Moby Dick

I apologize for this post coming so late, but I wanted to look back at the first scenes in the novel in which Ishmael and Queequeg interact, in chapters 3 and 4. As other blog posts in this topic have already mentioned, the lack of female characters in Moby Dick leaves us readers with no choice but to closely examine the homosocial and pseudo-homosexual relationships that take place in the realm of Melville’s imagination. The first communication between Ishmael and Queequeg is odd, amusing, and revealing.

Ishmael admits being terrified of the tattooed cannibal but then acknowledges that his fear is unfounded and born out of ignorance: “What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself–the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian” (22). Ishmael describes his night of sleep with the foreigner as the best of his life, but upon waking he discovers “Queequeg’s arm thrown over [him] in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought [he] had been his wife” (22). But this “pagan,” tattooed arm is not any ordinary arm; Ishmael compares it to the patchwork quilt on the bed they share. (Perhaps irrelevant, but I couldn’t help but think of Freudian discussions of fetishes in the early twentieth century.) Queequeg’s gender role is confused by conflicting, contradictory character traits and habits – for instance, “the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style” (as if Ishmael is his wife) contrasts with his appearance, tattoos, snoring, grunting, harpoon shaving, etc.

I believe Melville wrote this humorous exchange with the intent to make readers laugh. In fact the scene is hysterical in its awkwardness. Besides serving as a moment of a comedy in a largely dark, romantic novel, this scene might also be Melville’s way of exploring “the Other.” Ishmael the narrator seems to mimic Melville the author in many ways, and Ishmael’s struggling to work through and understand the exotic foreigner’s habits, customs, and intentions parallels Melville’s struggling to accept and trust the foreigners of the Pacific and the Caribbean in his own travels. Ishmael is ignorant of Queequeg’s background and thus these few pages in the novel serve as a cultural exploration: how might gender roles and expectations be different for Queequeg, an unknown and unpredictable force, than typical Americans in the nineteenth century? Queequeg is “off” in that he does not satisfy our culture’s understanding of gender divisions, as is revealed in his loving clutch of Ishmael in bed. He walks the line between masculinity and femininity. This further sets him apart as an outsider and clarifies that he is very different from Ishmael and the other American-born and raised men on the Pequod who abide by typical gender roles. Queequeg is “otherized” even more greatly. On page 25, Ishmael uses two different metaphors to assert Queequeg’s differentness and his transitioning into a person who fits more naturally and fluidly into normal society: “But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition stage—neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manner. His education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate” (25).

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