The Ship Of State:Imaging The Nation In Antebellum American Sea Narratives

Playing a key role in binding the virtually independent states into a Union in the antebellum era,American sea narratives not only helped shape the dominant Ideology featured with ever-expanding Republicanism and Anglo-American racial superiority,but also provided countless dramatic scenes for the critics to revitalize the repressed and marginalized during the historical process of nation building.Taking six sea narratives as my corpus and adopting a largely revisionist historical approach,I attempt to reconstruct a fuller and more humane picture of that nation building process.After a brief introductory chapter,I make a contrastive reading between Jeremiah Reynolds' Address(1836)and Symzonia(1820),arguably the first American utopian novel in chapter two.Not only a key person promoting the largest government-sponsored expedition to the Pacific and the South Seas in the 19th century,Reynolds also helped the new Republic to identify itself as a seaward nation despite of its strong agrarian tradition in his Address.On the other hand,though its authorship remains a mystery,I argue that Symzonia not only satirically responded to the imperial ambition toward the sea but also frustrated the ever-growing national ego by projecting a utopian Other deep under the earth.I discuss James Fenimore Cooper' s The Pilot(1824),both a historical romance and a founding myth of the new Republic in chapter three.Different from Prof.Thomas Philbrick's view,I argue that Cooper is much more concerned with social stability than nationalistic proud.By replacing the low born heroes as John Paul Jones and Tom Coffin with a bunch of gentleman officers like Edward Griffith and Richard Barnstable,Cooper installed his Ship of State in a much conservative manner against the democratic turn of America in the 1820s.My discussion of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym(1838),a fantastic response to America's involvement in the international Antarctic competition in the 1830s centers on chapter four.After pointing out Pym's catering to the strong national impulses and the sensational reflections on the racial issues that drew much attention at the time,I expatiate that it is the narrative undercurrent paralleling the voyage to the deep South that not only problematizes the on-going exploration,but also satirizes the Western colonial history in general and the America's imperial desire in particular.I argue that Two Years before the Mast(1840),one of the most popular sea narratives during the antebellum period by Henry Richard Dana,Jr.,bears a striking thematic duality in chapter five.On one hand,it records how a Boston elite broke the class boundary,exposed the social evils,and promoted the civil right of his social inferiors in a courageous way,thus constructing a true republican American self.On the other hand,it adopted a safer as well as a much prejudicial stance in its Californian narrative,feeding the racially biased domestic imagination at the cost the Mexicans.I try to prove that the split of the themes reveals the paradoxical nature of the imperial and expansionist Ideology that culminated in the Mexican War(1846-1848)in the antebellum era.In chapter six,I disagree with Prof.Zhou Yushu's opinion that Moby-Dick(1851)demonstrates Herman Melville's praise for an uplifting American national morale.I argue in this part that through a whaling tale,Melville raised a question that has both whaling and social-political reference:how an aged,disabled and even maddened captain as Ahab could have controlled a mob of young,strong and blood-shedding men to follow him so closely in his suicidal voyage without or failed to start a mutiny to save themselves.Different from Prof.Zhou's sanguinity,I locate Melville's intention in a much troubled personal as well as historical context,therefore reinforce the tragic nature of the lasting masterpiece of American sea narratives.I reiterate my opinion briefly in chapter seven,the last chapter of all.