This broadside from J.S. Swift’s Lectures in New England gives a sense of popular interest in the uses of electricity and magnetism as Melville was writing. Image courtesy of the Bakken Museum of Electricity and Life.
This broadside from J.S. Ross’ Lectures on Electricity in 1850 gives a sense of popular interest in “scientific and practical” uses of electricity as Melville was writing.
Ross lectured across New England and New York.
Image courtesy of the Bakken Museum of Electricity and Life.
People were well aware of electricity’s effects, and, again, by the nineteenth century this reached beyond public lectures and popular books to parlor games where people held hands and shocked each other. But the power of these moments of connection between persons was
counterintuitively in dislocation. Bodies were conjoined and individual selves’ spatial coordinates
were eliminated and replaced with new forms of Union.45 Not surprisingly, a number of American
texts in the 1850s capitalized on this feeling of connection as a potent conceptual metaphor.46
Notable examples of this include the “electric chain” formed by Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl clasping hands on the scaffold or the way that Ethan Brand’s heart hardened exactly because it “ceased to partake of the universal throb” in the moment he “lost his hold of the magnetic chain
of humanity.”47 We also find these references in authors that reach beyond Hawthorne. For
example, Paul Gilmore makes compelling cases about this kind of logic in work by Douglass,
Stowe, and Thoreau.48 And Melville draws on electricity in similar ways in both Redburn and
“Hawthorne and his Mosses” when he writes that “genius, all over the world, stands hand in
hand” such that “one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.”49
This logic of connection that is based in dislocation also shapes one of Melville’s most
powerful scenes: the moment in “The Quarter-Deck” when Ahab is framed as a “Leyden jar.”50
45 Halliday, Thinking and Writing Electricity (New York: Macmillan, 2007), 4.
46 Here I draw on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s idea of the “conceptual metaphor,” or the idea that concepts are derived from actual sensorimotor experience; the most famous example is that “categories are containers.” See Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999). The point is that there is a material basis for a sense of national connection—and the idea of nations as “imagined communities.”
47 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 120; Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales, Vol. 1 (London: Bell & Daldy, 1866), 74. Halliday also references this sequence of Hawthorne’s texts, adding that in The House of the Seven Gables, “natural magnetism” is said to bind one to “the great centre of humanity.”Sam Halliday, Thinking and Writing Electricity, 4.
48 Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism, 111-143.
49 Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in The Literary World, vol. 7 (New York: Osgood &
Company, 1850), 146. In the same year Melville’s Redburn describes commands that “run round like a shock of electricity” Herman Melville, Redburn, 164.
50 F.O. Matthiessen even begins an essay on Ahab by explaining that “Melville knew the strength of the contrast between the great individual and the inert mass. He expressed it in Ahab’s power to coerce all the rest within the sphere of ‘the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life.’” And while Matthiessen may be wrong about the frequent assumption that Ahab coerced his crew, he begins in the right place: the connection
First we find the mates and harpooneers with their weapons, as “the rest of the ship’s company formed a circle around the group.” Then Ahab has them pass around a “heavy charged flagon,” or a large, charged metal vessel, commanding everyone to drink. As soon as that charge begins to circulate he tells the mates to stand with their lances while the harpooneers stand with their irons. Then to make those weapons become linked conductors he tells the mates: “cross your lances.”
Ahab touches their “axis,” or their “magnetic meridian,”51 and they begin to glow—“radiating” or
emitting exactly the kind of force that could charge the larger circle.52 This is a world after Henry
and Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetic induction, after all.53 And this is the moment of
connection that prompts Ishmael to describe “the Leyden jar” of Ahab’s “own magnetic life.” This moment of connection is also about dislocation. This is the scene that leads Ishmael’s shouts to go “up with the rest.” This is the time that he finally identifies as “one of the crew.” And, finally, in this moment his “oath” had been “welded with theirs.” Or, as Ahab frames it, this is the moment when every member of the crew was made party to one “indissoluble league.” And if we have any doubts that in this moment Melville frames Ishmael’s individuality as merged with the rest of the crew, we only have to turn to the fact that he disappears as our narrator for the next
four chapters. His narration famously gives way to a series of short plays.54