B I L LY B U D D

BILLY BUDD
Unpublished and not even quite completed at
Herman Melville’s death in 1891, then reconstructed
and retitled several times until the 1962 edition by
Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts Jr., Billy
Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) now reigns as the
author’s major achievement after Moby-Dick (1851).
In 1958 Richard Harter Fogle thoughtfully called
Billy Budd “Melville’s nineteenth century version of
classical tragedy, with old forms revivified by new
issues” (p. 110), and in this one may liken it to Moby-
Dick. Indeed, despite his constant revision of it from
1886 until his death at the age of seventy-two in 1891,
the great short novel has mostly been taught to stu-
dents as one of Melville’s antebellum dark romances
exhibiting “the power of blackness” (p. 91), a phrase
Melville himself used in “Hawthorne and His Mosses”
(1850) to discuss Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing. Yet
the composition took place instead during the height
and flowering of American postbellum realism thirty
years or more after Melville had turned from fiction to
writing mostly verse. Some might feel that his five-
year struggle with the manuscript during the specific
era of literary realism reflects the literary-historical
moment (in Hippolyte Taine’s sense) in which he was
writing; others, perhaps that his older philosophical Herman Melville at age sixty-six. © BETTMANN/CORBIS

view of eternal questions and dilemmas was by now

harder to convey in prose than in his verse. In either
case, each reader simply must ponder the fact that
what Hayford and Sealts call only “a semi-final draft”
(Melville, Billy Budd, p. 1) after an extended and
vexing process of composing still resulted in an endur-
ing masterpiece. Given this surprising achievement,
Melville’s Billy Budd has attracted massive critical eval-
uation, although rarely incorporating analysis of
Melville’s compositional phases as specifically central
to its theme or interpretation.
The tragic plot evolves as follows: Billy Budd, a
surpassingly innocent and handsome young seaman,
kills by a single blow John Claggart, a venomous petty
officer (master-at-arms) who falsely and maliciously
accuses him of mutiny. Billy’s death blow is further
complicated because he strikes only after he is unable
to speak owing to his congenital stutter—an “organic
hesitancy” (p. 53)—exacerbated by heightened emo-
tion from Claggart’s accusation borne of sheer envy
and personal hatred. Nevertheless, naval law dictates
hanging for the act, and the fact that the events occur
in 1797 at sea on HMS Bellipotent in the aftermath of
the major mutinies that rocked the British navy at
Spithead and Nore in the spring of that year while
England was at war with France seems to require strict
adherence because of the threatening virus of anarchy
in the social order during wartime. At this juncture
the third major actor in Melville’s drama, Captain
Edward Vere, although he understands fully Billy’s
innocence and his victimization by an invidious man,
feels compelled to convince his subordinates to carry
out the capital punishment. Vere even cries out that
Claggart has been “struck dead by an angel of God!
Yet the angel must hang!” (p. 101). And before he
does hang, Billy declares in antiphonal counterpoint,
so to speak, “God bless Captain Vere!” (p. 123)—with
no taint from his usual stuttering. So the innocent
comes to a tragic end.
With such a powerful sequential plot tied together
and embedded within a rich linguistic texture and
open-ended Melvillian diction and tone, it is not sur-
prising that Billy Budd has prompted multiple read-
ings. These range from the interpretation of Billy as a
Christ figure and sacrificial lamb to the idea that the
story is a philosophical parable that confirms Melville’s
mature reverence for true art as the analogue to a “vic-
tory of LAW”—as he expresses it in his poem
“Dupont’s Round Fight” (Selected Poems, p. 12). For
many years after it was first published in 1924, Billy
Budd was deemed, in the words of E. L. Grant Watson,
a “testament of acceptance” (p. 319); that is, a work

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In the opening to chapter 4, Melville alludes to his
signature mode of composition and narration
through indirection and apparent digression that is,
however, typically pertinent to his theme. In this case,
he goes on to explore the prevailing dominance of
utilitarian thinking while yet deeming it to be ulti-
mately fallacious, or at least at odds with epic or
tragic grandeur.
In this matter of writing, resolve as one may to
keep to the main road, some bypaths have an
enticement not readily to be withstood. I am
going to err into such a bypath. If the reader will
keep me company I shall be glad. At the least, we
can promise ourselves that pleasure which is
wickedly said to be in sinning, for a literary sin the
divergence will be.
