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He had planned merely a fanciful tale of the whale fishery and had written almost an entire first draft. Then Herman Melville had discovered Nathaniel Hawthorne the man and William Shakespeare the tragedian. The result was Moby-Dick, a hybrid, a medley, an extravaganza, but progressively a formal drama, possibly the first American tragedy. “How to effect so mighty a metamorphosis?” one imagines him asking himself as he began to rewrite his story. By retaining the original light material, yet preparing the reader for the later heroic prose and action. Even more: justifying these last. That this is what Melville did, we can surmise from a number of transitional passages in Moby-Dick that reveal him in the process of converting a story about life on an American whaling ship, its officers and crew, into a tragedy such as readers were accustomed to associate with Shakespeare, his kings and clowns. Yet it is, finally, a tragedy whose protagonist—it is time to propose—was inspired by the greatest hero of Melville's own times.
1. Vincent, Howard P., The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1965), p. 30.Google Scholar
2. Stewart, George R., “The Two Moby-Dicks,” American Literature, 25 (01 1954), 435–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3. Muzzey, David S., The United States of America (New York: Ginn and Co., 1933), I, pp. 351, 357.Google Scholar
Also, he was the first president of the United States (since George Washington, whose social credentials were impeccable, of course) not to have gone to college, a fact not lost on Herman Melville, whose occasional references to college in Moby-Dick (e.g., “Schools and Schoolmasters”) border on derision. Descended as he was from two families of Revolutionary War fame, we find him having to assert (proudly) that “a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard” (24).
4. Miller, Perry, The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), p. 29.Google Scholar
5. Leyda, Jay, The Melville Log (New York: Gordian Press, 1969), I, pp. 184, 186.Google Scholar
6. Muzzey, , The United States of America, I, p. 352.Google Scholar
7. de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), I, pp. 430, 431.Google Scholar
8. Baldwin, Joseph G., Party Leaders (New York, 1855), pp. 311–12.Google Scholar Also see de Tocqueville, , Democracy in America, I, Chap. 18.Google Scholar
9. Ahab's personal problems and his destiny are quite another matter. I do not read Moby-Dick as an allegory of American politics, although Charles Foster and Willie T. Weathers make a convincing case that it is one.
10. Leon Howard has cited this passage as evidence that Melville “consciously thought of his protagonist as a tragic hero of the sort found in Hamlet and King Lear.” See “Melville's Struggle with the Angel,” Modern Language Quarterly, 1 (06 1940), 202–3.Google Scholar
11. Davis, Merrell R. and Gilman, William H., eds., The Letters of Herman Melville (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), p. 29.Google Scholar
12. Nor even inconsistent, he thought. See Davis, and Gilman, , eds., Letters, p. 127.Google Scholar
13. Baldwin, , Party Leaders, p. 294.Google Scholar
14. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books (Boston, 1841, p. 364.Google Scholar
15. Arthur, and Gelb, Barbara, O'Neill (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961). p. 540.Google Scholar