For various stupid and convoluted reasons, I once had to get an official name change so that my ID and passport would match. While at the registry, I asked if it would be a problem to add a new middle name. “Middle names don’t matter,” I was told.
I briefly thought about adding all of my sisters’ names as my middle names, in proper weird sibling prank fashion. I also thought about “Jam”, “Danger”, and “Kanye”. When I reached for the form, though, the right name came easily, without me having to think, as if it were already mine — a name that had been firmly stamped on me two years before.
When I was sixteen, my family moved 450 miles from Adelaide to Melbourne, and I read Moby-Dick. I wanted a high school experience resembling one in an indie movie (think Petra Collins’s photographs or Brick starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt). I was miserable, so I wanted misery to be part of it — it will come as no surprise that The Virgin Suicides and its dewy-dawn light had a major role in my preferred teenaged aesthetics — but I also wanted there to be friends, conversations late at night, underage drinking, a car or two, waking up hungover in the football field. Misery in high school is fine if you cast it in this nostalgic light, already a sweetly tinged memory as it happens. I suppose I wanted to be a teen dirtbag — I want, even in hindsight, to be able to tell those stories about being sixteen and wild.
What I got, and have, was Melville.
Herman Melville doesn’t bestow a nostalgic teen girlhood on anyone, especially not anyone reading him alone in recesses and lunches, in libraries, at mealtimes. Melville is not interested in women, and especially not interested in teenaged girls, and many therefore presume that teenaged girls should not be interested in Melville. He is a very clearly male writer, the Hemingway of the 19th century, with his booze and ships and sport and racism. He is interested in masculinity.
And yet: aged sixteen, I had never before read anyone who understood the particular kind of fury I felt — a fury that felt like being a teenaged girl, and being young and queer, and being hated. There was something in everyone in that book that I loved and recognised: Ishmael’s transformation — his neediness and then “cool collected dive at death”; Queequeg’s skill; Starbuck’s terror.
And in Ahab, I found the kind of madness — almost completely forged of anger and bitterness — that I understood instinctively. Ahab is the least interesting character of Moby-Dick, but his deranged temper and violence subsumes the book, touches everything in it. His obsession with his own unhappiness and his own moment of being wronged felt, to me, uniquely comprehensible and familiar. I was sixteen: I held grudges.
It helps that Ahab’s fury is not anchored to his character alone. It pervades the novel. The sheer savagery of his feeling wasn’t just relatable; the first time I read it, eight hours curled up tight in a car with a box lid flapping on my head, I felt Melville could have written it about me. Moby-Dick’s unhappiness, Ahab’s madness, is a particular kind of unhappiness and madness that made sense to me as a teenager: it is fixated and then flighty, moody and self-conscious. It’s also very, very funny. Often it’s all of this at once:
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 I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
For me, Melville was a revelation. I was smart enough to know that “nobody understands me” was a teenaged cliche, and lonely enough to feel the full depths of it. And then I met Melville, and he already knew me inside and out and sympathised: badly, and with frequent misogyny, and in a way that wasn’t at all comforting — except in the way that it is always comforting to meet someone who is made of the same stuff as you. Melville knew what it was like to be lonely. Melville knew the kind of sadness I knew: something boring and slow and utterly lacking in solutions or self-care.
I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock’s run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.
The despair in Moby-Dick is interpreted as adult despair — more than that, as adult male despair. But anyone who has weathered five years of a miserable high school experience, with all the confusion of sexuality and friendships (often tied together), will be able to see themselves in Moby-Dick. The book is about creating close ties — the romance between Ishmael and Queequeg, the kindness they show to one another — and then watching them drift. It’s about bodies, and the failures and the disorder of bodies. It’s about as many people as you can imagine in very close quarters, not trusting each other.
And Ahab’s madness was not mad at all, at least as seen through my calmly desperate teenage-self’s eyes, but instead the coolest kind of logic: If you are that sure you’re missing something, why not go out to get it back? Why not go out to kill a whale?
