The Imperial Self in American LifeStephen J. Whitfield
From Columbia Journal of American Studies Vol. 4, No. 1 2000
An historian who taught Turner in graduate school at Johns Hopkins was Woodrow Wilson, who later proclaimed: "We were very heedless and in a hurry to be great." [14] Here one might add that language itself can sometimes be revealing of this impulse: Wilson and his fellow American politicians run for office, whereas British candidates merely stand for office. Americans expected to master the dimension of time. Jay Gatsby is manifestly in a hurry to be great, no matter how high the ethical price, no matter how sinister his associates. When Nick Carraway advises his neighbor not to ask too much of Mrs. Tom Buchanan, and utters the cliche that "you can't repeat the past," Gatsby's rebuttal is amazing. He does not say that he is certainly going to try, or that he dares to hope that what he cherishes can be revised. His response is brazen in its self-assurance: "Why of course you can!" [15] His hydroplane has mastered air and water, and his cream-colored limousine has mastered earth. But by hastily demanding that Daisy Buchanan renounce her husband during the hottest part of the summer, as they pass through the Valley of Ashes, Gatsby is too absorbed in his own fabulous illusions to achieve the conquest of the fourth of the elements: fire. In the intensity of his faith in the power he possesses to define his life and to rearrange Daisy's, in the mad excess of his desires to defeat time--as he has already conquered space--and to propel himself into the upper class, Fitzgerald's protagonist is the representative "imperial self" in American fiction. Perhaps his only rival had been created by Herman Melville, who died in virtual obscurity only two years before Turner gave the American past its most influential formulation. Moby Dick had presented the most terrifying literary picture of limitless striving and uncontrolled ambition, though this novel has been read in countless other ways, not least as a parable of the Jacksonian America which Tocqueville had so ambivalently analyzed. (The crew of the Pequod numbers 31, the number of states in the Union in 1851.) Moby Dick is a hybrid and a travelogue; a whaling manual (so full of such lore about leviathans of the sea that the Yale University library had catalogued it under Cetology, the zoology of whales); an epic; a tall tale; a romance; and a tragedy (though without a resolution). What Frank Lloyd Wright said of "Fallingwater" (1936), near Pittsburgh, the most gorgeous house he ever designed, is an apt way of classifying Melville's novel (or of not classifying it): "It has no limitations as to form." [16] But Melville's theme is apparent enough, and can be described as the will to transcend boundaries. At the center of the novel is Captain Ahab's excessive yearning, springing from an obsessive solipsism and heartless drive to maximize his own power.
In the self-centered mind of the master of the Pequod, the Emersonian ideal of "self-reliance" is pushed to the outer limits of sanity and beyond, as the vengeful Ahab himself concedes: "All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad." He knows how to use the crew as instruments in his own design, treating the sailors as objects--as though parts of a machine--joined to his own hateful purpose. He is canny enough to know that "to accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order." When one of those cogs, the first mate, momentarily resists Ahab's metaphysical defiance of any prudent course and demurs from his captain's flagrant disregard for realism, Ahab tells Starbuck: "Talk not to me of blasphemy, man. I'd strike the sun if it insulted me." The diagnosis in Democracy in America of horrible isolation resulting from the vain and remorseless pursuit of one's ends finds its most doomed exemplar in this monomaniac who has left his wife and children behind in quest of the white whale. For Ahab is maimed and "unmanned," locked inside the prison of his own self and its calculated passion for revenge. When the gold coin of Ecuador is nailed to the mast as a reward for the first of the crew to spot the foe, the doubloon is depicted in Ahab's soliloquy in terms of "the firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, the victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magicians glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self" as if the captain were inhabiting a Ptolemaic universe revolving around his own self. [17] So ferocious a need for pursuit and mastery also brings down all those who join him in the enterprise (except for Ishmael). All but the narrator are damned to share a terrible fate unredeemed by sympathy or sensitivity, a fate that is the consequence of a self-contained drive bereft of any sense of proportion or restraint.
Stephen J. Whitfield holds the Max Richter Chair in American Civilization at Brandeis University . He is the author of eight books, including most recently A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (1988), The Culture of the Cold War (1996), and In Search of American Jewish Culture (1999). Professor Whitfield is also the editor of A Companion to 20th-Century America (2004).