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Variations on Nature: From the Old Manse to the White Whale

John Gatta

in Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and the Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present

Among the divergent forms of nature writing that flourished in nineteenth-century America, the “Old Manse” preface by Hawthorne reflects a distinctive mood of contentment about the author’s residence ... More

Among the divergent forms of nature writing that flourished in nineteenth-century America, the “Old Manse” preface by Hawthorne reflects a distinctive mood of contentment about the author’s residence in Concord, Massachusetts. This essay’s conception of nature is based not on a wilderness aesthetic, but on a pastoral sense of human interaction with the green world—a sense that Hawthorne associates in turn with Christian theological terms of grace and incarnation. The holiness of gardening likewise informs writing of this period by women such as Celia Thaxter and Margaret Fuller. The religious intensity of Walt Whitman’s ecopoetic worldview, epitomized by “Song of Myself,” ranges from the astronomical heights to the lowly plants mentioned in section 5 of this poem. Unlike Whitman’s oceanic poems, Herman Melville’s portrayal of the sea in Moby-Dick exposes nature’s underlying savagery and vulturism—but also raises deep questions about the divinely inscrutable freedom of Creation embodied by the great white whale.Less

Moby-Dick and the Opposite of Providence

Maurice S. Lee

in Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Chapter two shows how chance destabilizes conventional discussions of fate and free will. Beginning with a deeply historicized account of theological and philosophical denials of chance, the chapter ... More

Chapter two shows how chance destabilizes conventional discussions of fate and free will. Beginning with a deeply historicized account of theological and philosophical denials of chance, the chapter turns to Moby-Dick to demonstrate how Melville subverts Christian beliefs in providence and the argument from design, preferring instead to resuscitate concepts of chance as presented in classical and Early Modern scepticism. This chapter also shows how Melville’s knowledge of oceanography, meteorology, and navigation shape his understanding of probability and the potential for managing chance’s disruptive power. We end with a discussion of King Ahab as a figure for anxieties over the possibilities of chance as Moby-Dick resists both formal unity and causal teleology.Less

Introduction

Giles Gunn

in A Historical Guide to Herman Melville

One of the best words to describe Herman Melville's reputation, especially among other American writers, is colossus for he has been able to contribute in no small part to the classic literature of ... More

One of the best words to describe Herman Melville's reputation, especially among other American writers, is colossus for he has been able to contribute in no small part to the classic literature of the nineteenth century. Although he might have been outwritten by other prominent authors such as Mark Twain and Henry James, among others, Herman Melville managed to write some of the most significant and more ambitious stories in both prose and poetry, such as Mardi: And a Voyage Thither, Moby Dick, and Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land to name a few. Aside from taking on a multitude of various themes and issues, Melville's works complied with a common theme that involves consuming and creating, brought about by Melville's belief that art was meant to be perceived as a semireligious assertion that art reflects the most important aspects of life and experience.Less

The Nineteenth-Century Canon: Hidden in Plain Sight

Michael T. Gilmore

in Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture

This chapter considers some of the classics of 19th-century American literature: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Thoreau’s Walden, and James’s The American. These canonical ... More

This chapter considers some of the classics of 19th-century American literature: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Thoreau’s Walden, and James’s The American. These canonical works toy with the edict of knowability, but unlike popular genres, they ultimately reject complete revelation as an illusion. Their protagonists gravitate to inscrutability and hide in plain sight.Less

Fast-Fish and the Temple of the Philistines

Reeve Huston

in Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York

This chapter begins with a passage from Herman Melville, published in 1851, which offers a painful insight into the politics and economy of his era. Regarding property in human beings, the law of ... More

This chapter begins with a passage from Herman Melville, published in 1851, which offers a painful insight into the politics and economy of his era. Regarding property in human beings, the law of fast-fish was inviolable. Nor was Melville referring only to slavery. Between 1847 and the publication of Moby Dick, anti-renters learned with dramatic finality the limits to popular power under the second-party system. Melville's passage contained not just a description, but also a portent of change: like the Temple of the Philistines, a structure with only two props cannot stand. It was not the law that was at risk, however, but the party system through which lawmakers were chosen and organized. It doubtless referred to the slavery controversy, but perhaps not to that alone. New York's anti-renters and landlords helped undermine the stability of the second-party system and assisted in laying the groundwork for a new political order.Less

Chapter Four: Melville's Furious Life

Geoffrey Sanborn

in Whipscars and Tattoos: The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick, and the Maori

This final chapter argues that the crucial quality that Queequeg brings to Moby-Dick is the same one that was so powerfully associated with the Maori in general and Te Pehi Kupe in particular: a ... More

This final chapter argues that the crucial quality that Queequeg brings to Moby-Dick is the same one that was so powerfully associated with the Maori in general and Te Pehi Kupe in particular: a fiercely majestic pride. This is what makes it possible for Queequeg to read Moby Dick not as a symbol of evil, as Ahab does, or as an instructively baffling object of interpretation, as Ishmael does, but as a version of himself, a worthy and uncannily familiar rival. It is, the chapter suggests, exactly how we are encouraged to read Moby Dick: as a magnified incarnation of our own life-force, spouting his, and our, “frothed defiance to the skies.”Less

