By 1852, Melville was facing bankruptcy and personal ruin after the critical and commercial failures of Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre, or The Ambiguities (1852). On the advice of Charles Briggs, who became editor of the New York-based Putnam's Magazine in 1853, Melville turned to writing short magazine fiction to make ends meet, producing works for Putnam's and its main rival Harper's throughout the 1850s. Even though his literary reputation and contacts permitted him access to two of antebellum society's most prestigious publications, magazine writing was fraught with problems regarding the intersections of class and authorship, issues that he had previously explored in Pierre. Whilst journals like Putnam's positioned themselves as the vocal-piece of an upwardly mobile middle-class audience and featured work by many of the elite of antebellum literature, the cultural authority of short fiction was a subject of some debate. Whereas a small number of editors and readers “considered ‘magazinish’ writing a reputable and serious literary form” that was in the process of attaining the privileged status of the novel,Footnote 1 most considered the new genre a lesser cousin of the book and somewhere closer to the newspaper in status. Owing in part to the editorial decision to publish certain works anonymously, as well as the considerable access to a much-maligned urban world that magazine writers seemed to possess, they were often treated with a degree of suspicion.Footnote 2 Furthermore, the increasing need for copy to satisfy the demands of a growing and diverse body of readers often meant that within antebellum journals the work of a certified literary and intellectual elite was presented alongside unsolicited contributions from anonymous writers. Consequently, the antebellum magazines posed the problem of attributing fiction to an embodied figure whose status and sincerity could be verified within an increasingly complex and heterogeneous marketplace.
In order to overcome this potential difficulty, magazine writers often combined their work in this field with achievements in other literary endeavours. Indeed, the markets for books and journals were not wholly discrete entities. Many of the most successful literary figures of the day, such as Dickens and Stowe, made their careers out of exploiting the new periodicals whilst simultaneously publishing in the more established and culturally authoritative field of books.Footnote 3 Melville's magazine fiction was not the first time he had sought to match popular appeal with critical esteem. It is, in fact, a recurrent feature of his broader aesthetic. Sheila Post-Lauria has highlighted the manner in which “Melville's Pierre closely resembles French sensationalist fiction” and “stood in stark contrast to literary forms demanded by cultivated readers,”Footnote 4 even though the novel was published in a form that was too expensive for the lower-class readers of the very type of fiction that the novel mimics. To turn to magazine writing after such a literary disaster as Pierre raised a particular set of problems. The failure of that novel to convince readers of the author's value meant that Melville was entering a new marketplace without a preestablished claim to status. Without the class and cultural authority that came from success in the book market to undergird his short fiction, Melville's decision to turn exclusively to writing for the magazines radically destabilized his already unsure class status.
Unlike novel reading – an exercise primarily seen as contributing to a sentimental economy of domestic and private consumption – the circulation of journals and monthly magazines within the more public spaces of the market tended to contribute to an understanding of the medium as the textual analogue of theatre.Footnote 5 Like the frequent hostility that was felt by actors towards their craft, magazine writers ran the risk of being seen as deceivers, tricksters or hacks, whose intentions were purely economic and whose professional status was questionable.Footnote 6 In the antebellum popular imagination, when not fortified by status claims drawn from other areas of life or literary production, the more public and market-oriented work of magazine writers was more often associated with “the festive and somewhat transgressive quality” of a carnivalesque, working-class, street culture than with the sanctified realms of the upper-middle-class salon.Footnote 7
Following Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael (1967), critics have noted that Melville's work is filled with references to the stage that structure his critiques of American society and artistic practice.Footnote 8 Recently, moreover, Dennis Berthold has explored the significance of references to theatrical history in Melville's “The Two Temples.” However, it is not just at the level of reference that Melville's work utilizes the theatre, but also that of form. As in the “Midnight, Forecastle” chapter of Moby-Dick, which takes the form of a dramatic script, Melville's work for magazines often collapses an artificial, critical distinction that has divided orality from textuality. In one short work from this period, “The Fiddler” (anonymously published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in September 1854), Melville makes reference to a seemingly obscure figure from British dramatic history, the child actor Master William Henry West Betty. In a curious piece of dialogue the author grants this figure a crucial role in the reader's interpretation of the story, which seems outwardly to concern a chance meeting on Broadway between a failed Romantic poet and a violin player. Melville writes:
“Did you ever hear of Master Betty?”
“The great English prodigy, who long ousted the Siddons and Kembles from Drury Lane, and made the whole town run mad with acclamation?”
