Introduction
Moby Dick is considered the great American novel. There are many reasons Moby Dick has earned this award, from the accolades of English critics in Melville’s day to the positive commentary by Literary critics and theorists today. Melville was a master of sentence style, and wrote many complex and highly structured sentences in the novel. Likewise, he filled his text with allusions and references to the greatest works of literature, including the Bible, Paradise Lost, King Lear, and the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. While all of these elements contribute to the greatness of Moby Dick they are not the reason the book can be considered the great American novel. Moby Dick is the great American novel because Herman Melville made the text act as a mirror for American society; Melville made Moby Dick contain all elements of American society and culture. The text is multicultural, showing all the races and ethnicities of the nation; every region of the nation is presented, as are all social and economic classes. Truly, in Moby Dick, Melville created a text large enough to contain the entire story of America.
Body: Melville’s Understanding of America
Herman Melville was known to have said, “a whale ship was my Harvard and my Cambridge”, when asked about his educational background. His answer, in many ways, helps to reveal how Melville was uniquely positioned to write about the entirety of American life and culture in his novel, and why Melville, more than most writers, truly understood what it meant to be an American (Hayford and Parker 745-747). Unlike the other American Transcendentalists, Melville did not attend college or study in Europe. Most of his knowledge came from grammar schools, and his near encyclopedic knowledge of literature, science and philosophy which he demonstrated in Moby Dick he taught himself, much like Benjamin Franklin, who was often called ‘the first American’, and who Melville wrote about in his Revolutionary War novel, Isiah Potter. The reason why Melville went to a whale ship instead of to Harvard helps to understand why Moby Dick can be read as a novel about America.
Melville’s family dated back to colonial times, and one of his grandfathers was a general in the Revolutionary War, and was a war hero. His other grandfather served on the Massachusetts supreme court, and other members of his family helped to develop New York City (Hayford & Parker 587-590). Grooversfort Plaza in New York City is named after a relative, and his family was successful in both business, and social and political circles. However, as America became more of a capitalist country, it started to experience the boom and bust cycle of capitalist economies. During one recession, Melville’s father, who was not the best business man as it was, lost the family fortune. As a result, when Melville turned 18, he was not able to follow his peers in the upper social classes of America into college or Europe, as his family did not have the money. Thus, Melville experienced a side of the new capitalist America that would become familiar to far too many Americans in the future; the downward mobility of a bad economy. He could write about being broke in America.
Body: Melville as Sailor-Working America
In addition, instead of travelling to Europe on his family money when he turned 18, Melville was forced to find work in order to afford to live. After a short stint as a school teacher, Melville decided to seek his fortune on the high seas, as a sailor. He signed up for one voyage, on a merchant ship, which went to England and back carrying mercantile goods, which he eventually wrote about in the novel Redburn (Hayford & Parker 599). However, the merchant voyage did not pay well, so Melville signed up for the highest paying job as a sailor, working on a whaling ship. The job was the highest paying because it was extremely dangerous, and whale ships commonly spent two or more years at sea. In addition, the work on a whaling ship was incredibly hard, and whale ships were literally like floating factories. Thus, Melville got to experience not just life as an American from a founding family, and America as a person who had gone broke and needed to find a job to survive, and as an American who had to go to work in the factories. Thus, he had a rich person’s point of view, a poor person’s point of view, and a working class point of view.
Melville had many experiences on the whale ship, far too many to discuss here; however, there are two important things that influenced his composition of Moby Dick. The first is that he turned his adventures, (and they were truly adventures) into two bestselling novels, Typee and Omoo. These novels were best sellers and made Melville decide to become a professional novelist, which was a brand new career path in America. The second important element that influenced the composition of Moby Dick was the wide variety of people of different racial and ethnic groups he met on the ship and on his voyages across the Pacific. Indeed after he spent time living with one Polynesian tribe on a Pacific Island, Melville said he learned to never judge a person based on the appearance, their culture, religion, or skin tone. And this lesson taught him the truth of the pluralistic and multiculturalist true nature of American society and culure. And it was this multi ethnic and multi racial America that Melville represented in Moby Dick.
Body: Economic America
In the first chapter of Moby Dick, Melville writes of all the examples from American culture of Americans being drawn to adventure on the oceans and the high seas. He writes of how Americans love to go on luxury cruises and vacation by the lakeside or seashore, and how property by the waterfront is often some of the most expensive in America. However, Melville’s narrator, the famous Ishmael, cannot afford a luxury home by the beach or even a first class ticket on a cruise ship, for he is poor, yet he too is drawn to the sea too. And in the next several paragraphs he depicts America from an economic class point of view, revealing how the experience of America is different based upon the amount of money that one has. He writes, “now when I say that I am in the habit of going to seeI do not mean to infer that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go to sea as passenger, you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it” (Melville 5). Melville is here pointing out that he is poor, for he has no money, and therefore he must go to sea as a worker and not as a vacationer.
Thus, Melville shows America from the point of view of different classes, and he then lists the many ranks and social titles that people give themselves, and points out how these titles are completely meaningless, unless the person claiming the title has money (Melville 5-6). No, Ishmael’s only title is that of a common sailor, which means a common worker, and he notes, that unlike these rich people who give themselves fancy titles to make their families look important, Ishmael the common worker is the one who actually comes from the oldest and most established families in America (Melville 6). This reversal of fortune, although common in the modern world, was a rather uniquely American event in the time Melville was writing.
