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Final Essay
Darian Murillo
ECL 522
Professor Pressman
December 10, 2025
Psychological, obsession and depression
In Melville’s Moby Dick, madness is not a distant presentation, but mostly a storm that’s brewing in their mind. Herman Melville demonstrates the characters in the Pequod who are fighting their inner demons during their time sailing at sea they start to reveal their obsession, grief and isolation can wrap someone’s brain in a turmoil. 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 psychological struggles form the moral and narrative course of Moby Dick.
In Chapter 1, “Loomings”, Ishmael reveals the emotional crisis he’s going through, that pushes him into joining the sailing crew and Melville uses vivid imagery for his depression. In the quote, “ Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street…”(4), when Ishamel describes a “damp, drizzly November” in his soul, the cold weather becomes a metaphor for his inner life, such as cold and heavy clouded. What I noticed was the repetition of the word “whenever” creates a rhythm that mirrors the nature of his depressive state and how it returns during these random episodes of despair like a cycle over and over again. One thing I found noticeable in the quotes was Ishmael’s fascination with death: the coffin warehouses, follows funerals, saying his mind goes into the darkness even when he doesn’t want to. Melville mentions the word “hypo” defining down which meant how Ishamel had his moments of despair and downfall that was taking such control of him that “it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street..” (4) its almost like a reference to suicidal thoughts. The whole paragraph of the chapter, not only shows us Ishmael, the protagonist, but the whole theme of the story just by hearing the first couple of sentences and Melville demonstrating us Ishmael’s journey as a task to survival from the storm inside his head.
In chapter 44, Ishmael explains how obsessed Captain Ahab has become on planning his hunt for Moby Dick. Melville writes,” God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates”,(220), in this passage Melville explores how obsession can transform the human mind into its own tormentor and how easy it is to lose yourself to madness when the thoughts come too deeply to torment the human mind. He transforms Ahab as a victim and the creator of his own madness. The phrase,” God help thee” is recognizing that Ahab is suffering and no one can save him, but Him. When he says the “creature” it represents the madness being born inside of him from his obsession with Moby Dick, while comparing him to Prometheus due to both being defiant and both being punished for not fulfilling their duties. Melville uses imagery to warn us, the audience, about the conception of madness of the human mind, becoming too much of a delusion of something we can’t let go.
I recently read in my rhetoric writing class Terry Eagleton’s, “Literary Theory: An Introduction,” one of his chapter, psychoanalysis, in this quote, “ Every human being has to undergo this repression of what Freud named the ‘pleasure principle’ by the ‘reality principle’, but for some of us, and arguably for whole societies, the repression may become excessive and make us ill,” (Eagleton, 131) ,Eagleton discusses that psychoanalysis views that humans are driven by unconscious desires and compulsions that they don’t comprehend, which comes as a clear example: Ahab’s obsession with Moby Dick.
In chapter 93 of Moby Dick, Ishmael reflects, ” So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weak or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God,”(454) the quote transforms the idea of madness from being known as weak into a form of divine understanding. We see Pip, a young cabin boy who is left adrift in the vast ocean, who experiences trauma so badly, he loses touch with humanity itself. I think Melville often uses and questions the human definitions of sanity and reason, like in this chapter, he demonstrates in a tragic and spiritual way. Melville shows, in Pip’s point of view, explores how the moments of extreme isolation and suffering can lead to a person’s beyond reasoning of humanity. What’s the whole obsession with the sanity of the human mind that peaks Melville’s interest towards it?
Pip’s experience reminds me of Annie Cresta from The Hunger Games. Just like Pip, Annie endures the overwhelming trauma from not just witnessing her tribute member being decapitated in front of her, but also from drowning after the whole arena malfunctioned. Her being from District Four (known to be a district of water and fishing) she knew how to swim and was the only survivor hence made her the winner. But at what cost though? She’s considered unstable by the Capitol due to her losing her mind and going insane after her traumatic experience; she was found basically useless, but that also shows her fragility and how cruel the world can be. Both of these characters embody how innocence collides with inhumanity, such as sensitivity, being mistaken for madness, and is their true response to their suffering. Both Pip and Annie challenge society’s discrimination of sanity being called mad for no good reason at all. Both characters are gentle souls who have endured enough trauma that it transforms their sanity into understanding.
In conclusion, Melville presents psychological suffering as an inescapable condition of human existence. In my opinion, I think the book is mostly about survival both physically and mentally. Throughout the book, Melville demonstrates psychological problems in power, obsessions and control with his characters, especially with Ahab slowly becoming consumed by the darkness and self-destruction. Psychological or now, in the modern era, mental health struggles is an unavoidable part of human existence, even in such a time where it wasn’t recognized properly. Melville uses survival as a coping mechanism for his characters in order for them to recognize their inner darkness which can be the only way to endure it.
