From “Sea of Grass” to “Wire and Rail”: Melville’s Evolving Perspective on the Prairies

During the nineteenth century, Euroamericans held diametrically opposed views of the American prairie as it spread westward from the Appalachians: on the one hand, explorers considered it to be the “Great American Desert”;¹ on the other, developers considered it a new Eden. Writing in mid-century, Herman Melville contemplates both of these perspectives in Moby-Dick. In the opening chapter of his best-known novel, for example, his narrator, Ishmael, challenges a metaphysical professor to find water in “the great American desert,”² while later in chapter forty-two, he perceives the prairie as “the unfallen western world,” where “Adam walked majestic as a god” (MD 191). In works written throughout the nineteenth century, from Mardi (1849), to Clarel (1876), to some of his last poems appearing through 1890, Melville represents the prairie in diverse ways, revealing an environmental consciousness about the great grasslands of the North American interior.

With the nonhuman environment providing the context for most of his writing, Melville was in good company throughout the nineteenth century. In 1988 Leo Marx asserted his conviction that James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain, “measure[d] the quality of American life against something like an ecological ideal.” He was followed in 1995 by Lawrence Buell, who testifies that numerous nineteenth-century writers, men and women as well as people of various ethnic backgrounds, were “environmentally oriented” in their writing.³ Written thirty years after Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, Buell’s The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture emphasizes the necessity of reading the nonhuman environment “not merely as a framing device,” but as having a significant interest beyond that of human interest, and as involving natural processes. Buell also posits that in environmentally oriented literature, “Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation (Buell’s italics).”⁴ Certainly, other American writers, including Cooper, Washington Irving, Margaret Fuller, Caroline Kirkland, William Cullen Bryant, Whitman, and Twain, like Melville, journeyed to the prairies and subsequently wrote about them.⁵ This essay seeks to demonstrate, however, that no other nineteenth-century writer contemplated the prairie in so many ways, representing not only its natural diversity but also the immense changes to which it was subjected, over such an extended period of time, as did Melville and that Melville’s evolving perspective of the prairies would today be identified as ethical and environmental.

During his lifetime (1819–1891), if Melville was at all known as a writer, it was primarily for his concern with remote islands in distant seas; in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is primarily his maritime works—Typee, Moby-Dick, Billy Budd—which have similarly been the focus for his popular reputation. Unlike his contemporaries, Irving, Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Twain, who are now popularly and critically known for writings grounded in American places, Melville is usually associated with international seas rather than with the national landscape. However, although Melville notes in Moby-Dick that the sea may well cover “two-thirds of this terraqueous globe” (MD 64), using the imperative voice, Ishmael urges his readers to “consider them both, the land and the sea” (MD 274) as Melville himself did with increasing interest.

Diane Dufva Quantic in her Study of Great Plains Fiction observes that “the character of the nation’s center” reflects a “confusing collection of ideas,” based on the conflict between mythic expectations regarding space and political and economic expectations.⁶ Although Quantic fails to consider Melville in her study, in the course of his long writing career, Melville reveals the conflict among ways of representing the prairie. Throughout his work, but especially in his earlier writing, his images of the prairie are metaphorical, concerned to illuminate land-based readers’ lack of understanding of the sea, but also emphasizing the prairie’s fecundity, diversity, and processes. In Moby-Dick, not only does Melville embrace alternative ideas about the prairie, as I have already noted, but he also moves from an...