Based on Bill Brown’s proposal about museum exhibition and Alan Heimert’s examination of the political metaphors in Moby-Dick, I want to analyze how the Pequod’s constitution and Ahab’s physicality metaphorically reflect related historical figures and events. Based on Paul Brodtkorb’s proposal about body’s relation to self, I want to examine how Ahab’s self interacts with his body and how Ahab extends his physical and mental influence over the other crew. Finally, I want to see how Ahab’s body, the crew’s bodies, the ship and the whale interact with each other.
1. The Pequod and Ahab’s metaphorical projections
1.1 The Pequod and the national ship
Based on his reading of literary texts like The Country of the Pointed Firs, Brown examines how things are used to “make or re-make” characters, provoke and resonate with human emotions. [1] Noticing that an accumulation of things exemplified by characters like Mrs. Todd who decorates her house with “remnants of the mercantile economy by which coastal villages like Dunnet Landing thrived”, Brown proposes that the decorations in Mrs. Todd’s house are comparable to a museum exhibition in that they similarly inform readers of a history experienced by the coastal village. [2] In other words, this kind accumulation advances a “pedagogical practice.” [3] Even though Brown observes that there is a similar accumulation of things in Moby-Dick, for example, the decorations of Ishmael’s room at the Spouter Inn, he proposes that these things “refuse to disclose their meaning.” [4] After removing a thing from the chest, Brown points out that “Ishmael tries it on, continues to examine it, and finally abandons it as a mystery.” [5] However, Brown’s proposal that an accumulation of things performs the pedagogical function of reminding visitors of the historical foundation of their existences sheds light on how to examine the Pequod’s constitution as well as Ahab’s physicality.
Dating back to the historical period from 1840 to 1850 the nation was compared to “a ship” sailing “upon an unknown voyage” and would predictably confront the problems of expansionism and slavery, Alan Heimert draws on this comparison when he remarks that the Pequod made of “ ‘all contrasting things’ from the three sections of the United Sates: ‘oak and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp’” is a metaphorical projection of the contemporary America. [6] If we relate Heimert’s observation to Brown’s proposal that the remnants of certain historic period perform a pedagogical practice, we can see that these remnants simultaneously frame the narration in a historic moment; even they construct a symbolic contemporary American social context. This construction of context also relates to what Brown observes about “a narrative exhibitionary genre” or “the so-called life-group exhibit” by the 1890s, in which “person, place, and thing” are constellated into “an absorbing drama”, that supposedly brings “a local culture to life.” [7] Taking for his example a scene in which a woman’s body “made of plaster and wax” holds “a single jug to bring water to her child”, he further proposes that “the meaning of things is disclosed by their function within a specific environment.” [8] Similarly onboard the Pequod the mates, the harpooners and their relations symbolically reference historical figures, relations and events in which these figures are involved. As Heimert observes, the Pequod’s three mates Starbuck, Flask, and Stubb who are “every one of them Americans; Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man”, [9] respectively represent the Yankees, the Southerners and the Westerners. [10] The relations between the mates and their harpooners also symbolize an imperial history in which the three races represented by the harpooners -- “a native of Rokovoko,” “an unmixed Indian from Gay Head,” and an “imperial negro,” have “generously” supplied “the muscles” [11] to “each of the American sections” for building “its prosperity in the early nineteenth century.” [12]
1.2 Ahab and Calhoun
Citing the analogy between “Naboth’s Vineyard” and the conspiracy of annexing Texas, Heimert proposes that Ahab is made to represent John C. Calhoun, who Heimert observes is “the author of the present war between the United States and Mexico” against Texas’s independence.[13] Calhoun, a war hawk, advocated war against the British power that was interfering American maritime interests. As Calhoun was also a fervent supporter of slavery within the US and in the newly-annexed Texas, he is the national ship’s captain who runs “the vessel ‘into the whirlpool of the Mexican War."’ [14] But Heimert argues that Calhoun’s ambition was not confined to annexation and the practicing of slavery in Texas. After he designates Texas and Mexico representatives of the Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish in the chapter of Moby-Dick, with that title Heimert concludes that Calhoun intends a further imperial expansion within the territory of Mexico.[15] “Advocated as revenge on the British Empire”, Calhoun hopes that imperial expansion would inevitably involve the US in war with the Britain.[16] This challenge to British influence in Mexico was celebrated by the contemporaries who believe in Manifest Destiny. Heimert further proposes that Calhoun’s support of slavery within the US boundaries and of its extension to Texas pushes the Federal Union towards disruption. Calhoun’s views represented the vast number of Southerners who, fearing “the ‘increasing power’ of the Federal government in the North, wanted to wage war within the Union and gain control of it.[17] According to Heimert, Leviathan represents power promised by the US’s further imperialist expansion in Mexico and the economic profits that would ensue from this venture. The hunting of Leviathan diverted the national ship from “the course it had long pursued in safety, ‘well laden with rich and valuable cargoes’” to an unknown voyage that would involve with costly wars with the Britain.[18]