“The same,” said Standard …
I looked at him perplexed. He seemed to be holding the master-key of our theme in mysterious reserve; seemed to be throwing out his Master Betty too, to puzzle me only the more.
“What under heaven can Master Betty, the great genius and prodigy, an English boy twelve years old, have to do with the poor common-place plodder Hautboy, an American of forty?”Footnote 9
Master Betty appears here as a cipher, whose meaning is a “master-key” that not only unlocks “The Fiddler” but offers us new perspectives on the wider aesthetics of Melville's fiction. The question upon which the plot rests is given to the narrator and speaks to Melville's own literary exercise: “why cross the ocean, and rifle the grave to drag his remains into this living discussion?” (261). Critics have offered readings of Hautboy that have varied from seeing him as “an exemplification of Melville's view of the ideal man”Footnote 10 to seeing him as a mirror of Melville's artistic failures. None, however, has sought to seriously probe the significance of the “ghost” of Master Betty that haunts the text and informs the narrator's vision of his new acquaintance.
In this article, I show how Melville's story resurrects the transatlantic history of William Betty as a means to explore his own search for an aesthetic that could adequately serve both the demands of the spectacular world of antebellum magazine publishing (into which he had been forced by his dire financial situation) and his own higher literary ambitions. In “The Fiddler” the author uses the child actor as a conduit through which the reader (and the narrator) come to comprehend “an American of forty” (261), the “eternally blessed” (260), “overgrown boy” (258) Hautboy, whose ability to “hit the exact line between enthusiasm and apathy” (260) in conversation, and his “off-handed, dashing and disdainfully care-free” (262) style of violin playing, strike the narrator as a “miraculously superior” (262) form of art. Like the “dashing” manner of his performance, the man-child Hautboy skilfully balances the middle-class ideal of sincerity with a playful childishness that serves as a model for ideal literary relations in antebellum New York.
In choosing the theatre as his ostensible subject in a New York-based publication in 1854, Melville was cutting close to the bone by deliberately engaging with the preeminent site of contemporary disputes concerning class politics and cultural authority in the city. I see this story, long regarded as a secondary work in Melville's oeuvre, as central to recent debates in American studies concerning class relations and performance culture. In particular, many critics have sought to question the validity of Lawrence Levine's assertions concerning “culture” in America after the Astor Place riot of 1849, in which class conflict over performances of Shakespeare by the English William Macready and the American Edwin Forrest resulted in the deaths of twenty-three people.Footnote 11 Indeed, Melville had a personal relation to the events at Astor Place, having been one of the so-called “elites” who publically supported Macready over Forrest at a time when he was also seeking popular success in the marketplace. This points to his continuing attempts to find a cultural middle ground within an increasingly divided antebellum New York. Levine's narrative linking Astor Place to the antebellum schism between “high” and “low” cultural forms, which were in turn a reflection of ossifying class divisions in mid-nineteenth-century America, breaks down if one adopts a more nuanced and less obviously bifurcated approach to class. In its place, critics have begun to propose a model of “middlebrow” professional authorship, in which, through carefully selected cultural references and what Michael Denning would call “accents,” antebellum writers sought to balance the competing aesthetic and class-based demands of their audiences.Footnote 12
Furthermore, readings of Melville's work benefit from locating it within a transatlantic critical tradition in which national cultures are not assumed to have stable or fixed meanings. By consistently locating the “elite” within the terms of “British” cultural production (or that of the American Whigs who prized it) and “low” art within “American” performance cultures such as minstrelsy, Levine's arguments not only inadvertently reinscribe a potentially misleading notion that has attached prestige exclusively to European culture, but also miss the history of performances of Shakespeare before Astor Place that often highlighted the tensions and fluidities between market-oriented and elite theatre.Footnote 13 It is this history to which Melville returns in “The Fiddler” as a means to generate a “middlebrow” aesthetic that was appropriate for the new magazines, and question hegemonic, received narratives that located cultural authority as a possession of a disembodied, romantic intellect. Before coming to a close reading of the story it is worth recounting some incidents in the peculiar life of Master William Betty.
