The ocean is the world’s largest mystery, spanning immense depths and miles across our beautiful planet. It beholds a certain, ambiguous beauty which capsizes even the most steel-hearted when caught within its enamoring essence. Since the beginning of time our oceans have been a perilous journey traversed, a body to be respected with God-like reverence, a fearful booming giant or a place of solace. We continue to surround ourselves near and in this body with an unmistakable spiritual desire. What is the driving force which propels us to be near such a mystical, powerful presence? Throughout literature this question has been widely addressed in topics of maritime literature. Maritime literature contains stories focus on this obsession with the ocean, and the tales and journeys of our encounters with it. Stories under this umbrella span from age-old tales of grandeur such as Homer’s Odyssey all the way to the critical text Moby Dick by Herman Melville. The novel Moby Dick features a narrative by the character Ishmael, following his journey as a harpooner while he hunts down the elusive White Whale, Moby Dick. Melville glorifies the the sea through the eyes of Ishmael with the prose of sexual, feminine beauty. As the story advances, it appears that the hunt of the Moby Dick is not a harpooners journey but an allusion to eroticism in the feminization of the sea. The novel Moby Dick written by Herman Melville uses the feminization of the sea to represent heterosexual and homosexual conquest and desire.
The ocean has been a model of exploration since we first began voyages across its stormy seas. Although we historically do not know much about what lays within its watery depths, it has always been a matter to be contested and attempted to conquest. Within maritime culture there has been a current theme of referring to the ship as having feminine pronouns. In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick a instance of the feminine personification of ship is “in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the kneel, would make her shudder through and through” (91). By inferring that the ship is a feminine object, it intrinsically gives the ship a sexual connotation when compared to the masculinity attributed to the sailors which ride it. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick recounts the journey of the typical Nantucket sailor in this passage “thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits…two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it…the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales” (60-61). When looking at these two passages in relation to each other, and understanding the historical prevalence of the sea in the feminine, it is a apparent that Melville is alluding to a sexual conquest. To Herman Melville in Moby Dick the male, the valiant Nantucket sailor, whom bravely voyages across the sea as “emperors own empires” (61) would have to be strong enough to conquer the ships “effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea” (91). This latter passage is a quote from a description of the ship when she is fighting against the winds on her way to the shore. The emperor, the Nantucket sailor, completes his conquest when he is out of sight of land and only then can he finally rest (referred to by quotes on pages 60-61). Yet meanwhile the ship, the woman (she), is fighting against the gales to make it towards the land, in order to keep her independence. Using this tactic of emphasizing the feminine and masculine roles of maritime literature, Melville is alluding to stereotypical gender roles in society. By referring to the ship and sea as feminine objects, and the sailor as a masculine conquistador, he is outlining the generic dialectic of male-feminine relationships in patrichartical systems. Far from this being a novel of the maritime archetype, it is a critique/ example of sexuality as historically considered in the feminine and masculine.
As the final chapters of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick come to a close the sailors upon their ship, the Pequod, come across the prize of the entire journey, the great White Whale; Moby Dick. The novel has been building up to this climatic end since the main character, Ishamael, becomes crew of the boat journeying to set off on the hunt. Upon Ishmael joining this ship, he is introduced to the shadowy character of Captain Ahab, the Captain of the Pequod. Already it is understood the sea and ship are represented in the feminine, while the sailors (whalers), are masculine conquistadors. Captain Ahab is a perfect representation of this idealized masculine figure, in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick he is detailed as having a “whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus” (103). Although there is one aspect of this perfect masculine figure which is missing, his leg. This leg being ripped off by none other then the elusive Moby Dick, which they happen to be harpooning. The last three chapters capture the action once they come across Moby Dick, and these chapters are fittingly titled “The Chase.” In these chapters, Captain Ahab finally gets his moment of revenge for Moby Dick, the Moby Dick which stole his leg. Since masculinity goes hand in hand with heroism, it would be considerable to conclude that the Captain Ahab harpoons Moby Dick and saves the ship. This is not the case, Moby Dick ends up bashing into the Pequod, sending the ship to it’s watery grave. Throughout these final chapters, “The Chase (another allusion to men chasing women, or sex),” the sexual emphasis put on Moby Dick is startling. An example in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick focuses around Captain Ahab’s encounter “furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from his gripe” (394). This is obviously a reference to a repressed homosexual desire. Captain Ahab is an immense masculine figure in the novel, and represents the threat of homosexual desire on a masculine figure in society. The vernacular used in this combat is of sexual nature; “tantalizing,” “helpless in the very jaws he hated,” “frenzied,” “bone,” “naked hands” and “wildly” all allude to homosexual sex. Captain Ahab is a symbolism of homosexul erotic desire when repressed by society, and Herman Melville is using this character and the encounter with Moby Dick as an example of this occurrence.
Aspects of stereotypical femininity include notions like beauty and grace. When one compares something as magnificent as the ocean to a feminine concepts, there is a certain aesthetic that cannot be denied. This aesthetic places the woman, the feminine prowess, in a similar category such like the magnitude of the ocean. In a sense this is empowering, considering the ocean is one of the most important contributor of our existence on earth; placing the ocean in the feminine pronoun assimilates the notion that we, females, are also one of the most important contributors on earth. Yet, when one looks at the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville it appears that the ocean is stripped of the idea of feminine mystery and power, and is portrayed as the feminine as needed to be conquered by the male. This is obvious in the examples cited above which prove that masculinity in Moby Dick is defined as conquering the feminine, whether that be in women or in homosexuality. Herman Melville, by writing Moby Dick, used the feminine ideology associated with the sea, and the masculinity of the sailors, and the whale, to allude to heterosexual and homosexual conquest in society.
-MaraJean Hagen-Spath
Works Cited
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Delaware: Norton & Company, 2018. Print.
