paper for my melville class

Heather Beatty
Sweet
Engl. 250A
05/14/08



Eternal Mildness of Joy: Marriage and the Maternal in Moby-Dick


For a vast text that includes notably few women, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick continues to intrigue and frustrate contemporary feminist readers. In recent scholarship, critics have examined Melville and Moby-Dick with varying results regarding its relevance and functioning in current gender analyses. For example, while Elizabeth Renker explores Melville’s personal violently troubled relations with the women of his family, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis argues that some of Melville’s works may be read as “exposure of the exploitation of women” (1). Although Melville ostensibly had a problematic relationship with women and gender in his personal life, Moby-Dick yet appeals to readers, both male and female, in a deeply felt, sympathetic way that suggests an immersion into the traditionally female landscape of emotion in the psyche. The novel is rich with cultural and mythological imagery of the archetypal feminine that interacts with the explicit depictions of a patriarchal, masculine world.
Melville brings together the opposing binary of male and female in a way that evokes Julia Kristeva’s writings on the reintegration of the semiotic and the symbolic, the maternal and paternal realms. I will discuss his invocation of the semiotic, or pre-Oedipal expression of what Kristeva calls the chora or maternal realm, in his numerous descriptions of inscrutable signs such as Queequeg’s tattoos, the corresponding markings on his coffin and the body of the whale. Highlighting the value of the semiotic allows Melville to ultimately emphasize the necessity of masculine reunion with the feminine in order to find redemption. Melville uses the language of union or marriage in Ishmael’s relationship with Queequeg, as traced from their first night together to the “Monkey-rope” chapter to the epilogue in which Ishmael is saved by Queequeg’s strangely expressive coffin life-buoy. Melville repeatedly uses the word “connexion” meaningfully throughout the text, like his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne’s recurrent use of the term “sympathy,” and in the end it is this metaphoric union itself that allows Ishmael to survive to tell the tale.
The theme of unity as exemplified by Ishmael’s survival also plays out in the considerable structure of the text itself. In Moby-Dick, Melville creates a world occupied with dazzling characters, diversity, and interrelations much in the way of the carnivalesque as proposed by Bakhtin and elaborated upon by Kristeva. The carnival world, Kristeva explains, is “essentially dialogical,” that is, it is “composed of distances, relationships, analogies and nonexclusive oppositions” (78). The novel that creates this dialogical discourse and features carnivalesque motifs Kristeva calls “polyphonic,” in its incorporation of many voices and integration of dualities. Understood in this way, a novel that embraces both the semiotic and the symbolic is polyphonic, allowing for a “power of the continuum” where “symbolic relationships and analogy take precedence” (72). Through its repeated use of carnivalesque forms and imagery of “connexion” Moby-Dick takes on the power of “dream logic,” becoming part of Kristeva’s continuum in which a “poetic double” allows for a transgression of social divisions and prohibitions (71).
Moby-Dick’s occurrences of songs, theatrics, daydreams and madness create the carnivalesque scene that sets the stage for a dialogically discursive universe. Melville utilizes many forms Kristeva describes as typical of the carnivalesque such as the inclusion of many genres, a tending toward “the eccentric in language” and discourse on the “ultimate problems of existence” (Krisetva 83). This way the form of the novel itself reveals a reunion of the dualistic realm of the symbolic order. In the carnivalesque style, Moby-Dick uses songs, chants, dreams and humor to impart social messages. For example, Stubb has a dream that “made a wise man of [him]” with mythical imagery and trickster humor (143). Another carnivalesque scene occurs with the sailors’ carousing in the chapter “Midnight, Forecastle,” in which they shout out “Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it,” and “merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip…Split jibs! Tear yourselves!” (189). The festivities end with Pip crying out, “Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crash, crash! there goes the jib-stay” (193). Pip addresses the dangerous power of the mad revelries themselves to upset the stability of norms, just as the novel itself holds an implicit suggestion of transgression with its powerful descriptions of a polyphonic, dialogical otherworld. Herein lies the embedded implication regarding the value of recognizing and respecting the Other. In America in the 1850s, a world where prosperous society functioned on the basis of the violent oppression of natives, slaves and women, Melville’s structure and form here hint at an alternative in which union, or marriage, of the one (white, male) with the Other (dark, female) contains a hope for renewal and redemption.
