Book Store: These are all for me.

Thought I'd share with you my book store purchases today, and my thoughts, hopes, and dreams for each read.

#1 Republic, by Plato



What can I say about a book that was written in the fourth century, B.C.? It looks like a long conversation, which should at the least be readable for me as a format. I love asking myself questions and then answering my own question with a question. I also love stumping myself. Honestly, I get a spaghetti brain when it comes to politics and government, and it gets especially mushy when it comes to philosophy about such things. But there is hope, as I just flipped to a random page and the sentence read, "such a question is ridiculous." Hm, might be right up my alley.

To tell the vulgar truth I'm mostly reading this book to say that I've read it, but I have a lot of hope that I will be better for the reading. If it's too smart my head will explode, but that might not be so bad. There are worse things than a romantic woman reading Greek philosophy.

Like a romantic woman reading American science fiction.

#2 The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury


Ray Bradbury lived in Long Beach, or something. Okay, what I actually do know is that he came to the final day or days of Long Beach's long-suffering used book store Acres of Books.








I have never read Fahrenheit 451, or Something Wicked This Way Comes, but I have been interested in Ray Bradbury, and have a growing interest in science fiction. It might sound silly, actually, it's going to sound silly, but recently I watched a few Twillight Zones in a row, and I thought, you know what, I'm into this. I know what you're thinking, but Brooke, your story of interest in science fiction is so original and riveting, how could you even think of fighting your curiosity? I couldn't my friends, I couldn't. I especially love the idea that humans came to Earth from somewhere else. I suppose there is an echo of that idea in the story of humans who go to Mars. Either way, I needed an intro to this Long Beach loving, Acres of Books loving, Mars loving white dude.

#3 Confessions, by Saint Augustine



I have been reading the work of a few saints lately, like the works of St. John of the Cross, and St. Theresa of Avila. St. Augustine seems like a logical choice. What is very intriguing to me is St. Augustine's interpretation of the Genesis of the Hebrew Bible. I used to shy away from anything Saint-related, mostly because I get a very serious dread of religious war mongering, whether against a nation, people, or individual. The persecutions of the Inquisition haunt my dreams, and I think of Goya and his etchings, or Dante's inferno, and how so many so-called holy members of the Catholic church were very okay with torturing and such. But then I discovered works by Saints that were about faith, and about the personal search for the divine. I like those ones. I like personal struggle.

#4 The Big Red Book, by Rumi



I love Rumi because he loves the divine within. Reading his poetry is like taking off a heavy pack and laughing like a child. Each time that I ache for a lost love, or an old friend, I remember Rumi, and how his poetry teaches that this is yearning for the divine within. And how loves and friends can embody divine love. I love that his poetry is simple, and easy, and reads like it's plucked from the air, and descends in words that fall like swirls of ether.






#5 Monthly Notebook Diary/Planner 2012, by MOLESKINE

I need to know where my stuff is and when it is. But, I tend to like looking at a month in advance, so this little soft-sided book is perfect. I love MOLESKINE, of course, what English major doesn't. This one is good, and comes with tabs.

As I was leaving the bookstore, this cute little blond girl with freckles and a cute kid beanie and ugg boots and pigtails says, I go to such-and-such school and I am yadda-yadda-yadda, would you like your books wrapped? I smiled a big old smile and said thank you very much, but these are all for me.

Smells Like My Heart Feels

Scents are magical. Due to the olfactory senses that we possess with our three-dimensional body, we attach scent to memory, emotion, and idea. I can recognize the scent of my best friend in her clothes, the scent of my grandmother's house in a tablecloth; indeed, a memory tied to a scent can almost paralyze me if caught arbitrarily.

But scent doesn't have to work with memory in a strict, directly experiential sense. I have two people in my life whose signature or favorite perfumes always represent them, even if I didn't often smell them on their skin, or in intimate situations. The association is still strong.

I have never been one to have a signature scent, although for several years I wore Theirry Mugeler's Angel perfume. I wore it out, I think. Over time I just couldn't smell it the way I wanted to anymore. Several people tell me that that scent reminds them of me, but I can't smell it anymore. I wonder if certain perfumes change their recipe, or can't get the same ingredients over time, or something else scientific I can't imagine. My tastes might have simply changed. It is a bit sweet for me nowadays.