Melville, Billy Budd, p. 56.
without the subversive elements found—in very dif-
ferent ways, to be sure—in Melville’s fiction of the
1840s and 1850s. Gradually, however, criticism and
interpretation began to turn, and by the 1950s aca-
demic readers under the influence of narrative point of
view and the technique of unreliable narration revis-
ited the novel and reinterpreted it ironically. This
approach spawned a spate of critics who refused pas-
sively to accept Billy’s slaughter and instead attacked
Captain Vere as a misguided dogmatist and a destruc-
tive legalist.
Readings in this second wave have become known
collectively by Phil Withim’s term as Melville’s “testa-
ment of resistance” (p. 115). Such opposing approaches,
referred to sometimes as the “plain talkers” versus the
“ironists,” have constituted a critical controversy sim-
ilar to that surrounding Henry James’s The Turn of
the Screw (actual ghosts versus a narrator’s pathol-
ogy). In such controversies each critical side claims
that its opponents have not just missed a major
dimension of a rich, multilayered text (such as over-
looking multiple levels of meaning to the white
whale) but also that the opposing side has misread by
180 degrees the entire foundation of the author’s
vision and purpose. The “resistance” approach, never-
theless, has often been bolstered by the presence of
Melville’s tonal references in the text to the ambigu-
ous nature of various terms and lexicons; in fact, that
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B I L LY B U D D
dimension of his textuality can prompt phenomenolog-
ical investigation of Melville’s critique of language itself
with dire implications for the legitimacy of law, civi-
lization’s otherwise reliable lexicon par excellence.
When Fogle denominated Billy Budd a “nine-
teenth century version of classical tragedy, with old
forms revivified by new issues” (p. 110), he wished to
remind the emerging ironists of “resistance” that long
before the time of alleged pervasive narrative irony,
there lay a vast tradition of dramatic irony and irony of
fate in classical tragedy from Sophocles onward and
including, of course, Melville’s own favorite, William
Shakespeare. Although neither wrote narrative fiction,
Melville regarded them as mentors far more than he
did such contemporary writers as Washington Irving;
even his famous enthusiasm for Hawthorne was enun-
ciated specifically by reference to Shakespeare. Perhaps
today in the wake of Billy Budd’s complex critical his-
tory, it may help to reformulate Fogle’s idea in the
obverse: a nineteenth-century version of classical
tragedy with new forms revivified by old issues.
Putting the emphasis on new forms can bring us
back again to Melville’s phases of composition.
Hayford and Sealts in the introduction to their edition
of Billy Budd explain that during the five or six years
Melville struggled with the manuscript he underwent
three such phases corresponding to his three major
characters. Billy himself dominated the earliest phase,
John Claggart the second, and Captain Vere (hereto-
fore merely a background figure) the third. Suppose
we try to reenact Melville’s process of composition
with the not unreasonable idea that he really did hope
to compose, as earlier with Moby-Dick, some type of
classical tragedy, though occasioned also by such con-
temporary events as the mutiny aboard the USS
Somers in December 1842, with the ensuing execu-
tions and courts-martial, and the Haymarket Riot in
May 1886. The figure of Billy Budd could not quite
function as the plausible tragic hero in the traditional
Greek or Shakespearean context, in part because
Billy’s extraordinary goodness and innocence seem to
preclude the hamartia or “tragic flaw.” Melville did
seek to correct this problem when he introduced
Billy’s stutter in chapter 2 by attributing it specifically
to the hand of Satan—“the envious marplot of Eden”
(p. 53). Original sin, which Melville had called the
source of “the power of blackness,” was thus sutured
onto an otherwise angelic Billy. But that solution could
never quite sustain itself because Billy, however tainted
by residual original sin, so to speak, is never in posses-
sion of any genuine self-consciousness: he has “about
as much,” Melville writes, “as we may reasonably
impute to a dog of Saint Bernard’s breed” (p. 52). Billy
would thus remain the center of the novel’s tragic
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B I L LY B U D D
This hypothetical rumination by Melville’s narrator
from chapter 22 would seem to capture the idea that
Captain Vere finds himself an unhappy participant
in a necessary tragic action that goes against his own
humanity; yet he must follow through with it. Ironist
critics, however, would question both the reliability of
this viewpoint and even the truth of the incident
itself.
