A Queer Domestic Space As an Alternative to the (Re)Productive. Herman Melville’s “Jimmy Rose”

Abstract

In Herman Melville’s short story “Jimmy Rose” (1855) the narrator has inherited a house that once belonged to a socially unproductive and unreproductive man named Jimmy Rose. The story focuses on the narrator’s intimate identification with the elaborate and old-fashioned wallpaper in the house’s parlor. This is a space where, reluctant to live in the evolving prosaic times into which he is propelled by his family and contemporaries, the narrator chooses to linger in the obsolete and resists chronological sequencing. Honoring the memory of that socially failed earlier inhabitant of the house, he experiences this poetic room as a space of alternative values to his materialistic environment. In the frame of recent discussions of notions such as queer failure and shame this article reads the narrator’s bond with Jimmy Rose as a mode of relationality based on affect-genealogy, or chosen affiliation, with a queer type of failure, as well as as a gesture with which Melville invites readers to examine the notion of social value and to reevaluate that which is considered un(re)productive and, by extension, socially unsuccessful and/or failed

Keywords

• “Jimmy Rose
• ” Herman Melville
• domestic spaces
• queer spaces
• queer temporalities
• queer affiliations