“CHILD OF NATURE, THE WONDER OF THE AGE”
From 1804 to 1806, between his twelfth and fourteenth birthdays, Master William Henry West Betty, the only son of a bankrupt Irish country gentleman, began to play Shakespearean roles such as Hamlet and Richard the Third alongside adult actors to full and hysterically enthusiastic audiences in the great London patent theatres of Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Grown men rioted outside theatres demanding to see him. A whole industry developed around him, as merchandise from expensive crockery sets to cheap pamphlets and broadsides depicting the boy in classical theatrical poses flooded stalls and shops. Prices were vastly inflated at his performances, and he was invited by the Prince of Wales to have his portrait painted by the Royal Artist John Opie. Judith Plotz has suggested that even that paragon of the conservative elite William Wordsworth referred obliquely to the child actor in Book Seven of The Prelude (1805 text) in the figure of “the lovely boy … embalmed by Nature.”Footnote 14 Puzzling as the phenomenon is, it is worth noting that Betty rejuvenated a theatre industry that had been hit hard by the pressures of the Napoleonic wars and an economy in decline.Footnote 15 In particular, Betty was able to draw both patricians and labourers to his performances, greatly adding both to a much-needed sense of national unity and to London theatres’ account books. As Giles Playfair remarks of a run of Betty appearances at Drury Lane, “the gross return from a total of twenty-five performances amounted to more than £15,000 … [the manager] found himself, for the first time in a long while, operating in the black.”Footnote 16 The greatest of Master Betty's income though, came from tours of provincial stages, where, free from the high prices and elite status of the London patent theatres, he was able to play to packed crowds of artisans and rural labourers.
Whilst it may seem that enthusiasm for the boy's acting was merely a felicitous moment in the history of British fashion, his talent seemed to captivate even those among the cultural elite who made it their business to question the value of whimsical popular movements. In a short time Master Betty had become so famous that the notoriously exacting Romantic critic William Hazlitt was said to proclaim him, in the ideal terms of Romantic pastoralism, “some gay creature of the elements,” whilst the painter James Northcote stated, “He and Bonaparte now divide the world.”Footnote 17
In his time he became something of a poster boy for popular English Romanticism, “a wonder of the age” whose talent expressed the political power of Napoleon and the oratorical skill of the famed Roman actor Roscius. Consequently, Betty's freakish appearance on the London stage embodied characteristics that are both opposites and analogies: the timelessness of an ideal romantic Nature and the fleetingness of spectacle and fashion.
There was even a market for Bettymania in New York City. In a booklet of November 1806 (printed and circulated in New York by an anonymous fan of the child actor) the author writes, “Whatever was properly presented to his mind, he could immediately lay hold of and seemed to seize, by a sort of intuitive sagacity, the spirit of every sentence, and the prominent beauties of every remarkable passage.” As a description of his art, this passage resonates with a broadly Platonist conception of natural genius that was favoured by the Romantics and simultaneously with a focus upon the more artisanal elements of learning and mimicry. Cheap London and provincial newspapers aimed at the working and lower middle classes carried daily updates of Master Betty's relationship with his tutor, Mr. Hough. Reports focussed on what he was learning and how he was progressing, establishing a relationship between acting and craft that appealed to those who were establishing themselves through apprenticeships in the trades.Footnote 18 To his fans, Betty was supposed to possess an ideal balance between romantic “intuitive sagacity” and a skill at quick learning that could unite the diverse elements of the theatrical audience. In this way, the boy's appearance on the stage blurred an artificial line that situated elite culture within the terms of “high” Romantic drama and labour within the “low” world of the marketplace.
The story of William Betty did not end happily. The physical exertion that was required of him on the stage endangered his young body and at various times he was hospitalized for fatigue and injuries stemming from a gruelling acting schedule. Dropped from the roster of actors at the theatres that had once supported him (after his voice had broken around the summer of 1807), Betty was never able to regain his fame in the remainder of his life, and, in 1821 – forced into retirement after an unsuccessful comeback tour – he attempted suicide. Although Betty had a popular appeal that also resonated with the aesthetic concerns of the cultural elite, this was rooted in the temporariness of his preadolescence. Anne Varty has remarked that Master Betty was the origin point of a phenomenology of childhood acting that developed throughout the century.Footnote 19 Nineteenth-century audiences came to see children as (unlike the majority of actors in this period) incapable of deception or deceit. Varty states,
The child's spontaneity generated a special intimacy between audience and performer. When an audience witnessed the act it was allowed invisibly to participate in the “make-believe” of the child's world … The child's paradoxical exhibition of absolute sincerity on stage invited scopophilic attention.Footnote 20
When British and American audiences watched children perform in adult roles they were engaged in a voyeuristic act that had its root in the belief that children, as opposed to the adults they aped, were unable to distinguish between acting and playing. To inhabit the world of the child actor was, however briefly, to witness in their play-performances the ultimate expression of the oft-sought ideal of sincerity. Whilst adult actors were continually treated with suspicion and mistrust by the middle classes in both Britain and America, children became oddly exempt from these strong anti-theatrical prejudices.Footnote 21 Betty's career depended on his childhood, which allowed him to access the hallowed space of sincere performance favoured by elite romantic and popular audiences alike. It is the complex irony of Betty's cultural power and his position as an icon of “high” and “low” art that interests Melville in “The Fiddler.”