Captain Vere in end may have developed the pas-
sion sometimes latent under an exterior stoical or
indifferent. He was old enough to have been
Billy’s father. The austere devotee of military duty,
letting himself melt back into what remains
primeval in our formalized humanity, may in end
have caught Billy to his heart, even as Abraham
may have caught young Isaac on the brink of res-
olutely offering him up in obedience to the exact-
ing behest.
Melville, Billy Budd, p. 115.
movement, yet he could not function as the tragic
hero in the traditional sense.
In the second phase of composition Melville
developed John Claggart as the moral and spiritual
bête noire to Billy, attempting to explore nothing less
than the “mystery of iniquity” (pp. 76, 108). The nar-
rator concedes that Claggart’s “portrait I essay, but
shall never hit” (p. 64). As the opposing parallel to
Billy, Claggart, like the handsome, innocent sailor,
exhibits entirely unknown human origins, a suggestion
that promotes the idea that both figures symbolically
lie outside of time, or at least outside human and social
history. Since the eventual confrontation between
them amounts to good versus evil, such out-of-time
yet universal status may seem to us readers appropriate;
indeed, the narrator also tries to explain the unexplain-
able Claggart by recourse to the Platonic—and later
Christian—concept of “Natural Depravity: a depravity
according to nature” (p. 75). With such basis for char-
acter delineation, it is not surprising that both emerge
as far more type than character; and as types they can
but eventually destroy each other—Claggart by Billy’s
single “angelic” blow, Billy by naval law.
Yet in one respect Claggart, at least, is not so
atemporal or ahistorical, in that Melville associates his
particular duplicity with a contemporary view opposed
148 A M E R I C A N
to the lexicon and insight derived from the mythical
elements in Holy Scripture. This view is the biblical
higher criticism of the later nineteenth century, one
associated with the growth of scientific-positivistic
thought and much allied with the newer realist
movement that was in its prime while Melville tried
to write Billy Budd. It is not, obviously, that Claggart
is an advocate of the “higher criticism,” rather that
the disparity between his pleasant, rational, and
highly discriminating veneer belies an interior volcanic
“lunacy” and “riot” (p. 76) that the narrator associ-
ates with contemporary “higher criticism.” For this
reason the narrator invokes the “Hebrew prophets”
over “Coke and Blackstone”—those monumental
writers of British law—and even “admits” ironically
that he must appeal to “some authority not liable to
the charge of being tinctured with the biblical ele-
ment” (p. 75). He concludes the analysis of Claggart
with these words: “Dark sayings are these, some will
say. But why? Is it because they somewhat savor of
Holy Writ in its phrase ‘mystery of iniquity’? If they
do, such savor was far enough from being intended,
for little will it commend these pages to many a reader
of today” (p. 76).
Melville’s third phase of composition he turned to
Captain Vere in his search for the tragic hero. To begin
with, he needed a character rather than a type as well
as someone actually planted in time and history. So he
introduces Vere to the reader as “Captain the Honorable
Edward Fairfax Vere” (p. 60), thereby establishing
him with a family prominent—and profoundly divided—
at the time of the English Civil War, sharply contrast-
ing with those of unknown origin and lineage, Billy
and Claggart. Furthermore, in his development as a
character we become privy to both his consciousness
and his reading, reading that establishes the basis for
his conservative political and philosophical viewpoint,
which together with his scholarly demeanor earn him
the ambiguous appellation “Starry Vere” (p. 61). What
authorities such as Montaigne have refined in him is a
deeply a priori cast of mind, yet one also thoughtful
and “free from cant” (p. 62).
These features notwithstanding, the ironist
school of Melville criticism perforce denies Vere the
status of tragic hero in its condemnation of him as a
duped and close-minded legalist. The plain-talking
critic will find him exceptional but not subject to con-
demnation, even though the death of Billy betokens a
tragic movement to the overall drama. How does one
discern, then, a grand tragic flaw in Captain Vere
without otherwise diminishing the character Melville
brought forth from the background in his final phase
of composition? One way is to emphasize the surpris-
ing fact that, in his speech condemning Billy to the
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drumhead court made up of his junior officers, Vere
must eventually resort to the pragmatist’s argument—
the argument from immediate practical conse-
quences—in order to convince them that anything less
than full punishment will invite riot and anarchy
among “the people” (the seamen; p. 112), especially
in the climate of recent mutiny elsewhere. He turns to
this pragmatic argument, however, only after first
attempting—and utterly failing—to convince them by
philosophical argument that exhibits his usual a priori
cast of mind (“settled convictions . . . as a dike,” p. 62).
