Jonathan D. S. Schroeder
It is simple enough to say that Moby-Dick represents a father, or God, or Nature, or the Unknowable, but Ahab’s voyage was not an intellectual quest. The whale was not a man nor an idea, but a feeling.
–David Brion Davis
But if the whale is more than blind, indifferent Nature unsubduable by masculine aggression, if it is as much its adjective as it is its noun, we can consider the possibility that Melville’s “truth” was his recognition of the moment in America when whiteness became ideology.
–Toni Morrison
In October 1844, Herman Melville returned to Boston from slaughtering whales in the Pacific only to land on another kind of murder. Abner Rogers, a convict at the Massachusetts State Prison, had stabbed Charles Lincoln, the warden, to death, convinced that Lincoln was the leader of a conspiracy to kill him. Published soon after Melville pulled into harbor, The Report of the Trial of Abner Rogers, Jr. gives readers an expansive, novel-sized account of Commonwealth v. Rogers, which had been covered by newspapers around the nation and was soon recognized as “one of the most important cases involving the law of insanity . . . in this country.”1 Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and Melville’s father-in-law, presided over the jury trial, issuing an opinion that, out of the more than 2,500 he wrote in a long career, stands out.2 In response to the M’Naghten Rule, which a panel of British judges had issued the previous year and which set the standard of criminal responsibility as the defendant’s ability to distinguish right from wrong, Shaw pointed out that disorders of the mind were not confined to disturbances of the intellect alone but might be traced to the passions, the imagination, and other areas of the body. Drawing from Isaac Ray’s Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity (1838), he argued before the jury that a person “might be fully aware of the immorality of a possible course of action, yet be unable to repress his passions or to abstain from the acts of violence to which they impelled him” during a temporary period of insanity when an “irresistible impulse” reigns.3 The homicide trials of Rogers, M’Naghten, and a string of others in the 1830s and 1840s turned on the very concept that Melville later used to create Captain Ahab and, through him, the plot of Moby-Dick: monomania, or a compulsive fixation on a single idea.4 This concept, used at the time to prove that an individual could be insane on one subject and sane on all others, transformed previous definitions of insanity and helped justify why courts needed to rely on medical expertise.5 And from the standpoints of medicine and the law, which were rapidly becoming intertwined in the first half of the nineteenth century, this case of homicidal monomania placed major questions of enduring significance on center stage in America in 1843: Who is an agent? Who is responsible for a criminal act?
This chapter reads Moby-Dick as a rebuttal to Shaw and what his opinion embodies: medicine and law’s intertwined roles in creating and enforcing racial and natural hierarchies of life.6 Understanding the stakes of this debate first requires reconstructing a genealogy of monomania. The medical side of this history helps us understand what it means to take seriously the statement that Ahab is no agent at all, but “the living instrument” of external forces outside his control (namely, his desire for revenge, as well the forces that shaped his capacity for vengeance).7 In turn, the legal side of this history leads us to consider where responsibility lies for the natural destruction of the lives of sperm whales and the humans on board the Pequod (which, tellingly, is named after a tribe that was exterminated by genocide). This focus on the discourse of insanity matters for materialists precisely because it foregrounds the transpersonal forces that drive humans to act, because it enjoins materialists to recognize and engage with the epistemological frameworks that have long been used to explain these forces, and because it shows just how impotent the law is at holding humans collectively responsible for acts of mass killing like slavery, war, and whaling.
An exemplary case on all these fronts, Ahab constitutes a rebuttal to Shaw, because according to the influential criteria set out by the chief justice in Rogers, he would be adjudged not guilty in a court of law.8 Indeed, Ahab passes the test for insanity while failing the test for depravity, thus establishing him as an insane person who cannot be held criminally responsible, since he acts merely from a diseased heart and not a depraved one. To prove that a person is insane but not depraved and can therefore be excused from a criminal act, a person must possess, Shaw writes, “a real and firm belief of some fact, not true in itself, which, if it were true, would excuse his act.” “A common instance” of this counterfactual, he continues,
is where he fully believes that the act he is doing is done by the immediate command of God, and he acts under the delusive but sincere belief that what he is doing is by the command of a superior power, which supersedes all human laws, and the laws of nature.9
Thus, from a legal standpoint, Ahab’s theological mission to kill the white whale is precisely what would excuse him from the crimes of destroying the ship and killing the crew (to say nothing of killing the whales, which was not a crime).10 He is both insane (described as a monomaniac fifteen times throughout the novel, most frequently and famously in Chapter 41, “Moby Dick”) and not depraved, since he is “delusive but sincere” in his beliefs. And yet, even though Ahab cannot be held responsible, what a disaster he is!