“WOULD THEY APPLAUD THE POET AS THEY APPLAUD THE CLOWN?”
“The Fiddler” is narrated by a man named Helmstone, who first appears to the reader as a disembodied voice of shame and despair. Melville opens with his narrator's fury at his inability to write a successful poem, mocking his own literary frustrations after the publication of Mardi. The author writes, “So my poem is damned, and immortal fame is not for me! I am nobody forever and ever. Intolerable fate!” (258). Unlike the rest of the dialogue, Melville elects not to have the first words of his narrator within speech marks. However, the statement does not take the form of a direct address to the reader. Indeed, the reader's presence is not felt, as Helmstone's statement is internally directed rather than externally expressive. In framing the story, this internally directed statement serves the purpose of locating the narrator within a romantic literary tradition that focuzses upon the internalized language of the soul whose realm is the eternal: “Intolerable fate!” (258).
Elaine Hadley has provided an interesting account of the competition between romantic poetic language and the embodied performances of working-class melodrama that is useful for engaging with the terms of Melville's fiction. Hadley notes, “The romantic subject's internalization of feeling … results in a form of identity that is seen to be private and essential, the exclusive possession of the individual.”Footnote 22 In Hadley's Foucauldian terms, the romantic subject's form of address is spatialized to reflect the political sovereignty of the individual over the collective. In the work of the transcendentalists this egoistic individualism was becoming sutured to a liberal tradition of self-reliance, in which political sovereignty and an “original vision” were the fruits of one's intellectual labour. As Melville had showed previously in Moby-Dick, through his characterization of Ahab, this egoistic individualism always ran the risk of becoming tyrannical when self-reliance was coupled with a dangerous desire to wield power over others. There is an ironic reversal at play in the fate of Melville's narrator. Unlike the transcendentalist authors, Helmstone is unable to map this subjectivity onto political or economic self-reliance, because to do so would require an initial “investment” of cultural capital by others, namely critics. Melville presents a world in which to be self-reliant one must first be praised.
The spatial dimensions of romantic expression are expanded in the following line and further enhance Melville's privatization of the narrator's identity: “Snatching my hat, I dashed down the criticism and rushed out into Broadway” (258). The preposition “out” situates the narrator within an internal environment that reflects the internally expressive nature of the opening statement. The passage then continues to note, “enthusiastic throngs were crowding to a circus in a side-street near by, very recently started, and famous for a capital clown” (258). Mediated by the temporary embodiment suggested by the gesture of “snatching” up his hat, the internality of the opening statement is exploded by Melville's shift of perspective to the street, which the narrator designates the realm of the crowd. Furthermore, the statement “capital clown” connects a term that denotes the performer's skill and cultural capital (as in “capital fellow”) in the terms of financial investment (literal “capital”). It is here that we see the significance of Melville's choice of the actor as the ideal model of identification for the writer. Like Master Betty, whose critics praised his talent at original and emulatory forms of expression, the stage requires of actors that they demonstrate their professionalism through publicly ratified performances of internal sentiments. Theatre therefore highlights the fantasy of romantic subjectivity by showing that under market conditions no “successful” professional identity is ever purely the “private and essential … possession of the individual.”Footnote 23
The first two paragraphs of the story establish a dialogue between romantic authorship, associated with the internal world of the intellect, and the dynamic space of the street, associated with the marketplace and the carnival. It is worth following the work of Isabel Lehuu in seeing his reference to the circus in terms of contemporary discourses surrounding print culture. When Melville speaks of the circus, he is drawing parallels in the mind of his contemporaries with the literary marketplace with which he had become associated. The seemingly insatiable desire of the antebellum middle class for depictions of the street life, which tradition and etiquette compelled them not to experience at first hand, fed a concern that the middle-class intellect would become degraded by overconsumption of low-grade cultural products. For Lehuu the sheer abundance of print in antebellum New York posed a challenge to older sources of cultural authority and frequently drew comparisons with the carnival. Unlike the upper-middle-class salon, which was designated a space of objective truth telling, the street was frequently coded as a site of deceit and subterfuge. Lehuu remarks that antebellum print culture might be productively understood in the terms of Mikhail Bahktin's sense of the “carnivalesque.” Lehuu writes,
The period often described as the golden age of print was in fact a period of unstable cultural order. To the amazement of contemporary critics and enthusiasts alike, the printed word staged a carnival, in the twofold sense of both staging a dramatic representation and entering a phase within the maturing of American culture.Footnote 24
Unlike Bakhtin's carnival, however, the antebellum carnival of print not only served as a counterpoint to the world of capitalist acquisition, or even as a rare outpouring of cultural pluralism in the face of fixed hierarchies and traditions, but also was an embodiment of the free market's appeal to the values of abundance and choice. Even the most elite journals (like Harper's and Putnam's) were susceptible to critiques of this kind. Since the magazine form relied upon a heterogeneity and diversity of content, there was always an implicit possibility that the new public sphere would become carnivalesque in character. As Jean-Christophe Agnew asserts in relation to The Confidence Man, a work that similarly explores the intersections between authorship and marketable performance, “Melville's literary carnival adamantly refuses to reveal or to redeem the world it turns upside down.”Footnote 25 In antebellum society, to write of street life as a carnival was not necessarily to present an alternative to the advancing world of the capitalist marketplace, but rather to offer the reader a hyperbolic representation of a future world that seemed unavoidable.
