Moby Dick

…any man unaccustomed to such sights…would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.

The sharks which accompany the whalers on their hunts and in the butchering of their whales embody the mystical, savage energy Melville ascribes to the sea.  The image of sharks in the sea as maggots in cheese is a particularly revealing metaphor.  When Melville was writing, many people believed that maggots and other small vermin arose to life spontaneously from inanimate matter.  “Spontaneous generation” was conclusively disproved later in the century, but in the beginning of the 19th century it didn’t seem so obvious.  Life was thought to arise in all sorts of places as a more animated form of the matter from which it came.  In this sense, the sharks that infest the waters around the Pequod are literally the physical incarnation of the sea’s uncontrollable, irrational force.  The water teems with its deadly progeny, both incredible and terrifying to behold.

They viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound…A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed.  Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharkss almost took poor Queequeg’s hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.

The sharks do not possess any sense of self-preservation beyond their all-consuming desire to eat, which drives them even to eat themselves when wounded by the whaling spades.  In this respect, their manic drive mirrors that of Ahab.  To the sharks, the whaling spades might as well be a force of nature, unfathomable and unassailable.  Ahab was also wounded by a force of nature, but unlike the sharks, he has the ability to envision the being which “demasted” him.  His thirst for revenge is not unlike the sharks’ thirst for blood which causes them to gorge on their own entrails, and in his quest he eventually consumes himself.  Taking the Ahab-as-shark metaphor to the next level, Ahab might be interpreted as already dead.  Without any reason or understanding, he, like the dead shark, can only snap out compulsively at whatever draws near him.  Unfortunately for the crew of the Pequod, their fates are inextricably linked to that of their mad captain.

The Brutality of the Pequod’s Fated Pariahs

‘Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals – morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, soofficered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge.’  (Melville 180)

All the men under Ahab’s mad quest, the so-called mongrel renegades, castaways, and cannibals, share what Ishmael recognizes as a certain status of pariahdom. Outcast from the security of land and thrown into the danger of the seas, they participate in the particularly inelegant activity of whaling, reinforcing their outsider status.

Melville’s brilliance lies in his subtle indictment of the savageries of whaling and of Ahab’s monomania, the subtlety inhering in the device of using beautiful prose to ameliorate violent scenes. The description of the demise of the whale Stubb kills in Chapter 61 is evocative of this device. As the whale bled, ‘the slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men.’ (Melville 278) The violence visited upon the whale is projected back to the whalers themselves, exposing their iniquities, at least as seen through the eyes of Ishmael. When the whale finally dies, the bloody scene is deceptively rendered in seemingly pleasant language; ‘At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frightened air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea.’ (Melville 279) Melville’s descriptive powers perhaps make these scenes palatable to the reader, but in conveying this false sense of tranquility, they paradoxically foreshadow portents (the calm before the storm, so to speak)

It is important to note that Ahab’s physicality and his vindictive quest is not euphemized. Perhaps we are supposed to maintain some modicum of sympathy for the ship’s subalterns, while focusing on Ahab’s monomania, which is amplified by the contrast in prose.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Signet Classic, 1998.

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.

As the chapters discussing whaling pile up in the novel, Melville reveals the unrelenting nature of whaling and the constant work involved to make the ship sail and the whaling operation run. Many of these middle chapters examine minute parts of the whaling or sailing operation in great detail, conveying the massive amount of work intrinsic to whaling and the various knowledge needed by each seaman in order to be a successful whaler. It is a job requiring round-the-clock readiness, as each man is somewhat of an indentured servant to the whims of a whale. The sighting of the whale that Stubb eventually kills springs everyone into compulsive and complete response:

“As if struck by some enchanter’s wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from all parts of the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted forth the accustomed cry” (255)

Once the whale is hauled in (a grueling process for which they must “toil hour after hour” (262)) the sailors have a few hours rest before the morning, when they will take apart the whale, but even their rest is interrupted by “anchor-watches,” which “shall be kept; that is, two and two for an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck to see that all goes well” (271).

Even without considering the grueling, slave-like devotion that the sailors must show towards the whaling operation, regardless of any personal need or problem (witness the harpooneer, who must paddle hard with the company and then try to harpoon the whale, who have been driven to ‘”burst their blood-vessels in the boat” (260)), the sailor’s life on the ship is a constant need to work. The long chapter “The Town-Ho’s Story” examines the labor hierarchy and the consequences of an overworked company. Ishmael alludes many times to the workload on board and the captain and mates’ penchant to overwork their men, but for the time being, at least, the labor hierarchy is balanced enough to keep all the men content in their position (at least content enough not to mutiny). “The Town-Ho’s Story” finds the seamen under pressure from the constant work attending to the leaking ship. The mate Radney directly contradicts the labor hierarchy aboard the ship, demanding that Steelkilt sweep the deck, the “broom business” which is the “prescriptive province of the boys” (222). Labor is divided amongst the equal-ranking men according to ability:

“it was the stronger men in the Town-Ho that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain of one of the gangs; consequently he should have been freed from any trivial business not connected with truly nautical duties” (222-3).

