Moby Dick

In this post I decided to recall the class discussion of race as an ideology in Moby Dick. After finishing the novel I am still left with numerous overarching questions regarding Melville’s stance on race and how he intended to portray and critique the racism of his time, but in looking through the various posts and in trying to sort through my personal interpretations, I have come to the conclusion that Melville is not a racist. He frequently makes the point to give the ‘non white’ races positions of power and influence and in this may very well be trying to use Moby Dick to communicate anti-slavery sentiments.

More specifically I wanted to examine Toni Morrison’s assertions in her essay, ‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken’ regarding Melville’ s race related intent in Moby Dick. As highlighted in class, Morrison is claiming that Melville isn’t merely anti-slavery or supportive of slave revolts, but trying to overthrow the existing ideology of whiteness. Morrison states that

“he [Melville] was overwhelmed by the philosophical and metaphysical inconsistencies of an extraordinary and unprecedented idea that had its fullest manifestation in his on time in his on country, and that that idea as the successful assertion of whiteness as ideology” (Morrison 22).

In reading more of Morrison’s analysis of Moby Dick, her arguments became increasingly convincing. She explores Ahab’s character and his madness in his quest to destroy Moby Dick. I found her analytical viewpoint very interesting and persuasive and have come to agree that Melville very probably could’ve intended for the white whale, Moby Dick, to represent the ideology of race. Morrison makes numerous intriguing points involving this metaphor and how it plays out with Ahab’s psychosis and the concept of whiteness vs. savagery, or rather, the “white racial ideology that is savage” (Morrison 21).

Although I find Morrison’s discussion of Moby Dick very convincing, I think that Moby Dick, being a complex novel with countless symbols, metaphors, themes, and social commentaries, I don’t think it can be read purely as a racial narrative. Perhaps where Morrison loses me is in her analysis of Ahab’s psychosis and how in fact, his racism as represented by his intent to triumph over Moby Dick, has caused and perpetuated his madness.

With no surprise, Morrison highlights a few sections in the chapter, The Whiteness of the Whale, in order to bolster her argument. I definitely agree with her analysis in that Melville is not exploring white people, but whiteness idealized. I don’t want to go into analyzing this chapter too much because it has obviously been done repeatedly in class and on the blog. However, in my reevaluation of the novel it continues to resurface as one of the most powerful and intellectually challenging and confusing chapters. I think that in discussing both beautiful and dangerous sinister images of whiteness Melville is attempting to explore the evolution of whiteness as an ideology. But, to openly question the very notion of white racial superiority would have been very bold and risky in his time, so Melville indirectly critiques and questions whiteness and in the end leaves it to the readers to extrapolate their own conclusions. This is made obvious in the last sentence of the chapter, “…and of all these things the Albino Whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?” (Melville 189).

Works Cited

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

Morrison, Toni. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. 07 Oct 1988. Lecture.

For all the talk of Melville’s progressive (or not so progressive) stance on race, few have questioned the category of race itself. Melville and his narrator, Ishmael, have varying responses to the “cannibals” at different points in the text. Their responses range from outright terror—“had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker than I ever bolted a dinner (Melville 21)”—to patronizing, “these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvelous how essentially polite they are (Melville 27),” almost as if Ishmael were talking about a small child who had learned to say “please” and “thank you.” On either end of the spectrum of responses, Queequeg is clearly not the same as Ishmael, and his racial otherness characterizes his difference.
At one point in the text, Melville attempts to moralize on race relations for his audience, via Ishmael’s realization that “ignorance is the parent of fear (21).” Melville’s superficial attempts at moralizing on peace and serenity between races belies his work on the project of reaffirming both whiteness and the category of race itself. Race, on this liberal arts campus, is commonly discussed as a construct, and Melville’s text illustrates how individuals build race as a category, normalizing whiteness and casting those with different skin colors as a different race.
Ishmael almost constantly reaffirms whiteness as the default, in his first meeting with Queequeg, assuming that he is simply a tan white man who had traveled to New Zealand and received their tribal tattoos. He didn’t realize that Queequeg was not a white man until he saw him practicing his worship, exposed his hair knot, the extensive full-body tattoo covering Queequeg’s “purple” skin. Melville never speaks openly of “race,” but by spending excessive time describing and exoticizing Queequeg, Melville reaffirms whiteness as the default (and therefore unworthy of long descriptions). Setting whiteness as the default sets up racial relations to consider “whites” as superior to others, and whiteness has become a constant project of keeping itself in the default position by subjugating and dominating other “races.”
The project of constructing race and keeping whiteness as the default relies on the sorts of markers Ishmael uses to mark Queequeg as a “savage.” These racially-coded features would have resonated with Melville’s audience, clearly delineating Queequeg as “other,” without ever outright saying that he is of a different race. Seemingly arbitrary markers such as these are the code by which we read and interpret race, and the invisibility of these markers allow the project of whiteness to become normalized and shielded from critical analysis.