In order to create a setting for this vital union of opposites, Melville introduces non-linguistic signs of the semiotic. The semiotic mode of expression may be traced back to the bond with the mother, Kristeva asserts, it consists of “an uncertain or indeterminate articulation” (Desire 133) that belongs to “the chora, matrix space, nourishing, unnameable.” (Women’s 472). The maternal aspect of these types of nonverbal expressions is essential: representing important aspects of the pre-Oedipal connection with the mother, they are built out of the unconscious: rhythmic, tonal, and sensual. Semiotic communication takes place in Moby-Dick in the numerous mysterious markings such as Queequeg’s tattoos, Ahab’s scar, the markings on Queequeg’s coffin, and the markings on the whale.
Ishmael’s primary introduction to Queequeg takes place in the gloom of midnight in the dark room at the Spouter Inn that they will be reluctantly cohabitating. Ishmael’s shock: “good heavens! what a sight! Such a face!” is announced upon noting the “stains of some sort or another” on Queequeg’s face and body (23). “Dark, purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large, blackish looking squares;” these tattoos trouble and frighten Ishmael at first with their inscrutability. He decides that Queequeg must indeed be a cannibal and nearly absconds before realizing that “ignorance is the parent of fear” and giving this “purple rascal” another chance despite being “confounded by the stranger” (24). Contact with Queequeg’s foreign and indecipherable tattoos initiate Ishmael into a personal journey into the unknown, a mysterious territory mythically linked to the expressive quality of the maternal chora. In effect, Melville allows for what Kristeva considers a “resumption of the functioning characteristic of the semiotic chora within the signifying device of language” through the introduction of these mysterious semiotic signs (Reader 103). Ishmael’s eventual respect and appreciation for these tattoos indicates a willingness to return to the rationally inscrutable territory of the semiotic.
Queequeg later uses the markings from his own body as templates for the inscriptions he carves upon his coffin that becomes Ishmael’s life-buoy. The coffin itself is a mythical symbol of the Great Mother according to Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann, who describes “the fundamental symbolic equation of the feminine” as “woman = body = vessel = world” (43). The coffin fits into this formulation of the symbolism of the vessel (which also includes the ship) akin to the mother’s elementary protection. Significantly, Queequeg carves upon this maternal symbol with “all manner of grotesque figures and drawings” copying the “twisted tattooing on his body” (524). He reinscribes the semiotic figures of his own body, which
had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. (524)

The body, in Neumann’s configuration, contains “the whole scope of the basic feminine functions” (43) and Queequeg’s body with its mysterious markings that contain a “complete theory of the heavens and the earth” reflects the life-giving functions of the mystic feminine sphere. His body, then, taps into the psychological reality “whose fateful power is still alive in the psychic depths of present-day man,” (Neumann 43) a journey into the unconscious realm of the archetypal feminine. The semiotic quality of these mysterious coffin markings, not even comprehensible to Queequeg himself, mirrors poetic language, which Kristeva says, “awakens our attention to this undecidable character of any so-called natural language, a feature that univocal, rational, scientific discourse tends to hide” (Desire 135). In the end of the story, it is this coffin of course, rich with mythic connotations and carrying a secret language of the maternal semiotic, that saves Ishmael.
Even Ahab, the story’s most patriarchal and dominant character, is inscribed with a mysterious mark that may be read as a semiotic figure. Ahab’s “slender, rod-like mark” that goes “threading its way…down one side of his tawny scorched face” is “lividly whitish” (134). This scar, almost alive with angry energy, hints at unknown forces of rage and emotion that exist in the unconscious self. Ishmael likens the scar to “that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it” leaving the tree “branded” (134). Ishmael’s description of the scar links Ahab to the mythological world of Zeus; the scar represents the natural world’s mysterious caprices, whether encountered in the form of sudden lightning or a battle with a great whale. This reading also suggests the all-encompassing power of Neumann’s elemental Great Mother who contains devouring and destructive powers as well as nurturing and transforming. Whether inscrutable etchings of the semiotic mode appear benevolent or threatening, they are always interpreted as fraught with meaning that evades verbal human logic, linking back to the realm of the chora that lacks the cohesive structure of the symbolic order, rational and prohibitive.
