SOURCE: Lanzinger, Klaus. “Melville's Redburn: Old World Expectations and Disappointments.” In Americana-Austriaca, pp. 67-76. Stuttgart: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1974.

In the following essay, Lanzinger discusses Melville's disappointment and disenchantment with Europe as a legendary cultural mecca.

Although Herman Melville's fourth novel, Redburn: His First Voyage (1849), has received considerable critical attention since Gilman's breakthrough study of the “little nursery tale”,¹ the central problem of Redburn's relation to the Old World or Europe has hardly been touched upon to date. Much attention has been given to the theme of initiation from innocence to evil, of his disillusionment, and to the structural organization of the book, but Redburn's disenchantment has not been clearly explained owing to his cultural disappointment with the Old World.

Redburn could be called Melville's European novel. As such it anticipates the European theme in Hawthorne's Marbel Faun (1860), Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad (1869), and the novels by Henry James. Although...