Controversies over the authenticity of medievalism were probably most intense and formative in the late eighteenth century. The early Gothic novel emerges during this period, a substantially new genre that rivaled neoclassical tastes and prescriptions in provocative ways. In this essay I trace some of the ways the Gothic responded to its own questionable legitimacy as a new genre. The OED lists four definitions for authenticity, an abstract noun formed in the eighteenth century from the adjective authentic. All four definitions are relevant to my analysis of Gothic authenticities below: 1. True or in accordance with fact; veracity; correctness; 2. Authoritative or duly authorized; authority (now rare); 3. With reference to a document, artifact, artwork, etc.: the fact or quality of being authentic; genuineness; 4. The fact or quality of being real; actuality, reality. My argument attempts to demonstrate the depth and breadth of Gothic engagements with authenticity through an analysis of mimesis, authority, and nationalist literary history. Early Gothic novels such as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Matthew Lewis's The Monk, and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer make profound investments in the literary authority of earlymodern writers. They also invest in iconophobic, anti-Catholic polemics that were a distinctive feature of John Foxe's Protestant martyrs to the Inquisition, Edmund Spenser's fairyland, and Christopher Marlowe's Faust. As we shall see, one of the darkest sides of this cultural inheritance – the Spanish Black Legend – also makes a deep impression on the Early Gothic.

Walpole, inventor of the Gothic novel in The Castle of Otranto (1764), exemplifies the first definition of authenticity (“true, in accordance with fact”) in his Anecdotes of Painting in England (1760): “The portrait was rather a work of command and imagination than of authenticity.” Perhaps not coincidentally, the authenticity of likenesses (in this sense) is crucial to the anamorphic portraits of Gothic fiction. The hero of Otranto, Theodore, bears an uncanny resemblance to the portrait of Alfonso the Good, a dead hero of the Crusades whose ghost steps through the frame to taunt and haunt the usurper, Manfred.

By the summer of 1850, Hawthorne was successfully drawing himself out of extended metaphor into harsher and more interesting realism, with stories like “Rappaccini's Daughter.” At the same time, The Scarlet Letter brought new attention to his writing. What talisman had Hawthorne found that suddenly turned him from the least-known to the most-popular creative writer? It is likely to have been his “artistic study” of Balzac, through which he initiated what historically turned out to be the precursor of American Realism.

Before advancing through an analysis of the texts to demonstrate exactly what Hawthorne was learning from Balzac, a review of the relevant elements of Balzac's unique vision of reality, particularly in the introduction to the La Comédie humaine and in the Etudes philosophiques, will here suggest what Hawthorne comprehended of the Frenchman's signature achievements, especially in light of early commentators from Croker onward.

Delineating Characters

One important essay that we have yet to mention presented significant insights useful to Hawthorne in articulating the details of his study during his evolutionary period. Published in July, 1844 in the widely circulating Foreign Quarterly Review, George Henry Lewes, who would become Mary Ann Evans's partner before she took the name George Eliot, wrote a thirty-three-page essay comparing the merits of George Sand and Balzac in almost every aspect of their art. He evinced a remarkable estimation of Balzac's writing, which relates particularly to the development of Hawthorne, who was already being soundly schooled in Balzac's fiction:

Skillful handling of characters was required for Hawthorne if he were to enter into the fullness of his career as a writer…

The previous chapters have shown not only the direct influence of Hawthorne on the creation of Moby-Dick but that this influence was primarily effected through his sharing of what he had learned about realistic composition from his deep study of Honoré de Balzac's works and their critical reception. Melville had begun a whaling story with his habitual narrative form, but his progress was deterred, and rightly so. This delay relates to Hawthorne's conversations on Melville's earlier novels. According to Parker, Hawthorne had written Duyckinck on 29 August, 1850 that he read the books by Melville:

Hawthorne, for as long as he intended to put up with Lenox, encouraged Melville to brood over Moby-Dick. We do not know precisely when or why Hawthorne came to the conclusion that he was ready to move, but during the last preparations for publication of Moby-Dick, Melville was beginning work in earnest on Pierre ; but a few months later he began to display his characteristic haste to produce another novel once Moby-Dick was published on November 14. Perhaps he toyed with the idea of another “job” just to make money fast. This haste is often attributed to the looming commercial failure of Moby-Dick and the “betrayal” of Young America; but it can just as well be attributed to his realization that his time with his collaborator was coming to an end.