The language of class marked the fusion of carnival with the marketplace in the antebellum mind. In mid-nineteenth-century New York, class affiliations were often couched in terms of the Cartesian duality between body and mind. Most famously, popular journals and broadsides depicted the Astor Place affair as beginning after Edwin Forrest – whose appeal to working-class, Tammany Hall Democrats was largely rooted in what Evert Duyckinck and Walt Whitman saw as the muscular, “oxlike” physicality of his acting style – took offence against William Macready's “cerebral” performance of Hamlet in Edinburgh.Footnote 26 This dynamic between mind and body reflected the new conditions of antebellum society, especially in relation to questions over New York's financial and industrial future. Whilst the Whig elite of New York were directly involved in the complex financial and mercantile practices of international speculation and trade, at sites like the Astor Place Opera House and the American Art Union they cultivated artistic practice as a disembodied space of neutrality free from the influences of the very market society they had helped to create. In contrast, working-class artistic practices often made recourse to the working body as a sign of their desire to retain an older artisanal relationship between labour and individual creation in the face of growing proletarianization and alienation in the emergent industrialized marketplace.
Melville's language in this opening passage reflects his theme. By juxtaposing the narrator's ahistorical, transcendental vision of “immortal fame” with a transitory dynamism suggested by the words “snatching,” “dashed” and “rushed,” Melville demonstrates his command of two competing spatio-temporal registers that would have resonated within antebellum social hierarchies. The first signals a conservative version of the romantic sublime that attached a condition of timelessness to power. This would have spoken to the elite Whig conception of conservative stewardship and romantic providence. The second undercuts this by highlighting the temporary, conditional nature of life. Like Master Betty, whose style was both natural and artificial, the realm of the soul and that of fashion, Melville's style inhabits both fixed and mobile versions of experience. As Andrew Lawson has shown in regard to Whitman (whose Leaves of Grass was to appear in New York less than a year later), “at stake in Whitman's heteroglot style is the issue of cultural authority: the social power implied by the possession of literary language and the challenge to that power implied by other less legitimate language.” Helmstone's deployment of the “high-flown, Emersonian language of the soul” reflects a desire to locate himself within the terms of the literary elite that is frustrated by the demands of the author's position as an agent within a newly emergent market society.Footnote 27
In this way, Melville suggests that Helmstone's romantic subjectivism – frequently associated with the patrician, neoclassical values of the older New York Whig elite – is untenable in the context of the emergent market economy. Indeed, Melville even suggests that such a perspective may actually be unethical. When Helmstone meets his friend Standard in the street, the latter remarks, “Ah! What's the matter? Haven't been committing murder? Ain't flying justice? You look wild!” (258). The connection between Helmstone's elite romantic pretensions and violence is established at several points in the story, particularly in relation to Helmstone's poetry, which includes a “sublime passage … in which Cleothemes the Argive vindicates the justice of war” (259). Historicized in the context of the Astor Place riot and Melville's deployment of theatrical imagery, statements connecting “murder” and “the justice of war” with the romantic language of the “sublime” would have resonated strongly with Melville's readership in terms of class conflict.
In the numerous pamphlets and broadsides that circulated in response to the Astor Place riot, there was much speculation over whether the state police fired into the crowd at the direct request of the patrician, opera-going elite. In one such pamphlet, entitled Account of the Terrific and Fatal Riot, the author notes that “the private boxes were taken by the season” before immediately shifting register to a discussion of the National Guard's “attempt to charge with the bayonet” into the massing crowd outside the theatre.Footnote 28 In the pamphlet, the textual slippage between privately owned theatrical space and state violence is not accidental. The culture of theatre boxes was a hotly disputed issue in New York at the time, as their cost and the view they afforded were taken as broader symbols of elite power and control. In Account of the Terrific and Fatal Riot the author correlates the opulence of the theatre box with the power to command the army against the poorer elements of the city.
