AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to over 30 million articles from top publications available through your library.

Bringing out the Beast in Melville's Billy Budd: The Dialogue of Darwinian and "Holy" Lexicons on Board the Bellipotent.(Herman Melville)

Studies in the Novel

| December 22, 2005 | Goldman, Eric | COPYRIGHT 2005 University of North Texas. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)Copyright

Since its posthumous publication in 1924 by Raymond Weaver, Melville's last novel has been read as a Manichean portrayal of the conflict between good and evil; an illustration of the dialectical materialism of Marxism; a testament to Melville's "acceptance" of fate or moral relativism; a modern allegory of the Crucifixion; a deconstructive "allegory of reading"; and a psychodrama about repressed homosexual desire. (1) Critics have also begun to investigate Billy Budd vis-a-vis the historical time frame of its composition, the late nineteenth century. (2) Although several have considered the evolutionary aspects of antebellum works such as Moby-Dick (1851) and "The Encantadas" (1856), (3) only one scholar, Bert Bender, has considered the significance of Darwinian discourse in Billy Budd--Melville's only prose work written in the midst of the era Melville referred to in his long poem Clarel (1876) as "Darwin's year." (4) In Sea-Brothers Bender notes that Claggart is compared to several animals and that the new Darwinian vision of "nature at war with herself in evolutionary time" leads Melville to conclude that "we had come to train our 'murderous guns inboard'" (66). Yet more careful investigation of Melville's engagement with Darwinian discourse in Bill), Budd is necessary.

As difficult as it may be to distinguish "the Darwinian" in this novel from the ideas of other evolutionary thinkers, or even the suggestions of Puritan authors such as John Winthrop that humans were in many senses no better than animals without the restraints of civil authority, (5) I argue, nevertheless, that Melville's Billy Budd--much more so than Moby-Dick or "The Encantadas"--is indeed implicitly engaged with a Darwinian discourse that threatened the formerly exceptional status of the human will at the end of the nineteenth century. This discourse manifests itself not in overt exposition, but instead as one of the novel's implicit "languages," in the Bakhtinian sense of the word. As Gillian Beer has observed, the valence of a number of words "shifted" after Darwin's Origin of Species and Descent of Man, "words like development, generation, variety, inheritance, kinship, transformation" (13). Beyond the striking prevalence of such "weighted" words in Billy Budd, though, the novel is more generally preoccupied with the philosophical implications of a Darwinian perspective of human beings; in particular, Billy Budd broods over the shrinking possibility of free will in the apparently deterministic universe unveiled by Darwin.

I discern two conflicting "languages" in Billy Budd: that of Darwinian discourse, and that of antebellum, transcendent views of the human mind. The language of Billy Budd oscillates between a Darwinian, scientific vocabulary and a transcendent one; and the novel's consequent shifts of tone, language, and perspective betray anxiety about the tension between two conflicting worldviews. In Billy Budd, this linguistic and perspectival restlessness is transferred to readers, who hover between irreconcilable views of, for example, an animalistic and an angelic Billy Budd; and a scorpion-like, instinctive Claggart and a Satanic Claggart whose destructive purpose is deliberate, willful, and patently evil. The perspectival anxiety of Billy Budd concerns the degree to which human beings still can possess and exert free will in an age in which the "lexicon of science" (BB 125) was categorizing them as animals. In conflict with this perspective is an older one that preserves man's angelic "descent" and privileges human beings with a transcendent "force lodged in will power" (BB 124).

With Billy's final, seemingly miraculous act of will power--his defiance of his autonomic reflexes themselves--Melville preserves the possibility of transcendent free will in a looming, deterministic universe where people seem guided less by "the force lodged in will power" (124) than by the "brute Force" (122) of their animal instincts. Yet the dialogue between the novel's two major lexicons, like that of the surgeon and the purser in the twenty-sixth chapter, ultimately remains unfinished, and readers are left suspended between Darwinian and transcendent languages for understanding the minds and actions of Billy Budd and Claggart. Discerning the dialogue between those languages in Billy Budd requires a brief foray into late-nineteenth-century cultural discourse.

In writings after 1855, we observe the radical de-emphasis of the importance of the will, and the corresponding increased understanding of and interest in reflex and instinct. In Principles of Psychology (1855), Spencer demoted the seemingly transcendent human "will" to just another function of the environment. For him, mental categories such as "Reason ... Memory, Imagination, Will, etc." are nothing but "particular ways in which the adjustment of inner to outer relations is achieved" (389). Spencer proudly admitted that his biologized view of the human mind was "at variance with the current tenets respecting the freedom of the Will" (500) and opposed a conception of the will as an independent, active, and self-determined "power." He compares the seemingly "free" motions of will to those of the planets: both, for Spencer, are illusions created by the inability of viewers to discern the complex interaction of forces that determine them (503). Thirteen years later, another landmark in thought about the human mind, Alexander Bain's Mental Science; A Compendium of Psychology, and the History of Philosophy (1868), forwarded a similarly deterministic account of the will that consciously sought to supersede older, transcendent conceptions. Like Spencer, Bain asserted that the will is continuous with the laws governing the physical world. Like Spencer, too, he likened the movements of the will to those of planetary bodies that seem to move on their own power, but ...

