Melville, Darwin, and the Great Chain of Being

MELVILLE, DARWIN, AND THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING Eric Wilson Wake Forest University Although Melville was not deeply read in evolutionary science, Moby-Dick (1851) prophetically details the great scientific upheaval of 1859: the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin ofSpecies. A primary subtext of Melville's novel is the passing ofpre-Darwinian, anthropocentric thought, espoused by Ahab, and the inauguration of a version of Darwin's more ecological evolution, proffered by Ishmael. With Ahab's demise end the related pre-Darwinian beliefs that man, through his rational faculties, sits atop and controls the great chain of being; that civilized man is fundamentally different from and superior to uncivilized men and wild beasts; and that transformations in man and nature proceed according to design. The rise of Ishmael at the novel's close points to an alternative world, one controlled more by the forces of nature than by humans, one in which the civilized is not fundamentally different from the savage and the animal, one guided not by a linear plan but, to use Darwin's famous phrase, by an "inextricable web of affinities." Indeed. Moby-Dick itself exhibits the principle of natural selection, for it suggests that species like Ahab are not adapted for survival and therefore face extinction while variations like Ishmael are well suited to thrive and flourish. This essay treats Moby-Dick as an allegory signifying the rise of Darwin and the consequent dethroning ofman, the victory ofevolution over essentialism. The novel constitutes a prophetic parable of what Freud called the second great blow to man's sense of domination (after the astronomy ofCopernicus and before Freud's own psychoanalysis): the emergence of the evolutionary theory that "put an end to this presumption on the part of man" by showing that "man is not a being different from the animals or superior to them; he is himself of animal descent, being more closely related to some species and more distantly toothers."1 Of course, other scholar's have attended to relationships between Melville and Darwin as well as to Melville's interests in science, primarily (obviously) cetology. Most studies of Melville and Darwin, however, have focused almost exclusively on each man's voyage to the Galapagos Islands and on his subsequent account of his journey— 132Eric Wilson Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and Melville in The Encantadas (1856).2 This essay extends this work by unearthing less apparent, largely neglected affinities between Melville and Darwin in Moby-Dick. While Darwin's Voyage ofthe Beagle may not have influenced Melville's whaling novel as directly as it did The Encantadas, Darwin's basic challenges to anthropocentrism and design, nascent in the Voyage and full grown in the Origin ofSpecies, nonetheless illuminate Moby-Dick in important ways. In drawing comparisons between Darwin and Melville, I likewise wish to deepen our understanding of Melville's engagement with scientific issues ofthe nineteenth century. Scholars have proved very astute in revealing the cetological and natural historical sources Melville used in Moby-Dick, but no one has yet explored Melville's originality as a scientific thinker.3 1 hope to demonstrate that Melville was not merely an amateur cetologist but a powerful , innovative philosopher ofbiology, intuitively (ifnot empirically) aware ofDarwin's most iconoclastic ideas almost ten years before they found print—a harbinger of the scientist's momentous dissolution of the great chain of being. While Melville read little in evolutionary science before publishing Moby-Dick in 1 85 1 , a cluster of pre-Darwinian evolutionary ideas was in the air in mid nineteenth-century America. It is very likely that he was familiar with some of them, for he mentions two of the most important pre-Darwinian scientists inMoby-Dick, Baron Georges Cuvier and Louis Agassiz.' Before turning to these figures, as well to lean Baptiste Lamarck, I shall briefly contextualize early nineteenth-century evolutionary thought. The proper context for early evolutionary thought is what A. O. Lovejoy has memorably called the "temporalizing of the great chain of being." Until the eighteenth century, most Western thinkers presupposed a static, spatial chain of being, reaching down from God to angels to men to animals to vegetables to...