The "Mystical Cosmetic": White Light and the Ideology of Energy in Moby-Dick

Abstract: In his chapter on "The Whiteness of the Whale," Ishmael suggests that he joined Ahab's vendetta against Moby Dick in response to a kind of existential panic attack brought on by a series of associated thoughts having to do with white light. Whiteness, Ishmael concludes, is "the mystical cosmetic" which "for ever remains white or colorless in itself," and, as such, white light threatens to dissolve all color and hence all visible difference in the universe. While noting some of the ways in which light has served as a privileged metaphor for reason or, in Ishmael's hands, as an agent of deception (effecting various tricks of the light), this paper also thinks about light in the context of the developing nineteenth-century discourse on energy. Finally, I propose that Ishmael's meditation on whiteness both registers and disavows light as the commodified product of the whale hunting industry.