For me, one of the most interesting aspects of Moby Dick is (and I must say the title is rather prophetic of this) its utter lack of female characters. Now that I have read Bryant's analysis, in which he refers to Shakespeare as well as to Ishmael and Ahab's fear of the nothingness behind existence, I think I am beginning to piece together just how this exclusion of women really works.
In Much Ado About Nothing, one of the Bard's famous plays on words is in the title: Specifically, "nothing" referred back then not only to a lack of "thing" but also to the sexual implications of this - or female genetalia. Bryant ties this in nicely when he brings up motherhood in relation to Ahab's perception of the nothingness of being: "Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them," Bryant quotes from the novel. In other words, Ahab's soul is an orphan because it knows not its own creator, or from whence it emerged. But as Oedipus teaches us, no one is to see the genetalia, or the nothingness, from which it emerged. Thus we are all orphans, our consciousness always born from "nothing", which in life, as well as in Bryant's analysis and in Moby Dick, still appears to be something, but it is something we cannot know.
This metaphor of sexuality can be taken even further. Bryant contends that Ahab is impotent, in body as well as spirit, meaning he can only destroy and is incapable of creating. On the other hand, Melville himself is the opposite of this. Not only does he create, he "pulls poetry out of blubber", or "sullen matter out of existence". Similarly to the girls of Nantucket, whose beauty is presented as a product of the town's incredible wealth of oil, Melville sublimates beauty, or art, from gross matter. Thus Bryant's point can be taken further, to imply that Melville creates, in the character of Ahab, the destructive force that is the opposite of the artist's creative force.
No women are necessary for this creation, which is just as well, as none can be present on a whaling voyage. But I still think the novel could have had a wider appeal if it were not such a (excuse the term) "sausage-fest".
There's a referat paper here somewhere...
ReplyDeleteThe ship is female.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to subject of diversity i think that it is important to recognize how ridiculously diverse is Moby Dick: not just in the standards of the time but in the standards of our time as well. This novel counts amongst its cast white American, Englishmen and Frenchmen, it has Native Americans, African-Americans, South-Islanders, Chinese and single Persian. I can't help but compare it with the "literary novel" of today which might have men and women but would have them from a single socio-economic background and keep them all white (unless the novel is about racism, in which case a token minority is allowed), it is truly of the single less homogeneous novels I have read.
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