We have thoroughly reviewed some of the catalog of insights and enhancements in the text reflecting the unique narrative innovations of Honoré de Balzac. By 1852, however, packet boat travelers were no longer tearing up his books and casting them into the sea as reported by Margaret Fuller in 1846…

The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, the last novel published by Melville in his lifetime (1857), ends with a suggestive anticipation: “Something further may follow of this Masquerade.” The statement could mean, as sometimes interpreted, that he intended to write a continuation or expansion of the text, since the journey of the riverboat Fidèle on which the narrative takes place had not yet reached its destination. Or, in light of Melville's philosophical development, he could have been on the verge of a new philosophical level beyond “geniality,” where the text concludes, to resolve the moral conflicts he raises in this narrative. In either case, The Confidence-Man is the closest thing Melville wrote to the spirit of La Comédie humaine in the sense of a history of manners that Balzac outlines in his “Avantpropos.” Though its scale is quite different, its intention is similar, to depict moral actions in American culture. Moreover, the story itself, while dramatizing and discussing a range of native characters, incorporates its own explanatory comments in which an assumed author clarifies his narrative theory and his defense against critical readers in the stated agenda of the French master. If Melville had been deeply convinced, through Hawthorne's urging and his own proclivities, of the necessity to build up a national literature promised by the nascent Young America, the intervening years of transformation had given him some time to reconsider his position relative to Balzac's writings, which were becoming more available in English and French in the United States. Melville may at last have articulated his own principles of fiction by placing his work in contrast to the practices spreading from misunderstanding of a realist movement developing from Balzac's example.

The most accessible ground for discovering a stable theoretical relation between Honoré de Balzac and Melville's understanding of literary realism is The Confidence-Man. An authorial voice interrupts the story by the vehicle of metatext to modulate the effect on the reader of certain associated narrative passages. These chapters are generally considered, from examination of existing manuscript leaves and the scholarly speculations of Watson Branch, to have been added at the middle of the process of composition, or perhaps even later.

It is tempting, in conducting a longitudinal study of an author's work, to assume or even force a logical progression of thought or content without accounting for the important fact that decades often separate one work from the next. Awareness of this risk is particularly necessary in the case of Melville and Billy Budd, Sailor, for more than thirty years passed following the publication of The Confidence-Man before the former narrative was even conceived. Melville went through a considerable mass of poetic material and life experience, so in this chapter I will seek some continuity but allow also for new interpolations. Melville indulged in irony and cynicism in The Confidence-Man, developing a bitter religious image of the genial misanthrope; but our analysis need not be bound by any tendency found there, given the expanse of the passage of time. It would be a rare person who remains unmoved in spirit for thirty years. He had told Hawthorne at one point, “From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself.” The pace changed over the decades, but his moral elevation continued.

Consequently, the manuscript that became Billy Budd, Sailor may be the most thought out, if not the final, evidence for Melville's reconciliation of life and creative endeavor. It is an ideal conception unlike any examined in the preceding chapters of this book. His executer, Arthur Stedman, indicated that Melville wrote the story not for publication but for his own amusement. Modern scholars think that Melville did in fact plan some sort of publication, otherwise the obvious expenditure of effort, including at least attempts at a fair copy for printing, would seem unnecessary. Also, “amusement” may be too shallow a word for what Melville was likely attempting; a higher understanding of central issues of ontology is more likely. In it Melville tried out an abstract connection of metaphoric forces without collapsing into allegory as in the final chapter, “The End,” of White-Jacket. His paradigm, moreover, is closer to the dialectic of Hawthorne (who is referenced in the story) and to Balzac's unity of composition than in any other work.

