Moby-Dick (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

The first edition of Moby-Dick received a mixed reception. It was condemned for its unusual narrative style and for its irreverent tone. The proportion of positive to negative reviews was highest in England, where the book had been published in three volumes under the title The Whale. There were other differences between the American and English editions. The English publisher, Bentley, positioned the Extracts section at the end of the book and did not include the Epilogue at all. The main body of the text had also been abridged to cut out much of the overt blasphemy and sexual suggestiveness. One of the earliest and most expansive reviews appeared in the London Morning Advertiser, on October 24, 1851. In that review the rich, multi-faceted texture of the book was considered a strength. The novel was praised for its "High philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly phrased, soaring speculation, a style as many-coloured as the theme."

On the other hand, in America the book was enjoyed only in regard to those aspects in which it resembled Melville's earlier sailing narrative, Typee. Readers liked its graphic accounts of whaling and ignored its soaring religious and philosophical ruminations. Where the speculation and abstruse metaphysics were taken note of, they were roundly deplored, especially in religious journals.

A critic for the Methodist Quarterly Review wrote in January, 1952: "We are bound to say that the book contains a number of flings at religion, and even of vulgar immoralities that render it unfit for general circulation." The most scathing review appeared in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in January, 1952. It attacked Melville's vanity and assumed hunger for fame. "From this morbid self-esteem, coupled with a most unbounded love of notoriety," commented the reviewer, "spring all Mr. Melville's efforts, all his rhetorical contortions, all his declamatory abuse of society, all his inflated sentiment, and all his insinuating licentiousness."

Harper and Brothers, Melville's publisher and a Methodist firm, were affected by this response, and when the critical reception was matched by disappointing sales, they offered Melville unsatisfactory terms in his next contract. He was never to recover from this setback and although his position as one of the major writers of his time is now unassailable, it was never so in his lifetime. When Van Wyck Brooks set about a reassessment of the nineteenth century in his essay "America's Coming of Age," published in 1915, Melville's name was not considered worthy of mention. In Vernon Parring-ton's influential three-volume Main Currents in American Thought, published in the late 1920s, Melville is portrayed as an irrelevant eccentric. However, this decade was also the point at which several key voices were heard in support of Melville's reputation. D. H. Lawrence wrote an essay in 1923 which praised Melville as a great poet of the sea.

But of more profound critical importance was the publication, two years earlier, of Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic by Raymond Weaver, one of the first books to treat seriously the religious and philosophical themes in Moby-Dick and Melville's other books. Weaver's influence on students who later became academics, particularly while he was at Columbia University in the 1940s, was immense. The 1950s saw an enormous increase in the volume of critical comment about Moby-Dick, good examples of which include a long introductory essay to the novel by Alfred Kazin, for whom it "conveys a sense of abundance, of high creative power, that exhilarates and enlarges the imagination," and an essay by Richard Chase, "Melville and Moby-Dick," which enthused, "The symbols are manifold and suggestive; the epic scope is opulent; the rhetoric is full and various; the incidental actions and metaphors are richly absorbing."

However, there was still a reluctance to shower Moby-Dick with the highest accolades. Chase, in his essay, tempered his praise with a carping reservation about the novel's narrowness of meaning and simplification of issues when compared with great works such as Shakespeare's King Lear or Dante's The Divine Comedy. Another critic of the period, R. P. Blackmur, criticized Melville for not making use of the conventional dramatic strategies of novelistic characterization and for allowing his allegorical agenda to take precedence over narrative technique.

The criticism of recent decades has been inclined to explore the idiosyncratic structure of Moby-Dick in terms of potential, rather than weaknesses and deficiencies, and to treat the whale as the novel's central character. A. Robert Lee inter-preted the book in anatomical terms, searching for layers of meaning under the skin, and Eric Mot-tram is one of several critics who have discussed the novel's erotic and sexual connotations in Freudian terms. Certainly there now seems to be some agreement that it is no use approaching the book as if it were written by Henry James.

As John McWilliams put it in his essay "The Epic in the Nineteenth Century," published in The Columbia History of American Poetry, "The armada of scholars and critics who have felt compelled to reach a judgment upon Ahab are by now revealed to have been collectively gazing into Melville's doubloon." Inevitably, not all of the latest criticism is helpful or perceptive, and readers approaching the novel for the first time are advised to consider it both as a work that realistically portrays life on a whaling vessel and as a literary investigation of the conflict between humanity and fate.