*I had intended to post this before Monday’s discussion on gender, but because of internet problems, am only posting this now.<\/p>\n
In reading this story through a scientific lens, I find it worth noting that in many instances, Melville is conversely unscientific in his descriptions of whales.\u00a0 That is, he consciously abandons writing accurately about the natural world, as to make his tale more literary and poetic.\u00a0 It is interesting how Melville is deliberately inconsistent about this accuracy.\u00a0 One example that struck me was concerned with the gender and anatomy of the whale.<\/p>\n
In the beginning of chapter 102, A Bower in the Arsacides,<\/em> Melville writes, “But to a large and thorough sweeping comprehension of him, it behooves me now to unbuttom him still further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters, and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his unconditional skeleton (432 to 433).”<\/p>\n The male subject in the passage refers to the Sperm Whale, but Melville confuses this,in the same sentence, when he describes undressing the whale from its “hose” and “garters,” which are distinctly feminine objects.\u00a0 As was stated in Monday’s lecture, Melville complicates gender descriptions throughout the book, sometimes probably much more subtly than others.\u00a0 From what I have noticed, I think that Melville, in other places in the book, consistently refers to whales in the masculine form, but here he is being playful and speculative about gender, which makes for interesting questions.<\/p>\n Also, here Melville is being unscientific in that he is pretending the whale is removing its clothing, rather than being anatomically dissected, which he seems to be referring to, however figuratively .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" *I had intended to post this before Monday’s discussion on gender, but because of internet problems, am only posting this now. In reading this story through a scientific lens, I find it worth noting that in many instances, Melville is conversely unscientific in his descriptions of whales.\u00a0 That is, he consciously abandons writing accurately about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gender","category-science-or-cetology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=749"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":795,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749\/revisions\/795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}