Piercing the Corporate Whale: Agents, Principals, and the Personified Impersonal in Moby-Dick

Abstract: This essay considers Moby-Dick , the paradigmatic great American novel, as a meditation on the great American legal fiction of corporate person-hood. Infused with the new and exhilarating energies of a "joint-stock world" that "pays dividends," Melville's novel is also deeply preoccupied with the qualities of the corporate person: intangibility, immortality, and individuality. In delimiting the corporation's ontology, agency, and accountability, legal theorists grappled with the same mysteries of the "personified impersonal" embodied in both Moby Dick and the Pequod : is it "agent" or "principal," one man or thirty, an autonomous being of its own or a legal-fictitious mask veiling the real forces that act through it? I argue that the same tension between individual and collective personhood lies at the heart of Ahab's quest for revenge on Moby Dick. If Ahab's hatred of the white whale rests on a fear that the corporate form could be abused as a mere screen for the malign actions of a hidden "principal," his consolidation of tyrannical power over the Pequod 's crew ironically realizes that very fear by reducing the ship to his own alter ego.