Abstract
In this chapter, Pellar does an almost line-by-line analysis so that the reader can understand just how much Melville’s antislavery allegory pervades his novel. As with a key to a cipher, the hidden antislavery message of Moby-Dick becomes clear and readable.
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Notes
- 1.
As will be seen shortly, Melville repeatedly evokes the image of rope and “hanging” as they are central to his philosophy of the futility of words to capture or imprison truth.
- 2.
Ironic in the sense that the Manxman, via the ocean as his Harvard and his Yale, is much wiser than Ahab.
- 3.
This reflects the complex mixed imagery of the Ship of State as rocky continent, as Leviathan/Moby Dick, as impaling and sinking itself like the painting in the Spouter Inn.
- 4.
This stone or “rock” image not only references the “granite” college of Queen Nature but the “lifeless masses of rock” of the whales as men in the chapter “Brit.” This “rock” image as equated with “mortar” as the “precipitate of the fall” will be discussed further in my chapter “I Do Not Baptize Thee in Name.”
- 5.
Which again Melville alludes to in Father Mapple’s pulpit in the shape of a ship.
- 6.
Most notably in “Bartleby the Scrivener,” which, again, I will discuss in detail in a later work.
- 7.
Again, Garrison’s warning of the consequences of choosing a middle divide or way is resurrected here.
- 8.
In White-Jacket, Melville wrote that in regard to the destination of the “World Frigate,” even “the smallest cabin boy is as wise as the captain,” – which is an echo of Lear’s fool. 1983c, 768.
- 9.
Freeburg notes that through the interracial bond between Ahab and Pip, “blackness, which both characters embody in different ways, is an index where Melville interlaces Ahab’s metaphysical musing about absolute mastery with ideas about racialized social inequality” (2012, 21).
- 10.
One of many of Melville’s symbolic links between black men and black whales. In addition, Fanning, among others, also sees a racial significance to this scene. She sees Pip’s leap from the boat as, “a grim pantomime of the black race’s tenuous position in human history” and Pip’s idiocy as “an indictment of White America” (218).
- 11.
Bradley also noticed a fascinating link between Pip and a fugitive slave. He states, “Pip is first introduced in chapter 27 as an ‘Alabama boy’ and later in chapter 93 as hailing from ‘Tolland County in Connecticut’ – which is to say he is a fugitive slave.” “Our Crowd, Their Crowd: Race, Reader, and Moby-Dick,” 1997, 144. Bradley also noticed that the “chapter on Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish might have seemed an elaborate and satirical reference to the Fugitive Slave Act itself” 1997, 144.
- 12.
Again, an echo of Lear as others have already noted.
- 13.
An allusion to that other castaway, Ishmael, who states, “call me” instead of his name.
- 14.
Melville points out in chapter 102, “A Bower in the Arsacides” – “The weaver-God, he weaves…” (1967b, 374).
- 15.
Delbanco also briefly mentions this, where the wound fuels Ahab’s rage and makes him “crave his lost potency” (2005, 168).
- 16.
From Latin, sperma, seed, and cetus, whale. American Heritage Dictionary.
- 17.
Who was ironically made a cripple as that dependence manifested in the flesh.
- 18.
As ditches also calls to mind graves and bones and digging – there is a hint in the making of holes in that Ship of State to make it sink.
- 19.
Heimert also noticed that this passage is “a tragic parody of a fugitive-slave handbill,” but he didn’t link the word “clay” to Senator Clay. “Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism,” 1963, 513.
- 20.
The Congressman, William Cost Johnson, from Maryland, “believed that it was a blessing for Africans to keep them in slavery.” Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870, 1999, 660.
- 21.
Wallace feels that Melville might have indeed have caught the attention of abolitionist readers. Wallace notes that in Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Captain Delano walks up to a captive Spanish sailor on the stricken slave ship who was making a rope into a knot. The sailor says, “Undo it, cut it quick,” but just then a black sailor walked up to the sailor, took the knot, and “with some African word, equivalent to pshaw, he tossed the knot overboard,” Wallace, “Fugitive Justice: Douglass, Shaw, Melville,” 2008, 63. I feel that not only does the black sailor’s tossing of the rope/knot overboard reference Calhoun’s cords and the Manxman’s remark of a “rotten line” but Wallace makes a keen insight into Melville’s clever use of the word “pshaw”: “Melville’s use of ‘some African word, equivalent to pshaw,’ delivered with ‘an attorney air,’ is likely to have caught the attention of abolitionist lawyers in Massachusetts such as Dana – especially since ‘pshaw’ in English is pronounced like Shaw” (63). That is, Melville purposefully drew attention to the name of “Shaw,” his father-in-law Lemuel Shaw, whose decisions in the Latimer and Sims cases riled abolitionists whose chief aims were the cutting of the rotten cords and knots between the North and South.
Bibliography
Bradley, David, “Our Crowd, Their Crowd: Race, Reader, and Moby-Dick.” Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays. Edited by John Bryant and Robert Milder. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1997.
Delbanco, Andrew. Melville: His World and Work. NY: Vintage Books, 2005.
Freeburg, Christopher. Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Garrison, William Lloyd, “Letter to Louis Kossuth Concerning Freedom and Slavery in the United States in Behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society.” 1852. Samuel J. May Anti-slavery Collection: HYPERLINK “http://dlxs.library.cornell.edu” http://dlxs.library.cornell.edu.
Heimert, Alan, “Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism.” American Quarterly 15 (Winter 1963): 498–534.
Mayer, Henry. All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. 1851. Edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967b. Page numbers are to the 1967 edition.
Melville, Herman. White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War. 1850. New York: Library of America, 1983c.
Melville, Herman. Correspondence. Vol. 14, Writings of Herman Melville. Edited by Lynn Horth. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and the Library, 1993.
Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1999.
Wallace, Robert K., “Fugitive Justice: Douglass, Shaw, Melville.” Frederick Douglass & Herman Melville: Essays in Relation. Edited by Robert S. Levine & Samuel Otter. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2008.
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Pellar, B.R. (2017). The Log and the Line. In: Moby-Dick and Melville’s Anti-Slavery Allegory. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52267-8_9
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