Moby Dick

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.

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