The novel’s object is not to lay blame on Ahab, however, but rather to go beyond the law’s parameters to lay out the conditions for Ahab’s insanity so that guilt can be appropriately distributed for producing an Ahab. To this end, the novel does something with monomania that differs from the concept’s uses elsewhere. It diagnoses a Quaker sea captain with the disease. Merely doing so turns the concept on its head. Because the emotions were racialized in medicine in the eighteenth century and because medical knowledge about emotion was imported into the law as part of the medicalization of criminal guilt in the nineteenth century, a white sovereign figure like Ahab would have been considered virtually incapable of monomania. By contrast, and because of these baked-in biases, the people found to commit crimes of passion were almost always members of the laboring classes, and particularly those from ethnic and racialized populations. In the leading cases of homicidal monomania, such as Harriet Cornier (servant, 1827), Henry Joseph and Amos Otis (sailors, 1834), Abraham Prescott (farmer, 1834), Daniel M’Naghten (woodturner, 1843), Abner Rogers (convict, 1844), Orrin Woodford (farmer, 1846), and William Freeman (convict, 1847), every single one of these individuals was working class and socially marginalized, and several were not white (William Freeman and Henry Joseph) or were white ethnic (M’Naghten). This is partly what I mean when I write that Shaw’s opinion helped reinforce racial and natural hierarchies of life, which artificially and prejudicially ranked humans and animals according to how well they escape from bodily necessities.11
Rather than reproduce these medicolegal biases, Melville turns the medical gaze in upon itself by shining it on the sovereign figure of Ahab (named as he is after a biblical king).12 Read in terms usually reserved for the marginalized, Ahab turns out to be no unique individual but a representative of a population, as Chapter 14, “Nantucket,” uses Enlightenment medicine’s preferred method of medical geography to explain how pacifist Quaker outcasts from England became bloodthirsty capitalist “fighting Quakers,” their resource-scarce home of Nantucket influencing them to translate a joint theological quest for salvation into a collective economic quest for the blood and bone of whales. In treating a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant as a member of a population, the novel creates a Patrick Bateman before the fact, someone whom we are asked to see not as an exception to American norms but as an American psycho who exemplifies a broad tangle of natural, economic, and cultural tendencies. Put simply, the novel places Ahab’s whiteness on trial. My title, “The Whiteness of the Will,” alludes to three of the novel’s concerns with Ahab’s whiteness, starting with the whitening of the will in the nineteenth century, in which the reason’s power to form and execute actions is assigned to white individuals, while “excessive” capacities for emotion, said to impede the reason, are assigned to nonwhite populations. It likewise alludes to the philosophical problem of the weakness of the will (acting against one’s better judgment), which the novel identifies with Ahab’s chief affect, rage, which, monomaniacally intensified into an obsession with vengeance, destroys him, his ship, and the multiracial, mostly foreign crew.13 Finally, my title puns on the phrase “the whiteness of the whale” in order to highlight how Ahab’s whiteness is produced by whaling—and destroyed by it too.
Chapter 41, “Moby Dick,” tells the origin story (or aitiology) of Ahab’s monomania and marks the most extended use of the concept in Melville’s writing. Famously, Ahab is dismembered, his leg “reaped” away by Moby Dick “as a mower a blade of grass in the field.” In contrast to this impersonal language of accident, he takes it personally—as an attack, as if the whale had tried to assassinate him (“no turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay could have smote him with more seeming malice”). This is a mistake, insofar as Ahab misperceives what the whale was doing. The “wild vindictiveness against the whale” that he had already harbored, which helps explain this mistake, is then subsequently intensified and amplified by a period of “frantic morbidness” and “delirium,” during which he is so great a “raving lunatic” that his shipmates “strait-jacket” him to his hammock. In this makeshift asylum, “his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another, and so interfusing, made him mad,” until he associates not just “his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations” with the whale. His “broad madness” finally subsides into a “narrow-flowing monomania,” concealing his “special lunacy” behind a mask of “general sanity.” Once a “living agent,” Ahab “now became the living instrument.” He has become the instrument of his “rage,” which, “bolted up and keyed in him,” has fixated him on “the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale.” In Ishmael’s poetic summary, which borrows the language of Thomas Browne, after Ahab yielded to a “sudden, passionate, corporal animosity,” was dismembered, and thereafter felt a “wild vindictiveness” for Moby Dick, his disease emerges, which magnifies the whale into “the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them” (Moby-Dick, 185–88).
Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol first coined the word “monomania” in the 1810s as a replacement for the older term “melancholy”; his treatise Mental Maladies was translated into English in 1845, presumably in response to interest in monomania following the M’Naghten and Rogers trials. Since the early modern revival of Galenic medicine, melancholy had most often referred to a pathological fixation on a single object or type of object. In the French physician’s estimation, however, the term had been overextended and used to cover types of insanity that did not result from a melancholic temperament’s intensification by loss into a fixation on the lost object. With his neologism, he attempted to underline “the essential character of that form of insanity, in which the delirium is partial, permanent,” and therefore circumscribed.14 He likewise attempted to choose a name that pointed to the power of any passion—positive as well as negative—to engender a compulsive fixation on an object. As other authors noted, individuals were “mad on particular topics only” but still able to “reason very sanely on all others”; some were even said to “display the greatest powers of mind, till, by chance, the cracked cord is struck.”15 “On some subject, or group of subjects, [the monomaniac’s] conceptions are wrong, and his assumptions false,” an editor of a medical journal writes, adding:
The error lies in his premises, more than his conclusions; you may reason him into a modification of the latter, by correcting his logic: but no argument, persuasion, or authority, can drive him from the former. The spirit of his delusion cannot be exorcised. It governs him with despotic power, but its jurisdiction is limited. He has, as it were, two contemporary states of intellectual being, with alternate manifestations; one in common with those around him; the other peculiar to himself. In the former, he feels, and thinks, and acts, in consonance and sympathy with his race; in the latter, he contemplates nothing but the objects embraced in his delusion; and regardless of consequences, looks only to their accomplishment.16
Though monomania was recognizable by “a single false notion . . . impressed on the understanding, the mind being otherwise unclouded,” the disease was defined as a disease of passion, or a delirium of the passions (“le delire des passions”).17 In other words, the body’s emotion (usually viewed in the Hobbesian sense as an automatic reaction toward or away from an external motion that shared the form of that motion) causes the disease.18 “Monomania is essentially a disease of the sensibility,” Esquirol wrote; “it reposes altogether upon the affections. . . . Its seat is in the heart of man” (200). If the full-blown monomaniac’s “ruling passion” is responsible for generating his “reigning error,” this passion has “its origin in the intense excitement of the predominant feeling” (“Insanity,” 577). In the case of Ahab, his “wild vindictiveness” of feeling is magnified by his dismemberment and his reaction to dismemberment until it becomes an “all-engrossing idea,” such that, ultimately, “Ahab never thinks . . . only feels, feels, feels” (Moby-Dick, 565).
