[In the following essay, Schroeter discusses the limitations of the mythic, initiation into evil interpretation of Redburn, claiming that there are important elements of tone and structure within the novel that undercut such an interpretation.]

The usual critical opinion of Redburn is that it is a gloomy book. Some recent critics, including William Gilman and Edward Rosenberry, have pointed out comic elements in it, and when the book first appeared it was praised mainly for its “freshness” and “humor.” But ever since the Melville revival of the twenties, the critics, perhaps because they were trying to stress that the book ought to be taken seriously, have been calling it a “dark” book, a “bitter” book, a self-pitying book, a tragedy of some kind, or a reflection of Melville's own misery.¹ Commenting on the period when Melville was composing it, Lewis Mumford observes:

Now, for the first time, Melville is conscious of the black maggot within him, deposited as a mere egg in his youth, and growing day by day, nourished by his later disappointments, sorrows, frustrations. Things have begun to go badly: he thinks back without difficulty to times when they were even worse. The physical misery of those early years, the patched clothes, the bad food, the rough treatment of the sailors, the feeling of homelessness, the consciousness of being an Ishmael—all these experiences tallied point by point with the world outside, its cruelty, its misery, its sordidness and vice.²

Similarly, F. O. Matthiessen says that both Redburn and White-Jacket “reveal that the actual sufferings of mankind had been so impressed upon [Melville's] consciousness that none of the optimistic palliatives or compensations of his age could ever explain them away. As was the case with Keats, the miseries of this world became misery for him, and would not let him rest.”³ Newton Arvin writes: “Blows and hard words are mostly Redburn's lot on the Highlander, yet he suffers not only from the inhumanity of men but from the spectacle of their depravity generally.”⁴

I

Despite the general stress on the gloomy tone of the book, there have been two critical methods of interpreting it, two radically different frameworks into which critics have tried to fit it. The first, which might be called the biographical framework, is most clearly represented in the books on Melville written in the twenties by Raymond Weaver, John Freeman, and Lewis Mumford. “In Redburn, Melville went back to his youth and traced his feelings about life and his experience up to his eighteenth year,” says Mumford. “The book is autobiography, with only the faintest disguises: Bleecker Street becomes Greenwich Street, and the other changes are of a similar order.”⁵

The last major reading of Redburn as autobiography was William Gilman's Melville's Early Life and Redburn (1951), which delivered, or was intended to deliver, the death blow to the biographical school by demonstrating painstakingly that the book is not “autobiography, with only the faintest disguises.” But in any event the biographical mode of reading Redburn was already dying at the time Gilman's book appeared, a victim of widespread changes in the fashions of literary criticism and of a shift away from the biographical method of reading Melville. By about 1950, a second method, which might be called the “mythic” method, had already taken root, the most influential instance of it being an interpretation in Newton Arvin's Herman Melville.

Arvin's main point is his statement of what he takes to be Redburn's “inward subject”:

The outward subject of the book is a young boy's first voyage as a sailor before the mast; its inward subject is the initiation of innocence into evil—the opening of the guileless spirit to the discovery of “the wrong,” as James would say, “to the knowledge of it, to the crude experience of it.” The subject is a permanent one for literature, of course, but it has also a peculiarly American dimension, and in just this sense, not in any other, Redburn looks backward to a book like Brockden Brown's Ormond as well as forward to The Marble Faun and to so much of James himself. Wellingborough Redburn sets out from his mother's house in a state of innocence like that before the Fall, a state like that of Brown's Constantia Dudley or James's Maisie Farange, but he has hardly gone a mile from home before the world's wickedness and hardness begin to strip themselves before him. Man, Redburn quickly finds, is a wolf to man.⁶

The point that Redburn is concerned in some way with “the initiation of innocence into evil” is too fundamental to have escaped detection. For instance Matthiessen had noted in 1941 that “the account of Redburn's first voyage is a study of disillusion, of innocence confronted with the world, of ideals shattered by facts.”⁷ But Arvin was the first critic who attempted in a unified way to substitute the “initiation” theme for the autobiographical one as a broad pattern into which details of character, incident, and symbol could be fitted.

