Thesis: Within Moby-Dick, Melville uses Ahab to portray the obsessive nature in the American people and industrialization. Using the article, “The Blue Humanities” by John R. Gillis as an example of the over whaling that almost led to sperm whale extinction. Gillis states, “people began to come back to the sea in search for a quality they felt to be missing in the new industrial environment” with that, the sea became yet another resource of humans to destroy. The obsession of killing the white whale, it is a symbol for the over industrialization that humans caused with our obsessive nature.
I still need to figure out an argument to make my thesis. Industrialization devastated the common people and the landscape. Everyone knows this, but I still need a solid argument to go along with this.
I think you’re onto something, but I think turning industrialization into a strawman devil will only undercut your ability to make a sophisticated claim about the novel. I’m also not sure that there’s a single obsessive nature in the American people– probably more like many obsessive natures, as Melville’s hero, Hawthorne, teaches in his writing. If you’re interested in writing about the environmental aspect of this novel, I might ask you to focus here: ‘The obsession of killing the white whale, it is a symbol for the over industrialization”. Cut out the obsessive aspect of the American people, which you really can’t prove, and instead focus on how the whale–and the hunt for it, and the devastation experienced by the people that hunt it– serves as an allegory for a larger claim about whaling and exploiting nature. I think that might be a more focused and clear claim for you to make. I’m sure that you can find scholarly articles that support that–in other words, a reading of the novel from an eco-critical lens.
For example:
“Melville’s Environmental Vision in “Moby-Dick”
ELIZABETH SCHULTZ
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
Vol. 7, No. 1 (Winter 2000), pp. 97-113 (17 pages)
“The lessons ‘Moby-Dick’ has for a warming world of rising waters”
https://theconversation.com/the-lessons-moby-dick-has-for-a-warming-world-of-rising-waters-171557
Moby-Dick and the “oceanic turn” in American studies
Giorgio Mariani (2025)