For my final project, I will be doing a 6-8 page essay that further expands on my essay 2. I will be focusing on how Melville uses Ahab to highlight what an unhealthy obsession looks like and how it can lead them to madness. I will be specifically close reading chapter 113, The Forge and how Ahab’s forged harpoon is used to represent his madness.
For my final project, I think I have finally decided on utilizing my second close reading essay and expanding on the themes and ideas of complicity that exist throughout the novel. My argument is going to revolve around the way in which Melville presents complicity through the characters and how he uses it in a way that is so representative of the complicity that resides within the American population.
At the moment, I think I am going to just be writing a 6 – 8 page essay, however, I really do want to do something creative so if inspiration hits me that might completely change.
For this final project, I really want to focus on the theme of whiteness because Melville has such a fascinating way of describing it, and I will be utilizing my second essay to its fullest extent by exploring this topic. However, one particular point I am currently stuck on is creativity. I have this desire to be as creative as possible, but my mind is giving me blank answers. I would love to make a creative project that relates to its theme. I am working on how to make an artwork that revolves around the thesis statement, and I will be trying my best to finish it by the end of next week.
Final Project Proposal: I really want to elaborate on my second essay about illumination and how Melville uses whale oil and whalers to reflect on the actual cost of what humans are doing. The contradictions between whalers bringing the light to society while living and acting in the darkness. The whalemen are shown to be both creators and destroyers, and Melville shows quite clearly (ironically enough) that the line between these two is often quite blurry and hard to distinguish.
My thesis is going to argue that a whaleman’s very “life of light” is both his glory and his doom, always tied closely together. I will show this not only through the actual content of the novel but also through the physical grammar and syntax that Melville chooses to use through its structure and rhythm. “What begins as just a factual observation about whale oil, which happens to be the literal “food of light,” expands into a moral and metaphysical reflection on the cost of illumination itself. Melville’s language transforms physical light into a spiritual metaphor, complicating the whaleman’s apparent purity by revealing the violence and destruction that make such light possible in the first place.”
Through this creative project I will be demonstrating this argument in an expanded essay of at least 6-8 pages with multiple sources such as Steve Mentz’ articles on the study of blue humanities. I chose this format because it gives me enough space to trace Melville’s symbolic patterns and connect them to broader environmental and ethical questions.
Final Project proposal: I will be elaborating and extending my second essay regarding chapter 64 of Moby Dick, titled “Stubb’s Supper”, during which Stubb begins making his meal of their whale while thousands of sharks can be heard simultaneously attacking what remains of the whale below him in the water.
My thesis is going to argue that this scene is meant to symbolize the consumerist society they live in and what becomes necessary to survive in this capitalist system. In order to participate in this capitalist society, it becomes necessary for an individual in the workforce to become violent themselves in order to survive this type of system.
I will be demonstrating this through an essay accompanied with an illustration or poem [still deciding] that symbolizes and demonstrates this violent relationship in regard to capitalist adventures.
I realized that, belatedly, I had posted both my post about what I need to learn for the final project and my project proposal into one. To remedy that, here’s the isolated bits:
For the creative project, I found a beautiful set of book ends that are the head and the tail of a sperm whale. I am taking the head and using Paper-mâché to envelop it in every page from Chapter 42, along with the literary sources I’ve pulled from for my essay and some additional items; I have the forehead read “It was never about a whale,” having the audience read the brow of the creature for the central interpretation of Moby-Dick. I will have them as the literal book ends on a copy of Moby Dick – as though the whale itself and the meaning inscribed within it is too big for the novel to even contain. This works as a kind of physical manifestation of what people perceive Moby-Dick to be about, wrapped in the chapter that is the most well known of the book.
Through this project, I argue that Melville uses the whale to critique the expectations readers bring to the symbols – showing that the whale is never simply a whale, but a surface onto which meaning is compulsively imposed. The whiteness that terrifies Ishmael arises not from the animal itself but from the human impulse to project significance onto what fundamentally resists understanding. By wrapping the whale in the physical text of Chapter 42, my artwork materializes Melville’s insight that the White Whale’s terror is generated through the very act of interpretation.
My two scholarly sources are Mary Blish’s The Whiteness of the Whale Revisited and Michael C. Berthold’s Moby-Dick and the American Slave Narrative. Both of these sources play with the concept that “Whiteness” is wholly interpretive yet also rife with pre-existing interpretations of the time. Nothing can be divorced from the history surrounding it.
For my project, I would like to focus on the how this Whale, this object of Ahab’s desire, can be read in a similar way to that of the whale described to Ishmael in the chapter containing the sermon. This tale of Jonah and the whale, to me, feels like larger statement within the novel, especially as the Whale is not a main player, if you will, despite being the driving force for this journey that the novel details. This essay would be the lengthy one, at six to eight pages, rather than a mixed medium with a creative project and a show essay attached. In these pages, I hope to explore and explain this connection to the best of my abilities.
For my final project, I will be discussing about the psychological tension, obsession, trauma, and inner conflict, specifically, in these three characters: Ahab, Pip, and Ishmael who go through massive evolutions of trauma and psychological problems in the story. I have always being interested on how the mind works in mysterious ways and just discovering on how mental health was back centuries ago and not fully understanding it makes me astonished.
Thesis: Herman Melville uses Ahab’s obsessive monomania, Pip’s traumatic experience psychological break, and Ishmael’s existential crisis to explore how unaddressed mental health struggles not only shape that person’s inner conflict. Melville illustrates three different psychological responses to suffering, eventually suggesting that mental health struggles form the moral and narrative course of Moby Dick.
For my final project, I will connect Melville’s Moby Dick to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “American Scholar” by exploring their call-and-response relationship through a creative poem that incorporates direct quotes from both sources. The form and structure of the poem will represent the relationship between Emerson’s call and Melville’s response, making my project both a textual and visual answer to the final project prompt. Though the messages braided into Melville’s text stand individually as institutional critiques, it is through the novel’s perspective as an answer to a larger call for American national identity that Moby Dick clicks into place. By revisiting and reordering both Emerson’s “American Scholar” and Melville’s Moby Dick, the relationship between the two becomes poetry in its own right, an ebb and flow of the American Renaissance, and a historical preservation of exemplary American identity.
For my final project, I have decided to focus on the topic that I wrote about for my second close reading essay, which is the critique of Christianity within Moby Dick. As we read through the novel this is something that I truly didn’t focus on much until I came into class and heard all of the different ideas from my peers. Which then caught my interest and I have started re-reading some of these chapters even closer with this idea in mind. I will be focusing my essay around chapter 17 titled “The Ramadan” and another chapter which I have ideas for but haven’t decided which I want to incorporate the most. My project will not include a creative piece, it will be an essay revolving around Melville using Ishmael as a vessel to push forward a powerful critique of Christianity through the use of Ishmael’s moments of condescending and hypocritical language. My essay will also include the two scholarly sources that will help push forward this critique. I have found a couple of sources that relate to my topic and I will be making the final decisions this week of what works best.