The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 29 (2018)
Copyright © 2018 Michiko Shimokobe. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
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Inland/Oceanic Imagination in
Melville’s Redburn: Expansion andMemory in the Political Climate of America

Michiko Shimokobe*

Introduction: Space And Memory
In Transpacific Imaginations, Yunte Huang argues that a specific space
has a specific kind of sedimentation of memory: “I do not mean simply thateach Pacific nation, culture, or island . . . has distinct memories of the past.
What concerns me rather is the different ways of enunciating the past andprojecting the future with respect to a distinct sense of historicity” [italics
added] (3). In addition to focusing on the Pacific, I would like to discuss two
specific spaces of nineteenth-century America: the North American
continent, across which the United States was rapidly expanding, and theAtlantic Ocean, across which the nation tried to identify itself against its
mother country. Each space, inland and oceanic, is imbued with a sense of
the future in addition to “distinct memories of the past.” It is this dual
function of memories that underscores the significance of “the different
ways of enunciating the past and projecting the future.”
In this article, I discuss the psychological impact of space and memory on
the people who lived in nineteenth-century America, which was undergoing
rapid transformation both geographically and ideologically. Constantchanges in both the boundaries of US territory and relations with the*Professor, Seikei University3

4    Michiko Shimokobe

continent across the Atlantic made a coherent discourse of nationhood
impossible. In such a state of constant transition, memory of the past is
continuously overwritten, and the influence of previous experience cannot
be directly tied to the contemporary reflection of memory. Therefore, “theways of enunciating the past and projecting the future” is an essential topic
for a discussion of the function of memory during the age of expansion in
nineteenth-century America.
I will here address Herman Melville’s fourth novel, Redburn (1849). In
1845, John L. O’Sullivan published an article, “Annexation,” that aroused a
spirit of expansionism among the American people under the slogan“Manifest Destiny.”1 Redburn was, thus, published in the midst of a politicalclimate of expansionism that was carried out on a contiguous space of landand promoted by “inland imagination” (7). Melville’s autobiographicalnovel, however, was prompted by another type of expansionism, one thatcovered spaces not contiguous to the North American continent, that is, theocean. The mix of inland and oceanic imagination in Redburn represents thepolitical climate of America in the 1840s.
I. Expansion in the American Imagination
It is widely assumed among Americanists that expansionism is one of themost essential forces in American history. No country had grown so rapidly
and globally as this one starting from small pieces of land settled by English
planters to a country extending not only across the North American
continent but also across the ocean. Unlike its mother country, England,
which once expanded and shrunk dramatically, the United States has so far
kept spreading out without losing any land throughout its history. Therefore,
space expansion has been the basic type of movement for the United States,
both in political climate and cultural discourse.
This unprecedented rapidity and linearity of expansion brought
idiosyncratic perceptions of space to the minds of the American people. By
imagining the extent of space they had come to occupy during each step of
their nation’s history, Americans have told their unique narratives. Julius W.
Pratt, a representative scholar of American expansionism, in reviewing thehistory of American territorial expansion, wrote, “For every step in thatprocess, ingenious minds have found the best of reasons” (9). To seek thereason for an action, especially in the political sphere, narratives of eachcase have been invented by the promoters to validate what the nation has
done or is about to do. Some call this process narrative ideology, while

Inland/Oceanic Imagination in Melville’s Redburn    5others call it cultural myth making. Pratt points out that expansionists living
in various periods of American history have invoked specific narratives,
such as “a God of Nature, a God of Democracy, a God of Evolution, and a
God of Business” (17).2
Whatever narrative is advocated, all the narratives share one motivation
under the surface of their discourse—justification. Research on American
expansionism has mainly focused on this aspect of the narrative—why theactions are necessary at a certain historical phase and how pious/economic/
political reasons are found to sanction territorial acquisition.
In the course of US history, there have been two periods during which thenational movement of expansion was conspicuous: the early nineteenth
century and the turn of the nineteenth century. The former is called the“Westward movement,” and it was triggered by the Louisiana Purchase(1803), which doubled the size of the United States. It was accelerated by
the political slogan of Manifest Destiny. Charles Vevier, a diplomatic
historian, argues that American continentalism “viewed much of North
America as a stage displaying the evolving drama of a unique politicalsociety, distinct from that of Europe and glowing in the white light ofmanifest destiny” [italics added] (18). The people of this period believed andput forward the idea that the divine hand of God reserved the North
American continent for a democratic nation.
After the Civil War, according to Pratt, the expansionist program seemed
to collapse, “followed by a general loss of interest in such enterprises” (13).
At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the movement of expansion
recovered its momentum. The Spanish-American War of 1898 raised
popular consciousness and political interest in expansion, stimulated by
Alfred Thayer Mahan’s popular argument about sea power being anessential element of national greatness.
These two bursts of expansionism in American history differ in terms of
the space of their performance. The expansionism of the early nineteenth
century was enacted solely on land, that is, the space of the North American
continent, whereas the latter period covered global spaces interrupted byseas such as the Caribbean and the Pacific. How is the narrative of
expansion made when the action of extending territory is carried out over acontiguous space? Likewise, what kind of imagination is necessary for
inventing a narrative of acquisition of a space not contiguous to the space inwhich one is? The narrative of the former is formed by inland imaginationand that of the latter by oceanic imagination. Let us examine the mental
image of the territorial space formed in each case of expansion.

