Melville makes direct reference to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with the title of Chapter 31, “Queen Mab”. In Scene IV of Romeo and Juliet Mercutio talks of Queen Mab “the fairies’ midwife” who visits men in their sleep driving “an empty hazelnut” chariot “athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep”.\u00a0 She makes the sleeper dream of that which the dreamer’s desires, e.g., the soldier dreams “of cutting foreign throats”.<\/p>\n
In Chapter 31 Stubb recounts a peculiar dream he had the night before to Flask. Stubb describes,<\/p>\n
“You know the old man’s ivory leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to kick back, upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right off! And then presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid and I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking at it.” (113)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Strangely, Stubb, even as he continues to kick Ahab, believes that Ahab’s kick “may not have been much of an insult” (113), after all it was not as if Ahab had kicked him with a living limb; according to Stubb, “. . . there’s a mighty difference between a living thump and a dead thump” (113). Suddenly “a badger-haired merman” appears in the dream and physically threatens Stubb if he does not stop kicking Ahab’s leg. The merman explains to Stubb that he should consider it’s an honor to be kicked “by a great man with a beautiful ivory leg” just as it is an honor “to be slapped by a queen” (114).<\/p>\n
How can Stubb’s dream be interpreted with consideration of the title? Queen Mab makes men dream of what they desire. So, what does Stubb desire or fully expressed, what do his dream latently tell us about his desires? Does he passively wish to be “kicked”, i.e, dominated, by Ahab? If so, does the merman’s logic of honor behind passivity reflect Stubb’s own justification for subsuming to Ahab’s tyranny?<\/p>\n
http:\/\/shakespeare.mit.edu\/romeo_juliet\/full.html<\/p>\n
\nMelville, Herman. Moby-Dick<\/em>. New York: Norton, 2002. Print.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Melville makes direct reference to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with the title of Chapter 31, “Queen Mab”. In Scene IV of Romeo and Juliet Mercutio talks of Queen Mab “the fairies’ midwife” who visits men in their sleep driving “an empty hazelnut” chariot “athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep”.\u00a0 She makes the sleeper dream […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sources-or-literary-allusions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770","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=770"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":771,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions\/771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}