Melville’s Chimney: Queer Syntax and the Rhetoric of Architecture

Melville’s Chimney (Revised) 1

Melville’s Chimney:

Queer Syntax and the Rhetoric of Architecture

RASMUS R. SIMONSEN

Western University, Canada

This essay explores the connection between architectural tropes and sexual rhetoric in Melville’s short story “I and My Chimney.” The argument focuses on the inversion of conventional hierarchies such as top/bottom, straight/crooked, masculine/feminine, and natural/depraved. These inversions are all centered on the massive chimney of the story, guiding the rhetorical redistribution of unspoken queer desire through inverted parallels and a preoccupation with all things “backwards.” The trope of verticality combines with Melville’s use of different back-turning syntactical devices, such as periodic sentences and hypotaxis, to disrupt the forward motion of the plot. An analysis of rhetorical schemes such as polyptoton further reveals how Melville’s linguistic confusions disrupt the sexual hierarchy of phallus and anus to an extent that compels us to reconsider the phallo-centrism that Melville critics have argued is more or less universal to his style. The “backwardness” of Melville’s rhetoric expresses an inexpressible desire that can only be represented by a prose style turned against itself, which mimics the narrator’s resistance towards normative living arrangements of the mid-nineteenth century.

When the Spine is strait, well set, and finely turned, it makes a

handsome Body; and when it is crooked and ill turned, the Body

is deformed.

Nicolas Andry de Bois-Regard, Orthopaedia

We build our church up into the sky against the gravitation, but

’tis only the downward tendency that holds it fast.

Horatio Greenough, “Social Theories”


“I and My Chimney” was first published anonymously in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in

March 1856. Melville wrote the story when he was residing at his home, Arrowhead, in

Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which was outfitted with a large, central chimney. Merton M.

Sealts has noted that the story was generally received by the public as a humorous sketch

of domestic life (81). However, the incorporation of several biographical details made

members of Melville’s family, especially his wife, feel anxious about the story. Adding a

biographical counterpoint to his analysis, Sealts suggests that the fictional wife’s

insistence on having the chimney surveyed alludes to the “examination of [Melville’s]

mind that was reputedly made some time” in 1852 after the publication of Pierre (83).

Bruce Harvey has argued that the story depicts “the enigmatic inward corridors that

haunted [Melville] and became the subject of his most elusive fiction” (98). While it has

not been proven definitely that Melville ever underwent any kind of mental treatment,

biographers and critics have noted the link between Melville’s back pain and the

narrator’s sciatic disposition in “I and My Chimney.” Indeed, some Melville critics have

tended to read the narrator’s deformed spine as a metaphor for the author’s unsound mind

(Sealts 87). Although a careful reading of “Chimney” troubles the appropriateness of

equating rectitude, or straightness, with mental health, we should not dismiss the idea that

Melville’s rhetorical style at the time of penning “Chimney” may have been influenced

by a certain melancholy turn of mind. For instance, his finances were in disarray at this

point in his career. William E. Engel has connected Melville’s depressive moods with his

tendency “of retreating to a position of confessing incompleteness [that] recalls the early

modern rhetorical gesture familiarly known as the ‘inexpressibility topos’” (21).


“Inexpressibility” figures in Melville variously as the “unsayable” and “unutterable,” a

condition that Harvey links to a kind of “aphasia” in Clarel (141). Harvey intimates that

this aphasia can be traced to the “transgressive destination . . . of male-male couplings”

that “simply cannot be articulated” in the poem (141). In “Chimney,” the “transgressive

destination” of Melville’s language has less to do with the connotative inexpressibility

that Engel and Harvey identify and more to do with the rhetorical redistribution of the

unspoken through inverted parallels and a preoccupation with all things “backwards.”

The trope of verticality, in the guise of the massive chimney, as we shall see, adds to the

punning eroticism of the text.

