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Madness and mastery in Melville's "Benito Cereno." - Herman Melville
Criticism, Wntr, 1996 by Benjamin D. Reiss
By affixing the label "insane" to a threatening phenomenon, Delano tries to banish an uncomfortable aspect of humanity from the social scene: if Benito Cereno's behavior is only the result of madness, Delano wishfully hypothesizes, it will have no social meaning. Michel Foucault writes of this process as a specifically Modern type of disavowal in Madness and Civilization. By better "knowing" madness, Foucault argues, early asylum keepers defused madness's potential to disrupt a rationally ordered society, and made it, as Delano wishes to see it, more "innocent."(10) This preoccupation with controlling an unreasonable madness emerged in France (as well as England) during the post-Revolutionary period, "at the moment," Foucault writes, "when 'humanity' was being re-evaluated," and "too much liberty" was seen as a supreme danger of revolution against the old order. A causal link was made, in other words, between revolution and madness: radical disruptions of the social order led to radical disruptions of individual identity. For example, trying to explain why "madness is more frequent in England than anywhere else," the Viennese phrenologist Johann Spurzheim wrote in 1819 to the effect that it was the result of too much liberty: "Religious sentiments . . . exist without restriction; every individual is entitled to preach to anyone who will listen to him . . . [and] minds are disturbed in the search for truth."(11) The madness Spurzheim feared was the manifestation, at the level of individual psychology, of a breakdown in the social order.
As Eric Sundquist has argued, Babo's revolt plays on similar post-revolutionary fears--the threat of a Jacobin or Haitian reign of terror, an irrational blossoming of violence and disorder brought on by too much freedom.(12) Babo thus sets off a series of collapses of authority, beginning with Don Benito's loss of control over the ship, and then over his own mind. The asylum, in Foucault's account, presented itself as a paternalistic corrective to one aspect of this breakdown of paternalism. The first asylums were set up to reconstitute in their inmates an intimate and individuated--yet formally reproducible--sense of authority. The paradigm for this authority came in the shape of the "half-real, half-imaginary dialectic" of the bourgeois family, the institution that both literally and figuratively was supposed to prevent excessive freedom from engulfing society. Consequently, madness was judged as a transgression against family; the model of domesticity posed a rational limit to a potentially irrational freedom.(13)
What Delano insists on reading as an outbreak of madness aboard the San Dominick seems a transgression of this dialectic of the domestic space as well, with an anti-Catholic twist. Upon boarding the San Dominick, he compares the ship to "a strange house with strange inmates in a strange land" (242). On first sight, though, this "strange house" looks like a "whitewashed monastery," and the "negroes" give him the impression of "Black Friars pacing the cloisters" (240). The enclosed space of the monastery is a standard topos for horror and unreason in Gothic fiction, a domestic space gone haywire; but the usual anti-Catholic associations of the monastery with torture and sexual perversity are connected here with madness as well.(14) Delano's first impression of Don Benito is that "his mind appeared unstrung, if not more seriously affected," and his next thought is that he is like "some hypochondriac abbot," both because he is "shut up in these oaken walls" and because he is "chained to one dull round of command, whose unconditionality cloyed him" (245). Within the "oaken walls" of the ship, Delano fears, resides either an unconditional power or an absolute madness--and either possibility would fit his Protestant imagination of the interior of a Catholic monastery.(15) Don Benito's final mental breakdown leads him not into a mental institution, but into a monastery; for by the time Melville wrote his story, the asylum was beginning to look like a Gothic space, rather than a reconstituted family home. The paternalistic notion, prominent in the 1830s and 40s, that science, rationality, and good will could converge to produce institutions that would free American society of mental illness was by the 1850s an increasingly difficult proposition to maintain. To many, it seemed more likely that they would only produce more mental illness.
