18A. "Moby-Dick" (1851), Chs. 62-71

Billy Van, the monologue comedian, 1900. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID var.1831.  For more about Blackface and Minstrelsy see this webpage at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Ideology: Stubb vs. Fleece

1) What was most difficult and thought provoking at the same time I think when Stubb was abusing Fleece on the state of his whale steak and how it was cooked. To be honest, [it] was also kind of annoying as well[, mostly] because of the abusive talk that Stubb used and how he put Fleece down on how to cook and how to act as a black man[, which] I hated when reading the chapter.

2) However jovial [Stubb] may seem, he also is self-important. His crew brings back the whale they killed, which only furthers Ahab’s bad mood. He retreats into his cabin, and Stubb becomes insufferable. He demands a "steak" be cut from the whale. He wakes the cook up to prepare it, and then criticizes the cook. The cook is a black man, and Stubb treats him with no respect. This isn’t shocking given the time period, but it seems like it goes against the previous statements made about whaling. Fleece (the cook) says that he is about ninety years old. There is no telling how many of those years he’s been a cook… yet Stubb has the audacity to tell him how to do his job. 

Ideology: Fleece vs. Enlightenment? Transcendentalism?

3) … the [text] seemed to make a satire of Enlightenment values, as Fleece the cook leaned over the ship and was forced [by Stubb] to preach to a mass of hungry sharks devouring globules of whale . . .  [an] appeal in which he was to make the attempt of calming the gluttonous mass by shouting things like “Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don’t blame ye so much for; dat is natur . . . but to gobern dat wicked nature, dat is de pint” (Ch. 64). In this line, Fleece mocks Enlightenment values by showing the non-effect its ideals on personal nature have on the hungering mass that is society. . . . when Fleece tells the sharks “Don’t be tearin de blubber out your neighbor’s mout” (Ch. 64), the sharks, even if they could understand Fleece, would ignore his request, as the creatures voracious nature requires a particluar kind of ‘self-reliance’ to even survive in their harsh, submerged world.

From: Melville: His World and His Work ( 2005) by Andrew Delbanco

"...Melville's retort to romantic dreamers whose belief in the 'all-controlling and all-permeating wonderfulness' of the world (his parodic paraphrase of Emerson) blinds them to the truth that nature is nothing but a vast blankness on which man inscribes his fantasies."

"The Gulf Stream" (1899) by Winslow Homer

Aesthetics: The Reader is a Sailor
4) The point of these chapters could simply be to innocently give the reader a better understanding of the things that whalers get up to at sea. Or it could be an attempt by Melville to prolong the story, to give the reader a similar feeling to how the characters feel. For the sailors and Ishmael, the voyage they are on is a long journey over the course of several years. Melville may be trying to give the reader a sense of this in these chapters. For the characters, this journey is not simply from point A to point B. It is full of stops along the way and other events that may be too unimportant to include in the novel. In providing these brief chapters of extra information, Melville is prolonging the story for the reader. Just as it may feel for the characters involved.

Ideology: Sailors as Sharks
5) Chapter 66 discusses how the sharks use the whale they just caught to hold a feeding frenzy that Queequeg almost loses a hand in. However, during the feeding frenzy it’s noted that the sharks “viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelment… and bit their own” which could be foreshadowing that the crew will turn on one another at some point for, just a chapter earlier, Fleece was comparing the crew to wicked sharks (Ch. 66).

Ideology: A disturbing Ritual Sabbath?

6) . . . a line that caught my attention was when the narrator said someone would have thought they were “offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods” referring to the tale of Odysseus and the titan Helios’s prized red oxen (ch.67). In the tale when the oxen were killed to placate the sea and allow them passage, Helios was enraged and had Zeus destroy Odysseus’ ship and crew leaving him alone. This could potentially be further foreshadowing that the crew isn’t going to make this cursed voyage. 

7) Later they enter a ‘gab’ with another whaling ship known as the Jeroboam, currently under quarantine from some disease potentially causing hallucinations and delirium. One of their crew that appears to be heavily affected by the illness entered a state of “insanity” making him believe that he’s the “archangel Gabriel” (ch.71). This insanity the crewmate is undergoing makes me think of Ahab’s obsession with Moby Dick. Despite it not being a disease, it’s practically eating him alive as if it were.

Ideology: Cosmopolitanism

8) This book is often held up as an example of successful cosmopolitan ideals, but occasionally comments will pop up in the book where the reader questions some of these characters’ attitudes towards other cultures, and therefore cosmopolitanism itself. For example, in chapter 66, Queequeg’s hand is almost taken off by a shark, and he remarks that he doesn’t care for the shark or whichever god made it because “…de god watmade shark must be one dam Ingin” (Ch. 66). Queequeg had already been shown to be tolerant of Ishmael’s Christian faith, and he even says in this chapter that he wouldn’t have cared if the shark’s creator had been a “Fejee god or Nantucket god,”, but that is where the tolerance ends (Ch. 66). He very clearly does not like Native Americans, but why? How much contact has he had with the natives of mainland America? It almost makes the reader wonder if he picked up on this prejudice from the people around him rather than developing an opinion from any extensive experience with native peoples. And if Queequeg’s opinion can be swayed by the society he lives in, which we know was overall incredibly racist, does this undercut the book’s theme of cosmopolitanism?

9) Chapter 67 begins with Ishmael saying “It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed!” (Ch. 67) Then he describes how the crew broke their Sabbath oath by hacking up a whale, a process which he compares to the offering of cattle to “the sea gods” (Ch. 67). I think this is a very interesting analogy, since Ishmael lives in a predominantly Christian society, and Ishmael is a Christian himself. He’s already been shown in the book partaking in a pagan ritual with Queequeg, something that would cause many a Christian at that time (and now tbh) to dramatically clutch their pearls and faint on the nearest chaise. Ishmael has some hang ups with the idea of having to stick to a rulebook when it comes to religion (much like Dickinson and [Emerson]), so breaking the Sabbath or participating in pagan rituals does not seem like sacrilege to Ishmael even though it would to some other Christians. Ishmael has the capacity to coexist alongside other [beliefs] and actively participate in them without forsaking his own. This implies a positive example of cosmopolitanism. Honestly, my first paragraph was about a failed example of cosmopolitanism and this one is about a successful example. And the quotes I pulled from the book are only a paragraph apart themselves. It’s giving me whiplash. But it has also helped me see that this book is probably meant to be less one-sided propaganda for cosmopolitanism and more of a discussion of cosmopolitanism, and how it is an idyllic society that we aim for but haven’t perfected yet (evidence in the behavior of Queequeg and the Spanish sailor).

Ideology:  Ahab's Reverence for the Whale Head

10) . . . this is how [Ahab] speaks of the whale head, “"Speak, thou vast and venerable head, which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations,” (Chapter 70)  which, ironically, is a stark contrast to the very technical, analytical ways of interaction between the crew (by majority) and the whale.