6    Michiko Shimokobe

II. The Inland Imagination of Young Redburn
Redburn is a drama of a young man’s voyage across the Atlantic on amerchant ship. At the beginning of the story, the narrator states how hedecides to go to sea, prompted by “a vague prophetic thought, that I wasfated, one day or other, to be a great voyager” (11). Reading the ship
advertisements in New York newspapers, Redburn reports, “To my young
inland imagination every word in an advertisement like this suggested
volumes of thought” [italics added] (7).3 This young boy, who has justmoved from an inland village on the Hudson River, likes to dream about
foreign towns that he has never been to, especially those in Europe. Redburn
describes how he created mental images of scenes of foreign countries: “Allthese my imaginations were wonderfully assisted by certain shadowy
reminiscences of wharves, and warehouses, and shipping, with which a
residence in a seaport during early childhood had supplied me” [italics
added] (8). Recalling past events supplies young Redburn with the power ofimagining countries across the ocean. What connects his mental image of
faraway towns to reality? We are informed of the way these reminiscenceswere kept by Redburn, who “remembered standing with his father on thewharf when a large ship was getting under way, and rounding the head of thepier” [italics added] (8). It is Redburn’s father who connects, in theimagination of the young son, the image of a strange town to the reality. His
father, an importer in New York City, “had several times crossed the Atlantic
on business affairs” (9). Through experiences shared with a person who had
actually been to Europe, Redburn could invent the image of what he has
never seen in reality. Redburn remembers his father’s memories.
In his youth, his father used to tell Redburn about his perilous experiencesof voyages along with describing scenes of towns on the other side of theAtlantic. Redburn, now the matured narrator telling the story, recalls his
young imagination of the sea: “Indeed, during my early life, most of mythoughts of the sea were connected with the land; but with fine old lands, fullof mossy cathedrals and churches, and long narrow, crooked streets without
side-walks, and lined with strange houses” [italics added] (9). In Redburn’s
imagination, the sea was firmly connected with the impressions he received
in his native town where he lived with his father.
At this point, I would like to consider the reason why Redburn calls his
own imagination an inland imagination. Specifying his young reveries as“inland,” Redburn defines his thoughts of faraway space across the ocean as
the imagination of a person standing on land on which he expects to find old

Inland/Oceanic Imagination in Melville’s Redburn    7churches, narrow streets, strange houses, and so on. The feet of the person
who imagines foreign space are on his native soil (on land). The contiguity
provided by standing on the land, where we can feel connected with whatsurrounds us, makes the connection of the signifier and the signified
possible. Thus, Redburn, on his native land, is able to project the familiarthings he sees into what he expects to see in foreign space. He never thinks
there will be a fatal discrepancy between what he imagines on his own land
and what he will see on the other side of the ocean.
With continuity over time and space, we assume that two objects willremain next to each other. The connection between what one sees and what
one saw or might see is taken for granted. Our mind remains stable, and theself is filled with a feeling of wholeness in both time and space. This is why
Redburn is able to think, before he has even traveled, about “telling his own
adventures to an eager auditory” (11) after he returns from his voyage.
Young Redburn used to listen to his father telling his stories, entertaining
strange gentlemen over wine after dinner. Repeating what his father did,Redburn tries to declare the continuity of his identity before and after hisvoyage to Europe.
Before his voyage to Liverpool, Redburn, who longs for faraway lands,
easily imagines himself strolling down the streets of a foreign town. There isno split between his two selves, the one in his hometown and the other in the
future in the strange town. For Redburn, the image (the signifier) coincides
perfectly with the thing (the signified): he never doubts that he can findbuildings and streets in Liverpool at the same spots where they are locatedin the guidebook his father left for him.
III. The Guidebook as the Vacant Container of Identity
The bond between Redburn and his deceased father is located in the odd
volumes in his father’s library, among which is “a collection of old
European and English guide-books which he had bought on his travels, agreat many years ago” (155). In his childhood, Redburn spent much timereading these guidebooks, studying the descriptions of foreign countries, andgazing at the pictures. When he leaves home in his inland hometown for
New York, he chooses one of the guidebooks, The Picture of Liverpool, andtakes it along in case he is ever on board a ship going to Liverpool.
During Redburn’s eventual transatlantic voyage to Liverpool, theguidebook remains an identity prop for a son who plans to retrace hisfather’s footsteps. He reads the history of the town thoroughly and masters

