[In the following essay, Bartley analyzes “Benito Cereno” as a portrayal of inverted tyranny.]

But how is it with the American slave? … He is said to be happy; happy men can speak. But ask the slave what is his condition—what his state of mind—what he thinks of enslavement? and you had as well addressed your inquiries to the silent dead. There comes no voice from the enslaved. We are left to gather his feelings by imagining what ours would be, were our souls in his soul's stead. (Frederick Douglass)¹

But with all this charming jollity and waggishness, the nigger has terrible capacities for revenge and hatred (which opportunity may develope, as in St. Domingo), and which ought to convince the skeptic that he is a man, not a baboon; and whenever our southern partners quit us, and begin to take care of their niggers themselves, they will learn that they are no joke. (Putnam's Monthly, 1855)²

I

The still lively disagreement over the dark, parabolic tale of “Benito Cereno” is occasioned by the still vexing interpretive problem it poses—the problem, that is, of how to read and evaluate Herman Melville's judgment of Babo, the leader of the slave revolt on board the Spanish slave transport the San Dominick. So, although students of American literature are familiar with the tale and are likely to recoil from yet another summary, there remains an urgent need to propose a kind of factum on which the contending parties might agree, but which I hope to fill out in ways that may ease this contention and, at the same time, bring us into closer contact with the tale's disturbing energy.

It is important to recall that Melville's tale of a slave revolt adapts and expands an incident recounted in a narrative by Amasa Delano, an American captain.³ Melville introduces a number of significant changes, the most obviously relevant being the shift in point of view from the first-person narrative of the original to a third-person narrative which hovers exclusively over a fictional Delano. The most obviously relevant similarity to the original narrative is Melville's retention (with a number of highly significant modifications) of the court deposition of a historical Benito Cereno which Delano had appended to his account. I will return to these modifications later.

With these considerations in mind, I propose to trace the bare trajectory of Melville's story in the following way, as abstracted both from the third-person account of Delano's perceptions and from the deposition. Delano, the captain of an American sealer, the Bachelor's Delight, sights the San Dominick in evident distress off the coast of Chile. He boards the ship in order to supervise its relief and, remarkably, spends most of the day on board ship without realizing that a violent slave revolt has taken place—that the captain of the slave transport, Benito Cereno, and his surviving crew are under the control of the slaves, and that the late captain and owner of the slaves, Alexandro Aranda, has been gruesomely murdered. As part of a skillfully managed conspiracy among the slaves, Babo maintains control from behind his pose as personal servant and humble slave of Cereno, while Cereno is made to perform the role of the capricious master. Nevertheless, the success of Babo's well-contrived plan—which readers learn as they gradually move away from an anxious involvement with Captain Delano's perplexity—depends upon Delano's profoundly culpable gullibility, for he cannot or will not penetrate the masquerade. He is described, in a famous observation, as “a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man.”⁴ Complicating this ingenuous benevolence is his unshakable racism. When he does impute conspiratorial and malign motives, for even he notices certain incongruities on the ship, he will suspect Cereno, a “horrible Spaniard” (BC, p. 77), before he will suspect African slaves. He simply cannot credit the slaves with a conspiratorial, vengeful, and accordingly, human intelligence—“they were,” in his mind, “too stupid” (BC, p. 75). And so Captain Delano gradually emerges as a moral imbecile of a historically recognizable and culturally unexceptional type.

So durable, even willful, is this moral blindness that Delano does not see through the masquerade until Cereno jumps off the ship into Delano's boat when Delano finally departs. But not even then—for, at a critical moment, he bitterly concludes that Cereno is a pirate and a treacherous cutthroat, after all. His presumably loyal servant, Babo, jumps after Cereno, but only when Delano sees that Babo is out to kill Cereno do the scales fall from his eyes. The rebellion is put down; the slaves are recaptured. Defiantly silent, Babo is executed by the Spanish authorities in Lima on the basis of Cereno's corroborated testimony to the tribunal. Cereno himself is “broken in body and mind” and dies shortly after the trial (BC, p. 114).

Perhaps the most powerfully persistent but almost certainly mistaken view of Babo's role in the story is that he is an entirely positive image of a revolutionary conspirator, an African Spartacus, who heroically instigates and leads a ruthlessly violent but just rebellion. The conclusion traditionally drawn from this judgment is that Melville, in a strong abolitionist posture, endorses slave insurrection. Furthermore, according to this view, he satirically vilifies the racist complacencies of American whites, of whom Delano, a New Englander, is representative, along with the judicial process that brutally supports civil order as an absolute value. In the process, the two points of view—Delano's and that implied in the forensic statement of fact—undergo a sustained ironic subversion which emphasizes their respectively prepossessing and systematic blindnesses.⁵

Nevertheless, while affirming the tale's satirical and antislavery thrust, an equally persistent tradition of resistance to this view of Babo has expressed concern over the profoundly violent character of Babo's conduct of the rebellion and, more particularly, his disturbing relationship with Benito Cereno. These concerns find their source in an alertness to the equivocal and ironic densities of Melville's narrative, to what Robert Levine has recently called “a dynamic and threatening text.” Its full sense, he argues, is lost to a critical point of view which has come to regard reading the story as “an exercise in certainty, in literary mastery, an occasion to offer pious denunciations of Delano and Cereno and fraternal embraces to Babo and his fellow conspirators.”⁶ Carolyn Karcher voices a representative concern. If Babo, as she says, is “on the whole a favorable portrayal of a black rebel, despite the fearsomeness with which he is tinged in his role as white America's nemesis,” she nevertheless holds, even to the point of contradiction, that “moving as I find this glimpse, I do not believe one can honestly deduce from it an unequivocal endorsement [on Melville's part] of revolutionary violence as a means of ending slavery.”⁷ Karcher's abrupt objection acknowledges that Melville has raised the historical problem of the apparent incommensurability of revolutionary means and ends, a problem at the heart of the antebellum debate over slavery and at the heart of the story. The full historical particularity of this antebellum debate, in all its heated anxiousness, is thoroughly and skillfully absorbed into Levine's discussion of the story, and his judgment also yields an equivocal emphasis; while conceding that Babo is “properly vengeful,” he observes that there is little to encourage “even the experienced reader to find sole community with [him].”⁸

The reservations about Babo expressed by Karcher and Levine point out the unstable distinction between concession and objection exposed by the story—a distinction so tenuous that other critics express their reservations about Babo less cautiously, and with, I believe, greater justice. For justice is, in this case, better served by overstatement than by cautious understatement. Hence, the full measure of what Levine could mean by “a dynamic and threatening text” is better taken by Allan Moore Emery, for whom Babo, far from being a favorable portrayal of a rebel, becomes a “devilish symbol of all depravity.”⁹ George Dekker, placing due emphasis on the relationship between Babo and Cereno, brings us closer still to Babo's moral significance when he observes that “Cereno has had a glimpse, if not of pure evil, then at least an atavism so sinister, intelligent and profound, as to shatter forever his sense of what it is to be human.”¹⁰

