Editing Moby-Dick (section)

==Background==

===Autobiographical elements===
''Moby-Dick'' draws on Melville's experience on the whaler ''Acushnet'', but is not autobiographical. On December 30, 1840, Melville signed on as a green hand for the maiden voyage of the ''Acushnet'', planned to last for 52 months. Its owner, Melvin O. Bradford, like Bildad, was a [[Quaker]]: on several instances when he signed documents, he erased the word "swear" and replaced it with "affirm". However, the shareholders of the ''Acushnet'' were relatively wealthy, whereas the owners of the ''Pequod'' included poor widows and orphaned children.<ref>Heflin (2004), 16</ref>

The model for the Whaleman's Chapel of chapter 7 is the [[Seamen's Bethel]] on Johnny Cake Hill. Melville attended a service there shortly before he shipped out on the ''Acushnet'', and he heard a sermon by Reverend [[Enoch Mudge]], who is at least in part the inspiration for Father Mapple. Even the topic of [[Jonah and the Whale]] may be authentic, for Mudge contributed sermons on Jonah to ''Sailor's Magazine''.<ref>Heflin (2004), 41</ref>

The crew was not as heterogenous or exotic as the crew of the ''Pequod''. Five were foreigners, four of them Portuguese, and the others were American either at birth or naturalized. Three black men were in the crew, two seamen and the cook. Fleece, the black cook of the ''Pequod'', was probably modeled on this Philadelphia-born William Maiden.<ref>Heflin (2004), 26-7</ref> A [[first mate]], actually called Edward C. Starbuck was discharged at [[Tahiti]] under mysterious circumstances.<ref>Heflin (2004), 19</ref> The [[second mate]], John Hall, is identified as Stubb in an annotation in the book's copy of crew member Henry Hubbard, who also identified the model for Pip: John Backus, a little black man added to the crew during the voyage.<ref>Heflin (2004), 252 note 26</ref> Hubbard witnessed Pip's fall into the water.<ref>Tanselle (1988), 1012</ref>

Ahab seems to have had no model, though his death may have been based on an actual event. Melville was aboard ''The Star'' in May 1843 with two sailors from the ''Nantucket'' who could have told him that they had seen their second mate "taken out of a whaleboat by a foul line and drowned".<ref>Heflin (2004), 189</ref>

===Whaling sources===
{{See also|Cetology of Moby-Dick}}
[[File:Houghton AC85.M4977.Zz839b - History of the Sperm Whale.jpg|thumb|Melville's copy of ''Natural History of the Sperm Whale'', published in 1839]]
[[File:Herman Melville by Joseph O Eaton.jpg|thumb|A portrait of ''Moby-Dick'' author [[Herman Melville]]]]
In addition to his own experience on the whaling ship ''Acushnet'', two actual events served as the genesis for Melville's tale. One was the sinking of the Nantucket ship ''[[Essex (1799 whaleship)|Essex]]'' in 1820, after a sperm whale rammed her 2,000 miles (3,200&nbsp;km) from the western coast of South America. First mate [[Owen Chase]], one of eight survivors, recorded the events in his 1821 ''Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex''.{{sfnb|Philbrick|2000| p= xii- xv}}

The other event was the alleged killing in the late 1830s of the albino sperm whale [[Mocha Dick]], in the waters off the Chilean island of [[Mocha (island)|Mocha]]. Mocha Dick was rumored to have 20 or so harpoons in his back from other whalers, and appeared to attack ships with premeditated ferocity. One of his battles with a whaler served as subject for an article by explorer [[J. N. Reynolds]] in the May 1839 issue of ''[[The Knickerbocker]] or New-York Monthly Magazine''.<ref name="Reynolds, J.N">Reynolds, J.N., "Mocha Dick: or the White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal", ''The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine''. 13.5, May 1839, pp.&nbsp;377–392.</ref> Melville was familiar with the article, which described:

