The Essence of Whiteness

Daniel Boscaljon

III: The Dumb Blankness: Melville and American Whiteness

One of the unexpected joys I have found in this life is the work of Herman Melville. I decided to get a Ph.D. in literature after reading Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. I fell in love with his imagination, the integrity of his vision, the beauty of his words. His shorter fiction proved just as engaging as his longer works, gently foregrounding the baffling absurdity of the human condition with an unrelenting gaze. I’ve also enjoyed reading how many Black scholars find that Melville is one of the antiracists authors within the American canon, whose works expose the essence of whiteness. Melville wrote primarily for a white literary imagination, but engaged his readers to shake off their racist orientations. He achieves this differently in each of his books, as they differently grapple with the specter of whiteness and ways that it affects others. My hope in this section is thus to encounter the essence of whiteness from someone who knew it intimately but critically—understanding it both internally (as a white man) but also understanding how it created a terrible world.

In this section, I explore how Melville figures whiteness in Moby Dick as a conflation of the divine and the demonic, rather than something wholly pure or good. I then read “Bartleby” to show how Melville shows how the essence of whiteness is divided into the human (the privilege shared among individuals in the universal world) and the inhuman (the purity of those who are singular). Third, I examine “Benito Cereno,” which explores the weakness of whiteness in terms of specifically racist assumptions about the world. I conclude with a reading of “Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” which fuses most of these critiques of whiteness by causing the two essential properties of to overlap in opposition. Here, the “whiteness” of privilege owned by individuals in the universal world—detached from the reality of and relation to the wider world—becomes the essential opposite of the general world that supports it. The overall conclusion is that whiteness is almost always the harbinger of death, rather than life—either one’s own death or that of others.

Moby Dick:

“It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.”

Melville’s best-known novel, published in 1851, was written in just 18 months. Narrated by Ishmael, it describes the voyage of the Pequod, a whaling vessel commanded by Captain Ahab. It has aged well, more revered in this century than in Melville’s own—scenes such as Ishmael’s interracial, homosocial relationship with Queegqueg (the tattooed African harpooner with whom Ishmael shares a bed) is one example of Melville’s expansive vision of what America could be. But beyond presenting the beautiful potential of America as a place of difference, the novel provides a profound study of whiteness. Melville’s awareness of how whiteness was ingredient within the machinery of America, and the terrifying possibilities of attempting to claim whiteness, forms the heart of this novel. Whiteness is the sheer unknowable power of the white whale that Ahab pursues and attempts to overthrow and displace. In his pursuit of whiteness, Ahab also embodies the characteristics of cruelty, mastery, and destruction that he finds foreboding within the whale. Embracing whiteness is an insane folly. 

During the course of the novel, Ahab’s monomaniacal, peg-legged pursuit of the white whale becomes a metaphysical revenge story as Ahab declaims

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. …. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. … That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines.[1]

This passage provides a well-known example of Ahab’s poetic fixation on the need to control the stakes of meaning, mastery, and truth. Driven by despair over the problems of subjectivity (and the mere seemingness) of reality and the alienation from meaning (which prevents Ahab from knowing even whether his sworn enemy is “agent,” also determined by outside influences, or “principal” in causality), Ahab’s only response is to set himself against that which threatens his control in a work of rebellion.

 Ahab’s hatred of Moby Dick is well known: almost as well known is Ishmael’s account of the whale, which allows him to provide a critique of whiteness in the chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale. He writes, “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.” The next paragraphs speak in praise of whiteness, associating whiteness with beauty, gladness, justice, and holiness. Melville ranges through a variety of cultures and time periods in order to properly depict why whiteness holds its allure. He ends this paragraph, however, with a nod to the shadow of whiteness: “there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.” Ishmael notes that when removed from that which appears desirable, the color “white” takes on far more sinister connotations, discussing the whiteness of the polar bear, shark, albatross, and the White Steed as examples, and claiming, “That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect.” He looks also at landscapes: the snowfilled prairie, or mountain, or the whitewash on a coastline.

These examples of whiteness, however, do not for Ishmael address the core paradox: that whiteness “is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.” To resolve this paradox, Ishmael proposes two questions:

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? 

