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

Reading Moby-Dick as Ethnic illustration At a time when images of the white settler conquering the tearing frontier were prevalent in antebellum America, depictions of racial polarization and, alternately, co-existence among distinct heathenish groups had already begun to find expression in various delicious mediums, from painting to literature. Today more than ever, such(prenominal) works continue to distil critical re-examinations where race relations, colonization, and literary representation atomic number 18 concerned. While umteen literary and cultural critics have proposed allegorical readings of political and religious natures, Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick finish also be read relatedly as an ethnic allegory, where particular scenes and images representing finale or destruction illustrate Melvilles uneasiness with how white expansionist attitudes are enacted often in tension with or at the expense of contrary ethnic peoples living within Americas geographic borders. F or these purposes, I would like specifically to examine Melvilles rather unconventional portrayal of a non-white character such as Queequeg. The correlation between his anticipated and ultimate death and the mordant 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 alternative well-disposed reality and the historical reality of American westward expansionism. First, allow 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 Columbus to the Present. unfermented York Vintage Books, 1979. Brodhead, Richard H. Trying All Thin gs An Introduction to Moby-Dick. New 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 smutty Characterization in Uncle Toms Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel. New Essays on Uncle Toms Cabin. ed. Eric Sundquist. Cambridge Cambridge UP, 1986.