Ahab's Wife: Or the Star-Gazer

Product Information

Rather disturbingly, I thought, Una, still in her teens, ends up married to Ahab, a man in his fifties. In "The Candles" (Ch 119) Ahab's harpoon is called a "fiery dart." The phrase is taken from book XII of John Milton's Paradise Lost, as Henry F. Pommer recognized, where Michael promised Adam "spiritual armour, able to resist/ Satan's assaults, and quench his fiery darts" ( XII, 491-2). [27] Pommer argues that Milton's work was more immediate than Shakespeare, because while some of Melville's soliloquies appear to find their prototypes in Shakespeare, "there is a slight step from dramatic monologue to fictional thought," and Milton "had already taken that step, using, in his own extended narrative, soliloquies precisely like Melville's." [28]

LIKE A STONE STATUE I walked away from my cabin with them. Like a juggernaut, that stone car pulled forward relentlessly by the Hindi, I was pulled forward, arms outstretched, by my neighbors. I do not know how my adamantine body was able to bend enough to sit in the wagon. Craig, James A. (1887). "The Monolith Inscription of Salmaneser II". Hebraica. 3 (4): 201–232. doi: 10.1086/368966. JSTOR 527096.Soon, I discerned her face and believed it to be the color of dark walnut. Her lips, leaning over me, her lips very even in the fullness of the upper and lower lip, and most generous, shaped words: You be all right, soon now. Push on, now. Her dear lips pushed the air when she said push in a soft puff of encouragement. You sure to live. Her hands briskly rubbed my belly, so fast and light that I could not feel pain where her fingers shimmied. He went into the yard and lashed the little stump where I liked to sit till foam came to the corners of his mouth, and he fell in a faint. Then my mother tore a strip from the hem of her green dress, wet the cloth, went to him, and bathed his forehead. She crooned his name, Ulysses, Ulysses. I waited in the dark, but heard nothing. I felt my belly; the babe was yet within. I shivered. Yes, the bed shivered. As soon as Ahab got word of Naboth’s death, he went to take possession of the vineyard. As the Lord instructed the prophet, Elijah came out of the wilderness to meet Ahab at the vineyard and confronted him about Jezebel’s conspiracy against Naboth as well as Ahab’s sinful actions that were causing Israel to sin. Charles Olson mentions three modes of madness in King Lear, the King's, the Fool's, and Edgar's, allegorized in the book, with Ahab taking the role of Lear and Pip the roles of both the Fool and Edgar. [22] Melville makes his points by way of contrasts to Shakespeare. Olson identifies the typhoon in chapter 119, "The Candles," with the storm in Lear. "Ahab, unlike Lear," Olson observes, "does not in this night of storm discover his love for his fellow wretches. On the contrary, this night Ahab uncovers his whole hate." [23] Later, in chapter 125, "The Log and Line," Ahab says to Pip, in Lear's words to his Fool, "Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou are tied to me by chords woven of my heart-strings." [24] While Sweeney endorses Olson's identification, he finds exaggerated the claim that Ahab learns from his cabin-boy just as Lear does from the Fool. Ahab learns "little or nothing" throughout the book. [25] Satan (Milton) [ edit ]

Everhart, Janet S. "Jezebel: Framed by eunuchs?." The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 72, no. 4 (2010): 688-698.both share physical features, they are scarred or wounded, and each has a prominent brow or forehead. And then, after something bad happens, she cuts her hair and signs aboard a whaling ship as a cabin boy. (I swear, I could almost hear Streisand singing "Papa, Can You Hear Me?") Jezebel is introduced into the biblical narrative as a Phoenician princess, the daughter of Ithobaal I, king of Tyre ( 1 Kings 16:31 says she was "Sidonian", which is a biblical term for Phoenicians in general). [10]

terrain of Melville's wildness and disintegration, Naslund has erected a glistening pink utopia, every word of which argues by harmonious example, ''Now, isn't this better?''

Look for more clues & answers

I watched through the cabin front window, which had just been unboarded from the winter. Often, as a younger child, I had followed him into the yard, sat upon the stump, lamented his leaving. No longer! Now, from the house I read him, crossing the window left to right, how the harried buggy and his flailing arm moved as a unit from the left pane of glass to the right pane of glass, and out of sight. How undisturbed the trees seemed in their dark uprightness, how intact in their neatly fitting bark. My father had seemed so till his recent conversion. Cook, Stanley Arthur (1911). "Jezebel". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol.15 (11thed.). Cambridge University Press. p.411. During an exhausted respite from the pains that wrung me, and yet amid my anxiety for my too-long-absent mother, I thought I heard the door creak open and an attendant puff of colder cold, but sleep claimed me again. In my sleep Zephyrs roamed the room. Their cheeks were bloated with frosty breath, which they jetted through pursed lips across the tip of my nose, down the part of my hair, and into my ears. Ishmael, after he washes up on shore and meets Una at a party, speculates that men who kill whales, the sea's ''great, oil-saturated'' babies, show that they ''hate the oceanic mother.'' It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature -- whale-killers, in this novel, come to bad ends. Una, by contrast, says of the ''heartless immensities'' that ''we are a part of them, and they are a part of us,'' and lives happily ever after: progressive virtue is rewarded.

The song "Beneath These Waves" (in the 2005 album Touched by the Crimson King of the metal band Demons & Wizards) sings about Ahab's will of revenge.

Prophets fortell death

According to the biblical narrative, Jezebel, along with her husband, instituted the worship of Baal and Asherah on a national scale. In addition, she violently purged the prophets of Yahweh from Israel, damaging the reputation of the Omride dynasty. [5] [6] [7] [8] For these offences, Jezebel was thrown from a window to her death. Her corpse was trampled by Jehu's horse and then eaten by stray dogs, just as the prophet Elijah had prophesied.( 2 Kings 9:33–37) Bromiley, Geoffrey William (2009). The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids, Michigan: W. B. Eerdmans. ISBN 978-0-8028-3785-1.