Innocent Before God: Politics, Morality and the Case of Billy Budd

2006 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
Susan Mendus
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Short Novel ◽  
Active Service ◽  
Billy Budd ◽  
War Effort

I begin with the story told by Herman Melville in his short novel, Billy Budd. The year is 1797. Britain is engaged in a long and bitter war against France, and the British war effort has been threatened by two naval mutinies: the Nore Mutiny and the mutiny at Spithead. The scene is His Majesty's Ship, the Indomitable, and the central character is Billy Budd, sailor. Billy Budd is a young man of exceptional beauty, both physical and moral, whose only flaw is a stammer. He is loved by all his fellow sailors except the master-at-arms, John Claggart. The incarnation of evil, Claggart recognises in Billy the incarnation of goodness, and is consumed by a jealousy which leads him to accuse Billy (falsely) of inciting the crew to mutiny. Alone with Claggart and the ship's Captain, Edward Vere, Billy hears the lying charge against him. He is enraged, but his stammer prevents him from responding in words. He strikes Claggart, and the blow is fatal. Billy Budd, sailor, has killed the master-at-arms of one of His Majesty's ships on active service, and the penalty for this is death.

Innocent Before God: Politics, Morality and the Case of Billy Budd

2006 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
Susan Mendus
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Short Novel ◽  
Active Service ◽  
Billy Budd ◽  
War Effort

I begin with the story told by Herman Melville in his short novel, Billy Budd.The year is 1797. Britain is engaged in a long and bitter war against France, and the British war effort has been threatened by two naval mutinies: the Nore Mutiny and the mutiny at Spithead. The scene is His Majesty’s Ship, the Indomitable, and the central character is Billy Budd, sailor. Billy Budd is a young man of exceptional beauty, both physical and moral, whose only flaw is a stammer. He is loved by all his fellow sailors except the master-at-arms, John Claggart. The incarnation of evil, Claggart recognises in Billy the incarnation of goodness, and is consumed by a jealousy which leads him to accuse Billy (falsely) of inciting the crew to mutiny. Alone with Claggart and the ship’s Captain, Edward Vere, Billy hears the lying charge against him. He is enraged, but his stammer prevents him from responding in words. He strikes Claggart, and the blow is fatal. Billy Budd, sailor, has killed the master-at-arms of one of His Majesty’s ships on active service, and the penalty for this is death.

Herman Melville and “Billy Budd”

Tempo ◽  
1951 ◽  
pp. 6-8
Author(s):  
Ronald Mason
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
The Public ◽  
Billy Budd ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Adventure Stories

Melville's Billy Budd is the culmination of a lifetime's spiritual agony, and it is impossible to value this curious allegory at its true worth without studying it carefully in the light of its author's private despairs. It may be that the publicity that Britten's opera is sure to attract will focus the reluctant interest of the public at last upon a writer who for nearly a century (though he has been only sixty years dead) has been the dimmest of shadows for all but the occasional addict. In England his name is still the barest rumour. Moby Dick has had its boosts, Typee the popular reprintings owed to an entertaining travelogue; yet none of these temporary quirks of fortune has aroused more than the most cursory interest in the mind that created them. Projected into posterity as a crude adventurer who had lived among cannibals and hunted whales before turning these experiences into pleasurable adventure-stories, the richest and profoundest imagination in American literature still remains virtually unrecognised over half the English-speaking world. America is beginning to acknowledge him at last; but in this country indifference is still his lot. Some of his works, I am glad to say, are being reprinted and enjoyed again; but until he is accepted and appreciated as a coherent whole, the understanding given to isolated parts of his work will be at best partial and inadequate.

Nelson and Vere: Hero and Victim in Billy Budd, Sailor

PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (5) ◽  
pp. 370-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph W. Willett
Keyword(s):  
Short Novel ◽  
Billy Budd

Emerson's faith in the historic role of the hero did not prevent him from evaluating Nelson morally as a man without principle. Unfortunately, he failed to make his criticism specific; only the grouping of Nelson with Napoleon offers a clue to the origin of Emerson's disapproval. Hawthorne and Melville were more well-disposed in their appreciations, which resemble each other in extravagance of sentiment. Whereas Hawthorne's treatment takes the form of an essay, Melville incorporates Nelson into his short novel, Billy Budd, Sailor, and puts to his own uses what Hawthorne called, in Our Old Home, the “symbolic poetry” (i, 275) of Nelson's life.

