What we’re about
"Wisdom and Woe" is a philosophy and literature discussion group dedicated to exploring the world, work, life, and times of Herman Melville and the 19th century Romantic movement. We will read and discuss topics related to:
- Works of Herman Melville: Moby-Dick, Clarel, Bartleby the Scrivener, Billy Budd, the Confidence Man, Mardi, reviews, correspondence, etc.
- Themes and affinities: whales, cannibals, shipwrecks, theodicy, narcissism, exile, freedom, slavery, redemption, democracy, law, orientalism, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, psychology, mythology, etc.
- Influences and sources: the Bible, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Milton, Cervantes, Dante, Emerson, Kant, Plato, Romanticism, Stoicism, etc.
- Legacy and impact: adaptations, derivations, artworks, analysis, criticism, etc.
- And more
The group is free and open to anybody with an interest in learning and growing by "diving deeper" (as Hawthorne once said of his conversations with Melville) into "time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters."
"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces."
(Moby-Dick, chapter 96)
"Though wisdom be wedded to woe, though the way thereto is by tears, yet all ends in a shout." (Mardi, chapter 2.79)
"The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth." (Ecclesiastes 7:4)
NOTE: This page is intended as a thematic overview of the meetups in the series, but is not itself a meetup. To RSVP, please see the individual events as they are announced on the Wisdom and Woe calendar. This page will be updated as necessary to reflect changes to the schedule.
For a descriptive overview of this series, see here:
Series schedule:
- A Discourse Upon the Origin of Inequality - Rousseau - 5/19
- The Theory of the Leisure Class - Veblen - 5/26
- Of Dandyism and of George Brummell - Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly - 6/2
- Typee: A Peep At Polynesian Life - 6/9, 6/16, 6/23
- Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas - 6/30, 7/7, 7/14
- Totem and Taboo - Freud - 7/21
- Letters to His Son - Lord Chesterfield - 7/28
- Don Juan - Lord Byron - 8/4
- D'Orsay; or, The Complete Dandy - W. Teignmouth Shore - 8/11
- Henrietta Temple - Benjamin Disraeli - 8/18
- Pierre; or, The Ambiguities - 8/25, 9/1, 9/8, 9/15
- Movie night: "Pola X" - 9/22
- The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge - Carlos Castaneda - 9/29
- A Tale of a Tub - Jonathan Swift - 10/6
- Sartor Resartus - Thomas Carlyle - 10/13, 10/20
- The Rape of the Lock - Alexander Pope - 10/24 [Thu]
- Dandy Doodles - 10/27
- The Sea Lady - H.G. Wells - 11/3
- The Book of Job - 11/10
- Cinderella [Thu] - 11/14
- The Women of Trachis - Sophocles - 11/17
- John Rutherford, The White Chief - George Lillie Craik - 11/24
- A Fringe of Leaves - Patrick White (buy here) - 12/1, 12/8, 12/15
- White Shadows in the South Seas - Frederick O'Brien - 12/22, 12/29
- White Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War - 1/5, 1/12, 1/19, 1/26
- Movie night: "White Shadows in the South Seas" & "Fig Leaves" - 2/2
- The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - 2/9, 2/23
- Movie night: "Last of the Pagans" & "Omoo-Omoo, The Shark God" - 2/16
- The Overcoat; Master and Man; An Honest Thief - x1
- The Rebel - Camus - x1
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey - x2
- Murat - Alexander Dumas [Thu] - x1
- Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) - x1
- Movie night: "Beau Travail" - x1
- On Revolution - Hannah Arendt - x1
- Pacifism and Rebellion in the Writings of Herman Melville - John Bernstein - x1
- The Trembling of a Leaf - W. Somerset Maugham - x2
- The Cruise of the Kawa - George S. Chappell - x1?
- Red Jacket - John N. Hubbard - x2
- Rienzi, The Last of the Roman Tribunes - Edward Bulwer-Lytton - x3
- Masaniello, the Fisherman King of Naples - Giovanni La Cecilia - x2
- My Ten Years' Imprisonment - Silvio Pellico - x1?
- The Duties of Man - Giuseppe Mazzini - x1
- The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - x2
- The Burgundy Club Sketches - x1
Upcoming events (4+)
See all- Dandy DoodlesLink visible for attendees
Before the word "dandy" acquired a negative connotation, the song "Yankee Doodle Dandy" used it ironically to mock the unsophisticated pretensions of colonial Americans. Embracing the epithet, Yankee Doodle was a short-lived humor magazine, an "American version of Punch" based in New York. Melville wrote anonymously for the publication in the summer of 1847, then-edited by his friend Cornelius Mathews.