Melville, through Ishmael’s observant voice, describes another type of semiotic marking with great detail: the etchings on the skin of the great whale. One of the “many marvels he presents,” the whale’s skin or “blanket” is marked by “numberless straight marks in thick array…like those in the finest Italian line engravings” (333). He is quick to remark as well that these engravings “to the quick, observant eye…afford the ground for far other delineations” (333). Ishmael acknowledges that many possibilities exist for interpretation, and that the markings suggest the effects of the unknown secrets of the deep sea. So great mysteries are present here, unknowable and haunting, in the semiotic riddle of the whale’s “hieroglyphical” marks. Ishmael’s attention to these marks once again speaks to a tendency toward the speechless territory of the chora. He compares the whale’s markings to “old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi” and emphasizes that, like “those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable” (333). He places the whale’s markings in league with other great secret messages from an ancient mystical culture so that the whale, too, acts as an emissary from the deep unconscious inscripted by this semiotic secret code.
In the same chapter, Ishmael goes on to rhapsodize about the “cosy blanketing” of the whale’s body which provides a homey sort of comfort that keeps the whale alive in Arctic waters. Ishmael declares to humankind: “admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice” (334). He seems to promote here a soothing sense domesticity within the self, a sense of built-in home and self that comes from “a temperature of thine own,” almost alluding to a soul (334). Following so quickly on the heels of the description of the whale’s semiotic signature, Ishmael seems to see the whale as a kind of mother-figure representing a positive metaphoric union of the maternal and paternal which holds the power for an ultimate sense of fulfilled self. Wilma Garcia claims that “the leviathan that embodies the enormity of non-human, inhuman creation—the great white whale is, like God the Father, a solitary male” (90). And yet, the whale seems virtually sexless, an enigmatic presence throughout the novel, often figuring into the story with maternal imagery.
For example, when Tashtego falls into the severed head of the giant whale as it descends into the ocean, Queequeg must “deliver” him, “thrusting in for him,” and finding him breach:
a leg was presented; but well knowing that was not as it ought to be and might occasion great trouble; --he had thrust back the leg, and…had wrought a somerset upon the Indian; so that with the next trial, he came forth in the good old way—head foremost. As for the great head itself, that was doing as well as could be expected. (376)

The gentle humor of this passage lies in the fact that the language reflects precisely the style of obstetric reports of the 19th century, and Ishmael even ascribes Queequeg with “great skill in obstetrics” and asserts that “midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing” (376). The whale’s head here has taken on a completely maternal aspect, “doing as well as could be expected” after her harrowing delivery of a full-grown man. The language of childbirth and obstetrics serves to put readers in mind of the vital life and death processes engaged in by women similar to the whaling journey itself, and Melville’s sentence about the importance of “midwifery” among other male-dominated sports gives a nod of acknowledgement, albeit a bit derisive, to this most maternal of discourses.
Although Garcia does not attribute femininity to the whale, she does argue that the childbirth scene figures in to the development of Queequeg as what Leslie Fieldler, in Love and Death in the American Novel calls Ishmael’s “dark angel” (98). Both Garcia and Fiedler agree that the union of Ishmael and Queequeg provides symbolic and redemptive power upon which the narrative ultimately depends. In fact Fiedler asserts that Moby-Dick can actually be read “as a love story, perhaps the greatest love story in our fiction, cast in the peculiar form of innocent homosexuality” (372). For my purposes, the union of Ishmael and Queequeg does indeed read as a love story, one that brings together opposing systems of thought and being, the semiotic and symbolic modes, in a coalition that may be encompassed by the “plural, fluid” dynamism of Kristeva’s cosmic maternal continuum (Women’s 475). In Fiedler’s argument, “the male hierogamos [is] inter-racial as well as homoerotic” (366), so that the union takes place between a subject and the Other with sociological impact, a vital integration in Kristeva’s vision.
Fiedler has written on the implications and importance of Ishmael’s immediate recognition of his budding relationship with Queequeg as a marriage. Immediately upon waking up the first morning after they have been bedfellows, Ishmael describes “Queequeg’s arms thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner” and directly states, “You had almost thought I had been his wife” (28). His early acknowledgment of the relationship as a marriage, what Fiedler calls “an indissoluble union” reveals Ishmael’s growing trust in the implicit opening and offering of himself to the Other.