Arvin does this by selecting a number of more or less vivid details for symbolic interpretation—the character Jackson, “the first of Melville's full-length studies of ‘depravity according to nature,’” and a figure on whom, according to Arvin, all the “accumulated evil … is focused so concentratedly” as to “raise him to something like heroic stature”; Melville's “wonderful series of Hogarthian evocations” of Liverpool, which Arvin takes to be Melville's “symbol of human iniquity”; the London chapter concerned with “Aladdin's Palace,” which Arvin identifies as “the opulent counterpart of the ‘reeking’ and ‘Sodom-like’ dens in Liverpool, where Redburn's shipmates indulge their squalid vices”; the imagery of “disease, disaster and death,” especially the dead sailor who is thrown overboard and the suicide of the drunken sailor, which Arvin takes to be part of the “metaphor of death and rebirth, of the passage from childhood and innocence”; a series of humble “anti-romantic” or “shrunken” symbols—the glass ship, the guidebook to Liverpool, Redburn's moleskin shooting jacket; and the shipboard epidemic among the immigrants, which Arvin calls “the symbolism of plague and pestilence that had been or was to prove so expressive for a long series of writers from Defoe and Poe to Thomas Mann.”⁸ The point, in other words, that Arvin seems to be striving to make is that practically the whole of Redburn's experience with the outside world is with various guises of horror, death, and depravity.

Although clearly Arvin selected the features and stressed the symbolic horror in the way he did, even at the risk of appearing to strain and exaggerate slightly, because he wanted to lend substance to his “initiation” theory, his points seem to have been a guide to subsequent critics. For instance, Ronald Mason, whose study of Melville appeared the year after Arvin's, takes up the guidebook, the glass ship, the violent deaths, the Liverpool slums, and Jackson, whom he describes as “personified iniquity.”⁹ R. W. B. Lewis takes up the epidemic, the guidebook, Jackson—who “reveals to Redburn the power of the scabrous,” and Liverpool and its “stench of corruption.”¹⁰ Harry Levin, in The Power of Blackness, confines himself mainly to Jackson and Liverpool.¹¹ But the important point is that Arvin's central idea, that the real subject of Redburn is the “initiation of innocence into evil,” has formed a main tenet—perhaps the main tenet—of Redburn criticism since about 1950. Two independent studies, James E. Miller's “Redburn and Whitejacket: Initiation and Baptism” (1959) and Heinz Kosok's “A Sadder and a Wiser Boy: Herman Melville's Redburn as a Novel of Initiation” (1965), adopt the initiation idea as a framework; and much of the incidental comment on Redburn either explicitly or implicitly accepts the initiation idea in much the way earlier critics once accepted the idea that Redburn was autobiography.¹² “In Redburn (1849), the Adamic coloration of the experience which most interested Melville became explicit,” according to R. W. B. Lewis. “This has been remarked by Melville's best commentator, Newton Arvin, who observes that the boy-hero of the novel ‘sets out from his mother's house in a state of innocence like that before the fall’; and the voyage to Liverpool and back comprises for young Redburn ‘the initiation of innocence into evil.’”¹³

The “mythic” interpretation of Redburn first appeared about the time that a wave of books which either argued for, or explicitly applied, a mythic method to the interpretation of American literature was gathering strength—for instance, Richard Chase's Herman Melville (1949), Chase's Quest for Myth (1949), and Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950). These were followed by R. W. B. Lewis's The American Adam (1955), and after that a deluge of studies which reinterpreted Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Faulkner, and Hemingway in the light of mythic quests and patterns. In other words the reinterpretation of Redburn which has been going on for the past fifteen years must be seen in the context of a broad critical movement and as a contribution to the movement, much in the way that the biographical books on Melville by Weaver, Freeman, and Mumford were a contribution to the biographical method of the twenties—the style represented by Van Wyck Brooks's The Ordeal of Mark Twain or Joseph Wood Krutch's book on Poe. But the difficulty with the mythic method, certainly as applied to Redburn, is that, like the biographical method, it does not hold up—that it is contradicted repeatedly by some of the most important tonal and structural features of the novel.

II

Melville's tone, the peculiar quality of Redburn's narrative voice, presents the most obvious barrier to the “tragic fall” theory, especially Redburn's voice in the passages which are most clearly “initiatory,” and in which Redburn is most obviously “innocent.” This, for instance, is Redburn's response when he is first initiated into shipboard blasphemy:

At that time I did not know what to make of these sailors; but this much I thought, that when they were boys they could never have gone to the Sunday School; for they swore so, it made my ears tingle, and used words that I never could hear without a dreadful loathing.¹⁴

Later, the Greenlander sailor urges Redburn to drink Jamaica spirits, and Redburn reflects:

But I felt very little like doing as I was bid, for I had some scruples about drinking spirits; and to tell the plain truth, for I am not ashamed of it, I was a member of a society in the village where my mother lived, called the Juvenile Total Abstinence Association, of which my friend, Tom Legare, was president, secretary and treasurer, and kept the funds in a little purse that his cousin knit for him. There was three and six-pence on hand, I believe, the last time he brought in his accounts.¹⁵

