"What Is Called Savagery": Race, Visual Perception, and Bodily Contact in Moby-Dick

“What Is Called Savagery”: Race, Visual Perception, and Bodily Contact in Moby-Dick JOSEPH FRUSCIONE Georgetown University When we affect to contemn savages, we should remember that by so doing we asperse our own progenitors; for they were savages also. Who can swear that among the naked British barbarians sent to Rome to be stared at more than 1500 years ago, the ancestor of Bacon might not have been found?—Why, among the very Thugs of India, or the bloody Dyaks of Borneo, exists the germ of all that is intellectually elevated and grand. “Mr Parkman’s Tour”1 W riting two years before Moby-Dick’s publication, Melville interweaves in his review of “Mr Parkman’s Tour” several discourses underpinning race and colonialism. One see this in certain images and processes: the savage body (“naked British barbarians”); presumably uncivilized lands (“India” and “Borneo”); the savage mind (“intellectually elevated and grand”); and spectacle (“stared at”). As Josiah Nott, Samuel George Morton, and other nineteenth-century ethnologists proffered, analyzing the body of the “other” marked differences in character and intelligence in favor of whites and, in turn, buttressed racial hierarchies and colonialism. Melville’s fiction often examines—even questions—such systems of power, particularly their ways of focusing colonial and racial oppression on the bodies of nonwhites . “The savage is born a savage; and the civilized being but inherits his civilization , nothing more”—this language from the Parkman review anticipated Melville’s concerns in Moby-Dick and, to his mind, pointed toward the shortsightedness of seeing the “other” as little more than a physical spectacle (NN PT 232). Ever attuned to interracial and cultural dynamics, Melville was somewhat skeptical of “other”-ing those whom he called “our own progenitors.” C
2008 The Authors Journal compilation C
2008 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc 1 Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987), 231; hereafter cited as NN PT. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 3 J O S E P H F R U S C I O N E Instead, he attempted throughout his œuvre to make civilized and “savage” intersect—either cross-culturally or physically—with one another. Melville explored such cultural interaction most fully in Moby-Dick, which crisscrosses its principal characters’ racially diverse bodies and minds. As Carolyn Karcher and Samuel Otter show,2 cultural constructions of different bodies undergirded race in nineteenth-century America and in Moby-Dick. Whether Ishmael describes the harpooneers or Moby Dick himself, the novel teems with contradistinguishing descriptions of bodies and their color—consider, for example, how different “short, stout, ruddy” Flask is from “gigantic, coal-black” Daggoo.3 By and large, the novel illustrates how tightly racial bodies were woven into power networks: the narrative depicts different types of interracial bodily contact and, relatedly, abounds in color symbolism. Ishmael and Queequeg sharing a bed in “The Spouter-Inn,” Queequeg “birthing” Tashtego in “Cistern and Buckets,” and Fedallah’s mutilated body tied to Moby Dick in “The Chase, Third Day”— these are but a few examples of interracial physical contact, which sometimes entail democratic harmony, at other times violence and power. The novel’s bodily contacts—when “civilized” and “savage” are joined— complement “Mr Parkman’s Tour” while depicting numerous interracial encounters in which different-colored bodies are hybridized. Much postcolonial theory examines the hierarchical dynamic between white and “other”—among them Geoffrey Sanborn, Edward Said, and C. L. R. James. Similarly, Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture provides an especially effective approach to framing Moby-Dick’s cultural interactions. For Bhabha, bodies articulate cultural differences when joined, or at least when brought into proximity.4 Although such cross-cultural intersection is often power-centered, it is not ostensibly so. It can create “in-between” spaces [that] provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of...