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CROSSING INTO MILLENNIUM:
HERMAN MELVILLE'S NARRATIVES OF THE SEA

presented by

Marcus Lee Sheffield

has been accepted towards fulfillment
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CROSSING INTO MILLENNIUM:

HERMAN MELVILLE’S NARRATIVES OF THE SEA

BY

Marcus Lee Sheffield

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1993

ABSTRACT

CROSSING INTO MILLENNIUM:
HERMAN MELVILLE’S NARRATIVES OF THE SEA

BY

Marcus Lee Sheffield

The English Puritans who came to the New World had to
cross over the Atlantic Ocean. For many of them this
experience paralleled that of ancient Israel. God had called
his people from Egypt, over the Red Sea, to Canaan, the
promised land. “Crossing over” for the Puritans meant
achieving a higher spiritual level, allowing them to
enlighten the whole world through the example of their
millennial society. The American romance writer Herman
Melville (1819—1891) used this “crossing over” metaphor in
his six major sea narratives: Iypee, Qmoo, Marni, Bedburn,
Whitezlaghet, and Mnbxzfligh.

The story of the development of the American myth in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as the story of
the American romance novel in the nineteenth century confirms
the presence of this Puritan metaphor in Melville. Most
Americans in the middle of the nineteenth century saw
themselves as the destined millennial people of God. But
during the nineteenth century the Puritan-American sense of
millennial destiny was threatened by developments in the
intellectual world which undermined trust in the Bible.

Melville’s sea narratives point the way out of these

intellectual dilemmas. Typee, Qmoo, and Mardi contend that

Americans are in danger of backsliding into mere external

morality. What Americans need is regeneration in the Puritan

sense—~a radical change of the inner self. Eedbnzn shows that

failure to take care of the poor and dispossessed makes a

mockery of the millennial pretensions of America and that

Americans need to return to primitive goodness. White;lachet

argues that the American millennium will occur only when

individuals with vision and a sense of brotherhood catch a E
mystic sight of humanity’s native soil lying far over the l
horizon, a place far different from the brutal world of the

present. Finally, Mgby;fligk demonstrates the nature of the

false quest. Americans cannot become people of the “mind" who

pursue illusions in an indeterminate world. They must “cross

over” into heart religion, typified as an island of eternal

peace within the soul.

 

Copyright by
Marcus Lee Sheffield
1993

Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to my parents,
Harold and Mildred Sheffield,
and to my wife
JOY,
without whose loving support
the doctor of philosophy degree
would have remained beyond the horizon.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the faculty, staff, and fellow
graduate students I worked with during my time in the
department of English at Michigan State University from 1987
to 1990. The departmental secretaries Sharon Tyree and
Lorraine Hart were always kind and patient even when I asked
silly questions. Fellow graduate student Jason Peters was a
fine listener, commiserator, and wise man. My thanks go to
the outside reader Dr. Patricia Julius. Dr. Herbert Roth,
Chairman, Department of English, Southwestern Adventist
College, kindly provided time and encouragement that enabled
me to complete my dissertation. Each of the members of my
guidance committee taught me important ideas that he is
perhaps unaware of, but without which this dissertation would
be a far less proficient example of scholarship. Therefore,
special thanks go to the members of my committee—-Jay Ludwig,
Donald Rosenberg, Stephen Arch, and Michael Lopez. Dr.
Lopez, the director of this dissertation, originated my
admiration and respect for the author Herman Melville and
offered the continued encouragement I needed to pursue the

ideas I have developed.

Vi

Preface

This dissertation is a study of the metaphor of the sea
in the major sea narratives of Herman Melville. From at least
the year 1492 until the first east to west flight in 1928,
the journey to America involved a treacherous sea voyage
across an open ocean. Travelers began the journey with a set
of preconceptions and ideals which were threatened and
challenged by traversing the unstable sea. “Crossing over”
had a complex and metaphorical meaning for a particular set
of travelers--the English Puritans—~describing for them the
manner in which individuals and society progressed toward a
future millennium of peace and security. The way was often
encompassed by spiritual hazards and threats that had the
potential to destroy the enterprise.

Melville exploited the Puritan idea of “crossing over”
in his sea narratives. He was a metaphysical traveler who
invited the American people to cross over the abyss of human
experience into a place of millennial wholeness. This
millennialism remained distinctly Puritan in his writings. A
close reading of the six major sea narratives (Iypee, Qmoo,
Mandi, Radium, flhiteiacket, and Mohydlick) demonstrates
that the questioning and searching elements in them were not
subversive or skeptical in spirit, but were firmly Puritan.

Melville suggested that Americans, in coveting millennium,

vii

would endure many troubling failures and doubts in achieving
that goal.

Chapter 1, “O’th Raginge Floods,” details the Puritan
conception of “crossing over” as well as scholarly
interpretations of the place of the sea in the human
imagination. The experiment that America was to be, as
envisioned by Puritans, involved first crossing a large
ocean. That voyage was difficult and dangerous. The
Puritans’ preconceptions and usual ways of seeing their world
were threatened. Yet a special bond emerged between
travelers. A new social and religious structure began to
emerge different from what they imagined when they left
England. Together the Puritans faced both expected and
unheard of dangers.

The crossing experience was paralleled in the Old
Testament. God was continually calling his people to follow
him out of the old world (Egypt) and into the new world
(Canaan). Puritans rejected the current image of the old
world as exemplified by Europe and England and journeyed to
America to invent a communal Christian society of regenerated
individuals enabled to live out God’s moral law of
unselfishness. This special millennial community would
enlighten the whole world. But for the Puritan this next
stage in the progress of the gospel was not to be had without
considerable trial and doubt. The individual had to “cross

over” a frightening abyss to make it to the other side.

viii

The central question for the student of Melville is the
extent to which his use of the sea metaphor can be connected
to the tradition of the Puritans. Do his writings contain the
Puritan notion of “crossing over” into millennium? In
answering this question one must first acknowledge the basic
fact that the Melville canon is composed almost entirely of
sea journeys. However, setting alone will not demonstrate the
presence of the Puritan tradition. For this reason an
important task is to examine the literary development of the
romance novel in the nineteenth century and the manner in
which such a development coincides with the ongoing need to
tell the American story. Then, a connection must be made
between the development of the American myth and the
religious context in the first half of the nineteenth
century.

Chapter 2, “The American Myth,” asserts the
Puritan/Biblical origin of the American story. The myth of
America began with Cotton Mather’s Magnalia_flhristi
.Americana. For Mather, even if the experiment in the
wilderness was to fail in practice, it must live in the
narrative of American specialness. During the revolutionary
period, the story of America as a God-blessed and God-
ordained republic meant to bring about a millennium of
prosperity and peace became the secular sermon of the day.
Such a conception of America could have no other source than
the American Puritans. Early national poets created

prophecies of the American future based upon reason and

ix

 

scripture. America was viewed as the futuristic kingdom
replacing the failed kingdoms of the past. The difference
between what was revolutionary/political and what was
spiritual/otherworldly became difficult to distinguish. It
was asserted that only a virtuous people could maintain
political freedom.

The American romance novel developed out of a need to
tell the American story. The romance became the new medium
for describing the socially confirming and defining myth of
America during the time that Americans were searching for
that set of beliefs which could explain a new set of
circumstances in America. Modern life no longer seemed to fit
the traditional assumptions of the Puritan past, and the
romance novel was an art form used to describe a new social
structure.

Melville’s romances are an attempt to tell this new
American story, to create a new American order. For him, the
sea represents all that is disordered and unsure, and the
objective of his various wanderers is to find “landedness.”
This goal has been interpreted as a flight from an American
theocentric past, leading ultimately to religious skepticism,
but this is not the case for Melville. In his fiction he
achieves “landedness” by suggesting how Americans can
complete their American-Puritan past.

Chapter 3, “The Blank Horizon," explores the theological
and philosophical context for the writings of Melville. The

chapter begins with a description of Puritan theology. The

fundamental belief of the Puritans relevant to Melville is
the idea of God as the ultimate source of wholeness and
righteousness. In themselves human beings are incomplete and
unregenerate and in need of changed inner selves. Without
such change, humanity is forever cut off and separate from
God. The Puritans came to America to create a community of
regenerate individuals who were capable of properly loving
and caring for one another. This community was to be the new
American Israel possessing the promise of an earthly
millennium if individuals stayed in covenant relationship
with God, which meant living lives of obedience to God’s
expressed will as found in the Bible. A potential pitfall for
this new society was the temptation to substitute external
morality for true inner regeneration.

In the early and mid-nineteenth century the idea of what
it meant to be an American can be described as an extended
kind of Puritanism that had been appropriated and secularized
by American revolutionaries, turned into myth by the early
national poets, exploited by revival preachers, and then
evaluated by the literary community known as the American
Renaissance. Along with the continuing and developing notion
of America as an advancing, millennial, Christian nation came
serious intellectual threatenings from higher criticism,
evolution, anthropology, and comparative religion. These new
philosophies undermined nineteenth—century America because
the undergirding authority of the nation, the Bible, was

itself undermined. Melville was a part of the investigation

xi

and assessment of the American character as it existed in
this new context. For many intellectual Americans, the
horizon of American promise indeed seemed blank. In this
context, then, the writings of Herman Melville should be
read, first of all, as jeremiads on the American condition,
and then as quests for a workable, reconditioned American-
Puritan faith.

The remaining portion of this dissertation is an
examination of Melville’s six major sea narratives (Typee,
ano, Mandi, Bedhurn, W, and Wink) in order
to recover his “new" American faith. Chapter 4, “The Quest
for the Internal” (covering the first three novels), traces
the identification of what was wrong with American culture
and then describes Melville’s solution for the problem. Even
though it appears that Melville “went native,” Typee is a
work which criticizes both the South Sea natives and the
Christian missionaries sent to convert them. The natives are
healthy, free, beautiful, happy, innocent, and gentle,
creating a doubt that Christianity is the one truth faith.

However, the natives are simultaneously bloodthirsty,
lazy, ignorant, lustful, and spiritually dead. Into this
native culture come the Christian missionaries, whose
influence has been mostly evil. The missionaries have brought
in western cultural trappings and moral constraints without
the accompanying hope of inner change, what Melville called
“true religion.” The missionaries have been able to bring the

vices but have not been able to transfer the virtues of

xii

Christianity. Melville’s wanderer leaves the island and goes
back to the ocean in search of answers to this problem. In
Qmoo the search for millennium continues. The work is a
continuation of the quest for a workable Christian philosophy
of life seen in Iypee. Melville’s wanderer witnesses again
the missionaries’ inability to convert islanders into true
Christians. Sadly, vice among the people only increases. Once
more, the wanderer pines for the billows and is off on his
search.

In Mardi Melville widens the quest beyond the South Seas
by creating an allegorical archipelago representing the whole
world. Taji the wanderer, with his band of companions, goes
from island to island searching for Yillah, a female
representative of the spiritual experience he wishes to
possess. Every island in the archipelago represents spiritual
failure of some kind. The most skeptical of the band of
wanderers, Babbalanja the philosopher, experiences a
Christian conversion on the island of Serenia after seeing
that the islanders have successfully wedded precept and
practice. He finds “landedness” while Taji and the others
miss the significance of the island and continue on a false
quest.

The first three novels are a quest for the “landedness”
found by Babbalanja. Chapter 5 of the dissertation, “New Wine
into Old Wineskins,” extends the personal search for the
internal Christian experience to a wider arena. In Bedburn

Melville seeks to convince his audience that American culture

xiii

needs the same infusion of redemptive power as that
experienced by Babbalanja. Although set in England and
ostensibly referring to English social problems, Bedburn
addresses the American scene. Melville argues that American
society possesses the mere shell of Christianity but not its
soul. The emphasis in the novel is on the lack of proper
social action commensurate with the purpose of millennial
America. The novel singles out old guidebooks for criticism,
demonstrating that such books are not the answer for the
social ills that predominate in England, a land with a long
“book” history. The answer is found in human benevolence,
love, and equality. Books contain the precepts but not the
promise of human action. In the new world of America,
Christian action must predominate, not mere words. There must
be new wine in old wineskins. The role of covenanted America
cannot be reached until, as Melville put it, “we become what
Christianity is striving to make us.” America had to bypass
that which is temporary and external in exchange for the
eternal and the spiritual if she were to become her
millennial self.

Chapter 6, “Toward the Inland Zone,” discusses the last
two major sea novels, White;fiacket and Moby;Dick. White;
Jacket introduces the emblem of America as man-of—war. On the
unruly sea, a warship operates effectively only under the
most rigid discipline. The captain is a dictator who
determines life and death. There is little concern for the

individual sailor’s inner self. Ship life works well only if

xiv

a sailor obeys, to the letter, all the ship’s regulations.
From the maintop of such ships sailors with the proper vision
catch a glimpse of a “long—sought land,” a fragrant and sweet
native home of the oppressed. Maintop sailors are able to
pierce the mask of their man-of—war world with all its abuses
and brutishness, and to perceive their final millennial
destiny.

Moby;Dick describes an unusual quest in the Melville
canon. Ahab, the principal character, pursues that which
destroys him. But placed in its proper perspective, this
American romance can be seen as the faith-affirming work of a
Puritan imagination rather than as an agnostic work, as it is
often characterized. Moby;Dick concerns the false quest of a
man determined to pierce through that part of the mystery of
God for which there can never be a solution. The sea metaphor
helps readers understand the nature of what Ahab attempts to
do since he never leaves the sea. The sea is that place of
mystery, flux, change, and loss of perspective. It is the
testing abyss over which every Puritan must pass. Ahab
doesn’t cross the abyss; instead, he is determined to subdue
and conquer it. Thus, the novel can be read as an example of
Solomonic wisdom literature. In the book of Ecclesiastes
Solomon tells of the experience of false pursuit. Nothing
under the sun can be made to make sense, nothing satisfies
the human need for wholeness. The work ends in the
realization that there is nothing for a man to do but quit

the attempt to figure out the mystery of life under the sun

XV

and simply to obey God’s commandments. Ahab, like Solomon, is
determined to hunt down and destroy the mystery of life. The
white whale is a representation to him of all that is
unfathomable and mysterious, including the pain and suffering
of life. He fails to realize that the world and life are
ultimately indeterminate things. Ahab misses the consolation
of Ishmael, who finds the “one insular Tahiti” within his own
soul. Ishmael has crossed over the “Atlantic of [his] being”

into an “inland” place where there is “eternal mildness of

joy.”
In the perspective of the first five works in this
study, a clear connection can be made between the inland
voyage of Ishmael in Moby;fligk and the quests for wholeness
of experience in Limes, Omen, Mandi, Bedhurn, and White;
Jacket. Melville is arguing that America can never become the
millennial nation of destiny as long as she strays from the

primitive and fundamental virtues first advocated by her

Puritan forefathers.

xvi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: O’th Raginge Floods ........................... 1
Chapter 2: The American Myth ........................... 26
Chapter 3: The Blank Horizon ............................ 49
Chapter 4: The Quest for the Internal ................... 78
Chapter 5: New Wine into Old Wineskins ................. 112
Chapter 6: Toward the Inland Zone ...................... 131
Epilogue ................................................ 169
Bibliography ............................................ 177

xvii

Chapter 1

O’th Raginge Floods

Before April 13, 1928 every traveler to the new world
risked a journey on one of two great oceans, the Atlantic or
the Pacific. On that little-regarded date in transportation
history, three men completed the first east to west air
flight across the Atlantic Ocean. For the two Germans and one
Irishman (Captain Hermann Koehl, Baron Gunther von Huenefeld,
and Commandant James Fitzmaurice) the trip was hardly more
reassuring than a ship crossing. In their single-engine,
German Junkers airplane Bremen, they battled equipment
failure, headwinds, dense fog, and blizzard to crash land at
Greenly Isle, Labrador. At one point in their crossing they
dipped low trying to find a hole in the fog, only to find a
treacherous sea seeming to grasp for their plane (Robert J.
Hoare 60-68).

The three fliers would not have considered their journey
less hazardous than that experienced by other first-time
travelers to America. The Atlantic Ocean grasped at a
different set of seekers of fortune in America--the English
Puritans. Writers and other important figures in early
American literature from Captain John Smith in 1607 to Edward
Taylor in 1668 boarded small wooden vessels to risk months-
long journeys on the open ocean. This was true for William

Bradford on the Mayflower in 1620; for Robert Cushman on the

2
Speedwell about 1621; for John Winthrop and Anne Bradstreet
on the Arabella in 1630; for Roger Williams in 1630; for
Edward Johnson in 1630; for Thomas Hooker in 1633; for John
Cotton on the Griffin in 1633; for Nathaniel Ward in 1634;
for Anne Hutchinson in 1634; for Henry Vane in 1635; for John
Norton in 1635; for Thomas Shepard (with Thomas Shepard, Jr.)
in 1635; for Peter Bulkelely in 1636; for John Davenport in
1637; for Michael Wigglesworth in 1638; for Thomas Tillam in
1638; for Mary White in 1638 (as a two year old); for Samuel
Sewall in 1661. David Cressy notes that “Every adult in New
England before the 16508 was a veteran of the ocean passage”
(176).

Each one, excepting perhaps the small child Mary White,
was a searcher of things spiritual and metaphysical. Each
pursued a a vision fostered in the mind by the words of
others--discoverers and adventurers perhaps-—but usually
Protestant ministers possessed by a spiritual mission. Harry
S. Stout, in WW5.
enlLuxe_in_eeleniel_mefl_finglend, writes convincingly of the
way early New England culture was explained and preserved by
the weekly sermon. What accompanies this fact is another
equally true one. The countless sermons, books, pamphlets,
and broadsides created in old England and Europe contained
the vision transpleneed to New England. The millennial and
spiritual experiment that was America was the direct result
of ideas anciently conceived and then transferred in the

minds of thousands of Puritans crossing the Atlantic.

3

Cressy has investigated the Puritan experience of the
crossing of the ocean in Ceming_eyer;_migreeien_end
seyenteenth_eentury. He argues that “the Atlantic crossing
was a vital formative part of the colonizing experience.”
Cressy describes the voyage as a trial Puritans endured with
the help of “a coherent framework for understanding
giving significance to their ocean passage” (144). Since most
Englishmen at that time were agrarian, they began the voyage
in great fear of the ocean itself (146). Puritans arrived on
board the ship not as a group, but usually as individuals or
families. Once on ship, the new conditions created a new
sense of community (149). The social structure of Old England
was at once modified. A sense of rank continued, but the
journey itself forced all to have a feeling that their fates
were inextricably linked. Cohesiveness, commitment, and
bonding increased (150, 151). Religious practice was
necessarily liturgically primitive. Cressy writes, “Ministers
conducted services at sea without the paraphernalia of
vestments and altars, a practice that foreshadowed the purity
of the ordinances in New England." In short, “The vessel
provided a felicitous environment for the making of Puritans”
(158). The voyages were often marred by conflicts with a
profane crew, seasickness and disease, delay, foul weather,
and the fear of piracy. This is the reason Cressy notes that
for Puritans “the crossing itself became a metaphor for

conflict against worldly corruption” (176).

4

It is not surprising, then, that the early literature of
exploration and discovery points out something unique about
America and American writing. It has usually been a struggle
to get here, and it has always been difficult to describe and
comprehend America. In an essay entitled “The Literature of
Discovery and Exploration," Wayne Franklin notes the need to
invent the idea of America after the fact of the discovery of
America. Explorers often wrote, he writes, “in a language the
roughness of which caught the strain of their hard traveling
by land or sea or river” (16). Franklin generalizes that the
literature of exploration ends up being a strange combination
of “great hopes and the direst of ends.” “That, in a sense,”
he writes, “was the deepest of discoveries; that was the
moral terrain whose strange contours still awaited
exploration” (23). The Puritans were hardy adventurers in the
moral realm. Their journey involved the greatest of hopes as
well as the possibility of the direst of ends, both physical
and spiritual. Little wonder that Sacvan Bercovitch writes,
“For the American Puritans the highpoints of the pilgrimage—-
flight from corruption, sea—crossing, ‘wilderness—condition,’
conquest of Canaan—-were all too real” (“Cotton Mather” 142).

An important first impression after the journey across
the Atlantic is recorded in Thomas Tillam’s poem, “Uppon the
first sight of New—England June 29, 1638." The poem presents
us with strong images of death and resurrection to new life

in a kind of half-way Canaan offering spiritual achievements

5
and experiences heretofore impossible (in the Old World). His
poem of 1638 reads:

Hayle holy-land wherin our holy lord

Hath planted his most true and holy word

Hayle happye people who have dispossest

Your selves of friends, and meanes, to find some
rest

For your poore wearied soules, opprest of late

For Jesus-sake, with Envye, spight, and hate

To yow that blessed promise truly’s given

Of sure reward, which you'l receve in heaven

Methinks I heare the Lambe of God thus speake

Come my deare little flocke, who for my sake

Have lefte your Country, dearest friends, and goods

And hazarded your lives o'th raginge floods

Posses this Country; free from all anoye

Heare I'le bee with you, heare you shall Injoye

My sabbaths, sacraments, my minestrye

And ordinances in their puritye

But yet beware of Sathans wylye baites

Hee lurkes amongs yow, Cunningly hee waites

To Catch yow from mee live not then secure

But fight 'gainst sinne, and let your lives be pure

Prepare to heare your sentence thus expressed

Come yee my servants of my father Blessed.

(Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco 126-127)

The sea in this poem represents another in a long list of
trials through which the spiritual traveler passes in order
to attain a purer experience.

The journey to America cleanses the seeker of
encumbrances that separate him from the Word who precedes him
to the promised land. The Word always goes before. Hazarding
life “o’th raginge flood” is the ultimate test. One risks all
on the sea. For what? For the next stage, free of annoyances
but with trials of a new sort-—trials of security. But the
new trials will be worthwhile because the Word will again go
before the seeker, this time calling, “Come yee my servants

of my father Blessed.”

6

Tillam's poem resonates with the story of the Exodus
from Egypt. Oppressed by hundreds of years of slavery,
ancient Israel was called by Moses to cross the Red Sea. On
this journey, God went before the people. Exodus 13:21-22
reads,

By day the LORD went ahead of them in a pillar of
cloud to guide them on their way and by night in a
pillar of fire to give them light, so that they
could travel by day or night. Neither the pillar of
cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night left
its place in front of the people.
(New International Version).
This method of travel continued during Israel’s sojourn in
the wilderness on the way to the promised land. Numbers 9:17
indicates that “whenever the cloud lifted from above the
Tent, the Israelites set out; wherever the cloud settled, the
Israelites encamped.” Christ was interpreted by the Puritans
as the Old Testament captain of the host, the leader who
decides when and where his people Israel should move.

Since the crossing of the Red Sea, God’s true people
have followed their savior and king wherever he leads. The
Puritan errand into the wilderness was simply the
historically current example of a crossing over another abyss
into God’s plan, of escape from the world into a higher
destiny prepared by God for his people. The cloud by day and
the fire by night signaled the time to advance. In 1631

Thomas Hooker noted,

Look to it, for God is going, and if he do go, then
our glory goes also. And then we may say with
Phineha’s wife, I Samuel 4:22, The glery is

departed_fxem_lareel. So glory is departed from
England; for England hath seen her best days, and

7
the reward of sin is coming on apace; for God is
packing up of his gospel, because none will buy his
wares (not come to his price). God begins to ship
away his Noahs ... and God makes account that New
England shall be a refuge for his Noahs and his
Lots, a rock and a shelter for his righteous ones
to run unto. (Heimert and Delbanco 69)

The faithful will give up all to follow their God.

Notwithstanding the often disappointing results of “arriving"

in the promised land (noted by Patricia Caldwell 119—134),

the Puritan habit was to continue in the “way” in hope of

achieving a greater spiritual goal.

Puritan Robert Cushman sought to explain this in his
tract, “Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawfulness of
Removing out of England into the Parts of America.” He argued
that America was not given to the English in the same way
that Canaan was given to the Jews. He writes, “But now we are
all in all places strangers and pilgrims, travellers and
sojourners, most properly, having no dwelling place but in
this earthen tabernacle; our dwelling is but a wandering, and
our abiding but as a fleeting, and in a word our home is
nowhere, but in the heavens” (Heimert and Delbanco 42). The
dangers of the crossing are a necessary part of the struggle.
“As for such as object the tediousness of the voyage thither,
the danger of pirates’ robbery, of the savages’ treachery,
etc., these are but lions in the way.” America is merely “a
vast and empty chaos” convenient for the full working out of
the Gospel plan. “But we have here great peace, plenty of the

Gospel, and many sweet delights, and variety of comforts.”

The American wilderness is a place to start mankind anew, to

8
eradicate war, dissension, envy, murmuring, repining,
contentions, and economic exploitation. Cushman pleads, “Let
us not thus oppress, straiten, and afflict one another, but
seeing there is a spacious land, the_way_re_uhieh_ie_threugh
rhe_eea, we will end this difference in a day” (emphasis
supplied, Heimert and Delbanco 44).

Puritans left the Old World because of her failure to
create a pious Christian society. As Bercovitch has observed,
Puritan historiography was a “renunciation of Europe”
(“Cotton Mather” 139). The Magnalla_§hrlerl_Amerleana viewed
the European world as “an extension of Egypt, Babylon, and
pagan Rome" (“Cotton Mather” 140). The way to a new righteous
community was to be found by crossing over the abyss into the
American wilderness. This was a distinctly metaphysical
justification capable of generating the spiritual and
physical energies of many people. A powerful ideal and vision
was to infiltrate every phase of their lives, both inner
spiritual experience and outer conformity to civil law.

On board the Arabella during the Great Migration of
1630, John Winthrop summarized the height and depth of the
new communal ideal in a sermon entitled “A Model of Christian
Charity,” an ideal valuable enough to risk life by passing
“over this vast sea to possess it” (Heimert and Delbanco 92).
The enterprise was to be no less than the work of God
himself. The new community was to give him “the more occasion
to manifest the work of his spirit” and to show forth “the

glory of his greatness.” Under this umbrella of glorifying

9
God, men and women leaving England for the unknown had
certain obligations to one another. Winthrop said, “There is
likewise a double law by which we are regulated in our
conversation one towards another ... the law of nature and
the law of grace, or the moral law or the law of the gospel”
(83). He goes on to identify the one proposition of
Christianity summarizing all the law-—the command to love
your neighbor as yourself. Winthrop fully realizes that none
but the regenerate can obey this command. In asking the
company of Puritans to obey this law in their future
relationships in America, Winthrop intended the new
commonwealth to be something very great. In proposing that
the new inhabitants of America obey the central command of
Christ, Winthrop was asking them to achieve the ideal of not
only the New Testament gospel writers, but of the Old
Testament as well, since the New was the fulfillment of the
Old. The Puritans were to be the capstone of the promise of
God’s people on earth, the New Israel. Puritans were, in
fact, given the commission to be the restoration of the
innocence that existed before the fall of Adam. Winthrop
said,
Adam in his first estate was a perfect model of
mankind in all his generations, and in him this
love was perfected in regard of habit. But Adam
rent himself from his creator, rent all his
posterity also one from another; whence it comes
that every man is born with this principle in him,
to love and seek himself only, and thus a man
continueth till Christ comes and takes possession

of the soul and infuseth another principle, love to
God and our brother. (87)

10
This love was not to be some hazy goal. “This love among

Christians is a real thing, not imaginary.” And it was love
that was to be the binding element of the new community.
“This love is as absolutely necessary to the being of the
body of Christ, as the sinews and other ligaments of a
natural body are to the being of that body” (88). Later,
Winthrop writes that the inhabitants of the new world will be
“all in each other knit together by this bond of love” (89).
Using the explicit language of the Old Testament idea of a
covenanted people, Winthrop notes the serious nature of the
proposed relationship between God and his new Israel. Israel
is under full obligation to perform her side of the contract.
If she should fail, “the Lord will surely break out in wrath
against us, be revenged of such a perjured people, and make
us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.” It is in
this context that Winthrop makes the well-known statement
about the witness of such a people.

For we must consider that we shall be as a city

upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so

that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this

work we have undertaken, and so cause him to

withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made

a story and a by-word through the world. (91)

John Bunyan’s The_EilgrimLe_£regreee describes a similar
pursuit of the Puritan ideal in terms of the individual
Christian walk. Just as the community of saints must leave
England for the experiment that was America, so also

Christian, called by the Word and with his eye on the light,

must leave family and friends to traverse through many sore

11
trials during which there are moments of joy, insight and
hope—-plateaus of calm on the flatland of affliction.
Bunyan’s autobiography, W of
Sinners, explains the experience in the language of the sea.
Thus, by the strange and unusual assaults of the
tempter, was my soul, like a broken vessel, driven
as with the winds, and tossed sometimes headlong
into despair, sometimes upon the covenant of works,
and sometimes to wish that the new covenant, and
the conditions thereof, might, so far forth as I
thought myself concerned, be turned another way and
changed. But in all these I was but as those that
justle against the rocks; more broken, scattered,
and rent. (86)
Between moments of helplessness other events intervene——times
of “breaking out” or “lifting up” into understanding.
However, “before many weeks were over I began to despond
again" and “I began ... to examine my former comfort” (91).
Graee_Aheunding describes a hermeneutic of religious
experience--thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The continual
trials and doubts, the wrestling with scripture, produce a
“sure affirmation” (94). Biblical texts, which before had
tormented him with seeming conflict, appeared to “meet”
together in his heart (98). “Chains fall” from his legs and a
summarizing “scripture" grows in his heart, a scripture not
found in the Bible, which says “Thy righteousness is in
heaven” (106). This “scripture" represents the central,
satisfying truth he has been searching for. This truth is the
“Word" in the conscience that energizes his life into active

preaching and ministry (125). Both Bunyan’s autobiography and

The_EilgrimLe_Eregrees delineate the experience of the

12
achievement of ultimate rest by first “crossing over” trial
and doubt.

Herman Melville’s literary works describe the same mode
of advance demonstrated by The_EilgrimLS_Bngress. Melville
was a metaphysical explorer who invited his readers to cross
over a wide abyss of tormenting experience into another
realm, into a millennium of peace and security unavailable to
those who remained behind in the “Old World.”