But, if justice is in a sense served by overstatement, it is still overstatement. The purpose of this article is to suggest a more measured positioning along the continuum between understatement and overstatement—between a critical diffidence and a critical tendency to demonize. Although there is a widely shared sense of something disturbing about Babo, the precise character of the moral phenomenon he represents has, in a significant way, eluded the commentators who appear to be the most disturbed by it. In all cases, there is an awareness of a boundary having been crossed without a satisfactorily articulated acknowledgment of how “white America's nemesis” has encroached upon that limit—without, that is, taking us much beyond the terrible violence that Babo initiates, and which by itself is insufficient to account for Cereno's spiritual collapse. If critics like Emery and Dekker bring us within more proximate range of Melville's likely intentions in the story than Karcher and Levine do, all four are, nevertheless, insufficiently guided by the decisive implications of Melville's narrative style, however oblique and riddling. There is a tempting authority in Dekker's eloquent discomfort, but such a response is characterized—no less than is Emery's judgment—by an abstracted and inauthentic alarm that gives scope to sentimental, even histrionic, reaches of feeling. Both critics are representative in this species of response. There is a territory of significance in the story approached but not occupied by their reflections. This territory excludes the Gothic simplifications of sinister atavism, of “pure evil,” of “devilish symbol,” and most especially, is a territory that Cereno gets more than a glimpse of.¹¹ Cereno is crushed by his encounter with Babo, but by a mere glimpse?

The truth is that Cereno is deeply involved with Babo. His will to live is destroyed, not, as Dekker suggests, “because the different certainties of his world as a Spanish gentleman have been pulled down and caricatured with ferocious irony,” although Dekker is right in a very general and uninformative way.¹² Rather, it is because Cereno has been enslaved by Babo, a pattern that a slave's revenge might be expected to take, a psychological and historical plausibility which is fundamental to the appalling intensities of the story. Therewith, the ground of our concern shifts from the story's very real concern with the complexities of the problem of revolutionary means and ends to a more fundamental concern, one upon which any adequate perspective on this problem depends. What I mean is that, even if one acknowledges that the tale commands a profound allegiance to the slaves' cause—and the tale does command this allegiance—the story is finally, and not inconsistently, a study in tyranny. This hardly seems an exceptional claim, and I will shortly develop it further. Here I want to observe that this tyranny is enabled within a hypothetical scenario in which slave becomes master, in which the slave, now master, is susceptible to all the temptations and corruptions of having absolute dominion over another human being.¹³ The story, then, concurs with that line of antislavery polemic which, besides emphasizing the devastating effects of slavery on the enslaved, emphasizes how it morally devastated masters. Charles Whipple, a representative spokesman, would argue that “[no] human being is fit to be trusted with absolute, irresponsible power. … If the best portion of our community were selected to hold and use such authority [as masters possessed] they would very soon be corrupted.”¹⁴

As I hope to show, Melville universalizes this claim and deepens its implications in ways inconceivable to the benevolent and condescending racism of the abolitionist movement and perhaps even to a twentieth-century enlightenment.¹⁵ One can argue that Melville has taken on the particular burden of the sympathetic imagination commanded by Frederick Douglass in offering a narrative hypothesis about how it could be with the slave.¹⁶ This hypothesis accepts and dramatizes the obstacles that stand in the way of imaginative contact with him—and these obstacles are relevant whether we are speaking of Babo or Cereno. But far from anticipating a postmodern, hypersensitive skepticism concerning the “other,” Melville believes, along with Douglass, that because “there comes no voice from the slave,” we must “gather his feelings by imagining what ours would be, were our souls in his soul's stead.”¹⁷ And this means construing, through an act of the sympathetic imagination by author and reader, the quiet intrusion of contrary evidence that exceeds the grasp of Captain Delano, who is incapable of such imaginative possession, but which also subverts the canons of relevance dictated by the judicial process which shape Cereno's account of the incident. If we are never privy to Babo's thoughts—if Babo offers “no revelatory soliloquies, like those of Iago or Milton's Satan or Ahab”¹⁸—we have in Babo the more telling evidence of a consciousness that privileges the efficacy of deeds over words, and whose deeds are eloquent in themselves, in the historically conventional extension of eloquence to action.¹⁹ Here is the motive behind Babo's pointed refusal to speak after he is captured, all the while that his “aspect seemed to say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words” (BC, p. 116). Melville recovers and reconstitutes the basis of the slave's humanity as it might emerge in action behind, on the margins of, and in spite of the points of view in the story that would vigorously suppress or deny it. In doing so, he offers a profoundly wrought realization and extension of the hypothesis that the slave “has terrible capacities for revenge and hatred” sufficient “to convince the skeptic that he is a man.”

But for Melville the process of projecting such a frightening revenge yields a discovery that proves the most persuasive means for destroying the prepossessions of the personal and institutional points of view he recreates. This discovery—as dangerous to affirm as to deny—emerges from Melville's scenario in which the humanity denied the African by a racist mythology is redeemed by Babo's capacity for a tyranny of an exceptional kind, over body and soul. To specify what I mean by an exceptional tyranny, I invoke the notion developed by Simone Weil in her remarkable essay “The Iliad, Poem of Might.” “Might,” in its “elementary and coarse form,” is simply the capacity to make “a thing of anybody who comes under its sway. When exercised to the full, it makes a thing of man in the most literal sense, for it makes him a corpse.” That is, it is “the might that kills outright.”²⁰ However, Weil is interested in this crude form only for the service it performs as a foundation for a more prodigious form of might. She observes:

How much more varied are its devices; how much more astonishing in its effects is that other which does not kill; or which delays killing. It must surely kill, or it will perhaps kill, or else it is only suspended above him whom it may at any moment destroy. This of all procedures is what turns a man to stone. From the power to transform him into a thing by killing him proceeds another power, and much more prodigious, that which makes a thing of him while he still lives. He is living, he has a soul, yet he is a thing. A strange being is that thing which has a soul, and a strange state of that soul. Who knows how often during each instant it must torture and destroy itself in order to conform? The soul was not made to dwell in a thing; and when forced to it, there is no part of that soul but suffers violence.²¹

Melville, as I hope to demonstrate, discovers on his own the full, dramatically conceivable implications of this insight in his conception of Babo. For Babo victimizes Cereno with an exercise of might in this more developed sense. Moreover, Babo does so with an appalling virtuosity, attesting to his capacity for ruthless force (for “might” in its crudest sense), combined with a subtle intelligence and a highly competent malice. If I am right here, perhaps we have a sounder basis for the eloquent definitiveness of judgment that critics of the story have reached for.

