"There She Blows;" An examination of the feminine in Moby Dick

Would that Moby Dick were so simple. Both novels have only men, but Hemingway¹s novel acknowledges that the men's club exists only at the whim of an eternal mother. Melville's men's club sails a sea whose gender changes often and whose personality is resolutely enigmatic. The feminine in Melville¹s novel hides her face in a veil of stars and behind a cloud of words.

Literally, Moby Dick is a men's club, with only a glimpse of a woman in the background, or reflected in the stories of the sailors. They seem to have no sexuality, nor any personality. The two full blooded, dialogue speaking characters in the novel are both servants. Mrs. Hussey ladles out ³Clam or Cod³ to Queequeg and Ishmael, bans harpoons from her house, and busies herself like some cosmic washerwoman. In the novel, she is a laughably comic figure brought out for a few laughs, and then forgotten.

Bildad's sister, Charity fares far worse. While Bildad and Peleg battle and thunder in their wigwam on the deck of the Pequod, she outfits the boat, so "nothing could be found wanting."(All Astir, p. 137) For all this work that she seems to be doing single handedly, Melville claims that "no woman better deserved the name," but that doesn't stop him from poking fun at her:

"And like a sister of charity did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither, ready to turn her hand and heart to anything that promised to yield for safety, comfort, and consolation to all on board a ship on which her beloved brother Bildad was concerned"(All Astir, 137-8)

The sentence runs with repetition and alliteration, lightening the tone and making all of her work seem trivial and pointless. What is the point of a cushion or a sleeping cap in a three year ocean voyage? What difference does it make? If we have not gotten the point of the alliteration, her comforts get mocked in two later incidents. First, she places tracts and hymnals in each of the sailors berths, presumably for singing while whaling. Later in the novel, when Queequeg comes off the whale, the dough-boy gives him ginger-jub, as per Aunt Charity's orders. Stubb thunders and sends for more manly grog, then "Aunt Charity¹s gift...was freely given to the waves."(Monkey-Rope p. 419) So, even though we are told that she has been indefatigable in her efforts, the only gifts enumerated are trivial and silly, befitting someone who has no idea of the seriousness of the work involved. Both Charity and Mrs. Hussey are distanced from the men and men's work of the novel; they are the servants of the club, ignorant and silly.

The only other women in the men¹s club exist in memory. Ishmael speaks of his "best and most-conscientious" step-mother, sending him to bed during the daylight. Like Jane Eyre, locked up only in his room, his visited by a phantom and the vision haunts him. This scary vision is repeated, but happily, Ishmael wakes to have Queequeg¹s arm around him (The Counterpane). Both Starbuck and Ahab are married and have children, though their wives are scarcely mentioned. The Pequod rarely stops for a gam and never passes letters, so we know that Starbuck and Ahab never write home. Just before they sight the white whale, both Starbuck and Ahab stare at the sunrise, and think back to their families on Nantucket. Ahab cries in regret for the treatment of his wife, saying that in marrying her, he "widowed" her. Starbuck entreats him to return; Ahab to the "wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age" and Starbuck to the "wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly play-fellow youth." (The Symphony, p. 684) Both phrases are interesting, in that the wife and child are equated. Grammatically and syntactically, there is no difference between the wife and child; both see the same side of the man. Further, it is even more interesting that both Ahab and Starbuck have begot boys. In Ahab's case, after only the wedding night. The men's club becomes even more male.

The story of Perth the blacksmith, unfortunately, only highlights the male exclusivity of the novel. He had been a successful well respected artisan, who had led "four acts of gladness." He had had everything:

"He had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, and three blithe, ruddy, children; every Sunday went to a cheerful church planted in a grove."(The Blacksmith, p. 616)

In this passage, the wife is not described as an equal or as a the object of his affection, but "daughter-like" and "youthful." She, like Ahab¹s wife, is younger, faithful, and resolutely inferior. The sentence sinks her further. She is placed after his talent, his business, and his house and garden. She, at least, is not sexless as the children are, but she is certainly not prized in the sentence. Later in the story, we learn from vague references of his drunkenness hidden behind euphemism of the "Bottle Conjurer." However, when the wife dies, she, very actively,"dives beneath the church yard." Melville ascribes none of the failings to the Blacksmith. "Fate" and "drama" dog this old man, not weakness or folly. He has not failed his family in some act of sodden hubris, but has been the victim of "implacable fate." Perth is the sad story at the clubhouse bar, the recipient of twenty dollar bills in his locker, and the perpetual bridge player, looking out over a rainy golf course on a winter Saturday, with nowhere left to go.

