1) María Felisa López Liquete, Noviembre 1995, The presence-absence of woman

in the work of Herman Melville, Atlantis, AEDEAN, Vol. 17, No. 1/2, May-
November, pp. 115-126 
This paper discusses the rare appearance of women in Herman Melville’s work. The rare
female characters who appear in Melville’s work reflect not only Melville’s relationship
with his mother, but also prejudices of his age and three other frames: ideological, social
and psychological.
2) Robyn Wiegman, Winter 1989, Melville's Geography of Gender, American Literary
History,  Oxford University Press, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp 735-753

Melville’s diptych reveals the very problem of gender itself: Women are rappresented as the
reflection of masculine wholeness. Melville’s diptych is important in capturing the
transformation of women’s labor in for compulsory reproduction to factory production.

3) Juniper Ellis, Winter 1999, Engendering Melville,  Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol
29, No. 1, pp 62-84.

A study of Melville’s presentation of women characters is a necessary corrective to Melville

studies and to aspects of Americanist studies more generally. Melville’s dpiction of women
shapes his celebration of “non-normative” masculinity and male-male frienship. Throughout
his career from Typee to Clarel Melvilles formulates a poetics and politics defined in relation
to recurring potrayals of women. Moby-Dick presents a fascinating case of Melville’s
treatment of gender, beacuse it displaces femininity onto the natural world and briefly, onto
male-male bonds.

4) Nina Baym, Apr. 1989, Reviewed Work: Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the
Art of Herman Melville, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 88, No.
2, pp. 263-265.

Melville was socialized into the larger Victorian-American structure of mourning

designed to channel and control emotion. Women were obliged to express grief in highly
ritualized and decorous forms; men were barred from emotional expression altogether.
More generally in his culture at this period, women enacted the emotive and expressive
aspects of personality, men the rational and utilitarian. Women in Melville’s writings are
often represented as stylized figures of mourning.
5) Debra J. Rosenthal, Summer 2014, The Sentimental Appeal to Salvific Paternity in
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Moby-Dick", Texas Studies in Literature and Language,
Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 135-147.

Moby- Dick valorizes masculine culture, the novel contains a "sentimental sub- text" that
"works to reinforce and expand its nineteenth-century reader's awareness of the gender-
structured domestic sphere as the locus simultaneously of anguish and of the tenderness that
anguish calls up."Schultz identifies many moments of sentiment in the novel, including
several images of mourning mothers, particularly the novel's final scene where Captain
Gardiner's the Rachel picks up the orphaned Ishmael, the only survivor of the Pequod
mother ship. Schultz argues that Ahab's rejection of domesticity becomes displaced onto
Captain Gardiner, who becomes a "grieving maternal figure."

6) Judith Schenck Koffler, Spring, 1989, The Feminine Presence in "Billy Budd",
Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1-14.
According to Judit, in Billy Budd have as much to do with "the feminine in man" as with
Law. There is nothing remarkable about the absence of women in Melville's story Billy
Budd. It is, after all, a story of sailors at sea and aboard a womanless man of war. But
insofar as it is also a story of love and desire, the absence of women underscores a persistent
theme of the Mark narrative: the "feminine in man."
7) Mark Lloyd Taylor, Jul., 1992, Ishmael's (m)Other: Gender, Jesus, and God in
Melville's "Moby-Dick", The Journal of Religion, Vol. 72, No. 3, pp. 325-350
The author in this abstract focuses on the fact that Ishmael, narrator of Moby-Dick, draws
between the masculine power of God the Father and the feminine negativity of God the Son
in a chapter called "The Tail" provides an interpretive key to issues of gender and theology
in the book.

8) David Harley Serlin, Spring, 1995, The Dialogue of Gender in Melville's "The
Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids", Modern Language Studies, Vol.
25, No. 2, pp. 80-87.

According to Wiegman, the bachelors and maids are defined by their essential relation to
male power; that is, the bachelors enjoy an exclusively male social economy, just as the
maids are enslaved by a male-controlled labor system. Both of Melville's stories, in this
case, form a "diptych," a cohesive unit that, when examined together, isolates male access to
power and isolates female access. The "masculinized" Temple, and the "feminized" natural
forces, not only co-exist in the Bachelor's Paradise, but perpetually reverse, redefine, and
requalify each other so that whatever patriarchal power or privilege seems to be conferred
upon the Bachelors can never be reconciled completely with the fertility that surrounds
them. In addition, one possible site of contention discovered early on by Melville's narrator
is made through his references to the male body.

9) Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Summer 1990, Melville’s embrace of the invisible woman,

The Centennial Review,  Michigan State University Press, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 401-
411.
In Moby Dick "The Grand Armada," portrays a stark conflict between the masculine
and the feminine principles of Nature. It is a perfect image of the con flict over sexual
identity that made Herman Melville so sensitive to the sexual politics of nineteenth-
century America.The maternal mammals that charm Ishmael are grown-up ver sions
of those "amphibious young creatures" amongst whom Tommo disports himself in
the Marquesan lagoon. The article also focuses on other works by melville such as:
"The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids, Typee, Billy Budd.

10) Charles Haberstroh, JR, fall 1977, MELVILLE, MARRIAGE, AND "MARDI",
Studies in the Novel , The Johns Hopkins University Press, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp 247-260.
This article focuses on Melville's novel Mardi. It devotes itself to the single-minded
pursuit of the idealized woman. Yillah, the only time in Melville's novels of sailors
and voyaging that a female is the central object of the narrator's concern. Beloved, for
once, replaces "chummy." The most prominent reason for this was certainly
Melville's courtship and marriage with Elizabeth Shaw during the composition of
Mardi.

11) Kaitlin Eckert, 2011, "Melville and Women in Specific Relation to "Bartleby,
the Scrivener, Pell Scholars and Senior Theses. 74.
https://digitalcommons.salve.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1074&context=pell_theses
There are a number of factors in Melville’s life that may help explain why there are no women in
“Bartleby”: a poor relationship with his mother, an allegedly abusive relationship with his wife, and
the possibility of his being homosexual may all be contributors to the masculine world Melville
creates in “Bartleby.” However, despite the physical absence of women there are clearly female
characteristics throughout the story, from symbolism to the feminine. Bartleby possesses feminine
qualities: He has pale skin, which was traditionally a sign of beauty, and a delicate womanly voice
which is at one point described as a “flutelike tone”. At first Melville may have been intrigued by
the women’s call for equality, despite his aversion to them, yet it seems the more he thought about it
the more he hated the idea of it, and perhaps that is why the lawyer seemed to change emotions
towards Bartleby as he stood for the plea of women .