‘Circle-Sailing’: The Eternal Return of Tabooed Grief in Melville's Moby-Dick
[In the following excerpt, Boker presents a psychoanalytic reading of Melville's motivation in Moby-Dick,suggesting that Melville felt abandoned by his mother and that his art was nourished by “repression, disavowal, and displacement of grief.”]
Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.
—Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he's had his leg off it is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he'll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has “got over it.” But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.
—C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to Southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that is not the game he would be after. How long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot one's self.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Herman Melville's Moby-Dick provides an ideal starting point for my investigation of the theme of tabooed, or unresolved grief in American literature. It also helps to establish the usefulness of object relations and feminist psychoanalytic theory in illuminating the novel in this fundamentally new way. The novel functions so well toward these ends, partly because it explores with sophistication and complexity the literary and psychoanalytic issues that will be taken up again in even greater depth in the fiction of Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, and partly because many of the claims that this study will make about the repression of grief in American literature and the vicissitudes of the American orphan-hero's separation-individuation process have already been glimpsed by Melville's critics in this most canonical of American novels; consequently, their attention allows me to focus upon the exemplary, or representative, qualities of these thematic claims.
The self-willed American orphan, who both embraces his independent orphan status, and at the same time mourns over his isolation and essential state of deprivation and loss, makes a striking appearance in this epic American novel. Ishmael's heroic stature in the novel is defined by his emotional posture as an orphan insofar as it is predicated upon a valiant, yet ultimately unresolved, struggle with a fundamental ambivalence—an ambivalence created by the author's repression of grief and inability to mourn openly. Throughout Moby-Dick the American orphan repeatedly acts out his conflicted desire, alternately to cling to and to distance himself from his personal past: to regress to a state of comforting dependency and yet, at the same time, to break away toward radical autonomy. This central crisis, in what may be called the young male's separation-individuation process, becomes a major concern for the fictional heroes of Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway as well. Although for different reasons, these three authors were unable to conceive of an adequate resolution to their heroes' ambivalence, which disposed the American orphan hero toward a permanent state of arrested development, and condemned him to an endless struggle with his adolescent conflict, in which he perpetually straddles the borderline between maturity and immaturity.
Moby-Dick also lends itself to a demonstration of how the absent, or implied, figure of the mother, and the son's early relationship with her, play a central and pervasive role in the imaginative construction of what has previously been considered to be a masculine text. Despite her exclusion as a principal character in American fiction, the mother/woman occupies a prominent thematic place in the aetiology of the orphan hero's psychic drama. She is the repressed object of desire that continually returns, and only by evoking her symbolic presence can the American male author work through his conflicted grief in relation to her. Whether the influence she exerts is positive or negative, at any one point in the young male protagonist's psychological drama, to omit her is to risk underestimating the rich literary and psychoanalytic resources of the author's creative faculties. By reinstating her presence and influence within the thematic and psychological context of Melville's narrative, I hope to reinvigorate the novel as a feminist text, and, in doing so, recover the book for many of these essentially “lost” readers.
Melville's fixation, in Moby-Dick, on the theme of clinging versus distancing, or attachment versus loss, which the fiction of Twain and Hemingway also play out in various ways, can be traced, within the novel, to a fundamental experience of early deprivation and loss that directly affects not only the content but the narrative style of the American writer's fiction of tabooed grief. Melville, like Twain and Hemingway, used logocentric, patriarchal reasoning, or as Melville wrote in his novel Pierre; or, the Ambiguities, “all-stretchable philosophy,”1 to seek conciliatory patterns that transcend personal sorrow, and to make sense of their experiences of loss, deprivation, and disappointment. Yet, their rationalizations served merely to give a narrative and dramatic form to their grief, rarely to resolve it. Consequently, their fictions as a whole became monuments to their chronic mourning and unresolved grief.
In developmental psychology the conflict of clinging versus distancing is the dominant crisis belonging to what is called the “rapprochement phase” of psychic growth, which occurs somewhere between the ages of one and three years.2 It is the time when the child longs to explore his or her emerging autonomy and freedom, yet only within the safe assurance that the child's mother, or some other familiar and comforting object, is able to provide. When this feeling of connection is lost or suddenly disappears, the frightened child feels as though its whole inner world is dissolving, as though it is being abandoned, with emotional and physical rescue nowhere in sight. According to Daniel N. Stern, “[s]eparation loss (even momentary) is probably the most anguishing experience” a child can have. The primary caregiver, Stern explains, “is a psychological oxygen, without which, within seconds, the child experiences panic. And part of the panic of separation is most likely a feeling of becoming fragmented, of losing boundaries, of disappearing into a lonely, empty infinity.”3 From the point of view of the child, Stern contends, such isolation and abandonment feel as if the self is “dissolving like grains of salt in the ocean of space” (98). The anxiety of separation, Stern also maintains, does not change significantly when one becomes an adult: “The separation reaction is basic to us all and may not change much from the age of twelve months till death” (99).
In both its main plot and its many multiple subplots, Moby-Dick dramatizes the desolating consequences of abandonment and isolation. Young Pip's abandonment upon the broad and vast “open sea,” which Melville describes as an experience of “intolerable” and “awful lonesomeness,” is but a central moment in an entire novel of isolation and deprivation that resonates outward to envelop the tragic story of the fated Pequod and its crew.4 The repetitious sections on the anatomy of the whale that dissolve into unresolvable philosophical speculation, and the compulsive repetitions of variations on the Pequod's story through the gams, all point to a problem of rapprochement-phase ambivalence that Melville was compelled to deal with repeatedly in the novel, yet could not seem to resolve. Longing for protection and escaping from confinement simultaneously lead Ahab and Ishmael to traverse backwards and forwards across this psychic terrain, but this strategy also holds the authorial figure, Melville himself, in a constant position of dual possibilities.
Specifically, Melville's affixed gaze on the “good” nurturing mother and the “bad” smothering and disappointing mother, like the whale that cannot fuse the two distinct views of reality captured separately by each eye,5 became something of a primal scene that he could not get beyond in the book; thus, the novel as a whole takes shape as an anatomy of a fixation in narrative form. Through the dramatization of this fundamental conflict in the novel's plot, exposition, and characterizations, Melville draws the reader into his own efforts on behalf of Ishmael and Ahab either to repair, work through, or repudiate the anger and grief that he feels toward the ambivalently loved good/bad mother—which is acted out on several different levels in the novel. Hence, he allows us to participate regressively in his ongoing struggle with a primary ambivalence, in effect encouraging us, by perpetually reaching out to us and hectoring us, to engage in a kind of ego-merging with the author's own creative impulse in the book. In this way the rapprochement theme that thrives on Melville's own psycho-philosophical indeterminacy informs the psychological power that he masterfully manages to sustain throughout the book.
In the essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” written during the composition of Moby-Dick, Melville confesses that the drive toward radical separation and autonomy—toward orphanhood—was an important motivating force in his conception of the novel. “Would that all excellent books were foundlings, without father or mother,” he writes, “that so it might be, we could glorify them, without including their ostensible authors.”6 Melville admits that what he aspired to as a writer was complete “originality,” a radical break with one's personal, historical, and literary past.7 It is “better to fail in originality,” Melville proposes, “than to succeed in imitation.” Like a child seeking a new form of empowerment through an assertion of his or her emerging sense of autonomy, Melville senses that true greatness can be achieved only through separation and isolation.8 According to Leo Bersani, Melville, in Moby-Dick, participates in a nineteenth-century American “experience of an impossible dream: that of a literature without debts, which would owe nothing to the past.” Bersani then draws an allegorical parallel between America and the Pequod, claiming that: “by insisting on the Pequod's nearly total break with the land and the past, Melville simultaneously evokes the origins of America as a house for exiles from everywhere and makes those origins absolute. That is, he evokes the possibility of exile as a wholly new beginning and brutally deprives it of the comforting notion of loss.”9
Melville's orphan-hero Ishmael is, like Melville himself, a self-willed orphan. When Ishmael begins his narrative with the injunction, “Call me Ishmael,” he too is expressing a willful desire to assume an orphan identity as the disinherited son (3). Having no father or mother, Ishmael is a “loose-fish” that has been “abandoned … upon the seas of life” (396-97). He will forge an original self out of his complete isolation, as he forges the narrative of Moby-Dick out of his experience of abandonment on the sea when the Pequod and its crew sinks and disappears into the “closing vortex” of the black ocean (573). For both Melville and his narrator, then, Moby-Dick can be understood as an act of mourning, a product of greatness resulting from the grief of loss, separation, and isolation. Indeed, as Melville tells us by way of Ahab's final epiphany: “my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief” (571). Ahab's greatness, however, like Melville's aspirations for the greatness of his novel, lies not in the expression of grief from loss but in the willful denial of grief; in, as Bersani observes, the “brutal” deprivation of the “comforting notion of loss.”10
What Melville is advocating for both himself and for Ahab is to prolong the mourning process indefinitely by displacing one's grief from abandonment and isolation into a motivating force that drives one on to greatness. Ahab, Melville informs us, was abandoned by a “crazy, widowed mother, who died when he was only a twelvemonth [sic] old” (79). It is perhaps possible, and indeed Melville seems to imply, that Ahab's mother was “crazy” from grief at having been made a widow. As John Bowlby or D. W. Winnicott might suggest, a mother preoccupied with her own grief would have functioned as a poor mirroring mother to her newborn infant.11 The feeling of deprivation and abandonment that the infant Ahab would have felt from his grief-distracted mother is confirmed when she dies and abandons him forever. Throughout Ahab's life at sea, which he began as a “boy-harpooner of eighteen” (543), he carried within him the emotional pain of his “privation”:
forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! … When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without—oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!
(543)
One may well assume from this that Ahab channeled his repressed grief from maternal abandonment into a desperate, aggressive rage against the outwardly projected image of his abandoning, persecuting “bad mother”—Mother Nature, the sea, and their concomitant, the white-whale breast of Moby Dick.12 Given the tragic nature of Ahab's mother-infant relationship, Ishmael speaks truly when he intuits that “all the anguish” of Ahab's “present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe” (463-64).
