Pacific Revolt: The Typhoon, Japan and American Imperialism in Melville’s Moby Dick

Abstract

In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the American whaler the Pequod encounters a fierce typhoon in Japanese waters. Melville’s novel contains many sublime descriptions of various natural phenomena, yet the typhoon’s force is registered less through direct description than through its effects on the structure of the text and its pivotal role in the plot. Melville is seemingly more interested in the typhoon’s symbolic potential than its concrete actuality. This chapter argues that the location of the typhoon sequence in “the heart of the Japanese cruising ground” makes it legible as a symbol of both political and natural resistance to the USA’s imperial ambitions in the Pacific. In this respect, it bears comparison with another of the novel’s multivalent symbols—the white whale.