Beauty and Horror in Nature in "Moby Dick" (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Mannheim (Anglistik), course: Moby Dick, language: English, abstract: In this paper I want to focus on the main character and narrator of the book "Moby Dick", especially on his reported thoughts and impressions on Transcendentalist key aspects go get to the bottom of whether there is a clear inclination towards or away from Transcendentalist ideas.

When Herman Melville had written and released "Moby Dick" in 1851, Transcendentalism reached its peak in the United States. It is safe to say that Melville had not been totally isolated from the effect of this new movement and had formed an opinion on it. In spite of the temporal simultaneity, "when he wrote Moby-Dick Melville had not read Emerson. He had merely attended one of his lectures." Nevertheless, this one lecture gave him enough incentive to write a letter to Evert Duykinck nineteen days after the lecture, telling him about he felt about Emerson. In this letter, Melville "rejects the notion that he might be a follower of the Transcendentalist camp", but finds him a peculiar man nevertheless: "there is a something about every man elevated above mediocrity, which is, for the most part, instinctualy perceptible. This I see in Mr. Emerson".

In a pictorial description, Melville thinks Emerson capable of deeper thought and compares him to a whale descending great depths, acknowledging his skills, in contrast to other fish which are only able to swim closely to the surface. Hoffmann says that "Melville admires the figure Emerson cuts, not the word he utters" which is a pretty ambivalent statement to give. Melville also mentions in his letter a "gaping flaw" he had seen in Emerson. According to Hoffmann, Melville was bothered by the "high presumptuousness" Emerson displayed, "a feeling that had he been around when the world was created he could have given God some good advice-perhaps even taken His place". It is hard to say whether Melville was really fond of Emerson's ideas or not. According to Romero, we get an impression of "simultaneous embrace and rejection of Transcendentalist ideas" and Hoffmann also diagnosed a similar behavior of Melville, in which Melville argues that some ideas of Emerson are flawed but at the same time utilizes Transcendentalist ideas in his book Moby-Dick.