In Europe, the old established families, were called nobility, or the aristocracy, and inherited their political power, wealth and land based on their family name. The nobles and aristocrats stayed that way forever, as they claimed they were more special than the common man. It was exactly that type of aristocratic and feudal system of government the American Revolution fought. The Americans won, establishing a country where anyone could rise in wealth and power based on their ability and hard work. However, the other side of that coin was that if people went broke, the opposite would happen; they would lose everything and fall in the world. Ironically, Ishmael, and Melville, came from a family that fought the Revolutionary War, but in the 100 or so years since the war, the family had lost their wealth, land and status, and now its members were ordinary laborers. Melville’s point, is that there is no established aristocracy or nobility in America based on blood or family name. In America, it is not one’s blood that matters, but how much money one has in one’s wallet or purse. Or, as Melville puts it in Moby Dick, “there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid” (Melville 6). This powerful economic perspective has led some literary critics to all Melville America’s Marx, and have credited Moby Dick for presenting a “systematic critique” of the forms of economic and class domination and exploitation in America (Frank 2). Chapters like chapter 96 “The Try Works” has often been examined as a representation of the American factory system, and how rigid the class structure is there.
Body: Multicultural America
A few chapters later, Melville again uses a scene by the water front to present an image of the pluralistic, multicultural nature of American life. Ishmael travels to Nantucket, the home of the American whaling fleet in order to get a job on a whale ship. Since he arrives late at night, all the hotel rooms in the town are sold out; however, he is able to get the last room in town, as long as he is willing to share a room and bed with another sailor. Once Ishmael agrees to take the room, the innkeeper starts to scare him by telling him that his roommate is a foreigner, in other words and immigrant, and that the harpooner supplements his income by selling shrunken heads. First, this scene represents how there have always been immigrants coming to America, from all over the world, and of all ethnic backgrounds, and not just from Europe. Also it points out how some Americans always have a fear of immigrants and foreigners, and try to paint them in a horrible light. The landlord presents a horrible stereotype of people from the Pacific Islands, and other tribal cultures, claiming he is a heathen, and a headhunter, and a cannibal. So just as in America today, when horrible stereotypes of current immigrant groups are spread in order to invoke fear, the same was happening in Melville’s day. And, at first, Ishmael is afraid of his absent roommate. However, the roommate’s absence is the key to the scene, for Ishmael is only to believe these lies and fear the immigrant, the other, because he has not yet met him. Melville’s depiction of how American culture uses racial stereotypes and ethnic generalizations to make immigrants seem other, or as not ‘real’ Americans, has been hailed by modern critics for revealing a process of racial prejudice that American likes to keep hidden. Critics have said that Melville speaks what America wants to leave unspoken, and that Melville’s engagement with the unspeakable unspoken of American politics is perhaps most profoundly exemplified in his masterpiece, Moby-Dick” (Frank 3)
Once Ishmael meets Queequeg, in one of Moby Dick’s most amazing, and most humorous scenes, Ishmael realizes nothing he imagined about the harpooner was true, and instead Queequeg and Ishmael recognize each other’s common humanity and become the best of friends. Ishmael is first in the room, and goes to bed first. He is awoken at night and finds that Queequeg is now in the room with him. He examines his roommate, and finds he has dark yellow skin, and that Queequeg’s face and body are covered in tattoos. Thinking about his roommates skin color, Ishmael says “and what is it, I thought, after al! It is only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin” (Melville 21). Ishmael has declared that he will judge men not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character on the inside. As literary scholar David Reynolds has pointed out, this is a truly progressive thing for Melville to write in 1851, when America was embroiled in a conflict over slavery based on the color of a man’s skin, and which was justified by arguments that people with dark skin were not humans (Reynolds 288-290). Melville is rejecting slavery and all the racists justifications of it, as “Moby Dick is the literary culmination of Melville’s radical egalitarianism” (Reynolds 289). Queequeg seems to think the same of Ishmael, and welcomes him not as a foreigner with white skin, but as a brother sailor, and Ishmael again pronounces his belief in racial equality: “the man’s a human being just as I am” (Melville24).
Body: Freedom of Religion
Ishmael and Queequeg become best friends, and Queequeg, a highly skilled harpooner, uses his reputation to get Ishmael a job on his ship. They spend a few more nights together before the ship sets sail, and in these scenes Melville depicts America’s freedom of religion, and that all religions are to be treated equally, just as all men are to be treated equally. Queequeg practices a form of idol worship from his native culture, and rather than rejecting it or attacking it like so many ‘freedom loving’ American Christians would, Ishmael actually embraces religious equality just as he did racial equality, as he responds to Queequeg’s invitation to join him in his religious observation by saying “I’ll try a pagan friend, Thought I, since Christian kindness has proved a hollow courtesy” (Melville 51). In turn, Ishmael shares a Christian prayer with Queequeg and makes a long speech about how all religions are truly equal and what matters is that goodness of the people who practice them (Melville 52). In these scenes, just as Melville as depicted American from both a rich and from a worker’s point of view, and demonstrated how there is not established or hereditary aristocracy in America, he has also depicted what equality and freedom in America should look like and how it must be practices if America is to live up to its founding ideals. Liberty, equality, and democracy mean that all people are equal, and all have the same rights to do what they want to do and be what they want to be regardless of the color of their skin or the religion that they practice.
Conclusion
Melville, as critic George Shulman has stated, used Moby Dick as a literary mirror to hold up to America, to capture the entire image of America, both the agreeable and the disagreeable (Shuluman 70). Indeed, it is possible to read the Pequod, the whaling ship that Queequeg and Ishmael serve on under Captain Ahab as a metaphor for America; it is a literal ship of state. Melville depicted three main elements of America to reveal in his mirror: the economic and class system of America, the pluralism and multiculturalism of American society, and how Americans needed to practice the ideas it preaches, and the absence of any aristocracy based on name, or family of the accomplishments of the past.
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