{{blockquote| This renowned monster, who had come off victorious in a hundred fights with his pursuers, was an old bull whale, of prodigious size and strength. From the effect of age, or more probably from a freak of nature ... a singular consequence had resulted — ''he was white as wool!''<ref name="Reynolds, J.N"/>}}

Significantly, Reynolds writes a [[First-person narrative|first-person narration]] that serves as a [[Frame story|frame]] for the story of a whaling captain he meets. The captain resembles Ahab and suggests a similar symbolism and single-minded motivation in hunting this whale, in that when his crew first encounters Mocha Dick and cowers from him, the captain rallies them:

{{blockquote|As he drew near, with his long curved back looming occasionally above the surface of the billows, we perceived that it was white as the surf around him; and the men stared aghast at each other, as they uttered, in a suppressed tone, the terrible name of MOCHA DICK!

"Mocha Dick or the d----l [devil]', said I, 'this boat never sheers off from any thing that wears the shape of a whale.'"<ref name="Reynolds, J.N"/>}}

Mocha Dick had over 100 encounters with whalers in the decades between 1810 and the 1830s. He was described as being gigantic and covered in barnacles. Although he was the most famous, Mocha Dick was not the only white whale in the sea, nor the only whale to attack hunters.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Whipple|first=Addison Beecher Colvin|title=Yankee whalers in the South Seas|year=1954|publisher=Doubleday|isbn=0-8048-1057-5|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=v4sGAQAAIAAJ&q=Yankee+Whalers+in+the+South+Seas}}, 66–79</ref>

While an accidental collision with a sperm whale at night accounted for sinking of the ''Union'' in 1807,<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DMwEAAAAQAAJ&q=the+ship+union%2C+of+Nantucket+September%2C+1807+Edmund+Gardner&pg=PA115|title=Report of the Commissioner|date=February 20, 1878|via=Google Books}}</ref> it was not until August 1851 that the whaler ''[[Ann Alexander (ship)|Ann Alexander]]'', while hunting in the Pacific off the [[Galápagos Islands]], became the second vessel since the ''Essex'' to be attacked, holed, and sunk by a whale. Melville remarked, "Ye Gods! What a commentator is this ''Ann Alexander'' whale. What he has to say is short & pithy & very much to the point. I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster."<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.melville.org/hmquotes.htm|title=Melville's Reflections|website=www.melville.org}}</ref>

While Melville had already drawn on his different sailing experiences in his previous novels, such as ''[[Mardi]]'', he had never focused specifically on whaling. The 18 months he spent as an ordinary seaman aboard the whaler ''Acushnet'' in 1841–42, and one incident in particular, now served as inspiration. During a mid-ocean "gam" (rendezvous at sea between ships), he met Chase's son William, who lent him his father's book. Melville later wrote:

{{blockquote|I questioned him concerning his father's adventure; ... he went to his chest & handed me a complete copy ... of the Narrative [of the ''Essex'' catastrophe]. This was the first printed account of it I had ever seen. The reading of this wondrous story on the landless sea, and so close to the very latitude of the shipwreck, had a surprising effect upon me.<ref>Leyda, Jay. ''The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891''. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951, 119.</ref>}}

The book was out of print, and rare. Melville let his interest in the book be known to his father-in-law, [[Lemuel Shaw]], whose friend in Nantucket procured an imperfect but clean copy which Shaw gave to Melville in April 1851. Melville read this copy avidly, made copious notes in it, and had it bound, keeping it in his library for the rest of his life.{{Sfnb|Melville|1988| p = [https://books.google.com/books?id=jnNBh61lpjUC&q=Owen+Chase 971-77]}}

''Moby-Dick'' contains large sections, most of which are narrated by Ishmael, that seemingly have nothing to do with the plot, but describe aspects of the whaling business. Although a successful earlier novel about Nantucket whalers had been written, ''Miriam Coffin or The Whale-Fisherman'' (1835) by [[Joseph C. Hart]],<ref>Mary K. Bercaw, "A Fine, Boisterous Something": Nantucket in Moby-Dick, ''Historic Nantucket'', Vol. 39, No. 3 (Fall 1991); Philip Armstrong, ''What animals mean in the fiction of modernity'', Routledge, 2008, p.132</ref> which is credited with influencing elements of Melville's work, most accounts of whaling tended to be sensational tales of bloody mutiny. Melville believed that no book up to that time had portrayed the whaling industry in as fascinating or immediate a way as he had experienced it.

