Reading Moby-Dick as Ethnic Allegory Essay -- Moby Dick Melville Paper

Reading Moby-Dick as Ethnic Allegory At a time when images of the white settler conquering the savage frontier were prevalent in antebellum America, depictions of racial polarization and, alternately, co-existence among different ethnical groups had already begun to rise expression in various artistic mediums, from painting to literature. Today more than ever, such(prenominal) works continue to elicit critical re-examinations where race relations, colonization, and literary commission are concerned. While many literary and cultural critics have proposed allegorical readings of political and religious natures, Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick can also be read relatedly as an ethnic allegory, where particular scenes and images representing death or destruction illustrate Melvilles uneasiness with how white expansionist attitudes are enacted often in tension with or at the set down of different ethnic peoples living within Americas geographic borders. For these purposes, I would like speci fically to examine Melvilles rather unconventional portrayal of a non-white character such as Queequeg. The correlation between his anticipated and ultimate death and the calamitous demise of the Pequod , as a space which rearranges traditional structures of hierarchy and accomodates ethnic diversity, in the end, demonstrates Melvilles indecisive anxiety between an imagined fantasy of an alternative social reality and the historical reality of American westward expansionism. First, allow me to be clear At a simplified level, I call this an ethnic allegory because Moby-Dick both illustrates and confronts the ways in which white America expresses a desire for hegemonic control, symbolized in Ahabs unpitying quest for the white whale, at the same ti... ...Works Cited Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Mans Indian Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York Vintage Books, 1979. Brodhead, Richard H. Trying All Things An base to Moby-Dick. New Essays on Moby-Dick or , The Whale. ed. Richard H. Brodhead. Cambridge Cambridge UP, 1986. Duban, James. Melvilles Major Fiction Politics, Theology, and Imagination. Dekalb Northern Illinois UP, 1983. McIntosh, James. The Mariners Multiple Quest. New Essays on Moby-Dick or, the Whale. ed. Richard H. Brodhead. Cambridge Cambridge UP, 1986. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc., 1964. Yarborough, Richard. Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Toms Cabin and the Early black Novel. New Essays on Uncle Toms Cabin. ed. Eric Sundquist. Cambridge Cambridge UP, 1986.