Billy Budd -- a Tale

Billy Budd -- a tale of the sea or an allegory of fate?

Herman Melville's short novel Billy Budd seems to function in many ways like an allegorical novel about a classic moral tragedy, but such a reading does not place the novel in sufficient historical or political context to fully explain the novel's grappling with the ethical issues of impressing sailors into naval service. Rather than read Billy Budd as an allegory in the conventional fashion, readers must assume the point-of-view or readers of the age and tread the work a novel that pits civilian and humanitarian vs. military codes of modern ethics. By necessity, the novel shows that military ships must function in the interests of the common rather than the individual good. This is why impressments is wrong, because sailors must adopt a collective allegiance by force, a kind of social contract that they have not accepted by their own free wills, as citizens do when they agree to become part of a state.

The Conventional Reading of Budd: Why it is Wrong to Read Budd as a Fable

To modern readers who do not know about life at sea during the 19th century nor about the political issues of the era where it is set, before the War of 1812, Billy Budd seems to be a tale of an innocent, even Christ-like sailor who is beloved by all of his fellow men. "That signal object [Budd] was the 'Handsome Sailor' of the less prosaic time alike of the military and merchant navies. With no perceptible trace of the vainglorious about him, rather with the off-hand unaffectedness of natural regality, he seemed to accept the spontaneous homage of his shipmates." (Melville, Chapter 1) The master-at-arms of the ship Budd is impressed to serve for, one John Claggart is jealous of Budd's charismatic presence aboard the ship.

Claggart creates an event that results in Billy's death by the machinery ship's code of justice. Captain the Honorable Edward Fairfax Vere condemns Billy to die, as Vere assumes an almost 'Pontius Pilate' like role in Billy's drama. The story at sea is 'really' about the terrible fate of a lamb-like innocent. This reading suggests the story is a fable arbitrarily disguised as a sea novel revolving around an act of treachery on the open waters. But -- so the conventional reading goes -- the novel Billy Budd is 'really' about the culpability of us all, when our justice system condemns the innocent. (Franklin, 1997)

However, this reading of the novel is fundamentally incomplete. First of all, it neglects to consider the fact that Claggart and Billy come to the ship in two different ways. Billy is impressed by force. Claggart is a willing participant in the British military. "But very long ago, owing to the advance in gunnery making hand-to-hand encounters less frequent and giving to niter and sulphur the preeminence over steel, that function ceased; the Master-at-arms of a great war-ship becoming a sort of Chief of Police." (Melville, Chapter 8) The two men clash, not simply in terms of personality, or in terms of their 'good or bad moral characters, but because Claggart wished to be part of the ship's harsh system of justice, and willingly submitted to this social contract. Billy was a friendly man who wished to be an ordinary sailor, not serve the crown.

The regulations of the military ship also require the men's mettle is tested to the utmost degree, at every turn, much as in a classic adventure saga. To read the novel in thematic rather than practical and nautical terms is to give this insufficient regard in the context of explaining the moral dilemmas the novel provokes in the mind of the reader, such as how much blame to assign to Claggart Billy or Vere.

Yoder's theory: the centrality of impressment

The novella's narrative thus takes place amongst men in the claustrophobic, close quarters of the sea between a group of soldiers, some of which agree to take on the military's ethical code by free will, and the impressed sailors who never did, who were simple merchant seafaring lads, without any adherence to the collective social contract of the military. This environment creates the atmosphere of hatred that causes the wheels of justice to turn against Billy. Thus to read Budd as a purely allegorical Christ narrative, with little care about the seafaring settling at all, except to draw parallels between the gospel parables about fishes, loaves, and walking on water is false, argues military historian Edwin Yoder. (Yoder, 2000, p.619-620)

Rather, Billy Budd must be read as a novel about men at sea, not men in the abstract, Yoder argues persuasively in his article "Fated Boy: Billy Budd and the Laws of War," from the Journal of Maritime Law & Commerce. Too much inflated verbiage "has been expended in recent decades" by muddle-headed "ideological interpreters" of the Budd story. (Yoder, 2000, p.619) In fact, harbor-bound critics and land-faring readers "seem to overlook the rationale of military justice -- why it necessarily differs from civilian codes of justice: A mistaken act of sentimentality [as committed by Budd, under Claggart's watchful eye] could jeopardize many others whose lives are at risk in a military situation." Sentimentality and a concern for moral and philosophical concerns blind readers and critics to the uniquely nautical concerns of impressments central the Budd tale. (Yoder, 2000, p.619)

Herman Melville himself did not arbitrarily select his cabin-bound setting for Billy Budd from the confines of an academic study or sitting room. Melville is not simply the famous author of Moby Dick, another novel set at sea by accident. Moby Dick is also a tale about the madness and fixation the closeness of a sea cabin can bring and the dangers of hierarchical obedience and mutiny as well. The code of maritime ethics defined Melville's early working life. Melville as youth, worked a bank clerk, a farmer, teacher and a bookkeeper, but after failing in most of these endeavors, in 1839 he sailed as a cabin boy aboard the trading ship St. Lawrence to London. In 1841 he sailed on a whaling ship, then jumped ship. (Barbour, 1990, pp.25-52)

Although a poor sailor, Melville's used his sea life for the subject of his first novel and the work, Typee, proved so popular that he followed it with a work called Mardi, This proved less popular, because of its more musing philosophical character, one of the reasons, James Barbout suggests, one not ought to ever read Melville as a 'sea author,' concerned with uniquely nautical issues such as the impressments debate of the past, despite the work's sea setting, and despite Melville setting most of his novels at sea. (Barbour, 1990, pp.25-52) Such issues of loyalty, trust, jealousy, and fate would be addressed again, in even more finely crafted allegorical form, by the condemnation of the holy innocent Billy Budd.

