Melville's common man protagonists and his anti-establishment themes

[alice malice]

Melville was at sea when the "Young America" literary and political
movement took hold; the movement was Democratic, Expansionist, and
Jingoistic. But when he made his career writing Romances, he joined
the "Young Americans." Moreover, when the literary movement split from
the political, the literary group took a more elitist path, distancing
itself from the Democratic enthusiasm and wilderness life. Melville
was directly invloved with Mathews and Duyckinck, his brother
Gansevoort was a political orator for Jacksonian democracy, Melville
married Shaw, daughter of judge Shaw, a Whig, famous for enforcing
fugitive slave law. Melville, suspicious of the Democrats, skeptical
of Whigs, satirizes both, even his brother and his generous father in
law are subjected to his blackness. More to the point, Melville is now
free to swing, as he says in his famous letter about Emerson, to
"swing from his own halter" and swings from radical democracy to
intellectual aristocracy. He moves freely from the bowls of the ship,
where men cut and burn blubber, to the captain's table. The political
paradox, America, is embodied in King Andrew the Everyman that God
lifted from the dirt and tossed upon a warhorse and made president of
the Nation of commons, a nation blacker than black, where money made a
potential paradise a Tomb.

 There were none of those thousand sources of irritation that the
ingenuity of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity. There
were no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills
payable, no debts of honour in Typee; no unreasonable tailors and
shoemakers perversely bent on being paid; no duns of any description
and battery attorneys, to foment discord, backing their clients up to
a quarrel, and then knocking their heads together; no poor relations,
everlastingly occupying the spare bed-chamber, and diminishing the
elbow room at the family table; no destitute widows with their
children starving on the cold charities of the world; no beggars; no
debtors' prisons; no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; or to sum
up all in one word--no Money! 'That root of all evil' was not to be
found in the valley.

"To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange willfulness, will
cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will
eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience."
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