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

Reading Moby-Dick as Ethnic Allegory At a time when images of the white settler inhibit the savage frontier were prevalent in antebellum America, depictions of racial polarization and, alternately, co-existence among different ethnic groups had already begun to find expression in various fastidious mediums, from painting to literature. Today more than ever, such works continue to elicit critical re-examinations where race relations, colonization, and literary representation are concerned. While many literary and cultural critics have proposed allegorical readings of political and religious natures, Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick can also be read relatedly as an ethnic allegory, where particular scenes and images representing death or expiry illustrate Melvilles uneasiness with how white expansionist attitudes are enacted often in tension with or at the expense of different ethnic peoples living deep down Americas geographic borders. For these purposes, I would like specifi chit-chaty to examine Melvilles rather unconventional portrayal of a non-white character such as Queequeg. The correlation between his anticipate and ultimate death and the calamitous 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 semblance of an alternative social 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 said(prenominal) ti... ...Works Cited Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Mans Indian Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York Vintage Books, 1979. Brodhead, Richard H. Trying All Things 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 allegory 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 Black Characterization in Uncle Toms Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel. New Essays on Uncle Toms Cabin. ed. Eric Sundquist. Cambridge Cambridge UP, 1986.