Melville’s life as a sailor served as raw material
useful for creating the symbols necessary to describe such a
search. He can rightly be called America’s finest author of
the sea. After a number of disillusioning events over the
first twenty years of his life, he set out on his first sea
voyage to Liverpool, England on the ship SLl_Lawrenee in
1839. In early 1841 he left Fairhaven, Massachusetts on a
whaling trip. The ship, the Acufihnet, arrived in 1842 at a
place that was to figure prominently in Melville’s early
works--the Marquesas Islands. These islands in French
Polynesia lie some eight degrees south of the equator and are
4,200 miles west of Lima, Peru, 3,500 miles southwest of San
Francisco, and 900 miles northeast of Tahiti. On the little
island of Nuku Hiva Melville and friend Toby Green jumped
ship and went in search of the Happar tribe. Instead, they
found the Typees, a tribe thought to be cannibalistic. Later,
he and Toby escaped on the whaling ship Laey_Ann. He joined
the American navy in Hawaii in August of 1843, returning to

Boston on the Uni;ed_firaree by October 1844. His next major

13
sea voyage occurred during an 1856-1857 trip to Palestine,
including stops in Rome and Egypt. He also sailed from
Massachusetts by clipper ship to San Francisco in 1860.

A list of Melville’s major works and their settings
demonstrate the influence of the sea and exploration on his
imagination: Typee, 1846 (South Sea islands); Qmee, 1847
(South Sea islands); Mardi, 1849 (South Sea islands);
Redhurn, 1849 (Atlantic voyage to Liverpool); Whlre;1aeker,
1850 (American navy ship); Meby;Diek, 1851 (whaling cruise);
Eisrre, 1852; Israel_Botter, 1855 (American navy ship);
Brazza_1alee, 1856 (including “Benito Cereno," a story of
mutiny, and “The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles,” sketches of
the Galapagos Islands); Ihe.£onfidence:Man, 1857, (river
steamboat); BattlezBieces_and_Asnents_of_War, 1866; Clarel,
1876 (Palestine); John_Marr_and_cher_Sailors, 1888;
Iimoleon, 1891; Bill¥_Budd, 1891 (English navy ship).

Critics have observed that the sea has a remarkable
psychological effect on the human mind. Writing on Mehy;Qlek,
Paul Brodtkorb, Jr. notes that

water-formlessness seduces the mind to blend in
with its own fluidity [and] provides relaxation
from the rigors of patterned and patterning
thought--the mind just drifts; but perhaps because
the normal mind eventually will move out of total
passivity to some kind of active exploration and
direction of its thoughts, the formlessness
eventually becomes a kind of affront to thought
itself, and finally a challenge to mind to exercise
its proper powers. (24)

The sea forces the mind to make sense of new thoughts which

arise as a result of the sea itself, for as Brodtkorb says,

l4
“formlessness and unpredictable spontaneity can defeat the
mind’s comprehension” (28). Crossing the sea is symbolic of
the process through which human beings travel in order to
arrive at new levels of experience and comprehension.

When the voyager in the Old World traveled, his
psychological state and set of stabilizing beliefs were
strongly affected by the very fact of travel. Again,
Brodtkorb remarks, “Earth—bound men engage in water-reveries
as they face the sea. Mentally, they move from fixity into a
mobile realm of interest. When one of these men goes to sea
in actuality, he is giving physical expression to a prior
mental motion ... the domain of the stable and the familiar
takes on the character of the impenetrable” (34,35). The
Puritan removes himself from England because England is
frozen in an objectionable spiritual condition, the former
condition of the now—concerned Puritan. This is the reason
the religious experience of the Puritan is symbolically
realized by the travel metaphor. The act of sea travel opens
up paths that were not contemplated or thought possible.

William Spengemann, in The_Adyenrarene_Muee, discusses
the literature of discovery, noting a significant shift in
emphasis between 1500 and 1900. At first, writers focused on
the “changing world” and later shifted to “the meaning of
change itself," “from the world America was changing, to the
source of that change; from the world that was growing
quantitatively with each new acquisition of territory, to a

world that was changing qualitatively with each deeper

15
penetration into terra_incognita.” Writers in the Old World
watched the world recede before their eyes while writers in
the New World observed a change in the very meaning of the
world. Thus, Spengemann can make a strong case for the
influence of travel writing on American literature-—“American
travel—writing is organic to the literature in which it grew
and which grew out of it” (1). He explains this influence in
terms of the multitude of travel materials and documents upon
which American writers substantially drew. Literary artists
modified these materials to advance “their new view of the
world” (2).

According to Spengemann the greatest period of
connection between travel literature and formal literature is
the era of American Romanticism. He states that American
Romanticism “is only accidentally a congeries of conventional
subjects and attitudes” (2). (Such as those listed in
handbooks of literary terms? Examples might be the emphases
listed here: extravagance, the exotic, melancholy, the
natural goodness of man, the noble savage, emotions and
feelings, the hatred of worldly life, self-dramatization,
spontaneity, simplicity, the rustic, nature, the spirit, the
sublime, perfectibility, the individual.) Instead, Spengemann
says, “[Romanticism] is essentially an acceptance of change—-
of movement, time, and process-~as an ineluctable dimension
of reality, and hence the ground upon which reality must be
apprehended” (2). He continues, “In a very important sense,

the discovery, exploration, and settlement of America created

16
the world that Romanticism was invented to deal with, the
world of change" (2). The America that was being created in
the early 1800s could not be understood by the Old World of
Europe, which was frozen in its past, but only by Americans
themselves who were continually molding it in their own image
(2, 3). Spengemann concludes that it is not proper to see
American Romanticism as merely imitative of Old World
Romanticism, but as a new literature made in the New World
(5). Thus, the Puritanism and the Romanticism of the New
World are closely linked. Both involved emphases on change
and progress. Bercovitch’s observation about Mather’s
Magnalla is accurate. “[Mather] permeates his descriptions of
the Atlantic crossing with allusions to baptism which lend
allegorical dimension to the contrast between the New World
and the Old” (“Cotton Mather" 143).

The first reports back to Europe attempting to describe
America in the language of Europe failed to account for the
reality. Susan Manning writes, “Since Columbus reported his
unexpected discovery to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain in
1492, European observers and settlers have confronted the
pristine facts of America with a language already freighted
with centuries of tradition and association—~Eurepean
realities” (“Literature and Society in Colonial America” 3).

Manning's point can be extended to the whole of
Melville’s works: Melville is an American Romantic writer who
uses images of the sea, of travel, of discovery, who

metaphorically explores “pristine" spiritual places unreached

17
by most other Americans of his time. Harry Levin in Ih£_BQfl§L
er_Blaekneee writes “that voyages of discovery have served as
real or imaginary vehicles for our literature, from John
Smith to Ernest Hemingway, [and] that its prevailing movement
has been westward” (5). Levin refers to Melville’s chapter on
“Time and Temples” in Mardl in this connection, a chapter
which argues “that architecture represents duration, whereas
travel is the measure of space” (5). And further, that rather
than being a subversive writer undermining basic American
values (as some critics have said), Melville actually writes,
as William Carlos Williams has phrased it, in the American
grain and is firmly rooted in essential Americanness. This
American grain was first exemplified by the American Puritans
and by all other Americans who came west.

To overturn the old order, to be subversive, to go west,
is to be American. David S. Reynolds clarifies Melville’s
relationship to the notion of change in Benearh_rhe_Ameriean
‘-,,' ,qc -' , - -o e. I - I .o' g '00 in 9‘ to- o .u‘ on
and_Me11ille. He writes,

A close look at Melville’s fiction reveals that his
literary development was tied even more closely to
popular reform than was Hawthorne’s. Because
previous critics have wrongly associated antebellum
reform with progressivist optimism, Melville’s
complex fiction has been commonly viewed as a
rebellious gesture by a dark writer who, in the
words of one critic, intentionally ‘subverts the
ideology of reform.’ To stress Melville’s supposed
distance from his reform culture, however, is to
overlook an important source of his thematic and
stylistic breadth. Melville’s unique openness to
the rhetoric and spirit of a remarkable variety of
reform currents enriched his early novels and

18

contributed greatly to his major literary triumphs.
(136)

The reform movement is part of a mentality which sees beyond
current realities into the way things ought to be. Like the
Puritans (who pursued through the abyss a vision of the way
things ought to be, who decamped with Christ, captain of the
host, who migrated from Old Israel (England) to New Israel to
create a communal ideal, who in their individual experiences
searched for the state of grace), Melville made himself a
stranger in a strange land to search for the ideal America,
the America of brotherly love and perfected faith so eagerly
sought by the Puritans.

If this connection exists between the Puritan's
experience and Melville’s, then Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
statement concerning, as T. Walter Herbert, Jr. termed it,
Melville’s “darker meditations" and “apparent obsessiveness"
is true (MW 12).
Hawthorne said,

Melville, as he always does, began to reason of
Providence and futurity, and of everything else
that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he
had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be
annihilated’; but still he does not seem to rest in
that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest
until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is
strange how he persists--and has persisted ever
since I knew him, and probably long before—-in
wandering to-and—fro over these deserts, as dismal
and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were
sitting. (quoted in Herbert 12)

There are two examples of other responses to the ideal

that is America. Both involve sea journeys. Each represents

competing visions lying to the right and left of the path

19
blazed by Melville. The first example is that of the already-
mentioned Williams in his essay on Christopher Columbus (In
Ihe_Ameriean_Grain). The other example is an allegory
entitled The_Sniritual_yoyagel_Eerformed_in_the_Shin_Conyertz
WWW
Continent_of_filor¥i_An_Allegory. This allegory, published in
1828, was written by a Baptist minister from South Carolina
named Edmund Botsford. Williams, Botsford, and Melville each
tell a sea story. Melville’s story, as represented by the sum
of all his stories, tells of his search for the proper
America, the America that ought to be. That story is the
subject of this dissertation. The other stories represent
other traditions, which when compared to Melville’s creation,
illustrate much about his themes and concerns.

Botsford’s allegory is strictly within the Puritan
allegorical tradition. It might easily be called a sea—
version of Ihe_EilgrimLS_R£Qgreee. As the full title so
clearly expresses, the story represents the Christian
struggle to reach heaven under the guise of a sea voyage.
Each character, as in most simple allegories, has a
significant name exemplifying some Christian virtue. There is
Mr. Serious—consideration, Mr. True-peace, Mr. Enlightened—
mind, Mr. Sincerity, Mr. Careful, Mr. Fortitude, Mr. Hate-
sin, etc. God appears as the Emperor of Glory, and Christ as
his son, the Lord High Admiral of the Empire. Along the way

to the Haven of Felicity the Denier: encounters various

20
spiritual obstacles in the form of storms, rocks, quicksands,
and enemy ships.

Only rarely is the allegory as lively as The_EilgrimLe
Pregreee, but occasionally certain scenes elicit poignant
moments. One such occurs near the island of Impatience.
There,

the water was rough, and the ship laboured in a
hollow sea, which damaged her hull a good deal. We
found this a dangerous place. If we had not had a
good pilot, we surely must have been lost. One day
as we lay tossing and tumbling in a hollow sea,
which threatened destruction to us, who were in
such a crazy condition, we saw a fine looking ship
run ashore on the island of Presumption, and every
soul perished. (102)
This scene accomplishes something Bunyan could not. It
represents a spiritual condition difficult to recreate
metaphorically apart from the sea. On a voyage to salvation,
Christians encounter places “in a hollow sea.” The sea is a
featureless void to be sure, yet Botsford is able to describe
an even more desperately lonely place nirhin the void of the
sea--a hollow sea. Botsford makes no comment about it other
than to point out the potential destructiveness of such a
condition. His characters merely pass through the void.
Botsford says, “By the skill of the pilot, the good conduct
of our captain and officers, the attention of our men to
their duty, and above all, by the blessing of God, we
weathered all our dangers, surmounted our difficulties, got

into smooth water, and had fine weather, which soon recruited

our spirits" (104).

21

Botsford’s allegory is not substantially different from
other Puritan expressions of the stages of salvation and the
advance of salvation history except in one critical area.
There is not the slightest hint that the land of the New
World or America has any connection with the pursuit of a
blessed rest. There is no longer any suggestion of “Hayle
holy—land" as expressed by Thomas Tillam. The place of
salvation has receded beyond America to an abstractly
conceived “Haven of Felicity.” And America plays no part in
this goal, it is no longer the half-way Canaan. The allegory
is a great leap forward to ultimate rest. It seems clear that
for Botsford America itself is now in the position of old
England, the old Israel. America has exhausted its potential
as a communal, saving society. This is in sharp contrast to
works such as Edward Johnson’s Wender;Werking_Preyidenee_ef
SlenLa_Sayler_ln_Nen_Englann_(1654) and Cotton Mather’s
Magnalia_ehriarl_Amerleana (1702), both written in epic style

to defend the advance of the gospel in America.

In Mather’s “A General Introduction” to the Magnalla, he
defends the importance of the plane of America. “I write the
wonders of the Christian religion, flying from the
depravations of Europe to the American strand” (Miller The
.Ameriean_2nrirane 60). Mather praises God because he “hath
irradiated an Indian wilderness" (61). He indicates that
Protestants have been “driven to seek a place for the
exercise of the Protestant religion, according to the light

of their consciences, in the deserts of America" (63). The

22
place of America, formerly a “dark region,” is now to be
lighted by God’s golden candlesticks [symbolic of the
presence of God’s Spirit] (66).

Botsford’s work pointed the mind in a different
direction--outward, beyond the social and the physical world.
America is not criticized or condemned. It is simply no
longer relevant. Williams’ book ln_rhe_Ameriean_§rain seeks
to create another perspective on America. His chapter on
Christopher Columbus entitled “The Discovery of the Indies”
makes some comments about Columbus’s relationship to the Old
World and the New World and about the meaning of America. He
writes,

The New World, existing in those times beyond the
sphere of all things known to history, lay in the
fifteenth century as the middle of the desert or
the sea lies now and must lie forever, marked with
its own dark life which goes on to an immaculate
fulfillment in which we have no part. But now, with
the maritime successes of that period, the western
land could not guard its seclusion longer; a
predestined and bitter fruit existing, perversely,
before the white flower of its birth, it was laid
bare by the miraculous first voyage. For it is as
the achievement of a flower, pure, white, waxlike
and fragrant, that Columbus’ infatuated course must
be depicted, especially when compared with the
acrid and poisonous apple which was later by him to
be proved. (7)
Williams describes two things besmirched by the discovery of
America—-the land itself, pure and pristine, and Columbus,
poisoned by the very prize he was seeking. Columbus’s
troubles began, Williams says, when after a pleasant westward

journey, he turned back toward Spain. He writes, “But as he

neared the home coast at last his trials grew worst of all.

23
Everything hung on the point of being lost” (7). A terrific
storm developed and Columbus feared death. Williams notes
Columbus’s journal, which says, “‘but what caused me
boundless grief and trouble was the thought that just now
when our gainsayers were to be convinced and the discovery of
a New World Victoriously to be announced, that just now the
Divine Will should wish to block it with my destruction.’” He
becomes so fearful that he decides to write a note to be
placed in a cask and thrown overboard describing “‘how I had
discovered the lands I had promised to find.’” The entire
crew, he felt, “‘believed it some act of devotion’” (8).
Columbus and his crew do not perish. However, the return to
Spain offered him only the pain and conflict of the false
accusations and false promises of others. Soon, though, his
dreams of the New World return.
Immediately the urge was on him once more. He must
return at once to the New World. Never content
would he be for the balance of his whole life,
following his fortune, whose flower, unknown to
him, was past. But now he saw before him the
illusive bright future of a great empire founded,
coupled with a fabulous conquest of heathendom by
the only true church. (9)

Against all such hazards he persevered. “Yet this man,
this straw in the play of the elemental giants, must go
blindly on. More and more he threw everything he had into the
contest, his sons, his brothers, in the hope that his
fortunes would be retrieved in the end.” The enemies of this

quest, understanding his isolation and sacrifice “turned

[them] to their own advantage, being closer to that curious

24
self—interest of natural things than he.” At this point
Williams comments on the distinctive power of America. It is
no longer the desert or wilderness of the Puritans prepared
by God for the renewing presence of his people Israel.
Instead, in Williams’ understanding, America is a natural
force blind to the strivings and hopes of men. “Heroically,
but pitifully, [Columbus] strove to fasten to himself that
enormous world, that presently crushed him among its multiple
small disguises. With its archaic smile, America found
Columbus its first victim” (10). For Williams, America
represents what the whole of Nature offers every brave
voyager going against the grain—-a bite of bitter fruit (11).

Columbus suffered mightily in his pursuit of a westward
passage to the East. He saw his grandiose dreams for his
discoveries melt away. During his third voyage he was
returned home chained and soon saw a host of others crowd
into the business of discovering new worlds. He found that
being first to the New World was a mixed blessing. His death
came when he was both physically sick (with arthritis) and
humiliated and frustrated.

What is most relevant about Columbus’s discovery,
however, was his justification for the find. The new lands
were more than just sources of gold and slaves. He indicated
in 1502 to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that “‘neither
reason nor mathematics nor maps were any use to me: fully

accomplished were the words of Isaiah’” (“Columbus” The New

Encyslonaedia_Britanniea 605). Columbus refers here to Isaiah

25

11:10-12, a messianic prophecy foretelling that “the Root of
Jesse ... will raise a banner for the nations and gather the
exiles of Israel; he will assemble the scattered people of
Judah from the four quarters of the earth.” This vision for
the future of the newly discovered lands is exactly that of
the American Puritans. The New World is the place ordained
for the creation of a special society. That place has a
threatening, malignant aspect to it in Williams’ view. It is
a place that encourages dreams because America is new, but
crushes dreams because that is the way Nature operates.

Herman Melville is within the American Puritan tradition
and outside of the tradition of which Williams writes. He was
a metaphysical traveler who kept going westward in an attempt
to find the ideal America. Where did he go? What did he find?
America means continual growth and search for meaning. This
search is not subversive or threatening to basic American
values. In fact, subversion, destruction, and growth are her
basic tenets. Melville was creating a vision of a millennial
America. The America of dreams. The destiny she should have
achieved but was in danger of losing. In Melville exist great
hopes and dire ends because that is always the risk for any
traveler. He searched for what could be achieved in America
by Americans, who are the only people who can actually
accomplish what Americans imagine is possible. Herman
Melville was a Christopher Columbus of another potential

America.

Chapter 2

The American Myth

The development of the myth of America began early in
the Puritan experiment in the wilderness. Cotton Mather’s
Magnalia_Christi_Americana of 1702 celebrated the idea of
America rather than the reality of its accomplishment.
Bercovitch observes that “beneath the aggressive optimism of
their rhetoric, the emigrant ministers convey an unmistakable
disquietude. As in the course of the century dream and
reality veered farther apart, the orthodoxy came more and
more to rely on rhetoric” (“Cotton Mather” 142). Mather
wrote, “But whether Neuzfingland may Liye any where else or
no, it must Line in our Hiererx!” (Heimert and Delbanco 322).
Mather’s New England existed only in “the epic world”
(Bercovitch “Cotton Mather" 143). Thus, SLQIifiS of America
were to become particularly important as images of what it
meant to be an American. Americans were to be a people with a
narrative imprinted on their minds. William L. Hedges notes,

Mythologizing had begun early, particularly in New
England, thanks to Puritanism’s predilection for
typological readings of Scripture and history. The
Puritan conception of America as the foreordained
site of the completion of the Reformation—-later of
the onset of the millennium-—is tied historically
to the extravagant American self-image projected in
the literature of the Revolution. (192)

Just as every child of ancient Israel was to have the story

of the Exodus repeated to him at every passover season, so

26

27
too the American child of the future was to know the story of
New England’s reason for being. A future America could make
no sense without the story.

Revolutionaries such as John Adams made clear that
America had been settled by God for the emancipation of
enslaved mankind. Adams wrote in A_Dleeerrarlen_en_rhe_Qanen
and_Eendal_Lan, “‘I always consider the settlement of America

as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence
for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of
the slavish part of mankind’” (quoted in Hedges 192). Adams’
expression of America’s role is couched in the same language
as that used by countless Puritan ministers. Thomas Philbrick
observes that the idea of Revolutionary America was
constructed between the French and Indian Wars of 1763 and
the formulation of the Constitution in 1789. “It was as if,”
he contends, the sermons and tracts of the seventeenth
century gave way to the newspaper articles and pamphlets of
the eighteenth century in “a secular transformation by which
the quest of salvation was translated into the pursuit of
liberty.” American Revolutionaries “retained something of
their predecessors’ millennial vision and preoccupation with
values larger and more lasting than the interests immediately
at risk in a specific political controversy” (139).

The poets of the Revolutionary and Early National period
wrote glowingly of America’s future in terms of prophecy and
millennium. These poets sought to describe a new culture in

the making. Although they used the verse forms and diction of

28
old England, “their aim was ... to convince an outsetting
people of the truths of new thought, and thereby to supersede
the British tradition through imitating it” (John P.
McWilliams, Jr. “Poetry in the Early Republic” 157).
McWilliams calls some of the poems of these poets “secular
sermons” which were, as he says, to describe the present and
map the future. This description and this future were to be
based, not on the imaginative power of the poetic mind, but
on “images consistent with a universal Reason, itself still
dependent, for many, on the scriptural word” (158).

The search for a defining image and myth of America
created a need for an expressive mode commensurate with the
nature of the subject. Revolutionary poets used the
oratorical prophecy subgenre (heroic couplets or blank verse
of 200-600 lines). Literary historians have labeled this form
the prospect, vision, or rising glory poem. Titles during
this period include “Prospect of the Future Glory of America"
by John Trumbull (1770), “The Rising Glory of America” by
Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1771), “The
Prospect of Peace" by Joel Barlow (1778), and “A Poem on the
Happiness of America" by David Humphreys (1786) (McWilliams
159-160).

Poets of this period attempted to peer into the future
in an attempt to establish what America would be. Her
possibilities seemed endless. She would create a republican
and peaceful empire that would spread near and then to the

rest of the world. With her influence would go all of

29
humanity’s beneficial knowledge of farming, manufacturing,
religion, business, science, art, and law. Often these poets
used the language (directly or allusively) of the millennium
to describe this future. Americans were exhorted to retain
and act upon the old faith. “Whatever variety of republican
empire is anticipated, however, its future is said to be
secure as long as its believers will act upon their faith”
(McWilliams 160).

The prospect poems anticipated a magnificent American
future, yet were insightful in their warnings of possible
pitfalls. They saw the coming conflict between reason and
revelation, the horrors of slavery, and the battle over
women’s rights. One poem, Barlow’s Ihe_Celnmhiad, contained
astonishing predictions of “the Panama Canal, submarines,
airplanes, the United Nations, and a universal language, all
the while warning the reader that international commerce
might finally be man’s only deterrent to global war.” These
great hopes and concerns created a vague sense that the
future might be difficult; therefore, the public stance of
hope sometimes gave way to private worries about other
possibly dark and apocalyptic visions of the future.
McWilliams writes that “the American prospect poem was
relentlessly futuristic. In its most extreme form, it
projected an entire culture upon a void” (161). But the
rising glory poets accomplished their visions in the well—
used forms of English writers. Francis Scott Key’s “The Star

Spangled Banner” (1814) and Timothy Dwight’s “Columbia,

30
Columbia, to Glory Arise” (1783) based their melodies on
British drinking songs. “They thus provide telling examples
of the era’s need to pour new wine into old skins” (161).

In a recent article on Timothy Dwight, Peter K. Kafer
points out the source of much of the language used by the
rising glory poets. Kafer states that Dwight searched for a
poetic voice, finding it in a mixture of his grandfather
Jonathan Edward’s millennialism, God, and American
chauvinism. Kafer identifies other revolutionary poets as
using specifically millennial language. Two poets, Freneau
and Brackenridge, authors of “The Rising Glory of America”
modeled the poem, according to Kafer, after George Berkeley’s
well-known paean to the westward movement of civilization,
“Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in
America" (Kafer 197).

This Enlightenment poem indicates that the Muse is
disgusted with the state of learning in the Old World and “In
distant lands now waits a better Time.” These “happy Climes"
are “Where Nature guides and Virtue rules.” There the
“Pedantry of Courts and Schools" will be replaced with
“Truth." Another “golden Age” awaits in America. Probably
referring to the four empires of the biblical book of Daniel
(Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome), Berkeley indicates
that “A fifth shall close the Drama with the Day.” This sweep
of history has direction. “Westward the Course of Empire
takes its Way.” Berkeley's future is purely positive and

upward, not apocalyptic. The last empire will be “Time’s

31
noblest Offspring” (1521). Such an “idea of progress has
itself exercised an enormous influence over men’s lives. For
two centuries it has served both as the most widely accepted
model of historical development and as the justifying secular
faith of the North American peoples" (George Dekker 73). In
America of the eighteenth century, then, millennialism,
though considerably secularized, was a hopeful doctrine
closely related to the Enlightenment vision of the future.
The myth of America was a creation of the poets of the
eighteenth century. Hedges indicates that, “By 1800 many
Americans were anxious about their literature." There was a
deep desire for more than merely religious and political
books. Some Americans wished to see more substantial works
equivalent to those of England and Europe. The nationalistic
poets yearned for a national epic that would encompass the
America they had envisioned. Hedges writes,
Peering into America’s utopian or millennial
future, the nationalistic poets invariably
predicted the coming of American Homers, Virgils,
and Miltons. They wanted a literature commensurate
with the civic eminence of the emerging republic.
They conceived of the epic as what it had often
been for readers in earlier societies, a monumental
poetic embodiment of a nation’s ethos and sense of
destiny. (188)
McWilliams indicates in Ihe_Ameriean_Enie that the coming of
the future writers of epic was all part of the Revolutionary
poets’ belief in the westward movement of heroic culture,
from Greece to Latium to England and then to America (16).

The only problem with their goal was the conflict, Hedges

writes, “between their commitment to freedom and their

32

tendency to accept many of the artificialities of style and
form sanctified by the aristocratic taste of the past” (188).

Developing myth—makers in America were stymied by the
need to create a specifically American, non-aristocratic
epic. Hedges points out the kind of mythology of America
which came about. He writes, “In some texts the mythology
revealed itself in a blend of metaphors that evoked both the
Whig story of the perils of Anglo—American liberty and the
Christian story of reformed religion’s exodus from the Old
World in search of a promised land.” The language of
political freedom and individual salvation were united.
“Sermons formulated as jeremiads exhorted God’s people
simultaneously to resist parliamentary encroachment and to
renew themselves in virtue. Corruption-—in biblical terms,
enslavement to sin and Satan--in any form, in any situation,
loomed as a threat to liberty” (194). The future writer of
epic had among his qualifications the ability “to perceive in
the Republic’s recent past the seeds of future glory”
(McWilliams The_Ameriean_Enie 16). Since the revolutionary
experience was so closely tied to the Puritan past through
biblical language, it is reasonable to assume that the
American epic of the future would incorporate Puritan and
biblical language as well. As indicated by Dekker, the
history of the development of the historical romance shows
that Hawthorne and Melville sought to change the genre’s
historic “center of action and moral interest” toward the

human interior (28).

33

Thus, the American Romance novel developed as a response
to the search for a workable, Puritan American literary form
which incorporated Puritan fascination with the progress of
the soul. In the form of the Romance, American writers of the
nineteenth century, including Melville, attempted to create
the epic of Puritan America. Seen in the context of the
Puritan spiritual concerns, the jeremiad, the language of
exhortation, in the context of the Early National poets, and
in the context of the blending of secular and sacred
concerns, the appearance of the Romance as the prime American
literary form is no surprise. Preliminary to his discussion
in The_Ameriean_Epie, McWilliams quotes from George Lukacs’
Ihe_Iheer¥_ef_rhe_Neyel. Lukacs observes that the novel and
the epic are the “‘two major forms of great epic literature’”
and that only “‘historico-philosophical realities’” determine
which form is used. “‘The novel,’” Lukacs says, “‘is the epic
of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no
longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in
life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of
totality’" (1). Melville and others “deliberately assimilated
the spirit and conventions of the epic poem within the prose
romance." This process began among the poets of the Early
National period, who though imitative, were actually
transforming the “generic” forms into something “newer” and
“more Open” (2).

McWilliams discusses the debate between two critics of

the epic genre, George Lukacs and Mikhail Bakhtin (author of

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34
“Epic and Novel” [1940]). Both of these critics agreed that
true epic summarizes and makes immanent a set of cultural
values. Each saw that epic poems no longer hold literary
preeminence, and that they were being replaced by the
novelistic form. “They also,” McWilliams writes, “associated
the novel with a godless world, a subjectivity of authorial
vision, an openness of form, and a mixing of linguistic
levels, all of which worked against the unifying affirmations
of traditional epic literature.” The two critics disagreed
about the possibilities of epic in the novelistic form.
Lukacs argued that any hero who could perceive, in
McWilliams’ words, “immanent meaning in a world abandoned by
God” is necessarily heroic. Bakhtin, however, said that the
epic form was rigidly concerned with “‘fathers, beginnings,
and peak times’” (5). Novels are ironic and open and thus
cannot be turned into the closed and unitary world of the
epic poem. Epic can only exist in a world of absolutes.
However, in a world devoid of those values “everything
becomes potentially absurd” (McWilliams’ words). McWilliams
indicates that he accepts the idea “that, once prose became
'the dominant literary medium, no poem could any longer do the
cultural work ... required of the epic” (6).

Using the Romance form, Melville sought to reestablish a
set of distinctly American values in an America searching for
a set of values useful for making its way in a new world of
rapidly changing social, religious, and intellectual

climates. The novel in America came about at a time when

35
American poets were still creating the myth of America. Cathy
Davidson writes in WW3:
Neyel_in_Ameriea, “For all practical purposes, there were no
indigenous novels before the American Revolution. What we
have is a genre emerging within a culture precisely as that
culture attempts to define itself” (viii). According to
McWilliams, Melville straightforwardly wished to create “the
new American epic” of universal proportions. Critics of his
time lamented the lack of such an epic, Complaining that in a
country dominated by the railroad, canals, balloons, stump
speeches, circuses, wealth, commercialism, and skepticism,
that the heroic was dead (The_Ameriean_Enie 187, 188). In
response to this need for a national epic, Melville
“associated any new American epic with a willfully
improvisational genre allowing for high national feeling,
praise for commercial and democratic values, a brooding sense
of life’s hellish mystery, and a heroic openness to all
possible meanings" (The_Ameriean_Enie 192). In short, he
helped to create the American Romantic epic.