Melville's Intervisionary Network

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Haydock
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Honore De Balzac ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
French Writer ◽  
Innovative Environment ◽  
Billy Budd ◽  
New Methodologies ◽  
Literary Networks ◽  
The Web

The romances of Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, Sailor, are usually examined from some setting almost exclusively American. European or other planetary contexts are subordinated to local considerations. But while this isolated approach plays well in an arena constructed on American exclusiveness, it does not express the reality of the literary processes swirling around Melville in the middle of the nineteenth century. A series of expanding literary and technological networks was active that made his writing part of a global complex. Honoré de Balzac, popular French writer and creator of realism in the novel, was also in the web of these same networks, both preceding and at the height of Melville’s creativity. Because they engaged in similar intentions, there developed an almost inevitable attraction that brought their works together. Until recently, however, Balzac has not been recognized as a significant influence on Melville during his most creative period. Over the last decade, scholars began to explore literary networks by new methodologies, and the criticism developed out of these strategies pertains usually to modernist, postcolonial, contemporary situations. Remarkably, however, the intertextuality of Melville with Balzac is quite exactly a casebook study in transcultural comparativism. Looking at Melville’s innovative environment reveals meaningful results where the networks take on significant roles equivalent to what have been traditionally classed as genetic contacts. Intervisionary Network explores a range of these connections and reveals that Melville was dependent on Balzac and his universal vision in much of his prose writing.

Pure Gentleness?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Dufourmantelle
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
Billy Budd ◽  
Literary Characters

Gentleness must contain the seed of its opposite in order to maintain its agency. Violence is proof that that gentleness may not be fully received in this world. Dufourmantelle discusses literary characters who embody innocence and are its tragic heroes. She discusses Billy Budd by Herman Melville, The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo, and “A Simple Heart” by Gustave Flaubert.

Nursing presence

2018 ◽  
pp. 93-128
Author(s):  
Jane Brooks
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
Clinical Care ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Active Service ◽  
Nursing Presence ◽  
War Effort ◽  
War Zones ◽  
Female Nurses ◽  
Hospital Wards ◽  
Nursing Sisters

Military success in war was contingent on men sustaining a determination to fight. Persuading men to continue fighting or returning them to combat after illness or injury depended on maintaining their morale. The use of female nurses in upholding this resolve was integral to the war effort. The chapter explores the value of the presence of women in hospital wards and in social environments on active service overseas. It considers the occasional antipathy of military authorities and male colleagues to the location of female nurses in war zones. However, it is argued through the provision of expert clinical care, domestic acumen and the use of their ‘female-selves’, nurses were able to salvage men in readiness to return to battle. Nursing sisters thus created a space for themselves in frontline duties. However, the chapter argues, this was not without its difficulties. As single, white women in far-flung places, this position situated nurses in a liminal place between the respectable European colonial wife and the ‘biohazardous’ local women. The chapter acknowledges these difficulties, but also demonstrates how the nurses negotiated their way through these contradictions to their advantage and for those in their care.

Literary Spinoza

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Goldstein
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Heinrich Heine ◽  
Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Arts

This chapter focuses on literary artists—that is, novelists, poets, and playwrights—who have shown fascination with Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy. The fictionalization of Spinoza’s life begins during the Enlightenment period and continues until today. The multifaceted literary attraction to Spinoza becomes only more remarkable when one considers how little it was reciprocated. For all the attention that literary artists have paid to Spinoza, he appears to have accorded little thought to the arts. This chapter first examines why Spinoza has paid little attention to the arts before turning to literary figures who have made Spinoza the central character of their work, including Gotthold Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Heinrich Heine, Matthew Arnold, Herman Melville, George Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Zbigniew Herbert, Eugene Ostashevsky, Goce Smilevski, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. It concludes by discussing how compatible literary Spinoza is with philosophical Spinoza.

scholarly journals Do contar ao mostrar: "Billy Budd", de Herman Melville, no cinema

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (26) ◽  
pp. 585-600
Author(s):  
Gustavo Silva
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
De Se ◽  
Billy Budd

Em "Teoria e prática da adaptação: da fidelidade à intertextualidade" (2006), Robert Stam destaca a necessidade de se pensar em uma crítica às adaptações literárias para o cinema que se distancie da noção de “fidelidade” ao hipotexto. A partir disso, pretende-se desenvolver, aqui, algumas considerações sobre os filmes O vingador dos mares (1962), de Peter Ustinov, e Bom trabalho (1999), de Claire Denis, em especial no que diz respeito aos diálogos das películas com a novela Billy Budd (1924), de Herman Melville. Considerando a intertextualidade entre as obras, objetiva-se destacar diferentes possibilidades de apropriação de um texto literário para uma narrativa fílmica. Para tal, serão utilizadas, além do artigo de Robert Stam, as contribuições de Linda Hutcheon (2011) e parte da fortuna crítica das obras que compõem os corpora.

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