Commentary on Transcendentalism Throughout Moby Dick Essay

It is quite possible that nonhing runs deeper through the veins of Herman Melville than his disdain for anything transcendental. Melvilles deprecative of the entire transcendentalist movement is far from sparsely demonstrated through prohibited the pages of Moby-Dick, in which he strategic every last(predicate)y points out the intrinsic existence of evil, the asperity of nature and the wrath of the almighty immortal. To Melville, transcendentalists became a guild of self-impostors, with a stiff rabble of Muggletonian Scots and Yankees, whose vile brogue still the more bestreaks the stripedness of their Greek or German Neoplatonic originals (Herman Melville 2350).Transcendentalists went beyond denying the doleful possibilities of human error and suffering, and it is this ignorant altruism of transcendentalism in its looser grasps which prompted Melvilles scorn. Within the Emersonian give lessons of thought lies the belief that the ruin or the blank that we see when we look at na ture, is in our accept eye (Emerson et al. 81) and that the evils of the being be such nevertheless to the evil eye (Emerson et al. 174). Melville, however, believes that on our planet lies an implicit in(p) evil, going as far as to say, A sodding(a)ly good beingwould see no evil. But what did Christ see? He saw what make him weep (Thompson 2350), pointing out that not only does evil exist, exclusively it exists within Christ, the ultimate symbol of good. Moby Dick, the white whale itself, is the prosopopeia of evil and malevolence in the universe. All that most maddens and torments all that stirs up the lees of things all truth with venom in it all that cracks the sinews and cakes the card all the subtle demonisms of life and thought all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically undecided in Moby Dick.(Melville 154) Moby Dick is too a depiction of Leviathan, Jobs whale created by graven image as a malicious symbol of deity Ahab sees in Him out rageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it (Melville 138), and if God is a representation of the spirit of the world, then within the world must exist an inscrutable malice. Transcendentalists made nature out to be this wondrous, awe-inspiring creation of God whichseeing as he believed God to be more evil than goodis an idea Melville blatantly rejects as a fallacy.Where Emerson says, Nature satisfies by its loveliness, and without any mixture of corporeal benefit (Emerson et al. 107), Melville says, all other earthly huesevery stately or lovely emblazoningthe sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls all these are but the subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but laid on from without so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within.(Melville 164) When sent out to sea, the Pequod and its crew were co nfront by the nature of which Melville speaksa nature that, at times, seems to gild the surface of the water with enchantment, and causes even the leery hunter to have a land-like feeling toward the sea (Herman Melville 2351), but is actually veils behind which God hides and unendingly threatens to unleash his ambiguous animosity. It is the whale, a product of God and nature, that has reaped the leg of Ahab, that lashes out with the force of a green men.It is the beguiling call of nature that lulls the absent minded youth into an opium-like reverie by the blending standard of waves with thoughts until he loses his identity and takes it upon himself to take the ocean at his feet for the deep, blue bottom that pervades mankind (Melville 134-135) calms are go through by storms, a storm for every calm. Furthermore, Melville ridicules the transcendentalists for their blindness to the rest of the world. The transcendentalists saw only the world through the dimensions of a sturdy win dow in Concord (Herman Melville 2394).Melville could depict the true attributes of nature in a more scrupulous manner, for he had left his internal in New England and sailed around the world. When Emerson claimed that the poet disposes very good of the most disagreeable facts, it prompted Melville to respond, So it would seem. In this sense, Mr. E is a great poet (Thompson 443). Though a ostensibly of a seemingly different nature, passions, desires, appetites, and senses of the flesh are a part of nature nonetheless they are instincts, a natural part behind the drive of man. All deep, earnest thinking that is but the intrepid drive of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to wrap her upon the slavish shore (Melville 95). It is this natural drive that keeps man from falling under the spiritual drive, this tyrannous and uncouth enslavement of this wrathful God, for natural or carnal men are without God in the world (Alma 4111). It seems as though Melville has an everlasting quarrel with God. Throughout Ahabs quest for the white whale, Melville has sh take his own personal independence from the authoritarianism of Christian dogma.It is apparent that unearthly conventionalism was Melvilles favourite crisscross for satire, but largely because he saw himself in competition with it. His own genius was deeply religious and the Bible seemed to serve the deepest purpose in Moby-Dick. Melville was caught in a vicious battle that he created and could not win. He started by loving God, then moved to hating God, progressed into a complete detachment from Godfeeling neither love nor hate. He grew to hate his detachment and decided that God might indeed be lovable, and so the vicious cycle repeats (Thompson 148-149).Thompson concludes, The underlying theme in Moby-Dick correlates the notions thatGod in his infinite malice asserts a sovereign tyranny over man and that most men are seduced into the mistake n view that this divine tyranny is benevolent and therefore acceptable (242). Melville agreed with the transcendentalists that the spirit is substance, but he began to mold from the transcendental conclusion that its effect on man was benevolent. Moby-Dick tells not only the story of the ventures of the Pequod and its crew, but also of Melville himself.It captures all of Melvilles personal contempt toward the entire transcendentalist movement, and demonstrates his realistic recognition of evil through the symbolisation of the whale, his struggle with religion through the use of ontological heroics, and his less-than-altruistic ideas of nature through the use of sheer logic. It is the perfect emblem for his gratitude for rationalism and respect for realism. Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale In his ocean home will be A giant in might, where might is right, And King of the Boundless sea. WHALE stress Works Cited.Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Atkinson Brojoks, Edward Waldo Emerson. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York Random House Digital, Inc. , 2000. Print. Herman Melville. World Literature Criticism. 1st ed. 1992. Print. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Mineola capital of Delaware Publications, Inc. , 2003. Print. Myerson, Joel, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, and Laura Dassow Walls. The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism. New York Oxford University Press, 2012. Print. The King James Bible. Susan Jones. New York Doubleday, 1985. Print. Thompson, Lawrence. Melvilles Quarrel With God. Princeton Princeton University Press, 1952. Print.