Billy Budd, Herman Melville | Harry Modean Campbell (essay date 1955)
Harry Modean Campbell (essay date 1955)
SOURCE: “The Hanging Scene in Melville's Billy Budd: A Reply to Mr. Giovannini,” in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 70, No. 7, November, 1955, pp. 497–500.
[In the following essay, Campbell responds to Giovannini's analysis, deeming his treatment of dualism as contradictory.]
Mr. Giovannini says that I fail to see the “basic dualism” in Billy Budd and therefore I oversimplify the philosophical implications in the story. But Mr. Giovannini's treatment of this so-called “dualism” is so contradictory that I am afraid that I still fail to see it. At the end of his essay, apparently attempting to hedge in his argument, he explains this “dualism” as a kind of balance between opposites: “The issue,” he says, “is not simply between pessimism and optimism, unbelief and orthodox belief, but a complex at a point beyond them—perhaps at that point defined by Ishmael (Moby...
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