SOURCE: Sten, Christopher W. “Melville's ‘Gentleman Forger’: The Struggle for Identity in Redburn.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 21 (fall 1979): 347-67.

In the following essay, Sten suggests that Melville's Wellingborough Redburn undergoes not a simple initiation over the course of the novel, but rather the far more complicated and lengthy process of identity formation.

Since William H. Gilman's Melville's Early Life and ‘Redburn’ (1951) launched the scholarly discussion of Melville's fourth novel as something more than a minor chapter in the author's life story, critics of Redburn (1849) have debated the questions of whether and how the title character matures during the story.¹ Until James Schroeter, in 1967, challenged the prevailing “mythic” interpretations of the novel, most commentators accepted the notion that Redburn's growth follows the typically “American” pattern of the “initiation of innocence into evil” described by Newton Arvin in 1950.² While Schroeter, too, argued that Redburn shows clear signs of...