Melvilles Men :: Argumentative Argument Philosophy Papers

Melville's Men The body of this argument lies in a meager psychoanalysis of Melville. I have had to take a very broad approach, look at Melville purely as a man. I have attempted to put the reader into Melville's head, where I have attempted to put myself. To better achieve this I discuss much of Melville's background, hoping to give the reader a sense of what he had experienced. I have written with confidence, but hopefully not too much, you must decide for yourselves what of mine you feel is right. It is always very hard to use psychoanalytical approaches, because, as the mind is a mystery, it is all ultimately unproved. All psychoanalytical opinion is based on event, as all psychology is based on the idea that men are shaped by experience. I speculate below, on things I cannot really know, and I do this only to achieve some rough personal connections between Melville and his Moby-Dick. It serves me, and I hope you as well. Herman Melville might have been a homosexual, or at least, a lover of men. Of course the word, "Homosexual" did not exist in Melville's time and so he could not really be a homosexual. Besides this, there is little to no evidence that Melville ever did, or desired to engage in genital, homosexual sex. There is no way of knowing that he was homosexual, but there are many implications that he at least had strong affections toward men. The question is: How was this reflected in what is generally considered to be Melville's greatest work, Moby-Dick? Or one could even ask, how does the homoeroticism, ever present in Moby-Dick, reflect on Melville's own sexuality? Because homoeroticism, or rather, male friendships are such a large theme in Moby-Dick, one might also think to ask what it all means to the greater message of the book. The parallels between Melville's own sexual identity and the sexual identity of his protagonist, Ishmael are quite strong. Thus it follows that Moby-Dick might h ave been Melville's attempt to understand his own sexuality and its' course, or at least his fantasy. Sigmund Freud theorized that while most male children are secretly attracted to their mothers, homosexual male children harbor attraction toward their fathers. While I am not calling him a homosexual, it seems clear to me that Melville's relationship with his father must have effected him. I assume the effect to be negative, because, Allan Melville was not a model father.