As in melancholy, the faculty said to transform a passionate attachment into a monomaniacal desire is the imagination. If bodily injury or disappointment was usually said to induce the initial feeling, authors wrote that it is only “by dint of brooding over the imaginary wrong that [the sufferer] fixes it in his mind, and ultimately in his belief” (“Insanity,” 578), for monomania “generally arises from an indulgence of reveries and speculative hopes and fears, doubts and desire, which, ceasing to be under the restraint of reflection and judgment, assume at last a morbid ascendency.”19 Specifically, excessive absorption in images in the imagination is supposed to imbalance the body when the imagination diverts more than its ordinary share of the body’s resources; if the reason fails to intervene, the imagination continues to distort and exaggerate these images until the obsession becomes a permanent fixation, a state that by definition means that the victim’s reason is disabled, imprisoned in the mind, leaving her at the mercy of her body and the environment and leaving her without the ability to see this object in “proportion” to other humans’ viewpoints.20 For example, in one type of monomania, nostalgia, victims withdraw into their imaginations from the fear and loathing of exile and the love of and sorrow over their lost home, only to become so absorbed in spiraling fixations on images of the absent home that they grow insensible to other objects, refuse to leave bed, and finally starve to death, their last words almost always, “I want to go home! I want to go home!” In keeping with the prevailing view of the degenerative effects of desire, Esquirol wrote that monomania always ends in suicide, as the victim “hears a voice within him, which repeats these words ‘kill thyself, kill thyself.’”21
Thus, when Ahab fails to appear on deck before the Pequod casts off, when he only engages in conversation with sea captains who answer yes to his customary first question to passing ships, “Hast thou seen the white whale?,” when he remains silent at dinner with his mates, for “in the cabin was no companionship; socially, Ahab was inaccessible,” a physician would conclude that Ahab’s monomania has shut him off from all other sensations except those that pertains to the one great idea that he is constantly turning over in his head (156). “In no Paradise myself,” Ahab says, “I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad” (494). And indeed, when the Pequod meets the Rachel, after being “forced to it by Ahab’s iciness,” Captain Gardiner beseeches his fellow Nantucketer to aid in finding his lost son. When confronted directly with an appeal that would melt the stoniest heart, Ahab “stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own” (534).
By contrast, when he meets the Samuel Enderby and hears that the English captain has seen Moby Dick, Ahab rushes “impetuously” toward the boat and listens to the captain’s story with “suspended breath,” even crying “exultingly” that the harpoons in the whale were his (448, 449). When we learn that he leaves his hammock bed “all rumpled and tumbled . . . and the pillow frightful hot” and sleeps but three hours a night, or when we read that his brain is “blazing,” his body “scorched,” “his eyes glowing like coals,” that he is “consumed with the fire of his hot purpose,” then we encounter his monomania (129, 204, 542, 214). As the surgeon on the Samuel Enderby exclaims, “This man’s blood—bring the thermometer!—it’s at the boiling point!—his pulse makes these planks beat!” When, in Chapter 36, “The Quarterdeck,” Ahab “half sobs and half shouts” and with a “high raised voice” calls for his men to hunt the White Whale and is “fiercely glad” when they sign on board his “fiery hunt,” then we catch his monomania in the act again. The novel weaves together this language of hot and cold, fire and ice, and boiling and freezing to capture the sheer difference of Ahab’s either/or, yes or no responses, which indexes the fact that Ahab is not in control of his affective reactions because he has become imbalanced. If “thinking ought to be a coolness and a calmness,” Ahab himself says that “our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much,” producing too much heat, while conversely, his brain is sometimes so cold, “frozen calm,” that it feels as if his skull is cracking like a glass of water placed accidentally in the freezer (419). And while physicians reported that monomaniacs “suffer from . . . heat within the cranium,” have hot skin, and are “consumed by an internal heat,” Melville’s language of coldness perfectly describes the central paradox of monomania: its victims are capable of crimes of passion of the greatest intensity, but in other circumstances they are cooler than cool, “entertain[ing] little affection for their relatives and friends,” thereby appearing to contradict the traditional notion that calm passions allow for rational thought (Esquirol, 378, 333, 328).22 What made trials of homicidal monomania in France, Britain, and the United States so sensational was that these murders appeared to be committed in cold blood. In one notorious case, for example, Harriet Cornier took a shopkeeper’s daughter on a walk and decapitated her, then returned to work as if nothing had happened. Several hours later, when confronted by the mother, she “coolly answered that ‘the child was dead,’” then tossed the severed head out the window, where it rolled under the wheel of the father’s arriving carriage.23
Chapter 41 is thus more than just an origin story. It is a medical narrative, one that explains how an individual becomes imbalanced, how this imbalance becomes chronic, and how this condition dictates the plot of the novel. It is a key to understanding why Ahab reacts to certain objects and not others throughout the voyage of the Pequod. It is a key to understanding how Ahab bestows upon the objects that matter to him all the significance in the world (and beyond). And it is a key to understanding his style of rule on board the Pequod. Indeed, the novel asks us to imagine a character afflicted with a “certain sultanism of his brain” (150). However, the orientalist epithets that describe Ahab—“the Old Mogul,” the “Khan of the plank,” and so on—refer not simply to his style of governing others but also to the way in which he is despotically governed by an idea (173, 130).24 This alignment of inside and outside, microcosm and macrocosm, is typical of medical explanations of the workings of disease. His mind is said to be “gnawed within,” his body “scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea” eating him from the inside (Moby-Dick, 188). And in Chapter 44, “The Chart,” he is called a modern Prometheus. But he is not condemned to have an eagle daily eat his liver, as in myth; rather, a “vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates” (205).25 If Ahab’s “intense thinking” has created this creature, a vulture that feeds on the decaying flesh of his heart (i.e., the seat of his passions), then these passions are also what keep him intensely thinking and lock him in a vicious cycle that takes its toll on his body. For unlike in the myth, Ahab’s body does not regenerate each day. In fact, he is said to be slowly dying of his monomania. “He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri,” Melville writes, adding:
