!!Moby Dick and Kipling Essay Plan

Melville 'Moby Dick' and Kipling 'The White Man's Burden'

Intro (subaltern ‘speaking’ and crisis of representation)

• Victorian literature stages a crisis of representation → the failure of the subaltern to “speak” within imperial discourse

• Even when marginalised figures adopt or approximate the language of empire, their voices emerge as distorted, displaced, or relegated to non-authoritative forms (song, silence, fragmentation)

• “failed” speech is only failed by imperial standards

• Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’ and Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ suggest that song, silence, and fragmentation may instead offer alternative ways of expressing meaning that resist being fully understood or absorbed

Historical context

Written in the aftermath of Reconstruction, where legal emancipation coexists with ongoing racial violence and exclusion. 

• Hybrid texts combining sociology, history, lyric prose, and spirituals at the turn of the twentieth century?

[CRITIC] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) 

• "The subaltern cannot speak."  

• The ‘subaltern’ as marginalised figures who lack access to the structures of power (political, economic, institutional etc.) that would allow them to be heard on their own terms. 

• The problem is not absence of speech but absence of being heard within imperial structures.  

[CRITIC] Franz Fanon, ‘White Skin and Black Mask’ (1952) 

• Mastering the coloniser's language means "appropriating" their world 

• Colonial language produces alienation from one's own identity 

• "A normal Negro child ... will become abnormal on the slightest contact of the white world."

Paragraph 1: Kipling, The White Man’s Burden → thesis statement

speech functions as an instrument of authority

→ constructs the colonised subject as an object to be governed rather than a speaker in their own right 

Quotes + analysis from the White Man’s Burden → use of imperatives

‘To serve your captives need’, ‘to wait in heavy harness’, ‘to veil the threat of terror’

• repeated use of the infinitive verb ‘to’ → imperative speech → the White Man’s mission in perpetuating worldly correctness is reeled off in a similar vein to a pledge

• Militaristic language to further emphasise the heroisms of the White Man as a collective 

Refrain from the White Man’s Burden + analysis

‘Take up the White Man’s Burden’ 

• Refrain litters the poem with Kipling’s belief in racial superiority. 

• The White Man’s self-fashioned role as the arbiter of mercy and safety further elevates his race to a godlike status 

Quote from The White Man’s Burden + analysis → oxymoron absolving the white man of guilt

‘The savage wars of peace’  

• Employs oxymoronic irony

• suggests that the actions of the White Man are simultaneously acknowledged as violent, but necessary for a greater good 

Paragraph 2: Melville, Moby Dick → thesis statement

Moby-Dick complicates the imperial desire for knowledge through Queequeg, whose significance derives precisely from his resistance to complete interpretation

Spivak’s claim that “the subaltern cannot speak” illuminates the structural exclusion of marginalised voices from dominant systems of meaning → Melville suggests that opacity itself may constitute a form of agency 

How does Ishmael complicate the issue of agency and voice in Queequeg?

Ishmael mediates Queequeg’s voice and remains partially inaccessible, yet it is this irreducibility that prevents his absorption into the categories of imperial understanding 

Quote from Ishmael about how he perceives Queequeg as subhuman + analysis

‘creature in …’

‘Queequeg [...] a creature in the transition state – neither caterpillar nor butterfly’ 

• Queequeg seems to be not-quite-human to Ishmael, mindset which separates the culture and origin of the two characters 

• Queequeg in a state of metamorphoses perhaps draws a positive comparison between himself and the struggle of Christ from a low societal position to an enlightened one (the butterfly) 

• Contextually set in 1841 → eugenics and slavery were rife, particularly with the colonisation Westwards and the segregation of the West Indies from major cities in the US = pushing the narrative of American natives being ‘barbaric’ as the West Indies became a place of segregation and imprisonment from societal progression 

[CRITIC] C.L.R. James – Mariners, renegades, and castaways (2025)

• Implores the reader to look at our own notions of superiority, purity, and power, before we can begin to scrutinize Ahab for his pedantic search for Moby Dick, for his desires to dismantle what he perceives to be the crux of the world’s corruption

• Using the example of Nazism → their imposition of a ‘master race’ was primarily rooted in their patriotism - ‘the national state was the one god without any hypocrisies or pretenses. The national state was the master race’ 

Quote about Queequeg’s tattoos and enlightenment

‘Queequeg in his own person was a wondrous riddle to unfold’

as the prophet who tattooed him had written: ‘a complete theory of the heavens and the earth and a treatise of the art of attaining truth’ 

‘… in Queequeg therefore was embodied the mystery of the universe and the attainment of truth’ 

Conclusion:

• Ultimately, both Kipling and Melville expose the unequal conditions under which voice operates within imperial discourse 

• Victorian literature stages not simply the silencing of the subaltern, but a conflict between imperial modes of representation and alternative forms of expression that exceed them 

• = What appears as silence, fragmentation, or unintelligibility is revealed to be meaningful precisely because it resists the imperial imperative remaining from imperialist culture and burgeoning at the turn of Western industrialisation to classify and possess