‘How can I speak to thee?’: Herman Melville’s Muted Voice

Abstract

Odd forms of speech permeate Herman Melville’s fiction, from the strange tongue of Polynesian natives in Typee, to Billy Budd’s broken stuttering. This chapter examines a movement towards silence and wordlessness to express liminality in Melville’s later fiction. Pierre’s otherworldly Isabel Banford gives voice to her social isolation and familial exclusion through shrieks and a spirit-possessed guitar, influenced by the cultural phenomenon of spiritualism. Cadaverous Bartleby is a ghostly figure whose verbal refusals and withdrawals from conversation disavow ideals of the professional White male tied to sociality and self-making. In response to these unusual utterances, Pierre and the narrator of ‘Bartleby’ turn Isabel and Bartleby into dependent figures that define their own formation of White male civic identity as providers and protectors. Melville explores how one can move beyond language to testify experience, both in his characters’ strange voices and in his own wrestling with language and writing itself in his later fiction.