Word: queequeg
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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What could prompt an educated man to change Lady Macbeth's most famous line to "Out, crimson spot"? Or to excise mention of Queequeg's underwear from Moby Dick? In framing answers, Noel Perrin, professor of English at Dartmouth, takes as his point of departure Dr. Thomas Bowdler, who had a passion for chess and prison reform and an aversion to London smog, sick people, and all writing that, as he put it, "can raise a blush on the cheek of modesty." Certainly the Family Shakespeare (first edition 1807, second edition 1818) became the most popular expurgation...
Leslie A. Fiedler, literary critic and professor of English at Montana State University, describes the friendship of Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby Dick as "homoerotic"-a case of "innocent homosexuality." Written in that vein, Love and Death in the American Novel is a tumid, quasi-psychoanalytic study in which Critic Fiedler tries to strip American literature down to a heavily annotated fig leaf. As Fiedler sees it, the fig leaf conceals guilt and impotence, the historical inability of the U.S. novelist to portray mature women or deal with adult hetero sexual relationships...