II

In order to establish Babo's use of might, one must first attend to the “quiet intrusion of contrary evidence” occasioned by the deposition. And this means that one must acknowledge the remarkable ways in which Cereno's account of the actions of the slaves and Babo resists and subverts the hostile confinement dictated by the formal intentions of the deposition. But the account not only resists and subverts: its forms unintentionally although eloquently enact the actions of the slaves. Babo himself can be said, through a subversive appropriation of his own, to co-opt a kind of discourse which promotes, in its very movement and texture, the weight and majesty that the administration of law claims for itself, even as it subserves the interests of an oppressive legal authority.²² Babo's exercise of might, as we shall see, depends upon his ability to exploit the forms and procedures of that authority in the very act of overthrowing it.

This is not to overlook one of the profound ironies of the story—that the deposition affords the fullest expression of the attractive strength of the slaves' cause, and the clearest sense of their heroism. These perceptions depend, of course, on Cereno's testimony, but more decisively emerge from the stylistic forms of the deposition itself—the conventional prolixity and the relentlessly repetitive structural forms of professional legal discourse, which are superimposed on the raw material provided by Cereno. Cereno, now institutionally reduced to the role of mere deponent, disappears into the public movement of a judicial proceeding at which, moreover, he is not even physically present. A notable example of the deposition's power of enactment appears in that part of it which implicates the women slaves in the revolt and in the battle with the Bachelor's Delight:

that the negresses, of age, were knowing to the revolt, and testified themselves satisfied at the death of their master, Don Alexandro; that, had the negroes not restrained them, they would have tortured to death, instead of simply killing, the Spaniards slain by the command of the negro Babo; that the negresses used their utmost influence to have the deponent made away with; that, in the various acts of murder, they sang songs and danced—not gaily, but solemnly; and before the engagement with the boats, as well as during the action, they sang melancholy songs to the negroes, and that this melancholy tone was more inflaming than a different one would have been, and was so intended.

(BC, p. 112)

These are the women whom Delano comically misrepresents as maternal animals, who, “unsophisticated as leopardesses” and “loving as doves,” are nevertheless “ready to die for their infants or to fight for them” in ways he cannot conceive (BC, p. 73). Here, the otherwise inert legalese of the deposition (and certainly the inertness of Melville's source) is suddenly and powerfully alive.²³ The measured movement of the string of subordinate clauses approaches the flexible and capacious strength of the epic hexameter as it rhythmically activates the poignantly solemn and vindictive determination of the women slaves, who take their part in the desperate and heroic communal enterprise. If the songs they sing are melancholy, they nevertheless inflame because they, in ritualistic concentration, rehearse a communal experience of suffering. Their purpose is less that of elegiac bards, as Douglas Anderson suggests, than of choric accompanists to an epic struggle of a people who want their freedom and who passionately want to go home.²⁴ Such is the energy that the legal process would extinguish. But as this human movement is powerfully realized within, and even because of, the oppressive civic ceremonial of the deposition itself, a darker irony emerges, a darker sense of the atrocious, even cannibalistic energy of the deposition's civic intent.

This stylistic dynamic gives an unforeseen aptness to Albert Camus's designation of Melville as the “Homer of the Pacific”—not only the Homer of the Odyssey, as he had in mind, but the Homer of the Iliad as well.²⁵ The story's connection with the Iliad seems no less active at the beginning of the deposition, which makes forensic identifications of the conspiring slaves, and in which, again, the forensic converges ironically with the epic:

One, from about eighteen to nineteen years, named José, and this was the man that waited upon his master, Don Alexandro, and who speaks well the Spanish, having served him for four or five years; … a mulatto, named Francesco, the cabin steward, of a good person and voice, having sung in the Valparaiso churches, native of the province of Buenos Ayres, aged about thirty-five years. … A smart negro named Dago, who had been for many years a gravedigger among the Spaniards, aged forty-six years. … Four old negroes, born in Africa, from sixty to seventy, but sound, calkers by trade, whose names are as follows:—the first named Mure, and he was killed; … the second, Natu; the third, Yola, likewise killed; the fourth, Ghofan; and six full-grown negroes, aged from thirty to forty-five, all raw, and born among the Ashantees—Matiluqui, Yau, Lecbe, Mapenda, Yambaio, Akim; four of whom were killed; … a powerful negro named Atufal, who, being supposed to have been a chief in Africa, his owners set great store by him. … And a small negro of Senegal, but some years among the Spaniards, aged about thirty, which negro's name was Babo.

(BC, p. 104)

The passage, more specifically, invites comparison with the Catalogue of Ships in book 2 of the Iliad. Here—as in Homer—we have a catalogue of the principals, called forth as if in answer to a question like the one posed in book 2: “Who then of those were the chief men and the lords of the Danaans?”²⁶ Breaking from the loose, random enumeration of his source, Melville intervenes with a highly selective summary—extracted from a body of some fifty names, as we are informed in Melville's editorial note, and tightened by the visible editing out of intervening names. The result is a deliberately structured tableau. The measured movement is articulated by the patterned repetitions of epithet (“a small negro,” “a powerful negro,” “a smart negro,” and so on), name, age, place of birth, and vocation. Ultimately, that movement has the effect of a ritualistic performance, announcing a calculated ordering and ranking of the chief insurgents and so enacting an essentially civic pageant poignantly founded in rebellious aspiration.

The movement begins with the first and least: Don Alexandro's youthful domestic servant, the category of slave who is putatively the most susceptible to the civilizing influence of his white masters and yet whose servility only flatters the master's false claim to distinction. He is pointedly degraded to the least degree of dignity. The placing of Francesco the mulatto a rung above him in the catalogue is an ironic hit at Delano, who in keeping with the habits of an enculturated racism, accords the mulatto a status superior to native-born Africans (BC, pp. 88-89), even though he is, in the deposition's phrase, the vengeful “creature and tool of the negro Babo” (BC, p. 111). Next in ascending rank are the oakum pickers, the venerable elders of the slave community whose place in a slowly emerging civic hierarchy is earned and defined by their seniority. They exert a rhythmically suasive, order-inducing authority over the conspiring slaves with “a continuous, low, monotonous chant; droning and druling away like so many gray-headed bagpipers playing a funeral march” (BC, p. 50). Their role registers sufficiently on Delano, who sees them as “monitorial constables to their countrymen” (BC, p. 55). Next are the Ashanti hatchet polishers, whose “cymballing” hatchets keep a rhythmic counterpoint with the oakum pickers. They are a kind of officer corps, Babo's “bravoes,” armed and poised for battle. The penultimate figure is Atufal, a former king, now second in command. And finally the movement culminates with Babo, the former slave of slaves, now “the helm and keel of the revolt” (BC, p. 112).

