Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was published in 1851, but, the manuscript had been almost completed by the summer of 1850. Evert Duyckinck, the editor of The Literary World, who looked over the text, wrote to his brother that it was "a romantic, fanciful and literal and most enjoyable presentment of the Whale Fishery." However, as Melville got more and more literary inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne through the months from late 1850 to 1851, he could not resist the impulse to revise the work. After all, when the published text appeared, it was much different from the 1850 manuscript. Unfortunately, there is no decisive evidence for verifying this rewriting process because all the manuscripts were lost. Thus, what the 1850 original story was like has been a riddle to Melville scholars. Howard Vincent, George R. Stewart, and James Barbour, relying on external evidences such as letters, quotations, and books Melville used, tried to identify two or three different stages where he worked on different parts of the text. Unlike those critics, Harrison Hayford analyzed the text itself in detail, and hypothesized that Melville changed some of the characters' names in the original manuscript without editing their descriptions. For example, in the 1850 manuscript, Ishmael's partner must have been Bulkington instead of Queequeg, and, in his process of revision, Melville must have changed "Bulkington" both into "Queequeg" in some parts and into "Ahab" in other parts. He swapped the roles of the characters only by editing their names. Above all, this essay focuses on the hypothesis that Peleg was originally spelled as Pegleg in the 1850 manuscript ("peg leg" means an artificial leg made of wood), and that he must have been the one-legged captain of the Pequod. Namely, Pegleg's role as the captain was taken over by Ahab as Melville proceeded with the revision of the manuscript. Hayford calls it a hypothesis, but if we analyze one scene in the present text where Ishmael talks with Peleg, we can assert that his hypothesis is right. This analysis is done by examining Melville's use of the idiom, "clap eye on." Moreover, if Pegleg were the one-legged captain of the ship, his characteristics would represent the national hero of the age, Andrew Jackson. Pegleg initiates Ishmael into the world of whaling by threatening him with his peg leg, the limb devoured by a whale, which symbolizes the dangerous jobs he will have to undertake. In a similar way, Jackson received scars on his head in the Revolutionary War, and he menaced his political enemy with a hickory cane, at the same time, he succeeded in initiating the Republic into a new democratic era. Then, we can assume that Melville composed some parts of the 1850 manuscript, responding to the imperatives of the Jacksonian ideology. This can also be explained by the political backgrounds behind his compositional works, and we can regard his process of revision including Pegleg's transformation into Peleg with his lost leg recovered as his effort to alienate himself from this ideology. Thus, this essay makes clear the textual dynamics deployed in the 1850 and 1851 Moby-Dicks which are transparently visible through each other, and demonstrates the ideological conflicts in which Melville struggled for artistic integration.

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This essay explores how the dilemma of the understanding and representation of history challenged Hawthorne in writing Septimius Felton (or Septimius Norton). Hawthorne's posthumous work Septimius Felton has long been considered an artistic failure. But the unfinished work-which deals with the time around the outbreak of the American Revolution and was written during the period of the beginning of the Civil War-is critically important when we consider Hawthorne's complex view of history. In the face of the Battle of Concord, Septimius, the protagonist of the story, says, " [I]t is the snake-like doubt that thrusts out its head, which gives us a glimpse of reality." His desire to see the "real" behind "the shallow covering" is indeed not far from the modern (or post-modern) aporia of history. As is encapsulated in Walter Benjamin's well-known premise that "there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism," the problem of how to reach the "real" history free from the dominant ideology of a time and place-and of how to represent it-has troubled many historians, philosophers, and literary scholars to this day. Hawthorne was skeptical of the romantic concepts of history prevailing in nineteenth-century America. Indeed, the text of Septimius Felton and other documents surrounding it show how Hawthorne revised and resisted the romantic theories and practices of history of his era, such as popularly promulgated by George Bancroft and theoretically buttressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Hawthorne criticized romantic historicism for its tendencies to minimize the negative effects of historical events, such as violence and murder, and to justify and glorify barbarous acts of human beings in war-times. In Septimius Felton, by dramatizing the warlike atmosphere in Concord during the Revolutionary War, Hawthorne attempted to represent the same sort of war-craze that he saw pervading the town during the Civil War. But his rejection of the teleological description of events-which marks romantic historiographies-inevitably led to the collapse of the plot itself. The failure of the narrative, however, does not mean that Hawthorne failed in representing the "real" history of his time and place. What Hawthorne almost unintentionally accomplished in writing this "failed" work is the description of his story of barbarism. Confronted with the greatest political and social turmoil in his life and in the history of the United States, Hawthorne kept recording the barbarity (and timidity) of his own as "a" history irreducible to "the" history. By dint of this effort, Hawthorne barely managed to present a miniscule history against the grain, which Benjamin would call the very task of historical materialist.

