Controversy In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick

When an author writes a novel that is infused with years of hard work and personal experiences, it is usually well received. After being commended as thoughtful, thorough, and awe-inspiring, it disappears off the shelves as flocks of interested readers swoop it up. Of course, Herman Melville expected that his masterpiece, Moby-Dick, would be wildly successful. The novel, which Melville based on the daring voyages he took himself, is immersed in lush imagery from the time period, abundant details about the whaling industry, and perplexing themes that were previously unexplored. Never did he imagine that it would ever be a point of controversy. When critics condemned the novel upon its release, Melville, shocked and disheartened, stopped writing

Victorian England was highly conservative in its values, with straightforward novels tending to focus on appropriate, non-provocative topics; Moby-Dick strayed far from this ideal. For instance, when Ishmael, the novel’s protagonist, meets a cannibal, he thinks about how “wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet [he] began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him” (Melville 94). In Victorian England, cannibals would have been seen as repulsive, and authors would have described them as unruly and dangerous. This sympathetic and affectionate description of a savage human being, in addition to other similar instances in the text, was far outside the boundaries of what was considered appropriate at the time. Naturally, many critics despised the novel, and “most recoiled from what one reviewer called its strange ‘horrors and … heroics’” (Delbanco 430). Most other reviews echoed the same tune, as critics found the plot and writing style much too unconventional and horrendous for the time. In fact, before the first edition was released in England, the nineteenth-century publishers felt the need to “remove content they deemed vulgar and/or politically suspect” (Garber). Removing this content significantly lowered the quality of Melville’s