Conventional academic interpretation ascribes the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne on Melville's narrative style, structure, and subjects to indications present in the fabric of Pierre, his sixth romance. However, Melville dedicated Moby-Dick, not Pierre, to Hawthorne, which implies that he had something important to do with the earlier book. The other factor that suggests active influence relates to the publishing history of Moby-Dick. While Melville had told several persons that the book was “half-done,” “mostly done,” or that it would be completed by autumn 1850, the manuscript did not make it to press until many months later in 1851. During that time, Melville plainly made extensive emendations and revisions, and as far as we can tell today, his characters evolved in traits and motivations along an outline suggestive of a newly tapped paradigm. In fact, scholars agree that his most extensive revisions had to do with adding, eliminating, enlarging, or changing the characters of the drama. Moreover, Melville had not been happy with his two previous romances, despite their positive contributions to his popularity. He had written to his father-in-law in this regard as he left for Europe in 1849: “But no reputation that is gratifying to me can possibly be achieved by either of these books [Redburnr and White-Jacket].

They are two jobs which I have done for money–being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood.”

While most critics agree that Melville was then undertaking a mixed-form novel5 like Balzac's usual mélange of science and passion, it probably was more linearly connected than truly mixed. Like White-Jacket, Moby-Dick was likely written in accumulating stages: the simple narrative version first, although quite a different narrative than exists now. From remarks and conversations that have been recorded, there was no serious uncertainty about the nature of the ending, with the whale ultimately bringing down the ship, which Melville appears to have had in mind from the first as the “wild legend.” After that initial direction of the story, and possibly some of the commentary on whaling, Melville dedicated himself to two additional phases developing some of the more difficult dramatic passages or supplementary essays and consolidating rewrites to make the book appear to present a continuous flow of ideas.

The most frequent barrier for traditional critics’ accepting that Balzac exerted a stimulus for all of Melville's romances during and after the composition of Moby-Dick has been the uncertainty of whether or not he knew French. Early commentators expected that he did; but when no annotated Balzac books entirely in French were uncovered in Melville's final estate, general opinion accepted the hypothesis that he had not read French. This conjecture, although often treated as unassailable in Melville criticism, is yet to be decisively confirmed.

Laurie Robertson-Lorant, a biographer of Melville, made a deliberate effort to discover “how well Melville knew the [French] language” in 1995. She raises many tantalizing questions: “How well did Melville speak French? Could he carry on a conversation? Could he read French?” But she finds few hard answers, closing with the assessment that, “Sifting through the evidence we have so far, I would have to conclude that Melville probably spoke little more than the nineteenth-century equivalent to high school French.” Even reaching this tentative judgment, her search remains problematic: “In the end, Melville's knowledge or lack of knowledge of French remains a mystery. His writings reveal ambivalence toward France that may account for his not learning to speak or read the language well.” This suggestion is based on speculation from very scant evidence, which we will expand upon shortly. Nor do we know how much Melville's French improved over time with reading and conversation, or when among the seventy-two years of Melville's life the critic fixes this assessment. Melville had little formal education, but the breadth of his learning has been frequently noted, including his awareness of foreign-language originals.

The principal evidence for the idea that Melville had more actual knowledge of French than assumed is of course his welldocumented family connections to readers and speakers of that language. His father spent much of his life visiting France and importing French dry goods and cultural objects, books significant among them. The library at the Melville home probably contained numerous books in French. His sisters practiced French for their academic classes.

The most momentous circumstance in Melville's development of a deeply personal comprehension of Balzac was his interaction with Nathaniel Hawthorne, an apprentice of French-biased sensibilities. While it is apparent that many literary minded individuals were familiar with Balzac, few had really made a serious study of his methods or tried to crack the secret of his popularity as Hawthorne had. They were often satisfied to denigrate his deplorable morals without engaging seriously the implications of his literary achievements. Importantly, it was at this period in 1850 when the two met that he was particularly steeped in Romantic philosophy and theory, a favorite preoccupation of Melville from the year before with Professor Adler and his packet boat companions. In any conversation, Melville could contribute to the exchange from the German side, while Hawthorne was adept with the French.