If, however unconsciously, Melville was acting out an unresolved rapprochement-phase conflict in the novel, then it becomes significant that the mother, at this stage of development, is a figure of great ambivalence to the child, who both longs for her comforting protection and seeks to escape from her smothering confinement.13 To the child she is the prototype of all the good and evil in the world. It sometimes happens, however, as in the case of Ahab, that the trauma of maternal abandonment transforms the mother into a predominantly bad object. In order to preserve the image of the “good mother,” the child internalizes the aggressive or persecuting image of the “bad mother,” which results in a masochistic personality structure.14 The psychological motive for Ahab's early integration and outward projection of the “bad mother” was to preserve the untainted image of the “good,” nurturing mother. Indeed, so split off from Ahab's projective conception of an evil reality has the good or “sweet mother” become, that he “knowest not how” he came to be, and hence concludes that he is “unbegotten” (508).
The aggression toward the “bad mother,” that is internalized in order to retain the uncorrupted image of the desired “good mother,” may then take one of two courses. It may remain internalized and take the form of persecutory, destructive attacks against the self, leading ultimately to suicidal fantasies. Or, it may be projected outward onto the external world—onto God and nature. In the latter case, God and nature become narcissistic mirror images of the sinful blackness within the self—external objects that may then be attacked or hated. The guilt from Ahab's early hatred and rage toward his mother results in a fear of retaliatory persecution from the threatening external object, which is now identified as the locus of absolute evil, and is itself a remnant of the “bad” pregenital mother. As some critics already have suggested, to feel cursed and persecuted by Moby Dick, as Ahab does, is to suffer the malevolent attacks of his own hatred and aggression that are first projected onto the bad object and later turned upon himself.15 Within this sado-masochistic dynamic, the white whale is, for Ahab, both the agent and the instrument of evil.
Through Ishmael's analytical musings on Ahab's “malady,” Melville makes it clear that, for the Pequod's captain, the loss of Ahab's leg symbolizes all the “intellectual and spiritual exasperations” and “woes” he has suffered in his life (184). When Moby Dick bites off Ahab's leg, Ahab takes it as an opportunity to project his repressed grief and outward aggression onto a single, tangible object: “ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he's been a kind of moody—desperate moody, and savage sometimes” (79). This dynamic of projection, and the metaphorical displacement of intangible and ineffable psychological issues onto tangible, symbolic objects, parallel Melville's sweeping projective displacement in the novel of an inner ineffable ambivalence onto philosophical indeterminacy. By pondering intellectually and attempting to understand rationally his pressing and unresolved psychological issues, Melville, like Ahab, was, to some extent, able to transcend his own personal suffering.
In the past, Melville's Freudian critics have viewed the white whale as a symbol of the father, interpreting Ahab's ivory leg as an emblem of oedipal castration. If Ahab's leg is indeed a phallus, however, it is one that belongs equally to the devouring, “bad” phallic mother. Ahab's artificial limb is a memorial to the grief from loss that was denied expression and replaced by his monomaniacal hatred and rage against a persecuting, malignant object of evil. Yet, below the stump where Ahab's leg ends, as he confesses to the carpenter, he is still sensible, though only vaguely, of his lost wholeness. Accordingly, this phantom leg that Ahab still feels is the absent, yet still present, mother who was, and is, the source of all his unconscious loving desires and all-too-conscious present rage and woe.16
The theme of Ahab's rapprochement ambivalence resulting from maternal loss is further developed by Melville's duplication of the experience of maternal deprivation in Ishmael's life as well. Ishmael, like Ahab, suffers from an early traumatic experience involving the mother. In addition to being an orphan, having been abandoned by both his parents, Ishmael is raised by a stern stepmother, whose “conscientiousness” is a thinly disguised emotional coldness and perhaps even cruelty (26). So deprived of love is Ishmael, as he relates his story in “The Counterpane” chapter, that he would rather be beaten by his stepmother than abandoned by her and exiled to his room, where he must remain alone for hours. The psychological moral of Stubb's dream in the “Queen Mab” episode, in which Stubb is disturbed at having been kicked by Ahab, but finally decides that such abuse from “a beautiful ivory leg” should be deemed “an honor,” is that aggression can indeed be interpreted as a form of expressed love (132). Ishmael's stepmother refuses even to grant him such a perverted acknowledgment of her love; and the indifference she shows him, by “condemning” him “to lie abed such an unendurable length of time,” confirms his feelings of maternal abandonment (26). Despite Ishmael's absence of apparent grief and anger toward his stepmother, and his equivocal rationalization of her cruel behavior, Melville emphasizes the traumatic impact that this incident had upon Ishmael when he, as narrator, confesses that the experience made him feel “a great deal worse than I have ever done since, even from the greatest subsequent misfortunes” (26).
Ishmael, in concluding his narrative in “The Castaway” chapter of how poor Pip became a “lonely castaway” on the “shoreless ocean,” portends that it will soon be “seen what like abandonment befell myself” (414). And yet, Ishmael's description of his childhood experience of abandonment more closely mirrors Pip's devastating ordeal than his own final installment in the tale of Moby-Dick. The “awful lonesomeness” of Pip's deprivation on the sea, Ishmael explains, “is intolerable”: “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?” (414). Ishmael, of course, can and does tell, in painful detail, what such an experience of abandonment is like. It is to see and feel “among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities … God's foot upon the treadle of the loom”; and for Ishmael, to identify with the omnipotent power of an almighty deity is to feel as “heartless” and “indifferent as his God.” Ishmael can describe Pip's ordeal because when he, himself, lies for “several hours broad awake” (26) in his bed, Ishmael experiences the same “intolerable” “intense concentration of self” that poor Pip feels lying face down in the black ocean, that “jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul” (414). Melville, with intuitive psychological insight, metaphorically describes Pip's traumatic experience of near-drowning as an example of the rapprochement-phase panic of a child who, according to Stern, is too suddenly or prematurely separated from his “home base,” which makes him feel “stunned and disoriented: his breathing changes,” as if he were deprived of “psychological oxygen,” and he is overwhelmed by a feeling “of disappearing into a lonely, empty infinity” (Diary, 95-98).
Whereas Ahab projects the internalized aggression toward the “bad mother” onto the external world—onto God and nature—Ishmael's corresponding response to the hated mother is to retain his internalized aggression, where it takes the form of suicidal fantasies. By the end of Melville's first paragraph in Moby-Dick, he has already established the psychological connection in Ishmael's mind between tabooed or repressed grief, aggression, and suicide. Ishmael takes to sea, Melville writes, because, as Ishmael confesses:
It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulation the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.
(3)
Ishmael's aggressive inclination to knock “people's hats off” is manifested internally in his identification with Cato, who threw “himself upon his sword.” In view of the tragic ending of the novel, Ishmael's decision to embark on this whaling voyage is a kind of suicidal act. Yet it is not aggression by itself that drives Ishmael but a more originary and deeply repressed motive: the “striving for realization” of mourning.17 While Ishmael is aware of his periodic tendency to let his “hypos” get “an upper hand” on him, his impulse to linger in front of “coffin warehouses” and participate in the mourning ritual of other people's funerals is an unconscious act, “involuntarily” motivated by his own unacknowledged grief.
Like Perth, the blacksmith, Ishmael may have viewed whaling as a suicidal mission, and so took to sea with “death-longing eyes” (486). Perth knows that by his excessive drinking he provoked the deaths of his beloved young wife and children; therefore, he feels a strong inclination to deal out the same punishment of death upon himself. But, being among those “who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide,” he ships off to sea and buries himself in “a life which … is more oblivious than death” (486). To go “a-whaling,” then, for both Perth and Ishmael, fulfills a death-wish that contains within it a powerful desire to undo the devastating losses they have suffered. But, because of the unworked-through guilt that accompanies their grief—Perth's in relation to the “Bottle Conjuror!” (485), and Ishmael's to the repressed retaliatory aggression toward his parents and stepmother—their mourning process was impaired. Unable to grieve unimpeded by guilt, their grief became chronic, destined never to bring them the consolation they seek.
Ishmael's masochistic aggression, like Ahab's enraged, persecutory aggression, is perpetually fueled by an internally erected taboo against the conscious acknowledgment of his grief. As psychoanalysis tells us, “one can never overestimate the immense grief” that lies at the source of masochistic aggression. Behind the child's hatred of the “bad mother” is an aching desire to be loved, and a deep sense of unconscious or tabooed grief at having been abandoned, as it were, by the “good mother.”18 Therefore, as critics have often intuited about Melville's novel, Ishmael and Ahab are psychological mirrors of one another.19
For Ishmael, the Whalemen's Chapel that he visits shortly before setting sail on the Pequod functions as a metaphor, not for mourning or achieving catharsis through grief, but for the impossibility or inability of ever grieving fully and completely for lost loved ones. Perhaps many of the widows and mothers who lost their husbands and sons at sea unburden their hearts through grieving and prayer, but Ishmael cannot help but perceive in their appearance that they are suffering from an “unceasing grief.” “I feel sure,” he says to himself (perhaps because he describes his own inner state), that all those who are there possess “unhealing hearts” that “bleed afresh” with each reminder of their loss (36). Because we see only what Ishmael sees, every word and image in the chapel drives home the inevitability that personal loss results in chronic, unresolved mourning.
To have “perished without a grave” (36), or, in other words, to be lost at sea and denied the comfort of a funeral ritual that might provide a sense of closure for one's grief and mourning, is an ideal metaphor for the unresolved and unacknowledged grief from the abandonment and loss that afflicts so many of the characters in Melville's novel. Significantly, the first tablet Ishmael sets his eyes upon in the chapel reports that an unfortunate sailor “lost overboard” drowned “Near the Isle of Desolation” (35). For the whalemen, as for Ishmael, Perth, Ahab, and Pip, comforting death can merely be presumed to be the consequence of being lost at sea, while abandonment and desolation are the more certain, and the more devastating, fate of the orphaned sailor.
For the masochistic Ishmael who, like Perth, is unable to achieve catharsis through grieving, the punishment of death would indeed relieve him of his guilt. It is understandable, then, that when Ishmael, while sitting among the tombs of the dead sailors in the Whalemen's Chapel, considers the possibility that the “same fate” of death may be his, he finds himself suddenly growing “merry again” (37), just as later on in his voyage composing his will gives the feeling that he is “a quiet ghost with a clean conscience” (228). Experts on suicide suggest that the suicidal fantasy is motivated not only by a desire to punish oneself for hating the love-object by whom one feels abandoned, and to punish the beloved object herself, but also in order to give the fantasy omnipotent mother a second chance to rescue her abandoned child.20 Hence, the ending of Moby-Dick, in which the outcast and abandoned “orphan,” Ishmael, is rescued by the good mother-ship, Rachel, “in her retracing-search after her missing children,” can already be prefigured from page one of the novel (473).