The manic pursuit of Leviathan aroused a similar political attitude in the South where many Southerners who were “sympathetic to Calhoun” seem “monomaniac in their dedication to the ‘one idea’ of slavery” meanwhile fearing “the power of the Union.”[19] Calhoun’s self-interested individuality generalized to suit capitalist demands was a reflection of the monomaniacal South’s political atmosphere as well as what happened onboard the Pequod, where Ahab restricted the crew’s purpose to the single purpose of acquiring economic profits within a capitalist economy that included the whaling industry. Ahab confined the crew to this purpose when he hammered a doubloon to the mast and announced that it would reward the first sailor to sight the white whale. Ahab replaces the crew’s rationale with his purpose after the example of what Adorno and Horkheimer have called “the objective social tendency” which company directors involve to mask their own “hidden subjective purposes.”[20] Adorno and Horkheimer further observe that “the foremost among” these company directors control “the most powerful sectors of industry – steel, petroleum, electricity”, that culture industry financially depends on. Ahab, director’s counterpart onboard the Pequod, uses economic reward to capture the crew’s mind and will.
Like the life-size woman holding a jug in the life-group exhibit, Ahab’s physicality manifests a life-size projection of Calhoun in the narration. Citing descriptions of Calhoun in Theodore Parker’s A Sermon of War and Sarah Mytton Maury’s The Statesmen of America, Heimert lists physical features shared by Calhoun and Ahab. Like Calhoun who is said to be “giant” and “strong”,[21] Ahab’s “whole high, broad form seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus.”[22] The similarity between Calhoun and Ahab is further displayed by their eyes. Calhoun’s eyes are said to be “so dazzling, black and piercing that few can stand their gaze.”[23] Melville describes a comparable power lurking in Ahab’s eyes.
Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship’s ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable willfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance.[24]
In addition to these shared physical features, Melville endows Ahab with something even more forbidding. The scar on Ahab’s face conveys incomparable evil.
Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded.[25]
Two different crew members offer conflicting accounts of the scar’s origin. The old Gay-Head Indian “superstitiously” asserted that Ahab got the scar while his ship was caught by a strong sea storm at the age of forty. The old Manxman who is believed to be invested “with preternatural powers of discernment” provided the more trusted explanation when he said the scar is a birth-mark.[26] The birth-mark associated Captain Ahab with the biblical King Ahab whose worship of the false God Baal is comparable to Captain Ahab’s pursuit of God’s agent, Moby Dick.[27] The scar connects the three characters -- Calhoun, King Ahab, Captain Ahab -- by way of their shared personal belief. It also predicts that their blasphemous action will result in their destruction. According to Heimert, Melville’s comparison of Ahab to Calhoun resulted from Melville’s belief that Calhoun was leading the nation towards destruction.
1.3 Ahab and the doubloon
The doubloon’s Spanish origin might also shed light on its political significance. One day while passing by the mainmast where the gold coin is, Ahab has this careful observation:
There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things; look here,—three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self.[28]
Paul Brodtkorb and Hoang Gia Phan propose that “Ahab reads each and every image on the doubloon as representing Ahab himself.”[29] What Ahab reads from the three signs “the firm tower,” “the volcano,” and “the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl” perhaps respectively represent the firmness of his determination, the flames of his hatred, and his guts in pursuing his revenge. He associates the three peaks with Lucifer, the rebellious Angel, implying his own rebellion.[30]
Research on the history of the doubloon reveals its close connection to the old imperial power Spain. Doubloon Ahab pinned to the main mast remained widely used currency in Spain and its colonial territories until the mid-19th century.[31] “Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, gold doubloons played a pivotal role in the Spanish economy and were a major part of its colonial activities.”[32] Ahab’s investment of his own will in the doubloon’s value suggests that he will adapt imperialist design of Spain, which was the largest slave-holding power in the new world, to his own will. Ahab’s usage of the doubloon enables Melville to draw further parallels between Ahab and Calhoun around the matter of the ship of state, slavery, expansionism, and the impending catastrophe.
