Romantic Influences on Melville's View of Authorship and Audience: A Reading of “Hawthorne and His Mosses

Abstract

Yunok ParkIn "Hawthorne and His Mosses," Melville professes his elite notion of authorship and readership that he began to build in 1848 while writing Mardi, his third novel. In this essay, which defends Hawthorne's unrecognized masculine genius in The Mosses from an Old Manse with broad comparisons to Shakespeare's in his tragedies, Melville shows a continued deep interest in three key issues that had occupied his thinking since the shift in his plans for Mardi; genius, audience, and the ideal reader. In this paper, I argue that Melville's ideas on these three key issues, which are further developed and represented in his immediately following important works like Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852), are influenced most significantly by European Romanticism. And thus I attempt to discuss various aspects of its influences on Melville's article, drawing on materials dealing with Romantic notion of authorship, readership and gender, and literary marketplace. Then I also point out that Melville's gendered use of language in his discussion of authorship and audience is problematic because Melville opposes masculine qualities to feminine qualities and then privileges masculine qualities of Romantic notion of 'genius' over feminine qualities.