Work Cited
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Blackwell Publishing, 1983.
Melville , Herman, et al. Or, the Whale. Or, the Whale. London, Penguin Classics, 2003.
A Lesson In Arts and Crafts – What Does It Mean?
Moby-Dick exists as a novel that remains elusive in creating a universal understanding for readers. It remains inscrutable in and of itself, the titular creature of the whale working as Melville’s key unknowing analytical symbol. This is apparent in Chapter 79, “The Prairie,” as Ishmael describes the process of attempting to understand the whale’s brow through a lens of science. The human mind carries a constrained capability to decipher the mysterious whale, thus it promotes vast amounts of interpretation by evading any true meaning. My project entailed creating a box costume, representing the attempt to find meaning in interpreting the appearance of the whale based off of the novel’s descriptions. This works alongside Melville’s criticism towards phrenology, as a means of highlighting the way interpretation evades typical structured meaning.
Firstly, the novel itself claims that “face reading,” that is Physiognomy, is a flawed science that remains incapable of interpreting a whale. Ishmael notes, “Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable…I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can” (Melville 380). Ishmael offers the challenge of understanding the whale’s brow by addressing readers directly. Melville by extension finds fault with Physiognomy, calling it and other sciences a “passing fable.” A fable entails that it is akin myth or legend, as Physiognomy in modern times remains a pseudoscience now obsolete. Ishmael also mentions Champollion, the French philologist responsible for cracking the code of hieroglyphics. The line “But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face,” essentially states that there is no one central meaning, no one person capable of understanding everything or every face. Again the whale’s brow, and by extension the whale entirely, evades definition because of how humans are attempting to decipher it with the use of a specific lens. Everyone comes to find their own understanding, as knowledge remains a shared concept across human beings.
Information evolves over time, and creating the whale costume entailed finding my own explanation of understanding the whale’s appearance. Even if the symbol of the whale within the novel is inscrutable, the reader becomes significant in the process of finding their own definition as the novel itself constantly prompts readers to do so when constant themes and main ideas are tossed into the sea of the mind. Utilizing a box to create the shape of a whale required the references from Melville’s writing, but there was also a means of using modern technology and information alongside Moby Dick’s descriptive language. I took mental images of the whiteness of the whale, alongside making a pun on “The Prairie” chapter itself upon the brow. This in turn allowed me to find my own ideas towards what I think the whale could have truly looked like, as the costume could have referenced Moby Dick itself or the whale the Pequod had already slain. Chipped, dirty, and bloodied teeth, came about from the character’s ideas of violent animals. In addition to this, current scientific information showed that sperm whales only have a lower row of teeth. Accidentally giving the costume both rows of teeth before rescinding the mistake became both a learning experience and a creative one in an attempt to be “accurate” towards the novel.
Walter E. Bezanson’s “Moby Dick: Work of Art” (1953) essay commemorates the 100th anniversary of the novel’s publication, and his line “For the good reader the experience of Moby Dick is a participation in the act of creation. Find a key work or metaphor, start to pick it as you would a wild flower, and you will find yourself ripping up the whole forest floor,” written only 72 years ago, still holds true to this day. Bezanson’s line carries a sense of reverence, a sense of admiration for a novel that had done poorly during its time. Experiencing Moby Dick, reading it, analyzing it, dissecting it just like the Whale, creates an active participation as he claims. Spending time with the novel alongside creating a costume for this final project is an act of curious creation. Even with the terrestrial language Bezanson provides, the whale is the “key work or metaphor.” Picking at such a grandiose creature one can only dream of seeing up close is one of the reasons why the project was created to be more tangible. It is interactive, it “tears up the whole forest floor” of my imagination, and it has myself participating in finding my own interpretation of a whale, if not the whale.
Another analytical lens towards this creative project comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar.” Delivered in 1837 at Harvard University, Emerson called for intellectual independence. Making the box costume brought about the question of “why?” So what if a simple imaginative whale costume was made, why does it hold significance? Simply put, it carries significance because a reader’s self interpretation is important in and of its own due to the nature behind what is being presented within the novel. Emerson said, “Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student’s behoof?” All things, literature, nature, knowledge, it “exists” to a student’s “behoof.” Behoof. Benefit. Advantage. Moby Dick itself exists for students and readers alike to interpret for themselves because there are vastly different analyses. The box could simply be a box to someone else. It could pose as some insignificant toy that is simply a whale. Even so, it exists because time was spent in creating something to benefit existing knowledge pertaining to the novel.