Dickens: Transformist

Ian Duncan

in Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution

This chapter explores Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Charles Dickens's Bleak House. Dickens brings to a head the Romantic intuition about urban life developed by Walter Scott and Victor Hugo in ... More

This chapter explores Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Charles Dickens's Bleak House. Dickens brings to a head the Romantic intuition about urban life developed by Walter Scott and Victor Hugo in their novels of Paris: the world-city, the total human habitat, is where human nature comes undone. Monsters belong here, as modern cinema confirms. For all both novels' shared vision of a scale of natural history overwhelming human life, Dickens's leviathan affords an insight the reverse of Melville's. Where the whale is a living creature, the embodiment of a planetary ecosystem, Dickens's dinosaur is a phantasmatic emanation of the Victorian metropolis—an allegorical figure for the “Dickens World.” Against Moby-Dick's sublime vision of the world as a nonhuman natural order, upon which humanity imprints its violent signature of epic striving, the world of Bleak House is unnatural, man-made, an “artificial nature,” which reconstitutes its human origins in the aesthetic mode of the grotesque, according to a genetic logic of monstrosity, and is legible through the techniques of allegory.Less

Interchapter: Philosopher at the Masthead

Steve Mentz

in Shipwreck Modernity: "Ecologies of Globalization, 1550-1719"

Through extracts from “The Mast-Head” chapter of Moby-Dick, this Interchapter considers the intellectual consequences of exchanging land for sea.

Jefferson's Convulsions: Archiving Logan

in On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World

In this chapter the author focuses on the figure of the captive king led away from what Wai-Chee Dimock has convincingly argued is the dominant racial logic of Moby-Dick, namely, the fate linking ... More

In this chapter the author focuses on the figure of the captive king led away from what Wai-Chee Dimock has convincingly argued is the dominant racial logic of Moby-Dick, namely, the fate linking Ahab and his voyage with the “doomed”Indians after whom his ship is named. The Pequod, Ishmael explains, were a “celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians” now as “extinct as the ancient Medes.” The last man to go down with the ship in Moby-Dick is Tashtego, the Gay-Head Indian, whose final act is to nail a sky-hawk's wing to the mainmast. The royal slave or captive king, insofar as he is essentially African, is fundamentally deterritorialized: his mythic element is the sea, and the ideal event to which the tradition orients its confused thinking about him is an ever-postponed emancipation.Less

Etymology: (Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)

George Cotkin

in Dive Deeper: Journeys with Moby-Dick

This chapter explains the etymology of some words associated with Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, which was first published in England as The Whale in October 1851 by Richard Bentley. In November ... More

This chapter explains the etymology of some words associated with Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, which was first published in England as The Whale in October 1851 by Richard Bentley. In November 1851, Harper's published the book in the United States with the full title, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. The American edition included the Epilogue, which was lacking in the British edition. Moby-Dick refers to the White Whale, the leviathan dubbed by Jeremiah N. Reynolds as “an old bull whale, of prodigious size and strength,...white as wool.” The endless debates about the symbols and meaning of Moby-Dick are known collectively as “Moby-Dickering,” a term coined by Charles Poore in 1952. Moby-Dick has been published in almost every language in the world.Less

Extracts: (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian)

George Cotkin

in Dive Deeper: Journeys with Moby-Dick

This chapter presents extracts from various sources relating to Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, including quotations by Fitz-James O'Brien, W. Clark Russell, Donald G. Mitchell, Archibald ... More

This chapter presents extracts from various sources relating to Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, including quotations by Fitz-James O'Brien, W. Clark Russell, Donald G. Mitchell, Archibald MacMechan, Van Wyck Brooks, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Melville himself. Also included are quotes from publications such as London Morning Advertiser, New Bedford Daily Mercury, Boston Post, and Philadelphia Saturday Courier.Less

Epilogue

George Cotkin

in Dive Deeper: Journeys with Moby-Dick

This epilogue focuses on “Bob Dylan's 115th Dream,” a song composed and recorded by Bob Dylan. It compares Dylan with Ishmael, the narrator and the only survivor in the Herman Melville novel ... More

This epilogue focuses on “Bob Dylan's 115th Dream,” a song composed and recorded by Bob Dylan. It compares Dylan with Ishmael, the narrator and the only survivor in the Herman Melville novel Moby-Dick. The song refers to Captain Ahab as Captain Arab, with Dylan adopting Ishmael's persona. Instead of the Pequod, Captain Arab commands the Mayflower. “Bob Dylan's 115th Dream” is essentially a surreal reflection of the failed promise of America and how pursuit of the White Whale and profits can lead to disaster.Less

Introduction: Interstitial States in the Oceanic Nineteenth Century

Edward Sugden

in Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture

This introduction provides a synoptic overview of the project as a whole concentrating on how it relates to the crisis of identity in the study of the nineteenth-century Americas that has evolved in ... More

