“Beauty and Beast: Moby Dick as Negative Response to Emerson’s Transcendentalism.”

The most overt thematic device of Melville’s is use of the whale metaphor. The quest for the whale is Ishmael’s quest for divine understanding. Ahab’s is a quest to strike through the mask and harpoon God. The whale IS God . . . mysterious, unfathomable. Whaling is itself the philosophical endeavor to understand God, a preoccupation of the New England Transcendentalists and one that haunted Melville in particular. This symbolism is driven home again and again and again throughout the entire novel. Understanding this, and understanding Melville’s penchant of describing artwork in order to convey thematically linked metaphor (as in Benito Cereno and other works) the painting in the Spouter Inn makes a clear statement: The whale performs a miraculous feat by revealing itself fully in its attempt to hurdle the un-masted ship. God’s miracle of revealing himself through Christ. And in doing so, He sacrifices himself upon the cross. For the three masts void of rigging directly conjures the image of Calvary. The painting represents dogmatic Christianity and on the “opposite” wall are the “heathenish” weapons of whaling and images of death, such a sickles mowing. To oppose the church and seek God through philosophical contemplation is to break from dogmatic Christianity and risk perdition. It’s a dangerous, spiritually deadly affair. Incidentally, Ishamel, unlike Ahab, resigns himself to understanding God through his relations with his fellow man, his shipmates. His only transcendental experience of divine rapture occurs in the Chapter “A Squeeze of the Hand,” when the narrator’s hands are plunged deep into the barrel of spermaceti and he finds his fingers entagling with those of his crew-mates. Melville grounds the divine in human, social relations and scoffs at the Emersonian idea of “knowing” God through piercing the viel of wonderous nature in pilosophical contemplation. Nature for Melville is as red in tooth and claw as it is wonderful, and God’s hand in it remains unfathomable.

Thank you.

Cheers

Thanks, Mrs. McClain!