back to the kitchen, where she will be responsible for their washing (385-86). It is also dif- ficult to imagine that the wife’s house would be filled with the requisite com- fort and cheer. She certainly makes no serious attempt to create such ambience,

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as she frequently speaks “indignantly” (382, 390), “contemptuously” (386), with “high displeasure” (391), and refers to her family as a group of “fools” (395).

Domesticity also required women to avoid the pleasures and values of “a materialistic society” (Welter 38). Yet, the narrator’s wife is solely interested in material possessions. After the narrator discovers the “dingy and dusty table” (379) and brings it down from the garret and into the cedar parlor, his wife takes “little interest” in it because it is not an ostentatious piece of furni- ture. In fact, “[slhe disrelished the idea of so unfashionable and indigent-look- ing a stranger as the table intruding into the polished society of more pros- perous furniture” (38 1). After the narrator has the table appraised and refurbished at the cabinetmaker’s shop, however, her attitude toward it alters substantially. Once the table is “varnished over, bright as a guinea” and sub- sequently brought back home, the wife sees its natural beauty and only then places it in “an honorable position” in the cedar parlor (381).

As the 1860s approached, there were many forces at work that impelled women to change: “The movements for social reform, westward migration, missionary activity, utopian communities, industrialism, the Civil War-all called forth responses from woman which differed from those she was trained to believe were hers by nature and divine decree” (Welter 40-41). It is surely more than a coincidence that the composition and publication of “The Apple- Tree Table” coincided with these events. Melville was well aware, as Ann Douglas and Laurie Robertson-Lorant have noted, that his American reading public consisted largely of middle-class women (294; 137), those who were most familiar with and affected by the cult of true womanhood. It is possible that Melville wrote “The Apple-Tree Table” for his female audience, who would have possibly noticed the story’s inverted domestic world. It is all the more plausible that this was Melville’s intention, as he, through the narrator’s voice, directly refers to his female readers in the story’s concluding paragraph (397). By presenting a liberal female character who eschews the ideals of domesticity, Melville demonstrates his knowledge of and support for the emerging cultural shift from the cult’s ‘‘true’’ woman to the less domestic and somewhat liberated “new” woman that began to emerge in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

-COREY EVAN THOMPSON, Ingleside, Ontario

WORKS CITED

Adamson, Joseph. Melville, Shame, and the Evil Eye. Albany: SUNY P, 1997. Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America. Berke-

Chase, Richard. Introduction. Herman Melville: Selected Tales and Poems. 1950. Ed. Richard ley: U of California P, 1990.

Chase. New York: Holt. 1968. v-xix.

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Davidson, James West, et al. Nation of Nations: A Concise History of the American Republic.

Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culrure. 1977. New York: Knopf, 1978. Hardwick. Elizabeth. Herman Melville. New York: Viking, 2000. Melville, Herman. “The Apple-Tree Table.” 1856. The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces,

Renker. Elizabeth. “Herman Melville, Wife Beating, and the Written Page.” American Literature

Robertson-Lorant, Laurie. Herman Melville: A Biography. 1996. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P,

Rollyson, Carl, and Lisa Paddock. Herman Melville A to Z: The EsJential Reference to His Life

Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens:

New York: Overture, 1996.

1839-1860. Ed. Harrison Hayford et al. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1987.378-97.

66 ( 1 994): 123-50.

1998.

and Work. New York: Checkmark, 2001.

Ohio UP, 1976.

Twain’s ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

Huck Finn’s much-discussed “moral crises’’ in chapters 16 and 31 of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are conventionally regarded as climactic moments in the ongoing drama of his moral growth. Underwriting such read- ings is the notion that they reveal Huck’s dynamic character, his dawning recognition of Jim’s humanity and his gradual rejection of his society’s racism. But running beneath and opposing this narrative of Huck’s moral growth is a counternarrative of moral backsliding, within which Huck persists in denying the legitimacy of his relationship with Jim; he continues, in other words, to see Jim as a “nigger” and himself as, even worse, a “nigger-stealer.”

The first tugs of Huck’s “shore-trained” conscience in chapter 16 immedi- ately follow his abject apology to Jim at the end of chapter 15, perhaps giving the lie to his claim that he “waren’t ever sony for it afterwards” (105). As Huck begins to contemplate betraying Jim, we see that his “conscience” is the voice of his wounded white psyche; Jim has called him “trash,” and Huck has “hurnble[d himself] to a nigger” (1051, and whatever momentary guilt he may have felt for making a fool of Jim is quickly replaced by an urge to deny the legitimacy of their relationship, to relocate Jim “below” him, reassert his obligations to “poor Miss Watson” (124) and the white community, and there- by restore his own self-esteem. After Jim’s lecture on true friendship, Huck feels “mean” (105) for making Jim feel bad; one day and several pages later, he feels “mean” (124) for making Jim happy:

I got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most wished I was dead. [. . .] Every time he danced around and says. “Dah’s Cairo!” it went through me like a shot, and I thought if it was Cairo I reckoned I would die of miser- ableness. ( 1 24)

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