Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > The Sea in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature - William Hamilton (essay date 1979)


The Sea in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature - William Hamilton (essay date 1979)

William Hamilton (essay date 1979)

SOURCE: “Melville and the Sea,” in Soundings, Vol. 62, No. 4, Winter, 1979, pp. 417-29.

[In the following essay, Hamilton discusses Moby-Dick's sea in terms of its theological significance to Melville.]

For I say there is no other thing that is worse than the sea is
For breaking a man, even though he may be a very strong one.

Homer, Odyssey, VIII, lines 138-39

In Moby Dick the sea appears to mean virtually everything. It is the home of both the nursing whale-mothers and the rapacious shark. It has a serenity that can nearly cure Ahab's monomania; it is also darkness and death. It is in any case the primary symbol in Moby Dick and a clue to Melville's artistic and religious imagination. If, as Melville reminds us, the sea covers two-thirds of the earth, it also seems to cover two-thirds of Moby Dick. It is both earth's center, its ultimate clue; it...

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