Moby Dick

Melville evokes a complicated rendering of the popularly sentimentalized  “Noble Savage” in the Pequod’ three harpooners, Daggoo, Tashtego, and Queequeg. The trope of the Noble Savage goes waaay back, there are examples of it to be found in both Homer and Ovid. The term is an expression of the concept of primal man in the state of nature, uncorrupted and not weighed down by the burdens of civilization. That humans are potentially good, and civilization has distorted us. This idea picked up steam in the Romantic Period, with Rousseau, travel narratives, and Primitivism, and there are countless instances of its use in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It didn’t really take on negative connotations until Charles Dickens published a satirical essay attacking it as a romanticized cliché, entitled “The Noble Savage” – published in 1851, the same year that Moby Dick was published.

Melville uses the type distinctively in several respects. Most notably, the characters that invoke the Noble Savage are not serene tribal figures in their native lands, teaching a civilized newcomer their ways. Instead they have been subsumed into the western world, and have claimed positions of considerable power on the microcosm of the Pequod. Melville does not oversimplify the Noble Savage as purely good, tame and pleasing, the threat of past cannibalism hangs over their stories. Neither does he picture them as solely uncorrupted in the context of their uncivilized home, they operate within a western system and show themselves on multiple occasions to be more good and kind than white men. They may be used as token savages, but they are not just token savages. The harpooners form a complex picture of race that in ways attempts to subvert accepted notions of superiority. Melville uses a standard trope as a sort of “in” to contemporary consciousness and changes its players, context, and effects. He uses the term in chapter 34:

But for all this, the great negro was wonderfully abstemious, not to say dainty, It seemed hardly possible that by such comparatively small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so broad, baronial, and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble savage fed strong and drank deep of the abounding element of air; and through his dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds” (134) (italics my own)

Here Melville seems to satirize the idea and use of “noble savage” itself, over sentimentalizing Daggoo’s communion with nature while marginalizing his appearance. The image of a huge African man taking tiny dainty bights is meant to humorously parallel the inherent contradiction of the term Noble Savage, when translated as a civil uncivilized person. Moby Dick presents a fascinating example of the Noble Savage, both mocking and reinforcing.

Ishmael spends an entire chapter discussing “The Whiteness of the Whale,” which can be analyzed to cast light upon Melville’s thoughts on the white “race”. Ishmael contrasts the purity and beauty of whiteness in man-made settings with its terrible place in nature—on God’s most ferocious animals. These animals—the polar bear, great white shark, and Moby Dick—embody all that is terrible and terrifying about whiteness. These great animals, like the Albino, are too white; they have surpassed purity and beauty of whiteness and have come to represent the terrible power that pure whiteness holds.
Melville (and Ishmael) make the connection between the supremacy of whiteness and its position “giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe” (Melville 181). As discussed in my previous blog post, the white race is built up by subjugating others, including everything from “savages” to slaves. The ultimate power of the white race is compromised in its purity by the things it has to do to to get that power—torture and subjugate those beneath it. The contradictions in whiteness are evident in Ishmael’s association of personal freedom with his own “melancholy.” Ishmael characterizes whiteness as inherently unstable ever-changing, which both gives whiteness its power and makes it terrifying.
Ishmael alleviates this “white guilt” by giving up his freedom and joining the crew as a lowly deckhand, claiming that in so doing, he’s somehow similar to a slave (Melville 4). Not only does this give Ishmael the false idea that he could ever somehow approximate or understand the experience of a slave, but it belittles the experience of slavery for Melville’s white audience—if Ishmael, a free man, is willing to enter into a state of virtual slavery, then the real thing must not be that bad. Melville’s chapter on the whiteness of the whale serves to placate his audience’s white guilt and reassure them as to the rightness of whiteness.

I decided to analyze Melville’s description of Daggoo and his subsequent commentary on slavery during the 19^th century. A passage from Chapter 27 on page 114 provides an in depth description of Daggoo and his role as an African on the whaling ship.

“Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black negro-savage, … with a lion-like tread – an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler…Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man beside him.”

There is a lot to say about this description of Daggoo, but I want to highlight that, as an African tribesman who “voluntarily shipped” Daggoo functions in the novel as the symbolic replacement for much more common figures who don’t actually show up in the novel. These figures who Melville is alluding to are African-American slaves or descendant of slaves who were kidnapped from Africa and brought to the American South. Ironically, Daggoo is portrayed as both powerful and barbaric in this passage. Melville uses derogatory and somewhat racist descriptors such as ‘coal-black negro-savage’ as well as fear invoking terms that somehow induce a certain level of respect such as ‘imperial negro’.