Whiteness is both the fulness and the emptiness behind and within all else, but one aspect (as Ahab notes, substituting “mask” for “veil”) seems indistinguishable from the other. The ability for whiteness to simultaneously disclosure the profundity of total presence and absolute absence makes it a color whose inherent ambiguity is appalling—capable of making us grow pale. Thus, the joined phrases that circumscribe the ground and abyss of Being: a “dumb blankness, full of meaning” or a “colorless all-color of atheism.” Ishmael indicates that the essence of whiteness is a powerful paradox rather than a source of exclusive goodness. To forget that whiteness generates terror equal to its purity is to misunderstand the nature of whiteness.

 It is not by accident that the last lines of the novel include the term “white” as a descriptor for that which erases the existence of the Pequod after Moby Dick destroys it: “Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” The Epilogue, consisting of two paragraphs, indicates how Ishmael survived the whirlpool that appeared as the Pequod sank, allowing him to relate the tale: “Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side.” Ishmael survives through the persistence of blackness, not whiteness, and by clinging to the vehicle of death instead of attempting to avoid it.

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street

“…prone to a pallid hopelessness…”

Melville published this short story in Putnam’s Magazine in 1853 and republished it as part of the Piazza Tales in 1856. The narrator is an elderly lawyer who hires Bartleby, whose strangeness unmoors and fascinates him. The initial introduction of Bartleby, as “one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable,” is consistent with Melville’s understanding that the essence of whiteness denies knowledge. Additionally, the scrivener allows Melville to embody the qualities of purity, horror, and death within a figure who is wholly passive. Bartleby is unlike the thunderous Ahab or the terrifying whale, but nonetheless, in his absolute whiteness, becomes nothing at all.

Throughout the story, the narrator emphasizes Bartleby’s whiteness, often through synonyms such as “pale” and “pallid.” This begins with the appearance of Bartleby within the space of the narrative: “I can see that figure now— pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby.” Bartleby is hired in part because of his “singularly sedate aspect,” as the lawyer wishes to balance out the comportments of the other two employees. Initially, the lawyer is pleased with Bartleby’s voracious capacity for work:

Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically.

The adjectives matter here: the “silently, palely” relate to the “dumb blankness” of Moby Dick just as the “mechanically” verges into the inhuman. Put otherwise, and in advance of the rest of this section, Bartleby incorporates the essence of whiteness in its terrifying purity, but lacks the essence of its universality—the dimension occupied by the figure of the Bachelor in Melville’s other short stories. (Although the lawyer claims that Bartleby is “keeping bachelor’s hall” in his office once he finds the remnants of a whole life, the effect of it is to cause the lawyer emotional distress: “What miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible!” This allows Bartleby to serve as the opposite of Melville’s later bachelor figures). This distinction shows how whiteness becomes palatable to the extent that it becomes privileged, and how privilege also relates to a capacity for blindness. In Bartleby, this role is played by the lawyer, whose good nature and desire to feel moral based on attending to a universal sense of fellow feeling (rather than his own conscience) makes him a boon companion to Delano in Benito Cereno.

Bartleby’s reticence becomes a continual vexation to the lawyer largely through his refusal of a “common good” and preference for his “hermitage.” His absolute sense of whiteness, which affords him a singularity, makes for a less convivial office space. Bartleby’s language—especially variations on what Deleuze calls the formula, the statement that “I would prefer not to” which provides a spoken form of the dumb blankness (by relying on a negation of a conditional that neither negates what preceded it nor affirms anything contrary). The narrator depicts how quickly the lawyer’s feelings move from “pure melancholy and sincerest pity” to “fear” and “repulsion,” as Bartleby’s pure whiteness continues to erase the lawyer’s assumptions about the universal nature of his world.

