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.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS