Specious Bedfellows: Ethnicity, Animality, and the Intimacy of Slaughter in Moby-Dick

Specious Bedfellows: Ethnicity, Animality, and the Intimacy of Slaughter in Moby-Dick KYLA SCHULLER Rutgers University A nxious to “make [his] Self an man,” Maine youth Joseph Loring swore off the lure of the California goldfields and shipped out on a New Bedford whaling vessel a month prior to Moby-Dick’s publication in the fall of 1851. A year and a half later, he proudly wrote to his mother that he had “struck 5 whales and ha[d] not gotten [his] head smashed yet.”1 In fact, he was now so much less “green” that he could as readily “go on to a whale as go over the hill of an evening or escort a school marm to her place of abode.” Assuring her that his labors on board were equally serene, he gladly reported that his ship “is scelibrated for the harmony in which here officers and aftergard live [and] there has not bin a hard word be twine the officers or the Stewers the 14 months that wee have bin to gather.” Yet such sentimental scenes of domestic bliss appear as a cover for his unavoidable worry that, “Still an unlucky blow may make Sauce Pans out of me.” Torn between portraying his struggle with whales as manly graciousness and non-hierarchical camaraderie or as brutally dangerous sport against a worthy adversary, Loring hastily states the inescapable fact of his utter dependence on sperm whales in an aphorism worthy of Ishmael: “Yet by them I live or by them I die.” In regaling his family with news of his voyage, Joseph Loring suggests that an apparatus of affect and domestic bliss mitigates his overwhelming dependence on creatures of the sea for his existence and earnings. His emphasis on the sympathetic feeling between crewmembers and his own vulnerability to sperm whales runs counter to dominant characterizations of the harvesting of whales and challenges accepted interpretations of the industry’s most famous literary tribute, Moby-Dick. Nineteenth-century whaling has been praised as the paradigmatic enterprise of masculine vigor, built of “exposure, privation, and danger, in comparison with which other field-sports are tame, safe, and C  2010 The Authors Journal compilation C  2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 Joseph Loring, Joseph Loring Letters. MSS 188. Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego. 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 K Y L A S C H U L L E R effeminate.”2 Similarly, many critics, perhaps most famously Ann Douglas, have characterized Moby-Dick as a shining beacon of masculine aesthetic accomplishment amidst a decade awash in feminine, sentimental drivel.3 In contrast to the proposition that Melville’s literary rigor managed to surmount the stultifying mid-century climate of saccharine literature espousing maudlin emotionality, I propose that Melville’s novel is a fully developed exploration of the deeply affective relationships that pre-industrial whaling ironically nurtured between whales and whalers through the very intimacy of the hunt. The multi-faceted discourse of sentimentalism saturates and in fact structures his tour de force. For June Howard sentimentalism is an intellectual tradition that recognizes individual emotion as both a physiological and discursive event.4 Sentimentalism is frequently accused of inauthenticity. Nonetheless, the discourse makes transparent the dependence of the individual experience of feeling on commonly held conventions and is perhaps less trite than forthright. Sentimentalism unabashedly obscures any difference between the subjective and the objective, the individual and the social, the psychological and the somatic, the emotional and the rational, and the original and the mass-produced. Building on recent political, cultural, and literary studies of sentimentality, I demonstrate Melville’s indebtedness to sentimentalism despite the absence of weeping women in Moby-Dick. By animating the feeling animal—a key trope of sentimentalism as it is manifested in mid-century natural history research and domestic ideology— Melville reveals the self-serving relations at the heart of the industrializing economy. He represents both whales and whalers as affective, emotional subjects deserving of empathy from the emerging...