Ahab's Wife (83 page)

 

Interviewer:
Who are some of the writers you like to read, and who are those who most influenced the writing of this book?

 

Sena Jeter Naslund:
Of course
Ahab's Wife
begins with Melville's
Moby-Dick.
My taste in general is fairly orthodox, and I read many of the classics as a young teen—Charles Dickens, Alexander Dumas, Victor Hugo, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot. I read some of them again in high school, college, and graduate school, and again as I teach them. Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Katharine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor are the main influences on my sensibility. Also, Flaubert, James, Faulkner, Fitzgerald.

My tenth-grade English teacher Leslie Moss Ainsworth made
Julius Caesar
come alive for me, and gave us the assignment of writing a scene that is referred to but not rendered in the text. I chose the suicide of Brutus's wife Portia, who was said to have “swallowed fire.” For my eighteen-page scene, Miss Moss gave me an
A
with four pluses trailing after it, like the tail of a little comet. I think that assignment and my teacher's response to it instilled in me the courage to try to match my writing with the greatest I knew. And, even then, I chose to do the neglected story of the wife of an important man.

As a senior in high school, I began to read and understand the British romantic poets and especially admired, as does my character Una, the jeweled lines of Keats. At Birmingham-Southern College I learned how language creates art by analyzing Tennyson's short poem “The Eagle.” Other poets whom I have loved and learned from are Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Theodore Rothke
and among contemporary poets, the work of Richard Hugo, Denise Levertov, Lucille Clifton, Yusef Koumanyaka, Maura Stanton, Richard Cecil, Maureen Morehead (whom I quote in the epigraph to
Ahab's Wife
), Roger Weingarten, Greg Pape, Alan Naslund, Richard Jackson.

 

Interviewer:
Do you have a work in progress?

 

Sena Jeter Naslund:
I've barely begun a civil rights novel set in Birmingham, where I grew up. I also have ideas for another historical novel or two, and another Sherlock Holmes adventure; I'd like to have another short story collection to follow
The Disobedience of Water,
which came out in the spring of 1999.

 

Interviewer:
Finally, a question about Melville. Albert Camus thought of
Moby-Dick
as “one of the most disturbing myths ever invented concerning man's fight against evil and the terrible logic which ends by first setting the just man against creation and the creator, then setting him against himself and his fellow men.” Briefly, what is your analysis of the book?

 

Sena Jeter Naslund:
I've been fascinated by the book since I was thirteen, and I wouldn't want to attempt a definitive analysis of it. The last time I read it I was struck by the digressiveness of Melville's mind, and yet the unity of it, also by his wit—he made me laugh out loud on many pages—and by the sheer lyricism of the language, as fresh and evocative as any romantic poet in his nature descriptions.

Moby-Dick
changes as I change. It's as changeable as the sea. Most recently, Melville's novel seemed unified to me by a Shakespearean concept of a great man greatly flawed; certainly Ahab thinks of himself in his monomania as being a kind of Lear, with Pip as his Fool. And Starbuck considers murdering Ahab just as Hamlet considers murdering the murderous King Claudius. Melville wants us to see the
Shakespearean tragic element of the book. He wants to rise to the challenge—to write a truly great work of art. Having such a lofty ambition—partly inspired by his love of Hawthorne, whom Melville compared favorably to Shakespeare—Melville finally transcends or transforms Shakespeare's vision, I think, by being so thoroughly democratic: American. He's interested in the movement of the mind of an individual—Ishmael, as well as in the agony of Ahab.

Shakespeare's stage cannot contain
Moby-Dick
; it's epic and narrative, not just dramatic, in its scope; and as private as prayer. I don't know that I agree with Camus in his statement that
Moby-Dick
sets man against the creator and then against himself and his fellow man. Certainly, Ahab is not set against his wife and child. In the chapter “The Symphony,” just before the climactic chase chapters, Ahab says to his first mate Starbuck, “Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land, by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye.”

The ship of my book,
Ahab's Wife,
sails under that flag.

When I was writing
Ahab's Wife
, insight sometimes came unexpectedly and with a thrill of pleasure; for example, once when I was looking at a dear friend's tablecloth. Cinda Sullivan and I had walked out to enjoy her new little brick house, which consists inside of a single exquisite room with tall pink walls and a telescope in one corner. Using a gold marker, Cinda had written celestial quotations on a white, round tablecloth. Among them I read our friend Maureen Morehead's lines, that came to be the epigraph of
Ahab's Wife
:

And this, I thought, is the idea I'm trying to embody in my novel.

I went home to review my novel-in-progress and found that, indeed, Una's spiritual journey was the core of the novel. Since the book also focuses on friendship among women and on living creatively, it still pleases me that the gleaming epigraph about the individual journey arose from a context of friendship and beauty.