And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab’s soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom! (156)
Between this and the Prometheus simile, the novel suggests that two creatures inhabit Ahab’s hollowed out body. The first is his monomania, which is a vulture that feeds upon his “heart.” The second is his “soul,” which hibernates like a bear, feeding off the body’s reserves until Ahab’s “inclement, howling old age” is over. But given that Ahab’s monomania will feed upon his heart “for ever,” it is clear that only death will end this old age and free Ahab’s soul. And in the novel, we come across periodic signs indicating that Ahab’s body is, more and more, running out of supplies. By the time he stops to meet the Bachelor and learns the ship is Nantucket-bound and loaded with oil, he replies, “Well, then call me an empty ship, and outward-bound” (501). By the end, he is finally actually empty, “his eyes” like “coals . . . that still glow in the ashes of ruins,” his body, “like a blighted fruit tree . . . cast[ing] his last, cindered apple to the soil” (543, 546).
We’re not done accounting for Ahab’s monomania. Important questions remain unanswered—above all, “Why Ahab?” Why does Ahab become a monomaniac while the captain of the Samuel Enderby doesn’t, even though he too lost a limb to the great white? And if a case of monomania could involve any sort of passion and any particular object, why does Ahab rage and why is the object of his rage a whale? Answering these questions requires zooming out from our consideration of the novel’s account of how Ahab’s disease was triggered and how it works upon his body to consider a third cause of disease: the remote cause. To consider the remote cause involves investigating how Ahab has been subjected to a certain set of conditions, like environment, diet, occupation. It involves asking a series of questions. Does something make Ahab prone to anger? Is Ahab consequently predisposed to monomania even before his encounter with Moby Dick? And what in Ahab’s body does his dismemberment excite?
To answer such questions, physicians began by assessing not the idiosyncrasies of the individual but the idiosyncrasies of the population to which that individual belonged. From the 1750s through the publication of Moby-Dick, physicians assumed that what was idiosyncratic about a population could be determined by examining the natal environment’s influence upon them. Though we now associate biopolitics with the population, Enlightenment medical geographers played a major role in bringing this method to prominence through their project of linking diseases to geographic features; for their purposes, a population merely consisted of the inhabitants of a type of place.26 Lands unable to support people on agriculture alone were singled out as most likely to produce inhabitants with an idiosyncratic temperament (also called a disposition or character), which is to say a slight imbalance that might be aggravated by future circumstances and transformed into the pathological version of this imbalance: a fixed desire. “In [the monomaniac’s] morbid state,” one author writes, “we may often see much of his original character. If mild, timid, and benevolent, his insanity is less to be dreaded—if suspicious, he becomes jealous—if proud, haughty and impetuous—if ill natured, ferocious and revengeful” (“Art. 6.—Medical Jurisprudence,” 58). And a leading British authority, James Cowles Prichard, wrote that if, for example, an “individual of melancholic temperament,”
who has long been under the influence of circumstances calculated to impair his health and call into play the morbid tendencies of his constitution, sustains some unexpected misfortune, or is subjected to causes of anxiety; he becomes dejected in spirits, desponds, broods over his feelings till all the prospects of life appear to him dark and comfortless. . . . At length his gloom and despondency becoming more and more intense, his imagination fixes upon some particular circumstance of a distressing nature, and this becomes afterwards the focus round which the feelings which harass him concentrate themselves. . . . An unreal phantom suggests itself . . . which at first haunts the mind as possible, and is at length admitted as reality.27
Hierarchical assumptions about what makes individuals more or less human underwrite this discourse, as groups like the Scottish and Swiss were labeled as particularly prone to diseases of sadness like melancholy and nostalgia because their mountainous homes lacked the resources necessary for subsistence-level agriculture and required them to send young men abroad to serve in foreign armies and navies. The “excessive” mobility of these populations, which even before leaving for foreign parts began with supplemental sheepherding, was said to be reflected in their “excessive” emotions, in the form of an enlarged capacity for love and its opposite, sorrow. This rationale enabled physicians to stamp the Swiss mountaineer and Scottish Highlander as the prototypes of the white ethnic population, and some of the first emblems of national belonging, both because of their famed love of country and because the obverse of their amor patriae was their tragic tendency to die when forced away from home.28 Thus, before the emergence of “monolithic whiteness,” Enlightenment physicians defined white ethnic populations as more emotional, less rational, and therefore less human individuals due to their repeated exposure to loss and a high risk of associated diseases.29 This argument relies upon the assumptions that loss amplifies feeling, because possession is good and natural, and that long exposure to environmental privation produces people who are less capable of reason (since rationality is classically predicated on a certain “coolness” and “calmness” of thinking, as Ahab knows) because their emotions are slightly more intense and therefore prone to greater disorder when catastrophic situations arise—like forcible removal from home (as in enslavement) or dismemberment—that trigger their latent “weaknesses.” While scholars tend to study race in Moby-Dick in terms of visible skin difference, the novel engages another, older process of racialization, one that differentiates populations according to how human they are and places them on a hierarchy of life.30
