‘Who Ain’t A Slave?’ The Dialectics of Mastery and Bondage in the Works of Herman Melville

Abstract

In the opening chapter of Moby-Dick, considering the indignity of menial duties imposed upon him by superior officers at sea, Ishmael offers the rhetorical question ‘who ain’t a slave? Tell me that’. Here he implicates all humankind in a condition of slavery, which can be either physical or metaphysical. Underlying Ishmael’s playfully profound declaration are two key insights, which orient major thematic developments in Melville’s fiction. Firstly, that slavery is a universal condition and secondly, that a foundational, metaphysical equality unites all of Melville’s characters. ‘Who ain’t a slave?’ expresses what I see as a pervasive concern in Melville’s work: the balancing of all superficial and limited concepts of mastery and of subjection by the realisation of a basic and inalienable condition of bondage. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the ways in which Melville’s major fictional works develop and substantiate Ishmael’s claim. The emphasis of the analysis is on Melville’s construction of dialectical relationships and how those relationships work to structure his major works. I examine Melville’s narratives as expressions of dialectical processes, in which oppositions are presented and engaged between characters and concepts, within their unique environments. I explore the particular significance of the resolutions that these oppositions produce and analyse the ways in which these oppositions fail to produce resolutions. A particular focus is the relationship between the dialectical interplay evident in Melville’s work and the seminal dialectical model presented by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, especially in his chapter, titled ‘Lordship and Bondage’, in The Phenomenology of Spirit. The analysis aims to detail the overlapping characteristics of both Hegel’s dialectical model and Melville’s narrative dialectics, and to specifically locate the areas of tension and implicit disagreement, which cause Melville’s conclusions to diverge from Hegel’s. By concentrating on the specifics of the texts I intend to demonstrate a new approach to reading Melville, highlighting the dialectical process that constitutes and drives his narratives. Through a detailed interrogation of the dynamics of opposition introduced through the combination of character, concept and environment in Bartleby, Billy Budd, The Confidence-Man, Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick in particular, I aim to establish a coherent reading of Melville’s work as a detailed and subtle expression of universal human bondage. This method of analysis makes the content of Melville’s fiction the primary focus in order to build a crucial thematic link between diverse texts. By drawing attention to the ways in which these texts can be read to reveal complex and layered discourses of mastery and bondage, my aim is to explain precisely what Ishmael meant by ‘who ain’t a slave?’, and why that meaning is central to an understanding of Melville’s oeuvre.