Shaker community

The Shaker community enters the account through a visit to its village at Hancock, where a convivial outing by Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne turns into a revealing encounter with communal celibacy. Hawthorne regarded the Shakers’ intimate arrangements as a troubling denial of ordinary human attachment; the episode also leaves open a contrasting perspective through Ishmael and Queequeg.

The Visit to Hancock

While Sophia Hawthorne and the couple’s daughters were away visiting relatives, Melville called on Hawthorne, who was caring for five-year-old Julian and his pet rabbit. Melville arrived in a barouche and pair, accompanied by Evert and George Duyckinck, his dog, and a picnic. Hawthorne supplied the champagne, and the group set out for the Shaker village at Hancock. The visit belonged to the growing friendship between the two writers: their meetings and increasingly long letters had made the excursion possible.

Hawthorne’s View of Shaker Life

The community’s celibacy and shared sleeping arrangements became the focus of Hawthorne’s account. Having briefly experienced communal utopian life at Brook Farm, he found the Shakers’ practice a sad blasphemy. He dwelt on the narrowness of their beds, which, according to an elder, accommodated two people despite being hardly wide enough for one. Hawthorne described this arrangement as a “close junction of man with man” and professed to find it “hateful and disgusting.” His response records not simply a judgment about Shaker customs but his resistance to the particular form of intimacy he perceived there.

A Counterpoint in the Narrative

The account does not make Hawthorne’s interpretation the only possible one. Its brief suggestion that Ishmael and Queequeg might have seen the Shaker arrangement differently places their relationship beside Hawthorne’s revulsion, without claiming that the two men visited Hancock or explaining exactly how they would have judged the community. The contrast makes the Shaker episode part of a wider inquiry into intimacy: what one observer condemns as unnatural or repellent may look different through another relationship. The community thus serves as a pointed reference in the narrative’s treatment of closeness between men.