Stereotypes In Moby Dick, By Herman Melville

Love is a very powerful emotion that breaks stereotypes, crosses borders, and continues to inspire millions of people everyday. However what if the act of loving someone was physically dangerous? What if you were discriminated against based off of your partner? Well for many people in the LGBTQ+ community this is a daily reality. In a book called Moby Dick by Herman Melville two men are shown to have a close friendship that mirror an actual relationship. This is not by accident instead I believe the two characters, Queequeg and Ishmael, were actually married. Nevertheless this fact is not clearly stated anywhere in the book, it is because during the time period Moby Dick was written in being gay was seen as deviant. By using Gender Studies

Instead Ishmael was wary of Queequeg and thought he was a savage human being. Although this was the case at first, this was how their first morning went, “we had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we...”. Of course close friends cuddle every once in a while but later their friendship takes a dramatic turn after they smoked together. “He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be”. This oath that Queequeg is making towards Ishmael is not something to be taken lightly. In reality Queequeg has only known Ishmael for a day, if not two, and yet he is willing to essentially commit himself to Ishmael. This is where I believe they actually became “husband and wife” through the act of saying so, makes it technically true. As a result of this huge commitment their relationship continues to

As well as being irrelevant homosexuality was also seen as a form of sexual irregularity and it was added to the overarching umbrella of mental illness. This mean that just because a person was gay they could be subjected to the cruel mistreatment that many people with mental illness went through during this time period. In an article written my Michel Foucault, he talks about how the actual act of homosexual men having sex was also seen as abnormal. “This new persecution of the peripheral sexualities entailed an incorporation of perversions and new specification of individuals. As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts”. This suggests that homosexual sex is perverse and still very untested however it still says that homosexual sex is wrong. Meanwhile in the “nineteenth-century “bourgeois” society – and it is doubtless still with us – was a society of blatant and fragmented perversion”. This means that during the nineteenth century people were more open about their sexuality however that does not mean they would publically state their sexuality either. This passage also suggests that the elite people of the era were experimenting with their sexualities. It makes me wonder if because they were part of the “upper crust” of these elitist groups they were able possibly buy out