The chimney, as the idée fixe of the story, guides the inversion of conventional

hierarchies such as top/bottom, straight/crooked, masculine/feminine, and

natural/depraved. In “Chimney,” the reader’s sympathies quickly come to lie with the

sciatica-ridden narrator rather than his rigidly composed wife, whose inflexible posture—

she is “straight as a pine” (360)—signifies her resolve to tear down the narrator’s beloved

chimney, “a huge, corpulent old Harry VIII. of a chimney” (352). The chimney is at its

base “precisely twelve feet square,” which, as the narrator gleefully exclaims, seems an

inordinate “appropriation of terra firma for a chimney” (357). And “its dimensions, at

times, seem incredible,” even to him (358). It works against the propriety of architectural

proportion, and its sublime shape can only be properly comprehended “by a sort of

process in the higher mathematics” (358). Introducing the chimney, the narrator alludes

to “Lord Rosse’s monster telescope,” which—when “swung vertical to hit the meridian

moon” (352)—resembles the chimney. It is this “vertical” shift, rather than Melville’s

various historical allusions, that drives my analysis, particularly in relation to the cellar


scene later in the story. The trope of verticality combines with Melville’s use of different

“backward” syntactical devices, such as periodic sentences, to disrupt the forward motion

of the plot, which advances according to the wife’s different (unsuccessful) attempts at

removing the chimney.

When are we supposed to view the chimney as a metaphor, or a figure of speech,

and when should we accept it as an actual object belonging to the deictic space of the

story? If the answers to this question are not clear at all times, at the very least we can

establish that the question inhabits the narrative center of the story:

My chimney, were it not so mighty in its magnitude, my chambers had been

larger. How often has my wife ruefully told me, that my chimney, like the English

aristocracy, casts a contracting shade all round it. She avers that endless domestic

inconveniences arise—more particularly from the chimney’s stubborn central

locality. (359)

The chimney’s superior station in the household is confirmed by the fact that “each

architectural arrangement . . . is, in the most marked manner, accommodated, not to my

wants, but to my chimney’s” (353); the “centre of the house” belongs to the chimney,

“leaving but the odd holes and corners to [the narrator]” (353). The domestic friction

between the narrator and his family seems to serve merely as an excuse to talk about his

“superior” (353), the chimney.

According to the foremost architect and landscape designer in mid-nineteenth-

century America, Andrew Jackson Downing, appreciation of form is innate to the human

condition and so “the want of proportion in a building is felt as a great and irremediable

defect” (12). The chimney in Melville’s story is completely out of proportion to the


house, as if it belonged to a different space altogether. The immensity and rigidity of the

chimney stand, not only in an inverse relation to the deformed shape of the narrator, but

to the distorted language of the story itself. The architecture of Melville’s prose in this

particular story resembles less the rectitude of a healthy spine and more the misaligned

vertebrae of a patient suffering from sciatica: his language moves by awkward, twisted

byways, which I will scrutinize later.

I will analyze the ways in which the asymmetrical force of Melville’s writing in

“Chimney” anticipates contemporary theorizing concerning the concept of queer space.

As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick tells us, the etymology of the word queer “comes from the

Indo-European root -twerkw, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin

torquere (to twist), English athwart” (viii). The twisting apart of sexual categories that

“queer” entails is evident in the rhetorical inversions of Melville’s language. Through an

extended proliferation of backward-oriented word clusters, Melville creates an anal

syntax—understood in erotic terms and as linguistic compulsiveness—that is

centripetally focused around the figure of the chimney. Whereas previous critics have

tended to read “Chimney” biographically—pointing to the similarities between narrator

and author—I argue that a concern with rhetorical patterns and syntax becomes a way for

Melville to experiment with ways to articulate “inexpressible” connections among

language, space, and homoeroticism.1

The Architecture of Queer Style

In “I and My Chimney,” “backwardness” quickly emerges as the general sentiment of the

narrator. The confusion of different spaces and directions (front/back;


progression/reversal) becomes fundamental to our reading. At the beginning of the story,

Melville’s narrator takes a back seat to his chimney: “Though I always say, I and my

chimney . . . yet this egotistic way of speaking, wherein I take precedence of my chimney,

is hardly borne out by facts; in everything, except the above phrase, my chimney taking

precedence over me” (352). The syntactical precedence of “I” in the prose is immediately

subverted by the “true” nature of the relationship between the chimney and the narrator:

the chimney is Henry VIII to the narrator’s Cardinal Wolsey. It is thus not surprising that

the word “before” should appear 14 times over the course of the story to suggest the

chimney’s kingly stature. In one case, it is used to construct a litotes (emphasis through

understatement) to indicate that the narrator is behind the chimney (in stature,

metaphorically, erotically): “When in the rear room, set apart for that object, I stand to

receive my guests (who, by the way call more, I suspect, to see my chimney than me), I

then stand, not so much before, as, strictly speaking, behind my chimney, which is,

indeed, the true host” (352; my emphasis). The word “before” is used five times to

indicate how the mass of the chimney rises in front of the narrator or his wife. In this

way, the narrator alerts the reader to pay special attention to inversions as they turn up in

the remaining pages of the narrative, and it becomes clear that we cannot trust the writing

to stay faithful to a stable binary system or connotative hierarchy.