The inscrutable language of the novel creates this sense of a treacherous voyage in trying to decipher what Melville is telling readers. Language and life itself carries a plethora of meanings, and some messages being conveyed or taught are only know to the author when readers are presented with their novel. Melville’s criticism of Phrenology inherently had not effected the creation of the whale box because scientific information had long since evolved. Not only this, but all beings are capable of creation and interpretation, finding meaning merely becomes a question of how someone knows what they have come to know. The novel, other readers, and the internet all provided key information. As Emerson attempts to convey that it is significant for scholars to go out into nature and find their own observations alongside Bezanson’s explanation of Moby Dick as an active participation of bringing thoughts into tangible existence, the definition of meaning is brought about by only by oneself.
Works Cited:
Bezanson, Walter E. “Moby-Dick: Work of Art.” Moby-Dick Centennial Essays. Tyrus Hillway and Luther S. Mansfield, eds. Southern Methodist University Press, 1953.
Emerson, R. W. (n.d.). The American Scholar. Emerson–“The american scholar”. https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/amscholar.html
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale. Edited by Andrew Delbanco and Tom Quirk, Penguin Publishing Group, 2003
Pip in the Deep
The cloudless sky that is affixed above the South China Sea holds no remembrance. Memory, like CO2 and heat, is absorbed into the ocean. Pip, being at sea long enough, is now a memory. Just another greenhouse gas occluding into omniscient seawater. He notices his body straining to stay afloat as he is carried down alive to wondrous depths. Corals sway to the faint current. Reef sharks gently swirl around him, unbothered by his tender presence. The Deep breeds energy, jolting Pip with pulses of knowledge. He is aware of every world; past, present and future. Every transpiring reality surrounded him, like glowing colossal orbs. He witnesses his ancestors, cradled in the same depths, relinquishing themselves to the same transcendent orbs. Mothers weeping; ocean salinity rising. Like them, he surrenders himself into the arms of the miser-merman. These arms, that hold the finite of history, collect Pip among their hoarded heaps and cast him to the depths.
The deep swallows light and disrupts spacial awareness. It is a space for knowing everything and knowing nothing in one swift, spark of a moment. The sound of clicking is heard in the distance, or in the foreground, or somewhere in between. There is no way to tell. Pip is lost in his surroundings yet procured in his being. No longer subjected to earthly toil, to societal intolerance, Pip feels weightless under this unfamiliar immense pressure. The pressure acts as a binary opposition to oppression. It cradles his soul. That is all he can really feel, his soul. He can’t feel his legs kicking or his arms waving, or his head bobbing. He can’t feel his body being dragged onto the deck of an ancient ship. He can’t feel the resuscitation. The clicking multiplies into thunderous echoes. The water around him is displaced. A shock of white, a flash of horror, Pip’s mind slips out of consciousness.
He is awoken by the surge of a massive fluke swimming away, stirring the water around like a school of sardines. Awake in a wake and sieged by what seems to be a starless night sky, an inky cloud where light cannot invade, no matter how much oil is collected. This is the realm where whales govern, where glares do not exist. The blackness permeates Pip. It is the most blackness he has ever contemplated. It feels like home. In a world where shapes barely exist, and the sound that would usually hang upon a breeze dissipates into the cool, dense molasses, communication is seismic. Communication is haptic. Communication is electric and is now a piece of Pip’s freshly attained knowledge. His heightened senses attempt to situate him in this new world. Beings glide around him, he can feel the pressure undulating like a current as they stream past him. He is being examined, beheld, welcomed. Pip felt things he has never felt before. Physical anguish, frothy vengeance, an Ocean full of ache gyrating around him. But also, collective existence, an unshakeable kindredness, a seep of community. One of them stops in front of him, so close their noses are inches apart. Pip can make out the scaled tail that sweeps back and forth holding this… this, thing, this being upright.
“The white whale has sent you here. He is the guardian of innocence, a knight of the Ocean and the great judge of morality.” Aj’s tidal voice drifted back and forth. “He has brought you to the deep, to the wajinru. It means you are one of us, a descendant of the enslaved. Welcome two-legs. I am called Aj.” Aj bowed his voltaic head and touched it to Pip’s cnidarian soul. “O thy fish God in yon darkness, I am Pip. Have mercy. The white whale you say? The white squall. Have mercy on Pip. I was but thrown from a whale ship, shirr, shirr, forced on the hunt.” Pip rambled, his electric mind rampant. “A whale ship” said Aj puzzled. “Were you not held captive?”
