ellauri107.html on line 193: Hawthorne is much more explicit in regard to same sex relationships and perhaps alludes to Melville’s wooing of him in his 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance. In excerpting that work for the website, I introduced it as follows:
ellauri107.html on line 195: In the following excerpts from Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, the Hawthorne-like character, poet and narrator Miles Coverdale, and the Melville-like character, passionate monomaniac Hollingsworth suggest Melville's influence on the novel. The first person narrator, a young man who joins a major enterprise with mostly adventure-seeking motives, certainly calls to mind narrator Ishmael in Melville's Moby-Dick. The dark and brawny Hollingsworth, bearing a physical resemblance to Melville, cares for Coverdale and seeks his partnership, moreover, in an intensity that seems to parallel Melville's evident affection for and desire for intimacy with Hawthorne. The sharp, mysterious break in the relationships between the two authors and the fictional pair constitute yet another likeness.
ellauri107.html on line 208: Coverdale declares, "I loved Hollingsworth, as has already been enough expressed." He adds, "If . . .[Priscilla] thought him beautiful, it was no wonder. I often thought him so, with the expression of tender, human care, and gentlest sympathy . . . ." And in Hawthorne's most explicitly homoerotic allusion, Coverdale notes, "the footing, on which we all associated at Blithedale, was widely different from that of conventional society. While inclining us to the soft affections of the Golden Age, it seemed to authorize any individual, of either sex, to fall in love with any other, regardless of what would elsewhere be judged suitable and prudent."
ellauri107.html on line 214: Actually, the reader would have to be remarkably obtuse not to recognize the sexual tension between Coverdale and Hollingsworth. If only we could know what Melville thought when he read it! Certainly, Melville was aware that Brook Farm in Roxbury, Massachusetts, which Blithedale represents, had enjoyed the company of Hawthorne as a communal society member for most of 1841. Perhaps he also knew that substantial portions of Coverdale’s first person narration are taken directly from Hawthorne’s Brook Farm journals, and he would certainly know better than we the extent to which the novel may also represent allusions to Hawthorne’s and his experiences together during the year before the publication of Blithedale.
ellauri107.html on line 244: Claggart’s repressed, closeted attraction to Billy finds parallels with some interpretations of Hawthorne’s evident spurning of Melville’s too intimate attentions and Hawthorne’s character in The Blithedale Romance Coverdale’s similar rejection of the invitation from Holingsworth to be his “friend of friends, forever.” For Melville, Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale’s agonizing acknowledgement of adultery must have seemed a stunning parallel with what later generations would term “coming out of the closet.” Whether Hawthorne himself were a closeted gay man, it is clear that Melville was relatively open in his affections for the senior author and that those affections were somehow turned away and seem to have left a wound that never fully healed. The evils of the closet constitute a subtext in Billy Budd that may well have brought to its author’s mind the sad sundering of his closeness with Nathaniel Hawthorne.
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