For the past few years true commitment to a single scent has eluded me. I want to smell something so incredible that I pledge allegiance to it forever, but it is difficult to find that one fragrance. I would love it even more if that scent was already classic and respected, like Chanel No. 5 or Eau de Joy. But these perfumes are too strong for me, and they remind me that there might have been a time when bodies were not as bleached as they are today; you know, like perhaps there were more organic smells to compete with when the perfume was originally invented. I don't really know. I will smell something that I think I enjoy, then I wear it and get a headache, or get nauseous after a few minutes.

A perfumer that I have grown attached to is Jo Malone. Out of London, Jo Malone's line boasts several single-note fragrances that can be layered and interchanged to make new scents. While most perfumes must have bottom, heart, and top notes all in one bottle, Jo Malone's line lets you create these layers from a variety of notes. My problem is that I often only like lighter notes. I am in love with Nectarine Blossom, and Orange Blossom. Recently I have expanded to Mint and Jasmine Blossom, which I like because it smells almost exactly like a gin and tonic with lime. They also recently came out with a line that smelled of various teas, and I was smitten.



Aren't they lovely?

Recently I stocked up on my usual assortment of Jo Malone, and Neiman Marcus gave me a lovely little rose bag filled with samples of new perfumes, from all different lines and designers. Out of the ten or so sampled I really liked this one, ORIENS, by Van Cleef and Arpel



It's a bit spicy for me, but I think I might have found my grown up perfume. It smells like a romantic hug, or a hug with an open heart, ready to experience anything. It smells like the way my heart feels at the symphony, or the way my heart feels when I read something magical. I suppose it could just be enough to say that it smells like how my heart feels when it is open and vulnerable and filled with light.

And that kind of statement underscores the reason why I think scent is magical. Our bodies that are so marvelous, these vehicles that get us there, and house this energy and ether, need scent to explain other experiences. I hope my time with ORIENS is magical, as I take it with me today to the coffee house and read and write.

Afterward:

I failed to mention that in some cases the desire to smell a certain way is influenced by the whims of a lover. So, I will also be testing out L'ESSANCE Balenciaga Paris.

Those Who Can't Do or Teach, Read

I find myself puzzled that after so many years of what felt like slaving away at college I am not wildly chomping at the bit to go to graduate school. At first, I was tired and overwhelmed at the thought of four to six more years. Now, I look at the cost, realize that I'm not in it for the career (although I may not mind a career in writing or teaching someday) and the cost is sufficient to waylay my desire for more education. I have to admit that for the most part I am in this for the learning, and not for the preparing for a job. However, should it become apparent someday that I need to have a career and need to amass an income, having such a background in literature and education would qualify me for a number of different things.

The thing is, I want to travel more than anything. So, there the money I can possibly save goes, to travel.

Still, can you imagine me, sitting around, growing stale, rotten? I still have a noodle hungry for words and ideas. I've set myself up rather nicely for pure, original idea making. That is, I have limited access to mind numbing television, have deactivated my Facebook account, and don't eat meat anymore. I have set the scene for reading. I have a great new coffee house which sits a refreshing two blocks away. It is time for some serious reading and writing. The kind I would do in graduate school -- well, maybe not the writing part. In graduate school I would have to write so many papers, and research ones at that. But I have faith that I might write a paper or two. Its early in this new reader stage of things. I have early, new venture hope.

My generous, beloved instructors have given me a reading list to satisfy the basics in literary theory and philosophy. Since I have already started Madwoman in the Attic, I will continue with it, as if it is required reading. After, I will move on to Focault. I have read a little teensy bit of Discipline and Punish, but I will buy and read the whole thing. I am actually very excited. To read and to write! These are my dreams.

Meanwhile, to continue reading and rereading Moby-Dick is enough literature for me.

Also, since I am off Facebook, I would like to add tabs to the top of my blog to share with you other lovely things that I love and am interested in, like travel, shopping, art, films, etc.

And, of course, I love you.

