Savage Issues 2 - Filibustering

Reading Joseph Boone’s piece I have to pause a bit at the head line. The theory he poses (stated below by others in the blog, so it feels weird to rewrite it), is that of escape from the confines of society – which can be narrowed down to mainstream culture + heterosexual marriage. It’s very clear to the modern reader of Moby Dick, and right from the point he writes ‘Hidden’ (smaller headline), my thought was – ‘yeah, right, hidden’. Even Boone himself finds so much evidence easily entered into the ‘escape from culture and the closet’. The word Hidden should have been stricken out. But considering Melville’s times, where things of that sort moved more around the naïve and ignorant, when regarding homosexuality, this is more my reaction (and probably anyone else reading today), and I keep trying to remind myself, while reading, that Melville was operating under a stricter set of rules, and so – yes, he was hiding.

On the actual thesis though, I have to say that while not ruling it out, it should be worth mentioning that there’s a thesis relating to 19^th century quests as a different kind of escape. This thesis, presented well by Amy Greenberg in the excellent book ‘Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire’, argues differently. While maintaining the escape from society back to a sort of lawlessness, Greenberg shows that Antebellum expansionism is performed mostly by men only, in what grew to be called Filibusters. This is a savage, lawless expansionism, inconsiderate of the local populace, which Greenberg sees as the last opening of a pressure valve of manliness (after violent sports and secret fraternities and right before the civil war). She details several novels of the period and other reading sources, depicting the adventures of William Walker, who conquered Nicaragua, and Gaston Raousset-Boulbon running around Mexico. Gaston, for example, is depicted as conquering both the country and the women. Using The Greenberg thesis places Moby Dick in the middle of other books of his decade (much better selling) regarding filibustering, pieces like ‘Gaston the little Wolf’ and ‘The Story of Blannerhasset’ which is a cautionary tale on that topic. This is a different kind of escape, to savage, almost Darwinian, conquest – a totally different personal freedom. And while one can argue about the sexual escape that is hidden under the surface of Moby Dick, one cannot ignore the masculine escape of killing whales and conquering the sea, out there in the open.