Transcendentalism In Moby Dick

Through his novel Moby Dick, it is obvious that during his life Herman Melville experienced conflicts in his religious beliefs, an understandable outcome stemming from the intellectual background of the nineteenth century. There existed during Melville’s time, a contradiction between the Calvinist theory of predestination, with its idea of inborn immorality and original sin, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept of Transcendentalism, which emphasized the idea of inherent goodness and self-reliance. Critics have long debated Melville’s shared beliefs with Emerson and Transcendentalism and his faithfulness to the Calvinist religion. Moby Dick reflects the conflict between Calvinism and Transcendentalism as, through the characters and the biblical
Ishmael, the narrator of the novel, is named after the biblical Ishmael who is the wrongly disinherited son of Abraham and Hagar (18). Both the biblical character and the narrator are portrayed as spiritual wanderers and outcasts. Ishmael tells his audience, “Whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the streets, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball” (18). Ishmael admits he finds life on shore grim. Throughout Moby Dick there is “a symbolic opposition of land and sea, according to which the land stands for safety, security, conformity, orthodoxy, and so on, while the sea stands for the hidden, the secret, the half-known world where the other side of reality is shown and where alone one may find the full truth” (qtd. Romero). The sea is symbolically the realm of the Transcendentalist whereas the land seems to symbolize the realm of Calvinism. Melville, through saying that Ishmael felt a sense of doom on land where religious conformity was rampant, seems to be making a
Ahab is considered “Emerson’s transcendental philosopher turned satanic” (qtd Mahmoudi 155) while Bulkington is portrayed as a formidably strong man who prefers the open sea over the land, solitude over companionship, and intellectual freedom over dogma. Through Bulkington’s character, Melville concludes that it is possible to engage in a harmless Transcendentalist quest for free thought. When Bulkington is first introduced in the chapter titled “The Spouter Inn,” he said to be someone who “held somewhat aloof” (Melville 29), already portrayed as someone who is self-reliant. As stated previously, throughout Moby Dick there is the “symbolic opposition of land and sea” (qtd Romero), that the sea is symbolically the realm of the Transcendentalist, which Bulkington is constantly drawn towards. Bulkington epitomizes the Transcendentalist as he shuns conformity, security, and orthodoxy for the desire to gain knowledge and explore the unknown. Although Bulkington is also fated to die at sea with the crew of the Pequod, Ishmael considers his death much more noble, as it is during the search to find the full truth, and declare that the sea will transform Bulkington into a god, as he will be the god over himself obtaining ultimate self-reliance (Melville