Ahab's Wife, or The Star‐Gazer: A Wider/Deeper View of Melville's Tragic Hero and His Times

In the opening pages of her novel, Ahab's Wife, Sena Jeter Naslund quotes Melville's Moby-- Dick, where Captain Peleg says that "the old man" Ahab has a young, "sweet, resigned wife" and child; so he concludes, "Ahab has his humanities! (xvii-xviii). In her recent novel, Naslund literally recreates the mid-19th century world of Herman Melville as a way of developing her idea of that young wife, a perspective that includes "Ahab's humanities." It is interesting that Lisa Norling has just published Ahab Had a Wife (2000), which is her thorough research of women and the whalefishery in the mid-century. This is an era to which Naslund in her novel Ahab's Wife is both faithful and transcends, as we shall see. Naslund writes as though her protagonist were living at that time; says Walter Schott, she "brings the era of whaling ships and seafarers alive" (1397), and she does it in "elegant prose that is appropriate to the era" (PW 46-7). Still, her perspective is postmodern. Bob Hughes claims "its protagonist could only have been created now, since she is so hyper-aware of social ills and societal boundaries" (10E). It is difficult, of course, to imagine Melville's Ahab as a humanitarian. Moby-Dick is basically about (in Starbuck's words) a "cruel, remorseless emperor" possessed with getting revenge on a white whale for having torn off his leg. But Naslund expands on the character of Ahab in a much wider sense than does Melville. And, unlike him, she adds several women to her story, though the most significant is Ahab's wife, Una, who as the title suggests, is a star-gazer. That title is a key to the novel. In a negative way it may imply a person who is "spaced out," or unreal. Walter Kern says she is more "a figure of universal femininity than a human being (65). That is debatable, for it may also mean she simply has a wider, more inclusive-and in some ways deeper-vision of reality than her husband, Captain Ahab. It is my claim that Una not only expands on Melville's vision of his times through her travels on land, but in a psychological/metaphysical way she also counters Ahab's single-- minded notion of reality at sea. Norling in her examination of Victorian domesticity uses "the metaphor of whaling to explore questions of self, soul and humanity; of individual and community; of man's ability to control his own destiny" (270). These are the very realities that Una affirms in developing her complex relationship to her husband before and after the demise of the Pequod. Moreover, through her controversial choices, she emerges as a contemporary woman and thus a unique figure in recent American literature. First, a word on Naslund. In thel980s, she attended the Iowa Writer's Workshop-as have many noted American authors-and has since published two novels and two collections of short fiction. In a way, she has struggled with her writing much like Melville before completing her latest and, as with him, her most energetic attempt at creativity-the 668-page novel, Ahab's Wife. It is undoubtedly a woman's perspective on Melville's classic all-male journey to subdue the great white whale. But more than this, it is a review of mid-19th century literary and cultural history, as though the protagonist, Una Spenser, were there herself. It is at once, says one critic, "a seductive narrative," that is "historically accurate" (PW 340). Naslund teaches literature at the University of Louisville, so it is no accident that Una, named after the Spirit of Truth in Spenser's "Faire Queen," is highly literate. In the course of her journeys, by land and by sea, Una quotes, or in some cases meets, American, British, and world literary figures that help sustain her amid a variety of horrific trials. The author is a feminist in the sense that, no matter what happens to Una, she is an exciting person and always her unique self, making her own decision to go to sea on a whaler disguised as a cabin boy just prior to meeting Ahab. Here one is reminded of Melville's Redburn, only in this case "the youngster" is a girl. …