Study Guide to Billy Budd by Herman Melville

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645422075
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Herman Melville's Billy Budd, his final novel.

As a book of the twentieth-century, Melville focused on society's limiting forces on people's individuality. Moreover, Billy Budd has two versions as it was completed by different authors after Melville's death. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Herman Melville's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains:

- Introductions to the Author and the Work

- Character Summaries

- Plot Guides

- Section and Chapter Overviews

- Test Essay and Study Q&As

The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research

HERMAN MELVILLE

INTRODUCTION

 

MELVILLE’S LIFE

(1819-1891) Born into a family of substantial means in New York City on August 19, 1819, Herman Melville spent a secure and comfortable childhood. His maternal grandfather, Peter Gansevoort, had served as a general in the American Revolution, and his father, Allan Melvill (his father’s spelling for the family name) was a successful importer. In 1830, however, his father suffered heavy financial reverses which were followed by serious illness culminating in his death in 1832.

Shocked by the death of his father whom he idolized, Melville moved with his family to Albany where he attended the Albany Classical School for a time. Here, constant friction with his mother, and his own restlessness soon brought an end to his spotty education, supplemented only by his avid reading of the books from his father’s library.

Melville soon drifted into a variety of occupations. He worked for a time as a clerk in a store owned by an older brother, as a messenger for a bank, and later, as a country schoolteacher near his uncle’s home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Finally in 1839, he signed on a British merchant ship, the St. Lawrence, bound to Liverpool and back, a trip which provided the material for his novel, Redburn (1849), and the impetus for an extended period of travel and adventure. Although he again tried school teaching on his return from Liverpool, he signed aboard the whaler Acushnet as an ordinary seaman in 1841.

After a trip around Cape Horn, Melville suffered the hardship of life aboard a mid-nineteenth century whaler until he could no longer tolerate it. Accordingly, he and a shipmate Tobias Greene (who appears as Toby in Typee) deserted the St. Lawrence at Nukuheva in the Marquesas Islands. Here Melville spent a month as the captive of a cannibal tribe, and finally escaped aboard the Australian whaler the Lucy Ann, which he left a short time later at Tahiti. Again after a short stay working at a variety of occupations, he signed aboard the whaler Charles and Henry, and arrived in Hawaii in April, 1843. Here, after working for a short time as a warehouse clerk, by now homesick for America, he joined the U.S. Navy and was assigned to the frigate United States. Fourteen months later, after visits to Mexico and South America, he was finally discharged in New York City in October, 1844, and with the exception of a few trips later in his life, he closed forever the period of his adventures.

In the years immediately following his travels, Melville began his career as a writer. In 1846 he published Typee, a somewhat exaggerated and imaginative account of his stay among the Typee islanders, and in 1847, its sequel Omoo. These were followed by Mardi, in 1849, an allegorical novel quite different from its predecessors and the precursor of Moby Dick. Attempting to atone for the failure of Mardi, Melville returned to the method of his earlier adventure books with Redburn (1849), which borrowed material from his first voyage to Liverpool in 1839; and White Jacket (1850), which enlarged upon his experience as a seaman aboard the United States.

Although his first five books had won him considerable fame and some small measure of financial security, Melville still felt dissatisfied with his work, and in 1851 he published Moby Dick, which although a failure in its day, has proved in the twentieth century to be his most famous work.

It was also during these first few years at home following his travels that Melville became established as an important member of the New York literary group, and became a friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose encouragement was of immeasurable aid in the writing of Moby Dick. So much so in fact that Melville dedicated the book to him with the following inscription: “In token of my admiration for his genius this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

In 1847, Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, and had in the fall of that year moved from Pittsfield, Massachusetts to New York City. Later, early in 1850, after a brief trip to London to make arrangements for the publication of White Jacket, he moved to “Arrowhead,” a farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts where he was to remain for the next thirteen years.

