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Melville's “Isolatoes”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The unhappy fate of the man whom choice or chance has alienated from the human community greatly interested Hawthorne, as is well known. The theme held a similar fascination for Melville—even before he became acquainted with many of Hawthorne's tales. The probable discussions subsequently with his friend and neighbor, however, may well have strengthened his interest in the Ishmael motif. As might be expected, Melville explored the moral and philosophical implications of the theme, and out of them he evolved a doctrine of racial and social community as an ideal to set opposite the isolated individual. This positive doctrine need concern us here, however, only in so far as it is implicit in his delineation of individuals who, because of birth or achievement or action or character—a white jacket of some kind, in short—were set apart from normal human relationships. These persons may appropriately be called “Isolatoes,” a term coined by Melville himself in describing the crew of the Pequod: “They were nearly all Islanders … ‘Isolatoes’ too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own.” In each of his books one character at least is just such an exile, either by accident or volition.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1945
References
1 The date of Melville's first reading of Hawthorne is uncertain. He discusses “Hawthorne and his Mosses” in The Literary World for August, 1850, asserting that he had just come upon the book during July. In this review there is a reference to The Scarlet Letter (published a few months earlier) and to Twice-Told Tales (1837), but although the reference is eulogistic, it seems not to have been founded on much close knowledge. For instance, in February, 1851, Melville wrote to Duyckinck: “I have recently read … ‘Twice Told Tales’ (I had not read but a few of them before) I think they far exceed the ‘Mosses’ …” [see Willard Thorp, Herman Melville: Representative Selections … (New York, 1938), pp. 327 ff. and 385]. The assertion made by several critics that Melville reviewed The Scarlet Letter for The Literary World in March, 1850, has been thoroughly refuted by Willard Thorp, “Did Melville Review The Scarlet Letter?” American Literature, xiv, 302-305 (November, 1942). Melville's enthusiasm for The Mosses in the summer of 1850 was so unbounded that one is forced to conclude that Hawthorne had made little or no impact upon him previously. Yet the five novels Melville wrote before this time all employ in some degree the theme of isolation.
2 For a discussion, see the present writer's “Melville's ‘Sociality’,” American Literature, xvii, 33-49 (March, 1945).
3 Moby Dick, i, 149. All references to Melville's writings are to the Standard Edition (London, Constable & Co., 1922-24).
4 Typee, p. 25.
5 Omoo, p. 131.
6 Mardi, i, 16.
7 Ibid., i, 3.
8 Ibid., i, 15.
9 Redburn, p. 79.
10 Moby Dixk, i, 30.
11 Pierre, p. 172.
12 Ibid., p. 88. Another female Isolato was the Chola widow, Hunilla, whom Melville called a “lone, shipwrecked soul” (The Piazza Tales, p. 227).
13 The explicit motif of Israel Potter is, of course, Israel's forty years in the wilderness. This was obviously suggested by Potter's name, but Melville's use of the suggestion illustrates again his interest in the general theme.
14 R. M. Weaver, Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic (New York, 1921), p. 361.
15 Poems, p. 198.
16 Ibid., p. 199.
17 Moby Dick, i, 48.
18 “Herman Melville,” American Mercury, x, 39 (January, 1927).
19 The Course of American Democratic Thought (New York, 1940), pp. 73, 74.
20 Most notably in two remarks to Starbuck. First, when Ahab cried “Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better … than to gaze upon God.” Secondly, after his whalebone leg had been snapped off: “Ay, ay, Starbuck, 'tis sweet to lean sometimes … and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has.” (Moby Dick, ii, 329, 350).
21 Moby Dick, ii, 341.
22 Ibid., i, 210.
23 Ibid., ii, 240.
24 Ibid., ii, 239-240.
25 Ibid., i, 207.
26 Ibid., ii, 333.
27 Ibid., ii, 361.
28 Ibid., ii, 366.
29 Gabriel, op. cit., p. 74.
30 Moby Dick, ii, 366.
31 Ibid., ii, 367.
32 Ibid., i, 59. My italics.
33 F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York, 1941), p. 459.
34 Pierre, pp. 89, 90-91.
35 Ibid., p 125.
36 Ibid., p. 192.
37 Ibid., p. 363.
38 Ibid., p. 502.
39 Clarel, ii, 199.
40 Israel Potter, pp. 73, 74, 79-80.
41 The Confidence Man, p. 185.
42 Ibid., p. 178.
43 Billy Budd, etc. p. 263.
44 The Piazza Tales, p. 65.
45 Complete Works (Boston, 1903-04), ii, 54. Since the present article was written, Egbert S. Oliver, in “A Second Look at ‘Bartleby’,” College English, vi, 431-439 (May, 1945), has suggested that in writing his tale Melville intended “a reductio ad absurdum of the convictions Thoreau expressed” in his wish to dissociate himself from the community.
46 Moby Dick, i, 62.
47 Ibid., ii, 345.
48 Ibid., i, 222.
49 Ibid., ii, 172.
50 Ibid., ii, 302.
51 Ibid., ii, 316.
52 The Piazza Tales, p. 39.
53 Typee, p. 167. In a volume of Schopenhauer, which Melville read in 1890 or 1891 (about forty-five years after he wrote the above protest), he marked the following passage: “… when possible, the apparent severity of the punishment should exceed the actual: but solitary confinement achieves the reverse. Its great severity has no witnesses, and is by no means anticipated by any one who has not experienced it; thus it does not deter.” The World as Will and Idea, translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, Vol. iii, 413 (London, 1890). This volume is now in the Melville Collection in Harvard's Houghton Library. —Permission to use this material was granted by Kenneth B. Murdock as Chairman of the Committee on Higher Degrees in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University.
54 Moby Dick, ii, 168-169.
55 Ibid., ii, 328.
56 Ibid., ii, 366.
57 Thorp, op. cit., p. 331.
58 Ibid., pp. 394-395.
59 The Confidence Man, p. 210.
60 Moby Dick, ii, 282.
61 Ibid., ii, 351.
62 William Braswell, Melville's Religious Thought (Durham, N. C., 1943), p. 122.
63 Pierre, p. 289.
64 Mardi, ii, 368, 370.