| Summary: | Herman Melville will surely be remembered as the author of that epic of whaling, Moby Dick, with its savage harpooneers, loyal mates, and the monomaniac Captain Ahab grimly pursuing the white whale. His accounts of trips to the South Seas (Typee, Omoo), to England (Redburn), and around Cape Horn (White-Jacket) deal primarily with young men aboard sailing vessels. It may come as a surprise to the casual reader to realize that, besides the native girls in his South Seas stories, Melville wrote about women of his own society and time. He portrayed several such feminine characters, for instance, in his sentimental novel Pierre. His "romance of Polynesian adventure," as he styled Mardi in his preface, introduced his first use of the Fair Maiden/Dark Lady pair that reappeared in Pierre with certain changes. Melville's shorter works intended for magazine publication, often presented women as either victims of circumstance or as vixens in the battle of the sexes.
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