MASC

            After attending the MASC I was amazed at the amounts of books and history they had.  It was wonderful to see books that were written around the same time that Melville wrote his.  Many nobles written in the late 1800s have were very similar to Herman Melville’s writing style.  For example one book that I had the chance to look at was called The Comstock Club by C. C. Goodwin in 1891.  This book was written almost like a journal from a miner’s point of view.  This book talked about the life of rich miners who buy a cabin and live together.  This miners create a sort of brotherhood and spend their free type mostly talking about stocks (hence the title) and their daily lives.  From this book we can see the value of various products that people value and what it means to each one.

            Melville writes about an obsession that a whaler named Ahab has with a whale named Moby Dick.  This whole story also talks about a brotherhood between all this men who live their lives to obtain what little money they can.  They live in one enclosed area and share the dream of finding sufficient whales to obtain money.  In The Comstock Club we see this similar brotherhood the men have a goal to obtain more riches and enjoy the company of other males so that they may discuss what the best buy is.   We see this sort of brotherhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance.  Hawthorne’s novel shows the brotherhood between his character Coverdale and Holligsworth.  It seems that in the 1900s there was still separation of sexes and that man valued each other’s company more than having a woman by their side.  I am assuming that in that time a man could be a bachelor for quite some time and it was not frowned upon. 

            It seemed that those male authors mainly wrote about bad experiences but also as a way of warning to other men that things can happen.  Other than providing a little adventure these authors provided history of the past.  With their novels they show how brotherhoods were important and explain the benefits.