Herman Melville's books: A biographical and thematic obsession

“Herman Melville's Books: A Biographical and Thematic Obsession” explores Melville's physical dealings with books from his childhood through the major phase of his career (1846–1852), including his use of book imagery, his use of sourcebooks, and his book collecting. Beginning with the auction and dispersal of Allan Melville's elegantly-bound library in the late 1820s, I address the symbolic importance of the paternal library in Herman Melville's abrupt childhood descent from patrician affluence into poverty. Chapter 1 culminates with my examination of Melville's use of the book image in “Fragments from a Writing Desk,” which introduces motifs of autodidactic frustration and violent treatment of books. Chapter 2 examines the composition of Typee (1846) through evidence of source-appropriation, observing his use of source-passages as prompts for original allusions and episodes. With chapters 3 and 4 I return to Melville's book imagery and to his self-image as bibliophile. After the marketplace failure of Mardi (where he first announced himself as bibliophile) Melville returned to the semi-autobiographical vein with Redburn (1849), written in a reversed state of mind and drawn from the impoverished circumstances of his childhood. In Redburn the tragic themes of Moby-Dick first appear with book-related imagery.; Chapter 5 explores Melville's book buying experiences in London in 1849. I plot his movements among booksellers, publishers, and agents. The impact of his London book buying experiences can be seen in Moby-Dick, his next work, where Melville turned whales into books with his “Cetology” chapter. In their treatment of Moby-Dick (1851) the final two chapters are divided between source- and image-study. Chapter 6 examines Melville's use of Thomas Beale's Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839) for Moby-Dick. Chapter 7, devoted to both Moby-Dick and Pierre, concludes my examination of autodidactic frustration and of the book-image in Melville's fiction. In Pierre (1852), largely a commentary on Melville's sense of professional failure, the biblioclastic imagery of “Fragments from a Writing Desk” achieves its purest expression and is brought to a close.