The development of the nineteenth-century American
Romance cannot be detached from America’s Puritan past. M. H.
Abrams suggests such a connection in Narnral_snnernarnralimn;
Tradition_and_Be1Qluti_Qn_in_Eomanti_c_Literature. The use of
Biblical themes by secular and pagan writers began in
earliest Christianity, increased during the Renaissance,
reaching an apex during the era of Romanticism, he writes.

The rationalism and decorum of the eighteenth century gave

36

way to a return to the fundamental images of Christian
doctrine and life such as “destruction and creation, hell and
heaven, exile and reunion, death and rebirth, dejection and
joy, paradise lost and paradise regained.” Romanticism sought
to recast Christian doctrine and soteriology into forms
“intellectually acceptable, as well as emotionally pertinent,
for the time being.” This process secularized Christian
expression without really destroying it. The Romantics found
this impossible to do. Western culture was simply too
“Divine." Abrams discusses the major Romantics (Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Carlyle), noting how each
struggled to create a secular philosophical system based on
Christian mythology, and that “the general tendency was
to naturalize the supernatural and to humanize the divine.”
Thus, Romanticism can be called “a displaced and
reconstituted theology, or else a secularized form of
devotional experience ... because we still live in what is
essentially ... a Biblical culture [with] hereditary ways of
organizing experience.” Some have seen this attempt as a
failure to properly face reality, while others see the
Romantic achievement as a brave struggle “to sustain the
inherited cultural order against what to many writers seemed
the imminence of chaos” (65-68). An American Romantic author
such as Melville demonstrated such a secularizing tendency as
well.

Spengemann sees modern symbolism as the end of a line

streching from Puritanism. According to Spengemann, Puritans

37

tended to divorce expression from truth. Truth was something
rooted in Scripture which could be taken out and dressed up
in the language of men. However, they saw that truth could
not exist abstractly. Experience must accompany the growth of
truth in the life. Experimental faith validated the truths of
the Bible (199). The Puritan existed in a world (as
delineated by the Bible) of struggle and conflict between the
irreconcilable forces of good and evil, darkness and light,
alienation and incarnation, order and disorder (Richard Chase
11). But as dogma relaxed and the power of scientific
authority grew during the eighteenth century, it became more
difficult to root oneself in godly absolutes. Expression was
to be tied to revealing the laws of nature. The focus
gradually shifted from the mind of God to the shifting sands
of the human mind. Modern literary symbolism, therefore, is a
movement which began with the belief “that literary form
reveals the truth and [culminates] in the idea that literary
form ie the truth.” This is the reason, Spengemann indicates,
that Robert Frost saw literary expression as “‘a momentary
stay against confusion.’" The truth would change with its
expression (198, 199).

.A statement by F. D. Reeve makes sense in this context.
He writes that the American Romantics “were not muckrakers
exposing practical corruption but moralists pointing out the
irresolubde contradictions of a modern life ill-adapted to
‘traditional values. Even as they believed in and supported

those values, they understood that modern life made such

38
values inadequate" (10). American Romantics did not seek to
overthrow belief but attempted “to eliminate arbitrary
discrepancies and partial beliefs” (11). So, as Spengemann
notes in the following passage, Romanticism was really a
search for absolutes in a world of collapsing absolutes.

But Romantics like Melville found the transcendent
reason as unreliable as divinely revealed Scripture
or consensually validated nature. Emerson and his
Enlightenment forebears had lived on the capital of
absolutist belief amassed by Christian tradition
without ever feeling the need to replenish it. By
the time writers like Hawthorne and Melville came
to take their share, there was practically nothing
left. To get along, they had three alternatives.
They could keep up appearances, as Hawthorne tried
to do by professing liberal Christian ideals which
he only half believed. Or they could try to restore
the squandered capital by returning to long-
abandoned forms of orthodoxy—-a tactic employed by
the many Romantics, including Hawthorne, who toyed
with Catholicism. Or they could live hand to mouth,
as it were, on the hard-won daily earnings of their
art, trying to generate enough meaning from each
artistic effort to justify it and to tide them over
to the next one.

The immediate result of the loss of absolutes
was confusion--a mingled sense of liberation and
purposelessness. In time, American writers would
either discover in symbolism new possibilities of
form and expression or else find new systems of
authorized belief to satisfy their need for the
absolute--in the ideas of Spencer, Freud, and Marx.
In the meantime, writers like Melville, who could
neither accept traditional forms of belief any
longer nor see clearly a way to operate without
them, would revise old literary forms and devise
new ones in a continuing attempt to satisfy both
their disbelief and their need to believe.

(200, 201)

This discussion accounts for Chase’s ideas as expressed
in Winn. He indicates that
‘VMnerican fiction has been shaped by the contradictions and

INJC by the unities and harmonies of our culture.” American

39
fiction has been content to rest in “polarities, opposites,
and irreconcilables” (1). “These qualities constitute the
uniqueness of that branch of novelistic tradition which has
flourished in this country. They help to account for the
strong element of ‘romance’ in the American ‘novel.’" The
English novel takes the strange, the odd, the unusual and
incorporates it all into a great central vision of sanity and
normalcy. Disorder is almost entirely absent from the English
novel. The American novel “has been stirred ... by the
aesthetic possibilities of radical forms of alienation,
contradiction, and disorder" (1, 2). This concern indicates a
tendency “to explore, rather than to appropriate and
civilize” and “to discover a new place and a new state of
mind.” Thus, “The American novel is more profound and
clairvoyant than the English novel ... and it tends to carve
out of experience brilliant, highly wrought fragments rather
than massive unities” (5).

W. H. Auden’s insight is perceptive when he points out
that the classical hero never looked with disdain on his
culture and became tragic only out of an excess of pride,
while the Romantic hero was heroic because “he comes of
neurotic stock" (96). It is in disorder where arise the
possibilities of movement into a new place or state of mind.
The novels of Herman Melville contain stories of Romantic
heroes and wanderers who attempt to extract from disorder a

an order representing secure rest.

 

40

Melville’s works were written in the language of
exhortation, warning Americans of their tenuous spiritual
condition and urging them on to the achievement of the real
destiny of America as the city on a hill. Taken together,
Melville’s works summarize a new “myth of America,” a
culturally defining story of the need and desire for a new
myth of America, and a description of the path to this future
America. Bercovitch points out that the language of
exhortation has been with America since Puritan preachers of
the seventeenth century alerted New Englanders to their
situation of crisis and outlined a plan for revitalization.
“The legacy of this ritual mode may be traced through
virtually every major event in the culture, from the Great
Awakening through the Revolution and the westward movement to
the Civil War ... [and to] the Star Wars of Qnr latter days”
(“The Puritan Vision of the New World” 41). The sea and the
language of discovery was the vehicle Herman Melville used to
further the American Puritan tradition of exhortation. The
exhortations found in his writings encapsulated Melville’s
conception of where America ought to be and what it should
have become. Through an accident of time, his exhortations
were structured in the form of Romance, mythology, and quest.

A recent book written by Bruce L. Grenberg substantiates
the presence of the notion of quest in the works of Herman
Melville. In W
rhe_Werke_ef_flerman_Melyille, Grenberg argues that

“Melville’s first six novels ... are all built around quests

41
[and] are intimately related in that taken all together

they represent the goals of Enlightenment man and Romantic
man. [Each main character] seeks completion: the idea of an
ordered plenary universe, or of a universe that nan be
ordered and mastered by mind and will, is an assumption
shared by the protagonists of all six novels” (3). The title
of Grenberg’s book is taken from Melville’s poem Clarel; the
selection is worth quoting here. I

This world clean fails me: still I yearn.

Me then it surely does concern

Some other world to find. But where?

In creed? I do not find it there.

That said, and is the emprise o’er?

Negation, is there nothing more?

This side the dark and hollow bound
Lies there no unexplored rich ground?

Seme_ether_nerld: well, there’s the Nee--

Ah, joyless and ironic too! (40)
Images of quest and exploration are replete in this
selection. The “other world” is a metaphor for a state of
mind or a metaphysical place or spiritual experience the poet
yearns to find. In his experience thus far, creed alone has
not satisfied his desire. Neither, however, is he satisfied
with simple negation, or complete loss of purpose and
meaning. Somewhere, on rhie side of our world (“the dark and
hollow bound”) and not beyond in some foreign, unearthly
place, lies an “unexplored rich ground.” That rich ground is
the real “New World" for which he searches. The search and
exploration will take place on the sea, and as long as the
search continues the poet is at sea. When the poet arrives at

the desired place, he will have achieved landedneee, he will

42
have found his other world. Landedness is Melville’s quest.
The story of the quest is the American epic. The fact that
there man: he such a quest is the American myth.

Levin (Weakness) and Brodtkorb (Ishmaells
Whire_Werld), generalize that “It is the business of fiction
to explore what might have been, what may be, what is not”
(Levin 5), and that

Man moves forward in time toward his own
possibilities. The flow of time is his ground; or,
rather, he is time, and the way he incarnates it
sums him up: what he was, is, and will be. To
understand time would be to understand earthly
Being, which is becoming; to understand one’s own
time would be to understand oneself. (Brodtkorb 97)

The business of going forward is, as we have seen,
imperative to American literature (particularly the American
Romance). Setting and landscape can take on increased
importance in such literature. Pamela Schirmeister, in The
Emlyillei_and_lames, writes that “landscape is, by nature,
visionary, so that its details necessarily constitute a trope
of perspective. It is the space that the writer creates, and
in which he or she stands to see things better, to see them
under the particular lights and shadows that make romance
possible” (3, 4). Schirmeister argues that romance finds its
center, its place, in the landscape of the mind, so that
literal place in romance is merely a trope for a mental
perspective (4). Auden, in The_Enehafed_Eleedi_er_the
Remanrie_leenegraphy, writes that all myth begins in chaotic

seas. He writes,

43

The sea or the great waters ... are the symbol for
the primordial undifferentiated flux, the substance
which became created nature only by having form
imposed upon or wedded to it. The sea, in fact, is
that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out
of which civilization has emerged and into which,
unless saved by the effort of gods and men, it is
always liable to relapse. It is so little of a
friendly symbol that the first thing which the
author of the Book of Revelation notices in his
vision of the new heaven and earth at the end of
time is that ‘LW.’ (18, 19)

Both Auden and Schirmeister consider the sea to be
critically important to Melville. Schirmeister calls it,
among other kinds of landscape, an “obsessive concern” (4),
while Auden uses Melville’s flhi1e_la2ket to illustrate his
listing of four “new notes in the Romantic attitude” toward
the sea. Auden describes how the Romantics used the symbol of
the sea.

(1) To leave the land and the city is the desire of
every man of sensibility and honour.
(2) The sea is the real situation and the voyage is
the true condition of man.
(3) The sea is where the decisive events, the
moments of eternal choice, of temptation, fall and
redemption occur. The shore life is always trivial.
(4) An abiding destination is unknown even if it
may exist: a lasting relationship is not possible
nor even to be desired. (23)
Thus, Auden can say that “The ship, then, is only used as a
metaphdr for society in danger from within or without” (19).

Melville’s fiction of the sea, then, is only another in
a long series of messages of exhortation sent to the American
people. Emory Elliott writes that “the classic American

writers created literary works that internalized, quarreled

with, but invariably preserved the values, myths, and beliefs

44

that constituted an American ideological consensus” (337).
Melville did not reject American values, he simply showed
Americans “prospect.” Here you are now, he says, and here is
where you should or could be. The hill upon which they stood
was composed of the essential American story and defining
idioms. These notions include, according to Elliott,
“liberty, equality, freedom, geographic expansion, and
manifest destiny” (338).

The language of prospect does not signal a rejection of
the past. This means that even though the language of
essential Americanness was firmly established and then

generally applauded by American writers from the beginning,

the idea of the newness of the American experiment remains.
R. W. B. Lewis discusses this in The_Ameriean_Anami

.00 ‘0 ‘ 0.0". Q... .Q 00 I. 0‘ \.0‘ “0 O ‘0
He writes that “the American myth saw life and history as
just beginning ... in a divinely granted second chance for
the human race, after the first chance had been so
disastrously fumbled in the darkening Old World. It
introduced a new kind of hero, the heroic embodiment of a new
set of ideal human attributes.” This hero was free of all
that had plagued men and women in the Old World. The new
American hero was freed of the ties of family, culture, and
history. Such a hero is most easily identified with the first
man, Adam. In the eyes of a Christian culture, Adam possessed

moral superiority and innocence, as well as power over nature

45
and language. He was the namer of things new, making of
himself a type of the original creator (5).

Thus, Melville can use the language of Americanness
while at the same time exploring the very roots of experience
itself. He remains very American in this process. It is not
surprising that a critic such as H. Bruce Franklin, in The
flaKe_Qf_Lhe_GQdS;_MElMillELS_M¥Ltheg¥, expresses seemingly
subversive intentions to be found in Melville. Franklin
writes that “Melville’s major works, taken together, provide
a coherent and extremely valuable exploration of myth
[including Christian myth]” (203). This concern of Melville’s
does not have to be taken as opposed to or different from the
American Puritans. Franklin errs in thinking that Melville
explores the world’s myths and then strips them “of their
dangerous mythic trappings,” leaving “the safety of a
nonmythic religion of the heart” (204). Such an exploration
of myth remains well within the American tradition. It can be
demonstrated that in Melville’s Mardi the “religion of the
heart" is firmly Christian.

Michael Davitt Bell’s concern with the “revolutionary”
attitudes in Melville is understandable. He writes, “Melville
proclaimed clearly and fully what most of his predecessors
only intermittently hinted at: that the unleashing of these
lurking energies [in various ‘wretches’ found among
Melville’s characters] was the essence at once of romance and
of revolution.” It is not surprising that Bell writes of the

“revolutionary promptings” in Melville. Bell indicates that

46
“Melville surveyed a culture whose surface had come to seem
to him as duplicitous and arabesque as the rhetorical surface
of romance” and was “fast approaching a crisis over
capitalist exploitation and chattel slavery. Melville’s
fiction ... is filled with images of abuse and corruption of
political authority” (198, 199). Exploration of what America
had become and what it should be was Melville’s chief object.
But such concern is no more “revolutionary” than Cotton
Mather’s concern for what was to happen to the idea of New
England or than John Winthrop’s worries over what would
happen to the Puritan sense of the double covenant between a
man and God, and a man and his brother.

The American Romantic genre was the perfect form for
Melville’s purposes. Chase argues that the Romance is
actually poetic and epic rather than novelistic. The novel
grasps for comprehensive detail, relationship, and intricate
character development. The Romance creates mystery of
character and symbolism and is much more likely to mimic myth
and allegory.

It does not confine itself to what is known, or
even what is probable. It grasps at the possible;
and, placing a human agent in hitherto untried
Situations, it exerCises its ingenuity in
extricating him from them, while describing his
feelings and his fortunes in the process. (12—17)

Melville wished to continue telling the American story.
But the American story was difficult to tell because it had

yet to be lived to its full potential. American history and

American writers of the past were replete with the

47
nflfifiihiliLiee of America but not with a strong sense of
accomplishment. America was about starting over, about
beginning again, about re-creation, about finding the new.
The truly American genre had to incorporate this reality.
This is the reason Spengemann closely connects the literature
of exploration with the American Romantic novel. He
demonstrates that inherent in the American experience are the
seeds of its own destruction. Exploration values individual
pursuit and assumes that such a pursuit goes in the same
direction as other pursuits. There was one truth and all
paths led to that truth. However, American Romantic novelists
found that this was not the case. Individualism destroyed all
absolutes. “Free to pursue his self-will, the individual ends
either in mad demagogy, which destroys society, or in
paralyzing nihilism, which destroys the individual himself”
(211). Melville continued the search for the “how" of the
American story. How could the original plan, the original
hopes and possibilities of America be enacted in the
nineteenth century? The “how” could be best explored and
explained in the Romance novel. Perry Miller, in “The Shaping
of the American Character” (Narnrele_marien), writes that
Americans have been seeking an identity since the early
nineteenth century. “The reason for this national anxiety is
that being an American is not something to be inherited so
much as something to be achieved” (3). Since the American

Revolution Americans have shown a profound desire “to live

48
from a blueprint” (4). That blueprint can be found in the

writings of Herman Melville, the great romancer of the sea.

Chapter 3

The Blank Horizon

The central tenets of Puritanism relate directly to an
interpretation of the writings of Herman Melville. The most

useful and comprehensive source for a survey of Puritan
belief is Perry Miller’s monumental work, The_Nen_England
Mindr_The_SeyenteenLh_Centnry. In this scholarly masterpiece
Miller describes Puritanism as a vigorous religious piety
with strong connections to the spirituality of St. Augustine,
and centrally concerned with a serious human predicament.

In the Puritan understanding, all of human life depended
upon mankind’s bending to a knowable truth controlling the
entire universe. Puritans confronted this truth without fear,
no matter what its implications. When a man found himself in
conformity to this truth, he experienced an ecstatic sight of
wholeness and righteousness. God was himself the ultimate
meaning of everything and the source of righteousness.
Anything out of harmony with God was sin. The vision of the
difference between God and sin was a sought-after
illumination. Reprobation was, Miller said, the failure to
live within the illumination. Unregenerate man needs
desperately to get beyond himself since he is alone and
unimportant and knows nothing of the qualities of God.

Miller observed that Puritan piety “finds the infinite

variety of the world’s misery reducible to a concrete

49

50
problem, the relation of the individual to the One” (8).
Regeneration was the one great hope of mankind, through which
the great separation between an infinite God and man could be
bridged. Men could be brought around to God’s vision of
things. From man’s point of view nothing occurred by chance
in a world controlled by God, neither death nor accident nor
divine intervention. This strong sense of God’s controlling
will led to the doctrine of predestination, which in Puritan
eyes seemed perfectly understandable, since in no other way
could they explain why one person had faith and another did
not.

Biblical authority was the pedestal upon which
Puritanism rested. As Miller writes, “without a Bible, this
piety would have confronted chaos” (19). A Puritan could
never turn to reason, the church, immediate inspiration,
science, philosophy, or innate ideas as the source of truth
since each of these means of learning was seriously flawed in
some way. There always remained for the Puritan a gap
“between the revealed will and the secret will" (21). No
system of thought could close this fissure.

Puritans explained the natural world in symbolic terms.
Nature, they believed, told the story of the spirit. To
explain the natural world was merely to uncover the patterns
left there by God. Susan Manning speaks to this Puritan habit
of thought and argues persuasively for the Puritan foundation

for American literature. In W

O I I I I
O, I 0.0.. ill‘ 0.. “ o. .‘ O 1“ I I‘ “I O ‘I

51
she discusses two of the similarities between Puritans and
American Romantics. First, she notes that when given a choice
between the world and the spirit, the spirit always won out.
In this context she quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Harare-
—“‘The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet
conforms things to his thoughts’” (66). Second, she states
that Puritans found “uninterpreted signs” threatening since
the spiritual was more real than the natural and thus
important to dominate and control. She observes that Melville
thought, as did Thomas Carlyle, that only the elect (the
Heroes) could pierce behind the mask into the hidden reality
of the spirit (66). This point helps explain much in Melville
and shows his debt to Puritan thought.

Early in Puritan history this kind of thinking led to
some famous and typical examples. Cotton Mather, while
urinating, witnessed a dog doing the same and lamented the
fact that man and beast were not so terribly different. (At
least one literary historian says Mather was clearly insane.)
In another instance, John Winthrop read the entrance of a
snake into the synod at Cambridge as an attempt by the devil
himself to enter into Christ’s church in New England, only to
be crushed on the head just as the seed (Christ) of the woman
(Eve) had promised. Charles Feidelson, Jr. describes this
method as “[uniting] the objectivity of history with the
meaningfulness of Scripture” (78). In Symheliem_ann_Ameriean
Lirerarnre Feidelson says that Puritans read life as a story

both human and divine, so that “every passage of life,

52
enmeshed in the vast context of God’s plan, possessed a
delegated meaning" (79). This sort of reading of signs is
closely related to the typological method used by Puritans to
interpret the Bible. Typology, originally used by the apostle
Paul, read the Old Testament as a type or pattern of the New
Testament, whereby Old Testament stories foreshadowed events
of the New Testament. Ursula Brumm, in Ameriean_Thenghr_and
Religiene_Tynelegy, indicates that typology is “another kind
of symbolism” (18). She argues, however, that Puritans were
not true symbolists since they were hostile to “any symbolic
representations of religious doctrine” (15).

As Miller indicates in The_Nen_England_Mindi_The
Serenreenrh_genrnry, Puritans were terribly anxious and
hungry for spiritual fullness. Without the touch of God’s
regenerating power life itself was a dead thing for them.
Regeneration was the giving by God of life itself, the
establishment of humanity in the same way that Adam was
brought to life by the power of God. While an anxious people,
Miller notes, Puritans did not View life tragically. They
faced the realities of existence with an admirable strength
and were ultimately hopeful and optimistic. That which doomed
Puritanism, at last, was the failure to distinguish between
mere morality and the truly regenerated heart. By the
beginning of the eighteenth century Puritans were beginning
to give a wide latitude to the possibilities of morality as a
kind of guide to regeneration. A growing thought emerged that

men were not to be left with the mistaken impression that

53
they might be morally irresponsible and still claim
justification by faith. The growth of this new concern with
the obedient, as opposed to the pious life, doomed the
spiritual power of Puritanism. This new pharisaism is one of
Miller’s central insights into Puritanism.

In connection with the larger concerns of American
history, the most influential belief of the American Puritans
was the notion of the covenant. Puritan ministers and their
committed followers came to America to establish the New
Israel of God. They were to be, as Winthrop put it, a city on
a hill, proclaiming to the world the power and might of
Jehovah lived out in the lives of a regenerated people.
Miller suggests that the covenant was actually a convenient
method of advocating the production of works by the covenant
people, to let them know that predestined or not, their own
activities were the determining factor in the successful
outcome of the covenant.

Miller (WW)
shows that in the 1670’s there emerged a special kind of
sermon, since that time designated the “jeremiad,” which
called on Puritans to persevere in their special relationship
with God. That relationship was threatened by various sins
and backslidings among the people, horrors which were
punished by God in the form of wars, storms, and disasters.
Miller records a catalogue of sins especially noted by
ministers attempting to warn the people, sins such as pride,

contention, disrespect, extravagance, heresy, swearing,

54
sleeping during sermons, Sabbath-breaking, family discipline,
anger, sexual sins, abuse of alcohol, lying, worldliness,
deadness of spirit, mercantile spirit, and cheating (34—37).
The difficulty with the covenant, and the jeremiads that
accompanied it, was the critical problem of external
morality. Puritans could fall into the trap of works as a
means to acceptance before God (104).

Closely related to the covenant theology and the
doctrine of predestination is the fact that Puritans were
committed millennialists. Ernest Lee Tuveson writes,
“Millennialism applies predestination to historical as well
as personal salvation” (51). The term millennium comes from
the Apocalypse of John, better known as the Book of
Revelation. John writes of a Spiritual battle that will be
followed by a thousand-year period of saintly reign, followed
by the destruction of Satan and sinners. There are two phases
of the righteous kingdom of God: (1) the kingdom of God in
the heart, advocated by the New Testament book of Mark, and
(2) the future kingdom of glory. The kingdom of glory was to
be brought on by the gradual development of the first kingdom
as human hearts were transformed by righteousness. Miller
comments in Frem_§eleny_re_2re1inee that at the beginning of
the eighteenth century men were “hailing the dawn of the
century as an era in which piety, and piety alone, would
accomplish the tendency of our spirits to reunion with God,
[and] would attain the goal to which the Reformation had

aspired but been unable to reach" (408). Millennialism, also

55
known as millenarianism (a point indicated by the
Eneyelenedia_efi_Religien but disputed by Tuveson), is
generally defined as
the belief that the end of this world is at hand
and that in its wake will appear a New World,
inexhaustibly fertile, harmonious, sanctified, and
just. The more exclusive the concern with the End
itself, the more such belief shades off toward the

catastrophic; the more exclusive the concern with
the New World, the nearer it approaches the

utopian. (“Millenarianism” Eneyelenedia_er_fieligien

521)
H. Richard Niebuhr comments that Puritans “could not be
utopians” since they assumed that the problem with society
was the individual and not his institutions (49). However,
James Holstun (WWW
SexenLeenLh:QenLur¥_England_and_Ameriea) argues that Puritans
here utopians since they advocated “new corporate entities
built according to a new organizational detail from the
bottom up, as opposed to the monarchical body politic unified
from the head down." Individuals are not ungovernable
monsters, but the “raw material of utopia" (93). The
Christian commonwealth could be achieved. The barren ground
could be made to bear fruit (106).

Bercovitch’s interpretation of the argument between
Roger Williams and John Cotton over typology can be used to
support the notion of Puritanism’s utopianism (in “Typology
in Puritan New England: The Williams-Cotton Controversy
Reassessed”). “[Cotton],” Bercovitch writes, “refuses to
abandon the literal parallel between the biblical chosen

people and the children of Israel in New England. Williams

56

maintains that the events and laws of Israel, having
found completion in the New Testament, were without exception
purely moral and ceremonial, and thus, in their entirety,
‘dead’ for all practical purposes” (173, 174). Cotton, as
opposed to Williams, thought that a parallel existed between
the civil state of ancient Israel and the experiment in New
England (174). Israel and New England were part of a
continuous historical development. Israel prefigured New
England, and New England prefigured the New Jerusalem (176).
Bercovitch points out the spiritual reach exhibited by
Puritans, “The New England theocrats attempted to join
seemingly incompatible doctrines: the national covenant, by
which a group of men enter voluntarily into a pact with God,
and the covenant of grace, by which God myteriously
determines to redeem certain individuals” (181).

Millennialism (or millenarianism) is divided into three

types. (1) Post-millennialism, the position of the Puritans
(except for the Mathers and Jonathan Edwards), holds that
Christ will come after the millennium. Post—millennialists
see little struggle between this world and the next and tend
to be reformers. (2) Premillennialism advocates a more
radical position in the sense of waiting for the advent of
Christ before the millennium. Premillennialists believe that
the next world will come about as a result of some awesome
cataclysm. (3) Amillennialism (a view advocated by St.
Augustine) suggests that the millennium merely symbolizes the

church age.

57

Millennialists are careful observers of time and events.
They are often confronted with questions about what their
proper reaction to events should be. They ask, Should we
abide and do nothing? Should we flee? Should we build another
society? Should we fight evil? What are the signs? Is there
time left? Where do we fit in the scheme? What is our role?
Rarely do millennialists merely abide. To the uninitiated the
mathematics of millennialists is strange. Numbers take on
symbolic meanings which often signal wholeness and
completeness.

One of the best sources on millennialism in America is
Tuveson’s book Winnie
Millennial_Rele. Tuveson explains that Protestants understood
the idea of the millennium very literally. They did not view
millennium through St. Augustine’s allegorical eyes. The City
of Man eenln be made into the City of God: “militant action
against the remaining wrongs had now a great promise of
success” (19).-Evils such as superstition and injustice,
which were inherent in the city of man, could be ameliorated
and overcome in the light of the Reformation itself. The
spiritual reawakening of the Reformation cast a wider and
wider net into all areas of human life. We might, Tuveson
says, misunderstand the source for such social concern,
thinking that the Enlightenment was at the source, “rather
than ... traditional religious doctrine." Even so
rationalistic and revolutionary an individual as John Adams

found “the source of the usurpation of human rights [in] the

58
perversion of true religion” (21). America was viewed as the
continuation of the Reformation and Americans as a holy and
millennial people (24-25). Tuveson defines “millennialist” as
a person who believes “that history, under divine guidance,
will bring about the triumph of Christian principles, and
that a holy utopia will come into being" (34).

What Melville wanted for America as indicated in his
novels and short stories would not have surprised his Puritan
ancestors. As Delbanco has demonstrated, Puritans were
fundamentally conservative and absolutist (and thus
primitivist as one critic has noted) and only sought for a
new sight of old light in contradistinction to someone like
the Anglican Richard Hooker who advocated undecidability and
relativism. According to Delbanco, Hooker thought men were
free to use reason to decide best what was right for any
historical period (30, 31). The Puritans, however, saw no
alternative to TRUTH and could never accept an indeterminate
universe (32). This is why Feidelson can say, “Puritan
rationalism, unlike the scientific world view that supplanted
it and to which it is in some ways cognate, predicated an
indivisible unity of thought, word, and thing” (92). The
American Puritans set for themselves a considerable goal: the
living actualization of their doctrinal truths. They felt
strongly, as Sargent Bush, Jr. suggests, that America was to
be the place “where scriptural prophecy and history would at

last be harmonized” (63). Melville sought to delineate the

59
pathway to the harmonious unity of ideals and practice within
society in a way consistent with American Puritanism.

The influence of Puritanism on American life is
incalculable. That it is central has only recently been
doubted. Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as other prominent
nineteenth-century Americans including Melville, advocated a
similar love of the primitive and original elements they saw
in Puritanism. According to Lawrence Buell in Nen_Englann
Literar¥_Cnltnre, the Puritan settlement of New England
represented for Emerson “the sense of the pristine.” The
whole notion of Emerson’s “original relation” demands not
becoming captured by the future, but having a clear sight of
the pious Puritan past (202, 203). Buell notes that in the
nineteenth century such advocacy of the Puritan past could be
found across the political spectrum, from Whig to Democrat
(199). Buell observes that Americans tended to view their
history as a progressive unfolding of an original Puritan
idea (201). Thus, “American values became to a large extent a
nationalized version of what was once the ideology of the
tribe that had become dominant in the New England region"
(196). Since the New England region steadily lost power and
influence between 1776 and 1860, New Englanders consoled
themselves with the notion that all Americans were symbolic
Puritans (207).