Still, why might such a change in Vere’s mode of argu-
ment constitute hamartia?
The answer lies in the way Melville has already
addressed the issue of utilitarian thinking—he calls
such thinkers “Benthamites” (p. 57)—earlier in Billy
Budd. He objects deeply to such thinking and explic-
itly opposes it to the grandeur undergirding the poetic
“epics and dramas” (p. 58) of art, and he cites as an
exemplar of that grand ritualistic style the legendary
Lord Horatio Nelson. But Melville also knew only too
well that in the course of the nineteenth century—the
time frame between when Billy Budd is set in 1797
and when Melville wrote it nearly a century later—the
utilitarian mindset had won out in philosophy, ethics,
and culture, including its natural compatibility with
the higher criticism and postbellum literary realism. In
short, Captain Vere has been forced to employ the
utilitarian argument in order to try to preserve from
his perspective in 1797 a traditional and conservative
worldview which, as Melville knew from his perspec-
tive in the 1890s, would run counter to the actual
Benthamite direction of subsequent thinking and his-
tory in the course of the nineteenth century. Therefore
Vere becomes in Billy Budd the most profound
demonstration of the inevitable triumph of that his-
tory in the very attempt by which he hoped to imple-
ment and maintain the alternative history. In this
respect Vere exhibits both hamartia and classical irony
of fate. Melville thus manages, as he sought in the
earlier “Benthamite” chapter, to “hold the Present at
its worth without being inappreciative of the Past”
(p. 57).
Melville’s profound sense of that “Present” in
Billy Budd is the signature that his creativity informs
late-nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural his-
tory. The mode of “indirection” he admits employing
in this novel and the extended compositional process
can answer to the method and practice of pragmatist
minds and artists like William and Henry James,
respectively, during the realist movement. “Truth
uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged
edges” (p. 128), he wrote, and although its primary
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B I L LY B U D D
reference is to the circumstances of Billy’s death, the
open-endedness of truth fits well into the newer para-
digm of pragmatistic thought, while the novel he all
but finished would engender a debate many compare
with The Turn of the Screw (1898). Finally, Melville’s
achievement in Billy Budd may also be analogous to
the work of the prolific Puritan writer Jonathan
Edwards (1703–1758) in its honest attempt to convey
a traditional viewpoint through a newer mode of pres-
entation whose foundations tend to undermine that
traditional view—a case, dramatically, of new forms
revivified by old issues. It is an achievement Captain
Vere would have welcomed historically and politically
but must settle for in the artistic sphere.
See also The Bible; Jurisprudence; Philosophy
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Works
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative).
Edited by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts Jr.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Melville, Herman. “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” Literary
World 17 (17 and 24 August 1850). Reprinted in
American Literary Essays, edited by Lewis Gaston
Leary. New York: Crowell, 1960.
Melville, Herman. Selected Poems of Herman Melville. Edited
by Hennig Cohen. New York: Fordham University
Press, 1991.
Secondary Works
Brodtkorb, Paul, Jr. “The Definitive Billy Budd: ‘But Aren’t
It All a Sham?’” PMLA 82, no. 7 (1967): 602–612.
Fogle, Richard Harter. “Billy Budd—Acceptance or Irony.”
Tulane Studies in English 8 (1958): 107–113. Reprinted
in Stafford’s Melville’s “Billy Budd” and the Critics.
Hocks, Richard A. “Melville and ‘The Rise of Realism’: The
Dilemma of History in Billy Budd.” American Literary
Realism 26, no. 2 (1994): 60–81.
Marovitz, Sanford E. “Melville among the Realists: W. D.
Howells and the Writing of Billy Budd.” American
Literary Realism 34, no. 1 (2001): 29–46.
Parker, Hershel. Reading “Billy Budd.” Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1990.
Stafford, William T., ed. Melville’s “Billy Budd” and the
Critics. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1961. Reprints
numerous critical essays including three cited in this
article: Fogle, Watson, and Witham.
Watson, E. L. Grant. “Melville’s Testament of Acceptance.”
New England Quarterly 6, no. 2 (1933): 319–327.
Reprinted in Stafford’s Melville’s “Billy Budd” and the
Critics.
