The Impact of Modern European Thought on American Renaissance

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This study brought forth two main achievements : "'Clap eye on' Captain Pe(g)leg/Ahab : Herman Melville's Anti-Nationalistic Revision of the 1850 Manuscript of Moby-Dick" submitted to The Journal of the American Literature Society of Japan and "Development of American Dialectics : Resonance and Contrast between Herman Melville's Billy Budd and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun" submitted to Studies in English Literature. In the former article, I began the arguments from the question of whether Melville reflected on Captain Ahab the Cartesian dualism of spirit and body or the thing itself, and surmised that Melville's revision of the manuscripts of Moby-Dick was the manifestation of his instable attitude toward the textual "thing." On the basis of this surmise, I developed the thesis that the revision of Moby-Dick was in close relation to the political situation of those days, and Melville shifted the role of an one-legged captain from Pe(g)leg to Ahab in order to alienate himself f … More rom the ideology of American democracy. This shift shows Melville's instable response to the body or the thing itself, or to the text as a thing, which is the evidence of his noticing of ontological ineffability of the body or the thing itself incapable of being resolved by the Cartesian spiritualism.In the latter article, I analyzed Herman Melville's Billy Budd and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, their last novels published many years apart and long after the fading of their ardent friendship. Above all, the two works deal with the same motif, an innocent young man's murderous act. Behind this motif lies an important socio-philosophic issue : if there lurks fierce violence beneath a natural mind, how can human beings guide that animalistic impulse to a tamed, harmless condition? To put it in a simple way, how can wild nature be reconfigured through civilizing process? Upon this, they propose opposite answers ; while Hawthorne's Donatello changes into an intelligent being through penitence, Billy Budd is executed to death. Significantly, Billy's original innocence remains the same.Before the two writers reached such difference, their texts had resonated and contrasted with each other through the discovery of untamable nature concealed behind the Kantian phenomena and the acceptance of the Hegelian progressivism. By explicating the process of this development and locating the two writers in a stream of Western philosophy, this essay looks into their views of human growth from natural states to social beings, and then makes clear what Donatello and Billy's different destinies signify. In analyzing their ideas, this essay uses Hegel's terms, "mediation" which means an act of connecting an object with spiritual or linguistic meanings and "immediacy" which means a state of an object disconnected with any spiritual or linguistic meanings.Kant defines the external phenomena as reflection of a human being's inner state, and states that what lies behind reflection, or "the thing itself" cannot be recognized. Hawthorne and Melville criticize this idea in their early works. For example, Hawthorne looks beyond this reflection, creating Pearl both as another scarlet letter signifying Hester's sinful mind and as a character who loses "reference and adaptation to the world." Though Pearl is being built into the society, her wild nature resists being codified in the Kantian externalization of the inner state. Melville's Captain Ahab looks at Moby Dick as the reflection of his own evil nature, and at the same time, tries to step beyond "[a]ll visible objects" or the limit of human experience, merging with nature itself.Obviously, Donatello's "savage fierceness" follows Pearl's case. He cannot repress his wild nature and tries to murder Antonio. However, after the incident, Donatello learns to sense the reflection of his sinful mind, and recovers "the sweet and delightful characteristics of the antique Faun" in a new way, which means his past nature reflected on the Faun has been mediated with his newly gained intellect. Now he is not what he was. Thus, his existence is placed in the constant mediation between the spiritual and the material, the inner and the outer, the past and the present, and his personality is always renewed. Here, Hawthorne went over the Kantian phenomenology and adopted the Hegelian progressivism. On the other hand, though Melville's characterization of Billy Budd is analogous to Hawthorne's Donatello and Billy commits the same crime as Donatello, Billy's natural state does not change. In a meaning, Billy's stutter can be interpreted as the case of failure in the Hegelian mediation. Rather, Melville, by describing a sailor who composes a ballad from Billy's tragedy, finds a way of recovering beauty not through spiritual operation, but through immediate integration of past experiences by the workings of memory. At the final stage, the two writers found the highly different aesthetics. Less