This introduction provides a synoptic overview of the project as a whole concentrating on how it relates to the crisis of identity in the study of the nineteenth-century Americas that has evolved in the years since 2001. It begins with an extended analysis of the overlooked second and third clauses of Moby-Dick—“Some years ago—never mind how long precisely”—and shows how they contain a model for history, geography, politics, and form, as well as how these areas relate to issues of field definition. From this close reading, it defines the central structural terms of the book, namely, the “interstitial state,” the “oceanic geoculture,” the “dissonant time,” and the “archival form.”Less

Coda: Ishmael in the Water

Edward Sugden

in Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture

This coda considers how and why it is that the emergent worlds chronicled in this book have become legible to us now. It seeks to reflect on the contemporary conditions that have made the testimonies ... More

This coda considers how and why it is that the emergent worlds chronicled in this book have become legible to us now. It seeks to reflect on the contemporary conditions that have made the testimonies and archives covered across the three chapters comprehensible on their own terms, rather than through the lens of a later modernity. It concludes that we now live in a comparably interstitial age as the worlds that make up this book. More precisely, it studies Ishmael in the water at the end of Moby-Dick and suggests that this episode represents a point after a threshold, where he had left the chaotic Pacific and had entered into the beginnings of American modernity. In and around 2001, that era of modernity began to decline, and a new period of systemic uncertainty, our own, began. Ishmael is at the entrance, we at the exit to that age. Ishmael, as he drifts in the water, thus gestures toward anterior ages of transition but also to our future, warning us of the catastrophic consequences of failing to take advantage of these moments of historical promise.Less

Wisdom of the Heart: The Human Encounter with God in Pensées and Moby-Dick

Kim Paffenroth

in The Experience of God: A Postmodern Response

This concluding chapter links together Blaise Pascal's Pensées, conceived in the years before his death in 1662 and first edited as late as 1844, and Herman Melville's ... More

This concluding chapter links together Blaise Pascal's Pensées, conceived in the years before his death in 1662 and first edited as late as 1844, and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) by way of the theme of the “wisdom of the heart”. Our everyday experience is thoroughly mediated by the Bible. We refer ourselves and others to biblical characters, try to live up to them or react against them, while our deeds are oriented to scriptural injunctions, models, and even hermeneutical templates such as allegory and typology. Pascal's experience of God is firmly shaped by the scriptures, while the Bible is in turn marked by the ways in which he frames it. And we can read an entire theology condensed in the pages of Moby-Dick, one whose sense and function are quite different from the orthodoxy that animates Pascal.Less

Unearthing Pierre

Paul Grimstad

in Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses

This chapter looks at how Melville reacted to reviews for Moby-Dick by adding pages to the finished manuscript of Pierre, and considers Melville’s use of allegory. It also looks in detail at ... More

This chapter looks at how Melville reacted to reviews for Moby-Dick by adding pages to the finished manuscript of Pierre, and considers Melville’s use of allegory. It also looks in detail at Melville’s prose style circa 1851-1852.Less

The Uneven Balance: Dialectical Terror in Moby-Dick

Paul hurh

in American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville

This chapter argues that the terror of Moby-Dick dramatizes the logical paradoxes of a meta-dialectical method. It introduces a study of the influence of Melville’s close friend, George Adler, a ... More

This chapter argues that the terror of Moby-Dick dramatizes the logical paradoxes of a meta-dialectical method. It introduces a study of the influence of Melville’s close friend, George Adler, a proponent of Hegelian metaphysics and a chronic paranoiac, upon Moby-Dick. And it shows how the multiple terrors of Moby-Dick do not arise from one or the other philosophical commitment, but rather from a Hegel-inspired application of dialectical method to the problem of dialectical method itself. The chapter analyzes how moments of precarious balance, in Moby-Dick, are paired with an existential and epistemological terror. The chapter concludes with a reading of how Melville models this dialectical terror upon the physical properties of light.Less

Slit Throats in Melville

Michael T. Gilmore

in The War on Words: Slavery, Race, and Free Speech in American Literature

The tension between pressure on free speech, a position Melville reluctantly endorsed, and passionate belief produced an array of responses in the novelist, from the self-expurgation of Typee through ... More

The tension between pressure on free speech, a position Melville reluctantly endorsed, and passionate belief produced an array of responses in the novelist, from the self-expurgation of Typee through the linguistic defiance of Moby-Dick to the epidemic of silencing in “Benito Cereno” (1855) and the picture of a verbally evasive society of “No Trust” in The Confidence-Man. This chapter reviews these fictions and reveals Herman Melville's account of African bondage. Yet slavery and its corollary, the sign of the censor, stalk everything Melville wrote in this period; they form the self-conscious subtext of his work as well as the animating context for his genius. Typee is the novel that establishes the pattern for Melville's career: it announces the centrality of self-censorship to his work and points toward the convergence of his circumspection with the gathering storm over slavery.Less