Well here's a find if ever I saw one. Some of you know that I am currently in classes studying, respectively, Moby Dick and Paradise Lost, and I've been working at expanding my research base a little bit. Well, in searching for scholarly sources to go with some of the ideas that I presented in my last post, "God in the Whale," I came across a work that draws a really fascinating connection between Milton's Satan and Melville's Ahab. In Leslie Sheldon points draws on the research of other scholars to provide a stunning comparison of the two characters:[I]n Guttmann's view [ . . . ] "Milton's fable is used to supplement Melville's own." (2) The drawing of Miltonic connections in the criticism is, furthermore, often associated with the contention that Melville interpreted the epic in a primarily "Romantic" and "Satanic School" way, attributing to Milton (as did Blake), (3) an unconscious "sympathy for the Devil," a view apparently given some support by the recently discovered marginalia in Melville's personal copy of Milton's poetry. (4) Fifty years ago, Henry A. Murray claimed that "Melville's Satan is the spitting image of Milton's hero ... the stricken, passionate, indignant, and often eloquent rebel angel of Paradise Lost, whose role is played by Ahab" (5) And as recently as 1998, Paul Giles similarly noted that Ahab's "desire for revenge on the white whale is as anguished as Satan's quest in Milton's poem for vengeance against God."