Eventually, after the lawyer quits his office in order to leave the immobile Bartleby (who stays within them), Bartleby is arrested for vagrancy (despite the fact that he never leaves). He is taken to the Tombs, as the “Halls of Justice” are called, in a way that once again emphasizes Bartleby’s dumb blank whiteness: “the poor scrivener, when told that he must be conducted to the Tombs, offered not the slightest obstacle, but in his pale unmoving way, silently acquiesced.” Eventually, the lawyer finds Bartleby in a yard that was “not accessible to common prisoners,” where the wasted scrivener has died. The epilogue to the story is a rumor the lawyer received—that

Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration. When I think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness…”

The narrator concludes by imagining the series of letters that end their lives, here, with their hope stillborn. The last lines famously echo: “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” The lawyer in this way attempts to bring Bartleby back into the universal, seeing that in his death the scrivener is restored to the universal order of whiteness—death—that he had embodied too well in his life. If anything, Bartleby’s crime was to become too essentially white, too removed from relations, too divorced from vitality. He embodied whiteness to its ultimate destructive ends, but refused all sense of privilege that most take from it.   That could stand on its own. Everything produced by the slave was taken from him: the products of his labor, offspring, the work of his mind. He authored nothing that fully belonged to him. Slaves were considered mere merchandise, objects of luxury or utility to be bought and sold to others.

Benito Cereno:

“These natural sights somehow insensibly deepened his confidence and ease.”

Published over three installments in Putnam’s Magazine in 1855, “Benito Cereno” is one of Melville’s most well-known antiracist tales—and worth reading before continuing further with this article (spoiler alert!): http://pinkmonkey.com/dl/library1/benito.pdf . Part of the genius of Melville’s treatment is his ability to create a story whose ending causes readers to revisit the events throughout the story, allowing the experience of a second reading very much at odds with the first.

The narrative is set in 1799 and provides a third person account presented through the perspective of captain Amasa Delano, the captain of the Bachelor’s Delight. Delano and his crew stumble upon the San Dominick (captained by the titular Benito Cereno), a ship filled with slaves owned by Alexandro Aranda. Delano notes both the disproportionate number of slaves and the signs of traumatic distress present, but the faithful presence of Babo, a slave that tends to Cereno, allows him to accept Delano’s explanation that a fever wiped out the crew and that they’re hoping to recruit new hands.

Ultimately,  the San Dominick is the site of a revolution, and the Blacks are holding the Europeans hostage. The 1855 story of revolution has a few notable historical precedents: the 1839 vessel La Amistad, whose story is probably best known in recent times courtesy of Spielberg’s 1997 Amistad (starring Morgan Freeman, Djimon Honsou, Anthony Hopkins, and Matthew McConaughey). Madison Washington had commandeered the slave ship Creole in 1841, sailing it to the British Bahamas instead of New Orleans—his story had been published shortly before “Benito Cereno” appeared courtesy of Frederick Douglass’s 1853 novel The Heroic Slave. Melville found inspiration for his story in Damaso’s 1817 memoirs: chapter eighteen recounts Damaso’s adventure in 1805, when the Perseverance comes upon the Spanish boat the Tryal. By shifting the year to 1799 and altering the name to the San Dominick, Melville gestures to the successful slave revolt in Saint-Domingue—now Haiti.

What Melville does best is show the power of the white imagination to delude itself into accepting the reality that it prefers, rather than the one that shows itself. The first part of the novella—which precedes the legal documents that provide a more “objective” look at the situation—allows the narrator to describe both what Delano sees and how Delano is affected by it. The ambiguity of the novel is suggested in the third paragraph by the term “everything grey,” echoed by the use of “grey” three times following.

The captain of the Bachelor’s Delight maintains a good mood and bright spirits. The narrator ensures that readers know that Delano’s surprise at seeing a ship not strike its colors given “the lawlessness and loneliness of the spot” is cause for concern. This concern, however, remains hypothetical: his “surprise might have deepened into some uneasiness” but is prevented from this because Delano was a “person of a singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable…to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man.” Delano can see God in everything, finding that the San Dominick resembles “a whitewashed monastery after a thunder-storm,” and that the figures on board were a “ship-load of monks” as he spies “throngs of dark cowls” as though they were “Black Friars pacing the cloisters.”