Half-Read Books: Whole Lessons

Recently I leant the book Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach, by Paulo Freire, to a friend who either currently or in the past taught elementary school. When I found out she was a teacher, I quickly remembered this book, one that I had been required to read in my senior year of college, for an education class I reluctantly took to fill a credit requirement. I had found it thrilling, heart pounding, and comforting. She returned it to me recently, delicately sealed in a plastic baggie, and commented that she didn't read the whole thing, but found it intellectual, stimulating, and effective in bringing up memories from her past experiences with her students, teaching them poetry, etc.

I smiled with some understanding and sadness that she didn't finish it, and that she found it intellectual. It is true that Freire's work is not easy to understand. There are also cultural differences between his teaching experiences with children and illiterate young adults and adults in South America, and teaching mostly American and Mexican-American children in Southern California. However, Freire always speaks in generalities, using terms and references that indicate his letters are meant for the world, meant for humankind in various states of government and organization. Even still, this book is a work of theory; this work is information meant to challenge and argue, to draw out ideas and examine them, even to mercilessly scrutinize ideas until new perspectives are identified. I realize that I smiled with sadness because I wanted to see a spark in her eyes, a light of new hope, or some intense, childlike energy. I wanted to share my love of this work with someone, especially a teacher.

She did enjoy what she had read. I suppose I was disappointed at the idea that she felt the intellectual nature of the book was too much for her. Yet, I understood. How many times did I read theory in college and feel like crying (fine, maybe I did cry a few times), feeling that I would never understand such concepts. I still feel this way when I read theory. I begin to sense an energy, a rush of anticipation at devouring new information or new ideas, and then it comes, the fear. The fear that I don't understand everything. The fear that I'm outside of the intellectual circle, and that even if I wasn't, what I have to offer the circle isn't good enough.

These fears used to be very real to me, but now, a couple of years after college, I am not so intimidated nor so afraid of ideas. However, I am still afraid of not being good enough for academia. I see how I am saddened by my friend's fear, by the ease with which she explained that she didn't read the whole book, because I see my own fears, the ease with which I say that I'm not planning on going to graduate school, that I haven't written anything on Moby-Dick in over a year, that I haven't read any theory in just as long.

Freire has a chapter in his book entitled "Don't Let the Fear of What is Difficult Paralyze You." Freire states, simply, and reassuringly, that

"[s]tudying is a demanding occupation, in the process of which we will encounter pain, pleasure, victory, defeat, doubt, and happiness. For this reason, studying require the development of rigorous discipline, which we must consciously forge in ourselves. No one can bestow or impose such discipline on someone else; the attempt implies a total lack of knowledge about the educator's role in the development of discipline. In any case, either we are the agents of this discipline, or it becomes a mere appendage to ourselves. Either we adhere to study with delight or accept it as necessity and pleasure, or it becomes a mere burden and, as such, will be abandoned at the first crossroads.

The more we accept this discipline, this more we strengthen our ability to overcome threats to it and thus to our ability to study effectively."

He goes on to exhort his readers to never "stop at the at the level of emotions, of intuitions," when reading a text. I feel my heart blossom in the freedom of his exhortation. Does this mean that I am free? Free to love books, not because they are great, or classics, or literature, or funny, or important, but because I love words and stories? I am consistently afraid that I am not allowed to love literature. I am tired of being paralyzed by fear. I am tired of being panicked that my love of literature makes any of my scientific observations more vulnerable to attack and dismissal. I am tired of thinking that my love of literature could be taken from me as it is inevitably revealed that my ideas are not important, relevant, or high enough for others to enjoy.

All of this insecurity has troubled me since the day I walked into my first English class, in Fullerton, at 23. I carry a terrible shame about going to college with an eighth grade education. I battled this shame with bravado, superior attitudes, insistence that my reading list outranked most college graduates in terms of greatness and literature. I hid this gnawing rat of shame that my intelligence is and always will be linked to those dark years of "teenage wasteland." It loomed constantly over my experiences in college, when every B was a travesty, when I would have miscommunications and struggles with instructors or texts. And even as I was walking in procession during my university commencement, I couldn't be happy with any of the recognition without telling myself, yes, I suppose it's pretty good for the girl who left school at 13.

