SOURCE: Sten, Christopher W. “Melville's ‘Gentleman Forger’: The Struggle for Identity in Redburn.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 21 (fall 1979): 347-67.

[In the following essay, Sten suggests that Melville's Wellingborough Redburn undergoes not a simple initiation over the course of the novel, but rather the far more complicated and lengthy process of identity formation.]

Since William H. Gilman's Melville's Early Life and ‘Redburn’ (1951) launched the scholarly discussion of Melville's fourth novel as something more than a minor chapter in the author's life story, critics of Redburn (1849) have debated the questions of whether and how the title character matures during the story.¹ Until James Schroeter, in 1967, challenged the prevailing “mythic” interpretations of the novel, most commentators accepted the notion that Redburn's growth follows the typically “American” pattern of the “initiation of innocence into evil” described by Newton Arvin in 1950.² While Schroeter, too, argued that Redburn shows clear signs of moral and intellectual development, the “progressive” school of opinion, as it might be called, has had an increasing number of detractors, nearly all of whom share H. Bruce Franklin's view that Redburn betrays Harry Bolton in the last chapter and thus fails to act in accord with the mature principle of brotherly love he had come to profess in the second half of the novel.³

Redburn's treatment of Harry Bolton, while important to any consideration of his maturity, has been exaggerated, I think, at the expense of the slow and difficult maturing process which Redburn has undergone, but by no means completed, by the end of the novel. Furthermore, this process can be understood more accurately in terms of identity formation than in terms of initiation. For, whereas initiation implies a crisis of brief duration as well as a more or less fixed achievement in the life of the adolescent, identity formation implies an extended critical period as well as a tenuous accomplishment which remains subject to the influences of the youth's personal and cultural past, present, and future. Moreover, because identity formation constitutes only one of several essentially distinct stages in the maturing process, it is part of a more comprehensive theory of human development.⁴ Certainly Redburn experiences disillusionment about the world and himself during the four months of his “first voyage.” But to use the initiation idea of a shift from an unconscious state of innocence to a consciousness of evil as a description of the transition from youth to adulthood is to forget that most of us are lucky to make this transition in less than twice that many years; to oversimplify the complexity of the social and psychological processes of the growth of the self in American culture; and to disregard the precariousness of its accomplishments. It is also, I believe, to underestimate Melville's understanding of the maturing process—his own, perhaps, as much as his character's.

According to Erik H. Erikson, perhaps the chief theorist of identity formation, the struggle for identity is the major psychosocial activity of adolescence. In theory, it is the struggle to gain a sense of selfhood which grows out of one's social and psychological past, reflects accurately one's present circumstances, and promises a future that will nourish the continued growth of the self. In psychological terms, Erikson writes, “identity formation employs a process of simultaneous reflection and observation, a process taking place on all levels of mental functioning, by which the individual judges himself in the light of what he perceives to be the way in which others judge him in comparison to themselves and to a typology significant to them; while he judges their way of judging him in the light of how he perceives himself in comparison to them and to types that have become relevant to him.”⁵ Erikson's definition, though cumbersome, has a roundness and precision which more than adequately describe Redburn's actions and mental operations during most of the narrative, particularly when he is the active young protagonist rather than the passive, somewhat older narrator-observer. Thus Redburn, who at the start believes himself to be a gentleman like his father before the latter's bankruptcy and death, must either modify his conception of himself as he discovers that others, such as Captain Riga of the Highlander, take him to be the desperate, impoverished youth that he is, or else rationalize his illusion of himself by dismissing their way of judging him, as he does briefly when he concludes that Captain Riga is “a sort of impostor,” because “no gentleman would have treated another gentleman as he did me.”⁶

In practice, the process of forming an identity, Erikson adds, “is, luckily, and necessarily, for the most part unconscious except where inner conditions and outer circumstances combine to aggravate a painful, or elated, ‘identity-consciousness.’”⁷ Unhappily for Redburn, it is the exception rather than the rule that applies most often to him, for the novel's major source of dramatic tension, and of comedy, is the endlessly repeated aggravation of his painful “identity-consciousness.” His story, therefore, is in large part the record of an “identity crisis.” In his case the aggravation and the crisis result from a conflict between the inner condition of his desire to be recognized as the born “son-of-a-gentleman” and the outer circumstance of his serving as a green and lowly “sailor-boy” in a rigidly hierarchical institution where ease and respect, responsibility and remuneration—significant marks of the life of privilege Redburn craves and among the chief sources of identity strength in American culture—must be earned by pluck and luck, by meanness and long years of hard training. On only two occasions, each time while high in the rigging, does Redburn experience anything like an “elated” identity-consciousness, such as William James described when he wrote that a man's character is discernible in the “mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: ‘This is the real me!’”⁸ For Redburn, one such occasion is when “He Begins to Hop About in the Rigging Like a Saint Jago's Monkey,” in chapter 24. Yet only a moment's reflection reveals that a Saint Jago's monkey is a very limited form of identity and thus cause for a rather equivocal elation.

From the beginning, Redburn does not actually set out to become a sailor, though a sailor in earnest he becomes as we learn only on the last page when he refers to himself on a later voyage as “a sailor in the Pacific, on board of a whaler” (p. 312). In chapter 1, “How Wellingborough Redburn's Taste for the Sea Was Born and Bred in Him,” he tells us that “during my early life, most of my thoughts of the sea were connected with the land; but with fine old lands, full of mossy cathedrals and churches, and long, narrow, crooked streets without side-walks, and lined with strange houses.” As he grew older, he says, “my thoughts took a larger flight, and I frequently fell into long reveries about distant voyages and travels.” His early objective, then, is to become a world traveler—not because such a life offers novelty or education but because it promises to satisfy his identity ideal. This Redburn reveals in swelling tones when reminiscing that he “thought how fine it would be, to be able to talk about remote and barbarous countries; with what reverence and wonder people would regard me, if I had just returned from the coast of Africa or New Zealand; how dark and romantic my sunburnt cheeks would look; how I would bring home with me foreign clothes of a rich fabric and princely make, and wear them up and down the streets, and how grocers' boys would turn back their heads to look at me, as I went by.” One of Redburn's chief identity models in this early boyhood stage was the nameless man with big eyes who “had been in Stony Arabia, and passed through strange adventures there.” So strong is the boy's identification with this exotic stranger that not only did his own eyes seem to become magnified as he stared at him one Sunday in church, but also, Redburn says, “he long haunted me; and several times I dreamt of him” (pp. 5-6). Naturally, his identification with this man is ultimately narcissistic, for he wants the grocers' boys to stare at him as he had stared at the Arabian traveler. He wants to love and admire himself.

