Herman Melville (1689 words) Essay Example For Students

Herman Melville (1689 words) Essay Herman MelvilleHerman Melville: An anti- transcendentalist or notMelville, Herman (1819-91), American novelist, a major literary figure whose exploration of psychological and metaphysical themes foreshadowed 20th-century literary concerns but whose works remained in obscurity until the 1920s, when his genius was finally recognized. Melville was born August 1, 1819, in New York City, into a family that had declined in the world. ?The Gansevoorts were solid, stable, eminent, prosperous people; the (Hermans Fathers side) Melvilles were somewhat less successful materially, possessing an unpredictable. erratic, mercurial strain.? (Edinger 6). This difference between the Melvilles and Gansevoorts was the beginning of the trouble for the Melville family. Hermans mother tried to work her way up the social ladder by moving into bigger and better homes. While borrowing money from the bank, her husband was spending more than he was earning. ?It is my conclusion that Maria Melville never committed herself emotionally to her husband, but remained primarily attached to the well off Gansevoort family.? (Humford 23) Allan Melville was also attached financially to the Gansevoorts for support. There is a lot of evidence concerning Melvilles relation to his mother Maria Melville. ?Apparently the older son Gansevoort who carried the mothers maiden name was distinctly her favorite.? (Edinger 7) This was a sense of alienation the Herman Melville felt from his mother. This was one of the first symbolists to the Biblical Ishamel. In 1837 he shipped to Liverpool as a cabin boy. Upon returning to the U.S. he taught school and then sailed for the South Seas in 1841 on the whaler Acushnet. After an 18 month voyage he deserted the ship in the Marquesas Islands and with a companion lived for a month among the natives, who were cannibals. He escaped aboard an Australian trader, leaving it at Papeete, Tahiti, where he was imprisoned temporarily. He worked as a field laborer and then shipped to Honolulu, Hawaii, where in 1843 he enlisted as a seaman on the U.S. Navy frigate United States. After his discharge in 1844 he began to create novels out of his experiences and to take part in the literary life of Boston and New York City. Melvilles first five novels all achieved quick popularity. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), Omoo, a Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), and Mardi (1849) were romances of the South Sea islands. Redburn, His First Voyage (1849) was based on his own first trip to sea, and White-Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War (1850) fictionalized his experiences in the navy. In 1850 Melville moved to a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he became an intimate friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated his masterpiece Moby-Dick; or The White Whale (1851). The central theme of the novel is the conflict between Captain Ahab, master of the whaler Pequod, and Moby-Dick, a great white whale that once tore off one of Ahabs legs at the knee. Ahab is dedicated to revenge; he drives himself and his crew, which includes Ishmael, narrator of the story, over the seas in a desperate search for his enemy. The body of the book is written in a wholly original, powerful narrative style, which, in certain sections of the work, Melville varied with great success. The most impressive of these sections are the rhetorically magnificent sermon delivered before sailing and the soliloquies of the mates; lengthy ?flats,? passages conveying nonnarrative material, usually of a technical nature, such as the chapter about whales; and the more purely ornamental passages, such as the tale of the Tally-Ho, which can stand by themselves as short stories of merit. The work is invested with Ishmaels sense of profound wonder at his story, but nonetheless conveys full awareness that Ahabs quest can have but one end. And so it proves to be: Moby-Dick destroys the Pequod and all its crew save Ishmael. There is a certain streak of the supernatural being projected in the writings of Melville, as is amply obvious in Moby Dick. Exemplification Essay Melville was desirous of hitting the right cord with the readers and his audience. He wanted to be able to capture the attention of his audience and leave an impact on their minds, so that the tale would be remembered long after it had been read. With Moby Dick, he used the powerful tool of imaginative fantasy to capture the attention of his readers. The story incorporated the extraordinary, action, adventure, revenge, suspense. ..in fact every ingredient necessary for commercial success. But it didnt prove to be so. The book is appreciated not as a classic work and Melville has received much more fame in the present time frame. In Scrivener, he drew a picture of a man very similar to himself. A man sick of working, finally declines rapidly to reach his demise. However, in Herman Melvilles Benito Cereno reveals the authors disgust with Emersonian transcendentalism through the self-delusions of the protagonist. Cereno personifies nature, seeing it as a benevolent force that acts deliberately for the good of humanity. Melville makes it apparent that such idealism offers no practical use in a world that is as much evil as good, and will likely be a burden. Cereno is Melvilles strongest example of his suspicions for the American idealist. In this one case through his expression of disgust towards the idealists and their idealism, he has portrayed the image of a hard core idealist who is converted to a realist through the experiences that he goes through. This also drew on his seafaring days as experience and he struggled to bring across the death of the idealist and the birth of the realist. But at the end of the day, whatever emotions he possessed about the nature of idealism and idealistic thought, still form an integral part of him. Whether or not the reader understands the general aura of wanting to achieve something from his creations, yet Melville still strove to be a commercial success and his aim for excellence in the field of writing continued. Theater