Israel Potter: Melville's "Citizen of the Universe"
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Notes
1. Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929), p. 167; Warner Berthoff, The Example of Melville (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962), p. 69; Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York: William Sloane, 1950), p. 245.
2. George Henry Lewes, review of Israel Potter in The Leader (May 5, 1855), 428; Charles Feidelson Jr., Symbolism in American Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 183; F. O. Matthiessen, The American Renaissance (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), p. 491.
3. Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle, Vol. 8 of The Writings of Herman Melville, gen. eds. Hayford et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. and Newberry Library, 1982), pp. ix, x; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
4. Emile Montégut, review of Israel Potter, Revue des deux mondes (July 1, 1855), 7.
5. Arnold Rampersad, Melville's Israel Potter: A Pilgrimage and Progress (Bowling Green: Bowling Green Univ. Press, 1969), p. 101.
6. Alexander Keyssar, Melville's Israel Potter: Reflections on the American Dream (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), p. 24.
7. Kenny Jackson, "Israel Potter: Melville's '4th of July Story,'" CLAJ, 9 (1963), 197-198, 204.
8. Nathalia Wright has catalogued the Israel motif in Melville's Use of the Bible (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1949). Other critics—notably Edgar A. Dryden in Melville's Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1968)—have noted the irony of such Biblical analogues in Israel Potter but have not related the motif to America's typological self-image (pp. 143-44). Dryden observes merely that "unlike the Biblical figures with whom he is so often associated, [Israel's] physical pain and suffering is no preparation for spiritual cleansing and rebirth" (p. 145).
9. Ursula Brumm, American Thought and Religious Typology (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1970); Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), and The American Jeremiad (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
10. As Robert Zaller astutely notes, Melville's New Englanders may have been ironically conceived from the outset, the Titans, Sisyphus, and Samson all being "classic heroes of futility." See "Melville and the Myth of Revolution," SIR, 15 (1976), 608.
11. Michael P. Rogin sees this comparison as a contrast. See Subversive Genealogy: Politics and Art in Herman Melville (New York: Knopf, 1982), p. 230.
12. For a comprehensive discussion of Israel's non-identity, see John Seelye, Melville: The Ironic Diagram (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1970).
13. Both ships, for instance, suffer the unhelpful approach and retreat of their own consorts. The two ships are depicted, meanwhile, as "a hawk and a crow" (p. 123), and as opposite sides of the same faulted land mass (p. 125). Indeed, Melville's establishing shot of "that bewildering intertanglement of all the yards and anchors of the two ships" (p. 120) signals the extent of their indistinguishability. "The two vessels were as two houses, through whose party-wall doors have been cut; one family (the Guelphs) occupying the whole lower story; another (the Ghibelines) the whole upper story" (p. 126).
14. Matthiessen, p. 491.
15. Ray B. Browne also stresses this apotheosis of the common man in "Israel Potter: Metamorphosis of Superman," in Frontiers of American Culture, ed. Ray B. Browne et al. (Lafayette: Purdue Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 89-98. But for Browne, Israel Potter is a sort of Jacksonian-democratic deposition of our heroes and gods, a paean to equality and to "America . . . the hope of humanity" (p. 96). Such a nationalistic reading collapses under the irony of Potter's homecoming and death. Melville eschews chauvinistic considerations, so that at the close Potter is less a democratic hero than a bedraggled but deified "citizen of the universe."
16. The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle et al., Vol. 9 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. and Newberry Library, 1987), p. 45; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text...
