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Hook and Ahab: Barrie's Strange Satire on Melville

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

David Park Williams
David Park Williams*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Extract

Captain Ahab's pursuit of Moby-Dick and the crocodile's pursuit of Captain Hook have attained almost mythic stature. Nearly everyone, from nursery child to scholar, has heard of the Great White Whale and of the Ticking Crocodile. Each aquatic monster has swallowed the amputated limb of a dark and terrible captain. Each captain has replaced his limb with an unusual but useful prosthetic device. Each brooding victim is at last destroyed by his nemesis after a relentless oceanic quest.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 5 , December 1965 , pp. 483 - 488
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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References

1 Viola Meynell, ed., Letters of J. M. Barrie (London, 1942), p. 28.

2 J. M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy (henceforth abbreviated PW), Kirriemuir Edition (London, 1913), ch. vii, p. 96. Barrie's prose works quoted will be from this edition. The play, Peter Pan (henceforth abbreviated PP), is found in The Plays of J. M. Barrie, (New York, 1929).

3 Herman Melville, Typee, The Standard Edition of the Works of Herman Melville (New York, 1963), ch. xviii, p. 178. All of Melville's works quoted will be from this edition. Moby-Dick, in two volumes, will be abbreviated MD.

4 The music of “mermaids” (really seals) is mentioned in Moby-Dick, ii, cxxvi, 303.

5 For other sources of Hook, see Roger Lancelyn Green's Fifty Years of Peter Pan, (London, 1954), p. 38; and Walter Eschenauer's Sir James Barrie Als Dramatiker (Halle, 1929), p. 31.

6 See Howard P. Vincent, The Trying Out of Moby-Dick (Boston, 1949), p. 75. (When Hook says, “There's a Jonah aboard,” the pirates snarl back, “Ay, a man wi' a hook” PW, xv, 189; PP v.i. 82).

7 Denis Mackail, The Story of J. M. B. (London, 1941), p. 365.

8 Green, pp. 118–119, 196–197. See also James A. Roy, James Matthew Barrie, An Appreciation (London, 1937), pp. 187–189.

9 Henry A. Murray, “In Nomine Diaboli,” in Moby-Dick Centennial Essays (Dallas, Texas, 1953), pp. 10–11.

10 See Adalbert von Chamisso, Peter Schlemihl, translated by Leopold von Loewenstein-Wertheim (London, 1957), Ch. i, p. 23; Ch. viii, p. 78.