Herman Melville

Sea adventure and writings  experiences at south sea yield 37 books about it TypeeOmoo –But wants to change writing, wants meaning; wants to rebel, write banned books  1849 Mardi and Redburn—failures critically and financially

 1850 White Jacket; –Melville to Hawthorne (while working on Moby Dick): “Dollars damn me. [What I feel] most moved to write, that is banned—it will not pay. Yet altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, all my books are botches.”

 1851 Moby Dick –Topic: 800 pages about Ahab trying to find the white whale Moby Dick and get back at it. –Not as much of failure as Mardi, but not successful; received little notice

 : Pierre, Israel Potter, The Confidence Man  1867 abandons fiction –Magazine writing to make money –Publishes short stories in Europe (including “Bartleby”) –Emotionally wrung out from failures, careful of issues of offensiveness, still trying out technique of writing for two audiences at once –1920 H.M. rediscovered as an author

Themes  Romantic concern with good and evil –Hawthorne: Puritan ancestry –Melville: ships  Responded differently –Hawthorne: positive –Melville: negative

The Chart: Darker Romantics  View of Man: moral struggle with evil; feelings and intuition; dark interior  View of God: good v. evil; sin and its psychological effects on people  View of Nature: evil found in setting and symbol; often the supernatural  View of Society: must be reformed

Allegory  Objects and persons equated with meanings outside of the narrative  Characters personify abstract qualities  Evokes dual interest  Religious, moral, political, personal, satiric

Themes  Power of presence of evil  No logic in society or nature; man depend on self  No dogma can teach; man learn it on own  Man must fight society and nature  Life is mask of appearance  Battles of conscience  Redemption in human love for fellow man

Themes  Man=maker of own identity –must accept inability to fully know power of universe –must know own mortality –must know need for fellow man and capacity for love of humankind

Themes  Man is not equal to God  Love=only element of innocence that endures  Can result in isolation or “hell”  Responsible for other human beings

Moby Dick  a. Herman Melville’s masterpiece, one of the world’s greatest masterpieces.  b. To get to know the 19th century American mind and America itself, one has to read this book.  c. It is an encyclopedia of everything, history, philosophy, religion, etc. in addition to a detailed account of the operations of the whaling industry.  d. But it is first a Shakespeare tragedy of man fighting against overwhelming odds in an indifferent and even hostile universe.

 Themes and subjects  A. Alienation: existing on different levels, between man and man, man and society, and man and nature. (e.g. Ahab)  B. criticism against Emersonian self-reliant individual:  Ahab is too much of a self-reliant individual to be a good human being. He stands alone on his own one leg among the millions of the peopled earth. For him the only law is his own will. To him the world exists for his own sake. His selfhood must be asserted at the expense of all else.

 C. Rejection and Quest:  Ishmael resembles his namesake in the Bible in that he is a wanderer. Tired with and rejecting his early lifestyle, he tried to seek for a happy and ideal life. He gradually comes to see the folly of Ahab seeking to conquer nature and begins to feel the significance of love and fraternity among mortal beings. Voyaging for Ishmael has become a journey in quest of knowledge and values.

Symbolism in the novel  A. the voyage itself is a metaphor for “search and discovery, the search for the ultimate truth of experience.”  B. the Pequod is the ship of the American soul and consciousness.  C. Moby Dick is a symbol of evil to some, of goodness to others, and of both to still others.  D. The whiteness of Moby Dick is a paradoxical color, signifying death and corruption as well as purity, innocence and youth; it represents the final mystery of the universe.

The multiple view of point  Chapter 36, award of a doublon and different responses of different men –Tashtego (the American Indian), Daggoo (the African American giant), Queequeg (the Polynesian) -- Starbuck