For the last couple years, I have been deeply fascinated with Melville’s Moby-Dick. In this book, one thing that I found particularly interesting is Ishmael’s anxiety around his own identity and his fears of losing that identity through consumptive or penetrative forces. I am extremely interested in this topic because even though this was sort of the topic of a paper I wrote while taking the Moby-Dick class in my sophomore year, I feel like I never fully figured out what this anxiety meant and instead just identified that it was there. From the first chapter of the text, Ishmael is already telling the reader what to call him in a manner that suggests it is a pseudonym and immediately casts doubt on his identity. I want to explore the ways in which Ishmael’s anxiety around his identity affects his relationship to the other crew members, his relationship to Queequeg, and his feelings about religion.
I am not completely sure yet which theoretical and methodological tools I will use yet but I want to look into both gender and sexuality studies because I think it will help illuminate the issues Ishmael has with his own identity. One text I thought of specifically that I want to look into for this project is Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, which I know talks about the performative nature of gender and the body which I think is particularly interesting for Moby-Dick since there are so many references to plays or other types of performance.