The other identity model in Redburn's early years, a still more compelling one, was of course his father, who “had several times crossed the Atlantic on business affairs” and used to tell his sons “of the monstrous waves at sea … and all about Havre, and Liverpool, and about going up into the ball of St. Paul's in London” (p. 5).⁹ Young Wellingborough's desire to imitate his father is seen in the extraordinary interest he displays in all of the foreign objects which the elder Redburn had brought home from Europe—the furniture, the oil paintings and rare old engravings, the large French portfolios of colored prints, the long rows of old books that had been printed in Paris and London and Leipzig, and the old-fashioned glass ship. Indeed, the boy's “continual dwelling upon foreign associations,” he confesses, “bred in me a vague prophetic thought, that I was fated … to be a great voyager; and that just as my father used to entertain strange gentlemen over their wine after dinner, I would hereafter be telling my own adventures to an eager auditory.” Thus these articles encourage him to identify himself ever more strongly with his father, for while they are the tangible signs of what is foreign about the father to the boy, they are also the means by which he can gain identity with him—if only their “foreignness” can be domesticated, if only these things can be fully understood, as Redburn dreams of mastering French by foreign travel in order to “be able to read straight along without stopping” out of the copy of D'Alembert, “which now was a riddle to every one in the house but my father” (p. 7). In short, Redburn wants, at least unconsciously, to become his father, not only because, to his wounded young psyche, he can in that way restore him to life, but (pathology aside) because a boy's father is a natural identity model. For these reasons, then, he ships for Liverpool, where he can retrace his father's footsteps with the aid of the elder Redburn's “Prosy Old Guide-Book.”

Although at the time of his departure Redburn claims to have formed “a definite purpose of seeking my fortune on the sea,” he regards himself, rather comically, to be “as unambitious as a man of sixty,” a bitter and heavyhearted “misanthrope,” whose “young mounting dreams of glory” had left him following the loss of his family's wealth (pp. 7, 10). But he has not yet abandoned his presumed identity as a young gentleman. Like the aristocratic moleskin shooting jacket, the gift of Redburn's brother, his wealthy past still clings to him, and he to it. The jacket is a complex symbol, however; while it is to Redburn the last proud emblem of the leisure class which earlier had been his destiny, it is now a sign also of the destitution of his family, which can no longer even afford a proper sailor's jacket for its voyaging son. Significantly, this latter meaning never occurs to him. Even though rain shrinks it to the point where Redburn jokingly worries that “it would completely exhale, and leave nothing but the bare seams, by way of a skeleton,” on his back, he never finally gives it up (p. 74).

The irony of his being the son of a gentleman with the “scent and savor of poverty” upon him does not, to be sure, escape the young Wellingborough. But rather than accept his current state and put his former identity behind him (virtually an impossible achievement, for it is the only positive identity he has), Redburn does the predictable thing of youth and wallows in self-pity for his fallen condition. With a heart that “aches” in his bosom and “a few hot tears” on his cheeks, he walks “with a slouching, dogged gait” to the Hudson steamer. “Talk not of the bitterness of middle-age and after life,” Redburn lectures melodramatically, apparently in the mildly ironic yet sympathetic tones of the older narrator; “a boy can feel all that, and much more, when upon his young soul the mildew has fallen” (pp. 10-12). Once out in the world beyond his family village, moreover, Redburn immediately experiences the painful form of identity-consciousness, as revealed in his slightly paranoid speculation that some of his fellow passengers on the boat to New York were, like himself, silently “speculating … as to who each other might be” (p. 11). In addition, he attempts self-consciously to conceal his poverty and put a proud appearance before the world, as when he “studiously endeavored to hide” the big patch on his trousers leg with the skirts of his shooting jacket, from what he regards to be the “cold suspicious glances” of the other passengers (p. 12). But when the inner conditions of hunger and “that desperation and recklessness of poverty which only a pauper knows” begin to conspire with the outer circumstance of the others' stares, Redburn becomes so keenly aware of the inauthenticity of his presumed identity that he grimly taunts them to confirm what he feels to be true of himself. Now, he says, “I stretched out my leg boldly, and thrust the patch under their noses, and looked at them so, that they soon looked away.” The breaking point is all but reached when the fashionable young ticket collector, after taking Redburn's last dollar (though but half the fare), denies his presumed identity by “saying something about sportsmen going on shooting expeditions, without having money to pay their expenses.” Suddenly sensing “every eye” to be fastened upon him, Redburn reacts with pathological violence, like young Robin in Hawthorne's “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” He turns to one of the gazers and, clicking his gunlock, “deliberately” points his fowling-piece at him (pp. 12-13).

