Moby Dee

We all think we know the story of Moby Dick, a tale of human courage, obsession, and revenge against a monstrous white whale, a creature of evil nature. We also remember that in the end nature cannot be tamed or defeated: Moby Dick kills his obsessed hunter and leaves. This has become such a recognizable myth that the name itself -- Moby Dick -- evokes powerful feelings of fear and anxiety about the untamed monster whale in the vast ocean.

One detail in the story was never confirmed, though: the whale’s sex. Imagine the whale was female. Yes, female, so old that she lost much of her skin pigment and appeared white, while in fact she was gray. And her name was Moby Dee.

Moby Dee was unusually large for a female, and that’s probably why she was confused for a male. Sperm whales are known for their male-biased sexual size dimorphism, i.e., a systematic difference in size between males and females. As a rule, males in whales are larger than females because, evolutionarily, they have to compete for resources and mates. However, every rule has an exception, and Moby Dee was it. She grew extremely large when she was young, which gave her the ability to develop both male and female patterns of behavior.

Even though everyone believed Moby Dick was male, no one aboard The Pequod ever confirmed the whale’s sex. In nineteenth-century whaling, sex was usually determined only after a whale was killed and hauled alongside the ship, during the messy labor of “cutting in,” when anatomy became visible and unmistakable.

At sea, from the deck or even from a tossing whaleboat, sailors saw the whale’s spout, back, flukes, and scars. They estimated the size. They inferred behavior based on known patterns. They basically guessed the sex. Seeing only a vast back breaking the water, someone would yell, “Bull!” and everyone agreed. It was the easiest answer.

Whaling logs from New Bedford and Nantucket fleets show the pattern clearly: solitary large whales were labeled “bulls,” while “schools,” i.e., groups of females with their offspring, were assumed to be cows and calves. These were heuristics, not zoological certainties. The logbooks of the time were commercial documents, not biological journals. A whale’s sex was often assigned before it was known.

Melville’s white whale is described as enormous and frequently alone, both traits and behavior associated with adult male sperm whales. But as we know from science, association is not confirmation. Correlation is not causation. No character in Moby Dick ever inspects the whale’s body. No autopsy occurs. Even in the end, the whale is harpooned, the ship is destroyed, and the sea closes.

Thus, the pronoun “he” rests on convention, not evidence or verifiable proof.

As a prime example of maritime writing in the nineteenth century, Melville’s novel gendered formidable adversaries as masculine. Conventionally, storms were male. Leviathan was male. The whale was called “he” because the story required a masculine opponent for Ahab’s monomaniacal will.

But...

What if the whale’s sex was not male?

What if the “he” hardened into the myth simply because no one imagined a female elder large enough, or formidable enough, to command the sea? To protect her young? To learn the routes of the ships and stand between them and her school? To take multiple hits from harpoons over the years, just to deflect the whalers from her sisters, daughters, and their calves? So that none of them would have to witness their loved ones killed, sliced up, and put into barrels for human consumption?

Moby Dee was all of that: a protective matriarch with years of experience observing the whalers and their hunting methods, understanding and predicting their behavior, and determined to keep her school safe. Whales, just like humans, are known for this type of social behavior. Today, we call it the "grandmother effect," i.e. matriarch care that is shown to prolong and improve quality of the social community's life, be it a human extended family or a whale school.

Now, imagine reading Moby Dick again, knowing that the monster of the sea might have been a freakishly large overly protective grandmother.