Herman Melville becomes polyphonic : defining the link between Melville's maturing perspective on life and the development of his art

Abstract

Herman Melville is today a key figure in Anglo-American literature. Moby Dick is the best known of his books, having a vast amount of critical material written about it. Yet Melville was not to be the focus of any serious study till the 1920s. The novel which broke him with his contemporary readership was none other than Moby Dick. The proposed dissertation posits the idea that Moby Dick was so significant in Melville's writerly career because it was his first work to achieve polyphony of both voice and thought. What will be studied is Melville's evolution from the authorial voice of his early texts to the polyphony in Moby Dick. A correlation is to be established between Melville' s subject and his narrative technique which hopes to reflect a direct relationship between his evolving worldview and his developing art. The first chapter briefly comes to terms with the concept of ideology as set forth by Louis Althusser and discovers its crippling presence within Typee and Omoo. The second chapter identifies a crucial turning point in Melville's way of seeing the world and the text as reflected in Mardi and White-Jacket. The last chapter focuses solely on Moby Dick and how Melville was at the time of its writing able to transcend ideology and produce his first polyphonic text, where all the different voices in the text are allowed an equal amount of freedom. The dissertation's structure as described above will be supplemented by a brief Introduction and Conclusion. The research of several scholars on Melville is cited, including Lawrence Thompson, Newton Arvin, Wai-chee Dimock and Clark Davis. Other sources used for this analysis include works not only from critical writers such as Catherine Belsey and Julia Kristeva but also experts in other related areas of study within the humanities such as Louis Althusser (political philosophy) and Elaine Pagels (religion).