In Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” an unexpected comparison is made between whaling and gendered female labor. This rare presence of femininity and work associated with women draws comparison between the difficulty of whaling, and birth and delivery; two lines of work famously undervalued and yet foundations to society, one providing life, the other providing light. Despite this lack of women, there is not a lack of the female presence, which Melville includes in the novel through imagery and conversations of midwifery, childbirth, and domestic labor. This is seen in Chapters 78: Cistern and Buckets, through comparisons of midwifery and whaling; as well as Chapter 94: A Squeeze of the Hand, through the communal experience of ‘milking’ the spermacetti; and the witnessing of mother whales feeding their newborn calves in Chapter 87: The Grand Armada. Melville’s inclusion of feminine labor alongside the importance of whaling emphasizes the knowledge and experience required by both careers and underscores these gendered fields of labor as the underpinnings of a functioning and complex society, without the loss of community connection and sophistication.
In Chapter 78: Cistern and Buckets, where Midwifery and the whaling industry meet, the comparisons of the difficulty between these two professions create a moment of solidarity between feminine work, childbirth, and the dangerous work of whale harvesting at sea, traditionally done by men. Tashtego is placed in his position due to negligence but is blamed for his falling into the tun “Whether it was that Tashtego, that wild Indian, was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the place where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil One himself would have it to fall out so, without stating his particular reasons;(374)” Much like in childbirth, the fault of a difficult pregnancy or delivery is placed not first on chance, but on the negligence of the mother. Ishmaels blames Tashtego, when in fact Stubbs, Starbuck, And Ahab, those in charge of the industry and work on the boat, are responsible for endangering and not securing their crewmen. Queequeg, of all characters, who is symbolic of the defiance of all presuppositions of the intelligence, bravery and capability of non-westerners (non-Europeans), is the one to perform this act of assisted birth and rescue. Not only is he special for the connection he forms with Ishmael, or of his selfless acts of bravery, but he is also a midwife; assisting in Tashtego’s watery rebirth from the Tun:
“He averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a leg was presented; but well knowing that that was not as it ought to be, and might occasion great trouble;—he had thrust back the leg, and by a dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a somerset upon the Indian; so that with the next trial, he came forth in the good old way—head foremost. As for the great head itself, that was doing as well as could be expected (p.376).”
Alongside performing a c-section, by cutting in to rescue Tashtego, Queequeg also delivers him by performing a difficult medical procedure. The way that Tashtego was first positioned at the entrance of the Tun/womb, feet first, is called a breech position, in which the baby is usually in danger of injury or death by suffocation. Even in modern medicine this is considered a difficult birthing position for the fetus and mother, often resulting in the injury of the mother and tearing of the cervix. A skilled midwife, or obstetrician, is capable of either carefully following through with this birth position, or helping to turn the baby. In other words, Queequeg’s delivery of Tashtego was a feat of obstetrics even for what is possible on land (and with human babies). This feat of a delivery is acknowledged:
“And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten. Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing(176).”
This is no small compliment to the profession of midwifery, which experienced an attack that spanned generations with the rise of the “man-midwife,”which Lisa Forman Cody coins in “The Politics of Reproduction: From Midwives’ Alternative Public Sphere to the Public Spectacle of Man-Midwifery.” to discuss the manner in which male doctors invaded the birthing space via the growing interest in the obstetric field within western medicine:
“Into the eighteenth century, nearly all agreed that midwives had a “natural,” “innate” authority over generative matters because reproductive knowledge derived from personal, subjective, bodily experience. From the 1660s onward, scientific knowledge of reproductive matters and doctors’ ability to demonstrate the truth of analogies—that the reproduction of some lower life-forms was akin to that of humans, for instance—helped to undermine women’s epistemological and professional status as midwives. Obstetricians could only triumph once the fundamental intellectual and emotional connection between midwives and maternity was ruptured, as it largely was from the early eighteenth century onward.(Cody)”
A predominantly female profession which centered and involved feminine labor in the privacy of childbirth was invaded by male doctors whose foray into the field resulted in the publicization (through medical research) of a sanctified and private experience such as that of childbirth. The man-midwife, as Cody puts it, de-centered the importance of emotional and communal connection within the birthing space in favor of subjective reason and scientific practice; constructing a rigid and invasive epistemological branch of understanding childbirth and women’s bodies. Obstetrics further conquered the limited spaces women held as professionals with authority in the expertise of childbirth, who, despite their gendered work, held an important position:
“The seventeenth-century midwife stood at the threshold between conjugal relations and the state; as such, she had a uniquely privileged position and a duty to serve both mothers and the community(Cody)”
Midwifery was built through the knowledge gathered through the experience of assisting in childbirth, and was a trusted professional career that required constituents to be as well learned and well versed as any other male medical professional: “Like male participants in the public sphere, midwives read texts, sometimes kept notes, and shared their knowledge through apprenticeships and mutual discussions.” This invasion into the realm of childbirth and dethroning of midwives by male-midwives was propelled by accusations and suspicions of midwives, their overly-sympathetic connections, and the supposed flaws within their epistemologically based understanding of childbirth. This replacement of midwifery with male-midwives throughout the 17th and 18th century systematically altered women’s health, medicine, and the realm of childbirth from then on.
