How does Leo Marx use imagery in The Machine in the Garden; Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America?

Marx discusses imagery....

Throughout Moby Dick, Melville uses machine imagery to relate the undisguised killing and butchery of whaling to relate the undisguised killing and butchery of whaling to the concealed violence of "civilized" Western society. In fact the primitive urge back of the machine is what seems to invest it with a sense of fatality. ("We have constructed a fate," Thoreau says of the railroad, "an Atropos, that never turns aside.") To Ismael the line is at once a token of man's inescapable need to consume the whale and of the whale's deadly hold upon him.