“Held captive? No, we Blacks in the North are free, well shirr, if I didn’t go on that whale ship I coulda got chained up myself.” explained Pip. “The North… Blacks? What is Blacks?” Aj wonders. “Ya know Blacks, negroes, I guess you can’t see so clearly down here but, me, I’m Black. The White men they shackle us, whip us, make us work.” Pip describes in sorrow. He never did have to say it out loud. “You mean all those bodies, cast from ships, all those innocent people dead, because, because they’re black?” Aj said, the rage boiling inside of him. “Pip, what else can you tell us of these people? Where do they live, these two-legs?” “I… they, live in America. Some in the North like me, a lot in the South. That’s where you don’t wanna be. That’s where they lash you, where they hang you.” Pip’s grief welling. “America? Pip I have something to ask of you.” “Shirr, shirr.” “I Aj, hold all the grief for my people, for the wajinru, the memories, the hauntings of our past are within me and only within me. I promised my Amaba not to share these stories. Right now, we live only in the present, in togetherness. But I fear for my people. They become restless, they yearn for who they are, for where they come from. I must break my promise, if only for a few days, to fill the cavities of their souls.” Aj says spouting with emotion. “Pip, I believe this is why you are here, why the white whale brought you to us. You hold knowledge from the other world. Will you help me? Will you help me bring relief to my people?”
“O what’s this? One asks for young Pip? Thy white God has brought me here. O that glorious whale. I have never felt more alive than here in this cold, dark abyss. Shirr, shirr I will help you.” Pip replied.
The next few days, or nights, or whenever it was in this place where light does not bother to penetrate, the wajinru congregated. They collected kelp, and mud, and the skin of the dead: sharks, rays, seals. Anything to envelop them, to protect them in what they knew would be a vulnerable state. The water hummed along with their electric palpitations. The vibrating pressure comforted Pip. He was anxious, but he felt free for the first time, alive with the idea of being needed, his mind being desired. The wajinru begin shoaling by the thousands, surrounded by their miry cocoon “Are you ready?” asked Aj. Pip nodded. They floated into the center of this gyrating ball of mud and dead matter. It resembled an oceanic womb, regenerating its inhabitants to foster new life. And inside, the water pulsed like the ocean’s heartbeat. Aj and Pip hovered in the center. Aj snapped his tail to the left and all the wajinru followed suit. He communicated to them through the water. Pounding his tail, electrically transmitting every story he learned from his Amaba. Happy and sad and everything in between, all of them. While he did this Pip went around from wajinru to wajinru. They were still, debilitated with the surge of information. Pip pressed his cheek to theirs, one by one. They wept. In anger, in confusion, in fleeting joy, with vengeance they wept. It lasted days. And this was the first Remembrance.
“The Past—or, more accurately pastness—is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past.” (Troulliot)
The past shapes the present, therefore, the past surrounds us, like an ocean. Through fiction, the past is retrieved and reconstructed. In his 1851 novel Moby Dick, Herman Melville illustrates the lack of freedom of free Black men leading up to the Civil War. Throwing Pip overboard, and his subsequent enlightenment, is an acknowledgement of the atrocities of the Middle Passage and slavery because it is a recognition of the voices and History concealed in the Ocean’s depths. One hundred and sixty-eight years later, narrative discourse, like Rivers Solomon’s 2019 novella The Deep, continues to reiterate and remember the trauma inflicted on millions of captive people that were thrown overboard. Solomon retrieves the history of people who were deliberately silenced beneath the surface of the ocean. Both of these novels employ the setting of the Ocean to frame significant historical events. In this way, the Ocean operates as an archive of the American nation. An archive that has been concealed, like a witness who has collected hush money. Just as the silence of the ocean is depended upon to exploit it, so is the silence of the trauma of slavery. Emancipation might have been enacted, but the structures of slavery still exist, and silence enables them. Reading Melville’s character of Pip into Solomon’s novella The Deep demonstrates the prevailing marginalization of Black communities from 1851 to 2019. Pip and the wajinru act as voices for the Ocean and for Black communities both on land and those lost at sea.
Pip is a symbol of American blackness in Moby Dick. Christopher Freeburg, in his essay Pip and the Sounds of Blackness in Moby Dick, argues that Pip “allows us to realize that black culture is lodged in the very heart of the novel” (52) Melville is very purposeful and ahead of his time in his usage of Pip. It is Pip’s mere presence that welcomes readers into the diversity of America. This “presence constitutes the greatest value of the novel; he is a symbol of social equality and a catalyst for altruistic insight.” (Freeburg 52) Pip is a symbol of social equality because he demonstrates its inequities. The discrimination that independent Black individuals faced leading up to the Civil War constitutes a lack of freedom. In the “Forecastle—Midnight” Melville displays the marginalization of free Black communities: While ALL yell “The squall! The squall! Jump, my jollies! (They scatter.) PIP (shrinking under the windlass.)…” (193) soliloquizes. Pip giving a separate speech after “all” speak suggests that he is not a part of the crew. The Pequod, representative of the American nation, marginalizes Pip as America marginalizes Black communities. Through Pip, Melville demonstrates how freedom for Black individuals does not necessarily mean autonomy.