A few pages later, there is a smoking party, and a sailor named Ned offers Redburn a cigar. Redburn reflects:

But I was a member of an Anti-Smoking Society that has been organized in our village by the Principal of the Sunday School there, in conjunction with the Temperance Association. So I did not smoke any then, though I did afterward upon the voyage, I am sorry to say.¹⁶

Redburn's response to the trio of conventional sailor's vices—smoking, drinking, swearing—depends for the effectiveness of its comedy not only on Redburn's absurdly naïve Sunday school morality but upon the ironic tone, which in turn depends on the separation Melville maintains between himself and his narrator. Clemens was later to handle this device for humor in a more controlled manner in Huckleberry Finn, in which the vices of men are also reflected with comic irony through the eyes of a naïve boy, but Redburn shows the first sustained use of the device in the American novel.

It can be seen in a more important way in Redburn's initiation into the ship's hierarchy, brought out in his abortive attempts to establish friendly relations first with the men, then with the mates, and finally with the captain:

Thinking to make friends with the second mate, I took out an old tortoise-shell snuff-box of my father's, in which I had put a piece of Cavendish tobacco, to look sailor-like, and offered the box to him very politely. He stared at me a moment, and then exclaimed, “Do you think we take snuff aboard here, youngster? no, no, no time for snuff-taking at sea; don't let the ‘old man’ see that snuff-box; take my advice and pitch it overboard as quick as you can.”

I told him it was not snuff, but tobacco; when he said, he had plenty of tobacco of his own, and never carried any such nonsense about him as a tobacco-box. With that, he went off about his business, and left me feeling foolish enough.¹⁷

One entire chapter, “He Contemplates Making a Social Call on the Captain in His Cabin,” is devoted to Redburn's attempt to establish friendship with the captain. It begins with his naïve speculations about the captain:

I had thought him a fine, funny gentleman, full of mirth and good humor, and good will to seamen, and one who could not fail to appreciate the difference between me and the rude sailors among whom I was thrown. Indeed, I had made no doubt that he would in some special manner take me under his protection, and prove a kind friend and benefactor to me; as I had heard that some sea-captains are. … Yes, I thought that Captain Riga would be attentive and considerate to me, and strive to cheer me up and comfort me in my lonesomeness.¹⁸

To prepare himself for making “the first advances,” he gets himself up in what he thinks is fitting dress. “I put on a white shirt in place of my red one, and got into a pair of cloth trowsers instead of my duck ones, and put on my new pumps, and then carefully brushing my shooting jacket, I put that on over all, so that upon the whole, I made quite a genteel figure.” His hands are stained deep yellow from tar, and thinking “it would never do to present myself before a gentleman in that way,” he slips on a pair of woolen mittens his mother has knitted for him. Dressed in that fashion, he plans to “drop into the captain's cabin” to pay his respects.¹⁹

What is most interesting about the chapter devoted to the social call is that it never takes place. The chief mate collars Redburn on his way to the cabin, and “shoved me forward, roaring out I know not what,” while the sailors, standing around the windlass, look aft “mightily tickled.” Instead, Melville focuses on Redburn's dreams of the treatment he will receive from the captain—“that he would invite me down into the cabin of a pleasant night, to ask me questions concerning my parents, and prospects in life, besides obtaining from me some anecdotes touching my great-uncle, the illustrious senator; or give me a slate and pencil, and teach me problems in navigation; or perhaps engage me at a game of chess”; on Redburn's elaborate attempts to get himself up in genteel costume; and the merriment of the crew. Possibly Melville aborted the actual scene because his imagination boggled at the prospect of a boy such as Redburn, dressed in shooting jacket, pumps, and woolen mittens, “dropping in” on the captain. But what is more likely is that Melville softened the climax, deliberately substituting an anticlimax, because, despite all that critics have had to say about the “cruelty” and “hardship” of Redburn's lot on the Highlander, Melville sees clearly enough that showing Redburn as the butt of the most crushing and serious humiliations and insults does not fit the larger purposes of the novel.

The imaginative situation of a human, personal confrontation between captain and “boy,” between captain and crewman, or in general between superior and inferior was to be touched on with complexity and power in the later Melville—in Moby-Dick, “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and Billy Budd. Such a scene, passed over reverently, forms the crux of Billy Budd—the scene between Captain Vere and Billy, which Melville likens to the scene between Abraham and Isaac. In such passages in the later Melville—between Pip and Ahab, between the lawyer and Bartleby, or in quite a different way between the aristocratic Benito Cereno and the slave Babo—Melville suggests that the conventional barrier society interposes between men of differing social stations is in some way terrible, ludicrous, irrational—but capable of being overstepped. The conventional hierarchical arrangement breaks down, much as in Tolstoy's “Master and Man,” into an elemental love-hate relationship between two human beings. The “mastery” is subtly reversed, translated by hate in the Benito-Babo relationship, or love in the Pip-Ahab relationship. No transformation of this kind takes place in Redburn, partly because Melville is as much concerned with holding up to view the absurdity of Redburn's ignorance of conventional usage as the absurdity of the convention.