Since Foucault's groundbreaking work Discipline and Punish, the most common critical tradition in theatre studies has been to read boxes in terms of Bentham's panoptic prison. Critics have seen the architectural structures as affording the owners an invisibility that was synonymous with the unverifiable and unimpeachable exercise of power in the modern, liberal state. However, theatre boxes differ from the panopticon in several key ways that are crucial to the relationship between sight and power that Melville explores in “The Fiddler.” Whilst the view from the central tower of Bentham's panopticon allowed the invisible viewer to survey the differentiated and individuated subjects beneath him, theatre boxes operate by offering the owner a choice to be either visible or invisible. Sat back behind the curtains of the box, the viewer could see without being seen. However, sitting forward would enhance both the owner's view of the stage and the visibility of the viewer to other patrons, whilst largely screening off many of the audience members in the cheapest seats either above (“the gods”) or directly below the boxes (the pit). Theatre boxes are not strictly panoptic machines, since they actually function by asserting the owner's right to choose visibility in contrast to the anonymity forcibly inflicted on the poor. Those that owned the boxes could be seen as subjects whose individuality was affirmed in the context of Astor Place by their right of access to the state power of the National Guard, whilst those who could not afford such luxuries came to seen as an embodied collective whose right to individuality (which in the context of Jacksonian America often meant access to state power) was placed in question. In effect, theatrical boxes reflected a power based upon visibility and invisibility. Elite patrons could, in effect, benefit both from the power associated with being known and, as the aftermath of Astor Place would show, from an invisibility that would allow them to avoid prosecution or culpability for the violence committed in their name.
The squatting and rioting forms of visible theatrical protest undertaken by groups such as Mike Walsh's Spartan Band, as well as the Tammany Hall tradition of street-based political oratory, point to the fact that in New York during the 1840s and 1850s working people such as those that were killed at Astor Place tended to see their political future as lying in a hopeful, possible reconciliation of embodiment with political power. The Jacksonian politics of individualism pursued by Tammany Hall expressed the desire of the antebellum working class both for access to state power and to be left alone to live self-determining lives. The working public loathed outward displays of prestige such as the Astor Place Opera House's boxes not because they imposed a surveillance regime that individualized them, but because they were an affront to the Jacksonian democratic ideal of a socially egalitarian space of visible class admixture and interaction.
Melville would also explore this theme in another story from this period, “The Two Temples” (1854), in which, after the narrator climbs the spire of the new Grace Church, the congregation beneath him become a “standing human mass.”Footnote 29 In effect, his regime of vision operates counter to the panoptic principle by turning them into an undifferentiated group rather than individuated subjects, a perspective he calls “sovereign.” By contrast, the English theatre of the story's second section is a location of comparatively peaceful mixing between classes that is packed with differentiated figures and social types whose expressions are transparently readable: “quiet, well-pleased working men, and their glad wives and sisters, with here and there an aproned urchin, with all-absorbed, bright face” (310).
If we read Melville's short fiction as deliberately invested in the language of theatre, then rejecting the post-structuralist approach to the class politics of theatrical space has greater implications for interpreting Melville's aesthetics. At the level of form, “The Fiddler,” like “The Two Temples,” resists the kinds of perspective that Sheila Post-Lauria has indentified with Harper's Magazine, the very periodical that published it. Post-Lauria has remarked that submissions to the magazine often focussed on “aloof, spectator-narrators representing the privileged middle class isolated … from the events … to observe less fortunate characters from above.”Footnote 30 By contrast, Melville's work associates this kind of detached aesthetic with an elite power that in its desire for objectivity ultimately screens off, or distorts, the real working-class presence. Instead, the story is structured around a dialogue between the knowable and the unknowable, and between vision and invisibility, that reflects the dynamics of Melville's search for literary recognition in the antebellum marketplace. Like the politics of individualism demonstrated by theatre boxes, which operated around a vacillation between visibility and anonymity, Melville's story exhibits a radical uncertainty on behalf of its narrator about whether to participate or to remain distant from events. What might be rendered as uncertainty, or liminality, should be understood as the analogue of the right of the individual to freedom of choice – to not being bundled together into a mass by economic hardship – that was being fought for by figures like Mike Walsh at Tammany Hall.
