Melville, Moby-Dick, and Blasphemy

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• Melville, Moby-Dick, and Blasphemy
• Jonathan A. Cook (bio)

On October 1, 1856, the New York editor and publisher Evert Duyckinck wrote in his diary of a visit to his Clinton Street (now East 8^th Street) residence from a previously estranged literary friend living in the Berkshires, during which visit the two discussed passages from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Boccaccio’s Decameron as well as an incident from the career of the well-known New York Supreme Court judge and spiritualist John Edmonds:

Herman Melville passed the evening with me—fresh from his mountain charged to the muzzle with his sailor metaphysics and jargon of all things unknowable—a good stirring evening ploughing deep and bringing to the surface some rich fruits of thought and experience. Melville instanced old Burton as atheistical—in the exquisite irony of his passages on some sacred matters; cited a good story from the Decameron[,] the Enchantment of the husband in the tree; a story from Judge Edmonds of a prayer meeting of female convicts at Sing Sing which the Judge was invited to witness and agreed to, provided he was introduced where he could not be seen. It was an orgie [sic] of indecency and blasphemy.¹

It is not known to which passages in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy Melville was referring; but the allusion to Boccaccio’s Decameron is clearly to the ninth tale of the seventh day—an obscene story that Chaucer had used as the basis for his Merchant’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales. Melville’s mention of Judge John W. Edmonds (1799–1874) refers to an untraced story from his career as a New York State prison inspector, which began in 1843. Edmonds became a prominent spiritualist in 1851, and served as a justice on the New York State Supreme Court from 1847 to 1853.

It is richly ironic that Duyckinck was commemorating his participation in a prolonged “orgie of indecency and blasphemy” with the sailor-author whose career [End Page 145] he had helped launch, given the fact that as Melville’s closest friend in the New York literary establishment and a devout Episcopalian he had been increasingly concerned about Melville’s religious heterodoxy; just a few years before, he had complained about Ishmael’s remarks on Christianity in his two-part November 1851 Literary World review of Melville’s new whaling novel and advised his friend to show more respect for the public’s religious sensibilities. Unhappy with Duyckinck’s mixed review of Moby-Dick and his apparent disapproval of Melville’s morally subversive new novel, Pierre, Melville had in fact had broken off his friendship with Duyckinck in mid-February 1852, when he cancelled his subscription to the Literary World—a rift only aggravated by Duyckinck’s harsh review of Pierre in the Literary World later that August.²

Duyckinck’s record of Melville’s exuberant indulgence in “an orgie of indecency and blasphemy” shortly before the latter’s departure on an extended trip to Europe and the Holy Land potentially raises questions about Melville’s relation to the verbal offense of blasphemy—a crime firmly enshrined in Anglo-American law throughout Melville’s literary career. Not just Melville’s recorded conversation but his greatest work of fiction, Moby-Dick, manifestly challenged the traditional religious beliefs of his era and deliberately incorporated scenes that might well be deemed blasphemous. We may therefore legitimately ask whether Melville, as a writer of theologically provocative fiction, was in danger of violating the Anglo-American blasphemy laws in place when he was publishing his greatest works—laws enforced by his own father-in-law in a notorious blasphemy case in the mid-1830s. In short, did Melville’s so-called quarrel with God include the potentially actionable crime of blasphemously ridiculing or cursing Him, and if so, what were the risks involved, and what purpose of the author’s would this have served?³

As chronicled by Leonard Levy in a comprehensive history of the offense, blasphemy may be defined as verbal abuse or defamation of the deity, or as profanation of the sacred generally. In older religious societies, blasphemy was thought not...