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

(1.) Herman Melville, "Supplement," in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), 268-69. (2.) Ibid., 13. (3.) Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno," in Great Short Works of Herman Melville, ed. Warner Berthoff (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 246, 292, 272.

Future references to this text will be cited by page number. (4.) Homi K. Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817," in The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994), 102-22. (5.) See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 234-35. Lott sees Babo's charade as an ingenious re-appropriation of the popular stage genre of blackface minstrelsy. The implication is that Captain Delano's inadequate responses to the slaves in secret revolt have been so conditioned by forms such as minstrelsy that the blacks are reduced to instances of white fantasy about them, a fact that the insurrectionaries use to their own advantage. (6.) Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man," in The Location of Culture, 91. (7.) Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders," 112. (8.) Isaac Ray, A Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962), 253. For evidence that Melville was familiar with Ray's work, see Paul McCarthy, "The Twisted Mind": Madness in Herman Melville's Fiction (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), 142. (9.) My understanding of Delano's failure to read himself into the story has been influenced by Carolyn Porter's application of Lukacs's phrase "reification" in her study of classic American literature: "Man makes his world but then it takes on the appearance of an alien, autonomous, given world" (Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams and Faulkner [Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981], 26). For an ideological analysis of this reifiying blindness that focuses on ongoing problems in critical interpretation, see James H. Kavanagh, "That Hive of Subtlety: 'Benito Cereno' and the Liberal Hero," in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 352-83. (10.) Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965), 199-278, passim. (11.) Quoted in Foucault, 213. For Spurzheim's influence in antebellum New England medicine, see William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815-1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 35-36. (12.) Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 140-45. (13.) Foucault, 254. (14.) A partial explanation for this association might lie in the fact that many of the early European asylums for the insane were converted monasteries. See David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown, 1971), 134. (15.) On the logic of anti-Catholicism in "Benito Cereno" and Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," see Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebelum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 162-81. (16.) The following section draws primarily from three accounts: Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum; Mary Ann Jimenez, Changing Faces of Madness: Early American Attitudes and Treatment of the Insane (Hanover & London: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1987); and Ruth Caplan, Psychiatry and the Community: The Recurring Concern with Environment in the Prevention and Treatment of Mental Illness (New York: Basic Books, 1969). Rothman and Jimenez, trained as social historians, are more suspicious of the newly emerging field of psychiatry than Caplan, a psychiatric researcher. (Cf. Jimenez's conclusion that "the first interest shown in the insane [in nineteenth-century America] was not a humane one," [129]; and Caplan's view that early nineteenth-century "moral treatment" was "a prophetic movement ... many of [whose] practices resemble those of progressive programs of our own day" [4].) However, all three are more attuned to historical nuance and ideological contestation in the histories than Foucault, who sees liberal reformers as little more than unwitting errand boys for a brutal yet flexible regime of control. (17.) Quoted in Caplan, 39. (18.) Ibid., 8-9. (19.) Jimenez, 73. (20.) Pliny Earle and Edward Jarvis, quoted in Rothman, 112, 115. (21.) Jimenez, 88-97. (22.) Quoted in ibid., 41. (23.) Allan Melvill died in 1832 of what now seems to be a case of lumbar pneumonia. Family letters refer to the "melancholy spectacle" presented by the "delirium" of his final days--a condition which at the time indicated, according to Paul McCarthy, "insanity, psychopathy, and almost any psychopathologic manifestation ("The Twisted Mind," 4). (24.) Jimenez, 75-76. (25.) Ibid., 151. (26.) L. Clarke Davis, "A Modern Lettre de Cachet," Atlantic Monthly 21 (May 1868): 600, 589, 592. (27.) S. P. Fullinwider argues that this mechanization and emphasis on efficiency was a scientific forerunner of the cult of the machine that swept business management later in the nineteenth century. See S. P. Fullinwider, Technicians of the Finite: The Rise and Decline of the Schizophrenic in American Thought, 1840-1860 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982). (28.) Isaac Ray, "A 'Modern Lettre de Cachet' Revisited," Atlantic Monthly 21 (August, 1868): 242-43, 239, 227. (29.) Caplan, 83. (30.) Quoted in Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 57-58. (31.) Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 609. (32.) For a brilliant and at fumes enraging examining of the slippages of "inalienability" in the antebellum period, see Walter Benn Michaels, "Romance and Real Estate," in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 87-112. (33.) Priscilla Wald, "Terms of Assimilation Legislating Subjectivity in the Emerging Nation," in Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 65. On the justification of the Indian Removal Act on the basis of conceptions of citizenship and property, see Lucy Maddox, Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 15-49. (34.) Isaac Ray, A Treatise, 5, 32, 325, 328. (35.) Jimenez, 128. (36.) Stowe, 626. (37.) Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 136-38. (38.) Figures cited in Stanton, 59. (39.) Calhoun, in a letter defending slavery to the British ambassador, wrote that "The census and other authentic documents show that, in all instances in which the States have changed the former relations between the two races, the condition of the African, instead of being improved, has become worse. They have been invariably sunk into vice and pauperism, accompanied by the bodily and mental inflictions incident thereto--deafness, blindness, insanity, and idiocy--to a degree without example; while, in all other States which have retained the ancient relation between them, they have improved greatly in every respect--in number, comfort, intelligence, and morals." Quoted in Gilman, 137. (40.) "Who would believe," asked a writer in the American Journal of Insanity in 1851, "without the fact, in black and white, before his eyes, that every fourteenth colored person in the State of Maine is an idiot or lunatic?" Quoted in Stanton, 65; see also 214, no. 24. (41.) Quoted in Suman Fernando, Race and Culture in Psychiatry (London & Sydney: Croom Helm, 1988), 24. On Cartwright's marginality, see Stanton, vii. (42.) Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1891), 127, 146, 154. (43.) Quoted in Jimenez, 110, 111. (44.) George Fitzhugh, "Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society," in Ante-Bellum: Three Classic Works on Slavery in the Old South, ed. Harvey Wish (New York: Capricorn Books, 1960), 90-93. (45.) See Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 110-16. (46.) According to Leonard W. Levy, "Straw ... had commented that one of the many evils in legally sanctioning slavery was that it degraded ministers of the law and profaned the sanctuary of justice (The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957], 93). (47.) Ibid., 98. (48.) Ibid., 101. (49.) See Michael Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Art and Politics of Herman Melville (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 288-316; and Brook Thomas, Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 206 ff. I am indebted to these two works for their pioneering examinations of legal issues in antebellum literature. For the relevance of the Sims case to "Benito Cereno," see Susan Weiner, "'Benito Cereno' and the Failure of Law" Arizona Quarterly 47, 2 (Summer, 1991): 1-28. (50.) Cited in David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 47-48. (51.) My discussion of the law's role in regulating suspicion is informed by Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). (52.) Ray, A Treatise, 19. (53.) Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 252. (54.) Shaw's ruling in favor of a railroad company in the case of Farwell v. Boston & Worcester R.R. (1842) was pivotal in the development of this "fellow-servant rule"; in the case, he determined that the railroad company was not liable for an injury sustained by one of its workers due to the carelessness of another worker because the risk of such injury was a "natural and ordinary risk" taken on voluntarily by the worker when he signed his employment contract. See Levy, 169. (55.) Horwitz, 262. For an intriguing rebuttal of this view, see Thomas Has kell, "Capitalism and the Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility," American Historical Review 90. 2 (April, 1985): 339-61 and no. 3, 547-66. (56.) Quoted in Levy, 216. (57.) Quoted in Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes, Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness Before 1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 104. I thank Lynn Gamwell for making page proofs of this marvelous book available to me before its publication. (58.) Jacques Lacan, "On a Question Preliminary to Any Treatment of Psychosis," in Ecrits: a Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1977), 215-17. (59.) Philip Fisher, "Democratic Social Space: Whitman, Melville, and the Promise of American Transparency," in The New American Studies: Essays from Representations, ed. Philip Fisher, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 70-111. While I find Fisher's article provocative and informative, I disagree with his suggestion that a cultural preoccupation with "ritual" is "neurotic," while production is healthy. The opposition between the terms "ritual" and "production" seems to me to border on ethnocentrism--if not incoherence, given the deeply ritualistic qualities of productivity in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. (60.) Cover, 175. (61.) Jean Fagan Yellin, "Black Masks: Melville's 'Benito Cereno'," American Quarterly 22. 3 (Fall, 1970): 688. (62.) Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, 11. (63.) Quoted in Gamwell and Tomes, 81.

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