The “great shroud of the sea” (624) is a chronicle of all those who have been lost to its watery bowels. Through its obscurity, the Ocean is a silenced archive. It has been used as a naturally occurring cloak concealing capitalist exploitations. In “Pip’s Oceanic Voice: Speech and Sea in Moby Dick” Jimmy Packham “recognizes the power of language as a colonial tool, something which can impose itself onto a silence (…likely assumed) that cannot speak back” (Packham 7) Imposing language onto the voiceless enables History to be altered by colonial narrative. Melville also recognizes this muteness of the Ocean: “the waves rolled by… seemed a silvery silence” (Melville 253), “white, silent stillness of death in this shark” (Melville 206), “jetting his silent spout into the air.” (Melville 595). The archival Ocean and its creatures are speechless. The silence of an archive enables History to invalidate traumas. Silenced trauma and exploitation of the past enables the continuation of trauma and exploitation. Melville recognizes that “it’s the sea’s depths that obscure any voice the sea or its creatures might have.” (Packham 7) Because the Ocean and its inhabitants are unable to advocate for themselves, Melville assigns this task to Pip. “We can understand Pip’s discourse as Melville’s… effort to find a space in language for oceanic depth” (Packham 4) Pip, who was already a medium for the marginalized, forces the reader to acknowledge that the Ocean, similar to Black communities, is underappreciated, over fished(worked) and a vessel for unspoken trauma. Pip “saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it.” (454) Pip “spoke it”, that is he spoke for the Ocean and against Oceanic and Black exploitation.
Melville’s concept of whaling drives his narrative. He frames his novel on the surface of the ocean. Therefore, the whalers only comprehend the surface. Pip, who has been “carried down alive to wondrous depths” (453) learns to speak for the deep. Packham raises the idea that Pip “comes to embody the ‘strange shapes’ of the depths, his voice exhibiting an instability that recalls the fluidity of the element into which he has plunged.” (Packham 1) When Pip, who represents American blackness, speaks for the ocean’s abyss, he transpires the annals of a young nation. Pip’s designated voices collide when Pip’s soul is thought to be “in those far Antilles” (Melville 522) The Antilles, the Caribbean, where his ancestors were thrown from slave ships not so long ago. Pip is a voice for blackness, a medium for the Ocean, and ultimately an agent for his ancestors concealed in the sea. By giving Pip this multitudinous voice, Melville advocates for those lost within a buried archive. Melville uses Pip and the Ocean to frame the nation’s historical events.
The acknowledgement of the concealed archive is the cross section for Moby Dick and The Deep. One hundred- and seventy-five-years pass, and the United States continues to exploit its citizens while it feigns perfection. It is a time where Literature rather than History must command the discourse of the trauma of slavery in order to hinder the continuation of it. The Civil War may have legally ended slavery, but as Christina Sharpe points out in The Wake, “Racism [is] the engine that drives the ship of state’s national projects… cuts through all of our lives… in the wake of its purposeful flow.” (Sharpe 3) Slavery, through marginalization, through racism, through incarceration continues to press its haunting mark onto Black society. Silence enables exploitation. Silence of neighbors, silence of mainstream media, archival silence, exploits hidden in coral reefs, are all factors perpetuating exploitation. “The means and mode of Black subjection may have changed, but the fact and structure of that subjection have remained.” (Sharpe 12) Drexciya, clipping., and Rivers Solomon, the curators of the wajinru, exemplify the need to break the silence of this continuation of slavery. Literature like The Deep, which reinterprets the traumas of the Middle Passage into the creation of a new race of merpeople,attempts to begin a process of healing. This healing arises not only by re-gifting life to these erased humans, but by telling their story; uncovering the History that was meant to be obscured by the voiceless Ocean.
In The Deep it is the Ocean depths that act as the setting for the novel rather than the surface in Moby Dick. Expanding to the abyss of the Ocean as a main setting attempts to give definition to the deep, unknown, ocean environment. Similar to Melville, who implements a uniquely American narrative with whaling, Solomon turns to the wajinru to constitute a distinct facet of American history: chattel slavery. Connecting these two stories materializes the Ocean as an American archive. Mooring Pip into the narrative of the wajinru points to the extensive duration the issues of racial marginalization and exploitation have subsisted. Pip, who was written nearly two-hundred years ago, was an attempt to enlighten readers of 1851. However, he continues to be relevant, Pip can easily become a character in a 2019 novel. He does not demonstrate what has passed, instead he now depicts the continuity of Black American subjection. Pip and the wajinru are modern vehicles for the advocacy and amplification of the Ocean and Black communities.