Some contemporary historians such as Jon Butler contend
that the critical religious influence in America was not

Puritanism but, as Butler writes,

60

the post-1680 Anglican renaissance, the renewal of
Christian denominational authority, the effects of
the African spiritual holocaust, the further
development of authority and power in the Christian
denominations after the Revolution, and the
development of highly volatile antebellum mixtures
of popular supernatural views.... (291)
This eclectic view diverges sharply from Miller’s position.
He argued for the central importance of Puritan spirituality
in American life. Miller stated in Narnreie_uarien that the
Puritans “left so deep an impress on the country, that the
Puritan definition of purpose has been in effect appropriated
by immigrants of other faiths, by those who in the nineteenth
century left lands of a culture utterly different from the
English.” Miller notes the special importance of Winthrop and
his sermon “A Modell of Christian Charity,” stating that
“Winthrop stands at the beginning of our eeneeieneneee”
(emphasis supplied) (6).

Larzer Ziff agrees. In Lirerary_Demeeraeyi_The
DeelnratinnnfinltnrnLlndepnndeanerina, he points
out that while Puritanism was essentially a social response
to a developing need to solve everyday problems found in
England (see preface x), he later posits the otherworldly
example of Jonathan Edwards, who he says, “was concerned with
attaching his readers not to an American reality, but to a
vital eternal reality. The meaning of history was to be felt
by them in their psychic makeup rather than in their

connection with social institutions” (304). Ziff notes that

Emerson continued in the path of Edwards, seeking a more

 

61
spiritual and miraculous world to replace the materialistic
one of his time. “Thus does Emerson modernize the Puritan
view, revivified before him by Edwards, and fit it to
romanticism as Edwards did to sentiment" (305). Ziff broadens
the Puritan influence on Hawthorne and Melville, suggesting
that both Hawthorne and Melville are investigators of the
psyche in the context of “the workings of a divine plan"
(305).

Ziff makes the Puritan connection even more explicit in
his discussion of Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, who
he says, represent two branches of the same Puritan river-—
Edwards the pious and Franklin the moral. Ziff writes,

The relationship between piety and morality had
shifted in the wake of the old charter’s death and
the advent of mercantile dominance. A man’s outward
behavior came in New England to have a communal
importance at least as great as his inward
spiritual condition .... Morality, in being
increasingly accepted as the equivalent of piety,
was converting the provincial from Puritan to
Yankee. (307)

The scholarly focus on the important comparisons and
contrasts between Edwards and Franklin (see Miller’s
discussion on the relationship between Edwards and Franklin)
points to the larger secularization of Puritanism into
general Americanism. Secularization reeks of inevitability in
Puritan millennialism. As Tuveson points out, notions of
redemption and the millennium in America became increasingly
preoccupied with this world (58). This development should not

be surprising since general human progress had been the

justification of the American experiment from the beginning.

62
America was to be a continuation of the Reformation and the
agent nonpareil for the spread of knowledge and manifold
avenues of development. Holstun supports this,
For the Puritan pre-Enlightenment of the earlier
seventeenth century, millennialism and
enlightenment are related to each other not as
sacred precursor and secular successor but as
coexistent signs of each other. Both promise the
submission of all places, times, and ways of
knowing to a single domination, historical plot,
and reason. (50)

The Eneyelepedia_ef_Religien contains the following
statement: “Latter-day social scientists have made
millenarianism doubly emblematic, for they describe it as the
sign of transition from a religious to a secular society”
(527). In its development, a millennial society will appear
to become secularized, when in actuality it is only becoming
more fully millennial--less pious perhaps, as in Franklin’s
case, yet as completely progressive as any seventeenth
century Puritan who foresaw the day when righteousness would
possess the American landscape. The impulse to “do good”
possessed Franklin as much as it did a Puritan such as Cotton
Mather. Kenneth Silverman, re-telling the story of Franklin,
points to Franklin’s detachment from Puritan religion and the
necessity for spiritual regeneration (108). However,
Franklin’s individual case does not negate the essential
Puritan element of his active life aimed at encouraging all
of the same philanthropic ideas similarly advocated by

Puritans--care for the poor, education, literacy, and anti-

enslavement. Silverman contends that the parallels between

63
Franklin and Mather are quite striking, even to the similar
downplaying of prayer and meditation in favor of doing good
(108).

But Franklin’s life of doing good was acted out in the
context of the nen_kind_ef_eeeier¥ he was so instrumental in
formulating. How is this different from a Puritan such as
Samuel Sewall, who Bush indicates expressed a belief in
America’s millennial destiny while pleading for “secular” and
humanitarian concerns such as the anti-slavery movement (66).
After all, as Miller says, American revolutionaries had a
difficult time doing away with the religious notion of
America’s special covenant (Narnreie_Narien 8). Sewall’s
example was all part of a general tendency at the end of the
seventeenth century toward a greater concern with the
spiritual health of the whole community, not just of the
individual (Bush 63). Miller considers this period to be one
of “a turning toward a way of life in which the secular state

has become central” (Erem_geleny_re_2reyinee 171).

Butler argues that the Revolution had a profound effect
upon millennial language and thought. Millennialism, he
observes, became less concerned with the apocalypse of
Christ, a negative image, and more concerned with positive
and hopeful millennial images. The Revolution seemed to have
bypassed the second coming and brought on the thousand—year
reign of Christ (217). Butler contends that revolutionary
optimism and evangelical millennialism were actually closely

combined in people’s minds because

64

millennialist rhetoric performed important
functions in revolutionary society. Above all,
Christian millennialism played a significant role
in rationalizing popular secular optimism, which it
transformed more often than it confronted. Rather
than make extensive critiques of secular optimism,
millennialist propagandists offered a vision of
optimistic progress that was made more
understandable by Christian teleology. (217)

Perhaps Alexis de Tocqueville was right. America had
created a new faith: “‘a democratic and republican religion’”
(quoted by Butler 289), a “religion” some said, only
sustainable in a distinctly Christian form (Butler 264; see
also 200). Winthrop’s original Arabella sermon still seems
remarkably relevant, as Miller has argued. Winthrop, Miller
says,

probably did not entirely realize how novel, how
radical, was his sermon; he assumed he was merely
theorizing about this projected community in
relation to the Calvinist divinity .... What in
reality he was telling the proto-Americans was that
they could not just blunder along like ordinary
people, seeking wealth and opportunity for their
children. (Netnreie_Nntinn 7).

Melville’s was essentially an American Puritan
imagination; therefore, it is important to establish the
particular religious context of the first half of the
nineteenth century. As Butler describes it, this period was a
time of intense religious ferment in America. Experimental
and/or utopian faiths of all kinds spread from the civilized
east to the pioneer west. At the same time, new spiritual
emphases brought about new groups such as Mormons,

spiritualists, Mesmerists, Swedenborgians, Millerites, and

Adventists; other more radical versions of already

65
established groups also emerged. This new condition of
religion in America would have been incomprehensible to those
living at the time of the revolution. Christianity, in
general, continued to thrive while in Europe it suffered.
Americans remained convinced that their leaders should be
Christians.

Growing religious pluralism, however, led some to seek
support for Christian orthodoxy. This movement was partially
influenced by the notion that Christian progress might be
stopped by indifference and pluralism. Members of unorthodox
groups might threaten the fundamental Christian identity of
America. Established Christian institutions sought power and
authority in a way comparable to the church of the Middle
Ages. These institutions were successful in creating a
vigorous and disciplined American church (Butler 282—288).

The most startling religious phenomena of the period was
the single great revival which ebbed and flowed for the first
60 years of the nineteenth century. As Miller tells the story
inWmnnithW
(War, the credo of the period could be summarized as the
powerful belief in the promotion of religious excitement
(this notion was expressed in 1835 by the exemplar of
revivalism, the evangelist Charles Finney). Religious
excitement was put to the task of rescuing America from the
abyss of atheism into which she nearly fell after the
American Revolution. The culprit was the French Revolution,

which had, in the words of one minister of the time, “‘burst

66
forth like a volcano and threatened to sweep the United
States into its fiery stream’” (4).

The years 1790 to 1815 in America witnessed a general
condemnation of the French Revolution, an attempt to dissuade
the youth from the influence of such men as Paine and
Voltaire. But the effect of the threat from Europe seemed
only to increase American self—examination and a new focus on
evils such as idolatry, covetousness, love of the world,
Sabbath-breaking, disobedience, and drunkenness (as the
Methodists understood American evils in 1795). It was this
emphasis on America and how she should be reformed which
ultimately fueled the revivalism which began about 1800.

The Revival (always capitalized by Miller) began in the
Appalachian mountains (ministers in New England were fearful
of possible condemnations concerning revivals similar to
those of Charles Chauncy in the last century). Ministers,
mostly Presbyterian, invented the great religious phenomena,
the campmeeting, thereby lighting a match which started a
firestorm of emotion (Miller calls it an “orgy,” see 7).
Miller indicates we can understand neither Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman, nor Melville without taking into account the spirit
of revival sparked in 1800. Revival was seen as the means of
saving America as she swept westward into the wild unknown.
But it spread backward too, especially into the state of New
York until at least 1850 (Melville was born and raised in New

York during this time).

67

The greatest preacher of the period was Charles Finney,
a lawyer turned evangelist. His book Leernree_en_Reyiyale_er
Religien in 1835 captured the meaning of what was happening
to America. As he and others expressed it, revival was meant
to take the already churched and electrify them with
spiritual power. But the emphasis was on community rather
than on individual spirituality (in contrast to the Great
Awakening). The nation was to grow and progress into a
regenerated bloc of individuals.

Miller describes campmeeting-goers as being much more
unsettled in the literal sense. Ministers did not actually go
to the people in that they visited the churches; instead,
people came en masse to the campmeeting with no clear sense
of denominationalism or church identity. Thus, these
scattered individuals were creating a new entity, a new
nationalism. One minister in 1851 wrote that “‘the grace of
God ... can save us from the fate of former republics, and
make us a blessing to all nations’” (13). The strictly
Puritan language used by this minister was reflected in the
criticism of the revival by another minister in 1844. This
minister noted that the revival was essentially “‘Puritan and
Methodistic’” and relied on “‘justification by feeling rather
than by faith’” (16).

Finney justified the emphasis on feeling with language
used by literary romantics, including Melville, who said,
“‘To the dogs with the Head’" (quoted in Miller 26). The head

could grasp truths and yet not be affected by them. Thus, for

 

68
Finney the central battleground was the heart. Critics
countered that only intellectual propositions could be
unifying since men might agree together concerning them.
Finney was not, however, a mere ranter or ignoramus. He
advocated the simple truths expressed in the plain style by
the educated preacher. The new hermeneutic was common sense.
By this approach he thought that he was preserving the
consciousness, not destroying it. He felt that within a man
was the ability to help himself, to do and to act. Finney was
thoroughly American.

What startled Europeans about the revival was the fact
that within the multiplicities of denominations could emerge,
in the words of the nineteenth—century religious historian
Philip Schaff, “‘something wholly new’” (40). A single
society had been created in the midst of what appeared to be
only disorder. The principle of voluntary adherence to
religion created a more pure church free of coercion. Heresy
had been free to reign, but it did not! In freedom the
churches prospered; Truth was winning the day. And this could
do nothing but strengthen the spirit of national identity.
Foreign visitors noted that the spirit of revival had placed
all on a “‘common footing’” (45).

Miller contends that the revival generated “a
homogeneous America”, and that “the Revival ushered the
country into modernity.” Thus, the revivalists were right in
their assertion in the middle of the century that “‘More is

now being done to elevate the intellectual, social, and moral

69
condition of our race, than at any period since the Saviour
was born’” (48). The country was enlightened not by the
Enlightenment, but by the gospel beacon. By 1848 men were
saying that recent advances in technology were part of the
new spirit in the land. Both technology and the revival
signaled that Christianity was about to triumph in the world.
Not far behind this rhetoric was the language of
millennialism. It became a well—known View that America was
to be a missionary nation in both a spiritual and political
sense. Men, learned or not, came to believe that the purposes
of God were coming to a central point of completeness in
America. All the old kingdoms since Babylon had perished, but
America, because of her voluntary Christianity, would create
the special spirit of communion necessary for the fulfillment
of Christianity and thus American nationhood.

James Turner, in “Christianity Confused, 1840—1870,”
discusses the development of voices of unbelief in American
religious history at the end of the period of revival
addressed by Miller. The revivalists, Turner notes, had by
1840 made sure that America was a Christian nation. However,
a persistent minority entertained doubts as to the
authenticity of the faith. Old questions returned with
greater power. Turner says that “a process of rethinking
began. Out of it came eventually a new Christianity" (142).

Turner details that rethinking. First was the problem of
the inhumane God. Does God really hold the yet unborn

responsible for original sin? Are the heathen really destined

70
for eternal damnation for having not been reached by
missionaries? Related to the inhumanity of God was the notion
of eternal hell fire. That doctrine no longer fit so neatly
into the modern mind. Another problem was the Bible, a source
of authority which was no longer under the tight control of
the church. Individuals were allowed to interpret its meaning
within the bounds of literalism and common sense. The literal
and commonsensical approach left the Bible open to attack by
scientists and scholars on the basis of factual correctness.
Higher criticism especially brought up doubts concerning the
authorship and accuracy of the Bible, as well as a direct
attack upon the historicity of Jesus himself. In an effort to
defend Biblical texts, some critics came to view it
mythopoetically and symbolically. This interpretation led to
even muddier questions of authority.

Scholarship opened up other avenues of wisdom beside the
Bible’s, mainly from the Orient. Emerson is the best example
of a writer combining Biblical and Oriental thought. The
historical method emphasized development and change in every
area of study from theology to science. Anthropology and
comparative religion emerged as important disciplines by the
middle of the century. Evolutionism looked for primitive
elements for every aspect of modern life. Christian ritual
was shown to be rooted in savage precursors, turning
traditions like the Eucharist into primitive ceremonies in
which worshippers ate their god. For many intellectuals,

truth no longer seemed unique and everlasting but only

71
tentative and relative. The claim to absolute truth made by
Christianity was threatened. Every religion seemed only to
approach, as Emerson put it, some still undiscovered Truth.
Many Christians were only left with a tepid faith in
Christianity as a good philanthropic organization but with
weak claims to specialness.

These new developments did provide some credence to the
spirit of progress endemic to the age, however. For this,
Christians could only blame themselves and their
millennialism, which itself bound together progress and the
Christian mission. But within such notions of progress lurked
another notion--that Christianity would itself merely be a
stepping stone to some higher level. The basic rituals were
under attack, a condition making it more difficult to believe
in the larger structure of faith. Some clung to a theism
without the formal church institution, a belief which
immunized them against atheism. Transcendentalism was the
most powerful bridge out of formal Christianity and allowed
one to preserve spirituality, values, and hope. For
Transcendentalists God was a nebulous entity and often could
not be distinguished from Nature. Spiritualism provided
another avenue to the unseen by trying to create an aura of
scientific validity for faith.

Belief seemed based, after all, on mere authority. What
could be “known” became narrowed and select. The options for
believers became compressed because the pursuit of truth

split into the secular and the sacred. The sacred seemed so

72
intangible and disputable. As a result, language itself
became compartmentalized as it had never been before into the
language of science and precision, and the vaguer and more
fluid language of the spirit. “Reality” became the province
of science. The very methods developed to investigate the
sacred issues had destroyed the thing sought. Some sought
preservation in heart religion, intuitive faith, or
subjectivity as the reality of religion.

One American theologian of the period, Horace Bushnell,
absorbed all of this and sought to defend Christianity. He
contended that since language itself was metaphorical,
religious issues were by definition more difficult to
investigate than scientific ones. Individuals could never
come to ideas as precise about God as the scientist could
about astronomy. Some in the church community accepted ideas
like Bushnell's (Henry Ward Beecher, for example). Bushnell’s
ideas seemed to meld with notions of heart religion and
safely placed Christianity into an area of knowledge apart
from science. Many of the orthodox, however, saw that
Bushnell was only pointing the way out of Christianity and
was saying something not much different than Buddhism or
Transcendentalism. A tenet of Christianity had always been
that science and religion were in agreement, that there was
no conflict. For those leaning to scientism and materialism,
Bushnell only confirmed their belief that Christianity really
wasn't worth staying with. Agnosticism was becoming an

acceptable alternative, very nearly an intellectual

73
necessity. The questions continued to point, not to a
different faith but, in Turner’s words, “toward a blanker
horizon” (141—166).

Melville was born into the American world described by
Turner--a culture with aging Puritan assumptions about itself
now enlivened with revival, a culture jolted by new science
and new philosophy, but also a country hungry for answers to
the problem of the blank horizon. Melville’s was primarily a
Puritan/Protestant imagination butting against the
intellectual dilemmas of his age. Reeve writes that Melville
“believed in absolute truth” (75). He was not a subversive
attempting to undermine his generation’s belief system.
Instead, he was a searcher for workable propositions and
solutions to a Puritan problem—-how America could become the
holy instrument of God’s plan for her in the midst of
agnosticism and loss of faith. Melville’s literary
productions detail the search for the proper pathway.

Many Melville critics accept the notion that Melville
was a rejecter of orthodox belief. (An early extreme example
is Melxilleie_anrrel_Eith_§nd in which Lawrence Roger
Thompson basically calls Melville a hypocritical heretic. See
6). Herbert in Mehy;Qiek_and_eal1iniem indicates that
Melville studied the tenets of both Unitarianism and
orthodoxy (as well as other philosophies) but failed to
accept any of their views of reality. He then set out in his
works (particularly Mehy_Diek) on a quest for “‘vital

truth.’" Thus his works are dominated by the same questing

74
characters, all pursuing a coherent truth. But Herbert
indicates that Melville’s quest after truth was not founded
on agnosticism but was primarily a religious one in the sense
that he was searching for a religiene answer, not an agnostic
or atheistic one. Readers of Melville often seem to focus on
Melville’s themes of frustration and unmeaning, but as
Herbert writes, “the possibility of final unmeaning ... is
native to religious thought” (3-6).

Melville was attempting to make sense of his American
Puritan world, not overthrow it. As Harold Bloom has said,
British writers leave their fathers, while Americans complete
them (William Shurr 12). Melville was definitely not like
deist Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that Calvin’s god of the
five points was a demon or a malignant spirit. Instead, as
Herbert indicates,

Melville did not challenge the theocentric
presuppositions of his time from a standpoint in
symbolist theory, or psychoanalytic theory, or
naturalism, or phenomenology, or existentialism.
The aesthetic structures of Meh¥;Diek evoke the
religious crisis that gave birth to such

contemporary doctrines because Melville challenged
the theocentric scheme by working within its own

terms. (Mnbxznink_nnd_Cnlriniem 9)
Melville was much closer to Thoreau, who Shurr says,
attempted “to purge and purify ... trying to pull away from
the calvinist force-field set up by his culture" (13). While
theologians and philosophers in Europe and America “yielded
to secular frames of reference ... Melville is generally

recognized ... as a prophet of this spiritual revolution [the

historic shift in perspective]" (Herbert Mehy;Diek_and

75
Calyiniem 9). Thus, Lewis is correct when he observes that
the work of Melville (and others of the American literary
renaissance) represents an “off-beat kind of traditionalism”
(8).

That new spiritual perspective, and not the subversion
of Puritanism, was Melville’s goal. He was still a Yankee
individualist concerned with personal salvation. D. H.
Lawrence wrote that “Melville hated the world: was born
hating it. But he was looking for heaven" (142). He did not
wish to overthrow the world of Calvin’s God, but to learn to
live sanely and completely within it, as William Ellery
Sedgwick argues in HeranMelxillnrJneJragedLnLMind.
Melville, Sedgwick writes, sought an inward vision “not so
much of life as of what it is to be alive, and alive as a
complete human being and not a mere two-thirds or three-
quarters of one” (15). As any good Puritan ancestor would
have, Melville “was forever precipitating himself against the
ultimate truth of creation” (9). One of the primary questions
with which Melville was concerned was, “How are we as human
beings to accommodate ourselves to the external creation in
which we find ourselves?” (3). Not having answers meant only
chaos, a condition feared as well by Puritans.

This concern expressed by Sedgwick for the human element
agrees with James Duban’s assessment in Melyilleie_Majer
EinLiQni_EQliLiQSi_IhteQg¥i_nndilmnginntien. Duban writes
that Melville attacked the cultural assumptions of America

(“messianic nationalism, covenant psychology, racial

76

superiority, human perfectibility”) in strictly Calvinistic
terms in that he, like any believer in Original Sin, doubted
the purity of human motivations (257). Puritan doctrine was
not the problem, human beings were the problem. Herbert
writes, “The theocentric system gave him a fundamental idiom
in which to comprehend himself and his world; problems of
doctrine were for him continuous with problems of experience”
(15). The assumption for Melville was that Puritanism merely
described the world as it really was. Thus, modernists cannot
claim Melville as one of their own, since, as Harold Beaver
writes, “he fits uncomfortably into the history of modernism”
and was an exemplar of “the Calvinist insistence on the
‘Great Art of Telling the Truth'" (128). In fact, William B.
Dillingham makes an interesting argument by comparing
Melville’s sense of freedom with John Calvin’s idea of true
liberty for the Christian, a liberty which can be summarized
as (1) freedom of law, (2) an overwhelming focus on nothing
but love for God, and (3) freedom from externals. “Knowingly
or not,” Dillingham observes, “Melville was using a
Calvinistic framework to arrive at his own unique final
vision” (138). (I differ with Dillingham in that he qualifies
this last statement by saying that Melville’s vision “is
anything but Calvinistic,” a qualification itself qualified
one page later.) Melville’s vision is within the Calvinistic
tradition.

For a “heretic” and “subversive" attacking theism and

faith, Melville made a profound and large use of the Bible.

77
As Nathalia Wright has shown in Melyilleie_uee_er_rhe_Bihle,
he was a hardworking student of the Bible and reader of major
Biblical scholars. The Bible was overwhelmingly important to
Melville’s voice and style. He never gave up using it (in
fact, Biblical allusions increased as his career progressed).
Neither Emerson (a minister) nor Hawthorne (an excellent
student of Puritanism) approach Melville’s extensive use of
Biblical literature. His mind “seems to have been saturated
with its stories, its ideas, its language” (7). Wright
calculates that there are approximately 1400 allusions to the
Bible in the complete works of Melville (8). The more
profound the work, the greater the amount of Biblical
allusion (9). The person of Christ throughout the collected
works always appears as the ideal person worthy of worship
and imitation. Wright indicates that Melville seemed to use
Biblical imagery and symbolism to capture that “‘ungraspable
phantom of life’” he was seeking in his life’s quest (18).
Levin is right when he comments on the connection between
John Bunyan and Herman Melville (Dillingham makes the same
connection 142, 143). Levin says that “American fiction
sprang from religious allegory” (20). Melville was on a

pilgrimage to his celestial home (19).

Chapter 4

The Quest for the Internal

Herman Melville’s first six novels are literary romances
describing sea voyages. The first three can be seen to
comprise a single unit by virtue of a number of similar
characteristics, (1) all are set in the islands of the South
Seas, (2) little emphasis is given to the technical prowess
of sailors or sailing ships (begun in Reehnrn), (3) all three
emphasize the theme of searching, and (4) Melville himself
appears to have seen them as a unit. In the preface to Mardi
he complained,

Not long ago, having published two narratives of
voyages in the Pacific, which, in many quarters,
were received with incredulity, the thought
occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of
Polynesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to
see whether, the fiction might not, possibly, be
received for a verity: in some degree the reverse
of my previous experience. This thought was the
germ of others, which have resulted in Mardi. (661)

Though incredulous about the factual veracity of certain
events, readers have tended to perceive the first two novels
as straightforward adventure stories with few symbolic
elements. This can be substantiated by Melville’s publishing
history, which began with strength in the popular and
exciting adventure story lines and ended in oblivion in the

obscure and dark Pierre, ostensibly because of Melville’s

increasing concern with symbol and his abandonment of the

78

 

79
formula story. An example of such criticism can be found in
Joel Porte’s comments in The_Remanee_in_Amerieai_firndiee_in
WW. Porte argues
that Melville fought his readers’ increasing “incomprehension
with incomprehensibility.” Porte accepts the notion of
increasing obscurity in Melville and states that romance
itself is to blame, a genre which, he writes, “gravitates
inevitably toward mystery, inexorably turning into the kind
of literature that illuminates meanings” (155). The first
three novels are critically important because they set the
stage for understanding Melville’s later works, especially
Mehy;Diek. They pose a number of essentially Puritan
questions and dilemmas in the form of a searching voyage.
Thus, all of Melville’s works can be read as symbolistic
voyages of “becoming” (see Feidelson where he refers this
notion to Walt Whitman 27).

The Melville canon is a unified collection consistent in
purpose from the start and not an author’s failed search for
the right publishing formula. Schirmeister writes of
Melville’s creation of an internalized “romance world ... in
which the values of a transcendent self, free of history and
free of culture, might obtain” (134). The romance world for
Melville begins with Tynee and not with Marni or the
frequently mulled-over.Mehy;Qiek, and applies with equal
strength to Qmee or Billy_Bndd.

Tynee is the first person account of two young sailors,

Tom and Toby, who desert the whaler Dally at Nukuheva hoping

80
for better treatment aboard a different ship. With little
food, they seek aid from an island people, only to discover
that the tribe are the dreaded cannibals, the Typee. Among
the Typee they enjoy good treatment but have a vague sense of
danger because they are virtual prisoners. One native is
Kory-Kory, a kind of companion/guard to Tom. A beautiful
maiden named Fayaway becomes close to him also. Eventually
Toby escapes the island, leaving Tom alone among the
cannibals. During his time among the Typees, Tom is able to
observe their habits of life. They do little work, and enjoy
smoking, laughing, and talking. Their social structure seems
to work very well since there is never discord among them.
Religious piety is weak, although tattooing is held in high
regard as a kind of spiritual observance. At one time a
battle takes place with another tribe, and Tom is kept away
from the celebration afterward. He suspects cannibalism.
Marnoo is a taboo tribesman enabled to travel freely among
all the island’s tribes. He informs a ship’s captain of Tom’s
plight, and when a small boat approaches the shore, Tom is
able to escape.

From the beginning of Typee to the end can be seen an
intense struggle for comprehension. Tom’s preconceptions of
the island are forcibly wracked by the power and the mystery
of contradiction and contrary evidence, and he must make
constant mental adjustment (his confusion over which tribe to
fear, Typee or Happar, is an example cited by Spengemann

181). As his ship heads for the Marquesas after six months

81
whaling, he yearns for the definiteness of the shore, even if
that shore is inhabited by “visions of outlandish things” and
other heathen activities (13). From the first a great rift
exists between the fine Christian intentions of the local
missionaries and the savage realities on the island.
Christians despair of moving the inhabitants away from
heathenism and have merely bent them to the trappings of
civilization and Christianity. The king of Nukuheva, Mowanna,
is seen dressed in a French officer’s uniform, complete with
“gold lace and embroidery.” He has but one blemish—-“A broad
patch of tatooing stretched completely across his face” (16).
The trappings have in reality left Mowanna’s savageness
untouched.

Nukuheva is a veritable Eden, and suffers, ironically,
only to the extent that Europeans have brought corruption
(21). But what confuses Tom is that the blessings of beauty
and health accompany moral laziness among the savages. The
women especially exhibit “an abandoned voluptuousness” (25).
Even more confusing is the fact that advanced and refined
Western nations commit the most hideous atrocities against
the local inhabitants. “A high degree of refinement, however,
does not seem to subdue [European] wicked propensities” (27).
Tom observes that the spirit in the hearts of Christian
soldiers who could commit atrocities is clear to the savages.
Such a spirit raises the question, who is the savage? (37)

To Tom’s mind civilization seems to have brought only

the appearance of progress to Europeans and left the

82
undeveloped savage the happier of the two (40, 41). The Typee
man expends great effort in producing a fire, an operation
accomplished with a match in civilized society. However, the
Typee father can raise a family with less energy than it
takes to light a fire. He only has to pluck fruit from a
tree; the civilized father has to struggle to keep his
children from starving (136). The white man’s “progress”
creates misery in the islands. For every virtue he brings, he L

adds “a hundred evils in reserve” (149). War is among the

WM

worst evils, making not the cannibal but the civilized white r

 

man “the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth"
(150).

However, there is an enigma in the condition of the
Typees. They are a “passionate” and “wayward” people (171).
Ignorance is their happiness. Their joy is light and simple
because their minds are “unoccupied by matters of graver
moment.” Mere trifles make them happy while the white man
draws pleasures “from more elevated but rarer sources” (172).

Every day is like another. Life is “uniform and
undiversified” (178). The natives give much of their strength
to sleeping (182). Intellectual investigation is non-
existent. They give superstitious and ignorant answers for
mysteries in their lives (184). Considering their ancestor’s
mechanical skills, these natives are probably a degenerate
offspring from some superior race before them (186). In their
religious practice they maintain “an unbounded liberty of

conscience,” not out of principle, but from an uncaring

83
attitude toward their stone idols, which they treat with
disdain as a sort of amusement (202, 205). They know nothing
spiritual, but seem to value pleasure alone. Faith is a hum-
bug, a trick played by priests (208). As such, their religion
is in a state of decay (211, 212).

Tom begins to make sense of his many observations. He
contends that it is better “to remain the happy and innocent
heathens and barbarians that they now are, than ... to enjoy
the mere name of Christians without experiencing any of the
vital operations of true religion, whilst, at the same time,
they are made the victims of the worst vices and evils of
civilized life” (215). Their present existence is better than
civilization because “the penalty of the Fall presses very
lightly upon the valley of Typee” (229, 230). They possess
physical beauty exceeding the white man by far (213, 214).
There is an equality, simplicity, humility, and freedom from
restraint among them. If deference is required, it “was
willingly and cheerfully yielded” (219). Sustenance comes
easily without work (230).

Tom argues that the great evil is the conversion of the
natives into “neminal Christians” (230). Then, falsely, it is
declared that “Truth" has triumphed in the land, when in
actuality, the natives have given up their way of life, and
their island is stripped of its value (231). Tom is careful
to add “that against the cause of missions in the abstract no
Christian can possibly be opposed: it is in truth a just and

holy cause” (233). Christianity is still the goal (234). But

 

84
the natives have something to teach the white man about law
and justice. With no established law these savages have been
able to maintain a good social order. How did they accomplish
this? Tom says, “It must have been by an inherent principle
of honesty and charity towards each other. They seemed to be
governed by that sort of tacit common—sense law which, say
what they will of the inborn lawlessness of the human race,
has its precepts graven on every breast” (235). The white man
seems only able to produce “blue laws” regulating people’s
moral behavior, a practice inviting hypocrisy (295).

