Economic Anxiety,Class Dynamics,and Capitalism In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick And Other Writings

The purpose of this dissertation is to bring together the economic threads of Herman Melville’s life from his biography and writing up to the publication of Moby Dick in order to argue that it is economic anxiety which serves as the main source of Melville’s choices in his content and style.The evidence for this argument begins with Melville’s birth in the economic crisis of 1819 and the biographical evidence that shows an increase in financial concern leading up to the publication of Moby Dick in 1851.Every pertinent suggestion of class dynamics or financial concern from Melville’s first six novels has been compiled to ground the argument that Melville’s writing over this period is driven by economic anxiety.This economic anxiety redirects attention in Melville scholarship to Melville’s work as a critique of Western civilization.A course is charted over these six novels that shows an increase in economic anxiety that simultaneously aligns with the movement of his critique from Western civilization in general to a critique of the exploitative system of capitalism specifically in Moby Dick.The first chapter serves to lay the biographical and historical foundations for the economic reading of Moby Dick in the following chapters.By drawing together relevant data points from the financial history of Melville’s life a clear correlation can be seen between Melville’s need for money and the choices that he makes in his writing.From Melville’s letters to his publisher,family,and friends,the first chapter of this dissertation shows an increasing intensity of economic anxiety as Melville’s literary career consistently fails to bring him financial success.The need for money is ultimately what takes Melville to sea and it is at sea that he meets the common laborer and comes to understand the class divisions in American society.The first chapter finds not only that the source of Melville’s writing becomes increasingly focused on economics,but also that the forces of nascent capitalism raise Melville’s consciousness to the iniquities of the American economic system.The reading of Moby Dick is divided over the second and third chapters with the former dealing with Ishmael’s time on land and the latter with Ishmael’s time at sea.The purpose of the second chapter is to present Moby Dick as a pedagogical object offering a lesson to its readers in class struggle and capital-labor relations.The focus of Melville’s critique of capitalism begins with his attacks on the remnants of feudalism and aristocracy in the United States and turns toward inheritance as the source for wealth inequality and class division.By turning attention to the potential economic source of Melville’s numerous biblical and historical allusions,this chapter indicates that the variety of Melville’s allusion have a commonality in their focus on economics,from ancient times to his present.The third chapter focuses on the exploitative nature of the wage system in the whaling industry and argues that the whaling industry functions as an analogy for the system of capital at large.Following the discussion of exploitation,the third chapter draws analogies between Melville’s white whale and the mechanisms of capitalism before turning toward a reading of the character of Ahab as a schematic for the revolutionary process of class struggle against the system of capitalism.Ultimately,this research argues that Melville’s work provides valuable insights into the capitalist system as it existed in the mid-nineteenth century.The evidence presented urges scholarship on Melville to turn attention to economics in their research into not only Melville’s work,but also other American authors from the nineteenth century.