Ironically, when Melville entertains the idea of Daggoo’s position in comparison to white men, Daggoo prevails as a powerful ‘fortress’.  In doing so, Melville is challenging the idea of slavery and submission of the Africans to white men. By describing Flask as a chess-man strongly invokes a reversal of roles and addresses society’s contemporary understanding of racial dynamics. Despite this reversal of roles it is important to point out the fact that Daggoo is still diminished by Melville’s initial description and forever defined by his ‘savage’ ways, such as the ‘ring bolts’ suspended from his ears. Melville provides a unique insight into the blatant divide between the ‘white men’ and the ‘savages’ both within the hierarchical dynamics of the whaling ship and within 19^th century society.

Considering that Melville wrote Moby Dick in 1851, when slavery was a major issue in America, and that the novel reveals signs of thoughtfully considering race, it is interesting that there aren’t any slaves in the story at all – just different types of stand-ins for them.

Preface: I’m really interested in the characterization of Captain Ahab through rumors both before and after chapter 28, and how he is depicted as a mystery and a legend. In reading Ishmael’s first full description of the man I became particularly interested in the phrase “barbaric white leg” when our narrator first notices the whale jaw peg leg. I thought it had a bit of an interesting connection to race in the novel, so here I am, trying to combine race and characterization.

When the surreptitious Captain Ahab finally appears before the crew of the Pequod, his grim air overwhelms Ishmael — so much so, our narrator tells us, that it took him a moment to realize that much of the grimness came from the captain’s “barbaric white leg” (117).

The phrase struck me because of the juxtaposition between “barbaric” and “white.” Ishmael most often uses the word “barbaric” to describe men of other races, much like his use of the word “savage.” The contrast between the two words sums up Ishmael’s first impression of Captain Ahab quite well. The captain, though a white man, is “wild” (117) and is in many ways depicted as superhuman, even mythical.

Before chapter 28, in which we meet Ahab, we learn about him through what others tell Ishmael. The rumors construct Ahab’s reputation, and the man becomes the subject of a myth. Ahab’s mythical characterization continues in Ishmael’s initial description of the mighty man. When he first lays eyes on his captain, Ishmael notes that “his whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze,” likening the man to a statue (117). Who gets statues made of them? Certainly not whaling captains. Ancient, brave, mythical heroes get made into statues. Ishamel continues to glorify Ahab by comparing him to a “great tree” (117). This further separates Ahab from the other characters, from humans, and makes him more of a god-like figure.

Let’s go back to the phrase “barbaric white leg.” What makes the leg “barbaric” is its inhumanness. The leg, made from the jaw of a Sperm Whale, is by definition not human. While Captain Ahab’s being inhuman is what makes him great, we must note that therefore the use of the word “barbaric” in describing the non-white characters in Moby Dick is racist.

Ishmael often uses the word to describe the harpooneers, as much as he uses the words “savage” and “heathen.” We know, as modern readers, that these terms are politically incorrect and just plain rude. Ishmael’s use of “barbaric” in his description of Ahab reveals why. In Ahab’s characterization, to be inhuman is to be different from everyone else. However, that does not mean that to be different is to be inhuman. Regardless, Ishmael uses the same adjective to describe both the inhuman Ahab and the different harpooneers.

“Barbaric” and “white” is a suitable description of Ahab, the mysterious, wild captain. He is the least human character of the novel. But the presence of the word “barbaric” and its synonymity to “inhuman” makes us reflect on its use in other parts of the work, and its racist implications.

Above is a non-exhaustive list of possible explanations for Ishmael/Melville’s description of Fedallah and his Oriental homeland in Chapter 50, though we know that Fedallah’s true homeland, Persia, is actually a separate entity from East Asia altogether! The description is markedly negative:

“He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent— those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbis, indulged in mundane amours.”, [Herman Melville, Moby Dick]

To begin with, it is unlikely that Ishmael should hold a grudge against someone he had (1) only just met, (2) had never done him any harm, and (3) is a fellow whaler who, for all of his mysteriousness, is still working toward the same goal at himself. Therefore, Ishmael’s unflattering tale of origin is not due to a bias against Fedallah’s character.