In the first two pages of “Chimney,” “rear,” either as a prefix or stand-alone word,

appears four times. The word-cluster (“rearward,” “rear-guard,” “rear”) in the fifth

paragraph of the story adds to the proliferation of “behind,” which is repeated five times.

To properly convey Melville’s prose style, allow me to quote from the beginning of the

story at length:


From this habitual precedence of my chimney over me, some even think that I

have got into a sad rearward way altogether; in short, from standing behind my

old-fashioned chimney so much, I have got to be quite behind the age too, as well

as running behind-hand in everything else. But to tell the truth, I never was a very

forward old fellow, nor what my farming neighbors call a forehanded one. Indeed,

those rumors about my behindhandedness are so far correct, that I have an odd

sauntering way with me sometimes of going about with my hands behind my

back. As for my belonging to the rear-guard in general, certain it is, I bring up the

rear of my chimney—which, by the way, is this moment before me—and that,

too, both in fancy and fact. (353; my emphases)

In this passage, polyptoton (repetition of words from the same root but with different

endings) emerges as the central rhetorical device. Melville uses this technique to

communicate the narrator’s embrace of his lagging position in relation to his

contemporaries. His “behindhandedness” is both spatial and temporal. Trading on

different idioms (“behind the age,” “running behind-hand”),2 Melville employs the

central markers of posteriority (“rear-”, “behind-”) in as many configurations as possible,

rendering the style almost redundant. The increasingly lengthy and awkward word

endings tacked onto “behind” (“-hand,” “-handedness”) reveal the narrator’s propensity

for bottom-heavy language.

The linguistic geometry of the passage is intricate. Using a periodic sentence

structure, Melville suspends or defers the climax of the passage by adding another layer

to the “behind/rear” cluster at the end of each sentence. The end-weighted syntax of the

prose, in this way, contributes to the story’s resistance to progress; the rearward thrust of


the passage metaphorically supplements the narrator’s conservatism. The passage is

littered with parenthetical interruptions: prepositional phrases (“from standing behind my

old-fashioned chimney so much”) and non-essential clauses (“which, by the way, is this

moment before me”). Such parenthetical qualifications, as Richard Lanham observes in

his analysis of periodic style, “seem to follow a mind in the act of meditating, of

exploring possibilities” (53). For Melville, such “possibilities” involve the presence of

homoerotic desire in language and in the lived spaces of nineteenth-century America.

Lanham has demonstrated how hypotactic language tends to proceed by a ranking

imperative structured through subordinate clauses (38). In contrast to the terseness of

parataxis (as in Hemingway), hypotaxis allows us to see “the vertical coordinate upon

which so much depends in prose style” (39). Style, for Lanham, is made conspicuous in

moments of excess or self-reflexivity, when language turns into allegory. Indeed,

Melville’s language in the above passage seems to delight in slowing down the pace, as

the sauntering “I” explores the different combinations of “behind” and “rear.” The

meditative language suspends the agency of the narrator, as the words appear to

proliferate among themselves in a textual reverie. The desire that drives the increasingly

complex forms of “behind,” or the synonymous interplay with “rear,” carries the

narrative “I” along in a syntax that refuses to form symmetrical patterns of expression.

According to Lee Edelman, the “phallocentric positional logic” of Western

heterosexual culture—which can be traced much further back in time than the dawn of

sexology in the late nineteenth century3—sees “gay male sexual relations as a form of

extended, non-productive behind-play” (183). Melville’s text can be understood to enact

on the level of rhetoric and syntax “both a spatial disturbance in the logic of positions and


a temporal disturbance in the logic essential to narrative development” (Edelman 183).

His story refutes what Edelman calls “the determinacy of positional distinctions” (191)

and imagines a space of erotic textual possibility.

