Melville, Dickinson, Twain, Du Bois, Hughes

Herman Melville 1819-1891

Herman Melville was born in New York City. He was an American writer, poet, and novelist, who also wrote short stories. His father died when he was twelve, so he held a variety of jobs until in 1839 he shipped out as a cabin boy on a whaling ship. The experience would later be translated into his most famous novel, Moby-Dick, published in 1851. Then he joined the U.S. Navy and traveled to many parts of the world, particularly the tropics; these voyages inspired his novel Typee and its sequel Omoo. The first one, while a fictional novel, is largely autobiographical, drawn from Melville’s experiences among the Typee cannibals in the Marquesas Islands. He was rescued from the islands and eventually returned to the United States, where he wrote the narrative that was first published in 1846. A year later he married and moved to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, very near to the home of Nathaniel Hawthorne; they became friends and literary influences on one another. It was Hawthorne who suggested that Melville consider writing a book based on his experience on a whaling ship more metaphorically, in particular using whaling as a form of psychological insight into the human condition, and so Moby-Dick was born, but it was a commercial failure. Depressed, he started writing his short stories and the first, Bartleby the Scrivener, was in 1853. This story feels surprisingly modern with its setting on Wall Street and its examination of the legal and business mentalities; and Bartleby has been examined by each generation, who interpret him differently depending on their political or academic climate: he has been read as a fool, a tragic hero, or also as an allegory for the evils of materialism, while others still read it biographically, interpreting Bartleby as a stand-in for Melville. Melville was neglected in the post-Civil War literary world, but shortly before his death in 1891 a revival of interest began, especially in England, and he reached success with Moby-Dick, considered a masterpiece of American literature. In his writings emerges an interest in sexuality which expires the male dominant figure in society.

Benito Cereno short story, 1855

Plot

The narrator is Amasa Delano, captain of the Bachelor’s Delight, anchored off the island of Santa Maria. While anchored, Delano and his sailors spot another ship with torn sails coming toward the island. Delano decides to send a boat over to investigate and so he and his men reach the ship called San Dominick. The ship looks weather-beaten and decrepit, the figurehead of the ship is covered by canvas but chalked underneath they can see the words “follow your leader” in Spanish. When Delano boards the ship he is immediately accosted by sailors and black slaves, all begging for water and supplies, then he meets the captain of the ship, Benito Cereno, a strange man, very nervous and aloof, whose behavior confuses Delano. The captain is always attended by Babo, his young black servant. For most of the story, Delano tries to find out what happened to the San Dominick, but Cereno keeps having a strange behavior, he often reels and falls and Babo has to catch him; Cereno only tells him that the ship had left Buenos Aires six months earlier, but while rounding Cape Horn, they struck heavy wind and to lighten the ship they threw supplies overboard; but the ship was badly damaged and many of the ship’s crew became sick and died. Since then, Cereno claims he had continually attempted to reach land, and he ends by praising his servant Babo, whom he credits with keeping the slaves pacified during all the problems, and also Delano praises Babo, saying he envies that Cereno has such a faithful friend. At this point Delano tells Cereno he will give him some supplies and some sailors to help them reach the nearest port, but as he moves across the ship he often gets an intuitive feeling that something is wrong in the behavior of both the sailors and the slaves, for example a black boy hitting a white cabin boy in the head with a knife, but he reports these incidents to Cereno, who however makes no effort to punish the attackers. Inquiring about, Delano also discovers that the owner of the slaves was Alexander Aranda, who died of the fever, but he suspects Aranda’s body is still on board and moreover he starts suspecting that Cereno wants to attack him and capture the Bachelor’s Delight. The whole situation is extremely strange, but Delano tries, every time he becomes suspicious, to simply ignore it. The most strange episode is when Babo informs Cereno it is time for his daily shave; during the shaving, Delano admires Babo’s attitude and skills at shaving, while asking questions about the problems the San Dominick went through; at this point Babo accidentally cuts Cereno’s skin who looks instantly terrified at the sight of the blood. Then the two captains have lunch together, but Cereno will not dismiss Babo from the room, so they have no occasion to talk in private. When the wind returns, Delano pilots the San Dominick toward his own ship, the two ships are anchored near one another, and the supplies are delivered. Delano gets into his boat, and in that moment Cereno leaps over the side of his own ship and falls at Delano’s feet; Babo also leaps over with a dagger, but Delano’s men stop him from attacking. As the boat with the two captains escapes, the canvas falls away from the figurehead, revealing a human skeleton. Delano then sends his men to take the ship, which they manage with some losses. The rest of the story consists of Cereno’s court deposition, revealing the truth about what happened to the ship: the slaves revolted, led by Babo, killing much of the Spanish crew and taking control of the ship; they then forced Cereno to sail toward Senegal where they were to be released. But they required supplies, so they sailed to the island of Santa Maria, far from the view of people, and where Cereno hoped a passing vessel would save them. In the meantime, the slaves killed Aranda and hung his skeleton as a warning to the other sailors. When they saw the Bachelor’s Delight, Babo gave Cereno and the other sailors a story to tell and he started impersonating Cereno’s servant, so he could keep an eye on him. So Benito Cereno and his crew were threatened with instant death the whole time, until Cereno leaped overboard into Delano’s boat saving himself and most of his sailors.