8    Michiko Shimokobe

the columns of statistics about the population so enthusiastically that he“began to think he had been born in Liverpool” (166). Familiarizing himself
with the map of Liverpool, he seems to acquire a space orientation thatmakes him feel native to the foreign town. At this moment, Redburn
believes that he has succeeded in building a proper mental map of the town
he is going to visit.4
What gives Redburn the confidence that he exists in this imaginary spaceis the hard work he has done of making correspondences between the verbal
descriptions in the guidebook and the book’s illustrations. Perusing thedescriptions of public edifices in Liverpool, he “scrupulously compared thetext with the corresponding engraving, to see whether they corroborated
each other” [italics added] (165). By associating the words in the oldmorocco guidebook with the real corners of the town he is going to visit,Redburn is satisfied with the fidelity of the signs and their referents.
Before landing on the soil of Liverpool, Redburn takes out his guidebook“to see how the map would compare with the identical place itself” andbecomes puzzled to find that the actual objects he witnesses bear noresemblance to those in the guidebook. Trying not to doubt the credibility of“the family servant who had so faithfully served his own father” (166),
Redburn lands in Liverpool.
The happy correspondence of the signifier and signified further collapses
during his first walk in the town. Strolling around Liverpool, the son finds
himself on Hall Street that his father marked in the guidebook. Redburn’sheart is filled with affectionate emotions for his father, as the bond between
the information in the guidebook and real objects seems to be united firmly,
just like the father-son bond. This happy expectation does not last long,
however, as Redburn is deeply disappointed when he is to not be able tolocate Riddough’s Hotel, where “his father had stopped, slept and dined,
smoked his cigar, opened his letters, and read the papers” (171).
It is at this moment that “a new light broke in upon him concerning his
guide-book” (171). When the authority that had guided the son turns out tobe useless, the bond between the signifier and the signified dissolves. In
Lacanian terms, the Name-of-the-Father that presides in the Symbolic Orderis missing, and the identity of the son is lost.
The semiotic blow strikes Redburn not only at the disappearance of thesignified but also by the confusion of the signifying process of the place inthe town. It is the Liverpool customhouse that gives a fatal blow toRedburn’s competence in recognition.
Walking through the town with his guidebook, Redburn “found himself

Inland/Oceanic Imagination in Melville’s Redburn    9before a spacious and splendid pile of sculptured brownstone; and entering
the porch, perceived from incontrovertible tokens that it must be theCustom-house” (172). Taking out his guidebook again, Redburn is surprised
to find that “he was entirely mistaken with regard to this Custom-house; forprecisely where he stood, ‘The Old Dock’ must be standing” (173).
Originally, at this spot stood the “pool” that was made into the Old Dock.
After being filled up with mud, the site was rebuilt for the customhousestanding before Redburn with “incontrovertible tokens.” Redburn
understands the reason for this signifying confusion by collecting pieces of
information indicating that the site originally stood as the “pool” and wasmade into the “Old Dock” for shipping and that after being filled up it
became the site of the customhouse.
Christopher Hager gives a convincing argument about the symbolic
environment of Redburn’s experience in Liverpool. Hager explains theincongruousness of the two representations of the same spot—one denotes it
as “dock” and the other denotes it as “customhouse”: “Both the dock and thecustomhouse are sites of commerce, only at different stages of economic
development” (317). The conjunction of the signifier and signified are
performed differently at different stages of the history of the town. The siteused to be connected with the dock when it was used for shipping
commodities, and it is now joined to the customhouse, where anotheractivity of commerce is taking place.
This episode about the accuracy/inaccuracy of the descriptions in theguidebook of Redburn’s father sheds an interesting light on my discussion ofinland/oceanic imagination. In addition to Hager’s argument that the place isdenoted differently in the course of history, I would like to say that the site
gets synchronic connotation in terms of space, one inland and the othermaritime. A density of ships at the dock represents the sea, while a buildingof brownstone at the customhouse indicates land. The guidebook talks about
the first impression that strikes the stranger visiting the dock as “thesingularity of so great a number of ships afloat in the very heart of the town,
without discovering any connection with the sea” [italics Melville’s] (173).
Is this site one of the sea or the land? Finding the customhouse, whichsignifies the land, at the place where ships, the representation of the sea,should have been, Redburn’s confidence in signification totters and collapses
in semiotic confusion.
When Redburn is on his way to Liverpool, given his familiarity with themap in the guidebook, he feels as if he is going to see his native town.
“Redburn then” inhabited both his father’s town and his own real space10    Michiko Shimokobe