In that case, could Ishmael’s assertion of primitiveness stem from an ignorance of East Asian culture and geography? Perhaps to a certain degree. However, the “insulated…unalterable countries” Ishmael mentions had not yet begun to industrialize at this time. Only after the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s did Japan begin to develop industry and to shift away from Bushido and agrarianism. Many other “Oriental isles”, such as Papua New Guinea, many Polynesian islands, and parts of the Philippines and Indonesia, remain largely culturally and technologically isolated even to this day. Combined with the fact that Melville himself had firsthand experience with some of these places lead one to conclude that the strange description of Asia is not due to ignorance.

At the same time, Melville is definitely taking poetic license here. It is preposterous to claim that, merely by *looking* at Fedallah, one can see the origins of humanity. This dramatic, and ostensibly bigoted, verbiage seems to be the strongest incentive for Ishmael’s soliloquy. In order to evoke how very different the islanders’ culture is, Melville chose to not only separate them spatially from the reader, but temporally as well.

I’d also like to mention the extreme irony of the narrator’s charge that Fedallah came from an ignorant place where man was “unknowing whence he came”, even though the Genesis-citing speaker was probably ignorant of his own origins, as Darwin’s Origin of Species wouldn’t be published for another eight years.

For all the talk of Melville’s progressive (or not so progressive) stance on race, few have questioned the category of race itself. Melville and his narrator, Ishmael, have varying responses to the “cannibals” at different points in the text. Their responses range from outright terror—“had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker than I ever bolted a dinner (Melville 21)”—to patronizing, “these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvelous how essentially polite they are (Melville 27),” almost as if Ishmael were talking about a small child who had learned to say “please” and “thank you.” On either end of the spectrum of responses, Queequeg is clearly not the same as Ishmael, and his racial otherness characterizes his difference.
At one point in the text, Melville attempts to moralize on race relations for his audience, via Ishmael’s realization that “ignorance is the parent of fear (21).” Melville’s superficial attempts at moralizing on peace and serenity between races belies his work on the project of reaffirming both whiteness and the category of race itself. Race, on this liberal arts campus, is commonly discussed as a construct, and Melville’s text illustrates how individuals build race as a category, normalizing whiteness and casting those with different skin colors as a different race.
Ishmael almost constantly reaffirms whiteness as the default, in his first meeting with Queequeg, assuming that he is simply a tan white man who had traveled to New Zealand and received their tribal tattoos. He didn’t realize that Queequeg was not a white man until he saw him practicing his worship, exposed his hair knot, the extensive full-body tattoo covering Queequeg’s “purple” skin. Melville never speaks openly of “race,” but by spending excessive time describing and exoticizing Queequeg, Melville reaffirms whiteness as the default (and therefore unworthy of long descriptions). Setting whiteness as the default sets up racial relations to consider “whites” as superior to others, and whiteness has become a constant project of keeping itself in the default position by subjugating and dominating other “races.”
The project of constructing race and keeping whiteness as the default relies on the sorts of markers Ishmael uses to mark Queequeg as a “savage.” These racially-coded features would have resonated with Melville’s audience, clearly delineating Queequeg as “other,” without ever outright saying that he is of a different race. Seemingly arbitrary markers such as these are the code by which we read and interpret race, and the invisibility of these markers allow the project of whiteness to become normalized and shielded from critical analysis.

For this post, I would like to discuss the relative importance of being politically correct (talking in an unbigoted manner) compared to *acting* in an unbigoted manner. Ishmael provides a fascinating look into this question, for he makes blatantly racist remarks about so-called savages, but at the same time exhibits a remarkable respect and admiration for his friend, Queequeg. For example, Ishmael reveals his disgust for savage culture as early as Chapter 3, in which he stumbles upon “…a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears,” causing him to wonder “what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking , horrifying implement.” And yet just a few pages later he states that “a man can be honest in any sort of skin” and “For all [Queequeg’s] tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal.” Astoundingly, Ishmael even compares Queequeg to George Washington!

Therein lies the problem: How are we to reconcile the fact that this white man damns his cannibal compatriot out of one side of his mouth, and then compares him to George Washington and Socrates out of the other?

I would argue that, when denoting someone as racist or not, the superficial judgements and ignorant labels (“savage”) one uses hold far less import than one’s actual behavior toward others. That is, I would never call Ishmael a racist *person* simply because he was brought up in an environment in which he was taught that certain bigoted terms are acceptable. Even today friends will make jokes about everything from each other’s physical stature to their place of birth to their ethnicity without a second thought. I would be far more offended by a friend’s subtle remark about how my Jewishness must mean I’m stingy than if a different friend jokingly calling me something as ostensibly anti-Semitic as “damn Jew”. Political correctness be damned! It’s the sentiment that counts!