Typee is entirely Puritan/Protestant. Readers at the
time of publication clearly missed the point of the book when
they either condemned its “‘barbarism’” (Grenberg 7) or
envied Tom’s enjoying the pleasures of watching naked Eves
romp among the palm trees. The work argues for the power of
heart religion over that of nominal Christianity and speaks
in the voice of the Puritan jeremiad by its pointed warnings
of spiritual decay in the western world. The criticisms of
the failures of Christianity are no more anti—church than the
original jeremiads of the 1670’s. Melville is simply calling
for a completed, millennial faith.

Bell notes the contrast between primitive and arbitrary
virtue in Typee (200). Dillingham writes that in Typee
“reality is not static but dynamic and thus ultimately
unknowable, ‘indefinite as God’” (4). He observes that Tom

“distrusts the dogmas and systems he sees mankind

 

85
worshipping,” and that he prefers the continued searching on
the Open sea for the “‘howling infinite’” (30).

Lawrence, in Stndiee_in_QlneeiniAmerinnn_Liternture,
sees the reason Tom doesn't wish to stay in Paradise with the
beautiful Fayaway. It is because no Americans can go back.
They want “to fight. But with the weapons of the spirit, not
the flesh.... The mills of God were grinding inside him....
Why? Heaven knows. But we've got to grind down our old forms,
our old selves, grind them very very small, to nothingness.”
Purgatory for Melville [Tom] was staying where he was (147).
“But we can't go back. Whatever else the South Sea Islander
is, he is centuries and centuries behind us in the life-
struggle, the consciousness-struggle, the struggle of the
soul into fullness” (145). Lewis agrees. He writes that after
his experience with the islanders, Melville realized “that
Polynesian life never advanced into the realm of spirit.”
“Life, in the Typee valley, was restricted to the visible
spheres of love; it was Melville’s restless ambition to
penetrate to the invisible spheres” (136).

Miller sees Tom’s experience as “a flight to the
primitive” which proves “the superiority of the natural
Reason over the civilized Understanding" (Narnreie_flarien
192). Miller’s position fails to explain why the islander’s
behavior is often criticized and undermined. Spengemann is
correct when he contends that Melville “does not explicitly
advise the reader to abandon Europe for the South Seas.” Were

Melville to do this, then Tom’s leaving the island “would

 

86

seem inexplicably perverse” (179, 180). Tom leaves the island
because he has not found what he is looking for. As Ziff
explains in Enriraniem_in_Ameriea, “Melville, finally, opts
for history and for language, knowing full well the pain he
must resume .... His historical self is returning. And so he
flees into the sea" (10).

Grenberg perceives the millennial tone in Typee.
Although he does not apply the term per se, Grenberg notes I
that Typee does not represent a set “of polarized and

polarizing values” (8). Instead, he writes, “Melville sets

 

himself the task of wedding the two [sets of values] and
putting them to rest in harmonious felicity" (9). And later,
“we begin to suspect that Tommo’s allegiance lies with
neither native.nor with civilized culture, but with some
ideal realm not yet seen by land or sea" (11). Grenberg calls
this ideal realm a place where there might be “some ideal
fusion of possibilities” (11). Instead of seeing Melville’s
presentation of the problem of multiple truths as an
indication of Melville’s moral relativism (see Reynolds
140), Grenberg argues that in “Typee ... Melville depicts the
self’s determined, even desperate, efforts to square this
multiplicity with [the] drive to unity” (13). “Tommo demands
the best of possible worlds; he requires an ideal, composite
reality that will include all the good and exclude all the
bad features of his real experience" (14).

All of the elements in Typee advocating heart religion,

internalized faith, knowledge, history, and the possibility

87

of the creation of an millennial ideal here and now are
originally Puritan notions and are neither subversive nor out
of character with the context of the Second Great Awakening.

Qmee is a sequel to Typee. The theme of searching is
especially pronounced. The title of the work means a
“wanderer” or “rover” in the native language. The title
refers to one who wanders from island to island; as such,

Omen describes literally the events of the novel, and serves f

am

as an excellent forerunner for Marni, which greatly develops

the theme of the search into an allegorical search of the F

 

entire world.

Saved by a whaling ship from Nukuheva, Tom joins up as a
deckhand. The Julia is a bad ship and the conditions are
terrible. Finally, with the captain himself ill, the ship
pulls into Tahiti. The crew, however, is not allowed to leave
the ship. They mutiny and are imprisoned on a French frigate.
When the men refuse to return to their ship, they are taken
into custody and placed in a native house on Tahiti. The
native jailor, Captain Bob, is kind to them and their
captivity is easy. Eventually, the Jnlia sails with a new
crew, leaving the mutineers to fend for themselves on Tahiti.
Soon, Tom and his friend Doctor Long Ghost are hired as
laborers on a neighboring island called Imeeo. The work was
too hard for the two lazy sailors, so they left for Tamai, an
inland village. Within a day or so the natives chase them off
for no reason so far as they can tell. Next, the two seek to

meet the queen of Tahiti, so they travel to the village of

88
Partoowye. There they hear of another whaling ship. After
failing to meet the queen, the two attempt to join the
whaling ship. Doctor Long Ghost is turned down, but Tom ships
out without him, hoping to make it home eventually.

Qmee fully develops a theme begun in Typee: the white
missionary’s detrimental effect on native peoples, an effect
identified as “genocidal” by recent critics (see Robert
Milder 431). The novel can be understood as a “mere extension
of Typee” (Grenberg 16). However, as Grenberg points out, the

novel offers a much more profound discussion about how humans

 

learn, as well as “the correlative problem of distinguishing
between appearance and reality, truth and falsehood” (17).
Grenberg’s idea is important since Melville’s critique
of white missionaries is carefully focused in a way
consistent with Melville’s Puritan heritage. Melville makes
it clear that he means “no harm to the missionaries nor their
cause” (510). He adds that “the morality of the islanders is,
upon the whole, improved by the presence of the missionaries”
(511). Like English Puritans during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, Melville opposes a system not on its
moral claims, but rather on its experiential failures. Omen
is not a book advocating a return to romantic primitivism of
the native sort, but a jeremiad calling for a fulfillment of
Christian potential. Behind the sometimes-debilitating
activities of the white missionary is the possibility of a
true missionary spirit which might assist the developing

islanders. Grenberg is correct that the issue is appearance

89
and reality, since Melville must bludgeon the missionary
while not seeming to destroy Christian idealism (Milder
agrees that the book is an appeal to Christian idealism,
albeit an ineffectual one 431).

According to Grenberg Qmen is the beginning of an
attempt to define total human potentiality since neither of
the alternatives seems to be achieving that potentiality.
Grenberg writes that “the cultural interaction at Tahiti I
provides Melville a synecdoche of the human capacity to give .

full vent to total potentiality” and, “At Tahiti it is 1

 

impossible for Tom to be a savage, and he finds it equally
impossible to identify totally with the civilization that
brings disease, corruption, and death to nature and nature’s
children” (18). It is this quest for human completeness which
points in the direction of what Melville asks for in America.
The American millennium will arrive when the American
spiritual potential is reached.

For now, however, Americans exhibit bigotry and hatred
for an innocent people largely unknown to them. Tom observes,
“Indeed, it is almost incredible, the light in which many
sailors regard these naked heathens. They hardly consider
them human. But it is a curious fact, that the more ignorant
and degraded men are, the more contemptuously they look upon
those whom they deem their inferiors” (351). While the
Polynesian natives may be said to have found their place in
nature, the American sailors are caught in “the immense blank

of the Western Pacific” (360). The Julia and her crew are

90
swept westward, not seemingly by virtue of expertise, but
from a pure reliance on nature’s force. In fact, her
navigator Jermin is a drunkard. Sailing from the Marquesas
“he went staggering about deck, instrument to eye, looking
all over for the sun-—a phenomenon which any sober observer
might have seen right overhead” (389).

In Tahiti Tom comes in contact with the missionaries.
The Protestant missionaries took no notice of the sailors
except to leave them a bundle of tracts. By contrast, the
French priests made a courtesy call. But the priests have
their problems too, looking “sanctimonious enough abroad” but
living dissolute lives of drunkenness and immorality with
their “trim little native handmaidens” (469, 470). One of the
spiritual audiences of the two groups of missionaries, the
sailors, were a sorry lot with weak ties to their own faith.
Tom and others attend mass in order to gain alcohol from the
priests.

The other audience of the missionaries, the native
peoples, find themselves in a bit of confusion in attempting
to live out European faith. Melville illustrates this by the
problem of the round world. When the missionaries first
arrived in the South Seas by ship, they had gained a day
without realizing it. Therefore, the worship day originally
brought to the island was a day earlier from what later
missionaries knew it to be. This discrepancy became a point
of contention between sailors and islanders. All efforts to

solve or explain the dilemma of the time change were

 

91
fruitless. Each group doggedly held to its position without
really understanding why the differences existed (490). When
Melville’s descriptions of the moral weaknesses of sailors
and natives are compared, it is clear that he intends to make
the question of Sabbath observance an illustration of the
nature of the conversion of both groups. Both primitive
islander and civilized sailor have become attached to a mere
surface proscription which has done nothing for their inner
moral condition.

Spiritual differentiation between missionary and native
is not stressed. The prospect of inner change is not
presented. Instead, external habits, social proprieties, and
western rules are pressed on the people without their
consent. Missionaries make a spectacle of the externals by
making conspicuous promenades in all their finery, causing
the Tahitians to “slink into their huts” (492). Sailors fare
no better in the presence of missionaries. One evening Tom
shows himself friendly by greeting a family sitting on their
veranda. The response is revealing: “Hysterics and hartshorn!
who would have thought it? The young lady screamed, and the
old one came near fainting. As for myself, I retreated, in
double quick time” (493). Dividing lines are formed on the
basis of class difference rather than inner qualities. In one
sermon Tom hears, the missionary warns native girls not to
consort with sailors because, as Tom hears it told in
translation, “‘Where they come from, no good people talk to

‘em--just like-dogs’" (499).

 

 

92

Missionaries inculcate prejudice rather than true
Christian conviction. Transferring authentic Christianity
seems the unachievable goal of the missionary. Tom observes
that “In fact, there is, perhaps, no race upon earth, less
disposed, by nature, to the monitions of Christianity, than
the people of the South Sea.” He tells of the Sandwich Island
revival of 1836 which resulted in “no sober moral convictions
[and] an almost instantaneous relapse into every kind of
licentiousness” (500). The native problem is “an aversion to
the least restraint,” a quality that is one of “the greatest
possible hinderances to the strict moralities of
Christianity." Such behavior leads to a love of hypocrisy
(501).

The observed native love-of—the—flesh is the reason
their experience with Christianity is so radically different
from the American experience and so clearly related to the
Old World of Europe. Tom notes that hypocrisy is “nourished
in Tahiti, by a zealous, and in many cases, a coercive
superintendence over [native] spiritual well-being" (504).
“Whippers-in of the congregation” are used to fill the
churches. Other offensive behavior is also controlled
ecclesiastically (505). Melville notes that Christianity was
begun by force in Tahiti (632). In America during the early
18003 Christianity is realizing unprecedented growth,
revival, and prosperity in the presence of religious freedom.
Melville’s descriptions of missionaries in Qmee are

descriptions of English and French representatives, not

...—Fr
I]

j‘“

 

 

 

93
American. Melville is creating a distinction between what is
occurring in America and the experience of the native peoples
of the South Seas. The behavior and methods of the European
missionaries is not the way to the American millennium. The
millennium will not be based upon coercion, that favorite
principle of the Old World.

The weakness of the missionaries is that they manage to
pass on European behavior patterns while condemning innocent
island behavior. A source quoted by Melville in Qmee notes
that such religion “‘forbids every innocent pleasure, and
cramps or annihilates every mental power’” and merely
encourages “‘ignorance, hypocrisy, and a hatred of all other
modes of faith, which was once foreign to the open and
benevolent character of the Tahitian’” (512). The success of
the missionary effort is measured not “by the number of
heathens who have actually been made to understand and
practice ... the precepts of Christianity" but by “the number
of those [who] ... have in any way been induced to abandon
idolatry and conform to certain outward Observances” (513).

In the islands there is no community between the heathen
and the Christian (“the two races are kept as far as possible
from associating” and “every effort is made to prevent [young
whites] from acquiring the native language”). The efforts of
the missionaries only inereaee the amount of vice among the
islanders, a result which forces “numerous, severe, and
Perpetually violated laws against licentiousness of all

kinds” (514). In America revivalists had learned opposite

 

 

94
methods. Their appeals to heart religion and inward
experience promoted community, nondenominationalism, and
freedom from coercion.

The islanders express some disgust with this faith as
promoted by missionaries. They cry out against the various
evils “solely of foreign origin” (such as drunkenness, small—
pox, and venereal diseases),

Distracted with their sufferings, they brought
forth their sick before the missionaries, when they
were preaching, and cried out, ‘Lies, lies! you
tell us of salvation; and, behold, we are dying. We
want no other salvation, than to live in this
world. Where are there any saved through your
speech?’ (518)
The language is millennial. The native peoples are asking for
a salvation truth which will bring forth its results in_rhie
life. The evidence against the missionary truth is in the
effect in_LhieiHQle. Native peoples provide Melville the
perfect justification for criticism of this sort. His
complaint against Christianity is not its doctrinal truth,
but its experiential failure. Only natives far from European
influence and eeeleeiaerieal_jnriedierien retain their
healthy beauty, as Tom observes on one visit. This occurs
only because they “bury their charms in this nook of a
valley” (566).

But once again, as in Typee, the wanderer Tom “pined for
the billows” (642). In the various places visited in the
environs of Tahiti he does not find that which he pursues.

Certainly more interesting and exotic than Europeans, the sad

truth remains that native peoples largely waste the

 

95

“inexhaustible fertility” of their islands and remain
“improvident”, preferring to lounge under their ever—giving
bread-fruit and cocoa-nut trees (590, 591). Omen closes as
Tom meditates, “Once more the sailor’s cradle rocked under
me, and I found myself rolling in my gait. By noon, the
island had gone down in the horizon; and all before us was
the wide Pacific" (646).

In Marni Melville turns from any pretense of writing r

non-fiction prose. The search element, subtly developed in

 

Typee and expanded in Omen, becomes the unambiguous basis for
an allegorical pursuit of Truth and Goodness. The narrator of
the story is once again a young sailor. The sailor is almost
certainly the “Tom” of the previous two novels. Such a
conjecture makes geographic and narrative sense considering
that Marni opens just as the narrator is off on another ship,
this time the whaler Aernrien. “I had stepped ashore some few
months previous,” he says (663). In Omen Tom told us that the
wide Pacific lay before him. The narrator in Marni informs us
that he has joined the Aernrinn from the Pacific island of
Ravavai, not “very far westward from Pitcairn’s island”
(663). The assumption is that the narrator in Marni is Tom,
but he will be referred to by the name given to him by island
friends he meets--“Taji.” Tom as Taji accounts for the
increasing abstraction of the quest apparent in Melville’s
first two books. Grenberg sees the connection between the

first three books also. He writes,

96

In a very real sense, Mandi is best viewed as a
continuation and discursive commentary on the art,
thoughts, and implications of Tynes and QmQQ, for
although one might detect in Typee and Omen the
roots of Marni’s concern with the riddling
questions of death, time, space, sexuality, and
self, it is with Marni that Melville holds nothing
back in his attempt to push these questions to
their ultimate implications and to find workable
answers to them. (27)

Tom cannot find what he looks for among the islanders of the
South Seas. He realizes that neither native nor white man
owns the thing he wishes to possess. So off he goes into
allegory and romance, a world where he can give substance to

his dream. The historical world does not yet contain what he

 

yearns for.

The Arernrien cruises for the whale, but finds none.
When the ship heads for the cold waters of the Russian
peninsula Kamchatka, the narrator and a friend named Jarl
escape in a small boat. They head west and, while looking for
friendly islands, come upon a drifting ship. On the ship they
find a native man and his wife. Later the wife is killed in a
storm and the ship is sunk. The three men escape in a
whaleboat. Days after that they find a strange thing-~two
canoes with a platform lashed in between. They discover that
a native priest is holding a beautiful blond girl named
Yillah captive. The men rescue the girl, who wishes to return
to her home islands. The narrator falls in love with her and
wishes to help her return home. Coming upon some islands, the
group lands and is welcomed enthusiastically. It seems that

the natives think the narrator is a god, Taji, prophesied to

97
return as a human. The narrator accepts this accolade as not
particularly harmful to him and settles into life on the
island with Yillah. However, Yillah disappears, and Taji
receives flowers from the dark queen Hautia. The natives
think the flowers symbolize Hautia’s love for Taji and that
he should not pursue Yillah. But Taji is not to be put off.
He, his friends, and a party of important natives (Media the
king, Yoomy the singer, Babbalanja the philOSOpher, Mohi the
historian) launch off in a large and elegant canoe in search
of Yillah. Again, Hautia attempts to stop the quest by flower
symbol, but the group presses on. The rest of the novel
involves a series of visits to various island peoples, each
of which represent beliefs, philosophies, and ways of living.
Along the way the group discusses many areas of thought and
knowledge. Some of the islands are thinly disguised
representations of the United States, Great Britain, and
Europe. The entire group of islands is called Mardi and is
meant to represent the entire world and its thought. Finally,
at the island of Serenia, Babbalanja finds what he is looking
for, but the rest journey on. Not finding Yillah anywhere,
Taji finally goes to Queen Hautia and is tempted by her. He
remains with Hautia, but continues asking for Yillah.

The Arnnnrien’s search for a whale is inauspicious from
the beginning. Trade winds in the area of Ravavai tended to
take ships in a giant, weary, monotonous circuit (663). Days
pass in dreary sameness as the crew looked to the business of

whaling (665). Aloft at the mast-head, the narrator’s

 

98
thoughts go abroad into the wide ocean. “Vistas seemed
leading to worlds beyond.” As a lone bird flys by, his
thoughts follow it.
My spirit must have sailed in with it; for
directly, as in a trance, came upon me the cadence
of mild billows laving a beach of shells, the
waving of boughs, and the voices of maidens, and
the lulled beatings of my own dissolved heart, all
blended together. (668)

The wide, wide Pacific does this to a man. It
discourages precision and comprehension. When Jarl and Taji
come upon the startling phenomena of a glowing sea, they
attempt to analyze it by repeating “various sage opinings” of
the past, then move on “to record more reliable theories,”
which are merely what land-bound scientists might say. “But,”
Taji says, “these are only surmises; likely, but uncertain”
(784). One is never able to penetrate the mystery.

In this context Taji’s statement about Yillah is
significant. After rescuing her, he says,

Besides, what cared I now for the green groves and
bright shore? Was not Yillah my shore and my grove?
my meadow, my mead, my soft shady vine, and my
arbor? Of all things desirable and delightful, the
full-plumed sheaf, and my own right arm the band?
(806)
Whatever else Yillah stands for, finding her represents all
Taji has looked for. The language he uses mimics Old
Testament descriptions of heavenly rest for the people of
Israel--in short, the language of the Christian millennium.
Taji says, “For oh, Yillah; were you not the earthly

semblance of that sweet vision, that haunted my earliest

thoughts?” (820). Yillah is the thing Taji looked for,

 

99

thought he grasped, but didn‘t find among the idyllic peoples
of the South Seas. Now Taji possesses it, and “forebodings
departed, no happiness in the universe like ours. We lived
and we loved; life and love were united; in gladness glided
our days” (821). This significant statement provides a clue
as to the nature of the happiness he finds in Yillah. Life
and love are brought together. They are no longer separate
entities in a compartmentalized, fragmented world. L.

The nature of the objective pursued by Taji must be

understood in terms of an experience rather than a place, for

 

when Yillah disappears from the blessed little islet on which
he has been residing with her, he loses everything. The
severed eenneerinn to her cannot be made up by other
experiences or other persons on Odo. Yillah gone, he must
pursue her among all the islands of Mardi. His new mission,
now that he has already experienced that which he sought for,
is to re;eerahlieh a relationship. Therefore, the narrative
of Marni is fundamentally different from Typee or Omen in
that the thing sought is a known quantity. There can be no
other place in all the islands of Mardi answering to Taji’s
need except Yillah herself. All of the cultures and
philosophies witnessed on the quest are actually ironic
contrasts with what must be found. The places to be visited
can provide mere substitutes. They represent ideas about the
possible makeup of Yillah, but they are doomed to fail since
by definition, ideas are not experiences. And Taji pursues an

experience.

100
When Taji visits the island of Valapee with Peepi its
king, who possesses within himself various spirits of past
important persons, Taji discovers the unreliable nature of
the king. Peepi is found to be a man “subject to contrary
impulses, over which he had not the faintest control [and]
was plainly denuded of all moral obligation to virtue” (865,
866). In analyzing this passage it is difficult to surmise
that Taji idealizes the “obligation to virtue” as some sort
of pathway to that which he seeks. True, “King Peepi was
zninus a conscience” (866). But that does not mean that Taji
.is pursuing conscience. He yearns for Yillah and
(zonnectedness. The same qualification applies to the other
palaces visited in the Mardian archipelago. An example might
kDe the island of Juam, where pleasure and luxury are the
ggreat pursuits. Here Taji asks, “Was Yillah immured in this
sstrange retreat?” (879). Both Valapee and Juam, as well as
5111 other ports of call in Mardi, with one exception, are
truerely false paths to that which humanity seeks.
In “Time and Temples,” Melville discusses the weakness
CDCE’ all ideas of development and change through time. When men
1131—ILild their great temples and monuments, they fool themselves
‘VVjL1:h the thought that they have created eternity. “It is not
'tlklee Pyramids that are ancient, but the eternal granite
“Vlleereof they are made; which had been equally ancient though
37621; in the quarry.” And, “In all the universe is but one
C>31:3‘:'L.g'inal; and the very suns must to their source for their

fire; and we Prometheuses must to them for ours; which, when

101
had, only perpetual Vestal tending will keep alive" (890). In

the element of time, man is only and always becoming. He

“And his whole mortal life brings not his immortal

never is.
(891).

soul to maturity; nor will all eternity perfect him”

The journey through time never brings man to anything final,

“Thus deeper and deeper into Time’s endless tunnel, does the

winged soul, like a night—hawk, wend her wild way; and finds

eternities before and behind; and her last limit is her

everlasting beginning" (892). Taji does not see his desire

for Yillah in these limited terms. To behold her, to possess

tier, is to possess everything his soul desires. This chapter

Inlays a vital role in explaining the nature of Yillah. Yillah

jLs outside of time. She is eternal, she is original.

illustrates the difficulty

The ruler of Juam, Donjalolo,

c>f finding the eternal and the original in the world (Mardi)

j_tself. Donjalolo sends out two men to report on the

«:iistant island called Rafona. Each brings back a different
(fleescription of a reef there, and Donjalolo mourns the

czcxntradictions in their stories. He exclaims, “‘For me, vain

€3¥1u1 hope of ever knowing Mardi! Away! Better know nothing,

tiliaan be deceived.’” The phiIOSOpher Babbalanja, observing

tillnis scene, remarks to Media, “‘My lord, I have seen this

ESEirne reef at Rafona. In various places, it is of various

11110533. As for Zuma and Varnopi, both are wrong, and both are
er<3ht’" (911). In the world men perceive only limited and
I32irtial elements of the the one grand Truth, and in general,

51133 blind to their own blindness. As Babbalanja observes

102
later, truth is a thing hidden and voiceless so that “‘things
visible are but conceits of the eye: things imaginative,
conceits of the fancy. If duped by one, we are equally duped
by the.other’”_(944).

In Marni Melville offers a distinctly Puritan answer to
the dilemma of partial knowledge and the weakness of human
perception. In “Faith and Knowledge" he writes, “But let us
hold fast to all we have; and stop all leaks in our faith.”
Thus arrayed in the armor of the apostle Paul, we may defend
ourselves against the infidel Turks, he says. Growth in faith
.is not the development of naive belief, but a nearer grasping
(of the original. “The higher the intelligence, the more
:faith, and the less credulity: Gabriel rejects more than we,
tout out-believes us all. The greatest marvels are first
tLruths; the first truths the last unto whiCh we attain.
GThings nearest are furthest off" (957). The act of rejecting
Ifalsehoods that societies call true makes one a dissenter and
£3. heretic. Actually, however, dissenters believe more than

tlliose clinging to past truths because the dissenter is now
CZloser to the first Truth. Any society able to achieve first
tlilt‘uths as the foundation for action would be an ideal
£3(Deiety. Melville is advocating a society of healthy skeptics
“”1113 are actually a nation of great believers.

This insistent pursuit of first truths is a compelling
t1leme in Marni, and Babbalanja is the great practitioner of

Allies hunt. When Mohi tells a simple story, Babbalanja demands

103

its purpose. Mohi defends it as an entertainment. But

Babbalanja responds,

‘I am intent upon the essence of things; the
mystery that lieth beyond; the elements of the tear
which much laughter provoketh; that which is
beneath the seeming; the precious pearl within the
shaggy oyster. I probe the circle’s center; I seek
to evolve the inscrutable.’ (1008)

Words such as these are a blatant advocacy of political
and ecclesiastical dissent and thereby are demonstrably
Puritan/Protestant. The uncovering of first principles
threatens traditional powers. Melville is creating a contrast
loetween the healthy Protestant nation and a nation ruled by
‘the principles of Roman Catholicism. In Mardi this island is
Dflaramma, to which the searchers go in pursuit of Yillah

(982). The island is a thinly disguised reference to Roman

(Zatholicism in action. It is ruled by a “Pontiff” Hivohitee

DdDCCCXLVIII (or 1848; Marni was published in 1849), a ruler
vvho traces his lineage back to the divine Hivohitee I “the
c>riginal grantee of the empire of men’s souls and the first

ésvvayer of a crosier” (989). The island of Maramma was a place

(>1? confusion and arbitrary power. Its language “had become so

ilell of jargonings, that the birds in the groves were greatly
IEDlezled; not knowing where lay the virtue of sounds, so
-idr1coherent.” The Pontiffs were “spiritual potentates” who had
53 special connection to sharks, a creature deified and given
S32E>ecial protection from enemies. The logic of their special
E>lace is wonderfully strange, being that though “‘they

CiGestroy human life are they not sacred?’” (990). Later,

104
when the group visits the secluded Hivohitee the Pontiff,

Yoomy interviews him. When the Pontiff asks him what he sees,

“‘Nothing.’" The Pontiff then says, “‘Then

Yoomy responds,
In a truly

thou hast found me out, and seen all!’” (1017).

Protestant critique, Melville has Babbalanja say that “‘in

Maramma and in all its tributary isles true brotherhood there

is none’” (1287).
Even though Babbalanja admits that the pursuit of first

truths has its dangers (see 1008, “‘I am wrong in seeking to

invest sublunary sounds with celestial sense. Much that is in
rne is incommunicable by this ether we breathe’"), finding
ssuch original truths gives the possessor tremendous moral

anuthority, power, and a legitimate claim to precedence.

EFinding “‘the original and true’” trunk of the multi-boughed

kpanian tree is difficult. (Babbalanja tells of the attempt of

But there is “‘a reward offered for

ruine blind men.)
(1012). To find the original is to

ciiscovering the trunk’”
.fiind God since individuals, as heavenly satellites, “revolve

sun—like, fixed and luminous

J?<>und the great central Truth,
1fc>rever in the foundationless firmament" (1023). When one
~1HC>oks around the world, the original truths are impossible to

3ELi¢nd. As Babbalanja notes, “‘The microscope disgusts us with

C313;r Mardi; and the telescope sets us longing for some other

WOrid' " (1038).
That other world is the place Melville is searching for

Aaridthe method for finding it seems to owe much to

C:Ffillvinistic theology. As Marni comes to an end it becomes

105

clear that finding Yillah is going to be impossible. The

focus of the romance turns less to finding Yillah than to the
discovery of an inner experience which is a substitute for

her phantom—like nature. Babbalanja indicates this new

direction. He meditates on the nature of human choices and

identifies their source as outside of the mind. He says,

‘There is something going on in me, that is
independent of me. Many a time, have I willed to do
one thing, and another has been done. I will not
say by myself, for I was not consulted about it; it
was done instinctively. My most virtuous thoughts
are not born of my musings, but spring up in me,
like bright fancies to the poet; unsought,
spontaneous. Whence they come I know not. I am a
blind man pushed from behind; in vain, I turn about
to see what propels me. As vanity, I regard the
praises of my friends; for what they commend
pertains not to me, Babbalanja; but to this unknown
something that forces me to it. But why am I, a
middle aged Mardian, less prone to excesses than
when_a youth? The same inducements and allurements
are around me. But no; my more ardent passions are
burned out; those which are strongest when we are
least able to resist them. Thus, then, my lord, it
is not so much outer temptations that prevail over
us mortals; but inward instincts.’ (1111)

E3abbalanja goes on to state that men are controlled by their

(Dvmn natures and that “‘it is easier for some men to be

than for others not to be sinners.’" Within man is

Saints,
“"one dark chamber ... retained by the old mystery [the
irricomprehensible strangerJ’” (1112). When Babbalanja mentions

tlllis idea, Media calls it his “‘devil theory’” and argues
'tirlat it is a dangerous departure from moral responsibility.
Eséikmnlanja agrees, indicating that telling the good man that

E163 is free to do wrong will not induce him to do it, and

106

telling an evil man not to do wrong will not make him refrain

from evil (1113).
That the Mardi narrative is unfolding toward a Puritan

solution for the philosophical dilemmas it poses can be
demonstrated by the thinly-veiled discussion of America (the

island of Vivenza). Melville uses Biblical language to

describe her early promise: “Vivenza was a noble land. Like a

young tropic tree she stood, laden down with greenness,

myriad blossoms, and ripened fruit thick—hanging from one
.bough. She was promising as the morning.” And, “Vivenza might

loe likened to St. John, feeding on locusts and wild honey,

23nd with prophetic voice, crying to the nations from the

nvilderness.... [and] seemed a young Messiah” (1128). However,

ZAmerica had not fulfilled her promise. She had become a
evarlike, slave-holding braggard. The truth of America is that
sshe is only one nation along the way to a completion of
riumanity’s social desires. There will be other promised lands

1:11at will more fully complete the experienee demanded of a

ESIDecially-called people. The worth of any nation can be
Dneeasured only by the psychic development of her people, not
‘kDEK'Iher natural resources or form of government. “‘We must
nneErasure brains, not heads,’” Babbalanja says (1172).