where “Redburn now” is at the same time. However, after landing inLiverpool, his plenary experience of self is forced into crisis. When he finds
the guidebook unreliable, Redburn loses his confidence about navigating thespace of the foreign town. In Liverpool, he finds his own self bound neither
to time nor to space. The entire experience of the guidebook is, according toHager, “confounding” to Redburn, who might be diagnosed with “theproblems of fluctuating geopolitical identity” (310). The guidebook turns out
to be distant from the reality in which he actually lives. The precious
guidebook bound in green morocco has become “the vacant space of selfknowledge” (321).
IV. The Atlantic as the Site of Transformation
What happens to the imagination of young Redburn after his transatlantic
voyage and his landing on the soil of England? In other words, what does hefind missing in the town where he was looking forward to encountering thememories of his father?
Redburn acknowledges the loss of the referential competence of thelanguage in the guidebook that his father left for him. The son feels that the
memories of his father suffer from being polluted by signifying
incompetence and that the correspondence between the sign and the referent
breaks down. It is at this event that the ligament joining him with his father
is torn, and the son is left alone without the referential support of his father.
In this way, young Redburn loses the semiotic integrity that supported his
own identity as a result of his transatlantic voyage to England.
To view the conflict in his symbolic environment, let me analyze thesemiotic confusion concerning the site Redburn visits to locate the place of
the “Old Dock” on a page of the guidebook. As mentioned, he is surprised tofind the customhouse where, according to the authority of his guidebook,“‘The Old Dock’ must be standing” (173).
This place is denoted as a “dock,” signifying the “sea,” and, at the sametime, there is “a building of a Custom-house,” signifying “land.” It is truethat the site, chronologically, holds two different representations in thecourse of its history, but these two ways of signification make Redburn’s
imagination confused between that of land and that of sea.
Facing two different significations at one spot can bring fatal damage tothe function of a person’s memory. An effective memory system, according
to Johnathan K. Foster, who worked in the field of memory and memory
disorders, involves three steps: (1) encoding information, (2) storing or

Inland/Oceanic Imagination in Melville’s Redburn    11retaining that information faithfully, and (3) retrieving or accessing that
stored information (25).5 In the case of the guidebook to Liverpool, theinformation has already been encoded and stored by the author of theguidebook, which Redburn tries to use for his own orientation to the town.
Though the pieces of information—geographical, historical, andcultural—were encoded and stored not by his father but by the editor,
Redburn treats the guidebook with affection as if it were part of his father.
He addresses the guidebook, which has turned out to be useless to Redburn
as an introduction to Liverpool, “Poor old guide-book . . . I will not use youwith despite, old Morocco! and you will yet prove a trusty conductor
through many old streets in the old parts of this town” (172).
The information in the guidebook represents the sacred memory of his
father, and so the son never discards it as useless. Foster says, “What people
remember is mediated by their emotional and personal commitment to—andinvestment in—the original to-be-remembered event” (12). “The original tobe-remembered event” in Liverpool, for Redburn, is what his father once
experienced in the town. The emotional and filial commitment to thememory of his father should have been easily accessed when Redburn
walked around Liverpool with the guidebook in his hand.
It is at the third stage of memory—retrieving the stored information—that
the function of memory fails in Redburn’s experience. Searching for the Old
Dock, Redburn is led to a different representation that bears no connection
to the sea. With Redburn’s failure to retrieve the original to-be-rememberedobject, the link between Redburn and his father is severed. The contiguity ofthe sign and its referent collapses when Redburn finds the words “the Old
Dock” in his guidebook connected to the huge brownstone building in frontof him.
The contiguity of the sign and its referent have provided the son with anemotional and filial tie with his father. If the sign, “the Old Dock,” on thepage of the guidebook were to be contiguous with the real spot in Liverpool,
Redburn could confirm a palpable connection with the experience of his
father. This is how Redburn’s imagination works, and he calls his own
imagination an “inland imagination” that functions on a contiguous space—
the continent of North America.
It is notable that the dysfunction of signs occurs after Redburn makes atransatlantic voyage. How does the huge ocean strike Redburn’s
geographical imagination? His inland imagination suffers from radical
changes when he is crossing the Atlantic, a vast space of water that exists
between his native land and England.

