멜빌의 청년들: '퀴어'한 결혼과 남성적 성장의 서사

Abstract

This study aims to theorize what I would like to name Melville’s ‘queer aesthetic’ which deploys a certain type of ‘queer’ male characters. These male characters are seemingly ordinary young men but destined for an extraordinary fate, which is largely defined by a failure to grow into so-called normal adulthood through marriage. Pierre in Pierre, or the Ambiguities marries his alleged half-sister Isabel so as to restitute the deprived family name to her and to cut ties with the corrupt past of his family. However, with this radical decision his life only spirals down to a complex set of failures. For him, marriage is an occasion for achieving an independent adulthood; yet he cannot succeed insofar as his performance of masculinity is predicated on his impossible desire for his sister and his inability to break away from the paternal heritage. For Billy in Billy Budd, Sailor, marriage figures only metaphorically as a “consummation” of his death sentence, caused by his failure to articulate himself in an existing order of masculine language that conflates heterosexual notions of justice and legitimate male desire. While marriage thus figures in Melville’s narratives as a threshold to a stunted adulthood and even death, Melville’s young male characters act out a ‘queer’ failure of the traditional Bildungsroman formulae of male growth and successful socialization. This peculiar failure is the gist of Melville’s uniquely anti-Bildungsroman narrative that textualizes his queer aesthetic, which in turn resists, disrupts and critiques the persistently hegemonic notions of heterosexual masculinity of the Andrew Jackson era and beyond.