Herman Melville’s Longing: Queer Desire and the Love That Dare Not Speak

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is a towering achievement of American literature—an epic of obsession, isolation, and the terror of the sublime. But beneath the surface of whale hunts and metaphysical meditations lies a quieter, more intimate current: one of longing, desire, and an almost unbearable hunger for male connection.

To read Melville queerly is not to impose something onto his work, but to listen carefully to what has long been submerged. Melville’s letters, prose, and poetry reveal a complex erotic tension—particularly in his intense emotional attachment to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Their relationship, brief but powerful, left a mark on Melville that permeated his most ambitious work. And for modern readers and scholars, it opens a doorway into understanding how queer longing operates within—and outside—the constraints of 19th-century literature.

One need look no further than Moby-Dick’s opening chapters to sense the homoerotic undercurrents. Ishmael and Queequeg meet as strangers and go to bed together in the same inn:

“How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other... thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cozy, loving pair.”

It’s easy to brush this off as a literary quirk of the time, or as “romantic friendship,” a phrase often used to sanitize same-sex intimacy in pre-modern texts. But as queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick insists, such denials reveal more about our discomfort with queer desire than they do about the text itself.

Melville did not write Moby-Dick in a vacuum. He was living through a period when the boundaries of male affection, especially between white men, were beginning to harden under the emerging pressures of modern sexuality and nationalism. The intimacy between Ishmael and Queequeg—an interracial, interspecies tenderness that plays with marriage tropes—is both radical and tender. And it’s not the only place where Melville flirts with the queer uncanny.

When Herman Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850, he was already struggling with Moby-Dick. The two men met on a mountain in the Berkshires, a meeting that Melville would describe with near-mythic intensity. His subsequent letters to Hawthorne are lush with admiration and charged with emotional urgency.

In a famous letter dated November 17, 1851—shortly after finishing Moby-Dick—Melville wrote:

“I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him... Your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s.”

This is not mere literary appreciation. It is erotic mysticism. Melville expresses something deeper than influence; he articulates a yearning for fusion, for emotional—and possibly physical—intimacy. He speaks of Hawthorne the way lovers speak of one another: with awe, need, and a desire to be changed.

Herman Melville

And yet Hawthorne, ever the Puritan, remained emotionally distant. He never responded in kind, and over time their relationship cooled. Scholars like Robert K. Martin (Hero, Captain, and Stranger) and Michael Moon (Disseminating Whitman) have argued that Melville’s passionate language toward Hawthorne reveals not only a personal longing but a deeper struggle with the closet—the internalization of forbidden desire in a culture that could not name it.

Melville lived in a world where same-sex attraction had no name—at least not one that could be spoken without legal or moral consequence. His longing had to be encoded, dispersed across metaphors: ocean voyages, male comradeship, sublime terror, the unknowable Other.

The white whale, Ahab’s madness, Ishmael’s dislocation—these are not just metaphors for metaphysics. They are metaphors for disavowed desire, for the grief and alienation of a man who cannot speak what he feels. Melville’s men are always looking: at the sea, at each other, at something just beyond the horizon. They are haunted by what they want but cannot name.

Queer scholar Caleb Crain, in his seminal essay Lovers of Human Flesh: Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville’s Fiction, argues that the erotic in Melville often arrives as the monstrous. Same-sex intimacy must take a distorted form—Cannibalism in Typee, obsession in Billy Budd, or metaphysical annihilation in Moby-Dick. Desire is always there—but it is cloaked, deferred, submerged.

Herman Melville may never have openly claimed a queer identity, but his work pulses with unspoken eroticism, intense male intimacy, and a longing that borders on the divine.

His relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne gave language—however brief—to a part of himself that found few outlets elsewhere. And Moby-Dick, for all its grandeur and madness, remains a deeply personal book: a monument to desire, frustration, and the ache of what cannot be named.

To read Melville queerly is not to diminish him—it is to finally see the fullness of his emotional range. It is to understand that American literature did not begin with heterosexual conquest alone, but with longing, contradiction, and the quiet, thunderous heartbreak of men who could not speak their names.