If, however, the strong, ritualized rhythms work decisively to bind our allegiance to the slaves' cause, we also perceive that allegiance complicated and compromised as these ritualized rhythms give form to Babo's tyranny. As we learn from the deposition, Babo's tyranny is founded on his wielding of might in the elementary and coarse sense, that particular power which, in Weil's words, “makes a thing of anybody who comes under its sway” and “when exercised to the full … makes a thing of man in the most literal sense, for it makes him into a corpse.” We see Babo wielding might in its most spectacular form in his staging of the public execution of Alexandro Aranda. At best, this is a prudential display of violence meant to guarantee the slaves their freedom, serving that end, as Michel Foucault observes, as a “policy of terror.” But at worst it serves equally “to make everyone aware, through the body of the criminal,” of “the unrestrained presence of the sovereign.” The public execution, Foucault reminds us, “did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power.” The atrocious excess of violence in the execution is not a “demonstration of why the laws are being enforced, but rather who were its enemies.” The sovereign triumphs “over those whom he had reduced to impotence,” to “a body effaced, reduced to dust and thrown to the winds.” Thus, the law pursues “the body beyond possible pain”—as if to imply that the very limits of punishment have been defined and, even then, breached.²⁷

All these intimations are rendered shockingly vivid in the deposition: Babo orders Aranda killed before him and the surviving Spaniards. Aranda's body disappears below deck and is apparently cannibalized, the white skeleton at night riveted to the prow as the San Dominick's new figurehead, displacing the figure of Christopher Columbus (a triumphant gesture that will appeal to a contemporary revisionism). Underneath it are mockingly scrawled in chalk the words Seguid neustro jefe (Follow your leader). To Cereno's repeated inquiries about Aranda's remains, Babo

answered nothing till the fourth day, when at sunrise, the deponent coming on deck, the negro Babo showed him a skeleton, which had been substituted for the ship's proper figure-head, the image of Christopher Colon, the discoverer of the New World; that the negro Babo asked him whose skeleton that was, and whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a white's; that, upon his covering his face, the negro Babo, coming close, said words to this effect: “Keep faith with the blacks from here to Senegal, or you shall in spirit, as now in body, follow your leader,” pointing to the prow; … that same morning the negro Babo took by succession each Spaniard forward, and asked him whose skeleton that was, and whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a white's; that each Spaniard covered his face; that then to each negro Babo repeated the words in the first place said to the deponent; … that they (the Spaniards), being assembled aft, the negro Babo harangued them, saying that he had now done all; that the deponent (as navigator for the negroes) might pursue his course, warning him and all of them that they should, soul and body, go the way of Don Alexandro if he saw them (the Spaniards) speak or plot anything against them (the negroes)—a threat which was repeated every day.

(BC, pp. 107-8)

Once again, the stylistic inertness of the deposition becomes suddenly enlivened—this time with a terrible energy. The passage, entirely of Melville's creation, articulates, again with Foucault's useful keying of our perceptions, a veritable “liturgy of punishment and terrorization.” The ordered, stately pace, measured by the repetitive gestures customary in a judicial proceeding, enacts a “meticulous ceremonial.” Ironically, however, this enunciation of might is enfolded within the texture of Cereno's deposition, which is a part of the formal proceeding against Babo. Babo, in turn, is executed according to the meticulous ceremonial of might which identifies and eliminates the enemies of Spanish sovereignty: we recall that Babo is “dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule,” where he meets “his voiceless end. The body was burned to ashes,” the head is “fixed on a pole in the Plaza” (BC, p. 116). In this action the two practices coincide and affirm each other, with the implication that the one assertion of sovereignty is no less—or no more—legitimate than the other. Each shares the same assumptions and structures, which give each assertion the same coherence.²⁸ These forms become the means of exactly depicting Babo's meticulous staging of Aranda's execution. But this outcome should not be surprising, for who could know better the institutional articulations or better feel the formal rhythms of power than a slave? Who could better sense their capacity for majestic terror, and who could be more utterly attuned to their absolute dissociation from natural justice?

Thus Babo, like the authority he overthrows, and in precise conformity with the forensic means he appropriates, proves a competent practitioner of might. Nevertheless, Babo's ambition reaches far beyond the aims that could be fulfilled by a prudential if ruthless violence, and for which he might still be defended. For this vengeful slave is as competently ruthless toward the soul as he is toward the body—a fact already crudely apparent in the terror that attends the exercise of might. I turn in the next section to examine the practice of an ultimate sense of might.

III

“Might” in this more prodigious form does not simply depend upon the capacity to kill but on the suffering that follows from holding this power in abeyance, from suspending it above the person whom it may at any moment destroy. “This of all procedures,” we have noted Weil as saying, “is what turns a man to stone. From the power to transform him into a thing by killing him proceeds another power, … that which makes a thing of him while he still lives. He is living, he has a soul, yet he is a thing.” She observes, furthermore, that the victim of might is a thing which “aspires every moment to become a man, a woman, and never at any moment succeeds. This is a death drawn out the length of a life, a life that death has frozen long before extinguishing it.”²⁹ These images of the living dead, of a soul frozen inside a corpse, gesture at the totality with which might silences the imprisoned soul. Frederick Douglass draws out their implications more explicitly when he says that the slave is like “the silent dead. There comes no voice from the enslaved.” And further: “If there were no other fact descriptive of slavery, than that the slave is dumb, this alone would be sufficient to mark the slave system as a grand aggregation of human horrors.”³⁰

And so, as we try to construe the actions of Babo that haunt the margins of Delano's perceptions, we sense that Babo sees to this first: he silences Benito Cereno by making him a thing even as he spares his life. Babo achieves this by forcing Cereno, for the purpose of keeping the conspiracy intact, to act the role of capricious master for Delano. Accordingly, he is forced to dress, with a punctilious attention to detail that Delano notices, the part of a South American gentleman slaveholder, “however unsuitable for the time and place” and “however strangely surviving in the midst of all his afflictions.” He wears “a loose Chili jacket of dark velvet; white small clothes and stockings, with silver buckles at the knee and instep; a high-crowned sombrero, of fine grass,” as well as “a slender sword silver mounted, hung from a knot in his sash” (BC, p. 57). Another feature of the masquerade is that Cereno must make a show of subduing Atufal, the former king, kept in chains for an unspecified offense—appropriately a matter of indifference to the putatively capricious Cereno. Every two hours, so Delano is told, Atufal is brought before his imperious master to seek his pardon, but Atufal, in keeping with his “royal spirit,” as Delano construes it, defiantly refuses to speak.

