Melville’s “Joy-Childlessness” and its Queer Afterglows: Experiments in Kinship Forms from Moby-Dick to Becoming Dinah

Abstract: This essay explores the force of childlessness in Melville’s writing and its queer afterlives. It focuses in particular on Ahab’s coining of the term “joy-childlessness” in Moby-Dick , situating it within the demographics of population decline in the late nineteenth century and within the paradoxical psychic (and textual) unfolding of griefs and joys as Ahab understands them. The essay then draws on “joy-childlessness” in a reading of Kit De Waal’s subtle rewriting of Moby-Dick into a recent young adult novel, Becoming Dinah . I see in Becoming Dinah , a fertile legacy of for Melville’s “joy-childlessness” as it unfolds in queer, affective complexity throughout the novel. To understand the dynamics of textual and demographic afterlives in de Waal’s novel, I rely on Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic concept of the “enigmatic signifier.” Laplanche’s psychoanalytic approach facilitates my reading of the formal effects of de Waal’s engagement with Melville’s work and provides a useful methodology for understanding the queer and psychic textual afterlives of childlessness.