Moby Dick

I have talked several times about the delicate balance of madness and happiness found in whaling. As the novel draws to a close, I find that Melville gives more and more insight into this balance, and finally, right before Ahab’s death, puts the pieces together which, for me, truly explain Ahab’s madness.  Work with me, here: Ahab is out of touch with the forced, normal happiness of land, and has given himself over to the madness of the sea.  Although for most men, this would be a carefree and happy madness (according to Ishmael, anyway), because Ahab has forsaken his ties to land, he must totally rely on the idea of Self for happiness.  When Moby Dick attacks this Self and takes Ahab’s leg, Ahab is no longer whole, hence the aporia he experiences, and the vengeful chase that ensues.  Let’s look at the text.

As I have discussed in detail before, Ishmael talks about “settling” for domestic happiness:

I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country. (Melville 456)

Although Ishmael is quite taken with the sea, there is still a balance with land to be had, which I believe can most easily be seen in Starbuck: he obviously needs his release and finds it in whaling, but he does have a wife and child to return to.  Ishmael, himself, sees it rather the other way around: he will bear the land as long as possible, and when he needs to, he will return to the sea: “Whenver my hypos get such an upper hand of me… then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as possible” (3).  Although Melville waits until the end of the novel, he finally reveals a large reason as to why Ahab is unstable: he has no ties to land:

Out of those forty years I have spent not three ashore… When I think of all this… how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare— fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow— wife? wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive!

He reveals, too, that his has a son that he has never seen.  Because of this, he admits that he is out of balance: that his soul has fed only on “dry nourishment”.  Because he has stopped trying to offset the wild madness of the sea with controlled happiness on land, he has lost his grip on humanity.  At this point, now, Melville has given all the pieces to Ahab’s madness, but we must go back in the book to put them all together.

The next step is to consider Ahab’s leg.  Taken from Moby Dick, the leg has already been listed as one of the founding reasons for the captain’s vengeful quest.  But why, one might ask, did this affect him so much? Melville reveals this in chapter 106, “Ahab’s Leg”. After suffering an accident,

[Ahab’s] ivory limb having been so violently displaced… it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured.  Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like.  Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.

With every mishap, every occurrence that reminds Ahab of his false leg, his is also reminded of “a former woe”, in that all the feelings of emasculation that Ahab feel are directly connected to the original emasculation he suffered at the jaws of Moby Dick.  The loss of his leg, then, is a direct occurrence that has given Ahab his aporia, and keeps him from his happiness.  I feel that this is true because by forsaking his family on land, Ahab isolates himself (as he admits to Starbuck).  Because of this self-isolation, Ahab can only rely on himself for happiness.  Because, one might say, all of his eggs are in one basket, when Moby Dick crushes that basket by the removal of Ahab’s leg, the whale single handedly removes the link to happiness that Ahab finds within the idea of Self.  Although a man that still retained the saneness from land-living might be able to get past this, the wild madness that Ahab has permanently given himself over to is now forever tainted.  So now, hopefully, you see my point: Ahab, given all over to lonely madness, relies on self for happiness.  Because Moby Dick makes this impossible, Ahab goes on a vengeful quest to avenge his leg, and therefore makes Moby Dick into a malicious character that is directly barring him from contentment.

The extent of his vengeful madness is shown when the Pequod meets the Rachel.  As the Rachel’s captain calls for aid to find his missing son, Ahab says “Touch not a rope-yarn.  Captain Gardiner, I will not do it.  Even now I lose time” (579).  Ahab is so wrapped up in his pursuit of Moby Dick, that one might say his leg is, in a way, his own son, and he cannot give up searching for it.  Just as the loss of Captain Gardiner’s son keeps him from being whole, Ahab’s leg is the same for him: he has no connection to humanity, and thus all his love and happiness is intertwined in the self, which was destroyed by the whale.  So, while Ahab eternally mourns his loss of whole self, his the Rachel weeps for Ahab, lost eternally from humanity.

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