These familiar details emphasize how the silenced Cereno is trapped behind a public surface which, lineament by lineament, is disjoined from his private self. With all the terrible pressure of his unvoiced fear—and grief, for Aranda was his dear friend—Cereno is made to appear exactly what he is not, as, for example, the capricious slaveholder that the text never indicates he was. This forced imposture crosses the grain of every muscular striation and sinew. We take as grotesque understatement at the end of the story the report that “again and again it was repeated, how hard it had been to enact the part forced on the Spaniard by Babo” (BC, p. 114). The difficulty is intensified by Delano's obtuseness and by Cereno's concern for Delano's safety; indeed, Cereno's compassion is co-opted by the might that would destroy compassion. His fellow feeling guarantees his silence, just as it aggravates his suffering, and is even used toward achieving that end. One effect of this silencing of Cereno is something like the hysteria which Juliet Mitchell defines as the behavioral distortion that follows from a “simultaneous acceptance and refusal” of power.³¹ An exact equilibrium between acceptance and refusal would seem to imply the perfect silence of paralysis, but with Cereno we see something more familiar but equally dreadful—the thwarted and disguised expression of protest. On the one hand, Cereno will sink into a cadaverous sullenness, indifference, apathy, a “dreary spiritlessness,” “muteness,” “vacancy,” “motionlessness,” and “remoteness.” On the other hand, we see his desperate, unvoiced alertness rising toward the surface of expression but diffused as hectic animation—as, that is, a “grasping,” “shrinking,” “glaring,” a recoiling “as if flayed alive,” a “pausing,” “starting,” or “staring,” accompanied by “lip biting,” “flushing,” and “paling.” These manic oscillations answer well to Weil's description of the victim of might as a thing that aspires passionately and alertly at every moment to become a person again but that never at any moment succeeds. Thus, Cereno is helpless and Babo mocks this helplessness in numerous ways with an intense preoccupation irrelevant to the practicalities of rebellion. One example is the calculated humiliation by which the “silver-mounted sword, apparent symbol of despotic command” proves “not, indeed, a sword but the ghost of one. The scabbard, artificially stiffened, was empty” (BC, p. 116).

Such a characterization of Babo becomes more plausible in the famous shaving scene where the very delicacy of his might quietly emerges and is all the more appalling for being so. Its occasion comes when Cereno forgets the lie he tells about running into storms around Cape Horn—“Cape Horn?—who spoke of Cape Horn?”—as Delano, pressing for details of the ship's misfortunes, is having difficulty finding the story believable (BC, p. 81). In quick response to Cereno's lapse, moving to reimpose close, threatening surveillance on him, Babo says that it is time for his master's shave, according to Cereno's fictitious standing orders. Delano finds nothing unusual in this, another apparent sign of Cereno's caprice. The action of the scene begins with another assault on Delano's imperception when, for a moment, Babo brandishes the razor threateningly near Cereno's throat. Delano cannot “resist the vagary, that in the black he saw a headsman, and in the white, a man at the block” (BC, p. 85). Nevertheless, Delano—noting Babo's “easy cheerfulness” and “smooth tact” and recalling his own conviction that “most negroes are natural valets and hairdressers”—is sufficiently reassured of Babo's docility as he observes his preparations to shave his master (BC, p. 83). Thus he misses the ironies of Babo's subsequent political theatrics. For example, Delano notes with perplexed amusement “an odd instance of the African love of bright colors and fine shows” in which Babo has pulled the royal standard of Spain out of a flag locker to use as a shaving apron (BC, p. 84). During the shaving, the bunting accidentally unfolds.³² When Delano recognizes the flag of Spain, he remarks fatuously: “It's well it's only I, and not the King, that sees this,” adding, as he turns to Babo, “‘It's all one I suppose, so the colors be gay;’ which playful remark did not fail somewhat to tickle the negro” (BC, p. 85). Babo, of course, is in perfect command of the situation, attuning his manner to Delano's racist expectations. Moreover, he takes pleasure in this command, availing himself of the perfect disguise for such pleasure. That this flag is chosen from among other banners is another gesture of humiliation—at best a petty one, but perhaps for that reason all the more contemptuous of Cereno. It mocks Cereno's silenced helplessness, compounded by Delano's inability to recognize it. This is itself another likely source of Babo's pleasure, even though Babo needed only to make his point to Cereno—which we can assume was his original intention, given that the flag's identity is at first concealed.

More significant, as Babo finishes up the shave, we see new intensities in his manner. First he massages Cereno's head with a vehemence that causes “the muscles of his face to twitch rather strangely”—a slightly Gothic and relatively clumsy touch on Melville's part. But there is nothing clumsy in what follows:

His next operation was with comb, scissors and brush; going round and round, smoothing a curl here, clipping an unruly whisker-hair there, giving a graceful sweep to the temple-lock, with other impromptu touches evincing the hand of a master; while, like any resigned gentleman in barber's hands, Don Benito bore all, much less uneasily, at least, than he had done the razoring; indeed, he sat so pale and rigid now, that the negro seemed a Nubian sculptor finishing off a white statue-head.

All being over at last, … the negro's warm breath blowing away any stray hair which might have lodged down his master's neck; collar and cravat readjusted; a speck of lint whisked off the velvet lapel; all this being done; backing off a little space, and pausing with an expression of subdued self-complacency, the servant for a moment surveyed his master, as, in toilet at least, the creature of his own tasteful hands.

(BC, p. 87)

“Creature,” drawing on its root sense of “create,” is anything made, and so includes the familiar, associated senses of “one who is actuated by the will of another—an instrument, a puppet—one produced by, or owes its being solely to another being,” or “a person subject to the will and influence of another.”³³ Certainly by this point we are aware that Babo has made Cereno in these possessive, appropriative senses, through an artistically reductive enterprise that unfolds in the course of Babo's masquerade. But this passage discloses an extraordinary fulfillment of Babo's artistic capacity to fashion roles, a fulfillment horribly enabled by the tendency of Babo's artistry to approach the formal sensitivity, practical skill, and creative passion of the accomplished sculptor. If Babo emerges here as “a Nubian sculptor finishing off a white statue head,” this has a far more ominous thematic significance than Karcher ascribes when she sees it as evoking the “artistry that recalls an African heritage of civilization, rather than of barbarism”—and thus earning its presence in the story merely as a device to counteract a crude stereotype.³⁴ Instead, we can trace the convergence of that artistry with the ultimate form of might.

As a crucial point of contact in that convergence, Babo becomes a version of Pygmalion, a symbol with a wide currency in nineteenth-century American literature. And like Pygmalion, in at least one of the symbol's latent implications, Babo insists upon another human being's unconditional submission to the necessarily reductive confines of his own possessive conceptions and constructions, to the dictates of his own projected desires and hopes for the other.³⁵ In Babo's case, his insistence finds its fulfillment in a species of domination that takes the appropriate metaphorical form of both fashioning and imprisoning that person in stone. Adam Verver in Henry James's The Golden Bowl wishes the same for his daughter Maggie, at least momentarily, inasmuch as he would like her to be “like some slight, slim draped ‘antique’ of the Vatican or Capitoline hills, late and refined, rare as a note and immortal as a link, … keeping still the quality, the perfect felicity of the statue.” Thus, as Martha Nussbaum observes, he “denied her status as a separate, autonomous center of choice.” He wishes “to collect and keep her always.”³⁶ This is to wish for his own daughter a kind of death in life, although he does relinquish it in loving recognition of her integrity and autonomy.