Throughout his time aboard the San Dominick, Delano feels uneasy because his racist assumptions about white dominance and Black compliance, universal within the context of his American life, are not consistently practiced on Cereno’s ship. The need to remain within the familiar boundaries of the universal racist world almost instantly causes him to reinterpret what he saw: “scarce an uneasiness entered the honest sailor’s mind but, by a subsequent spontaneous act of good sense, it was ejected.” Delano is habituated to see racist patterns: because Delano values the privilege of having an “instinctive good feeling,” he finds “tranquilizing” thoughts that would allow Cereno to be “relieved of all anxiety” until he could “be restored to authority.” He even thinks through ways to interpret Cereno’s character as having a surplus of command. When meeting the Captain, Delano moves from interpreting the Spaniard’s reserve as issuing from “the involuntary victim of mental disorder” to convincing himself that it reflects the “unhealthy climax of icy though conscientious policy” that “obliterates alike the manifestation of sway with every trace of sociality; transforming the man into a block, or rather into a loaded cannon, which, until there is call for thunder, has nothing to say.” In other words, Delano is able to understand Cereno as having mastered the pinnacle of whiteness—transforming  into an icy subject without properties who commands through fear that itself is a tool.

The narrator damns Delano—and thus also Americans who share his racist assimilationist attitudes—with grotesque praise. When reading “Benito Cereno,” it becomes clear quickly how slavery undertaken with a self-serving air of pleasure is no better than any other form of racist thought. In this case, the narrator shows how Delano’s racist underestimation of Black intelligence, combined with his desire to retain a delighted disposition, dissociates him from reality. The narrator is unrelenting in this regard, continually comparing the Blacks on board to animals or children: “Like most men of a good, blithe heart, Captain Delano took to Negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs.” Thus, Delano interprets Babo’s acts toward Cereno as filled with a general quality that he finds familiar, “that affectionate zeal which transmutes into something filial or fraternal acts in themselves but menial; and which has gained for the Negro the repute of making the most pleasing body-servant in the world…” so that they become “less a servant than a devoted companion.” The narrator at one point describes Delano’s first impression of Babo in exactly these terms, “a black of small stature, in whose rude face…like a shepherd’s dog…sorrow and affection were equally blended.” Delano pleases himself in how he can recognize Babo’s behavior, finding “humane satisfaction” when witnessing the “steady good conduct of Babo,” especially given the “noisy indocility of the blacks in general” and the “sullen inefficiency of the whites.” This good feeling—the privilege of being an individual in a world obedient to the universal order, provides Delano with his habitual attire of benevolent kindness. Melville in this way shows how white American interpretations of Black attitudes are steeped with a racism that requires an antiracist education to unlearn.

Delano’s racist attitudes toward Black women also compare them to animals. Further, the narrator’s characterizations of Delano presciently gesture to racist tropes that have continued into contemporary culture: the “Mammy” and “Magical Negro” stereotypes. These exist today in television characters, including the “Black girl bestie”[2] and “Black lady therapist”[3] tropes. These character types support white protagonists and generally offer a blend of wisdom and humor that massages the white character’s struggles as a pseudo-mother might. Delano finds that simply seeing Black women assuages his emotional turbulence. He notices a “a slumbering Negress…lying, with youthful limbs carelessly disposed...like a doe in the shade of a woodland rock.” This allows him to reappraise the other women nearby: “He was gratified with their manners; like most uncivilized women, they seemed at once tender of heart and tough of constitution; equally ready to die for their infants or fight for them. Unsophisticated as leopardesses; loving as doves.” The narrator concludes this description of Delano’s observations: “These natural sights somehow insensibly deepened his confidence and ease.” The women exist for his gaze and their very existence serves his needs, even without direct interaction.

