In “Bartleby, A Love Story,” Peter Coviello argues that “Bartleby” is a love story: to understand it, we must recognize that it features a pair of star-crossed workers in the core of mid-century New York capital, one management and one labor. But Bartleby is a special kind of love story, one that—because it is so thoroughgoingly also about exploitation, money, and contractualism—we do not really exhaust by nominating it “queer” as such. The tale reminds us that Melville’s signature villains are typically the Enlightenment-bred men who stand at empire’s managerial center, where the imperatives of labor discipline, “civilizing” racial subjugation, and secular rationality collaborate in the work of dispossession. For Melville these developments—capital, racialization, secularism—also ratified a horizon of liberation, that was itself fed back into even the most dynamic idioms of dissent. At the anguished heart of Melville’s expansively synthesizing fictions is thus a bedeviling question: is authorship, no matter how combative or how queer, another vector of imperial management?
Dalia Davoudi, in “Video Killed the Literary Star: Queer Melville and the Video Essay” takes an experimental approach by delivering a joint talk and video essay. She thus remediates nineteenth-century literary texts in conjunction with contemporary adaptations. Her video essay cuts together Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Claire Denis’ adaptation of Melville’s novella in her 1999 film Beau Travail, and audio from queer theorist Eve Sedgwick’s famous lecture on Billy Budd in Epistemology of the Closet. Davoudi’s video essay places concepts of queer temporality from scholars such as Elizabeth Freeman and José Muñoz into a media methodology, examining the way that contemporary remediations of Melville’s canonical nineteenth-century text stage conversations about sexuality, race, and colonialism.
In the third paper, “Herman Melville, Peeping Tom (of Finland),” Peter Wallace Brown looks back to nascent queer readings of Melville from the 80s and early 90s, starting with Robert K. Martin’s explicit identification of Melville as a homosexual in his 1986 monograph, Hero, Captain, and Stranger. Reading Martin’s work in 2024, these arguments seem outdated. But Brown shows how this argument was not very convincing in its time either. Brown approaches Martin’s monograph as something which is both outdated and foundational. He concludes with the cover of the book itself, as if Martin yanked Melville out of the university library and dropped him into a Tom of Finland scene, illustrating Melvillian queer desire in a way that remains ahead of its time.
Finally, Dana Medoro and Alyson Brickey return to Melville’s Bartleby in “Bartleby, Cross-Dressed and Transmigratory” to position him as a transmigratory figure who crosses multiple socio-legal and conceptual divides, threatening everything the narrator takes as bounded and real. With his high “flute-like” voice and small toiletry kit significantly absent of razer and brush, Bartleby also traverses gendered codes. Given the pattern of hints that develop around him, Medoro and Brickey argue that Bartleby reads as a freedom seeker from the South who cross-dresses as a way of masking his (her) identity. As antebellum advertisements for the return of freedom seekers show, “fugitives” hiding in the apparel of the so-called opposite sex became increasingly common, so much so that it contributed to the rise of anti-cross-dressing legislation in the U.S. Bartleby first arrives in New York from Virginia specifically “a bit of wreck in the mid-Atlantic.” Bound to an allusion to the Middle Passage. Bartleby, the authors thus contend, is a refugee fleeing the South who escapes enslavement only to find himself transcribing mortgages on property that in all likelihood includes human beings. Bartleby is thus anything but the passive figure perceived by Melville’s narrator. Rather, Bartleby’s queer presence is a form of kinetic transgression, coming together as the refusal to reproduce—to prefer to be non-reproductive of the system that enriches Wall Street.