Melville’s novel locates Ahab as a member of a religious group, the Quakers, who have been transformed by inhabiting Nantucket and the sea. These “insulated Quakerish Nantucketer[s],” Melville writes,
retain in an uncommon measure the peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance. (78)
Nantucket Quakers have become “Quakerish,” we read, because they have broken with their most famous principal: pacifism. The phrase “fighting Quakers” was a name for Quakers like the Rhode Island general Nathanael Greene, who were disowned by the Society of Friends for choosing to participate in the Revolutionary War and who later formed a small offshoot of “Free Quakers” that subscribed to “self-defence.”31 Melville uses the phrase differently, however, for Nantucket Quakers were stubbornly peaceful during wartime, a decision that devastated them, as Sarah Crabtree writes, because “the new government persecuted them as loyalists” for continuing to trade with Great Britain, and Massachusetts and Britain refused them aid and “destroyed their livelihood, the whaling industry.”32 Melville’s use of the phrase refers instead to the effects of the whaling industry on Quaker character, which has made them “sanguinary,” a word that does not simply suggest bloodthirstiness and killing but also names one of the four Hippocratic humors and thus keys us into how the Quakers developed a new temperament and tendency toward anger after moving to this new environment.
While the novel broadly indicates that the sea has transformed Quaker principle, Chapter 14, “Nantucket,” narrates how. This chapter, which represents Melville’s parody of medical geography, posits that Nantucket inhabitants have been conditioned by privation and resource scarcity more extreme than those of the Swiss or the Scottish and closer in nature to that of the Lapps in the Arctic, a population long known for their susceptibility to nostalgia:
Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don’t grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day’s walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snowshoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois. (65)
Nantucket, a lonely “elbow of sand; all beach, without a background” produces a different kind of tribe from the mountains and tundra of Europe because it lacks plants of all kinds and what it has in abundance are barren, arid expanses of sand, encircled by the ocean, which makes the island, as Ishmael and Queequeg discover, “the fishiest of fishy places” (64). This aridity is reflected in Starbuck’s fat-free and Ahab’s “heron-like” bodies. As another gamesome wight’s whaling novel, Joseph Hart’s Miriam Coffin; or, The Whale-Fisherman (1835) puts it, “Nantucket is to America what Iceland is to the northern nations of Europe”:
The scrapings of the great African Desert, were they poured into the sea, would not emerge above its level with an aspect of more unqualified aridity than does this American island, with the exception of a few small lakes, and swampy oases, nourished by an unwonted moisture. . . . But few trees, and those, it is averred, not the natural growth of the soil, relieve the monotonous surface of the island.33
Hart’s and Melville’s novels both position the island as such an extreme place to live that its inhabitants are forced to make equally extreme adaptations—“extravaganzas,” Melville writes, in the sense of wandering beyond, like a vagabond. In this case, the adaptation is not partial but absolute, sublime even. For if Nantucket island is flat and has no “background,” if it is all sand because it was deforested in the eighteenth century to aid the whaling industry, it is “no Illinois” because it forces its inhabitants elsewhere, into the very sea itself.
If medical accounts gave maximum importance to the natal environment in producing disease but disregarded occupational, social, and economic factors, Melville goes farther by accounting for the effects of migrant labor on ethnic populations, who were usually forced by privation and broader economic flows to go abroad, much like the sailor Leonard in William Wordsworth’s poem “The Brothers.”34 And in doing so, Melville considers the transformative effects of both the whaling industry and the sea, which becomes Nantucket men’s “step-mother world” (544):
And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders. . . . Two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it. . . . There is his home; there lies his business. . . . He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. (65)
Hart’s novel “denominat[ed] the Nantucketers an amphibious race,” a “sort of half Quaker, half sailor breed, to be found nowhere else on earth,” but only on the sea; Melville’s novel demonstrates what hunting does to the hunter at sea, even when the hunters are Quakers: stereotypically thrifty, sober, and “supposed incapable of strong emotion” (Hart, 33–34, 40). Melville uses medical geography to set out the “phases” of “Quakerish” character made possible by Nantucket’s resource scarcity and represented by the shipowners, Bildad and Peleg, their employee Ahab, and Starbuck.35 By connecting theology to political economy, he provides an account of how the Quaker work ethic dominated the world whaling industry. Decades before Max Weber, anthropologist John D. Kelly argues that Melville charts the rise of the “fighting Quakers” whose systems of company and finance combined utilitarian calculation (policy) and religious calling (honesty) into a single “voyage,” with all participants invested in future hopes by virtue of the lay system (in which they received a share of the trip’s profit instead of wages) (Kelly, 1091–103). “The world’s a ship on its passage out,” Ishmael says, “and not a voyage complete, and the pulpit is its prow” (Moby-Dick, 40). Even when imitated by the English, the lay system “fit and extended the moral economy of New England better than the old,” because it “was an industry built by and for fighting Quakers and other ambitious dissenters questing for a new world,” one that would take them beyond the Atlantic into the Pacific and around the world (Kelly, 1097).