In a space that always demands work, work itself must be hierarchized; everything else is dropped once a whale is sighted, and after that ship duties, according to capability, involve keeping the ship afloat first and foremost, and then the other duties that involve general cleaning and maintenance. When Radney violates the hierarchy of labor on a ship, it becomes violent. The length of this chapter stresses the importance of preserving the hierarchy of work and the workers in order for the voyage to remain successful. Perhaps Ishmael is foreshadowing the problems the Pequod will face as their voyage grows longer and Ahab abandons convention in his maniacal pursuit.

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).

In the middle few hundred pages of Moby Dick, we finally get to experience catching and cutting up the Pequod’s first whale.  Ishamael takes a lot of time explaining to the reader exactly what must happen to properly complete this task.  Some parts of this appear very scientific, while others are open to variation.  Throughout the entire process, there is the danger of deadly accident.  While Ishmael seems to want to relate the science of catching and harvesting a sperm whale properly, he also lets the reader in on instances when the science fails and mistakes happen.

Ishmael himself sees a way to improve the way a whale is harpooned when he suggests that the boatheader and the harpooner do not switch places in the boat:

Now, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish and unnecessary.  The headsman should stay in the bows from first to last; he should both dart the harpoon and the lance, and no rowing what whatever should be expected of him, except under circumstances obvious to any fisherman (280).

Ishmael has come to this conclusion through his experience with whaling and shows that the discipline can still be improved.

Other aspects, however, are very exact.  Ishmael describes the precision needed to behead the sperm whale.  He says that it is “a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced surgeons very much pride themselves, and not without reason” (300-301).  Other parts of cutting up and separating the various parts of the whale have very strict procedures, and yet Ishamael will still tell us when the Pequod does something slightly different, as when the monkey rope attached to Queequeg is attached directly to him as well.

Great risk is always present even when everyone is following all the rules.  Tashtego very unexpectedly falls into the whale while removing sperm and causes the head to fall into the water.  These events contrasted with the scientific mood Melville seems to be striving for in the surrounding chapters when he describes the physical aspects of the sperm and right whales.  Whaling therefore appears much more up to chance.  Sharks may come and eat the entire whale while it is tied to the boat over night, or they may not.  Queequeg may get hit with a dart meant for a shark while he sits on the whale’s back, or he may not.  I think that both the specific steps involved in whaling and the constant danger of the unexpected contribute to why Ishmael, and therefore Melville, are so obsessed with the activity.  Both the steps and the dangers are portrayed prominently in these chapters.

In chapter 58 (“Brit”), Ishmael compares the land and the sea, which are then employed as metaphors on the nature of man. He begins the chapter with a discussion of brit, a “minute, yellow substance” the right whale feeds upon. Through the comparison of animals in the sea (such as the right whale) and those on land (such as the elephant), Ishmael segues into a more generalized discussion of the two masses. While our narrator believes many people generalize the sea and land to be made up of much the same elements, he points out that the “mortal disasters” of the sea are more quickly “lost” than the ones on land.

…to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it” (Melville 267).

To hear of men being swallowed by the sea, but never actually seeing it take place (or of what lies below the surface causing it), leads men to dismiss the overwhelming depth Ishmael believes the ocean possesses. It is that very lack of visibility—only seeing the surface—that both inspires fear and, at the same time, a blank slate for Ishmael to interpret its depths as he sees fit. On land, man’s inherent ability to see all of his surroundings means the majority of the mental work (of interpreting the world) is already done for him. For Ishmael, life on land forces his mind within itself (because he cannot project his own thoughts onto an already concrete society), and thus he comes close to madness; in going to sea, he’s looking to free his mind and allow his thoughts to flow uninhibited.
In relation to the human soul itself, Melville understands the ocean as surrounding the soul, and thus its true nature is nearly impossible to decode. And that there exists within an “insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy,” but it cannot be discerned among the depths.  And so our purest form of self is “encompassed by all the horrors of a half known life” (268). It is that search for self (the Tahitian island) that Ishmael has embarked upon, but he warns against anyone else ever pushing off, as he thinks its unlikely you’ll ever find meaning before “the masterless ocean overruns the globe” (267).

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Signet Classic, 1998.

