I Wondered if I’d Been Misjudging Moby-Dick: A Guest Post from Tara Karr Roberts

By Tara Karr Roberts / January 11, 2024 at 1:31 am

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Using Moby Dick as a starting point, Tara Karr Roberts crafts a gorgeous, character-driven narrative that is part retelling and part wholly original historical fiction. With a massive scope and a sprinkle of magic, this is ideal for fans of The Essex Serpent and Great Circle.

Before I wrote a novel inspired by Moby-Dick, I spent almost 20 years avoiding Herman Melville’s hulking classic.

I first encountered Melville through his delightfully odd story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” when I was 16. But reading 200,000 words about whaling? I preferred not to. Moby-Dick became one of those novels I laughed about never having read. But the white whale caught up with me when I decided to earn a master’s in English in my thirties, chipping away at requirements as I worked and raised my kids. It was the first book on the syllabus for my very last class.

I started reading it on a Greyhound bus during Christmas break, expecting a long slog. But from Ishmael’s fussy, funny opening monologue, I wondered if I’d been misjudging Moby-Dick.

I found myself fascinated by the book’s rambling combination of philosophy, humor, garbled science, and sweeping adventure. Like many readers, I noticed the glaring absence of women. So few, there are far more named ships than named female characters.

But in Chapter XV, when Ishmael and his companion Queequeg are wandering Nantucket before joining a whaleship, they head to an inn and spy a woman scolding a man on the porch. Ishmael assumes she’s the proprietor’s wife, and soon learns she’s slightly more: “Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs.”

If Moby-Dick readers remember anything about Mrs. Hussey, it’s chowder. She greets Ishmael and Queequeg with a shout of “Clam or Cod?” and spends the rest of the chapter hollering about chowder varieties, much to Ishmael’s bemusement. She appears again when Ishmael mistakenly thinks Queequeg is dead. In a slapstick scene, Mrs. Hussey joins Ishmael in flailing and panicking and knocking Queequeg’s door down — but she also mentions an unfortunate sailor from years before who turned his harpoon upon himself in the inn.

I thought and thought about Mrs. Hussey, about her chowders, her hints of a terrible past, her absent husband. I’m a journalist and a teacher, a mother and a woman: I’m familiar with how the stories people tell often fail to line up with reality. What if Ishmael was missing the truth about Mrs. Hussey?

On my walk to class one day, I found the words that became the first line of Wild and Distant Seas, and Evangeline Hussey took on a life of her own in my mind.

I populated my opening chapters with minor characters from Moby-Dick’s Nantucket scenes: the women and the outsiders, the people left behind when Ishmael sails away, the characters we tend to forget. I gave them abilities beyond Ishmael’s imagination. Soon, I let myself further escape the confines of Moby-Dick, letting Evangeline and her family forge their own path around the world.

I like to think Moby-Dick found me at the right time: when I was ready to appreciate it, but question it. To ask what might be missing, and tell a new story myself.