Title: This infinite fraternity of feeling
First published: 1996
Description: The friendship between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne was perhaps the most famous friendship involving two great American authors. This book proposes that Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance and Melville's Pierre, both published in 1852, are pivotal to understanding the two men's literary as well as personal relationship and should therefore be read as companion pieces.

Both novels dramatize a crisis in the relationship of the two writers that occurred in the summer of 1851 when Melville - whose homoerotic preoccupations have finally become a major critical topic - made some advances toward Hawthorne that were immediately rebuffed.

This study argues that both The Blithedale Romance and Pierre provide a significant comment on this crisis in the relationship, and taking into consideration recent directions in gender studies, it also proposes a new reading of the two novels as homoerotic texts.

After departing from an exploration of Melville's and Hawthorne's personal relationship and the literary influence that the writers had on each other, author Monika Mueller analyzes gender, genre, and homoerotic crisis in the two works, focusing on the unfolding of their parallel structure after the stage has been set by the failed male friendships in the novels. Mueller reads the two books as texts that encode homoerotic desire.

She positions the male friendships in the novels within a framework of reference of other nineteenth-century male friendships in order to show how same-sex desire had to be presented so that it would be allowed to surface. The homoerotic relationships of the male protagonists are permitted to function only as a subtext to the heterosexual love stories and are finally subsumed under a "love triangle" involving a woman who becomes the mutual love interest of both men.

. The fact that Hawthorne and Melville placed The Blithedale Romance and Pierre in the literary genre of the "sentimental romance" (which was traditionally reserved for women) further exacerbates this sexual/textual ambiguity. The confusion of literary genre that both novels have in common further comments upon the gender confusion that both authors experienced, and which in its turn ultimately caused them to dramatize a confusion of gender and genre.
Subjects: History and criticism, American fiction, History, Masculinity in literature, Literary form, Male authors, Friendship in literature, Men in literature, Homosexuality and literature, Sex in literature, Gender identity
Places: United States
People: Herman Melville (1819-1891), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Time periods: 19th century
LC classification: PS1855 .M84 1996