Related articles from newspapers, magazines, journals, and more
Herman Melville, immortality, St. Paul, and resurrection: from Rose-Bud to...
Magazine article from: Christianity and Literature Boudreau, Gordon V. March 22, 2003 700+ words
...the Rose-Bud," Chapter 91 of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, second mate Stubb swindles...joke between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Melville about the malodorous diapers of Hawthorne...at her birth on 20 May 1851, when Melville was deep into the writing of his great...
Musikale narratief in Benjamin Britten se opera Billy Budd/musikale narratief...
Magazine article from: Literator: Journal of Literary Criticism, comparative linguistics and literary studies Vermeulen, Karen Spies, Bertha April 1, 2007 700+ words
...Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd In Herman Melville's story, which is...music. Key concepts: Billy Budd Britten, Benjamin Melville, Herman musical characterisation...Lee, 1993:xx). 2. Melville se Billy Budd 'n Onskuldige en kwesbare...
Reading Billy Budd.
Magazine article from: The Review of English Studies Claridge, Henry November 1, 1993 700+ words
...established in it is that Billy Budd, Sailor was left unfinished at Melville's death in 1891...might come to about Melville's story; even...old' texts of Billy Budd (here one uses...ground. Reading ~Billy Budd', however, has...the Story is late Melville, not ...
Naturalist psychology in Billy Budd.(Critical Essay)
Magazine article from: Leviathan Hove, Thomas October 1, 2003 700+ words
...Clarel (1876). In Billy Budd, Melville explores a naturalist...framework it supports. Billy Budd manifests a post...Ever since the 1920s, Melville scholarship has commented...action can help us read Billy Budd in a way that does...
Billy Budd, Sailor.(Audiobook Review)(Book Review)
Magazine article from: Library Journal Adams, Michael May 15, 2004 700+ words
Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville 3 CDs. unabridged...33 years after Melville's death, Billy Budd, Sailor was instantly...Claggart falsely accuse Billy Budd of plotting a mutiny...also fascinated both Melville scholars and general...
Malice reconciled: on Billy Budd.
Magazine article from: LawNow Normey, Rob June 1, 2002 700+ words
...from Hart Crane's "At Melville's Tomb" Billy Budd, Sailor was the last work...American literature, Herman Melville. Melville worked on this novella...have whispered the words "Billy Budd," but not, says the narrator...
The scorpion's suicide: Claggart's death in Billy Budd.
Magazine article from: Melville Society Extracts Beauchamp, Gorman July 1, 2005 700+ words
...notable exception to Miller's strictures is Herman Melville, who in Billy Budd created a character as much impelled by "motiveless...his personal dynamic shrouded in mystery, what Melville called "the mystery of iniquity." Melville finesses...
Judge nixes micro's "Billy Budd" Ale.(Weekly Specialty Beer...
Magazine article from: Modern Brewery Age November 10, 2003 700+ words
...brewery cannot use the name "Billy Budd" for its ale, because beer...of naming a product after Billy Budd, the title character from Herman Melville's posthumously published and unfinished work, 'Billy Budd, Sailor,"' DiClerico...
Irresistibly moving.(Billy Budd)(Opera Review)
Magazine article from: Spectator Tanner, Michael December 24, 2005 700+ words
Billy Budd Coliseum English National Opera's production of Billy Budd originated in Wales seven...but the peculiar pathos of Billy Budd is that the hero remains...and philosopher, singing Melville's own lovely 'Billy in...
Britten's Billy Budd.(composers)
Magazine article from: The New Leader Simon, John September 1, 2000 700+ words
...periods. The opera Billy Budd, my subject here...attraction to Herman Melville's novella. To...importantly as well in Billy Budd, the work that...punishable by prison. Billy Budd, by the no less homosexual Melville, fits right into...
For more facts and information, see all results

Source: HighBeam Research, Bringing out the Beast in Melville's Billy Budd: The Dialogue of...

©2009 Gale, a part of Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
About us | FAQs | Contact us | Privacy policy | Terms and conditions
Other Gale sites: Encyclopedia.com | HighBeam Research | Acquire Content | Books & Authors | Goliath | MovieRetriever | Smart QandA