Melville goes beyond Kelly’s historical materialism by providing a natural history, arguing that Quaker morality was itself modified and hybridized by the sea. As a case in point, if Nantucketers are framed as an “ethnic population,” they do not fit into any readymade Enlightenment logic of the ethnic population because they are characterized by a capacity for unlimited mobility and firm discipline. While Quakers were elsewhere famous for being unchangeable, Melville detects, as he says of Peleg, a certain “lack of common consistency” about the Quaker, who refuses, “from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore” (79). This capacity for unlimited mobility is a quality imparted by the ocean itself, which has transformed this English sect, who fled to Nantucket doubly persecuted by the British and the Puritans, into persecutors of nature, sailor “savages,” who “live in the varying air, and inhale its fickleness” (215). “Long exile from Christendom and civilization,” Melville writes, “inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois” (277). Thus, while the Nantucketer became a figure of national pride for the new American republic, Melville’s novel cautions us to see that this figure has two sides and that the celebration of American enterprise, industry, and ability to make something from nothing is only a celebration of the “healthy” side. The “sick” side of this character might be brought on “by the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north” (73). This is a new character in literature: the figure of American white rage.
Enter Ahab. Primed by his childhood in Nantucket and by forty years at sea working a brutal trade, Ahab is the ultimate fighting Quaker. Sharing with all sailors a penchant for superstition (recall that Chapter 41, “Moby-Dick,” begins not with Ahab’s dismemberment but with an explanation of how rumors and gossip of Moby Dick spread at sea), he also has a “ponderous heart” that is atypical of Quaker character:
And when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has . . . been led to think untraditionally and independently . . . that man makes one in a whole nation’s census—a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. (78)
Ahab’s “half wilful overruling morbidness” is what makes him successful in the whaling industry (leading the “calculating” Peleg and Bildad to condone his madness in order to profit off it) and it is most likely these same tendencies that Ahab himself recalls in his final conversation with Starbuck in Chapter 132, “The Symphony,” in which he laments the way he has been changed by his profession:
Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and stormtime! 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! . . . and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more a demon than a man! (544)
If Nantucket whaling transforms the concept of vocation into the hunt for whales, thus marrying religion and economy, the novel suggests that it also conditions men like Ahab to perform a “demonic” role that predisposes them toward rage. By tipping the scales of Ahab’s temperament in favor of rage, Nantucket whaling primes Ahab for a monomaniacal fixation on vengeance. Thus, Ahab’s rage is not singular but a trait possessed by all Nantucket “fighting” Quaker sailors, albeit in varying degrees. It is his dismemberment—this catastrophic loss—that intensifies this predisposition to fight “whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them” (181). It is this conditioning that makes sailors fit for all weather conditions but also transforms them into something like pagans, and it transforms Ahab into a Roman emperor, a Scandinavian king, a wearer of the “iron crown of Lombardy.”
So far, this chapter has demonstrated that Moby-Dick uses the medical concept of monomania to describe how a fixation on revenge affects Ahab’s body and how Ahab’s natal and nautical environments predispose him to monomania by enlarging his capacity for rage. Melville places this disease narrative on the biggest stage possible: the novel itself. Indeed, because Ahab is insane, driven by desire and incapable of choosing his own movement, and because he is in charge of the voyage of the Pequod, which takes up nearly all the action, it is justifiable to say that Ahab’s desire is what directs the ship and most of the novel’s plot.36 Chapter 14, “Nantucket,” clues us into the fact that if Ahab once learned how to rage from killing whales, this same rage, amplified into an unbreakable monomania, is what ineluctably and unceasingly kills him and those around him. Ahab is forever Ahab, his purpose laid on iron rails, even as his body is simultaneously withering under the charge of the “fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life” (165). His “white rage,” a phrase that is part and parcel of his identity as a white Nantucket Quaker whaling captain, spells not only his downfall but also the downfall of sperm whales and the multiracial, mostly foreign crew who work under him and whom Ahab binds to his monomaniacal desire until they “seemed the material counterpart of [their] monomaniac commander’s soul” (423). The only survivors are, famously, the White Whale, which for Ahab is a symptom of what Toni Morrison describes as “the very concept of whiteness as an inhuman idea” and the “assertion of whiteness as ideology,” and Ishmael, a plotless character whose beatific pursuit of knowledge about life makes him the exact opposite of Ahab, with his compulsive drive of desire toward death.37
Yet as the Pequod disappears into the vortex, we are left wondering whether all responsibility for so much death and destruction goes down with the ship as well. Ahab, the obvious culprit, is dead, and in any event, he would have been found not guilty in Lemuel Shaw’s courtroom. Like Abner Rogers, his heart would be deemed diseased but not depraved, establishing that his actions are not the result of, in the words of the jurist William Blackstone, a “vicious will” and “a disposition to do an evil thing” (quoted in David Brion Davis, 62). To establish his insanity, an attorney would only need to point to the fact that he labored under the “false but sincere belief” that he was divinely mandated to destroy the White Whale because it represented for him “the incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them” (Moby-Dick, 184).
