Madness and mastery in Melville's "Benito Cereno." - Herman Melville

Perhaps Shaw's mistake, like the mistakes of psychiatrists who had too much faith in the "moral cure," was overconfidence; he thought that the sphere of legal reasoning mapped out by the Constitution could smooth over any conflict, a view William Lloyd Garrison proved incorrect when, in the wake of Sims, he called for anti-slavery judges to step down from the bench rather than uphold the Fugitive Slave Law. Publicly burning a copy of the Constitution, which he called "a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell," he prophetically declared that his country would soon have to choose between slavery and union.(50) On the opposite pole from Vere's and Shaw's faith in legal positivism, but just as dangerous a response to difference and suspicion, is Delano's complete faith in the natural categories that are in fact the products of his own mind: his "good-nature, compassion, and charity" re-emerge in the aftermath of his traumatic experience, willed forms of complacency that allow him to miss the significance of the threats posed to himself and his class. But he presents this trust as a "natural" position--one that occurs just as inevitably as "the bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky." And in viewing Babo's masterful performance in the barber scene--in which the rebel leader at once displays to the American his supposed trustworthiness and holds a blade to his master's neck--Delano can only comment that "most negroes are natural valets or hair dressers" (278). His mistake is the same one that allowed the blacks to revolt in the first place--as slaves, none of them "wore fetters," Don Benito states in his deposition, "because the owner, his friend Aranda, told him they were all tractable" (301). Babo capitalizes on this drastic white underestimation of the slaves' resentment of slavery; the supposedly "natural" servitude that Delano so admires is actually a calculated performance springing from what could be seen as another--and entirely contrary--natural desire: the desire to be free.

Delano's faith in nature, as I have shown, helps him contain his own suspicions. In this regard, his faith is an internalization of an important legal function--regulating suspicion by formalizing and stipulating a certain kind of trust.(51) The clearest example of this psychological function of the law is the contract drawn up by Don Benito in the midst of the rebellion, in which he "formally made over the ship" to the insurgents. Contracts, as opposed to slavery, imply a voluntary submission to the service of another, a bond formed out of trust rather than coercion. Significantly, the two classes of people who could not enter into contracts in the antebellum period were slaves and the insane. As Isaac Ray wrote, "Where the insanity of one of the parties is perfectly well known to the other or might have been so by the exercise of ordinary sagacity, a contract between them, except for the necessities of life or comforts and luxuries suitable to his wealth or station, should obviously be held invalid."(52) The unusual exceptions of vital necessities (or, strangely, class privilege) lift the insane above the condition of the slaves, who, not owning themselves, can have no right to contract their services; but still, slaves and the insane represent a continuum in their exemption from contract law. Something is up, then, in "Benito Cereno," when a legally insane man and a rebel slave draw up a contract.