Moby Dick Background

Genre: Novel

Moby Dick falls within the genre of Dark Romanticism. Dark Romanticism is distinguished from Romanticism in its emphasis on human fallibility and sin, tending to be more pessimistic. Romantics, on the other hand, believed in human goodness, and hence have a more optimistic view. According to Dark Romantics, even good men and women drift toward sin and self-destruction, and there can be unintended consequences that arise from good intentions. Considered to have emerged from the Transcendental Movement in nineteenth-century America, Dark Romantics focused on human error, sin, punishment, and self-destruction. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson also fall in this genre.

Moby Dick is also a quest romance of epic proportions with tragic consequences. As Tony Tanner had pointed out in the “Introduction” of the 1998 Oxford World’s Classics edition of Moby Dick, America in the mid-nineteenth century was an ideal place and time to “generate its own epic and myth—in effect find its own Homer.” There can be a strong argument made for Moby Dick being the first great American epic for its length, its elevated style, and its treatment of the trials and achievements of democratic heroes or epic anti-heroes of national and cultural significance. A story of monomania aboard a whaling ship, Moby Dick is a tremendously ambitious novel that works simultaneously as a documentary of life at sea as well as a vast philosophical allegory of life in general. No sacred subject is spared in this bleak and scathing critique of the known world, as Melville satirizes religious traditions, social customs, moral values, and the literary and political figures of the day.