Cannibalism, Slavery, and Self-Consumption in Moby-Dick

HOMER B. PETTEY Cannibalism, Slavery, and Self-Consumption in Moby-Dick They were "slaves without masters," the little fish who were food for all the larger. George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or, Shves Without Masters In this vein, Maori cannibalism—well-documented from contemporary nineteenth-century accounts—was set in a context of ritual warfare; the consumption of human flesh paralleled that of birds and fish in hunting rituals. Men consumed at cannibalistic feasts were referred to as "fishes," and "first fish" being eaten by a chief who thus acquired control over the land of the vanquished. I. M. Lewis, Religion in Context: Cuits and Charisma "Kill-e," cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly expression of disdain, "ah! him bery small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!" Melville, "The Wheelbarrow," Moby-Dick That melville chose an unrepentant South Sea cannibal, Queequeg, to be his narrator's spiritual guide and savior in MobyDick ( 185 1 ) certainly must have disturbed his nineteenth-century readers . Equally disconcerting, the novel's narrator assumes the allegorical guise of Ishmael, slave son ofAbraham: symbol of alienated, social outcasts from the bosom of Abraham; progenitor of enemies to Israel, whose tribe conspires with the nations of Edom, Moab, Ammon, and Assyria for Israel's destruction (Ps. 83); and in literature, wild man father (Gen. 16:12) of the enemies of Christianity, the "Africk" in Spenser's Faerie Queene, as well as father ofNative Americans in Longfellow 's Evangeíine (1847).1 By pairing Queequeg with Ishmael in Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 1, Spring 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1 610 32Homer B . Pettey Moby-Dick, Melville unites barbarous cannibal with outcast slave. Barbarity and slavery would also be recognizable in the ship's name, Pequod : these Amerindians, viewed by Puritan sages as "Bloody Salvages" (Mather, Magnolia 166), were nearly decimated in a genocidal military campaign by New England settlers in 1637.2 Pequot survivors were forced into the peculiar institution of Puritan slavery, sold to plantations in the Caribbean, given a status comparable to African slaves, and inhumanely branded for running away.' Historically, Pequots were faced with vicious New England slavers to the north and east and had nowhere to go westward, because beyond the Connecticut Valley lived hostile Mohawks, whose name also meant cannibals.4 Puritans collected war trophies—severed heads and hands—of the Pequots as evidence to Bay Colony officials that their capital had been well invested in military protection; Thomas Hooker adopted a cannibalistic metaphor when preaching on these body parts, stating that "the Indians would be 'bread for us,'" a recognition of, if not praise for, New England's Christian brand of bloodthirsty aggression (Shuffelton 237-38). In the nineteenth centuty, numerous examples ofChristians resorting to cannibalism at sea pre-dated Mob^-Dick, among them, the Medusa in 181 6, subject of Géticault's Raft of the Medusa (1819), and the Essex in 1820, subject of Chase's Narrative cited in his "Extracts."5 Melville distrusted hypocritical condemnations of savages or cannibals by Christian culture , whose pieties he viewed as more gruesome than the rituals of socalled primitives. In Moby-Dick, Melville uses cannibalism in order to attack the cruel institutions of slavery and capitalism which were eating away at American culture. Aware of the political rhetoric of slavery, particularly the denigration of African-Americans as savages by pro-slavery Southerners , Melville recognized the equally savage conditions imposed by Northern industrialism and American expansionism, not just upon indigenous and slave populations, but also upon Northern workers.6 Cannibalism , then, served Melville as a socio-political metaphor by which he could attack America's hypocritical system of values. It also afforded Melville an allegorical and symbolic mode for representing acts of appropriation , subjugation, and consumption. Fot Melville, the whaling industry itself was a perfect symbol of American capitalism and expansion of his day; the enterprise of whaling also shared similarities with cannibalism—hunting, killing, possessing, dismembering, and consum- Cannibalism, Shvery, and Self-Consumption33 ing. Fish, sharks, and whales often function as metaphorical substitutes for mankind in Moby-Dick; as most readers recognize, the...