Moby Dick

Throughout the middle section of this novel, Melville seems to finally address the femininity that he left out of the earlier pages of the novel; but he uses whales to fill this void.  This causes a sharp distinction to emerge between the masculine life aboard the whaling ship and the feminine world that they hunt.

Melville gives to women the stereotypical characteristics of docility, gentleness, grace, and beauty, and compares these feminine virtues to whales.  In chapter 85, “The Tail,” Melville describes the “delicacy” of the sweeping motion of the tail as having a “maidenly gentleness the whale with a certain soft slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the surface of the sea.” (337)  Later on, in chapter 92, “Ambergris,” Melville says that “the motion of a Sperm Whale’s flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor.”  (368)  In both of these  instances, whales are compared to genteel ladies — a stark contrast to the sweaty, dirty, hard-working men aboard the Pequod.  In chapter 77, Melville describes Tashtego’s escape from the whale’s head as “the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego.” (308)  (This also reminds me of the story in Greek mythology of Athena springing from the head of Zeus.)  Here the whale becomes feminized through the depiction of birth.

In chapter 89, “Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish,” Melville directly says, in the context of describing a trial that “the whale and the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other.” (355)  Melville clearly wants the reader to see the whale as containing the feminine characteristics that have barely appeared in the rest of the novel.  (I find it curious and slightly suspicious, however, that Melville chose to use the above words in a chapter whose title uses the words “fast” and “loose,” since those two words also mean “promiscuous.”)

Through his comparisons, Melville has set up the whaling world to mirror the society of the time — men chase women.  But does this mean that Melville thinks women should be given more freedom?  Does a man’s control over his wife stifle and even kill her spirit?  His attitude towards women confuses me; I’d like to think that he was a forward thinking man, but I don’t think he could entirely escape the attitudes of his society.  In chapter 85, “The Tail,” Melville describes the whale’s power as similar to Jesus’; the pictures of him do not show his power, but instead show “the mere negative, feminine [traits] of submission and endurance, which…form the peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.” (336)  So does Melville believe that the docile, feminine exterior can hide power underneath?  Does he believe that women can be powerful in their femininity?  Three chapters later in “Schools and Schoolmasters,” Melville says that the old whale “will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets.  (353)  Something wild, who in the fact of her secret keeping holds some form of power, makes the best wife.  This is hardly the quiet gentlewoman desired by so many men back on the mainland.

But later on in that chapter, Melville seems to revert back to the society-backed ideal of women when Ishmael says that he has “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.” (373)  Here Melville, or at least Ishmael, shows his desire for the typical life of a man — to live with a loving wife who has has his supper on the table when he returns home from work.

How did Melville view women?  Maybe, as we discussed in class, it wasn’t so much the woman as the binding contract of marriage that disturbed Melville; after his marriage he was bound to a father-in-law that he disagreed with.  Perhaps Melville wanted to marry the freedom that the ocean presented instead of marrying a future that would keep him strapped down in one place.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1988, reissued 2008. Print.

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