Ahab's Wife, Una and I

I am quite in love with this remarkable book. I arrived in Bali with the desire to find a holiday read with depth and beauty, that would speak to me, sing, take flight by drawing me into its world to teach me about life and thus myself.   I spent a long time in the second hand book shop and it turns out that I chose well.


Ahab's wife follows an epic journey, the life of Una, wife to Captain Ahab, the nemesis of Moby Dick in Melville's classic. Making it thus, Naslund has enabled Una's reflection on the twists and turns of her own life path:

“I marvelled some (to myself) that I had known so little of my own course.  I had been like a ship, blown about in dark and storm, suddenly finding, beyond all hope, that the dawn illuminated the port of home.” (p 363)

Una's life's path is textured by travel, adventure, religion, intellect, literature, the joy of nature and domestic arts. And Naslund lays much emphasis on love through exploring many meetings of hearts and minds through  friendship, family and romance.

It is little wonder that I identify strongly with Una, she is a wonderfully drawn heroine and a classic one, in the sense of Joseph Campbell's heroes.  From her beginnings in the woods of Kentucky  as a young girl she challenges her father's Christian fundamentalism with “you can not order belief”, thus exiled she lives a simple, idyllic, nature-mystical life with her aunt and uncle,  New England lighthouse keepers.  Leaving them, she cuts her hair and pretending to be a boy, boards a whaling boat seeking to feel the bigness of the world.  Sailing into the seething oceans opens the way for majestic vistas of natural beauty, and in turn for great tragedy, violence and darkness.  Throughout all, Una's questioning mind and  spirit, contained and quietly graceful, is infused by an inner fire and steered with certitude. 

She has been holding a mirror for me, as I have been remembering myself on this journey, much reflecting on how I have come to this place in my life, remembering the girl I have been, a girl not unlike Una, alit with an adventurous and questioning spirit. A girl who shaved her head and wandered alone through strange and beautiful lands, who created ecosystems in sunflowers, who organised festivals, who wandered naked in the forest, who danced. I've been remembering her, gathering her up, holding her as I keep travelling down these paths; watching the road ever vanishing behind me, watching the road ever arriving, arriving.



I've been struggling  with the loss that death of relationship has brought me. I have come to see the potency of this energy and the way it signals the beginning of a new adventure. To pause too long, to mourn too deeply, is to refuse the call.  I have come to see how I am being called once again, but this time I know it, as I didn't before. I know that I am being called to grow, to peel back, to deepen, to allow grief and pain to burn right through me, to illuminate my dark corners, and to soften my heart.

I have found my own twists and turns mirrored in the fortutitous meetings, struggles, losses and tragedies of Una's life. While I would not myself use the paternal language of Christianity, passed through internal translation, this passage, directed to Una, floored me: it might have been to be spoken straight to me:

“Dwell not in the inner hell which is always of our own making.  Inside yourself you must give up the illusion of power.  That is God's realm.  Your life is like a vast ocean.  Can you control the tempest?  Can you make the sun shine?  'Twere naught but folly to think so.  Your despair comes from your struggle, from your vain belief that you order the sea of feeling.  ... Prayer is the shelter from despair; good works for others is the obligation of joy at home.  Meditate only on the glory of God, his magnificence, his kindness in the most ultimate sense, his ever-flowing forgiveness, his warm love.  Admit your lowliness before his plan.  Give up the illusion that you can order either your own life or Kit's turmoil.  Trust that Kit can find his way, according to the plan of God.  Look you only to your own way, which is in God.” (p 287)