FREE ESSAY ON HERMAN MELVILLE: AN ANTI- TRANSCENDENTALIST OR NOT?

HERMAN MELVILLE: AN ANTI- TRANSCENDENTALIST OR NOT?

Herman Melville: An Anti- Transcendentalist or Not? 
Melville, Herman (1819-91), American novelist, a major literary figure whose exploration
of psychological and metaphysical themes foreshadowed 20th-century literary concerns but
whose works remained in obscurity until the 1920s, when his genius was finally
recognized. Melville was born August 1, 1819, in New York City, into a family that had
declined in the world. The Gansevoorts were solid, stable, eminent, prosperous people;
the (Herman's Father's side) Melvilles were somewhat less successful materially,
possessing an unpredictable. erratic, mercurial strain. (Edinger 6). This difference
between the Melville's and Gansevoorts was the beginning of the trouble for the Melville
family. Herman's mother tried to work her way up the social ladder by moving into bigger
and better homes. While borrowing money from the bank, her husband was spending more than
he was earning. It is my conclusion that Maria Melville never committed herself
emotionally to her husband, but remained primarily attached to the well off Gansevoort
family. (Humford 23) Allan Melville was also attached financially to the Gansevoorts for
support. There is a lot of evidence concerning Melville's relation to his mother Maria
Melville. Apparently the older son Gansevoort who carried the mother's maiden name was
distinctly her favorite. (Edinger 7) This was a sense of alienation the Herman Melville
felt from his mother. This was one of the first symbolists to the Biblical Ishamel. 
In 1837 he shipped to Liverpool as a cabin boy. Upon returning to the U.S. he taught
school and then sailed for the South Seas in 1841 on the whaler Acushnet. After an 18
month voyage he deserted the ship in the Marquesas Islands and with a companion lived for
a month among the natives, who were cannibals. He escaped aboard an Australian trader,
leaving it at Papeete, Tahiti, where he was imprisoned temporarily. He worked as a field
laborer and then shipped to Honolulu, Hawaii, where in 1843 he enlisted as a seaman on
the U.S. Navy frigate United States. After his discharge in 1844 he began to create
novels out of his experiences and to take part in the literary life of Boston and New
York City. Melville's first five novels all achieved quick popularity. Typee: A Peep at
Polynesian Life (1846), Omoo, a Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), and
Mardi (1849) were romances of the South Sea islands. Redburn, His First Voyage (1849) was
based on his own first trip to sea, and White-Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War (1850)
fictionalized his experiences in the navy. In 1850 Melville moved to a farm near
Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he became an intimate friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, to
whom he dedicated his masterpiece Moby-Dick; or The White Whale (1851). The central theme
of the novel is the conflict between Captain Ahab, master of the whaler Pequod, and
Moby-Dick, a great white whale that once tore off one of Ahab's legs at the knee. Ahab is
dedicated to revenge; he drives himself and his crew, which includes Ishmael, narrator of
the story, over the seas in a desperate search for his enemy. The body of the book is
written in a wholly original, powerful narrative style, which, in certain sections of the
work, Melville varied with great success. The most impressive of these sections are the
rhetorically magnificent sermon delivered before sailing and the soliloquies of the
mates; lengthy flats, passages conveying nonnarrative material, usually of a technical
nature, such as the chapter about whales; and the more purely ornamental passages, such
as the tale of the Tally-Ho, which can stand by themselves as short stories of merit. The
work is invested with Ishmael's sense of profound wonder at his story, but nonetheless
conveys full awareness that Ahab's quest can have but one end. And so it proves to be:
Moby-Dick destroys the Pequod and all its crew save Ishmael. There is a certain streak of
the supernatural being projected in the writings of Melville, as is amply obvious in Moby
Dick. The story revolves around the idea of an awesome sea mammal, which drives the
passions of revenge in one man and forces him to pursue a course of action which leads
ultimately to his death as well as the deaths of his companions. There is a great deal of
imagination involved in these stories and the creativity is highly apparent. There is an
expression of belief in the supernatural, as the author strives to create the image of a
humongous beast in the mind of the reader. There are no indications that Melville was in
any way averse to fame or to the pursuit of excellence in his work. Every author, when
writing a book, is hopeful of it's success and Melville was no less. 
