Melville Herman - A Historical Guide to Herman Melville

A HISTORICAL GUIDE TO

Herman Melville

HISTORICAL GUIDES
TO AMERICAN AUTHORS

The Historical Guides to American Authors is an interdisciplinary, historically sensitive series that combines close attention to the United States most widely read and studied authors with a strong sense of time, place, and history. Placing each writer in the context of the vibrant relationship between literature and society, volumes in this series contain historical essays written on subjects of contemporary social, political, and cultural relevance. Each volume also includes a capsule biography and illustrated chronology detailing important cultural events as they coincided with the authors life and works, while photographs and illustrations dating from the period capture the flavor of the authors time and social milieu. Equally accessible to students of literature and of life, the volumes offer a complete and rounded picture of each author in his or her America.

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Edited by J. Gerald Kennedy

A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau
Edited by William E. Cain

A Historical Guide to Mark Twain
Edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton
Edited by Carol J. Singley

A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes
Edited by Steven C. Tracy

A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson
Edited by Vivian R. Pollak

A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison
Edited by Steven C. Tracy

A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald
Edited by Kirk Curnutt

A Historical Guide to Herman Melville
Edited by Giles Gunn

EDITED BY

GILES GUNN

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A historical guide to Herman Melville / edited by Giles Gunn.
p. cm.(Historical guides to American authors)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13 978-0-19-514281-5; 978-0-19-514282-2 (pbk.)
ISBN 0-19-514281-0; ISBN 0-19-514282-9 (pbk.)
1. Melville, Herman, 1819-1891Handbooks, manuals, etc.
2. Novelists, American19th centuryBiographyHandbooks, manuals, etc.
3. Literature and historyUnited StatesHistory19th century
Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Gunn, Giles B. II. Series.
PS2386.H54 2005
813.3dc22 2004063564

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

My special thanks to Jacob Berman for helping me review the recent bibliography on Melville, to Mr. Michael Perry, for all of his assistance and thoughtful suggestions in the early stages of the preparation of this volume, and to Ms. Maggie Sloan, for her help in selecting images and arranging for permissions. In addition, I am very grateful to Ms. Jennifer Kowing for her expert editorial assistance and support and to Dr. Toni Mantych for so carefully preparing the index. As always, I owe special thanks to my wife, Deborah Sills, for her shrewd counsel and strong support. But the deepest debt of gratitude goes to all those critics and scholars who have voyaged these seas before and have brought back such troves of insight and understanding.

Introduction
Giles Gunn

Herman Melville, 18191891: A Brief Biography
Robert Milder

Romantic Answers, Victorian Questions:
Cultural Possibilities for Melville at Midcentury
Leon Chai

Melville and Class
Myra Jehlen

Melville and the Marketplace
Sheila Post

Without the Pale: Melville and Ethnic Cosmopolitanism
Timothy Marr

Wandering To-and-Fro: Melville and Religion
Emory Elliott

Bibliographical Essay
Giles Gunn

A HISTORICAL GUIDE TO
Herman Melville

Among American writers, Herman Melville remains a kind of colossus; there is no other word for him. Though in sheer number of pages he was outwritten by other American artists of the nineteenth century, such as Mark Twain, Henry James, and the still more prolific E. D. E. N. Southworth, he nonetheless managed to pen some of the centurys most massive and, even more, ambitious narratives both in prose and in poetry. Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (1849), a romantic quest narrative that turns into an allegorical search for the ideal life; the much better known Moby-Dick (1851), his great sea epic named after the whale that is chased around the world by Captain Ahab; and the masterwork of his later years, an 18,000-line poem devoted to exploring the spiritual crisis of modern civilization, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876)all take their place among the ranks of those mammoth literary productions that the nineteenth century seemed almost obsessed with creating and consuming, as though history had presented it with perhaps the last opportunity to try to say absolutely everything in art. For Melville, there was in this ambitionas there was for such fellow artists as Victor Hugo at the beginning of the century, George Eliot in the middle, and Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy toward the endsomething like a semireligious conviction that art could encompass in its representations very nearly the whole of life itself, or at least that art could tap into and mine some of lifes deepest and richest veins of experience. Melville, in other words, belonged to that company of nineteenth-century literary artists of whom it could be said, as Walt Whitman declared so truly of himself, they were large and contained multitudes.

But Melville deserves to be associated with greatness of size and aspiration not merely because of the length of some of his texts but also because of the enormous scope of the themes and issues with which he grappled. Not for him the depiction of local customs, well-worn traditions, regional practices, and conventional morals and manners. Melvilles was a mind that from the beginning of his career not only was preoccupied with the everlasting itch for things remote, as his narrator, Ishmael, remarks about himself at the beginning of Moby-Dick, but also was tormented by questions of transcultural, indeed universal, range. Melvilles reflections kept extending outward toward the farthest horizons of thought to engage such huge questions as the coherence of life, the existence of God, the goodness of creation, the problem of evil, the nature of truth, the possibilities of justice, the limits of knowledge, and the meaning of death. And even when he succeeded in, or at any rate settled for, reining in some of the more abstract, ultimately unanswerable inquiries, he remained intensely interested in probing the deep structure of more specific but no less complex and recalcitrant issues of the day, from the nature of industrial capitalism, the depredations of colonialism, the dangers of imperialism, and the evils of slavery to the oppression of women, the diversity of sexuality, and the prospects for democracy.