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BIOGRAPHY
Witham, Phil. “Billy Budd: Testament of Resistance.”
Modern Language Quarterly 20, no. 2 (1959): 115–
132. Reprinted in Stafford’s Melville’s “Billy Budd” and
the Critics.
Richard A. Hocks
BIOGRAPHY
Between 1870 and 1920, biography was an unstable
genre, and many questions surrounded the practice of
it. Who, for example, deserved to be the subject of a
biography? Should biographers present their subjects
as unique individuals or as representative of something
larger? Should they consider only the public lives of
their subjects or their private lives as well? Should they
attempt to elevate their subjects or should they
“debunk” them by revealing their unknown shortcom-
ings? Must a biography present a complete, linear nar-
rative of a subject’s life? Or should a biographer distill
the essence of a subject’s “inner life” using a few telling
anecdotes? Such questions reflect the development of
biography as a genre, but also circumstances that were
specific to the cultural context of the United States.
HAGIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHY
In the broadest sense, modern biography reflects an
abiding Western belief in the autonomy and impor-
tance of the individual. The genre emerged in part
from the medieval Christian tradition of hagiography,
that is, spiritual biography that presents the exemplary
lives of saints so that believers might imitate them.
Hagiography is not supposed to be strictly factual or
objective; it presents idealized role models that help to
construct and stabilize the values of the communities.
By the late eighteenth century, however, the
values of the Enlightenment were encouraging greater
objectivity in biographical writing. Secular biography
sought to present factual, even scientific documenta-
tion of the actions of important figures in politics,
exploration, science, and war in the emerging demo-
cratic nation-state. Secular biographies may have an
exemplary character, but their importance to readers
is presumed to lie less in the realm of faith than in their
encouragement of civic progress. The main tendencies
reflected in these two traditions—religious and secu-
lar, subjective and objective, idealistic and realistic,
exemplary and individualized—were continually being
renegotiated by communities of authors and audi-
ences. The general development has been away from
the religious traditions of hagiography. Nevertheless,
both traditions supported a view that individual lives
150 A M E R I C A N H I S T O R Y
were worth documenting for the instruction of future
generations.
The circumstances of postcolonial cultural nation-
alism in the United States after the Revolution—
coupled with the uneven spread of Enlightenment
secularism to relatively isolated rural communities—
meant that hagiographical writing persisted well into
nineteenth century, particularly in education and reli-
gious culture. After the Civil War, the assassinated
Abraham Lincoln became the great exemplar of national
virtues. Of course, there was a note of Northern tri-
umphalism in this celebration of the Rail-splitter, but
Lincoln was also a better model of the self-made man
than the slave-owning George Washington, whom he
replaced as a favorite subject of biography. Horatio
Alger Jr. (1832–1899), author of the best-selling
Ragged Dick series (beginning in 1868), applied the
rags-to-riches template to Abraham Lincoln, the
Backwoods Boy; or, How a Young Rail-Splitter Became
President (1883). After President James Garfield (1831–
1881) was assassinated, Alger wrote a companion
volume: From Canal Boy to President; or, The Boyhood
and Manhood of James A. Garfield (1881). Similar pop-
ular volumes about Garfield as a self-made man and
secular saint were written by James S. Brisbin, James
Dabney McCabe, William M. Thayer, and many
others. Of course, the somewhat priggish version of
American presidents inflicted on generations of school-
children probably did much to encourage a complete
rejection of the vestiges of the hagiographical tradition
toward the end of the nineteenth century. These pop-
ular biographies would provide writers with a tradition
to define themselves against, particularly in the so-
called Gilded Age when the notion of a saintly politi-
cian seemed cloying and that of the self-made man a
misguided justification of the excesses of capitalism.
MONUMENTAL BIOGRAPHY
While popular biographies reached large segments of
the reading public by presenting simplified and ideal-
ized subjects, so-called monumental biographies were
often unreadable compendiums of ill-digested letters
and diaries presented chronologically within their his-
torical context. With titles such as “Life and Times” or
“Life and Letters,” these biographies occupied several
volumes and were ponderous in style as well as heft. If
scrupulously edited, monumental biographies could
be valuable repositories of primary documents. More
often, these documents were selected, edited, and in
some cases revised to suit the interests of the compiler-
biographer. Readers were frequently left to extract
their own interpretations from the mass of material
and most had little interest in doing so.
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