Ahab’s Wife, or the Star Gazer

by Sara Jeter Naslund, 1999. Perennial, NY

24 January 2007 – up to page 192 of 666

For me, this book didn’t start to take off until Una Spenser—the title character and the narrator—trades in her button boots for a pair of flat-soled men’s shoes in order to pass herself off as a cabin boy on the ship Sussex. The story of a woman taking on a disguise in order to gain entrance into the restricted world of men is one we’re all with. Una herself, an exceedingly clever young woman, is able to list off a string of examples from literature and history.
The device is so powerful in historical fiction because it’s such a concentrated act of rebellion: by crossing the gender line and putting herself to all the tests of seafaring life, Una defies the prejudice of her age. And because up until this point the character’s mental and emotional development have been so carefully recorded, it’s exciting to see the character enter into a whole sphere of experience that would normally be cut off from her. In order to prove herself to prospective employer Captain Fry, Una must climb to the top of the ship’s rigging, which she readily does, using the strength she gained from climbing the lighthouse on the tiny New England island where she spent her late childhood. As she climbs the rigging, it feels as though not only Una but also Naslund is going through a rite of passage, a transition from one style of literature to another. The early sections of the book, dealing with Una’s life at the foot of the lighthouse, represents one style of fiction in which the action is primarily in the mind. We witness Una’s psychological development, enjoy watching her exploration of the senses and her evolving sense of her connection to others and of her own mortality. It’s the realm of Jane Austen, and as with Austin’s characters, there’s a sense that Una’s intelligence and imagination are enough to give her freedom even within the confines of a cozy and withdrawn domestic life. But there’s also a sense of regret at the fact that Una has to experience so much vicariously. As with Austen’s characters, Una is faced with a romantic choice between two potential suitors, the bookish Giles and his more ruddy and emotional companion Kit. In choosing between them, it’s as though Una also has to admit her limitations, because her choice is between two lives she might only experience vicariously, waiting patiently for them to return to her after their trip to sea on a whaling vessel. And so it’s a palpable relief when she simply cuts the Gordian knot and joins the crew of the same vessel.
I’m interested in this idea that there are two parallel literatures, one for men and one for women. Clearly, this is true of juvenile books—Tom Swift is for boys, Little Women is for girls. The same divide exists in adult literature, but we’re a little less comfortable speaking about it. Moby Dick, which is almost bereft of woman players, is probably the least ambiguously male book you could choose—and yet we’re taught that this book is a classic of universal importance. Little Women? Well, that’s a classic of girl’s fiction, but if a guy doesn’t read it, no one will tell him he’s missing out.
And yet on the other side of the divide, there’s a growing sense that the actual life of literature lies with woman readers and woman authors, and the fact that men tend to have an aversion for things that are “for women” is seen as more an emotional and intellectual handicap than anything else. Let the men stay out at sea, stranded on the doomed Pequod, while the real work and truth of life goes on shoreside.
So the way I see it now is that in writing Ahab’s Wife, Naslund is striking a much deserved blow at the haughty prejudice represented by Moby Dick, but she’s also making a conscious effort to reach out and bridge a divide. Essentially, she’s saying that Herman Melville is still worth reading, that the book is not the moribund repository of stale thinking one might suspect. All it needs is a fresh set of eyes, a fresh population of readers, used to a different tradition and ready to see something that all the scholarly experts have missed.

