Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Billy Budd, Herman Melville - Walter L. Reed (essay date 1977)

Billy Budd, Herman Melville - Walter L. Reed (essay date 1977)

Walter L. Reed (essay date 1977)

SOURCE: “The Measured Forms of Captain Vere,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer, 1977, pp. 227–35.

[In the following essay, Reed examines the conflict between aesthetic and legal forms of order and expression in Billy Budd.]

The figure of Captain Vere in Melville's Billy Budd is a particularly enigmatic one, as generations of critical controversy testify. He proves to be a harsh, even savage disciplinarian but is presented as a man of considerable culture and civilization as well. In one of the last chapters of the story, after Billy's execution, the author reports something of Vere's social philosophy and reflections on the revolution in France; the author credits Vere with a curious application of the myth of Orpheus. “‘With mankind,’ he would say, ‘forms, measured forms, are everything; and that is the import couched in the story of Orpheus with his lyre spellbinding...

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