The Piazza Tales (1856) contain some of Melville's finest shorter works; particularly
notable are the powerful short stories Benito Cereno and Bartleby the Scrivener and the
ten descriptive sketches of the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, The Encantadas. Bartleby's
story is an allegory of withdrawal suggesting more than one level of interpretation.
Among them, Bartleby may be seen as a writer (like Melville), who chooses no longer to
write; or as a human walled off from society by his employment on wall Street, by the
walls of his building, by the barriers of his office nook within the building, by the
brick surface he faces out his window, and by the walls of the prison where he dies.
Bartleby's employer, the narrator of the story, has several walls of his own to break out
of. In his final grasp at communication, the narrator invites the reading that Bartleby's
life, and the story that presents it, are like dead letters that will never reach those
that would profit from them. He leaves us with the words, Ah Bartleby! Ah, humanity! In
Bartleby, the Scrivener, Melville tries to relate to the reader and explain his declining
situation. This story, on an allegorical level represents Melville, his life, and what he
wished his reading audience would understand about him. This is probably what he wanted,
but readers, initially, see a melancholy story about the condition of humanity. Whether
or not Melville is an anti-transcendentalist is a question to be pondered over. As such
he is as focused on leaving an impression on his readers as any other writer on the
writing block. Therefore, I believe that Melville was transcendental in many ways. He was
a writer who portrayed his own persona through his writings and thus he was a writer who
had the power to be able to express his own emotions and experiences through his
characters. This he has accomplished by writing stories, which had a depth, an essence of
their own. Melville was not o much concerned with the commercial success of his works,
but that was still a very high contributing factor to the motivation behind his writings.
Although he mainly drew on his personal experiences while formulating the stories that he
wrote, he greatly embellished them through his imagination and creativity to create
literary masterpieces out of them, which are appreciated greatly today. Being a success
meant a great deal to Melville and he was always aware of the fact that his books were
not very popular during his lifetime. In fact Bartleby the Scrivener relates to this very
fact through its portrayal of a writer, and it is greatly reflective of Melville's own
private situation.
He probably wished that his writing would be more popular among the readers, although he
professed his own demise with Bartleby's atrophy. The expression of accepted failure was
prevalent in Scrivener. Yet this did not make Melville any less desirous of fame and
popularity. He still strove to deliver excellence in his works in any way possible. Every
writer in history has had to find a place for himself in the mind of his readers before
reaching a level of maturity and respect in this profession. The quality of work is
judged solely on the readers perception of the work and nothing else. Melville was
desirous of hitting the right cord with the readers and his audience. He wanted to be
able to capture the attention of his audience and leave an impact on their minds, so that
the tale would be remembered long after it had been read. With Moby Dick, he used the
powerful tool of imaginative fantasy to capture the attention of his readers. The story
incorporated the extraordinary, action, adventure, revenge, suspense...in fact every
ingredient necessary for commercial success. But it didn't prove to be so. The book is
appreciated not as a classic work and Melville has received much more fame in the present
time frame. In Scrivener, he drew a picture of a man very similar to himself. A man sick
of working, finally declines rapidly to reach his demise. However, in Herman Melville's
'Benito Cereno' reveals the author's disgust with Emersonian transcendentalism through
the self-delusions of the protagonist. Cereno personifies nature, seeing it as a
benevolent force that acts deliberately for the good of humanity. Melville makes it
apparent that such idealism offers no practical use in a world that is as much evil as
good, and will likely be a burden. Cereno is Melville's strongest example of his
suspicions for the American idealist. In this one case through his expression of disgust
towards the idealists and their idealism, he has portrayed the image of a hard core
idealist who is converted to a realist through the experiences that he goes through. This
also drew on his seafaring days as experience and he struggled to bring across the death
of the idealist and the birth of the realist. But at the end of the day, whatever
emotions he possessed about the nature of idealism and idealistic thought, still form an
integral part of him. Whether or not the reader understands the general aura of wanting
to achieve something from his creations, yet Melville still strove to be a commercial
success and his aim for excellence in the field of writing continued.