D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence is presented as a critic who made the whale in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick a charged figure of religious and sexual meaning. His comments link the animal to Leviathan and to modernist literary vision, while illustrating the book’s larger account of how readers and writers continually remake the whale as myth.

Religious Myth and Leviathan

Lawrence recasts the Christian story through the whale: in his formulation, Jesus the Redeemer is Cetus or Leviathan, while Christians become the little fishes. The comparison places the whale within a tradition that could treat it not as an emblem of innocence but as a fearsome, almost apocalyptic power. In the surrounding discussion, this interpretation contrasts with modern depictions of whales as innocent animals and recalls older religious images of the whale as the shape of the Beast of Revelation.

Melville and the Modernist Imagination

In a collection of rhetorical essays published two years after Viola Meynell’s 1921 praise of Moby-Dick, Lawrence described Herman Melville as a futurist before futurism and as a mystic and idealist. He also presented the novel as one of the world’s strangest and most wonderful books, marked by mystery and tortured symbolism. These judgments place Lawrence among the readers who recognized the novel’s importance after its first edition failed to sell out and it was largely neglected during Melville’s lifetime. His response supports the account of Moby-Dick as a work whose standing grew retrospectively, becoming a major American novel and a text repeatedly approached for its layers of meaning.

The Whale as Sexual Symbol

Lawrence also called the sperm whale the last phallic being, making explicit the sexual symbolism that the book finds in interpretations of the whale. His reading belongs to a broader critical pattern: readers construe the whale as a force that men seek to master, even as the animal threatens to overwhelm them. The discussion connects that symbolism to the novel’s all-male whaling world and to Ahab’s conflict with Moby Dick, where the whale becomes at once a quarry and an object of projection. Lawrence’s formulation thus enlarges the whale beyond its status as a hunted animal, while also exposing how human interpretations impose meanings upon it.