Melville seems to have created his floating men¹s club and hung a "No Girls Allowed" sign on its front door. The women were either clowns brought on for a laugh, or grieving widows left behind, ignorant of the vast dangers and truths the men learn on their voyage. From our safe vantage point in the nineties, we could happily condemn the old sailor as a hopelessly ignorant chauvinist of another age. Unfortunately, the novel isn¹t that simple at all. Female characters may have been banished, but femininity overwhelms the crew.

This femininity is hidden, of course. It lives in pronouns, personification, and metaphor. At its most obvious, we see it in the boats and in the whales. The Pequod by custom and authorial intent, is resolutely tagged with the feminine pronoun: "She was a ship of the old school."(The Ship, p. 104) Melville does little with this gender and contradicts it by placing "a beard upon its bows" and comparing it to a French Grenadier. Similarly, whales are almost always termed in the feminine before they are caught. Tashtego clings to the masthead and exclaims "There she blows..." at the first whale spotted. That call is repeated throughout the book for spirit spout, squid, whale, and even Moby Dick. At the most, we can say that both of these examples illustrate a view of the feminine as large, natural, and whimsical. Since boats are almost always referred to in the feminine and whales are spotted and called "there she blows² by custom, any explanation of their gender becomes more enlightening culturally than texturally.

However, many of the intangibles of the men's lives are referred to in the feminine. Large ideas, like Faith and Reflection, are given the female gender as a matter of course. Ishmael reflects that "Faith...gathers her most vital hope"(The Chapel, p. 650) while he is waiting for mass to begin. Later, "Free will...plies her shuttle" like a fate, as Ishmael and Queequeg make sword mats at an idle moment at sea. Finally, reflection "lends her solemner purposes." Even Ahab is not immune. As he contemplates the sunset, his soul mounts up, even though "she wearies with her endless toil." Looking at all of these quotes, we can conclude that Melville has feminized Faith, Reflection, Free Will, and the Soul. Therefore the thoughts and the thinking of all men, at one point or another, are controlled, or at least affected by a feminine aspect.

Stubb and Flask bear this idea out in the chapter entitled "Queen Mab." Queen Mab, according to Mercutio and Shakespeare, was the Queen of Dreams. She came in miniature and inserted dreams into men's and women's minds. In this chapter, both Stubb and Flask are flummoxed by Stubb¹s dream of a pyramid and a humped old man. While the interpretation of the dream may leave us off as well, Melville¹s chapter heading gives us gender. The things that control men, like Free Will, Faith, Reflection, and Dreams; these things are given a female gender. Perhaps our men's club is not as powerful as it once appeared.

More importantly, Melville sexes the sun. Our men on the Pequod sail under "her" benign and life giving gaze. Sun tans are the mark of the seaman at the Spouter Inn. Its gentle heat warms Ishmael and Queequeg on the deck, the sunset used to soothe Ahab, the sunrise gives both Ahab and Starbuck the illusion of a new beginning, and even gives a 'heavenly ray' through the fountain of the Whale¹s spout. The sun told them where they were and even, in "The Needle" attempts to guide them away from the White Whale. Only at the very end of the novel, is the sun given a negative connotation, as it dries and sinks the life-buoy. Otherwise, the voyage of the Pequod is one of the few trips without sunburn, sun-stroke, or dehydration. The sun is mostly portrayed by Ishmael as the gentle, life-giving aspect of nature.

Throughout the novel, Ahab has an uncomfortable relationship with the sun. In his rousing speech to the whaler's, he holds the doubloon up to the "ratifying" sun for its judgment. Then he challenges it; "I¹d strike the sun if it insulted me." Later, after he has rallied the troops, Ahab notes that the sunrise "no longer spurs me," nor does "the sunset sootheth." More importantly, the sun moves in opposition to his soul. As the sun goes down, his "soul mounts up." By implication, then, Ahab is a night man. Ishmael¹s second dream, while he is steering the ship, shows Ahab as a ship at night. In the day, the "golden, glad sun, the only true lamp"(The Try-Works, p. 542) will show that same nightmare scene in "gentler relief." Ahab finds the harsh night, with its nightmare shadows more to his liking than the gentler and "life giving" day.