12    Michiko Shimokobe

In the text of Redburn, the term Atlantic appears twenty-three times.
Interestingly, these twenty-three Atlantics are divided into two kinds ofusage: thirteen Atlantics are used as the objects of either a verb, “cross,” or
preposition, “across,” whereas the other ten Atlantics appear with adjectives
denoting huge spaces such as “wide,” “great,” and “broad.” Of the thirteen
Atlantics after “cross” or “across,” five are the objects of the verb “cross,”and eight follow the preposition “across.”6 In both usages, the oceanic void
between the two continents—North America and Europe—is the criticalspace where something fatal happens to Redburn. His relation to his father
disappears, and the semiotic environment changes dramatically. After hesteps on the soil of England, his “inland imagination” suffers from fatal
damage and stops functioning to link his mental image to the object inreality. This is why he gets confused when he finds not the customhouse but
the Old Dock. Redburn’s self becomes riven when his father’s guidebook
turns out to be unreliable. For Redburn, referential contiguity as well as his
filial bond to his father dissolves after the voyage across the Atlantic.
Both the verb “to cross” and the preposition “across” presuppose
movement from one side to another. In changing one’s position, the person
who moves transfers himself from his native space (one side) to a foreign
space (the other). In the case of Redburn crossing the Atlantic onboard theHighlander, bound for Liverpool, he found retrospectively that he is forced
to discard his idealized view of the world as well as his total feeling of theself after finding the guidebook unreliable. In other words, Redburn istransformed when he crosses the fatal space where the function of his inland
imagination stops working.
Ten Atlantics in the novel are preceded by the adjectives “broad,” “wide,”and “great,” depicting the notion of expansion.7 The huge space between thetwo continents is covered with a broad ocean, including a wide variety ofthings, thus appearing great to the self who is floating upon it. The
protagonist, who finds himself in an identity crisis, gets disorientated by the
expanse of the ocean, which turns out, in retrospect, to be the site of histransformation.
V. Transformation, Trauma, and Expansion
Because the father-son relation is an important theme in Redburn, I would
like to cite serious biographical events concerning fatherhood in Melville’s
life. In 1832, when Melville was twelve, his father, Allan Melville, diedsuddenly. In 1867, Herman, now father of two sons, found his son Malcolm

Inland/Oceanic Imagination in Melville’s Redburn    13dead in his bedroom with self-inflicted gunshot wounds. John Bryant, aleading Melville scholar, locates “two wounds: the son who lost a father; thefather who lost a son” in the life of Melville and finds the two father wounds
a “significant grounding for our thinking about Melville’s creativity” (204).
How is the father wound announced in the text of Redburn? Bryantemphasizes the meaning of the wound in this autobiographical novel andpoints out the narrative strategies of telling the story. As Redburn is told by anarrator recounting his juvenile experience much later after he has returned
from his voyage, “the modulations of voice between the angry boy (then)and the older, still boy-like man (now) are evident” (206). The discrepancy
between the two personalities means that Redburn’s competence inrecognition collapsed during his voyage to Liverpool and that thistransformation leaves “the ineradicable scar” (206) in the protagonist as a
trauma.
Trauma is a special kind of memory that causes anxiety in one’s mind.
The most important feature of trauma is that the memory is frozen deep
down so that it is almost forgotten. It demands a repetition of the actual
scene in which the shocking event has occurred. Bryant uses the trauma
theory of Cathy Caruth to investigate the narrative strategy of Redburn.
Caruth defines trauma in her classic book Unclaimed Experience “as the
response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are
not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks,
nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena” [italics added] (91). There are
two positions concerning traumatic experience—one is when the person
encounters “an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events.” andthe other is when that person suffers later from “repeated flashbacks,
nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena.” In one position, the personpresent at the shocking events cannot “fully grasp [them] as they occur,” andin the other position, the person has to return to the scene to encounter the
event and grasp its real meaning. This is the task called “working through”
in the field of psychoanalysis. Caruth recommends that we listen to “a voicethat is paradoxically released through the wound” [italics added] (2).8
Redburn consists of the same narrative structure as that of trauma inwhich the memory of it is voiced by/through the voice of the other. This
autobiographical novel is narrated by a mature narrator (Redburn-now)
remembering and telling the events that an immature sailor (Redburn-then)went through. Bryant argues that “these necessary oscillations of then andnow, self and other, emerge in aestheticized versions of the wound evident in
one of Melville’s narrative strategies” (206). If transformation of the self