Unfortunately for Melville the critical reaction to Moby Dick was negative, and the reaction to Pierre (1852), a somewhat confused and melodramatic novel which attacked, among other things, conventional morality and publishing practices, was even worse. Disturbed by his waning popularity and in ill health, Melville turned for a time to writing articles and short stories for the magazines Putnam’s and Harper’s. Among his works in this period are Israel Potter (1855), which had been first published serially, and Piazza Tales (1856), a collection of short stories which included the now famous “Bartelby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno.” In 1857, he published the last novel in his lifetime, The Confidence Man, a satiric tale which has its setting on a Mississippi River steamboat, and which like Moby Dick has aroused much recent critical interest.

His career now at its lowest ebb, ill and in debt, Melville traveled through the Mediterranean countries and the Holy Land on borrowed money, and on his return attempted to make his living lecturing on such subjects as “statuary in Rome” and “the South Seas.” Unsuccessful, he sold his farm at Pittsfield, paid his debts with the remaining money, and bought a house in New York City where he secured a job in the Custom House which he held until his retirement in 1885.

During these years and those which followed, Melville published several volumes of poetry, including: Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), Clarel: a Poem and a Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), John Marr and Other Sailors (1888), and Timoleon (1891). These last three volumes were for the most part privately printed in small editions at the expense of an uncle, Peter Gansevoort.

At his death on September 28, 1891, Melville left in manuscript a considerable number of verses as well as the short novel, Billy Budd, which was not published until 1924. It has since proved one of his most interesting works, for in addition to accelerating an already reviving interest in Melville, it has achieved much critical acclaim.

BILLY BUDD

BACKGROUND

 

Written during the last years of Melville’s life, Billy Budd in some respects represents a resolving of some of the problems which had beset Melville during his life. Always concerned with the place and welfare of man in a universe naturally hostile, and made even more so by the rising industrial revolution (which led to the economic upheavals of 1873-1879), Melville explores in Billy Budd the tragedy of man’s inability to cope with the difficulties of his own creation. In those late years of his life following the Civil War, Melville lived through the chaos of reconstruction; the numerous government scandals; “Black Friday” 1870; the Tweed Ring in New York, 1871; the Haymarket Riots in Chicago, 1866; the growth of monopolies; the expansion of the west, and numerous other momentous movements and events. Gone now is the rebelliousness of the Captain Ahab of Moby Dick, and in its place there appears a spirit of quiet acceptance of the laws of society which condemn the guiltiness Billy, who, like so many, suffers injustice because of an inflexible social order.

And perhaps like Billy Budd, Melville came quietly to his own end. Always a religious skeptic, he was able, as his friend Hawthorne remarked of him, to “neither believe nor be comfortable in his disbelief, and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.” Rejecting early the stern Calvinism of his mother, he found life a series of paradoxes in which the good was inextricably interwoven with the evil.

Finally, Billy Budd, like most of Melville’s work is at least partly autobiographic. Not only is the volume inscribed to Jack Chase, who had been a fellow foretopman with Melville many years before aboard the United States, but the story opens in Liverpool, the city to which he had traveled on his own first voyage, and it is from his own knowledge of the sea that he achieves realism in a novel otherwise filled with dark forebodings and veiled meanings.

The difficulties of Melville’s career as a writer, of course, stemmed from many causes. First of all, his great books, Moby Dick, The Confidence Man, and Billy Budd could not achieve a great audience in their own time. They required, with their wealth of allusion and imagery, too much of the often simple and provincial American. Nor was it possible for his age to lightly accept the manifold criticisms which he leveled at society and its institutions, for Melville possessed none of the humorous talent of a Mark Twain who could make such criticisms palatable, nor could he emulate those writers of sentimental fiction whose simple and unsophisticated work passed for great literature. And lastly, Melville in his own way, as he had nearly always, wrote the books he wanted to write. As he said in Pierre, “I write precisely as I please.”