Before/Behind

While expressive of a certain erotic, untamable energy, the linguistic plane of the story

also signifies on the sexual connotation of “behind” (anus) as it contrasts with and

overturns “before” (phallus). The before/behind confusion renders the hierarchy of

narrator and chimney uncertain; at the same time, this linguistic confusion disrupts the

sexual hierarchy of phallus and anus to an extent that compels us to reconsider the phallo-

centrism that Melville critics have argued is more or less universal to his style. William

G. Crowley has noted that the chimney is “ambiguous but definitely phallic” (qtd. in

Sealts 91); similarly, Bruce Harvey calls the story “phallo-eccentric” (130). But can a

symbol be both ambiguous and definite? Critics over the years have both affirmed and

railed against Melville’s phallicism. Robert Shulman claims, with reference to Moby-

Dick, that “for Melville as for Ishmael the power of self is inseparable from sexual

potency” (186); he goes on to argue that, in Melville’s artistic creation, “[p]rimal, sexual

energy is intrinsically subversive of conventional order and of respectable systems”

(187). Robyn Wiegman criticizes Melville’s supposed reliance on phallic imagery.

Analyzing “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” she notes how male

bonding “is achieved through the adulation of the male body where the phallus is the

supreme signifier not only of the circuit of the male bond but also of the representational

economy itself” (741). Wiegman draws on Luce Irigaray to argue that Melville’s


representational economy renders woman the “underside” of the phallus, its negative

counterpart (741). Quoting the beginning of “Paradise,” Wiegman briefly notes that anal

imagery shapes the threshold of the story (738): one enters the hidden male refuge by

“adroitly turn[ing] a mystic corner,” which “is like stealing from a heated plain into some

cool, deep glen, shady among harboring hills” (“Paradise” 316). Although Wiegman

takes Robert K. Martin to task for focusing on the phallus in his reading of the Melville

canon, her own analysis does the same but from a negative perspective. By concentrating

solely on the “asymmetrical representational economy of gender” (737) in Melville’s

writing, Wiegman fails to see that the “underside” of the phallus is not necessarily

feminine.

In “Chimney,” Melville evaluates and refigures the potency of phallic imagery in

his writing. Irwin points out the doubly figural importance of Melville’s chimney,

comparing it to the Egyptian god Osiris who is traditionally conflated with Apis, the bi-

sexual cow/bull deity of ancient Egypt. According to Irwin, the chimney is “associated

with both the dismembered/life-giving phallus and the pyramid as tomb/womb” (297).4

This reading is plausible, but Irwin’s hetero-centrist emphasis on phallus (male) and tomb

(female) ignores the extent to which the chimney’s “truncated” structure, decreasing as it

does “towards the summit” (“Chimney” 355)—like the whale’s spinal canal in Moby-

Dick that “tapers in size” (Moby-Dick 349)— might also be read as a (male) rectal figure,

tapering towards the point of expulsion. The reversal between male and female, top and

bottom, structures the rhetorical imperatives of the story.

The before/behind confusion—the destabilization of sexual and narratological

hierarchies—in Melville’s prose allows us to read the chimney as simultaneously


representing different organs and orifices. David Greven recently has demonstrated how

Margaret Fuller successfully deployed phallic imagery in her writing as part of her

feminist “counter-poetics” (43). Melville, in effect, blends phallic and anal figures to

create what we might call a “counter-directional” poetics. We can link a concern for the

“downward tendency” of Melville’s chimney to a theory of queer architecture. Hélène

Frichot defines queer architecture as a “perilous threshold . . . the meeting place between

the framing capacity of a provisional form and the forces which both facilitate and

trouble its construction” (67). At one point in “Chimney,” a young man calls on the

narrator’s daughter. After visiting with the family, the unfortunate gentleman caller, upon

taking his leave, succeeds in “backing himself into a dark pantry,” having failed to locate

the proper exit (364). Melville’s readers similarly experience disorienting areas in the

house’s architecture: “Going through the house, you seem to be forever going

somewhere, and getting nowhere. It is like losing one’s self in the woods; round and

round the chimney you go, and if you arrive at all, it is just where you started, and so you

begin again, and again get nowhere. . . . never was there so labyrinthine an abode” (364).

