Response Journal Week 2-Gabi

The first thing that struck me when I was reading Moby Dick for this week was duality that Melville presents (whether wittingly or not) between the the romantic, spiritual, image of the whaling, and the image of whaling as being in the frontier of civilization. I only refer to this conflict because I remembered something we had discussed in my American Environment class. So far the subject of our study has really been the “wilderness” and the conception of wilderness and how different people and cultures viewed the wild. When America was beginning to establish itself as a nation, Americans were trying to find something that could legitimize their nation in the face of Europe’s extensive accomplishments. Growing out of a romantic movement, Americans realized began to refer the “American wilderness” as what made America so great. The wilderness was simultaneously a place of spiritual magnitude as well as a great civilizing force because of all it’s bountiful resources and potential for development. Melville presents the ocean in a somewhat similar way. The act of whaling is spiritual in that it involves long periods in the wilderness of the ocean, very far from civilization (much like the American wilderness). At the same time conquering the whale (much like American’s spoke of conquering the wilderness) is exemplary of the force of man and civilization. The whale because of it’s blubber (and the ocean because it is home to the leviathan) becomes a civilizing force. In chapter 24, “The Advocate”, Melville makes a case for the whaler and his profession. He compares going whale-hunting to going to battle, but he argues that whaling is as courageous if not more so, “For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!” (98) Then, if you still aren’t convinced of the virtues of whaling then Melville goes on to write about the whalers as pioneers, “If American and European men of war now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages.” (99) He even goes so far to write, “...I prospectively ascribe all the honor and glory to whaling; for a whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” (101).
I also thought it would be worth to mention, no matter how briefly, Ishmael’s of the tragic grace of man in Chapter 26. Here Melville writes of the dignity of man. But what struck me was the Melville takes this very human dignity to be almost divine in nature, “Thou shalt see it [dignity] shining in the arm that wields the pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself!” (103) This an ode to the common man or to the worker.