Melancholy

Melancholy is both a condition attached to the Narwhal’s legendary tusk and an interpretive key to Moby Dick. The book connects the tusk’s supposed medicinal power with Robert Burton’s account of the English malady, then sets melancholy within a symbolic reading of the novel’s structure and its account of Ishmael, the biblical outcast.

A Remedy and an Affliction

For centuries, the Narwhal’s tusk was mistaken for a unicorn’s horn and credited with magical powers. Its powdered form was prized as an antidote not only to poison but also to melancholy, identified as the English malady. Robert Burton, the reclusive clergyman who documented that affliction, was a writer Herman Melville had studied. The tusk thus carries a history in which an animal’s physical feature became entangled with human fears and hoped-for remedies.

Melancholy as a Reading of Moby Dick

Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving Melencolia, with its brooding angel and a comet above a distant sea, becomes part of a proposed hidden structure for Moby Dick. The modern writer Viola Sachs reads the novel through the magic square of four. In her account, this cipher joins the theme of melancholy to the story of Ishmael, the biblical outcast, and expresses a vision of the terrestrial origin of creation. Melancholy therefore operates not simply as a character’s mood or a historical illness, but as a principle through which the novel’s imagery and design can be connected.

The Whale’s Symbolic Weight

The account presents the Narwhal as a creature burdened by the symbols accumulated around it: its tusk makes it seem fantastical and melancholy, while its resemblance to the horn of a unicorn preserves the old legend in popular imagery. The tusk’s great weight—something that takes two hands to hold and feels like carved stone—gives physical form to that symbolic burden. The following section title, “The Melancholy Whale,” carries the association from the tusk and its history toward the whale itself, extending melancholy from a human affliction into the book’s representation of the animal.