‘Failed’ Genius Figure in Melville’s “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!”

“Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! Or, The Crowing of the Noble Cock Beneventano” (1853) is one of Herman Melville’s short stories which he had written between 1853 and 1855. After the commercial and critical failure of Pierre (1952), the Harpers Publishing Company, which had published Melville’s earlier novels, refused to publish his next book, and then Melville turned to an outlet for his work--i.e. short fiction for magazines. In many of his fifteen short stories written after Pierre, Melville deals with figures for the “failed” male artist placed in a variety of domestic, social and commercial settings, and I think that this results from his successive literary failures of Moby-Dick and Pierre. In this paper, I focus on “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” The narrator as a gentle farmer is in trouble because of big debts and attempts to find what could rescue him from his depression and recover his manhood, as he struggles to deal with failure. The rooster owned by a poor sawyer turns out to be the special “cock” whose loud crow cures the narrator’s dejection. The “cock” seems to stand for the faculty of masculine genius, whose loud and invigorating crow inspires the narrator. And there seems to exist a parallel between the owner of the cock and Melville himself as a male genius figure who refuses to sell his genius for money. The tale as a whole seems to affirm Merrymusk’s passive but individualistic resistance to selling his “genius” in the marketplace, but the cost paid by Merrymusk’s wife and children in this tale suggests that Melville was questioning the price his own family had paid for living with a writer committed to his own unfolding genius regardless of the lack of monetary return.