Transformation and Mixture in Moby-Dick

Classroom discussions of Moby-Dick often result in a heightened awareness of Melville’s depictions of duality in nature; for example, the contrasting sky and sea respectively represent heaven and hell and the foul-smelling whale in Chapter 92 produces a fragrant and valuable substance called ambergris. But interpreting Melville’s Moby-Dick only as an exercise in duality limits the scope of this complex novel. Melville’s contemporary, Margaret Fuller, also seems aware of the confining notion of duality and states in Woman in the Nineteenth Century:

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens into solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman…Nature provides exceptions to every rule (Fuller 293-4).

Fuller explains that duality is a limiting and artificial concept, especially when used to describe nature. Transformation and mixture are concepts that more accurately characterize both nature and the writings of Fuller and Melville. Multiple perspectives are ideal for these authors, as is evident in Melville’s multifaceted Ishmael. At the end of the novel only Ishmael survives because he is able to view life and nature in an all-encompassing fashion.

Melville is preoccupied with coffins in this novel, exploring the connection that this object has to nature -- an object that is made from nature (wood) and holds another part of nature (a body) after a natural progression has taken place (death). Melville seems fascinated by this odd and frequent custom of humankind of burying bodies inside a wooden box. Even seamen who remain unattached to land, such as Queequeg, desire such a ‘burial’ at sea. This coffin motif begins within the first few lines of Chapter 1, "Loomings," when Ishmael thinks of funerals:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral procession I meet… (Melville 3).

This statement in the beginning of the novel introduces the reader to the coffin imagery that Melville uses throughout Moby-Dick and serves as the metaphor for transformative mixture throughout this paper.

In Chapter 110, "Queequeg in his Coffin," Chapter 126, "The Life-Buoy," and the Epilogue, Melville explores many different and interesting representations of Queequeg’s coffin. Queequeg’s coffin cannot be defined only in terms of duality – it is not simply just a coffin and a life-buoy.