Borne out of Sight: Childhood and the Limits of Figuration in Moby-Dick

Abstract:This essay looks at the presence of both figural and actual children in Moby-Dick. I note first that Ahab and others invoke children as alternatives to the destructive world of the Pequod. In this metaphorical sense, children anchor the ship in the domestic world it leaves behind. I note second that the actual children—like Pip, the whaling ship’s cabin boy, and Ishmael’s memory of his own childhood—provide an opportunity for Melville to test the possibilities of figuration. In literary history, the child was closely aligned with the concept of figuration. Literary historians took the “figure” to mean both the original form of something and its representation. Through their plasticity and their representation of adult forms and values, children became vehicles for figuration. However, in Moby-Dick, the treatment of young Ishmael and Pip strains the possibility for the child to be a representation of the values of a community. This is not Ahab’s “sweet childhood of air and sky.” Rather, I argue that through Pip’s loss of a sense of self, Melville brings to the fore the history of violence that contradicts Ahab’s domestic metaphor, setting limits on the possibility of the figure to represent reality.