Analysis

The narrator of this short story is Amasa Delano, captain of a Massachusetts whaling ship called the Bachelor’s Delight. The subject matter is slavery, and this is Melville’s only work of fiction that deals with slavery. Melville’s attitude about this topic is nearly impossible to be figured out; some critics say his attitude is forgiving, patronizing and contemptuous of black and/or slavery, but the popular interpretations of Benito have changed depending on the political and academic atmosphere of each critic. In the story, the black slaves are portrayed as both brutal and cunning, revolting against their masters, and these figures may have been inspired by Melville’s experience amongst cannibals. But we need to remember that Benito Cereno was written during a time of great political turmoil over the issue of slavery, exactly six years before the Civil War, and also that Melville was in the center of abolitionist activity, as he was related to New England, Massachusetts and to the Transcendentalist movement. In fact, only few critics believe that this is a pro-slavery story. About the question of slavery, an important object of discussion is the behavior of Delano and that of the slaves themselves. Delano’s attitude toward the slaves is usually indifferent, he is not bothered that they are running free on the deck of the ship rather than chained, but he also believes blacks are naturally inclined to be servants. Instead, the slaves turn out to be bloodthirsty savages, and some of them are fiercely intelligent. Moreover, Benito Cereno is surprisingly modern in its contemplation of racism.

Until the very end, it seems almost certain that the story is going to be Delano’s, and Cereno will be revealed to be some sort of villain, instead Cereno himself is the protagonist, who falls under “the shadow of the Negro” in the course of the tale, eventually leading to his death. The plot is unfolded very slowly. It is interesting that while Delano is worried that Cereno was plotting to kill him, Cereno was in fact preserving the other captain’s life through his strange behavior. In the last section, the reader is forced to examine the story’s treatment of blacks and whether their revolt was justified. Benito’s court deposition paints them in the worst light, as they murdered dozens of men in their sleep and Babo is depicted as a cold-blooded murderer. Babo is a complex character, he is more intelligent than the two captains, because he has almost total control on Cereno and he fools Delano; his performance as Benito’s servant is so convincing that Delano admires him on several occasions for his loyalty to his master. When the story is re-read, the relation between Cereno and Babo results ironic, because Cereno is the real servant and every time he falls into Babo’s embrace, it could be the embrace of death. However, it is not clear why Melville has credited Babo with such considerable intelligence; maybe it is intended as proof that blacks are as smart as whites, or maybe simply to make Babo into a formidable villain. Gray areas in Melville fiction are intentional, and this is an example of it.

Probably the most significant fact of the end of the story is Cereno’s inability to recover. When Delano asks him what has cast a “shadow” over him, Cereno responds “the Negro”, an answer that could mean many things: maybe Cereno’s mind has been ruined by the terrible ordeal he has been through; or, more symbolically, it could mean that Cereno has realized he is less intelligent than a black slave so a “shadow” is cast over his own skin making him the “black”. This last interpretation may be supported by the last few lines of the story, where Delano tells us that a few months after Babo was executed for his crimes, Cereno died and was buried in the same cemetery as Alexander Aranda, and therefore he truly “followed his leader”. But this statement came right after Delano describes the death of Babo, while Aranda is only mentioned very briefly in passing. So the reader can never be sure just who Cereno’s leader really was between his friend Aranda and the black slave Babo, and this is another example of Melville's purposely ambiguous storytelling.