When I first read Moby-Dick, I didn’t know some of the things I know now, the reasons that keep me over-identifying with him year after year. In a way it didn’t matter — I felt them all the same — but it was rewarding to have the secrets come out as I continued to study Melville in university.
Most particularly, I didn’t know about his sexuality, which has been debated and wrestled with over decades, but which probably amounts to him being gay, and tormented over it. Melville wrote Moby-Dick in hopeless, unrequited love with Nathaniel Hawthorne, in a way that is painful to read. He wrote long letters to his friend that basically follow the lines of: I was reading Plato!! You know how he talks about how people were separated from their soul mates and are doomed to wander the earth forever, incomplete until they find the other? Isn’t it super great that we found each other! The compass in your heart is a divine one and mine swings to you!! Lots and lots and lots of love, Herman, while Hawthorne wrote back staid monogamous heterosexual tracts about the hills.
Melville’s queerness influenced most of his work in a way that I didn’t recognise when I first read it, except perhaps on some basic, instinctive level — in the way that I was also gay and lonely and most likely in unrequited love again. James Creech wrote about this in his reading of Melville’s Pierre in Closet Writing/Gay Reading, drawing attention to the fact that many critics have managed to somehow ignore the overt homosexuality of much of Melville’s work:
One has to fall back on a caveat like “some of us” because, indeed, some readers might not see the wink or share in the secret awareness that it both constitutes and acknowledges. If they do not, the text may do nothing to inform them. On the contrary, it is because there are readers like them that the text resorts to the camp wink in the first place. It is much like cruising. If the object of interest does not recognise that he is an object of interest, then he is, in fact, uninteresting.
I like Creech’s idea of Melville’s wink. But for me it was something even sweeter and sadder: reading Moby-Dick and feeling Melville look back at me and nod in acknowledgment. It was similar to the way I felt about the furious unhappiness I read of in Moby-Dick. Sexuality in Melville’s work is an uncomfortable experience, constantly worried over.
The novel was mine. It made more sense to me than any well-meant high school sex ed class, more than any romance novel I furtively read when my parents weren’t looking. Sex is never explicitly mentioned in Moby-Dick, but it’s there all the time, to be sniggered over or — more frequently — hurriedly backed away from. Yes, I thought when I was sixteen. That sounds about right. And the fantasies that Melville nurtured were the same ones I wrote about in a journal where I imagined having a girlfriend who would rub my stomach when I had period cramps — transgressive in their queer domesticity:
Be it said, that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them. For now I liked nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full of such serene household joy then.
Sometimes I still wish I’d had that high school experience that so many people make stories from, something flawed and brilliant at once, something filled with dramatic sadness involving a boy. But I don’t have it. Instead I have Melville, and Moby-Dick, which is enough. And I have my name.
My middle name is a little embarrassing now. Sometimes I pretend I was tipsy when I chose it, or roll my eyes at my own teenage melodrama. Mostly, though, I enjoy filling in my name on forms — Mikaella Melville — and tipping my hat to my old friend.
Illustration by Stephanie Monohan.
I have tried to read that book repeatedly since my teens but have been unable to finish it because I hate it so much. I have made it through Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake and even Don Quijote in Spanish, but I give up on Moby-Dick forever.
It took me ages to get to into it, and I definitely got frustrated at the pace and the chapters on whale skeletons and depictions of whales throughout history, and why whales aren’t mammals because they are under the sea, but it builds and builds and the last few chapters are really intense and fast paced and it really affected me and I loved it.
Plus, there’s a section about the use of a whale’s penis skin that is so well worded that it passed untouched through the censors at the time.
Oh! If you can’t quite get into it but want to try (again) and are into audio books at all..this is an amazing series where the whole book is read aloud, each chapter by a different notable person (Chapter 1: Tilda Swinton! Chapter 105: Sir David Attenborough!) It is wonderful in every way. http://www.mobydickbigread.com/
Exquisite. Thanks for this… BTW spider plant is my spirit vegetable. 🙂
There are between 5 and 7 copies of Moby Dick in my house right now. Those first few paragraphs…I don’t know why more teenagers don’t identify with it! And I love your name choice. If I were you I’d use my full name on everything.
