A Jacket That Shrinks: Measuring Time on Board Melville’s Neversink

This article aims to read Herman Melville’s White-Jacket as an instance of domestic confinement, where the clock-based understanding of naval life is substituted for the pace of seasonal time. The story revolves around the narrator’s jacket, a stretchy garment that shrinks due to its contact with temperature variation. The jacket is a dynamic sailcloth and I draw attention to its physical properties—weight, drape, stretch—to read it as a material instrument for measuring time: building on Cesare Casarino’s reading of White-Jacket in Modernity at Sea (2002), I argue that, as the jacket shrinks, Melville defamiliarizes chronological time (naval discipline) from natural time (seasonal weather), drawing away from omniscient metanarratives of progress (official history) and providing readers with a first-person, domestic account of natural growth (unofficial history).

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC

A person counts once a day per paper. We keep no cookie and no address: a reader is a hash that changes every day. Any month under five reads shows no number.