30 January 2007: pp. 193-242 of 666

What bothered me about the first part of the book was how pristine and utopian everything seemed to be. After a twelve-year-old Una expresses doubt as to God’s existence her fundamentalist Christian father starts acting threateningly toward her. Fortunately, she has an aunt and uncle who are extremely liberal and very kind. They oppose slavery, they don’t slaughter their livestock, they encourage their daughter Frannie to explore the world around her. It corresponds a little too well to the sort of wishes that a late-20th-century humanist would have for the world, but it doesn’t jibe too well with accounts I’ve read about the realities of pre-Civil War progressives, who often mixed a heroic opposition to slavery and support of women’s rights with a dour and constricting Puritanism and an often abortive naïveté when it came to managing their own finances. (For more on this subject, study the history of Oberlin College).
If Una were to go forth from this utopian upbringing like some angel shedding rays of enlightenment into her backward era, teaching valuable life lessons about tolerance to a 19th-Century America just a little too dim to catch on to the blindingly obvious fact that we should all just accept ourselves for who we are, this would be a pretty silly and fluffy book. It almost seems that this will be the case; the Captain of the Sussex seems as enlightened a mariner as one could hope to set sail with. When confronted with the actual business of capturing and slaughtering a whale, Una is revulsed in a way that seems haughty, far too much like the save-the-whales mentality that evolved in later times, far too different from the way Herman Melville’s enthusiasm for all things that had to do with the whaling trade. There’s even a scene where Una and her two suitors, Kit and Giles, are able to steal away below-decks for a late-night faux picnic with stolen wine and cheese. It seems here like the narrative is going to skirt easily away from the tough issues of inhumanity and oppression that confront anyone who looks seriously at the past, if not the present.
But Naslund is playing a more sophisticated game. Having just weathered a rough patch of storm, the ship’s crew lets out a collective sigh of relief. “. . . [R]eally, we felt the need of nothing. . . Nonetheless, we were a whaling ship, and to complete our completeness if that is a possible idea, we began to watch eagerly, again, for a whale.”
In a scene that is (intentionally, I think) almost cribbed from the end of Moby Dick, the ship is destroyed by an enraged whale, and goes down. Three open boats are left out at sea, they get separated. They’re too far from land to have a realistic hope of survival. In the end, Una and her two friends, Giles and Kit, murder their fellow boat-mates and drink their blood to survive. They’re rescued after a month at sea, and come aboard the Albatross, a vessel whose caring crew nurses the castaways back to health in yet another show of civilized compassion—but our heroes can’t forget the evil they’ve partaken in. Eventually, Giles falls from the high rigging and drown. It’s unclear whether it’s suicide or an accident.
It may seem a little twisted to think that this sort of thing should happen. I remember once when I was at a book fair, a potential customer asked me why it was that fiction tends always to be so dark. I’m not sure I understand this myself. A couple of quotes I tend to keep in mind: in the introduction to Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon says that the serious of a book is determined by the way it deals with death. And in his introduction to the short-story collection Bagombo Snuff Box, Kurt Vonnegut encourages writers to make terrible things happen to their characters, “So that we can see what they’re made of.”

6 February 2007: pp. 242-456.

I’m afraid that the deeper I get in this book, the more my initial excitement turns to lukewarm appreciation. The breaking point came for me when our protagonist, Una, finally comes together with Ahab after seeing him confess his love and inner torment to the flames of a burning building. Unfortunately, Ahab is due to ship out the next day, so he leaves his newfound wife with a purse full of money and instructions to shop exuberantly. Is this supposed to be a spoof of the modern credit-card-as-therapy genre of fiction? It almost seems so, but the joke doesn’t really bear fruit. In a way, Una’s reaction to coming into wealth is supposed to show that she’s a person whose intellectual refinement is reflected in material taste, much like in Edgar Allen Poe’s essay about interior decorating. But while Poe’s article was meant to stand alone, Una’s new identity as a shopaholic dilutes the tale of passion and self-discovery that this novel had the potential to be.
There are other things that fall short of the mark. For instance, Ahab’s sermon to the flames reads more like a freshman composition on the theme of “What would a sea captain say when he’s in love?” than something that comes from the heart. Likewise, Ahab’s letter to Una from the Pequod is filled with forced references to Shakespeare’s Sonnets and with descriptions of the process of ambergris formation that are more informative but less jazzy and interesting than Ishmael’s dissertations about all things aquatic in Moby Dick.
That being said, it’s not as though I feel I’m wasting my time with this book. It’s a good piece of work, and Naslund clearly has something to say about the value of tolerance and kindness. More and more, Una resembles one of those Jane Austin characters who, with her force of wit and maturity, is able to set things straight in the lives of all those around her. She uses her wealth to help set things right with her friend Charlotte, and she acts as a confessor for the troubled bounty hunter David, who guides through the forest and back from Kentucky to Nantucket. Una even learns to overcome her intolerance for religion in order to befriend the escaped slave Susan, who attributes her newfound freedom to divine intervention.
But Una doesn’t have the impetuousness of Emma. Her progress through life seems as calm and well measured as the pace of her narration. At no point do I feel overwhelmed, and feeling overwhelmed is one of my favorite parts about reading good fiction. Whereas Emma seemed so full of vivacity that it was hard to imagine a world that could contain her, Una seems to be in a perpetual process of settling down, even when she comes face-to-face with major hardship. When, on her shopping trip, Una meets up with Margaret Fuller (a real-life historical figure who espoused feminism in the 19th century), you can tell that this is supposed to be a mentor-student relationship, but Fuller seems to have little to impart in terms of real wisdom. All we see is a sort of cosmopolitan aspect of sophistication and a deft command of literary references from various languages.
One of the things that interested me about this book is the possibilities that arise when a modern author “revisits” a classic work of fiction and expands on characters and events that would otherwise have remained marginal. I think the best example of this is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which manages to create a parallel world that both complements that of Hamlet and is capable of standing on its own two feet. So far, Ahab’s Wife is mainly demonstrating that this is a tricky literary feat not everyone’s capable of.