Throughout Moby-Dick, Ishmael appears preoccupied with the kind of rapprochement-phase ambivalence that characterizes the child's, and later, the adult's, polarized and ambiguous relationship with the split good/bad mother. The theme of ambivalence as transferentially projected onto linguistic and philosophical indeterminacy is, in fact, the subject of many of the most notable and provocative chapters in the novel, including “The Whiteness of the Whale,” “Moby Dick,” “The Doubloon,” “The Try-Works,” “A Squeeze of the Hand,” “The Monkey-Rope,” and “The Mast-head.” A child who experiences deprivation in relation to the maternal object will often, as an adult, engage in clinging and distancing behavior with others, and will maintain throughout adulthood a bifurcated worldview in which everything is either good or bad, black or white, comforting or smothering.21 Fascinated by the whale, whose eyes allow him to view two “distinct picture[s]” at once, Ishmael is obsessed—in his own philosophical, monomaniacal fashion—with the fact that, as a man, he can never “examine any two things … at one and the same instant of time” (330).
Through his cytological discourse (the anatomy of the whale sections in Moby-Dick), and his musings on the analogies between the self and nature, Melville compulsively reiterates his philosophy of indefiniteness and ambivalence, by which the “[w]onderfullest things are ever the unmentionable” (106). In his hopelessly bifurcated reality, Ishmael can only attempt the “classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed” (134). To explain the “ineffable” (188), “unfathomable” (263), “impenetrable” mystery of God and nature, Ishmael confesses, “would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go” (187). The mysterious Mother-Whale-Self, like Ahab's cryptic doubloon, “must remain unpainted to the last” (264). As is characteristic of a rapprochement-phase crisis, Ishmael is both fearful of returning to an engulfing maternal utopia and, at the same time, unwilling to accept the impossible divisiveness of a heterogeneous reality. Trapped in an adolescent universe of indefiniteness and ambiguity, Ishmael must perpetually choose between the “open independence” of the sea, and the “treacherous, slavish shore” (107).
In the figure of the good sailor, Bulkington, Ishmael sees the incarnation of the fundamental ambiguity of all things. Through Bulkington, Ishmael recognizes the differences between the “safety, comfort” and “succor” of the port, and the “direst jeopardy” to one's freedom that the port also represents; and between the “highest truth” of “landlessness,” and the threat of being left to “perish in that howling infinite” of a perpetually “shoreless” existence (107). No wonder Bulkington, as Ishmael comments, “interested me at once,” when he first encountered him at the Spouter-Inn (16). For, in Bulkington, as in Ahab and himself, Ishmael perceives that “in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy” (16). Ishmael senses in Bulkington the repressed grief that is the mark of true greatness in a man; as Ishmael is later to realize, “all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness” (74). It is not grief but the taboo against grief that leads to greatness, and Bulkington shows no sign of grief. Instead, his grief has become a monomania through which he pursues “the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of the sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore” (107).
Although Melville does not mention the cause of Bulkington's grief, the nature of his symptoms, and Ishmael's affinity towards him, lead one to conclude that the traumatic loss of some beloved object motivates his compulsive wandering. According to experts on grief and mourning, wandering is a form of searching that, “by its very nature, implies the loss or absence of an object.”22 Therefore, wandering is “an essential component” of chronic or unacknowledged grief. As one noted authority on “pathological wandering” proposes: “Is it not possible that the desire for adventure abroad, for voyages of exploration, etc., is in some individuals a sublimation of an abnormal compulsion to wander?”23 The Pequod is a ship-of-death, but not because of the tragic fate that awaits it; its end represents merely the fitting burial for those among its crew who were seeking death before the vessel ever shipped out, and who finally joined, in death, those beloved whom they had lost long ago.
For a healthy resolution of the rapprochement crisis, both the “good” and “bad,” comforting and disappointing, aspects of the mother must be fused and internalized, thus preparing the individual for the limitations and compromises of reality.24 Instead, Ishmael's trauma in relation to his mother, like Ahab's, results in a pathological resolution of the rapprochement crisis, through which he internalizes the “bad mother” in an effort to preserve the untainted image of the omnipotent, “good mother.” As both an internal and external psychic entity, the idealized “good mother” becomes the source of all love and plentitude, the prototype of utopian perfection. In the course of the novel Ishmael periodically attempts to recapture a regressive experience of maternal utopia—a blissful merging or “melting” into the lost “good mother.” For Ishmael, as with the Transcendentalists, she becomes Mother-Cosmos-Nature, into which his ego longs to dissolve and, hence, undo the trauma of abandonment by repairing his lost feeling of narcissistic omnipotence. At the same time, he fears the annihilation of the self and the loss of control that such a state of egolessness represents.
Throughout his voyage on the Pequod, Ishmael habitually engages in a regressive fantasy so as to reunite with the lost “good mother” of his orphan past. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel describes this regressive fantasy as a “desire to discover a universe without obstacles, without roughness or differences, entirely smooth, identified with a mother's belly stripped of its contents, an interior to which one has free access” (Sexuality, 77).25 This fantasy calls to mind the biblical story of Jonah, who entered the belly of the whale and emerged again unharmed. At one point in his cytological narrative, Ishmael recalls the opportunity he once had to enter, without confronting obstacles, the “great white, worshipped skeleton” of the whale:
To and fro I paced before this skeleton—brushed the vines aside—broke through the ribs—and with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid its many winding, shaded colonnades and arbors. But soon my line was out; and following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered. I saw no living thing within; naught was there but bones.
(450)
This literal or physical fulfillment of a maternal utopian fantasy has a parallel, on the level of mental functioning, in Ishmael's primary drive to rediscover a state of egolessness, which he manages to achieve temporarily in the chapters “A Squeeze of the Hand,” “The Mast-head,” “The Try-Works,” and “The Monkey-Rope.” In these episodes, this time on the level of mental functioning, Ishmael escapes heterogeneous reality by returning to a state of homogeneity—an essentially anal universe ruled by the pleasure principle, with no limits or boundaries between objects. Chasseguet-Smirgel refers to this utopia as an entirely “malleable” universe formed by the “melting of thought into an undifferentiated mass” (84). The task appointed to Ishmael and his companions in “A Squeeze of the Hand” is “to squeeze those lumps” of sperm “back into fluid” (415). When immersed up to his elbows in the vat of sperm, Ishmael feels “divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever” (416). “I squeezed that sperm,” he says, “till I myself almost melted into it.”
The belief that all goods are held in common also characterizes most utopian fantasies. According to Chasseguet-Smirgel: “There must be a single identity among the citizens” in a utopia; in effect, the “maternal breast must belong to everybody” (95-99). The similarity between Chasseguet-Smirgel's description of the utopian maternal fantasy and Melville's depiction of Ishmael's emotional response to his pleasurable regressive experience is striking. “Come; let us squeeze hands all round,” he proposes, “nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness” (416).
Ishmael experiences a similar kind of ego-merging with Queequeg, in “The Monkey-Rope” chapter, when, connected to the savage by the rope-line, he perceives “that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two” (320). “The Try-Works” chapter represents Melville's most perfectly constructed fantasy of his regressive passion to return to an undifferentiated state of maternal chaos, “preceding the introduction of separation, of division, of distinctions, of naming, of paternal law” (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 88). The try-works is the anal vessel that transforms heterogeneous reality back into a homogeneous, unified universe. Lured by the burning mass into an “unaccountable drowsiness,” Ishmael falls into a trance-like state of egolessness, so “that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern” (424). Again succumbing to an “unseasonable meditativeness” during his post on the masthead, Ishmael is “lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie,” that “at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading manking and nature” (158-59). Melville's imagery suggests that Ishmael finally attains a regressive, intra-uterine state, in which, as Ishmael observes about himself, there “is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea” (159). The sea, itself, often becomes an alluring, “tranced,” and “mystical” haven of maternal bliss for Melville (4-5). Ishmael speaks, in the very first chapter of Moby-Dick, of “thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries,” longing to free themselves from their social responsibilities and the restraints of the land (4).
Melville also perceived that the maternal womb—the “insular Tahiti” (274)—of his utopian fantasies could also be, as Chasseguet-Smirgel says, “a murderous anal trap” (107). In depicting the alluring danger of maternal regression—of whaling and voyaging at sea—Melville again dramatized the child's ambivalence or rapprochement crisis with the good/bad mother. The “live sea,” he cautions, “swallows up ships and crews” (274). Indeed, Melville goes so far as to identify the sea as a devouring mother, “a fiend to its own offspring” (274). In his early south-sea novels, Typee, Mardi, and Omoo, the friendly, comforting and solicitous nature of the hero's relationship with the natives, particularly with a gentle and seductive female figure, is always overcast with a sense of fear and anxiety regarding the possibility that the hospitable natives will suddenly become inhospitable, turning against their visitor and perhaps even cannibalizing him.26
To be a “joint stock company of two,” Ishmael says, in “The Monkey-Rope,” is to risk “that another's mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death” (320). Rather than strive to attain an impossible cerebral utopia, one should, as Ishmael cautions, in “A Squeeze of the Hand,” “lower” one's hope of happiness to a more “attainable felicity” with wife and family (416). To lose oneself in the “elusive thoughts” of an “enchanted mood” is to risk toppling from the mast-head into the sea, “no more to rise for ever” (159). Finally, the terrible danger of losing one's self totally in the horrible maternal, chaotic “blackness of darkness” of the try-works induces Ishmael to conclude: “Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man!” (424). To retreat, or regress, too far from the light and order of heterogeneous reality into the maternal embrace, to rush too wildly “from all havens astern,” is, as Tashtego nearly discovers, to be “smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum” of the whale/mother (344). It may be a “precious perishing,” but it is a perishing nonetheless.
