Temperance, Slavery, and Reforming Excessive Appetite in <i>White-Jacket</i> and <i>Moby-Dick</i>

This paper argues that Herman Melville’s White-Jacket (1850) begins to redefine individualistic and popular meanings of temperance reform and self-restraint in its attention to the biopolitical and civilizing processes on a man-of-war on the high seas. A renewed understanding of temperance and appetite emerges through the oceanic experience in White-Jacket and Moby-Dick (1851). The texts depict a modified civilizational process through interrogations of the regulation of appetite and addiction in acts of flogging, the grog ration, and in overlapping meanings of wage slavery, racialized slavery, and slavery to the bottle. This essay explores the implications of excessive appetite in sailors’ experiences of various modes of cannibalism, the transatlantic slave trade, and in their relationships with the ocean. The temperate oceanic perspective indicated in Moby-Dick and in moments of White-Jacket suggests a consumptive cosmology that evokes an ethical and religious meaning of cultural, human, and animal relations based on temperate, environmental reciprocity.