Response to Wife Beating and Written Page by Robert K. Martin

Reading this article made me think of Ahab and how similar to Melville he is. If I were to imagine Ahab domestically it would be as Melville is described in this article, a wife beater, a drunk, “a tortured individual” (55). It seems that the darkness that ruled Melville is very much projected on Ahab. Ahab is a tutored individual, tortured by his sense of revenge and apparently similar to Melville who according to Martin is also driven by a sense of revenge “so one takes revenge on the first creature that crosses one’s path. Too likely it will be a creature one holds dear” (53). But where Ahab’s sense of revenge is towards the whale that had his leg cut off, Melville is stricken by a sense of revenge that has absolutely no reason or place to be there in the first place, abusing his wife for nothing.

Additionally, when I read the following line: “but his drinking and wife abuse were not to be discussed” (53) I thought about an earlier discussion we had in class in which there is no mentioning of any women in Moby-Dick. The silence that Melville enforced on his wife by beating her, for me, is similar to the silence of women that Melville enforces in his book. This shutting up of women is violence that is administered physically on Melville’s wife and literary by nullifying women in the book.