I have been given the opportunity to see, through the sad and dismissive eyes of my friend, who sealed this book of generous encouragement in sanitary plastic, my own abandonment of education, largely due to the shame I willingly carry about my upbringing and childhood experience. This is what hit home for me. Usually, I would judge her as not courageous enough to finish the work, or lazy, but now, with a clear mind I see myself. I see how I have mostly given up on graduate school.

But maybe all is not lost. Before putting the book away, back with its comrades in theory, in my own personal theory section in my library, I quickly read the introduction, which moved me to tears, and inspired me to write this post. Written by Joe L. Kincheloe, esteemed professor, author, and rigorous critic of pedagogue, the introduction speaks about an experience Kincheloe had as an undergraduate in which a professor claimed that a beloved researched paper Kincheloe has slaved over was not original work, and without any proof stated it must be plagiarized. The professor blasted him with: "I know that someone like you is not capable of such work." Kincheloe explains, "In retrospect I think he was referring to my Appalachian markers: the Tennessee mountain accent, cheap clothes, the nontraditional scholarly persona." And yet, what Kincheloe did next hit me right in the heart. He tells, "I walked over to the library and returned to the works...the ideas soothed my agitated mind like an opiate." Returning to the work has always been a saving grace for me. Even fighting myself, fighting my own voice that would oppress me and have believe the lie that there is no place for a 32 year-old female adult-child with an eighth-grade education in university academia, I have always returned to the work. I return to Melville, to Faulkner, to Jonathan Culler, to Derrida, to Freud, to Kirkengard, to Gilbert and Gubar.

Perhaps it's time to get the thirteen year-old dropout alcoholic off my back, and return to the work.

New Bunk on Dick

Sometimes I wonder when Melville wrote the first chapter on Moby-Dick. Did he begin with it? Did he revise it many times?

There are so many little chapters that have beginnings which inform you that this tale is off the cuff; there are things like chapters with paragraphs that begin with lines like, this is a good a time as any to tell you about whale digestion, etc. The story is so electric and alive that it is as if the encyclopedic information, the biological asides, the historical interjections are all fighting for recognition. Yet, not all asides and background information are arranged equally.

There are thirteen short consecutive chapters in which the majority of the text adheres to Ishmael's narrative, then chapter fourteen decides that the narrative has grown stale, and some historical backstory is due

Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it.

Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled by the red-men.

Moby-Dick reads like an attempt to synthesize all knowledge about whaling as an American enterprise, formal knowledge, and then subvert this knowledge with informal organization and presentation. As recently as this year a respected Harvard academic was still asking, what constitutes literature? And the usual is advertising, movie scripts, or comic books literature arguments ensued. Melville, with Moby-Dick, integrates all forms of writing into Moby-Dick, even including dream imagery and symbolism, news paper headlines, native American oral tradition, advertising, his contemporaries' fiction, paintings, poetry, and drama. Before the great debate over reading Shakespearian drama as literature, Melville insists that dramatic format be included as part of the text in Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick is almost beyond revolutionary as a novel. The narrator is also so struck by the novel itself, as the story digresses to emphasize extremes that you might have overlooked, or not been smart enough to appreciate. In chapter 65 the narrator "fishes" you directly

That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and philosophy of it.

Is this and the chapter that ensues the stuff of an adventure novel? Or is it the desperate synthesis of a crazed philosopher, made mad by the compounding crimes of a consumer-mad capitalist country? "The Whale as a Dish" is amazing. What is the tone of the text? Consuming animals is the stuff of Moby-Dick. Hunting whales, real whales, is what the story is about, from all angles. And yet, to look at all angles at the same time is more than our three-dimensional perspective can really absorb. It is like a story translated from the higher dimensions.

The more I read the novel, the further it travels from my grasp. I find it more and more along the lines of the work of Walt Whitman, who wrote to fuse romance and science, sexuality and philosophy. I used to find Moby-Dick saturated with dread, and I still believe that there is a vast amount of existentialist nausea that overpowers the different narrators as they try to reconcile knowledge and experience, the past and the present and the unknown, but now I'm starting to really cave to the idea that this is Melville's Odyssey, his allegory of sexuality and psychology, his to be or not to be, with no real answer, and no homecoming.

Sometimes I see such a loathing in Melville's work, such a terrifying cynicism that I translate to mean that he feels America is doomed -- orphaned and generating more momentum than it can control.