I remembering reading that first page, needing to take a moment, and rereading it three more times. I connected to it so strongly, and I didn’t read Moby Dick until I was 30.
I never read any Moby Dick (and never heard anything about it other than that it was long and boring) until the first few paragraphs appeared as a practice AP English prompt, and I was just blown over.
Yes, please, let’s all get to the sea as soon as we can.
Loved this, and love the book.
Recently learned about Nakahama Manjirō, one of the first Japanese people to visit the United States back in the 1800s, after being shipwrecked and rescued by an American whaling ship. After returning to Japan, he produced an illustrated manuscript about his travels.
http://www.hakaimagazine.com/article-short/manjir…
What. Bless.
I did a nineteenth-century American literature module at university. I expected to love The Scarlet Letter and hate Moby Dick, but it was completely the other way around (Hawthorne was nowhere near worthy of Melville.) I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t been scared of it when I was the kind of teenager you describe, reading in my break time instead of talking to friends. I might have hated reading it, I might have loved it. I never realised it before but you’re completely right, the Pequod is in many ways a floating secondary school. Now I’m picturing Ahab as the laddish type everyone knows is an asshole but they can’t help but listen to his crazy rants about how he’s just realised how unfair life is and they all want him at their party.
This resonated with me so much, even as someone who has never read Moby Dick (I think I might give it a try, now!) Queer stories where angry is present and unabashed and aware of its own complexity (including its absurdity) are so important to me and something I crave– they’re in some ways more identifiable and more validating to me than love stories. In a lot of ways, I think, love stories are something we pine for (like your LOVELY descriptions of domesticity); when I’m feeling cynical about obtaining such a thing for myself, I need reassurance that /other people feel the same way/.
This is great, and I loved it, and I’m even more excited to one day attend the annual Moby Dick readthrough in New Bedford. My friends & I were talking about going this January, but we’ll see.
And this piece right here has made me determined to sit down and read Moby-Dick as soon as I can. I missed it somehow in middle and high school, but now I’m almost glad; now I can go in with my eyes open, knowing what to tune out and what to tune to.
Same here!
I tried reading it in 8th grade. How hard could it be? I thought — I was a precocious child — and I stuck with it until the chapter that pretty much reads like an encyclopedia of whales. Then I threw up my arms and declared Melville totally unreadable, ick, ugh, no way, never again. In 10th grade I read The Scarlet Letter and in 11th a few short stories by Hawthorne for school. I liked most of the lit we read in high school (where my deep and abiding love of Shakespeare began), but Hawthorne never did it for me and I have refused to pick up Moby Dick again.
This article makes me want to give Melville another chance. What a lovely discussion about a book and author that usually don’t get this kind of love! It reminds me of how I feel about Dickens. (I was pretty anti-American, lit-wise, in high school, I now realize.) Maybe — hah, maybe? — 8th Grade Me was a bit too hard on poor Melville. I had no idea about his sexuality, but that really puts Moby Dick in a whole new perspective. If he can inspire you like this, I think he deserves another chance from me 🙂
Thank you, though, for confirming my opinion on the overrated blah-ness of Hawthorne.
YES, 100 YESES FOR YOU MELVILLE. God, reading Moby-Dick in my early teens took MONTHS and at times I hated Melville (I remember being on a plane and getting to the chapter about all the different types of rope and wishing desperately that there were some way I could roll the window down and chuck the book right out) but it was so worth it.
I feel like if you met an alien who didn’t know what it was like to be human and was like “What is being human, what can I read to learn about it, tell me one book,” I’d be like well OK not ONE book I can’t do one but read Moby-Dick and Middlemarch and if you do that carefully and come back and tell me you don’t pretty much have the gist, I will tell you that you are incorrect.
What a wonderful essay with a beautiful illustration.
I have to admit, I expected the reveal of your chosen middle name to be Ishmael!
And how uncanny, I just saw the Moby Dick opera (which i highly recommend, though sadly they excluded the squeeze of the hand chapter) and have been obsessing over this strange book again, in all its bizarre, occasionally-fumbling, often-offensive ponderous glory. The Toast always manages to know what we want before we want it!