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This essay examines the ideological and even libidinal investment in a child's innocence in Richard Powers's fourth novel Operation Wandering Soul (1993). Criticisms of Powers's novels have concentrated on their so-called "post-modernist" aesthetics and their political sensitivity, which might be regarded as a liberal humanist one. However, instead of following the common path of praising their politics without reserve, this essay demonstrates how his alleged humanism reflects the cultural obsession with the child's innocence in contemporary American society. Symptomatic of this cultural obsession is the recent heated debate on the "recovered memory syndrome." This epidemic discourse of the recovery of the memory of childhood sexual abuse articulates the problem of child molestation in the fixed triangulation of victimized child-monstrous pedophile-benevolent rescuer, or, "us." My argument follows James Kincaid's contention that such representation enables "us" to "produce and circulate the details of child molesting not only with impunity but with righteous fervor" (Kincaid 180). Published in the midst of the epidemic of "recovered memory" discourse, Soul incorporates and reflects this cultural enthusiasm for the innocent child. The text consists of three multi-layered narratives: the predominant realistic narrative of a relationship between the pediatrician Richard Kraft and the nurse Linda Espera; fragmentary narratives of "escaping children" interpolated into this; and the metafictional narrative of a novelist writing Kraft's narrative. Central to these narratives are repeated images of suffering children. The emphasis on their vulnerability and morality, which Kraft has failed to confront, is intended to evoke the readers' humanistic sympathy and responsibility towards them; hence the text closes by calling for the readers' intervention: "Someone donates their organs, all of them. You" (351). The text's humanist politics that have hitherto been praised, then, rely on the intense association of the images of the child with vulnerability and innocence. Such representation resonates with, and is symptomatic of, the ideological and libidinal investment in a child's innocence that has sustained the contemporary epidemic discourse of child molestation. Not surprisingly, Kraft's intimacy with the others is shadowed by the subtext of child/childhood sexual abuse. As the relationship with Kraft reminds Espera of the molestation she has suffered as a child, the emotional entanglement between them, and that between Kraft and his girl-patient Joy, is underpinned by a thorough unevenness of power; hence the line between their attachment to Kraft and the Stockholm syndrome, or the abductee's involuntary identification with the abductor, in sexual abuse is rather contingent. Moreover, Kraft's characterization itself obscures the boundary between pedophilic desire and "pure" affection towards children. Kraft is characterized by his misanthropy, which critics like Joseph Dewey have generalized as a "withdrawal" from reality. However, the fact that the rhetoric of his operation of Joy (273-4, 286) is explicitly sexualized seems to suggest that there lies behind his figure the subtext of pedophilia; in other words, that his misanthropy might be a symptom of his sexual orientation not towards adults but towards children. From the viewpoint of child/childhood sexual abuse, then, the text's ethics interconnected with its metafictional structure turns out to be problematic. The metanarrative of the novelist writing Kraft's narrative negates Kraft's "withdrawal" by relativizing him as a fictional character even within the framework of the text, in order to evoke the readers' responsibility. However,

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