Fastening Moby Dick to The Deep aimed to establish two main assertions of the books: Ocean as archive and the oppression of Black communities. Utilizing Solomon’s narrative enabled a clearer highlighting of these allegories in Moby Dick, a book with endless analyses. Both of these novels employ the setting of the Ocean to frame American historical events. They recognize the important documents held within Oceanic depths and sought to retrieve them. For it is through literature that the past is reconstructed. Literature breaks the silence that exploitation so dearly depends upon. It then became natural to transport Melville’s sea speaking character of American blackness, Pip, to the profundal realm of the wajinru. The nearly 200-year-old Pip, who was fabricated before emancipation, emphasizes the continuity of a nation that upholds slavery as his character retains relevance. Through Pip, the wajinru, and the Ocean we learn that the concealment of sunken traumas promote exploitation. The Lorax might speak for the trees, but Pip and the wajinru speak for the Sea.
Works Cited
Freeburg, Christopher. “Pip and the Sounds of Blackness in Moby Dick.” The New Melville
Studies, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 42-52.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Penguin Books, 2003.
Packham, Jimmy. “Pip’s Oceanic Voice: Speech and Sea in Moby Dick.” The Modern Language
Review, vol. 112, no. 3, 2017, pp. 567-584.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016,
https://doi-org.libproxy.sdsu.edu/10.2307/j.ctv1134g6v.3
Solomon, Rivers. The Deep. Saga Press, 2019.
Final Project
A Peaceful and Nourishing Moment by Zoe Olow
Essay Explaining My Painting (A Peaceful and Nourishing Moment)
In Chapter 87, The Grand Armada, Melville lulls us into a peaceful reverie by presenting a scene devoid of violence or obsession. Ishmael and crew come upon a pod of whales protecting a group of calves as they breastfeed. Despite a lack of female characters within the novel, there is a strong feminine presence in moments such as this that are scattered throughout Moby Dick. To draw attention to this scene and its importance, my creative project is an oil painting featuring the mother whale feeding her young, with the underside of the ship visible but not centered. These moments of feminine tranquility and tenderness serve a narrative purpose to show a mind-changing moment of peace and grace amongst the rest of the book, which is filled with rage, violence, and obsession. This shows that Ishmael’s views of the whales begin to change compared to Ahab’s monomaniacal focus on them, which leads him on this path. Although the presence of women is sparse in this book, Melville proves this with a moment of grace, a beautifully tender act of breastfeeding done by these creatures amid the violence they commit towards the whales throughout the rest of their journey aboard the Pequod.
As one reads through this large book, there is constant hatred, anger, and obsession seen through Ahab and Stubb aboard the Pequod as they traverse the vast oceans in search of Moby Dick. There are not many moments of grace or peace, where the characters are not ruthlessly killing these whales for profit, but Melville does give us this beautifully tender scene that takes the readers away from their manly obsession for a moment to show us peace and femininity amongst these men. “As human infants, while suckling will calmly and fixed gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence” (Melville 423).
This moment shows us that these whales are not just dangerous animals that are hunted for a commodity, but they are amazing creatures that are very intelligent and nurturing, like some humans. The men can see the peace that the whales were showing; they see the human-like qualities that they exude in that moment as they look overboard. “Human infants while suckling” and “drawing mortal nourishment” are descriptors of proving that the whale is breastfeeding, as a human child would. I wanted to illustrate the beauty of this scene that takes us away from the gruesome acts that these men were committing against the whales by making an oil painting of a mother sperm whale breastfeeding her calf, specifically using oil paint, as it used to contain whale oil back in the 19th century; they used every part of these whales to their advantage and this was one of them. A very feminine moment that the men aboard the Pequod get to see, which takes them away from hunting these beautiful creatures, to empathize with the whales for a moment before going back to killing them. Melville writes in the Grand Armada chapter, “For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers” (Melville 423). These whales were soon to be disturbed by Ahab and his desire as they drew near to this protective moment for them. It is peace amidst the storm of violence for these men to see this tranquil sight before their eyes. Seeing this act humanizes the whales to them as they can see that motherly act that a human would do, but it is the whale doing it for her calf.
Melville is trying to show us some peace before the violent acts towards these whales. “Though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight ” (Melville 424). As they gaze down into the watery abyss, these whales exhibit the femininity they don’t have on their ship. A moment when they watch these creatures perform an act truly beautiful. This is where Melville and our perception change, giving us a moment to see these whales’ nourishing act. “In this moment, our narrator’s vision becomes everyone’s (“our eyes as we gazed over the side”), and we (the reader included) finally see whales not as prey, commodities, or monsters but as living, loving, nursing beings” (Pressman). Melville again showed us that there was a moment of admiration among the men for what the whale was doing before helping the whale that was in distress in the harpoon lines, before Starbuck had sprung into action to help the whale. He wants the reader to see the difference in how these men can act in the situation at hand.