While the regressive lure toward unconscious, egoless merging with the lost “good mother” serves to undo the grief and loss of maternal abandonment, it also results in a terrifying feeling of engulfment and annihilation of the self. The psychologist, Henry A. Murray, was captivated by the fiction of Herman Melville because he saw in it, years before Freud's “discovery” of the unconscious, “the dazzling and bewildering shapes” of the “inner world” of the human mind. Melville, Murray enthusiastically believed, was the first “literary discoverer of … the Darkest Africa of the mind, the mythological unconscious.”27 The mysterious depths of the unconscious in both classical and contemporary feminist psychoanalysis has often been compared to “the primitive abyss of Dionysos … the mother's womb” (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 128, 138).28 The same question that Chasseguet-Smirgel poses about Freud might also be posed about Herman Melville. How could Freud, she asks, seek to “explore the Unconscious—the Mother's body—and to send a flood of light into its dark depths, without lurching himself into the abyss” (139)? By way of an answer, she proposes that Freud's identification with Judaism provided him with an armor against engulfment in the form of his tools of investigation—reason, analysis, intellect, separation, and division—all of which belong to the paternal dimension of reality (135-39). But, whereas Freud had Judaism to wear as a diver's suit, complete with mask to observe coldly, and oxygen tank to breath without gasping, Melville had science, or rather, cytology; and also language, or more specifically, metaphor. By balancing the dangerous, chaotic, darkness of the unconscious in Moby-Dick with intellectual, cytological narrative, Melville could, so to speak, keep one foot on the shore, while allowing the other to be immersed in the mysterious sea of the unconscious.
Moby-Dick, Melville's perilous voyage into the depths of the unconscious, is buoyed throughout by a preponderance of historical, paternal symbols, metaphors, and similes, derived from ancient Greek texts, the Bible, Shakespeare, mythology, biology, nineteenth-century culture, and more.29 Safely suited within the protective paternal confines of his cytological and analogical armor, Melville, in Moby-Dick, dove as deep into the maternal “invisible spheres” (195) of the unconscious as a mortal can go. On the level of narratology, then, Melville dramatized a rapproachement-phase conflict in which science (cytology) and language offered a refuge from engulfment in the joyous, yet self-annihilating, cosmos of the mother. In this way, Melville created a tension in the narrative text that paralleled the contextual, or philosophical, rapprochement conflict depicted throughout the novel.
For Melville, Moby Dick, the white whale, is the cosmos of the mother. He is both the “colorless” object of Ishmael's passive desire for divine unconscious egolessness, and the “all-color” object of Ahab's aggressive desire for divine super-conscious egomania.30 While Ishmael longs to submit regressively and passively to the “inscrutable” in nature, Ahab will jealously “strike through the mask” of “visible objects” in nature in order to discover that power “beyond” that presides “over all creations” (164). Ishmael's passive-aggressive, and Ahab's willful-aggressive, search for the utopian body of the mother are both displacements of the same desire to repair an original experience of maternal abandonment depression. Comrades in abandonment and grief, Ishmael and Ahab share beneath their “hypos” and “haughty agony” a common desire to repair their emotional wounds and find refuge in a regressive mother-infant paradise. Thinking back to when he was “a boy,” gazing at the sea from “the sand-hills of Nantucket,” Ahab dreams of his own immortality, which brings to mind Ishmael's mystical utopian vision of “immortal infancy.” In his quiet gazing, Ahab says to himself: “There's a soft shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings! They must lead somewhere—to something else than common land, more palmy than the palms” (565).
In “The Gilder” chapter, Ishmael and Ahab partake of the same utopian maternal fantasy of returning to a state of blissful “immortal infancy.” The “mystic mood” that Ishmael speaks of, in which “fact and fancy” melt into “one seamless whole,” unmistakably evokes the longed-for image of the maternal womb:
Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,—though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,—in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. … Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
(492)31
Like Ahab, however, Ishmael mistakenly thinks that the ideal he is searching for is the “foundling's father,” whereas to be “begotten” by “unwedded mothers” is to embrace a utopian fantasy of symbiosis with the mother in which, as Plato emphasizes in The Republic, “fathers will not know their sons, nor the sons their fathers” (Chasseguet-Smirgel, Sexuality, 95).32 Ahab's desire to be “welded” with God the Father is a demonic, patriarchal version of Ishmael's fantasy of dissolution into the Mother-Cosmos.
This same merging and confusion of gender identification has previously occupied a significant place in Melville's biographical criticism. According to a number of his critics, in his own sea voyages, as well as in his early fictional accounts of those journeys—Omoo, Mardi, Typee, and White-Jacket—Melville was presumably seeking a father figure who might allow him to transcend his disappointment with his biological father, Allen Melville, who died a bankrupt when Melville was twelve years old. However, there is evidence in all of these novels that points to the additional possibility that Melville's search for the father, like Ahab's, contained within it a more primal wish: to re-find the exotic and satisfying refuge of the comforting and nurturing mother. Charles Haberstroh, for one, believes that Melville's young seafaring protagonists represent Melville himself, who, as a child, felt “abandoned” and “impotent” in relation to his father and his highly prized older brother, and who hoped to find repose in the “safe bosom of some father's seeming strength.”33 Yet, despite Haberstroh's thesis that Melville was searching for an heroic paternal ideal, the oceanic images of comfort Haberstroh employs describe not paternal masculine support but the peace and serenity of the maternal womb:
The orphan's discovery of a lost parent would constitute an entry into a tireless and timeless world of golden peace: the final escape, the final freedom from doubt, the final and safe pillow for the head of the troubled child … a soft suspension of the need to think, or hope, or fear. Past and future, memory and desire will dissolve into an eternally placid present: a bay from which one hears the beating of the sea waves, but where the currents of the sea have no authority.
(13)
Frederick Rosenheim suggests that Melville went to sea to repair his poor sense of self-esteem; in other words, to seek a narcissistic identification with his important and prosperous male Melville and Gansevoort relatives and ancestors (some of whom, including Captain John De Wolf, and Melville's cousins, Guert and Leonard Gansevoort—as well as his own father—had achieved considerable recognition as seamen).34 Like Haberstroh, Rosenheim evokes, through the powerful father's image, the loving care of the good nurturing mother. In the father/monarch/god, he maintains, Melville yearned for a person “who will adore him, protect him and tend to him like a helpless babe” (7).
Believing that he was seeking a powerful and protective father, Melville, according to Rosenheim, found instead devoted women figures, such as Yillah, in Mardi, who would love and adore him, and soothe the rage he felt at “his mother for not adoring him enough, for abandoning him as he distortedly saw it” (7). Appropriately, then, the threat of cannibalism is also omnipresent in Melville's regressive fantasies of mother-son reunion. Cannibalism offered Melville the perfect objective correlative for the threat of castration, which he enacted to punish his oedipal longings, and the threat of engulfing annihilation, to punish his pre-oedipal or regressive desire to return to the embraces of the fantasy archaic mother.
At bottom, therefore, it is not only the father, but also the mother, whom Melville's protagonists set out to seek. For Melville, as for Ishmael, paternal inheritance was not something which he sought, but rather, something from which he wished to disconnect himself. Again, as Melville explains in his essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” he felt he had to dissociate himself from his historical past—to embrace his “foundling” or orphan status—in order to attain the independence, originality, and spiritual grandeur he sought. One might say, then, that Melville's interest in the mother's body was sublimated in a more logical and psychologically acceptable search for self-esteem, through a longing to identify with a powerful paternal figure.
The psychoanalytic origins of the feeling of awe that Ahab seems to have in relation to his “fiery father,” and to Moby Dick as well, further support the hypothesis that Melville's search for a powerful, phallic father figure disguised a more primal wish to be unconditionally embraced by the mother, at the hands of whom he believed he had suffered a devastating experience of emotional, and perhaps also physical, deprivation.35 Freud explained the feeling of awe, in his essay, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” as phallic awe, or the child's oedipal need for and fear of the father, which Freud believed that he himself felt in relation to the Parthenon temple.36 Recent revisions of Freud's theory of awe, however, trace the preoccupation with feelings of oceanic and religious awe to a skewed experience with the pre-oedipal mother that occurred “well before self-object differentiation,” and re-routed “the awe experience in the direction of anxiety or fear.”37 Current definitions of maternal awe as “reverential dread,” mingled with “wonder,” “mystery,” and “the ineffable,” come remarkably close to describing both Ishmael's emotional relationship with Nature and the Self, and Ahab's relationship to the great white whale, Moby Dick. Hence, if Freud, while in Athens, mistook the “temple” of the mother's body for a paternal, phallic temple, then it is reasonable to assume that patriarchal psychoanalysis, like Ahab himself, misconstrued the “Temple of the Whale” (458) and all that is “ineffable” in nature, including the creative principle of the universe, for a phallic father figure.
Maternal awe, it is now believed, results from the child's narcissistic identification with the split-off “bad mother,” which in turn leads to a masochistic (passive-aggressive) or sadistic personality structure. In such individuals a crisis often results, resembling that of the rapprochement-phase crisis, in which “grandiosity and terror may coexist or alternate” in the adult, who finds it “difficult to untangle the web of dread and rage, humiliation and triumph, megalomania and devastation” within himself or herself (Harrison, “Awe,” 191). Both Ahab's and Ishmael's ambiguous and awe-filled relationship with God and Nature, therefore, may perhaps be explained in terms of an early narcissistic identification with the persecuting, abandoning mother. But whereas Ahab focuses on the malignant projection of the early “bad mother,” eclipsing, and hence losing sight entirely of, the “good mother,” Ishmael apotheosizes the ideal “good mother” and, through an attempted regressive fantasy of fusion with her, seeks to attain a limitless narcissism and the oceanic bliss of mystical egolessness.
While the son's identification with the powerful father might repair a fundamental lack of self-esteem, only with the original ambivalently loved mother—or some symbolic substitute—can he work through his fixation at the rapprochement phase of development. Furthermore, if it is remembered, for a true resolution of the rapprochement crisis, or the phase of radical ambivalence, the images of the “good” and “bad” mother must be fused, a fusion which cannot occur until the persecutory guilt associated with an abandonment trauma is changed to depressive guilt, and the grief of loss at its core realized, activating a long-postponed mourning for the lost maternal object (Chasseguet-Smirgel, Sexuality, 125). Whatever critical interpretations have been generated to account for what Queequeg means to Ishmael, he certainly, in some respects, partakes of Melville's image of the good, nurturing mother. Queequeg's tomahawk, the “hatchet-faced baby” (27), produced from the communion of love between Ishmael and the savage, can be construed both as an oedipal product of father-Ishmael and mother-Queequeg (in which case the tomahawk signifies Ishmael's castration fear and feminine identity), and as the offspring of mother-Ishmael and father-Queequeg. In both scenarios, however, Ishmael is enacting a feminine/maternal identification.
