ABSTRACT Melvilles Unfolding Selves: Identity Formation in Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre Margy Thomas Horton, Ph.D. Committee Chairperson: Joe B. Fulton, Ph.D. Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre share striking parallels in form and content: each is narrated by an introspective yet adventurous narrator who encounters various triggers for his development, including authorities, mysterious people and phenomena, and evidence of the social contracts binding society together. All three novels juxtapose conflicting ideologies and culminate in an ambiguous integration of the narrator-protagonist into the larger world. Throughout the narration process, the narrator gradually progresses toward knowledge of self and world by learning from mistakes and altering behavior. These narrative characteristics are not drawn wholly from Melvilles imagination and experience, but rather typify a European genre, the Bildungsroman, that Melville read closely around 1850. Before now, scholars have assumed or argued that Bildungsromane did not exist in America as early as the mid-nineteenth century, with some scholars even denying that Bildungsromane can be written in an American context. However, this study shows that Melville wrote three novels that draw upon the conventions of that genre while revising them to depict a uniquely American process of identity formation, one in which no stable authority figure defined the path to maturity. Like America herself, the American Bildungsroman protagonist had to develop a means of self-invention. Melvilles maJor revision to the Bildungsroman is in his modification of the portrait self motif. In the European Bildungsromane Melville read, the portrait self is a text or image presented to the protagonist by an authority figure with the intent of showing the protagonist either who he is or who he should strive to be. The portrait self crystallizes the pedagogy designed by the protagonists father or guardian and is intended to motivate and focus the young mans efforts toward positive change. In Melvilles American Bildungsromane, the narrator-protagonist constructs his own portrait self: in Mardi, he constructs a dream self (Taji); in Moby-Dick, a remembered self (young Ishmael on the Pequod); and in Pierre, a fictional self (the character Pierre). As each narrator imagines and describes his portrait selfs formation, he himself is formed. The protagonists strive increasingly toward independent self-invention but find themselves still entangled in their cultural inheritance. Melvilles conception of identity formation challenges the still-current view that humans are capable of absolute self-invention; paradoxically, it also enables todays readers to see that, however environmental, social, or political factors may work against ones cultivation, resources for constructing ones own pedagogy are always available. Copyright © 2012 by Margy Thomas Horton All rights reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v DEDICATION vii CHAPTER ONE: Introduction 1 Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre as a Triptych 17 Critical Interventions 25 Chapter-by-chapter Overview 27 CHAPTER TWO: Melvilles Identity Formation in Context 32 Melvilles family identity and American identity 58 Melvilles reading of European Bildungsromane 79 The Bildungsroman in American literature 97 CHAPTER THREE: Education as Conversation in Mardi 100 Critical Interventions 112 Views of identity and of growth 121 The Protagonists Developmental Process 139 Outcomes of the developmental process 146 CHAPTER FOUR: Education as Experiment in Moby-Dick 180 Critical Interventions 188 Views of identity and of growth 198 The Protagonists Developmental Process 201 Outcomes of the developmental process 208 CHAPTER FIVE: Education as Storytelling in Pierre 259 Critical Interventions 268 Views of identity and of growth 281 The Protagonists Developmental Process 292 Outcomes of the developmental process 301 CHAPTER SIX: Conclusion 334 Identity Formation in Melvilles Other Works 335 BIBLIOGRAPHY 343 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The Baylor University community has made this project possible. Five years of funding were provided by the English department in the form of teaching and tutoring assistantships, the Graduate School gave generous supplemental funding, and the Universitys Mission Statement was a constant source of inspiration and focus during my years at Baylor. My professor Joe Fulton has been there all along the way: he introduced me to the Transcendentalists, let me help him teach Melville to his undergraduates, pushed me to apply for my first conference, led me toward my first publication, always expected excellence in my work, and most of all has been a warm and honest human being throughout the long graduate school process. I am honored that he would direct my dissertation. Each of the other members of