Chapter 3, “He Arrives in Town,” continues the process of exposing the folly of Redburn's attempt to maintain the image of a gentleman in the face of contradictory circumstances and the penetrating eye of others, here principally that of the sly Captain Riga. That Redburn, by the opening of this chapter, has already begun reluctantly to see himself as others see him, however, is signaled by his willingness simply to “stalk off” from the grocery where he has stopped for water, rather than use his gun to challenge the “rough looking fellows” there who banter him (p. 14). Still, this adjustment in his self-image becomes clear only in the next scene when we witness the growing distance between Redburn and the well-intentioned Mr. Jones, his older brother's college friend who accompanies him to the docks to help him secure a position. Indeed, in his humorous attempts to win Riga's respect, Mr. Jones misguidedly encourages the boy's false identity by promoting him as the son of a “gentleman of one of the first families in America”—to Redburn's increasing consternation and the eventual dashing of his hope to gain an advance on his salary (p. 16). That it is the young Redburn, not the wise older narrator, who draws the moral is seen in Melville's use of the past tense: “I said nothing, though I thought the more; and particularly, how that it would have been much better for me, to have gone on board alone, accosted the captain on my own account, and told him the plain truth. Poor people make a very poor business of it when they try to seem rich” (p. 17).

This is the first of several important lessons which Redburn is to learn from Captain Riga, his early self-appointed “tutor” in the business of identity formation (p. 16). Riga is an unsympathetic figure, mainly because he cheats Redburn of his wages at the end and seems as duplistic in personal manner as he is in attire; “splendidly dressed” and marked by “extreme civility” while on shore, he wears “nothing but old shabby clothes” at sea and flies into a “rage” when Redburn, in a severe breach of sea decorum, strikes up a conversation with him one day on the quarterdeck (pp. 15, 70-71). But Riga is a more complicated character than has generally been recognized, an early avatar of the charming, preternaturally shrewd cosmopolitan in The Confidence-Man (1857). Perhaps because he himself is something of an “impostor,” as Redburn claims, he is capable of exposing the pretensions of others; and, in a sardonic way, he is a truth-teller. He repeatedly admonishes the young would-be sailor to be honest in his dealings with others and realistic in his judgments about himself. Immediately perceiving Redburn to be a “country lad,” he cautions him that a sailor's life is “hard” (pp. 15-16). And in his parting words to the boy at their first meeting, Riga warns him not to “get home-sick before you sail, because that will make you very sea-sick when you get to sea,” a seemingly indifferent remark which nonetheless serves as a serious reminder as to the need for Redburn to come to terms with who he is before undertaking his first voyage (p. 18). The fact that Redburn's great-uncle had been a Senator, Riga knows, will be a positive hindrance to the boy's learning to stand on his own legs. “‘But his great-uncle don't want to go to sea too?’ said the captain, looking funny,” in response to the name-dropping of Mr. Jones (p. 16). Although Redburn comes to dismiss Riga as an unsuitable father substitute because he fails to “prove a kind friend and benefactor,” he is in fact one of those fathers such as “Solomon's precepts tend to make—severe and chastising fathers, fathers whose sense of duty overcomes the sense of love …” (p. 67). That he is not a worthy identity model, however, can be concluded from the facts of his dualism and selfishness. Riga's example reveals what one becomes when he sets out to achieve the status of a “gentleman” in the cruel economy of the merchant service. He must develop a double identity, one for the land and one for the sea. To stay free of pawnbrokers and still pay his “wine bills at the City Hotel” (the false address given by the young thief whom Redburn encounters in a New York pawnshop), he must use technicalities to cheat sailor-boys of their wages and be miserly with the crew's “allowance of bread and beef” while at sea (pp. 307-08, 22).

Unaware of the awaiting difficulties of becoming a sailor before the mast, Redburn at first presumes that it is sufficient to achieve the appearance of a sailor before the mirror. In the amusing narcissistic scene when he tries on his motley new sailor's outfit, after carefully locking the door of his room in the Jones's home and hanging a towel over the keyhole, Redburn reveals acute anxiety regarding his newly adopted identity. His uncertainty as to who he is, unself-conscious though it is, is well-founded, for not until he has completed the first leg of his first voyage can he have a true sense of what it means to be a sailor. Melville further emphasizes the fact that one's identity is gained slowly and painfully, not simply chosen, by providing several instances wherein Redburn suffers from mistaken identity during the period when the Highlander is being prepared for her voyage. Even though he is now down officially in the ship's articles as a “sailor-boy,” no one on ship recognizes Wellingborough as such. Indeed, he is variously misjudged to be a “tailor,” a “hay-seed,” a “loafer,” a thief, a “barber's clerk,” a “clod-hopper,” a stowaway, and even a “pig” (pp. 24-29). And a little later, when the crew is divided into watches, Redburn is passed over as though he were an invisible man, until finally he stands alone, “like a silly sheep, over whom two butchers are bargaining” (p. 39).

Still, Redburn is not a tabula rasa. It is because he necessarily retains the little wisdom of his past as a gentleman's son that every early experience in the radically new environment of the ship is a shock to the boy's expectations. Thus, much to his chagrin, Redburn learns that his showy use of a tobacco box (despite his membership in an Anti-Smoking Society) is not a practice subscribed to by the true “salt”; that sailors must forego all independent reasoning and “Obey orders, though you break owners” (p. 29); that the crew must address each mate as “sir,” just as though he were “a born gentleman” (p. 39); that seasick or no, a sailor must do his duty; that infractions of table etiquette are not tolerated; and much besides. Moreover, people and things can have peculiar names on the sea; a young boy may be called “Buttons” (p. 28) or “Jimmy Dux” (p. 49), pails are not pails but “buckets” (p. 65), and “traps” are not the undoing of rats but a tar's baggage (p. 24). What is more disconcerting still, Redburn discovers that at sea practically everyone and everything is capable of taking on an unexpected identity. A man such as Max, who has not one wife but two, can still be an “old bachelor of a sailor” (p. 79); demon rum can be an effective medicine for a seasick member of the Juvenile Total Abstinence Association; and the cook's coffee will taste like anything but coffee, from Dutch herrings to old stocking-heels (p. 43).