The sort of victimization that is only threatened in the case of The Golden Bowl is fulfilled in The Scarlet Letter, where the dreadful efficacy of the Pygmalion motif is exposed. In her tyrannized solitude, Hester Prynne appears in a profound sense composed, even sculpted by a communal determination to reduce her into a symbol of sin. Thus she is denied that quality of recognition finally accorded Maggie Verver by her father. As a victim of scornfully reductive and ultimately possessive regard, Hester is an outstanding example of the life that death has frozen long before extinguishing it, of the victim of might figuratively trapped within stone. Her face, Nathaniel Hawthorne says, “showed a marble quietude” which “was like a mask; or rather, like the frozen calmness of a dead woman's features.”³⁷ Only Pearl can intuit the riot of feeling within her silenced mother's “unquiet bosom,” betraying in her own antic conduct a perception of emotion “which none could detect in the marble passiveness of Hester's brow.”³⁸

And so Babo puts the finishing touches on the public mask that he has fashioned for Cereno—a mask which, as we have seen, is the studied contradiction of everything that Cereno is and which now attains a perfected marble quietude. What perhaps distinguishes Babo from these other Pygmalion figures is the degree of calculated and energetic artistry he shows at the conclusion of the shaving scene: the graceful, impromptu, light touches of the comb, scissors, and brush, the soft warm breath lightly blowing on a stray hair, the nimble and deft strokes of the razor as if it were a sculptor's tool—these are all particulars exhibiting an attention to the smallest details with the most delicate means. No doubt these signs of intimate care and expertise answer to Babo's servile vocation and Delano's racist expectations. The African could even be allowed a certain pride in the craft of grooming—a suitable and clever disguise for keeping close surveillance on Cereno. But Babo's attentions serve more than the necessities of security, and Eric Sundquist surely comes up short when he terms them a “masquerade of devotion” and a “simulation of intimacy,” remarking that Babo “in his delicate physical mannerisms and his verbal solicitude” merely “replicates the fawning care attributed to slaves in the propaganda of the master class.”³⁹

Indeed, Babo's preoccupation with Cereno merges with the intimate attention that one can show to a thing one has made. Examples of this intimate attention to small details recur throughout the story: rubbing out a spot on Cereno's velvet, adjusting a loose shoe buckle, placing a pillow, or smoothing the hair along the temples “as a nurse does a child.” We also find it in Babo's attention to Atufal, who additionally invites comparison to a sculpted figure and who is no less the creature of Babo's tasteful hands. This is dimly sensed by Delano, who early on sees Atufal as “monumentally fixed at the threshold, like one of those sculptured porters of black marble guarding the porches of Egyptian tombs” (BC, p. 92). Within the context assembled so far, it emerges that Babo, himself the slave of Africans before he became the slave of whites, through his passionate efficiency in arranging, shaping, and attending to the finest details, from the neat appurtenances of Cereno's dress to the ceremonious rhythms of a public execution, has not only firmly and vengefully displaced Atufal as leader of the revolt, which would be his royal due, but has artistically diminished him as well—has in effect monumentally fixed him—in the role fashioned for him to play in the conspiracy, that of a muted slave in chains, with his head bowed.⁴⁰

In both cases, but especially in Cereno's, Babo's attentions exhibit a tenderness, a minuteness of passionate surveillance that overwhelms imposture.⁴¹ The sincerity of such attention is again obtusely but reliably recognized by Delano, who notes in Babo the “anxious fidelity” of a “devoted companion.” This is, furthermore, a persuasively intense devotion consistent not only with proprietary care but also with the hate which it finally defines.⁴² Hawthorne has such consistency in mind in The Scarlet Letter, where he shows how love and hate blur together:

It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object. Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky and lurid glow. In the spiritual world, the old physician and the minister [Chillingworth and Dimmesdale]—mutual victims as they have been—may, unawares, have found their earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transmuted into golden love.⁴³

Hate in this perspective can be an excessive need for another person while surely also figuring as a life-seeking impulse, a manifestation of the survival instinct, a desire too for a previously withheld recognition.⁴⁴ But unlike love, which seeks that fragile equipoise of desire and reciprocal respect, hate passionately requires the presence of the other in order to deplete it. That depletion is clearly achieved here through reductive enactment—the small, even petty attentions that articulate the delicately wrought contours of the attenuated image. As such, these attentions are the gestures of might, whose capacity to violate inversely correlates with their ostensibly light precision. Small wonder, then, that the moment Cereno tries to escape, Babo uselessly sacrifices everything to make the ultimate claim on his creature, to perform the final act of depletion—jumping overboard after Cereno in order to kill him, “his countenance lividly vindictive, expressing the centered purpose of his soul” (BC, p. 114).⁴⁵

Weil points out how the Iliad beautifully works its way beyond the “empire of might” in those moments of grace when an intimacy between enemies, one born of enmity, seems to prepare the ground for loving recognition—as if an excessive need somehow intuits, at a crucial and unpredictable moment, how to retreat to a caring distance.⁴⁶ Such a moment occurs between Achilles, the slayer of Hector, and Priam, the father of Hector, slayer of Patroclus:

Then Dardanian Priam began to admire Achilles;
How mighty and handsome he was: he had the look
          of a god.
And Dardanian Priam, in turn, was admired by
          Achilles,
Who gazed at his beautiful visage and drank in
          his words.(47)

The extraordinary reciprocity here follows from a sudden recognition of a fellowship in loss which transcends the desire to avenge a son and a friend, the one enemy seeing the image of his own father, the other of his son as they look at each other. But “Benito Cereno” does not permit such moments of grace. Melville cannot imagine a ground lying beyond a continuous cycle of judicial violence; he can only imagine an impasse. His is a world of perfected estrangement: Cereno, after his life is saved, can never again countenance the defiantly silent Babo. Cereno cannot look at him, cannot speak to him, cannot even appear at his trial to give testimony against him. Overwhelmed by his victimization, Cereno can never, in short, acknowledge Babo. And Delano remains ignorant of and forever remote from his own complicity with the two men.

