Redburn

A pro-environmental work does not have to focus on beautiful settings in a natural landscape that should be preserved – in fact, some ecocritical works do not have to speak about nature at all. Melville’s 1849 nautical narrative Redburn is one such example. Instead of being filled with lengthy descriptions about an untouched environment or animal rights, Redburn approaches urban settings with an ecocritical tone. The novel is a re-telling of Melville’s first journey at sea through a character named Wellingborough Redburn, who travels from New York City to Liverpool, England aboard the Highlander merchant ship. While part of the novel discusses life at sea and the details of crew duties and dynamics, nearly half of the tale takes place in the port city of Liverpool. It is here that Melville’s environmental perspective can be identified, as his descriptions of urban settings relay views on mankind’s impact on Earth and duty to maintain an environmentally friendly mindset.

Liverpool as an Urban Setting

Before analyzing Melville’s environmental awareness, it is first necessary to understand how Liverpool is a good urban setting through which to explore environmental ideas. As previously stated, natural landscapes do not need to be the setting for a work to have

an ecocritical lens. A city is a great location to explore ideas about sustainability, because it is completely manmade and a hub of population. For instance, according to the 2012 World Bank population measurements, roughly 82% of the United States population is living in urban areas (“Rural Population in the United States”), meaning more people are living in cities than not. These are the areas of “civilization” that Melville is so critical of in works such as Typee, where he asserts that Western civilization should leave places like the Marquesas alone, since Westerners create horrifying environments where they settle. Liverpool is one such horrifying environment.

Liverpool in 1800s

The city at this time period was one of the biggest in the world – not just in size, but also in its impact on the international industry of nautical trading. Vessels frequented the Liverpool ports from European countries, African countries, and the Americas, making it the second largest shipping city behind London (Lambert). Yet these traders and rotating populations brought more than riches to this city. One of these unfortunate additions was plagues

(Lambert). As scholar Sam Warner puts it, “periodic plagues of cholera punctuated the droning rhythms of dysentery, typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, and syphilis” that littered Liverpool during the 1800s (Warner 70).

Redburn does a brilliant job of painting the picture of Liverpool as a once-beautiful and thriving city that has now been ruined because of mankind’s disgusting habits and disregard for clean environments. Redburn travels to Liverpool under the assumption that it is exactly what his father experienced nearly 60 years earlier: a bustling trade town that is clean and has a lot to offer to tourists. Yet as he wanders the streets of the city, he becomes disappointed as he realizes that this is not the case at all – Liverpool has been transformed into a disgusting city nothing like the one his father experienced decades before. With the city, Melville creates a sort of man-made desert in Liverpool, by generating “man-made barren space(s) as hostile to people and nature as New York’s Wall Street at 2:00 AM” (Warner 72). As Redburn discovers that Liverpool is not the gorgeous city that his father visited, the reader realizes that the reasons for this poor transformation is Westerners’ disregard for maintaining healthy environments in their manmade spaces.

How Liverpool Vouches for Environmentalism

Warner asserts that before leaping into the details of Melville’s writing, one has to understand that “the goal of sustainable ecosystems require a particular human consciousness for its achievement.” He goes on to say that environmentalism “demands that humans understand themselves to be beings of nature who are in ceaseless interaction with non-human organisms and non-human natural processes. The goal of sustainability makes this demand because without it, humans act as if human systems could be constructed and maintained apart from natural systems” (71). In other words, for environmental

activism to succeed, it is imperative that humans understand that they are a part of the inherent process of the natural world. There is no separation between humans and the environment – they are a part of the “natural systems” that exist regardless of what they believe or create. In Redburn, mankind has disregarded the fact that they are a part of the natural system, and the mutilated city of Liverpool is collateral damage because of that disregard. Melville is showing what happens when humankind loses its “consciousness” of the necessity of cooperating with natural systems.

Redburn's Liverpool is disgusting, plain and simple. Redburn wanders through the streets of a city that his father loved and is amazed at the dirty streets, mean people, and polluted environment that the city has now become. The residents of Liverpool have ignored the unavoidable fact that their city is an environment itself – even though it is not a “natural setting,” it is still a place that needs maintenance and care. Because the residents have disregarded this, they have lost their consciousness that recognizes that “the workings of nature (are) in every dimension,” including spaces such as Liverpool.

The takeaway from this is that Melville is asserting that humanity must realize that it is never exempt from the natural systems of the environment. Not all environmental mindsets are surrounded by beautiful, “earthy” places such as islands and parks – no, nearly all of the pollutants that plague earth’s atmosphere are generated from cities such as Liverpool. Through Redburn, readers understand that mankind has the tendency to ruin beautiful places and make them into nasty environments.

NEXT: ENCANTADAS

Images from top to bottom:

- 1976 Penguin Edition of Redburn (version cited)

- Liverpool in the 1800s http://www.roydenhistory.co.uk/mrlhp/liverpool/riseoftheport/riseoftheport.htm

- Modern urban pollution http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/