Through it all, Redburn manages to develop the identity of a sailor-boy, in spite of his reluctance, by being forced by his new condition to judge himself in the light of what he perceives to be the way in which the rest of the crew judge him in comparison to themselves and to the seaman's typology (for example, “greenhorn,” “soger,” and “sailor man”). Although the process seems more or less inexorable, given Redburn's fundamentally healthy flexibility and the others' ceaseless “fault-finding,” its advance is fitful and marked by both crises and regressions, as evidenced in a comic instance as late as chapter 14, when Redburn “Contemplates Making a Social Call on the Captain in His Cabin” (p. 79). The first major crisis and regression occur simultaneously in chapter 10, significantly the first night at sea, when the drunken sailor who had been occupying Redburn's bunk throws himself over the side. Despite the fact that Redburn refers to him as a “suicide,” his end seems the unintended result of the temporary loss of his identity as a seaman (p. 51). One of “the sailors who had been brought aboard dead drunk, and tumbled into his bunk by his landlord,” it is speculated that he “must have suddenly waked up … raging mad with the delirium tremens … and finding himself in a strange silent place, and knowing not how he had got there, he had rushed on deck, and so, in a fit of frenzy, put an end to himself” (p. 50). Thus his example is, in a symbolic way, a solemn warning as to the hazards of radical identity-confusion.

It is the aftermath of this incident, when the other crew members taunt Redburn for showing his fear, that constitutes the first real crisis in his identity formation. That he immediately regresses to the role of the child is seen in his vain declaration that he “would have given the whole world” to be safe back in his home. Of course Redburn rightly argues, first to himself and then to their faces, that the rest of the crew also were frightened by the incident of the “suicide.” But he wrongly assumes that they mock him simply because they are “false-hearted and insincere.” Judging from the ultimate effect of their persecution upon him, it seems that they harass Wellingborough for a benign purpose. They try to force him to overcome his childlike vulnerability and self-pity by making him so “mad” that he will stand up to them, and thereby discover his own strength (p. 51). This is, at any rate, what happens. Even though they turn upon him more mercilessly still in repayment for his forwardness, asking “whether I ever dreamed of becoming a captain, since I was a gentleman with white hands,” they are simply reasserting their natural superiority over him and in the process egging him on to a peak of anger which carries him through this critical episode: “I loathed, detested, and hated them with all that was left of my bursting heart and soul,” Redburn confesses, “and I thought myself the most forlorn and miserable wretch that ever breathed. May I never be a man, thought I, if to be a boy is to be such a wretch. And I wailed and wept, and my heart cracked within me, but all the time I defied them through my teeth, and dared them to do their worst” (p. 52; italics mine). Yet he is soon on his way to becoming a man, and their worst they never do.

These sailors may not be master psychologists (the exception is Jackson, who “understood human nature to a kink”), but neither are they wicked fools; they know that if Redburn is to conquer his fear and self-doubt, and become a man in the world, he must receive no mothering from them (p. 57). Moreover, despite Redburn's feeling that he was “a sort of Ishmael in the ship, without a single friend or companion,” the others do not treat him unkindly in the round (p. 62). The Greenlander shares his Jamaica spirits with him when he becomes seasick; Ned does not fail to include him when offering cigars to the crew; the cook respects his education enough to demand his exegesis of a mysterious Biblical passage; and Max gives him “something like a compliment” after the boy performs his first feat in the rigging, and otherwise “sometimes manifested some little interest” in his welfare (p. 79). Only when Redburn acts the “greenhorn” or the pompous fool—roles for which he shows considerable talent, at least in the early days of the voyage—do the other crew members make him the butt of their jokes and criticism. Virtually all of their behavior toward him, in fact, seems designed to make him a man and a sailor. As Redburn himself comes to admit, “As I began to learn my sailor duties, and show activity in running aloft, the men, I observed, treated me with a little more consideration, though not at all relaxing in a certain air of professional superiority” (p. 120). Still, they condemn and compliment him, finally, not simply out of unselfish concern; they know that unless he becomes a true sailor, his example might corrupt them, as is humorously suggested when Redburn is obliquely accused of being a Circe figure who, by his bad table manners, would make his messmates “no better than swine” (p. 55).

The lone exception to this collective portrait of the Highlander's crew is the “great bully” Jackson, whose “infernal looking eye,” the older Redburn says, “haunts me to this day” (p. 57). This man has a deeper impact on Redburn than any other except his father, for he is the strongest identity model of a sailor among the crew. Not even Max, finally, can stand up to him (p. 79). Moreover, there is a secret sympathy between them, for, like Redburn, Jackson is a reluctant sailor. Though “the best seaman on board,” he was “a notorious old soger” and “despised the ordinary sailor-rig,” signs that he also despises what he is (pp. 56-59). In fact, self-contempt is his master trait, and explains his “dissipation and abandonment” (p. 57); his perverse joy at the suffering of others, whether his tobacco-less mates or the dying emigrants on the return voyage; and his “hatred and gall against every thing and every body in the world.” It was “as if all the world was one person,” Redburn remarks, “and had done him some dreadful harm, that was rankling and festering in his heart” (p. 61).

In psychological terms, Jackson's behavior is marked by a pathological level of “projection,” one of the ego's mechanisms of defense against anxiety, in Freud's scheme, whereby an internal danger is attributed to an external source. It is impossible, of course, to determine the historical origin of Jackson's malady, but it seems to be connected to his being a mere sailor rather than the “General Jackson of New Orleans” whom he claims to have been his “near relation,” for he “swore terribly, if any one ventured to question what he asserted on that head” (p. 57). Moreover, it is evident that he has become caught in the vicious cycle of compulsive behavior. Because he hates himself, he engages in dissipating behavior; and the more he becomes dissipated, the more he has reason to hate who and what he is. Thus burdened with self-contempt, his conscience meanwhile exerts such pressure on his ego that Jackson must reform or else project the evil onto some target in the external world—in his case, “all the world.”