Here we see how the chimney has subverted what Adam Sweeting calls the nineteenth-

century “moral geography” of houses (107), which required that “the various decorative

elements be united in style so that the specific functions of each room could be

unambiguously expressed” (105). The layout of Melville’s interior, contorted by the

obscene chimney, disrupts any attempt at linear progress, thwarting the romantic energies

of the suitor. In the story, progressive and reproductive desires (as represented by the

wife’s decorative plans and the suitor’s intentions towards the narrator’s daughter,

respectively) lose momentum, as the house appears to variously prolong and retard the


movement of different characters, rendering them unproductive. However, the chimney,

in all its spectacular and rectilinear glory, appears to order the discontinuous parts of the

house into a greater contiguous whole, even as it thwarts the wife’s plan to have a “fine

entrance-hall” in its stead (359). The chimney is like an obscene linchpin that both

determines and disorders the form of the house; it is this capacity to re-frame its own

initial function (simply, to let smoke out) that renders it queer in Frichot’s sense of the

term. Furthermore, it turns out that the chimney is a repository of secrets.

Exploring the Fundament

Melville’s non-normative vision of the domestic space produces an asymmetrical

aesthetic. The chimney is the epitome of irregularity. No direct path exists to the hidden

chamber of the chimney, which is said to contain a treasure left by the narrator’s

ancestor; the wife urges the narrator to seek out the chamber and explore it. The baroque

presence of the chimney compels her to desecrate its frustratingly opaque form in an

effort to unearth its cavernous interior. The discovery of the secret closet—if it exists—

would mean the end for the chimney, and perhaps even for the wife, as the narrator warns

her to stay out of the “secret ash-hole,” that “queer hole” behind the chimney, exhorting

her: “‘Don’t you know that St. Dunstan’s devil emerged from the ash-hole? You will get

your death one of these days, exploring all about as you do’” (372). The narrator believes

that “‘[i]nfinite sad mischief has resulted from the profane bursting open of secret

recesses’” (376). He seems less concerned with his wife’s health, though, and more

concerned that she leave the interior of the chimney alone. According to the narrator’s

vision of his “behindhandedness”—as opposed to his wife’s impatient, progressivism—


her interest in the chimney’s “recesses” is entirely unwelcome, forming a threat to his

sense of identity. The wife continually complains of the smoke that both the chimney and

the narrator’s pipe produce in seemingly equal measure. “‘How you two wicked old

sinners do smoke!’” (372), she exclaims; part of her project is to locate whatever might

be obstructing the ascent of smoke through the chimney. But reducing the size of the

chimney, or violating it in any way, would be a direct attack on the narrator’s sense of

self, however backward his sentiment might appear.

In this respect, the chimney shares an architectural feature with the eponymous

House of the Seven Gables in Hawthorne’s novel. Christopher Castiglia refers to the

“queer interiority” of the Hawthornean house, the secretive nature of which provides a

counterpoint to the progressive impetus of making “inner life public and orderly” (189);

indeed, “the house always ‘had secrets to keep’” (189).5 As long as the chimney in

Melville’s text is left alone, it will be, as David Dowling puts it, “an object of meditation

like the whale, unfathomable and incomprehensible from one vantage point within one

field of vision” (48). But the narrator’s reluctance to seek out the supposed secret

chamber of the chimney does not mean that he is not interested in knowing his chimney.

From Moby-Dick on, according to Hershel Parker’s biography, Melville became

“extraordinarily aware of his states of being, so acutely aware of his self that to talk of

bodily states and mental states is to set up falsely distinct categories” (12). The cellar

scene in “Chimney” appears distinctly Melvillean, then, as the narrator’s “body becomes

absent-minded, absent of mind” (Parker 12) when he comes into contact with the

chimney’s fundament.


The narrator is drawn to the bottom of the chimney, about which his wife has no

immediate interest. We are told that the chimney is the most spacious at its root in the

“umbrageous cellar” of the house (357), and that the “numerous vaulted passages” of the

cellar “resemble the dark, damp depths of primeval woods” (357). Despite its telescopic

shape, pointing heavenward, the chimney yet has a certain affinity with or reliance on the

earth, and it is only when the dark “conceit” of the cellar steals over the narrator, the

alliterative “d” words (“dark, damp depths”) spurring his reverie, that his “wonder” at the

chimney “deeply penetrate[s]” him (357). Alliteration works here to further the rear-

oriented reading of Melville’s chimney. But, ironically, the style of the prose, employing

what Lanham calls “front rhyme” (122), here shifts to a connotative erotics, as the

alliteration prepares the reader for the masturbatory associations of the scene that unfolds

in the cellar section.