The passages in which Melville's ironically comic tone is perhaps most beautifully modulated are the ones concerning Redburn's clothing. A number of critics—Newton Arvin, James Miller—have commented on the fact that Melville raises the clothing, especially the shooting jacket, to poetic or symbolic status. But Arvin's comment that “old, cheap and ill-fitting clothes” are a “natural metaphor” for the “insulted and injured,” or that “Redburn's shooting jacket puts one in mind of that other shabby garment, the old clerk's overcoat in Gogol's famous tale,” seems—much like Lewis Mumford's sentimental comment about Melville-Redburn's “patched clothes” and “bad food”—wholly to miss the dignity and complexity of Melville's comedy.²⁰

Melville focuses mainly on three “patched” or “maimed” items of clothing—Redburn's boots, his pantaloons, and his shooting jacket. The boots are described as follows:

Nor must I forget my boots, which were almost new when I left home. They had been my Sunday boots, and fitted me to a charm. I never had had a pair of boots that I liked better; I used to turn my toes out when I walked in them, unless it was night time, when no one could see me, and I had something else to think of; and I used to keep looking at them during church; so that I lost a good deal of the sermon. In a word, they were a beautiful pair of boots. But all this only unfitted them the more for sea-service; as I soon discovered. They had very high heels, which were all the time tripping me in the rigging, and several times came near pitching me overboard; and the salt water made them shrink in such a manner, that they pinched me terribly about the instep; and I was obliged to gash them cruelly, which went to my very heart. The legs were quite long, coming a good way up towards the knees, and the edges were mounted with red morocco. The sailors used to call them my “gaff-topsail-boots.” And sometimes they used to call me “Boots” and sometimes “Buttons” on account of the ornaments. …

At last I took their advice and “razeed” them, as they phrased it. That is, I amputated the legs, and shaved off the heels to the bare soles, which, however did not much improve them, for it made my feet feel flat as flounders, and besides, brought me down in the world. …²¹

Redburn's magnificent moleskin hunting jacket is also “altered” or “maimed” in a similar way:

Every day it grew smaller and smaller, particularly after a rain, until at last I thought it would completely exhale, and leave nothing but the bare seams, by way of a skeleton, on my back. It became unspeakably unpleasant when we got into rather cold weather, crossing the Banks of Newfoundland, when the only way I had to keep warm during the night was to pull on my waistcoat and my roundabout, and then clap the shooting-jacket over all. This made it pinch me under the arms, and it vexed and irritated and tormented me every way; and used to incommode my arms seriously when I was pulling the ropes; so much so, that the mate asked me once if I had the cramp.²²

Redburn focuses mainly, however, on the most maimed item, the pantaloons:

I had them made to order by our village tailor, a little fat man, very thin in the legs, who used to say he imported the latest fashions direct from Paris, though all the fashion plates in his shop were very dirty with fly-marks.

Well, this tailor made the pantaloons I speak of, and while he had them in hand, I used to call and see him two or three times a day to try them on, and hurry him forward; for he was an old man with large round spectacles, and could not see very well, and had no one to help him but a sick wife, with five grandchildren to take care of. … Now, this old tailor had shown me the pattern, after which he intended to make my pantaloons; but I improved upon it, and bade him make a slit on the outside of each leg, at the foot, to button up with a row of six brass bell buttons; for a grown-up cousin of mine, who was a great sportsman used to wear a beautiful pair of pantaloons, made precisely in that way.