Snug and warm under the bedcovers with Queequeg, Ishmael reflects upon the savage's hand that lies across the counterpane, an image which brings to mind the “phantom” memories of his austere stepmother. But extract the “bad” from Ishmael's memory of his mother, or in Ishmael's own words, “take away the awful fear” (26), and one is left with the “good mother,” Queequeg. Queequeg's arm and the comforting maternal quilt “blended their hues together,” making them, in effect, one. Unlike Ishmael's own mother, Queequeg can be counted upon to rescue a person from near death, particularly death from abandonment and drowning.38 Before setting sail, Queequeg rescues the drowning greenhorn from the jaws of the black sea; later, he pulls Tashtego back from a “delicious death” (344) from drowning in the vat of warm sperm; and of course it is Queequeg's coffin that, in the end, saves Ishmael from the “suicidal” fate he envisions for himself when he resolves to go on a whaling voyage.
Even more importantly in terms of Ishmael's rapprochement crisis, Queequeg represents the healthy outcome of the child's ambivalence toward the splintered, good/bad mother. He is a heathen and a Satan worshipper—“the devil himself” (22), and yet he is also an omniscient and omnipotent nurturing mother-companion to Ishmael. Queequeg is complete unto himself, an incarnated fusion of all the goodness and evil in the world. Tattooed from head to toe, he wears the “mysteries” of “the heavens and the earth,” as well as his entire personal history, on the outside of his body (480). For Queequeg, the “bad” does not need to be hidden or repressed in order to preserve the purity of the “good.” To internalize Queequeg's inner wholeness—to allow himself to be “mysteriously drawn to him”—is, for Ishmael, to partake of Queequeg's “silent, solitary twain” (51). The “strange feelings” of “melting” that Ishmael experiences when he is snuggled up so close to Queequeg so as to become a part of him are the melting of the barrier between his severed worldview; in other words, of his own barricade between the good/bad mother. Therefore, as if magically: “No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world” (51). Although, as D. H. Lawrence complained, in the rest of the novel “Queequeg is forgotten like yesterday's newspaper” (Studies, 156), it is Queequeg's love for Ishmael that plays the critical role of saving Ishmael's life at the end of his tale. Queequeg's coffin, on which is engraved the secret to all the good and evil in the world, which was once writ on Queequeg himself, is the emblem of overt mourning for the ambiguously loved, and now lost, maternal rescuer.
The fact that Queequeg plays an emblematic role in the latter half of the novel does not in any way detract from the important place he occupies as, quite literally, a life-and-death ingredient in Ishmael's story. His absent presence, like the absent presence of Ahab's lost leg and the lost maternal object, reveals the critical relevance of symbolic thinking in Melville's psychological drama and creative process. Perhaps partly for this reason Moby-Dick did not receive enthusiastic critical attention until after the discovery of psychoanalysis in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a discovery which allowed for a perceptible recognition of the emblematic psychoanalytic factors in the novel. In a similar way, the reader of Moby-Dick perhaps had to wait until the advent of feminist literary and psychoanalytic theory in the latter half of the twentieth century to identify, and hence, to fully appreciate, the vital critical import of the mother/woman's absent presence in Melville's novel.
Near the end of Moby-Dick, Melville gives Ahab several opportunities to transform his persecutory guilt into depressive guilt, as if toying with the possibility of psychological salvation. In “The Symphony” chapter, Melville lures Ahab infuriatingly close to an integration of his divided soul with the lost and repressed “good mother,” and therefore to a catharsis of his aggression through grief. As before, the mildness of “a clear steel-blue day” inspires reveries in Ahab and Ishmael of the “innocency” of a “Sweet childhood”—a symbiotic oneness fantasy with the pregenital mother that is described by Ishmael as a state of “immortal infancy” (543). In evoking this archaic universe, Melville envisioned a wedding between the “feminine air” and the “masculine sea,” which in pregenital experience corresponds to the “gentle,” “snow-white” nurturing, “good mother,” and the “strong,” “murderous,” phallic, “bad mother” (542). Through his narrative, Melville again merges Ishmael's experience of trauma with Ahab's, as he imagines Ahab's reconciliation with the castaway good mother:
That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the stepmother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.
(543)
With his defenses down momentarily, Ahab opens his heart to comfort not only from the rejected and rejecting “step-mother,” but to his companion, Starbuck, as well: “Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye” (544). Neither Ahab nor Melville seems able, or willing, to explain why, suddenly, “Ahab's glance was averted” from the course of emotional salvation, except to ask what “cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?” (545). Surely Ahab's unrelenting passion for greatness and immortality is responsible for his sudden and recalcitrant refusal to carry his mourning response any farther, as it is fueled and motivated by his denial of grief, and the displacement of that grief into wandering and searching, willful aggression, and angry protest.39
When his ivory leg is “snapped off” during the final chase after Moby Dick, Ahab again weakens somewhat in his resolve to defy his “natural loving and longing,” and confesses to Starbuck: “Aye, aye, Starbuck, 'tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has” (560). On the last day of the chase, Ahab, for a third and final time, reaches out a human hand to his first mate: “‘Starbuck. I am old;—shake hands with me, man.’ Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue” (566). Attempting to dissuade Ahab from his belief that courage and greatness are solely dependent on the denial of expressed grief, Starbuck pleads with Ahab: “Oh, my captain, my captain!—noble heart—go not—go not!—see; it's a brave man that weeps” (566).
It is the young Pip, however, who presents the greatest threat to Ahab's repressed grief and resulting monomaniacal resolve. Like Ahab and Ishmael, Pip has been abandoned by the “heartless”-seeming devouring “bad mother” sea. Even before his abandonment trauma at sea, however, Pip, as a slave, occupied an orphan identity, having been separated forcibly from both mother and father. Here Pip is “carried down alive to wondrous depths” in the mother-belly of the sea, “where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes … among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities” (414). Partaking of the infinite, mysterious creative powers of the Cosmos, Pip “saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom” (414); but now, having attained what for mortal man is impossible, Pip has forever lost his “mortal reason” (414). Having been all but destroyed by maternal abandonment, Pip now shares the same trauma that Ahab and Ishmael once suffered. “There is that in thee, poor lad,” Ahab says to the distracted boy, “which I feel too curing to my malady” (534). When Pip vows that he will “never desert” his master, Ahab comes too close to the emotional “cure” of worked-through mourning and forgiveness that he fears will sever him from his immortal anger and woe, and replies sharply to Pip: “Weep so, and I will murder thee!” (534). But before Ahab utters this murderous refusal, Pip speaks more profoundly and directly than anywhere else in Melville's novel of the original trauma of emotional deprivation, and the only true cure, of Ahab's divided heart and rage-filled monomania. Taking the comforting and protective hand of Ahab, the boy exclaims to his captain: “Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne'er been lost!” (522).
In these temptation episodes, Melville permits Ahab to perceive lucidly that salvation, or the resolution of his internal conflicts, might well be achieved were he to acknowledge the grief and sorrow beneath his persecuting and persecutory rage and aggression. Without these moments of consciousness, however, Ahab could not attain the Aristotelian status of a true tragic hero. Otherwise, he would be merely the figure of a possessed madman. And so, with a clear understanding of his fate, Ahab will confront—“Forehead to forehead”—the evil, leviathan white-whale breast at last; the fate of the Pequod is “immutably decreed” (565, 561).
There is something truly uncanny and disturbing about Ahab's tragic end, however, in which he is tightly strapped forever to the outside of the terrible white whale that he has spent the better part of his life attempting to hunt down. Had Ahab been devoured by the whale and, like Jonah, been allowed to experience the blissful satisfaction of returning symbolically to the comforting mother's womb, his end would represent the fulfillment of a universal archaic myth. Instead, he dies a “lonely death” disconnected from his ship and crew, and, like his “lonely life,” he must spend eternity “still chasing,” searching, and grieving for the lost object of desire, never attaining the consolation of the comforting notion of loss (571).
As for Ishmael, he, along with the Pequod and its remaining crew, is sucked down toward the “closing vortex” of the devouring mother-sea. In his description of the disaster, Melville evokes the images of Ishmael's Jonah-like passage into the longed-for belly of the mother and then out again:
When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side.
(573)
Ishmael becomes the sole survivor of Ahab's, and the Pequod's, “death-longing” voyage. Embraced at last by the comforting and annihilating maternal sea, the Pequod and crew are digested into a chaotic, undifferentiated mass in the belly of Mother Nature. Ishmael's survival, by means of Queequeg's floating coffin, is psychoanalytically appropriate to Melville's novel as a whole, in which both mother and father have been seen to play a critical role. The image of paternal, symbolic language—Queequeg's coffin and Ishmael's, and Melville's, “immortality preserver”—rises from beneath the dark, impenetrable core of the engulfing maternal sea to save the narrator—the teller of the tale—from annihilation. Symbolic and metaphorical language, which belong to the paternal domain, combine with the mysterious, chaotic depths of the maternal unconscious, to create a balanced equation, or primal scene, in which both parents participate in the creation, or in Ishmael's experience, the preservation, of life.
In the novel's final scene Melville thus encapsulates the dynamic life-giving primal scene—the balanced interplay between the maternal and paternal elements in nature—that he had repeatedly acted out in Moby-Dick, but which he could not seem to get beyond. The reader, having struggled along with Melville through his multifarious variations of the primal scene, participates with Ishmael as well in this final act, which is, after all, merely the prologue of Ishmael's narrative that, with the circling of the eternal return of repressed grief, brings us back to the novel's first chapter. Similarly, Ahab's outwardly projected conflict with the good/bad mother, like Ishmael's inwardly projected (toward suicidal fantasies) conflict with her, merge and separate throughout the novel to form a pulsating rhythm of perpetual mourning for an ungrieved-for experience of early deprivation and loss.
Since it has been my intention, in this chapter, to introduce the theme of tabooed grief as it appears within the text of a key work of American literature, I have proceeded with my investigation, for the most part, without engaging in the kind of weaving of fiction and biography that I shall rely upon more heavily in the extended subsequent discussions of Twain and Hemingway. For the sake of completing and enriching my exploration of Moby-Dick in this chapter, however, it is nevertheless appropriate to conclude by providing a few biographical details about Melville that can serve as a basic foundation for my critical analysis. The numerous, and in many cases, excellent biographical and psychoanalytic studies of Herman Melville suggest that he, like Twain and Hemingway, experienced a problematic childhood relationship with both his mother and father, which related specifically to an early object-relations trauma of combined maternal abandonment and disappointment in the father.