Projection, however, can relieve anxiety only if, to the knowing eye of the ego, there is some objective evidence of the evil of the world and of the relative worth of the self. Thus, to cope with his acute sense of inferiority and with the evidence of his own wasting body that he has time and again played the fool, Jackson makes a practice of turning others into fools, as for instance when he once told his mates a “truly funny story, but with a grave face,” so they knew not how to respond, “till at last Jackson roared out upon them for a parcel of fools and idiots … and laughed them to scorn” (p. 61). For the same reason, too, he “would enter into arguments, to prove that there was nothing to be believed; nothing to be loved, and nothing worth living for” (p. 104). That Jackson's despair is not absolute is revealed in his uncharacteristic attempt to befriend the young stowaway; but that it is finally incurable is seen in the hatred he seemed to feel for him when the little boy shrank from him (p. 113).

Jackson's relationship with Redburn marks a critical stage in the formation of Redburn's identity, because Jackson is what Redburn would become over time if he continued to deny his sailor-boy identity on the grounds that it is beneath his fantasy of being a gentleman. In short, Redburn seems to be headed down the spiraling path of self-hatred. Unknowingly he admits as much when he finds himself “a sort of Ishmael on the ship” after having attracted Jackson's enmity on the night of the suicide by exposing Jackson's fear of death: “I began to feel a hatred growing up in me against the whole crew—so much so, that I prayed against it, that it might not master my heart completely, and so make a fiend of me, something like Jackson” (p. 62). As will be seen, however, what comes to master Redburn's heart instead is the sea itself and the consequent sense of belonging to the “All.” But Jackson's warning to Redburn—that “if ever I crossed his path … he would be the death of me”—seems a guarded admonition to avoid the temptation of following his ignoble example (p. 52). It is because he has such power as a negative identity model, as an inverted Christ, that only in Jackson's death can Redburn and the rest of the crew find “their deliverance” (p. 297).

By the second day out of port, Redburn has made some advance in his struggle for identity, for at least he feels “very well” in body. But his “heart was far from feeling right” and he still desires the leisure to “think of home.” The change from night to day and from a “black and forbidding” to a “beautiful and blue” sea, however, signals a similar sea-change in the boy. Awed by the rising and falling of the surrounding seaswell, Redburn is no longer self-pitying or defiant; rather, he “felt as if in a dream all the time” and “did not exactly know where, or what I was; every thing was so strange and new” (pp. 63-65). Then, with the breeze blowing more and more and the ship under additional sail, “Every mast and timber seemed to have a pulse in it that was beating with life and joy; and I felt a wild exulting in my own heart, and felt as if I would be glad to bound along so round the world.” Suddenly, in this transcendental moment, Redburn discovers his own heart beating with that of the ship and the sea, and he comes alive as a true sailor. “Then was I first conscious of a wonderful thing in me, that responded to all the wild commotion of the outer world; and went reeling on and on with the planets in their orbits, and was lost in one delirious throb at the center of the All. A wild bubbling and bursting was at my heart, as if a hidden spring had just gushed out there; and my blood ran tingling along my frame, like mountain brooks in spring freshets.” Just as suddenly, however, this elated form of identity-consciousness is forced to give way to the painful form by the “vile commission to clean out the chicken coops, and make up the beds of the pigs.” “Miserable dog's life is this of the sea!” he now wails, not realizing that in this fallen world, no matter how paradisiacal a job may seem, one must earn his bread by the sweat of his brow; “commanded like a slave, and set to work like an ass! … Yes, yes, blow on, ye breezes, and make a speedy end to this abominable voyage!” (p. 66).

Nevertheless, well before the ship reaches Liverpool, Redburn finds himself free of such farmboy jobs and able to take pride in “the feeling of mastering the rebellious canvas, and tying it down like a slave to the spar.” Indeed, here he feels so content as to compare himself, though reservedly, with the “young King Richard … when he trampled down the insurgents of Wat Tyler” (p. 116). What is just as important, for the first time he is willing to admit his limitations, to take disappointments “coolly, in the spirit of Seneca and the stoics,” and to stand almost in awe at the sailor's calling, as when he explains that he is given little chance to take the helm because “I was quite young and raw, and steering a ship is a great art” as well as a job of such responsibility that the man who holds it is to be regarded with “reverence” (pp. 116-17, 122). Chapter 26, “A Sailor a Jack of All Trades,” a veritable paean, offers further evidence of a dramatic change in Redburn's attitude toward a sailor's work, and toward himself.

A sailor, however, is more than what he does. He is also what his society views him to be, as Redburn learns with considerable force in Liverpool, where he is barred from entering a newsroom and the Lyceum; where former sailors constitute a sizable portion of the “army of paupers” in the streets near the docks (p. 186); and where sailors, in the practice of their “two great vices,” fall prey to “a company of miscreant misanthropes” (pp. 176, 191). Thus when Redburn now admits to being “nothing but a poor sailor boy,” he has a legitimate reason to be unhappy with his lot (p. 133). It holds out only a limited prospect for future identity development, for “by their very vocation,” he observes, sailors “are shunned by the better classes of people, and cut off from all access to respectable and improving society.” Remarkably, however, Redburn does not retreat into his young gentleman's self-image of the past upon making this discovery. Instead, he comes to identify himself with the lowly classes the world over, as seen when (in the voice of the older narrator) he pronounces the radical theory that the evils of the sailors' condition “can only be ameliorated … by ameliorating the moral organization of all civilization.” The problem is pandemic because sailors are among those “classes of men in the world, who bear the same relation to society at large, that the wheels do to a coach: and are just as indispensable.” Despite continued improvement in the comforts of the wealthy who ride inside, therefore, “no contrivance, no sagacity can lift [the working classes] out of the mire; for upon something the coach must be bottomed; on something the insiders must roll” (pp. 138-39).

