“Struck dead by an angel of God. Yet the angel must hang!” Here we confront the central moral dilemma of this classic sea tale by Herman Melville.
Billy Budd, a newly conscripted sailor aboard H.M.S. Bellipotent, finds himself on the wrong side of Mr. Claggart, one of the ship’s petty officer, who secretly loathes Billy for his popularity among the crew, which he garners through his easy temperament and Grecian good looks. When Claggart trumps up charges that Billy is inciting a mutiny among the crew, Billy accidentally strikes and kills him—a capital offense under the rigid Articles of War that govern the warship—and now the ship’s officers must decide what fate is to befall this angelic yet luckless seaman.
Like much of Melville’s later work, Billy Budd can be read on several different levels, and the discerning reader will be surprised at the amount of depth Melville has given to such a short narrative.
On the most basic level, it can be read as a simple historical sea story that explores the sociology of the crew aboard a Napoleonic-era man-of-war and the various classes of men that had to coexist within its cramped quarters. After all, the interplay among the sailors, petty officers, and commissioned officers lies at the heart of the plot, and Melville aptly conjures up a sense of the tensions that must have existed among them during a period that was already intensely hierarchical.
The story can also be read as a juristic thought-experiment, and indeed it is much discussed in law schools as a case study that encapsulates a moral-legal dilemma in which a law seems to condemn a good and arguably innocent man. The haphazard approach of the drumhead court that tries Billy offers food for thought regarding how courts come to understand the facts of a case and render their verdicts.
Few stories in Western literature can be said to be devoid of Biblical undercurrents, and here this story abounds with them. Might this be a reworked version of the fall of Adam, with Claggart as the serpent and Captain Vere as God? Or, more compellingly, might it be a story of the trial and death of Christ, with Claggart standing in for Judas and Captain Vere as Pontius Pilate? After all, doesn't Pontius Pilate ask that famous question, "What is truth?" And here we have another case in which a hapless judge fails to see the truth and renders faulty justice.
Another angle that cannot be ignored is the latent homoerotic undertones in the work, which suggests that Melville was wrestling with his own conflicted sexuality. Melville makes Billy’s “comeliness” a central element of the story and often paints him in an overtly feminine light, comparing him, to name just some examples, to a lily and a rose and the dames of the court. It is even hinted in the book that Claggart may have loved the “Handsome Sailor” and despised himself for it, and resolved to destroy this affection by destroying the object of it. This may likewise have been Melville’s way of vanquishing his own feelings for this Ganymede by restoring a repressive sense of law and order aboard his own ship.
Billy Budd remained incomplete at the time of Melville’s death and was only published when the manuscript fell into the hands of a literary scholar in the 1920s. Its publication reignited interest in Melville, who went mostly unappreciated during his lifetime, and finally prompted his induction into the canon of American literature.
And how lucky we are that it was discovered. Billy Budd, Sailor is a wonderfully complex nautical tale that is both a tribute to Melville's genius and an invaluable window into his psyche and ours.
