The Head and the Heart in Melville's Mardi

Extract

Melville's Mardi is the account of an ostensible search for a lost, ideal maiden. But from beginning to end its true object seems to be rather an undiscovered, ideal man, such a man as Babbalanja described to King Abrazza: “Cerebrum must not overbalance cerebellum; our brains should be round as globes; and planted on capacious chests, inhaling mighty morning inspirations. We have had vast developments of parts of men; but none of manly wholes. Before a full-developed man, Mardi would fall down and worship.” For such a man Melville's whole literary life, in fact, was a search, which naturally discovered more halves than wholes, more Ababs and Pierres than Jack Chases—more Emersons, Hawthornes, and Goethes than Shakespeares. Without doubt Melville's sympathies between halves lay with the heart, yet he regarded neither as adequate, uncomplicated, or hostile to the other. As the earliest, longest, and most undisguised account of this search for the “full-developed man,” Mardi is the most important single work by Melville for the study of one of his most important themes.