A final implication remains. It perhaps leads us to a provisional if not stable resting place between the extremes of critical diffidence concerning Babo as a moral phenomenon and the critical tendency to demonize him. Few besides Melville had the imaginative courage to countenance another kind of impasse latent in antebellum America—an America, that is, in the shadow of the Fugitive Slave Law and the constitutional protection of slavery and an America haunted by the historical precedents of insurrection: San Domingo, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and the Creole and Amistad affairs.⁴⁸ The story presents two equally weighted appeals: on the one hand, the appalling relief provided by the rule of law in the form of a restored civil order which is the restoration of tyranny; on the other hand, the appeal of an insurrection justly motivated but dreadfully and tragically implicated in the tyranny it resists. Yet if Babo's paradigmatic evil is palpable, it nevertheless remains inseparable from this last, compelling image of his dignity in the aftermath of his execution: “The body was burned to ashes; but for many days, the head, that hive of subtlety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza, met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites” (BC, p. 116). If this is the punitive pursuit of the body beyond all pain in the name of the sovereign, its coercive closure is breached by an emblematic demand for recognition. This demand is that of a tyrant insofar as Babo sought to dictate the terms of that recognition himself, but it is nevertheless powerfully defiant, defiant beyond the pain of death, toward those who would tyrannize him. Having reached this point we might describe our experience of Babo in the terms Stanley Cavell uses to describe his experience of Lear. It is the experience “of unplaceable blame, blame no one can be asked to bear and no one is in a position to level—like blaming heaven. That does not seem to me inappropriate as an experience of tragedy.”⁴⁹

Notes

1. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, ed. William L. Andrews (Urbana and Chicago, 1987), p. 276. Emphasis in original.

2. “About Niggers,” Putnam's Monthly 6 (December 1855): 12. This anonymous piece appeared in the same issue as the third installment of “Benito Cereno.” The first and second installments appeared in the October and November issues, respectively.

3. Amasa Delano, Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres Comprising Three Voyages Around the World Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery in the Pacific and Oriental Islands (Boston, 1817).

4. Harrison Hayford et al., eds., The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860 (Evanston, Ill., 1987), p. 47. Future references to “Benito Cereno” will be to this edition, noted as BC in the text, followed by page number.

5. For representative instances of this criticism, see Eleanor E. Simpson, “Melville and the Negro: From Typee to ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Literature 41 (1969): 19-38; Joyce Adler, “Melville's Benito Cereno: Slavery and Violence in the Americas,” Science and Society 36 (1974): 19-48; Marvin Fisher, Going Under: Melville's Short Fiction in the American 1850's (Baton Rouge, La., 1977); Joshua Leslie and Sterling Stuckey, “The Death of Benito Cereno: A Reading of Herman Melville on Slavery,” Journal of Negro History 67 (1982): 287-301.

6. Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville (Cambridge, 1989), p. 166.

7. Carolyn Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville's America (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), p. 142. For useful discussions of the problem of revolutionary means and ends in an antislavery context, see John Demos, “The Antislavery Movement and the Problem of Violent ‘Means,’” New England Quarterly 36 (1964): 501-26; and Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, “Ends, Means, and Attitudes: Black-White Conflict in the Anti-slavery Movement,” Civil War History 18 (1972): 117-28.

8. Levine, p. 289, n. 73. Italics are Levine's.

9. Allan Moore Emery, “The Topicality of Depravity in ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Literature 55 (1983): 330-31. Italics are Emery's.

10. George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (Cambridge, 1987), p. 204.

11. The following exemplify the sort of overstatement that I have in mind. Stanley T. Williams, “‘Follow your leader’: Melville's ‘Benito Cereno,’” Virginia Quarterly Review 23 (1947): 61-76 (Babo is a “motiveless” but malign baboon); William Stein, “The Moral Axis of ‘Benito Cereno,’” Accent 15 (1955): 221-33 (Babo is an evil priest at a black mass); James E. Miller, Jr., A Reader's Guide to Herman Melville (New York, 1962), p. 131 (Babo “enjoys evil itself alone”; “he ‘relishes’ murder”); Richard Harter Fogle, Melville's Shorter Tales (Norman, Okla., 1966), p. 142 (“He is everything untamed and demoniac”); Margaret M. Vanderhaar, “A Re-examination of ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Literature 40 (1968): 183 (Babo is “a symbol of powerful incomprehensible evil”).

12. Dekker, p. 203. For a related argument, see Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979), pp. 187-220.

13. See Charles Nicol, “The Iconography of Evil and Ideal in ‘Benito Cereno,’” in Studies in the Minor and Later Works of Melville, ed. Raymona E. Hull (Hartford, 1970), pp. 25-31. Nicol does emphasize this point while overlooking the concretely realized complexities of this relationship. He sees that Babo is Cereno's “complete master,” “guiding every move” but flattens this perception with a strikingly evasive or elusive judgment: “Babo is merely excessive, sinning and vengeful, not evil” (p. 28).

14. Charles K. Whipple, The Family Relation, as Affected by Slavery (Cincinnati, 1858), p. 23. See also Theodore Weld, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York, 1839), p. 115: “Arbitrary power is to the mind what alcohol is to the body; it intoxicates. … It is perhaps the strongest human passion; and the more absolute its power, the stronger the desire for it; and the more it is desired, the more it is enjoyed.”

15. See Simpson (n. 5 above), p. 34; and Howard Welsh, “The Politics of Race in ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Literature 46 (1975): 556-66. Simpson shows how Delano's condescension mimics white abolitionists who perpetuated the stereotype of the constitutionally docile and cheerful Sambo. See also James Freeman Clarke, “Condition of the Free Coloured People of the United States,” Christian Examiner, vol. 46, no. 264 (March 1859); William Ellery Channing, “The African Character,” in Anti-Slavery Picknick: A Collection of Speeches, Poems, Dialogues and Songs, ed. John A. Collins (Boston, 1842), pp. 56-58; Charles Stuart, “On the Colored People of the United States,” Quarterly Anti-Slavery Magazine, vol. 2, no. 16 (October 1836). See also Dekker, p. 204, who actually refers to Babo as “the little black rebel.”

16. Melville's familiarity with Douglass is, of course, likely, but undocumented. An anonymous review of Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom did appear in the November 1855 issue of Putnam's, which also contained the second installment of “Benito Cereno.”

17. For an example of this hypersensitive skepticism, see Brook Thomas, Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 110-13. Because Babo is silent, Thomas despairs of the sort of exercise Douglass proposes. For a more deeply skeptical extension of Thomas's argument, see John Haegert, “Voicing Slavery through Silence: Narrative Mutiny in Melville's Benito Cereno,” Mosaic 26 (Spring 1993): 21-38.

18. Dekker, pp. 204-5.

19. Melville also makes this connection in Billy Budd, Sailor. For a discussion of this point, see William Bartley, “‘Measured Forms’ and Orphic Eloquence: The Style of Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor,” University of Toronto Quarterly 59 (1990): 516-34.