That inner quality is the real goal. As a fiery youth in
‘JGiNvenza states, “‘It is not the prime end, and chief
I5:L<essing, to be politically free. And freedom is only good as

El Imeans; is no end in itself.’" Every politically free man is

Still “‘a slave unto Oro [God].’" The truth is that men need

107
to learn to rule themselves. The average man must “‘be
better, and wiser, than the wisest of one-man rulers’”
(1184). So, because the people of Vivenza have not

experienced the inner changes necessary for a millennial

people, it must be true that Yillah is not there; and she is

not (1192). Though Vivenza “‘cheers our hearts [and] is a

rainbow to the isles’", it is also true that she has not yet
proved her creed. “‘Her climacteric is not come’” (1199). The
age when America, or any nation, fulfills her creed is the
Inillennial age Melville looks forward to.

But failing to find such a place, as represented by the
Ioresence of Yillah, the band of wanderers is seemingly lost.
IBabbalanja says, “‘This Mardi is not our home. Up and down we
twander, like exiles transported to a planet afar:--’tis not
t:he world me were born in; not the world once so lightsome
23nd gay; not the world where we once merrily danced, dined,
21nd supped’” (1281). Babbalanja makes it clear that the
Einswer for living now is to remember that Oro lives in
IEt:ernity and that “‘we live in Eternity now’” (1282). To
Eerlter into eternity is seen by Melville to be entering into
'tlfle life for which precept and practice are identical.
-E3Eikmelanja says, “‘But we care not for men’s words; we look
f3‘C>rcreeds in actions; which are the truthful symbols of the
‘terlings within. He who hourly prays to Alma [Christ], but

l—irves not up to world-wide love and charity--that man is more

Eirl unbeliever than he who verbally rejects the Master, but

does his bidding’” (1288).

108
At the island of Serenia Babbalanja finds his Yillah
because there he is converted. He finds an island community
that fulfills his philosophical requirements; where the

mirhin matches the fliLhQnL. Here is the place with happiness

and holiness in the now. As their guide indicates, “"Tis

Mardi, to which loved Alma gives his laws; not Paradise’”

(1289). This is the place where the millennial age lives, in

an absolute perfection, not of social condition, but in

wholeness of inner experience. “‘Yet not by statute,’” the

guide says, “‘but from dictates, born half dormant in us, and

*warmed into life by Alma. Those dictates we but follow in all

rue do; we are not dragged to righteousness; but go running'”

(1289). “‘We love him [Alma] from an instinct in us;—-a fond,

:filial, reverential feeling.... We love him because we do’”

(1290).
Babbalanja responds to this description of Serenia in

t:he language of Christian conversion. “‘Some black cloud

sseems floating from me. I begin to see. I come out in

.lright.... Quickened in me is a hope’” (1291). And finally,

“"Oh, Alma, Alma! prince divine!’ cried Babbalanja, sinking

C311 his knees—-‘in rhee, at last, I find repose’” (1292).

E3Eibbalanja has found his landedness, for at sunrise, he and

his companions sinndninnnrthehennn. He says,

‘My voyage is ended. Not because what we sought is
found; but that I now possess all which may be had
of what I sought in Mardi. Here, I tarry to grow
wiser still:--then I am Alma’s and the world’s.
Taji! for Yillah thou wilt hunt in vain; she is a
phantom that but mocks thee; and while for her thou
madly huntest, the sin thou didst cries out, and

109
its avengers still will follow. But here they may
not come: nor those, who, tempting, track thy path.
Wise counsel take. Within our hearts is all we
seek: though in that search many need a prompter.
Him I have found in blessed Alma. Then rove no
more. Gain now, in flush of youth, that last wise
thought, too often purchased, by a life of woe. Be
wise: be wise.’ (1300)

Taji and his companions continue the quest for Yillah,
tfldough now Taji has assumed the role of “‘the hunter, that
never rests’” (1301). The restless sea still calls him
“‘beyond the reef’” (1301). Taji now becomes the victim of
the malignant queen Hautia. He is a figure seen throughout
the rest of the Melville canon-~the restless wanderer.

Critics have failed in large part to see the essential
Puritan nature of Mardi. They tend to focus on Taji’s
continuation of the quest and downplay Babbalanja’s discovery
of the core of human meaning and existence. Milder separates
the two characters’ quests as if they were searching for two
different things (Taji for Yillah and Babbalanja for “the
ideal way of life”) (431). Milder’s idea of a dual ending for
Mardi leads him to suggest that the novel is merely a gesture
“of accomodation and defiance" for “a spiritual crisis that
enduringly defied resolution in life” (432). Miller misses
the point also when he asserts that the ending of Mardi shows
“the ambiguity of nature. The blonde Yillah is lost in the
dark Hautia” (Nafereie_Narinn 193). What of the discovery of
Babbalanja? Feidelson also ignores Babbalanja, although he

correctly recognizes what Taji becomes. “Taji,” he says,

“cannot trust absolute experience; he is too much aware of

 

 

110
its disintegration into rational opposites” (175). But
Feidelson is incorrect when he observes, “And Melville, no
less than Taji, is committed to an intellectual search which
holds out no prospect of success but to which there is no
alternative” (175). Levin argues that Melville failed to
reach any “symbolic Ultimate” (175). Dillingham posits a
world in Mardi in which the narrator “seeks substance and
meaning but finds only empty reflections” (105).

For Dillingham, as for the other critics, Babbalanja’s
discovery is invisible. Dillingham is correct in identifying
Taji as an Ahab (see 107, “[Taji’s] mind is closed tight with
a monomania that sends him madly in pursuit of a tangible
object. The wanderer recognizes that ambiguity, not final
answers, lies at the heart of life”), but incomplete in
rejecting the answer that lies in Serenia. In discussing the
connection between Bunyan and Melville, Dillingham falsely
contends that “there is no peace in Melville’s eternity” as
compared to that of Bunyan (143). To all of these critics the
question can be posed: What of the Puritan quest, originally
outlined by Winthrop and reiterated by Melville, of a
Christian nation possessed by love in its millennial
greatness? This communal goal was the vision of the heirs of
Puritanism during the second Great Awakening in the first
half of the nineteenth century, and was the prospect
envisioned by Herman Melville in Mardi as exemplified on the
island of Serenia. Melville’s desire for internalized

Americans is no different from what Bercovitch observes

 

 

111
Puritans imagined for themselves from the beginning. Puritans
thought that their physical flight to the New World and its
subsequent development were “symbolic. The more closely they
examined the actual, the more clearly they perceived the
Grand Design, which, they kept telling a deaf or incredulous
world, rendered New England’s progress the historical
analogue to the private, interior movement of grace” (“Cotton
Mather" 142).

Lewis was much more accurate in his assessment of
Melville. His idea of the American Adam leads him to write
the following of Melville: “He has the Protestant’s contempt
for the long line of commentary and influence; he can go
directly to the source and find it anywhere” (144,145). Thus,
as Lewis contends, “The Adamic hero is an ‘outsider,’ but he
is ‘outside’ in a curiously staunch and artistically
demanding manner.” The Adamic hero is unlike the European or
modernist outsider who was “dispossessed,” “superfluous,”
“alienated," and “exiled” (128). “Melville ... had penetrated
beyond both innocence and despair to some glimmering of a
moral order” (133). Melville has achieved salvation for the
Puritan mind caught in the new world of nineteenth—century

skepticism.

 

 

Chapter 5

New Wine into Old Wineskins

Redburn represents a significant development of Herman
Melville’s millennial ideals for America. The story concerns
a young boy named Wellingborough Redburn and his adventures
in New York, on the Atlantic Ocean, and in England. As in the
preceding works of Melville, Redburn is a tale of quest and
discovery of metaphysical truths. Having lost his father,
Redburn decides to ease his mother’s cares by going to sea.
He joins a ship headed for Liverpool, England, named the
Highlander. As a greenhorn he at first regrets going on a sea
voyage, but soon finds ways to make himself into a sailor. He
finds that most sailors are not a bad lot, though they have
corrupted manners. Once in Liverpool he finds the ill—
treatment usually given dirty sailors. His most enlightening
and shattering experience is the attempt to use an old
guidebook to find his way around the city. The guidebook has
become outdated and useless. In Liverpool he meets Harry
Bolton, a sort of prodigal son who wishes to emigrate to
America. The return voyage to America is rough because a
fever breaks out among the passengers. Arriving in New York,
Redburn finds that the captain will not pay him his wages,
and that in fact Redburn owes the ship money. Harry and he

angrily leave the ship.

112

 

 

 

113

In Redhnrn, Melville engages in a powerful criticism of
the American and English social systems and describes a set
of values necessary to the purpose of America. These values
are Biblical/Puritan, but yet are tempered by nineteenth—
century notions of heart religion and a blurring of
denominational distinctions, concepts which are themselves
inherent in Protestantism. Melville, in the midst of
spiritual searching and confusion at the time of writing
Redburn, secularizes the old-fashioned understanding of
America’s millennial role into a new blend--the democratic
equality of all peoples and the Puritan notion of a
covenanted people. In a sense Melville overlays Biblical
concepts on the political and social problems of the day. Sin
becomes social problem; salvation becomes political solution.
Melville de-emphasizes the necessity of spiritual conversion
in the coming millennium, which seems to rise out of social
action rather than through radical inner change.
Melville’s state of mind and intellectual development during
the 18408 and 18503 are important in understanding his vision
of a new kingdom, a new millennial America. The very newness
of this kingdom called for fresh approaches, original
thinking, and unusual interpretations of the critical,
undergirding, American source texts, including the Bible.
Melville had rejected European and English literary models,
happily proclaiming the “true American author.” Bercovitch
sees this desire for a new authorship building in Melville's

career toward Redburn and only later giving way to

 

114
disillusionment (TlieiBunitan_Orinine_o_f_tne_Amerinnn_Self
181). In his letters Melville demonstrates the radical nature
of this newness. He wishes the American author to see into
the absolute truth of things in a completely independent way.
“We think that into no recorded mind has the intense feeling
of the visable [sic] truth ever entered more deeply into this
man’s [Hawthorne’s]. By visable truth, we mean the
apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as
they strike the eye of the man who fears them not ... the man
who, like Russian or the British Empire, declares himself a
sovereign nature (in himself) amid the powers of heaven,
hell, and earth” (124).

William Braswell, in Melnilleia_Reliniene_Thnnnhf,
provides excellent documentation for the reasons Melville
struck such an independent pose. Melville came from a family
of “sturdy faith” (8). But various sticky theological
questions plagued his mind; for example, Why does God permit
evil? Calvinism was content with seemingly contradictory
positions. But Melville was unable to accept such tenets
unquestioningly. Braswell writes that “[Melville] is one of
the strangest and most pathetic cases in his century. None of
the English men of letters affected by the skepticism of the
time ... were hit quite so hard by their disillusionment”
(3).

Although scholars do not know whether or not Melville
attended church regularly in his youth, Braswell concludes

that from the 18505 on, he seldom went (6). Nathaniel

 

 

115

Hawthorne observed, though, that Melville was no confirmed
skeptic or atheist since “‘he can neither believe, nor be
comfortable in his unbelief’" (quoted in Braswell, 3). This
is the picture of a man unwilling to throw faith over, yet
unhappy in the faith he saw around him in family, friends,
and country. Something had to give way in this psychological
conflict; a new faith had to emerge. Braswell contends that
in Melville, students of literature find a man looking “for
learning and wisdom to help him out of his confusion” (15).

Though denigrated by critics and downplayed by Melville
himself as a work written hastily for money, Redburn
represents an answer to his personal dilemma and confusion.

Thompson in MelMilleie_flnnrrel_flith_find supports the
connection between Melville’s personal intellectual questions
and Redburn. Thompson examines the narrative point of view in
the novel and abstracts three stages in Melville’s mental and
spiritual development: (1) the first shock to religious
idealism, signified by Wellingborough as the naive narrator,
(2) a modified idealism that still believes, signified by
Redburn as experienced narrator, and (3) a forthright
skepticism toward his Calvinist heritage and a “bitterness
toward any authoritarianism which interfered with the natural
expression of the natural rights of man,” signified by
Melville as narrator (75, 76). This corresponds well with
Melville’s newly discovered answer to his intellectual
dilemmas: “that the greatest wisdom for man lies in following

the dictates of the heart--the emotions that make one

 

116
benevolent toward his fellow men” (Braswell 22). Following
the dictates of Calvin’s God seemed to offer only a muddle of
opposing propositions.

In order to forge a reinterpretation and fresh
understanding of the Puritan apocalyptic vision and future
glorious millennium, Melville had to deal with Puritanism’s
principle guidebook and sacred text--the Bible. Although he
does not often directly comment on the Bible in Redburn,
Melville does provide an indirect and ironic commentary on
“guidebooks” of all sorts. Taken together, the various views
of guidebooks leave a clear impression that they are not to
be completely trusted.

The first of these guidebooks is Smirhie_Wealrh_ef
Nariene (99). Redburn’s purpose in attempting to read the
book is clear—-he looks for the secret that will lead to
wealth. He discovers that the book is incredibly dry reading
and offers none of the answers he is seeking--how to
“retrieve the poverty of [his] family, and make them all well
to do in the world” (99). This suggests one of the overall
themes of the book and of the great truth Melville
discovered--that the answer for poverty (and other social
ills) is found in human benevolence, love, and equality, and
not in dry guidebooks with no inner life. The next guidebook
more clearly refers to the Scriptures. Blunt’s Dream Book
describes in a mystical fashion how to tell the future.
Similar to Biblical apocalypses (Daniel and Revelation), the

Dream Book is complex and difficult to understand (103). Like

 

117
Daniel and Revelation, Blunt’s book predicts the Day of
Judgment (104). (See Daniel 7 for the heavenly judgment scene
and Revelation 14:7-—“the hour of his judgment has come.”)
But ironically, while Blunt cries “‘Benches! benches!’” (104)
to be used for sitting at the judgment of the last day, he
misses the truly serious event actually threatening the crew.
“With a wonderful dream in his head” Blunt sleeps the night
away while the ignorant “sailors at sea ... seem to know when
real danger of any kind is at hand, even in their sleep”
(105). At that moment another ship nearly collides with them
on the open sea. Melville is highlighting the differences
between what he considers real dangers and those only in the
imaginations of slightly strange Bible students.

Such a contrast is demonstrated later on the Highlander,
perhaps more poignantly but no less effectively. A little
man, “a deputy from the Deaf and Dumb Institution in New
York, going over to London to address the public in pantomime

concerning the signs of the times,” harmlessly yet
wistfully languishes about the deck, gazing windward,
“looking disappointed" (120). The “signs of the times” is a
phrase found in Matthew 16:3 and is rich in Biblical meaning.
From the “time, times and half a time” of Daniel 7:25, to the
proclamation of Jesus in Mark 1:14 that “‘the time has come,
the kingdom of God is near,’” to the apostle Paul’s statement
concerning the historical context of the gospel “to be put
into effect when the times will have reached their

fulfillment" (Ephesians 1:10), the Scriptures are

118
unmistakably concerned with the “signs of the times.”
Considering the dashed hopes and “great disappointment”
suffered by the Millerites in New England in 1844 (concerning
the “signs” of the second coming), Melville probably had in
mind such Biblical interpretations. Like Blunt, the little
man was missing the real action—-“He seemed the true
microcosm, or little world to himself: standing in no need of
levying contributions upon the surrounding universe” (121).

In the Liverpool travel scenes Melville completes his
ironic undermining of guidebooks. Using his father’s
guidebook to Liverpool, Redburn tours the city. He is
impressed with the “vanity of all human exaltation” as he
reads the guidebook’s glowing descriptions of a city now
fifty years older (163, 164). The past, he learns, simply
sets the stage for the future (163). Man, thinking his cities
magnificent, fails to see them as only another destined layer
beneath a future city (164). Melville was well-versed in
current Biblical archaeology and higher criticism. He knew
that the Bible described ancient cities praised for their
size, magnificence, and opulence, which by the 18503 scholars
knew were only acres in size and populated by a few hundred
or thousand inhabitants.

In approaching Liverpool with his venerable guidebook,
Redburn has much “boyish delight at the prospect of visiting
a place, the infallible clew to all whose intricacies I held
in my hand” (165). Since the book worked for his father, in

his father’s time, he had no doubt but that he would be able

119
to use it as well (165). But “Dear delusion!” (166). “It
never occurred to [his] boyish thoughts, that though a guide-
book, fifty years old, might have done good service in its
day, yet it would prove but a miserable cicerone to a modern”
(166). Redburn discovers that he lives in a “moving world”
(171); “it never stands still” (172). “The book on which I
had so much relied ... was next to useless. Yes, the thing
that had guided the father, could not guide the son” (171).
“Guide-books,” Redburn learns, “are the least reliable books
in all literature” (172). “Every age makes its own guide—
books” (172). Melville here states his point directly.
Americans must not be bound to British literary models but
must also eschew ancient ones as well. Those models can still
serve a general educative purpose but must not be held up as
the only guiding statements for the present age. Redburn
says, “Though my guide-book had been stripped of its
reputation for infallibility, I did not treat with contumely
or disdain, those sacred pages which had once been a beacon
to my sire” (172).

Redburn understands the lesson Melville intends to teach
his own generation. “Put it up,” Redburn says, “hereafter
follow your nose throughout Liverpool; it will stick to you
through thick and thin" (174). America needs to look for new
ways, to see the unalloyed truth, to create a current,
peculiarly American faith. The answers are in the benevolent
heart of man, not in the old guidebooks. The American people

must reject all the old models. However, Melville needed to

120

address an essentially Christian audience in familiar
language used in a new way in order to create the new image
of the purpose of America. Redburn accomplishes this task.

Lewis O. Saum notes in The_Eennlar_Meed_ef_Ere;Oiyil_War
Amerina, “The most basic tension in the pre-Civil War world
view had to do with the juxtaposition between the spiritual
and the temporal” (62). For Melville the merely spiritual had
little authority. But he had to address America in
understandable language. Braswell observes that “though
[Melville] had recently expressed doubt about certain
Christian doctrines, he ... adopts Christian terminology to
his own purpose, pleading with orthodox Christians as though
their beliefs were his own" (46). Melville capitalized on
Christian America’s dilemma in attempting to balance the
spiritual and the temporal. Saum indicates that gradually
during the period before the Civil War the providential View
of America--God’s active, spiritual intercession and leading-
—gave way to a progressive view (5,6). Niebuhr in The_Kingdnm
ef_Oed_in_Ameriea writes, “Protestantism furnished a
revolutionary philosophy to the new forces which were
stirring in the political, economic and racial world” (29).
The force and language, then, for nineteenth-century
intellectuals like Melville, came from seventeenth-century
Protestantism. But, Niebuhr continues, larer revolutionaries
rejected the God of those same Protestants. Without a church—
state amalgam, economic man could rule himself (29). So while

many in the nineteenth century could still claim godly

 

121
blessings for American actions, “Melville sketched a
providence vastly removed from this godly [underwriting] of
national intentions" (Saum 19).

But in Redburn Melville continued to use Biblical
language even though the Biblical God was now less visible.
At least three passages demonstrate this new secularized use
of Scripture. Niebuhr has observed that theological questions
are at base really political ones (6). Melville turns these
questions into the purely human and political. In “What
Redburn Saw in Launcelott’s-Hey,” Jesus’ story of the good
Samaritan reappears (see Luke 10 for this parable). In
touring the dingy area of Liverpool Redburn hears a “low,
hopeless, endless wail of some one forever lost” (199). The
phrase “forever lost” is particularly significant in a
description redolent with a Biblical view of the spiritually
lost (see Matthew 13 for the parable of the weeds [the
lost]). Looking into a cellar, Redburn sees a pitiful mother
with children. He asks himself, aren't these poor people
worth the life of any monarch? Meeting a number of local
people, he inquires if something could be done for the mother
and children in the cellar. As in the Biblical parable, no
one will have anything to do with them (200). One man says,
“‘It’s none of my business, Jack’" (200). For Redburn the
problem is social and political, not spiritual. He says, “I
felt an almost irresistible impulse to do them the last
mercy, of in some way putting an end to their horrible lives”

(203). But such an act of “mercy" would be condemned by the

122
“law” (203). The law, or society, will not do anything to
help, but would work unceasingly to see that such an act of
mercy-killing was punished. According to Niebuhr, Calvinism
had always emphasized the kingship of God, his aerien in
coming after man (18). In this passage in Bedhnrn the focus
is on the inaction of society in failing to work for
benevolent, humanitarian treatment. The concern is that “all
men are created equal,” rather than on an obligation to a
sovereign God. The “sin” here is the transgression against a
human principle, not against God. Comparing Protestant and
Catholic moral philosophy, Niebuhr points out that while
Catholicism values contemplation of God, Protestantism values
“the sovereignty of God ... [making] obedient activity
superior to contemplation ...” (20).

At the end of “Booble—Alleys,” more literal Biblical
language appears. In this “sooty and begrimed” place “the
very houses have a reeking, Sodom—like, and murderous look.”
For Melville the various perverts practicing unspeakable acts
here are “a company of miscreant misanthropes, bent upon
doing all the malice to mankind in their power.” Once again
the betrayal of human benevolence is the principle issue; for
this “they ought to be burned out of their arches like
vermin" “with sulphur and brimstone” (211). The tools are
Biblical, but the actor is man as destroyer of vermin.

One other scene demonstrates how Melville is
politicizing and socializing previously spiritual issues.

Still travelling about Liverpool, Redburn witnesses a “pale,

123
ragged man, rushing along frantically, and striving to throw
off his wife and children, who clung to his arms and legs;
and, in God’s name, conjured him not to desert them.” This
scene is comparable to John Bunyan’s description of Christian
leaving his family in BilgrimiLErngrnee. In Eedbnrn,
however, the man is “in some despair, and craziness of
wretchedness." “Poverty, poverty, poverty” drives this man
from his family (221). In Eilgrrmie_2rngreee Christian leaves
on a spiritual quest more important than even family.
Bunyan’s scene is purely allegorical. Redhnrn’s desperate man
faces a social problem--he cannot keep his family together in
the face of abject poverty. Society’s carelessness and
hardheartedness is breaking up families. The solution to this
essentially social concern is political action. The
elimination of poverty will allow the natural benevolence of
the family to thrive. The solution is not merely
metaphorical, but a literal political solution stated in
familiar Biblical images (that is, to the nineteenth-century
readers of Bunyan).
Niebuhr identifies such political ideals, though framed
in Biblical language, as distinctly non-Puritan.
Seventeenth century Protestants could not be
utopians or idealists in the popular sense of the
words, for they did not share the fundamental
presuppositions of utopianism-—the beliefs that
human ills are due to bad institutions, that a
fresh start with good institutions will result in a
perfect commonwealth, and that human reason is
sufficiently wise, or human will sufficiently
selfless, to make the execution of a perfect

society possible. They were for the most part
thoroughly convinced that mankind had somehow been

124
corrupted; they knew that the order of glory had
not yet been established; they were pilgrims all
who did not expect to be satisfied in the time of
their pilgrimage. (49)

In Redburn Melville successfully argued the need for a new
American guidebook, and politicized the old Puritan hope for
the kingdom of God. He needed, however, to account for the
essentially pessimistic view Calvinism took toward the nature
of man. He had to accomplish this because a secular state has
no power to change its citizens if people are by nature
depraved. In a pessimistic world view like that of Calvinism
the state must use coercion to control its citizens. Melville
is asking, “Is this necessary?”

The cook on board the Highlander was “much given to
metaphysics, and used to talk about original sin” (94). Redburn
discovers him pouring over his Bible and observes that “reading
must have been very hard work for him; for he muttered to
himself quite loud as he read; and big drops of sweat would
stand upon his brow, and roll off, till they hissed on the hot
stove before him” (94). This scene indicates the intense
psychological struggle of the cook as he attempts to reconcile
various Biblical teachings. He was pondering how naturally
depraved humans could be commanded to conform to all God’s laws
or be held accountable for their actions. Doing the impossible
seems to be a particular frustration of his. Redburn notices
that he curses occasionally in trying to light his cook—house
fire on wet, stormy mornings (95). Melville implies that

perplexities such as this are unnecessary and even harmful. The

125
faithful cook, toiling at his lowly job, searches his soul for
the beast nature he presumes is there.

The moral condition of the sailors is an important aspect
of Redburn. In trying to account for what they are and how they
live, Melville further clarifies his view of original sin. He
acknowledges their low social standing and general immorality
(152) but accounts for this not with the doctrine of original
sin but with the need to “[ameliorate] the moral organization
of all civilization.” They have, he says, missed out on the
general prngreae of man (153). But what can be expected of a
class of men “friendless and alone in the world," “beyond the
reach of ... good influences," “exposed to a thousand
enticements” (152). They form, Melville says, the wheels of the
wagon of the world, and as such are always stuck in the mire
(153, 154). Their “original sin” has not put them there, but a
world that shuns them and treats them like beasts (154). The
important point here is that society erearee the beast in the
sailor; the sailor was not born a beast steeped in sin. This
indicates a new definition for “lostness”—-not an alienation
from God but an alienation between people. One of the causes
then for evil in the world is not those with souls sold to the
devil, but those “whose souls are deposited at their banker’s”
(266). It is this class structure that causes the cruel
treatment for the Irish immigrants. Religious feeling is an
aberration generated when people suffer from class structure.
When plague breaks out among the immigrants, “spasmodic

devotions" break out also (314). Melville is saying that we do

126
not need devotion so much as we need reform of class structure.
The only assistance sailors receive are “instructive little
moral precepts” printed on tobacco pouches while “the noble
truck—horses” are treated like noble “Roman citizens” leading
“dignified lives" (217). In contrast, the sailors are whipped
and degraded into working. Duban says that “Redburn becomes the
first novel to dramatize the tension between Christianity’s
regenerative premise and a democratic ethic of self-help
cultivated in an atmosphere of laissez-faire individualism that
is governed solely by laws of fitness and chance" (59).

Melville makes a connection between the various beggars,
(and, by inference, degraded sailors and immigrants) and the
rejected and dispossessed of ancient Israel. The cripples of
Israel in Jesus’ time would gather at the pool of Bethesda
hoping for a miracle (see John 5). The beggars of Liverpool
gathered at the docks while Redburn wished “that some angel
might descend,.and turn the waters of the docks into an elixir,
that would heal all their woes, and make them, man and woman,
healthy and whole as their ancestors, Adam and Eve, in the
garden” (208). Melville wants a new set of circumstances for
these people, a new paradise on earth. What sort of place would
this be? How could this setting be created?

For over two hundred years Americans have assumed that
America was the destined haven, the new heaven on earth.
According to Bercovitch, the early Puritans took this very
literally. He notes that “the subsequent impact of their

concept cannot be overestimated.” The spiritual biography of

127
the nation was wrapped in concepts such as the “American dream,
manifest destiny, redeemer nation, and, fundamentally, the
American self as representative of universal rebirth” (The
W 108). Melville, however,
is saying something quite different about this view of the
American self. Manifest destiny had been a mixed package.
Bercovitch observes that “for Winthrop and Mather, the progress
of the American theocracy, church and commonwealth together, is
part of ecclesiastical history” (The_Enriran_Origine_ef_rhe
Amerinnn_Self 73). Puritans seemed to be saying that because it
possessed the correct theology, creed, and prophetic promise,
the meaning and purpose of America would always remain the
same. Various jeremiads warned against rejection of the
covenant relationship as codified in church and commonwealth
laws. In Redhnrn Melville introduces Irish immigrants, assorted
beggars, and rejected sailors as examples of the need for a new
American paradise with a different kind of creed and law that
would accommodate such disreputable citizens. Meditating on the
despised beggar woman and children in the cellar in Liverpool,
Redburn thinks, “Ah, what are our creeds, and how do we hope to
be saved?” (204).

The poor, the foreign, the Roman Catholic “have God’s
right to come; though they bring all Ireland and her miseries
with them” (318). The Calvinist creed would reject such
individuals as unAmerican in the covenant sense. How could God
“destine” followers of a Roman pope? How could an America

filled with chanters and candle lighters redeem the world? No,

128
Melville says, that idea is gone forever, “for the whole world
is the patrimony of the whole world” (318). How can a nation
claiming the name of Christ treat immigrants on ships as it
does, stacked in dark, rank holds? What laws demand this sort
of treatment? (319). Echoing the apostle Paul in Galatians 5:23
Melville says, “There is no law concerning these things,”
meaning that love and benevolence demand better treatment for
the Irish. “We talk of the Turks, and abhor the cannibals; but
may not some of rhem, go to heaven, before some of he? We may
have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls” (319). Jesus
said the same of the Pharisees, “‘I tell you the truth, the tax
collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God
ahead of you’” (Matthew 21:31). For Melville then, covenanted
America, like covenanted Israel, could lose out to a new chosen
nation. “Not till we know, that one grief outweighs ten
thousand joys, will we become what Christianity is striving to
make us” (319).

