reverenced by the public. And that self — formed out of a communal wish to admire a young, pious, and learned minister — he cannot bring himself to renounce. That his private suffering contributes to the public mask of spirituality is a kind of masochistic dividend for him.
It is Hester Prynne who breaks the cycle of vengeance and selfloathing in The Scarlet Letter. For Hester, who stands in haughty agony on the scaffold at the outset of the romance, neither seeks vengeance nor loathes herself. Proud, unable to hate her sin, she ornaments the letter and thereby (as Nina Baym points out) subverts 'the intention of the magistrates who condemn her to wear it.' The iron grace of her life for seven years, a discipline bred on suppressed emotion, leads directly to the forest interview with Dimmesdale and the unraveling of the story Hawthorne has set in circular motion. Without Hester, there is nothing in the logic of The Scarlet Letter to make it end, so tightly has Hawthorne woven his narrative of revenge -85- and self-absorption. The ending, as it must be, is grim. But the survival of Hester Prynne shows that there is life after the distortions of caricature and obsession.
Chillingworth's revenge is personal, Ahab's cosmic. And while Chillingworth masks his motives during the course of The Scarlet Letter, Ahab announces the vengeful purpose of the Pequod's voyage when he first faces his crew from the quarterdeck. Yet Ahab on the quarterdeck does not divulge the full dimensions of his rage. That responsibility falls to Ishmael, Melville's narrator, who is at pains to account for the growth of Ahab's monomania; Ishmael's language registers the intensity, the pitch, of the Captain's burning idea. Since his first and near-fatal encounter with Moby Dick, Ishmael tells us,
Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malignant agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning…; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; — Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
Strong language, this, an absolute rhetoric with its repetitive all, all, all. It posits the existence of an 'intangible malignity…from the beginning'; it invokes the 'rage and hate' of the human race, 'from Adam down.' Ishmael notes that Ahab bears a scar, 'a slender rodlike mark, lividly whitish,' as if he were a tree struck by lightning. According to the Manxman, should Ahab ever be 'tranquilly laid out' and made ready for the grave — an unlikely supposition — it would turn out to be 'a birth-mark from crown to sole.' Maddened, desperate, and scarred (perhaps by birth), Ahab seeks to confront not experience but evil. There are voices of reason in Moby-Dick, voices that speak of whaling as a business and of ties to families in Nan-86- tucket. Chief among them is Starbuck, who says he has come to hunt whales and not his commander's vengeance. But Ahab, who would confront the absolute, is absolute aboard the Pequod. The crew, he says, are his arms and legs; to him, the three symbols on the doubloon are all Ahab. Tied to him alone, the crew share the destructive fate of a captain questing for absolute revenge.
After the publication of The Scarlet Letter and Moby- Dick, Hawthorne and Melville continued to use the latitude of the romance to fashion narratives of revenge. Both Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun extend the revenge story to include gothic elements, the first a family curse that shapes the issues of the narrative, the second an oppressive and haunting figure of malevolence who is murdered by the faunlike Donatello — precipitating a new fall from innocence. Likewise gothic in atmosphere is Melville's provocative Benito Cereno (1856), in which revenge comes from slaves who revolt on board a ship carrying them to South America. Finally, in the posthumously published Billy Budd (1925), Melville converts the romance to fable with a story of 'natural depravity,' as seen in Claggart, causing the fall of the preAdamic Billy Budd.
Perhaps to demonstrate that the myth of the American Adam was indeed a myth, American writers have shown a fascination for revenge as a motif for the romance. Motives for vengeance cut across race and gender, involving such characters as Magua in Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Nathan Slaughter in Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods (1837), Ruth Hall at the end of Fanny Fern's novel of that name (1855) — as well as the plots of powerful twentieth-century texts such as Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), and Stephen King's garish Misery (1987), in which a reader turns vengefully on a writer. Native Son, of course, has never been called a romance; it is a hard-driving novel, unrelenting in its realism. Yet Bigger Thomas takes revenge for his life, for the fact of living, in that novel; and when he says, 'What I killed for, I am,' in the final chapter, realism falls away before an existential moment akin to the free-floating ventures of the romance. The urge to get even with someone or something or everything may be an essential part of the American sense of story, something artic-87- ulated out of a deep sense of loss or disappointment. If so, it continues to seek new forms of expression. As Melville said at the end of the broken promises and surfaces of The Confidence-Man (1857), 'Something further may follow of this Masquerade.'
Terence Martin
-88-
Who ain't a slave? Tell me that.
— Ishmael, Moby-Dick
Henry Whistler, writing during the English expedition of 1654-55 against Spanish Jamaica, described Barbados as 'the dunghill whereon England doth cast forth its rubbish.' In this hub of excrement he lamented how a rogue could so easily become a gentleman, a whore a lady. Both Edward Long, in his History of Jamaica (1774), and Lady Maria Nugent, in her Jamaica journal, observing the behavior and appearance of white ladies on their plantations, complained about these surprising hybrids of the New World. Long writes: 'We see…a very fine young woman awkwardly dangling her arms with the air of a Negroe-servant.' Lady Nugent focuses on the shock of hearing the English language corroded by the drawling, dissonant gibberish of negro domestics: 'Many of the ladies, who have not been educated in England, speak a sort of broken English, with an indolent drawling out of their words, that is very tiresome if not disgusting.' Nugent and Long speak from the position of a dominant culture: threatened by the fact of creolization, a contamination, as they see it, of the pure civilities of Mother England. A latter-clay Rochester in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) looks at his white creole wife Antoinette and momentarily confounds her with the negro servant. 'She raised her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth turned down in a questioning, mocking way. For a moment she looked very much like Amélie. Perhaps they are related, I thought. It's possible, it's even probable in this damned place.'
What happens to romance when we turn to those places where -89- everything was allowed because thousands were enslaved, where the fact of slavery — the conversion of person into thing for the ends of capital — turned all previous orders upside down? If 'masters' claimed civilization on the backs of those they called polluted or bestial — claims ever threatened by evidences of a terrible brutality and abandon — they had to clarify their identity against a background of hybridization, forced intimacies, and pollution. Perhaps we can no longer understand what we mean by romance in the Americas without turning to the issue of slavery. The forced intimacy of what Pierre de Vassière, writing about creole life in Saint-Domingue from 1629 to 1789, called 'a very strange familiarity' between those who called themselves masters and those who found themselves slaves made the old practices of
