John's Personal Reflection Piece

 John Flanagan

English 352 Winter 2013

In a close reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick it remains almost impossible to discuss topics of race, imperialism, colonialism, and industrialization without simultaneously investigating all concurrent historical developments. With this in mind, the most influential historical text regarding my reading of the novel was John L. O’Sullivan’s definition and coinage of the term “manifest destiny”. Within American history the idea of American exceptionalism, and divinely inspired democratic rule pervade most thought in regard to imperialism and expansionism dating back through Jefferson to the Pilgrims and John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” doctrine. However, O’Sullivan’s theories existed at a point just before Melville’s novel was published, and served to influence all mainstream political theory of he time as well.

            To reiterate, O’Sullivan proclaimed the United States to be a God-given nation with the express “manifest destiny” of overspreading the continent (and in more extreme examples the world). The doctrine also involved a deep religious and racialized signifigance as well in terms of ending the heathenism and primitiveness of the lesser races as American democracy spread across the land. O’Sullivan wrote in an editorial published in The New York Morning News on December 27^th, 1845, “…and that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.” Essentially, O’Sullivan borrows the same idea as James K. Polk of a European balance of power from the Monroe Doctrine while also adding to popular thought that the United States should expand while limiting European power. He claims earlier within the same article that given the exact same situation, other world powers would expand, and probably without as much investigation and thought as the United States.

            In terms of illumination of Melville’s work, he constantly evokes imagery surrounding expansion, while also tying that expansion very closely to race and ideas of colonialism. This begins in chapter 14 of Moby-Dick. Melville writes of Nantucketers as a group, “…issuing forth from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parceling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada...two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s” (Melville, 65). Comparisons to the greatest conqueror, expansionist, imperialist and assimilationist of all time (Alexander the Great) only serve to draw the book more closely with contemporary acts of imperialism. Melville seems to be equating the trips and treks of whaling ships to the campaigns of great nations across uncivilized lands bring cultural imperialism. Interestingly, Melville refers directly to the Mexico dilemma, which O’Sullivan refers to in the same article noted above. O’Sullivan advocated for the idea that all of Mexico should join the Union along with Texas. Within this idea obviously a racialized contradiction remains apparent because he claims to want to annex Mexico, but without granting American citizenship to the darker races. This racial contradiction is also often felt in Melville’s conception of the whaling ship as a nation expanding onto the seas. In chapter 27 Melville writes, “…not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are…in all these cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles” (Melville, 107). At the heart of Melville’s ruminations upon imperialism lies the Pequod as a symbol of an assimilated nation of subjugated peoples ruled by the ultimate imperialistic leader in the character of Ahab. Ahab’s quest to conquer the “nation” which the white whale represents only works as a further accentuation of the themes of imperialism set out in Melville’s work.

Works Cited:

O'Sullivan, John L. "Manifest Destiny." Editorial. New York Morning News [New York City] 27 Dec. 1845: n. pag. Print.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford. New York: Norton, 2002. Print.