A Man's Soul and a Fish's Scale: Sex, Size and Spirit in Moby Dick

Part sea-faring yarn, part auto-biography, part natural biology, Melville's longest novel defies easy attempts to negotiate its content. Loved and hated almost from the first, Moby Dick has become, in latter centuries, most primarily considered from two perspectives: The Religious Quest and the Man's Quest (concerning masculinity and its discontents). In the following article, I suggest another way into this complicated narrative. Susan Stewart's theory of scale in On Longing (1993) provides a cross-sectional view of the traditional binaries in Moby Dick. Beginning not with gender, but with size, we may "understand the book," as Melville's comment to Hawthorne suggests, without attempting to narrow its wild scope. Gender boundaries are challenged in Moby Dick through an emphasis on the physical and the spiritual quest, but the novel draws upon both gender representations in an attempt to define the soul/self against the immense Unknown. Hebraic and pantheistic, male and female, contradictory and inclusive, the novel (much like its author) contains "divine magnanimities"—the soul of man on an enormous scale.