Ralph Waldo Emerson's optimistic ideal of the 'autonomous man' in nature found an echo in the literature of many of his contemporaries . Although many agreed with Emerson's principles, two major writers, Herman Melville and John Keats, chose not to imitate him in their major works. On the contrary, they criticized him. In the following essay, I will first show how Melville's Moby Dick is a critique of the ideals of man exemplified by Emerson in his essays "Self-Reliance" and "Nature." Through Captain Ahab's failure and Ishmael's survival, Melville shows how Emersonian ideals can be perverted and destructive in the search for truth. Second, the Romantic poet Keats also shows the potential for the darker side of self-reliance in his poem “The Fair Lady Without Mercy,” in which the knight, in attempting to capture an elusive truth, ultimately fails. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay For the sake of chronological order, I will begin my analysis with Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Mercy." The beauty of this poem can be seen as the mysterious, non-human other, and paralleled with Moby Dick in the sense that the attempt to encapsulate and capture this elusive truth destroys the truth seeker. In pursuit of the truth, both Ahab and the knight project their distorted version of the truth onto the objects they pursue. The knight in “La Belle” creates a love scenario in which he and this mystical lady are wonderfully united. As critic Theresa Kelley writes, “Neither the reader nor the knight are privy to her inner thoughts,” because she is “a figure known exclusively by her attributes” (Kelley 342). For the knight, the beauty's passive manners are easily interpreted as a semblance of love: "She found me delicious roots, /And wild honey and dewy manna, /And of course, in strange language , she said: /I really love you” (Keats 25-28). is ambiguous; his general intentions are completely based on the knight's fantasies. His “strange language” is obviously reinterpreted by the knight as words of love, in order to perpetuate his favorite scenario: “This “strange language”. ...indicates how figurative meaning tends to “mistake,” being half wrong when it strays from its referent” (Kelley 342). Like Belle's ambiguity in language and actions, the ambiguity of Moby Dick's meaning allows Ahab and the other crew member to think and focus on a specific meaning relating to the concern. personal of each man. It is also important to recognize that the torment the knight experiences while he is “loafing alone and pale” (Keats 46) is, for the most part, self-inflicted. There is no agent to inflict this alienation, only its own sculpted and narrow reality. The eternal Promethean torment that Ahab experiences is also of his own creation: “God help you, old man, your thoughts have created a creature in you; and he whose intense thought thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds on this heart forever; this vulture the very creature it creates” (Melville 1008). Ahab pivots his existence around Moby Dick. If the whale is truly invincible, then Ahab has created a scenario in which he cannot exist. Ahab thus projects a gargantuan meaning onto the whale, even though the whale may be nothing more than a “stupid brute,” according to Starbuck. This meaning is due to the whale's symbolism of all evil in the world: "All that makes the most mad andwho torments...all truth with malice...all evil, for the madman Ahab, was visibly personified and made practically attackable in Moby. Tail. He has heaped upon the white hump of the whale the sum of all the general rage and hatred felt by his whole race from Adam down..." (Melville 989). Narcissism allows Ahab to merge all of his various angers against the universe into a single object. Thus, his monomania breeds a narrow-mindedness that Ahab considers crucial to his ability to complete this quest: "The White Whale swam before him like the monomaniacal incarnation of all those malevolent agents that some deep men feel gnawing away inside them, until 'that they live with half heart and half lungs' (Melville 989) Ahab's inability to let go of the inscrutable culminates in an interaction with Starbuck, in which Starbuck is angered by Ahab's determination to take “revenge on a stupid brute!” Starbuck does not believe that the whale had any free will or guiding principle of its own, but only an animal instinct that caused it to take Ahab's leg. To this, Ahab responds: “He charges me; he piles me up; I see in him a scandalous strength, with an impenetrable malice that strains it. This inscrutable thing is especially what I hate; and whether I be the agent of the white whale, or whether I be the principal of the white whale, I will subject him to this hatred” (Melville 967). This indicates that the physical existence and overall intention of the whale is of no importance to Ahab. Ahab is preoccupied with the elusive truth, the “impenetrable wickedness” that the whale symbolizes for him. However, the only way for him to capture this truth would be to physically kill the whale, thereby possessing the "impenetrability" that had previously eluded him. As critic Michael Hoffman comments: “Three generations of critics have been concerned with what the whale symbolizes. They should have looked at the creator of meanings, Captain Ahab, because it was he, not Melville, who created “meaning.” " of the white whale. He shapes the myth of Moby Dick to give substance, form, and value to his own unhappy life, and he is aided in his efforts by other sailors who, in turn, project their own meanings onto the 'animal.' things he describes. Symbols are attached retrospectively to the ideas with which we begin…” (Sartre 95). Ahab embodies the dangers of merging one's will into a "supreme goal" and trusting oneself to a sense that will always be infected by a narrow individual. However, it still seems possible for the reader to fall into the same trap that ensnared Ahab – the trap of attributing lump-sum meaning to an object in light of an inevitably infected and narcissistic personal agenda. In the first chapter, "Loomings", Ishmael wonders about the magnetism of the sea. He draws a parallel with Narcissus and indicates that this myth is the "key to everything". This parallel seems to foreshadow the presence of Ahab in the he story. In the extensive literary criticism on Moby Dick, Ahab has often been called a "narcissist", an adjective primarily used to describe his selfishness. But when examining the story of Narcissus, we see a greater parallel between Ahab. doomed and the obsessed young boy Both are consumed by something they see in the water, and both plunge toward their deaths in an attempt to merge and therefore grasp the meaning of (and merge with) this reflection. In his famous essay “Nature”,Emerson affirms the reflective qualities of nature toward man by asserting that “nature always bears the colors of the mind” (Emerson 25, nature also seems to create reflections of