Abstract
In this chapter” Pellar discusses the Compromise of 1850 and how Melville symbolized the Pequod as the popular “Ship of State” motif. Both Henry Clay and Daniel Webster used the Ship of State motif during the debates on the Senate floor, as it was an ideal metaphor to solidify the hearts and minds of a divided country in one simple and yet coalescent image. Pellar then provides a history of the term and discusses how Melville wove the image of the Ship of State into the plot of Moby-Dick. Pellar also discusses how Melville secretly correlated the birth of Ahab, the Captain of the Pequod/Ship of State, with the birth of America in September 1783.
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Notes
- 1.
This idea seems to resonate with a similar idea in Hawthorne’s “The Old Manse”: Hawthorne wrote that great men “set themselves apart” (2012b, 21) from the ages, and that “a work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries” (2012b, 21). Hence, Melville’s decision to write an allegory about the times in which he lived, an allegory that was indeed the newspaper account of the century. This combined with the added need to be loyal to his father-in-law and family seemed to be more than enough incentive to write an allegory in secret like the other “great masters of telling the truth.”
- 2.
Others have also remarked on the political climate and the Compromise of 1850 as informing Melville’s writing. See Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America; Bradley, “Our Crowd, Their Crowd: Race, Reader, and Moby-Dick”; Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work; etc. For instance, Rogin states, “Melville began Moby-Dick when the fears of disunion were strongest.” Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics of Art and Herman Melville, 107.
- 3.
It was also exploited by the pulpit – Wallace notes that in 1854 Rev. Theodore Parker characterized the Fugitive Slave Law as “a long wedge, thin at one end, wide at the other; it is entered between the rotten planks of our SHIP OF STATE; a few blows thereon, will enforce more than the South thinks of – a little more, and we shall go to pieces.” Douglas and Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style, 2005, 59. Wallace points out that this might have influenced Fredrick Douglass and a black readership as well. After noting that the black intellectual James McCune Smith made a direct reference to Moby-Dick in a political commentary in 1856, Wallace asks a very important question: “To what degree was Melville aware of an anti-slavery, non-white audience for his writing?” (56).
- 4.
Karcher also points out that the subtext for Moby-Dick was the “apocalyptic doom for America’s slavery-rocked ship of state,” and that Ishmael was “the prophet of a future cataclysm that may yet be averted by timely repentance.” Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America, 1980, 61, 90.
- 5.
For a more recent account of this, along with some new evidence (such as the link between Fleece and Van Rensselaer), see Wallace, Douglas and Melville: Anchored together in Neighborly Style, 2005, 48–51, 103–105.
- 6.
Delbanco’s book, Melville: His World and Work, 2005, 149–166, revisits Heimert’s connection in the chapter “Captain America,” as well as discusses briefly the issue of race and slavery and the Compromise of 1850.
- 7.
That Melville meant exactly this will be seen later in two other even more direct links between the word “clay” and the pro-slavery Senator.
- 8.
Others have noticed this as well. For instance, see D.H. Lawrence’s 1923 essay “Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick,’” or, for a more recent account, see Otter’s “The Eden of Saddle Meadows: Landscape and Ideology in Pierre,” 1994, or Levine’s “Pierre’s Blackened Hand,” 1999, or Oshima’s “Dreaming a Dream of Interracial Bonds: From Hope Leslie to Moby-Dick,” 2006.
- 9.
There was another smaller battle of Kabul later in 1842, but it doesn’t fit as nicely as a part of the “brief interlude” from November 1841 to January 1842. Also, after discovering the connection between the battle of Kabul and the presidential election, I found out that several authors had already noticed this connection as well. Mansfield and Vincent in 1958 identified the battle in Afghanistan as the one in January 1842, and Mukhtar Ali Isani in “Melville and the Bloody Battle in Affghanistan,” 1968, noted that the Presidential election and battle in Afghanistan are the 1840 election and the January 1942 Battle in Afghanistan. However, neither of them noticed the tie-in with the age of Ahab and the Ship of State.
- 10.
This three-day cycle might also hint at the resurrection of Christ, as Ishmael rises from the “black bubble” in the center of the axis of Ixion’s Tartarus, or Hell, just as Christ rises from hell, as per the Apostle’s Creed, on the third day.
- 11.
I found that the old reading table with the fire-fly eggs embedded in the wood was made, unknown to the “superficial skimmer of pages,” in the year 1776 – the same year as the Declaration of Independence. “The Apple-Tree Table, or Original Spiritual Manifestations,” 1969, 381–382. That is, 1856, the year that the story was written/published, minus the “80 years for the age of the table,” equals 1776. This symbolic connection between the reading table and the Declaration of Independence and “fire” as a common antislavery metaphor of abolitionists will be elaborated on in more detail in a later work.
- 12.
Garrison, in invoking the right for his colleague, a woman, to enter with him into the 1840 World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, remarked, “Why, Liberty herself is a woman, is she not?”
- 13.
Strange as it may seem to us today, there were, ironically, southerners at that time that were convinced that liberty implied slavery: “Waddy” Thomson, a congressman of South Carolina, stated that slavery was “essential to the maintenance of human liberty.” Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870. 1999, 660.
- 14.
This link between black men and black whales will be discussed in more detail in my Chapter Five, “Man as Whale.” Furthermore, the symbolic use of women as Liberty is not just confined to Moby-Dick, but is seen in his follow-up novel Pierre, which I will discuss in a later volume. Other instances of this, combined with an antislavery allegory, are seen in his short stories, such as the “Bell Tower,” where liberty is personified as the bell. Karcher and others have also noted the same correlation between liberty and the bell in “The Bell Tower”; see Karcher’s Shadow Over the Promised Land, 1980.
- 15.
Douglass used this image of a latent volcano in an 1849 speech: “Slavery, The Slumbering Volcano.” Gleason, “Volcanoes and Meteors: Douglass, Melville, and the Poetics of Insurrection.” 2008, 119. He also wrote that when he was still a slave, he felt that he was “…in the hottest hell of unending slavery.” Stuckey, African Culture and Melville’s Art: The Creative Process in Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick. 2009, 84. This image of fire and destructive heat also evokes Garrison’s famous warning in his opening salvo of his antislavery newspaper, The Liberator: “I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; – but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest – I will not equivocate – I will not excuse – I will not retreat a single inch – AND I WILL BE HEARD.” Mayer, All On Fire. 1998, 112. An appropriate equivalent to this call to action would be not only modern slavery, which the International Labor Organization estimates may be up to 21 million people today living in forced labor, but also global warming, as our global house, as science has clearly shown, is definitely heating up.
- 16.
This painting and image will be discussed in more detail in the chapter “Who Ain’t a Slave” (1967b, 20–21).
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Pellar, B.R. (2017). The Ship of State. In: Moby-Dick and Melville’s Anti-Slavery Allegory. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52267-8_3
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