Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Death in American Literature (Vol. 89) - Pamela A. Boker (essay date 1996)

Pamela A. Boker (essay date 1996)

SOURCE: “‘Circle-Sailing’: The Eternal Return of Tabooed Grief in Melville's Moby-Dick” in The Grief Taboo in American Literature: Loss and Prolonged Adolescence in Twain, Melville, and Hemingway, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 38-67.

[In the excerpt below, Boker presents a psychoanalytic reading of Melville's motivation in Moby-Dick. She suggests that Melville felt abandoned by his mother and that his art was nourished by “repression, disavowal, and displacement of grief.”]

Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.

—Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

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