The struggle experienced by the slow erasure of such a critical career, such as that of midwifery is echoed In “Moby Dick” and Ishmael’s concern over the shifting narrative over what is considered knowledge or knowing; the contents in a book or the worldly knowledge built over time by one’s own experiences:
“So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory(ch45, p.223).”
The contextual understanding of the position of midwives in the 17th and 18th century (and onwards) is relevant to discussing the similarities posed by Ishmael (Melville) between Whaling and midwives, which is that both were inherently critical to sustaining life; one delivering life, the other illuminating it, and yet both careers were considered to exist on the fringes of society, and yet, while conducted in seclusion or isolation, and both in gendered spaces, community was allowed to thrive outside the bounds or a rigid society while still maintaining hierarchy and order (for the most part in the case of the Pequod)
Cody writes about the the spheres that midwives operated within during assisted childbirth, and the communal collaboration that took place during the lying-in of a woman’s birthing experience: “participants in this space putatively left their socioeconomic status at the door and were allowed to enter if they possessed the requisite gender. Midwives were commoners, subordinate to elites outside the lying-in chamber, but once at delivery, women apparently abandoned such usual hierarchies for the tasks at hand. The head midwife directed the lying-in, but she and the other women at the birth worked and conversed together regardless of their rank.”
This in no small way mimics the hierarchy and the kinship between sailors built upon the microcosm of the Pequod, where at times even Ishmael commented on the domestic and feminine similarities of their shared labor aboard the ship. For example, Ishmel compares the gathering and squeezing of spermacetti to collecting milk, and being a dairy maid:
“up comes the bucket again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid’s pail of new milk (Ch 78, p.373).”
“As I crossed my hands in it, as in milking, I felt something of the same rhythmic squeeze a dairy-maid feels, only on a much larger and stranger scale.”
These two scenes in which ishmael uses feminine roles such as that of dairy maid, to describe the closeness of community while working upon the Pequod are significant, in male spheres finding a connecting link, or solidarity with women, even in isolation amongst men. This suggests that unlinke the apprehension of the patriarchal society that contributed to the slow decline of midwifery, men were able to empathize, connect, and find clarity within femininity and the expression of emotion. Another scene where femininity is present is with the communal and protective herd of mother whales witnessed by the crew of the Pequod giving birth and feeding their young calves: But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers.(Ch.87,p.423)
In “Moby Dick and Breastfeeding” Jessica Pressman writes about Melville’s ability to capture the intimacy, fears, and complexity of nursing mothers through this scene, and writes: “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. It is a moment of serenity and humanity, but the humanness is located with the whales, not the men. Female whales, mothers nursing.” In this deeply intimate moment that the crew is made privy to the inner working lives of mothering whales and nursing young, despite their being an interrupting force ready to attack, Ishmael, and by extent of the argument;the whalers, come closer to understanding a question posed : “The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to express it. At times, there are gestures in it, which, though they would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic gestures…Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never”
Though Ishmael struggles to comprehend the whale through these various chapters, he comes very close to understanding the bigger picture present in this scene of the Grand Armada, which is that the view is unobstructed if he is capable of looking and understanding. Though capitalism is the ultimate driving force behind this endeavor on the Pequod, there are still moments of solidarity between the whalers aboard the ship and their female counterparts, the women who toil on land, called midwives, who are involved in the daily delivery of new life. It is through the empathy and understanding of experience that these whalers have gained at sea, that they can connect and understand the complex innerworking’s of the labor conducted by midwives and mothers, as well as the community it takes to deliver new life.
Works Cited:
Cody, Lisa Forman. “The Politics of Reproduction: From Midwives’ Alternative Public Sphere to the Public Spectacle of Man-Midwifery.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 32 no. 4, 1999, p. 477-495. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ecs.1999.0033.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale. Edited by Andrew Delbanco and Tom Quirk, Penguin
Publishing Group, 2003.Pressman, Jessica. “Moby Dick and Breastfeeding.” Avidly, 20 Aug. 2020, avidly.org/2020/08/20/moby-dick-and-breastfeeding/.