Throughout the entire book, Melville writes that there is a desire to gain as much as they can, and that way was through the whales, as they were seen as a big source of income within their capitalistic society. Only Ahab and his obsession with Moby Dick would stop them from making as much as they could. Philip Armstrong writes in his Leviathan is a Skein of Networks that, “Melville implies that these whales, even the mothers and newborn offspring, are simply resources waiting to be harvested. The comparison between cetacean and human reproductive and nursery habits, it has seldom been noticed that an economic imperative cuts violently through the idealized maternal imagery” (Armstrong). That brief moment of beautiful peace that the men saw would only be seen for a moment before they went after the whales again. Again, this moment of the mother whale breastfeeding her calf is showing us the beauty of what the ocean holds within, and that is what I wanted to capture with my art piece.
The shift of perception on these whales is what is crucial in this moment, the peacefulness, beauty, and tenderness of the whales breastfeeding before the violent acts committed against them for man’s desires. Melville shows that Ishmael’s view of these whales is changing, which can even include the reader’s as they continue the book. This small scene captures why these whales are so special and beautiful, which then goes back to the men hunting them down. This shows that something so beautiful won’t stop them from their progress of hunting these whales for profit; Capitalism does not stop for the vulnerable or the innocent. I wanted to capture that tender moment between the mother and baby whale in my painting, as it is a very important part of how one might begin to change their views on these misunderstood creatures that live in our world’s vast oceans.
Works Cited
Armstrong, Philip. “‘Leviathan Is a Skein of Networks’: Translations of Nature and Culture in Moby-Dick.” ELH, vol. 71, no. 4, 2004, pp. 1039–63. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30029956. Accessed 9 Dec. 2025.
Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick, or The Whale. Penguin Classics, 2003. Book. Chapter 87, page 423 and 424
Pressman, Jessica. “Moby Dick and Breastfeeding.” Avidly, 27 May 2021, avidly.org/2020/08/20/moby-dick-and-breastfeeding/. Accessed 08 Dec. 2025.
“It Was Never About a Whale”: Layered Symbolism, Historical Context, and Interpretive Instability in Moby-Dick
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is a novel defined not by interpretive clarity but by an overwhelming proliferation of meaning. The text generates symbols faster than it explains them, leaving readers to navigate a maze of metaphors, references, and philosophical digressions that destabilize the possibility of any definitive interpretation. This instability is nowhere more evident than in Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” in which Ishmael attempts—and fails—to account for the terror embedded in whiteness. Written in 1850, in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act and increasing national conflict over slavery, Melville’s novel emerges from a political moment when whiteness was not merely a color but a racialized ideology shaping the moral crisis of the nation. My creative project—two bookends representing the whale’s head and tail layered with scholarly sources, tissue paper, and the pages of Chapter 42—attempts to materialize the novel’s layered, unstable symbolism. Although the whale’s whiteness is often read as universal or metaphysical, a historically grounded reading reveals that Melville’s symbolism is shaped by the cultural and political anxieties of his time. Critics such as Michael Berthold, Mary Blish, and Walter Bezanson show how Melville’s symbolic system accumulates meanings rather than stabilizing them. My artwork enacts this very process: it demonstrates that symbolism in Moby-Dick is never fixed but expands through layers of interpretation. The novel, like the sculpture, insists that the whale’s meaning cannot be contained—because it was never about a whale at all.
Walter Bezanson’s foundational essay “Moby-Dick: Work of Art” captures the generative, endlessly unfolding nature of Melville’s symbolism. He writes, “Find a key word or metaphor, start to pick it as you would a wildflower, and you will find yourself ripping up the whole forest floor. Rhetoric grows into symbolism, symbolism into structure; then all falls away and begins over again” (Bezanson). His metaphor of uprooting an entire forest to pluck a single flower underscores that Melville did not design symbols with fixed meanings. Instead, each symbol leads outward into a network of historical, philosophical, and emotional associations. This insight directly supports a reading of the whale’s whiteness as both unstable and overdetermined: it grows in significance as the reader attempts to analyze it. Bezanson’s claim also resonates with the structure of my creative project. Like the forest floor buried beneath layers of leaves, soil, and roots, the bookends reveal their meaning only through excavation. Beneath the white tissue and the pages of Chapter 42 lie the historical and critical sources that shape the deeper implications of the text. Bezanson thus frames Melville’s symbolism as a process rather than a product—a view that becomes essential when examining whiteness in its nineteenth-century context.
