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

Reading Moby-Dick as heathenish Allegory At a time when images of the white settler check the savage frontier were prevalent in antebellum the States, depictions of racial polarisation and, alternately, co-existence among different ethnic groups had already begun to find expression in respective(a) artistic mediums, from painting to literature. Today more than ever, such works cut across to elicit critical re-examinations where race relations, colonization, and literary representation are concerned. maculation many literary and cultural critics have proposed allegorical readings of political and apparitional natures, Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick can also be read relatedly as an ethnic allegory, where cross scenes and images representing demolition or destruction illustrate Melvilles uneasiness with how white expansionist attitudes are enacted often in tension with or at the disbursal of different ethnic peoples living within Americas geographic borders. For these purposes, I w ould like specifi nattery to examine Melvilles rather unconventional portrayal of a non-white persona 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 substitute social reality and the historical reality of American westward expansionism. First, stick out 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 ruthless quest for the white whale, at the same ti... ...Works Cited Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Mans Indian Images of the American Indian from capital of Ohio to the Present. sensitive York Vintage Books, 1979. Brodhead, Richard H. Trying All Things An Introduct ion to Moby-Dick. impudent 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 Afro-American Novel. New Essays on Uncle Toms Cabin. ed. Eric Sundquist. Cambridge Cambridge UP, 1986.