2. Ahab’s physical extensions
2.1 The Body’s relation to the self
While examining Ahab’s body, Brodtkorb distinguishes the body from the self, observing that body is “almost the same as, yet is clearly different from, the self... since body only partially and ambiguously reveals self. [33] Based on the proposal that self is a combination of “spirit or soul” and “mind or will”, he further proposes that self animates and controls body.[34] But to Ahab, it is the interaction between his maimed body and the anguished soul that causes his madness. While he is lying in bed recovering from his near fatal encounter with Moby Dick, “his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.”[35] It was his willfully strong mind that invigorated his maimed body. “Unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium.”[36] In other words, his willful self is something exceedingly more powerful than his body.
Ahab is keenly aware of the limitations of his mutilated body as well as the seemingly boundless power of his self. On the second day of the chase after Moby Dick, Ahab, who is indignant at Starbuck for his reluctance to continue the hunt, says,
Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot. 'Tis Ahab -- his body's part; but Ahab's soul's a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs.[37]
2.2 Ahab and the crew
Before symbolically transforming the crew into a physical extension of his missing leg, Ahab strategically replaces the crew’s purposes with a purpose all his own.
At the Quarter-Deck scene, Ahab first cannily provokes the crew’s collective excitement at the prospects of a whale hunt. He begins with a series of questions about normal whale-hunting.
"What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?"
"Sing out for him!" was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices.
"Good!" cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them.
"And what do ye next, men?"
"Lower away, and after him!"
"And what tune is it ye pull to, men?"
"A dead whale or a stove boat!"[38]
The sailors who “gaze curiously at each other” try to understand Ahab’s rationale for asking these seemingly purposeless questions.[39] Ahab reveals the purpose behind his questions, gives orders about a white whale and links them to the Spanish doubloon.
'All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white whale. Look ye! d'ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?' —holding up a broad bright coin to the sun—"it is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D'ye see it?"[40]
Knowing the awe and fear Moby Dick will incite in the crew, Ahab does not linger on the topic of Moby Dick. Instead, after briefly mentioning Moby Dick, he quickly turns to the doubloon, which he carefully converts into its “sixteen dollar” cash value to make the gold coin attractive enough to surmount the crew’s fear of Moby Dick and entice them to sign an unofficial contract to hunt the white whale.
However, Starbuck is keenly aware of what lurks in Ahab’s performance. He utters, “I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance”, pointing out that Ahab’s introduction of a vengeful hunt for Moby Dick violates the contract he signed with the ship’s owners at Nantucket market.[41] Confirming his violation of the whaling contract, Ahab idealizes the purpose of his hunting so that it fits in with the crew’s need to frame their profit motive under “some higher purpose than economic profit.”[42] By bringing Starbuck’s will to “the little lower layer”[43], Ahab intends to remind Starbuck of “a deeper motive.”[44] By uttering his deep dissatisfaction with “a religion based on market values”, Ahab turns “the public argument with Starbuck” “into a cosmic struggle Ahab alone can fathom.”[45] Ahab thereby turns himself into an agent who can lead Starbuck and the crew towards a higher motive.
Ahab’s eloquence not only puts out Starbuck’s rebellious fire but also rationalizes the transformation of the Pequod’s profit-driven hunting into his revenge-driven hunting. Casting himself as a representative member of the crew, Ishmael testifies to the influence of Ahab’s eloquence.
'I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine.'[46]
Ahab’s usage of the doubloon as an economic reward enables him to replace the crew’s objective tendency with his vengeful purpose. The doubloon extends Ahab’s control over the crew’s bodies. He then treats all the crew as his physical extensions, his soul’s “hundred legs.” Ahab’s recasting the crew as his physical extensions becomes obvious on the final day of the hunt for Moby Dick. When he orders his sailors to jump from the boat, he remarks, “Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.”[47]
3. Ahab, the Pequod and the whale
When Ahab turns the crew into replacements for members of his disabled body, Ahab acts upon the desire to treat the objects in the material world as physical extensions of himself. Noticing the way Ahab steadies his bone leg in the ship’s auger hole, Brodtkorb observes that it is as if “he were a component part of the ship.”[48] Brodtkorb further proposes that after Ahab seemingly becomes a part of the ship, readers are tempted to treat Ahab himself “as an object.”[49] Brodtkorb’s observation might also be taken to mean that the Pequod can also be seen as an extension or a physical supplement to his body. This ship’s physical connection to Ahab also becomes evident in the scene in which Ahab is strangled to death by a flying turn attached to Moby Dick immediately after the whale destroys the ship.
Even Ahab’s pathetic leg connects him to Moby Dick. Even though his fake leg is made of another whale’s bone, its belonging to the same species makes the bone’s owner the white whale’s deputy. The whale bone of Ahab’s leg is a physical extension of the white whale’s body. Moreover, Ahab’s lost leg seems to carry the implication that together to this lost leg Ahab has lost part of his soul as well. If we construe Ahab’s near fatal encounter with Moby Dick as an event in which he almost drowned, it becomes prefiguration of castaway experience of Pip, the cabin boy, who goes mad after being abandoned in the sea.[50] Brodtkorb points out estrangement between body and soul that caused insanity in Pip is similarly responsible for Ahab’s madness. Regarding Pip’s castaway experience, Melville writes, “the sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.”[51] He is “not drowned entirely” but rather carried down alive to wondrous depths.”[52] Pip’s body is not split but his soul is split and part of it is lost. After this castaway experience, Pip constantly weeps over the lost part of his soul which he calls “Pip the coward.”[53] As for Ahab, he loses part of his body as well as part of his soul. In other words, Moby Dick not only devours part of his body but also part of his soul. His lost leg which is now a part of Moby Dick is like a magnet attracting Ahab’s remained body to join it.
“While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked.”[54]
The lost part of his soul functions like a magnet as well. As it is stated above, his soul dominates his body. His remained soul which extends its dominance making the crew and the ship as the body’s physical extensions, is the chief instigator who brings the Pequod and Ahab into the deadly encounter with Moby Dick. When the dead Ahab is attached to Moby Dick, it seems that what remains of his soul now longs to join the lost part. When Ahab becomes attached to Moby Dick as the novel’s conclusion, the sovereignty over Ahab’s body and soul goes shifted from Ahab to Moby Dick and brings about a chimerical transformation of Ahab into the whale.[55]
Conclusion
The accumulation of things and people onboard the Pequod makes the Pequod a metaphorical equivalent to mid-nineteenth century US society. The harpooners and their relations to the mates allegorize the contribution of three American races to the United States’ imperialist expansion. Captain Ahab is the symbolic equivalent to Calhoun, the captain of the national ship. Calhoun’s monomaniac pursuit of the slave power across Mexico and the newly annexed territories is the culmination of Ahab’s revengeful hunt. Ahab’s need to drive the Pequod to destruction reveals Melville’s bleak sense of the United States’ political future. Just as Calhoun’s hunt for power and territory led the ship on a course of self-destruction, Ahab’s hunt for vengeance against the white whale turned the Pequod and the crew into extensions of his will to self-destruction. Instead of impaling Moby Dick with his vengeful will, Ahab finds himself transfigured into a bodily extension of Moby Dick.
Notes
1. Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: U of Chicago, 2003), 4.
2. Ibid., 87.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 127.
5. Ibid.
6. Alan Heimert, "Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism," American Quarterly 15.4 (1963): 501, accessed April 8, 2014, doi: 10.2307/2710971.
7. Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: U of Chicago, 2003), 92.
8. Ibid.
9. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 106.
10. Alan Heimert, "Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism," American Quarterly 15.4 (1963): 502, accessed April 8, 2014, doi: 10.2307/2710971.
11. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 55, 104-5.
12. Alan Heimert, "Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism," American Quarterly 15.4 (1963): 502, accessed April 8, 2014, doi: 10.2307/2710971.
13. Ibid., 503.
14. Ibid., 499.
15. Ibid., 505; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 319. In Moby-Dick, "Fast-Fish" and "Loose-Fish" are defined as follows. “A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it. … a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other recognized symbol of possession.” “A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.” Later Melville extends the meanings of Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish to political issues, implying that Texas is a Fast-Fish and Mexico a Loose-Fish to the US; “Manifest Destiny”, last modified April 8, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny. “Manifest Destiny provided the rhetorical tone for the largest acquisition of U.S. territory. It was used by Democrats in the 1840s to justify the war with Mexico”.