As a youth, Melville apparently suffered a double loss in relation to his father, Allen Melville: first, through his father's death from pneumonia when Herman was twelve years old; and second, through the disappointment that Melville's biographers believe he felt as a boy upon discovering that his father died a bankrupt—a disillusionment in the paternal ideal that was replayed in Melville's life through the death and bankruptcy several years later of his older brother Gansevoort.40 The anger, disappointment, and general ambivalence that the twelve-year-old Melville must have felt toward his father, and the guilt from his aggressive thoughts, would likely have been repressed when Allen Melville died, a repression which would have made a direct emotional response to his father's death exceptionally difficult.41 Like both Ishmael and the blacksmith, Perth, in Moby-Dick, Melville's grief over his father's and brother's death may have been obstructed by the guilt that he felt at having survived, or been “left … standing,” while his “virtuous elder brother” and father were “plucked down” by death (485). Also, like both Ishmael and the blacksmith, Melville may then have viewed whaling as a suicide mission, taking to sea with “death-longing eyes” (486).
While Neal Tolchin, in Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville, may have been somewhat too narrow in attributing Melville's incapacity to grieve to a Victorian propriety against the overt expression of grief, Tolchin was right, I believe, in his unwavering conviction that one of the motives in Melville's composition of Moby-Dick was to act out an unresolved, and therefore chronic, mourning response for a lost parent. The grief from father-hunger and the son's devastating disillusionment in the heroic paternal ideal that become openly dramatized in Pierre are, for the most part, eclipsed in Moby-Dick by the more originary unresolved conflict with the rejecting and rejected mother. Perhaps it is this unworked-through father-son conflict that led Henry Murray to conclude that while “Ishmael survived the wreck” of despair and loss in Moby-Dick, “there was still,” in Melville, “some energy, some grief, some hate—‘deep volcanoes long burn ere they burn out.’ Pierre is the burning out of Melville's volcano” (“Introduction,” xiv). Melville's later novel is, indeed, the psychological sequel to Moby-Dick, in that it draws into the rapprochement equation the son's unresolved relationship with the ambivalently loved, real and ideal—disappointing and heroic—father.
That Herman Melville also suffered from “separation anxiety,” or what John Bowlby calls an “insecure attachment,” in relation to his mother,42 Maria Gansevoort Melville, is an established notion, primarily owing to the biographical studies executed by some of Melville's most competent psychoanalytic and literary critics. However, while some critics, such as Newton Arvin, Lewis Mumford, Ludwig Lewishon, and Leonard Pops, contend that Herman's unsatisfied desire for unconditional love from his mother took the form of oedipal rivalry with the favorite son Gansevoort, others, most notably Edmund Bergler, Henry A. Murray, and Frederick Rosenheim, believe that Melville's separation anxiety in relation to the maternal figure originated in infancy from a traumatic and premature weaning experience.43 Before the age of one, Herman and his two older siblings were afflicted by a severe case of whooping cough, and it was this, Rosenheim suggests, that perhaps was responsible for Maria's early weaning of the infant Herman from the breast.44 In his later life, Melville persisted in experiencing himself as “an outcast, an Ishmael.” According to Rosenheim, “Melville never forgave his mother for ending his blessed babyhood” (12). The lonely-wanderer protagonists of all of Melville's major novels, Rosenheim affirms, were images of Melville himself, who “felt lost, deserted, thrust away from his mother's breast.” “It is the memory of this loss,” Rosenheim concludes, that “keeps [Melville] bitter” (22). Melville's admission to his niece later in life that his mother “hated him” has suggested to several biographers not only his mother's feelings toward him but his own repressed aggression toward her.45
My elucidation of the rapprochement-phase crisis, acted out on many textual and contextual levels in Moby-Dick, both takes as its premise, and further supports, the convincing argument set forth by Bergler, Murray, and Rosenheim, that the psychological conflicts that infused and inspired Melville's fiction were rooted in his unresolved trauma of abandonment in relation to the pregenital mother. Melville's anger toward his mother and his lingering feelings of abandonment and grief, combined with his longing to recapture his too-suddenly lost exclusive infantile relationship with her, may well, therefore (as in the case of Ishmael and Ahab), have led him to internalize the aggressive or persecuting image of the “bad mother” as the only way to preserve his intrapsychic image of the loving “good mother.” In this way, Melville might readily have inhabited in fantasy the masochistic and sadistic personality structures of both Ishmael and Ahab.
Certainly, embarking on a whaling journey was for Melville (and as he reveals in Moby-Dick, it was also, for Ishmael), a kind of suicidal act that was motivated not merely by aggression and masochism alone, but by a deep underlying striving to mourn for his own imagined orphaned, abandoned, and isolated self. Moby-Dick as a whole represents the orphan-Melville's cathartic pre-oedipal struggle. It is perhaps for this reason that, after writing the novel, Melville felt “spotless as the lamb,” while at the same time the demonstrative and violent primitive aggression released through the uncensored rage of Ahab led Melville to feel that he had also “written a wicked book.”46
Melville's general philosophical views about life, which can be seen not only in Moby-Dick but in Pierre, The Confidence Man, and in most of his short fiction, are that wisdom is woe, that the world is divided into the irreconcilable ambiguity of good and evil, and that the loss of Paradise results in the predominance of evil in the world. These beliefs conform to the thinking of a child, who sees reality as a consequence of tragic loss, and whose psychic development is caught up in a recurring and unresolved rapprochement crisis of hopeless indefiniteness and ambiguity, where one is compelled to choose between clinging and distancing—between the “open independence” of the sea or the “treacherous, slavish shore” (Moby-Dick, 107). The loss and deprivation that Melville experienced as a child in relation to both his father and his mother thrust him into a state of ambivalence and abandonment depression that remained with him for the rest of his life. These early conflicts, as dramatized in Melville's fiction, are, metaphorically, the “long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam” (388). The depressive protest, “I prefer not to,” of Melville's Bartleby is perhaps the final submissive, “human sort of wail” of a young cub that has forever lost its dam (524).
Of all of Melville's superb and uncanny insights into the hidden nature of mankind and the world, one of his most significant realizations is his assumption that if greatness is to be had (meaning, of course, that if greatness is to be had by him), it would depend not on the cathartic indulgence of grief through mourning and tears, but on the strict enforcement of the taboo, or repression, of grief. According to Edwin S. Shneidman, Melville “had an enormous appetite for recognition and fame.”47 A person's accomplishments, Melville wrote, in Redburn, “are but tombstones that commemorate his death, but celebrate not his life.” Melville “was partially dead during much of his own life,” Shneidman concludes, because he cared more about his “post-self”—his reputation as a great writer—than about his living self.48 Whatever the exact causes of Melville's overriding conviction that life is loss, and living is grieving, his life itself was a striving for the realization to mourn, and all his fictions were epitaphs.
When viewed through the dual lens of object relations and feminist psychoanalysis, and scrutinized according to current theories of attachment, separation, and pathological mourning, the fictions of Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway also begin to take shape as elegiac narratives that act out the author's repressed and displaced mourning. Twain, through his humorous fiction, and Hemingway, through his narrative of omission, succeeded, as Melville also did, in making a virtue of loss and grief by sublimating these painful emotions into their art, eventually coming to flourish and prosper both personally and artistically on the creative displacement, or indirect expression, of their grief. Because of the prolonged absence of conscious grieving, they, like Melville, remained fixated in a position of adolescent ambivalence in relation to their disappointing, and therefore emotionally lost, parent figures, wavering one moment to the next from regression to childhood and feminine identification, to the assertion of autonomy and masculine identity. Finally, because the repression, disavowal, and displacement of grief had become an integral part of their artistic processes and personal identities, they began, ultimately, to hoard their grief, transforming the one thing they wished to rid themselves of into the very thing upon which their creative unconscious, and their psychic equilibrium, thrived.
Notes
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Herman Melville, Pierre; or, the Ambiguities, vol. 7 of The Writings of Herman Melville, 33.
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For a summary discussion of the “rapprochement phase” of development see John B. McDevitt, “The Role of Internalization in the Development of Object Relations During the Separation-Individuation Phase”; and, M. S. Mahler, “Rapprochement Subphase of the Separation-Individuation Process,” 487-506. During the rapprochement phase, according to McDevitt, on the one hand, the child “wants to fully exercise his new-found autonomy and independence; on the other hand, he painfully feels the loss of his former sense of omnipotence and is distressed by his relative helplessness” (332).
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Daniel N. Stern, Diary of a Baby, 98.
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Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, vol. 6 of The Writings of Herman Melville, 414. All subsequent citations from Moby-Dick; or, The Whale will be to this edition and will be noted parenthetically.
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Speaking of the sperm whale, Ishmael concludes that: “The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him” (330). Later, Ishmael adds that although man, unlike the whale, “can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and completely, to examine any two things—however large or however small—at one and the same instant of time …” (330).
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Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” The Writings of Herman Melville: The Piazza Tales & Other Prose Pieces: 1839-1860, vol. 9, 239.
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In this same spirit in which Melville valorized perpetual change and growth, and condemned stagnation and the comfort of complacency, he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne on November 17, 1851: “Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing.… Lord, when shall we be done changing? Ah! it's a long stage, and no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold.” Letter reprinted in Moby-Dick (Norton Critical Edition), 567. In an earlier letter to Hawthorne, Melville wrote of his own personal past: “Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life.” Letter dated June 1(?), 1851. Reprinted in Moby-Dick (Norton Critical Edition), 559-60.
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In Melville's Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (New York: Signet, 1979), as in Moby-Dick, the pivotal moment of crisis in the hero's life occurs when he is coldly rejected by the once omnipotent and all-fulfilling mother—the “pure and unimpairable” (16) Mary Glendinning—which gives to Pierre, as it gives to Pip and Ishmael, a “feeling entirely lonesome, and orphan-like,” and he suddenly sees himself as “driven out an Ishmael into the desert, with no maternal Hagar to accompany and comfort him” (89). With Pierre's disillusionment in the abstract heroic father, its archaic prototype, the all-providing, utopian Paradise of the mother, symbolized not only by Mrs. Glendinning in the novel but by all of Saddle Meadows, is brought down as well, and Pierre experiences a long-postponed loss and grief in relation to them both. Yet, true to Melville's philosophy in Moby-Dick, the disappointments and grief that Pierre suffers are narcissistically embraced by him; he has “ringed himself in with the grief of Eternity” (304), and he comes to believe, as Ahab does, that his “topmost greatness lies” in his “topmost grief.” Given this new outlook on things, Pierre's only recourse, as he sees it, is to become a writer.
