Melville and the Sublime in Moby-Dick
1976; Duke University Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2925070
ISSN1527-2117
Autores Tópico(s)Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
ResumoTHE SUBLIME WAS ESSENTIAL to romancers of nineteenth century, and Melville's use of sublime followed on his conception of Moby-Dick as a romance. Moreover, terrible quest of Ahab and Pequod for great white whale, Moby Dick, may be identified with quest for sublime that in nineteenth century had become inextricably entangled with a religion of nature and a secular theodicy enunciated by most influential of Melville's contemporaries. Melville's depiction of that sublime quest in Moby-Dick, informed by a more traditional theodicy that he found in earlier writers, is a judgment and a rejection of dominant philosophy of his time. Samuel Monk, in his study of sublime, remarks that by end of eighteenth century the sublime resembles a very full treasure box in which can be found all paraphernalia of romantic writers.' While Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into Origin of our Ideas of Sublime and Beautiful was by no means only source and background for Melville's use of sublime, it was much most influential and comprehensive statement to emerge from eighteenth-century occupation with sublime. We do know that Melville was familiar with Burke; a copy of Enquiry was in his personal library.2 Burke's exhaustive catalog of what things they are that cause in us affections of sublime and beautiful3 is duplicated to an astounding degree in course of Pequod's voyage. Burke defines two separate and distinct realms of sublime and beautiful. Terror is ruling principle of sublime: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite ideas of pain, and
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