my dissertation committeeSarah Ford, Daniel Walden, James Barcus, and Todd Burashas been indispensable in his or her own way. They and my other professors have done so much for the graduate students at Baylor, including designing and teaching seminars that I always felt privileged to attend and sorry to finish. I would also like to thank Laine Scales, as well as my fellow graduate student teachers and my students, for teaching me how to help other people pursue knowledge inside and outside the classroom. Lois Avey, the endlessly patient woman who runs the English department office, always had the smile or the v form I needed, and cannot go without acknowledgment here. Also, I cannot thank enough the colleagues and friends with whom I have, over the past five years, escaped from abstraction into concrete reality and shared the rich conversations that will remain my warmest memories of graduate school: Holland Whiteburch, Lanta Davis, Jessica Hooten Wilson, Noelle Davies, Kat Adams, Nathan Kilpatrick, Jeffrey Bilbro, Steven Petersheim, Cameron Weed, Anna Blanch, and so many others. You taught me that books come alive not in the individual imagination but rather in conversation with others. Finally, thank you to my family. Dad, you taught me dogged-stick-to-it- iveness and the importance of always (metaphorically) shining my shoes; Mom, you taught me to be a problem-solver and a listener, two virtues that Im still working on; Betsy, you taught me how much there really is to laugh at in the world; Jewell, you taught me that everything is connectedespecially science and artand did so long before I read it in Emerson; Jack, you have challenged me in a good way with the otherness of your perspectives; and Nick, you have taught me to be diplomatic when expressing my shockingly strong opinions. Herman and Pablo, the Amazing Dissertating Dachshunds, you kept have me company through many a long day of writing and have been worthy namesakes of Melville and Picasso. Most of all, I want to thank my partner Seth Horton, who makes me a whole human being instead of a disembodied brain, and our son Abraham, whose Bildung will be our greatest joy. vi DEDICATION To the parents who shaped and the siblings who shared, and to Seth and Abe, who are the unambiguously happy ending of my Bildung vii CHAPTER ONE Introduction Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all, writes Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne around June 1, 1851, adding that he dates his life from his twenty-fifth year. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself (Correspondence 193). Twenty-five had indeed been a significant age for Melville; it was then, in 1844, that he had left behind the life of a common sailor and begun shaping his experiences at sea into fantastic tales for his family and friends. If ships were a Yale College and [a] Harvard for Melville as they were for his most famous protagonist, Ishmael, then it was not until Melville graduated from college and began narratizing his college experiences, and reading books that helped him to make sense of those experiences, that his development really began. Writing this letter at age thirty-two, he could recognize that turn to narration as the fulcrum of his life, the impetus of his development. He understands that development in the Romantic terms of an unfolding plant, a metaphor that also appealed to the Transcendentalists. Still, amidst the sense of flourishing in Melvilles letter lurks an intuition of coming decay. Despite, or because of, his rapid development over the previous six years, Melville realized that this process was doomed to end soon. 1 He writes, But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould (193). He compares himself to one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould.1 At the heart of Melvilles assertions lie profound questions about human development: how do we define and measure human growth, and how does growth differ from stagnation or regression? How long can inevitable decay be staved off, and by what means? A deeper reflection upon the specific conditions that prompted Melvilles sense of growth raises still another question: To what extent is human growth influenced or regulated by the selfs encounters with the external world, and to what extent is growth an unfolding of already present qualities? At this point in his writing career, as Melville reflects upon his own continual internal unfold[ing] (193), he also works out answers to these questions in his writings. Retrospective reflection upon ones past life and process of development is a key motif in the three major novels Melville wrote within five years of this letter to Hawthorne: Mardi (1849), Moby-Dick (1851), and Pierre (1852). Each of these three 1 If Melville senses at this moment in 1851 that he will not long be in full bloom, he also senses that he is still, if fleetingly, in full intellectual flower.