To possess both individuality and a sense of the power of collective class-based solidarity is one of the key functions served by Hautboy in the text. Described as “juvenile,” “animated” and wearing a “bunged beaver,” Hautboy is styled on the preeminent, much loved – and feared – social type of 1850s New York, the Bowery B'hoy. Indeed, the phonetic possibilities of his name suggest a direct connection. In contemporary works such as Benjamin Baker's popular melodrama A Glance at New York (first staged in 1848) the B'hoy was less an image of degeneracy and gang violence than an “incarnation of republican virtue in an urban setting – fiercely independent, self-reliant, and free.”Footnote 31 In their theatrical self-fashioning, the Bowery B'hoys represented an ideal, individual negotiation of class politics in public space. Never fully losing their identity to the mob, yet able to retain a certain appealingly raffish aura of the street, Bowery B'hoys suggested the possible future direction young manhood would take under the conditions of the expanding urban marketplace. The importance of the visual realm of the theatre is asserted when the three figures go to watch the aforementioned clown. In contrast to the stratified and “classed” regimes of vision at “elite” sites like the Astor Place Opera House or within the internalized intellect of the romantic subject, the circus reflects the more egalitarian visuality of the street. As the clown performs, Helmstone's eye is drawn to Hautboy, registering a sentimental connection between his new acquaintance and the performer. The narrator remarks,
Hautboy was the sight for me. Such genuine enjoyment as his struck me to the soul with … the reality of a thing called happiness … Now the foot, now the hand, was employed to attest his grateful applause … In a man of forty I saw a boy of twelve; and this too without the slightest abatement of my respect. (258–59)
Against the backdrop of the circus, Hautboy's responses to the show come to resemble the gestural performances of the clown. When Helmstone says, “Now the foot, now the hand was employed to attest his grateful applause” it is as if Hautboy's gestural manner of being in the world mimics the clown's tumbling and expressive performance. To the eye of Helmstone and the reader, the spectator himself becomes a spectacle. A ritual is being enacted in which the viewer and the viewed subject are equally involved in the performance, challenging Helmstone's prior commitment to the power that comes from a purely internalized and detached romantic intellect. For Helmstone, Hautboy is radically embodied through his act of viewing. By viewing the scenes unfolding before him, Hautboy registers the certainty of his position in the world and the sincere pleasure he takes in it. Melville establishes within a theatrical setting the relationship between the spectator and the performance that Ralph Waldo Emerson found in the natural world. In Nature (1836) Emerson writes that the “lover of Nature” becomes a “transparent eyeball,” “whose inward and outward senses are … truly adjusted to each other.”Footnote 32 Like Melville, Emerson was concerned about the politically conservative implications of a total disembodiment that sought to transcend nature and removed one wholly from engagement with an ever-changing world. Since “God” and “Nature” were part of the same universal essence for Emerson, to remove oneself from a relationship with the natural world was a hubristic attempt to exceed the reach of God. In Melville's story, Helmstone's evocation of Hautboy's gestural mimicry of the clown highlights the way that in viewing the world one might also interact sincerely with it. Hautboy is, in effect, a participant observer.
Consequently, in order to critique the detached perspective that Post-Lauria associates with Harper's, “one of the most politically conservative and sentimental monthlies of the decade,”Footnote 33 Melville posits the filial relations of visible and embodied subjects as a radical form of democratic association. Not only is the “rurally ruddy” (258) Hautboy watching the clown, but also Helmstone is watching Hautboy. Additionally, through the use of the first person, the readers of Melville's story are themselves positioned as viewers. The matrix of gazes between the characters serves to draw the reader of the short story into a voluntary, shared experience of viewing not unlike the theatre, undermining the ideal of a disembodied and detached romantic consciousness that had often been designated the preserve of the elite individual. As a facet of Melville's broader search for a place within the literary marketplace of 1850s New York, this “participatory” form of reading was a perfect aesthetic for the new magazines as they attempted to build national audiences.Footnote 34 The ritual of participation in the shared vision of the clown in “The Fiddler” is a synecdoche of the larger project of the antebellum magazines. In the story, reading becomes a performative, ritual act among individuals who possessed no immediate or personal means of association.