Michael C. Berthold provides the historical grounding necessary to understand how whiteness in Moby-Dick intersects with racial ideology. In “Moby-Dick and American Slave Narrative,” Berthold argues that Melville’s novel shares thematic terrain with slave narratives, particularly in its depiction of violence, dehumanization, and national guilt (Berthold 135). He emphasizes that Melville wrote during a period when the Fugitive Slave Act forced Northern citizens to participate in the capture and return of enslaved people, creating what Berthold calls a “moral crisis of complicity” (Berthold 145). Through this lens, the whiteness of the whale can be read not as a mystical abstraction but as a symbol of a nation attempting to mask its brutality beneath an ideology of racial purity. When Ishmael describes whiteness as “the intensifying agent in things the most appalling” (Melville 212), his language echoes the rhetoric abolitionists used to expose the hypocrisy of a country that imagined itself morally “white” while participating in racialized violence. Berthold’s interpretation shows that the whale’s whiteness resonates with real historical anxieties—and thus cannot be separated from the culture that produced it.
Mary Blish deepens this perspective by arguing that whiteness in Melville’s novel derives its power not from intrinsic symbolism but from cultural meaning. In “The Whiteness of the Whale Revisited,” she contends that whiteness terrifies precisely because it is “culturally encoded with contradictions” (Blish 56). Whiteness signifies purity, innocence, and superiority, yet simultaneously evokes erasure, violence, and domination. Blish’s argument aligns with Ishmael’s meditation on “that ghastly whiteness” that renders the color more dreadful than the red of blood itself (Melville 205). Her analysis clarifies why whiteness, in the mid-nineteenth-century American imagination, could elicit both attraction and horror; it represented the ideological contradictions of a society that imagined itself morally righteous while perpetuating slavery. Blish thus reinforces the idea that the whale’s whiteness is not a natural symbol but a cultural one—constructed, contested, and loaded with meaning.
These critical perspectives illuminate the structural logic of Chapter 42. Ishmael’s language repeatedly emphasizes the emptiness and terror of whiteness: he describes it as a “colorless all-color” and “the heartless void” (Melville 212). These metaphors suggest that whiteness becomes frightening because it operates as a blank screen onto which the most appalling meanings can be projected. This dynamic mirrors the workings of racial ideology, which depends on the illusion that whiteness is neutral or pure even as it functions as a tool of domination. In this sense, Ishmael’s philosophical inquiry parallels the political crisis Berthold identifies: whiteness appears innocent but conceals—or intensifies—the violence beneath. The chapter thus critiques not only symbolic interpretation but also the cultural logic that underpinned 1850’s racial politics.
My creative project translates these textual dynamics into physical form. The two bookends—one shaped like the whale’s head and the other like its tail—visually emphasize fragmentation. By presenting only the extremities of the whale, the sculpture mirrors the novel’s insistence that the whole meaning of the whale is inaccessible. Just as Ishmael can only interpret fragments of the whale’s symbolic presence, the viewer can only see portions of the creature’s body. The layering of materials further enhances this effect. Nestled at the center of the sculpture lie my scholarly sources, which reflect the historical and critical foundations beneath any interpretation of the text. Covering these are layers of white tissue paper, a material that simultaneously conceals and reveals. The tissue becomes a metaphor for whiteness itself: thin, translucent, seemingly pure, yet capable of obscuring the darker layers beneath. Finally, the outermost layer—the pages of Chapter 42—situates the sculpture directly within Melville’s textual universe. On the brow of the whale’s head, I placed the words “It was never about a whale,” a statement that reframes Ahab’s metaphysical fixation into a symbolic argument about history, ideology, and interpretation. The sculpture literalizes the process Bezanson describes: meaning grows as layers are added, stripped away, and reinterpreted.
Ultimately, reading the whale’s whiteness through Berthold, Blish, and Bezanson reveals that Melville’s symbolism is historically situated, culturally loaded, and structurally unstable. The whale becomes a site where national anxieties about slavery, racial ideology, and moral complicity collide with philosophical questions about meaning itself. My creative project embodies this multiplicity by presenting the whale not as a singular symbol but as a layered, fragmented, ever-evolving figure. In both the novel and the artwork, the meaning lies not within the whale but in the act of interpretation. We can never see the whole creature—because the whale, like the nation it reflects, resists being seen in full.
Work Cited
Berthold, Michael C. “Moby-Dick and American Slave Narrative.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 1994, pp. 135–14., www.jstor.org/stable/25090518.
Bezanson, Walter E. “Moby-Dick: Work of Art.” Moby-Dick Centennial Essays. Tyrus Hillway and Luther S. Mansfield, eds. Southern Methodist University Press, 1953.
Blish, Mary. “THE WHITENESS of the WHALE REVISITED.” CLA Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, 1997, pp. 55–69, www.jstor.org/stable/44323040.
Melville, Herman, et al. Moby-Dick Or, the Whale, chap. 42, pp. 204–212. London, Penguin Classics, 2003.