It is small solace that because “sailors form one of these wheels … they are the true importers, and exporters of spices and silks … the primum mobile of all commerce” (p. 139). But in this conclusion, Redburn suggests there is reason to view the wealthy “importer” who had been his father with less idolizing eyes than formerly, and thus reason not to identify with him so heedlessly as he had earlier (p. 5). More important still, however, is the fact that Redburn's assessment of the social predicament of his fellow sailors, like that of the Liverpool poor and of the emigrants on the return voyage, is made possible not simply by his newfound identity as a lowly sailor but also by his initial identity as a gentleman's son, with its attendant virtues of cultivated values and educational training—the capacities of perception, understanding, and expression. As becomes increasingly clear in the Liverpool chapters, where the reflective mind of the older narrator takes over more and more, Redburn has not simply exchanged one identity for another. Rather, his sailor identity has developed in the midst of his identity as a gentleman's son; only the pretensions of the latter have been abandoned. He cannot erase the advantages in education and social training that his father's wealth and station had earlier granted him. Indeed, only the combination of his aristocratic upbringing and his rude sailor apprenticeship could have provided Redburn, as it did Melville, with his full identity as a writer of the sea, an “artist in the rigging” (p. 121).

While still a youth in Liverpool, however, Redburn continues for a period to identify himself with his father. In fact, his voyage there, like his abortive trip to Riddough's Hotel, is a “filial pilgrimage” (p. 154). With the aid of the very guidebook his father had used, and the assurance that “thereby it had been thoroughly tested,” the boy sets out to follow his father's earlier paths “through all the town,” only to discover that “the thing that had guided the father, could not guide the son” thirty years later (pp. 152-57). “This world … is a moving world,” Redburn moralizes; “its Riddough's Hotels are forever being pulled down … and its sands are forever shifting.” This scene is usually regarded as the turning point in Wellingborough's coming of age. But it is not generally recognized that, despite many disappointing reminders of the truth of this lesson, Redburn never finally gives up “old Morocco,” because he comes to see that in some instances the town's past does survive, as his own past survives in himself. Thus the old book “will yet prove a trusty conductor through many old streets in the old parts of town,” he at one point concludes; and, like old guidebooks generally, it will continue to inform him reliably about “the ways our fathers went” (p. 157), as it does in the last instance in which it is mentioned, when Redburn faces the Lyceum and finds that “sure enough, the building before me corresponded stone for stone” with the book's plate (p. 207).¹⁰ Still, that he has by this time already achieved psychological independence from his father without forfeiting his love of his memory is seen in chapter 41, when he explains that “after I had visited all the noted places I could discover, of those marked down upon my father's map; I began to extend my rovings indefinitely” throughout the town (p. 200).

As much as Redburn's discovery of the guidebook's limited value impresses upon him the need to form an identity that is appropriate to the conditions of his own present, what releases him from his identity fixation on his father is his nearly simultaneous recognition that his father once had an identity independent of him. In a poignant scene, while standing in a street where his finely dressed father had once walked and pitying himself for his own “sorry apparel,” he suddenly realizes that “my own father did not know me then; and had never seen, or heard, or so much as dreamed of me.” And if this was once so, he wonders, “how might it be with me hereafter?”—an apprehension which he conquers in the next scene, fittingly at the site of Nelson's Victory Statue, where, after a momentary impulse to run after and overtake his father around the corner, Redburn recalls that he “had gone whither no son's search could find him in this world” (pp. 154-55). Finally, thinking of all that must have happened to his parent since he was last there, “how he had been shaken by many storms of adversity, and at last died a bankrupt,” a man as poor as Wellingborough himself, he perceives the fallibility and mortality of his father; and the father ceases to be the boy's identity ideal, the “marvelous being … who could not by any possibility do wrong” (p. 34). By the end of the chapter, after suffering additional disappointments and frustration at the poverty which prevents him from visiting the antiquities beyond Liverpool, Redburn has reached the point of identity clarity necessary to admit, “I am not the traveler my father was. I am only a common-carrier across the Atlantic” (p. 160).

Accomplishments in identity formation, however, are never permanently secure. Under altered circumstances, a person can revert to an earlier self-image or fabricate still another one, and such self-images can cause identity confusion. Moreover, according to Erikson, “the strength acquired at any stage is tested by the necessity to transcend it in such a way that the individual can take chances in the next stage with what was most vulnerably precious in the previous one. Thus, the young adult, emerging from the search for and insistence on identity, is eager and willing to fuse his identity with that of others. He is ready for intimacy, that is, the capacity to commit himself to concrete affiliations and partnerships and to develop the ethical strength to abide by such commitments, even though they may call for significant sacrifices and compromises.”¹¹ Thus the entrance of Harry Bolton initiates another major crisis, the final one, in Redburn's struggle for identity. At the time of their meeting, Redburn's “whole soul … in its loneliness … was yearning to throw itself into the unbounded bosom of some immaculate friend” (p. 223). However, because Harry is initially presumed to be an “incontrovertible son of a gentleman,” Redburn's “eagerness to enjoy [his] society” leads to an irreducible conflict: only by regressing to his boyish self-image as a gentleman can Redburn hope to advance to the point of gaining the intimacy with Harry that he longs for (p. 216). That he ultimately refuses to play Harry's hectic game of gentlemanly pretensions is a sign of the strength of Redburn's identity development. But the question remains whether he holds back his “whole soul” from Harry simply because he suspects him to be a “gentleman forger,” who sometimes spends funds of “imperial reminiscences of high life” not his own (pp. 223, 226). If this is the sole cause, Redburn would seem to be unwilling to make the sacrifices and compromises necessary for the achievement of full intimacy, and his engagement in the maturing process would seem to have come to a halt.

