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Article Excerpt
Linda Costanzo Cahir. Solitude and Society in the Works of Herman Melville and Edith Wharton. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999. 155+ pp.
Those of us of the teaching persuasion usually recognize the value of perspective by incongruity. As Linda Costanzo Cahir points out early in her book, there are often surprising rewards to be gained in a yoking which at first glance may appear an act of "literary violence" (1). Her linkage of the art of a man known to much of the world as exclusively a writer of adventure books set on grubby whaleships, with that of a woman whose characters are exclusively dressed in tea gowns and diamonds, is very much a valid one, as her chapters show. Her book reminds me of my own impulsive offering of a course in Melville and Dickinson. I had merely intuited a correspondence but was as pleasantly surprised as my students to find during the course of the semester that indeed my intuition was not at fault. Let us have more of these startling juxtapositions, which broaden our perspective and correct our stale unexamined notions.
Melville and Wharton, once one sets aside surface considerations such as tea gowns, can be seen to have a great deal...
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