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Leo Bersani, “Incomparable America,” in Major Literary Characters: Ahab, 221.
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Through the “double-doom of his parents” (287), the “twice-disinherited” (199) Pierre also cuts himself off from all means of external parental support. He has become a “little toddler,” who is for the first time “learning to stand by itself!” (296). Like Ishmael, Pierre enters what Melville describes with remarkable accuracy as the child's rapprochement phase of development, with its devastating grief from separation, lack of connectedness, and terrifying isolation. At first, Melville explains, the child: “shrieks and implores, and will not try to stand at all, unless both father and mother uphold it; then a little more bold, it must, as least, feel one parental hand, else again the cry and the tremble; long time is it ere by degrees this child comes to stand without any support” (296). But like the child who cannot yet tolerate such independence, who—like both Ishmael and Ahab—was traumatically and too soon forced away from the mother and out into the world, Pierre still “clings” and “clamors for the support of its mother the world, and its father the Deity” (296). At the close of the novel, however, Pierre is unable to reconcile “all the ambiguities which hemmed him in”—Isabel and Lucy, grief and joy, isolation and dependency, the city and the country—and he, like Ishmael, is trapped in the intense anxiety of a seemingly unresolvable rapprochement crisis. Bemoaning his fate of ambivalence, Pierre laments: “Oh, seems to me, there should be two ceaseless steeds for a bold man to ride,—the Land and the Sea; and like circus-men we should never dismount, but only be steadied and rested by leaping from one to the other, while still, side by side, they both race round the sun” (348-49).
For Pierre it is “merely hell in both worlds” (360), but he rises to his fate, perceiving that true greatness lies in bearing the burden of his grief and ambivalence, and he resolves to “mold a trumpet of the flames, and, with my breath of flame, breathe back my defiance!” (360). Pierre is unable to receive catharsis through his grief and self-pity, however, because he has displaced his personal grief and gloom onto “all-stretchable philosophy” (339), and has narcissistically embraced that philosophy of nihilism in an attempt to achieve greatness as a martyr who, in the lonely isolation of an indefinite universe, grapples with the fire-spewing dragon of darkness and evil.
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See John Bowlby's Attachment, and Separation, vols. 1 and 2 of his series Attachment and Loss; and D. W. Winnicott's discussion of “good enough” mothering in Playing and Reality. The “good-enough” mother, Winnicott explains, “is one who makes active adaptation to the infant's needs, an active adaptation that gradually lessens, according to the infant's growing ability to account for failure of adaptation and to tolerate the results of frustration” (10). According to Bowlby, mourning is essentially an act of self-preservation through which the individual hopes to come to terms with a disappointing reality and the injury that life has inflicted upon him or her through the loss of a loved one. This process demands a withdrawal of psychic attention away from reality onto the self. Such emotional withdrawal in a mother would have an adverse effect on her ability to empathize with her child to the degree that is necessary to function as what Winnicott describes as a “good-enough” mother. The effects of the mother's failure to respond and adapt adequately to the infant's needs might predictably result in “anxious and insecure attachment” behavior “or else a vehement assertion of self-sufficiency” in which the child grows up “to be tough and hard.” In either case, a “prolonged absence of conscious grieving” is the likely consequence of such maternal deprivation (214-30).
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Edmund Bergler identifies Melville's white whale as the “white-breast” of the dangerous, devouring “bad” pregenital mother against whom Ahab launches his enraged attacks. Bergler also points out that Melville's “white whale is reminiscent of the white skin of the mother,” and hypothesizes: “Moby Dick equals monster or pre-oedipal mother.” See “A Note on Herman Melville,” 385-97. Melville's imaginative movement from adulthood back toward comforting pre-oedipal experience is described by Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel, as the removal of his subject “from the landbound world of history back toward the oceanic, which is to say, an archaic, or ‘antemosaic’ world of portents and monsters, unchanged since the days of creation” (382). Henry A. Murray contends “that the imago of the mother as well as the imago of the father is contained in the Whale” (414). See Murray, “In Nomine Diaboli,” in Critical Essays on Herman Melville's “Moby-Dick”, 408-20.
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In the novel Pierre; or, the Ambiguities, that Melville began writing within a few weeks of completing Moby-Dick, one does not need the assistance of psychoanalysis to identify the central role played by the ambivalently loved mother, whom the son both desires to cling to and to identify with, and at the same time wishes to distance himself from, in an effort to establish his autonomy and separateness of self. Henry A. Murray, in his introduction to Pierre, maintains that the “entire novel, indeed, could be apperceived on one level as a young man's desperate attempt to break away from his matriarchal house of bondage.” See Henry A. Murray's “Introduction,” to Pierre, or the Ambiguities (Hendricks House), lv.
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See McDevitt's “The Role of Internalization in the Development of Object Relations,” in which he calls this a “negative outcome of the rapprochement-crisis”; and, he explains, if this “crisis leads to intense ambivalence and splitting of the object world into ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ the maternal representation may be internalized as an unassimilated, dissociated foreign body, as a hostile, ‘bad’ introject. The relationship with the actual mother is preserved, that is, protected from the child's hostility, by introjection of the representation of the ‘bad’ mother” (334).
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That Moby Dick's aggression is a projection of Ahab's own hatred and anger toward the whale is a long-held notion in Melville criticism, just as the reciprocal quality of persecutory aggression is a standard tenet in psychoanalysis and object-relations theory, originating perhaps in Freud's discussion of aggression, guilt, and sadomasochism in New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933[1932]), 22: 3-158.
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The oedipal and pre-oedipal views are not contradictory here in that both primary (pre-oedipal) and secondary (oedipal) castration symbolize a gesture of the loss of, or forced separation from, the mother. Perhaps this explains why Melville's critics fall on both sides of this issue, often embracing a theoretical explanation that describes Moby Dick as both a maternal and a paternal agent. Robert K. Martin views Ahab as an aggressive, phallic, and logocentric symbolic construct in Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville. David Leverenz sees the novel as a whole as a “projection of male penis envy,” but also maintains that “Ahab rages to be beaten by an enormous symbol of both the father's and the mother's power, a sperm whale and milk-white breast, at once mutilating and abandoning.” Manhood and the American Renaissance, 290-94. Similarly, Newton Arvin claims that Moby Dick “embodies neither the father merely nor the mother but, by a process of condensation, the parental principle inclusively.” “The Whale,” in Herman Melville, 151-93; rpt. in Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford, eds., “Moby-Dick” as Doubloon: Essays and Extracts (1851-1970), 211. However, since Ahab's traumatic experience of maternal deprivation is clearly stated by Melville, and since the absence of a real father figure in Ahab's young life suggests that oedipal competition with the father was not a substantial threat to his psycho-sexual development, it seems more likely that the agent of the symbolic castration Ahab suffers is not the father but the mother.
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This phrase was coined by Helene Deutsch in her essay “Absence of Grief,” 12-22. Deutsch concludes her study with the statement: “I suspect that many life stories which seem to be due to a masochistic attitude are simply the result of such strivings for the realization of unresolved affects” (21).
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Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Sexuality and Mind: The Role of the Father and the Mother in the Psyche, 127.
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Edward Stone, for example, in A Certain Morbidness, argues that “Ahab is not merely a creation apart from Ishmael but an extension of him” (32).
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See Viggo W. Jensen and Thomas A. Petty, “The Fantasy of Being Rescued in Suicide.” Jensen and Petty describe the “prototype for the relationship the suicidal person seeks with the rescuer” as a state that “probably existed originally between the infant and mother at a time when they shared a common ego, chiefly the mother's, and each responded directly to the unconscious of the other as though it were his own; this state is temporarily reinstated by regression in the patient contemplating suicide” (334). Whether or not this state ever actually existed in the life of the infant, even during its life in the womb, is questionable, as is the real existence of an “omnipotent” mother. I tend to concur with Daniel Stern, in The Interpersonal World of the Infant, who states that the omnipotent mother—either benevolent or hostile—is an imaginary figure belonging to a regressive fantasy. The dangers of viewing the mother as an omnipotent figure, and the state of infancy as an experience of mother-child symbiosis devoid of agency on the part of the infant, is discussed by Nancy Chodorow in Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. Sydney Smith, in “The Golden Fantasy: A Regressive Reaction to Separation Anxiety,” describes the regressive fantasy of omnipotence, and the fantasy omnipotent mother herself, as embodying the wish “to have all of one's needs met in a relationship hallowed by perfection … to be cared for so completely that no demand will be made on the patient except his capacity for passively taking in.” Smith adds: “Implicit in the fantasy is the notion [my italics] that such a blissful state was at one time actual but now has been lost” (311). Specifically with regard to the rescue fantasy in suicide, Jensen and Petty maintain that the imagined omnipotent mother's “[f]ailure to come to his rescue probably would have been understood … as proof of [the mother's] abandonment” (331).
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See James Masterson, The Search for the Real Self.
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C. Murray Parkes, “‘Seeking’ and ‘Finding’ a Lost Object: Evidence from Recent Studies of the Reaction to Bereavement,” 188.
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Erwin Stengel, “Studies on the Psychopathology of Compulsive Wandering,” 254.
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See McDevitt's “The Role of Internalization in the Development of Object Relations.”
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The womb imagery in Melville's early novels has been recognized by many of his critics. Charles J. Haberstroh, for example, points out how Tommo, in Typee, “can comfortably convert tomb to womb, and prison to ‘Happy Valley’ of tranquil security.” Melville and Male Identity, 34. In Mardi, Omoo, and Redburn as well, Haberstroh writes, Melville succumbs to “the temptation to allow his narrator to fall into the role of dependent child in hopes of gaining support for him from individuals who would serve Melville's need to fictionally restore some of the security of his own childhood” (33). Helen Petrullo sees Tommo's entrance by sea into Nakuheva bay in Typee as a voyage into the amniotic universe of the mother's womb. See Petrullo's “The Neurotic Hero of Typee.” Neal Tolchin, in Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville, builds on Petrullo's interpretation by viewing the entire island landscape as a “womb-like scene of a ‘narrow valley, with its steep and close adjoining sides’” (57). In his essay, “Moby-Dick: The American National Epic,” Richard Slotkin discusses Melville's “island” fantasies, which evoke “the dream-remembered, womblike haven of an innocent childhood, ruled and ordered by a maternal figure.” In Twentieth-Century Interpretations of “Moby-Dick”, 15. Melville's “flight from home” in his novels, Frederick Rosenheim affirms, represents his birth fantasies and suggests his desire to go “back to mother, to the first voyage from her womb to her arms and breasts.” See Rosenheim's “Flight from Home: Some Episodes in the Life of Herman Melville, 10.