During his exploration of the chimney’s bottom, the limitations of the narrator’s

sciatica-stricken body seem to disappear, and in an ecstatic mood, the narrator starts

vigorously “digging round the foundation” of the chimney (357). The chimney brings

him out of himself. Presumably, the physical limitations of his sciatic condition are

alleviated as he turns his attention to the chimney’s base, and his newfound vitality seems

to be a requirement in exploring the fundament of the chimney.

In “Is the Fundament a Grave?”—whose title riffs on Leo Bersani’s influential

essay on male anality and AIDS, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”—Jeffrey Masten examines

the etymology of the word “fundament.” He observes that in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries in England, “fundament” could mean “foundation,” as in the

foundation of a house, or it could refer to the “buttocks” or “anus” (133). By the end of


the seventeenth century, “fundament” and “foundation” appear to trade places, such that

the latter now refers to the body part. Drawing on numerous textual examples from the

early modern period, Masten concludes that, “[i]n a culture where knowledge is figured

as depth, the fundament may be fundamental” (137). The “rhetoric of the fundament,”

according to Masten, reveals “an asshole that is not the derogated bottom of the lower

bodily strata, not the backside of what should ‘rightfully’ be front-sided” (138). Anality

as a trope appears throughout Melville’s oeuvre,6 and we should be careful not to read his

anal allusions in terms of lack. In his analysis of Melville’s long poem Clarel, Bruce

Harvey notes that transgressive sexuality in the text is entangled with “more agitated

longings” (145). Harvey interprets one character’s desire “to search the depths of the

Dead Sea” in terms of lack: any interest in the abyssal elements of life must finally

indicate a need “to fill in the desolations of the heart” (145). But Melville’s fundamental

figures of speech merge with the dialectics of before/behind and above/below to suggest

an erotic space that connects us to the theoretical ground of the contemporary queer

voices that I have been drawing on in this essay.

Whether Melville was aware of the etymological relationship between

“foundation” and “anus” cannot be proven with certainty. However, we know that

through his intensive reading of classical poets such as Virgil and Shakespeare he had

become highly familiar with the rhetorical and poetical devices of the early modern

period.7 Masten’s essay demonstrates that the rectal connotation of fundament/foundation

was present in Shakespeare’s time, and we have seen Melville, tongue-in-cheek, pun on

the “ash-hole” of the chimney: that “queer hole,” the abode of the St. Dunstan’s devil

(372). (The devil is of course typically connected with everything base and down-turned,


which only strengthens the anal connotation). And so Melville’s ignorance on this matter

should not be assumed.

As Melville’s narrator is digging in the foundation of the chimney, he imagines

the toiling bodies of masons who laid it, being abused by the “sweltering” heat of “an

August sun, or pelted by a March storm” (357). Combined with the early modern

“foundational” resonances of the chimney, we encounter here an erotic metaphorics at

work, invoking images of strained male bodies. Being “a little out of [his] mind” (357),

under the spell of the gargantuan chimney rising before (behind?) him, the narrator is

feverishly “[p]lying [his] blunted spade” (357)—not unlike Kory-Kory, the narrator’s

native servant in Typee, who “pl[ies] his hands to and fro with amazing rapidity” (111)

while rubbing sticks together to start a fire and light the narrator’s pipe—and it does not

strain the imagination to read this as a scene of masturbation.8 Moreover, “plying” one’s

instrument can be taken as an expression of individualism or the exercising of resistance

to outside forces that are imposing on one’s personal liberties. For example, when the

candle-maker China Aster, in Melville’s last major novel The Confidence-Man, is offered

a loan by the shoe-maker Orchis, he recalls a saying of his uncle, the blacksmith: “To ply

my own hammer, light though it be, I think best, rather than piece it out heavier by

welding to it a bit of a neighbor’s hammer, though that may have some weight to spare”

(209). Juxtaposed with the digging scene in “Chimney,” we can see how autoeroticism

becomes paired with a feeling of personal liberty. This ideal remains unfulfilled in

“Chimney,” however, as the narrator’s personal liberty is hampered by his financial and

domestic struggles. This sense of limits leads Vicki Halper Litman to conclude that “[t]he


farmhouse in ‘I and My Chimney’ is emblematic of a dystopian view of earthly

possibilities” (635).

