Douglass & Melville
Anchored Together in Neighborly Style
by: Robert K. Wallace
$19.95 $15.00 (paperback) • ISBN 978-0932027-91-7
160 pages • 100+ Photographs & Illustrations• 7.25” x 10”
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Douglas and Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style will be released during the Fifth International Conference of the Melville Society, to be held in New Bedford, June 22-26, 2005. The event celebrates the 150th anniversaries of Melville’s Benito Cereno and Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom.Douglass and Melville compares the lives of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville and shows how these two powerful nineteenth-century figures shared views on important American issues such as race, identity and nationhood. It explores their impact on American culture and the possibility that they were aware of each other’s work. Both men played an important part in New Bedford history. Frederick Douglass, who was raised as a slave in Maryland, sought refuge in New Bedford and became a leading abolitionist, statesman and writer. When Herman Melville had financial problems, he came to New Bedford and signed on to a three-year voyage with a whaling ship. He described New Bedford from his own experience in his renowned novel Moby-Dick.
Today, Douglass and Melville have resurfaced as important figures in our cultural legacy. Frederick Douglass has become a necessary figure in our understanding of African-American history and literature. His speeches, essays, and autobiographies are increasingly regaining the kind of wide circulation they enjoyed in his lifetime. Melville’s status has continued to expand during the last four decades as a variety of his texts are now being appreciated for their multicultural insights. Melville is now valued for addressing many of the same contemporary issues that have brought new attention to the writings of Frederick Douglass.Although Douglass and Melville are regaining some of the cultural centrality they had during their lifetimes (1845-1855), their achievements still tend to be seen separately rather than together. Melville is often treated as a “white” American figure and Douglass as a “black” African-American figure—even though the lives and writings of each man take us “beyond the color line” in ways our culture needs to appreciate and understand. Academic disciplines tend to confine Melville to the literary curriculum, whereas Douglass can be found in history and political science as well as literature. Yet the works of both men cross disciplinary boundaries with a keen holistic vision. They were among the most insightful observers of race, slavery, and freedom in the nineteenth- century.
Douglass lived in New Bedford for four years (from 1838 to 1842), whereas Melville lived in the city less than two weeks (in 1840 and 1841). Yet the city was to remain a touchstone for each man in later life. In July, 1851, Douglass reverted to memories of New Bedford when his Rochester newspaper was under savage attack by his former Garrisonian friends. Douglass reassured his readers that “he who . . . has caulked ships in the shipyards of Baltimore . . . [and] who has rolled oil casks, stowed ships, sawed wood, swept chimneys, and labored at the bellows in New Bedford for a living, until he has hands like horns, has . . . no dread of returning to manual labor” should his newspaper career be destroyed. Melville in 1851 was recalling the New Bedford waterfront in the manuscript of Moby-Dick, published in October of that year. From Ishmael’s arrival in New Bedford in chapter 2 (“The Carpet-Bag”) until his departure in chapter 13 (“Wheelbarrow”), Melville brilliantly recreated the city he had visited ten years earlier.
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