Melville found the bulk of his data on whales and whaling in five books, the most important of which was by the English ship's surgeon Thomas Beale, ''Natural History of the Sperm Whale'' (1839), a book of reputed authority which Melville bought on July 10, 1850.<ref>Vincent (1949), 128</ref> "In scale and complexity," scholar Steven Olsen-Smith writes, "the significance of [this source] to the composition of ''Moby-Dick'' surpasses that of any other source book from which Melville is known to have drawn."<ref>Steven Olsen-Smith (2010), [http://melvillesmarginalia.org/introductions.php?id=52 "Introduction to Melville's Marginalia in Thomas Beale's ''The Natural History of the Sperm Whale''." ''Melville's Marginalia Online''. Retrieved on 30 November 2016.] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141215023652/http://melvillesmarginalia.org/introductions.php?id=52 |date=December 15, 2014}}</ref> According to scholar [[Howard P. Vincent]], the general influence of this source is to supply the arrangement of whaling data in chapter groupings.<ref>Vincent (1949), 129</ref> Melville followed Beale's grouping closely, yet adapted it to what art demanded, and he changed the original's prosaic phrases into graphic figures of speech.<ref name="Vincent 1949, 130">Vincent (1949), 130</ref> The second most important whaling book is Frederick Debell Bennett, ''A Whaling Voyage Round the Globe, from the Year 1833 to 1836'' (1840), from which Melville also took the chapter organization, but in a lesser degree than he learned from Beale.<ref name="Vincent 1949, 130"/>

The third book was the one Melville reviewed for the ''Literary World'' in 1847, J. Ross Browne's ''Etchings of a Whaling Cruise'' (1846), which may have given Melville the first thought for a whaling book, and in any case contains passages embarrassingly similar to passages in ''Moby-Dick''.<ref name="Vincent 1949, 131">Vincent (1949), 131</ref> The fourth book, Reverend Henry T. Cheever's ''The Whale and His Captors'' (1850), was used for two episodes in ''Moby-Dick'' but probably appeared too late in the writing of the novel to be of much more use.<ref name="Vincent 1949, 131"/> Melville did plunder a fifth book, [[William Scoresby]] Jr., ''An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale Fishery'' (1820), though—unlike the other four books—its subject is the [[Greenland whale]] rather than the sperm whale. Although the book became the standard whaling reference soon after publication, Melville satirized and parodied it on several occasions—for instance in the description of narwhales in the chapter "Cetology", where he called Scoresby "Charley Coffin" and gave his account "a humorous twist of fact": "Scoresby will help out Melville several times, and on each occasion Melville will satirize him under a pseudonym." Vincent suggests several reasons for Melville's attitude towards Scoresby, including his dryness and abundance of irrelevant data, but the major reason seems to have been that the Greenland whale was the sperm whale's closest competitor for the public's attention, so Melville felt obliged to dismiss anything dealing with it.<ref>Vincent (1949), 132–134. Quotation on 134.</ref>

In addition to cetological works, Melville also consulted scattered literary works that mention or discuss whales, as the opening "Extracts" section of the novel demonstrates. For instance, [[Thomas Browne]]'s essay "Of Sperma-Ceti, and the Sperma-Ceti Whale" from his ''[[Pseudodoxia Epidemica]]'' is consulted not only in the extracts but also in the chapter titled "Cetology".<ref>{{cite book |last=Browne |first=Thomas |title=The Major Works |publisher=Penguin |pages=216–220}}</ref> Ishmael notes: "Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few:—The Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne."<ref>{{cite book |last=Melville |first=Herman |title=Moby-Dick |publisher=Gutenberg |url=https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm#link2HCH0095}}</ref> Browne's playful examination of whales, which values philosophical interpretations over scientifically accurate examinations, helped shape the novel's style. Browne's comment on "the [Sperm-Whale's] eyes but small, the pizell [penis] large, and prominent"<ref>{{cite book |last=Browne |first=Thomas |title=The Major Works |publisher=Penguin |page=217}}</ref> likely helped shape the comical chapter concerning whale penises, "The Cassock".