14    Michiko Shimokobe

brings transformation to the identity of Redburn, we should listen to thevoice of otherness that comes from the father wounds of both Redburn andMelville in the working through of trauma.
About the correspondence between literary text and the society into which
the text is introduced, Cathy Caruth mentions “the ways in which text of acertain period . . . both speak about and speak through the profound story of
traumatic experience” (4). If traumatic experience of a certain individual isspoken through the voice of a sailor in Redburn, how does the text itself“speak about and speak through the profound story of traumatic experience”
of the period into which Melville brought this text in 1849?
The nineteenth century in America was a period of expansion not only of
territory but also of the idea of democracy, which was advocated under thepolicy of Manifest Destiny. The American ideology of equality andopportunity led to a positive outlook, whereas survival in a democraticsociety caused hidden anxiety about identity in people’s minds.
Bryant binds the dark side of people’s psychology in nineteenth-century
American society to the anxiety of transformation. To live in a democratic
culture in which “perpetual revolution” is taking place, people are required
to undergo “a perpetual redefinition of identity” (203). Thus “trauma andtransformation were wedded” (203) in the texts of Melville; we can witness
how characters such as Ahab, Ishmael, Pip, as well as our protagonist,
Redburn, work through the trauma of self-transformation, not only ofthemselves as individuals but also generally of the democratic society of theperiod.
“Young America” is a cultural metaphor for mid-nineteenth-century
America; it stands for a fresh air of rapid growth in a young nation.9 The
Young America movement is one of the most exciting intellectual
movements in American history. However, the national development withterritorial enlargement, which caused necessary transformation of the nation,
turned out to bring despair as well as hope to people living during theperiod. In Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City,
Edward L. Widmer mentions “a dark side” of Young Americanism as “onethat would manifest itself as increasingly unsavory things were done inAmerica’s name during the late 1840s and 1850s” (14). In Widmer’sargument, the movement of Young America “metamorphosed” into “a callfor more territory, unleashing tensions over slavery and exposing democracy
to ridicule” (14). It is notable that not only the nation itself but also theslogan promoting the nation changed (metamorphosed), not only in its form

Inland/Oceanic Imagination in Melville’s Redburn    15but in its nature in the social currents of the period. Transformation is theundercurrent of an anxious society.
Another aspect of the dark side of the Young America movement ofexpansionism is the transformation of the identity of the nation, whichstarted from an idealistic ideology of revolution in the eighteenth century. In
Redburn, a heavily contextualized text concerning the political and cultural
climate of 1840s, Hager discovers “a kind of multidimensional entropy—aleaching of meaning by spatial expanse and estrangement from origins”(311). The imperial expansion of the period partook of unuttered anxiety
among the Young Americanists, who felt themselves estranged from theorigins of the nation.
Melville, together with his contemporary writers such as Hawthorne andWhitman, lived “in a hyperpolitical time” in which, according to Widmer,“the very principles of the Revolution seemed to be at stake in a way they
never had previously” (26). Thus, expansion and transformation are linked
through anxiety brought about by the traumatic transformation of thenational identity.
VI. The Pacific and Global Expansion
The Atlantic is a dead space where the inland imagination of Redburn
suffers fatal destruction. What about the Pacific? In the whole of Redburn,the term Pacific appears three times, and all of them are embedded in thecontext of whaling.
At the end of the text, recalling his first voyage across the Atlantic,
Redburn, now the matured narrator, recounts that “years after this, I foundmyself a sailor in the Pacific, on board of a whaler” (339). In the next
paragraph, an Englishman, “who had now been in the Pacific several years,”
informs Redburn of the tragic end of his long-lost friend, Harry Bolton. This
Englishman discloses that Harry fell over the side of a whale boat and was
crushed between the ship and a whale. With this episode, Redburn
terminates his story: “But yet, I, Wellingborough Redburn, chance tosurvive, after having passed through far more perilous scenes than any
narrated in this, My First Voyage—which here I end” (340). My First Voyage
is the subtitle of Redburn. We find that Redburn, who survived his younger
days, is now onboard a whaling ship in the Pacific telling the story of his
voyage across the Atlantic. The text is told/written by Redburn-Melville,
who has “passed through far more perilous scenes than any narrated in this.”
It can be said that by “far more perilous scenes” Redburn/Melville means

16    Michiko Shimokobe

those depicted in his fifth novel, Moby-Dick, in which only Ishmael survives
the destruction of the Pequod to tell the story. To this is added another pieceof information known to scholars––that Melville himself had cruised thePacific on whale boat in his younger days. The fact that both the narrator andthe writer have gone on transpacific voyages and that they retrospectively
tell and write the memory of their experiences on the Pacific gives adifferent dimension to the imagination of space in Redburn.
Redburn voyages across the Atlantic linearly to his destination, Liverpool.
In contrast, the voyagers who enter the Pacific such as young Melville,
Ishmael, and other sailors onboard whaling boats, wander the ocean without
any destination. While Redburn sailed back to his home in North America,
Tommo of Typee, a sailor on a ship cruising the Pacific, complains that he is
not sure when and how he will get back to his home. Sailing the Pacific istraveling on the vast ocean without an itinerary. How does this experience ofmoving aimlessly on the sea influence the imagination of Melville’s
contemporary Americans?
Concerning the cultural connotations the Pacific had in American society
in the 1840s, Hsuan L. Hsu argues: “As the world’s largest ocean and theone least traversed by Euro-American shipping, the Pacific held forth apromise of global unity and mobility” [italics added] (130). It seems that theterms unity and mobility contradict each other: unity requires fixation, andmobility prefigures fluctuation. It is the contradictory relation between thesetwo concepts, however, that underpins the feeling promoting expansionism
in nineteenth-century America. In unity people dreamed imperialist visionsof the United States, whether implicitly or explicitly, while in mobility they
enacted their cosmopolitanism.
While inland expansion promoted by westward movement occupied thespace of the North American continent, another expansion was going on
globally in a different space—in the Pacific. Hsu argues that “in the midnineteenth century, improved technologies of transportation, communication,
and warfare enabled the USA to expand not only to the coast of California
but further into the Pacific with a momentum that seemed destined to span
the globe” [italics added] (131). To span means to extend over something.
The United States of America as a nation extended over the boundaries of
the continent and reached into the space across the ocean, that is, globally.
Expansion, according to Hsu, proceeded into a second stage in which thehorizontal enlargement of the land mass shifted to the vertical acquisition of
space across the Pacific.

