Intro
A crazy captain loses a leg to a giant whale. Said crazy captain then gets a ship and fills it with salty characters who love to discuss the meaning of life. Together, they all hunt down the whale who ate the captain's leg.
But the whole venture doesn't go as planned… to say the least. Why?
Melville's view of nature is essentially that man is an island surrounded by stuff that wants to kill him. As our narrator, Ishmael, teaches us: nature is hungry, and humans are delicious.
See, nature is personified as a kind of beast who actively seeks to eat you for dinner. Why frame nature in this way, you might ask? When we put our Ecocriticism hats on, Shmoopers, we realize that Melville is trying to teach us something about people, through his portrait of man's anthropocentric relationship to the environment.
Specifically, he's trying to say that we see monsters everywhere because we've got monsters inside of us. Everything non-human in Moby-Dick ends up being a symbol of some repressed human fear. And many of these monsters are born, in the ecocritical view, from our modern-day disconnect from the true spirit of the natural world.
Quote
Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
Analysis
Most men at the turn of the century, Captain Ahab included, thought they were the center of the world. Their own little "insular Tahiti"s. Gross. Anyway, Ecocriticism asks the reader to consider why literary characters see nature as all about them. These scholars believe all of our navel-gazing-in-nature is indicative of why we're in such an ecological mess right now—with our polar ice caps melting and species dying out all over the place.
The passage above also clearly has a flair for the dramatic. In Melville's mind, the ocean is not full of smiley sharks and other friendly creatures, a la Finding Nemo. For Melville, the sea is appalling. Just like man's inner fears; Melville sure loved to turn nature into a metaphor for the male's tortured soul, thereby co-opting it for his own purposes:
Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
To him, the earth is lush and docile (it represents humankind's better spirit, perhaps?). But what about earthquakes and volcanoes and hurricanes and tornadoes, Herman? The land can be a nasty place as well. And why must people view nature in such extremes, ask the ecocritics? Despite the inspiration John Muir provided for many future ecocritics, for all his accolades, that dude's description of nature is equally simplistic.
To him, Nature is Heaven—a wonderful place of sunshine and rainbows where all the birds sing your name. Muir's got this to say about the land:
No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.
But when authors turn nature into black and white analogies, they're ignoring nature's complexity. And the inner workings of ecosystems that have nothing to do with humanized desires and motivations. So this behavior makes ecocritics kind of pissy.
They'd prefer we get down-and-dirty with the real science of ecology, and of our human biology, and use that knowledge to explore the many nuanced interactions between people and their environments. Ready? Set? Go.