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"A Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo": The Strange Saga of Steelkilt in Moby-Dick
- Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 76, Number 4, Winter 2020
- pp. 85-112
- 10.1353/arq.2020.0025
- Article
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Abstract:
This article foregrounds and explores the character of Steelkilt, a lake mariner from Buffalo, New York. Steelkilt takes center stage in Herman Melville's "The Town-Ho's Story," a stand-alone narrative that later appeared as the fifty-fourth chapter of Moby-Dick (1851). Though he has rarely been discussed in depth by critics or scholars, Steelkilt is many important things at once: a representative of a Great Lakes region that was still considered semi-wild at the time of Moby-Dick's publication, a bizarre vessel of violence and brutality, and a troubling symbol of nineteenth-century empire-building and global capital. Through textual analysis and a series of detailed examinations of the character's cultural and geographical milieus, this article sheds light on an obscure but vital corner of Melville's corpus.