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.
