The argot of abounds in more linguistically concise ways of explaining the same point. One might casually say, for example, that Melville wanted to bottom Hawthorne so hard.
Was it love? Something else? But if you think back to American Lit , you almost certainly learned about the desire this review expresses in the demure idiom of friendship. Scholars and teachers are hesitant to expound much more β to speculate, in the austere registers of literary criticism, about a possible sexual connection or attraction between these two canonical authors.
Ultimately, we have no idea whether Melville and Hawthorne had sex. Part of the problem is that writers of the midth century did not have available to them the same expressive concision as those of us today who might speak glibly of topping and bottoming.
Sure, those two might have eventually pursued dalliances on the side, as some functionally heterosexual married men, then as now, surely did. Melville wrote of Hawthorne with undeniably sexy language. What proves more elusive are the feelings to which, with any precision, this language can be said to refer. This work, though not exact, is often a lot of fun.
Whether or not we agree on that last adjective, it is arguably worthy of a writer who was never shy about tucking bawdy jokes into even his most serious contemplations. Like Moby-Dick. Are jokes different than reviews, than letters, than literature? Do they imply a different kind of intentionality β a different kind of access to desire? These jokes could become the kind of documentary sources that form the building blocks of any historical reconstruction, literary or otherwise.
