Sena Jeter Naslund. Ahab’s Wife. New York: Harper, 2003. E-book.

Ahab’s Wife is a first-person narrative told by the woman who would become the wife of Captain Ahab of Moby-Dick fame. It is easy enough to dismiss her as following in the footsteps of the wife of the first Ahab, namely Jezebel. Like the evil queen of the Bible, she rejects God and commits some terrible sins. Of course, being written at the turn on the Twenty-first Century, we could not have a literary heroine any other way.

Una Spenser shares her life story in over a hundred chapters, perhaps echoing Moby-Dick. She grows up in Kentucky rebelling against her puritanical father, joining relatives who keep a lighthouse off the Massachusetts coast, and eventually disguising herself as a boy and going off to sea. She ships out on a whaler called the Sussex, sister ship of the Essex. The Essex was sunk by a whale and inspired Melville’s Moby-Dick.

The Sussex also gets shattered by a whale, and Una and her two boyfriends are the only survivors. This trio becomes a kind of unholy trinity, but Una is such a good storyteller that we go along with her adventures. She does not even meet Ahab until about halfway through the story, and as Moby-Dick suggests, she is not married to him very long.

In the course of her life, Una travels with a dwarf, thus echoing her namesake from Spenser’s Faerie Queene. She hides a fleeing slave woman, who ends up escaping to Ohio across the ice floes on the Ohio River like Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Indeed, there are literary echoes throughout the story. The chapter in which she encounters Nathaniel Hawthorne is especially entertaining—though unlikely. Hawthorne is wearing a black veil over his face, but the dialogue is pure Hawthorne. Indeed, it is one of the few episodes which do not present a far more radical position than one would expect even from a nineteenth century Unitarian.

Ahab’s Wife is just simply too modern to really have us accept it as a nineteenth-century story. Yes, Una becomes friends with Margaret Fuller, the transcendentalist writer (and model for Hawthorne’s Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance), and Maria Mitchell, the first person of either sex to discover a comet using a telescope. So we do get the idea that Una is “out there” or “on the cutting edge,” but this reader had trouble suspending some disbelief to accept her in that time period.

Having said that, the author is a skilled writer. There are many elegant turns of phrase. The female characters are all pretty sympathetic, so we get a sense of a feminist sisterhood. Ahab also comes across as the striking personality he is in Moby-Dick, which makes him attractive to a much younger Una. He also accepts her in spite of some of the past sins she confesses to. The book is faithful to Ahab and the historical figures she encounters.

For fans of Melville or the Transcendentalists, this could be an interesting read. There are also some profoundly disturbing scenes. At one point I had to quit reading it for a week and was unsure whether I should bother to continue it. I am still ambivalent about having finished it. I understand its cleverness and appeal; after all, the original Ahab was attracted to Jezebel. The Faerie Queene’s Una stands for truth. This Una, like Jezebel, stands for herself.