The question of “whether it is Christian-like knowingly to reside in a house,

hidden in which is a secret closet” (369), posed to the narrator by Hiram Scribe, whom he

has hired to examine his chimney, places us in sodomitical territory. Scribe suggests that

the sacredness of the chimney is somehow profaned by the knowledge of the secret

closet. The “spirit” of the chimney engenders erotic visions of male bodies in the

narrator, and leads to a figurative scene of masturbation. The masturbatory associations in

the “Chimney” scene are different from the exuberant “A Squeeze of the Hand” chapter

in Moby-Dick, in which fellow-feeling is crucial. The mood in “Chimney” is ecstatic, but

this story is void of camaraderie. If Moby-Dick is concerned, in part, with delineating “a

transformative sexuality in which men enjoy each other and, at least temporarily,

abandon their place in the order of work,” as Robert Martin suggests (195), then

“Chimney,” written during Melville’s darker, more depressed mid-1850’s, treats

masturbation as a temporary measure responding to the frustrations of domestic life.

Domesticity, Melville seems to say in the wake of Moby-Dick and Pierre, restricts the

spirit of adventure and ruptures the possibility of male-male intimacy. In lieu of

interpersonal intimacy, autoeroticism serves as a partially fulfilling reprieve from

domestic pressures, and masturbation, in different times and places, can create private

spaces in complicated living situations.9

While the activity of “plying one’s spade” suggests phallic masturbation, “digging

in [one’s] cellar” can be read as a self-probing of the anal cavity (“Chimney” 358). The

twentieth-century French thinker Guy Hocquenghem has suggested that “the anus


remains an intimate and empty site of a mysterious and personal production” (151). No

wonder that the interruption of the narrator’s cellar activities—directed both to the front

and back of his body, involving what Patricia Parker calls “preposterous discoveries”

(140)—should be judged the more “ungracious” (357).10 The confusion of before/behind

that we have identified in Melville’s prose is now implicitly eroticized. Historically,

sodomy involves all non-procreative acts, and a form of masturbation involving both the

penis and the anus can be considered doubly perverse. John Allison contends that the

narrator comes to his senses “out of respect for the concealed mystery of [a] sacred

interior” (21). But we must take issue with this reading; for whereas the narrator, in the

more public upper levels of the house, acknowledges the “profane” (376) nature of

“plying” his chimney for secrets, the cellar’s influence on him is irresistible. He stops his

plying only when intruded upon. Melville provides an additional anal pun when a

neighbor encroaches upon the scene. The neighbor teasingly asks our anti-hero if he is

“[g]old digging” (358). That the narrator regards the chimney as growing out of himself

(either as phallic embodiment or as excrement) is clear when he, in an agitated voice,

warns the neighbor not to become—“‘ahem!’”—“‘personal’” in inquiring about his plans

for the chimney (358); he “permit[s] no gibes to be cast at either myself or my chimney”

(358), which are conflated at this point.

The narrator’s idea of self is contingent on the state of his chimney. The spatial

confusion evinced in his before/behind rhetoric could be seen as a way of “protecting the

crypt” against intrusion (see Sealts 85). His wife, in lieu of her “proposed hall,” will not

be allowed to succeed in penetrating the chimney “all the way into the dining room in the

remote rear of the mansion” to make room for “a modified project” (363). The narrator


links his wife’s inability to appreciate the almost sacred significance of the chimney to

the fact that “she never thinks of her end” (361). “End” here is meant to denote demise,

but given the story’s attention to spatial metaphors it might serve as well as a pun on her

rear-part, her body’s “crypt.” Curiously, her defiance of old age does not hinder her from

investing ideologically in the future; indeed, she is “spicily impatient of present and past”

(361), and she “always buys her new almanac a month before the new year” (362). Her

disposition runs counter to everything that characterizes the narrator’s

“behindhandedness” (353). Her anxious anticipation of the future might of course be

because she fully understands the secret basis for her husband’s interest in the chimney.

The “backwardness” of Melville’s rhetoric expresses an inexpressible desire that can only

be represented by a prose style turned against itself, which mimics the narrator’s

resistance towards normative living arrangements of the nineteenth century. Melville’s

rhetorical style “makes room” in the text for a reading that looks simultaneously

backward and forward in time, affirming unlikely, errant, and surprising pleasures.

