Melville's Idea of a Wife

This article argues that what I call Herman Melville's "idea of a wife" structures his fiction's interest in the violent exploitation built into US capitalist extractive economies. It draws on insights from feminist political theory, feminist critiques of nineteenth-century US literary studies, and environmental humanities scholars' interest in Melville to show how his idea of a wife is a primary political fantasy that excites and incites his fictions of extractivist violence. Reading the wife as a prototypical figure of subjection within contract liberalism, I instead argue that Melville's fiction is repulsed because it is entranced by the narrative possibilities of women within the compromised position of conventional nineteenth-century heterosexual marriage. The argument extends to compass and critique Melville's interest in sexed and gendered violence. In readings of "I and My Chimney" (1856), Moby-Dick (1851), and "Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow" (1855), the wife emerges as a core figure that, for Melville, sutures together voluntary civic subjection and fantasies of violent resource extraction without end or deleterious effects.