===Composition===
[[File:Arrowhead farmhouse Herman Melville.jpg|thumb|[[Arrowhead (Herman Melville House)|Arrowhead]], the house in [[Pittsfield, Massachusetts]] where Melville wrote most of ''Moby-Dick'' over the winter of 1850-1851]]
Scholars have concluded that Melville composed ''Moby-Dick'' in two or even three stages.<ref>Tanselle (1988), 583, 656-58, 832, 849</ref> Reasoning from biographical evidence, analysis of the functions of characters, and a series of unexplained but perhaps meaningful inconsistencies in the final version, they hypothesize that reading Shakespeare and his new friendship with Hawthorne, in the words of [[Lawrence Buell (academic)|Lawrence Buell]], inspired Melville to rewrite a "relatively straightforward" whaling adventure into "an epic of cosmic encyclopedic proportions".<ref name="Buell 2014, 364">Buell (2014), 364</ref>

The earliest surviving mention of what became ''Moby-Dick'' is a letter Melville wrote to [[Richard Henry Dana Jr.]] on May 1, 1850:<ref>Melville (1993), 160</ref>

{{blockquote|1=About the "whaling voyage"—I am half way in the work, & am very glad that your suggestion so jumps with mine. It will be a strange sort of book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; — & to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.<ref>Melville (1993), 162</ref>}}

Bezanson objects that the letter contains too many ambiguities to assume "that Dana's 'suggestion' would obviously be that Melville do for whaling what he had done for life on a man-of-war in ''White-Jacket''{{-"}}.<ref name="Bezanson ">Walter E. Bezanson, "''Moby-Dick'': Document, Drama, Dream," in John Bryant (ed.), ''A Companion to Melville Studies'', Greenwoord Press, 1986, 176–180.</ref> Dana had experienced how incomparable Melville was in dramatic storytelling when he met him in Boston, so perhaps "his 'suggestion' was that Melville do a book that captured that gift".<ref name="Bezanson"/> And the long sentence in the middle of the above quotation simply acknowledges that Melville is struggling with the problem, not of choosing between fact and fancy but of how to interrelate them. The most positive statements are that it will be a strange sort of a book and that Melville means to give the truth of the thing, but what thing exactly is not clear.<ref name="Bezanson"/>

Melville may have found the plot before writing or developed it after the writing process was underway. Considering his elaborate use of sources, "it is safe to say" that they helped him shape the narrative, its plot included.<ref>Bryant and Springer (2007), ix</ref> Scholars John Bryant and Haskell Springer cite the development of the character Ishmael as another factor which prolonged Melville's process of composition and which can be deduced from the structure of the final version of the book. Ishmael, in the early chapters, is simply the narrator, just as the narrators in Melville's earlier sea adventures had been, but in later chapters becomes a mystical stage manager who is central to the tragedy.<ref name="Bryant and Springer 2007, xi">Bryant and Springer (2007), xi</ref>

Less than two months after mentioning the project to Dana, Melville reported in a letter of June 27 to Richard Bentley, his English publisher:

{{blockquote|1=My Dear Sir, — In the latter part of the coming autumn I shall have ready a new work; and I write you now to propose its publication in England. The book is a [[Romance (literary fiction)|romance of adventure]], founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author's own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer.<ref>Melville (1993), 163</ref>}}

Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family had moved to a small red farmhouse near [[Lenox, Massachusetts]], at the end of March 1850.<ref>Miller (1991), 274</ref> He met Melville on August 5, 1850, when the authors met at a picnic hosted by a mutual friend that included, among others, [[Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.]] and [[James T. Fields]].<ref>Cheever, Susan. (2006). ''American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work''. Large Print ed. Detroit: Thorndike. 174. {{ISBN|0-7862-9521-X}}.</ref> Melville wrote an unsigned review of Hawthorne's short story collection ''[[Mosses from an Old Manse]]'' titled "[[Hawthorne and His Mosses]]", which appeared in ''[[The Literary World (New York City)|The Literary World]]'' on August 17 and 24.<ref>Miller (1991), 312</ref> Bezanson finds the essay "so deeply related to Melville's imaginative and intellectual world while writing ''Moby-Dick''" that it could be regarded as a virtual preface and should be "everybody's prime piece of contextual reading".<ref name="Bezanson"/> In the essay, Melville compares Hawthorne to Shakespeare and Dante, and his "self-projection" is evident in the repeats of the word "genius", the more than two dozen references to Shakespeare, and in the insistence that Shakespeare's "unapproachability" is nonsense for an American.<ref name="Bezanson"/>

The most intense work on the book was done during the winter of 1850–1851, when Melville had changed the noise of New York City for a farm in [[Pittsfield, Massachusetts]]. The move may well have delayed finishing the book.<ref>Springer and Bryant (2007), xi</ref> During these months, he wrote several excited letters to Hawthorne, including one of June 1851 in which he summarizes his career: "What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the ''other'' way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches."<ref>Melville (1993), 191</ref>

This is the stubborn Melville who stood by ''[[Mardi]]'' and talked about his other, more commercial books with contempt. The letter also reveals how Melville experienced his development from his 25th year: "Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould."<ref>Melville (1993), 193</ref>

Buell finds the evidence that Melville changed his ambitions during writing "on the whole convincing", since the impact of Shakespeare and Hawthorne was "surely monumental",<ref name="Buell 2014, 364"/> but others challenge the theories of the composition in three ways. The first raises objections on the use of evidence and the evidence itself. Bryant finds "little concrete evidence, and nothing at all conclusive, to show that Melville radically altered the structure or conception of the book"<ref>Bryant (1998), 67</ref> and scholar Robert Milder sees "insufficient evidence and doubtful methodology" at work.<ref>Milder (1977), 215</ref> A second type of objection is based on assumptions about Melville's intellectual development. Bryant and Springer object to the conclusion that Hawthorne inspired Melville to write Ahab's tragic obsession into the book; Melville already had experienced other encounters which could just as well have triggered his imagination, such as the Bible's Jonah and Job, Milton's Satan, Shakespeare's King Lear, Byron's heroes.<ref name="Bryant and Springer 2007, xi"/> Bezanson is also not convinced that before he met Hawthorne, "Melville was ''not'' ready for the kind of book ''Moby-Dick'' became",<ref name="Bezanson"/> because in his letters from the time Melville denounces his last two "straight narratives, ''[[Redburn]]'' and ''[[White-Jacket]]'', as two books written just for the money, and he firmly stood by ''Mardi'' as the kind of book he believed in. His language is already "richly steeped in 17th-century mannerisms", characteristics of ''Moby-Dick''. A third type calls upon the literary nature of passages used as evidence. According to Milder, the cetological chapters cannot be leftovers from an earlier stage of composition and any theory that they are "will eventually founder on the stubborn meaningfulness of these chapters", because no scholar adhering to the theory has yet explained how these chapters "can bear intimate thematic relation to a symbolic story not yet conceived".<ref>Milder (1977), 208</ref>

Buell finds that theories based on a combination of selected passages from letters and what are perceived as "loose ends" in the book not only "tend to dissolve into guesswork", but he also suggests that these so-called loose ends may be intended by the author: repeatedly the book mentions "the necessary unfinishedness of immense endeavors".<ref name="Buell 2014, 364"/>