The topic that was randomly assigned to me was Environment and nature, which for the sake of this blog and a few others I will assume to be vague. Let’s just say I’m examining the social environment in Ahab’s mind, and his thirst for destroying a whale, which is a part of nature.  When reading Moby Dick, and Ahab’s insane reason for hunting a whale, i couldn’t help but think of a masculinity issue being at play. The descriptions of past Ahab’s character as a good captain would’ve endeared me to him before he was shown if I hadn’t already heard how crazy he was in pop culture. However eventually  we come to see him as a man devoid of really any other characteristics besides his vengeance for a beast without reason. In class and in other circles, Ahab’s injury is seen as one that robbed him masculinity. He was essentially “de-masted”. Reading this book, I couldn’t help but agree. Not only did the accident rob him of really any functioning position beside captain, but in is thirst for vengeance their seems to be a lack of passion for anything else in the whaling ship that does not discern Moby. As the crew hunts down a non-Moby whale in the graphically memorable “Stubbs kills a whale” chapter, Ahab is completely separate from this, mostly disappointed. This is seen in clear contrast to the rest of the crew when the omnipresent narrator takes over and we get to see his actions as coldly calculating. I could talk in length about his death in this subject; him jumping off with spear in hand in a final effort to take down Moby, but I really feel anyone could tell where I would go with this… My point is really that Ahab’s first fateful encounter of the whale robbed him most of all any other base emotion beside an obsessive vengeance. In hunting down Moby I think, and I know I’m reaching, that Ahab was either trying to take it back or express the only form of masculinity he had left. “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!”

We spoke the first day of class about Melville’s Protestant background contributing to the book’s religious themes.  Moby Dick is greatly concerned, my notes say, with the individual and his/her relation to fate.  In “The Monkey Rope,” the chapter concerned with the cutting up of the now-deceased sperm whale, Ishmael supports Queequeg, who must balance on top of the whale, his feet in and out of the shark-filled bloody water, dissecting the beast.  The monkey rope, tied around the waist of both Queequeg and Ishmael, is the support system; if one falls, the other will too.  Ishmael notices at this moment that his fate is completely dependent on an outside source.

I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of the two: that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have sanctioned so gross an injustice. (341)

Ishmael’s sudden discomfort with his lack of control – to him, a “gross injustice” – should really lead him down a slippery slope of realization that the monkey rope should be the least of his worries.  After all, his most trusted friend on the ship, Queequeg, is attached on the other end.  Ishmael’s fate truly lays in the hands of Ahab, the crazed captain of the voyage.  If Ahab’s fate is doomed, there is nothing Ishmael can do to save himself.

And, to this point, there is no reason for Ishmael to trust the divinity of his captain’s fate.  He has already reflected that Ahab is an alien to the Christendom to which he nominally belongs (171).  Ishmael received a mortal wound to his free will the moment he stepped on the ship, sailing with a crazy captain, on a dangerous mission of vengeance, who is probably not guided much by Providence.  This situation, as symbolically exemplified by the monkey rope passage, is not a good one for anyone – especially not a Protestant concerned with his fate.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1991.

When looking for character development, most readers would skip over the cetology chapter.  However, Melville inserts a remarkable amount of personality into his description of the whales.  This is not surprising, considering that, in many ways, Moby Dick is the central character of the novel.  In the Cetology chapter, Ishmael refers to every whale as “he,” not “it,” an important, humanizing distinction.  Some descriptions are more clearly human-esque than others, such as when Ishmael refers to the Sulphur Bottom whale as a

retiring gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings.  He is seldom seen…and then alays at too great a distance to study his countenance.  He is never chased; he would run away with the rope-walks of lline.  Prodigies are told of him.  Adieu, Sulphur Bottom!  I can say nothing more that is true of ye (p. 133)

This description sounds eerily applicable to a human, especially the phrase “retiring gentleman” and the words “profounder” and “countenance.”  Ishmael is describing a shy man, who runs away from those who pursue him.  Few have seen his face, and they know little about him.  Without the mention of diving, this could easily be a reclusive guest at an inn or some mystical stowaway on the Pequod.

The characterization of whales seems to be a matter of some debate with the characters in the text.  When describing Moby Dick’s encounter with Ahab, and the taking of Ahab’s leg, Ishmael states that “no turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice,” (p. 177).  This creature is vindictive, which gives him power of thought like a human.  The very fact that he has a name, Moby Dick, shows that the line between animal and human is blurred in this narrative.  Of course, not everyone sees it this way.  When Ahab informs the crew of the goal of this journey, Starbuck protests.

‘Vengeance on a dumb brute!’ cried Starbuck ‘that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness!  To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous!’

Starbuck does not approve of anthropomorphism.  To him, blurring the line between human and “dumb brute” is unacceptable, blasphemous.  The repeated descriptions of whales as having human characteristics, and the strength of Starbuck’s objections, suggests that this debate will carry on throughout the novel.

(New York: Signet Classic, 1998)