Immediately after this wifely recognition, while snuggled in Queequeg’s arms, Ishmael goes on to remember a disturbing childhood trauma, a punishment at the hands of his stepmother. Fiedler posits this as the recovery of an old ache that the marriage will now be able to help solve, beginning Ishmael’s “sentimental re-education” and freeing him “for a reconciliation with the tabooed mother” which, ironically “he will not know until the book’s end” (375). For now, the entire memory takes place as Ishmael attempts to reconcile himself to the “strangeness” of “waking up and seeing Queequeg’s arm thrown round me” with its “bridegroom grasp” (29-30). This particular expression of his wonder at the circumstances reveals the underlying importance of this new vital relationship to Ishmael’s unconscious and his renewing experience of maternal love. In fact it is later the same day that Ishmael feels, “a melting in me” as he and Queequeg become bosom friends: “wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him” (57). Now melted together, they smoke together ritualistically and then Queequeg proclaims their marriage: “ he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me around the waist, and said that henceforth we were married” (57). Completing this unusual marriage ceremony, they go to bed together “in our hearts’ honeymoon…a cosy, loving pair” (58). It is their very togetherness, their marriage, which will ultimately allow for a redeeming sense of integration and wholeness.
Fiedler has also written extensively on the ”Monkey-Rope” chapter, in which Ishmael and Queequeg intensify their marriage relationship. Interestingly, as Fiedler points out, this is the only instance in the entire novel that Melville apparently “makes a deliberate change in the facts of whaling procedure” (376). It is obviously a crucial point, then, that Melville desires to illuminate in his descriptions of Ishmael and Queequeg’s tying-together in Melville’s ever-important “connexion,” by the monkey-rope, each one relying on the other in a reciprocal trusting arrangement. Here Ishmael returns to the language of marriage: “for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded” (349). Ishmael’s contemplations celebrate this predicament, in fact “so strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that…I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two” (349). It is here in his role as spouse and friend that Ishmael proclaims one of the novel’s most poignant lessons: that every “mortal that breathes” is caught up in “a plurality of other mortals” (349). Ishmael’s words here remind us of the polyphonic novel, the many voices of the topsy-turvy world of the carnivalesque that allow for change and growth through shared ordeal. It is Ishmael’s poetic ramblings about the circumstance of dependence and love that allows it to shine here in print. Ishmael’s ramblings, of course, which would not have been possible, had not the ship sunk and Queequeg’s inscrutable coffin sprung up to save Ishmael’s life. The semiotic prevails on multiple levels.
It is a subject that becomes more and more important to our narrator Ishmael and the chapter entitled “The Line” offers another look at a symbol both semiotic and uniting, yet patriarchal and exploitive. The whale-line itself: “magical, sometimes horrible” has the capacity to create a terrible linkage of whale and ship that reads like another, darker, wedding ceremony. “You would not think it so strong as it really is” Ishmael assures readers, hinting at that indissoluble bond of marriage yet again (303). He describes the line-tub as “a prodigious great wedding-cake to present to the whales,” linking love and death in this terrible hunting marriage ceremony that is consecrated by the whale-line. Ishmael sees the line, with its “complicated coils” and its “perilous contortions” as the bond between the nature and industry, whale and ship. He later describes the ship and whale as “yoked together like colossal bullocks” but of course one is still in motion and the other has been hunted and killed. The line serves as a powerful image of the dualistic nature inherent even in marriage itself, the power of love to destroy as well as to create. The bond created here is one of power and death, and its mirror image, the umbilical cord, a line of love and nurturing, comes in a later chapter.
“The Grand Armada” chapter, in its vivid depictions of mother whales and nursing offspring, provides the essential image of the umbilical cord as a foil for the whale-line and shows Ishmael’s cresting awareness of this semiotic space with its inherent value and power. Garcia explores this chapter in relation to Ishmael, Starbuck, and Queequeg’s reverence in the domain of these literal great mothers. She writes that “the men in Starbuck’s boat alone are granted a glimpse of nature at her most benign…and only Ishmael seems to understand fully the significance of the images of fertility and sexual union” (99-100). Garcia suggests that Ishmael retains some hold on femininity that allows him to be saved in the end. In my Kristevan reading it is not so much his personal feminine aspect but an ability to integrate life and nature’s duality in a way in line with the poetic continuum of semiotic and symbolic, that enables and even requires his ultimate survival so that he may enact this integration through the writing of the novel.
