Melville's Black God: Contrary Evidence in "The Town-Ho's Story"

Abstract

H IHAT HERMAN MELVILLE in Moby-Dick rejected important features ll of the Calvinistic version of God has been frequently maintained, if not universally accepted. episode of The Town-Ho's Story, Chapter LIV, in the context of the whole book1 presents impressive evidence for this interpretation. Yet the story has proved difficult for critics to explain in their infrequent comments on the episode. Once the story is considered in terms of its thematic implications, the temptation is apparently to think of it as a condensed illustration of the meaning of the book as a whole. This is the opinion, I think, even of Mr. Sherman Paul, who suggests that in this episode is a glimmer of relief from the overwhelming sense of evil that engulfs Ahab. For here the whale carries out a cosmic decree that more nearly accords with our ideas of Christian justice.2 Mr. Paul (whose entire article should be read for a study of the episode's democratic theme), though he here provides a valuable hint for tracing out a distinction between the meanings of the episode and the book as a whole, seems personally to think of the difference as one of degree: Against this background, Ahab's tragedy comes to mean the same thing as Radney's . . .3 Mr. Lawrance Thompson, because he has perhaps a securer sense of the book's argument against God, does not make this mistake. Instead, however, he plainly takes the episode for an epitome of the total book's portrait of a wicked God.4 Now there is nothing in this episode which contradicts the meanings which