14 February 2007

pp. 456-574

There’s a really interesting part of the book. I’m not completely sure why, but I see it as the best example of what’s wrong with Naslund’s book as a whole. While trying to track down her friend and mentor Margaret Fuller, Una comes afoul of a mysterious figure who, it seems, is Nathaniel Hawthorne. He seems a clownish figure who takes himself far too seriously. When asked what he writes, instead of giving a real answer, he merely quotes a single sentence, completely out of context: “I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale’s jaw bones.” Una is immediately struck by the sentence. Hawthorne (?) asks her, “What associations does it set to resonating?” And then Una rattles on for about two pages, dissecting every little piece of the sentence, from the coincidental reference to whaling and a woman named Susan (the same name as Una’s best friend) down to the references to love, domesticity and a relationship to nature. Finally, Una goes into a reverie about the sound of the sentence itself, especially the profusions of “s” sounds.
Where to begin? First of all, this seems to be Naslund showing off something special that she’s learned in the academic study of literature. A sentence is actually a jewel box, but it takes a special person to note the richness that lies within. Una, we’re supposed to believe, is this rare sort of person. I think Naslund intends this interchange between Una and Hawthorne to be the sort of thing that young writers will copy down verbatim and turn to whenever they want to remind themselves the true potentials of language and expression, or something like that. Unfortunately, she doesn’t pull it off, not by a long shot. What happens is that the character of Una who was being carefully developed earlier in the novel is compromised and diluted because Naslund wants to show off her idea of what a wonderful, well rounded 19th century woman should have been like. Similarly, when Una meets the father–daughter team of naturalists, the Mitchells, she instantly pops out a couple of impressive sounding observations about the digging habits of squirrels and the weather patterns in Kentucky, observations that she’d made on her own while growing up. We’re supposed to think, What raw talent and potential this young girl had. But what we wind up thinking is: Where did this come from? Since when did Una start caring so much about squirrels and storm patterns?
In another sense, Naslund uses the scene as a criticism of Hawthorne. He’s too puritanical, too mean-spirited. This could be a fair criticism. I haven’t read much Hawthorne, and I don’t know much about him. I do know that he supported Herman Melville in turning Moby Dick into the ambitious project it became, so maybe Naslund is hinting that if not for Hawthorne’s influence, Moby Dick would have been a more sensitive story, more representative of the harmonious balance between humanity and nature that Una supposedly represents.
What I remember about reading Hawthorne is that, while it wasn’t always the most interesting reading, it at least had a sense of tension. As a reader, I moved through dense paragraphs of description because they seemed to fit together into a story that meant something. "The Scarlet Letter," for instance: Descriptions of the woods and old mansions, suits of armor and grim colonial meetings all seemed to come together to form a background that seemed necessary for the main story of hypocrisy and damnation. The language was overwrought, but it seemed to serve a purpose other than drawing attention to its own prettiness.
I think that the central flaw of Ahab’s Wife is in making Una both the main character and the narrator. Not that you can’t have a main character who narrates her own life, but in this book it doesn’t work because Naslund’s intention is to create a sort of paragon of enlightened womanhood. Because Una is telling a story designed to show off her own virtues, she comes off as a vain person who is perhaps dishonest even with herself of her vanity. The idea of grief keeps cropping up in the novel—Una loses her first husband, her mother, her first child. But she never really seems to be hit by the simple pain that real people associate with suffering. Rather, we have long meditations on such things as the ocean and the moon and the stars that seem like attempts to come up with as many frilly, elegant sentences as possible. Grief serves only as an excuse to make pretty metaphors (“Like funeral cloves are these stars, spiky and spicy. Like cloves in an orange, they are the preservers of the skin and of the black flesh of space.”) In real life, of course, grief is something demanding—it can overwhelm us and sap our strength. But if Una was ever overwhelmed by grief, she might seem less perfect and more human, and in the end, it seems like that’s a sacrifice Naslund is not willing to make.

20 February 2007; page 574-end.

There’s not a whole lot I have to add about this book. As the plot progresses, the number of characters who seem nothing but excuses to bring up “interesting” subject matter increases. For example, Una’s friends the Mitchells allow ponderings about astronomy to be added to all the other ponderings that gather like barely used playthings in a storage shed of superfluous metaphor. Characters who once had some promise, such as young cousin Frannie or bounty hunter David Poland, return as lifeless functionaries to whatever purpose Naslund thinks this book serves. The only story that’s really moving is that of Susan, the escaped slave we meet at the beginning of the book. Other than her struggle to reunite with her still enslaved mother, I get the sense that the only thing in this story worth worrying about is Una’s peace of mind, and as even the death of a beloved husband Ahab seems barely to rattle her for a moment from her even keel, I was confident that Una’s peace of mind was never really in question. Near the end of the book Naslund provides a “twist” ending that I won’t give away except to say that no one really cares how much of a twist you put into a limp noodle.