This access of the semiotic climaxes in this scene with the maternal and nursing whales of the deep. Naturally, it is poetic Ishmael who takes special notice of “another and still stranger world” far below the surface, “suspended in those watery vaults” (423). It is Ishmael who describes the umbilical cord with its “long coils” as a “natural line, with the maternal end loose” (424), making the connection between the two opposing realms of domesticity and industry, maternal and paternal. This natural line becomes “entangled in the hempen one,” trapping the whale cub and introducing human destruction into the peaceful scene, just as another whale, wounded by the harpoon line, bursts in on the scene of “bridal-chambers and nurseries” and they vanish in the wake of fear and destruction (426). The sweet scene is vulnerable to penetration by violence, and yet Ishmael portrays it carefully as having the power to provide a place “deep down and deep inland” of the “eternal mildness of joy” (425). He is able to see human possibilities in this primal scene: the nursing babies and peaceful mothers of the deep show moving characteristics of nurturing and tenderness with power to stir the most masculine and toughened of hearts: the entire boat of seamen “thus lay entranced” (425).
This scene, which Fiedler asserts “constitutes Ishmael’s real descent into the whale,” carries Ishmael’s secret key for survival and renewal (382). Ultimately it is the recognition of the power of the chora: the nurturing, regenerative love present in the “dalliance and delight” of these families of whales, that shows the power of love and “connexion.” Ishmael takes a heart lesson from these whales that reinforces his “Holy Marriage” with Queequeg and all the non-verbal semiotic expressions he has encountered throughout the novel (Fiedler 280). Not Garcia’s “image of Ishmael as the bride who survives the doomed quest” (100) but Ishmael’s unconscious recognition and incorporation of the maternal into his own worldview as a budding poet, renders his survival necessary for the survival of the tale and the regeneration of humanity. This view is more aligned with Fiedler’s argument that the “coffin-lifebuoy” and the “plunge which eventuates in a resurrection” repeats the “holy marriage with Queequeg” who represents “the watery area of the world” (381). Thus it is Ishmael’s union with Queequeg, the Other, symbolized by his coffin covered in semiotic tattoos of eloquent mysteriousness, that eventually saves him: “Buoyed up by the coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft, dirge-like main” (625). Ishmael’s explanation to his readers in the Epilogue, using terminology like “buoyed up,” conveys that his spiritual marriage with Queequeg has ultimately been his savior.
Just as Kristeva urges a convergence of the semiotic and the symbolic, the psychological realms of the maternal and paternal, in the end it is “connexion” that redeems in Melville’s Moby-Dick. In order to fully apprehend the impact of the text we must leave Melville’s personal life and his troubled relationship with his wife aside and examine the words and evocations of the novel itself. We are left with Ishmael’s voice, the hopeful voice of a poet, saved from the great wreckage of the Pequod by his “love-union with the dark savage” which Fiedler goes on to suggest “signifies a life-giving immersion in nature or the id, a death and rebirth” (381). Fiedler’s mythical terms here are central to this kind of understanding of Moby-Dick as a socially fraught narrative with lasting historical impact.
To respect and celebrate the Other, to find one’s place in the continuum of dualities, to “strike through the mask” as Ahab so desperately desires (178), this is the role of the Carnivalesque, the role of poetry, the role of the semiotic and ultimately, the role of “connexion.” “How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?” Ahab demands (178), a sentiment that Melville no doubt admires, but with a different wall in mind and within a different scope than Ahab’s mad revenge scheme. Melville’s wall is that of dominant structural society, those binds that trap humankind into unthinking acceptance of norms. The carnivalesque form of this novel with its polyphonic voices and semiotic expressions, presents a microcosmic world that emerges from the capitalism, greed, and corruption of the imperialistic patriarchal Western world and is finally able to send one emissary back who has struck through. Ishmael has experienced “that inscrutable thing” that Ahab hates, and found love and connection instead (178). He has integrated the semiotic into the symbolic order through his use of poetic language as a means to tell the story. Herein lies redemption.

Works Consulted

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