Major props to teenage you for being able to get through it!
And oh my god reading the letters between Melville and Hawthorne is kind of heartbreaking and secondhand embarrassing at the same time. Too empathetic…
This was great, I relate so hard and now I want to read Moby Dick
I also love Moby Dick! I was so sad in college when for junior seminar the Moby Dick course was full and I was sentenced to a whole semester of various interpretations of the story of the Fall. (Spoiler: he gives in to temptation.)
If you like whale stories may I recommend In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, which I think someone here recommended and is a page-turner
The movie version of Whaleship Essex (well, In the Heart of the Sea) is coming out in December! I’m very excited.
Hm. I’m not sure I can watch some of that on-screen. Those poor tortoises were bad enough on paper … among other things.
I didn’t know a bunch of this background about Melville (despite reading MD AND Hawthorne in class at a rather queer college). IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW.
Lovely piece!
Melville’s unrequited crush on Hawthorne was practically visible from space. He wrote a book review of Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse in which he says, among other things, that Hawthorne “expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.” And this was before he even met Hawthorne. (Aww, Melville, you deserved someone who loved you back!)
This is a great essay and I will now move _Moby-Dick_ higher on my to-read list.
This is now one of my favorite accounts of the experience of reading a great book (as distinct from a review/analysis/what-have-you of a great book).
Also-
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=afWLwPZZv2w
“Melville is not interested in women, and especially not interested in teenaged girls, and many therefore presume that teenaged girls should not be interested in Melville.”
“And then I met Melville, and he already knew me inside and out and sympathised: badly, and with frequent misogyny, and in a way that wasn’t at all comforting — except in the way that it is always comforting to meet someone who is made of the same stuff as you.”
This is just so – right, and so perfectly put. This is pretty much exactly the way I feel about Rudyard Kipling, and you’ve just articulated a feeling I’ve always had a really hard time explaining and justifying. It’s so hard to say, “Yes, Kipling was a Victorian, and he was conservative, and he thought imperialism was on the whole a good thing, and I’m a 21st-century liberal Jewish woman, but when I want to read someone who knows exactly what it’s like to be me, Kipling is who I go to.”
I have a comment for the editors that I hope isn’t out of line. Of all the articles on the Toast yesterday, this was the last one I opened, and I almost didn’t open it at all. I read the paragraph that appeared on the home page, assuming it was the start of the essay, and it didn’t grab me, and I went on to something else. When I opened the essay and read the actual intro, I was hooked and read all the way to the end and loved it. It’s not that I don’t like the paragraph that appeared on the main page. I like it a lot, in context. But for me at least, it didn’t do the job of an intro paragraph, and the actual intro would have worked much better.
I am late, but this is tremendous.
I am a Moby Dick fanatic so it might color my impressions, but I am convinced that one can not go more than a week or two without hearing/reading/seeing a reference to MD in popular culture today. Collectively, we are obsessed with MD, even the majority who have not read it, which is fitting because, duh, it is a record of obsession among so many other things.
I loved this piece – it gets at how much there is to love in Melville and how it reveals more and more the closer you look. My best friend had read Moby Dick in college, and it was her favorite book. She convinced me to read it after some resistance. Since then, I return to Moby Dick as Ishmael returns to the sea.
About the rope chapter, the history of fishes, the whiteness of the whale,* that is, the “boring” chapters, think about them this way: life is often very boring. Boredom is no small part of the depth and breadth of experience Melville captures in Moby Dick. I think so, anyway.
* this one is damn near straight philosophy regarding 18th century debates about secondary qualities. Shrug.
I always wonder how critics and teachers miss the gay in Melville. I mean, Ishmael/Queequeg couldn’t be more obvious. They are *married*. And I’m pretty sure Starbuck has a hopeless crush on Ahab, too.
And then there is Billy Budd where teachers make up some bullshit about good and evil and Vere being Pontius Pilate and blah blah allegory, instead of just saying: look, kids, it’s very simple: Claggart and Vere are so deep in the closet they have reached Narnia. They can’t deal with it so Billy must die.