American Fantasies of Masculine, Physical Labor and the Dangerous Bodies of Pacific Island Whalemen in Roger Starbuck's The Golden Harpoon and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Throughout the nineteenth-century, writers, such as James Fenimore Cooper and Joseph C. Hart, fairly consistently appropriated the New England whaling industry for national purposes. They claimed the economic successes of the industry as American successes, and they positioned the whalemen as exemplary American workers. However, not all American whalemen were native-born Americans; some were foreign-born laborers. The presence of Polynesian workers and their racialized laboring bodies - often described as monstrous, grotesque, and repulsive - disrupted nationalistic appropriations of the whaling industry and its workers. What was so dangerous about these men was not just that were reputed to be "savage" cannibals, but that they had the potential to threaten the capitalist hierarchy according to which the whaling industry was organized. Polynesian sailors were believed to be naturally predisposed to disobeying the orders of their superiors, causing racial tension in the forecastle, and engaging in bloody mutinies. To control these workers and the threats they posed, authors of American whaling narratives employed discourses of containment which described the bodies of Polynesian whalemen as either physically or metaphorically constricted. Roger Starbuck's popular dime novel, The Golden Harpoon, depicts, Driko, the Maori mutineer, as a bloodthirsty cannibal who must be imprisoned in the bowels of the ship's hold before proper order can be restored to the ship. In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Ishmael, Bildad, and Peleg attempt to metaphorically transform Queequeg's body into an American one, "a George Washington cannibalistically developed" or reduce him to an American animal, a quahog. Although different, discourses of physical and metaphorical containment accomplish the same goal: controlling the bodies of racially-different, potentially "savage" Polynesians such that they are no longer capable of threatening the safety and well-being of white Americans, the chain of command aboard ship, and the proper functioning of American capitalism's organization of labor.
Repository Citation
Schell, Jennifer. "American Fantasies of Masculine, Physical Labor and the Dangerous Bodies of Pacific Island Whalemen in Roger Starbuck's The Golden Harpoon and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 7, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1–26. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol7/iss1/50