The narrator does not judge Delano for his racism, and in fact shows throughout the story that he desires to support his brother captain. In order to maintain his racist assumptions, Delano’s capacity for empathy is triggered by sentimental expectations rather than an engagement with true humanity. Thus, while the spectacle of enslavement does not constitute a cause for sorrow, at one point Delano’s “surprise was lost in pity, both for Spaniards and blacks,” based on the scarcity of food and water. But Delano’s affection for his “brother captain” leads to an important depiction of trauma:

But the debility, constitutional or induced by the hardships, bodily and mental, of the Spanish captain, was too-obvious to be overlooked. A prey to settled dejection, as if long mocked with hope, he would not now indulge it, even when it had ceased to be a mock…seemed in no perceptible degree to encourage him. His mind appeared unstrung, if not more seriously affected. …like some hypochondriac abbot he moved slowly about, at times suddenly pausing, starting or staring, biting his lip, biting his finger-nail, flushing, pailing, twitching his beard, with other symptoms of an absent or moody mind. This distempered spirit was lodged, as before hinted, in as distempered a frame. He was rather tall, but never seemed to have been robust, and now with nervous suffering was almost worn to a skeleton.

Melville’s narrator thus notes the consequences of how a white man suffers in response to playing a role to please violent masters after an uprising. This depiction is at odds with the characterization of Atufal, who even in chains “has a royal spirit” that remains unbroken despite being enslaved. Cereno, by contrast, finds that his short time as a captive leaves him “broken in body and mind” because of “how hard it had been to enact the part forced on the Spaniard by Babo.[4] The implication, especially when contrasted with the unbroken body of Atufal and the unbroken mind of Babo—despite having survived worse, and for a longer time—is that whiteness is weakness. Added to Delano’s racist blindness and the accidents that allow the American to survive, Melville’s novella provides an account of whiteness that shows its deleterious effects—another way that it destroys those who employ it.

The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids

“So, through consumptive pallors of this blank, raggy life, go these white girls to death.”

Melville’s diptych, published in Harper’s Magazine in 1855, offers a contrasting portrait of gender relations, and provides a way of understanding whiteness as it becomes gendered. The Bachelors of the story are white lawyers in London libraries, the Maids occupy a New England papermill. The reader is provided with contrasting portraits and experiences of whiteness: the bachelors are brothers in spirit to Delano, captain of the Bachelor’s Delight, swimming in an ocean of good cheer based in willed ignorance that remains non-identical to innocence. The mill’s maids are kept pure as the paper they produce, but are nonetheless consumed within the process. As two aspects of the performance of purity, the essence of whiteness in Melville’s tales has become banal, but no less destructive in its humanized form. Put otherwise, even absent the audacity of Ahab or the potent fury of the whale, and beyond the cruelty of slavery, whiteness in its most banal form still destroys human life.

The Bachelors of Paradise describes an “inner circle,” building on the mythology of the knights templar and other such masculinist organizations. The bulk of the story describes the way that the gathered men consume food and drink in an unceasing flow, served by servants. The narrator recounts how the occasion provides the dream of whiteness:

It was the very perfection of quiet absorption of good living, good drinking, good feeling, and good talk. We were a band of brothers. Comfort -- fraternal, household comfort, was the grand trait of the affair. Also, you could plainly see that these easyhearted men had no wives or children to give an anxious thought. Almost all of them were travelers, too; for bachelors alone can travel freely, and without any twinges of their consciences touching desertion of the fire-side.

The nature of this fraternal order is to become so divorced from relations with the vital world to leave behind anxiety and conscience. Drinking heavily, they avoid the need for care: “The thing called pain, the bugbear styled trouble -- those two legends seemed preposterous to their bachelor imaginations.” The dinner disbands and the bachelors depart, leaving the narrator as the last lingerer. The story ends with a final conversation between the entitled guest and his gracious host:

"Well," said my smiling host, "what do you think of the Temple here, and the sort of life we bachelors make out to live in it?" "Sir," said I, with a burst of admiring candor -- "Sir, this is the very Paradise of Bachelors!"

This, Melville indicates, is the goal of whiteness—not to be like Delano and engaged in slavery, but to have a life so distanced from any sign of suffering that one could think of cares as a distant myth.

Because the Bachelor’s lives are so thin to recount, the satirical sting becomes especially sharpened when set next to its co-offering: “The Tartarus of Maids.” The narrator is no less over-the-top in the depiction of the mill, which “lies not far from Woedolor Mountain in New England,” requiring that one turn “right out from among bright farms and sunny meadows” in order “to enter ascendingly among bleak hills.” The mythological stacking is replete—while the Bachelors live in Paradise, the maids are framed by a “Dantean gateway,” “sunk among many Plutonian, shaggy-wooded mountains…called the Devil’s Dungeon,” near “Blood River.”