Melville's best-known contribution to Yankee Doodle was the mock-journalistic serial on General (later President) Zachary Taylor: "Authentic Anecdotes of 'Old Zack.'" Among other things, the essay characterizes "Old Zack" as a sort of ineffectual dandy with a vanity for mending his own pants ("Taylor Retailored"?). More broadly, the essay satirizes the journalism of the day, exaggerating Taylor into a Baron Munchausen-type character, ala the "authentic" specimens of P.T. Barnum.
In "Fragments from a Writing Desk No. 1," the narrator is a vain dandy who boasts of being "the envy of the beaux, the idol of the women and the admiration of the tailor."
"A Thought on Book-Binding" is Melville's review of a novel by James Fennimore Cooper (or more accurately, a review of its cover) which insists that "books are men" and "should be appropriately appareled." It serves as a sort of spiritual addendum to "Wonder and Wen": the comically confused characters of Melville's Pierre who had abandoned (more-or-less) "the ignoble pursuit of tailoring for the more honorable trade of the publisher." (Pierre, 17.1)
For this meetup, we will discuss these "dandy doodles" (Melville's short sketches on the theme of dandyism):
- "Authentic Anecdotes of Old Zack"
- "Fragments from a Writing Desk No. 1."
- "A Thought on Book-Binding"
Links:
- Collected Works of Melville (includes all selections under "Essays")
- Authentic Anecdotes of Old Zack (9 anecdotes)
- Fragments from a Writing Desk No. 1
- A Thought on Book-Binding
Note: This meetup will be recorded for private use.
Supplemental:
- Yankee Doodle Volumes 1-2
- Super Doodle Dandy from "The Incredible Mr. Limpet" (1964)
This meetup is part of a series on Fig Leaves and Fancy Pants.
- The Sea Lady - H.G. WellsLink visible for attendees
Prior to the invention of the bathing suit, men and women usually swam in the nude. Although the first Victorian-era bathing suits were extremely chaste by modern standards--covered by full length gowns, caps, shoes, and even pantyhose--it was not considered "respectable" for women to be seen in public wearing them. Swimming was regarded as morally dubious (except on health grounds), so genders were segregated, and women concealed themselves with towels and under cover of "bathing machines" that transported them in and out of the water.
The Sea Lady (1901) by British writer H. G. Wells took inspiration from such an outing. The characters make an excursion to a private beach conscious of all the rules of propriety. Despite their precautions to preserve modesty, however, the family is scandalized by the unexpected intrusion of a mermaid: a lady "of the sea" (that is "too seen").
This fantasy novel by England's "father of science fiction" is a light-hearted social satire that nevertheless explores serious themes: nature, sex, the imagination, and the ideal, in an Edwardian world amid loosening moral restraints.
The Sea Lady:
- Kindle
- Gutenberg
- Google books
- Librivox
- YouTube 4h 35m
Supplemental:
- The Sea Lady stage adaptation
Extracts:
- "And what strange shapes were lurking there! Think of those arch creatures, the mermaids, chasing each other in and out of the coral cells, and catching their long hair in the coral twigs!" (Omoo, 17)
- "He was, upon the whole, a good-natured fellow, and a little given to looking at sea-life romantically; singing songs about susceptible mermaids who fell in love with handsome young oyster boys and gallant fishermen." (Redburn, 18)
- "But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here." (Moby-Dick, 90)
This meetup is part of a series on Fig Leaves and Fancy Pants.
- The Book of JobLink visible for attendees
The book of Job has been called the greatest poem ever written. It is both central to and transcendent of the biblical tradition, universal in its influence on Western literature and civilization. It is a polyphonic text, featuring a complex of perspectives and genres, probing profound existential issues: the nature of good and evil, humanity and divinity, justice and piety, innocence and suffering. There is hardly a person who has not confronted the questions posed by the text, and countless are the artists and thinkers whose imaginations have been gripped by it.
When pious Job becomes the subject of a wager between God and Satan, he is inflicted with a series of catastrophic pains, losses, and grief. In mourning and utter debasement, he dons an outfit of sackcloth and ashes, by which he symbolically regresses into a state of worthless dust. But his misery is only compounded by his would-be comforters (friends provoking him into theological debate) before God mysteriously confronts Job from out of the whirlwind.
The Book of Job powerfully permeates Moby-Dick: from the first of the "Extracts," to the final "extract" (a solitary quote in the Epilogue), and pages in between, including the decisive image of Ahab chasing "a Job's whale round the world."