the mind, these). reflections manifested in the white whale. Ahab recognizes this distorted mirror in "The Dubloon", where, after looking at the golden doubloon and seeing only himself in the room, he deduces that the entire earth is only a reflection of the man: “…this The round globe is only the image of the rounder globe which, like a magician's glass, for each man in turn, only reflects his own mysterious self” (Melville 1254) . This confirms what we already suspected about Ahab; his solipsistic view of the universe reduces reality to a “mirror-like opacity,” in which Ahab sees only himself, reflected by an introspectively sculpted reality (Zoellner 115). Ahab takes this vision of universal thinking to the extreme during the chase itself, when he senses Moby Dick being in his clutches. On the second day of the chase, Starbuck once again begs Ahab to abandon this doomed pursuit under the argument: "...you will never capture him, old man..." To justify his actions to Starbuck, Ahab refers to himself as "destiny". lieutenant”, who is content to “act on orders” (Melville 1394). This manipulation of destiny in Ahab's designs shows the intensity and blindness of his monomania. Not only does the world reflect Ahab, but fate itself is tailored to Ahab's whims. Although Ahab imagines himself lacking willpower, he has actually used it to desire nothing more than to capture Moby Dick: “...surrendering all his thoughts and imaginations to his one supreme goal; this goal, by its pure inveterity of will, imposed itself against the gods and the devils to become a kind of independent and assumed being of its own (Melville 1007). But this will is limited by fate, it is not directed by it. Ahab cannot understand a destiny beyond that which will advance him in his quest. He doesn't do much to justify himself to the world, except for a feeble assertion that he's giving in to fate. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson asserts that “nothing is finally sacred except the integrity of your own mind. Absolve yourself and you will have the suffrage of the world” (Emerson 149). Captain Ahab has in effect absolved himself - directly into the delusion that his quest for truth is so vast, his agenda so great, that he will persist with the "suffrage of the world" even if the whole ship is against it. him. It is difficult for a man to deceive himself when he has a conviction. For Melville, conviction is a dangerous feeling, especially in the case of Ahab, where his convictions align with the truth: “Who is against me? The truth has no limits” (Melville 967). This belief echoes Emerson's conception of man realizing all his possibilities in "Nature." Emerson finds spatial and temporal constraints ineffective in the face of personal truth or will: “We become immortal, because we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that with a perception of truth or a virtuous will they have no affinity” (Emerson 47). Ahab strives to maintain his self-inflicted madness and deliberate alienation, and “assiduously cultivates this dehumanization, protecting it from any influence that might lessen its terrible singularity” (Zoellner 100). He must be completely immersed because he knows that Pip could cure this madness, but does not want to: “There is this in you, poor boy, that I feel cures my illness too much like remedies. as ; and for this hunt, my illness becomes my most desired health” (Melville 1363has a similar feeling, writing, after being delighted by nature, that "the name of the closest friend then seems foreign and accidental: to be). brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and an inconvenience” (Emerson 24), the neighbor for Ahab no longer matters during his immersion, simply an accessory in the great pursuit. in-depth mediation. It is made to serve. He receives the dominion of man as gently as the donkey on which the Savior rode […]” (Emerson 38). Given the destruction that Moby Dick's attempt at "domination" entailed, Melville would probably find this passage laughable. Emerson's "doctrine that nature is a tool and the mind a technician," concisely stated by critic Frederick Garber, is a potentially dangerous presumption when existing alongside evil. Of course, one of Melville's main criticisms of Emerson was his ability to ignore the evil in the world, assuming that it was mitigated by a greater good (Garber, 196). For Melville, this anthropocentric view expressed by Emerson produces tragic results if man cannot accept his insignificance in an impenetrable and immense universe, in which his conceptions of truth are irrelevant and no more primordial than that of any another man. To believe that “all the facts of natural history, taken in isolation, have no value, but are sterile, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life,” is to ignore the incredible autonomy of Moby Dick, the cruelty of the sea, and the futility of man's attempts to rule over nature ( Emerson 32). It seems that an epic drama of man is being played out on the sea, but once man is destroyed in a brief anti-climatic storm, the sea continues "as it rolled five thousand years ago." This anti-climax and eradicating futility demonstrates the ridiculous nature of Ahab's impossible quest. The only survivor of this shipwreck is Ishmael, who from the beginning seemed perfectly aware of his insignificance in the great project, as well as the inscrutable nature of the truth. . Looking back, he said: "I think I can see a little of the motives and motives which, artfully presented in various disguises, induced me to begin to play the part which I played, besides cajoling me into the illusion that it was a choice. resulting from my own impartial free will and discriminating judgment” (Melville 799). Ishmael does not consider the whale his defining truth; he is not obsessed with his own identity in relation to her. Rather, he is an objective viewer and attempts to understand the whale from all angles, including scientific, philosophical, and literary. Unlike his captain, he does not see the whale through the lens of revenge or ultimate truth. Ishmael does not believe he can master the truth by the simple physical conquest of the white whale. At the start of chapter 49, for example, Ishmael bitterly expresses his anger at the universe becoming a "vast farce...and widely suspects that the joke is at no one's expense but his own" (Melville 1035). . This is quite different from the first chapter, where we are introduced to an Ishmael who feels somewhat deceived by his relatively insignificant place in the "great program of Providence", but who comically accepts him as his own, due to that it “was written a long time ago” (Melville 799). Although Ishmael's attitude towards destiny has changed, what has not changed is the belief in destiny itself. Ishmael always humbly accepts his destiny. Unlike Ahab, he does not embark on an immense and autonomous quest to conquer an inescapable destiny and an inscrutable truth. Even in this bitterness.