The Serpent and the Whale: Leviathan in Billy Budd

• In Event: Hobbes: Authority, Betrayal, and the Demos

Abstract

Critical discussion of Herman Melville’s posthumously published novella Billy Budd has largely focused on Melville’s treatment of Captain Vere; in particular on the question of whether he intends to offer a sympathetic portrait of decent and thoughtful leader acting under tragic circumstances, or an ironic denunciation of the abuse of discretionary power in wartime. Efforts to interpret the text by appealing to outside sources have generally focused on Melville’s earlier writings – most notably White-Jacket, which is based on his own experience serving on a warship – or on historical events which parallel the circumstances of the plot – most notably the Somers affair of 1842, in which an American naval captain had three alleged mutineers executed at sea without benefit of trial.

In this essay I argue that Billy Budd can be fruitfully read as a dramatization of the theory of political authority that’s laid out in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and that the text provides a sophisticated treatment of characteristically Hobbesian themes such as the relationship between fear and consent, prudence and glory, language and feeling, nature and artifice, and divine and secular power. Casting Vere in the role of Hobbesian sovereign allows us to bridge the divide between “tragic” and “ironic” readings of the text, and to find in Melville’s novel a profound meditation on the nature and limits of political authority in the modern era.

The argument proceeds in four stages. First, I consider what light the complicated history of the origin and composition of Billy Budd can shed on the question of what Melville’s intentions may have been in writing it. Second, I consider the textual and extra-textual grounds that we have for thinking that Hobbes was a key source for Melville in writing Billy Budd, despite the fact that he isn’t directly mentioned in the novel itself. Third, I show how a Hobbesian reading of Billy Budd provides a satisfying way of accounting for many of the interpretive puzzles that it poses. I conclude by considering the question of what Melville's story encourages us to make of the doctrine of Hobbesian sovereignty.

Author

• Eric MacGilvray, Ohio State University