The Threat of the White Page

In the chapter named “Wife Beating and the Written Page”, Elizabeth Renker describes historical evidence that indicate that Melville physically and emotionally abused his wife. She makes a claim that Melville associated women with blank pages and the limitation of textual production, as a result of the domestic environment that influenced his writing. Renker analyses Melville’s writing and shows that the white page withholds for him the very characteristics that the woman as “the angel of the house” stood to embody, ultimately representing “ the blankness or dumbness that terrifies the narrator/writer” (60). This threat triggers a violent reaction which results in the disappearance of women in his fictional world and the abuse of the women in his household.

The statement regarding Melville’s fear of the whiteness of the blank page and the violent reaction to that threat seems very interesting to me. Until now, Melville was mostly associated with Ishmael, the truth seeking narrator of the novel. However, Renker unfolds another side of Melville, as an Ahab figure, fighting relentlessly and violently against his mortal enemy, represented by a white figure. In both cases, the object of threat is dismembering: for Ahab it is physical, as the whale literally rips off his leg; for Melville it is the dismembering of his soul with the fear of a writer’s block, or the inability to create. Both set on a quest, which ultimately ends in failure, Ahab dies and Melville’s novel is unsuccessful. The whiteness in the novel represents not only the characters' fear, but also Melville’s biggest horror. Much as the journey is meant to confront Ahab with his mortal enemy, it is also an instrument for Melville to challenge his own foe. The threat of the white whale is the same as the white page, both deprived of meaning. The essence white whale cannot be embodied on the page despite Melville’s efforts, thus resulting in a most feared blankness. The novel is Melville’s own effort to fill the white page and to compose a literary text that embodies language, investigates and inscribes meaning.

In conclusion, Renker’s reading portrayes Melville as an Ahabian figure, madly trying to defeat an assumed enemy, ultimately losing. The tragic character of Ahab is depicted throughout the novel in a tragic, serious way since he stands for Melville’s own perception of himself. Ahab embodies in a sense Melville’s fears, which he attempts to demolish by writing the novel, and that is also why Ahab must die.