Abstract
In this chapter, Pellar discusses how the oft-neglected preliminary chapters of Moby-Dick (“Etymology” & “Extracts”) form the very core of Melville’s overall philosophy. Melville’s revelation to Nathaniel Hawthorne regarding the book’s secret motto “ – Ego non baptiso te in nomine [I do not baptize thee in name]” is explored in detail, as well as the Ship of State as Hobbes’ Leviathan. Pellar also explores the Indian idea of “tat tvam asi” that pervades Moby-Dick, as well as Melville’s displeasure at the hypocrisy of the Founding Father’s words of “all men are created equal.” The empty materialization of their promise is seen in slavery, genocide, economic servitude, and the suffering of women and the poor.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Levine notes that The House of the Seven Gables was a major influence on Melville. He remarks, “in this sense, whether Hawthorne ‘intended’ to or not, he wrote a novel that addressed many of the same issues informing anti-slavery and anti-racist narratives,” Levine, “Pierre’s Blackened Hand,” 1999, 27. For an extended look at the influence of The House of the Seven Gables on Melville, see Wyn Kelley’s “Pierre’s Domestic Ambiguities,” 1998.
- 2.
Note the carefully chosen word “threadbare” with “thread” within it, which, of course, calls to mind Calhoun’s “cords,” “fabric,” and “heartstrings.” The word “threadbare” also calls to mind the thread fabric handkerchief from “all the known nations of the world” that Usher lovingly dusted his books with.
- 3.
Which traces its biblical authority to Romans 13: 1–2, “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers…”
- 4.
See Kulkarni’s Moby-Dick: A Hindu Avatar, 1970, for a more comprehensive exploration of Hinduism in Moby-Dick.
- 5.
“[t]his immediate reaction and response represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization – namely (as he states the idea in Sanskrit), ‘tat tvam asi, thou art that.’” Campbell 1986, 112.
- 6.
Which evokes the hemp “cords” of Calhoun.
- 7.
It’s also interesting that Melville’s implicit claim that he has “no comprehension” of this ironically allows him to be one of those rare souls who actually “comprehended” it.
- 8.
“Call me,” as opposed to “My name is,” which hints at the Gnostic teachings of Christ.
- 9.
Which was written at a time when he was ruminating deeply on these ideas.
- 10.
In Israel Potter, Melville writes, “Are not men built into communities just like bricks into a wall?” For a discussion of this and Melville’s use of “bricks” as a metaphor for race in Israel Potter, see Ernest’s “Revolutionary Fictions and Activist Labor: Looking for Douglass and Melville Together,” 2008.
- 11.
See Melville’s Anatomies by Samuel Otter, 1999, 101–171. On the “slipperiness of the project of classification” as it applies to whales and “racial categorizations,” see also Burns’ “‘In This Simple Savage Old Rules Would Not Apply’: Cetology and the Subject of Race in Moby-Dick,” 2006. Karcher also discusses the science of measuring – craniology, cetology, and ethnology – as applied to race in Moby-Dick. Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America, 1980, 21–25. In addition, in a review of Melville’s Anatomies, Karcher notes that Otter demonstrates “more persuasively than any other critic to date that the cetology chapters are not only integral, but absolutely central to the novel.” “Reviews: 2000 Henning Cohen Prize Winner, Melville’s Anatomies,” 2001. Furthermore, Otter’s explorations into getting into the head of another – notably non-white (“the invisible pencil traces” that lined the human body via the whale in its “message of separation and hierarchy”) (Otter 1999, 34), complements my own findings on defining, classifying, and dividing “Me, a God, a Nature.”
- 12.
Pride as in: “We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets, and that He would like a little information on certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us.”
- 13.
They were left over from the original book that he had intended to write before meeting Hawthorne as discussed earlier.
- 14.
This relative spectrum will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.
- 15.
Morrison was commenting on the ideology of whiteness as personified by Moby-Dick. See also Rampersad for a discussion of Du Bois’s “veil” being a symbol of the black’s “divided consciousness.” “Melville and Race,” 1994, 171. He compares this veil to Melville’s “shadow” in “Benito Cereno.”
- 16.
