“The Ugly Socrates”: Melville, Hawthorne, and the Varieties of Homoerotic Experience

Abstract “The Ugly Socrates,” an echo of Alcibiades’ words in Plato’s Symposium,is drawn from a letter Melville wrote to Hawthorne on or around November 17, 1851, in response to Hawthorne’s “joy-giving and exultation-breeding letter” of praise for Moby-Dick (Corr212). What we know of Melville’s feelings toward Hawthorne is largely contained in such letters, along with “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” which Edwin H. Miller called “a love letter” in the guise of a book review. Hawthorne’s letters to Melville do not survive, and his journal entries on Melville, while respectful, even admiring, tend to hide rather than reveal his private feelings and to hint very little about Melville’s. “Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection,” Emerson observed in “Friendship”: “the scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend,-and, forthwith, troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words.” Emerson was speaking generally, but the content and language of his essay borrow from his sometimes ardent letters of the period to twenty one-year-old Caroline Sturgis. What was Emerson, married and in his late thirties, thinking when he told Sturgis he “could spend ‘the remainder of [his] days’ in her ‘holy society,”‘ or when he wrote erotically in “Friendship” of those “jets of affection which make a young world for me again”?