Herman Melville’s Poetics / Politics in “The Encantadas”

Abstract

Melville’s fictional narrative The Encantadas (1854) and his letter to his brother Gansevoort, a democratic politician who passionately supported U.S expansionism, will allow us to explore Melville’s politics of action; i.e., his critique of the Mexican war and his doubts about Manifest Destiny. Simone De Beauvoir, French writer and feminist, insists that we are ethically compelled to do all we can to change oppressive institutions. De Beauvoir demonstrates the need to take sides, acting politically and with an ethical vision. Her action illustrates the links she sees between the embodied individual consciousness and political action. For her the alternative is simple and clear-cut. Either you align yourself with the “contemporary butchers rather than their victims” (1962: 20) or reject their atrocities and stand against them through active fights. The idea of narrative secrecy - Hunilla’s rape - is gradually revealed to the reader through Melville’s narrative omission revealing the female character as a practitioner of narrative secrecy as her right.  This paper explores the female character’s twofold otherness, the native and female as distinguished from the civilized and male, which designates her as the living embodiment of these dualities, the binary oppositions upon which Western Civilization rests. Her ‘double otherness’ is expressed in the figure in which race and gender emblematically intersect. The racial and sexual differences are equated to dramatize the power relationship between the native and the colonizer where the white male colonizer has both racial and sexual superiority. Hunilla’s otherness is most fully articulated by textual interruptions. The denunciation of rape through a narrative strategy – elision - mediates Melville’s politics as action.