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Moby-Dick

TONY MAGISTRALE (ESSAY DATE 1988)

SOURCE: Magistrale, Tony. "'More Demon than Man': Melville's Ahab as Gothic Villain." In Spectrum of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Sixth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by Donald Palumbo, pp. 81-86. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1988.

In the following essay, Magistrale discusses Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick as an example of a quintessential Gothic protagonist, possessing both human and demonic qualities.

Gothic literature reached its apex in England during the last decade of the eighteenth century, when the enlightenment's neoclassic lights were replaced by the brooding darkness of haunted castles and the supernatural. Gothicism emerged from an era surfeited with reason and the prosaic, anxious for something wildly different and bizarre. A reaction to the spirit of scientific rationalism that characterized the...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Primary Sources
   1. Herman Melville (Story Date 1856)
4. General Commentary
   1. Newton Arvin (Essay Date March 1949)
5. Title Commentary
   1. "Benito Cereno"
   2. "Bartleby the Scrivener"
   3. Moby-Dick
6. Further Reading

1. Herman Melville