The Problem Of Democracy In Harold Kaplan's Moby Dick

Harold Kaplan states “that democracy and its moral dilemmas, particularly the problem of human equality, obsessed Melville at the time he was writing Moby-Dick. His mood was almost defiant on the subject…” (164). Melville’s views on the subject were shared by Nathaniel Hawthorne and in a letter to Hawthorne, he elaborates on his “ruthless democracy” in Moby-Dick – “It is but natural to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a thief in jail is as honourable a personage as Gen. George Washington. This is ludicrous. But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun” (Melville as quoted in Kaplan 164). In the novel such egotistic claims to Truth, on which the entire edifice of the colonial worldview was erected, as professed by the hubristic white …show more content…

It is fair to say that Ahab’s hatred of the whale reads like an inverted and poisoned pantheism” (Kaplan 170). Ahab sees nature as antagonistic, something to be conquered and defeated, as malicious and deliberately malevolent. He attempts to reinstate the Humanist conception of Man as the Supreme Being, the unquestionable center of the universe and from such a standpoint his dismemberment by Moby Dick is seen as an affront to this supremacy of Man as the lord of the universe, particularly of Nature. Ahab’s anthropocentric ideology dictates the necessity of categorically fixing as inferior this creature which belongs to a lower order of creation, Nature, and thereby rightfully dominating it. This distorted lens for ordering the world masquerades as a justification for his desire to annihilate this monstrous anomaly of Nature as retribution for its arrogant display of power. He is unable to view the loss of his leg as a defensive act by a “dumb brute” (Melville 175) as Starbuck calls the whale but rather as a deliberate, offensive attack on his character and a severance of a part of his identity. His monomanic hunt for the whale is an attempt to restore the scales of power in favour of Man; he has suffered a humiliation at the heroic level and will stop short of nothing but the death of the Leviathan. But the courage or dignity of American heroism taken to an extreme results in madness and Ahab as the ‘fallen angel from grace’ is willing to defy God himself – “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me…Who’s over me?” (Melville 176). However, ironically, his fetishistic pursuit of the whale locates and fixes him inversely as a slave to Nature. In his mad obsession Ahab has already regressed from the type of ‘heroic’ Mankind at the brink of