No Help At All

I recently decided to read the novel The Help for a ladies' book club I infrequent. I found the novel useless, demeaning to black people, the civil rights movement, and dangerously uplifting and soothing concerning deadly serious social issues of black people in the south in the 1960s. The novel perpetrates the myth of the mammy, and strips the black community of the dignity it reserves for its white villains and heroes.

Thankfully, the Association of Black Women Historians has written an open letter to the fans of The Help, which I will quote here:

An Open Statement to the Fans of The Help:

On behalf of the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), this statement provides historical context to address widespread stereotyping presented in both the film and novel versionofTheHelp.

The book has sold over three million copies,and heavy promotion of the movie will ensure its success at the box office. Despite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice, The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers. We are specifically concerned about the representations of black life and the lack of attention given to sexual harassment and civil rights activism.

During the 1960s, the era covered in The Help, legal segregation and economic inequalities limited black women's employment opportunities. Up to 90 per cent of working black women in the South labored as domestic servants in white homes. The Help’s representation of these women is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy—a mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by slavery or segregation, to serve white families. Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites, the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. The popularity of this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.

Both versions of The Help also misrepresent African American speech and culture. Set in the South, the appropriate regional accent gives way to a child-like, over-exaggerated “black” dialect. In the film, for example, the primary character, Aibileen, reassures a young white child that, “You is smat, you is kind, you is important.” In the book, black women refer to the Lord as the “Law,” an irreverent depiction of black vernacular. For centuries, black women and men have drawn strength from their community institutions. The black family, in particular provided support and the validation of personhood necessary to stand against adversity. We do not recognize the black community described in The Help where most of the black male characters are depicted as drunkards, abusive, or absent. Such distorted images are misleading and do not represent the historical realities of black masculinity and manhood.

Furthermore, African American domestic workers often suffered sexual harassment as well as physical and verbal abuse in the homes of white employers. For example, a recently discovered letter written by Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks indicates that she, like many black domestic workers, lived under the threat and sometimes reality of sexual assault. The film, on the other hand, makes light of black women’s fears and vulnerabilities turning them into moments of comic relief.

Similarly, the film is woefully silent on the rich and vibrant history of black Civil Rights activists in Mississippi. Granted, the assassination of Medgar Evers, the first Mississippi based field secretary of the NAACP, gets some attention. However, Evers’ assassination sends Jackson’s black community frantically scurrying into the streets in utter chaos and disorganized confusion—a far cry from the courage demonstrated by the black men and women who continued his fight. Portraying the most dangerous racists in 1960s Mississippi as a group of attractive, well dressed, society women, while ignoring the reign of terror perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council, limits racial injustice to individual acts of meanness.
We respect the stellar performances of the African American actresses in this film. Indeed, this statement is in no way a criticism of their talent. It is, however, an attempt to provide context for this popular rendition of black life in the Jim Crow South. In the end, The Help is not a story about the millions of hardworking and dignified black women who labored in white homes to support their families and communities. Rather, it is the coming-of-age story of a white protagonist, who uses myths about the lives of black women to make sense of her own. The Association of Black Women Historians finds it unacceptable for either this book or this film to strip black women’s lives of historical accuracy for the sake of entertainment.

Ida E. Jones is National Director of ABWH and Assistant Curator at Howard University. Daina Ramey Berry, Tiffany M. Gill, and Kali Nicole Gross are Lifetime Members of ABWH and Associate Professors at the University of Texas at Austin. Janice Sumler-Edmond is a Lifetime Member of ABWH and is a Professor at Huston-Tillotson University.

Word Count: 766

Suggested Reading:
Fiction: Like one of the Family: Conversations from A Domestic’s Life, Alice Childress The Book of the Night Women by Marlon James Blanche on the Lam by Barbara Neeley The Street by Ann Petry A Million Nightingales by Susan Straight

Non-Fiction: Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household by Thavolia Glymph To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors by Tera Hunter Labor of Love Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present by Jacqueline Jones Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration by Elizabeth Clark-Lewis Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody

Any questions, comments, or interview requests can be sent to:
ABWHTheHelp@gmail.com

I am so thankful for this letter.

Sandra and Susan: Monster Vaginas and Moby-Dick's Teeth

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.