NP Melville's cross-cultural homoeroticism

[jbor]

    Although _Moby-Dick_ is not explicitly about race or racial issues--in
    the same way, for example, that its contemporary _Uncle Tom's Cabin_
    is--it does possess what we might call a "racial unconscious."
    Throughout the novel there are many different representations of race:
    through the cross-cultural homoeroticism of Ishmael and Queequeg's
    relationship, the presence of Fedallah and his men as Ahab's personal
    crew, the presence of Pip--at first as a Shakespearean Fool, and later
    as the image of "weak madness" that contrasts to Ahab's towering
    monomania. These are all important parts of the novel that add both to
    the "realism' of Moby-Dick as a portrait of the globalized whaling
    industry, and to the "romaniticism" of Moby-Dick as a sea-faring
    adventure story that is at once gothic intrigue and philosophical
    speculation.

http://www.georgetown.edu/bassr/mdrjb1.htm

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