Herman Melville's novels, with good reason, can be defined as masculine. Moby-Dick can, rightly, be called a book for men and Melville's seafaring episode suggests a patriarchal and anti-feminine approach that adheres to the separation of the sexes of the nineteenth century. The value of masculinity in nineteenth-century America may have come from certain expected roles into which males were expected to fit; I argue that its value comes from examining it not alone, but in relation to and in conjunction with femininity. As Richard H. Brodhead stated, Moby-Dick is “so outrageously masculine that we can hardly afford to do justice to the full extent of masculinism” (Brodhead 9). I agree with Brodhead in this observation, and that Melville's use of flagrant masculinity serves as a vehicle in which femininity is brought aboard the Pequod; femininity is inseparable from masculinity in Melville's works, as staunchly masculine as they superficially appear. The marriage of the masculine and the feminine in a sometimes indistinct sphere produces what Gene Laskowski calls a "male sentimentalism" in his dissertation of the same name; curiously named, he adds, since “sentimentality is commonly associated with the tender landscape of the feminine” (Laskowski 4). Laskowski calls for a broader understanding of genre in Melville's works, which must be “freed” from prescribed genre definitions (Laskowski 4). I hope to extend Laskowski's argument by adding more evidence of "male sentimentalism," particularly in Moby-Dick. Juniper Ellis's "Gendering Melville" argues that not enough attention has been paid to masculinity in relation to other major characteristics in nineteenth-century America, including femininity, race, and class......center of paper... ....Laskowski, Gene L. Male sentimentality in the early novels of Herman Melville. Diss. University of Michigan, 1993. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1993. Print.Robbins, Sarah. “Generating the History of Antislavery Fiction: Juxtaposing Uncle Tom's Cabin and Benito Cereno, Beloved and the Middle Passage” American Quarterly 49.3 (1997): 531-73. JSTOR. Network. November 24, 2012.Weigman, Robyn. "Melville's Geography of Gender". American Literary History 1.4 (1989): 735-53. JSTOR. Network. November 24, 2012.Wilson, Sarah. "Melville and the Architecture of Antebellum Masculinity." American Literature 76.1 (2004): 59-87. Duke University Press. Network. November 24, 2012. Brodhead, Richard H. “Trying Everything.” New essays on Moby Dick. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge UP, 1986. 9. Print.36 Melville to Evert Duychinck, 13 December 1850, correspondence, 174.