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“(waves for thought).” Creative Final Project
Here is the link to the Google Doc in case it doesn’t appear correctly: (waves for thought).
Writing this final project was like being aboard the Virginia Reel, twisting, turning, pivoting, plummeting, rising, and falling. My time with Emerson was personally revolutionary; I carry his call for fierce individualism and the necessity for one’s relationship with nature with me. I look up at the clouds we walk under and see my reflection in the waves of the turtle pond, bonding with the world around me and forming my own relationship with it. I hear my classmates talk about their education, their days, and I hear the murmuring heartbeat of America’s past, present, and future. In everything, I see Emerson’s message and call to action. And that is why I saw it reflected throughout Melville’s novel, Moby Dick.
Though there is no evidence that Melville read or regularly engaged with Emerson’s “American Scholar,” his novel Moby Dick can be read in dialogue with and in reflection on Emerson’s work, affirming Emerson’s overarching call for experimental learning, intellectual independence, and the value of nature. By reading Moby Dick as a reflection of Emerson’s “The American Scholar,” the novel becomes a living fossil of the American Renaissance and an attempt to realize Emerson’s American individuality through scholarly work. Reading Melville’s work alongside Emerson’s touches on one of Emerson’s central messages throughout “The American Scholar”: individuality. It is in the combined effort and mediations of multiple diverse scholars that we find the call to action posed to scholars in America’s Renaissance. Through a return to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar,” I seek to relate Melville’s relation to the call to action that Emerson presents through his work, showing how this unconfirmed relationship between the two American scholars defines the historical and academic context of our nation, shaping the development of an American literary identity grounded in experience, embodied knowledge, and cultural self-definition.
At first, I wanted to experiment with the structure of my poem and explore the forms of Emerson’s and Melville’s works. But then, every attempt that I had at the playful organization of Emerson’s quotes and Melville’s quotes felt off and not fluid. I began thinking about how these two American scholars are engaging in the same larger conversation on American individuality and identity, and what is a conversation but two columns? The dialogue between Emerson’s call to action in “The American Scholar” and Melville’s Moby Dick is indirect, meaning there is no confirmation or evidence that Melville read Emerson’s work and created his novel as a direct response. However, it is still part of a broader national conversation. A conversation between two individuals could be organized into two columns, weaving and bouncing between them to form a larger whole. However, because the two scholars are part of a bigger discussion on the essence of America, it didn’t make sense to have one column represent Melville and the other Emerson. Instead, their quotes are interwoven and braided to form a larger message, just as their prospective works function together.
There are distinct similarities between Emerson’s call and Melville’s various messages throughout his novel, particularly in Emerson’s transcendentalist perspective on nature, Melville’s emphasis on bodily experience over academic structures, and the overarching value placed on self-reflection. Just as Emerson calls for “man thinking,” Melville not only thinks for himself on how to contribute to the larger American identity, but writes a central narrator who prioritizes deep, critical thought for over 600 pages (Emerson, “The American Scholar”). Similarly, as Emerson tells his audience to trust themselves, Melville writes a character who trusts himself so bodily in his mission to catch the whale that it wholly consumes him, leading to his downfall. Ahab’s character demonstrates a critical point for the broader construction of American identity: the ability for scholars to think for themselves, work with one another, and disagree. Though Melville presents a character who touches on Emerson’s call to “trust yourself,” he cautions against too much trust, thus allowing his novel to embody his own individual representation of American identity. Like Emerson warns, thinking as everyone else makes you “a cog in the machine,” stripping away any uniqueness (Emerson, “The American Scholar”). Ahab’s character exemplifies scholarly dialogue, though indirectly. In terms of citations, Moby Dick’s footnote and citation style are unclear and wholly unique, part of the novel’s larger puzzle. In my creative attempt, the citations are purposely not clearly cited. This was part of an effort to address the fluidity between the two messages: both authors are independent American scholars, yet their work blends to form something larger than themselves. Both Emerson and Melville work to break down barriers of the classified and unclassified, the known and unknown, the singular and collective. I attempt to outline the shared overlap between the two others, the overlap that paints the field of American literature today.
And because my poem does not have an actual works cited, here is my works cited:
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” Essays: First Series, 1841. Norton Critical Edition, edited by Joel Porte, W. W. Norton, 1982, pp. 3-21.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Penguin Classics, edited with an introduction by Andrew Delbanco and notes by Tom Quirk, Penguin Classics, 2002.
Final Essay – Vain Unity within the Pequod and the U.S.