Critics such as Barbour see Billy Budd as a tale about a pure man, unschooled in the ways of the world in general, not the world of maritime commerce and might n specific. In such a reading, at the beginning of the novel, Budd is shifted to another environment, and is crushed by the social pressures around him. As the tale opens, "the handsome model sailor of the title is impressed from the merchantman Rights of Man (named, we are told, for Thomas Paine's pamphlet defending French revolutionary principles against Edmund Burke) to the 74-gun man-of-war Bellipotent ("mighty in battle"). Young Budd gracefully accepts the forced transfer in good humor, and as he is being rowed toward the battleship even makes a sort of joke of his lot; but his transfer marks a symbolic passage from an environment of natural law to the sterner climate of military law. And that passage will lead to his death." (Yoder, 2000, p.615) Billy is unjustly deprived, in such a reading, of his political or human rights, and is taken into the terrible conditions of an older and evil order of the military code, struck as if by a blow through the horrors of forced military service. But is specious to read the life Billy left as pure, given the earthy life of all sailors, nor as the military world he suffers as a strange fate particularly harsh upon the back and mind of the title protagonist.

Budd's fate was common in the England of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The forcible conscription of sailors "began as early as the Anglo-Saxon period" in England. In English life, impressments of men were a common and harsh fate a man might be 'struck' with, as if by lightening. It was used as a practice quite extensively under Elizabeth I, Charles I, and Oliver Cromwell. Press gangs seized individuals into naval service like Budd, especially after 1800, when England was most interested in expanding its naval service. "The Napoleonic Wars increased English need for sea power" and led to the impressments of even larger numbers of sailors. Also noteworthy considering Melville's own nationality, until 1850, England did not recognize the right of a man to renounce his nationality. Frequent interception of American ships to impress American citizens was a major cause of the War of 1812. ("Impressments." The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. 10 Aug. 2005, (http://www.factmonster.com/ce6/history/A0825052.html)

The enforced and arbitrary nature of the fate of impressment, and Budd's fate of facing the code of military law, which was different from the life he was accustomed to, did not understand, and had not agreed to, was thus the result of Billy being forced to obey a social contract in an environment that necessitated individuals obey without question to fight an armed enemy. This differing social contract is not necessarily 'worse' than life upon a non-military ship. The problem is not necessarily the innocent civilian Billy is good and that the military men are bad, but that two orders of individualism and the collective good are clashing on a ship -- it is through impressment that this has occurred, not because it is wrong to ask men to obey in a military context.

Impressment forces men who do not understand the military, its order of discipline, or military justice on a ship to function in the claustrophobic environment at sea, in a way they are unaccustomed to -- Billy puts human loyalty above the military needs of the crown because that is what he understands -- and he never agreed to the social contract of military life in Her Majesty's navy, he was forced to 'take the queen's shilling.' In Billy's mind he is still an ordinary sailor and man. Not only does he does not understand the seriousness of the military order, he was forced into its social construct and contract rather than assumed it by choice. Impressment thus makes for an inefficient fighting force, as well as does an injustice to the rights of the human individual in abstract philosophical terms. (Yoder, 2000, pp.916-920)

Yoder, making a persuasive argument from Melville's own early notes in constructing the novel as well as from the novel's own text, argues that rather 'stapling' or spackling moral issues onto a sea novel about jealousy, Melville was used his own experiences at sea to ask why mutiny was so common, even amongst good soldiers. (Yoder, 2000, pp.615-616) Melville's drafts includes outlines of an early poem about mutiny at sea of an impressed sailor and notes about Melville's own admired first cousin, Guert Gansevoort, then a U.S. Naval officer.

Impressment: Budd must as a clash of two social ethical systems or cultures, not in literary or allegorical terms

Military ethics are different than civilian ethics. "Command authority requires" that a "lucid recognition that larger justice" in the interest of the state. (Yoder, 2000, p.619) The conditions of a military vessel may require that the needs of the many require "a more severe, indeed pitiless, brand of literal justice to the solitary defendant. Sacrifice is integral to warfare and the severest penalties for insubordination part of "the price of admiralty"; and for countless generations, in many societies, such has been the considered judgment of the necessities of military law." (Yoder, 2000, p.619)

Of course, there are tempting literary parallels one can draw between Budd and other stories from the past. Shakespeare's "Othello," as well as the passion narrative of the Bible seem to parallel the tales of Billy Budd. Billy, like Othello, is a rough and untamed but charismatic leader, whose barbaric and primitive innocence, guilelessness, and physical beauty are emphasized by the author's language and references. Billy is also an outsider like Othello. Billy is manipulated the designs of the jealous John Claggart. Shakespeare's Othello is a tragedy about fate and jealousy -- a lost handkerchief of Othello's wife Desdemona leads to his betrayal by the envious Iago, and so with Billy Budd. Othello, one could argue, is a tale about military men. Othello is a sailor, an outsider to the world of Venice.

However, the presence of literary parallels does not do sufficient justice "all the battles about the moral and political vision at the heart of the tale" that swirl around one question: Are we supposed to admire or condemn Captain Vere for his decision to sentence Billy Budd to death by public hanging, according to an ethical system that may be valid, but that Budd does not either understand nor agree to. In his essay "Billy Budd and Capital Punishment," like Yoder, Franklin sets forth the issue of how to contextualize Budd as a specific narrative of situation, not as a moral dilemma with allusions to Shakespeare and the Bible.