Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
not for the wilderness but for a dierent frontier: the ocean. He served as a cabin
boy on a ship bound for Liverpool. That city acquainted Melville with slum life, an
experience he would later recall in his satirical novel Redburn (1849). In 1841, he
served on The Acushnet, a whaler in the South Seas. The conditions of life on that
ship caused Melville and a shipmate Richard Tobias Greene (b. 1825) to desert
in the Marquesas Islands. The two spent a month among the Marquesan Taipis,
supposedly cannibalistic islanders. After being retrieved by an Australian whaler,
Melville enlisted in the United States navy as an ordinary seaman. After sailing
the Pacic on the United States, he returned to Boston in 1844. On this voyage, he
witnessed over 150 shipmates punished by ogging.
In 1846, he published Typee, a novel drawing upon his experiences on The
Acushnet and at the Marquesas. Thereafter, Melville became known as the man
who lived with cannibals. The book sold very well, as did his second novel Omoo
(1847). His more philosophical third novel, Mardi (1849), did not sell well. He
bolstered up his apparently-agging writing career with Redburn and White-
Jacket (1850), the latter exposing the cruelties suered by men in the navy. In
1847, Melville married Elizabeth Knapp Shaw, daughter of the chief justice of the
Massachusetts Supreme Court. With his father-in-law’s assistance, Melville settled
with his family rst in Manhattan then at a farm near Pittseld, Massachusetts. His
next work, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), should have conrmed his literary
reputation. Instead, it almost ruined it.
In Albany, he lived near his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne who introduced Melville
to other literary gures. Melville also immersed himself in reading Shakespeare;
Milton; George Gordon; Lord Byron (1788–1824); John Keats; and Emerson. He
grew ambitious for great American literature, asserting the ability of American
writers like Hawthorne to rival Shakespeare. He himself sought not to write
adventure stories but works of genius, to achieve an artist’s stance of engagement
and detachment that gives as much energy and truth to an Iago as a Desdemona, as
Keats said of Shakespeare’s art. In Moby-Dick, Melville follows Shakespeare’s lead
through such disparate characters as Captain Ahab and Ishmael, exploring the
mysteries of human nature, lifting the mask of appearance to reveal unfathomable
truths—about nature, God, and death. But he leaves his readers to nd their truths.
Melville’s contemporary readers rejected the book.
His next book Pierre; or the Ambiguities (1852), ostensibly sought to appeal to
female readers with a love story. It satirized hypocrisy, dishonesty, and sexuality
(or perceptions of sexuality). It also failed. Melville turned to anonymously
publishing short stories and novellas in Harper’s Magazine and Putnam’s
Magazine at rate fees. He later collected them in The Piazza Tales (1856). In such
works as “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus
of Maids,” and “Benito Cereno,” he touched upon slavery, industrialization, and
labor conditions. Melville revealed what Charles Dickens’s Stephen Blackpool
called the “muddle” of a modern society that inverts good and evil and pulls even
the brightest into the dark.
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