And these were the very pair I now had at sea; the sailors made a great deal of fun of them, and were all the time calling on each other to “twig” them; and they would ask me to lend them a button or two, by way of a joke; and then they would ask me if I was not a soldier. Showing very plainly that they had no idea that my pantaloons were a very genteel pair, made in the height of the sporting fashion, and copied from my cousin's, who was a young man of fortune and drove a tilbury.²³

This is Redburn's account of how these beautiful and elegant pantaloons come to be patched and maimed:

When I went aloft, at my yard-arm gymnastics, my pantaloons were all the time ripping and splitting in every direction, particularly about the seams, owing to their not being cut sailor-fashion, with low waistbands, and to wear without suspenders. So that I was often placed in most unpleasant predicaments, straddling the rigging, sometimes in plain sight of the cabin, with my table linen exposed in the most inelegant and ungentlemanly manner possible.²⁴

The point of producing these passages is not merely to show that gloomy Redburn has its comedy—although this point alone seems in need of being stressed as much as possible. The point is rather to show why there is comedy—that it is not simply an element Melville added here and there for relieving the gloom, or, as William Gilman concludes, for “offsetting the prevailing tone of somberness.” Instead, the comic tone seems to stem from the structure of the book, and to be a necessary part of the conception. The passages in which Redburn is introduced to smoking, drinking, and swearing seem to be based on Melville's analysis of the conventional sailor's vices. The passages in which Redburn tries to make friends first with the men, then with the mates, and finally the captain stem from Melville's analysis of the ship's social hierarchy. Similarly, the other “initiatory” passages—in which Redburn is introduced to shipboard language, shipboard eating habits, clothing, use of leisure, manners, superstitions—are arranged in a series, as though Melville had worked from an outline in which he divided shipboard language from shipboard customs, and then subdivided these into finer, discrete parts. This technique, which is a general characteristic of Melville's writing, was noted in the thirties by R. P. Blackmur, who observed that Melville tended to work from an intellectual scheme rather than from a dramatic or story conception, and who aptly dubbed this the “technique of putative statement.” Melville's presentation of shipboard and English life in Redburn is organized, in other words, much as the materials are organized in Typee or Omoo, in which the novelist devotes so many passages to Polynesian religion, language, social habits, use of leisure; or, in Moby-Dick, in the “cetological” portions, or the chapters dealing with the social hierarchy of a whaler.

The vividness of these “putative” sections of Redburn are based on the sharpness of the incongruity between Melville's scenes and Melville's narrator—between Redburn's genteel dress, language, customs, and expectations, and those of the people he comes in contact with. But the irony, complexity, and comedy depend on the fact that Melville himself takes a quite independent and detached stance in portraying the conflict, especially when he is working most successfully, removed on the one hand from the narrow gentility of his narrator and on the other from the crudities of shipboard life.

The “Adamic” pattern into which modern critics have rather clumsily been trying to fit Redburn requires a prelapsarian hero like Billy Budd or Hawthorne's Donatello—a “natural” man who is uncontaminated by society and its institutions. But the humor in Redburn depends on the fact that the hero is not a “guileless spirit,” certainly not a Billy Budd or Donatello. His mother's village, with its Sunday School, Anti-Smoking Society, Juvenile Total Temperance Association, and cousin who drives a tilbury, is not an Eden nor a Monte Beni. Nor does Redburn “set out from his mother's house in a state of innocence like that before the Fall,” as Arvin and Lewis claim. On the contrary, he sets out from his mother's house as a “Son-of-a-Gentleman,” with the catalogue of social attitudes, prejudices, and minor vices that this estate implies—snobbery, exaggerated piety, smugness, priggishness, narrowness. Most important, the mythic Adamic pattern is a tragic pattern; it is a “Fall.” But Melville does everything in his power to make clear that Redburn's transition from “Son-of-a-Gentleman” to “Sailor Boy” is not a “fall”—that the gentleman's estate is less rather than more blessed than the deracinated estate of the classless voyager at which Redburn, after completing his initiation, finally arrives.

The fall of Adam might be called an archetypal myth, “archetypal” in the grand sense used by Northrop Frye and other mid-twentieth-century critics who suppose that such archetypes have always secretly but powerfully influenced the imagination; yet it is doubtful whether Melville was writing myth in even the local sense of “myth” which obviously influenced the nineteenth-century storyteller. Many novels of “initiation” had appeared in the years before Melville wrote Redburn—stories about genteel or aristocratic young heroes who undergo a change from one class into a lower one. For the most part, these fall into one of two opposite categories. The least common and more modern variety is the democratic romance—the story of the ennobling consequences of hard work or the common lot on the privileged or coddled, the story of the snob who is made into a man. Richard Dana had touched on this theme in Two Years Before the Mast, as did Hawthorne in quite a different way in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”; but it was not until considerably later—in Dickens's Great Expectations or, more obviously, in Kipling's Captains Courageous—that the theme found full romantic expression. The earlier and more common variety is the bourgeois tragedy—the story of fineness, beauty, and distinction trampled underfoot by the commonplace, or the theme of gentility in adversity that Dickens uses in Oliver Twist or David Copperfield. Melville had both kinds of myths available to him when he wrote Redburn, especially the second; but the point is that he rejects them, carefully steering a middle course between—and this is perhaps the strongest evidence that Melville, rather than relying on myth of any kind, was consciously trying to stay independent of it.

