Radical Freelance, Esq. |
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Riffs William Gibson, USN Augustus Ely Silliman |
The Philosophers of Foufouville
(New York: G. W. Carleton, 1868)
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new! cabbage cameos |
| Miss Serena Minerva Griffin on "The Co-Relation of the Sexes" and
Melville's Urania on "co-relatives" A romantically inclined feminist and prolific diarist, "Miss Minerva" in The Philosophers of Foufouville occupies much of her time at Harmony Hall writing notes for a planned lecture on "The Co-Relation of the Sexes." Minerva's favorite subject is that of Urania in Melville's poem "After the Pleasure Party." Urania is a female astronomer who lately (approaching middle age, it would seem) has been stung by Love but "feels herself," as William H. Shurr observes, "too old or too aloof" for romance (The Mystery of Iniquity [University Press of Kentucky, 1972], 160). A form of the hyphenated word in Minerva's title, Co-Relation, occurs twice at a crucial and revealing moment in Melville's poem. Tormented by the power of human sexuality, Urania laments the physical divisions in Nature that limit human beings to one sexual identity, male or female: Could I remake me! or set free This sexless bound in sex, then plunge Deeper than Sappho,in a lunge Piercing Pan's paramount mystery! For, Nature, in no shallow surge Against thee either sex may urge, Why hast thou made us but in halves― Co-relatives? This makes us slaves. If these co-relatives never meet Selfhood itself seems incomplete. And such the dicing of blind fate Few matching halves here meet and mate. What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder The human integral clove asunder And shied the fractions through life's gate? [lines 80-94, quoted from "After the Pleasure Party" as printed in Melville's Tales, Poems, and Other Writings, ed. John Bryant (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 531-532.] |
In the passage quoted above, Melville's Urania glosses the discussion of Love in Plato's Symposium, in particular the story of the androgyne as told by Aristophanes. As John Bryant explains in his notes to "After the Pleasure Party" (Tales, Poems, and Other Writings, p. 202), "Plato's discourse on love in the Symposium (alluded to in ll. 84-94) is based on the creation myth in which human souls are originally attached in pairs (of all sexual combinations) but then cataclysmically separated at birth so that the split halves spend their earthly lives hoping to match up again with their former soul mates."
from
Plato's
Symposium (trans. Benjamin Jowett)
...the original human nature
was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as
they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman,
and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double
nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word
"Androgynous" is only preserved as a term of reproach.
In The Philosophers of Foufouville, "Miss Minerva" Griffin echoes the complaint of Melville's Urania. Like Melville's Urania, Minerva alludes to the discourse on love in Plato's Symposium, in a dialogue with Professor Nicholas Malpest that has specific reference to the problem of divided genders or "halves" that too seldom meet. In conversation with Malpest (to whom Minerva feels an unrequited attraction, early in the narrative), Minerva summarizes the myth of the androgyne in Plato's Symposium as follows:
"I believe," said Miss Minerva, "it was a Greek philosopher who gave utterance to that beautiful idea of the duality of the soul,―that each man and woman possesses but the half of one, and hence each is constantly seeking its mate."
"I am afraid," said the professor, "that the right halves don't often come together."
"Alas! it is too true," replied the lady; "and the reason is because, in obedience to the requirements of puritanical laws,―
"'Woman still must veil the shrine
Where feeling hides Love's fire divine.'
[slightly misquoting Frances Osgood's "Ah! Woman Still" in which
"feeling feeds the fire divine"]
But I scorn to be shackled by public opinion; I am above the petty prejudices of the age. Nature is my guide. Do you not agree with me that society requires a radical change?" (The Philosophers of Foufouville, p. 38)
Minerva in The Philosophers of Foufouville accepts the duality of divided genders according to Nature as a "beautiful idea." She would leave Nature be and transform society, whereas Melville's Urania wishes to radically change Nature, to make herself sexless and therefore impervious to the humiliating sway of sexual urges. Seeking divine empowerment to rise above her sexuality, Urania in "After the Pleasure Party" invokes the Roman goddess of wisdom and war...
Minerva, the "Transcender" (line 140). But Urania fails to find any lasting consolation since gender divisions persist in the natural world and Amor will not be disrespected. Melville's Urania appeals to Minerva as the "arm'd Virgin" (line132) and "Helmeted woman" (134). In visual representations, Minerva's helmet was frequently adorned with the figure of the gryphon or griffin―hence the appropriateness of Minerva's surname Griffin in The Philosophers of Foufouville.
