The Pusher and the Sufferer by Stein Suzanne;

Author:Stein, Suzanne; [Stein, Suzanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2022-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

…Mr. Pyncheon heard a half-uttered exclamation from his daughter. It was very faint and low; so indistinct that there seemed but half a will to shape out the words, and too undefined a purport to be intelligible. Yet it was a call for help!— his conscience never doubted it;—and, little more than a whisper to his ear, it was a dismal shriek, and long reechoed so, in the region round his heart! (House, 244)

The vengeful laborer brings Alice under his spell by gazing at her so fixedly that he wrests control of the recesses of her selfhood, specifically of her ability to say no.19

Matthew Maule will cause Alice Pyncheon to come and go as he wills, and scenes like this, of one character seizing possession of another through psychic subjugation and humiliation, recur throughout the works of Melville and Hawthorne. Both writers are fascinated by how the charismatic figure, by steadily denying that boundaries exist between himself and other characters, quietly dissolves those boundaries and undermines the other's will to maintain himself as a separate being. But the persuading away of another's separateness, represented in the latter's volition to say no—gestalt psychologists posit a “‘no’ reflex”—occurs in another dimension as well, that inhabited by reader and writer, and understood in the conventional expression, “suspension of disbelief,” which denotes temporary surrender by readers of their volition to say “no” to what they are reading.

In order to simulate a sense of himself as powerful, Ishmael needs simultaneously to imagine the reader as powerless and continually to vanquish potential readerly resistance, just as Ahab needs to see the crew as mere extensions of his will and at the same time be constantly attentive to every atmospheric influence that might inspire them to think otherwise. No one does think otherwise; Ishmael's Ahab has his way with every member of the crew, and the ease with which he has it makes him despise them: “I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve” (147).

The next chapter will explore the interesting question of whether Melville, revolving readers, depises us. Before concluding this one, I would like to summarize and entertain some final thoughts regarding narcissism in the novel.

It is because the narcissistic person is unable to see the otherness of other persons except as a threat that he hates them, at the same time that he needs and uses them, and that is why he feels like an imposter. Feeling like an imposter is unbearable, so he must convert his guilt into another, trumped-up feeling. This magical conversion of one's inadequacies into virtues that mark one as superior to other persons becomes more than a habit. It becomes, with practice, a reflex. The narcissist converts his guilt that he is an imposter into its compensatory opposite: nobility.

Upon the idea of nobility Ishmael's tale spirals, the most conspicuous spiralling in the text being the narrator's voice itself. The spiralling, involving, coiling energy that

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