Inland/Oceanic Imagination in Melville’s Redburn    17We establish our spatial position in relation to our surroundings, andwhere a country begins or ends can have an impact on the politicalperception of a nation’s people. In emphasizing the importance ofgeographic mental maps on policymaking in the latter half of the twentiethcentury, Luis da Vinha states that “it was only in the 1980s that a systematiceffort to ‘operationalize’ the concept of mental maps in foreign policy
analysis was undertaken, beginning with Alan Henrikson’s essay ‘The
Geographical “Mental Maps” of American Foreign Policy Makers’” (5). The
ideas that behavioral geographers such as Henrikson have brought into thearea of foreign policy analysis permit us to understand the spatial
relationship between the environment and a person involved in a particularcommunity in a particular period.10 In nineteenth-century America, themental map was constructed and reconstructed with the same rapidity as thenation expanded. In the course of this process in the mid twentieth century,
the palpable contiguity of the land mass was replaced with the metaphysicalcontiguity of intercontinental space, which brought a dynamic change ofmental map to the national identity of the United States.
Conclusion: Expansion and Memory
During his round-trip voyage to Liverpool, Redburn uses the terms,
Western and Eastern Hemisphere several times.11 The course of histransatlantic voyage is not a horizontal movement between two cities but achanging position from one half of the globe, vertically divided, to the otherhalf. The narrator, a matured Redburn, and the writer, Melville, have sailed
both the Atlantic and the Pacific when they tell/write Redburn. The
terminology of hemispheres can only be used by those who have experiencein moving from one half of the globe to the other.
Hemispheric imagination is triggered by oceanic voyages, in the course ofwhich explorers have often gained access to new space on a global scale. It
is this global perspective of the Pacific that Redburn provides to readers.
Young Redburn, whose inland imagination is expanded by his first voyage
across the Atlantic, grows into a mature narrator onboard a whaling ship in
the Pacific—he has acquired an oceanic imagination inspired by his global
perspective.
The space in Melville’s fourth novel, Redburn, is represented by theimagination of a writer who has not only traveled globally but who is also
conscious of the political climate of nineteenth-century America. In this18    Michiko Shimokobe

climate, the mental image of space, combined with the territorial desire for
expansion, was formed in both inland and oceanic imaginations. As for theinland imagination, which is motivated by contiguous enlargement on land,
it is notable that Redburn was written just after the largest US territorialacquisition, one of more than half a million square miles from Mexico in
1848. The rapid expansion of the land mass of the nation helped the peopleof Young America to envision further geopolitical expansion.
At the same time, oceanic imagination was gaining momentum foroceanic imperial expansion, inspired by two historical events in the earlynineteenth century: the claiming by an American naval captain of Nuku
Hiva (now one of the Marquesas Islands) as a US possession in 1813, andPresident Monroe’s speech of 1823 in which he declared the Western
Hemisphere immune from political intervention from the Eastern
Hemisphere.12
In the introduction to this article, I noted that the trend of expansionism
came to American society in two waves: first in the early nineteenth century
and then at the turn of the nineteenth century. Historians see the former as an
expansion in the North American continent that terminated when it reached
the coast of California, and that the expansion of the latter period extended
overseas in the Pacific to acquire the islands of the Far East, the Philippines.
It is natural that Redburn, published in 1849, is viewed as a text that
represents the first trend of expansionism supported by the contemporary
politics—westward movement, the contiguous enlargement of the land mass
territory. However, as I have discussed, we find another kind of
expansionism in Melville’s text, which spans the globe in areas notcontiguous to the native soil of American people. Redburn is a text that is
infused by both inland and oceanic imagination. The former triggers
expansionism within the North American continent and the latter opens up
the global expansion going on in intercontinental spaces.
At this point, I would like to pay attention to the original momentum that
motivated European people to reach the “unoccupied” land on the other sideof the Atlantic. They sailed out toward the west. It is said that people havebeen directed westward throughout America’s history, but the radical
westward movement began with westward voyages from Europe to theAmerican continent.
The tendency toward an expansionist psychology is inherent throughout
American history. If the stimuli of expansionism is under the surface of all
the discourses expressed in the course of American expansion, how does
cultural memory work in each period? Frederick Bartlett, in his

