Homosexuality and Spiritual Aspiration in Moby-Dick

There is now widespread agreement that Melville depicts homosexual affection in the passages of Moby-Dick that treat Ishmael's developing friendship with Queequeg and in a later chapter entitled "A Squeeze of the Hand." Among critics who have sought to deal directly with the homosexual motif there is the further agreement that psychoanalytic concepts offer the greatest promise of yielding a persuasive interpreta- tion.1 Psychoanalytic doctrine is attractive as a way of illuminating the significance of these passages because of its claim to describe powerful unconscious forces; and the critics who have followed this line typically present the homosexual materials as embodying meanings of which Melville was only partly aware. Newton Arvin and Leo Marx, for example, hold that the homosexual theme emerges from a depth of Melville's mind where psychic opposites clash. Arvin conceives Ishmael, and Melville himself, to be plagued by an obscure inward contest between Eros and Thanatos; to him the homoerotic passages convey love's vic- torious battle against death.2 To Marx the issues have a collective social significance; he finds in Moby-Dick the divided mentality of American culture generally, its partition into "two kingdoms of force," a realm of mechanistic aggression opposing a pastoral world of idyllic sentiment. In treating "A Squeeze of the Hand," however, Marx offers a Freudian inter- pretation of pastoralism itself; he sees the chapter as Melville's "deepest penetration into the psychic sources ... of sentimental pastoralism.... The basis of this feeling, it now appears, is what Freud no doubt would have called an infantile pleasure ego."3

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