Yet there is a huge difference between saying that a marginalized person like the convict Abner Rogers has a higher power on his side and that a sovereign does.38 When a marginal person claims a divine mandate, she is usually condemned as an outcast; when a ruler claims this mandate, he is generally shoring up his sovereignty (as in the divine right of kings; recall that one exercise of that right is claiming whales as a “royal fish”). The marginal person appeals to a higher law to challenge the order of things; the ruler calls upon a higher law to justify the order of things. Yet Shaw’s notion of a false but sincere belief implies that no matter a person’s social standing or sanity, that person must subscribe to a normative idea of society to be excused from a crime. Even as an Ahab seems unimaginable for Shaw, Melville shows that this character represents a dangerous blind spot in Shaw’s opinion: a sovereign who has been driven mad precisely by the normative order of things. In other words, Shaw’s opinion does not provide room to hold rulers and the ruling order accountable.
Moby-Dick continues this rebuttal of Shaw by subjecting Ahab to the same biopolitical gaze that medicine and the law, in a biased and racialized fashion, used on subaltern classes, who are treated as members of populations whose environmental conditions render them susceptible to diseases of the emotions and crimes of passion.39 In doing so, the novel suggests that Ahab is no exceptional figure but rather an extreme production of a confluence of natural, economic, and cultural tendencies. Ahab, after all, is the ruler of a ship, the sole mission of which is to kill whales in one of the most rapacious and violent manifestations of capitalism on record. Supporting such missions of conquest, domination, and extraction was precisely the normative notion of an animate hierarchy that Shaw’s putatively progressive reform of the insanity plea helps reinforce. From the point of view of this hierarchy of life, the whale is only a feeling for Ahab and nothing more, at least in terms of the way courtrooms, asylums, and clinics see things. By contrast, in rendering the problem of crime on the scales of humans as species and the planetary, Moby-Dick translates the problem of criminal responsibility onto a far greater scale, asking us to judge how social descriptions dematerialize the whale and human populations and individualize Ahab’s crime, such that, in the eyes of the law, no one else or no other thing has to bear responsibility for what happens on the Pequod. Yet who or what bears responsibility? Who or what can be held responsible if an individual’s “insane” crime of passion is no exception but merely the logical outcome of a devastatingly violent extractive economy? And what can people do in the absence of a legal system that can account for such a case? And can we imagine a system where justice is served for the whale? I hope we continue to read Moby-Dick as a profoundly materialist response to such questions.
1. “Review,” North American Review, no. 126 (January 1845): 5.
2. On Shaw, see Leonard W. Levy, The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
3. The quotation is from Kenneth Lynn, “Lemuel Shaw and Herman Melville,” Constitutional Commentary 5, no. 2 (1988): 413. Daniel M’Naghten was a Scottish woodturner who had attempted to shoot the prime minister of England, Robert Peel, because he was “delusionally” convinced that Peel and other Tories were persecuting him and wanted to kill him.
4. Melville used the concept of monomania first in Mardi (1849), then again in Redburn (1849), and later in Israel Potter (1855), Clarel (1876), and Billy Budd (1891). It’s possible that his friend, the physician Augustus Kinsley Gardiner, told him about monomania on their voyage to England in 1849, for Gardiner was the author of a medical travel narrative, Old Wine in New Bottles (1847), that recounts his visits to the various medical institutions of Paris, the leading center of medicine in the Western world and the place where monomania was initially conceptualized and popularized.
5. Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
6. While it is surprising that monomania in Moby-Dick has not been seriously historicized, a number of scholars have pointed out the link between Melville and Commonwealth v. Rogers, including Lynn, “Lemuel Shaw and Herman Melville”; Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Knopf, 1983); and Jodie Boyer, “Religion, ‘Moral Insanity,’ and Psychology in Nineteenth-Century America,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 24, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 70–99. On the medicalization of criminal guilt, see David Brion Davis, Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860: A Study in Social Values (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1957), and Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
7. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1988), 185; subsequent references to this volume are in the text.
8. Shaw’s opinion in Rogers constituted an American critique of the M’Naghten Rule, which he deemed insufficient as a test of the individual’s agency.
9. Shaw, in Reports of the Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, recorded by Theron Metcalf, court reporter, vol. 8 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1864), 503.
10. For more on the theological quality of Ahab’s quest, see Bonnie Honig’s essay in this volume.
11. On animate hierarchies, see Mel. Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), and Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018; originally published 1957), esp. sect. 3, “Labor.”
12. One possible model for Ahab comes from the last of William Scoresby’s Memorials of the Sea (London: James Nisbet, 1835), which gives an account of William Stewart, the monomaniacal captain of the Mary Russell. During a voyage from County Cork to Barbados in 1828, Stewart imprisoned and then murdered his crew after becoming convinced that God was sending him signs that they were planning to kill him.
13. On the weakness of the will, see Plato, Protagoras, and Donald Davidson, “How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?” in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 21–42; on the conceptualization of the will in Moby-Dick, see Martin Rayburn, “The Styles of Volition: Toward a Theory of the Novelistic Will” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2018), 50–90.
14. Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol, Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity, trans. E. K. Hunt (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845), 200. Further citations in the text.
15. “Review of De la folie, &c.,” Medico-Chirurgical Review, and Journal of Medical Science 3, no. 12 (March 1, 1823): 703; “Review of Observations on the Medical Treatment of Insanity,” Medico-Chirurgical Review, and Journal of Medical Science 18, no. 35 (January 1, 1833): 140. Monomania helped legitimate the new field of psychiatry because it was considered “the most difficult form of insanity to discover” (“Review of Observations,” 140) and therefore required an expert gaze to detect. This is Jan Goldstein’s argument in Console and Classify (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). See also Lennard Davis, Obsession: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
16. “Art. 6—Medical Jurisprudence.—Report of a Trial for Murder, in Which the Culprit Was Defended on the Ground of His Labouring under Mania a potu, or Delirium from Intemperance. By the Editor,” Western Journal of the Medical and Physical Sciences 3 (1830): 58. Further citations in the text.
