Moby Dick

I found the various encounters the Pequod had with other ships to be a kind of relief, a chance for the reader to even slightly escape the confines of the ship and its inhabitants and see how they interact with their peers in the larger world.  Of course, these can be read as more than chance meetings, as each ship also seems to embody its own ideology or somehow act as a symbol of an idea Melville wanted to get across in the text.  Here, I think, it may also be significant that ships are conventionally referred to with female pronouns, and can thus make interesting cases for the representation of gender in the novel.
I found the meeting with “The Virgin” in chapter 81 o be a particularly good example of this.  While “virginity” is often associated with youthful femininity in Western culture, it does not necessarily preclude a connection to male virginity as well; thus, the fact that the German word “jungfrau” (the ship’s true name) contains in it the word for “woman” is perhaps more significant in an indirect way.  I hope that this analysis is not reading too much into the text by latching on to one of the relatively few references to women, and making it more than was intended.  However, I thought that in the context of our discussion of Melville’s own life and experiences with women and marriage, one could read this ship as a kind of statement on one aspect of its nature.
We first meet the Virgin empty of oil and thus “deserving the name of Jungfrau or the Virgin” (315).  However, it becomes apparent that the naiveté suggested by the name also refers to their lack of skill and knowledge of whaling.  After supplying the other ship with supplies the crew of the Pequod is insulted that it turns around and begins to compete for the same target.   Although the Pequod ultimately triumphs over the inexperienced Virgin, the old whale is practically defeated already – in it the crew finds an old piece of harpoon – perhaps the remnant of other whalers as incompetent in catching their prey as the Virgin.  We feel pity for this creature who has apparently been hounded by whalers all his miserable life only to die a meaningless death as it sinks to the bottom of the ocean.  The last we see of the Virgin, it is off chasing an “uncapturable” whale, completely unaware that its chase is in vain.  Perhaps this is not at all what Melville intended, but this desperate, fruitless search for a whale (combined with the name of the ship) almost reminded me of a young girl seeking a husband to provide the same thing a whale would provide for the Virgin: money.  However, like young girls can sometimes be, the Virgin is selfish and naïve, causing more harm than good.

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