Herman Melville
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Chapter 4: Neoclassicism and Romanticism Herman Melville |
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Herman Melville
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Herman Melville, born in New York City in 1819, learned the lessons of blackness early. When he was eleven, his father, a well-to-do merchant, went bankrupt; two years later he died, driven insane through worry and overwork. The widow moved with her children to Albany. By the time Melville was twenty, he had worked as a bank clerk, a salesman, a farmhand, and a schoolteacher. In 1839, he signed on as a cabin boy for a voyage to Liverpool and back, a shocking experience of brutality and vice. In 1841, he sailed, this time as a seaman, on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the South Seas. After eighteen months, he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, encountered a tribe of cannibals, and left the islands on an Australian whaler, whose crew mutinied. Melville was briefly imprisoned in Tahiti for his share in the mutiny. After a period of beachcombing in Tahiti and clerking in Hawaii, he signed on as part of the crew of the American frigate United States; during the fourteen-month voyage home, Melville witnessed firsthand the injustice and brutality of navy life. The ship arrived in Boston in October 1844, and Melville was discharged along with the rest of the crew. The experiences of this three-year adventure were to furnish him with the materials of his books and to shape his attitudes for the rest of his life.
Typee, a barely fictionalized account of his experiences in the Marquesas, appeared in 1846, and Omoo, which continues the story of the voyage through the mutiny and Tahiti, followed in 1847. Both books were successful, but Melville’s next book, Mardi, was greeted with bafflement. Again the book dealt with a young American deserter in the South Seas, but the narrative burst the bonds of the romantic adventure genre to become a dense political and religious allegory. Melville returned to more conventional sea stories with Redburn (1849), the story of his first voyage to Liverpool, and White Jacket (1850), based on his voyage home from Hawaii aboard the United States. Melville married in 1847, and in 1850, he moved with his wife to the village of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he began a new sea novel, Moby-Dick. The first draft seems to have been a fairly literal documentary whaling narrative; the second draft, completed under Nathaniel Hawthorne’s influence, became a richly symbolic quest story, "broiled in hell fire." It is narrated by a young man named Ishmael, superficially, at least, much like the narrator of Typee. It deals with the obsessed, demonic Captain Ahab, perhaps Ishmael’s double, who, like many of Hawthorne’s protagonists, has arrogantly isolated himself from life in a quest not only for the white whale but more for human knowledge. The commercial failure of Moby-Dick, which he knew was his masterpiece, embittered Melville, who became increasingly alienated from his family and friends. He continued to write. Pierre (1852), a bitter, dreamlike allegory, mystified readers even more than Moby-Dick. Israel Potter, a historical novel, appeared in 1855, and Piazza Tales, a collection of short stories which included "Bartleby the Scrivener," appeared in 1856. The Confidence Man (1857) explores, aboard a Mississippi riverboat, the theme of truth and allusion. In 1866, Melville obtained the post of deputy customs inspector in New York, a job that provided the financial security his books had never provided but which left him little time for writing. Clarel, a book-length symbolic poem about a trip to Palestine, was published in 1876; three collections of shorter poems also appeared during Melville’s lifetime. He resigned the customs job in 1885 and died six years later, virtually forgotten as a writer but leaving one of his finest stories, the novella Billy Budd, in manuscript among his effects. It was not until the 1930s that Melville’s works were rediscovered and republished, where he began the rapid rise to fame that has now placed him with Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Whitman, among the giants of American literature. Author Links
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Bartleby the Scrivener
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