The second alternative, the myth of the fallen aristocrat, was probably the more dangerous temptation for Melville. Those qualities of “bitterness,” “misery,” and “self-pity” which so many critics have noted in Redburn, and which some feel mar the book, may be due to the fact that Melville fails wholly to avoid the temptation, Yet the function of Melville's ironic comedy, which most of the critics who think Redburn is full of self-pity ignore, is to reject the myth—to reject genteel pretension of merely any sort.

Another American novel about gentility fallen on hard times written at the same time as Redburn, Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, has been to some extent recognized as a democratic rejection of aristocratic values. Critics have observed, for instance, that Hawthorne portrays the aristocratic and genteel Pyncheon inheritance from the past as not only useless or chimerical but actually sickly, cumbersome, disadvantageous, harmful: the Pyncheon family claim to vast tracts of land is a harmful chimera; the aristocratic Pyncheon roses sicken while the plebeian Maule beans flourish; Hepzibah's aristocratic name and blood is not only useless but disadvantageous in running a penny shop. But Melville's rejection in Redburn, although equally important to the scheme and worked out in more circumstantial detail, seems to have been ignored: that the manners Redburn acquired, which dictate his offering the mate tobacco out of a “tortoise-shell” box, result in the ridicule of the mate; that his attempts to dress in mittens and pay the captain a social call result in the ridicule of the crew; that the more genteel and fashionable his clothes, the more useless they are at sea—that the beautiful moleskin jacket must “shrink,” that the elegant pantaloons must rip and be patched before they are useful, that the fashionable boots must have their high heels removed so that Redburn can “come down in the world”; that Redburn's notions of “proper” table manners and his ignorance of the way food is served and eaten by a ship's crew result in the crew's regarding him as unmannerly and in his going hungry; that the genteel recommendation Mr. Jones gives the captain, the sort of recommendation that would be given of a young gentleman about to start a career in banking, result in his advance wages being withheld; that his father's guidebook, a relic of genteel prosperity, misleads him; and the elegant glass ship imported from France gives him a damagingly false view of the world of ships.

There has already been too great, or at least too sentimental, a stress on the terrible hardships Redburn undergoes—the viciousness of Jackson, the cruelty of the captain and crew, the bad clothes and bad food, the hideous impact of the Liverpool slums. But these elements are also important. There is a tough-minded realism in Melville's rejection of gentility and the past, coupled with a democratic dislike of class distinction; but at the same time Melville goes at least as far in the opposite direction by refusing to romanticize the common lot or the salubrity of menial labor.

Hawthorne ends his romance by uniting Maule and Pyncheon in a marriage which implies an acceptance of both the plebeian and aristocratic myths. But Melville ends his with the phrase, “yet, I, Wellingborough Redburn, chance to survive”—the expression of a proud and lonely Ishmael, who has rejected both plebeian and genteel society as opposite but connected parts of a total social order.

III

The strongest evidence of Melville's rejection is provided by the main structural feature of Redburn. Characteristically, Melville builds the deeper meanings of his stories and novels on the basis of parallels and contrasts that he draws between characters who represent certain complex abstractions—for instance, Billy Budd as a representative of Good, Claggart of Evil; Ahab as a representative of Defiance, Ishmael of Acceptance. Melville uses the same kind of structure in Redburn in the parallels and contrasts he draws between Harry Bolton, the gentlemanly Englishman who sails back on the Highlander, and Jackson, the ruffianly American sailor.

A great deal of attention has been paid to Melville's picture of Jackson; but except for Merlin Bowen, in his study “Redburn and the Angle of Vision,” relatively little comment has been devoted to Harry Bolton, who is as important as Jackson, and who, if Bowen is correct in his guess that Melville would have enlarged the figure had he been less hasty in drawing his book to a conclusion, played a larger role in Melville's conception.

Bowen notes a parallel between Harry Bolton and Redburn, which he claims is “carried out in such detail as to cause one to wonder that it has not been more commonly noted”:

Both, to begin with, are more than ordinarily well born and come from a relatively sheltered background. Both are “Ishmaels,” driven by hard times and misfortune too soon into the world. They are alike, too, in their romantic and distorted views of the world: the Canaan to which each aspires is the Egypt, from which the other would escape. The illusions of each are at first encouraged by the captain's “sympathetic concern” and later shattered by the cruelty of both officers and crew. Both are inexperienced as sailors, and both exacerbate the contempt this brings upon them by their incongruous dress and by their pretensions to refinement and high social status.