In 1820 an edition of Mather’s Magnalia was published and
sold steadily for decades. The editor of the edition
“speculated ... that the interest centered not so much in the
church history as in the general fascination with the growth of
America” (Bercovitch The_P_uri_tnn_Or_igine_o_f_tneiAmerinnn_Self
87). Melville understood, unlike many of his fellow Americans,
that the promise of America could be lost if a worn-out creed
remained rooted in the American consciousness, a creed claiming
blessings when such blessings were impossible in the midst of

cruelty and social oppression. Covenanted America had to take

129
another step beyond the old “extended parallel between
historical Israel and the United States” (Tuveson 157). Tuveson
agrees that Melville tried to discover for America a new
“wisdom, which will eventually enlighten the world” (157). That
new wisdom, the new vision, needed to reject temporary
covenants and creeds. Melville uses the Melchizedek theme to
explain this. Throughout the book of Hebrews the apostle Paul
tries to explain to Jews the priesthood of Jesus. Jesus was not
a priest in the line of covenantal Israel, the line of Aaron
and the Levites, but was “in the order of Melchizedek” (Hebrews
5:6). Melchizedek was a priest in Salem (ancient Jerusalem)
centuries before the establishment of the Levitical, covenantal
priesthood (Genesis 14:18). Paul said Melchizedek had no
genealogy, no beginning or end (see Hebrews 7). In other words,
this priesthood was superior to the Levitical system, which was
based on racial bloodlines, the sacrifice of animals, and was
only temporary until the true high priest (Christ) arrived.
Melville uses this concept to proclaim a new American calling
beyond covenanted, Puritan America which would “forever
extinguish the prejudices of national dislikes." “Who was our
father and our mother?" “We are the heirs of all time, and with
all nations we divide our inheritance. On this Western
Hemisphere all tribes and people are forming into one federated
whole; and there is a future which shall see the estranged
children of Adam restored as to the old hearth—stone in Eden”

(185).

130

This is the new “Earth’s Paradise,” “the world’s jubilee
morning.” In America “shall the curse of Babel be revoked, a
new Pentecost come” (186). At the ancient tower of Babel
men’s language was’confused and they were scattered (see
Genesis 11). At Pentecost the Spirit gave understanding to
all peoples. “Each one heard [the disciples] speaking in his
own language" (Acts 2:6). This is the new American
millennium, a time of security, health, love, benevolence,
and understanding. Redhnrn achieves this masterful
apocalyptic vision, at once familiar (Biblical, covenantal)
and revolutionary. No son of the Puritans could remain
comfortable with it, no recent immigrant safe without it.
This was Melville’s declaration of independence, his new wine

into old wineskins.

 

 

 

Chapter 6

Toward the Inland Zone

Whife;daeker and Mehy;Oiek demonstrate the height of
Herman Melville’s ability to combine a knowledge of sailing
life with the mastery of storytelling. Only Bill¥_Bndd comes
close to repeating the kind of achievement found in these two
books. Both narratives take place entirely at sea after
relatively short opening scenes prior to weighing anchor.
Significantly, both end at sea. Each book represents
Melville’s successful attempt at creating powerful symbolic
elements (a jacket and a whale) within the context of highly
detailed descriptions of life aboard an American warship and
an American whaler.

Of the two books, Whife;daeker is “positive” in theme in
the sense that it openly points the way to the American
millennium, while Mnhy;Oiek is the “negative” story of a
false and tragic pursuit much like the quest for Yillah which
Taji persists in after Babbalanja ends his pursuit on the
island of Serenia. whitezlnehet might be viewed as a
representation of Bunyan’s Christian on the right path, with
Mehy;Oiek seen as a representation of a pilgrim off the path.
White-Jacket ends “homeward bound,” while Mehy;Oiek ends in
disaster.

A young sailor (his name is never revealed) aboard an

American man-of—war knows his ship the Neyereink will soon be

131

 

132

in the icy waters of Cape Horn and that he will need a warm
jacket. In harbor at Callao, Peru he fashions himself an odd-
looking white jacket made of odds and ends. The jacket
arouses suspicion among some of the crew, and White-Jacket,
as he comes to be known, must leave his mess group for
another headed by a renowned and respected petty officer of
the maintop, Jack Chase. As White-Jacket performs with
exactness all of the rigorous duties of a common sailor, he [1
experiences and witnesses a multitude of abuses heaped upon

himself and his fellow sailors by a set of arbitrary,

was.

haughty, and cruel officers. The greatest focus of abuse

 

centers on the practice of flogging as punishment.

He continually tries to rid himself of his hated jacket,
but is never able to do so until an incident aloft. High
among the rigging one day, he accidentally falls one hundred
feet into the sea. He saves his life by cutting away his
jacket. Another sailor sees the jacket and harpoons it,
thinking he sees a shark. Brought back on board and
immediately put back to work, White-Jacket continues heading
for home aboard the Nerereink.

The primary contrast created in Whine;daeker is that
between the arbitrary rule of ship discipline and Melville’s
advocacy of human brotherhood. But the millennial theme is
subtly maintained since the way to brotherhood can be
achieved only through Christian principles. Melville does not
argue for mere superficial change in the naval handbook,

societal attitudes toward sailors, or reform of the

133
relationship between superiors and subordinates, but for a
more fundamental change in human nature which would supercede
all other attempts at change.
From the first chapters of the novel there is an
explicit belief that without the absolute order of the ship
chaos would reign. “Were it not for these regulations a man—
of—war’s crew would be nothing but a mob.” Man’s flawed
nature seems to allow no other effective means of achieving
the specific purpose of a naval vessel. Every one of the five
hundred men aboard the warship “knows his own special place"
(355). Among the crew there is “endless subdivision” into
precise groups for all of the various tasks demanded by a
huge, three—masted sailing ship (358). Endless numbers
complicate the life of a sailor-—the number of his mess, his
ship’s number, the number of his hammock, gun number, as well
as others (358, 359).
This carefully oiled system is run with the iron grip of
the ship’s officers. At the pinnacle is the captain.
It is no limited monarchy, [White-Jacket observes],
where the sturdy Commons have a right to petition,
and snarl if they please; but almost a despotism,
like the Grand Turk’s. The captain’s word is law;
he never speaks but in the imperative mood. When he
stands on his Quarter-deck at sea, he absolutely
commands as far as eye can reach. Only the moon and
stars are beyond his jurisdiction. He is lord and
master of the sun. (371)

The captain’s power over the sun is humorously described such

that “It is not twelve o'clock till he says so" (371). The

captain’s authority is demonstrated daily, since after the

sailing-master completes his noon sighting, a “respectful

 

134
suggestion” is sent to the captain, who responds, “‘Make it
so.’" Only fhen may the messenger-boy strike eight bells
(372).

Melville approves of the general arrangement of affairs
aboard a warship because such discipline takes place en_rhe
nnrnl¥_eea. It is expedient that rigid order be enforced,
“For a ship is‘a bit of terra firma cut off from the main; it
is a state in itself; and the captain is its king” (371).
Even Jack Chase, the paragon of noble republican virtuousness
among the men, defender of sailors’ rights, is called “a
little bit of a dictator” (362). But when Jack goes ashore,
he changes. White-Jacket tells a strange story concerning
Jack’s leaving his duty on ship.

He abandoned the frigate from far higher and
nobler, nay, glorious motives. Though bowing to
naval discipline afloat; yet ashore, he was a
stickler for the Rights of Man, and the liberties
of the world. He went to draw a partisan blade in
the civil commotions of Peru; and befriend, heart
and soul, what he deemed the cause of the Right.
(365)
Surprisingly, the captain tolerated this dereliction of duty,
reinstating him as long as he rernrned_re_hie_dnry_aheard_rhe
ehin (367). The plain truth is that such radical behavior
(involving “heart and soul”) can occur only on shore.

Aboard ship, life is a ceaseless round of sometimes
inexplicably regimented behavior, such as that exhibited at
meal times. Men eat according to rank, and “He who dines

latest is the greatest man; and he who dines earliest is

accounted the least” (377). This means that the lowly sailor

3E3?

 

Vii-

135
must always, and unhealthily, eat all three of his meals
within the space of eight hours--precisely at eight, noon,
and four (379).

Though external behavior itself is carefully regulated,
Melville describes the moral condition of sailors as
generally low. He writes that “sailors, as a class, entertain
the most liberal notions concerning morality and the
Decalogue” (387). All manner of evil flourishes, and “It is
in vain that the officers, by threats of condign punishment,
endeavor to instill more virtuous principles into their crew”
(388). The great moral difference among the crew depends on
where in the ship a sailor is stationed. Throughout Whine;
Jaeker, men below decks are generally identified with moral
obtuseness of some sort, while those in the rigging are
morally superior. Melville equates this difference to “the
wondrous influence of habitual sights and sounds upon the
human temper.” He asks, “Who were more liberal—hearted,
lofty—minded, gayer, more jocund, elastic, adventurous, given
to fun and frolic, than the top—men of the fore, main, and
mizzen masts?" “The reason of their lofty—mindedness was,
that they were high lifted above the petty tumults, carping
cares, and paltriness of the decks below” (397).

Melville attaches significance to this placement of men.
For him it shows an approach to that which is original and
eternal in the universe. White-Jacket meditates on his
condition as he sits aloft and comments on the thoughts

generated, “And it is a very fine feeling, and one that fuses

 

136
us into the universe of things, and makes us a part of the
All.” “Ay, ay! we sailors sail not in vain. We expatriate
ourselves to nationalize with the universe” (427). White-
Jacket lauds the life of the roving sailor, expressing
disgust with the sedentary life of the towns. However, he
qualifies what he means by true sea life. It is “not life in
a man-of—war, which, with its martial formalities and
thousand vices, stabs to the heart the soul of all free-and-
easy honorable rovers.” For him the true sailor is a very
metaphysical being. He looks for spiritual benefits in
sailing instead of the opportunities for a daily ration of
grog as well as other vices that the common sailor craves.
Aloft, one hundred feet above the deck, he says, “I lay
entranced; now dozing, now dreaming; now thinking of things
past, and anon of the life to come.” The sea is for White-
Jacket a means to an end. Something new awaits him. Some
landed experience is out there, some original, home ground
where, in the end, life will be more meaningful than in those
tired towns of the past in which one hears only the “dull
tramp of these plodders, plodding their dull way from their
cradles to their graves” (428).

Aboard ship White-Jacket occasionally witnesses
something of the unity and wholeness he seeks. The sailors
get up an entertaining play with “Matchless Jack” among the
players. As the play is performed, he is startled to see some
of the officers enjoying this spectacle withihhe_nrefl. “It is

a sweet thing," he says, “to see these officers confess a

137
human brotherhood with us” (447). He imagines that this
unusual mingling with the sailors might somehow create a more
cordial atmosphere. But he is disappointed. The very next
morning he sees these same officers assemble with the captain
to witness a punishment. An old salt comments, “‘See, White-
Jacket, all round they have ehinned_their_nnarrer;deek_faeee
again. But this is the way’” (447, 448). The old way is
difficult to throw over since “prenedenne_nre_ngninen_in”
(435).

But some higher force is always breaking through men’s
arbitrary ways. This force can be seen in the story of Mad
Jack’s assumption of command during a powerful storm off Cape
Horn. The Nexeraink is running (foolishly) full sail about
midnight when a sudden gale blows up. Mad Jack, the officer
of the deck, refuses to turn over command of the ship because
the captain gives a command every sailor knows is wrong.
“Contrary orders! but Mad Jack’s were obeyed" (459). Melville
comments on this event through White-Jacket, saying that “In
time of peril, like the needle to the load-stone, obedience,
irrespective of rank, generally flies to him who is best
fitted to command” (463). In a system infiltrated by
“favoritism and nepotism,” incompetent captains can be found
throughout the navy. The system for choosing captains is not
based on experience and ability; therefore, few common seamen
are enabled to rise to a captaincy (467). The same criticism
applies to the naval practice of sometimes placing “childish,

ignorant, stupid, or idiotic” midshipmen in charge of mature

Fr,

 

138
and experienced sailors. These grown men must obey without
hesitation the most absurd or arbitrary orders of “boy-
worm[s]” (575, 576). Melville is in these incidents
emphasizing the natural possession of gifts as a means for
organizing society rather than the determinations of
society’s arbitrary wishes based upon greed and selfishness.
That Melville is suggesting a symbolic value for a warship
can be seen when White-Jacket puzzles over “this man-of—war
world" (519).

The hideous practice of flogging can be laid at the feet
of arbitrariness. After a vivid section describing such
punishment, Melville bemoans how flogging can be justified at
all, especially since the laws broken by the sailors are
“things not essentially criminal, but only made so by
arbitrary laws" (492).

Melville appeals to higher laws and natural principles
in the condemnation of flogging. The appeal is essentially a
Puritan one since it refers, not to laws superior to a
secular society, but to laws that ought to be explicitly a
part of essential Americanness and the essence of the
American personality. Melville appeals to an established
American/Puritan moral base. In “Flogging Not Necessary,”
Melville uses the religious language of American specialness
to argue for the rejection of tradition.

Escaped from the house of bondage, Israel of old
did not follow after the ways of the Egyptians. To
her was given an express dispensation; to her were

given new things under the sun. And we Americans
are the peculiar, chosen people-—the Israel of our

139

time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the
world. Seventy years ago we escaped from thrall;
and, besides our first birth-right--embracing one
continent of earth--God has given to us, for a
future inheritance, the broad domains of the
political pagans, that shall yet come and lie down
under the shade of our ark, without bloody hands
being lifted. God has predestinated, mankind
expects, great things from our race; and great
things we feel in our souls. The rest of the
nations must soon be in our rear. We are the
pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on
through the wilderness of untried things, to break
a new path in the New World that is ours. In our
youth is our strength; in our inexperience, our
wisdom. At a period when other nations have but
lisped, our deep voice is heard afar. Long enough
have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and
doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had
come. But he has come in ne, if we would but give
utterance to his promptings. And let us always
remember that with ourselves, almost for the first
time in the history of earth, national selfishness
is unbounded philanthropY; for we can not do a good
to America but we give alms to the world. (506)

Americans are crossing over into something that has as
yet not been discovered. America is more than the mountains,
valleys, or streams of her physical landscape. America is a
spiritual experience exhibited in radically philanthropic
people who feel_grent_nhings_in_their_ennle. They can feel it
in the soul because in America faith is not something forced
upon the individual, as it is on the Nerereink. Aboard ship
the captain has the right to require men to attend divine
services, a practice directly opposed to the United States
Constitution (512).

Melville argues that one cannot condemn the Russian Navy
for absolutism since Russian society itself is absolutist.
“But with us it is different. Our institutions claim to be

based upon broad principles of political liberty and

 

140

equality” (498). As ancient Romans had special rights based
upon birth (see 496), so too Americans are held to a special
standard which Melville compares to “the Law of Nature”
(499). Thus, flogging is wrong on the basis of “the essential
dignity of man, which no legislator has a right to violate

In a word, we denounce [flogging] as religiously,
morally, and immutably mreng" (500). Thus, the judgment of
natural law and the principles of primitive and original
Americanness will be the same. As Melville observes,
“Christianity has taught me that, at the last day, man-of— f

war’s-men will not be judged by the Amiinlee_nf_flnr, nor by

 

the Onired_Snaree_SfaLnree_ar_Large, but by immutable laws,
ineffably beyond the comprehension of the honorable Board of
Commodores and Navy Commissioners” (545).

Natural law must always contend against the very fabric
of a warship, which Melville makes symbolic “of much that is
tyrannical and repelling in human nature.” In a warship the
officers are often eager for the glory of war, while the
average sailor fears it, thus creating a “contrast between
the forecastle and the quarter—deck.” The situation in a
warship, where one part is cursed while another is blessed,
destroys the feelings of brotherhood that should reign
“uncoerced” (566). Melville looks ferunrdinn_nhe_hime (a time
under the control of God) when no segment of society will
interpret the signs of war with joy (567).

This future time is described as explicitly Christian,

which is ironic because at the present time America is

141
already a Christian nation. However, the future experience
will be fundamentally different from America’s present “man-
of—war” set of social principles. Melville says,

But alas! when Virtue sits high aloft on a
frigate’s poop, when Virtue is crowned in the cabin
a Commodore, when Virtue rules by compulsion, and
domineers over Vice as a slave, then Virtue, though
her mandates be outwardly observed, bears little
interior sway. To be efficacious, Virtue must come
down from aloft, even as our blessed Redeemer came

down to redeem our whole man-of—war world; to that *i
end, mixing with its sailors and sinners as equals.
(588, 589)

Here are the same truly virtuous people seen by Babbalanja on

.1-

the island of Serenia. Melville is describing the spiritual

condition of the true chosen of Israel to be re-enacted in an a

 

American nation free of religious coercion and enjoying
equality of yirrne, not merely equality of political status.
As Melville understands and describes the American
condition, society is built on the pyramid system. “Virtue”

resides among the elite at the top who receive a refined
training and education, while the moral condition of the
lower orders is ignored. These classes are useful as subjects
for a detached examination of the ills and troubles of the
uncultured, a characteristic exhibited by the Nexereink's
surgeon Dr. Cuticle, a master of anatomy but a failed
physician and healer. He carefully performs his operation on
the smashed thigh of a common sailor, without emotion or
passion, but expressing profound interest in the details and
exigencies of a surgery performed on a man who will perish

moments after its completion (622—627).

142

The American warship illustrates what has become of
America itself, a Christian nation in need of being re-
christianized (631). The nation claims Christianity, but her
actions betray the distance from the eternal principles on
which she was founded. This is the reason White-jacket, when
threatened unjustly with the scourge, hauls himself before
the heayenly_trihnnal (“that of Jehovah”) for judgment and
defense (644). Only in the future “Millennium,” Melville
comments, will individuals have their eyes opened to the

“obsolete barbarism” of the age (647).

 

Melville intends us to believe that those future
millennial Americans will have been indeed re-christianized.
In fact, Americans seem not to have been Christianized at
all. They exhibit behavior reminiscent of the old covenant of
law and works. Aboard the Nexereink, as White-jacket listens
to the Articles of War being read, he imagines them to be
“the infallible, unappealable dispensation and code” (657).
There is not the slightest hope within the code for
“reservations” or “contingencies.” There is “not the remotest
promise of pardon or reprieve; not a glimpse of commutation
of the sentence; all hope and consolation is shut out--ehall
enffer.dennh! that is the simple fact for you to digest.” He
asks, Where is the Sermon on the Mount? Where is Christian
love? For White-jacket the Articles of War “[become] an index
to the true condition of the present civilization of the
world” (658). War itself is an abomination to the civilized

world--it is “unchristian, barbarous, brutal, and savoring of

143
the Feejee Islands, [and] cannibalism” (682). War turns men
into “blasphemers” and “fiend[s]” (687).

Melville argues that Americans are a people who should
live within the eternal and not within the shadows and
patterns of systems and cultures of the barbaric, long dead
past. This point is indirectly supported by Melville’s

description of the hypocrisy of naval officers, who

In.
.9

rigorously enforce the Articles of War without being
themselves subject to them. Such behavior mimics Christ’s
view of the Pharisees who piled worthless requirements on to

the people while violating those same requirements themselves

 

(Matthew 23:3, 4). The present Article-of—War America
Melville blames on the British. He writes, “No; [The Articles
of War] are an importation from abroad, even from Britain,
whose laws we Americans hurled off as tyrannical, and yet
retained the most tyrannical of all.” Melville idealized the
period in American history before the importation of the
Articles of War during the “Puritan Republic.” Only later was
the “monarchy restored,” preparing the way for the imposition
of the Articles of War (662). Thus, the Articles of War
symbolize an oppressive system of forced obedience, not
essentially different from “Mohammed enforcing Moslemism with
the sword and the Koran” (667).

Melville uses an argument from Christology to bolster
his case. He notes that Christians have been unable to
translate their ideals into “bringing about a Millennium”

(691). They have embraced the notion that the principles of

144
Christianity are impractical for the present world (as
Plotinus Plinlimmon advocates in EieLLe, showing that
chronological or celestial time can never be mixed with
horological or terrestrial time, see Bierre 247-252).
Melville, however, indicates that the nature of Christ had a
“divine consistency" in that Christ was both God and man
(692). In other words, Christ successfully applied heavenly
principles in this world, principles Christians today seem to
teach to the heathen for the purposes of evangelism
(“bringing about a Millennium”) without actually living them.
John Samson, author of WhitniLieenJflelxilleisninrrntilemf

Lies, notes the millennialist nature of this passage, writing

 

that, “In a word, White-Jacket is a millennialist” (141).

Grenberg, in his comments on Jack Chase as Christ-figure,

misses the Christological implications by writing,
we must conclude that Melville conceives of Christ
as impotent in the affairs of this world. He is an
idea without substance, an ideal without force.
Jack Chase thus embodies the essential dilemma of
Melville’s dogged inquiry into the nature of
perfection and his hardening conviction that
perfection is unattainable in this life. (83)

The man-of—war ship (representing America and/or the
world) exemplifies the realities of human life. It is built
on “checks and balances, blood against blood.” The ship’s
various ranks and rigid discipline keeps the balance of power
through the grinding of its “cruel cogs and wheels" while
disregarding “the moral well-being of the crew” (742). A

warship is a seething collection of “irritabilities,

jealousies, and cabals, the spiteful detractions and

145

animosities, that lurk far down, and cling to the very kelson
of the ship.” Melville writes that the “immutable
ceremonies,” “iron etiquette,” “spiked barriers,” “delegated
absolutism,” and lack of appeal for abuse creates “a general
social condition which is the precise reverse of what any
Christian could desire” (743). A ship is a breeding ground
for various unmentionable sins and horrors which called forth
the destruction of ancient Gomorrah (743, 744). :H

A ship seems to operate best when manned by men of low

moral worth. Melville indicates that common sailors such as

 

“Landless" are much admired by the officers of a ship.
Landless was “a fellow without shame, without a soul, so dead
to the least dignity of manhood that he could hardly be
called a man.” On the other hand, “a seaman who exhibits
traits of moral sensitiveness, whose demeanor shows some
dignity within; this is the man they, in many cases,
instinctively dislike" (753).

But the realities of ship life are not to be seen as
irredeemable or unchangeable. White-jacket says, “There are
some vessels blessed with patriarchal, intellectual Captains,
gentlemanly and brotherly officers, and docile and
Christianized crews” (754). The Nexereink is inhabited by
eeme sailors and officers (White-jacket’s group of main-top-
men headed by Jack Chase) with the power of vision and the
bond of brotherhood enabling them to see beyond the cruelties
of life aboard a man-of—war. They can imagine, as they watch

the stars, “the everlasting, glorious Future, forever beyond

146

us.” The warship now glides toward some “far inland” zone

which the sighted may see (766).
Hand in hand we top-mates stand, rocked in our
Pisgah top. And over the starry waves, and broad
out into the blandly blue and boundless night,
spiced with strange sweets from the long-sought
land--the whole long cruise predestinated ours,
though often in tempest-time we almost refused to
believe in that far-distant shore--straight out
into that fragrant night, ever-noble Jack Chase,
matchless and unmatchable Jack Chase stretches
forth his bannered hand, and, pointing shoreward,
cries: ‘For the last time, hear Camoens, boys!’
[after which comes a song celebrating arrival at
“‘natal soil’”] (767)

In “The End,” Melville equates the ship “that sails
through the sea [with] this earth that sails through the air”
(768). Earth dwellers are not condemned to a continual
passage through space. They are destined for a final harbor
congenial to their true natures (since the voyage itself is
making them sick). Melville’s concept of a final haven belies
Grenberg’s contention that there can be no “new worlds” for
White-Jacket, and that in Whife;daeker “Melville closes the
circles of world, time, and space, trapping the self within
unbreakable bonds” (85). Melville’s idea of a final haven
does not refer to the American millennium. Melville is
primarily concerned in this final chapter with the
apocalypse, with the nlrimare destiny of humanity. The
millennial element is that place of individual serenity at
which the visionary arrives in the present world. The world
itself is undoubtedly a man-of—war place,

Yet the worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon

ourselves; our officers can not remove them, even
if they would. From the last ills no being can save

 

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147

another; therein each man must be his own saviour.

For the rest, whatever befall us, let us never

train our murderous guns inboard. (769)
The American millennium is that condition, not of apocalyptic
otherworldliness, but of brotherly bondedness and concern
acted out in a hideous environment by those fully knowledge-
able regarding the essential unworkableness of things.
Dillingham argues incorrectly “that White-Jacket is [no] more
a part of the crew or the great world as the novel progresses
than he is initially” (65), nor is Grenberg correct when he
writes that “the narrative in whireedaeket is essentially
static ... and the narrator seems to end where he began--in
the doldrums of indecision and isolation” (77). Jack Chase,
White-Jacket, and the other main-top—men know the true condi—
tion of the world, they know its brutish nature, they under—
stand what lies far below them on the decks of the warship.
But in Christian affection they bond themselves together in
the belief that ultimately a glorious destiny will arrive.
They believe in belief. There is meaning behind the mask.
Sailors (literal or metaphysical) can sound the bottom to de-
termine the nearness of the far shore. Such belief can beat
back the worst abuses and evils which afflict the world,
though certainly never eradicates them. The American millen-
nium is not a period without tragedy and suffering, it is a
period of tragedy circumscribed.

Samson misinterprets when he writes that White-Jacket’s

millennialism is mere conservatism and complacency, or even

“contradictory, for millennium and tribulation are mutually

 

148
exclusive. It is also abhorrent to Melville, for it denies
the reality of pain and suffering” (154). Bell comes close to
seeing the true millennial nature of whireedaeker. Bell
demonstrates that Whife;danker is actually skeptical of
romantic and revolutionary notions of reform. The novel is
not a work of protest pitting artificial codes against the
noumenal character of the individual (see 200 for the
discussion noumenal philosophy of Jack Chase). Instead,
“Beneath the surface ... lurks a growing recognition that

perhaps the ‘artificial’ is all the ‘truth’ there is.”

u: N "w -

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‘5:.'__ ...

Perhaps the Declaration of Independence is no truer than the

 

Articles of War (211). Where Bell goes wrong is in
discounting what Melville is suggesting is possible in this
world. Bell contends that “Melville [drifts] from messianic
sincerity to the somberly ironic dualism of Bierre” (211).
Just as critics have missed the achievement of Babbalanja in
Mardi, so also Bell needlessly argues for the fundamental
pessimism in Melville. Because Melville begins to understand
that depravity is not the production of social evil (see Bell
201, 202) does not suggest that Melville offers no
consolations or hopes for inhabitants of a depraved world.
Grenberg correctly suggests that “[White-Jacket] demands
nothing less than meaningful experience in the world” but
erroneously writes that “it is precisely this fusion of mind
and experience, meaning and fact, that the novel as a whole
denies" (88). The main-top-men of the Nexereink have

discovered a workable solution for the problem of pain, sin,

149
and unworkability in the joyous union of men of belief and
vision. This is the stability which Grenberg denies them.

In Mehy;Oiek Melville created his most interesting
wanderer. The narrator and wanderer, Ishmael, seeks a
whaling voyage for therapeutic and metaphysical purposes, or,
as he expresses it, as a “substitute for pistol and ball.” At
the Spouter Inn in New Bedford he finds a stranger in his
bed, a cannibal named Queequeg with whom he later signs onto
a whaling ship, the Pegnnd. The most compelling aspect of the
whaler is her captain named Ahab, a severe-looking man with a
leg made from the jawbone of a whale. Within a few days of
leaving New Bedford, Captain Ahab announces to the crew the
reward for the man sighting the white whale named Moby-Dick,
the very whale that maimed Ahab. Along the way the ship and
crew sight and kill various schools of whales, as well as
encounter other whaling ships. Captain Ahab unhesitatingly
asks for news of Moby-Dick. One captain of a whaler, himself
a victim of the white whale, tells Ahab where he last sighted
Moby-Dick. Ahab, now grown mad, begins a final relentless
pursuit of the whale. Though warned by various prophetic
signs of impending doom, Ahab rages on. Finally sighted by
the captain himself, the white whale leads the men in a
desperate three-day chase. Eventually, Moby-Dick smashes the
Pequod. Ahab is killed when a harpoon rope becomes entangled
around his neck and he is jerked from the boat. All on the
ship die except Ishmael, who saves himself by clinging to a

wooden coffin fashioned beforehand for Queequeg.

150
In the context of the millennial and Protestant aspects
of the first five sea narratives of the Melville canon, Mnhy;
Oink takes on a more recognizable structure. The millennial
aspects of Mehy;Oiek are much more subtle than the direct
discussions of the subject in Redhnrn and Whife;daeker. After
all, the central figure of Mehy;Oiek is Ahab the monomaniac.

Ahab is not the classic Melvillean wanderer, he merely

 

Rt
pursues an illusion. He is the Taji, not the Babbalanja, of i
Mardi. The tendency to see the work as pessimistic or
agnostic gives way to an acknowledgement of its fundamentally 1
Protestant and affirming nature. If Mehy;Oiek_is read as an A
9'

example of Solomonic wisdom literature, then the dark
elements are tempered and placed in their proper perspective.

In Mehy;Oiek the theme of the ocean as symbol continues;
however, the most pronounced theme of Mnhy2Di£K is that the
world (and the white whale) is ultimately indeterminate.
Mnhyeniek, in a very Protestant fashion, closes in on what is
fundamental and at the core of experience.

The man who wishes to be called Ishmael (the Biblical
child of Abraham’s flesh, but not of God’s promise) finds his
soul in a poor state. He perceives but two choices for
himself: the death of the soul by suicide or the taking of
the soul to sea. He chooses the sea. This action seems
natural to him, as well as to all men. They live “insular”
lives and love_nothing more than standing by the sea “fixed
in ocean reveries” (795). “Nothing will content them but the

extremest limit of the land” (796). All men are united in an

151
intense desire to stand and gaze into the sea. Their
reasoning is simple--in the ocean they see themselves,
representing to them “the image of the ungraspable phantom of
life” (797).
The only hope for a crosser of the sea is the proper
vision. Thus “a dauntless stander-of—mast-heads” peers with

hope “through the thick haze of the future, and [descries]

 

what shoals and what rocks must be shunned” (957). It is only I‘
at the mast-head where rests the fulfillment of the purpose
of the voyage. As the ancient Egyptians (“a nation of mast—
head standers”) rose to the top of their pyramids to “sing F;

out for new stars” (956), so too does the whaleman find
whales from the top of the mast-head only-~“your whales must
be seen before they can be killed” (961). The vision from the
top is mystical, since “There you stand, lost in the infinite
series of the sea” (958). At the main—top a sailor
loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his
feet for the visible image of that deep, blue,
bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and
every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing
that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising
fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the
embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only
people the soul by continually flitting through it.
(961, 962)

The sea represents the completely other, the
“everlasting terra incognita.” Nothing at sea seems to bear
any relationship to what is on the land (1086). Thus,
humanity, by nature the very substance of landedness, fails

in its attempt to comprehend the sea. Ishmael argues that man

and his science (which flatters him with hopes of future

152

develOpment) will only be insulted and murdered by the sea.
What occurs only as a miracle on the shore, is an everyday
event on the ocean, the swallowing up of ships on the ocean
being commonplace (1086). The ocean is uncontrollable and
“masterless” (1087). Sailors are “the most directly brought
into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the
sea” (984). The Pacific Ocean is “mysterious,” “divine,” and ,1

“eternal” (1308). The ocean is comparable only to death

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itself, since both represent “the strange Untried," as well

as “the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored"

 

(1312). Yvor Winters places the contrast between sea and land
at the center of the novel, writing that “The symbolism of
Mehy Oink is based on the antithesis of the sea and the land:
the land represents the known, the mastered, in human
experience; the sea, the half-known, the obscure region of
instinct, uncritical feeling, danger, and terror" (200).

