Melville’s Ahab does mention a wife; now Naslund gives her life. As a young girl, Una learns to quote Shakespeare and Keats by the yard, then decides somewhat on the spur of the moment to cut her hair and sail out on a whaling ship as a cabin boy. The escapade ends badly–shipwreck, open boat, survival by cannibalism–but she finally gets back to shore aboard the Pequod, where Captain Ahab quickly falls in love with her. He marries the brave and amazingly literate maiden and promptly ships out again, leaving Una to hundreds of pages’ worth of further adventures.
Jeter’s yen to put a feminine face on the quintessential American classic is understandable. Literary critics have long called “Moby Dick” a universal tale, but what’s universal about an all-male universe? If men stitched quilts and women harpooned whales, feminists have argued, stitching quilts would have gained a lofty place in literature; and thousands of term papers would have been written about the role of the needle in the formation of the New England mind. The problem is that politics, even sexual politics, makes a poor starting place for fiction. Jeter’s agenda is slathered all over “Ahab’s Wife,” down to the numerous paragraphs devoted to, yup, sewing as a metaphor for life. By the end of the book Una is a pacifist, a feminist, an abolitionist, and best friends with the gay male couple next door. In a prescient food-studies reference, she even celebrates a family recipe for jam cake because it’s been handed down from woman to woman.
Jeter loves the storytelling part of her job, and there are good yarns embedded in “Ahab’s Wife.” But a relentless pileup of historical detail turns Una’s world into a diorama. Maybe “Moby Dick” was the wrong template for a woman-centered approach to fiction. After nearly 700 pages of Una’s tempestuous life and times, Jane Austen’s modest preoccupations seem more provocative than ever. More powerful, too.