In Moby Dick, Herman Melville uses the Pequod’s doomed voyage as a consequence of vain unity throughout the novel. The inability to unite under rational judgment and respect for autonomy shows how Ahab’s monomaniacal leadership, the crew’s coerced obedience, and the dismantled social order of the Pequod undermines possibilities of a collective goal – successful whaling, profit, and a safe communal voyage – that ultimately lead the entire crew towards destruction. These elements within the novel are direct parallels of tensions within the United States at the time Melville wrote the novel, a period marked by conflict over slavery, the deep-cutting erosion of democratic compromise, and the rise of extremist leadership – a time marked with the rise of division rather than cohesion.
Throughout the novel, Melville frames the Pequod as a place of community and cooperation. Whaling voyages are a promise of shared labor, risk, and reward – an economic and social system dependent upon mutual trust and a collective goal. Ishmael initially views the ship as a kind of democracy, referring to it as a nation-state, which is populated by men of various backgrounds from across the globe whose labor surpasses the national and cultural differences amongst them all. However, this political pluralism is proven very fragile amidst the emergence of Ahab’s authoritarian rule over the Pequod and its crew, gradually undermining the ship’s communal structure and transforming the crew’s labor into coerced participation in his journey to kill the White Whale. What starts out as an enterprise built on cooperation and trust becomes a vessel of singular obsession of the White Whale, revealing how easily unity can be crushed under a centralized power.
Ahab’s authority over the Pequod exemplifies how obsessive authority and leadership can dismantle a structuralized sense of unity for a lesser good. From the moment Ahab reveals his true intentions on leading the Pequod – to hunt down Moby Dick at any cost, even the cost of his and the crew’s lives – he then replaces the ship’s commercial purpose for his own personal vendetta. Ahab declares, “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks” (Melville, 165), insisting that Moby Dick represents a type of evil that must be condemned and killed at all costs. From this moment, the White Whale is framed as a metaphysical evil, elevating Ahab’s private obsession into a moral imperative. Many traditional Americanist readings portray Ahab as a figure of “totalitarian will”, whose authority tolerates nothing along the lines of dissent and demands absolute submission to his authority (Pease, 110). Captain Ahab’s leadership thus becomes abstract as well as totalitarian as resistance is pushed far from reach and considered a moral betrayal as the book progresses. However, Ahab’s power is not grounded solely in the consent of the crew, but also in his charisma, experience, and intimidation. His body consists of scars, a prosthetic, ivory leg, and prophetic rhetoric that renders him as an almost mythical presence in Ishmael’s eyes. Starbuck, the ship’s moral conscience, recognizes the danger of Ahab’s quest, calling it “blasphemous, monstrous” (Melville, 223), and yet is still the only character throughout Moby Dick who attempts to make a stand against Ahab. In the end, his moral clarity reigns ineffective through his repeated hesitation to confront Ahab and his refusal to kill him in the end when given the chance. It goes to prove that authoritarian unity can paralyze an individual’s better judgement and ethicality. In his writing, Melville suggests that when absolute allegiance is demanded of an authoritarian, morality alone cannot prevent the catastrophe of vain unity and leadership.
The communal obedience of the Pequod’s crew further reveals dangers of unity when stripped of one’s physical and metaphysical autonomy. Though composed of men from diverse backgrounds, the sailors are gradually combined into a singular mess under Ahab’s will. The absorption of all of these diverse characters into a single wave of conscience occurs through a rather ritualized performance rather than a politically democratic agreement. When Ahab presents the doubloon to the crew, he nails the gold coin to the mass and invites the crew to interpret what they see or feel when observing the coin, yet each interpretation ultimately circles back to a singular sense of obsession despite the continual differences in interpretation per each man. This reinforces Ahab’s dominance over the crew, sealing their loyalty through an oath that institutes ritual submission: “Drink ye harpooners! Drink and swear” (Melville, 179). Arguably, such moments reveal how collective identity aboard the Pequod is manufactured rather than chosen, showing how authority converts difference into a type of submission (Pease, 119). Unity aboard the Pequod is less a result of shared values, as each member of the crew has their own reason for being aboard the ship in the first place, but rather of enforced allegiance. There is no chose for them to back out of the voyage so far in; once the voyage begins, it takes many years for them to return back home to Nantucket, if at all, leaving them to succumb to the will of their authoritarian captain and sustain the all-consuming goal of killing Moby Dick. Even Starbuck eventually succumbs, despite being more of a doubter and free-thinker throughout the novel, ultimately admitting, “I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too” (Melville, 227). Starbuck is a crucial character for presenting obedience as surrender rather than acceptance, exposing a sense of moral conflict without autonomy over one’s self.
