Shaker celibacy

Shaker celibacy was a defining feature of the Shakers’ communal life, but the account of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s visit to their village at Hancock places the rule beside an arrangement that Hawthorne found troubling: an elder said that two people slept in each of the community’s narrow beds. The contrast shaped his response to the Shakers and left room for a very different imagined view from Ishmael and Queequeg.

The Rule and the Shaker Community

The Shakers are described as celibate, and their rule forms part of the communal life Melville and Hawthorne encountered on an excursion to the Shaker village at Hancock. The visit was one stop on an outing from Lenox: Melville arrived with Evert Duyckinck, his dog, and a picnic, while Hawthorne supplied champagne. The account does not detail how the Shakers enforced celibacy or how the community understood the rule; it instead records the visitors’ reactions to what they saw and heard.

The Beds and Hawthorne’s Response

Hawthorne, who had briefly experienced communal life at Brook Farm, judged the Shakers’ celibacy harshly. He regarded it as a sad blasphemy, and the elder’s report that two people shared each narrow bed sharpened his discomfort. Hawthorne described this close arrangement between men as hateful and disgusting. His reaction reveals his own moral response, not evidence that the Shakers’ shared sleeping arrangements violated their celibacy rule.

Narrative Contrast

The episode sets Hawthorne’s aversion against the possibility of another interpretation. Its aside that Ishmael and Queequeg may have seen the Shakers differently links the communal setting to the intimacy between Melville’s fictional companions. The rule thus enters the account not as a fully explained doctrine but as a point of tension: a celibate community, beds shared by two sleepers, and observers who assign those facts sharply different meanings.