Whalebone, Hoop Skirts, Corsets, Pants Roles: Women and the Melville Effect in Contemporary Art.

The past two and a half decades have witnessed an explosion of savvy, edgy, creative work inspired by Melville. This "Melville effect," occurring across multiple genres and media and often in mixed-media formats, is characterized by an aesthetics of hybridity and pastiche that recalls Melville's own stylistic and formal innovations. Fascinatingly, many of the most intriguing examples of this effect make the presence of women central to their engagements with the heady "masculinity" associated with Melville's nearly all-male worlds. Indeed, the material and metaphorical links between whaling as an industry and the female body as a site of consumption—hinging on the historical use of whalebone or baleen in the manufacture of hoop skirts and corsets—form the point of entry for artists T. L. Solien, Ellen Driscoll, and Rinde Eckert, whose bold reenvisionings of Moby-Dick , at once postmodern and feminist, form the subject matter of this essay. Moving the women so often absent in Melville to the forefront is one productive point of entry for such contemporary efforts, and it is an approach that Solien, Driscoll, and Eckert—in their different but complementary ways—exemplify at its best. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]