5. Early in Moby Dick Melville offers his famous depiction of New Bedford:“But think not that
this famous town has only harpooners, cannibals, and bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at
all. Still New Bedford is a queer place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land
would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador. As it is,
parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they look so bony. The town itself is
perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England.
It is a land of oil, true enough: but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The
streets do not run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in
spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and
gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? How planted upon this
once scraggy scoria of a country? Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round
yonder lofty mansions, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and
flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all.”
6. It is difficult for Melville’s Ishmael, an
astute though limited observer, to
imagine New Bedford sprouting native
groves from its “bony” back country.
Yet the oceans of the world have
helped sow the gardens and parks of
patrician New Bedford. Whalemen
(not farmers) have cultivated what
would otherwise have remained
barren. While my partner, Jason
Fiering, and I did not limit ourselves
to gazing “upon the iron emblematical
harpoons” fixed upon “lofty
mansions” we did look about town to
the images of whaling adopted by New
Bedforders.
In our survey we found that some
homes and establishments, while not
marked with harpoons…
8. In greater New Bedford references to the historic whaling industry abound
and have been overlaid by those of the city’s other great catch, Herman
Melville’s novel, Moby Dick.
9. As such, New Bedford’s self-representation, whether commercial or
personal, is inter-textual in nature (that is, referring both to its
w
whaling past as well as to its literary celebrity).
The images most weighty in such significance are of the great whales
themselves (rather than their spare iron slayers).
11. New Bedforders have variously depicted the
whale, choosing images that to them most
accurately if also hopefully represent their
town and their particular enterprise. Still, in
assuming the whale, they also participate in
Melville’s project in Moby Dick of trying to
render the leviathan, if not accurately at least
in ways that speak of their communal and
commercial identities. As we learn from Moby
Dick, however, such is no small task. For
Melville defining the whale is akin to
defining the nature of meaning itself. The
whale, says Ishmael, submerged and hidden
must necessarily at least in its living totality
remain a mystery.
12. In some sense then, we might be
like Ahab before the decapitated
sperm whale’s head, asking these
images to “speak.”
“Speak, thou vast and venerable
head. . . and tell us the secret
thing that is in thee” (339).
13. Unlike Ahab, fortunately, some
of our living subjects—still in
possession of their heads—did
explain their renditions of
whale-ness.
14. Moby Dick invites us to think about images and their underlying meanings as well as to
reproduce images in response. As Elizabeth A. Schultz notes in Unpainted to the Last:
Moby Dick and Twentieth Century American Art Melville’s novel has inspired an
unprecedented number and variety of visual representations from commonplace items
like t-shirts, pot holders, and cartoons to artist’s sketches, paintings, and sculptures.
Shultz explains the propensity to recreate or re-cast Melville’s images in part as
resulting from the novel’s prototypical (archetypal) status (Barbara Herrnstein Smith) and
its tendency to challenge temporal and spatial boundaries (Charles Olson). The universal
questions and conflicts and the novel’s refusal of coherence allow for reinterpretation
and reproduction. Like the white whale, therefore, images from the novel are ubiquitous.
Further, Melville provides extensive visual details and artistic references.
In recent criticism Melville’s interest in art and images has received increasing
attention. Images for Melville, it seems, inspired and shaped Moby Dick. Melville also
likened his craft to that of visual artists. In “The Whale and the Panorama” Robert L.
Carothers and John L. Marsh argue that Melville’s novel was influenced by the Benjamin
Russell-Caleb Purrington Panorama “A Whaling Voyage Round the World” which
showed in Boston in 1849 and depicts scenes of whaling that correspond to some of the
events in Moby Dick. Along with his numerous references to renowned paintings,
sculptures, and architecture, Melville was also affected by individual artists as well, such J.
M. W. Turner (1775-1851). Later in his life the paintings of Elihu Vedder (1836-1923)
inspired Melville, such that Melville dedicated his late collection of poems: Timolean to
Vedder.
15. The novel’s engagement with art and the visual begins almost immediately
with Ishmael’s initial comments justifying his whaling expedition through a
universal fascination with water. He entreats the reader to consider the artist
whose landscape painting would be “in vain unless the shepard’s eye were
fixed upon the magic stream before him” (5). From his portrayal of the New
Bedford inns at night as “blocks of blackness” (10) . . .
16. …to his review of the “boggy, soggy,
squitchy” painting at the Spouter
Inn, Ishmael has just begun to
consider art and also to act as artist,
himself.
Melville’s Ishmael considers shapes
not only in art but of people,
objects, and actions. Of “cutting
in” to the whale, he says: “Now as
the blubber envelopes the whale
precisely as the rind does an
orange, so is stripped off from the
body precisely as an orange is
sometimes stripped by spiralizing it.
For the strain constantly kept up by
the windlass continually keeps the
whale rolling over and over in the
water” (331).
17. Also, Queequeg’s
“phrenologically . .excellent” head
reminds him of General
Washington’s (56). Later, Ishmael
relates Queequeg’s tattoos to the
astrological etchings on the
dubloon as well as to those that
Queequeg carves on his coffin.
The marks tantalize Ishmael, for
they invite interpretation: He sees
these as being the work of some
long gone prophet “who, by those
hieroglyphic marks, had written
out on his body a complete theory
of the heavens and the earth, and
a mystical treatise on the art of
attaining truth; so that Queequeg
in his own proper person was a
riddle to unfold; a wondrous
work in one volume” (524).
18. Ishmael also graphically details Ahab: “His, whole high, broad form, seemed made
of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus”
(134). And, as we shudder to learn, Ahab has a “crucifixion in his face” (134). As we
see here, Melville, according to Douglas Robillard, “describes paintings, statues,
buildings and carvings which decorate them, and ships . . . sometimes . . . people as
if they themselves were works of art, comparing them to statues or paintings or even
architectural masterpieces”(4).
19. In addition to painting these images, Ishmael also reviews renditions of
whales, especially in the chapters entitled, “Monstrous Pictures of
Whale,” “Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales,” and “Of Whales in Paint;
in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains’ in Stars.”
There he assesses the merits and failures of a range of mythic, scientific,
and artistic reproductions. Stuart Frank, in his Herman Melville’s Picture
Gallery scrupulously catalogues Melville’s references and contends that
those chapters move purposefully from less erroneous pictures (depicted
by those far removed from whaling) to those with truer experience of
whales, and beyond. He says, “The path is a gradual ‘descent’ from the
lofty pinnacles of theology, mythology, and science to the ‘savage’
immediacy of Nature and the hunt; and then literally upwards into the
starry heavens beyond sea and earth” (xix).
20. Through a similar movement, Jason and I have organized our images of whales in New
Bedford, beginning with more distinctly literary references to the white sperm whale made
famous by Melville to a range of whales varying in color and aspect.
Blue Whales
27. Our “lofty pinnacles” are the literary and
philosophical realms of Melville’s Moby Dick.
Our more “immediate” pictures are those numerous
reinterpretations of the white whale and challenges to
the sperm whale’s dominant position as New
Bedford’s official symbol. We will end with whales in
the sky, a movement upwards again, that seeks to cast
New Bedford into a more hopeful future.
In the official/street signage of the whaling city the
white sperm whale dominates.
28. The white whale’s is also the face of many of New Bedford’s
establishments and public events.
29. In Melville’s novel the whale’s whiteness
is highly significant not only for Ahab
but for Ishmael as well. For Ahab it is
that blank wall, undecipherable
pasteboard mask that infuriates him,
“That inscrutable thing” he says, “is
chiefly what I hate” (178). For Ishmael
whiteness is ghastly, “the visible absence
of color, and at the same time the
concrete of all colors. . . . a colorless, all-
color” (212). Whiteness reveals that all
colors, he says, are “subtile deceits” and
cover the frightening truth that “Nature
absolutely paints like a harlot, whose
allurements cover nothing but the
charnel-house within” (212). The white
whale, though smiling, references that
highly coded object of Ahab’s disdain
and Ishmael’s fear.
30. The sperm whales, in the wooden signs
weathered by the elements while not
wearing that ghastly hue, illustrate the
disturbing workings of nature. They may
have, after all, at one point worn some
fresher stain or color, but now hang in a
grayish non-color. Like the ragged Moby
Dick, they brandish their battle scars.
31. Joel Gonsalves keeps his thirty-seven year old sign hanging in front of the
Surrey Shoppe despite his periodic impulses to replace it. Something about
the age and decay speak to him, and so he re-attaches its jaw and repairs
wind damage.
32. Others are meticulously maintained, covering over the “charnel house
within” but here through the color-less, non-color.
33. But what do we make of New
Bedford’s variously colored whales?
Does this blue whale successfully
replace the phantom white with
more natural hues? So that, to use
Ishmael’s illustration, like the
“blue” in Virginia’s Blue Ridge
mountains, we are left feeling more
of a “soft, dewy, distant
dreaminess” rather than the more
sublime starkness of New
Hampshire’s “whites” ? (209).
38. Images of whales in New Bedford,
also variously re-cast the sperm
whale’s shape that at times defy
taxonomy:
39. In Moby Dick the right whale’s head is
counterbalanced with the sperm whale’s even
though, to Ishmael, the sperm whale’s is far
superior. He valorizes the Sperm Whale’s head
for its “mathematical symmetry” and
character.
While some of New Bedford’s black whales
are also clearly sperm whales…
42. Elaine’s at the Black Whale challenges the gloomy white sperm whale, both in
color and in kind. Elaine Lima identifies this as a black baleen whale —
which, tells us, is often mistaken for a whale upside-down. Elaine’s black
whale, therefore, surrenders the reference to Melville’s novel and looks
instead to the black dog of Martha’s Vineyard. Hoping to reproduce a
similarly profitable sales gimmick, Elaine’s at the Black Whale stays true to New
Bedford’s whaling identity, but not to the white sperm whale. This black
whale, will, perhaps, help recast the city in a more auspicious light.
43. Melville comments on the accuracy of wooden whales cut in profile on the
forecastles of whale boats (295). In New Bedford and surrounding towns,
these profiles are numerous, though as to accuracy, we cannot always attest.
44. Often marked with the homeowner’s names or house numbers, these whales establish
ownership and place.
48. As signs on residences that welcome, we also
categorize the smiling brass whale knocker here
as well. These are not the “anvil-headed whale”
knockers that Melville says are best when the
“porter is sleepy.” For that reason, however, he
might also have found them more (295), though
uninspiring in their manufactured uniformity.
49. These are New Bedford’s fast fish. Melville defines these fish: “alive or dead a fish is
technically fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all
controllable by the occupant or occupants” (433). A loose fish is up for grabs, with no
one yet who can claim it.
50. While not all the whales in New
Bedford as not content to stay fixed
to walls, fences, and doors, we
wonder if these are technically “loose
fish.”
54. Of these whales Melville writes:
“On the spires of some old-
fashioned churches you will see
sheet-iron whales placed there for
weather-cocks; but they are so
elevated, and besides that are to all
intents and purposes so labeled with
“Hands off!” you cannot examine
them closely enough to decide upon
their merits” (295).
55. This is a significant lament from Ishmael
who examines the whale to the minutest
detail even to the “transparent” “skin of the
skin,” through which, he says he has read the
printed page and imagined, significantly,
that it “exerted a magnifying influence.”
56. They challenge, that is, being trodden upon and being physically as
well as philosophically “manhandled.”
57. But, If these whales only
intimate flight, the winged whale
of Gallery X takes whimsically to
the sky. In direct response to the
preponderance of dead whales in
New Bedford’s past, this whale
comes to life ascends on his own
power.
58. Gallery X’s hanging mobile by Charles Hauck paradoxically brings to mind
the sectioning of the whale in diagrams of “cutting in.” The segmenting also
suggests air, movement, and flight, as if the whale could yet escape its
grounding. As the flying whale rises up it hopefully takes the whaling city with
it.
59. Despite Ishmael’s and Melville’s best
attempts the novel concedes that it can
never contain, paint, or properly define the
whale. “The more I this mighty tail,” they
say, “the more do I deplore my inability to
express it. . . Dissect him how I may, then, I
but go skin deep; I know him not, and
consider never will. But if I know not even
the tail of this whale, how understand his
head? much more, how comprehend his
face” (414)
60. We have certainly learned from the novel not to expect to understand all that these
images might intimate about New Bedford. Unlike Ahab, we do not presume to find
“the secret thing” (339). Nonetheless the whale as symbol and the whaling city are not
soon to be parted.
61. Works Cited
Bredahl, A. Carl, Jr. Melville’s Angles of Vision. Gainesville: U of Florida Press, 1972.
Berthoff. Warner The Example of Melville. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1962.
Carothers, Robert L. and John L. Marsh. “The Whale and the Panorama” Nineteenth-Century
Fiction. 26.3 (Dec. 1971): 319-328.
Eldredge, Charles C. “Wet Paint: Herman Melville, Elihu Vedder, and Artists Undersea.”
American Art. 11.2 (Summer 1997): 106-135.
Frank, Stuart M., Herman Melville's Picture Gallery: Sources and Types of the “Pictorial"
Chapters of Moby-Dick. Fairhaven: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1986.
Greenberg. Robert W. Splintered Worlds: Fragmentation and the Ideal of Diversity in the
Work of Emerson, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson. Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1993.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick: or The Whale. New York: Penguin Classics, 1992.
Robillard, Douglas. Melville and the Visual Arts: Ionian Form, Venetian Tint. Kent, Ohio: Kent
State University Press, 1997.
Schultz, Elizabeth. Unpainted to the Last: Moby Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art.
University Press of Kansas, 1995.
