Civil Liberties and Military Justice in Billy Budd and Guardians
This paper examines how two American authors — Herman Melville in the nineteenth century and Peter Morris in the twenty-first — explore the intersection of military justice, civil liberty, and imprisonment. Through a close reading of Melville's Billy Budd and Morris's monologue drama Guardians, the paper argues that military service represents a fundamental trade of freedom for security that ultimately results in the loss of both. Drawing on the historical contexts of naval conscription and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the paper analyzes how each work uses confinement and military authority to interrogate broader questions about civil order, wartime paranoia, and the human cost of institutional power.
- Introduction: Franklin's Paradox and the Military Exception: Franklin quote reframed around military civil liberties
- Billy Budd as Prison Narrative: Conscription and Confinement: Naval conscription analyzed as forced imprisonment
- Wartime Paranoia and the Logic of Military Justice: 1797 mutiny context parallels post-9/11 security fears
- Homoeroticism, Gender, and Power in Billy Budd: Homoerotic tensions underlying Billy's trial and execution
- Conclusion: The Loss of Both Freedom and Security: Military service costs both freedom and security
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper opens with a well-known quotation and immediately complicates it, using Franklin's aphorism as a launching point rather than a conclusion — this creates intellectual momentum from the first sentence.
- Extended close readings of primary texts are grounded in historical context, connecting Melville's 1797 naval setting to post-9/11 "homeland security" anxieties in a way that feels analytically earned rather than forced.
- The paper draws an unexpected but productive parallel between two very different literary works — a nineteenth-century novella and a twenty-first-century monologue drama — unified by a clear comparative thesis.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates sustained comparative analysis across historical periods. Rather than treating each text in isolation, the author consistently returns to a shared thematic framework — the trade of freedom for security — allowing each text to illuminate the other. The use of block quotations from primary sources, followed by careful line-by-line interpretation, models how to let literary evidence drive an argument.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a broad cultural and historical introduction that establishes the stakes of the argument. It then moves into close analysis of Billy Budd, first as a prison narrative, then as a text about wartime paranoia, and finally as a story inflected by homoeroticism and gender. The Guardians analysis (implied in the introduction) is set up as a twenty-first-century counterpart. The conclusion synthesizes the comparative argument. The structure is essentially funnel-shaped: broad claim → historical context → textual evidence → interpretive conclusion.
Introduction: Franklin's Paradox and the Military Exception
"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither." Benjamin Franklin's statement is often invoked in times of warfare, when civil liberties tend to be most at risk of curtailment, yet it crucially fails to describe the one sector of the American population most involved in warfare: the military. Historically, military service has not exactly been the voluntary affair it currently is. During the U.S. Civil War, cities like New York and Philadelphia saw riots over Lincoln's imposition of a military draft; the First and Second World Wars witnessed the invention of "conscientious objector" status, and Vietnam made "dodging the draft" a generational meme among baby boomers.
Leaving aside the question of whether military conscription is a gross violation of civil liberties — to some extent, this depends upon the culture, as mass conscription continues in places like Switzerland or Israel with relatively little domestic controversy — it is worth noting that an army private has given up not only his or her freedom, but also his or her own personal security. The loss of freedom is literal: the soldier becomes subject to a code of military justice rather than the free and unrestricted enjoyment of customary civil rights, a code that includes substantial policies intended purely for reasons of social engineering — such as the exclusion until very recently of openly gay service members, or the continued status of adultery as a punishable offense in the army. But the loss of security is total, as the conscript is effectively ordered to kill or be killed in the defense of some larger idea of national security.
This essay considers the intersection of military justice and ideas of imprisonment as they occur in two texts by American authors. Herman Melville's Billy Budd is written after the Civil War as a consciously mythic invocation of a "press-ganged" sailor — the eighteenth-century naval equivalent of the military draft — dating from America's earliest days. Peter Morris's Guardians is a monologue drama about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, originally staged in New York in 2006, with L-Word star Kate Moennig playing a role based on PFC Lynndie England. Reading these two American authors — one writing in the nineteenth century and one in the twenty-first — illuminates the way each approaches issues of confinement, civil liberty, and public security. In the military, the trade of freedom for security results in the loss of both, and of life.
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