ABSTRACT
THE HIGH HOPES WITH WHICH MELVILLE HAD LAUNCHED MARDI INTO THE literary world soon foundered under the storm of criticism that issued from the marketplace upon the novel’s publication. His masterpiece, as he had considered it, went unappreciated by the critics and the general reading public. Melville found himself hardpressed for money and forced to return to writing the romantic sea novels that his public expected from him, the man who had “lived among the cannibals,” but that he considered incompatible with his present ambitions. Growing increasingly disillusioned and embittered, he wrote Redburn and White-Jacket in an attempt to recapture the readers he had alienated by the ill-fated Mardi and to satisfy his unhappy publisher’s demands for another “successful” novel. It was during the interim between White-Jacket and MobyDick that Melville discovered Hawthorne, who became one of the major influences on his philosophical development. His friendship with Hawthorne was the only really close mentoring relationship Melville ever experienced, and he felt that in Hawthorne he had found his alter-ego; here he found affirmation of his own growing awareness of the limitations of optimism, and during the months when their relationship was at its most intense, Melville underwent an immense change in attitude-especially toward Transcendentalism.
