American Culture at the Cross Road in the Early Novels of Herman Melville

America’s culture is moving in a new and dangerous direction, as it becomes more accepting and tolerant of dishonesty and financial abuse. Tamar Frankel argues that this phenomenon is not new: in fact it has a specific traceable past. During the past thirty years temptations and opportunities to defraud have risen; legal, moral and theoretical barriers to abuse of trust have fallen. Moreover, considering the American West as a “cultural crossroads”, and interpreting its past in terms of “convergence”, as historian Stephen Aron has done over the last decade, opens wider perspectives. While the New Western History stressed the ethnic and racial diversity of the West, and studied its past through the prism of multiculturalism, the new emphasis on convergence” highlights the connections, interactions, exchanges, and “the complex weave of cross-cultural connections that these interactions have generated” (Aron 4).