Ahab, in the end, turns his back on the sun. After the typhoon, when the compasses are inverted, he awakes to an "enchanted silence" over a sea that "leaps with light and heat." Ahab calls his ship the "Sea-chariot of the sun", yet the sun is fooling him. While it is astern, the boat must be heading west, away from the White Whale. Ahab breaks the enchantment, slips the sun from the chariot, and turns away from it. In all of these passages, the sun remains unsexed. Only at the very end of the novel, in the lyric opening to "The Symphony," is the sun revealed in its feminine and fertile glory:

"Aloft, like a royal king or czar, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and roiling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion...denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away."(The Symphony., p. 681)

This tender metaphor begins with a masculine "seeming" sun, that quickly fades to the metaphor of bride and groom on the wedding night. The air itself is even feminine "soft, with a woman's look." The young bride of sun and air touches Ahab and recalls him back to his own child bride. The "step-mother world...now threw affectionate arms around his stubborn neck."(The Symphony, p. 682) Ahab refuses these comforts and steels on. "the great sun does not move of itself, but is an errand boy." Ahab, moved on by his "Emperor Fate," pushes through this last femininity and continues his doomed cruise.

Marrying the feminine sky and sun of The Symphony is the "troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea" full of "mighty leviathans, swordfish and sharks."(The Symphony, p. 681). In spite of this image, the whales do not get any particular sex ascribed to them. When studied up close, the whales are termed either male or female and get personalities for each. After passing through the straits of Java, the Pequod stumbles upon a huge herd of whales. The bulls circle in rings around a center filled with nursing mothers and calves. As Ishmael and his boat float in the oceanic 'amniotic fluid' or, in Melville¹s alliterative words "smooth, satin-like surface," they watch the nursery of whales. Melville sunders the tranquillity of this scene first by a footnote that informs that a "lanced and bleeding breast of a nursing whale" yields milk that "tastes like strawberries." Second, Queequeg notices that the rope from a harpoon has become entangled in an umbilical cord. Not only is the men¹s club in the midst of a center of femininity and fertility, but they are also messing it up.

In the following chapter, Ishmael leads us through the romantic life of the bull whale. Early in his life, as a "collegian", he roams the sea with his buddies, "full of fight, fun, and wickedness." Soon, he gives that up and becomes and Ottoman, cruising the seas with a harem of female whales. He "has not taste for the nursery" and love'em and leaves'em all over the world. In the end, however, he becomes a schoolmaster, chiding the young forty barrel bulls. Finally, he becomes a lone whale, wandering the sea with noone but nature to accompany him.

Melville¹s chapter, "Cisterns and Buckets" complicates this somewhat simple and clear idea. In the chapter, two odd things happen. First, the chapter begins with Tashtego standing on the head of the whale, digging into the Tun, retrieving buckets of spermaceti. His work, however, has a hidden sexuality.

"Tashtego has to ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeper and deeper into the tun."(Cisterns and Buckets, p. 441)

The repetition suggests that he is violating the whale, somehow raping the whale head . Like a proceeding chapter, "A Squeeze of the Hand," the sexuality seems fairly open, although a bit too junior high. The sexual connotation is reinforced by Tashtego's later "birth." By misadventure, the Indian slips into the head cavity of the whale, and the head slips into the sea. Queequeg dives after it and performs the "deliverance, or rather delivery of Tashtego." The whale head, we are told, is doing as "well as can be expected." The language of the rescue echoes the hospital, all the way down to the euphemisms. The reality is different. The whale head is sinking to the bottom of the sea, after threatening the life of Tashtego.

All of Melville¹s language here leads us to conclude that this is Tashtego's renaissance, yet he doesn¹t really change over the rest of the novel; his character does not reveal any hitherto undiscovered traits. Further, the whale head as uterus has some rather complicated connections. The head is, after all, dead and the result of Queequeg¹s trip into the womb would be his death, were it not for the timely intervention of the best of men, Queequeg. Finally, the rape imagery of the early part of the chapter reinforces the whale head as uterine.

A possible reading for this chapter could be that Tashtego was somehow having intercourse when the uterine whale head swallowed him, taking him to his death. Only with the timely intervention of a male friend is he able to be untimely ripped from the womb. Although there is plenty of mythic evidence of the all-consuming womb, this reading seems too extreme.

However, nature is surely terrifying and feminine in this novel. The bull whale takes her to wife "in the wilderness of waters...though she keep so many moody secrets."(School and Schoolmasters, p. 515) This same "wife" is also the "frigate earth" where millions lie drowned "in her hold" as Tashtego may have been. The whale's bride, nature, keeps those fierce and deadly secrets down, down, deep

Nature takes the fiercest wild and feminine aspect in the chapter "The Whiteness of the Whale." The White Squall, is "her...crowning attribute to the terrible." The squall may be among her least palpable, but still hers. Melville focuses the chapter on his final metaphor-the harlot.

