TONI MORRISON 15
the final confrontation between Ahab and the white whale some
time in the first half of 1851. He may well have written his last
chapters only after returning from a trip to New York in June.
[Judge Shaw's decision was handed down in April, 1851]. When
New York anti-slavery leaders William Seward and John van Buren
wrote public letters protesting the Sims ruling, the New York Herald
responded. Its attack on "The Anti-Slavery Agitators" began: "Did
you ever see a whale? Did you ever see a mighty whale
struggling?"...9
Rogin also traces the chronology of the whale from its "birth in a
state of nature" to its final end as commodity.10 Central to his argument is that Melville in Moby Dick was being allegorically and
insistently political in his choice of the whale. But within his chronology, one singular whale transcends all others, goes beyond
nature, adventure, politics and commodity to an abstraction. What
is this abstraction? This "wicked idea"? Interpretation has been varied. It has been viewed as an allegory of the state in which Ahab is
Calhoun, or Daniel Webster; an allegory of capitalism and corruption, God and man, the individual and fate, and most commonly,
the single allegorical meaning of the white whale is understood to be
brute, indifferent Nature, and Ahab the madman who challenges
that Nature.
But let us consider, again, the principal actor, Ahab, created by
an author who calls himself Typee, signed himself Tawney, identified himself as Ishmael, and who had written several books before
Moby Dick criticizing missionary forays into various paradises.
Ahab loses sight of the commercial value of his ship's voyage, its
point, and pursues an idea in order to destroy it. His intention,
revenge, "an audacious, immitigable and supernatural revenge,"
develops stature-maturity-when we realize that he is not a man
mourning his lost leg or a scar on his face. However intense and
dislocating his fever and recovery had been after his encounter with
the white whale, however satisfactorily "male" this vengeance is
read, the vanity of it is almost adolescent. 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. And if the white
whale is the ideology of race, what Ahab has lost to it is personal
dismemberment and family and society and his own place as a
