Hunting Moby Dick: Melville in the Global Context of the American Studies Classroom

In his 1850 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), Herman Melville—as a “Virginian Spending July in Vermont”—argues against the imitation of “foreign models,” implicitly setting the stage for what would become his masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851). Rather than praising Washington Irving’s appeal to the young nation, he singles out “The American Goldsmith” as an “amiable writer,” who imitates a European tradition of storytelling but who “can not be great” because he chooses to “succeed in imitation” of European models rather than taking the risk that he will “fail in originality” (NN PT 247–48). Creating an aura of national importance around Hawthorne, Melville denounces New England’s appropriation of European texts. Given Melville’s pursuit of literary independence in a national publishing climate, which in the 1940s became known as the American Renaissance, the fact that he does not address the creative benefits of the transnational, intertextual qualities of literature in the United States is not surprising.

But I argue that Melville’s book should not only be treated as a cultural artifact heavily steeped in Western oral and literary traditions, but also as one that continues to be appropriated in creative global arenas today. Using a discursive lens that centers on negotiations of national literature and transnational literature as increasingly interdependent entities in a globalized world, one is productively faced with re-evaluating Melville’s Moby-Dick in the nineteenth century. Moby-Dick serves as a prime example of how literary texts thrive by imitating “foreign models” without sacrificing originality.

As scholars have long known, Melville himself appropriated many “foreign” literary sources, including the Bible, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, and Romeo and Juliet, and Milton’s Paradise Lost (Markels 169). Moreover, in doing so, Melville was no different from Shakespeare who was himself “an active adaptor and imitator, and appropriator of myth, fairy tale, and folklore, as well as of the works of specific writers as varied as Ovid, Plutarch, and Holinshed” (Sanders 46). Melville borrows from Shakespeare, who borrows from even earlier sources.

Although the mind is arguably the best traveler, Melville’s years of employment on ships and his travels sparked his writerly imagination about the world he lived in and clearly put his American life as well as the texts he read into a global perspective. As Peter Gibian puts it: “While many American authors, taking up the International Theme plot, tend to see travel through foreign cultures as a valuable text helping to bring out the innate and distinctive qualities of the American character, Melville can develop the same plot to explore the paradox of an American writerly identity that finds itself most fully in transnational situations, at the boundary between two cultures” (Gibian 22). Melville’s work includes “all five continents, examines cultural practices, prejudices, and preoccupations from all quarters of the globe” (Gunn 8). As readers can trace on the “Map of Melville’s Actual Atlantic and Pacific Voyages” (Anderson 31), the author’s employment on ships for almost four years spans both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. He stopped in ports in Brazil, Peru, the Galápagos, the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, and Hawaii before finally returning to Boston and New York. Melville also travelled to Great Britain in order to find a publisher for his manuscripts. He briefly visited Germany, loved Italy, and visited the pyramids in Egypt as well as the Holy Land (Leroux 3–10; see also Wallace 352–54). Dennis Berthold states that “[o]f all American Renaissance writers, Melville was the most sensitive to intercultural influences. … He was equally multinational in his reading, exhibiting a transhistorical and global literary appetite that feasted equally on Livy, Shakespeare, Balzac, and Hawthorne, and Plutarch, Gibbon, Byron, and Harpers Weekly” (Berthold 16).

Melville’s travels can be productively brought into dialogue with global studies theory by placing what is traditionally known as the American Renaissance into global perspectives. This idea is superbly discussed by Jan Nederveen Pieterse in his article “Many Renaissances, Many Modernities” (2011), a review of...