Melville’s attitudes on women, economic servitude, and the poor can be seen in his short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” Much has already been written on this. See also Kopacz’s “Cultural Sweat: Melville, Labor, and Slavery,” 2011. Furthermore, this idea of “hypocrisy” was quite common at the time, from both the American abolitionists and those who championed human rights overseas, such as the Irishman Daniel O’Connell, who stated in 1829 at an antislavery meeting, “Of all men living, the American citizen, who is the owner of slaves, is the most despicable. He is a political hypocrite of the very worst description. The friends of humanity and liberty, in Europe, should join in one universal cry of shame on the American slaveholders!…how dare you profane the temple of national freedom, the sacred fane of republican rites, with the presence and the sufferings of human beings in chains and slavery?” (Garrison 1852). And then later in 1833, he again stated, “I here tear down the image of liberty from the recreant hand of America, and condemn her as the vilest of hypocrites – the greatest of liars” (Garrison 1852). George Thompson, an abolitionist and member of Parliament in England, also remarked in 1835, “Base hypocrites! Let your charity begin at home! Look at your own Carolinas! Go, pour the balm of consolation into the broken hearts of your two millions of enslaved children!” (Garrison 1852).
- 17.
For an interesting perspective on text as unstable and having a dynamic presence unto itself, see Wyn Kelley’s “Melville in the Fluid Medium: Teaching Billy Budd at M.I.T.,” 2000. Kelley notes that the revisions of Billy Budd “had become a kind of living text in themselves, something that closure would kill” (81).
Bibliography
Burns, Mark K., “‘In This Simple Savage Old Rules Would Not Apply’: Cetology and the Subject of Race in Moby-Dick.” “Ungraspable Phantom”: Essays on Moby-Dick. Edited by John Bryant, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, and Timothy Marr. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2006.
Campbell, Joseph. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. New York, 1986.
Christodoulou, Athanasius C., “A Double Prelude on Melville’s Moby-Dick: ‘Etymology’ & ‘Extracts’.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 16, no. 1 (March 2014): 5–21.
Ernest, John, “Revolutionary Fictions and Activist Labor: Looking for Douglass and Melville Together.” Frederick Douglass & Herman Melville: Essays in Relation. Edited by Robert S. Levine & Samuel Otter. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Garrison, William Lloyd, “Letter to Louis Kossuth Concerning Freedom and Slavery in the United States in Behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society.” 1852. Samuel J. May Anti-slavery Collection: HYPERLINK “http://dlxs.library.cornell.edu” http://dlxs.library.cornell.edu.
Karcher, Carolyn L. Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.
Karcher, Carolyn L., “Reviews: 2000 Henning Cohen Prize Winner, Melville’s Anatomies.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 3, no. 1 (March 2001): 104–107.
Kelley, Wyn, “Pierre’s Domestic Ambiguities.” The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Edited by Robert S. Levine. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Kelley, Wyn, “Melville in the Fluid Medium: Teaching Billy Budd at MIT.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 2, no. 2 (Oct 2000): 75–85.
Kopacz, Paula, “Cultural Sweat: Melville, Labor, and Slavery.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 13, no. 1 (March 2011): 74–87.
Kulkarni, H.B. Moby-Dick: A Hindu Avatar: A Study of Hindu Myth and Thought in Moby-Dick. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1970.
Levine, Robert S., “Pierre’s Blackened Hand,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 1, no. 1 (March 1999): 23–44.
Leyda, Jay. The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891. Vol. 2. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951.
Melville, Herman, “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” The Literary World (1850). Reprinted in Moby-Dick. Edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: W.W. Norton, 1967a. Page numbers are to the 1967 edition.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. 1851. Edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967b. Page numbers are to the 1967 edition.
Melville, Herman. Mardi. 1849. New York: Library of America, 1982.
Melville, Herman. Redburn: His First Voyage. 1849. New York: Library of America, 1983b.
Melville, Herman. White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War. 1850. New York: Library of America, 1983c.
Melville, Herman. Correspondence. Vol. 14, Writings of Herman Melville. Edited by Lynn Horth. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and the Library, 1993.
Melville, Herman, “Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land.” 1876. The Poems of Herman Melville. Edited by Douglas Robillard. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2000a.
Morrison, Toni, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1989): 1–34.
Otter, Samuel, “The Eden of Saddle Meadows: Landscape and Ideology in Pierre,” American Literature 66 (1994): 67.
Otter, Samuel. Melville’s Anatomies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Rampersad, Arnold, “Melville and Race.” Herman Melville: A collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Myra Jehlen. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1994.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pellar, B.R. (2017). I Do Not Baptize Thee in Name. In: Moby-Dick and Melville’s Anti-Slavery Allegory. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52267-8_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52267-8_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-52266-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-52267-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)