So, one may count up the scores of times Ishmael uses the term cannibal to refer to island peoples, but these add up to naught next to the number of times he praises Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo for their strength of character and unfailing performances in the face of danger. After all, when the “bumpkin” in Chapter 13 falls overboard, it is the recently-derided Queequeg who dives in after him to save his life. As a result, “all hands voted Queequeg a noble trump” and Ishmael immediately makes a silent vow to stick to Queequeg “like a barnacle”. Whatever unfortunate attitudes Ishmael was raised with, he clearly cares more about the content of an individual’s character than the color of their skin.

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, copyright fictionwise ebooks.  (hence no page numbers)

Melville courageously and yet tactfully utilizes the adventures of Ishmael to insert his own commentary regarding issues surrounding race in the 19^th century. He highlights common racial divides, scrutinizes widely accepted racial prejudices of the time, and proposes a renewed meaning of racial coexistence. However, Melville’s seemingly modern perception of race doesn’t fully escape the grasp of numerous race related social constructions.

Within the first 21 chapters of Moby Dick, Melville focuses his racial commentary around the budding friendship between Ishmael and his ‘peddler of heads’ bedfellow, Queequeg. A passage on page 48 from the chapter ‘A Bosom Friend’ in which Ishmael consciously commits to befriending Queequeg, highlights Ishmael’s ironic acceptance and to a certain extent curious appraisal of Queequeg as a racially dissimilar friend.

“Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face—at least to my taste—his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart…”

This passage exemplifies the fact that Melville’s notion of racial serenity doesn’t come without burdensome obstacles. In this passage Ishmael recognizes Queequeg as something beyond the color of his skin. He is able to identify ‘traces of a simple honest heart’ among other commendable traits. However, Ishmael persistently uses prejudicial labels such as ‘savage’, ‘unearthly’, and ‘pagan’ that prevent him from leveling with Queequeg as a human being. It is in this way that Melville conveys a conflicted message in terms of promoting racial equality.

The most interesting component of this passage is the surprising comparison Ishmael makes between Queequeg and George Washington.

“…but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.”

As a reader, the reference to George Washington came as a surprise to me. I didn’t expect Ishmael to be willing to liken a ‘savage’ such as Queequeg to a man of such great historical and symbolic importance. However, this comparison remains confined to a physical similarity and not one that functions to elevate Queequeg to George Washington’s level of fame or respect. Additionally, Melville allows Ishmael to revert to his prejudicial tendencies by using the term ‘cannibalistically developed’, whatever that means, to define Queequeg.

As the book progresses and Ishmael and Queequeg’s friendship blossoms it will be interesting to see if Ishmael will be influenced to shed his seemingly natural racial discriminations and fully embrace Queequeg as a companion at sea.

Works Cited

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Signet Classic, 1998.

Upon entering the exposition of Moby Dick with race in mind, the problem immediately presents itself of how to situate myself in relationship with the book. How do I navigate my reading of a novel that presents such a complex depiction of race? Which racist ideas to I attribute to Ishmael, and which to Melville, and how can I delineate between the two? It seems likely that in certain cases Melville gives Ishmael an overly prejudiced mindset in order to illuminate and strengthen the realization and rejection of these prejudices through Ishmael’s burgeoning friendship with Queequeg. Even so, what from my perspective may seem steeped in racism may in Melville’s have been highly progressive. Without endeavoring some kind of historically driven psychological reconstructivism, the best I can do seems to be to examine the novel through the words of Ishmael as Melville chose to tell it, making myself aware of the ideas communicated within their context when possible.

The glaring obstacle to straightforwardly applauding Melville’s forward thinking, is that Ishmael’s treatment of his great friend Queequeg, though certainly well intended and one of admiration, is one of objectification and dominance. Ishmael reconstructs Queequeg’s “broken” and implicitly inadequate telling of his story through his own frame

When a new hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green sapling; even then, in Queequeg’s ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two” (49)

In reading this we first of all must remember that within the narrative Ishmael heard this story quite some time ago, his relationship with Queequeg has already played out completely and this therefore reflects his feelings towards him not just at the time of its first telling but the sum of their interactions, and also that Ishmael presents it as a somewhat objective retelling. In the opening sentences Ishmael once again refers to Queequeg as a “savage”, repeatedly comparing him to animals, and even a plant. Overall we get the sense that Ishmael controls the power, specifically the power of language as he is retelling what he deemed Queequeg could not, a motif repeated often throughout the novel when Ishmael translates for Queequeg (with good intentions). The noble and redeeming ambition attributed to Queequeg that eventually leads to giving up his previous “cannibalistic” lifestyle is the ambition to see more of “Christendom” which I interpret both strictly as the Christian world, and also more widely as any part of the world worth really learning about, any part of the world with allying Christian morals. This desire shares an intimate connection with whaling, an early harbinger of Queequeg and Ishmael’s coming relationship as ‘partners of fate’ that is developed later in the novel.

