“One of them”: Narrative Perspective and Radical Democracy in Moby-Dick and Two Years Before the Mast Open Access

Abstract

Herman Melville and Richard Henry Dana drew from their time as sailors to write, respectively, the novel Moby-Dick and the memoir Two Years Before the Mast. Both writers attempt to capture the experience of sailing “before the mast,” or as common sailors rather than officers. As both authors were not career sailors, their ideas are filtered through their position as authors and as middle-class men. By looking at democracy and labor in these two books, this thesis examines how each narrator positions himself in relation to his working-class shipmates. The first chapter explores death at sea, as the two narrators are forced to reckon with the exploitative reality of sea labor. Frightening glimpses of class-crossing ultimately reconstitute the difference between them and their shipmates. The second chapter views each book as a circle that reinscribes the same hierarchies each narrator goes to sea to escape. Both the desire and inability of each narrator to “become” sailors reveals the broader instability of wage labor, social mobility, and democracy in the U.S.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

Living Radical Democracy.................................................................................................1

Narrative Positionality and Democratic Realization.........................................................8

Literature Review

Melville, Dana, and Radical Democracy...........................................................................11

Freedom, Slavery, and Rationalism in the Developing Atlantic........................................17

Reimagining Labor at Sea.................................................................................................23

Chapter I: I Only Am Escaped: Death, Survival, and Subjectivity..................................................32

Chapter II: Follow Your Leader......................................................................................................46

Conclusion: Fugitive Democracy...................................................................................................63

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	English
Degree	B.A.
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, English History, United States American Studies
Keyword	Perspective Labor Democracy Maritime
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Benjamin Reiss, Emory University
Committee Members	Emma Davenport, Emory University Adriana Chira, Emory University

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