Artistic Study

According to William Bysshe Stein, Balzac, whom Hawthorne read in the original, “fascinated him throughout his life; he had procured copies of the French master's work as soon as they appeared in print.” While no Balzac books can be found in Hawthorne's library preserved at Bowdoin, corroborating evidence does support his possession of such works around the time Melville was visiting him. Hawthorne probably acquired most of the volumes from friends or from a private bookseller. According to Austin Warren,

Since Peabody was a bookseller in Boston, it is likely that he would continue to order books through her, especially given that in 1842 he married her sister, Sophia. Concerning Hawthorne's application of Balzac's narrative innovations, Leon Chai writes, “Here I believe it is possible to speak not only of affinity but of an actual influence exerted by the great French author upon his American contemporary.”

Hawthorne was not the only American author making an “artistic study” of works selling well in the American marketplace. In addition to Olson's charge that Melville was a notorious literary pickpocket, Hennig Cohen also remarked on Melville's strong “tendency to respond to what was afloat in the popular culture.” Similarly, a reader can take as significant Strachey's intuition that Melville had become “very strongly under the spell of Balzac.” Additionally, until the year of their meeting, both Hawthorne and Melville were in debt and shared with Balzac, not only the dream of self-sufficiency by writing alone, but real poverty. Balzac's ultimate rise to popularity by the skill of his narratives was an object lesson for both Americans.

However, while Hawthorne had, despite his earlier whining, at last by 1850 captured the popularity he wanted with The Scarlet Letter, Melville was still concerned with crafting a masterpiece; the networks and the moment seemed right to bring him a similar windfall. While Strachey notes that in Redburnr Melville was developing an important Balzacian effect, at least in his villain Jackson, and it was clear in White-Jacket that he was starting to explore in depth psychological realities through the metaphor of the jacket, he was still trapped by allegory, particularly in the ponderous ending of White-Jacket, where in excruciating detail he stretches a trope of society as a sailing vessel ad nauseam.

Most of Melville's creative efforts after his trip to Europe in 1849 were devoted to working on a narrative about whaling excursions, much in the way and in the context in which he had thought about travel on men-of-war or packet boats: as another sea-faring account. The earliest extant reference to what would become Moby-Dick is in a letter to Richard Henry Dana, Jr., dated May 1, 1850, in which Melville told Dana,

The novels of Herman Melville are usually examined from the basis of some theme almost exclusively American: American society, American history, American politics, American industry, etc. European or other planetary contexts are treated as reactions or responses to assumed limited or exclusively “American” considerations. While this local approach plays well in an arena constructed on American exclusiveness, it does not express the reality of the literary processes working around Melville in the middle of the nineteenth century. A series of active, expanding networks made his writing part of a global complex, without which he could not have created and completed his narratives. Balzac was also in the web of these same technologies both during and at the height of Melville's creativity; and because they both shared energetic participation in networked activities, an affiliation developed almost inevitably to bring them together. Only recently have scholars begun to identify such linkages, and usually the criticism that has developed out of this strategy pertains to recent postcolonial situations.

However, the networks and interrelationships had their origins in Melville's world of the Industrial Revolution and can be identified in literary history as accurately as similar processes in India, China, Africa, or other contemporary interdependent emerging cultures. Melville's America was just eighty years beyond liberation from England. Consequently, many of the phases identified for the development of a national literature undergoing “decolonialization” can still be found in the literary processes of Melville's time. Remarkably, the intertextuality of Herman Melville and Honoré de Balzac is quite exactly a casebook study in transcultural comparativism. A strictly historical approach to the relationship between these writers, one constrained to specific authorial admissions, public records, third-party witnesses, or even some form of plagiarism that could be irrefutably demonstrated involves an interpretive process more like a court of law than the arena of the humanities. Hence the existence of the heavy tomes and logs of daily records that reflect little of Melville's vital essence. Due to these restrictions many areas of interaction are unnoticed or devalued as “general knowledge” simply “in the air” without significant contact—what are now termed “typological affinities.”