C Observe if you please the very close verbal parallel between Urania's and Minerva's modes of introducing the problem of spliced genders with the word but:
| "but in halves," according to Melville's Urania in "After the Pleasure Party"; |
| "but the half of one" according to Radical Freelance's Minerva Griffin. |
Also, the conjunction of Minerva with a form of serene in the name "Serena Minerva Griffin" echoes Melville's description in his lecture on Roman statuary of the statue of Minerva in the Villa Albani:
One of the finest of the statues to be found in this villa is the Minerva, a creature as purely and serenely sublime as it is possible for human hands to form.
[quoted from "Statues in Rome" as reconstructed in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle et. al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library), p. 407.]
As Melville's Urania fantasizes about becoming unsexed, her
language becomes metaphorically masculine in sexually-charged images
of lunging, plunging, and piercing. Earlier lines mingle
traditionally masculine and feminine symbols of the bee and rose: "I'd
buy the veriest wanton's rose / Would but my bee therein repose"
(78-79).
Urania's images and ideas of transcending gender exhibit the
desire for
androgyny,
well described by Terry Castle as "a state unmarred by sexual
differentiation and the limitation it implies" [The Female
Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the
Uncanny, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 80]. To
the same effect, Robert Martin identifies a major theme in "After the
Pleasure Party" as "the yearning for a
rediscovery of an androgynous
self" [quoted by Lawrence Buell in "Melville the Poet,"
Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 156, n.31].
Melville comprehended the appeal of a transcendent androgyny, which he understood as something that might be realized aesthetically, through Art. "Can Art, not life, make the Ideal?" he queried listeners to his 1857 lecture on "Statues in Rome." The figure of Minerva/Athena as "Transcender" appears in "After the Pleasure Party" as a statue of the goddess―a work of art that beautifully symbolizes the divine union of power and peace but does not and can not lastingly invest these virtues in mortal creatures: "For never passion peace shall bring, / Nor Art inanimate for long / Inspire..." (lines 142-145). In Book 3 of Clarel Melville returns to this same theme. While the androgyny of souls in heaven seems a noble ideal, earthly men and women find their human identities and relationships inextricably bound up with sexuality: "Can Eve be riven / From sex, and disengaged retain / Its charm?" (3.31:38-40; the right answer is, "No").
In The Philosophers of Foufouville, Radical Freelance makes Melville's point while satirizing the absurdly transcendental ideas of Doctor Jonathan Goodenough, founder of the utopian community at "Harmony Hall." A letter from German translator Prof. Gummp brings disheartening news of the poor reception in Germany of Goodenough's book "The New Utopia":
It is too profound in thought, and its sentiments are too lofty for the materialistic mind of the present day; but the time will come when its superlative merits will be understood,―a time when practical realism shall give place to speculative idealism, when man, no longer anthropopathetical, shall contemplate the metaphysical harmonies of the soul, and, ceasing to ingurgitate the biological philosophy of the present, shall reject amphibological physianthropics and exist in his sphere according to the preordained universal laws of androgynal asthetics. (258)
Mundane realities force Gummp and Goodenough to recognize that androgyny represents a higher state of being than is yet possible for humans to attain. They never do grasp, however, what Melville grasped, that the tenets of "androgynal asthetics" are valid only in the arena of aesthetics. Art, not life, makes the Ideal.
| "Imagination is the pilot-fish of love."
This fine conceit of Serena Minerva Griffin appears in The
Philosophers of Foufouville (p. 83) with other notes for her planned
lecture on "The Co-Relation of the Sexes." In chapter 18 of
Mardi, Melville similarly invested the pilot fish with an almost
mystical significance: "Now the relation subsisting between the
Pilot fish above mentioned and their huge ungainly lord, seems one of
the most inscrutable things in nature. At any rate, it poses poor
me to comprehend." |
| The conclusion of Professor Nicholas Malpest's lecture on Plato's Timaeus (133-142 at 142) satirizes the commentary of Proclus on the cosmology of Plato. Melville gleefully satirized Proclus on Plato in chapters 170 and 171 of Mardi. According to Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville's source was the translation by Thomas Taylor of The Six Books of Proclus...on the Theology of Plato. See "Melville and the Platonic Tradition" in Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Pursuing Melville, 1940-1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), pp. 278-336. |
Links to The Philosophers of
Foufouville
| at Making of America, University of Michigan...
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also available online at Google Books |