"All deified Nature paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel house within."(The Whiteness of the Whale, p. 264)

This image, in all it's viciousness, resolves and focuses the entire work. Nature is feminine, evil, and misleading. Like a whore, she hides her ugliness with pretty colors and allurements. When viewed, she looks beautiful and attractive and fools men into her arms. Once there, however, she is a charnel house-a place of death and murder. This figure resolves even the Tashtego problem. He is drawn to whale¹s head by the beautiful smell, as one would be drawn to a whore by her perfume. Once in her arms, Nature (the dead whale head) pulls him down into the charnel house. The death of the man on watch, lured into the sea by it's very peace, also shows this harlotry. Even the very conclusion of the novel, as the ship sinks in the whirlpool in the midst of a beautiful day, reinforces this image of the dissembling, murderous, harlot.

So, after further and closer reading, the men's club no longer seems as safe. Where the female characters of the novel are pushed to the side and diminished early on, femininity takes on a terrifying and, finally, dominant role. Women may have been banished, but their nature's live on. They live on first in the deeper thoughts and the souls of the men. Secondly, the gentler aspect of the female nature resides in the solar images of the book. However, this gentle and fecund sun is countered by the harlot of nature, and specifically, the ocean. The Pequod men's club may have abandoned the human women, but they have a spiritual woman above them, below them, and inside their very souls.

Yet Ahab presses on, willing himself to punch through the mask that is the white whale and get at the god or goddess that lies beyond. Both Ahab and Moby Dick transcend sex to become something more. Unlike his crew, he recognizes the harlot; "thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest in the wide-slaughtering typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm."(The Dying Whale, p. 619) That queen is nature, speaking in both violence and in "painted" calm. Later, as Ahab, rails at the sky during the typhoon, he claims to be the blackness. The lightning is his "fiery father" but his mother, he "knows not." Of course, this mother must be nature, the infidel queen of the Typhoon.

In this rage at the storm, Ahab assumes a feminine aspect as well. He challenges his father, the lightning, even though he knows that it has an "unintegral, unconditional mastery of" him. "Mastery" could perhaps mean malignant will. The masculine fire could be thought of as the same fire for revenge which has burned in Ahab since Moby took his leg off. Yet, inside there is a "queenly personality that lives in me and feels her royal rights."(The Candles, p. 641) Ahab has defined his personality as feminine, among the masculine identity of the lightning. This is not so much of a gender switch as it is hermaphroditic. In other words, Ahab has assumed both sexes, labeling his own personality "infidel Queen" of nature, and the other forces that of the "masculine" storm. He is the union of the feminine, deathly, darkness and the masculine fire.

Moby Dick also embodies both genders. Aside from the standard calls of "there she blows" and "there she breaches," Moby Dick is resolutely male. At every mention of his name, he gets the male pronoun. Moby Dick, however, is the personification of the feminine nature. In his very whiteness, he is the harlot without make-up. On the first day of the chase, the boats come upon him in an "enticing calm." This very phrase echoes two different parts of the book. In being "enticing," the whale is using the allurements of the harlot. In the "calm waters", the amniotic center of the Grand Armada¹s nursery is echoed. Further, the calm after the typhoon is the same calm that Ahab labels as part of the Hindoo Queen. Both "enticing" and "calm" link this whale to the feminine whale images used earlier, although we are told time and time again that this whale is male.

Perhaps the whale is best thought of as the mirror to Ahab. Where Ahab has a feminine center of darkness surrounded by the unconditional male mastery, so the whale has the unconditional female, natural, mastery which surrounds a male core. The male core, could, perhaps, be his malignancy. The white whale is not indifferent to Ahab. Moby Dick aims for him on the first day and for the Pequod on the third. In either case, the hermaphrodite seems to be a union of nature and will. This union transcends all other characters and conflicts in the book and leaves the ending in question. Following this logic, Ahab could never kill Moby Dick as Moby could never kill Ahab. Like matter and anti-matter, they would merely cancel each other out.

In this novel, it's hard to see Ahab surviving and the whale not. It's hard to see that because the feminine side of nature is so overpowering and overwhelming. Almost everything that is larger than man is female and all of it is indifferent to him. Indeed, the part of Moby Dick that is male is probably the part that wants to hunt Ahab so much. The rest of his power is that over-arching feminine power of the ocean, the sun, nature, and even the soul. The men's club doesn¹t stand a chance. In the end, Santiago does indeed sail the same ocean as Ahab and both must take whatever she decides to give them.

Back to the Beach Copyright © Finestkind Publications and Paul Brody.