Yesterday was the last day of the Fourteenth International Melville Society Conference, which took me to Mystic, CT. The conference was fantastic, overflowing with passion and ideas, and it was great to see many dear friends and make some new ones. We also had the opportunity to stay on the nineteenth-century training ship, the Joseph Conrad, held at the Mystic Seaport. It was a strange and wonderful experience, one that I don’t think I could handle repeating but also am so glad I did.

At the conference, I presented some new work on Melville’s final novella, Billy Budd, Sailor. If you’re interested in the full talk, get in touch, but here’s a bit about one part of it. While preparing my paper, I read the new collection of three short stories and a novella by Torrey Peters, Stag Dance, and in reading the titular novella, I realized that it was an oblique rewriting of Billy Budd. I’m going to refrain from too much summary here, but I want to draw out a couple of parallels between the books. Those interested in Melville might want to pick up Peters’s book, and readers of Peters might like to go back to Melville.

Across her work, Peters has documented trans experience through a shifting array of genres, and her latest novella brings her to the adventure genre. Stag Dance details a crew of piratical lumberjacks, who venture into the woods in the depths of winter “to fell as many of those trees as we could before spring thaw when the state agents and timber inspectors might again take up their patrols and have us all thrown in the coop.” Peters swaps Melville’s ocean for a frozen-over forest, the endless expanse of water now tree-studded snow, as his British Navy becomes landlocked pirates. Yet both novellas depict a crew of men working together, separated from broader society. While she doesn’t mention Billy Budd, Peters has cited Melville as sparking her interest in the overwrought, technical, and often made-up vocabulary of her characters, but Stag Dance also shares Melville’s interest in the making and unmaking of identity and desire that shapes Billy Budd.

The first clue that we’re in a Melville revision is in the name. The protagonist of Stag Dance is yet another B.B.—here named Babe Bunyan, so-called through a combination of Paul Bunyan and his ox, Babe. The combined nickname joins Babe’s prowess as a lumberjack to the ugliness and stupidity of an ox. Like Billy, Babe serves as a cynosure for the lumber camp, here standing out not for his beauty but for his ugliness. And Babe’s crudeness captures the spirit of his context. While the Bellipotent is characterized by discipline, Stag Dance’s lumber camp is riotous, as the pirate lumberjacks imbibe large quantities of low-grade moonshine referred to as either “flambeau lightning” or “cougar milk.” To contain the energies of his crew, the camp’s leader, Karl Daglish, announces a “stag dance,” a festive party in which some men will elect to attend as women. Those interested signify that they are open to courtship, by wearing an inverted triangle of brown fabric between their legs, what Peters describes as “a flat bush, an ersatz twat.” And Daglish does insist on courtship, “Men, you’ve got to be sweet if you expect her to accept your invitation to the dance. That means gifts, that means courtesy and flattery.” The brown fabric suggests a certain ease with which individuals here might modify their gender identity, as both Peters and her characters fluidly adopt different pronouns depending on the brown fabric triangle’s presence or absence.

Things eventually unravel, and Peters brilliantly rewrites and inverts the climactic scene in Billy Budd, in which Billy strikes Claggart and kills him. I will refrain from spoilers, but Stag Dance shows the way that artistic adaptation and revision provides a way to gain new insights into canonical work such as Melville’s. This is a tradition that we explore in a forthcoming special issue of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies on “Melville’s Queer Afterlives.” That issue charts a tradition of queer artists and writers who have shaped our understanding of Melville alongside the scholars who have studied him. Peters’s novella is the latest instance in such a tradition, which begins with Benjamin Britten and E. M. Forster and continues through Claire Denis. You should read it!