Several incidents of the homeward voyage, moreover, appear as counterparts (occurring in the same order and at roughly similar intervals) of experiences encountered by Redburn on the passage out. The discovery of the burning corpse in the bunk is in effect a repetition of the frenzied suicide that took place on the first night out from New York. Harry's humiliating first trip aloft is a vivid reminder of Redburn's earlier success in meeting the same challenge. … Arriving in America, Bolton meets with much the same exclusion and indifference that Redburn had encountered in England. And the last sentence of the book reinforces the parallel with the narrator's expression of wonder that, though Harry has died, he himself has “chance[d] to survive.”²⁵

Certainly these parallels between Redburn and Harry exist, and are striking enough; but Bowen fails to notice that an equally striking parallel can be made between Harry and Jackson: (1) like Redburn, both are lonely or in some way isolated figures; (2) unlike Redburn, both are exceptionally scornful of proprieties, and override social or conventional restraints; (3) both are careless about their own preservation, Harry by wasting his property and Jackson by wasting his health; (4) both exercise a strange fascination or attraction for Redburn; (5) both, for a time, are able to tyrannize over, and control, Redburn; (6) both lose their control, and become objects of pity to Redburn; (7) both are older than Redburn and his superior in terms of experience and knowledge; and most important (8) both meet their deaths, and in a similarly dramatic way—at sea, without proper burial.

There are, more obviously, differences. Harry's recklessness seems to stem from his having too much money; Jackson's from having nothing. Jackson exercises his control at sea or in sailor-haunts; Harry, on his home ground. Jackson and Redburn are drawn by hate; Harry and Redburn by love. Most important, Jackson represents the lowest, hardest, coarsest element aboard the Highlander; Harry—with his finery, girlish beauty, and voice “like a bird”—represents the highest, softest, finest. The contrasts and similarities are such as to suggest that Melville was deliberately drawing in Harry and Jackson two extreme models, both counterparts of Redburn, both representing a kind of experience, but an opposite kind; and both experiences representing certain attractions but also dangers which Redburn, if he is to survive, must avoid. The figures are orbits, either one of which Redburn might have been drawn into with disastrous consequences—and the two orbits are much like the “aristocratic” and “plebeian” commitments which Melville avoids in narrating the book.

H. Bruce Franklin, the most recent commentator on Redburn, seems to believe that if Redburn had properly protected and befriended Harry when the two arrived in New York, Harry would not have drowned at sea. He maintains as the main point of his article that Redburn is responsible for Harry's death.²⁶ But surely Melville, who draws faults and weaknesses in Harry almost from the moment he is introduced more than sufficient to lay the groundwork for his destruction, makes it clear that it is not Redburn's fault but Harry's.

The most vivid instance is the scene in which Redburn, to his astonishment, sees Harry, who has shipped as a common sailor, “on deck in a brocaded dressing gown, embroidered slippers and a tasseled smoking cap, to stand his morning watch”:

As soon as I came behind him thus arrayed, a suspicion, which had previously crossed my mind, again recurred, and I almost vowed to myself that spite his protestations, Harry Bolton never could have been at sea before, even as a Guinea-pig in an Indiaman; for the slightest acquaintance with the sea-life and sailors, should have prevented him, it would seem, from enacting this folly.

“Who's that Chinese mandarin?” cried the mate, who had made voyages to Canton. “Look you, my fine fellow, douse that mainsail now, and furl it in a trice.”

“Sir?” said Harry, starting back. “Is not this the morning watch, and is not mine a morning gown?”

Redburn finally persuades Harry to take off his outlandish costume, and Harry exclaims:

“It's too bad! I meant to lounge away the watch in that gown until coffee time;—and I suppose your Hottentot of a mate won't permit a gentleman to smoke his Turkish pipe of a morning; but by Gad, I'll wear straps to my pantaloons to spite him!”²⁷

This passage, with its exaggeratedly farcical humor, combines in a short space several themes developed in a more leisurely way in the first half of the book when Redburn, rather than Harry, appeared in a shooting jacket, high-heeled boots, and gentlemanly pantaloons; and when, like Harry, he showed a comic ignorance of sea language, sea usage, and the relationship between officers and men. But Harry is in every respect more extreme: his dress more absurdly refined and unsuited to sea duty; his ignorance of sea language still wilder. Most important, his response to the seaman's tasks he is given marks a crucial difference. As Newton Arvin has pointed out, Redburn had been desperately afraid of “falling—falling—falling” when he was sent up to loosen the skysail. But he loosens it, and later “Begins to Hop About in the Rigging Like a Saint Jago's Monkey.” Harry never does. He makes one desperate attempt, “but no; he stopped short, and looked down from the top. Fatal glance! it unstrung his every fiber; and I saw him reel and clutch the shrouds.” From that moment, “he never put foot in rattlin; never mounted above the bulwarks.”²⁸