Writing this novel was, at times, a difficult and solitary night journey, but there were many joyful moments—like meteorites shooting through the dark. I especially enjoyed writing Chapter 10, “The Giant.” Here Una uses sight, smell, touch, hearing to apprehend the nature of the Giant (the Lighthouse). Sensual data proves inadequate for exploring something mythic, and Una turns to metaphor, a more appropriate tool for knowing what is beyond the realm of science. Dwelling inside her whimsical, searching mind led me to comparisons that surprised me and made me smile: she imagines the tower to be like a flower stalk, a mountain abstracted into height and stone, the wick of a candle, the thighbone of God. This playful treatment of the tower has its shadow side in Chapter 13 when Una prays to the Lighthouse to be a Friend to Frannie, who has smallpox.

I played the senses against imagination again in Chapter 16, “The Brightness of Brightness.” Blinded by lightning, Una uses imagination and memory to visualize reality. That evening, when Giles reads Wordsworth's poems aloud, language makes vivid a world Una's never seen: London at dusk, or a host of daffodils dancing beside a lake. Simultaneously, I had the pleasure of using language to make my reader see, although the pages of
Ahab's Wife
present only ink on paper to the physical eye.

To balance the ascendancy of imagination over direct sensory experience depicted in “The Giant” and “Brightness of Brightness,” Una's response to the waves breaking on the beach in Chapter 124, “To Siasconset,” is purely sensual. Because of her physical excitement at the sight and sound of the pluming waves and expanse of ocean, Una claims the seaside as the place to create a home.

I am surprised to see—just now—that the spiritual liftoff moment for the novel, Chapter 126, “Journey Toward the Starry Sky, In Present Tense” (a scene I had envisioned in the initial concept of the novel), has its necessary precedent in that joyful sun-spangled moment.

The father of American poetry, Walt Whitman, posed the question within a poem: “Do I contradict myself? Well then I contradict myself.” Part of the pleasure of writing this novel has been to have enough space and time in which to contradict myself, to embrace the ebb and flow, to seek a passionate balance.

 

—Sena Jeter Naslund

Ahab's Wife
is a novel that invites the attention of reading groups. Along with this special-features-enhanced e-book edition, there is a trade paperback edition, published by Perennial. The questions below are but a starting point for the rich discussion that is likely to follow any group's reading of this novel.

1. Ahab's Wife
   takes place in the early nineteenth century. In what ways is Una's story a product of the times in which she lives? In what ways are her experiences timeless?
   
2. Early on in Una's life, her mother instructs her, “Accept the world, Una. It is what it is.” Does she?
   
3. In many ways,
   Ahab's Wife
   is a spiritual journey. What are the forces that guide Una? What is her notion of her place in the universe and how does it evolve over the course of her lifetime?
   
4. Una writes: “Let me assure you and tell you that I know you, even something of your pain and joy, for you are much like me. The contract of writing and reading requires that we know each other. Did you know that I try on your mask from time to time? I become a reader, too.” Several times throughout this book, Una addresses the reader directly. What is the effect of this interchange? How do you participate and become a character in this novel?
   
5. Discuss Una's relationship to the sea.
   
6. At the most painful time in her life, when she has lost her child and her mother, Una befriends Susan. Why is this relationship so important to Una? What is it that Susan teaches her? Compare and contrast their friendship to Una's friendship with Margaret Fuller.
   
7. How do you react to Una's cannibalism? Was she justified in doing what she does to survive? Is Giles more culpable because he himself makes the decision and executes the other shipmates? Or is he the most courageous of all because he takes it on himself to make a terrible decision and save those he loved?
   
8. Throughout
   Ahab's Wife
   , Una makes reference to the works of great writers—Shakespeare, Keats, Homer, et al. What is the effect of drawing on these other books? How does it enhance, deepen, and expand
   Ahab's Wife
   ?
   
9. How does Una reconcile “the inevitable animal within” with her spiritual aspirations?
   
10. Why do you think that three out of Una's four loves (Giles, Kit, and Ahab) go mad? Is this merely coincidence?
    
11. Throughout her life, Una explores the art of sewing. Although Maria Mitchell considers sewing to be an act and a skill that confines rather than liberates women, at one point Una supports herself with a needle and thread. Discuss the numerous ways in which images of mending, binding, and sewing inform the telling of this novel.
    
12. When Una is looking for icebergs on Ahab's ship, she returns his trust “with silence on the subject of a white whale and all his massive innocence.” Has she betrayed Ahab? Why does she see the whale as innocent? After Ahab loses his leg and then his life, do you think she continues to see Moby-Dick as innocent?
    
13. “Beware the treachery of words, Mrs. Sparrow. They mean one thing to one person and the opposite to another,” Ahab tells Una. Why do you think Una finally finds her vocation to be working with words?
    
14. “Wondering what Margaret Fuller would say to such a distinction between spiritual and moral matters, I asked the judge if he thought there was a difference.” Do you think there is a difference?
    
15. Una's narrative plunges back in time, leaps ahead, and loops over itself again. Different sections are told through other characters' perspectives and through their letters. How does the narrative structure itself enact some of Una's beliefs about the world?
    
16. The alternate title of this book is
    The Star-Gazer
    . Why do you think Sena Jeter Naslund chose to have an alternate title at all? What meanings does it hold?