The Common Continent of Men": Visualizing Race in Moby-Dick

symbols. Old Fleece Preaching to the Sharks (1985-86) by Walter Martin and the several versions of The Whiteness of the Whale (1986-87) by Tim Rollins + K.O.S. connect Moby-Dick to a range of questions related to race Particular works in Frank Stella’s that Moby-Dick may be understood as an examination not only of the dangers of democracy’s transformation into despotism, but also of its potential for creating a society where diverse individuals respect and care for one another. I t is apparent that Melville’s opening strategy in Moby-Dick is to convince his readers of the possibilities of fulfilling such a vision through his representation of the developing friendship between Ishmael, his naive Yankee narrator, and Queequeg, the mature Polynesian harpooner. Moby-Dick’s readers are encouraged to grow with Ishmael, who, through ignorance and fear, at first perceives the tattooed Queequeg as “the devil himself” (22), but who soon comes to “see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them” (54). However, in his depiction of Fedallah, the Persian harpooner, and of the crew of Fedallah’s whaleboat, Melville himself lapses, associating them with 19th-century literary conventions of ghostly Gothic demonism and assigning them racial signifiers corresponding to 19th-century American fears of Asia and the Near East. Since the first illustrated editions of Moby-Dick a t the end of the 19th century, the Pequod’s multicultural crew and the relationship between Queequeg and Ishmael have been prominently featured. With few exceptions, these characters have been realistically represented.2 However, realism itself, as a mode of Moby-Dick series (1985-19971, which includes a monumental and provocative abstract piece for each of the novel’s chapters, often appear to focus on the racial discourse in the narrative. For detailed discussion of Stella’s works, see Robert K. Wallace’s Frank Sietta’s Moby-Dlck Senas: Words m d Shapes (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001); for detailed discussion of Ives, Martin, and Rollins + K 0 S. , see Elizabeth Schultz, Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century Amencan Art (Lawrence. UP of Kansas, 1995). For further discussion of the importance of these few abstract works, also see my essay, “Visualizing Race in lmages of Moby-Dick,” 3 1, Leviathan (2001): 31-60 19 ARTISTS AFTER MOBY-DICK “THE COMMON CONTINENT OF MEN”:VISUALIZING RACE IN MOBYDICK representation, comes into question when it accentuates or distorts racial or ethnic signifiers, such as skin color, hair, teeth or clothing, as often occurs in the depiction of Melville’s ethnic and racial characters. Literary criticism of Moby-Dick has consistently emphasized the hazards to Ahab, Ishmael, and the novel’s readers of perceiving the great white whale as an abstract other an incomprehensible and appalling evil identifiable primarily by its color; study of the visual interpretations of Moby-Dick% racial and ethnic characters likewise dramatically demonstrates the degradations to which these diverse human beings are reduced when perceived in similarly abstract terms savage and demonic identifiable primarily by their color. Although illustrators of Moby-Dick have consistently reinscribed dominant racist stereotypes rather than illuminating Melville’s passionate democratic vision, as a result of challenges in the 1960s and 1970s to America’s racism and of the increasing attention to the significance of ethnicity and multiculturalism in our national culture, artists and illustrators inspired by Melville’s novel have increasingly been drawn toward not only incorporating the lenses of race and ethnicity into a recognition of his characters’ complexities, but also seeing beyond such lenses to illuminate these characters as individual human beings. Spanning the years from 1896 through 2001 and focusing on the range of visual interpretations of Moby-Dick’s racial and ethnic characters, the Hofstra Museum’s ninth-floor exhibition reveals America’s anxiety regarding race as well as certain artists’ exaltation in the diversity of Melville’s racial characters. The exhibition is divided into two parts, with the display of illustrated editions of Moby-Dick published between 1896 and 1997 providing a historical context for a collection of five individual artworks, created between 1956 and 2001, each of which centers on the figure of Melville’s impressive Polynesian harpooner, Queequeg. In addition, six works by two non-American artists offer complementary and revelatory perspectives on problems Moby-Dick raises regarding the difficulties of perceiving our fellow human beings with clarity and consideration. Moby-Dick% first illustrators, A. Burnham Shute (1896) and I.W. Taber (1899; figure 6), both single out Queequeg as the primary subject in one of their four pictures, presenting him as an anomaly on the streets of New Bedford. Other early illustrators, such as Mead Schaeffer (1922; figure 7), Alfred Staten Conyers (1931) and Raymond Bishop (1933; figure 8) , in expanding the number of scenes in which he appears, go so far as to deny him his Polynesian attributes, associating him with African American racial signifiers and exoticizing him through bizarre costume or nudity. The immensely popular illustrated edition of Moby-Dick created by Rockwell Kent in 1930 reveals both the artist’s and his culture’s uncertainty regarding Melville’s racial and ethnic characters. This uncertainty is evident in his portraying them as naked noble savages, idealizing them on the one hand, and as sailors, simply engaged in a variety of shipboard tasks and thus altogether devoid of racial and ethnic traits, on the other. Two commercially successful illustrated editions of Moby-Dick, in quite different ways, have countered these stereotypical representations: Boardman Robinson’s (1943; figure 9) and Barry Moser’s (1981; figure 10). Robinson explicitly selects a number of scenes from the novel in which the oppressive power relationships on the Pequod are exposed, with the inequitable position of the ethnic characters made vivid. Restricted by editorial mandate to draw only generic and historically accurate whaling scenes, Moser does not attempt to interpret any of Moby-Dick’s particular episodes or characters; yet as the overwhelming majority of his illustrations shows the human players in Moby-Dick to be nonwhite, he suggests the importance of the racially diverse crew to the novel as well as to the whaling trade. Increasingly since the 1950s, other illustrators who did not have the subversive, democratic vision of Robinson and Moser nevertheless created single images of Moby-Dick$ characters that reflect sensitivity to their racial and ethnic backgrounds as well as to their individual humanity This has frequently been the case with evocative portraits of both Queequeg and Pip, the Pequod‘s cabin boy Gamck Palmer (1974) and Joseph Ciardiello (1989), for example, give us Queequeg, his enigmatic tattoos exquisitely rendered, not as an exotic, but as “a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume” (480-811, while Mark Summers (1994) and Catherine Kanner (1996; figure 11) succeed in visually embodying a Pip who, though pitiable in his isolation and his terror, is not portrayed as a victim. 20 ELIZABETH SCHULTZ “THE COMMON CONTINENT OF MEN”: VISUALIZING RACE IN MOBY-DICK Figure 6. I.W. Taber, “Queequeg throws his harpoon.” Moby-Dick. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899, facing 78 Figure 8. Raymond Bishop, Moby-Dick. New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1933, facing 21. Figure 7. Mead Schaeffer, Moby-Dick. New York: Dodd, Mead & ‘Company, 1922, endpapers. 21 ARTISTS AFTER MOBY-DICK “THE COMMON CONTINENT OF MEN”: VISUALIZING RACE IN MOBY-DICK Figure 9. Boardman Robinson. “Ahab and Pip.” Moby-Dick. Norwalk, CT The Easton Press, 1977, facing 557. Figure 10. Barry Moser. “The Flurry” Moby-Dick. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. 22 ELIZABETH SCHULTZ “THE COMMON CONTINENT OF MEN”: VISUALlZING RACE IN MOBY-DICK Figure 11. Catherine Kanner. “Pip.” CETUS. Pacific Palisades, CA: The Melville Press, 1996 Figure 12. Victor G. Ambrus. “Ahab Demons.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. ARTISTS AFTER MOBY-DICK 23 “THE COMMON CONTINENT OF MEN”: VISUALIZING RACE IN MOBY-DICK Appallingly, Moby-Dick comics and Moby-Dick children’s books have continued, throughout the 20th century, to ignore Melville’s racial and ethnic characters altogether, to conflate them, or to perpetuate them as debased stereotypes despite the stunning revisionary illustrations of Bill Sienkiewicz in his 1990 comic book edition and of Victor G. Ambrus and Allan Drummond in children’s books, designed for major publishing houses in 1996 and 1997. Throughout the drawings in their books, both Ambrus and Drummond focus on the multicultural composition of the Pequod’s crew, transforming identifiable racial and ethnic signifiers through their individualization of the characters. In his creation of Queequeg, as a massive, even corpulent, figure, and of Fedallah and his crew as weary with work and capable of anguish (figure 12), Ambrus not only subverts previous visualizations of these characters but rectifies Melville’s own misrepresentation of Asians. Such radical re-envisionings of racist stereotypes in those texts, explicitly marketed for mass audiences and for children, allow their readers to accept more easily Ishmael’s recognition, derived from his deepening love for Queequeg, that a person’s exterior “cannot hide the soul” (49). Gilbert Wilson, who devoted several decades (c. 1948-1978) to painting Moby-Dick, worked from his perception that the Pequod was “not only a symbol of America with its amalgamation of races, but a microcosm of the world, which is of all nations and nati~nalities.”~ Framing his Queequeg (c. 1949; figure 13), which he bequeathed to The Melville Society, are passages from Chapter 10, “A Bosom Friend,” reflecting Ishmael’s changing perceptions of his frie