Jackson's catastrophic end comes not because he is too little of a sailor but because in a sense he is too much of one. He is hard enough, experienced enough, and cruel enough to survive any voyage; but he is wasted by his strengths—by his hardness, hatred, brutality, and debauchery. But Harry, the girlish youth, seems to perish for the opposite reasons—from being too soft, gentle, refined, genteel. It is perhaps symbolically significant that Harry, besides failing to climb the rigging, fails to jettison his gentlemanly baggage—his “collection of silks, velvets, broad cloths and satins,” which he brings aboard in a special chest.

Newton Arvin observes:

Despite the underlying gravity of the symbolism generally, Redburn is anything but a lugubrious book as a whole: the current of animation and vivacity on which it is sustained is purely inspiriting. Melville's feeling … for light and shade did not fail him in the writing of Redburn. … There is the familiar ballast of prosaic information—the chapter, for example, on the furniture of the quarter-deck—and there is a good deal of Melville's characteristically smiling and low-toned humor. … In its richness of emotion and variety of tone, Redburn is generally the most likable of Melville's secondary books.²⁹

This concluding statement, which Arvin seems to have added as a needed corrective to his main position, is a triumph of good sense over critical method; and one finds fault with it only in its failure to connect the “feeling for light and shade,” the “variety of tone,” the “current of animation,” with the actual details of Melville's tone and structure—and in the failure to see that this tone and structure runs directly contrary to the view of Redburn as a novel of “tragic initiation.”

Redburn's rejection of Bolton and Jackson, and Melville's rejection of the genteel and “Jacksonian” viewpoints seem both to stem from Melville-Redburn's striving for balance and independence. Melville projected the striving into a unique artistic technique in Moby-Dick—in, for example, the balance between the lyricism of “The Symphony,” and the realism of “The Try-Works”; between the rhythms of stasis and of motion; or in the balancing figures of Ahab and Ishmael, who represent far better than Jackson and Harry Bolton what Melville grew to see as the two main responses to life. But if the balances are less complex and less successfully worked out in Redburn, they are of a similar kind; and they represent a more nearly unique and independent artistic achievement than any of the critics who have been trying to fit Redburn into an autobiographical or mythic pattern have given Melville credit for.

Notes

1. Edward H. Rosenberry, Melville and the Comic Spirit (Cambridge, Mass., 1955). William Gilman, Melville's Early Life and Redburn (New York, 1951), pp. 227-230. A summary of the early reviewers and their comments on the humor is contained in Gilman, Appendix D, “The Reputation of Redburn,” pp. 274-281.

2. Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Vision, rev. ed. (New York, 1962), p. 72. (The book originally appeared in 1929.)

3. F. O. Mathiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York, 1941), p. 396.

4. Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York, 1950), p. 104.

5. Mumford, p. 71.

6. Arvin, p. 103.

7. Matthiessen, p. 396.

8. Arvin, pp. 104-109.

9. Ronald Mason, The Spirit Above the Dust: A Study of Herman Melville (London, 1951), pp. 71-78.

10. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago, 1953), pp. 136-138.

11. Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (New York, 1958), pp. 178-180.

12. James E. Miller, “Redburn and Whitejacket: Initiation and Baptism,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, XIII, 273-293 (March, 1959). Heinz Kosok, “‘A Sadder and a Wiser Boy’: Herman Melville's Redburn as Novel of Initiation,” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, X, 126-152 (1965). Other critics who refer to Redburn as a novel of “initiation” include Robert Spiller, Merlin Bowen, Ronald Mason, and R. W. B. Lewis.

13. Lewis, p. 136.

14. Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage (New York, 1957), pp. 31-32.

15. Ibid., p. 40.

16. Ibid., p. 44.

17. Ibid., p. 25.

18. Ibid., p. 65.

19. Ibid., pp. 65-67.

20. Arvin, p. 109.

21. Redburn, pp. 71-72.

22. Ibid., p. 72.

23. Ibid., pp. 70-71.

24. Ibid., p. 70.

25. Merlin Bowen, “Redburn and the Angle of Vision,” Modern Philology, LII, 107-108 (Nov., 1954).

26. H. Bruce Franklin, “Redburn's Wicked End,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, XX, pp. 190-194 (Sept., 1965).

27. Redburn, p. 245.

28. Ibid., p. 248.

29. Arvin, p. 109.