The Prestige of Failure

Modern Sentiments in Susan Warner and Herman Melville

It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.

—Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1850)

Jan. 1: It was a pretty thing, the reading of the notices of my work [The Wide, Wide World] that Father had brought home,—from the Evening Post, Boston Chronotype,Commercial, and Literary World. [...] I lay awake, and thought about it after I went to bed. Thank God for every promise of success and encouragement; and oh! for the spirit to thank him, should both fail!

—Susan Warner, journal extract (1851)

The comparison announced in the title of this first chapter deliberately upends many of our received notions about the era known as the American Renaissance. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics have labeled Herman Melville a figure of laudable defiance to the standards of taste and morality in his day. Susan Warner, in her more recent critical recovery, has been understood as a paradigmatic figure in the very formation of those standards of taste and morality. When Melville speaks of failure as the true test of greatness in "Hawthorne and His Mosses," he registers a heroic, almost eschatological struggle of creative artists to represent Truth. When Warner speaks obliquely about failure in her journals, she seems to register primarily the acclaim of her contemporary readers and the mere number of volumes sold. The former appears to insist upon failure as the expression of absolute authorial autonomy, while the latter views failure as nothing more than an insufficient connection with the sympathies of the multitude. These perceived divisions have sprung from and been reproduced by a long-held critical perception of a gendered, Manichean binary between popular and prestigious literature in the mid-nineteenth century, one that has only recently been challenged in contemporary criticism. On one side of this putative binary is the mid-nineteenth-century rise of a mass literary culture dominated by sentimental women authors. On the other side is the first intimation of American modernism, a separate masculine sphere of literary culture in which, largely unrecognized in its day, the first great era of American (men's) literature supposedly emerged in opposition to this mass cultural moment.

However, rather than reading the literature of the 1850s as the ascendency of an oppositional, masculine modernity over a fashionable and feminized sentimentality, this chapter investigates the explicit and implicit connections between two writers as seemingly dissimilar as Melville and Warner, a relationship crucial to a better understanding of the efflorescence and imbrication of popular and prestigious American literature during this decade. Like the American modernist writers after him, Melville expressed great anxiety about what was in many respects the first mass cultural literary moment in American literature—the rise of the sentimental novel—while also directly drawing from these very sources in his own writing. At the same time, the rhetoric of literary failure was not only deployed by Melville and the canonical writers of the American Renaissance alone; it played a crucial role in the negotiation between popular entertainment and religious instruction in sentimental literature. Recognizing these shared complexities allows for a more complete picture of American literature of the 1850s: popular and prestigious literature emerging in tandem, demonstrating the ways that American Renaissance writers depended intimately upon the historical context of the literary marketplace in which sentimental authors wrote and published.

The influence of popular literary genres and topics can in fact be found throughout the American Renaissance's high canon—from the discourse of abolition in Emerson's late political essays to the rhetoric of temperance in Whitman's early fiction and first editions of Leaves of Grass. My focus, however, will be on a network of explicit citations and veiled correspondences between Melville and Warner, who when read together help demonstrate a visible and unresolved dialectic of sentimentality in Pierre's (1852) failed narrative aspirations for a radical break from both literary contemporaries and antecedents. The terms of this comparison also open up possibilities to reread The Wide, Wide World (1850) as a text motivated by many of the implicitly modernist standards Warner's critics and defenders alike have reserved exclusively for the American Renaissance canon—stylistic intricacy, psychological complexity, and epistemological difficulty among them—revealing Warner's stark ambivalence toward the publicity the novel ultimately achieved. Not simply two texts that share a common historical moment, Pierre and The Wide, Wide World inaugurate their literary aspirations by celebrating and transvaluing worldly failure. By reexamining these fault lines of literary taste and production in the 1850s, and the subsequent critical interventions that frequently reified them, we can view the dynamics of popularity and prestige during this period as a dawning expression of modernism in American literary history, one premised on the often equivocal celebration of literary failure.

Sentimental Connections, "Scribbling Women," and Impugned Success

To understand these connections, however, we first have to survey the distance customarily perceived between the work of Melville and Warner specifically, and their discourses of modernist autonomy and sentimental connection more generally. A colorful illustration of these critical commonplaces emerges in "The Monkey-Rope" chapter of Moby-Dick (1851), in which Ishmael first describes the process of "cutting-in" and harvesting whale blubber. As are many of the vivid scenes of such labor in the novel, "The Monkey-Rope" is typically read as a celebration of the democratic bonds forged between men. Ishmael and Queequeg become "inseparable twin brother[s]" through the shared peril of their being tied to each other, Ishmael on deck and Queequeg perilously balancing on the running treadmill of the whale's floating, spinning carcass. Ishmael's expansive and metaphysical conceit spins this analogy outward, eventually encompassing a "Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals," a vision of an intimately bound network of human interrelations.

The work finished, Queequeg is brought on deck and given a cup of "ginger-jub" as a restorative, an offer that prompts the outraged second mate Stubb to cry: "Where...