What did Steelkilt say to the Captain?

[Alex Liddie]

Somewhere, probably on Ishmail or Ishmailites, someone suggested an answer to the question, "what did Steelkilt hiss to the Captain?" that prompted the Captain, but not, later, Radney, to renege on his threat to flog the rebel?  Do any of you remember what the suggested answer was?

[Alvin Hass]

Dear Alex and Listmates,

 

     Thomas Farel Heffernan, in his article "Eonism on the Town-Ho, Or What Did Steelkilt Say?" Melville Society Extracts, Number 83, November 1990, suggested, though I can't believe he was serious, that Steelkilt might have said, "I am a woman."  Heffernan explains that Melville's shipmate Ephriam Curtiss Hine wrote a novel, Orlando Melville; or The Victims of the Pressgang.  A Tale of the Sea.  (Boston: F. Gleason, 1848), in which the heroine, Kate Lorraine, a sailor-girl-in- disguise, who is let off a flogging when her sex is revealed in a bodice-ripping worthy of a paperback thriller.

 

     I wrote a lot of stuff to the Ishmail list about the sailor-girl figure in fact and fiction, and I will try to get this computer to send a copy by disguising it as a reply.

 

     Another suggestion in Heffernan's essay was, "I am your son".

 

                                                  Regards, Normie

Alex Liddie <AandP....@comcast.net> wrote: