I took a few personal days in Big Sur last month, taking with me The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. I got through the first two chapters, around ninety pages. I dog-eared seven pages, and cursed myself for not bringing post-it notes. While at present I have nothing more to say except yes, yes, YES, here are some of my favorite insights, so far, with a bit of commentary:
...if as death angel the woman suggests a providentially selfless mother, delivering the male soul from one realm to another, the same woman's maternal power implies, too, the fearful bondage of mortality into which every mother delivers her children.
The Queen's Looking Glass, pg. 26
Ahhhhh, here I began to see the image of the woman as life/death giver that I have been struck with over and over again in Moby Dick. While women are almost non-existent as characters in the novel, I feel Moby-Dick is permeated with imagery and allusions to a nameless dread.
...the female monster is a striking illustration of Simone de Beauvoir's thesis that woman has been made to represent all of man's ambivalent feelings about his own inability to control his own physical existence, his own birth and death...male dread of women, and specifically the infantile dread of maternal autonomy, has historically objectified itself in vilification of women...
The Queen's Looking Glass, pg 34
Emblems of filthy materiality, committed only to their own private ends, these women are accidents of nature, deformities meant to repel...
The Queen's Looking Glass, pg 30
Some of the most sexually pervasive and grotesque imagery in Moby-Dick emerges in the form of a giant squid. It is described as "the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but it undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life...with a low, sucking sound it slowly disappeared again." Further, Melville comments that "few have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish the sperm whale his only food...the sperm whale, unlike other species, is supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it."
The sperm whale, so often described in the novel as "ramming," "attacking" can easily, I think, be symbolic of male sexuality; nothing new there. However, this description of a cream colored faceless mass, with curly arms numberless, clutching and sucking, submerging and unseeable, is not a bad abstract explanation of female genitalia. It's referred to as a spectre, a ghost, portentous, mysterious, and finally, a monster.
The information given about Ahab in the beginning of the novel describes a wife and a child, conceived after one night's conjugal union. It is immediately after this union that Ahab begins his encounters with Moby-Dick, and let's not forget that Moby-Dick bites Ahab in a particularly debilitating way, sexually. This is and other references to reproductive activity, intimacy, death, and dread accessorize Moby-Dick into a tale of the inescapable doom cycle of reproduction and death, down to the vortex into which the ship and its crew are swallowed. The pursuit of an all-male human society is not enough to escape, and can still result in death. A cautionary tale? Of course this doesn't even begin to explain the numerous threads that run through Moby-Dick. But it may be enough for an article.
Melville also uses the concept of "negative space" in a feminist way -- see Queequeg (Ishmael's spouse) and his coffin (Infection in the Sentence, 88). This may be the moment to highlight the novel's jovial way of dealing with female/male interchangeability, and its confusing way of jumping back and forth between what Gilbert and Gubar call male/female authority. A conflict in the narration comes from the inability to perceive if the perspective is male or female. Here is where more Queer theory would probably enlighten me.
I think the gender transcendence that occurs throughout the novel necessarily rests upon its insistence that human male-female unions result in a tragic and futile mortality, but I don't think Melville was especially hopeful concerning same sex intimacy. I do believe that these are major theme in the work. More theory is in order.
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