The Harland's Honeymoon Quilt & D&M's Child

[Terrance Flaherty]

Dixon is with child. Maybe this does tie into the slave-trader and his
children. When we get there we can tie it up I suppose. 



The Honeymoon of Ishmael and Queequeg

Leslie Fiedler, discussing the homosexual-pastoral nature of most
American fiction, points out in An End to Innocence (1948) that Ishmael,
the narrator of Moby Dick (1851), and Queequeg, the cannibal, are
"ambiguously intertwined" in bed when they awake at the Spouter Inn. On
can go further than Fiedler, and show that both men are quite
unambiguously married, and even symbolically conceive and give birth to
a child. 


he bed they sleep in is the same marriage bed in which the landlord and
his wife spent their wedding night: "it's a nice bed: Sal and me slept
in that ere bed the night we were spliced. There's plenty of room for
two to kick about in that bed; it's an almighty big bed that." Ishmael,
virtually a new bride...

Next morning Ishmael awakes with "Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the
most loving and
affectionate manner." He muses: "You had almost thought I had been his
wife." Just so we do not miss the significance of this line, Melville
adds two more variations: "his bridegroom clasp" and "hugging a fellow
male in that matrimonial sort of style." Events happen quickly in this
marriage, for already they have given birth to a child, symbolically of
course: "Throwing aside the quilt, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by
the savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby." 

http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/melville.htm