A social and moral order aboard the Pequod collapses, so does autonomy. The Pequod once acted as a microcosm of democratic labor and shared profit, one that upheld American economics and society, instead becoming a kind of dictatorship as the novel progresses, driven solely by the will of Captain Ahab. Ishmael states during the voyage, “Ahab was tyrannical; a tyrant in fact” (Melville, 214). This singular quote strips the novel of any romantic ambiguity surrounding Ahab’s leadership of the crew and their voyage overseas. “The collective enterprise is overtaken by a single dominating vision” (Buell, 136), dramatizing the collapse of national concord and abandoning the crew’s original purpose of successfully hunting whales and collecting spermaceti, leaving that sense of unity in a vain and destructive mess. Though the entirety of Moby Dick includes foreshadowing of the Pequod’s demise, the collapse of social order is the most prominent in ensuring its catastrophic end. The shipwreck in the final chapter is something that was inevitable since the moment Ahab made it known what his true intentions were. It produced a system that valued loyalty to the captain over rational judgment and accountability. Each crew member is a valid participant in the authoritarian rule, whether actively or passively, by helping to sustain such a problematic system and refusing to absolve it. Melville presents each character’s obedience as a moral choice shaped by power, one that cannot be excused as per the back-and-forth judgement and final submission of Starbuck.
Melville’s critique of vain unity is reflective of the political climate of the United States in the 1850s. At the time, the nation was divided socially, economically, and politically over slavery and Westward Expansion, giving way to a sectional extremism. Situating Moby Dick within this historical moment in our history, it can be argued that its enduring relevance lies in the state’s refusal to resolve national contradictions into a single moral vision (Buell, 145), fueled instead by power and personal gain rather than communal agreement. Similarly, the transnational reading of Pease’s article challenges the assumption that American unity is inherently virtuous, revealing how appeals to cohesion often conceal domination (Pease, 112). Within Moby Dick, the Pequod thus becomes a warning to the reader, using allegory to state that unity pursued without reason or autonomy leads to destruction.
Moby Dick portrays the doomed voyage of the Pequod as a tragic, yet inevitable, outcome of vain unity, one that is corrupted by obsession and authoritarianism. Through Ahab’s monomaniacal rule, the crew’s coerced obedience, and the dismantled social order, Melville demonstrated how the suppression of rational and moral judgement and the erasure of an individual’s autonomy can undermine the success of a collective goal. He not only critiques Ahab’s monomaniacal leadership but also the political culture of his own nation in the 1850s by exposing the dangers of vain unity. Moby Dick successfully parallels the antebellum period within America, deepening the warning of lack of balance, structure, and communal morals ultimately leads us – whether aboard a ship or within the politics and society of our own nation – to ruin.
Works Cited
Buell, Lawrence. “The Unkillable Dream of the Great American Novel: Moby-Dick as Test Case.” American Literary History, vol. 20 no. 1, 2008, p. 132-155. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/233009
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick Or, the Whale. Edited by Andrew Delbanco, Penguin Books, 1992.
Pease, Donald. C. L. R. James, Moby Dick, and the Emergence of Transnational American Studies, John Hopkins University, Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, Volume 56, Number 3, Autumn 2000, pp, 93-123.
Final Creative Project
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
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.
We’re on the home stretch
What you still need to learn/do for your final project?
So, I already have a strong idea of what creative project I want to do for my final paper, I’m just solidifying my thesis statement for the paper portion of it. I’m planning to re-read Chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale in the next couple of days so that I can have a solid foundation to build upon.
For the creative project, I found a beautiful set of book ends that are the head and the tail of a sperm whale. I was initially thinking of taking the head and using Paper-Mache to envelop it in every page from Chapter 42, then have the forehead read “It was never about a whale.” It would be set either inside of the book at Chapter 42 or — using both ends — I would have them as the literal book ends on a copy of Moby Dick. 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.
As a kind of related aside: I read once that to understand the social commentary of a horror novel, you need to remove the monster from it. Whatever story you have left is really what the story is about. With Moby-Dick, which monster would you have to remove to understand the commentary on — Ahab or Moby-Dick? Or are either of them truly to blame for the events of the novel?
My biggest takeaway from this novel is that there is so much we cannot ever know, but there is so much that we can miss on our first read through. There are so many strands that Melville is weaving here, from the aspect of race, slavery, nation, capitalism, obsession, etc. there’s so much that you can see in this book. I want to try and read the book again with a different focus each time so that I can see what changes in my perception of the book.
Food for thought: articles to feed your mind
Hey Everyone,
So, I know that we are all deep in the trenches of trying to figure out what we want to do our final project on — I certainly am. I’ve found some really fascinating articles that I think might benefit more than just me, so I’m going to share a link to the Google Drive Folder so that others might benefit from my searching.
There’s a few that are articles about racism, about Melville’s intentions with his black characters, about how Melville plays with our perceptions to make us racially assign Ishmael as white, one that gives really interesting interpretations about the truth behind what Moby-Dick actually was, and a few more. They’re free to use, I just hope they help! I’ll keep updating the folder as I find more, let me know if you have any issues loading the link.
See you tomorrow!
-Kit Jackson