Abstract:This essay explores the connection between architectural tropes and sexual rhetoric in Melville’s short story “I and My Chimney.” The argument focuses on the inversion of conventional hierarchies such as top/bottom, straight/crooked, masculine/feminine, and natural/depraved. These inversions are all centered on the massive chimney of the story, guiding the rhetorical redistribution of unspoken queer desire through inverted parallels and a preoccupation with all things “backwards.” The trope of verticality comb… Show more
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