But that which is ungraspable and untamable does not
hinder men’s heady expectations. In the expectations and
hopes of Mehy;Oiek can be seen the theme of millennialism.
Captain Bildad, an owner and investor with Captain Peleg in
the Pequod, sings of a future promised land lying beyond the
sea:

‘Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood,
Stand dressed in living green.

So to the Jews old Canaan stood,
While Jordan rolled between.’ (903)

Ishmael perceives these words to be “full of hope and

fruition.” He foresees that in spite of the present

153
circumstances of sea life, that indeed “it then seemed to me,
many a pleasant haven [lay] in store” (903). With this
expectation in mind, the crew “blindly plunged like fate into
the lone Atlantic” (905). No one of the crew knows what
actually lies ahead for himself. Ishmael understands the
voyage in the guise of a school, saying that the “whale—ship
was my Yale College and my Harvard” (912). The sweet
expectation is there, but the propositions to be learned E!
remain a mystery. Schirmeister observes that being “at sea in .

Mnby Dick is in some sense to desire and to quest” (99).

 

Milder sees a kind of millennialism, noting too that the

 

novel is exploratory and “dramatizes the emergence of a new
cultural order from the death-throes of the old” (434).

The ocean in Mehyinek is used in the same way that it
is in all of Melville’s previous works; hoWever, the
millennial elements are not an integral part of the plot
structure. That is, Mehy;Oiek does not “arrive" at a
millennial understanding; instead, it ends in disaster. Duban
writes that “Ishmael's outlook borders on ... millennialist
optimism” because Ishmael survives the horrendous voyage of
the Pequod just as Americans will survive the horrors of
slavery to become God’s forgiven but still chosen peOple
(133). This is not the sort of millennium in Mehy;Oiek, and
the case is a bit weak for it. But a connection can be made
to the millennialism of the heart found in previous works.
The millennium Melville is after can be determined by looking

at Mehy;Oiek as a book of essentially Protestant sensibility.

154
McWilliams comes closest to this kind of millennium when he
notes that “Ishmael assumes that the inner divinity of the
common man has become the heroic essence of a new people”
(W 210) .

The possibility of a new people becomes apparent in
Steven Ozment’s WW.
Ozment has written a historical work covering the early days
of the Reformation. He seeks to account for the relationship
between spiritual and worldly revolutions. He argues that
Protestants doggedly pursue “a religious life that works,”
and “unhesitatingly change churches and denominations,
shedding the spiritual truths of yesterday as if they were
just another bad investment” (xiii). For Protestants, filling
an inner spiritual need is as important as satisfying a
physical need (3). Thus, Protestants are by nature spiritual
skeptics unwilling to live in the folly of the age. They live
apart from their age, “secure in God’s clear Word and simple
truth” (217).

In sound Protestant fashion Melville in Mehy;Oiek and
his other works vigorously admonishes his readers to aim for
the core of spiritual experience. Finding the core involves
looking at things the way they are and deciding what is folly
and what is the clear Word and simple truth. The pursuer of
such truth reduces the very breadth of his life; that which
is nnr illusory for him narrows and narrows, and narrows
still further. Illusions are cleared away for him as he looks

at the world in the light of the “natural sun ... the only

 

155

true lamp-—all others but liars” (1247). That light hides
nothing from him concerning the awfulness of what is,
including “swamps,” “deserts,” “griefs,” and most
significantly “the ocean, which is the dark side of this
earth, and whiCh is two thirds of this earth” (1247). Anyone
who remains more joyful than sorrowful in this context is
either “not true, or undeveloped” (1247). Thus, Melville
says, the “truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the
truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the
fine hammered steel of woe" (1248). In apparent observation
of the narrowing of the spiritual focus and the rejecting of
folly, Brodtkorb writes, “Ishmael goes to sea in endless
repetition to create meaning out of emptiness.” Such a
statement makes sense to the extent that it is Protestant and
millennial, but not to the extent of Brodtkorb’s next
sentence, which reads, “For [Ishmael], there is no Bible to
reveal Truth” (148). Such an idea seems profoundly
contradictory to Melville’s own praise of Christ and the book
of Ecclesiastes. .

The introduction of the book of Ecclesiastes into Mehy;
Oink helps clarify the Protestant and millennial aspects of
Melville’s most important work. The theme of Ecclesiastes is
closely related to the theme of indeterminacy in Mehy;Oink. A
comparison of the works can demonstrate what Melville
considers folly and what he considers the core. Finding
Melville’s core means finding the millennial aspect of Mehy;

Dink.

156

Ecclesiastes is a book about the pursuit of meaning. The
pursuit is an ironic one since individuals never see or hear
enough to satisfy them (1:8). Solomon argues that because
everything under the sun is meaningless, the pursuit of
meaning is “a chasing after the wind” (1:14). Solomon
considers various possibilities whereby meaning may be had——
pleasures, wisdom, folly, toil, advancement, riches. But none
of these offer satisfactory answers to him. In fact, Solomon
states plainly that “No one can comprehend what goes on under
the sun. Despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot
discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he
cannot really comprehend it” (8:17).

What is significant about Ecclesiastes is the
“conclusion of the matter” (12:13). The chasing after the
wind under the sun has failed to produce meaning, but Solomon
suggests that there still remains a single thing at the core
of life that is meaningful to do. The conclusion is to “Fear
God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of
man” (12:13). The comprehensive list of various pursuits has
been reduced to the one pursuit. The “whole duty of man” has
been compressed into six words (in the English Bible).

A comparison of Mehy;Oink and Ecclesiastes demonstrates
the similarities of their structures. Just as the wise man
turns first one existential rock and then another in search
of satisfactory meaning, so too does Ishmael live out the
psychic experience of monomaniac Ahab, accompanying him as a

helpless participant in his pursuit of the uncatchable whale.

 

 

 

157

Both Solomon and Ahab are doomed to failure except when
enabled to envision that which lies over the horizon beyond
their perceptions. Solomon sees into the nature of things and
grasps the irreducible principle of life. Such a vision is
unachievable by Ahab since his monomania permits him the
privilege of pursuing only illusions.

A hope intimated by Ishmael resembles the irreducible
injunction of Solomon. His great pain is that all of life :3
seems to conspire to thwart the achievement of that hope. In

the language of whaling, Ishmael observes that just when

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sailors have finished with another besmirching pursuit of a
whale and “cleansed [themselves] from its defilements, and
learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul,” they
hear once again “There_ehe_hlnme!--the ghost is spouted up,
and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through
young life’s old routine again” (1252).

The tabernacle of the soul. In Mehy;Oink there are a
number of references to a place of inner calm and serenity.
As with the serenity found by Babbalanja in Mardi, the inner
peace alluded to by Melville is precious and delicate,
difficult to find and easy to lose. What is insightful about
Mnbyznink is the clear connection made to the relationship
between the ocean and this inner calm. That which readers
must heretofore read into the earlier texts through the

juxtaposition of ocean and spiritual goal is made explicit.

158
Two passages are supportive and enlightening here. The

first is in the context of Melville’s discussion of the
otherness and treachery of the sea. He writes,

Consider all this; and then turn to this green,

gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both,

the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange

analogy to something in yourself? For as this

appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in

the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full

of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the

horrors of the half known life. God keep thee!

Push not off from that isle, thou canst never

return! (1087)
Individuals must crossover into their own peace just as
Babbalanja had to cross over many a mile of open ocean in
order to find the island of Serenia. In Mehy;Oink there are
no references to the possibility of America crossing over to
a social and political millennium as was suggested in Whine;
flanker. In Protestant fashion the focus has narrowed to the
core of the nation--the individual spiritual experience. The
soul is the subject; encompassing the soul are the horrors of
the “half known life.” The millennial expectation has been
reduced to “one insular Tahiti.” So, even though Ishmael
makes reference to a corporate journey on the sea in much the
same way White-Jacket did (Ishmael observes that “the world’s
a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete” (836),
it remains clear that Mehy;Oink is primarily concerned with
an inward voyage.

The second passage concerns the life of the harassed,

relentlessly pursued whale. Though buffeted by the exigencies

of the sea and

 

 

 

159
surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations
and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at
the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all
peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in
dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the
tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still
for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while
ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me,
deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in
eternal mildness of joy. (1208, 1209)
These two passages are nearly identical as descriptions of
the inner life possible in a world of woe. The first passage
represents a bringing—in to Mnhy;Oink of Melville’s
millennial metaphor developed throughout his first five
narratives, while the second passage is a restructuring and
re-telling of the larger metaphor for the actual context of
the whaling motif. In the second passage is the notion of the
self as analogous to the ocean (the “Atlantic of my being”)--
been the self and the sea are unknowable and mysterious. The
passage represents a shift in perspective from the idea of
the millennial hope being out there beyond the horizon, to
the idea of the “mute calm” being “deep down and deep
inland.” Individuals must retreat inward to the calm core
because “All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born
with halters round their necks” (1094). This inward shift is
an important development in the progression of the millennial
theme in Melville and reflects his Protestant nature.
Melville directs the quest inward in Mehy:Dink for a
similar reason that Solomon reduces all of life to six words.

Ecclesiastes is a search for meaningful employment and

activity, while Mnhyzflink is a search for definition and

 

160
comprehensibility. Eventually both quests end in utter
frustration. In Solomon’s instance, it is only after the
complete failure of the quest that a resolution is offered.
Mehy;Oink offers no such resolution. It merely warns
ominously along the way that the quest for the white whale is
doomed and suggests a possible alternative to the pursuit of
the whale. In both Ecclesiastes and Mehyznink the world ends
up being enigmatic at best, and in the case of Wink, a
malignant at worst. But such indeterminacy should not lead

literary historians to describe the novel as agnostic or

 

relativistic. Spengemann summarizes this idea when he E
contends that

before Mebyznink, most American literature assumes

the existence of transcendent ideal truth and

attempts either to illustrate this truth, if it is

foreknown, or to discover it, if it is not. After

Mehy;Oink, one main line of American literature

recognizes the probable nonexistence of absolutes

and attempts to devise forms of belief that can do

without them. (198)

Mnbyzninkis most important comments on
incomprehensibility come in discussions of the nature of the
whale. The chapter “Cetology,” which attempts a history and
description of the whale genera, opens with an important
caveat—-“Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but
soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless
immensities.” Once in the open ocean, scientists must beware.
They are dealing with the “Constituents of a chaos" and it is

“no easy task” to understand. Much has been written about

whales since Biblical and Greek times, yet “of real knowledge

 

161
there be little” (933). And even after reviewing all that is
known of whales, Ishmael warns that in his own attempt he can
“promise nothing complete.” To understand the whale one must
reach down “among the unspeakable foundations” of the world
where all is “uncertain,” and “unsettled” (935). Though
Ishmael proclaims his descriptions of the whale “unfinished,”
he generalizes that having a complete understanding of
anything is somehow detrimental to human existence--he says, fig
“God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book

is but a draught--nay, but the draught of a draught” (946).

 

The pursuit of this incomprehensible creature inspires g!
thoughts of fruitlessness. Round the world we go, Ishmael
says, only to end up where we left. In this round world,
sailing east merely brings one back to the beginning. In such
a world there is no promise of reaching “new distances.” “But
in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in
tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or
other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over
this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or
midway leave us whelmed” (1046). Melville’s “mazes” are
connected here to Milton’s characterization of the
discussions held in hell. The lost angels discoursed “Of
Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate, / Fixt Fate, Free
will, Foreknowledge absolute, / And found no end, in
wand'ring mazes lost” (Earadiee_Leer II, 559-561).

The mysteries of the whale, as well as the world itself,

are similar to the mystery of God. Barbour comments that

 

162
Melville has chosen the symbol that God uses for himself in
the book of Job, chapter 41, and that “the whale, like God,
exists beyond our ability to know” (31, 32). In attempting to
read the face of the whale, Ishmael observes,
But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty
god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so
immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that
full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread
powers more forcibly than in beholding any other
object in living nature. For you see no one point
precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no
nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none,
proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a
forehead, pleated with riddles. (1164).
The Biblical allusion is not direct in this passage, but is
certainly related. In asking to see the face of God, Moses is
told that is impossible. He is hidden in the cleft of a rock
and allowed to witness the back of God as he passes by. A few
pages later Melville does directly allude to this Biblical
passage. Into the mouth of the whale he puts these words:
“Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but
my face shall not be seen” (1198). Melville is making the
point that our inability to define and comprehend the whale
or the world is part of our general inability to understand
God. There is to be no deciphering of this hieroglyphic. We
can no more comprehend the face of a simple peasant than the
face of the whale (1165). How then the face of God?
Herbert, in Wm,
also sees the story as theocentric. He writes,
Melville’s quest portrays the heroism of a man
without a standard of final belief, who casts

himself unreservedly into the search for it. The
basic criterion of his quest remains insistently

 

163
theocentric: he seeks a unified vision of ultimate
reality that can gather all experience into an
intelligible and coherent totality. (36, 37)
It is the incomprehensibility of things, the

unresponding mysteries of life, which have driven Captain

Ahab mad. He has endeavored to “pierce the profundity”

 

(1373). “‘Forty years of continual whaling!’” Ahab laments,
“‘forty years of privation, and peril, and stormtime! forty
years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken
the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors

of the deep’” (1373). Ahab is locked in the midst of his

 

personal crossing of the sea. He cannot go over to the other
side. For him there is no green land, there is no inland
calm. Instead, “There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a
determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and
fearless, forward dedication of that glanCe.” In place of
inland peace there is “the nameless regal overbearing dignity
of some mighty woe" (925). As such Ahab was only a nominal
Christian, an “alien” to the faith (955). Herbert notes that
Ahab is actually a Calvinistic heretic who “refuses to submit
to the ‘inscrutable’” (Mehy_Oink_and_Oalyininm 40, 122).
Herbert notes that as such Ahab is a perfect example of John
Calvin’s innate depravity (“Calvinist Earthquake” 128).

Ahab lost his leg to the white whale. And it is on the
white whale that Ahab foists all of life’s unexplainable
sorrows. Behind all things, reasons Ahab, there is a
malignant controlling force. To strike at that force means

one must

164

strike through the mask! How can the prisoner
reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?
To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to
me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But
’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him
outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice
sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what
I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the
white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon
him. (967)
The primary element of the whale hated by Ahab is its very
indeterminacy. But in the context of Ishmael’s comments about
the nature of things, Ahab’s reaction is pure madness.
Inscrutability is at the heart of all things, not just at the
heart of the mystery of the white whale. Leo Bersani
expresses the inscrutability of reality as “an infinitely
meaningful absence of meaning” (153).

The whale is a mere exemplar of the mystery. As Ishmael
observes about the captain--he “had cherished a wild
vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that
in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with
him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual
and spiritual exasperations” (989). John T. Irwin is correct
when he observes, “The qualities attributed to Moby Dick in
the novel are simply the projected attributes of his
pursuers.... The whale’s intelligent malignity is Ahab’s own,
the whale’s ubiquity is but the self’s own sense that, look
where it will, it sees only some aspect of itself” (287).

At the core of Ahab’s being resides, not the sweet calm

spoken of by Ishmael, but unspeakable pain. Ishmael says,

“The very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable

 

165

anguish” (1007). By making the choice he has, his spiritual
nature has not made the necessary progress. He has not
crossed over the abyss to the inland zone. He has, Ishmael
observes, become a savage (1082) and a demon (see baptism of
harpoon 1315). His inland zone has become a horror (“Far
inland, nameless wails came from him, as desolate sounds from
out ravines” 1383). In this condition he can no longer see
the possibility of arrival at the core and center. Ahab cries
out, “‘There is no steady unretracing progress in this
life.... Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no
more?’” (1318). His life is directionless, his quadrant is
useless to him—-“‘Pilot! thou tellest me truly where I am--
but canst thou cast the least hint where I shall be?’”
(1326). Starbuck warns Ahab, “‘t’ is an ill voyage!’” and
pleads with him “‘to go on a better voyage than this’”
(1335). The notion of proper and improper voyages suggested
by Melville has been noted by various critics. Herbert
observes that Melville’s “mission is prophetic, that of
calling us to a deeper life” (“Calvinist Earthquake” 113).

Mehy;Oink is the story of a man who refuses to compress
his life into the achievable and doable. Instead, he is stuck
in life “under the sun” in an endless round of frustrating
and bitter pursuit, a “chasing after the wind.” He has not
allied himself with the wisdom Merlin Bowen sees in the
novel. Bowen writes, “Wisdom comes, when it does, with the
discovery that nature and God are too vast to be captured in

any of our formulations” (121). Instead, Ahab clings to what

 

166

the philosopher Kierkegaard called defiant depair, a despair
that recognizes that to accept comfort is the same thing as
destruction (cited by Auden 114). Chase writes, “To be Ahab
is to be unable to resist the hypnotic attraction of the self
with its impulse to envelop and control the universe” (108).

Ahab is simply on the wrong voyage. Auden suggests as
much when he makes a connection between Mehy;Oink and the
book of Jonah. Concerning Ishmael he writes, “The story of
Jonah is the story of a voyage undertaken for the wrong
reasons, of learning repentance through suffering and a final
acceptance of duty” (101). Ahab’s voyage is the antithesis of
Jonah’s in that Jonah’s journey through the tormenting
experience in the sea leads to repentance-~Ahab’s voyage is a
constant shaking of the fist in the face of God. Herbert
writes that “Jonah accepts the whale’s attack as a divine
correction; Ahab takes it as an outrageous affront”
(“Calvinist Earthquake” 125). Chase contends that “[Moby-
Dick] is a book about the alienation from life that results
from an excessive or neurotic self-dependence” (105).

Melville wrote Mnhy;Oink as a book of warning concerning
the pathway to salvation in as clear a manner as John
Bunyan’s The_Eilgrimie_Erngreee. The great difference is the
obvious one. Melville’s great sea novel is written in an era
in which belief itself is threatened, in which the horizon is
indeed blank. Herbert sees the Protestant/Calvinistic
elements clearly. He notes that the logic of Calvinistic

theology was perfectly consistent-~that the realities of

 

 

 

167
human life conform to it rather than to expressions of human
dignity as expressed by the liberalism of Melville’s day
(“Calvinist Earthquake” 112). Mehy;Oink is rife with the
language of current doctrinal arguments (“Calvinist
Earthquake” 113). Herbert writes that
Melville thus draws us into a religious struggle.
The traditional perspectives at work are biblical
and theological, pointing toward the ultimate
boundaries of experience; and Melville places the
unresolvable conflict of these perspectives at the
book’s own outermost horizon, embracing within that
horizon a discourse concerning final questions, the
meaning or unmeaning of life and death. (“Calvinist
Earthquake" 114)
Herbert contends that Melville, in carrying on this debate,
is tearing down and building anew (“Calvinist Earthquake”
114). Such a stance on Melville’s part renders him suspect in
his culture, and he must assume the role of outcast. No
single religious tradition can contain “ultimate truth" or
“universal validity.” This line of reasoning places Ishmael
on the sea as an escapee from the hardened shore. The sea is
itself the place of religious truth--“a truth beyond all
formulation" (“Calvinist Earthquake” 122, 123). What opens
for such a traveller is an infinite series of collapsing and
reconstituted selves always open to new possibilites and new
avenues to truth and understanding (“Calvinist Earthquake”
138).
Herbert here misses the point of all the sea voyages of
Melville, including Mehy;Oink. He strays beyond monism into a

world unknown to Melville. All of Melville’s voyages must

either end “landed” or suggest some sort of “landedness.” The

 

 

 

168
arrival at the millennial shore could be a future time in
America in which the chosen people live out their spiritually
matured Protestant selves in Christian social action, or
could be the arrival at a place of serenity and peace found
deep within the private human heart in the face of a blank,
meaningless world. Both sorts of arrivals are indeed possible
for and even demanded of all Protestants claiming to be on
the Christian way. Every true Christian must board the same

vessel of experience and cross over into millennium.

 

 

 

Epilogue

The entire canon of works by Herman Melville might be
explored in order to cull references to the sea and its
connection to millennialism. I will limit myself to a few
comments about three works—-lnrael_£efrer, Billy_Hndd, and
the poem Clanel. The first two works incorporate the sea as
an element of their narratives, but are not sea quests in the
same sense as Melville’s first six novels. ClnIEI is not a
sea quest at all, but a “landed” metaphor which bears a close
relationship in theme to the first six works. These three
works will be discussed in this epilogue.

Terael_2errer is the story of another of Melville’s
wanderers. Set in late eighteenth-century and early
nineteenth-century America, England, and France, and
published in 1855, the work incorporates a number of
Melville’s earlier themes. The central character Israel is
the inhabitant of Melville’s man-of—war world, but does not
possess the vision necessary to escape that world. In this
sense the novel lacks the millennial qualities of Melville’s
first six works.

The thematic emphasis of the work concerns the
fundamental savagery and lostness of America. Naval hero John
Paul Jones figures prominently in the novel. Melville creates
an equality between Jones, revolutionary France, and

primitive savages. Jones is described as a “jaunty barbarian

169

170
in broadcloth.” He is anticipatory of the civilized barbarity
to be witnessed in the French Revolution, an event which will
be a combination of “refinement” and “the blood—thirsty
ferocity of Borneo” (496). Jones is symbolic of the country
for which he fights. America is “intrepid, unprincipled,
reckless, predatory, with boundless ambition, civilized in
externals but a savage at heart.” “America is, or may yet be,
the Paul Jones of nations” (561).

The problem of external morality in lerael_Eerrer echoes
Typee, Omen, and Mardi, and is reminiscent of those earlier
questions about which was superior, missionary or savage?
However, lerael_2errer is most unhopeful for the future of
American savages. Israel is a wanderer more befuddled than
questing. Aboard the Ariel with John Paul Jones during a
brief sea fight with an English ship, Israel leaps onto the
enemy ship thinking she is about to be boarded by the other
members of the American crew, only to discover that the ships
are pulling away from each other. It is night, and Israel
attempts with “perseverance of effrontery” (578) to pass
himself off as an English seaman; the great difficulty, of
course, is that he has no place on board the ship. Observing
him in the clutches of the master—at-arms, the captain of the
English ship says, “‘Come here, master-at-arms. To what end
do you lead that man about?’" To which he responds, “‘To no
end in the world, sir. I keep leading him about because he

has no final destination’” (584).

 

 

171

Israel’s apparent madness aboard the ship saves him, and
he returns to England. However, because of his poverty his
visit there is extended for 40 years, stopping him from “a
voyage to the Promised Land” (612). As an old man he finally
returns, with his son, to New England. Unfortunately, he is
just as lost in the promised land as in England. His efforts
to gain a pension as a veteran come to nothing, and he dies
unknown and “out of being" (615).

Billy_Bndd, the story of an innocent young sailor caught
in the grip of naval justice, is the last work of the
Melville canon. The novel was found in manuscript following
Melville’s death and published posthumously. The character
Billy is the classic handsome sailor aboard the merchantman
Righre;ef;Man who is forcibly removed on the high seas to the
British warship Bellinnnent. The master-at-arms Claggart
develops a hatred for the young man and seeks to trick him
into a mutinous act. Accused of mutiny in the captain’s
presence, Billy lashes out at Claggart, striking a blow which
kills him. Captain Vere, though realizing Billy’s innocence,
feels compelled to make an example of Billy. He is hanged on
the yardarm.

The novel illustrates the conflict between worldly moral
structure and true Christian virtue that Melville outlined in
his first six works. As has been noted by most critics, Billy
takes on the innocent, sacrificial characteristics of Christ.
The captain of the Righfe;nf;Man complains that “‘you are

going to take away my peacemaker!’” (1357). Billy’s death has

 

172
obvious connections to the passion of Christ, especially in
the scene in which the surgeon and the purser discuss the
manner in which Billy died. The purser asks if the death were
not an act of “euthanasia,” a word the surgeon likens to
“‘mill_nener’” (1428). The word euthanasia means “good
death,” indicating that Billy willingly lay down his life in
sacrifice to the system Captain Vere represented. Such a
self-sacrifice would explain Billy’s last words, “‘God bless
Captain Vere!’” (1426).

There is another possibility, however. Billy’s innocence
is not that of the perfect God-Man, but rather the naiveté
and innocence of an Adam. Melville writes that “his simple
nature remained unsophisticated by those moral obliquities
which are not in every case incompatible with that
manufacturable thing known as respectability" (1361). “Billy
in many respects was little more than a sort of upright
barbarian, much such perhaps as Adam presumably might have
been ere the urbane Serpent wriggled himself into his
company” (1362).

What Melville emphasizes about Billy is his untested
nature and his lack of self-consciousness. In this man—of—war
world such a nature is doomed. Captain Vere, knowing the
truth, must still do what he must to preserve the
prerogatives of absolute power. However, the “virtue” of such
a system is based solely on respectability and conservatism.

The weakness of respectability is its derivation “from custom

 

Hafilh

r“

 

 

173
or convention ... from a period prior to Cain’s city and
citified man” (1362).

Conventionality, that is, not possessing the power of
natural virtue but only the authority of tradition, leads to
the enforcement of conventions including the horrors of
injustice seen in Billy’s case. But such injustice is no
different from that perpetuated by respectable missionaries
in the South Seas. The moral system seen aboard the
Bellinnrenr is identical to that witnessed from Typee to
Whinezdanker. What Melville is suggesting by default in Billy
Budd is the need for nothing short of the conversion of an
entire people to an internalized virtue. The prospects as
well as the necessity for this change can rightly be called
millennial.

The long poem Olarel, published in 1876, is the story of
a young divinity student on a tour of the holy sites of
Palestine. Among a sizable group of pilgrims, he makes his
way through Jerusalem, the Judean wilderness, the Jordan
River, Mar Saba (a traditional site of the temptation of
Christ), and Bethlehem, returning to Jerusalem. Along the way
the pilgrims discuss, in many different venues,
circumstances, and guises, the great basic questions centered
on the possibility of faith in the modern world.

The poem has attracted recent attention with the
publication of a new scholarly edition. Helen Vendler
reviewed this edition in the December 7, 1992 issue of The

Nen_Rennhlin. She describes Melville as an intellectually

 

 

174
questing individual looking for answers to spiritual
dilemmas. She notes that Melville hated the effects of
theological higher criticism on the power of the Biblical
narrative (40), belying the current notion that Melville was
a skeptic. Vendler wisely subverts this criticism by pointing
out that Melville (in Clarel) is a grown man who “sees more,
and he knows more” than when he was the boy of Typee (41).
Modern critics are unable to perceive the religious nature of
Melville, or as Vendler writes, that “Melville, like
Hawthorne and Dickinson, was a Calvinist to the marrow, one
for whom a calm stoicism was in the end unnatural” (42).

Vendler also understands the connection between the
desert of Clarel and the ocean of the sea narratives. She
writes,

The poem records Melville’s encounter with an
immensity--the desert--that had for him the same
fascination, in its pitilessness, as the sea. In
the desert, as in the sea, human scale is lost, and
the mind grapples for a larger scale by which to
measure both life and thought (40).

Clarel is a literalized expression of the sea metaphor
which delineates “crossing into millennium.” Clarel details
the historically precise intellectual struggles a Protestant
Christian would have gone through in the nineteenth century
in the attempt to maintain faith. Walter Bezanson has done a
thorough job of identifying the various characters in the
poem as advocates of philosophical positions. These

characters represent, in Bezanson’s View, such positions as

“ANCIENT ORTHODOXY,” “MAMMONISM,” the “FATALIST,” the

 

175
“UNQUESTIONING'BELIEVER," the “MELIORIST,” “THE MODERN
CRITICAL SPIRIT,” “IRRESPONSIBLE AND HAPPY YOUTH,”
“SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM,” “COMMERCIALISM,” “SELF-
ANNIHILATION,” “NARROW SECTARIAN ORTHODOXY,” “HUMANISTIC AND
RELIGIOUS VALUES,” and “GENIUS” (529-549).

Clarel listens to these characters' arguments, doubts,
and concerns, traversing through the emotional and
intellectual plight they create. The narrator describes this
journey in terms of the metaphor of the sea. He says, “The

bird in end must needs migrate / Over the sea: shall Clarel

‘-

too / Launch o’er his gulf, e’en Doubt, and woo / Remote

 

conclusions?” (130). The poem concludes this quest in a
Protestant fashion by wrapping itself in the fundamental
core. Back in Jerusalem, Clarel observes, at the beginning of
Whitsun-tide, the Via Crucis--the way of the cross (521). The
lane is crowded with Jews, Muslims, and Christians, each “in
varied forms of fate.” Melville is emphasizing the
fundamental nature of the cross. In the midst of doubt and
despair that nearly “exclude the hope” endures “the sign 0’
the cross--rhe_eeirir_ahene_the_dnen!” (522). The light of
knowledge has created greater shadows. But these shadows of
the intellect are tempered by the thought that they are
“strange illusions.” The poem concludes with these lines:

Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned--

Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind;

That like the crocus budding through the snow--

That like a swimmer rising from the deep--

That like a burning secret which doth go

Even from the bosom that would hoard and keep;
Emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea,

 

176

And prove that death but routs life into victory.
(523)

Clarel has reached his Bunyanesque river of life. It but
remains for him to pass through to the other side, to that
final shore of faith that defeats despair. The possibility of

that crossing is Herman Melville’s millennial hope.

 

 

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