Herman Melville(1819-1891 )

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 identityMust accept inability to

fully know power of universe

Must know own mortalityMust 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 MelvilleTook 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.

EvaluationToday, Melville regarded as great world writerHis 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 AeschylusClassical Elizabethan drama

Particularly attracted to Shakespearean tragediesEpic 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 oceanThe hunt, especially the hunting of the whaleThe extreme vicissitudes of physical natureMasculine friendshipHuman crueltyThe lure of the exoticThe 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-receivedMardi, 1849, surprised the readersRedburn, 1849, and White-Jacket, 1850 Moby-Dick, 1851Pierre, 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, 1839-1856

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 truthTruth 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 handsomenessBilly’s stutterBilly’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.