Moby-Dick, American Studies and the Aesthetic Education of Man

Moby-Dick has long served as an index of contemporary events and changing paradigms. Yet despite its long and varied history of interpretation, an analysis of the novel’s reception history demonstrates a striking unanimity of purpose. In nearly every instance, Ahab’s excesses and inhumanities are identified and prohibited in the name of ensuring that the novel can aid in the work of furthering the aesthetic education of man. In the process, the artwork’s integrity, achievement and essential irreducibility are subordinated to the demand that artworks provide essential moral instruction. The present essay reconstructs this common task through a close reading of the novel’s reception history, tracking its development from the time of Melville’s contemporaries to more recent debates between Donald E. Pease and William V. Spanos. Through Theodor W. Adorno’s work on aesthetics and society, this critical reinterpretation of Moby-Dick tries to better understand the “wicked book” its author first recognized, and for whose infernal birth he felt, in his own words, “as spotless as the lamb.”