The Book of Job:
Supplemental:
- Encounters with the Greater Personality lecture by Edward Edinger
- Tree of Life scene
- The Great Whale: Answer to Job from Paul Bishop Psychology and the Cross podcast
Extracts:
- “Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep to be hoary.” —Job (Moby-Dick, Extracts)
- “Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if is not Leviathan described by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job.” —Rabelais (Moby-Dick, Extracts)
- "Who wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job!" (Moby-Dick, 24)
- "What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job might well appal me." (Moby-Dick, 32)
- "Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world..." (Moby-Dick, 41)
- “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” —Job (Moby-Dick, Epilogue)
- "In lifted waste, on ashy ground / Like Job’s pale group, without a sound / They sat." (Clarel, 3.3)
- "But Clarel felt as in affright / Did Eliphaz the Temanite / When passed the vision ere it spake."
- "But see, / Job’s text in wreath, what trust it giveth; / I know that my Redeemer liveth." (Clarel, 1.40)
- "Thought’s last adopted style he showed; Abreast kept with the age, the year, And each bright optimistic mind, Nor lagged with Solomon in rear, And Job, the furthermost behind—"
- "Methinks they show a lingering trace Of some quite unrecorded race Such as the Book of Job implies."
- "In lifted waste, on ashy ground / Like Job’s pale group, without a sound / They sat."
- "Ah, wherefore not at once name Job, / In whom these Hamlets all conglobe." (Clarel, 3.21)
- "With him misloved that fled the bride And Job whose wife but mocked his ban Then rose, or in redemption ran—"
- "Now night enthrones Arcturus and his shining sons; And lo, Job’s chambers of the South:"
- "...Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman."
- "...talk to him for all the world as Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar did to poor old pauper Job. Yes, Job's comforters were Old Plain Talk, and Old Prudence, and Old Conscience..."
- "Soft poet! brushing tears from lilies—this way! and howl in sackcloth and in ashes!" (Mardi, 2.76)
- "...we shall be wedded to the martial sound of Job's trumpeters, Lucy."
- "'Eh!—He's asleep, ain't he?' 'With kings and counselors,' murmured I." ("Bartley the Scrivener")
- "...what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?"
- "In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti." (Moby-Dick, 94)
- "Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!" (Moby-Dick, 81)
- "Of Thy ways / No knowledge we desire; new ways / We have found out, and better."
- "Order back your broken battalions! home, and repent in ashes!" (Israel Potter, )
- "...sackcloth and ashes as they are, the isles are not perhaps unmitigated gloom."
This meetup is part of a series on Fig Leaves and Fancy Pants.
- CinderellaLink visible for attendees
"Cinderella" is one of the best-known and loved stories in the entire world. By some estimates, there are well over 1,000 different variants of the tale bearing its essential features: a neglected or orphaned heroine, a magical reversal of fate, and an epiphany involving (often) a telltale article of clothing.
But it endures in no small part due to its adaptability and versatility, reflecting the peculiar time and place of the cultures that adopt it. Charles Perrault left his literary stamp on the tale in 1697 when (quoting Italo Calvino) it "flourished in Versailles at the court of the Sun King" as a story of "elegant fantasy counterbalanced by formal Cartesian rationalism."
"Thanks to the Brothers Grimm it flourished again, somber and earthy, at the beginning of the nineteenth century in German Romantic literature." For the Brothers, folklore "meant bringing to light the fragments of an ancient religion that had been preserved by the common people and had lain dormant until the glorious day of Napoleon's defeat had finally awakened the German national consciousness."
Whereas 20th century Freudians "salvaged... a repertory of ambiguous dreams common to all men," including Oedipal taboos and evidence of ancient totemism (in the form of Cinderella's animal protectors).
For this meetup, we will read and discuss both the Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm versions of Cinderella.
Cinderella version #1 (Charles Perrault):
Cinderella version #2 (Brothers Grimm):
Supplemental:
- Jungian Ever After podcast part 1: grief
- Jungian Ever After podcast part 2: envy
- Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants
Extracts:
- "This last is a Lilliputian beauty; diminutive in statue, fair haired, and with a foot for which Cinderella's slipper would be too large..." ("Fragments from a Writing Desk No. 1")
- "...the prettiest little foot you can imagine; cased in a satin slipper, which clung to the fairy-like member by means of a diamond clasp." ("Fragments from a Writing Desk No. 2")
- "Folly and foolishness! to think that... the badge of nobility is to be found in the smallness of the foot, when even a fish has no foot at all! Dandies! amputate yourselves, if you will; but know, and be assured, oh, democrats, that, like a pyramid, a great man stands on a broad base. It is only the brittle porcelain pagoda, that tottles on a toe." (Redburn, 56)
- "...so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah?" (Moby-Dick, 2)
- "...my stepmother who, somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,—my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to bed..." (Moby-Dick, 4)
This meetup is part of a series on Fig Leaves and Fancy Pants.