Melville and Reproduction

In nineteenth-century America, seeds were the third most popular enclosures in postal letters, after money and photographs. It is fitting, then, that the narrator of Melville’s short story “The Tartarus of Maids” visits a Massachusetts paper-mill to pick up envelopes for his agricultural seed business, cashing in on the plant-dissemination boom across burgeoning antebellum mail and farming networks. This apparently minor detail speaks to Melville’s wider interest in reproduction, both in biological domains – following the development of models for plant and animal reproduction from eighteenth-century botany through Darwinian evolutionary theory – and in the realm of literary creativity amid the bustling mid-century print-capitalist market. For Melville, producing paper, inking an envelope’s address, and mailing a seed were contiguous features of agrologistical modernity: a dawning era in which writing, ecology, territory, and empire would become deeply entangled. This chapter looks at Melville’s investigations of reproduction and related terms like generation and offspring through a reading of “The Tartarus of Maids” that opens fresh perspectives on, for example, the lush vegetations of Omoo, Mardi and Weeds and Wildings and the sexual complexities of Moby-Dick, Pierre, and other texts. In his entwinement of the reproductive and the literary, we glimpse the furthest reaches of Melville’s ecological imagination, wherein the reproduction of experience promised by writing uncovers the differential traces that constitute biological life.