Melville carefully cues his readers to allegory, when it
appears in his text: “Call me
Ishmael.” Note also the person committed to outfitting the ship:
“Never did any woman better deserve
her name, which was Charity—Aunt Charity, as everybody called her. And like a
sister of charity did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and
thither, ready to turn her hand and heart to anything that promised to yield
safety, comfort, and consolation to all on board…”
Aunt Charity is strongly allegorical, for all live by
Charity—every soul on the Pequod (which
is the world) entrusts his body’s future welfare to Charity. We are born
helpless. Indeed, notions of infancy pervade these chapters, through chapter
22, “Merry Christmas,” which also invokes a helpless babe. Ishmael, during this
time, occupies his mind persistently with hapless foreboding. Melville swaddles
his novel’s last sight of land in vulnerability.
Because of this, Melville’s embodies his vision of human welfare
and glory in Charity. Yet this character fades quickly from our memory as we
read the text. Why does she so diminish? Once out to sea, there are no more stays
on Captain Ahab—Charity being a last shelter from his maniacal independence. “Surely
all this is not without meaning!”
Moby-Dick, a strictly
American novel, focuses from this point forward on independence. Despite this
cultural identity, however, the story maintains its universality, finding in
America a unique example through which to disclose humanity’s wayward nature, a
truth at least as old as another nation with which this book is concerned:
“’Sweet fields beyond the swelling
flood,
Stand dressed in living green.
So to the Jews old Canaan stood,
While Jordan rolled between.’
Never did those sweet words sound
more sweetly to me than then. Spite of this frigid winter night in the
boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there was yet, it
then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads and glades so
eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring, untrodden, unwilted,
remains at midsummer.”
Ishmael, significantly, speaks these lines—the not-Isaac; by
definition not Israel. This is
America too, wayward in its independence yet vulnerable in its infancy. Melville
will clarify this contradictory state of humanity in the following chapter. For
now, little more needs to be said:
“…of all
ships, whaling vessels are the most exposed to accidents of all kinds.”
Born in vulnerability and brought up by Charity (an aunt,
not a mother), what cause do we have to be independent? Yet liberty obsesses
the human mind. The central concern of the novel becomes clear. Melville
writes: “…we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate
into the lone Atlantic.” So the voyage starts—into the ocean deep, into deeply
human Truth.
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