Romanticism And New Types Of Writing : Herman Melville

Herman Melville was a Romantic Era writer but before he wrote one of the Great American Epics he was a whaler. When Melville was writing he was very inspired and influenced by Nathaniel Hawthorne and even dedicated his work to him. Melville was also influenced by some other great writers including Poe, Thoreau, Emerson and Shakespeare. Melville heard a story about a ship called the Essex from a member on the ship, George Pollard, Jr.

Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick, which was based off of Melville’s voyages. This book was mainly based off of the Essex whaler ship that sunk on account of a whale attacking the ship. There were very few survivors that were rescued and they told the story of what had happened. Moby Dick was originally titled The Whale.

Published in 1851, the story of Moby-Dick is not just the tale of one mans search for control over nature, but also the story of friendship, alienation, fate and religion that become intertwined amidst the tragedy that occurs upon the doomed Pequod. The crew itself are an amalgamation of cultures, from the cannibal Queequeg, to Starbuck, "a native of Nantucket." The Pequod can thus be seen as a microcosm for immigrants and whaling within America. In Moby-Dick Herman Melville examines both the exploitation of whaling and the reality of being born outside of America.

Due to his experiences a sailor, Melville commonly wrote his stories based on life at sea. His common theme of the sea attracted many literate people of the Renaissance. However, Melville´s common theme of life at sea is not the only factor which contributed to his style of writing. Herman Melville used many different rhetorical strategies to emphasize significance in many of his pieces. The use of similes, metaphors, and imagery supply Melville´s stories with various ways to describe certain characters or things. Alliteration, repetition, and onomatopoeia all come together to create specific effects on words and phrases in Melville´s works. The way Melville used parallel structure, malapropisms, and long, drawn out sentences reveals the variety of ways he has structured certain stories throughout his career. The rhetorical strategies used by Herman Melville are what made him the great Renaissance writer he was.

Although Washington could not describe himself as a revolutionist, his present state of external conflict forged him into the figure engraved in our minds today. Herman Melville (1819-1891), author of the literary classic Moby Dick, possessed much experience that contributed to the setting and message of his writing. Although Melville never became a midshipman, or naval sailor, he can attribute a great deal of influence for writing to his life while at sea. Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor tells the story of a young mariner and his induction on the H.M.S. Bellipotent. From unstable relationships to cabin revolt, Billy, the main character, faces a series of conflicts that ultimately creates varying images of him in the differing minds of those around him. In view of all of this, Melville, in Billy Budd, Sailor, communicates to readers the theme that “conflict, internal or external, exists as the framework of destiny,” through Billy's initial reaction to the crew as a result of enlistment on the Bellipotent, the rumor of mutiny, and his

During early American Literature, four new philosophies arrived with the arrival of a new nation. As more people from Europe came to the new world, culture sprang into writing and writing turned into philosophy. The religiously-oriented Puritan writers of the 17th Century were classified as Neo-Classic writers. Writers such as Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop were early American writers who stressed the beauty, truth, and perfection under one god. In the 17th and 18th century, the Romantics opened the door for the founding fathers and artists to write about the world from a new perspective. Romantics acknowledge human beings as the failures that they are, but they also celebrate human potential for greatness. Writers such as Thomas Paine, author of “common sense”, write about strong beliefs based on the mind ,and not the words of another man. With many great artists and authors, both Romantics and Neo-classics give many great examples that aid in proving the periods existed. Through their syntax and structure they prove their loyalty to either Romanticism or Neo-classicism.

The Anti-Transcendentalism movement was a movement against all conventional beliefs. A participant in this movement was Herman Melville, most famous for his novel Moby Dick. Moby Dick highlights the journey of an obsessive quest to find a whale. The obsessive quest leads Ishmael, the main character, to his death because he tries to work against the forces of nature, which expresses some of Melville’s Anti-Transcendentalist beliefs through this particular novel. The Anti-Transcendentalists or the American Gothic writers emphasized two major themes: the destructive power of nature and the dark side of the human mind, and paved the way for modern horror stories.

In 1841 Herman Melville went on his second seafaring trip on a whaling ship called the Acushnet, his first being the St. Lawrence. The ship set off from New Bedford, Massachusetts and set sail for the South Seas. In June 1842, the ship stopped at the Marquesas Islands in what is now French Polynesia (Maxwell, D.E.S.). His time there inspired his novel, “Typee” which was popular at the time. After that trip, he joined the crew of the whaler Lucy Ann. On that voyage, he went on adventures on which he based Typee’s sequel, “Omoo”. After that voyage he

Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the most important authors in the history of American literature and the genre of Romanticism or Dark Romanticism, due to his unique style of writing and his focus upon subjects of Puritan religion and the unknown. I consider Hawthorne an important author, due to the fact that he skillfully and accurately based his fictional writings upon happenings of colonial times, was one of the first authors to display unfortunate outcomes for his characters’ immoral choices according to Puritan beliefs, and wrote of things that were considered taboo in his time, such as witchcraft, scientific innovation and experimentation. I strongly believe that Hawthorne’s influence for his writings were his Puritan ancestral background, his fascination with Puritan beliefs, and his interest in what was considered the unknown such as witchcraft and science. According to the Norton Anthology Textbook Vol. B, Nathaniel Hawthorne was “born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1804” (370). Hawthorne belonged “to a family whose ancestral roots were tied to Puritan history, with his family being among the first settlers of Massachusetts and having one of his relatives serve as a judge during the Salem witch trials” (370). Hawthorne, as a young boy, “had a particular interest in writings such as John Bunyan’s Puritan allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, and by his mid-teens he took interest in British novelists such as Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollet, William Godwin, and Sir Walter Scott”

Herman Melville was born in New York in 1819 so he grew up in a time where slavery was still common and accepted, but in an area in which blacks were treated with much more respect than they were in the south. His father 's relatives could be traced back to a man who was a part of the Boston Tea Party and both his mother and father had relatives who fought with the union in the Revolutionary war (Johnson). Melville had many jobs growing up, including teaching, being a bank clerk, and sailing on a whaling ship, which is what jump started his writing career (Johnson). Many of the stories that Melville writes take place out on the sea and tend to be quite adventurous and unexpected, much like Benito Cereno. This style is more than likely

Herman Melville’s novels, with good reason, can be called masculine. Moby-Dick may, also with good reason, be called a man’s book and that Melville’s seafaring episode suggests a patriarchal, anti-feminine approach that adheres to the nineteenth century separation of genders. Value for masculinity in the nineteenth century America may have come from certain expected roles males were expected to fit in; I argue that its value comes from examining it not alone, but in relation to and in concomitance with femininity. As Richard H. Brodhead put it, Moby-Dick is “so outrageously masculine that we scarcely allow ourselves to do justice to the full scope of masculinism” (Brodhead 9). I concur with Brodhead in that remark, and that Melville’s

Moby-Dick is considered to be one of, if not the, best novels in American history. Harper & Brothers first published it in 1851 in New York. In England, it was published in the same year under the title, The Whale (“Moby Dick”). Melville explores topics and themes that were scarcely spoken of and never even seen in a novel. In the novel, the Pequod, which is the ship, is named after a Native American tribe that was exterminated when the white settlers arrived. It is a symbol of death and doom and foreshadows event that occur later in the novel. Melville brings some very controversial themes to light in the novel. Revenge is one of the main themes of Dark Romanticism and Melville uses it to drive every action taken by Ahab. This is seen early on in the novel as Ahab explains to the crew why he has a peg leg and that he wants to enact his revenge on Moby Dick (Melville 160-161). “Moby Dick is, fundamentally, a revenge tragedy. It’s about one man’s maniacal obsession with vengeance. It’s about finding an object on which to pin all you anger and fear and rage, not only about your own suffering, but also about the suffering of all mankind” (“Moby

Donald Yannella, author of New Essays on Billy Budd, says that “at the heart lies an obsession with justice," as is exhibited in Herman Melville’s classics, Moby Dick and Billy Budd, Sailor. Herman Melville was an American author born on August 1, 1819 in New York, New York. The author wrote many books and penned poetry in his later years. Best known for his novel Moby Dick, Melville was not regarded as one of America’s greatest writers until after his death on September 28, 1891. Not achieving his dream job, and with his family in shambles, he boarded the St Lawrence in 1839. His time spent at sea would prove to be useful, as the majority of his books take place on the high seas.

In much of what we “identify" with in our everyday lives has to do with the relationships we have with one another. These relationships are ultimately embedded into our memory for basically the rest of our lives, and with some shape or form, shape us to who we are today. These relations, similarly have to do with faces, actions and personal experiences that we have never been exposed to before. This type of exposure is apparent in Herman Melville’s Typee,where “identity” is of critical importance to that of Tommo, the narrator, along with the tribe that he encounters while stranded on the island. There are numerous instance as to where Tommo questions his moral and somewhat physical ‘identity’ in Typee. These events such as Tommos decision to tattoo himself is a major identity crisis because it’s not something he, nor his Western culture is really exposed to or familiar with. The Typee practices and societal structures displayed by Melville in Typee allows the reader in some case, to compare and contrast how Western civilization and the “other” [Typee] reaffirm “identity.” In a sense Tommo and his decision, by the end of the novel, really allows the reader to understand what creates and helps maintain identity for ones self.

Herman Melville, in his renowned novel Moby-Dick, presents the tale of the determined and insanely stubborn Captain Ahab as he leads his crew, the men of the Pequod, in revenge against the white whale. A crew mixed in age and origin, and a young, logical narrator named Ishmael sail with Ahab. Cut off from the rest of society, Ahab attempts to make justice for his personal loss of a leg to Moby Dick on a previous voyage, and fights against the injustice he perceived in the overwhelming forces that surround him. Melville uses a series of gams, social interactions or simple exchanges of information between whaling ships at sea, in order to more clearly present man’s situation as he faces an existence whose meaning he cannot fully grasp.