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Like “the universal cannibalism of the sea” (274) in Moby-Dick, the cannibalism of the natives in Melville's Typee and Mardi is explained by Rosenheim and Murray as Melville's image of the devouring oral-aggressive mother.
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Henry A. Murray, “Introduction” to Melville's Pierre; or, the Ambiguities, xxvi.
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Madelon Sprengnether recognizes in Freud's and Jung's conception of the mother imago “the simultaneously terrifying and renewing powers of the unconscious.” The Spectral Mother, 98.
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For one of the more comprehensive discussions of Melville's sources for Moby-Dick, see Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (Northwestern University Press/Newberry Edition).
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As D. H. Lawrence remarked in Studies in Classic American Literature, Ahab's obsession is “the Gethsemane of the human soul seeking the last self-conquest, the last attainment of extended consciousness—infinite consciousness” (167).
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Because of Melville's use of archaic pronouns in this paragraph, and his reference to Ahab's reveries in the preceding paragraph, there is some confusion as to whether these are Ahab's or Ishmael's thoughts. Whether consciously or not, Melville seems to imply that Ahab and Ishmael share this utopian immortality fantasy.
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The father, Chasseguet-Smirgel explains, “is absent from utopias, and the holding of children in common and the absence of inheritance which is also often mentioned lead to an effacing of the paternal image” (96).
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Haberstroh, Melville and Male Identity, 17; Leon Howard, Herman Melville: A Biography, 16-17.
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Frederick Rosenheim, in “Flight from Home,” speaks of the “host of father figures” Melville “conjures up” in his fiction, all of whom “are idealized, powerful and protecting,” as if to say that “father is not the weak, ineffectual bankrupt, incapable of protecting anybody, but is strong and powerful. He is also not the father who was unexcited about Herman's birth and thought him backward and slow but one who worships Herman and is ready to devote himself to Herman” (6-7).
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If, in his novel, Pierre, as Henry Murray believes, “many years before Freud, Melville … discovered the Oedipus Complex” (“Introduction” to Pierre, xxxvii), Melville also demonstrated, through Pierre's tribulations, that an adolescent boy's ego-ideal identification with an abstract, heroic father image represents a continuation of his primitive infantile omnipotence and narcissism in relation to the archaic mother, and that when the moment of disillusionment with the heroic father arrives, it brings with it the grief of mother-loss in addition to the grief of father-hunger. Together these losses amount to a devastating narcissistic injury for Pierre, and awaken him not only to the threat of oedipal castration and the incest taboo, but also to his regressive desire to reunite with the mother.
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Sigmund Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” in Standard Edition 22: 239-48. For Freud, to see the Parthenon temple was to feel the “guilt” or “filial piety” of the oedipal son's feeling toward the father of “undervaluation which took the place of the overvaluation of earlier childhood” (247-48).
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Irving B. Harrison, “On the Maternal Origins of Awe.” Also see Harrison's “On Freud's View of the Infant-Mother Relationship and of the Oceanic Feeling—Some Subjective Influences.”
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To the newborn infant, death, suffocation, and drowning are believed to be linked fears originating from the birth experience, which resurface again during weaning or removal from the breast. See Frank S. Caprio, “A Study of Some Psychological Reactions During Pre-Pubescence to the Idea of Death.”
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John Bowlby, in “Pathological Mourning and Childhood Mourning,” speaks of protest as a distorted variation of expressed mourning. Searching and angry protesting directed at the lost object are, according to C. Murray Parkes, two common displaced grief responses. “‘Seeking’ and ‘Finding’ a Lost Object: Evidence from Recent Studies of the Reaction to Bereavement,” 187-201.
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Haberstroh discusses Herman's losses in relation to his idealized father and older brother in Melville and Male Identity. Philip Young writes that Melville “had as a boy idolized his pious father,” and analyzes Melville's “destruction of belief” in both his father and God. The Private Melville, 4. Leon Howard writes of Melville's ultimate disappointment with “a brilliant older brother and an idealized father” (Herman Melville: A Biography, 22). Newton Arvin attributes Melville's “emotional crisis” as a boy, characterized by “abandonment” and “desertion,” to the fact that he was “[d]eprived of an idolized father on the very verge of adolescence” (Herman Melville, 23). The underlying premise of Neal Tolchin's analysis of grief in Melville's works is that Herman's ambivalence toward his father before he died resulted in a “lifelong inability to finish mourning for his father” and a “deep need to work through conflicted grief” (Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville, xii, xvi). To attribute Melville's repression of grief to his identification with the repressed Victorian social codes of behavior endorsed by Melville's mother is, however, a reduction of a more profound psychological trauma to what more realistically may be identified as a supporting, yet less psychologically important, explanation for Melville's repressed grief. Henry A. Murray and Philip Young endorse the hypothesis that Herman's disillusionment in his idealized father was exacerbated when he discovered, in his late teens, that Allen Melville, like Pierre's father in Melville's Pierre, fathered an illegitimate daughter. See Young's discussion of this controversy in The Private Melville.
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As John Bowlby writes: “Evidence at present available strongly suggests that adults whose mourning takes a pathological course are likely before their bereavement to have been prone to make affectional relationships … marked by a high degree of anxious attachment, suffused with overt or covert ambivalence.” Loss: Sadness and Depression, vol. 3 of Attachment and Loss, 202. According to Helene Deutsch: “Psychoanalytic findings indicate that guilt feelings toward the lost object, as well as ambivalence, may disturb the normal course of mourning.” (“Absence of Grief,” 12-13).
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John Bowlby, Separation: Anxiety and Anger, vol. 2 of Attachment and Loss, 213.
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See Arvin's Herman Melville; Lewis Mumford's Herman Melville; Ludwig Lewishon's The Story of American Literature; Martin Leonard Pops's “In the Splendid Labyrinth: Moby-Dick,” in The Melville Archetype; Edmund Bergler's essay, “A Note on Herman Melville,” 385-97; Henry A. Murray's “Dead to the World: The Passions of Herman Melville,” in Essays in Self-Destruction, 7-29; and, Frederick Rosenheim's “Flight from Home: Some Episodes in the Life of Herman Melville, 1-30.
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One might add in support of this theory Henry A. Murray's observation that Herman's unusually early appearance of teeth at the age of three months infused his satisfying breast-feeding experience with an element of oral-aggressive trauma, and intensified Maria's desire to wean her infant early. Murray describes this event as Herman's “virtual expulsion from the paradise of his mother's embracing arms,” and believes it accounts for his lifelong association of “deprivation and grief” with outward aggression toward the world and an inner aggression in the form of depression, guilt, a need for punishment, suicide, and emotional numbness (“Dead to the World,” 17). In his short essay, “A Note on Herman Melville,” Edmund Bergler perceives at the heart of Moby-Dick a drama characteristic of a child's masochistic attachment to the pre-oedipal mother, in which one can observe the “infant's fantasy of cruel, pre-Oedipal mother of earliest infancy” (387).
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See Arvin's Herman Melville, 30.
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Letter from Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nov. 17, 1851. Reprinted in Moby-Dick (Norton Critical Edition), 566.
Edmund Bergler believes that, in Moby-Dick, “Melville rescued himself from masochistic submission [to the devouring ‘pre-Oedipal mother’] by denying it via identification with the fanatic and openly aggressive captain.”
The oedipal theme of maternal incest in Pierre, Bergler maintains, is used merely as a defensive “countermeasure instituted” to protect Melville from “more deeply repressed oral-masochistic dangers” in relation to the persecuting “bad” mother (“A Note on Herman Melville,” 388-91).
According to James F. Masterson, in The Search for the Real Self, Thomas Wolfe, in order to “deal with his feelings of disillusionment, betrayal, and loss,” originating in a disturbed mother-infant relationship, “submerged himself in self-dramatization, fantasy, and a lifelong search for an omnipotent mother figure who would acknowledge his emerging self” (218). Wolfe, as I suggest about Melville, never matured emotionally past the stage of adolescence, and like Melville, Wolfe's infantile desire and aggression toward the disappointing and longed-for mother emerges in his creative writing process. Remarkably suggestive of Melville's feelings upon completing Moby-Dick, Wolfe once wrote after he had finished one of his own novels: “I have written it almost with a child's heart, it has come from me with a child's wonder and my pages are engraved not only with what is simple and plain but with monstrous evil as if the Devil were speaking with a child's tongue.” Elizabeth Nowell, Thomas Wolfe, A Biography, 105-6.
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Edwin S. Shneidman, “The Deaths of Herman Melville,” in Melville and Hawthorne in the Berkshires, 118-43.
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In a letter to Hawthorne, dated June 1?, 1851, Melville wrote that the literary reputation of his friend “is in the ascendant. My dear Sir, they begin to patronize. All Fame is patronage.” As for himself, he proclaims, “Let me be infamous: there is no patronage in that. What ‘reputation’ H. M. has is horrible. Think of it! To go down to posterity is bad enough, any way; but to go down as a ‘man who lived among the cannibals’!” Letter reprinted in Moby-Dick (Norton Critical Edition), 559. If, for Melville, greatness is directly a consequence of grief, then “Fame” can only be won by repudiating goodness and embracing evil. Perhaps, then, Melville counted upon the fact that he had written a “wicked book” as an assurance that he would earn for himself a place in posterity, even if the prize that was coming to him was not fame, but infamy; and it was this assurance that allowed him to feel, upon completing Moby-Dick, that he was “spotless as the lamb.” Letter to Hawthorne, dated November 17, 1851. Reprinted in Moby-Dick (Norton Critical Edition), 566.
As Shneidman concludes his thoughts on Melville's relationship to death and fame:
Out of Melville's combination of his great sense of inner pride, his bravura inner life style, his imperious reaction to hostility and to criticism, his conscious and unconscious attrition of the social side of his literary life—out of all of these diverse elements grew his concern with death and annihilation and his enormous investment in his postself. In this sense, Melville wrote not so much for his own time as he did for any appropriate (that is, any appreciating) time to follow—for what Leyda has called a “posthumous celestial glory.” Melville was partially dead during much of his own life, but he more than compensated for that lugubrious limitation by writing in such a way that he could realistically plan to live mostly after he had died. ‘On life and death this old man walked.’” (“The Deaths of Herman Melville,” 143)
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