After reading Melville’s Anti-Transcendentalist text, I am
still torn on where I stand. I still don’t find myself a transcendentalist or
an anti-transcendentalist. Like I stated in my original blog, I believe that
there is good and evil in every being. It is all in how you look at things and
which you choose to promote. There is no case where a person’s soul is only
good or only bad.
In Fuller’s Leila,
it is clear that her depiction of the human soul is a feminine force for good.
It is a peaceful, clear pond. Melville’s Moby-Dick
offers a very different picture of the dark depths of the soul lurking below
us. In this way, both authors create vivid settings of the souls—the
transcendentalist’s peaceful and serene, the anti-transcendentalist’s rough and
disturbed.
Reading Melville’s piece I did find interest in his use of
sex. He used the female figure as the weak, surface-level peace and the male
figure as the powerful, deep, and churning inner-soul. He talks little of the
relationship between them, but it can be inferred that they are together. They
make up the person as a whole. For this reason, I think I can relate more so to
anti-transcendentalism. I see that there are both forces of good and bad, but
not that women are weaker or shallower. Good and bad, in this case women and men,
are interwoven in the soul.
No comments:
Post a Comment