Inland/Oceanic Imagination in Melville’s Redburn    19Remembering, argues in regard to the way people construct their own
memories that we are apt to impose meaning on what we observe in an
attempt to find meaning in the real world. It is on the third stage ofremembering that history as a cultural discourse heavily depends. Recall thatmemory involves not just taking in and storing information but having theability to retrieve it as well. We may reconstruct memory from the parts that
we actually remember and from what we know or believe must have
happened. In the history of America, including the original event of comingfrom Europe to the New World in the seventeenth century, the rhetoric ofexpansion has been constructed and reconstructed by retrieving the memoryof what people of each period saw, according to the different influences thatwere present on each occasion of retrieval.
Notes
This article is partially based on a paper, “Inland/Oceanic Imagination in
Melville’s Redburn: Space in the Political Climate of America in the 1840s,”that I delivered at the Eleventh International Melville Conference at Kings
College, London, June 30, 2017.
1
O’Sullivan focused on the question of the annexation of Texas in his article “Annexation”
in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review (July–August 1845), but in fact hewas promoting his Democratic Party to adopt a program of expansion that would claim theentire North American continent.
2“God of Nature” refers to geographical determinism; “God of Democracy,” to so-called
Manifest Destiny; “God of Evolution,” to the idea of racial superiority; and “God ofBusiness,” to divine sanctioning of taking the Philippine Islands in 1898.
3
Another item that fed Redburn’s imagination was “an old-fashioned glass ship about
eighteen inches long and of French manufacture” (12). This glass ship was brought home byhis father thirty years earlier as a present for a great-uncle of Redburn’s, Senator Redburn
Wellingborough, after whom he was named.
4
In “Geography for GIS,” Robert Slobodian explains that “cognitive mapping seeks tounderstand how people perceive their spatial environment and how those perceptions get
translated into actions. The reality of space sometimes gets set aside as people operate on
their understanding of reality as it exists in their own mental maps.” http://escholarship.org/
uc/item/5t16s9sk#page-1.
5
Foster emphasizes the importance of the third stage; “So memory involves not just taking
in and storing information, but the ability to retrieve it too” (25).
6
The subjects of the verb “cross” are Redburn’s father, Redburn himself, the sailors
onboard the Highlander, and Harry Bolton, a friend of Redburn’s.
7“For far away and away, stretches the great Atlantic Ocean” (42); “he had stood there,
though now the ship was so far away on the wide Atlantic Ocean” (80); “Bless my soul! andhere I am on the great Atlantic Ocean” (89); “the whole broad Atlantic being between
them”(142); “Where’er his shores the broad Atlantic waves” (162) [italics added].
8
Caruth emphasizes the meaning of listening and witnessing in the introduction to20    Michiko Shimokobe
Unclaimed Experience:
Each one of these texts [discussed by Caruth] engages, in its own specific way, a central
problem of listening, of knowing, and of representing that emerges from the actual
experience of the crisis. . . . If traumatic experience is an experience that is not fully
assimilated as it occurs, then these texts, each in its turn, asks what it means to transmit
and to theorize around a crisis that is marked, not by a simple knowledge, but by theways it simultaneously defies and demands our witness. (5)We now understand that in writing this book on trauma the author tried to “speak about andspeak through the profound story of traumatic experience” (4), that is, to work through her
own trauma.
9
Edward L. Widmer separates Young America into “two very different groups,” which hecalls Young America I and Young America II. The former “strove for the flowering of
democracy, promoting culture and ideas,” and the latter “stood for its deflowering,
misleading people through empty promises and slogans designed to steal land and treat
human beings like chattel” (15).
10Henrikson defines a mental map as “an ordered but continually adapting structure of themind-by reference to which a person acquired, codes, stores, recalls, reorganizes, applies
information about his or her large-scale geographical environment. (177)”
11
In chapter 27, the people onboard the Highlander see Ireland, and they encounter the firstforeigner, who tries to cheat them and escapes. Redburn says, “Here, then, was a beautiful
introduction to the eastern hemisphere; fairly robed before striking soundings” [italics added](159). Two other instances in which the term hemisphere is used are in chapter 33: “On thisWestern Hemisphere all tribes and people are forming into one federal whole” [italics added](216); and in chapter 51: “The last we should see the Eastern hemisphere was now in plainsight, and all the rest was broad ocean” [italics added] (335).
12
President Monroe used the term hemisphere in his speech on December 2, 1832: “Weshould consider any attempt on their part [i.e., European powers] to extend their system toany portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

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