Wilder Gives Last Talk: 'Moby Dick'

Castration fears and mother complexes explain nothing about "Moby Dick," Thornton Wilder told an audience of 500 in his last Charles Eliot Norton lecture last night in Sanders Theatre.

Departing from psychoanalitic interpretations, Wilder outlined seven experiences which he asserted made Melville an outcast and pariah. These included revolts against 10th century American religious training and American faith in unlimited progress.

According to Wilder, "Mob Dick" represents a challenge to America's belief in "a gradual man-propelled amelioration." Melville's book, he said, is set apart from European literature because of its individualism, its abstractness, and its lack of "a sense of sin."

Wilder interpreted the white whale as a symbol of God. Such a symbol illustrates the book's abstractness, Wilder claimed, because it detracts from the conventional father image. "There is a limit to which we can consider ourselves sons and daughters of a whale," he pointed out.