17. “Insanity,” in A System of Practical Medicine: Comprised in a Series of Original Dissertations, vol. 1., ed. Alexander Tweedie (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1842), 577. Further citations in the text.
18. On emotion’s relation to motion, see Hagar Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).
19. J. G. Millingen, Aphorisms on the Treatment and Management of the Insane, with Considerations on Public and Private Asylums (Philadelphia: Ed. Barrington and Geo. D. Haswell, 1842), 38.
20. For a fictional example of this, see Edgar Allan Poe’s “Berenice” and the character of Egaeus. Thanks to Russell Sbriglia for the suggestion.
21. Quoted in “Suicide,” Medico-Chirurgical Review, and Journal of Medical Science 4, no. 13 (June 1, 1823): 7. On nostalgia, see Jonathan Schroeder, “What Was Black Nostalgia,” American Literary History 30, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 653–76.
22. See also Susan James, The Passions and the Actions: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
23. “Trial of Harriet Cornier,” Medico-Chirurgical Review, and Journal of Medical Science 6, no. 12 (April 1827): 483.
24. It is worth pausing here to reflect on this use of orientalist epithets. It is troubling here that the novel flippantly compares Ahab’s insanely extreme instrumentalization of his crew to multiple Asian modes of rule. This style of comparison aligns Melville’s novel with abolitionist rhetoric, which often compared American slavery unfavorably to Asian “despotism,” as in Richard Hildreth’s Despotism in America: An Inquiry into the Slave-Holding System in the United States (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970; originally published 1840).
25. For stealing fire from the gods, Jupiter punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock on a mountain and having a vulture or an eagle (accounts vary) feed on his liver, with the liver regrowing each day. According to one summary of the most relevant variation on the myth, Plato’s Protagoras, Prometheus is “the person who endowed man with his senses. He says that the gods formed all mortal animals within the earth, out of the mixture of earth and fire, and of as many things as are mingled with earth and fire, and that they entrusted to Prometheus and Epimetheus the business of providing them with all the faculties necessary for their preservation.” In charge of “bestow[ing] upon the different animals the means of preserving themselves,” Epimetheus proved to have “been so prodigal of all his resources that he had nothing left to bestow upon man,” and so Prometheus “stole from Hephaestus and Athena fire and the intelligence which is displayed in works of art, and gave them to man; so that by means of this wisdom, and fire as its instrument, men were endowed with the power of providing for themselves.” See “Prometheus,” The Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, vol. 19 (London: Charles Knight, 1841), 42.
26. The classic essay on medical geography remains Ludmilla Jordanova, “Earth Science and Environmental Medicine: The Synthesis of the Late Enlightenment,” in Images of the Earth: Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences, ed. Ludmilla Jordanova and Roy Porter (Oxford: British Society for the History of Science, 1979), 127–52. On disease and movement, see Kevis Goodman, “‘Uncertain Disease’: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading,” Studies in Romanticism 49, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 197–227, and Richard Wrigley and George Revill, eds., Pathologies of Travel (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2000).
27. James Cowles Prichard, A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (London: Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1835), 28.
28. On excessive mobility, see Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom.
29. On monolithic whiteness, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
30. For an example of the former, see Graham Thompson, “‘Through Consumptive Pallors of This Blank, Raggy Life’: Melville’s Not Quite White Working Bodies,” Leviathan 14, no. 2 (June 2012): 25–43.
31. On Greene, see John Hayward, The Book of Religions (Boston: John Hayward, 1843), 162–63; on “self-defence” and the customs of the Quakers, see William Craig Brownlee, A Careful and Free Inquiry into the True Nature and Tendency of the Religious Principles of the Society of Friends, Commonly Called Quakers (Philadelphia: John Mortimer, 1824), 117.
32. Sarah Crabtree, Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 49.
33. Joseph Hart, Miriam Coffin; or, The Whale-Fisherman (New York: Harper, 1835), 25, 35. Further citations in the text.
34. Melville arguably builds upon the Romantic critique of medical geography in doing so. On “The Brothers,” see Goodman, “‘Uncertain Disease,’” and Jonathan Schroeder, “The Wreck of Reason: Nostalgia by Land and by Sea,” in A Cultural History of the Sea, vol. 4, Age of Enlightenment (1650–1800), ed. Jonathan Lamb (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
35. On the different phases of Quaker character in the novel, see Donald Pease in this volume and John D. Kelly, “New Bedford, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Anthropological Quarterly 90, no. 4 (Fall 2017): 1085–126; further citations in the text.
36. This claim depends upon defining plot as action or movement, which I am not troubling here. Thanks to Meredith Farmer for pointing out that there are alternate ways of defining how Moby-Dick defines plot.
37. Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 382.
38. Abner Rogers’s false but sincere belief was not that he had a higher power on his side but that he was acting in self-defense when he killed the warden. There were, however, plenty of cases of religious monomania, including Jonathan Martin (1829) and William Stewart (1829), the latter a likely model for Ahab.
39. To be more precise, “subaltern classes” refers here not only to the white ethnic groups discussed earlier but also to nonwhite populations. In the Americas, these medical and legal frameworks were designed and implemented to control the mariners, renegades, and castaways of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Soldiers, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013), and Julius S. Scott’s The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (New York: Verso, 2018).