I realized that, belatedly, I had posted both my post about what I need to learn for the final project and my project proposal into one. To remedy that, here’s the isolated bits:

For the creative project, I found a beautiful set of book ends that are the head and the tail of a sperm whale. I am taking the head and using Paper-mâché to envelop it in every page from Chapter 42, along with the literary sources I’ve pulled from for my essay and some additional items; I have the forehead read “It was never about a whale,” having the audience read the brow of the creature for the central interpretation of Moby-Dick. I will have them as the literal book ends on a copy of Moby Dick – as though the whale itself and the meaning inscribed within it is too big for the novel to even contain. This works as a kind of physical manifestation of what people perceive Moby-Dick to be about, wrapped in the chapter that is the most well known of the book.

Through this project, I argue that Melville uses the whale to critique the expectations readers bring to the symbols – showing that the whale is never simply a whale, but a surface onto which meaning is compulsively imposed. The whiteness that terrifies Ishmael arises not from the animal itself but from the human impulse to project significance onto what fundamentally resists understanding. By wrapping the whale in the physical text of Chapter 42, my artwork materializes Melville’s insight that the White Whale’s terror is generated through the very act of interpretation.

My two scholarly sources are Mary Blish’s The Whiteness of the Whale Revisited and Michael C. Berthold’s Moby-Dick and the American Slave Narrative. Both of these sources play with the concept that “Whiteness” is wholly interpretive yet also rife with pre-existing interpretations of the time. Nothing can be divorced from the history surrounding it.