On several occasions Redburn allays his suspicions with evidence of Harry's aristocratic background: “his manners are polished, he has a mighty easy address,” Redburn argues to himself; and when Harry suddenly appears with “money to rig [Redburn] all out” for the London venture, Redburn rather eagerly concludes that “he was then indeed what he seems” (pp. 223-24). More frequently, however, he finds that “all he said was enveloped in a mystery that I did not much like” (p. 225). Twice during the London trip Harry vehemently refuses to explain his unaccountable behavior in Aladdin's Palace; and, in the end, his “secrets” lie forever in his “ocean grave” (p. 252). Yet, because so little can be proved about Harry's past, only when it is discovered that “his nerves would not hear of” his going aloft on the Highlander does it seem justifiable to conclude that he is capable of having “fibbed” (pp. 255, 223). For as Redburn reminds him, “‘Did you not tell me that you made no doubt you would acquit yourself well in the rigging? Did you not say that you had been two voyages to Bombay [as a guinea-pig sailor]?’” Still, rather than pass moral judgment here, Redburn expresses concern for his welfare: “‘Harry, you were mad to ship’” (p. 255). Thus Redburn seems true to his earlier word that he “ever cherished toward Harry a heart, loving and true,” despite his reservations (p. 223). What prevents Redburn from giving his “whole soul” to him is not his pretensions or his presumed prevarications per se but Harry's refusal, in spite of his obvious love for Redburn, to open his true self to him. For, like the early Redburn, he is forever striving to proclaim to himself and the world an identity which is not truly his. To his sorrow, therefore, Redburn discovers that authentic intimacy can be achieved only between parties who are themselves authentic.

Bona fide son of a gentleman or no, Harry lacks the necessary means of a gentleman's identity. Thus, just as Jackson is the model of what Redburn might have become at sea, so Harry Bolton, who is “some years” Redburn's senior, is the model of what he might have become had he stayed on land—a posturing “blade” frenetically trying to keep up the appearance of an outworn self-image, a moody and vulnerable youth whose fear of exposure isolates him from humanity (pp. 225, 253). Such is the lesson of the London episode for Redburn. Entering the boisterous city in a cab, seated beside his newly bewhiskered friend, and himself dressed in stylish new clothes, Redburn suddenly thought himself “somebody else” (p. 227). And at Aladdin's Palace, though he “tried to assume a careless and lordly air … like a young Prince Esterhazy,” he confesses that “all the time I felt my face burning with embarrassment, and for the time, I must have looked very guilty of something” (p. 229). When a “terrible revulsion” unexpectedly comes over him upon his sensing the falsity and evil of this house, Redburn's achieved identity as a sailor comes back to him. Now he admits, “I would have given the world had I been safe back in Liverpool, fast asleep in my old bunk in Prince's Dock”—much as he had wished to be safe at home on the night of the “suicide” (p. 233). But there is a difference: Redburn no longer acts like a child; he accepts what he is.

Contrary to the view that Redburn betrays Harry Bolton, it seems that it is Harry who betrays Redburn—as a consequence of the even more important betrayal of himself. Nonetheless, the recurring issue concerning the ending of this book is whether the title character acts out of immature expediency, “that charming call of the world,” in H. Bruce Franklin's words, when he leaves Harry in New York and returns to his own home. According to Franklin, what Redburn has to gain by abandoning his friend is freedom from the responsibilities of being a “brother” to him (p. 312). In transferring those responsibilities “from his own neck” to that of his New York friend Goodwell, “Redburn has … forcefully acted out the answer to a question about the ‘friendless’ common sailor which much earlier he had shoved in the reader's face: ‘Will you throw open your parlors to him; invite him to dinner?’”¹²

There are two immediate problems with this argument. First, Harry is not a common sailor. This is not a subtle distinction, for Melville's object in attacking the closed-door policy of the rich is specifically to improve the sorry prospects of sailors—men, he says, whose “recklessness and sensualism of character, ignorance and depravity” cut them off “from all access to respectable and improving society” (p. 138). The issue is not the sailors' financial poverty, but their cultural poverty. Thus Harry hardly qualifies; his failings and his needs are of another order. Second, aside from the question of how Harry would pay for a 180-mile trip to Redburn's home (how Redburn is to pay for it is not even made clear), it is a little uncertain whether there would be much of a “parlor” there into which Harry might be invited, let alone “dinner” enough to share with a friend. Invocation of the familiar folly of carrying coals to Newcastle seems appropriate here. For although Melville fails to explain what was contained in the letters conveyed by Mr. Jones that “compelled” Redburn to return home, presumably it was not good news (p. 304). When Redburn had left home only four months earlier, his family was so impoverished as not to be able to afford powder for the rifle that he pawned for sailor clothes in New York. Moreover, given the presence of autobiographical details elsewhere in the book, it seems pertinent to recall that upon Melville's own return from his Liverpool voyage he was greeted with the news that the family furniture had been advertised for auction to prevent foreclosure on the mortgage—a detail which Melville might have had qualms about advertising still further in his book and one which possibly he simply suppressed rather than fabricate an explanation that would not have been autobiographically true. Despite William Gilman's thorough examination of the subject, we are a long way from knowing in every detail where autobiography in this novel ends and fiction begins.¹³

In addition, it should be noted that Harry does not travel to America in order to be a guest in Redburn's home. Although at the time of his departure from Liverpool Harry had “resolved upon the sea” for his future, when it is discovered that he is not a sailor at heart he tells his friend that “somewhere in America he must work out his temporal felicity” (pp. 238, 279). When Redburn last sees him, Harry is waiting for an opening “in a mercantile house, where he might flourish his pen” (p. 282). “[D]ull” times and “multitudes” of other qualified young men, however, prevent him from securing such a place, despite the efforts of Goodwell. Redburn, therefore, hardly could have anticipated that, as Goodwell informs him, Harry's “melancholy could bring him to the insanity of throwing himself away in a whaler” (p. 311). Harry's problem, so to speak, is his failure to develop an identity with a future, and for this both the dull times and Harry himself are to blame. Significantly, it is Redburn, not Harry, who dreams up jobs that might be suitable for Harry to undertake when they reach America (pp. 279-82).

