Herman Melville ( )

Darker Romantics  Share characteristics with other Romantics but more pessimistic view  Authors: Hawthorne, Melville, Poe  View of humanity: moral struggle with evil; feelings and intuition; dark interior  View of God: good versus 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

Like Transcendentalists  Melville sought evidence of human spirit in nature  Found division and disunity---“however beautiful the sunlit surface of the ocean, sharks and other terrors still swim in the dark depths.”  Unlike:  Ineradicable evil in all existence haunted Melville’s imagination

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

Melville’s Themes  Power of presence of evil  No logic in society or nature; a man depends on himself  No dogma can teach; we learn it on our own  Humans must fight society and nature  Life is mask of appearance  Battles of conscience

Themes cont.  Person=maker of own identity  Must accept inability to fully know power of universe  Must know own mortality  Must know need for fellow humans and capacity for love of humankind=redemption

Early Family  Born in New York City in 1819  Mother from well to-do Dutch Hudson River mercantile families  Father from affluent Boston family  Lived in comfort till in 1830  Father went bankrupt  Great economic and social uncertainty until 1832 when father collapsed, took to bed, went insane and died

 Melville educated himself while working a variety of jobs throughout teens.  In 1839, joined the crew of the St. Lawrence and set sail for Liverpool, England.  In 1840, set sail aboard the Acushnet, a whaling ship headed for the South Pacific.  Rough conditions of the sea toughened Melville  Took such a liking to sea life that he sailed around the globe four years aboard various ships. Young Adulthood

Post-Sailing Years  Welcomed home by his family who was entertained by his tales of the high seas and encouraged him to write them down.  Wrote Typee quickly in 1845, and published it the next year.  Typee a critical and financial success  In 1847, married Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of the Chief Justice of Massachusetts.

“Dollars Damn Me.”  Became friends with Hawthorne  Often irritated that his success didn’t last  Novels became less about physical adventure (which Americans liked) and more mental adventures (which bored Americans)  Self-examination and mental examination didn’t pay the bills

Career  Married, with children, Melville needs income;  Wrote a series of successful adventure novels  Baffled his readers with Moby-Dick, 1851  Received poor reviews and did not sell  Decline in popularity after Pierre, or The Ambiguities (1852)  in 1853 and following, publishes short stories in monthly magazines, including “Bartleby” (1853)  All the rest seem to have been "eminently adapted for unpopularity"

Career, 2  1860s and 70s: poetry, including Battle- Pieces (1866) about Civil War;  Despite continued output and the fact his earlier novels continued to be reprinted and sold fairly well, Melville's literary reputation in rapid decline  Melville suffers financially and personally (son commits suicide in 1867)  1880s: with inheritances, Melville is able to focus on writing.  Last great work: Billy Budd, Sailor.

Evaluation  Today, Melville regarded as great world writer  His life represents  One of the greatest tragedies in the North American literary history,  One of the greatest losses to American literature,  One of the most disgraceful episodes of critical stupidity in the United States

Evolution of Beliefs  Melville felt betrayed and abandoned by his father  Sense of the utter precariousness of the human situation and the tormenting mystery of things  In search of what he called "the Arch-Principles," those invisible, perhaps unknowable and maybe malignant forces that control human life

Arch-Principles  The theme of the Original Sin was modified into a belief that though all persons might be flawed, only some were genuinely evil  Focused on the mystery of God's nature and the knowability of God  In Clarel he reached the frightening conclusion that there was simply no rational order in the universe, nothing to believe in, nothing to either worship or hate, only a vast universal blank

Formative Influences  His voyages on board several merchant and military ships from 1839 to 1844  His readings:  Greek tragedy, especially the Orestia of Aeschylus  Classical Elizabethan drama  Particularly attracted to Shakespearean tragedies  Epic poetry of Homer and others  From 1844 onward caught in “the tragedies of thought”  Inward adventures, adventures of the mind

The Sea  One of the most important ingredients of Melville's education:  The vast reaches of the Pacific ocean  The hunt, especially the hunting of the whale  The extreme vicissitudes of physical nature  Masculine friendship  Human cruelty  The lure of the exotic  The mixed attractions of the pastoral

Melville’s Works  Produced seven novels in six years-- unmatched in American literature:  Typee, 1846, an immense success  Its sequel, Omoo, 1847, also well-received  Mardi, 1849, surprised the readers  Redburn, 1849, and White-Jacket, 1850  Moby-Dick, 1851  Pierre, or The Ambiguities, 1852

Other Works  Israel Potter, 1855  The Piazza Tales, 1856  The Confidence Man, 1857  Battle Pieces, 1866  Clarel, 1876  John Marr and Other Sailors, 1888  Timoleon, 1891  Billy Budd, posthumous, 1924  Uncollected Prose,

Writing Moby-Dick  In the summer of 1850 met Hawthorne  Shifted and enormously enlarged his conception of Moby-Dick in the course of writing it under Hawthorne’s influence  Dedicated the book to him  “I’ve written a wicked book, and I feel as spotless as a lamb”  “I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould"

Moby-Dick  A sea-haunted novel  As Ishmael says in the opening chapter, "the sea is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life.”  The whole book is about the pursuit of that phantom, an attempt to seek out the mystery which seems to lie, malevolently or benevolently, at the heart of human experience

Moby Dick  Epic in scope  Contains several of the epic conventions:  The long and arduous journey  The great battle  Much dramatically shaped, indeed staged; scenes with speeches and images  Defined as an epic, which contains a tragic drama, a tragedy of pride, and pursuit and revenge, which is also a tragedy of thought

Themes of Moby-Dick  The voyage is a “fiery hunt” for one particular whale, the great beast, Moby- Dick  To Ahab, the white whale is the very embodiment of the ultimate mystery  The whale is the ungraspable phantom seemingly made accessible to human attack

The Whiteness of the Whale  Whiteness and not blackness used as symbol of the terror of the human soul  For Ishmael-– heartlessness and emptiness in the universe

 800 pages about guy trying to find whale and get back at it  Melville wanted to write novels written at two different levels  Said to Hawthorne: “secret motto that few would discern”  Said Hawthorne’s books (and his own?): “are superficially calculated to deceive—egregiously deceived, the superficial skimmer of books” Moby-Dick

Perspectives on Truth  Ahab: Truth has no confines  Ishmael: Truth is living within the limitations of our human understanding & coming to terms with our own mortality  Seekers of absolutes deceive themselves. We live in a neutral universe that has “meaning” only in our human perceptions, and historical actualities are our only guides to truth  Truth is relative to its pursuer

Evaluation  Moby-Dick is, critics have agreed, one of the world’s greatest masterpieces. To get to know the 19th century American mind and America itself, one has to read this book.  A classic of American Literature and even world literature.  Moby-Dick is an encyclopedia of everything: history, philosophy, religion, etc., in addition to a detailed account of the operations of the whaling industry.

Billy Budd  Unfinished at Melville’s death  Discovered and published in 1924 during Melville “rediscovery”  Several different versions in publication  A tale of good and evil, rich in symbol and allegory

Symbols in Billy Budd  Billy Budd = Christ, Adam  Claggart = serpent, Lucifer or Satan, Judas  Vere = Pontius Pilate  Multi-layered meanings  Billy’s handsomeness  Billy’s stutter  Billy’s anger

End  His death from a heart attack on September 28, 1891, went entirely unheeded by the general public.  Melville's literary reputation remained in decline until he was rediscovered in the 1920s by a generation who, disillusioned by the Great War, began to appreciate the depth of Melville's spiritual struggles and the modern experimental style of his stories.