In fact, so crucial is viewing to the meaning of “The Fiddler” that Helmstone himself remarks that he “needed the optical sight of such a man to believe in the possibility of his existence” (260). By specifically defining the required “sight” as “optical” Helmstone alludes to the romantic, visionary tradition that had previously dominated his view of the role of the American author. Unlike the fantasy landscapes of the romantic visionary poet, the “ambitious dreamer” (261). Helmstone must confront the force of the real: an “optical sight” and not a speculative one. Indeed, Standard mocks the “visionary” powers of his friend when he says, “Doubtless your own masterly insight has already put you in possession of all” (263). Through Standard's attachment of “insight” to “possession,” the author draws attention to Helmstone's own earlier connection between individual vision and individual ownership: “the internalization of feeling” that is essential to elite conceptions of romantic literary authority. For Helmstone, everything he is able to perceive, he imposes his authority upon. Indeed, the term “insight” perfectly connotes the internalized and ratiocinative form of visual and cultural authority traditionally favoured by readers of Harper's Magazine. In its place, Melville posits a model of cultural authority that is derived from a playful relation with, rather than critical distance from, unfolding events. It is this desire for “proximity” that returns us finally to Master Betty, whose success as a cultural practitioner was largely dependent upon assumptions about the “honesty” and “purity” of his acting and the sense of participation his performances offered the audience.
When Helmstone remarks, “In a man of forty, I saw a boy of twelve … without the slightest abatement of my respect,” Melville is connecting embodied performance with “respect” and “respectability.” Hautboy is able to perform “successfully” in the world because he is not quite an adult in manner. Hautboy and Standard's attribution of the characteristics of Master Betty to Helmstone derive from the latter's capacity to balance competing registers of experience without self-consciousness, the absolute sincerity of his responses to the world. Hautboy is, in effect, the living embodiment of the nineteenth-century child actor whose inability to distinguish between acting and playing was the source of his cultural power. Ironically, what should be most contemptible in him – the excessive pleasure he derives from the carnivalesque consumption that associates him with a much-aligned underclass – makes Hautboy the ideal arbiter of cultural authority and literary prestige in antebellum New York. As the narrator remarks,
What was sad in the world he did not superficially gainsay; what was glad in it he did not cynically slur; and all which was to him personally enjoyable, he gratefully took to his heart … his extraordinary cheerfulness did not arise either from deficiency of feeling or thought. (260)
The liminal position of playful sincerity that Hautboy represents – between childhood and adulthood, the market and the street, English cultural prestige and America democracy – reflects Melville's own search for a workable aesthetic for his magazine fiction. In the narrator's acknowledgement that this liminality is like childhood in its transience, we see Melville confronting the possibility that the varying aesthetic demands placed upon him are untenable in the long term. As a model for literary authorship, Hautboy is ultimately insufficient because, like the music he plays on his violin, he only establishes his claim to cultural authority in the very moment in which it is expressed. However, like the clown's show at the centre of the text, it is to these fleeting, ritualized moments of coalescence that the author attributes the status of great art. At the same time, the transience of the experience reflects the demands of the short-story genre, upon which Melville had begun to depend financially. By its very nature short and fleeting, reading a short story resembles, for Melville, the kind of theatricalized and collective experiences explored in “The Fiddler.”
Melville ends the story on a note of irony, which reflects the fact that for all the positive potential embodied in the new magazines, he would not find total aesthetic contentment in the form, turning to the religious poetry of pilgrimage in the latter part of his career. After eating lunch at “Taylor's” the group return to Hautboy's home, “in the fifth story of a sort of storehouse, in a lateral street to Broadway” (262). The very location of Hautboy's house marks him as an embodiment of liminality, a storehouse being both a site of market exchange and a temporary holding-place for goods. Upon hearing him play “Yankee Doodle” Helmstone remarks that he has become “a charmed Bruin” under Hautboy's guidance. Rather than precipitating Helmstone's development as an artist, Hautboy transforms him into a dancing bear: carnivalesque, infantilized and devoid of soulfulness.
Ultimately, Melville's art would move in the direction of a search for more permanence than was possible within both the magazines and the antebellum culture of “sincere” performance that is depicted in “The Fiddler.” In the story's final lines, in a passage that seems to modern readers like a foreshadowing of Melville's own pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1856, Helmstone evokes the exile of Cicero to the east: “If Cicero, travelling in the East, found sympathetic solace for his grief in beholding the arid overthrow of a once great city, shall not my petty affair be as nothing” (263). In this short story, Melville confronts the paradox at the centre of his art. In Ishmael's conflicted views of Ahab in Moby-Dick, as in the pilgrim's response to Christ in Clarel, the tension between the growth of the individual that is possible under the guidance of another, and the loss of individuality when one completely emulates one's guide, is an ever-present theme in Melville work. In this manner, “The Fiddler” is an important, though neglected, moment in Melville's trajectory as a writer.