Reading “I and My Chimney” through the lens of queer theory, I have sought to

emphasize the erotic elevation of the lowly elements in the story, an elevation producing

a series of sexualized images that convey the embattled identity of the narrator. Given the

anatomical connotations of the chimney, it seems only proper that its foundations,

extending into myth, should form the seat of the story’s eroticism. On this foundation, the

dialectics of height/before and depth/behind, which include a disavowal of the feminine

orifice in favor of the masculine, can be linked to the narrator’s struggle to establish a

space for his nameless desire, while denying the legitimacy of his wife’s needs and

hopes. Rather than a straightforward humorous sketch of domestic life, “I and My


Chimney” is a twisted tale about the incompatibility of different desires living side by

side in mid-nineteenth-century America.

Notes

1 My analytical approach resonates with Ohi’s Henry James and the Queerness of

Style (2011). Ohi aligns himself with what he, tongue-in-cheek, calls “that most old-

fashioned and, by now, almost marginalized activity: close reading” (1). Specifically,

grammatical complexity, temporal uncertainty, and excessive syntax are all foundational

to Ohi’s queer textual theory, which he seeks to separate from gay studies, in that queer

“analyses extend beyond . . . elements of culture where same-sex desire is explicitly at

stake” (27). In direct reference to Melville, Snediker’s recent reading of the Melville

canon emphasizes the “erotic willfulness of words” (162). Snediker considers the

“instances when aesthetics and pleasure inspire textual verve . . . beholden to no one and

nothing so much as itself,” in order to highlight a “queer sensitivity to the pleasure that

Melville’s language takes in itself” (163). Whereas Ohi and Snediker focus on linguistic

queerness, in my reading of Melville I combine syntactical analysis with a connotative

reading of the narrator’s fascination with the foundation of the chimney by drawing on

Jeffrey Masten’s excavation of the word “fundament” to suggest the anal erotics at play

in the story. This approach emphasizes the degree to which Melville’s “backward” style

equally influences the linguistic and representational levels of the text.

2 “Behind the age” appears to be a pun on “behind the back,” which, according to

John Russell Bartlett’s 1848 Dictionary of Americanisms, is to slander someone in his/her

absence (see entry on “Back”). Interestingly, the OED lists “behindhand” as variously


meaning to be in debt, behind the times, or ill prepared, all of which characterize the

position of Melville’s narrator.

3 In Intimacy in America, Peter Coviello takes stock of “the first rumblings of a

major conceptual shift” at midcentury, concerning “a gradually more intense scrutiny of

the nature of any attachment, of its qualities, its extensions, and, eventually, its propriety”

(8). In his more recent book, Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-

Century America, Coviello asks what “erotic life” looked like in the nineteenth century

prior to the advent of sexology.

4 Bruce Harvey notes that when Melville tried to enter a pyramid on his trip to

Egypt in 1857, in an effort “to re-enact physically the genealogical urge he had described

in “I and My Chimney,” “he ran out quickly, feeling an intolerable sense of

claustrophobia” (132). The titillating feelings produced by the chimney’s “secret ash-

hole” were seemingly replaced by what Harvey calls “a sense of suffocation [and]

gloomy bewilderment” (132) in Melville’s real-life encounter with the massive

entombment of the pyramid.

5 The actual House of the Seven Gables, known as the Turner-Ingersoll House

prior to Hawthorne’s romance, contains a secret staircase (Chamberlain 34).

6 For Melville, the theme of male invagination had already surfaced in Moby-

Dick, where Ahab’s “firm,” “calm” front does little to hide his “larger, darker, deeper

part” (186).

7 On His 1849 trip to London, for instance, Melville purchased numerous works

by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Sir Thomas Browne, among others (Journals 144).


8 Considered in the context of Melville’s oeuvre as a whole, there is nothing glib

or untoward in reading the “plying of one’s spade” as a figure of masturbation.

Recognizing Melville’s coy use of language, James Creech, in his study of Pierre, shows

how, through references to the “‘exultant swell’” of the young protagonist’s ruddy and

flushed soul and “the erect family shaft,” a scene of “lusty adolescent masturbation” can

be discerned (126).

9 Reflecting on her childhood home, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick remarks that “I used

to assume I craved privacy in order to masturbate so much—now I also imagine I

masturbated so much as a way of hollowing out a privacy for myself within the

permeable ear of my room” (Moon et al. 32).

10 On “preposterousness” and the relation to sodomy, see Jonathan Goldberg’s Sodometries.


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Melville’s Chimney: Queer Syntax and the Rhetoric of Architecture

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