SOURCE: “‘Circle-Sailing’: The Eternal Return of Tabooed Grief in Melville's Moby-Dick” in The Grief Taboo in American Literature: Loss and Prolonged Adolescence in Twain, Melville, and Hemingway, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 38-67.
In the excerpt below, Boker presents a psychoanalytic reading of Melville's motivation in Moby-Dick. She suggests that Melville felt abandoned by his mother and that his art was nourished by “repression, disavowal, and displacement of grief.”
This is a free excerpt of 69 words. There are 16,612 words (approx.
55 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Death in American Literature: Critical Essay by Pamela A. Boker Access Pass.
