Herman Melville
(1819-1891)
and the American Renaissance
Performer - Culture & Literature
Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,
Margaret Layton © 2012
Herman Melville and the American Renaissance
1. Life
Arrowhead, home of Melville, Pittsfield, Massachusetts
Performer - Culture & Literature
• He was born in New York in
1819, into a wealthy merchant
family.
• At the age of twelve he left
school because of his father’s
death.
• After various jobs, in 1839 he
signed on to a merchant ship.
• In 1841 sailed on his first
voyage as a member of the
crew of the whaling ship
‘Acushnet’.
Herman Melville and the American Renaissance
1. Life
Arrowhead, home of Melville, Pittsfield, Massachusetts
Performer - Culture & Literature
• In 1842 he deserted the ship
and spent some time in the
Marquesas Islands (now French
Polynesia).
• He came into contact with the
way of life of the Typees, a tribe
thought to be cannibals.
• Then he escaped to Tahiti, and
later to Hawaii, where he joined
a US ship and returned home.
• In 1851 he published MobyDick, his masterpiece.
• He died in 1891.
Herman Melville and the American Renaissance
2. Moby-Dick (1851)
The story
• Ahab, the captain of the whaler
‘Pequod’, has devoted his life to hunting
down and killing a white sperm whale,
called Moby Dick.
• Moby Dick had attacked him and bitten
off his leg during a previous whaling
expedition.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Herman Melville and the American Renaissance
2. Moby-Dick (1851)
The crew of the ship consists of mixed
races and religions:
• Starbuck, the wise and cautious first
mate.
• Queequeg, a superstitious Maori whom
Ahab has hired because of his skill with
the harpoon.
• Pip, the cabin boy.
• Ishmael, the narrator, who joins them
in Nantucket before the departure of the
ship.
• The whale, which is eventually seen
and then hunted for three days.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Herman Melville and the American Renaissance
2. Moby-Dick (1851)
• Ahab wounds Moby Dick, but in its
rage the animal destroys the Pequod
and its crew.
• Only good Ishmael is not caught in the
vortex of the sinking ship and
manages to float upon a coffin.
• He survives to tell the story.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Herman Melville and the American Renaissance
3. Captain Ahab
Two different perspectives
1. Ahab’s quest  a blasphemous activity.
• Ahab equals himself to God.
• He rejects God in favour of an alliance with the devil.
2. Ahab  the voice of the instinctive spirituality of the New
World, which rejects the
tyranny of nature over man.
• Ahab  a tragic hero who,
in his quest for his enemy,
takes his crew with him
in the final disaster.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Herman Melville and the American Renaissance
4. The meaning of the
white whale
Ishmael’s description of the sperm whale
 the problem of its superiority over all
other creatures.
The excellence of the whale places Ahab’s
quest as a very hard task doomed to failure.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Herman Melville and the American Renaissance
4. The meaning of the
white whale
Various interpretations
• more than a natural creature;
• the personification of the evil in the world;
• a mirror in which Ahab and his crew look for
their own image;
• the embodiment of mankind’s quest for a
reason for their existence.
A symbol of
• the hidden and mysterious forces of a
wonderful and powerful nature, capable of
sudden and incredible acts of destruction.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Herman Melville and the American Renaissance
5. The American Renaissance
Towards the middle of the 19th century
a group of intellectuals and writers developed a movement
the ‘New England Renaissance’
The term did not indicate the rebirth of something, but the
beginning of a truly American literature, with
themes and a style of its own.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Herman Melville and the American Renaissance
5. The American Renaissance
The period between 1830 and 1865,
saw the publication of
• Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay
Nature (1836).
• Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter (1850).
• Herman Melville’s
Moby–Dick (1851).
• Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass (1855).
Engraved illustration from an 1878
edition of The Scarlet Letter
Performer - Culture & Literature
Herman Melville and the American Renaissance
6. Transcendentalism
The most influential figure in framing the
thought of the American Renaissance
was Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82)
with his philosophy called
Transcendentalism.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Herman Melville and the American Renaissance
6. Transcendentalism
Key ideas
• All reality was seen as a single unity (oneness and
multiplicity were the same thing).
A concept
which well suited the reality of the ‘melting pot’, of a
country where people from all over the world formed
a national unity.
• Contact with nature was the best means to reach truth
and awareness of the unity of all things.
• The ‘over-soul’ was the spiritual principle linking
everything together.
• Man was the emanation of the over-soul, and the
emphasis lay on his individuality, on his self-education.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Herman Melville and the American Renaissance
6. Transcendentalism
The influence of Transcendentalism encouraged an
optimistic and self-reliant point of view
•in the poems of Walt Whitman;
•in David Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience (1849).
Non-violent protest against
unjust government policies.
Thoreau memorial at Library Way, New York City
Performer - Culture & Literature