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1819 b. New York
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1830 family bankrupt
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1832-3 family falls apart; H.M. drops out of school
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1839 1 st voyage at sea

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1841-1848 experiences at sea=37 books about it
– At first popular reading & commercial success
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1841-1844 on ships Acushnet and Lucy Ann
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1844 Typee
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1847 Marries Elizabeth Shaw; Omoo
– But wants to change writing, wants meaning; wants to rebel, write banned books
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1849 Mardi and Redburn—failures critically and financially

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1850 White Jacket; develops relationship with Nathaniel
Hawthorne
– Returns to “popular fiction” but hates it
– Melville to Hawthorne (while working on
Moby Dick): “Dollars damn me. [What I feel] most moved to write, that is banned—it will not pay. Yet altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, all my books are botches.”

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1851 Moby Dick
– Topic: 800 pages about guy trying to find whale and get back at it
– Not as much of failure as Mardi, but not successful; received little notice
– Wants to write novels written at two different levels
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Said to Hawthorne: “secret motto that few would discern”
Said about Hawthorne’s books: “are superficially calculated to deceive— egregiously deceived, the superficial skimmer of books”

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1852-1867 Pierre, Israel Potter, trip to Europe, edits Hawthorne’s works,
The Confidence Man
1867 abandons fiction
– Magazine writing to make $
– Publishes short stories in Europe
(including “Bartleby”)
– Emotionally wrung out from failures, careful of issues of offensiveness, still trying out technique of writing for two audiences at once

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1866-1886 Job in Custom House; sons die
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1886 Inheritance
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1891 H.M. dies
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1920 H.M. rediscovered as an author

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Romantic concern with good and evil
– Hawthorne: Puritan ancestry
– Melville: ships
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Responded differently
– Hawthorne: positive
– Melville: negative

**D.R. shares characteristics with other
Romantics but more pessimistic view
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Authors: (Hawthorne), Melville, Edgar
Allan Poe
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View of Man: moral struggle with evil; feelings and intuition; dark interior
View of God: good v. evil; sin and its psychological effects on people
View of Nature: evil found in setting and symbol; often the supernatural
View of Society: must be reformed

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Objects and persons equated with meanings outside of the narrative
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Characters personify abstract qualities
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Evokes dual interest
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Religious, moral, political, personal, satiric

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Power of presence of evil
No logic in society or nature; man depend on self
No dogma can teach; man learn it on own
Man must fight society and nature
Life is mask of appearance
Battles of conscience
Redemption in human love for fellow man

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Man=maker of own identity
– must accept inability to fully know power of universe
– must know own mortality
– must know need for fellow man and capacity for love of humankind

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Man is not equal to God
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Love=only element of innocence that endures
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Can result in isolation or “hell”
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Responsible for other human beings

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Dickens quality
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Some readers: about Melville’s own struggles as writer
– Bartleby paid as copier (scrivener) to write what everyone else is writing—
Melville’s own feelings?

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Mythological Allusions in
“Tartarus of Maids”
Tartarus
Greek version of hell/underworld
Bacchus (Old Bach)
God of wine; often had a harem of women called
Bacchantes: “[Bacchus] was accompanied, as was his custom, by a train of women dancing and singing exultant songs, wearing fawn skins over their robes, waving ivywreathed wands. They seemed mad with joy.”
(Edith Hamilton’s Mythology 68-9).
Cupid
“[Venus’s] son, that beautiful winged youth whom some call
Cupid and others call Love, against whose arrows there is no defense” (Hamilton 122).
Actaeon the hunter who accidentally witnessed the goddess Artemis bathing and “was changed into a stag…His dogs saw him running and chased him…They fell upon him, his own faithful hounds, and killed him” (Hamilton 374).