The narrator’s characterization shows that Melville intends the Temple/Mill to replay, at a third level, the paradoxical tenor of whiteness. Initially, this is undertaken by the setting, saturated in whiteness (visibly) just as the dinner was redolent in it (culturally): “The far summit fairly smoked with frost; white vapors curled up from its white-wooded top,” The narrator’s horse, named Black, is “Flaked over with frozen sweat, white as a milky ram.” Arriving at Devil’s Dungeon, the narrator finds that the “whole hollow gleamed with the white” beneath mountains that stood like “a pass of Alpine corpses,” around the “whitewashed factory.” As the narrator regales the scene, it reminds him of his earlier journey, and he finds that the Mill is, in “inverted similitude,” “the very counterpart of the Paradise of Bachelors, but snowed upon, and frost-painted to a sepulchre.” Whereas the Bachelors enjoyed the extracted essence available to individuals in the universal world, the Maids—inhabiting the place of death—have been conscripted into the general pool that supports their excess.

He stops a passing to ask for direction, and sees “a face pale with work.” Once he arrives in the interior, he finds the industry: “At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper.” The girls are silent: “The human voice was banished from the spot,” as the “girls did not so much seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels.”

He tours the place, guided by a young lad named Cupid, whom causes the narrator to wonder at the “strange innocence of cruel-heartedness in this usage-hardened boy,” no longer marveling at these conditions. Throughout the tour, the narrator looks for signs of London and the Bachelors. Instead, he finds omnipresence of the fatal employment given the workers: “So, through consumptive pallors of this blank, raggy life, go these white girls to death.” The narrator tours through the vats of pulp (quite reminiscent of the try-pots of sperm in Moby Dick), and becomes impressed by the punctual efficiency of the machine that stretches out foolscap paper in exactly nine minutes. The amount of paper reminds him, also, that Locke “compared the human mind at birth to a sheet of blank paper; something destined to be scribbled on, but what sort of characters no soul might tell” and considers all that may be written upon the paper he sees: “sermons, lawyers' briefs, physicians' prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates, bills of divorce, registers of births, death-warrants, and so on, without end.” He compares the machinery to a “Behemoth,” rather than the organic “Leviathan” that betokens the white whale, but the press also induces a “strange dread” based in the “unbudging fatality which governed it.”

The narrator thinks to ask why the employees are called girls, rather than women, and the foreman answers that married women are forbidden: “We want none but steady workers: twelve hours to the day, day after day, through the three hundred and sixty-five days, excepting Sundays, Thanksgiving, and Fast-days. That's our rule. And so, having no married women, what females we have are rightly enough called girls.” The narrator takes it a step further, guessing at “their pale virginity,” the narrator finds that “some pained homage…made [him] involuntarily bow.” The workers, here, retain their purity and perform productivity toward a pallid death. The story concludes as the narrator leaves the valley and thinks once more of Temple-Bar before exclaiming: “Oh! Paradise of Bachelors! and oh! Tartarus of Maids!”

These two scenes, explicitly conjoined and contrasted by the narrator, emphasize how the essence of whiteness becomes humanized. On the one hand, those in a position to enjoy living in the universal world that feeds on the essence of labor—purified—are able to live in paradise. This life, filled with abundance and divorced from relation to the world of work, leads to a kind of white blindness exhibited by Delano, the Bachelors, and Cupid. As Ishmael noted in his discussion of whiteness, the implications of its purity can ultimately become equated with death.

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm

[2] https://www.teenvogue.com/story/i-am-not-okay-with-this-black-bestie

[3] https://slate.com/culture/2018/03/black-woman-character-actors-are-popping-up-on-your-favorite-shows-as-therapists-to-white-characters-video.html

[4] As an aside incidental to this argument but nonetheless noteworthy, Melville mentions in the court documents at the end of the story that the American forces, when liberating the Spanish vessel, end up killing a few of the former POWs.