But these qualifications and mitigating circumstances aside, there is still a lingering doubt as to whether Redburn acts out of immature expediency in taking leave of Harry. An answer seems necessary for a full appreciation of Melville's portrayal of the trials of the maturing process. Harry's end is not the result of Redburn's negligence; rather, it is the product of chance operating in frightful conspiracy with Harry's own lack of self-knowledge and consequent identity-confusion. When Redburn says at the end, “I … chance to survive,” he is making a distinction between his own fate and that of his friend, who “fell over the side” of a whaler and “was jammed between the ship, and a whale” (p. 312). In a world where it is possible for a young man, such as one Redburn knew at home, to leave “his cottage one morning in high spirits” and be “brought back at noon with his right side paralyzed from head to foot,” the element of chance must figure mightily in the explanation of any individual's fate (p. 93). But self-knowledge is at least potentially within one's control, and self-knowledge—a sense of identity—is what Harry Bolton lacks. It is known from Harry's conduct during the London episode that he was liable “to yield to the most sudden, crazy, and contrary impulses” under duress, and given Harry's fear of going aloft on the merchant ship Redburn has every reason to agree with Goodwell that it would have been “insanity” for him to ship on a considerably more dangerous whaler (p. 311). In fact, Redburn knows his friend better than Harry knows himself, for he is the one to suggest that it would be better for him to “cross the sea as a steerage passenger, since he could procure enough money for that” (pp. 220-21). But Redburn knows, too, that everyone must finally get on his own legs. Indeed, this is the hardest lesson of his whole maturing process and explains why there is “a secret sympathy” between himself and the little glass ship's fallen figurehead which Redburn will not have “put on his legs again, till I get on my own” (p. 9). As Redburn laments when Harry refuses to pay his passage to New York, “after all, every one in this world has his own fate intrusted to himself; and though we may warn, and forewarn, and give sage advice, and indulge in many apprehensions touching our friends; yet our friends, for the most part, will ‘gang their ain gate;’ and the most we can do is, to hope for the best” (p. 220). If this is the language of expediency, then it is that of an expediency which must be reached at some point in all human relations if an individual is to have any hope of gaining an identity worth having. Brotherly love is not, unfortunately, the answer to every human problem.

Redburn, like his creator, was one of the lucky ones. Not only did he survive; he also escaped the unhappy identities of Jackson and Harry Bolton. Although he went on to pass “through far more perilous scenes than any narrated” in the record of his first voyage, he ended neither as a lowly sailor nor as a pretending gentleman (p. 312). The one identity had as little future as the other. But having been nurtured as the son of a gentleman and reshaped as a sailor-boy, Redburn, like Melville, was freed to choose an identity of ever-expanding identity and a career in which he, too, “might flourish his pen.” “Would that a man could do something & then say—It is finished,” Melville wrote to his friend Evert Duyckinck in the month before he sat down to compose Redburn; “—not that one thing only, but all others—that he has reached his uttermost, & can never exceed it. But live & push—tho' we put one leg forward ten miles—its no reason the other must lag behind—no, that must again distance the other—& so we go till we get the cramp & die.”¹⁴ Though written in tones which indicate Melville's frustration at the difficulties of the growth of the self, this statement makes explicit what we know from the books he left—that he had committed his whole life to the process of becoming a new kind of “gentleman forger,” one who would forge in the smithy of his soul a remarkable identity as the novel-writing sailor and gentleman's son.

Notes

1. William H. Gilman, Melville's Early Life and ‘Redburn,’ rev. ed. (1951; rpt. New York: Russell, 1972).

2. James Schroeter, “Redburn and the Failure of Mythic Criticism,” AL [American Literature], 39 (1967), 279-97; Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York: William Sloan, 1950), p. 103.

3. H. Bruce Franklin, “Redburn's Wicked End,” NCE [Nineteenth-Century Literature], 20 (1965), 190-94. See also John J. Gross, “The Rehearsal of Ishmael: Melville's ‘Redburn’,” VQR [Virginia Quarterly Review], 27 (1951), 599; T. G. Lish, “Melville's Redburn: A Study in Dualism,” ELN [English Language Notes], 5 (1967), 113-20; Edgar A. Dryden, Melville's Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), pp. 66-67; John D. Seelye, Melville: The Ironic Diagram (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1970), p. 52; Michael Davitt Bell, “Melville's Redburn: Initiation and Authority,” NEQ [New England Quarterly], 46 (1973), 558-72; Paul McCarthy, “Opposites Meet: Melville, Hemingway, and Heroes,” KanQ [Kansas Quarterly], 7 (1975), 40-54; and Edwin Haviland Miller, Melville (New York: Persea, 1975), pp. 160-61.

4. See Erik H. Erikson, “The Life Cycle: Epigenesis of Identity,” in Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968), pp. 91-141, for a discussion of the theory of developmental stages on which my study of Redburn is based.

5. Erikson, pp. 22-23.

6. Redburn: His First Voyage, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1969), p. 71. Subsequent references to this edition appear in the text.

7. Erikson, p. 23.

8. Quoted in Erikson, p. 19. See The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James [his son], Vol. I (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), p. 199.

9. Sacvan Bercovitch provides a pertinent discussion of Redburn's relationship with his father in “Melville's Search for National Identity: Son and Father in Redburn, Pierre and Billy Budd,” CLAJ [College Language Association Journal], 10 (1967), 217-28.

10. See Redburn, p. 178, for additional evidence of the continuing usefulness of the Liverpool guidebook.

11. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2d ed. (1950; rpt. New York: Norton, 1963), p. 263.

12. Franklin, pp. 193-94.

13. See Gilman, pp. 146-47, for a discussion of the Melville family's financial troubles.

14. Letter dated 5 April 1849, in Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, eds., The Letters of Herman Melville (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), p. 83.