Rethinking Cultural Awareness Toward Nature: Oriental Animals in Herman Melville’s Clarel

Mikayo Sakuma examines Herman Melville’s aesthetic appreciation of the natural world and his moral interest in it. Her account extends from animals’ visual images to cultural incidents that impacted Melville. After completing his phenomenal work of sea literature, Moby-Dick, Melville traveled the Levant region and encountered Oriental culture, which provided him with additional opportunities to become aware of animals in different cultural contexts. His last long pilgrimage poem Clarel exhibits a human-animal communal world. By following Melville’s trajectory of animal representation, the essay elucidates his awareness of nature and culture toward broader recognition of ecology.