Casting Off The Female

Timothy Marr's view of Ahab, Ishmael, and Melville as Muslims provides an interesting parallel to Elizabeth Renker's article on the latter's seeming hatred - or at least rejection - of the opposite sex.

Marr's argument states that Melville's redemption of the Islamic figure, whom he delivers as a Romantic renegade and individualist, serves to "romanticize the privileges of patriarchy". And indeed, Islam has historically disregarded, even subjugated, women. Women are not significant players on the Islamic stage, just as they play absolutely no part in Melville's novel. Even their very existence in the world of Moby Dick seems due only to the dictates of realism. 

Marr's analysis also introduces the notion of Houris and Peris, angelic female forms whose purity - epitomized in virginity - is the prize offered by Mohammed. These stereotypes are reminiscent of the "angel in the house" and other such damaging views which portrayed women as "selfless", actually lacking a self, in Victorian times. Melville's seeming worship of these types, seen alongside his possible history of abusing those who could not possibly conform to them, explains his adherence to Muslim patriarchy, or what Marr calls his "Islamicist imagination". His stabs of punctuation at the pages copied over by his female minions begs a comparison, within this framework, to the male fantasy of penetrating these virgins of the heavenly realm - both are "pure" and devoid of recognizable meaning (or individuality) until the male comes to provide it.

These patriarchal concerns are perhaps enforced all the more by "The Grand Armada", that chapter in which Ishmael becomes privy to the female whales nursing their young. As practically the only example of femininity in the entire book, it reveals only that aspect of it which is necessary to patriarchal society - motherhood. Even the cub newly born in this scene is a feisty male, an individual who boldly swims up to the sailors. This scene parallels the individualism, free of all familial ties, associated with all of the novel's characters: Though we know, realistically, that they have to have been born to females, there is no mention of such a history, in keeping with the characteristics of the American Adam. The world of relationships posed by the novel is that of God, Ahab, Ishmael, and the Moby Dick, women simply do not enter into this web of relations.