I know I’m giving Ishmael a hard time, certainly Melville and his character are products of a different time, and they continually demonstrate an unhappiness with and wish to change the current state of race relations. I thought that Queequeg’s story about the mistaken finger bowl, and his noble act on the passage to Nantucket were two especially powerful sections supporting this by indicating (very loosely)a kind of cultural equality Queequeg’s individual goodness and ability to win over even the close-minded, ultimately giving Ishmael a healing faith in humanity. The mode through which this is communicated, (subjecting Queequeg to humor at his expense, multiple object-referential definitions, broad generalizations of all non-western peoples etc… ) remains problematic, but the tension between the wonderful progressive attitude, and deeply racist mindset of Melville and Ishmael gives us a singular reading from the modern perspective in which we are forced to examine psychological, historical, and linguistic forces, and the perspective through which we read is thrown into sharp relief. We read this novel with a varied awareness of influences on the author, text, and ourselves, are unable to read it otherwise, and the hermeneutics of the reading experience is brought to our attention in the process.

“I’ll try a pagan friend,” Ishmael says matter-of-factly on page 49 of Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick. Melville presents Ishmael as an example for his readers in the subject of race. At times Ishmael acts as a race-relations role model, and at others he represents the audience’s faulty ideas about race.

As soon as Ishmael hears that the harpooneer with whom he is to share a bed is dark-complexioned, he becomes suspicious. However, he does not immediately think about race differences, and continues to worry mainly about his bedfellow’s unattractive harpooneer qualities.

When Ishmael lays eyes on Queequeg for the first time, he sees that the dark complexion is not solely a tan, and that Queequeg is in fact of a different race. This realization changes everything and Ishmael becomes frightened. Instead of thinking of his new companion as a “head-peddling harpooneer” (19), Ishmael calls Queequeg a “purple rascal” and an “abominable savage” and concludes that “had not the stranger stood between [him] and the door, [he] would have bolted out of it” (21).

Melville slips in a lesson to his readers at this point. In explaining his terror, Ishmael states: “Ignorance is the parent of fear” (21). Ishmael reflects the audience in that his lack of knowledge about Queequeg causes his fear. Melville’s readers should take away from this passage that they have nothing to fear of other races and should simply learn about them. They will learn that they are not so different.

With one polite act, Queequeg wins Ishmael’s affection. Ishmael concludes that “cannibals,” or “savages” are not so bad after all. Ishmael’s appreciation for Queequeg is a huge step in the right direction, but at the same time opens up a new can of worms.

In describing Queequeg, Ishmael generalizes people like him. He says things like “these savages have an innate sense of delicacy” (27). Ishmael does not think of them as individuals, but decides that since Queequeg can be polite, his whole tribe, or even the entire race, must also be polite. Most likely Queequeg’s race has both polite and rude individuals, just like white people. Ishmael does not think of them as “just like white people,” however, so allows himself to make generalizations.

In the quote with which I opened this post, the line from page 49, Ishmael makes yet another generalization. He has befriended a pagan, a savage, a man who is a different race. Ishmael feels pretty good about himself for that. What a good Christian man he is for befriending a pagan! While Ishmael is in fact ahead of his time, and it was a good thing for him to get along with Queequeg despite their differences, Ishmael is again not thinking of Queequeg as an individual. In that statement, he counts Queequeg as just some pagan he can befriend to feel good about himself.

Ishmael, like Melville’s readers, is imperfect. On page 31 he still judges people by their color. He explains that “in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners, savages outright.” Ishmael sees them simply standing and chatting, so how can he make a judgment on them, except by the color of their skin? Ishmael has made progress for his time and environment, but there is still work to be done.

Melville uses Ishmael to teach his readers about true acceptance. Ishmael demonstrates that overcoming society’s racial separations is a difficult feat. He has taken the first step in conquering prejudices by accepting Queequeg, but he undoubtedly has more attitude changes to make. Melville presses upon his readers that superficial changes are not enough. They can befriend people of different races, and claim to unprejudiced all they want, but it may not necessarily be so. Melville calls for deeper change, and maybe one day we can all be friends.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Signet Classic, 1998.