16. Alan Heimert, "Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism," American Quarterly 15.4 (1963): 507, accessed April 8, 2014, doi: 10.2307/2710971.
17. Ibid., 517.
18. Ibid., 505.
19. Ibid., 515-6; Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge Press, 2007), 409.This situation is much like what Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer criticize the culture industry about, which they propose reduces the society’s “capacity to nourish true freedom and individuality” because the industry reduces the artistic space requiring “individual effort” and mass-produces cultural products according to the capitalist economic requirements. They further point out that generality replaces individuality under the influence of culture industry.
20. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge Press, 2007), 407.
21. Alan Heimert, "Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism," American Quarterly 15.4 (1963): 511, accessed April 8, 2014, doi: 10.2307/2710971.
22. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 106.
23. Alan Heimert, "Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism," American Quarterly 15.4 (1963): 523, accessed April 8, 2014, doi: 10.2307/2710971.
24. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 107.
25. Ibid., 106.
26. Ibid., 107.
27. The white whale is seen as the God’s agent. In the Quarter-Deck scene, when Starbuck reminds Ahab that his hunting a brute which hurts him out of its instinct is blasphemous, admitting his action is blasphemous Ahab elevates the whale from a mere animal to a sublime existence which represents God’s will and God’s inscrutability, which is precisely what he hates.
28. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 346.
29. Paul Brodtkorb, Ishmael's White World: A Phenomenological Reading of Moby-Dick (New Haven: Yale UP, 1965), 68; Hoang Gia Phan, Bonds of Citizenship: Law and the Labors of Emancipation (New York: New York UP, 2013), 188.
30. “Lucifer,” last modified April 8, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer. Lucifer’s symbolic meaning is based on its Christian interpretation from Wikipedia.
31. “Doubloon,” last modified April 8, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubloon.
32.“Doubloon”, last modified April 8, 2014, https://store.nwtmint.com/info/doubloon/. This citation is from the following website.
33. Paul Brodtkorb, Ishmael's White World: A Phenomenological Reading of Moby-Dick (New Haven: Yale UP, 1965), 42, 51.
34. Ibid., 62.
35. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 155.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 422.
38. Ibid., 136.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 138.
42. Donald E. Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 1987), 240.
43. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 138.
44. Donald E. Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 1987), 237.
45. Ibid.
46. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 149.
47 Ibid., 447; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri “Postmodernization, or the Informatization of Production,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge Press, 2007), 191. Moreover, the way the crew members are treated as Ahab’s physical extensions reflects dimension of the dehumanization of capitalism, resonating with the argument made by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri regarding the modernization’s dehumanization. Hardt and Negri argue that in the process of modernization, society is slowly “industrialized even to the point of transforming human relations and human nature”. Under the influence of the capitalism condensed in the doubloon, Ahab’s addressing the crew as his arms and his legs reveals the fact that Ahab’s relations to his crew have been similarly capitalized.
48 Paul Brodtkorb, Ishmael's White World: A Phenomenological Reading of Moby-Dick (New Haven: Yale UP, 1965), 64.
49 Ibid.
50 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 411. This projection can be proved by Ahab’s encounter with Pip. When Ahab meets Pip who in the meantime repeatedly describes his castaway experience, Ahab empathizes with Pip, saying “thou touchest my inmost centre, boy”.
51 Ibid., 334.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., 411.
54 Ibid., 193.
55 Jill H. Casid, “Chimerical Figurations at the Monstrous Edges of Species,” in Environmental Criticism for the 21st-Century, ed. Ken Hiltner, Stephanie Lemenager, and Theresa Shewry (London: Routledge Press, 2011), 61–83. This chimerical transformation resonates with Casid’s observation about the eighteenth century’s live teeth transplantations. Based on the finding that the hostess’s mouth grows to fit in with her slave’s teeth rather than the other way around, Casid proposes that the teeth transplantations manifest a subversion of the contemporary social order in which slave owners dominate slaves. For Ahab, his hunting the whale ends up in his being hunted and incorporated by the whale, similarly demonstrating a subversion of power order.
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