20. Simone Weil, “The Iliad, Poem of Might,” in The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George Panichas (New York, 1977), pp. 153-54, 155.

21. Ibid., p. 155.

22. My approach in reading derives from a single remark by Fogle (n. 11 above): “In the deposition, Melville uses the stately phrases of legal formula to embody a vision of tragic life. Gradually, they take on deep cadences” (p. 146). See also Huntington Brown, Prose Styles (Minneapolis, 1966), pp. 90-124, for a discussion of “the indenture style.”

23. Compare the flatness of the corresponding passage in the original narrative: “that the negresses of age, were knowing to the revolt, and influenced the death of their master; who also used their influence to kill the deponent; that in the act of murder, and therefore before that of the engagement of the ship, they began to sing, and were singing a very melancholy song during the action, to excite the courage of the negroes” (Delano [n. 3 above], p. 341).

24. See Douglas Anderson, A House Divided: Domesticity and Community in American Literature (Cambridge, 1990), p. 135. My remarks here enlarge upon Anderson's observation that this passage displays the “tendency of Melville's imagination to prize the fusion of antagonistic influences.”

25. Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York, 1969), p. 291.

26. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, 1951), bk. 2, line 487.

27. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), pp. 48-50.

28. See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald R. Bouchard, trans. Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), pp. 150-51, who shares Melville's insight: “The law is a calculated and relentless pleasure, delight in the promised blood, which permits the perpetual instigation of new dominations and the staging of meticulously repeated scenes of violence.”

29. Weil, p. 158.

30. Douglass (n. 1 above), p. 277.

31. Juliet Mitchell, Women, the Longest Revolution: Essays on Feminism, Literature and Psychoanalysis (London, 1984), p. 289. Hypochondria is repeatedly associated with Cereno, but a more accurate diagnosis in nineteenth-century terms is provided by Paul McCarthy, in “The Twisted Mind”: Madness in Herman Melville's Fiction (Iowa City, Iowa, 1990), pp. 106-7. According to James Prichard's Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (London, 1835), a standard authority, Cereno has symptoms of “moral insanity,” a malady which includes elements of hypochondriasis and withdrawal states, as seen in Cereno's manic oscillations. Hysteria is, at least in terms of Mitchell's definition, a related if intensified phenomenon. See also Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985), pp. 200-202, for a discussion of the symptomatology of hysteria. The male hysteric was “an accepted clinical entity by the late nineteenth century” (p. 200).

32. For a discussion of the shaving scene as political theater, see Rogin (n. 12 above), p. 215, although Babo is more ambitious than Rogin suggests. For a similar and equally vulnerable discussion, see Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), pp. 160, 163. He sees Babo as a “tormenting master artist” who conducts a “theatrical, even gaudily ostentatious political torment of the deposed master.”

33. This definition combines elements found in the OED and Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (New York, 1828).

34. Karcher (n. 7 above), p. 140.

35. For useful discussions of the nineteenth-century revival of the Pygmalion myth, see Carl Woodring, Nature into Art: Cultural Transformations in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); and Joseph A. Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny: The Social Discourse of Nineteenth-Century British Classical-Subject Painting (Madison, Wis., 1989).

36. Henry James, The Golden Bowl (Harmondsworth, 1990), pp. 153-54. See Martha Nussbaum, “‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and the Moral Imagination,” in Literature and the Question of Philosophy, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Baltimore, 1987), p. 173.

37. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 241.

38. Ibid., p. 243.

39. Sundquist, pp. 160-61.

40. That Melville might have been suggesting a visual correspondence between Babo's Atufal and Hiram Powers's famous statue The Greek Slave (1842) is not unlikely, given the statue's wide popularity in both the North and the South. For a discussion of the cultural significance of this statue in antebellum America, see Joy S. Kasson, “Narratives of the Female Body: The Greek Slave,” in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York, 1992), pp. 172-90. Kasson estimates that more than 100,000 Americans viewed it in the 1840s and 1850s. Powers's engraving of the statue enabled him to reach an even wider audience. In a passage cited by Kasson, Powers describes his as yet incomplete work to a benefactor: It “is of a young girl—nude, with her hands bound [in chains] and in such a position as to conceal a portion of the figure. … The feet also will be bound to a fixture and the face turned to one side, and downwards with an expression of modesty and Christian resignation” (quoted in Kasson, p. 174). The irony of the statue's popularity in the South as well as the North was not lost on Punch (20 [185]: 236), which, on the occasion of Powers's Crystal Palace exhibition in 1851, published an engraving which substituted an African-American woman slave for the Greek slave and entitled it “The Virginian Slave. Intended as a Companion to Powers' ‘Greek Slave.’”

41. Compare Lydia Sigourney, The Young Lady's Offering, or Gems of Poetry (Boston, 1862), p. 10, discussed in Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1988), p. 197. There is an unsurprising likeness between Babo and the father in Sigourney's story, whose daughter is very much his creature. Having educated her, he exults with Pygmalion's pride: “Was it strange that I should gaze on the work of my own hands with ineffable delight?”

42. Are homoerotic intensities present here as well? If sexual domination is an aspect of having absolute power over another human being, as one line of abolitionist thinking claimed, the implication is difficult to dismiss especially in view of the eroticism of the Pygmalion motif. For a discussion of abolitionist views on the relationship between power and sexuality, see Ronald G. Walters, “The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism,” American Quarterly 25 (1973): 177-201; and Karcher, p. 152.

43. Hawthorne, p. 272.

44. See David Holbrook, The Masks of Hate: The Problem of False Solutions in the Culture of an Acquisitive Society (Oxford, 1972), p. 36.

45. Compare Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, trans. David Magarshack (Harmondsworth, 1955). There is a striking concordance between Rogozhin and Babo which again raises the possibility of Babo's eroticism (see n. 40 above). Rogozhin murders Nastasya Filipovna in a possessive rage (“Aye, so I'd decided not to give her up on no account, lad, and to no one!” p. 612) with a “small knife” which like Babo's concealed knife (and his razor) is a sculptor's tool, which Rogozhin conceals in a book. That the knife is a sculptor's tool is reinforced by the observation that Nastasya Filipovna's foot, protruding from under a sheet, “seemed as though it were carved out of marble” (p. 610).

46. Weil (n. 20 above), pp. 180, 181.

47. Homer, Iliad, bk. 24, lines 629-33. See Weil, pp. 176, 506. This is the editor's translation of Weil's own rendering of the Greek.

48. See Sundquist (n. 32 above), pp. 135-82; and Karcher (n. 7 above), pp. 2-14. For a superb discussion of Melville's literary response to the antebellum political crisis over slavery, see Helen P. Trimpi, Melville's Confidence Men and American Politics in the 1850's, Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences (Hamden, Conn., 1987).

49. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1987), p. 74.