I Know Him Not, and Never Will: Moby Dick, The Human and the Whale

Harris, Katherine

I Know Him Not, and Never Will: Moby Dick, The Human and the Whale

Master Thesis

2021

Abstract

In this thesis, I argue that Herman Melville's Moby Dick depicts the ocean and whales in a way that develops aesthetic theory into a proto-environmentalist message. Melville draws on theories of the mathematical and dynamic sublime as outlined by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, while also employing Goethe's Theory of Colours in his depictions of the ocean setting. Goethe posits that opposing phenomena require one another to signify and to function, and Melville dramatises this idea throughout a complex and often self-contradictory novel. Moby Dick depicts whale hunting in a paradoxical, unstable way which both defends the practice and highlights its cruel nature. In considering this, I trace how depictions and cultural representations of whales have changed over time, shifting from the whale as icon of the monstrously non-human to the whale as touchstone for environmental humanism. Melville, despite the image of Moby Dick as a monster, also portrays whales in a way which humanises them and allows the reader to empathise with them, so allowing for a counter discourse against whaling to emerge. The industrial consumption of marine animals is highlighted in Moby Dick, as Melville notes the various ways in which whales and similar creatures are used for food and other products. Unscrupulous methods of acquiring resources are paid particular attention in the chapter, ‘Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish,' which I use as a guide to the contradictory ideologies at the heart of the text. I argue that the aesthetic theory embedded in the novel enables a nascent environmentalist consciousness, and I place such moments in dialogue with more recent accounts of whales and work from the field of the oceanic humanities.

Keywords

English language

English literature

Reference:

Collections

Masters

Full item page