BRIEF SUMMARY

In the year 1797, following the great mutinies in the British Navy at Spithead and Nore and during the first of the Napoleonic Wars, the British Merchant ship Rights of Man is halted at sea by H. M. S. Indomitable. The Indomitable, in need of seamen, impresses the young foretopman of the Rights of Man, Billy Budd, into the King’s service. Although Billy is a young man without either family or education, Lieutenant Ratcliffe, the impressment officer from the Indomitable, instantly recognizes him as a superior man. And though Billy does not make the same excellent impression among the more experienced sailors of the Indomitable, he is, nevertheless, noticed as a capable sailor by the officers of that vessel.

Captain “Starry” Vere of the Indomitable is a well-read, quiet and capable commander, respected by his officers and highly regarded by his superiors. The officers of his crew, though generally young, are capable and efficient, and the crewmen, though some have been involved in the recent mutinies, are in general experienced and loyal.

Among the petty officers of the Indomitable’s crew is John Claggart, Master-at-arms, whose principal duty is to oversee the men of the main decks. He is a comparative newcomer to the Navy and has risen rapidly through the ranks to his present position of authority, the duties of which he performs by harassing all those who are under him. Although he appears perfectly sane, he is a man whose essential nature is unbalanced, a man whose violent nature is carefully concealed beneath a placid surface.

From their very first meeting Claggart nurses a hatred for Billy, “the Handsome Sailor,” who appears the incarnation of all that is good in contrast to his own evil nature. Throughout their many meetings the good and simple Billy cannot grasp the fact that Claggart hates him and is plotting mischief for him. And even though he is warned by Dansker, an old sailor who befriends him, Billy cannot believe that anyone hates him.

Finally, Claggart unmasks his evil nature by accusing Billy of plotting mutiny among members of the crew. After amassing false evidence with the help of Squeak, one of the corporals of the gun deck who is his willing and unscrupulous tool, Claggart confronts Billy before Captain Vere with his accusations. Here Billy, shocked and unable to speak because of a speech impediment which affects him in moments of crisis, strikes out and accidentally kills Claggart.

Although Captain Vere is aware that Billy’s action was both automatic and in some measure justified, he convinces the Court Marshal aboard ship, which he has hurriedly called because of the recent mutinies, of the need to maintain discipline. Accordingly, Billy is convicted and the next morning hanged from the yardarm, dying with the words “God bless Captain Vere” on his lips.

Later official accounts of the affair falsely record that Billy was an irresponsible killer, and Claggart a patriotic sailor killed in the performance of his duty. The truth, however, is somehow recorded among the simple men of the service who keep track of the spar from which Billy was hung and by one who writes a ballad telling the sad story of the good Billy’s fate.

BILLY BUDD

A NOTE ON THE STYLE OF BILLY BUDD

Billy Budd, like many sea stories, was based on an actual event. Long engrossed by the famous Somers’ Affair which had taken place years before when Melville was himself in the South Seas, he, late in his life, decided to reproduce the story of that event in narrative form. Melville, then, first wrote the story as a short tale under the title “Baby Budd, Sailor,” which he later revised and expanded to more than twice its original length. Although an examination of the earlier draft reveals more action and fewer digressions, it was neither as effective nor as powerful as the final version in spite of its numerous digressions, allusions, and symbols.

Through the judicious use of his own knowledge of the sea, and a faithful, if somewhat imaginative, handling of the events of the Somers’ Affair, Melville achieved in Billy Budd a novel that is both believable and realistic. Thus, recalling his own horror of flogging, and his own careful efforts to avoid even a reprimand, Melville created Billy much in his own image. Further, Melville borrowed from his past work as well as his past life. In Billy Budd a vicious and destructive Master-at-Arms is protected by the rank, as was Bland in White Jacket, and the Articles of War which harshly and irrevocably ruled the lives of seamen aboard men-of-war are again explored and excoriated. To these primary and personal sources, Melville added The Naval History of Great Britain by William...